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six months pass...
affleck is a failed writer; she's shown to be the more successful writer. seems like the point of the odd ending is to show affleck being written into a reversed version of an archetypal 'woman's story' of marriage, one that was itself echoed in her fabrication of their story in her diary entries. now he goes about the house in fear for his life, unable to penetrate her inscrutable thoughts or read her emotions accurately. and now (inescapably?) he is trapped in a joyless performance that denies him any possibility of authentic human development through knowing and being known by another, intimately. it would be bonkers to have her return and have BOTH the detective and his lawyer (both reality-principle characters) believe that she had framed him, in a movie whose ultimate aims were in some sense realistic or whose genre were in some sense 'straight'. but they do because that serves to reinforce the sense in which affleck and pike are bound together in confinement from the world - she has trapped him. not with the baby, exactly, but with her revision of the myth of marriage, for which the baby is the dumb conventional social sanction, as validated by the performance for the media and the nancy grace or whoever knockoff. so the genre is one in which she must play out 'psycho' desires, out of vengeance, to magnify some version of the desires at play in 'realistic' analogues of the underlying plot of love and happy married life. if i quite had a read of the fantasy projection it is articulating, what i'd want to suggest is that it does it despite the risk of seeming to court MRA appeal because the MRA fantasy about women and men is one that it must activate to reject. not sure if it does that, though.
interesting that it goes to the trouble of having both their parents figure in the story, presumably in order to back-stop the interpretation of their roles in the marriage or in the roles of their self-scripted performances. they make a big deal out of her parents (mom, but dad somehow wholly on board with it?) stealing, or not stealing, but improving upon her childhood and life by writing her into a fictional character. affleck gets a sick mom and a mentally ill dad (who forgets himself, his family, apparently becomes just a font of vile misogyny). in her case at least, that makes the reclamation of the authority of 'writer' a clear goal. not as sure about him.
curious too that when he's conferring with his sister at the end, and she's wrecked by the news that he might stay because of the baby or whatever, she says 'i knew you before we were born', which sounds to me like the movie's somehow sanctioning the hilarious rumors the nancy grace knockoff feeds about the twins being too close (in the airport, the other passenger glares at affleck and says 'twin sister' in total disgust). not as literally true, but as one of the elements in the movie's myth-rewriting work. with his sister, his twin, there's a claim to knowledge of each other that somehow prefigures their birth into the world, i.e. society, into their social and gender roles as formed by that society. but as pike underscores after she has returned and they've had it out, perfection of the knowledge they have of one another is one of the key things at stake in their marriage, as marriage, too. so (as is already the case in real life) marriage is in competition with other forms of relationship in which people can find fulfillment. (this probably has something to do with why they make his affair be with a student, and him be a teacher: then we're on the same ground, life of the mind turning unplatonic, or over-poetic, sketched in just enough to allude to that cliche).
― j., Tuesday, 24 July 2018 08:15 (five years ago) link
three years pass...
six months pass...
seven months pass...