Empathetic Effort in Where’d You Go, Bernadette and Bernie

This chapter analyzes Linklater’s films Where’d You Go, Bernadette? (2019) and Bernie (2011) as efforts in interpersonal understanding. Both films narratively center on drastic, and perplexing, actions committed by eccentric characters: supposedly unpremeditated murder in Bernie and the sudden willful disappearance, paired with abdication of a filial role, in Where’d You Go, Bernadette?. The case made is that these films are less governed by a desire to explain these drastic actions than they are invested in the effort of trying to understand them. One of the ways in which this effort manifests is, in characteristic Linklater form, through conversation. Indeed, considering these films through the lens of the conversation privileges inconclusiveness and as such, draws the effort of understanding into focus.