• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Brendon Marotta

  • Work
  • Blog
  • Show
  • About
  • Contact
  • Subscribe

Archives for January 2018

Phantom Thread (2017) Explained Through Love Languages (Spoilers)

January 30, 2018 By Brendon Marotta

Spoilers.

Phantom Thread (2017) has some wild twists towards the end, but the whole film makes sense when viewed through the lens of love languages.

If you’re not familiar with the five love languages, read this. Basically, love languages is the idea that different people give and receive love in different ways – touch, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, and quality time. Very often, problems arise in relationships because each person is speaking a different love language.

Daniel Day Lewis’s character communicates love through acts of service. His love interest played by Vicky Krieps wants love through quality time. That’s why at she complains they never have any time alone, and he shouts that he gives everything to her. His dressmaking is an act of service he has devoted his enitre life too, and the fact he makes her his primary model and muse is the highest expression of love he has. 

He falls for her when she is able to perform a very complex act of service from memory. He takes the order from her pad as a test – can she keep track of his precise demands from memory? When she shows she can, he sees her as a relationship material. On their first date when he measures her it plays like a love scene, because creating for her is his biggest act of love.

However, Lewis’s character is actually a hypersensitive person. His senses pick up every little sound she makes. He might even be on the spectrum. It makes him “fussy” but it’s also what allows him to create dresses with the level of detail and quality he does. Even his fast driving could be an autistic attempt to “stim” or give an intense point of focus for his senses.

So when his wife tries to provide an act of service for him making a surprise dinner, he appreciates the gesture, but his hypersensitivity makes him unable to receive the gesture, and her unable to to be sensitive to his particular tastes. He is such a master of acts of service, and so hypersensitive, no one create for him the way he creates for others. He is extremely frustrated by it, and so is she.

(Sidenote: When I realized the film was about the relationship between a hyper-sensitive artist and a his muse, I immediately assumed the film had to be inspired by something auto-biographical. IMDB trivia confirms it was.)

In the end however, he is only able to receive her act of service when (spoilers) she poisons him.

Lewis’s character desperately wants to receive from his mother what he gave to her. It’s clear his dress-making as an act of service began in childhood when he made his mother’s wedding dress. He has some enmeshment with her, to the point where he carries a lock of her hair sewn into his coat.

The first time his love-interest poisons him, he sees his mother in the room as a ghost. Krieps character enters, and the three of them hold the same space. Then his mother disappears and his love-interest takes her place. The next day, he asks Vicky Krieps character to marry him. She takes on the emotional role his mother played.

It’s unclear at this point if he knows she poisoned him, but at the end, he is a willing participate. She tells him to his face that she wants him helpless, on his back, with only her to help him. He eats her poison willingly.

This puts him in the position where he is able to actually receive her act of service, and reverses the role he had as a child. Instead of giving himself in an act of service to his mother, someone is giving themselves in an act of service to him, completing the lingering emotional need created in childhood. His hypersensitivity and independence is so dulled by sickness that he is actually able to receive her.

And so in a weird way, their “poison-kink” becomes what makes the relationship work. By poisoning him, she can feel needed and spend quality time with him – which is what she wants – and he can receive her love in an almost maternal act of service – which is what he wants.

Watch the film with someone you want to talk relationships with. You’ll learn a lot.

Read More: Work-In-Progress Explained For Non-Filmmakers

 

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Filed Under: Blog

Work-In-Progress Explained For Non-Filmmakers

January 8, 2018 By Brendon Marotta

Often it’s very hard for non-filmmakers to understand what “work-in-progress” means. Audiences are used to seeing a finished product, so if you show a friend or test-audience something you’re not done with, often their feedback is based in the assumption that what they’re looking at is a final product – even if you might pre-frame otherwise.

It’s hard for non-filmmakers to imagine what the final sound, color, visual effects, music, etc. will feel like – but then again, if they could imagine a movie that wasn’t there, they’d be filmmakers.

However I think I’ve finally found the perfect tool to explain what work-in-progress means – The Mummy (2017) trailer.

Someone at Warner Brother accidentally posted the first trailer for The Mummy with several audio tracks missing, including most sound effects, backgrounds, and music. It was up long enough to be ripped, reposted, and written about. The result was… well, I’ll let you watch for yourself:

The Mummy – missing sound

The Mummy – full sound

As you can see – without full foley and music, the trailer is almost comedic. With sound, it feels like a real blockbuster. That’s the difference those final touches of music, and sound can make.

Can you imagine what it’d be like without visual effects, and those pilots reaction to nothing, or Tom Cruise and  Annabelle Wallis rolling around on wires, and then falling out into a green screen?

If you need to explain work-in-progress to someone – a client, test audience, or less film-literate collaborator – just show them those two trailers back to back.

Read More: The Secret of Damascus Steel: Rewriting and Editing Films

 

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Filed Under: Blog

Primary Sidebar

Follow

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • GitHub
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • Medium
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube

Subscribe for more here:


Share

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

Archives

  • November 2022
  • June 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • October 2014

Copyright © 2023 · Brendon Marotta