"Your crime is terrible, one you can't forgive yourself for, so you invented another self."
....Uh... Disagree? His wife's crime was terrible, beyond terrible. Shocking, devastating and cruel.
His wife even asked of him to "set me free." His only crime of killing his child-murdering wife isn't unforgiveable.
His crime was more than just killing his wife. He was also an alcoholic, probably psychologically abusive, who neglected his mentally unstable wife. In Andrew’s mind, this was an unforgivable lapse which resulted in the deaths of his children. He blames himself for all of it because in retrospect he believes that he could have prevented it, and this is what splits his psyche in two: the good man searching for justice, and the monster who destroys lives.
shareInteresting tph, interesting.
shareBy the way, as wrong and maybe immoral as it also is, but is being an alcoholic and neglecting actually a CRIME, or even WAS it some 80 or so years ago?
shareI don’t believe there are any legal statutes against being an alcoholic in USA, Prohibition was the closest it ever got. There are still Public Drunkenness laws in effect. There are laws against spousal abuse nowadays but it was definitely different in the fifties, you would have to beat your woman into a hospital back then to face any legal repercussions, and emotional abuse was more often than not simply laughed off or drugged away.
I think the film uses the term ‘crime’ in more of a symbolic—rather than literal—way. Like a moral crime, rather than an illegal act.
The doctor isn’t expressing his own opinion of the crime, he’s adopting Andrew’s perspective to help explain the nature of his psychosis.