Empathetic Space on Screen by Amedeo D’Adamo

Author:Amedeo D’Adamo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319667720
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

On the Rich and Strange Sea Change of the Dead: The Wide Gamut of Hauntings

“Full fathom five thy father lies:

Of his bones are coral made:

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.”

Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2

Lars and the Real Girl

Lars and the Real Girl (2007) is a low-budget drama set in a small town. When we first meet the film’s main protagonist Lars, he is a social isolate, a neurotic who cannot touch people. Lars lives with his brother Gus and is scarred by a series of Dantean moments in his past: his mother died when he was born and his father abused him when Gus left home. So far Lars has held these scarring moments in abeyance, but that changes one evening when his brother Gus announces that Gus’s wife is about to have a child. Disturbed by this, Lars has something like a psychotic break that, as Gus and his wife slowly realize, is powered by Lars’ reawakened guilt about his mother’s death, his fears of being abandoned again by Gus and replaced by this baby, as well as Lars’ newly-triggered desire to have, like his brother, a partner of his own. This last desire is a particular problem since Lars is so phobic about people that he wears white gloves to keep from touching anyone.

Lars’ solution is simple: he purchases a life-sized sex doll that he orders on the internet, names it Bianca, and then starts a romantic but non-sexual relationship with the doll, squiring her about town and bringing her to dinner parties. While the viewer stays at a dramatic distance from Lars’ perceptions, we do see that the sex doll has in a sense become inhabited with the shade of Lars’ dead mother, becoming both a realized physical ghost and, as his conversations show, also a shade that lives only in his mind. For most of the film Lars then psychotically explores his deepening non-physical relationship with the doll, caring for her by bringing her to doctor checkups (Fig. 6.2), helping her to bed and so forth.

Fig. 6.2A Dantean character in a dramatic space , Lars and the Real Girl (2007)

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