The letter is superimposed over the image of Jean Weiss (Ellen McLaughlin). She reads the letter aloud to her husband Ray (Tom Blair).
The implied meaning of the superimposition echoes the character-defining importance of the letter. For Jean, as for us, the letter will shape a perception of Ray, one he is quick to deny.
But the letter initiates an unalterable and irreparable new reality so strong it supplants all prior convictions. The world twists into violent, fractured, painful dimensions for Jean. Again, Jost mirrors this visually.
Ray: And you say you love me. "For better, or for worse." But you throw it away because Tracy writes some crazy letter.
Jean: It's not crazy. It is not crazy. I don't know if it's true Ray, but it is not crazy. And she's my daughter, and I love her. And I thought you did too.
Jean is shocked and repulsed by the immensity of the accusation, but refuses to allow the gravity of her pain to be allayed by platitudes, excuses, moral deflections, or tangential circumstance. This lack of personal regard defines her character and the scope of her own love. Her choice to reciprocate the emotional nudity of the letter protects her from Ray's desperate and manipulative defenses.
And since Ray is unable to directly confront the emotions of the letter, and because Jean is, he exposes to her a side of himself ugly and repulsive enough to fill in further the shades of misery and destruction.
Jost, too, chooses to reveal his characters through unrelieved honesty.
What I really like about The Bed You Sleep In is it's not the typical "hidden view" of the sins of a small town. It's much more about the dual nature and violent divisions of a single person. This to me is more sinister, and suggests not that danger lurks in the corners of the picturesque, but that the seed of sin is everywhere, in everyone, and waits to be revealed.
I bumped into this a bit belatedly. Just a note: nothing in the film confirms the accusation made in the daughter's letter (a very vague image - when the young man calls to telephone to the father the alleged suicide, there is another person in the lower left of the image). The film was made at the height of period when "recalled memories" were in dispute and was, I knew well, a social topical "hot button" which likely would evoke knee-jerk responses that ignore the actual evidence.
ReplyDeleteI can trust you on this perspective, of course. Must admit, and it seems obvious, that I didn't realize this was the intended perspective. Thanks for the comment!
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