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Wednesday, August 7, 2019

Tully, The Climax - My Mistake!


In my previous post, "Theme or Why Are You Telling Me This Story," I mistakenly presented the resolution of Tully, not its climax.  The above clips, beginning with the first one are one continuous sequence in the film and are the fullest, most profound expression of the theme that I extrapolated from the film and stated in the previous post, that is, "... the marriage, as it's lived, and caring for children, none of which is undesirable, must nevertheless abandon that self prior to marriage, that free spirit she once was, because if she would pursue that self she was before becoming a wife and mother, she could die from it."  Note that there's nothing static about the progression of the climax.  So why did I make this error?  My own prejudices got in the way of my critical thinking.  I resented that the character had resigned herself to her conflict, so much so that I mistook the resolution for the climax.

Consider the dialogue in the climax:  to be dull and constant is necessary to raise her kids in a "circle of safety."  "I'm not safe," she says.  "I dared," as she rides the bike to where she once lived, but her free spirit self points out that "there's no there anymore."  And that the "sameness you despise is your gift to them," that "...waking up every day doing the same things for them over and over, you are boring, your marriage is boring, your house is boring, but that's fucking incredible..."  l

Tully was exquisitely executed.  I just didn't like the theme.  For me, the theme and its resolution (in the previous post), her resignation, rather than an open-ended awareness of a so far insoluble conflict, seemed static to me, and it still does.