“If a sense of the absurd is a way of perceiving our true situation (even though the situation is not absurd until the perception
arises), then what reason can we have to resent or escape it? Like the capacity for epistemological skepticism, it results from the
ability to understand our human limitations. It need not be a matter for agony unless we make it so. Nor need it evoke a defiant contempt of fate that allows us to feel brave or proud. Such dramatics, even if carried on in private, betray a failure to appreciate the cosmic unimportance of the situation. If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn’t matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.” (Nagel, 727)
Based off of Nagel’s conclusion about absurdism and the wazs of living with or escaping it, I thought this analysis applied to Grace’s reaction at the end of the movie Ready or Not. Spoilers ahead. After spending the entire moving playing a murderous game of hide and seek with her new in-laws due to a pact with the devil, the time limit for the game has passed. According to their family legend, because they have not managed to kill and sacrifice Grace by sunrise, the devil will take their lives instead. Througout the entire movie the pact has been questioned in its legitimicy, and has lead to an arguably absurd situation to begin with– playing hide and seek on one’s wedding night as part of a satanic ritual. With the emphasis that the family has placed on this ritual, which is purely superstition to their knowledge, is most likely, and to any normal person, a matter of cosmic unimportance, however by placing importance on it they create the first absurd situation, which is not entirely absurd to Grace, as for her it is literally a matter of life and death.
The second absurd situation, would be, as I have prefaced, Grace’s reation to finding out that the absurd superstition is real. The Le Domas Family actually made a pact with the devil. As their punishment for not killing Grace and completing the ritual before sunrise, the devil kills everyone but Grace. Grace watches as her new in-laws are spontaneously exploded, and she starts to laugh at the situation, even when she gets bits of blood and and other exploded parts in her mouth. As Nagel describes, the absurd is a way of perciving the true situation, and there’s no reason to resent or escape it, because the situation is both what one makes of it and also outside the percieved realm of possibiliy for that situation. Grace laughs, because she is no longer in danger, her in-laws are having a wonderful serving of karma, and the idea of exploding humans is completely outside the percieved realm of possibility, making it absurd.
What I love about this is the different possibilities as for the cause of Grace’s laughter: relief, recognising the absurdity of the pact being real, or realising this sense of nothing matters so one might as well enjoy the irony of a given situation that Nagel mentions. The best part is that it is probably all three.