I first watched this movie with my roommate about two weeks ago. I'm a wuss when it comes to blood, so she warned me it would get gruesome really quickly. Armed with that clue, about fifteen minutes into the movie I looked at her and asked, "She's going to commit suicide, isn't she?" The response was in the affirmative.
The reason this is relevant is because the entire time the movie unfolded, I was thinking about how she was going to do it, and how the director was going to portray it (mostly out of self-interest, I was worried about it being too gory). Seeing the movie from that perspective, there are many, many instances where the scene is set to intentionally make it seem like she's about to do it; every time Nina held Beth's nail file I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, and until the scene changed I was convinced she was going to drown herself in the bathtub. These, amongst other instances, made the moment when she did kill herself... anticlimactic.
Seeing as her self-harming was so frequently and blatantly alluded to throughout the movie, and the fact that she was going to kill herself pretty inevitable, why did the writer/director choose to make her suicide, well, not really a suicide? Psychologically, she never actually stabbed herself; her hallucinations are so powerful she obviously fully believed in them. And yet, once she's done it, she doesn't try to help herself or fix the situations. It's almost like she just let her suicide happen, passively. There was no "okay I'm going to do this now" the way it would have been if she had hung herself, jumped off a bridge, poisoned herself, etc.
While she does ultimately dramatically jump off of the stage-cliff, she and we as an audience know she was already dead/dying (another discussion point in its own right) when she did it. So the question rests, which was her suicide? Did she actually commit suicide? And, probably most importantly, why did the writer/director make her suicide so ambiguous?
-Christine Jarjour
PS. Why is Natalie Portman just the most wonderful talented person ever?
No comments:
Post a Comment