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).

The Escapist

The Escapist (2008, dir. Rupert Wyatt, 102 mins.) is an intriguing prison escape film for two reasons. First, the filmmakers intercut the prison break with its preparations. From the beginning, then, we see the characters breaking out of prison. As we do not see the result of the prison break until near the film’s end, there is typical prison break suspense, but we ultimately learn that the film is only partly interested in the escape, which takes up the bulk of the film’s running time. We learn this because of the film’s second break with the prison escape genre. Second, we learn near the film’s end that the main character, the prisoner who masterminded the escape (played by Brian Cox) did not escape, even though we have seen him fleeing with the escapees throughout the film. Instead, he has sacrificed himself in order to liberate his young cell mate and, as he dies at the hands of the prison’s criminal boss, he imagines the escape we have seen (cf. Train of Life).
The shift from “reality” to dream/imagination is more common in the horror genre than the prison escape. The surprise, then, will infuriate some viewers and entrance others. The emphasis upon imagined escape does, however, make the film an intriguing dialogue partner for Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor’s Escape Attempts: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Everyday Life (Routledge, 2nd ed., 1992). Their work grew out of interviews with convicts concerning the methods convicts used to manage captivity. Cohen and Taylor soon realized that people outside prison use similar techniques to avoid feeling trapped by the institutions and worldview that dominates culture. They also quickly learned that all such attempts at escape were doomed to failure. There was only, then, the struggle to escape.
Many would see religion as the ultimate escape attempt. The only other random religious comment that I have to make about The Escapist is the use of the prison chapel/confessional as the site for the escape’s origin and, of course, the use of the chapel crucifix to batter through the wall to freedom (cf. the use of the Bible in The Shawshank Redemption).

The Punisher War Zone

Punisher: War Zone (2008, Lexi Alexander, dir., 103 min) is yet another cinematizing of a comic book franchise. It seems like a comic book. I have no defense for watching it. It happened to be on while I was doing other things. For my religion and film purposes, however, the film had three sterling moments.
First, at the funeral of a “good guy” killed accidentally by the Punisher in one of his many killing sprees, the minister intones, “The Lord is compassion and love, slow to anger and rich in mercy. He does not treat us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our faults. As parents have compassion on their children, the Lord has pity on those who fear him for he knows of what we are made. He remembers that we are but dust. As for us, our days are like grass …” The scene stands out in the film’s gruesome violence and fascination with vengeance. It is the ideology that the film and the film’s violent genres deliberately, polemically reject. The Punisher’s killing spree stems from the mob’s slaughter of his family. We see the sobbing Punisher at the grave of his family, and a replay of his family disaster, immediately after the “good guy” funeral. At the “good guy’s” funeral, a special agent promises the “good guy’s” widow that he will get the Punisher. Of course, he does not. Ultimately, he joins forces with the Punisher.
Second, two-thirds of the way through the film, the Punisher visits the priest, also his friend, who officiated at his family’s funeral. The priest tells the Punisher that he is a long way from the seminary and asks him why he’s taken this tact. The Punisher’s response is that someone must punish the corrupt. The priest responds that we will be judged by the same measure with which we judge. The Punisher recognizes the reference (Matt. 7:2) and accepts his fate laconically. He has chosen a suicidal path, rather than life. In fact, he admits that sometimes he’d like to get his hands on God. Incidentally, it is in this same church that the Punisher and the special agent hunting him join forces to save the widow and daughter of the “good guy.”
Third, in the film’s epilogue, the Punisher departs the climactic shoot out, which saves the “good guy’s” family, with another (comically ineffective) policeman. As they leave, they pass in front of a church with a flickering, cruciform neon sign that says “Jesus Saves.” While the bumbling policeman talks about his opposition to the death penalty and his belief that even bad guys can change, the Punisher disappears. Almost immediately, a thug mugs the policeman who cries out to the Punisher for help. As the mugger threatens to kill the policeman, we see the armed Punisher standing beneath the “Jesus Saves” sign. “Jesus” flickers out, the Punisher pulls his weapon, the screen darkens, and we see simply “Saves” as we hear one gunshot. While the screen remains black, the bumbling police man says, “Oh God, now I’ve got brain splatter all over me.”
The credits roll. The music is Rob Zombie’s “War Zone.” The message is complete. God/Jesus/religion are ineffectual against contemporary violence and evil. Today’s evil calls for dark, violent heroes (cf. The Dark Knight). The move, not incidentally, is exactly the opposite of that executed in End of Days, where Jericho Cane learns that faith, not guns, defeats (supernatural) evil.