Charlie St. Cloud

[d. b. wilyumz]

(01-15-2012 03:34 PM)Fruitfly Wrote:  A very good analysis. In a book you can play with notions of ambiguity because internal dialogue or introspective reflection is made explicit to the reader, and he or she can make up their minds as to what they want to believe about a character. In a film, the audience isn't privy to the character's interiority, only their behavior and their words, so what they say and do has to be consistent with a single interpretation OR with two possibilities in order to maintain plausibility.

CSC's plot was not consistent with both possibilities at all times, and the critics noticed it.

A similar problem occurred in Fight Club, which was made evident when the security guards are watching the narrator being beaten up by an invisible Tyler. We are made to believe that Tyler is an alter-ego of the narrator, a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, so for the narrator to be beaten up requires him to be outside of himself (and invisible.) That didn't work for me.

And Fight Club (a modern day Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic) is one of my favorite movies.

I love the character of Charlie, however, because he is a Romantic Hero in the 18th century sense of the word. That's why to date I think Zac's best personal work was in a director's most flawed piece.

And the same to you.

I think the greatest weakness in the design of CStC is that Charlie has no one to talk to, or talk to him, about his experience. That's why a lot of people didn't understand how Tess could be an apparition while she was still alive. There was no one to explain that there are two kinds of apparitions, apparitions of the dead and "crisis" apparitions projected by the living under great stress.

As for "a modern day Hegelian Master-Slave Dialectic," I'll go see one of those any day.