Is anyone else annoyed by movies where the protagonists are tortured by supposedly horrible actions, that in reality aren’t horrible at all?
I can think of two books right off the bat where stuff like this occurs.
The Prince Of Tides-a double murder using a tiger is covered up, HOWEVER it is clear cut self defense after a woman and two children have been raped by the dead men and they were going to murder their victims.
Deliverance-Same deal basically.
Am I supposed to feel sorry for the dead men in either book? Cuz I am like kill the fuckers! And it baffles me why the protagonists feel guilty when they had every legal and moral right to do what they did, covering it up doesn’t bother me since the original acts were justified.
I don’t want to start a political debate about self defense but come on, how anyone could hold them accountable is beyond me.
in Deliverance are they more upset about killing in self-defense or trying to cover it up illegally?
edit: now I see that OP addressed it I should read more carefully lol
That raped your mother, brother, and sister and had the weapons ready to murder them(Prince Of Tides) would eat someone up with guilt?!
Attack Of The Clones got a lot of shit but at least there it was understandable the protagonist would be torn up(he killed not only the people who kidnapped, beat and raped his mother but also all the women and children in the village too).
Are you sure it’s guilt that the characters are feeling? I haven’t read either of the books mentioned in the OP, nor have I ever killed anyone. But I imagine for the average person, taking another person’s life would be an incredibly traumatic thing to go through, no matter how justified it may be.
Probably in a difference sense, but in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? Jane is overcome by guilt at having run into her sister Blanche while driving drunk, who is now an invalid due to the accident. Jane spends her life caring for Blanche and growing more and more bitter.
At the end, it’s revealed
Blanche had tried to run down Jane, injuring herself, and crawling away from the car. Jane, still blind drunk, got into the car and passed out and, when she woke up, believed she had been driving.
Not film, but literature…one of the sections of Tolkien’s “Silmarillion” is “The Children of Hurin”. Hurin’s son Turin is a fosterling with the king of the grey elves (his father is a prisoner of war), and one of the elves of the court takes a huge dislike toward him. One day, while out in the forest, this elf tries to kill Turin, who manages to step out of the way in just the right place for the enemy elf to end up leaping off a cliff and dying. Turin convinces himself that he basically just MURDERED one of the elf king’s relatives and runs off to become an outlaw (only the first of many, many way overblown reactions Turin commits…I can’t stand the emo git, really). The dead elf IS one of the members of the court, yes, but it’s been noticed by others that he hated Turin, for no obvious reason, so Turin could have returned to court, told the truth, and really had no animus against him at all. What happens instead is why I can’t re-read that section without wanting to strangle him and why I’ve never read the fleshed-out novelization of what is, in the Silmarillion, not much more than a summary of the story.
I do not think that we are meant to feel pity for the rapists (Callanwolde and his two accomplishes) in Prince of Tides. Tom and Savannah are so traumatized because they were terrorized and raped by those men, along with their mother, Lilah, and then forced to pretend it never happened after Luke rescues them. The killing sof Callanwolde and company were still stressful of course because there is something in a human that protests against killing another person, even when it is entirely justified as it was in this case.
The paperback version I read of it had a sea captain, a dolphin, a tiger, children at a funeral, and at least three or four other bizarre things on the cover. All these things are in the book.
If I recall, Deliverance wasn’t quite so clear-cut. They think they’ve got one of the chaps who played hide the sausage* with Ned Beatty, but they’re not sure; his teeth seem to match but they can’t say for definite. I’m not sure myself if the same actor was used in the two scenes, but the important thing is that the characters aren’t sure either, and I don’t think the film makes it clear.
And on top that they’re also scared witless by PTSD and the pressure of having to cover up the events that took place. As for self-defence, in a purely legal sense I can’t imagine the hillbillies running to the police - unless the local police was great friends with the hillbillies - and in this case the chap on the clifftop was shooting at the blokes in the canoe… but even that was ambiguous, wasn’t it? They weren’t sure if Dick Jones had been shot, or just fallen out.
The more I think about it the more I respect Deliverance. It’s one of those films that sticks with you.
