Renfield (2023) Anniversary

I'm fascinated with the idea of these two. They're fucked up in opposite directions, but are initially drawn to each other for the same reasons. They each see strength in the other that they envy.

Rebecca's strength of will, her ability to stand firm and sass a guy with a gun to her head- that's something Robert admires deeply; so too, in this scene, does she admire his willingness to put his life on the line without personal stakes like hers.

I really do think he's among the first few people she feels comfortable trusting, after her dad. She speaks to him with a vulnerability we don't see with 90% of the other characters. I couldn't really get the without you that starts off this line, because of how the sub track is set up, but it's pretty emblematic of this to me.

Rebecca lives a life where having rock-solid walls up is vital. Any vulnerability she shows is an opportunity for the corruption she's fighting against to chew her up and spit her out, and that's another reason why her and Robert work well together- they respect each other, in a way that neither gets anywhere else in their lives. They can see each other. And they like what they see.

Robert listens to her, in a way that quite literally nobody else in the film does, not even Kate- compare and contrast his response to her venting vs Kate's when Teddy Lobo is let go again.

The value of just having someone look you in the eye and say, for the first time, that must be awful. I don't think Rebecca has, herself, that freedom of emotion or ability to express affection- the same walls that protect her from the outside world are up inside her head.

It's why I like to HC them as falls first (Robert), falls harder (Rebecca), and part of why I think they work SO MUCH BETTER for not being canon on the final draft- by the end of the runtime, neither is quite ready to be normal about letting someone get close- but I feel like they will be soon. And when they are, they'll be perfect for each other.

P.S: It's also important to me that Robert can talk back to her- she isn't entirely unlike his last partner, imo, he has something of a type (dominance)- but he's able to snark back at her. He's not scared of her.

Rebecca Quincy hits all the sweet spots for me- she's relatable, funny, and feels fully-realised, in addition to being an key moving piece in the narrative and theming of the movie. Her no-bullshit bravado is a big part of what catalyses Renfield's entire character arc, and also sets them up as a sort of foils.

She's very much the Yang to his Yin, in the symbological sense:

And she's constructed so well- she's fueled by her anger and this rock-solid conviction, and those traits are both good and bad. The determination and moral compass that get her through day after day of traffic stops in a city with daiquiri drive-throughs (!) are the same core characteristics that have had her banging her head against a wall on a ten-year revenge-quest. It's been a while since I've seen a female character like her.

Rebecca isn't the suave, slick, hypercomentent had-six-brothers Strong Female Character tm that pissed everyone off in the mid-late '10s. She's badass, but she's also temperamental and impulsive and perpetually sick of everyone's shit and it shows.

Her physical direction is also fantastic. The way she MOVES. It's played for comedy, mostly, but I love how she's allowed to throw her weight around and scrunch her face up in huge expressions and just.. emote. This is the first movie I've ever seen where a woman smiles like I do.

I also think being a woman informs how she's treated by the rest of the force- She IS good at her job, and rightfully should have been promoted several times, but to her captain (and probably most of the rest of them) she's just her father's daughter. They respect his memory enough to keep her on the payroll, but she's still stuck her in a dead-end "babysit the nepo baby" to keep her out from underfoot, even though I'm pretty sure he had similar goals and convictions. The exact same traits they admired him him are reasons to shut her down- peep the lecture she gets after arresting Teddy Lobo at the traffic stop: