The Lovely Bones

The Lovely Bones (Peter Jackson, dir.; 2009)
One would think the image in The Lovely Bones would be those bones or, failing that, the Beyond that narrator/protagonist Susie Salmon inhabits as she tells the story of her murder and its effects upon her family. Jackson and his crew do lavish attention on that Beyond. For me, however, the film’s image is the sinkhole the Salmon family visits early in the film to dispose of a derelict refrigerator. It is a family outing because the sinkhole is something fascinating to see. And, for me, The Lovely Bones is really about those fascinating depths.
In the first place, the world of The Lovely Bones is a place where bad things or the earth itself can swallow you up in an instant and without warning. In the scene after the sinkhole, Susie’s younger brother almost dies. Only her quick thinking saves his life. Unfortunately, in the world of The Lovely Bones, sometimes no one is around to help. Thus, Susie finds her own figurative sinkhole in an encounter with the friendly neighborhood pedophile, George Harvey. He meets her in a desolate cornfield between her school and home, lures her into the dugout he’s built there for the purpose, and rapes and murders her (although we see none of this). The film’s climax offers a more literal sinkhole because George, fearing detection, dumps Susie’s bones, already interred in a safe, into the sinkhole from the film’s beginning. The earth literally swallows Susie, then, although she provides the voiceover that describes it all.
In the second place, The Lovely Bones is about our voyeuristic attraction to these sinkholes. Susie comes to her end because the dugout fascinates her. Her family almost comes apart after Susie goes missing because of her Dad’s fascination with the mystery of her disappearance. In the last third of the film, Susie’s sister flirts with her own fascinating sinkhole by entering George Harvey’s house through a broken basement window in a hunt for evidence. Of course, we are the ultimate voyeurs, and it is our fascination with terrible events like those The Lovely Bones only hints at that is the film’s reason to be.
The penguin snow globe, which is the film’s opening shot and its other enduring image, is something of a comment on the narrator’s perspective and the audience’s fascination. A very young Susie peeks over the top of a table to look at snow globe and to worry about the penguin’s isolation. Dad, trying to comfort her, says that the penguin is trapped in her own perfect world. That, of course, is Susie’s place in the Beyond as she narrates the film (and that of the audience as well?). While she tries to interact with the story’s plot and characters, and succeeds to a minimal degree (most memorably, finally getting that missed first kiss), her real interaction is with the audience.
Perhaps, it is this isolation, which allows the film to say something significant about vengeance (is it justice?). The film plays with our desires for vengeance/justice from its inception. We, the narrator, and various characters want to see vengeance/justice done. The father seeks vengeance/justice by a relentless pursuit of evidence, but never finds it. Late in the film, he takes up arms (a baseball bat) to exact vengeance personally and is beaten and hospitalized. Susie’s sister enters the demon’s lair to find evidence and succeeds, but we never see her give it to the authorities (although the police arrive at Harvey’s house too late to arrest him). Finally, Susie herself returns to earth, possessing a young girl who is sensitive to things others are not. As this occurs while George is trundling the safe with Susie’s bones to the sinkhole, we might think that Susie has returned to out her killer. She has not. Instead, she has come back for that first kiss.
While the film titillates our desires for vengeance, it puts them off repeatedly in order to value other matterss—that first kiss, the family’s continuance, etc. Perhaps, that’s why Susie’s boyfriend is starring in the production of Othello near the film’s beginning. What better source than a revenge tragedy to teach the ultimate emptiness of vengeance? As Don Corleone says in The Godfather, “Will vengeance bring your son back? Or mine?” In the book, on which the film is based, the protagonist says that she had to learn to forgive her attacker. The film does not go so far. In fact, in something which seems remarkably like an added postscript, a strange series of coincidences finally dispatches George Harvey, sending him falling into his own sinkhole. While that postscript, like the film’s Beyond, may comfort some, it does not seem at home in the film’s sinkhole world (it may be, of course, commiserate with our voyeuristic fascination with sinkholes).