The film is excellent but right from the outset, I was wondering why they couldn’t escape through the skylight. There were loads of ways to do it, includong standing the bed on its end. I agree that it’s an issue with the film set design rather than the book/story, but there’s something else which was a clear error- especially surprising, since the film was so observant and precise over Jack’s relationship to the new world outside ‘Room’. Jack is seen on a swing after walking the dog. He is swinging just like a child who has been familiar with swings since a toddler. I know from experience that kids take a while to master the art of ‘solo swinging’, rocking your legs and pulling back on the rope which Jack is clearly seen doing, allowing him to reach really high heights, never mind the nervousness you’d expect if this was his first time. Even if it wasn’t, he looks far too confident and competent for something so new to him
I may be mis-remembering, but I didn’t think we were supposed to have the impression that we were seeing his very first minute on the swing. I assumed someone had shown him. I thought that was part of a montage of shots demonstrating how he was quickly adjusting to becoming a fairly normal kid, rebounding from the trauma much faster than his mother ever could.
I don’t imagine it would take a kid his age days and days to get used to the idea of a swing.
If you’re not speaking from personal experience of escaping from a place where you were locked in and subject to virtually unlimited retaliatory responses from the people keeping you there if they discover your attempt, you’re just guessing what you’d do, and you’re projecting that guess onto this story’s main character.
Stockholm syndrome is not like a light bulb that is either on or off. Appeasement behaviors are often necessary for survival, and become habitual; behaviors that risk provoking your captor are dangerous and a wariness about engaging in them also becomes habitual.
And all of that is true and applicable even for someone who does not have a dependent young child who is also at risk from anything that you do in that situation.
By myself, I think I would keep trying things and would take risks. But I also might pass up dozens of iffy / questionable opportunities — lack of nerve at that precise moment, fear of possible worst-case scenarios stirred in with the unknown factors, paralysis from fear of the captor. I think these things because I escaped from a locked psychiatric ward. It wasn’t easy (psychologically, I mean): I was 40% convinced that they knew what tools I had and were watching me and that I was playing into their hands by making the attempt. And I passed up a couple opportunities because I was scared. I did not have anyone else whose welfare I was responsible for, just myself.
I didn’t find it difficult to believe. I was impressed with what she did. (and with the kid and what HE did).
:rolleyes:
Yeah, its true that Stockholm syndrome is not like an on/off switch. In real life, while Dugard was not trying to escape, and had to be coaxed to admit her true identity, others who also suffered from Stockholm syndrome behaved differently.
Kampusch did not take several chances to escape before the one she did take; Steven Stayner was able to come and go as he pleased and only escaped when another child was kidnapped to take his place, whom he wanted to protect.
However, Ma/Joy is not shown as not trying to escape, quite the contrary, she tries continuously until she succeeds. If she has in fact not been really trying, then your post would have merit, however in the story she makes several attempts of various seriousness and risk, from yelling, to flickering lights to throwing things at the skylight and also trying the combination. Basically if she had been trying, as the writer says, she would have succeeded long before 7 years had passed.
Everybody relates with their personal experience and perspective. Disregarding fear, anxiety and the like, I can say with confidence I would literally have been out of THAT shed as in the proportions/materials/design featured in the film in under five minutes. I am not Houdini. My issue is that they could have added elements to make it more difficult to escape through the skylight or removed the obvious aids to escape. Joy was fit, healthy, resourceful and desperate to escape. Her eventually successful plan was way more risky than breaking and clambouring out through the skylight.
As to the swing issue, I agree that the time lapse between the escape and the swinging shot was unclear. However, I have taught/observed three bright children learning to swing and it’s a pretty convoluted process between being pushed then going solo then learning to pull back and kick out your legs then managing to do it as high as ‘Jack’ . I accept that both points are pedantic and neither spoiled the narrative, but I suspect many who have either had to solve really easy problems (like getting out of THAT shed) or spent time in a playground will see my point. Thanks for the feedback.
I thought the police officer who sat in the back of that patrol car and gently teased enough details out of Jack to allow them to find the shed was terrific. I hope that she got some sort of medal for that. (And compare her to the other officer driving the car, who seemed to think there was nothing going on.) It’s really hard to imagine just how alien everything would have been for Jack.
:rolleyes:
Wasn’t the shed reinforced with some kind of outer shell to make it soundproof and more secure? It looked to me when Nick went inside that there was an outer door and then the keypad locked door.
The skylight also did not look either accessible or easily breakable to me.
But OK, everyone here is an Internet Tough Guy who could have quickly punched through the wall to escape. Got it.
