I want to you to listen to something [sound of fire works]
The sound of fireworks... but let's take away the lights for now.
The sound seems pretty normal and familiar but after hearing it for while,
the sporadic bursts and crackling combustions begin to form an invisible nuisance.
What if I asked you to listen to this for an hour or a day or a week?
Every where you went to and even when you had to go to sleep, forced to even find it
in your dreams...
It would become unbearable and exhausting.
How would you be able to go about your day.
Your normal tasks and interactions would be greatly affected.
It's as if you're living in a disorienting reality apart from everyone else.
Always on edge...At the mercy of the next destabilizing POP... hoping for a moment of
silence.
While preparing to make the film You Were Never Really Here,
director Lynne Ramsay gave a recording of fireworks to Joaquin Phoenix to prepare him
for his role.
It's an interesting way to introduce someone to the mindset of a person afflicted by a
traumatic event.
Trauma is a relentless and constant assailant that can intrude in all aspects of a person's
life.
It's an invisible aggressor with the power of reminding you that it can break you whenever
it wants and that even time has difficulty of silencing
it.
So how do we show something that likes to remain hidden like trauma?
In today's video we will examine how Lynne Ramsay manages to portray a character suffering
from PTSD without addressing it.
[ Phone Beep] - It's done
You Were Never Really Here is a surreal and lean character study that succeeds in giving
us access to the broken mind of Joe, a war veteran turned hammer wilding hitman
that saves girls from the seedy underworld of child prostitution.
An imposing beast of a man, heavily masking his past traumas.
He's been recently hired by a senator to find his kidnapped daughter Nina.
-McCleary said you were brutal
-I can be
When we first meet Joe, he's presented to us in pieces:
His face deformed under a plastic bag, his younger self, his hands,
a string of tightly shot questionable actions, his lower body moving out of a room, his POV
avoiding being seen, his silhouette exiting a hotel and his features
being obscured by his hood and the darkness of the night in the alley.
It mirrors how throughout the movie we never get a full picture of who Joe is (or any of
the other characters).
We only get fragments.
Lynne Ramsay has a measured approach to handing out information like a faint trail of breadcrumbs.
Little by little, the pictures and the limited dialogue give us only a need to know basis
of the character's background and relationships with each other...
ultimately forming a puzzle with lost pieces.
Even the action follows this pattern by hiding the violence and focusing on the brutal aftermath...
which parallels Joe...He's a walking aftermath of trauma.
The curious thing is that we never have the main character come out and say it.
He never mentions it to anyone, and it never comes up from any other character.
Nor does anyone seem to be aware of it.
What Ramsay does is show us the scars and the alarming actions.
We only catch glimpses of how he got this way, but we're withheld an explanation.
It causes us to pay attention to the visual language she uses so we can fill in the blanks
ourselves.
Usually, the easiest way to show someone dealing with trauma would be to have them verbalize
it, but that wouldn't be realistic.
People don't just willfully say that they have a problem.
Sure, we see it in movies all the time for dramatic effect and to advance the plot
but, most people are bad at communicating, especially about things they are not ready
to come to terms with.
Most of the time people won't even admit to themselves that something isn't right or that
they need help.
Especially someone as emotionally ill-equipped like Joe.
They might lack the tools necessary to exteriorize it
and if they did, they might be afraid of being judged or feel ashamed to share something
so intimate as: I don't want to be here anymore.
-Joe?
-Yeah...?
For Joe, this feeling is a daily struggle and Lynne Ramsay does a great job of showing
how routine it is in his life.
She has a very particular way of representing it on the script.
INT.
JOE'S BEDROOM, MOTHER'S HOUSE - DAY.
Joe sits upright on a chair that he's dragged into the open doorway of the walk-in cupboard.
DRY CLEANING covers hang by his head.CLOSE ON - Joe's feet.
His shoelaces are untied.
He uses one foot to lever off a shoe.
He places a socked foot onto the floorboards ahead of him - the floorboard creaks as he
places his weight.
A bare patch of skin above Joe's sock reveals an old but pronounced scar.
Joe has a belt looped around his neck,
the end of the belt is looped over a clothing rail...he pulls tightly on the belt.
