ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Limbo, a 1999 film by independent filmmaker John Sayles, one of America’s most spiritually astute directors. His character-driven films regularly explore self-transformation stymied or propelled by personal misfortune, social change, or the mystery of fate. Several of his films explicate the hazardous relationships between people and places, particularly as those places incorporate existential limitations or possibilities. In Limbo, the place is early 21st-century Alaska, which is both the setting and antagonist for three main characters who face personal and interpersonal risk as that risk is impelled by place in both its human and natural forms. Sayles suggests that what one’s place is may not be the place where he or she really needs to be. Finding one’s place is never guaranteed but, if we are successful, we break free from “limbo”—what Sayles defines as “a condition of unknowable outcome” but also as “an intermediate or transitional place.” In the film, Sayles suggests that searching for one’s place may ultimately be as important as finding it.
