MovieChat Forums > Sleeping Beauty (2011) Discussion > Maybe I'm the only one...

Maybe I'm the only one...


Maybe I'm the only one who thought that what they showed the men doing to her while she was asleep was mild...I mean, I can just imagine so much worse....the one guy was rough and the cigarette burning was really bad but outside of that....it seemed like these guys just needed sexual/intimate company without expectations from their partner.

Also, everyone keep commenting on her lack of emotion....I thought that while she wasn't a very emotion character....as someone who does those types of jobs in real life would be emotionally dettached from things that are just job related and money makers and not person...especially sex work of any kind this is expected. I actually saw her as emotional for the way she cried with birdman multiple times and when nothing sad was actually happening at the moment but obviously she was saddened by her thoughts/emotions/feelings.

I said in another thread, but I'll say here too a couple of thoughts I had about the questions we all have after watching the film....
That the film was not a great work and the ending was frustrating and odd for most of us....but that despite the viewpoint that it was trying to be something with depth but wasn't successful....that most people have.....it actually has a number of threads/comments/responses by people including myself analyzing and working out the movie and the meanings....so it was successful in a way....making people think and come up with explanations for what they've seen....

Those wondering about why the old men wanted to have a sleeping young woman in bed who they couldn't have sex with....for every fetish, there is an industry that caters to it....and this could be one of them. It makes me think of necrophilia....also a lot of men require dominance and some want a woman to be silent....maybe it is about control....maybe these men have the desire to be with someone who is sleeping...maybe it is a service for older men who can't perform sexually but still want the company of the young and beautiful. Personally...I think it is about these men wanting a "sexual" experience with no expectations from their partner...whatever defines expectations....with this sleeping girl...there is no work, shame, failure, goal to achieve....

A thought I also considered:.... I work with hospice and it occurs to me after she was with her "friend" when he was dying and then with the old man at the end and the fact that they are all old men at the service....what if this is similar to hospice which is an organization that provides comfort medication to the dying....what if it was like that....and they were basically all dying....and it is entirely possible that even if that were the case, she could still be upset as she was at the end because I've dealt with hospice nurses and sometimes they do get get emotional at the death of a patient because of whatever connection they felt or their own way of coping with death....just a theory...

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Oh, and I don't think her body is unattractive...it actually looks pretty similar to my own which gets plenty of attention and compliments and so on....

The birdman stuff actually struck me too as a paid gig ....for multiple reasons, but mostly because everything she did seemed to be for money.

The most confusing part of the film was when she burned the money. I still haven't worked out the reasoning behind it...

This line of text confuses me on everyone's posts as it is usually unrelated to the topic at hand...

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I didn't think what the men did was that horrible either. And I think Emily Browning is beautiful. She is SUPPOSED to look like a very young untouched virgin.

The one thing I don't agree with is the idea that this is a sex fetish. I find this movie poetic, not erotic or sexy. It's about a confused young woman, but it's also about men who desire the IDEAL of a woman not the women herself. Of course, the ideal of a woman is going to be a young, untouched girl, but she can't be awake because that would definitely ruin it. Still, I don't know that this a SEXUAL fetish anybody really has.

The movie reminds me of a couple of my favorite poems--"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot and "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allen Poe. With regards to the last, Poe once said that the most poetic thing in the world is a beautiful young woman--who is dead. Of course, everybody just thinks he was sick, but he was speaking metaphorically, not literally. A beautiful young, dead girl--or sleeping girl--represents all the beauty in life that is itself eternal, but that mortal can never really touch in this world because its always just outside of their reach. And that goes back to some of the closing lines of "Prufrock"--"I have heard the mermaids singing/Each to each/I do not think that they will sing for me".

Anyway, I think sleeping Browning REPRESENTS something to the men. She's not an object, but a metaphor or a mask. But then awake she's just an ordinary girl with problems of her own.

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[deleted]

I thought the burning of the money might be connected to the note she had just read from her flatmates - I thought maybe she had finally got the rent money and then read the note telling her she hadn't cleaned the bathroom properly or something, so thought "*beep* it" and burned the rent money instead. I thought her face was mesmerising as she was watching it burn. On a different level I saw it as a comment on the things she has to do to get the money she needs to live, and how meaningless it all feels to her and how detached she feels from it. again "*beep* it" is the sentiment that comes to mind.

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[deleted]

I just watched this for the first time. I am with you, I believe it is all about granting terminal (wealthy) patients their last day of an assisted suicide together with their chosen fantasy.

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