#anelleoriginal

gladly.

so, at first, i thought it was me projecting but i think the first clue i got was eddie. yall might think i’m being dramatic but eddie was…suspicious from the get-go. in a normal situation like this, there’s actually 0% chance that it turns out the way it did for arthur.

but that’s beside the point. eddie knocks on the door and receives an unhurried response. he walks away to do.. whatever it is he was doing. arthur comes to the door, opens it, looks around and picks up some trash, muttering to himself. suddenly eddie has urgent business inside the office with a. flimsy excuse at best. strike one.

we, as the audience, know that arthur is being shifty because he’s just killed a man. eddie has been told, quite convincingly, that arthur was moving… boxes or something (im looking at the transcript, arthur just says ‘not furniture’ so…). and that arthur is working with sensitive documents. not sure if you know this but private detectives have to work with proper authorities to be allowed to operate legally. that means they work with the police and the courts. when a PI says a document is sensitive, they mean legally. they mean eyes only. they mean ‘come back later or i could lose my fucking license because you got the wrong look at classified documents.’ a building manager, especially their building manager, should know that. strike two.

he also asks for arthur’s partner, peter yang (who is, i can only assume, an east asian man). i should hope that i dont have to remind you that this is massachusetts in the 30’s we’re talking about, and what that means logically. but i will. america hated asian people the most they ever did until COVID in the 30s through the 60s. the only people they hated more were black and brown people. no matter how shifty and suspicious arthur was acting, eddie would’ve been… let’s just say ‘incredibly unlikely’ to ask for peter instead of the white man. strike three

there’s some little bits about subvocals and tone that i could say, but it’d be a lot and i don’t fully understand it enough to explain well why eddie set off alarms for me. because i dont have to. it takes 5 minutes (from 11:48-16:09 on spotify, so nearly exactly) for eddie to go from inconvenient, to annoying, to suspicious, to violent. and he ends the conversation with a very real threat of violence that essentially boils down to ‘don’t come back to the building again.’ eddie is a maintenance man. he did not have the power to evict anyone. unless, of course, they were a poc. so why was arthur worried about eddie when sneaking back into the building?

but, like i said, i thought i was projecting. projection and being-on-the-lam can easily explain arthur’s hesitance when delivering the baby and asking for a ride. or the gunshop in part 6. but the lighthouse? no, what really solidified it for me was the end of part 8.

here’s what officer collin knows so far: a visibly disabled man has stumbled, confused and upset, away from a lighthouse and a body that CANNOT have been killed by a human; and it is dark outside. that’s it. using this knowledge, he then proceeds to beat said man. brutally. repeatedly.

in part 9 they learn he is blind and when that timid little fucker (mitchell) expresses doubt, collin says this

this is something we like to call coerced confession. arthur did not kill that man (the lighthouse keeper). officer collin knows that arthur didn’t kill that man. (dont play, he knows.) but because it is convenient to say that he did, they’ll threaten and torture him until he says that he did.

now, friends, i’m not going to lie to your face and say that white folk are safe from the cops, youre not, i know. but what im also not going to do is pretend like there os any world in which this happens and arthur is visibly white. not in the thirties, not in america. despite being forgotten or unmentioned they are in the midst of the great depression, the exact last thing these small-town cops need is the arrest of a blind white man on their hands. regardless, i have never ever heard of a cop speaking this way to a white person unprovoked. i, on the other hand, have been spoken to this way myself.

this is already quite long and it doesn’t even cover the sheer magnitude of people who feel comfortable calling arthur (at his grown ass age of visibly-an-adult) ‘boy.’ or the wicked and downright racist way that larson says it, (genuinely. it sounds like he’s a middle school boy who discovered the word ‘fagg*t’ for the first time the way he says it. i couldn’t tell you how many times that word (boy) drove an ice pick through my fucking skull this season.) but i hope you can at least get the picture.