Birdcage during sex scene..

I remember reading an interview with BBThornton where he says that the scene wasn't really about sex at all. It was about two people who hated themselves so much they'd do anything not to feel that for a while. Makes sense to me, actually.

I think the bird was about Leticia's soul, and maybe about Hank's, too. Can you imagine how jangled her soul must have been, after all the horror of her past however many years of being married to her husband, then having him on death row, trying to scrape by with her morbidly obese son, and then his death?

Sex can be misused in so many ways, but it still retains the power to reconnect us with life and bring us some relief from pain. Despite everything, it is a precious magic.

The bird was freaked out and terrified, but gradually grew still, until the hands were able to hold it peacefully. Once enough pleasure had been had, enough oxytocin released, Leticia was able to feel her own soul again, if only for a moment. This doesn't really say anything particularly special about Hank as a lover, except that he was there with her, and feeling exactly as horrible about his life as she did hers. They were on wavelength, and were able to bring one another a bit of peace.

Could it also be a reference to her husband being in prison? Or that she was rattling her cage, trying to break out? I'm not too sure. I agree that the their connection was more of an emotional nature than a sexual one. But remember how just before Sonny and the prostitute had sex, we see him in his shaving mirror, then during H + L's sex scene we see them reflected in a mirror, then we see Hank in Letitia's bathroom mirror the morning after; it's all symbolic, and I think flashes of Letitia's hand running accross the bars of a birdcage while they're having this intense encounter is also symbolic. Remember at the end of the sex scene, it fades out to the beaded curtains that look like bars but clearly aren't keeping anything caged; they're curtains. It's kind of a repeated theme, mirror images of someone who's lost, wounded, the cage that's keeping someone repressed, restricted. Maybe we're supposed to think of the cage and mirrors as symbols of these people's pain and inability to cope.

Just a thought. It's been bugging me since I saw the film, and I still don't think I fully understand it.