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stork daddy
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there is in the blessing of the gypsy in the wolfman, the tendency to both be horrified and sympathetic. when she ruefully states "the way you walk is thorny through no fault of your own, but just as rain falls to the earth so too do tears have a predetermined end" there is foreshadowing of great pain and suffering, but also of its relief. We recoil at the notion she expresses because we exist in the present, before the trial of those tears, and it seems to remove from us the power to do otherwise. The fear in the wolfman is the fear of transformation, the fragility of the faculties we base our notion of self-control on, the ambiguity of what it means for an act to be "ours". When we are younger, we act largely on hunger, until we learn that any individual desire or hunger must by necessity of our inability to have everything we want, often submit itself to the concerns of our relationships and the established hiearchy between ourselves and the world. We must know our role, even when our hunger longs for more than it grants us. It is better something than nothing. But a movie like the wolfman reminds us by an exaggeration that at any given moment our hunger can spiral out of the control of the personality we've established with others and which they expect of us in their daily interactions and allotments of our needs. The wolfman is suddenly granted the power to take, and has the hunger to blindly do so, but the key is that he eventually transforms back into the vulnerable, beholden larry talbot, who has learned to respect the wishes of others as a prime part of fufilling his own wishes. So for this monster to take over him seems an affront to his own desires, it becomes a horrible secret that move only at night. The fear that our latent desires if given the ability will take something under the cover of night that would jeopardize our standing in the morning is a common one. There is common in criminal but also all human history, the fear of being left alone to your own devices. We want to either be controlled in the way we are to be most subjected to, or to have control of our own actions. To be controlled by an alien force which alienates us from the previously controlling hiearchy of human order and love and support that we have known til then is a terrifying fear. The moment a schizophrenic first hears voices can only be compared to the terror Talbot feels upon looking down and seeing animal fur growing from his hands. The horror we feel is not for the wolf of course, but for the man who must return to a world which holds him responsible for what his body has done. The idea that the transformation will not be recognized by society. The further extension of this idea is that how much is the analogy of the wolfman applicable to our daily lives? How much are we open to a transformation, how much are we open to triggers which are known or unknown? The wolfman has its moon, but are we often in an even more horrifying bind? The moon seems necessary to return some anguish to the story. It almost seems as if he can control it, as long as no circumstance affects his ability. But of course circumstance does. The door is unlocked, or he doesn't get home in time. The horror of the movie is in the subtle implications you start to intuitively realize as the movie goes on. What if we were always like the wolfman? Held responsible for acts which were beyond our control, all the while thinking they weren't? Are we ever Larry Talbot? Is our guilt an ineffectual tool when faced with the desire that propels us, and the circumstances that often derail our attempts at correction? And do we ever achieve escape from the triggers? Is the true tragedy in the wolfman that he lost control in a way society who had told him that they loved him would not accept? Did they merely want him to lose control in the way they recognize as necessary for them? All the while the issues of morality are eroded at in this movie by questioning whether or not Larry Talbot had any choice. "Even a man who is pure and true and says his prayers at night, may become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms and the moon is full and bright" It seems there are circumstances out of our control. In fact it seems we never can tell when these are, or when they befall us. When the gypsy woman blesses Talbot, he is terrified that she knows and is calm in her knowledgee. When she says to him "the way you walk is thorny through no fault of your own....find peace in a moment my son" she is forgiving all of humanity. The most memorable visual scene, where talbots face goes from ferocity to a look of docile and bewildered peace is forceful because it captures within us an acceptance we all must face eventually of our limitations, of our inability to stop aspects of the world around us and ourselves. There comes over his face an excess of hunger and love which bewilders him as he dies, he is peaceful and yet longing. This is the moment in all of us when we realize those things we depend on are not ours. The emotions are ours, the actions our ours, but the choices, the plot, is bigger than us, can contain an ending whether we like it or not, where we lie wounded, forgiveness the only love we can still be offered. The wolfman's hunger and horror has been made ineffectual in its death, but up until the last moment its pathos remains.
(sorry this is unorganized, just some thoughts for an essay i might write more completely someday)
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040826
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