Joan Cusak - "Bad-guy" or misunderstood?
In my last meditation I discussed how movies often distort history or events to tell a story. It is not always bad, but just one of the side effects of writing a script for a movie or play based on historical truth. One such change in history is the biased representation of an antagonist. In almost every movie, historical or not, there seems to be a clear cut bad-guy and a good-guy. The good-guys are always moral and innocent to some degree. The bad-guys usually are evil or deceiving in some way. However, in the movie Cradle Will Rock, I noticed that the person who could be considered an antagonist, Joan Cusak’s character, Hazel, didn’t seem to fill the roll as a bad-guy.I really made this distinction towards the end of the movie. As the plot of the story began to fall into place and the relationships between all the characters came together, I realized that Hazel was one of the main people that was causing problems for the Federal Theatre group. But although I saw her as a troublemaker, I didn’t get the feeling she was an immoral, stereotypical bad-guy. Towards the end of the movie in the scene where the announcement is made that the project had been shut down, I almost got a feeling of sympathy for her – a feeling that is usually never associated with bad-guys. I am not saying that I condone her actions or think that she was right for going to the government reporting communist behavior within the program. However, I think that in the movie Cradle Will Rock, Hazel’s character was portrayed with complexity such that the audience could see that her intentions were not purely evil. Her character is developed slowly and with care so that the audience can see that she is human. She has doubts and even experiences loneliness and fear. I found it unique to see the antagonist of the film be depicted as a human with emotions, and not just a “bad-guy.”
posted by Layne @ 11:20 PM
2 Comments:
I think that you need to differentiate between the actual antagonist of the FTP and people like Hazel Huffman. The actual antagonist would be the government and their fear that this idea of communism could rise up and become something bigger while Hazel Huffman was just one of many people who believed that they felt the same way the government did. Hazel Huffman was not the "bad-guy" she was just concerned for her own well-being and the "integrity" of her country.
I dont think Hazel fit the role of the "bad guy" in this movie. She was just trying to help things, and she thought that she had strong enough views, opinions, and supported evidence to prove her case and to help things.
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