MovieChat Forums > Melancholia (2011) Discussion > Wait, what? Kiefer Sutherland's Characte...

Wait, what? Kiefer Sutherland's Character (Spoilers warning)

posted 12 years ago by AceTheMovieCritic
57 replies | jump to latest

(DON'T READ UNLESS YOU HAVE ALREADY VIEWED THE FILM AS THIS CONTAINS SPOILERS, BUT IF YOU ARE READING THIS AND HAVEN'T SEEN THE MOVIE YOU'LL PROBABLY HAVE SEEN THE SPOILERS BELOW AND IT IS ALREADY TO LATE. IF THAT IS THE CASE--WOULD YOU LIKE A CUP OF TEA?)

Alrighty, so I just finished viewing the film and I am wondering why John, Claire's husband, decided all out of the blue like to kill himself? I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but was this not kind, oh I don't know, completely freaking out of character? I don't get why he'd just decide that was what he was going to do when he had a wife and son he rather seemed to care for. He didn't really seem like the cowardly type to me, until you know, he was dead.
Hope you who haven't seen the movie took my spoiler warning and didn't ruin it for yourselves. I did, after all, forewarn.

This ain't my first tea party...

[–] 12 years ago

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[–] rmontro 12 years ago

I understand his motivations for committing suicide, but that was pretty cowardly leaving his wife behind to cope alone, considering how freaked out she was by that planet.

[–] NeoDeMover 12 years ago

He was killed off because they couldn't make the teepee big enough for 3 adults and the child.

He'd want to see the planet... if you're going to die... not much reason to OFF yourself unless its less painful.

At 60,000 miles per hour... death is pretty instant on Earth. Of course, the movie didn't include the life-killing earth quakes and volcanic eruptions that the flyby would have caused.

[–] readyforbed 12 years ago

I am not a scientist here, but can you explain in plain language why there would have been earthquakes and volcanic activity from the fly by? I assume it has something to do with gravity, similar to the moon and tides, but I am curious to understand it better.

Thanks!

[–] oh_no_mrbill 12 years ago

If a planet the size of Melancholia were to pass close enough to Earth, its gravity would actually stretch the shape of the Earth briefly from a sphere into a more irregular ellipsoid. That stretching causes the crust to "flex" to adjust to the new shape, opening up all kinds of faults in the surface. When faults rupture you get earthquakes, and magma can escape upward through the cracks, creating volcanic activity at the surface.

Try clasping your hands together in a ball, then squeeze in and out. You can feel the tension between your fingers as they slide past one another. That's the same force that would cause cracks to appear in Earth's crust during a Melancholia flyby.

This effect is actually visible on a body in our Solar System. Io, the innermost moon of Jupiter, is continually bulging and flexing due to Jupiter's massive gravity. There is a small irregularity in its orbit that causes it to wobble closer and further away from Jupiter. As it does, Io's surface can flex up to 100 m in elevation, literally tearing the crust apart. The end result is that Io is the most volcanically active object in the Solar System.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Io_(moon)

[–] musicalfreakgurl 12 years ago

That's very interesting and scary.

[–] gapeach1 11 years ago

Either he couldn't handle being wrong or he saw the completed movie and realized how supremely boring it was.

[–] anni_boo 12 years ago

if i had been him i would have made a lovely cocktail for the family and taken them with me to the point of sleep/unconsciousness - nothing that would cause any discomfort in any way.

they would never had been able to feel the terror then. i think he was a coward to leave them.

[–] snookafly2000 12 years ago

I love how everyone wants to call him a coward when none of us could possibly fathom what we would do in this situation. If everyone is goin to die anyway, how he choose to do it is really moot.

[–] harlowfan 12 years ago

My impression was sort of that maybe Kiefer's character knew about Melancholia's impending collision with Earth the entire time, he just didn't want to worry his family. He kept his feelings to himself and had been planning suicide for a while. I just don't get why he wouldn't go do it away from his family, where they wouldn't have time to find him.

