MovieChat Forums > The Life Before Her Eyes (2008) Discussion > Completely different take on this movie ...

Completely different take on this movie (SPOILERS!)

posted 14 years ago by Datakin
21 replies | jump to latest

Couldn't Diana have survived the shooting? After all "the heart is the strongest muscle" is mentioned several times, even as she lay on the bathroom floor after she was shot. She also answered in reply to Michael Patrick's question, "shoot me" (not kill me) after he asked "Who should I kill?". The older Diana could have just been loosing her mind. When she got the abortion, she was with the older boy, not her professor husband. I don't recall anything being said that Emma wasn't her professor husbands. Of course it showed that she wanted to name her baby, Emma and the crosses on the lawn had one with the name Emma. Doesn't mean that later she didn't name her living daughter, Emma. When she sees her husband with another woman who ends up being her when she was younger, could've been a flash back of who she used to be. Also, when she gets to the school and the lady asks her if she's a survivor and she says no, if she were dead, how did the lady see her? Why did she get the call that her daughter was missing & she was always hiding & they found a pink jacket...It wasn't like her daughter (or herself for that matter) never existed to the school & the detective & even her husband who told her that there was only one girl for him & he said that he was her husband to which she replied, "you're not my husband" which could've been her anger & her mental condition talking.... I have to admit that I was confused when the movie ended. I logged into this site & read many posts that gave me a different perspective but didn't answer many questions... Just wondering if I missed some things or if anyone else out there maybe feels the same way about the movie? Also, for those of you that saw it differently, can you see my point of view? Thanks, everyone! Remember, it's just a movie! One more thing...remember when she was in bed & said "I don't deserve this."? Why would her fantasy of her future bring such guilt, remorse & unhappy or unstable feelings?

[–] 14 years ago

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[–] merlinsbeard 14 years ago

I wondered the same things at the end. I mean, I figured they may be saying that she really had died and that all this was the "life that passed before her eyes" right before she died, but I still had these same kinds of questions and wondered if the ending meant that she HAD survived but has lost her mind by the end.

The thing is that you can interpret the lines both ways-- like when she's asked, "Are you one of the survivors?" and she says, "No," well, you can interpret it to mean that she is dead/didn't survive it/is fantasizing all this, OR you could interpret it to mean that she didn't "really" survive it fully-- that is, IF all this in the film is REALLY an adult life she has gone on to live, then it's not a full life-- she is so tormented and fragmented by the trauma. So, in that sense, she didn't fully "survive" the shooting. See? The movie does support different interpretations.

I also wondered this: if all of this is her fantasy-life that passes before her eyes as she dies, then why is it that Maureen as an adult is not anywhere in it? I mean, if it's a fantasy, then why not fantasize that they both survived?

On the other hand, I guess you could argue that she had this "vision" of what her life would *actually* be like-- that is, what she's seeing is not a fantasy but an alternate reality if she were to choose it. After all, she had this tendency to want to connect with older men, professors, so it isn't all that impossible that she might marry Prof. McFee. It also isn't all that incredible to believe that she thought of her aborted child as "Emma" and therefore named her real daughter "Emma" when she had her.

IF this is the case, then the way I might see this would be to say that she had a vision of what her life would be like IF she survived, and she saw how broken she would be-- and her reaction was that "I don't deserve this," and so she chose to die instead.

This would kind of combine both your view here-- that it's a REAL life (a possible life she could choose if she chose to live through this shooting with her strong heart) that we've seen and she is going insane in realilty at the end-- and the other view, that she's just seeing it before she dies as a teen. BUT it's a REAL life and she could CHOOSE to have it, but she truly doesn't deserve a life so tormented, and so she chooses to let go of life.

I wish that people didn't get so upset about trying on different ideas. To me, it's intriguing and fun to see different interpretations in a movie or a book, even if it's something I don't agree with politically or whatever. *The Golden Compass* was like that to me-- I didn't think you had to see it with that athiest interpretation, even if the author thinks that's what he meant. There are so many other ways you can interpret it, and that's the fun of reading or watching films. I used to be the type who might decide immediately that I "hated" a movie and just wouldn't give it a chance, or if a movie ended in a way that didn't tell me directly what was meant, I would get angry and feel like I had wasted my time. But now I really appreciate an ending like that, and the freedom to play with all kinds of possible ideas.

There is SO much more than you see on the surface of most things. Try to free your mind to play with different ideas, and you'll enjoy movies even more.

