Resident Angry Queer

a lot of people think the only point of engagement with art is just to decode exactly what the author was trying to say, and their intent is the "real meaning," and once you've figured out the real meaning you're done you've solved it. that's dumb and boring. don't do that.

things death of the author does not mean:

every interpretation is equally valid

you are forbidden to treat what we can know or reasonably guess about the author's intentions as something that matters to your interpretation at all

the only valid way to interpret fiction is to treat it like it's a documentary of events that really happened and never think about it in terms of "why would the creator, a human person, choose to present it this way"

authors shouldn't get to have opinions about what they intended to say through their work, they should shut up and let me tell them what it means because i know better

actually i, the person reading or watching or viewing this art, am the infallible source of real meaning, and everybody who disagrees with me is wrong including but not limited to the author

Normally when a character (usually a woman) who starts the story being villified and villainised, just as Grace was deemed "the harlot whore" for 60 years, their redemption in the eyes of the story comes from the revelation that they were a better person than people gave them credit for. Maybe they were a good mother, or did their best in the face of the deck being stacked against them.

With Grace, we don’t see that. I can’t recall any instance in the movie of her being a particularly good person, or a good mother to Jefferson Wicks, or a virtuous woman as befitting her name. A lot of her actions are recontextualised to be more understandable within the story, yes, but that’s not necessarily the same.

Grace is messy. Some would call her shallow with her focus on expensive brands. She’s unashamedly destructive. She probably wouldn’t have wanted her father’s church where she was pretty much held hostage for years to be named after her, even if the Wicks family weren’t in charge anymore.

And she STILL didn’t deserve what Prentice Wicks and her family did to her, whether she was a good person or not.

There are no perfect victims. Trauma, shocker, tends to mess with people’s mental state a lot, and they’re not always going to act the way people think they should. They can’t always be, well, graceful about it- I dare say they can’t be EXPECTED to be.

And people don’t have to be perfect or even particularly good people to be sympathised with as victims.

And it didn’t take anyone finding out about her secret better side or good deeds. All it took was one person - Vera - having a change in perspective, to consider things from Grace’s point of view and realise she never really had a chance to BE a better person, to plant that idea in the heads of the characters and the audience.

Pilots and other transportation workers have absurd hours of service requirements that start your rest period as “the moment you shut the vehicle down” and can be as short as 9 hours in some cases.

Railroad workers have to be available on-call 6 days a week and be ready within two hours notice. They don’t get sick time.

Retail workers have to keep a veneer of politeness against any and all abuse or they can be fired.

Truck drivers get paid by mileage and rarely see pay for shipper or receiver delays.