Brett's Marrowbone Notes

Marrowbone (2018)

Background

For some time, Spanish productions have been rife with the mind-control themes so prominent in American movies, especially B-movies (or so-called “psychotronic movies”) of the 70s-90s. Anguish is the classic example. Consider Bunuel, Un Chien Andalou.

Director also made The Orphanage, which, as I recall from a viewing many years ago and from the synopsis, also deals with induced childhood trauma and ghosts as a cipher for retraumatization (see below) with overtones of ritual abuse.

Both Taylor-Joy and Charlie Heaton, who plays Billy, were in the Monarch film The New Mutants. Heaton is in Stranger Things.

Themes

Like virtually every other movie starring Anya Taylor-Joy, dissociation, to the point of MPD/DID, is a major theme, arguably the main theme.

As in many Monarch movies, including Bad Dreams, the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, and Shutter Island, ghosts are really a cipher for retraumatization. Applied to serial killers, it validates the sinister spirituality of so many of them, according to which they will rule over their victims in the afterlife.

Several Monarch motifs underscore this:

The ubiquitous shattered mirrors, common symbol of psychic fragmentation.

Dollsappear frequently, representing, as we learn at the end, alters: either his demonic, returned-from-the-grave serial killer father killed his siblings, or else Jack did it while possessed by said entity, and the ensuing trauma, coupled with the memory-effacing dissociation technique learned from his mother, causes him to “imagine” that they are alive through dolls that he animates with his own MPD/DID.

Indeed, the film opens on dolls, representing the family, in a dollhouse, signaling that the entire diegesis of the film is effectively a dissociative episode. This is reinforced by other scenes, for example when little Sam and sister Jane track Jack’s bike ride on a map, intercut with Jack actually riding his bike in this “map world.” Final confirmation comes with the reveal that the “siblings’” journal was all written by Jack in a dissociative state. Remember that constructed fantasy worlds are part and parcel of Monarch programming: they are used, like film diegeses, to capture and manipulate the consciousness of dissociated subjects. So it makes sense to read the entire film as a coded narrative reflecting the fractured psyche of a Monarch victim. Perhaps Allie is Jack’s new handler.

Little Sam also plays with dolls, and by the end of the movie we discover how profoundly traumatized the whole family is.

Keys and keyholes figure importantly into the plot, and we get a “through the keyhole” shot, a la Alice in Wonderland. Richard Rush provides one of the keys for this motif in Color of Night: we only get a glimpse of the deeper, darker realities of the world through our own knowledge and perceptions and also through film.

There’s a bird cage in the attic where Jack bricked in his siblings only to have Simon crawl down the chimney. Note also the shots at the end, after Allie has taken over Jack’s care, of a birddrawing and a carved bird, possibly indicating Allie’s control over Jack’s soul.

There are hints of Satanic ritual abuse. When Sam rolls the dice three times, they come up 6, 6, and 6, right before a scare moment involving the (ghost?) serial killer father, “the Beast of Bampton.” All the children suffered horrific abuse and trauma (it’s suggested that Sam is really Jane’s son from incest). Note that the children, the “Fairbairn Four,” were accused in the newspapers of “collusion,” relating to the missing 10,000 pounds. Was the father grooming them all for the family business?

Message

The conclusion affirms the goodness of dissociative personality disorders, as Allie, Jack’s new caretaker, decides not to medicate him (with Thorazine/Chloropromazine) so that he can retain his MPD/DID and the comfort of believing his siblings are still alive.

One of the hallmarks of the Monarch genre, if I may call it that, is the fetishization of trauma and dissociation.

Odds and Ends

Allie wears greenalmost exclusively throughout the first half of the film. In a few scenes, there is a hint of red under the green, and in the final scene, she is wearing an all-red top with black pants. Green is the color of the initiate, red that of the initiated. The family meets Allie in “the red witch lands,” by the rock that looks like a skull.

In one scene, Jack is jarred by weird audio on the TV (I can’t find out what he was watching). In another scene, in the house, Beach Boys music is played to drown out the spookiness—perhaps hinting at the use of music in trauma-based programming.

The date “December 23” is circled on the calendar, and the clock in the libr