[–] whitespirit26 14 years ago

Merlin, I LOVE that answer! I'd much rather she lived; much deeper ending, esp. since the "life she could have had" ending has already been done before and better.

[–] aimless-46 14 years ago

There is a director's commentary on the DVD, in which he takes you through every clue and symbolic reference in his film. And there is also a source novel.

[–] Guitarchic33 14 years ago

Has anyone else thought about the possiblity that Diana being shot in the bathroom was only a re-interpretation of what Diana wanted to happen? For instance, at the end in the scene where adult Diana is looking for Emma, she falls in the water. The scene then switches back to the restroom scene...Maybe she was perhaps thinking about what might have happened if she was shot instead and told the boy to shoot her instead of her friend, Maureen. I think the scene in the bathroom at the very end was her seeing things if Maureen had not been shot. Does that make sense? I think in the reality of things, Maureen really was shot and Diana couldn't cope with the fact that she did survive and her friend did not.
Just my interpretation...

[–] aimless-46 14 years ago

Try watching those scenes again where Diana is searching for Emma. What the director and production designer are trying to communicate in those scenes was that the real Diana had already been shot and that her imaginary future is unraveling. Watch the necklace the adult Diana is wearing when she is searching for Emma in the woods (falling in the water in the woods coincides with the young Diana falling into the water that is pooling on the rest room floor), her necklace has broken and the stones are hanging in the same pattern the bullets made on the young Diana's chest.

[–] wordartist1 14 years ago

That's also why she tells McFee: "You're not my husband." He's not. He's the older professor she has a crush on and therefore imagines as her husband in her possible future.

Someone also mentioned the modern clues in the teen scenes - cellphones, the clothing, the cars. I was a teen in the early 90s and I kept thinking that the movie was full of anachronisms until I realized the teen stuff was happening now.

Sometimes an idea is so bad that it starts to be good again.

[–] Krazylilqbanqt1 14 years ago

I'm more inclined to agree with xzilez because at the end after we see that she was shot, it goes back to the memorium where a woman asked Uma "are you a survivor?" and she said no. This leads me to think that it just shows that she died back in that bathroom.

[–] whitespirit26 14 years ago

The author originally wanted Diana to die and apparently the director did too, but the author was forced to make a more ambigious ending due to a publisher's request and I guess the movie followed suit. So with that, I'm sticking to the theory that she lived; not only do I find the one that she died weak and silly (her life was made too complex to be "imaginary", sorry writers) and a rip-off of a better novel, but the suggestion that she lived and what this meant to her, the meaning of her survival, is far more precious and complex. This is why, I think, more interpretation than one is good in cases like these: sometimes the audience gets it better than the writers (heh) and more importantly, every person may find individual interpretations (and inspiration, meanings) that are precious to them and impact them personally as people.

[–] aimless-46 14 years ago

I have no idea where Whitespirit's assertions about the source novel are coming from. Diana does die in the book, complete with a "The Lovely Bones" style epilogue where her spirit is carried through a tunnel toward a white light by a May Queen parade float. Technically she is killed twice (simultaneously), in the rest room by Michael and in the zoo of her imaginary future by a wolf which is symbolic of Michael's evil. When each Diana faces them at the end it all ties back to the statement early in the book: "the moment she'd been born for, the moment in which she gave up herself".

Far from changing the end result to make it unclear whether she was murdered, the publishers included a guide for reading groups which concludes with the question: How credible is it that the story of Diana's adult life occurs instantaneously, as Michael Patrick shoots her in the left temporal lobe of her brain, "the place where the future is imagined, the where what would have been is"?

The book (much more than the film) is focused on the concept of there being little demarcation between what someone actually experiences and what someone imagines (which is why it has a lot of "Alice In Wonderland" expressionistic tripiness). Her imagined life begins with her imagining that she has told Michael: "kill her - not me". The film incorporates some of this but only in the service of providing clues (to those who "read films") that much of the action is being imagined. The film's focus is much more on the mysteries and implications of a human conscience.

[–] whitespirit26 14 years ago

It would be nice if you addressed me personally, Aimless. I only know what I read, and most people seemed to find the book ambigious; I'm guessing this was not the reader's guide edition. One lady said she thought Diana survived the shooting to die for her daughter later (killed by the wolf for her?), and another said the author made the ending ambigious on purpose. But, thank you for clarifying; I struggled with indecision about this book for a while, and now that I know it is, as I feared, a lesser similarity to Anita Shreve's book, I can leave it behind. What a silly bizarre ending.

