McGivern and the bucket...
Did that bucket have some sort of significance I didn't catch? He brought it with him into the classroom that night and left it on the teacher's desk, but why?
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MovieChat Forums > School Ties (1992) Discussion > McGivern and the bucket...
he used the bucket of water to clean the chalkboard during his breakdown.. I don't think it had any other symbolic meaning.. kind of a disappointing scene.. it had all the buildup of a suicide, and then nothing
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I wondered about that, too. I figured a scene must have been deleted. It was so prominent and then, nothing. I thought maybe he was going to stand on it and hang himself.
shareOne notices that Mac had written "Mousieur Cleary est un merde" referring to Cleary in scatological terms. That was Mac's last act before his possible attempted suicide, possibly by hanging himself on the desk, although we didn't see what really happened and how he ended up on the floor. I believe that we were to have interpreted that as a suicide attempt that failed.
MGD
Perhaps. I've seen this film many times and I still can't figure that scene out, or what the viewer is meant to think.
I think the filmmakers botched it a bit. We don't know if McGivern failed at suicide or just had a nervous breakdown. I did catch the Cleary est Merde bit.
That scene always confused me, too. If he wanted to kill himself, then the boys would have found him with a rope attached to his neck from the ceiling. But he's just laying there.
Also, I don't think he would bother to get a bucket just to fill it with an inch of water to wash the blackboard.