The Problem With Split And Finding Dory

so I just saw split and I really liked it but I felt like it kind of had the same problem that finding dory did so I just wanted to talk about theme and this is a spoiler warning for both movies here we go so in split you keep having these frequent flashbacks to the protagonist KC's childhood I love stories with flashbacks in an alternate timeline to like establish theme I think it's super literary like you see it more in books and in movies and more in short stories and in book anyway these flashbacks gradually reveal that Casey was molested by her uncle on the family hunting trips on one occasion she took a gun and she pointed it at him and she was gonna shoot him and he was like Casey you don't want to do this in your uncle I'm a nice guy he got her to hesitate and then he grabbed the gun away so then he just kept abusing her her whole life so this haunts her and it's kind of like a defining moment for her I think we're shown over and over again that Casey is really smart and resourceful but whenever she has an opportunity to act like running away or attacking or something like that she just freezes up because she's got this learned helplessness from her childhood I mean that's one of the first things we say you're doing in the movie James McAvoy is subduing the other girls with his product placement chloroform spray whose movie was brought to you by Skype Lindner truffles and fast-acting chloroform spray it was actual targets are the other girls and there's like a couple seconds where Casey he's just ignoring her and she probably could have gotten away but she just freezes up so I'm already looking for parallels between the Casey flashback story and the present-day story because like flashbacks always happened for a reason and there's a supernatural element to this story too they specifically make it so James McAvoy has just one super dangerous personality called the Beast when he's the Beast his body physically changes so he's basically invulnerable when he's in his other human personalities he can be hurt or fought or killed so it's the climax of the movie Casey's running through the building she's got her big shotguns just like that time with her uncle James McAvoy is chasing her but if she shoots him while he's the Beast her gun is basically useless because he's indestructible I was like oh okay the point is she's going to have to somehow by waiting or saying or doing the right thing get him to revert to one of his other personas probably Hedwig because he's one of the more sympathetic one and then she's going to have to shoot that one because James McAvoy is still a threat to her like she's going to realize that even though he's nice sometimes the danger that he poses to her is too great and she's going to have to defend herself I was like oh my god this makes sense the whole thing is James McAvoy is a metaphor for abusers like there are different facets to them like abusers aren't abusers all the time they can like go out and function in society but then also they're monsters and sometimes they're nice usually when they realize you're fed up and you're going to like leave them or fight back and that's one of several complex reasons that abuse people will stay in those kind of relationships but actually no that's not the theme of the movie instead James McAvoy sees that KC is covered with scars so she's like him and he goes a broken arm or evolved I said he saw my pain I remember him sounding like Bane and he just decides to leave her alone so this is a throwback to like a line his psychiatrist has earlier in the movie she's talking to a friend and she goes like I'm paraphrasing because I don't remember people assume the mentally ill are less than the rest of us but they've actually like survived some tough stuff so they're actually stronger so that's a cool moral but it doesn't really apply to either of our broken characters in the film like for example did the audience really view KC as broken I didn't and the other girl she was with didn't seem to either they kind of criticized her for not acting but like from the point of view of like hey we don't get where you're coming from here because you're not explaining your actions to us ever but it's not like they wrote her off as like a lost cause they were still trying to get all of them out and they did invite her to that birthday party at the beginning I mean if the movie ultimately wanted to show Casey's not broken this couldn't they have just established that her more passive approach was like really effective in its own way like if she's not going to get out by fighting that's understandable so maybe she could get out through subtlety and cleverness you've seen the other girls trying to run and fight and Casey freezes she shrinks back into a corner Casey tries to give the other girls advice to prevent sexual assault it would have been interesting if this knowledge of abuse and how it works had helped Casey survive in her situation to like illustrate the more evolved angle it seems like it's going in that direction no movie actually the other girls get locked up in separate closets and they don't get to eat Casey manipulates James MacAvoy and gets access to a walkie talkie but there at the end the girls get chomped up by Beast James MacAvoy and Casey almost does too ultimately the only reason case you survives is she was covered in physical scars which is not even true of all victims of abuse if she hadn't had those scars none of that other stuff she did would have made any difference at all she would just die so it's not really like the broken arm or evolved it's like if you have physical evidence of being broken then maybe in a really specific circumstance you will get a get-out-of-jail-free card from another broken person Casey is a survivor and we like her for that but the film failed to establish how her surviving past trauma in any way ultimately helped her to survive also even if it had that's not a very uplifting moral it's uplifting in the context of James McAvoy like he survived all this terrible stuff but he's strong now but it's not actually uplifting because James McAvoy is a crazy murderer that eats people it's definitely not uplifting that Casey got molested her whole childhood just because that eventually made crazy James McAvoy decide not to kill her okay now I'm going to talk about finding Dory the moral finding Dory was the broken arm or is all I mean it was that the injured or handicapped aren't any less able to lead full happy life I mean it actually wasn't anything that was backed up by the material and it easily could have been I mean it had half a moral I'm going to explain so when I