Marrowbone
Thank you so much to @iscahwynn for buying this from me for my mother's birthday trip! I am happy to say this is SOLD OUT FOR THE YEAR. (And I have no idea if it'll come back next year--I don't think I have a major trip to help with) In October, I'll be doing Hero, and in November, I'll be doing Parasite. Keep your eyes peeled if a book is of interest to you, and then after I get my schedule done, there may be some other ancillaries!
This is a Spanish horror film in English. That isn’t me saying that everything inspired by a different film is stealing it, this is me saying a Spanish writer and a Spanish director made a film in English, and it is very Spanish in feel and in the sort of “scare” we’re offering up. Me putting that in quotation marks makes it seem like I don’t appreciate Spanish horror but Spanish horror is in fact my very favorite if we have to pin down extremely large and broad swaths of movie by country. However, I understand why a movie like this would not necessarily be appreciated by a lot of fans of horr or casual horror watchers. It’s pensive, it’s slow, it doesn’t have a lot in the way of actual ‘scares’ because that’s just not, by and large, what Spanish horror films DO. If someone is looking for a film that involves a lot of the American style of extreme tension and release (Which I also enjoy. This is absolutely not me dogging on American horror.) then this film really isn’t for you.
BUT, if you love the idea of pursuit in an emotional sense, of the walls closing in and reality coming for you as you attempt to hide from it, this might be right up your alley. Is it as good as The Orphanage? No, I’m not sure I think it is. It’s really missing some of those ‘pop’ moments, like “toca la pared’ in its driving force, and I think a couple of the characters feel a little half-formed, but it is a deeply enjoyable film if you are a fan of this style of horror film
Horror is always a difficult medium because what horror is and means to people is so different. It’s like comedy, only I would argue that people seem to realize more easily that comedy is extremely personal. Horror is the same. Not just ‘what scares you’ though that as well, but ‘what are looking for in a horror? What does that mean to you?’
So, Me: In horror I generally want a supernatural base for a story, and I prefer it to say something, though i am totally fine with “Isn’t this fucked up?” as long as the tension is well balanced and i don’t feel insulted. I tend to prefer ghost stories where there is some sort of explanation for the haunting, as is more common in European and American stories, and truly adore possession stories. When it comes to what i like horror movies to be about, many things, but I’m very fond of memory, and history, and guilt, and what the idea of a person is.
All this to say that in many ways, this is tailored to me.
Jack is this axis upon which the family spins, even long before his mother dies, the stable and straightforward one. Each of the siblings has their own role, but it matters that Jack is the one to survive because in truth he’s the only one that could survive. And with his mother dead, he has to keep this massive secret. I would argue with a great many parts of this whole “We have to hide that our mother is dead to the extent that we cannot fucking leave the house in rural Maine” and as someone who has lived in rural America most of my life, I am not sure that it holds up in narrative court, but ultimately it’s not so distracting that it pulls me out of the story. It’s part and parcel of how the story has to work, though it DID make me figure out they were dead. Jack is under immense strain, though, even before they die. It’s plucking at the fabric of his mental state long before his father comes and kills everyone.
(For all being confused by the fact that he can’t do anything until he’s 21, the age of majority in the US was not 18 (I would argue it still is not, but that’s a different post entirely) in the US until 1971, in the wake of the Vietnam War and specifically the draft. Not that he would have been in much better shape in the UK--the age of majority became 18 there only in 1969.)
But when they ARE killed, they come back to save his life (according to Jack’s version of them*) and they are all aspects of Jack. It’s important to remember that Jack is actually doing everything for himself. So, Jane is the nurturing aspect of Jack’s self, the one who cooks and cares and soothes, Billy is his anger, his ability to destroy and to kill--at the end, it’s the voice of Billy that goes, “let me do this”--and of course Sam is his innocence, Jack’s need to be protected and cared for, the part of him that is afraid and young. On a rewatch, it’s actually pretty easy to see how their personalities change to fit these incredibly broad strokes after they die, because our memories of people are not those people. They are the coastal outlines of how we remember them. Jack is saved by the aspects of the people he loved.
I want to DO something with the idea that the family escapes England, runs from it, to come to America, and the exact same trouble that they had in England follows them here. The same murder and abuse and pain comes for them anyway, a sea between them. And the mother is from Maine, or her family is. I’m not sure what to do with all of that, but it feels like that’s so much work to simply be a coincidence. But I’m not just not sure what to do with it. I could do a whole idea about the very formation of America, about this idea that is very much a part of the building of the American idea where your history is anew the second you step over the border, where you are far enough away from the ‘old world’ that you can escape its horrors. But you can’t. It comes for you, it comes down the chimney, it kills the things you love, and is this part and parcel of the inescapable horror of Where You Come From? I don’t know that I LOVE that as an answer, it feels imperfect to me, but I feel like that’s such a very specific choice, especially with taking the money from there, that there has to be something in it.
