The real message of the film
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Under Suspicion
tavaresd001 — 15 years ago(May 09, 2010 06:15 PM)
This film was based on the book "Brainwashed". This wasn't about his marriage or his wife's jealously.
It was about police grilling the man until he finally gave in and having no one to stop the brainwashing not even his family. They "brainwashed" him into confessing; every sentence he uttered was questioned until he didn't know right from wrong, day from night. This has happened to all of us at one time or anotheralthough on a very small scale.
Think of being accused falsely or someone taking credit for something he/she didn't do. Imagine if everyone in the room believed you WERE lying and kept at it for hours, eventually YOU wouldn't know what way was up or down. You would even question your own name and if the color green REALLY was green. Maybe everyone who has seen the color lied to YOU and green was really white
In the end, the wife and the cop KNEW that they had destroyed the man. When you tear away a person's sense of reality, there is no going back, no apology that can heal the break.
The man will probably divorce his wife and sue the cop and the whole police departmentand hurt both professonally and financially, but that will NEVER make up for what they did to that manit wasn't just a mistake, it was evil.
That is why it ended the way it did, without anything about what happened to the marriage or the police department. In the end, the story wasn't about them, it was about being "brainwashed" into confessing for something he had not done. -
thornugc — 15 years ago(June 12, 2010 09:29 PM)
I understand what you are saying but I think Gene and Morgan also wanted it to be about the jealousy.
Gene's character did not give in to saying he killed the girls until he said "She thinks I did this, doesn't she?" It was then that he started to realize that the woman he was madly in love with hated him. Or at least he thought she hated him. Remember Gene's character says that he never thought she would go to such lengths to prove a point. At that point, he gave up and was throwing it back at her by saying he killed the girls.
Morgan's character used the two against each other and that is why I agree with that you are saying. I do not believe Gene's character would have ever said he committed the murders but believing his wife was behind it all made him cave in.
http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=21312696 -
Naldoman — 15 years ago(August 14, 2010 10:47 PM)
He realized his wife's suspicion and jealousy was so deep that she would allow and even help others to condemn him for a crime she'd only imagined he'd do.
At this point he knew there was no reconciliation, and also that no matter what he said, her statements and knowledge of his hobbies would add weight to any case against him. He knew his goose was cooked as a gift to her in an act of self-sacrifice, he confessed to save the both of them from a public airing of their private lives, and to allow her to feel vindication and satisfaction of SOME kind, whereas over the last few years all she has felt was doubt and suspicion.
His confession is a gift to her to set her heart free, i.e. "I war right, he's a monster." so that perhaps the both of them would not be destroyed by a trial. He felt he was already done for at that point, so why should she have to suffer as well when he could make a gesture to save her?
As for the last scene, I see it as a reversal of the home condition where now HER door is unlocked and HIS door is locked. -
crconrad-980-962579 — 15 years ago(February 18, 2011 06:00 AM)
You might be talking more about the book. But they are not necessarily the same; the story can change a lot between printed page and silver screen.
As I understood the film, Hearst actually thought his wife had killed the girls in order to frame him for it, and consciusly decided to sacrifice himself by confessing to her crime; if she hated him that much, he wouldn't have anything to live for anyway. -
tavaresd001 — 15 years ago(February 18, 2011 08:16 AM)
Most movies don't do the book justice. However, in this case I believe it was very much true to the spirit of the book. Again, the entire premise of the story was what can happen when a person is mentally abused into accepting a "truth" they can't even excuse because they have no anchor of reality.
This was a man who believed in two things: the law and his wife. Both betrayed him, not in the conventional sense where the man could hold on to his outrage; knowing he was innocent but in stripping away his entire understanding of reality.
THAT is what made what they did so evil.
The one thing we all can and must hold on to is our sense of who we are, what we've done, and what we can and may do in our sense of what is real.
Take that away and you take away a person's soul. -
CmdrCody — 15 years ago(February 19, 2011 05:05 AM)
crconrad:
Right.
Hearst thought his trophy wife left their villa in the fancy part of San Juan to La Perla and went door to door looking for the exact, right young girl to murder and leave her on a garbage pile ? Did she have her $1000 shoes on during this supposed murderous search through the worst part of town ?
Yeah. I'm sure Hearst was thinking THAT in the interrogation room at the police stationi.e, "duh..I gotta protect my wife from being found out that she's a secret assassin of my underage girlfriends so I'm gonna confess instead !"
Duh.
CmdrCody -
canuckteach — 14 years ago(June 20, 2011 04:21 PM)
** Spoiler Thread **
First of all, I turned OFF the film (Netflix) as compelling as it was, it became too graphic for my tastes*- as a result, I needed help on the boards to find out what happened (this looked like a suitable thread..) - I gather that the lawyer, under duress, confesses, but a third murder is committed while he is in semi-custody, and the real serial predator is caught ? and the man and his wife have suffered a serious breach?
- the kind of irony (and ambiguity) I would expect from the remake of a European film..
despite the minor discrepancies in his initial statement, I knew the Hackman character was innocent all along,, it was so absurdly simple, but I haven't seen it discussed here: He called the police and reported the discovery of the body.
Why would he do that if he was guilty?
it connects him to the crime, and perhaps, the earlier attack on another young female. if it was HIS crime, he would jog in a different area, and leave the find to someone else. there would be nothing to link him to the crime scene.
(oh, I know that some real-life killers report a crime, or join the search team and 'find' the body, but there is no basis for suggesting that the Hackman character is that kind of needy, pathetic psychopath)
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- a film that dealt with sensitive issues (rape, murder) but in a
non-explicit
fashion:
Anatomy of a Murder
1959, Jimmy Stewart, Ben Gazzara
http://www.imdb.com/board/10052561/
canuckteach
- a film that dealt with sensitive issues (rape, murder) but in a