Antonioni at The House

The Passenger

For our Film Club, we watched Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger, a film that initially looks like a mysterious thriller about a journalist who decides to assume the identity of a dead man, but slowly reveals itself as something much more philosophical: a film about identity, freedom, mortality, authenticity and the almost impossible desire to escape from yourself.

It is such a simple narrative idea, but Antonioni uses it to ask a much bigger question: if you remove everything that tells the world who you are, are you actually free to become someone else?

Or do you simply take yourself with you?

That is one of the questions at the centre of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger. The film follows David Locke, played by Jack Nicholson, a journalist who is travelling through North Africa when he discovers the body of a man who has recently died. He decides to take the man’s identity, switching his passport, his belongings and his life for someone else’s. What begins almost like a thriller becomes something much more philosophical: if you change your name, your history and the way other people see you, have you actually become a different person?

This is where The Passenger becomes particularly interesting because it can be read through some very old philosophical questions about identity and the self. The character’s name, David Locke, is itself an intriguing coincidence or possible philosophical joke, because it brings to mind the philosopher John Locke, whose ideas about personal identity are deeply concerned with the relationship between identity, consciousness and memory. Locke is also associated with the idea of tabula rasa, the notion that the human mind begins as a kind of blank slate and that experience helps shape who we become. In The Passenger, David seems to attempt something like this in reverse. He wants to wipe the slate clean, abandon the life that has already been written for him and begin again through another identity.

But Antonioni complicates this idea. David can change his name, his passport, his clothes and even the country he lives in, but he cannot simply erase the experiences that have shaped him. If our identity is partly formed through everything we have lived through, can we really begin again from a blank slate? Or do we carry the previous version of ourselves into every new life we try to create?

For John Locke, personal identity is also connected to the continuity of consciousness and memory. Being the same person is not simply about having the same body or name. It is connected to the consciousness that allows a person to recognise themselves as themselves. Antonioni turns this philosophical question into a story: if David Locke abandons his name, his history and his social identity, but remains conscious of his own past, can he really leave his old self behind?

There is another philosophical connection in the name David Locke: David Hume, whose ideas about the self move in almost the opposite direction. Hume questioned whether there is actually such a thing as one permanent, stable self. When we look inward, he argued, we encounter a changing collection of perceptions, feelings and experiences rather than one fixed identity underneath them all. Read through Hume, Locke’s attempt to become another person starts to look even stranger. Perhaps the self was never as solid as he imagined it was in the first place.

The film does not give us a simple philosophical answer to either of these questions, and I think that is part of what makes it so compelling. Locke believes that changing his identity might allow him to escape his life, but Antonioni keeps asking whether escape from your circumstances is really the same thing as escape from yourself.

There is something very existential about this. Locke is dissatisfied with the life he has, but he cannot simply invent a new existence without carrying something of the old one with him. The film asks what freedom actually means when the person you are trying to escape is yourself. You can change your country, your name, your clothes, your relationships and even your story, but can you change the consciousness experiencing all of it?

This also connects to the existential idea of authenticity: the difficult question of whether we are actually living according to our own choices or simply inhabiting roles that have been given to us. Locke is a journalist, a husband, a traveller, a man with a particular history, but none of these identities seem to feel entirely his own. When the opportunity appears to become somebody else, he takes it. Yet instead of finding freedom, he slowly discovers that another identity comes with another set of problems, responsibilities and unfinished stories.

The title The Passenger becomes important here too. A passenger is someone who moves, but does not necessarily control the direction of the journey. Locke spends much of the film trying to take control of his own story, yet he increasingly becomes a passenger in someone else’s. By taking another man’s identity, he also inherits his relationships, his obligations and the consequences of a life he did not live.

This is what makes the storytelling so great. On the surface, The Passenger has the structure of a thriller. A man assumes a dead person’s identity, and we naturally want to know what will happen next. Will people discover who he really is? Will he be caught? Who was the man whose identity he has taken?

But Antonioni slowly shifts the question underneath the story. We stop asking only, “Will he get away with it?” and start asking, “What exactly is he trying to get away from?” That is a much more difficult question, because there is no geographical destination that can solve it.

Antonioni is also telling this story visually. His films are famous for their use of architecture, landscape, distance and empty space, and The Passenger is a perfect example. The desert, hotel rooms, roads, modern buildings and long stretches of empty landscape often feel as important as the characters themselves. Instead of constantly explaining what Locke is feeling, Antonioni allows the spaces around him to express it. His characters can appear small inside enormous environments, as though the world itself has become indifferent to their attempts to give their lives meaning.

His use of long takes is particularly important. Antonioni allows moments to continue after the conventional purpose of a scene has already been completed. We have time to look, wait and notice. The story is not only happening through dialogue or action; it is happening through silence, distance, movement and what the characters refuse to say.

And then there is that extraordinary ending.

The famous final sequence of The Passenger is a long, almost seven-minute shot. The camera slowly moves away from Locke inside the hotel room, passing through the bars of the window and turning towards the world outside. When we eventually return to what has happened inside the room, the event has already occurred.

It is one of those endings where the storytelling itself becomes philosophical. The camera seems to leave Locke behind, and suddenly the world outside continues without him. After spending the entire film trying to control the story of his own life, he becomes only a small part of a much larger world that keeps moving regardless of what happens to him.

It leaves us with questions about mortality, freedom and the limits of control. How much of our life can we actually author? Can we choose who we become, or are we always carrying parts of ourselves with us? Is freedom about becoming someone completely different, or about accepting the person you already are?

And perhaps this is why The Passenger stays with you. It gives you a compelling story, but the story is deep enough to keep opening up after the film has ended. You can approach it as a thriller, a story about identity, an existential film, a meditation on mortality, or even through the philosophical questions raised by Locke and Hume about what makes us the same person over time.