But this is assuming that her goal is to get back at him. She doesn't want revenge. She wants to get out of an abusive/controlling relationship.
I wrote you a reply this morning, but it vanished before I could send it. Oh, the joys of using the mobile version. Not a bad thing, as it gave me a chance to go over it again and be more specific.
But that is how abuse works! When you are basically being controlled by another person and possibly in physical danger from them, getting away is the priority. Survival comes before career ambitions.
I feel like we didn't watch the same film. ….Many relationships that involve abuse and control do not start out that way.
To me, it’s not that we watched two different films, but that we take different methodological stances. I believe we need to distinguish between how we talk about films and how we talk about domestic abuse in real life.
Separating fiction from life is, in my view, the only way to be able to enjoy the ‘aesthetic’, side of art (I think @
Iroquois and I had a conversation about this in the Shoutbox in relation to
Cabaret or
Sound of Music, can’t remember). When I watch a film, I root for the more entertaining character. Not the Shakespearean fool as much as the one that ‘acts out”. That doesn’t always mean it’s the villain. But this is partly why I keep banging on about the lack of backstory in the film. Cecelia is not entertaining and it doesn’t matter whether this is because in real life, she wouldn’t be.
If Cecelia had a personality outside this relationship, if she smoked weed, for God’s sake, or did anything of note, such as watching porn while Adrian was asleep, that would keep me hooked. This has nothing to do with ‘career ambitions’. Yes, I do understand being in an abusive relationship leaves no room for personal growth or building new skills, but this is where we need to distinguish between life and fiction. Yes, I do understand that she would be, in short, too scared to do anything whatsoever of any interest, but that is boring to me as a viewer and consumer.
Creating a film or a novel means arranging events in a particular order to create an artificial semblance of progression and development, which is what we call a narrative. This is especially the case in a genre film. We know that is not how life works, things do not all progress to a conclusion, nothing gets resolved, but this is what I expect in a work of fiction (unless it’s some post-modern experiment). Even if in real life, Cecelia would have lost all sense of identity and agency in this relationship, this is not enough of a justification to make her interesting to me.
In
Gone Girl, Amy Elliott-Dunne is fascinating because she schemes, she sets up Desi, she has her own weird and fascinating personality, and she entertains, while we still sympathise with her a bit because Nick cheated. (Could also note that we do get a lot of Nick-Amy flashbacks and that Amy has a hell of a backstory with the books about her). Amy is fun to watch. Cecelia isn’t. You have explained very well why Cecelia isn’t, but why should I be engrossed?
I keep brining up
Gone Girl,, because this is another film in the broad genre of ‘domestic thriller’. (Incidentally,
Gone Girl does show both sides and shows both parties as having been at fault in the past in some way.) Even Adrian is, as you say, a ‘monster’, he is more entertaining than Cecelia is (which is bad news as he is also quite boring).
Sorry to keep going back to that documentary, but the one woman talks about once she lived with her husband, every day when he went to work he would take her wallet (to keep it safe, naturally!) so that she didn't have her driver's license. He kept all of her credit cards in a safe.
Do go back to it all you want. If you PM me a link, I’ll watch it, sounds fascinating. I really mean that. But think about. Let’s make a narrative film about this specific woman, for argument’s sake. She had everything taken away from her and then told the world about it. I will definitely watch this thing now, but while I haven’t, I can confidently say what already interest me most is how she ended up in this relationship. Backstory. We are back to square one.
If Adrian wants to hide away in his mansion, go for it… …I think it is a good story because of the suspense and the performances that are lifting up a story that has a lot of typical revenge tropes. It's not the story itself that is worth attention, it's how well it is executed. Much the way I feel about
John Wick or
The Man from Nowhere. I also thought that the direction was interesting and the effects were used very, well, effectively.
I saw it in a theater and there were gasps and cheers from the audience. I would argue that male revenge basically always ends with the man (protagonist) killing the man (antagonist). I agree that there are films with different endings, but they aren't big-budget horror/thrillers.
Waiting for her to get the upper hand on Adrian was what kept me hooked into the film. To me it's not about the ending itself (because, again, 99% of revenge films end with the good guy killing the bad guy), it's the journey to that ending. I don't feel antagonized, but I stand by my feeling that her fear and paranoia, as well as Adrian's later actions, tell us everything we need to know about their relationship. It is, after all, a monster movie. And the man who
WARNING: spoilers below
knifes an unsuspecting, innocent woman because he can't handle being left by a romantic partner . . . he's the monster
knifes an unsuspecting, innocent woman because he can't handle being left by a romantic partner . . . he's the monster
I see your point, I really do. I’m doing my best to articulate why that approach to characterisation is not enough for me.
If her paranoia and fear tell us ‘all we need to know’, fine. I appreciate this is a conscious choice Whannel made. He is telling her story, focussing on her perception, doing his best not to take away from it, because this is the kind of film he wanted to make. But it then becomes (for argument’s sake, let’s ignore the invisibility gimmick) a story about her feelings. There is nothing to it except her knowing she is right and the world telling her she is crazy. It is her feeling versus objective reality. This is why I feel this kind of film needs more characterisation than
John Wick. If Whannel makes a choice to focus on her feelings, then she should be more interesting. You can’t, as you say, have it both ways.
John Wick gives me gorgeous fight scenes and
Kill Bill-style fight choreography.
The Invisible Man gives me Cecelia figuring things out.
There are millions of films like that that have nothing to do with domestic abuse, all the way to
Prisoners where Loki has a gut feeling Alex Jones has something to do with the girls’ kidnapping, but can’t prove it. If it’s just about that, about knowing you are in the right but have no evidence and feeling undermine by that, then in a sense that makes it even more trivial. How is it a ‘monster’ movie if all we are concerned with is whether or not she is crazy? It’s what I would call an entirely inward-facing plotline, like
A Beautiful Mind, where the resolution depends on John Nash realising he is schizophrenic (shorthand here). Cecelia, conversely, realises she is not crazy. All she desires as a character is to get out of the relationship, you have convinced me Is that all it is? All I’m getting is ‘no, this character is not crazy’. But then this is where I will again readily admit this is something I’ve always hated. I hated
A Beautiful Mind. So, perhaps you got to the bottom of it and I have reservations about it because underneath the invisibility-cloak-gimmick exterior, it boils down to the ‘Am I crazy?’ narrative.