This movie denied me catharsis, and I loved it for that.
I hadn't made the "ancient Indian burial ground" parallel, till you pointed it out. I hope that the average audience member on the street is still informed enough about recent history to get what's going on in this movie and why it's scary.
There is no ending something that no one will acknowledge started in the first place. You cannot have an exorcism unless you first admit there is a ghost. You cannot heal a trauma if you deny there was ever a wound.
Yes. This. This is wisdom. I like this. I think this is the answer to the kind of defensive people who hear about racist and/or cultural atrocities and go, "Well, what do you want ME to do about it?! Self-flagellate?!" How about acknowledgement? That'd be a good first step! How about let's talk about what actually happened! How about let's teach it in schools, with honesty, without shying away from things that will make us sad or question our own behavior! When everyone is informed and has the facts before them, then we can sort out what to do about it!
(I just finished typesetting a play about a white Southern family who are all in denial that racism is even a thing. I may be an angry historian right now. Which was what the play intended to do to me, so yeah.)
On a shallower and more immediate front, the friend I saw it with agreed with me that the part of this movie that scared us the most was the wedding itself. It looked fun for the first few scenes of dancing and eating, but then it turned into a nightmare. The domineering parents, the awkward speeches, the messy drunkenness, the violence, the faaaaamily values, and THE NORMALIZING. Most of all, the normalizing. "Don't worry, family! Nothing to see here, move along, everything's going to be okay, nothing's wrong, the bridegroom's just epileptic or else he does a lot of drugs or has a head injury or never existed at all! Here are four hundred more gallon bottles of vodka!" It was so embarrassing, it set off a voice in my head going "Get up and RUN! Get out of here!"
The bride digging in the grave was a refreshing jolt, like, "Hah! Someone is finally having a healthy reaction to this horror!" If this movie had had a catharsis for me, it would have been Zaneta thanking the Professor, putting her husband and his dybbuk in the car, driving the hell away from her hometown and family, and never looking back. But the movie's not about her and she's not a final girl.
I thought the woman on the ferry was Zaneta, having cut her hair and changed into casual clothes to go out into the world and find Piotr. But I'm not great with faces--maybe she was an unrelated character, like the screaming woman in the water at the beginning.
I had never heard the song that the Professor sings sung in Yiddish before. A friend of my mom's named Marianne, who was born in New York in the 1940s and was the child of (I assume) refugees, knew it as "Raisins and Almonds", but only in English; her mom would never, ever sing it to her in Yiddish or allow her to learn a word of Yiddish, because she wanted her daughter to assimilate. Marianne got sad when she talked about that. I seem to recall she went back and learned it in Yiddish as an adult, and tried to gather family heritage that her mother had put aside because as far as she was concerned the past had to die.
Did we ever see what happened to the Professor? I wanted him to be the Van Helsing, and I understand that this isn't that sort of story, but now I'm concerned something bad happened to him. The last I remember seeing, he and Piotr and Hana were in a car driving through town. Then, nothing.
There is a possible mundane interpretation of events, where that pretty-faced guy dumping the car at the end of the film is getting rid of Piotr's body in the car trunk, having murdered him (and presumably re-murdered the dybbuk) to get rid of the problem. But it would be harder to murder the Professor without someone in the community missing him. I hope.
no subject
I hadn't made the "ancient Indian burial ground" parallel, till you pointed it out. I hope that the average audience member on the street is still informed enough about recent history to get what's going on in this movie and why it's scary.
There is no ending something that no one will acknowledge started in the first place. You cannot have an exorcism unless you first admit there is a ghost. You cannot heal a trauma if you deny there was ever a wound.
Yes. This. This is wisdom. I like this. I think this is the answer to the kind of defensive people who hear about racist and/or cultural atrocities and go, "Well, what do you want ME to do about it?! Self-flagellate?!" How about acknowledgement? That'd be a good first step! How about let's talk about what actually happened! How about let's teach it in schools, with honesty, without shying away from things that will make us sad or question our own behavior! When everyone is informed and has the facts before them, then we can sort out what to do about it!
(I just finished typesetting a play about a white Southern family who are all in denial that racism is even a thing. I may be an angry historian right now. Which was what the play intended to do to me, so yeah.)
On a shallower and more immediate front, the friend I saw it with agreed with me that the part of this movie that scared us the most was the wedding itself. It looked fun for the first few scenes of dancing and eating, but then it turned into a nightmare. The domineering parents, the awkward speeches, the messy drunkenness, the violence, the faaaaamily values, and THE NORMALIZING. Most of all, the normalizing. "Don't worry, family! Nothing to see here, move along, everything's going to be okay, nothing's wrong, the bridegroom's just epileptic or else he does a lot of drugs or has a head injury or never existed at all! Here are four hundred more gallon bottles of vodka!" It was so embarrassing, it set off a voice in my head going "Get up and RUN! Get out of here!"
The bride digging in the grave was a refreshing jolt, like, "Hah! Someone is finally having a healthy reaction to this horror!" If this movie had had a catharsis for me, it would have been Zaneta thanking the Professor, putting her husband and his dybbuk in the car, driving the hell away from her hometown and family, and never looking back. But the movie's not about her and she's not a final girl.
I thought the woman on the ferry was Zaneta, having cut her hair and changed into casual clothes to go out into the world and find Piotr. But I'm not great with faces--maybe she was an unrelated character, like the screaming woman in the water at the beginning.
I had never heard the song that the Professor sings sung in Yiddish before. A friend of my mom's named Marianne, who was born in New York in the 1940s and was the child of (I assume) refugees, knew it as "Raisins and Almonds", but only in English; her mom would never, ever sing it to her in Yiddish or allow her to learn a word of Yiddish, because she wanted her daughter to assimilate. Marianne got sad when she talked about that. I seem to recall she went back and learned it in Yiddish as an adult, and tried to gather family heritage that her mother had put aside because as far as she was concerned the past had to die.
Did we ever see what happened to the Professor? I wanted him to be the Van Helsing, and I understand that this isn't that sort of story, but now I'm concerned something bad happened to him. The last I remember seeing, he and Piotr and Hana were in a car driving through town. Then, nothing.
There is a possible mundane interpretation of events, where that pretty-faced guy dumping the car at the end of the film is getting rid of Piotr's body in the car trunk, having murdered him (and presumably re-murdered the dybbuk) to get rid of the problem. But it would be harder to murder the Professor without someone in the community missing him. I hope.