Stupid Points

Included below in this essay are six points of analysis of the film Wristcutters: A Love Story.  It's quite an enjoyable little film.  This essay will not do it justice.

• I was once told that people have a tendency to marry others with similar physical features as their own (I think it was Brian Walton's ex-girlfriend that told me this... though the two of them didn't look too similar.  Did I mention she's an ex-girlfriend?).  The theory goes that people spend so much time looking at themselves, that when they find an opposite sex doppelganger, they innately find that face familiar, soothing, and trustworthy.  Throw into the mix American culture, in which we people tend to have heightened senses of self-worth, and you got yourself a match made in Narcissist Heaven.

I think the casting director spent too much time looking at pictures of the lead couple.  Notice the mirror image moles near the eye!

Girl

Boy

• Tom Waits is here, that's fantastic!  Why is it that he always seems to be a prescient figure in films that take place in someplace other?  I hope that on the day I find myself beyond the Pearly Gates, I'll look around and find Mr. Waits making himself very comfortable there.  I'll walk up to him, shake his hand, and say, 

It is a joy to find you here, good sir! 

Oh, I've been here for quite sometime already.  Enjoy it, kid.

That'll be perfect.

• As much as I admire the comedy of Will Arnett, it's just that that I admire; his comedy.  He was miscast here.  I just kept thinking about the magical exploits of Arrested Development's Job, rather than focusing on this, quote, new character, unquote.  

• My schoolyard buddy, Sam Borden, dropped out of High School during our Senior year.  He got a high school diploma, I think, but for some reason he got it into his head that the ghetto that is public school was something too... well, too something for him.  I'm not sure exactly what.

Eugene's brother, the youngest son of a family of Russian immigrants to America that all canned themselves, tells our protagonist Zia that Eugene saved him from killing himself when he was ten years old.  We then are given a flashback of the event.  The 10yr old with noose around his neck, cries for his brother to explain what the meaning to life is RIGHT NOW or he'll hang himself.  The loving brother Eugene coaxes the boy to first step away from the noose.  The young one does so.  Eugene then promptly slaps the boy and walks away.  The boy, for some reason, took this as a sufficient answer.

Long before Sam Borden abandoned the high school life, he told me that his older sister gave him the best reason for not dropping out.  I, being one who didn't want my friend to escape the ghetto we called home, was curious to know what epic wisdom this older sister shared with Sam that temporarily had quelled his desire to exit.  She had simply said, You shouldn't do that.  I was dumbfounded.  I had given my friend vast, poetic depictions of why he should stay in the trenches with me.  But that didn't matter. What mattered was that his older sister slapped him.

I don't really get either scenario.  And in the end, Eugene's brother did commit suicide, and Sam did leave Oceanside High School.  But slapping does seem to have some temporary benefits, I guess.

I guess.

• I like the whole black hole plot device element.  I read it as saying, Yeah, we acknowledge that true love is impossible.  That's why we need black holes and other miracles to make it work.  Well played, indie film about purgatoryland, well played indeed.

• I have no idea what this monologue by Tom Waits is about, or what it has to do with the movie's plot, but I think we can all agree it's the best way to end this essay.

Once upon a time there was a crooked tree and a straight tree. And they grew next to each other. And every day the straight tree would look at the crooked tree and he would say, 

"You're crooked. You've always been crooked and you'll continue to be crooked. But look at me! Look at me!" 

said the straight tree. He said, 

"I'm tall and I'm straight." 

And then one day the lumberjacks came into the forest and looked around, and the manager in charge said,

"Cut all the straight trees." 

And that crooked tree is still there to this day, growing strong and growing strange.