This alarming description starts in a very mundane way.
We begin picturing Joe, sitting down at an open doorway... so far, it's okay...
she mentions the dry-cleaning covers hanging by his head...still normal...Ramsay details
his feet ...the floor boards, a scar... this could all be descriptive information
but then she inadvertently reveals: Joe has a belt looped around his neck.
She purposely lets us know the most important part of the scene at the end and in the following
excerpt as well: INT.
JOE'S BEDROOM, MOTHER'S HOUSE - LATER
Joe sits on the edge of the bed, he is wearing jeans and
sleeveless T-shirt,
his hands wrapped around his own neck, pressure applied to his throat, his face, beat red.
She starts by presenting the idle aspects of the scene, burying the lede with how Joe
is currently suffocating himself and it's done in a cold mechanical way without
urgency or build-up.
This word placement is meant for you to imagine the jarring bit of information last.
Because in this situation, the fact the character is committing self-harm, is treated like an
afterthought.
The closet scene goes unaddressed and it's followed up by a tender yet uneventful moment:
Late afternoon sun.
Joe & his Mother are sat across the corner of the dining
table.
Open in front of them is a large mahogany CUTLERY CASE.
They are both engrossed in polishing its contents.
Joe's mother sings "A you're adorable" as they clean, they both sign out each letter
of the alphabet.
The tonal shift creates a contrast that feels out of place but for the character both scenes
are ordinary... because this is his reality.
It's like walking a constant tight rope.
You have moments where the traumatic noise can be faint and others where it's completely
unbearable, but the thoughts are always there.
[Voices in his head] The most significant manner the director shows
the affliction of trauma is how the narrative is tailor made to the main character's psyche.
We get to be inside Joe's fractured mind.
We see how he struggles to make sense of his reality because he's living simultaneously
in the past and in the present.
His body is here but at any second, he can be brought back into a moment of trauma and
anything can set him off.
Like tapping on the steering wheel of a car, randomly being asked to take a picture or
just staring into empty space.
A look, a feeling, a smell or a sound can immediately transform him into a helpless
child.
These invasive memories disorient the character and the soundtrack follows his instability.
We can notice the background music unusually skipping time and stopping.
When Joe manages to save Nina, we hear a stable and even calming tone...It's light, warm and
reassuring but it erupts into a broken mess once she's
taken away from him.
It's a cacophony of sound and emotion.
-obviously a kid that uhm grew up with a lot of trauma and um
always felt he couldn't protect himself or others
so there's obviously this need as you grow older to become as powerful as
you possibly could right... and yeah when we meet him in his kind of later
days he's middle aged so a lot of that has gone
away...
- At the end of the movie, Joe reaches the mansion
were Nina is being kept.
Hammer in hand, he quickly brings down all the security detail (offscreen) and makes
his way to her room.
As he enters for the final confrontation...he finds the villain is already dead and Nina
is nowhere to be seen...
We cut back to Joe, the shock fades from his face and gives way to a gamut of emotions.
He laughs, he cries, he is full of rage, he is exhausted, he falls apart.
There is nothing left of Joe.
His internal taunts are revived at a deafening volume:
Nina didn't need his protection, he couldn't save his mother, his employer, the girls in
the truck, the girl in the dessert... he couldn't help any of them.
He surrenders to the murky depths of his mind.
No matter the effort...no matter the progress he keeps getting pulled under.
We see the thin barrier holding the past and the present erode.
He can no longer distinguish between them because they both feel painfully real.
He finds himself opening doors to old wounds reminding him of one thing...
He's powerless He's still that defenseless boy from so many
years ago.
Joe wanted to be the hero, he wanted to save the girl, he wanted to have the climatic boss
fight and maybe go out in a blaze of glory.
But Lynne Ramsay's focus is not on the hero aspect...
This story isn't about getting revenge...
It's about the unseen constant struggle with an overpowering internal threat that distorts
you from the inside out.
You see this is the story about an exhausted man...
Trying to find a reason to stay.
-Its okay Joe -Its okay...
Thank you for taking the time to watch our video.
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Until next time.