That's the one thing that puts a hole in my theory, I realize.

[–] Shindiggy 12 years ago

I think he killed himself because he realized he was wrong and he lied to her. He promised her it wouldn't hit. But then again, I think he was just a selfish jerk because he did not save any pills for the rest of them. Maybe it's a little bit of both. I knew he was a weak character when someone mentioned in the movie that John always tries to kick his mother-in-law out but never follows through. That's why the butler followed him outside and picked her stuff back up, he always did it. His bark was bigger than his bite.

[–] GreyHunter 11 years ago

Despite what others have said, it's not in any way clear that John killed himself. The vomit could easily have come from his reaction to being kicked in the body or even the head by a nervous horse. Nausea isn't an uncommon side-effect of sudden blunt trauma. More telling is the fact that Justine had just noted that the horses seemed to have calmed down. It's entirely possible that John had gone out to administer the sedative to them and been killed by the horse before the drugs took effect. In fact, that seems like the likely interpretation of the scene. Since it was implied that they were sedatives (pills that kill aren't generally available from your local drugstore, and poisons like rat poison aren't available in pill form) vomiting would actually have been counterproductive -- sedatives aren't a fast-acting poison. If they are vomited up, they won't kill you.

[–] 11 years ago

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[–] somesunnyday 11 years ago

John was the very successful, very together patriarch of the family who was very self assured about everything in his life. Of course that's his facade anyway. I believe he either was wrong about his calculation of the planet moving away or really knew what was going to happen all along. Either way, when it came to the crunch he lost control of his world and couldn't handle either his family or himself seeing him decline in this situation. He felt he couldn't be the man he needed to be at that moment so did himself in. Justine, on the other hand, had nothing to lose and found strength through this in the end.

[–] chuck-526 11 years ago

... why John ... decided all out of the blue like to kill himself?

Several possible motivations (and it probably wasn't just one:-) have already been mentioned. Yet another is control!

John is accustomed to being "in charge" of his life. He makes things happen. He takes some action, then gets the desired result. Likely John is in some sense a "control freak" (although this could be just happenstance:-).

In death-by-pills he's proactive. He decides when and where and how. He takes some action (i.e. swallows the pills) to get some result. To his way of thinking, this is much preferable to "letting it happen". This is not anything about the current specific situation with Melancholia, nor even is it anything about death - rather it's simply John's "style" of thinking and dealing with everything.

[–] gleamy-jog 11 years ago

Several possible motivations (and it probably wasn't just one:-) have already been mentioned. Yet another is control!

That's a good point. It fits with the theme of the seemingly paradoxical adaptive benefit of depression.

Life sucks. To cope, "normal" people have to maintain a state of denial and the illusion of control. Those who seem the most together and in control may well be more out of touch with reality than those who might be labeled pathologically depressed or those with pessimistic outlooks.

Denial is an extremely powerful and adaptive coping mechanism. John probably never objectively considered the available information because of simple confirmation bias. Also, in many cases, large groups of people will likely be in denial of the same things, such as the likelihood of extinction, so, they all reality test with others who are out of touch with reality the same way that they are, and become overconfident in their distorted perspectives.

Normal folks can have serious crises when reality becomes overwhelming and their denial can't be maintained. When John could no longer deny the facts, he could no longer live. When he knew the worst was going to happen and he could do nothing about it, he had to quit living because he had no other way to cope - no magic tent.

Depressed people tend to reality test better than "normal" people which is not adaptive to day-to-day life, but seems to be quite adaptive when the inevitable horrific thing actually happens. The depressive's life is a daily rehearsal of the worst of life's experiences. They know that everything that most people deny to get by every day is not real - just a magic tent that is no more real than Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Depressives maintain control of the magic tent, because they know that it is magic. Those who can no longer pretend that their cavernous magic tent is real, have no tent at all.

Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

[–] BecauseIAmBATMAN 11 years ago

I found it pretty funny.

Anybody can be Batman