1/3/2024 0 Comments The allegory of the caveI have not read the original book, though I understand it was written from the point of view of the child. She has been robbed of her youth, her late teens and twenties-having been forced into a sadistic charade with only the most radically reduced options to choose from for most of the life she can remember. Freedom, in this case, is truly just another word for nothing left to lose, as Ma struggles to adjust to the world outside. Yet the movie is all the more poignant in explaining how a woman who has been pushed to the limits of endurance and despair in trying to protect her child finds it nearly impossible to protect herself. It’s not a big spoiler to say that Ma and Jack eventually escape, since the trailer for the film makes this clear. For whatever reason, the monstrous man was willing to concede this one small point, with considerable repercussions for the development of the story. The one claim that the mother was able to stake out in Old Nick’s dictatorial rule was that he would never see nor touch her son, who stayed more or less in a small cabinet or cupboard whenever the master came for his visits. Like slaves who had to thread the needle of interactions with masters that always risked the possibility of violence or even death, Ma and Jack created room for themselves within the impossible confines of Room. If Lars von Trier’s Melancholia was a uniquely compelling take on depression, then Room does much the same thing for trauma. That reading is fitting enough, but there is more going on. One thinks of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House as well. Old Nick, of course, is so deluded and deranged that he can lecture her on “Who pays the bills around here?” and “You didn’t have to worry your pretty little head about that, did you?” as if he’s doing her a favor by imprisoning and raping her while being a male “provider.” If the women of Friedan’s generation saw the suburban home as a kind of prison-in a time before no-fault divorce and all the other historic gains of second-wave feminism-then Old Nick’s shed is just the reductio ad absurdum of disempowerment under patriarchy. When her captor loses his job, she has to worry about corralling resources, like so many other women forced to depend on a man in more ordinary conditions. She has to be careful what she asks for, and she has to be polite, even gracious, for what he supplies just so that she and Jack can survive. Over the years, Ma has learned to negotiate (another favorite word of historians) with Old Nick, her only outlet to the outside world and her sole source of food, electricity, and so forth. I could not help but think of The Feminine Mystique while watching the interactions between Ma and her captor, Old Nick-while the shed is a far cry from the Westchester homes of Friedan’s frustrated middle-class housewives of the 1950s, Room still offers a grotesquely distilled vision of utter dependency on male authority. As critics have widely noted, it’s about the enduring love of mother and child that somehow transcends sadism, trauma, and an inescapable feeling of powerlessness-in a sense, what historians call “agency,” the way that humans carve out lives through sheer force of will in even the most (literally) confining circumstances.Ĭritics have often described Room as a feminist film, and I would suggest that it is. So what is Room about? On one level, it is about how anyone adapts to gruesome conditions, whether a concentration camp, gulag, plantation, prison, or backyard shed. The real world parallels are well-known enough: author Donoghue looked at horrifying cases of women’s imprisonment and rape, such as the notorious Fritzl story in Austria as she wrote the book, while another, similar case emerged after it was released (the Ariel Castro kidnappings-that motherfucker was sent away for life plus 1000 years). For five years she has raised a child, Jack, in this small room, attempting to cope with her dehumanizing circumstances while making Jack’s strange, claustrophobic world as intelligible to him as possible. That, of course, is an awful lot of freight to put on one movie-especially a film that, for much of its duration, concerns only two actors interacting in a tiny space, one of whom was a seven or eight year old boy at the time of filming (albeit playing a five-year-old).Īgain, the facts are simple: Brie Larson plays Ma, a woman who has been detained for seven years after being kidnapped by a rapist psychopath and installed in a tiny shed for which only he, “Old Nick,” controls exit and entry. The truth is that the film pushes against the outer boundaries of what we understand about love, family, parenting, epistemology, and even the meaning of existence itself. But there is always a gap between facts and truth. Room is the adaptation of a popular novel by Irish writer Emma Donoghue, with a screenplay written by the author herself and ably directed by Lenny Abrahamson.
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