Watching the first two episodes of the Netflix show The Crown I was struck by how soon the tears came. Not after some great revelation or climactic rupture, but almost immediately, even before I quite understood why I was moved at all. There was something disarming in that early emotional access, as if the series had bypassed my critical faculties and gone straight for something already waiting inside me. I remember thinking, with mild embarrassment, that very little persuasion was needed.
That sensation reminded me of the emotions I felt when watching the movie The Hours, which had undone me in much the same way years earlier. Different story, different setting, different lives and yet the emotional effect was eerily familiar. In both cases, the common denominator was British director Stephen Daldry, whose work seems to operate less by narrative propulsion than by emotional resonance.
Daldry doesn’t build emotion through explanation. He assumes I already carry something fragile and unfinished, and he goes straight for my inner archive. In The Hours three women in different eras find their lives quietly shaped by Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, each confronting the shadow of suicide in her own way. Almost immediately, the film makes it clear: this is not about plot, but about lives echoing across time. The film doesn’t ask me to follow; it asks me to resonate. I cry not because I understand everything, but because something in me recognises a pattern before language catches up.
Daldry’s work does not introduce these themes to me; it uncovers them – restraint, duty, private grief, unspoken conflict, the roles I inhabit – were already there, waiting. Daldry does not plant these themes; he activates them. His storytelling trusts that I bring a life with me. What Virginia Woolf understood, and what Stephen Daldry seems particularly sensitive to, is that emotion is not triggered by plot. It’s triggered by recognition at the level of memory. Woolf’s great insight was that human experience cannot be reduced to plot without distortion. The present moment is never simply present; it is thick with memory, association, emotional residue. I carry an invisible history that shapes how the world appears to me now.
Mrs Dalloway throws a party. Her guests exclaim: “What a charming party! What a beautiful house! What a charming hostess!” Yet Mrs Dalloway herself reflects: “What is this terror? What is this ecstasy? What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?” In Woolf’s novels, two people can stand in the same room, hear the same sentence, witness the same event and yet live in entirely different realities. Not because one is mistaken, but because each arrives with a different internal accumulation of past moments and unfinished feelings. Meaning is private before it is public.
What moves me most easily often does so because it fits me, because it confirms patterns I already know how to feel. Emotional sensitivity, John Berger showed us in the BBC tv-series Ways of Seeing, depends on our historical makeup. The way we see is deeply personal. Once understood this way, the importance of our understanding of our seeing, does not stop at watching Netflix.
If perspective shapes how I experience a fictional queen’s silence or a housewife’s despair, it also shapes how I respond to events that claim moral urgency. When I follow the news from Gaza, I do not arrive empty-handed. I encounter images, testimonies, numbers through an inner archive already arranged: a life lived in the West, shaped by liberal democratic assumptions, postwar European reflexes, and a deep suspicion of unaccountable power. Although the suffering in Gaza is indisputable; civilians are killed, families erased, cities flattened, hostages taken, the moral framing of the suffering fractures almost immediately depending on where you stand. In London, New York and Berlin, the debate moves between self-defence, proportionality, historical guilt and international law. In much of the Global South, the language is colonialism, occupation, historical injustice. In Israel, the vocabulary is existential threat, survival, Holocaust and in Gaza, it is erasure, abandonment and genocide. The same images circulate everywhere and yet they do not produce the same meaning. The divergence is not primarily about facts, but about which inner archive those facts land in and thus which emotional response they elicit.
This does not make the suffering relative, but it does shape how it is understood. What feels obvious in one place feels incomplete or even blatantly offensive in another. Certainty arrives early not because people are careless, but because their inner archives are already arranged. Once I realised this, perspective stopped being an abstract idea. It became something I can watch at work in public debate, in moral judgment, and, uncomfortably, in myself.
This tension surfaced years ago in a chance encounter with a Russian woman in the south of France. I spoke enthusiastically about Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev, whose work I have experienced as essential on every conceivable level. To be sure, I did not come to his films with recognition; they felt foreign, even exotic. They belonged to a world I did not inhabit. And yet I was certain I was watching a critique of power laid bare. The origin of this certainty is difficult to trace. I now believe the certainty is as much part of my inner archive as the tears shed over lives lost in The Hours or The Crown. Whatever the filmmaker intends on a political level, may land correctly only when the inner archive allows for it. For the most part, I had already made up my mind, convinced that Zvyagintsev’s exquisite storytelling is deeply critical of Russia. The Russian woman I am speaking to, however, dismissed his films as utter kitsch. Not false. Not dangerous. Kitsch. The word unsettled me because it exposed my position. What I had read as gravity, she experienced as excess. What struck me as truth, she read as performative. I had allowed my seeing unchecked.
This is what George Orwell meant when he warned that seeing what is in front of one’s nose requires a constant struggle. Not because reality is hidden, but because our inner archive is always at work, arranging meaning before we notice. The struggle is not against facts, but against the ease with which private recognition masquerades as public truth; against the temptation to mistake what lands deeply in us for what must be simply true. Orwell’s warning is that we return, again and again, to examine how our archive shapes what we see, how recognition hardens into certainty, how perspective quietly dictates its own unwavering truths. Perhaps changing perspective is not a cure for our chaotic times. The task, however, is to keep struggling with how and why we see what we see. I cry easily; seeing clearly is more difficult.