Cinsumia Sporadica

I love how close Elaine is with the aunts. They're so harmonious and affectionate, and the movie does a great job demonstrating that despite omitting all the informative details-- how they've been neighbours for two years, how Elaine's mother died shortly after they moved there and Abby and Martha being the Harpers' main support during that time. They probably set her up with Mortimer as much for their own sake, if not more, as for his. It was probably nice having her around every day for tea, to bake with them, sing at the piano with Teddy, go elderberry picking. She's one of the family already, they just need to make it official.

I also like the implication in both the play and the movie that Elaine doesn't tell her father about Jonathan strangling her. In the play, I don't think he could hear that and then leave for Philadelphia without her. And in the movie, he probably took some cold medicine and slept through everything. In both I think she's trying to protect Mortimer and her prospects with him, knowing her father would put up a lot more resistance to the marriage if he found out about Jonathan. But in the movie I'd be interested to know what she does with the information about the bodies in the cellar. I think she keeps that to herself as well. Seems like she comes to terms with it pretty quickly, and she'd want to protect her father and the aunts' friendship. Or maybe she decides she didn't see anything after all, that it was dark and the end of a harrowing day; she must have imagined it.

Mortimer's fear of the window seat/coffin overlooking the cemetery between his house and Elaine's. He tried to distance himself from his family and their hereditary insanity by retreating into rationalism, making a name for himself by denouncing marriage and becoming a theatre critic, proving to himself that he's sane by proving that the rest of the world is insane. Then he falls in love with Elaine and forgets about his anxieties until he comes back home and is confronted with what it would mean to continue the family line. There's this double fear of his own mortality/immortality. Initially he'd hoped his work would keep his name alive. Then he decided to start a family after all, forgetting all about the prospect of another Jonathan. Not until he learns he's not really a Brewster is he brave enough to hop into the window seat. By that point he's lost it, with or without the Brewster genes, but Elaine has already assured him she doesn't care, and now he's past caring too. Spiritually he's a Brewster and that's more than enough for him.

Irina (I don't want to call her The Wife the whole time) wishes the Wizard could find joy in the mundane. She keeps telling him that would make her happy. But instead he keeps trying to impress her, which only hurts her. He's more inclined to dwell on the future than on the moment, and plans a story about the conflict between a person's nature and a person's love, ending in the inevitable loss that he's afraid of. Eventually Irina will die and he'll spend an eternity missing her. The Bear and the Princess are supposed to be his way of coping with that-- painting loss as grand and heroic, something that will make him stronger.

But he's frustrated by Irina's lack of enthusiasm for tragedy. She doesn't enjoy being sad and it reminds him that he's the one making her sad. It forces him to think about their relationship as it stands now, sparks the fear that she might leave, and sets him wondering if she would be happier never having met him. These fears manifest in the Bear and the Princess as they wrest control of the story, each having their own moment of letting the other go instead of giving in to passion.

He tries to assuage his doubts and appease Irina with Emil/Emilia, a couple who reunites after a misunderstanding broke them up for years. They do the mundane thing and marry and live happily ever after. Emilia is susceptible to authorial intent, but unfortunately for the Wizard, he wrote Irina into the story in the form of the Innkeeper. They're basically the same person; they're the hosts of the settings, they're wounded spectators of the narrative, they both actively petition the Wizard for a happy ending. The Wizard invented the Innkeeper so that he could vent his anxieties to Irina without worrying her. Not intentionally, but the whole story has been a demonstration of the real and subconscious infiltrating the fictional beyond the author's power to stop it.

Bruno Bozzetto, Help? (1996)

Robert Alvarez, No Tip (1996)

William Hana, Hard Luck Duck (1995)

John McIntyre, The Kitchen Casanova (1996)

The comparison of Jonathan to the monster is pretty clear. Frankenstein is either Mortimer or Einstein. I like Einstein for this. He's the one who physically works on Jonathan, literally builds him, is complicit in Jonathan's murders, and can't or won't escape. Einstein seems more worried about legal repercussions than anything Jonathan might do to him, and Frankenstein runs from his guilt, never confessing until he's on his third deathbed. He and Frankenstein are each their own hostage more than they are the monster's.

Just read the play. It seems more grounded in its time, with reference to the war and "the good old days", the Victorian house and the Victorian old women, giving it clearer themes than the movie-- invasion, oppression, conflicting ideas about peace, freedoms and restrictions, fear of the future, retreat into the past. We have the invader in Jonathan and the visitor in Mortimer, both trying to assert their will over their aunts in their own home. Mortimer being confronted with his future in his aunts' victims. All the men in the play are playing tug-of-war for control, but eventually they'll be old, lonely, and dead. It's like they don't feel at liberty unless they're controlling someone, and when they're finally ready to concede, Abby and Martha will be there with their elderberry wine. Or there's a sense of futility Mortimer has to deal with, of surrender. He can surrender to Jonathan or he can surrender to Abby and Martha, or to Elaine, or to no one. It all ends the same regardless. I don't know. The play's doing something deep but I can't illuminate it.

It also cleared something up for me, that Mortimer wants to commit Teddy in order to pin the murders on him without sending him to prison. That's what I thought was happening in the movie, but his urgency made less sense to me as it went on. However, I do like that Mortimer shows concern for Teddy after the papers are signed, wanting to be sure he'll be happy. In the play he says Teddy's his favourite brother and then immediately throws him under the bus. Sure, it may be naive of the aunts to think the cops would understand but I'm not quite convinced that they really need Mortimer's protection. From Jonathan, yes. From their friends, meh. Maybe.