first saw the trailers for this movie I actually thought it was going to have an adoption theme dory can't find her family but she has Marlin and mimmo now sadness happiness bittersweet mix of the two then from like the first scene it becomes clear that it's actually about coping with disability so I was like oh wow that's intense and I was like oh my god no according to the comedic setup from the last movie Dory's short-term memory loss is so bad it's like crippling li horrible if we're going to look at it as like a serious disorder and not a comedy device that's going to be pretty dark like how are they going to resolve that in a way that's satisfying the answer is that they don't so the whole movie the present-day action is set against flashbacks from Dora's childhood oh my god no it's not like the ones in split its flashbacks to her childhood where her parents are trying to cope with the idea that she has severe short-term memory loss it's really tragic like they know they can't take care of her forever but they don't think she's ever going to be able to take care of herself they think she'll just immediately get lost and like eaten by something the movie even sets at the ocean as a handy metaphor for like the real world like her parents don't think she can survive out there so while she's looking for her parents adult dory and at this marine Institute whose slogan is rescue rehabilitation released so they want to send all their able-bodied capable fish back out into the real world and keep the injured ones there forever sheltered because they can't handle it like okay that seems like it's going to serve the metaphor pretty well but in the climactic scene Dory ends up in this tank of blue tang fish that are going to get sent inland to another aquarium and the reason that they're going is that aquarium wants a blue tang exhibit Dory gets out of the van in time but Marlon and Nemo are stuck so now Dory needs to save Marlon and Nemo from the truck okay so hold up when the obvious choice be the fish in the truck are going to the inrun aquarium because it's decided that they're too disabled they are unfit to live in the ocean and maybe the fish aren't happy about that so the climax of the film is this van full of so-called disabled fish that need to cleverly work around their perceived weaknesses in order to get into the ocean by working together proving that they can do things their way and be just as good as other fish there's like a sneezing fish in the van he never shows up again by the line the tank full of blue tangs are all perfectly healthy fish like they're just going because that one aquarium wants blue fish and none of the fish even initially seemed to mind going to dis aquarium it's only a problem because if Marlon and Nemo go to the aquarium they'll never see Dory again and the thing is the whole time Dory is trying to find her parents she keeps overcoming her short-term memory loss by just remembering stuff when she needs to like when it's really important that she remembers something she just does you can see them trying to establish this idea that Dory has a unique way of thinking that's all her own and maybe she uses connections to things to pull things back out of her memory after she forgets them but the way they show that is she goes which ways the ocean and then like a seagull flies overhead and she sees it and she goes oh a seagull seagulls go to the ocean oceans away my friends are in where are my friends where are they and then she hears like a honking truck horn from somewhere conveniently and she's like ah we trapped her in a truck so that's not her learning to work through her memory gaps that's just whenever she needs to remember something there's conveniently something in her line of sight or immediate surroundings to remind her through no accomplishment of her own also if her memory is lost then why should a honking truck horn remind her I mean basically what I'm getting at is there are no established rules she just remembers what she needs to remember always it's similar with her blue girlfriend he's at the Institute because he can't echolocate and then later Dory is stuck in some pipes and she might die if she needs someone to echolocate for her and then he like stinks really hard and he's like oh I can do it I just so he didn't learn to live with his disability he just found out he didn't have it the octopus has PTSD but when his friends need him he becomes brave there's a whale shark who's nearsighted and she ends up figuring out that she can like enlist one of her friends to be a scene well and then she can swim fast without running into things and that was the one instance of like a clever solution to their disability so that one gets points but that's the only one but none of the other fish in this movie learn to cope with their disability they all just find out that when they need to really not be disabled they just aren't anymore at the end of the movie it's like Dora's journey was only successful because fortunately all the times she really needed to remember stuff she did and thank God for that but it wasn't really a story about learning to overcome the challenges of disability or even finding a reliable workaround for her it was really just finding out that at the end of the day she really only has short-term memory loss like sometimes also in Finding Nemo they had that whole subplot where Nemo has that deformed fin and it makes marlin believe that he can't do things with the other fish can and at the end of the movie Marlin learns that Nemo's is capable as the other fish and he needs to just let him go out into the world and live his life yeah it's almost like it didn't make sense to do this whole story again it's kind of weird that Marlin had to learn the exact same lesson again but this time with his adult friend anyway my point is that split and finding Dory at the same movie my friend and I were laughing when James MacAvoy is like honey you have to get that shotgun I'm going to turn into a monster again soon because like we wanted Casey to be like uh if there's something else I can kill you with I have emotional baggage about specifically that kind of gun like that's really bad luck Casey just can't catch a break

Channel: Jenny Nicholson

Views: 662,487

Keywords: split, finding dory, finding nemo, james mcavoy, m night shyamalan, comedy fish with serious life-affecting disorders

Id: 8W2xnyyc8qk

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Arcanine26]

This is really off topic but once I noticed that she had a spider stuffed animal, I couldn't focus on what she was saying anymore. I couldn't imagine ever wanting to have that in my room let alone on my bed