[–] biz143 13 years ago

What novel are you talking about!

[–] kmc-4 13 years ago

I agree with this totally. I think she lived, but she was having a terrible time leading up to the shooting's anniversary and and what she did/didn't do as a teenager, especially in the bathroom. It was affecting her career, her marriage, and her ability to parent.

I didn't even consider the fact that she really died. Frankly, I didn't think the teenaged version of her character was deep enough to imagine her future life, even as she was dying.

[–] Cheena71 14 years ago

I'm responding to all...I think what's key is the adult Diana in the bathroom talking to her husband. Diana says, "I thought I could change things if I loved you..." and now I can't remember the rest of the quote. Anyway, point is, she was basically she thought she could make her future better if she did those things. I took it that she realized if she lived, she would've failed to live happily ever after.

You just HAD to see what was behind this spoiler, didn't you?

[–] aimless-46 14 years ago

I agree. She was imagining her future life if she had allowed Maureen to be shot; she was projecting it as the best case dream life she could imagine for herself; and she finally realized that even if everything happened exactly the way she hoped it would, that her guilt would still crush her.

Recall when she is lying in bed and says "I don't deserve this". At first you think she is feeling sorry for herself because she continues to feel guilty about being alive. Later you realize she means being alive because of Maureen's sacrifice.

Then when she says "I have to go"; you think she means to attend the memorial service but she really means that she has finally convinced herself that she must be the one who is killed.

[–] hubble-hallow 14 years ago

Absurd plot. Annoying plot twist had me going WTF what a swindle! Epic fail.

[–] riverlynx 14 years ago

And I'm so sorry that you have failed to really see this film, WTF indeed.

[–] whitespirit26 14 years ago

You know aimless, she could have sacrificed herself AND lived. Obviously the scene in the bathroom really happened one way or another. I have to admit that the way it was portrayed, the possibility that she died and reflected somehow in her would-be life of what she would have felt, how she decided she needed to die, was more beautifully done than I thought.

[–] budgieboop 14 years ago

I watched this movie over the weekend and had so many questions after it was over. Thanks to all who posted here, especially Aimless. I now have a better understanding and a greater appreciation for the film.

[–] kcolli11 14 years ago

Obviously her "fantasy" is what she imagines life would be like after her friend died in her place. She's imagining the guilt she would feel, how her life would unravel.

In response to your point about "the heart is the strongest muscle," I would point to the scene where Diana and Maureen are talking, and Diana starts crying and says, "In my case, I really don't think that's true."

Another clue, for me at least, was the fact that Diana continued living in the town she supposedly hated. I know we all grow up and mature, but Diana told Maureen that staying in the town, getting a job, getting married, and having children would be lame... So why would she then do it? Just made it all the more believable for me that it was her imagination.

I don't much understand why people want to nitpick every single detail of a movie and dissect it until it all fits into a neat little row. As you said, "it's just a movie." It's fine to have alternate points of view, but little things like why the woman at the memorial would have seen her if she was dead... This is all happening in her head. She never existed as an adult. It makes sense to me that she imagined all of these details and that they never actually occurred because she was killed in the bathroom 15 years prior. Emma never existed. The professor as her husband never existed. It just makes sense to me.

Call me Katie. ;-)

[–] Guamley 14 years ago

by - kcolli11 on Wed May 18 2011 21:26:10 "Obviously her "fantasy" is what she imagines life would be like after her friend died in her place. She's imagining the guilt she would feel, how her life would unravel.

In response to your point about "the heart is the strongest muscle," I would point to the scene where Diana and Maureen are talking, and Diana starts crying and says, "In my case, I really don't think that's true."

Another clue, for me at least, was the fact that Diana continued living in the town she supposedly hated. I know we all grow up and mature, but Diana told Maureen that staying in the town, getting a job, getting married, and having children would be lame... So why would she then do it? Just made it all the more believable for me that it was her imagination.

I don't much understand why people want to nitpick every single detail of a movie and dissect it until it all fits into a neat little row. As you said, "it's just a movie." It's fine to have alternate points of view, but little things like why the woman at the memorial would have seen her if she was dead... This is all happening in her head. She never existed as an adult. It makes sense to me that she imagined all of these details and that they never actually occurred because she was killed in the bathroom 15 years prior. Emma never existed. The professor as her husband never existed. It just makes sense to me.

Call me Katie. ;-)"

THE END.