“You’re destroying me. You’re good for me.”

There’s an uncanny paradox between love and violence—two forces colliding and blending, where tenderness and destruction fuse into a single, volatile thread. Tragicomic—horror and hilarity are two sides of the same coin—life. Marguerite Duras explores this intersection, where tenderness and cruelty become inseparable, in many of her works, including her novel The Lover and her script for Hiroshima Mon Amour. Hiroshima Mon Amour is a film about memory—what we remember, what we forget, and the spaces between these two states. The two strangers, bound by their separate tragedies, discover that their love, like the ruins of Hiroshima, becomes a monument to what has been lost, while also embodying the love that endures in the face of unbearable sorrow. In Duras’s writing, the idea of memory as a form of failure is palpable. For her, writing becomes a way to confront the inadequacies of memory, transforming the unknown into a sacred act of remembrance. Duras wrote: “You have to trust this unknown, the self… The most important experience you can have is to write. I have never had another experience as violent—except the birth of my child. In fact, I can’t discern a difference between the two.”

This violence has a distinct quality in Duras’s work. Looking at the film through the lens of Sylvère Lotringer’s essay “The Person Who Tortures Is Me,” one can reflect on the sacredness of violence. From the intimate scenes between the protagonists—interspersed with harrowing images of Hiroshima’s destruction—to her language and approach to writing, Duras wields violence with surgical precision, similar to Antonin Artaud’s concept of “cruelty” in theater. For Artaud, cruelty wasn’t about literal violence but a disciplined, controlled force that reveals deeper truths. His vision of theater aimed to shock and disturb audiences. Likewise, Duras’s writing confronts and shocks, as though she signs each piece with the intent to unsettle. Her approach explores violence, where writing itself becomes a means of exposing deeper truths about suffering and resilience.

In the film, the protagonists’ emotional wounds, revealed through their confessions and recollections, serve as a form of ritualistic violence. This violence binds them together, even as it deepens their sense of alienation. But what is more horrifying than death? A scene in the film still haunts me: the terrifying image of a man who hasn’t slept in two years. His state of non-death, more horrifying than death itself, lingers. Duras questions the fear of death by contrasting it with the horror of a life that is effectively over, though the body continues. Non-death is the most cruel, tragic aspect of existence—and perhaps the most tragic element of Hiroshima Mon Amour.