Posted by finn mccool on November 6, 2009, 9:39:03, in reply to "Mrs. Hardiman responds"
Certainly there are many perspectives available. I myself wouldn't go as far as saying that the husband was mad, or more sadistic than most, or didn't love his wife. To me, the story has more strength if they did love each other the best they could, if they both had good intentions, at least consciously, but it all still happened. No need to distance onelself from them by saying they were just crazy or not good people. But I do agree that the husband pushes her toward the conclusion, both on the level of everyday life (advice, exercises, medication) and by assuming a faintly similar male position to the ones she encountered in her studies of the history of misogyny.
I don't agree that the wife's self-torture is an expression of the animal in her but the very opposite, it's the human in her. Her healthy grief turns into something pathological, call it depression of whatever. She turns against herself, and the rage that is felt by a depressed person is very ambiguous - it's not clear whether she hates herself only, or both of them, or even mostly her husband, but it is clear that she, like people in general, tries her best to turn those energies away from the people she loves and towards herself. But once the violence erupts, there is no difference between her and her husband as objects of aggression. It's not particularly animalistic. Maybe a bad human reaction to something animalistic. At any rate, the cultural tools at their disposal to deal with their situation prove inadequate for the job.
That's also where we might reach for religious language or imagery to be able to point towards something that threatens to take us beyond reality as it's known to us. Within the film's own logic, I want to hold on to the substance of the nightmare as it overcomes rational psychological discourse. In other words, "evil has no meaning" is the position where we and the husband begin, and what the wife would like to believe but is afraid she cannot, but it's exactly that proposition that the films turns around, and that's where the wife's fears about her hell being more real than the reality offered to her by her husband come true for both of them. "Am I evil?" is a question that a person in a depressive deadlock asks herself. As she sees it, it may be that she is evil, women are evil, nature is evil, but she doesn't want to admit it to herself, understandably. But of course she was right, and there's the horror and the chaos. So I would say Satan is the villain of the film, but one has to keep in mind what that entails - the fear that reality transcends psychological, rational description in some horrible way. That's where her private fears and religious paranoia come together, and since it's a horror film, and a fairly traditional one, those ideas take over external reality. In the beginning, the husband is sane, but at the end of the movie, not a chance.
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