Most of the time you are not aware of when you have an important moment in your life. Usually you just sorta walk into it, the thing happens, and then it's years later and you realized that small moment had defined practically every moment of your existence since then. It's like realizing that you've been hearing an echo of a song this entire time, and when you finally realize what had happened you can never unhear that song, in everything. Lyrics start lining up, you start hearing the tune in your head at points where you really need it to... and then all of a sudden that thing is just you. You absorbed it. You are more than you. And so is it. That moment is given a form of sentience and awareness that it would not have without you. And you are a more full and complete person because of that moment. It's a pretty awesome thing.
Yeah, the Brothers Bloom was never like that.
I knew, right from the opening frames, that it would never leave me.
It's ten years later.
It still hasn't.
The main character, Bloom, is someone I just get. It would take a few years before I met another character who I would identify with more than him, Tomoya Okazaki from Clannad, but Tomoya is more like looking in the mirror and seeing your shadow staring back, beaten, bloody, and screaming at you for ignoring him for so long, than that incredibly close friend that you just hadn't seen in awhile.
Bloom was a warm-up to that very uncomfortable, ongoing, conversation.
Morally speaking, Bloom is the antagonist of the film. He wants to destroy his own life, literally. He hates himself, just out and out, showing all the classic signs of a rape victim. And yet he wants more? Maybe? Possibly? But how does one get out of that rut? How can you start to like yourself enough to crawl out? Most of my life I was taught that some form of self-acceptance was necessary in order to evolve. If you don't like yourself how can you let yourself heal?
That, for the record, is the biggest line of bullshit I've ever been force fed, and the sooner people stop trying to preach "self-acceptance" and "See me as I see you" and all that nonsense, the better. Because as the movie shows, that just simply doesn't work. I mean, sure, you start to do that very thing I just called nonsense, but that's certainly not what starts that starts the ball rolling. That would be love, in point of fact, that allows you to move outside yourself.
Enter Stephen, the actual protagonist of the story. He's the one concerned about his little brother, Bloom, not Bloom. Stephen seems more or less OK with being an amoral con artist, but the little boy he's spent his entire life trying to protect is wilting right in front of him, and that means the acceptance that he's been looking for his whole life dies too. Telling Bloom the truth seems to be utterly unhelpful, so Stephen does the only thing he's good at: he devises a con.
And then there's Penelope, whose smile is like the sun, which all men need, not just the ones who are living in the shadows. It is almost impossible to imagine another actress in the role, Rachel Weisz handles it so well. Even now I can't pretend to know how the character exists. There's so many open contradictions in Penelope: kind and sweet, yet a thief, enlightened and yet incredibly physical, she's someone that Bloom cannot figure out. Which is why Stephen picked her.
The previous blog entries in this series had stated that Rian Johnson has a pretty simple structure: set up a brunette and two white dudes and play them off each other. The Brothers Bloom is the only one where the main character is out and out in the wrong. He is out to destroy his own life, and everyone else is out to stop him. Stephen and Penelope grab Bloom, an arm apiece, and drag him out of his little hell, kicking and screaming, one bloody and battered inch at a time. The two of them just relentlessly love Bloom, and he finds that he loves them back. And so you watch as his defenses crack against the impossible barrage that his brilliant brother has set against him, forcing him to see light between the cracks in his armor, opening him up little bit by little bit...
I do not care what anyone says. There is no way to know if Stephen died in the end. He's too smart to leave such an obvious plot hole, and given that just about every thing that happens in this movie could have orchestrated by him... it's hard to say the ending wasn't either. There's just too much intentional air-tight imagery going on.
To this day I don't know what happened to Stephen.
Yes, I still think about him.
And wonder what he did.
Isn't what art's supposed to do? Stay with you, always?
Well, Stephen is the one who wound up staying with me. Weird, manipulative, bullish, brilliant Stephen.
Not Bloom.
Funny how that works.
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