Piano Jax and what he represents
Dunno where else to talk about this cus nobody in my life is a TADC fan, but I have a thing I've been dying to talk about since I watched the finale.
And the specific thing I've seen almost nobody talk about is Piano Jax from the Jax headspace room and his significance as a representation of what's going on in Jax' mind, so I think everyone can agree by now that each of the Jax' in the room represent a facet of the masks he wears to conceal his feelings, with Maid Jax being his toxic irony poisoned persona, Scary Jax representing his nihilism and violent tendencies and Toon Jax obviously being his use of humour as a defence mechanism, his need to be 'the funny one'. Importantly though, all of these presentations vanish as soon as Pomni physically interacts with them, disappearing into smoke, which I personally view as a way of showing just how thin those personas really are, they're not a true reflection of Jax' interiority, but a fiction Jax uses to paper over his insecurity and repression, they all exist only to keep the parts of himself he doesn't want to face contained (which is why they react with so much hostility to the chained door (which I tend to think houses the version of Jax that *she* is most afraid of confronting) when it so much as makes a noise), the only one that remains for a second is Piano Jax, who's revealed to be chained to the Piano and hands Pomni the key to get to the real Jax with a tiny nod before disappearing himself.
My personal view of this scene is that Piano Jax is representative of Jax as a performer, specifically a performer of masculinity, when Pomni talks to the real Jax and remarks on how she didn't know he could play Piano, he says "I only know like two songs" so if playing Piano isn't even something he's particularly adept at, why is there a version of him playing in the room with the other personas? The answer is that Piano Jax' presence isn't about playing piano necessarily. Metaphorically speaking, Jax is an unskilled performer who doesn't particularly want to play, but he's been chained to his instrument and forced to repeat the same two songs he knows over and over again and berated and mocked when he so much as pauses to tell people he's there, and that's what masculinity is to Jax, it's a performance he's not allowed to finish, I imagine the reason he even knows piano is because it was something he was signed up for by his mother, it's something he learned out of necessity, out of expectation and a desire to please the people around him, which is why Piano Jax is projected the way he is. Jax is a prisoner of himself, of his need to be what everyone expects him to be in so many ways. And that's why Piano Jax is the one to give Pomni the key, because he wants more than anything for the performance to end.
Hope that was a somewhat interesting stream of conscious anyways, I've been rattling this around in my head for weeks now and needed to get it out, I should also give credit that idea for all of this was sparked by a post mentioning something akin to this idea I saw just after I watched the movie in theater, can't for the life of me remember who or where, but I appreciate you lol.