And I mean, that doesn’t have to be specifically about the US and the UK, you could say the same thing about Spain and Mexico, to bring it back to the writer/director, where there are so many good things about the US/Mexico, but also horrors that have been inherited from the UK/Spain, and it is impossible to live in a house that was built for people across the shore and to keep out the horrors.
On that note, let’s talk about Tom, who is a little mustache-twirling for my tastes in a movie that is essentially about escape and memory and how we choose to live with tragedy. I’m not sure if this has anything to do with The UK, sure, but specifically England--and this family is specifically English--and the US have a really difficult history, we are family of a kind, but we can also resist each other and be pretty cruel to one another. This feels like a kind of anger, a kind of resentment that no matter how well you do, no matter how absolutely ruined Jack/the UK is, he’s preferred for what? Suffering in silence instead of wanting more? ALSO ALSO, and I don’t know that the writers even knew this, but it could be something about how the well-being of the UK has, for at least the last 70-odd years, been tied in a large way to the well-being of the US. The two worst recessions in the Uk before the pandemic were tied to US CRISES. The recession in the early 00s, the worst in the UK since WW2, was tied to OUR subprime mortgage crisis. In the 90s? Tied to our savings and loan crisis. We are inevitably fucking tied to each other, and also we hate each other. I was going to write something else, but I’m getting off-track, and I don’t know if I think this is totally supported by the narrative, but I want to do something with Tom that is more than ‘mean antagonist’ and so I’m standing here before you with a list of recessions in the Uk going “Is this anything?”
I actually think Anya Taylor-Joy is a bit wasted here, as her character requires very little, and is mainly an accessory and an idea to everything that is happening. Maybe I’m underselling it--it’s completely possible that without Taylor-Joy, the character would become so weak and one-dimensional as to be annoying, and she never really does that, she feels unexceptional and real, and that is enough.
This is by design, of course. WE are Allie. We immediately fall in love with the family and are kept emotionally distant from the reality of their situation. We understand things only as they come to us through Jack. We have to rely on his version of events. Remember the ‘reveal’ is through his little book. We choose to believe him, because like Allie, we love him.
So Iscah asked me what I think of the ending and specifically what I think of the idea, as put it “that it seems to be cast as positive” that he is still seeing his family. Do I think it’s being cast as positive? I don’t know if I do. I do think it is designed to put him in sharp contrast with his mother, who has everyone step over the line and forget everything that came before, and even when Jack himself does this, it’s to forget something instant and specific. I think part of what’s it’s saying is that what his mother attempts is impossible. That our pasts and our presents are impossibly tied up in one another, and to set it aside is going to end in tragedy. And, in fairness, maybe that makes it correct that Jack’s still living ‘with’ his siblings.
It’s certainly not being cast as fully negative, I’ll give you that all day long, but I don’t know if I fully agree that it’s being cast as positive. It’s sort of cast as neutral. If it were cast as positive I’d argue that he would be living a richer, fuller life. When we come upon him, we don’t even really interact with him, Allie comes upon him sleeping on the porch, and wakes him up. There’s no indication that he’s helped by the haunting of his siblings. There’s no indication he ever leaves the house. Now, could he someday end up having a good life, with something he enjoys doing, and marrying Allie, fixing up the house, al the things he’d like to do? Sure, perhaps. But also could he end up essentially always sitting on that porch staring into the field.
I do think that is the point, actually. That he could go either way, now. That he has decided, and Allie has decided, that living with the denial of what’s happened is better than living with the reality of what has, and whatever happens after there is still up to them. He was going into town and making cakes and selling things and all that when he was hallucinating his family as alive, so there’s really no reason why he can’t learn to repair plaster and lath while Billy holds the ladder or whatever. I realize I’m being a little flippant about it, but I think when you’re dealing with being, we’ll just call it odd for the sake of casting a wide net, you can learn to live with it, and learn to be a reasonably happy person with it, most of the time. You may not do everything the way other people do, but you can learn to make it work.
In all, I really enjoyed this movie, but I don’t know that I would say it’s a slam dunk. The characterization really leaves something to be desired, and while I am absolutely making things out of it, I have no idea how much of that is based in intention and how much of it is simply me seeing what I’d like to see. The dialogue is sometimes very stilted, and while I think the idea is fantastic, I think the execution needs a little massaging. All that said, I love this kind of movie and so I would happily recommend it to anyone else who ALSO likes this kind of movie.