Where the fuck did anyone say that it could have been done quickly (and this story, while inspired by real events is fictitious, lest you forget). The issue is not the ease, but the length of time she was in there and her continuing efforts.
Here:
The character Joy was limited in what the author allowed her to do. The book was much better.
I quoted it in the very post you replied to.
I guess threads take on a life if their own- to the extent that the original point is missed, forgotten or lost. I teach film. I understand the concept of a willing suspension of disbelief and I accept that Joy, in the story, was unable to escape from the shed. The point I was making was that the shed, as depicted in the film, was very easy to escape from. There were many stacking combinations of the available furniture which would have allowed her to reach the necessary height to smash the skylight. She would have had to hit it quite hard, of course. 7 years was also enough time to dig a tunnel, even through concrete, if it came to it.
I haven’t read the book - ugh. I assume the baby(ies) died soon after birth?
Jaycee Dugard had her first child by her captor when she was 13. She had to learn about pregnancy and childbirth through television. shudders
As a female viewer of the movie, I can’t say that “that place looks easy to escape from” is a thought that occurred to me, or probably would ever occur to me. I just assumed that it was all Solidly Enough Built … and it certainly wouldn’t take very much Solid Enough Building to keep me inside a structure.
I would certainly have tried the flour-on-the-keypad trick if it were me … but Joy is not me, and that’s fine. I wouldn’t have had the guts to attempt the trick that she actually used to get out with (Remember as Old Nick is leaving the shed with Jack’s “dead body” and just for a moment he looks speculatively around his own property for a burial site - gave me the cold shivers just to watch it).
The one thing that did take me out of the movie was the behaviour of the TV interviewer. Her final questions to Joy were so appallingly insensitive - I can’t believe that a real journalist who made those sort of insinuations to a multiple rape victim would still have a job by the next morning.
But overall it was a fabulous movie.
Exactly. I guess the needs of the story supersede “reality”.
[QUOTE=Aspidistra]
As a female viewer of the movie, I can’t say that “that place looks easy to escape from” is a thought that occurred to me, or probably would ever occur to me. I just assumed that it was all Solidly Enough Built … and it certainly wouldn’t take very much Solid Enough Building to keep me inside a structure.
[/QUOTE]
Even after you had been locked in for a while and understood that it was a shed? When you had tools like knives, and seven years of time?
It’s obvious from the movie that Joy wasn’t in ‘escape mode’ all the time - she had a lot of (understandable) mood swings. The ‘gone days’, for instance. And from what Jack says at the start, before he was born she was pretty non-functional. So it didn’t seem like seven years of continual escape attempts - more like occasional phases of serious trying, followed by lethargy when it failed.
But also, the big problem with trying to break/dig yourself out when your captor is continually visiting you - if you can’t get it all done in one day, you have to hide that you ever tried. That would be hard, in a 10x10 room. So it’s not really “she has seven years to do it” - she has about 8 hours to do it, and seven years of thinking time about *how *to do it.
If he left them alone for weeks and months at a time, I would feel quite different about it. But I still wouldn’t assume a random teenage girl could physically break and climb out of a skylight.
Agreed! I told my wife as soon as the film ended, “That movie was totally believable…except for that over-the-top jerk reporter. Yes, the media can be insensitive, but that was just too much.”
I completely agree with you about Jack and the swing. As you say, children need to learn to “pump” their legs on a swing, and it isn’t a maneuver that comes naturally even for children who have been familiar with swings and playgrounds all their lives. Even if Jack had seen swings on television, it is highly unlikely that he would master the fine art of swinging 
without some actual practice.
A minor issue in an overall excellent film, but I agree that it was something the filmmaker should have paid more attention to.
I’m willing to assume that by then he had experience with other swings or even more experience with that swing. The movie does show, in other ways, how he is unfamiliar with many aspects of normal life. Like when he first gets to the house, he is tentative about using the stairs, almost the way a toddler is. Or the way he was looking out the hospital room window at the big wide world the first morning.
The movie would have been far more boring had it gone into excruciating detail showing him learning stuff that other kids would have known by then, like how to use a playground swing.
I don’t think I can add much more to the debate over swinging. I’m not suggesting the film should have shown the many drawn out steps that lead to confident swinging. Boredom within a long term relationship, experimentation, practice… (joke). Seriously though- if Jack had been seen confidently riding a bike so soon after freedom, it would have looked wrong to most viewers. The highly confident, competent, accomplished and VERY high swinging by Jack could take as long to master as it takes to ride a bike from scratch. Since there was no great narrative importance to the moment on screen, maybe the film makers should have left the swing thing out or showed him, for example, on a climbing frame.