*This brings me to a very very interesting point, which is: Do they come back, or are they only figments of Jack’s imagination? You might say, ‘Well, Doc, the doctor says that he’s nuts, and even you said that every single one of them is an aspect of Jack.” Listen just because I said something doesn’t mean I’m not going to argue with it literally five minutes later, and also, this could be something that almost BECOMES a possession narrative. Is there a chance that he
On that note, I don’t actually think the narrative believes this or backs this, because we have Allie physically and literally see his father, but an interesting idea that his father is also an aspect of himself and he killed his siblings under the pressure of caring for them. Note that I don’t think the story bears that out and I don’t think that’s the intention of the film, but it’s an interesting thought experiment. But it’s at the bottom because I don’t think it’s ‘real’.
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Deep dive into a very minor, very niche Spider-Man topic time!
The subject…WHO IS THAT WOMAN??? 🤨
It’s not crucial to the plot, and it’s not a mind-blowing theory, I just like gathering up little background details and connecting them. :)
DISCLAIMER: While obviously the Spider-Man movies are inspired by and based on the comics, I treat the movies as their own thing because tbh...I am not reading all that. It’s Movie Universe Time!
So indeed the 2002 Spider-Man movie does have a lot of cool tidbits that give extra information on characters. Sometimes it’s very subtle, sometimes it’s more overt! So we begin our journey to discover the Mystery Woman here:
95% of the words are actual Character Lore(!), with only the last paragraph copy-pasted, but Today's Focus is one particular section at the bottom of the 2nd column:
"His personal life has not been nearly as successful as his business life. Married only once, to the artist Caroline Mulder, he was divorced after ten years of what was said to have been a singularly strained and unhappy [...]"
3 whole pieces of Mystery Woman information! Her name is Caroline Mulder, an artist ("the artist" implies she's well-known at least in NYC), and they were married for 10 years before divorcing. That gives the portraits in the mansion more context, very likely that Caroline painted them.
Caroline’s impact on the story is also stated by an executive producer in a behind the scenes book when discussing how characters are developed:
"Here's a man raising his son alone—there must be a tragic story with his wife. She must have left him! Does Harry remind him of her? Does he love his boy or hate him?"
Harry does have an interest in art like his mom. In Spider-Man 3 we see him painting a still life in his spare time, after post-traumatic amnesia ironically leaves him happier than ever before. He's forgotten many details of the negative things in his life and instead enjoys reliving childhood activities and memories. It's possible painting was a passion of his when he was younger, similar to how he discusses writing a play for MJ and playing basketball with Peter during high school, but gradually became disconnected from or was pressured to drop.
Knowing the marriage lasted for 10 years helps narrow down a few things, like that the divorce probably wasn't recent. But that’s assuming he was born during the time they were married, meaning Harry could have been 10 at most. Whether Caroline is still alive also isn't clear-cut...in the movie, at least. In the novelization for the 3rd movie, Peter confirms Harry is an orphan after Norman dies. The novelizations and movie details don't always line up 1:1, so it's left open imo. I feel like the paper would have mentioned her passing if she had died but...choose your own route of angst! (And wow would that add a whole new layer of awful to Norman’s misogynistic “advice” about women to Harry if he’s shit-talking his dead ex-wife.)
If Caroline is alive that opens a new batch of questions about where she went. Do they have any sort of shared custody situation? Doubtful, as Caroline seems to be totally cut out of the picture and only exists in the story via possessions. But if the marriage ended bitterly, and some years ago, why is her art and her collections present at all? Her portrait makes sense to keep, as it's revealed in the sequel to be the cover for a hidden safe.
(That's another fun symbol, hiding treasures behind a loved one's image. A place for safety and precious things, hidden from public view.) Other pieces of art seen around the house raise more questions about sentimentality. If Norman hated any reminder of his ex-wife, why keep her work? Why keep it for so long and have it displayed prominently?
I will not let this derail into A Norman Post (it would not end I could not stop) SO my personal take is that it’s probably a mixture of some longing for the past, but mostly spite. Keeping the art is a reminder that while he lost her, he also won. What was hers is now his (son included). Which may factor into why we don’t see Caroline involved with the family at all. Either she didn’t want to be, or she was prevented from doing so. Honestly it would not be surprising to cut all ties, as I do not think many would want to test their luck in a legal battle against a vindictive person who holds a massive amount of money and potential life-ruining influence.
I could also talk about Harry forever but in short I think these details make him more interesting. It's another angle as to why he seems so conflicted and avoidant about family issues, to the point he physically distances himself from them whenever possible. He might have had a strong connection with his mother, but it likely wasn't something he could talk about without Norman taking it as a personal betrayal. Still, he's surrounded by memories of her and keeps his own mementos nearby.
^ There's a photo of her in the apartment he and Peter share, the same image as the portrait (on the middle shelf to the left 🔍). Interestingly, like the portraits, the photos of his parents are kept apart. But here his mom is given more focus on a higher shelf.
Despite the work that went into backstory creation, multiple photographs, and a painted portrait, I haven’t been able to find who "played" the role of Caroline. It would be neat! But it’s also just cool to see how background details offer glimpses of a larger story if you want to look for them. :)
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