"Lost and Delirious": Likeable Characters, Moving Story

Feb 13, 2008

I wrote the following essay for the fan Web site, http://www.lost-and-delirious.com
WARNING: This essay gives away more about the movie than a review would.

Why does "Lost and Delirious" pack such an emotional wallop that it has brought so many of us to this Web site to share our often-effusive feelings about it? I obviously can't speak for anyone else. But, for me, the main reason is that the three main characters are not only very real but very likeable. As a result, I care about what happens to them.

Paulie is an ultra-assertive hellion who will blast a boom box while three of her schoolmates are trying to perform live music. But she has such an infectious sense of fun that I want to cut her slack as much as her teachers and fellow students do. What matters to me more than her enthusiasm, though, is her generous spirit. She shares some of her deepest feelings with Mouse shortly after they meet and, when Mouse does the same, renames her Mary Brave.

Paulie's denial that she or Tori are lesbians helps keep the movie from becoming a political tract and focuses it on the love between two individuals. Paulie's claim is plausible because she acts on it. She never shows a flicker of sexual or romantic interest in her sweet, kind friend Mary, even as she expresses an intense need to be connected to Mary as a blood sister -- and by exploring the darker reaches of their minds together.

Tori is as friendly and welcoming to Mary as Paulie is. Later, of course, she tells hurtful lies about Paulie in what I think of as the betrayal scene on the footbridge. Those lies, with the help of her sister Allison's vivid pre-adolescent imagination, eventually take the form of the memorable line, "She practically raped my sister."

But the lies don't hurt Paulie anywhere near as much as Tori's rejection of her as a lover – and that is a decision Tori has a right to make. Tori struggles with the conflict between her love for Paulie and her urge to protect herself from the loss of her family's love. She is in tears as she leaves the footbridge after the betrayal, she begs Mary to be the friend Paulie needs, and she lets Paulie see her real feelings even while pulling away from her. After Paulie delivers her most venomous line -- "Do you always fuck your friends up against trees?" -- Tori seems to understand that Paulie is expressing hurt rather than hatred and reaches out to her.

Unfortunately, there's one scene where I don't think Tori is given enough to do. When Paulie walks into the library in fencing gear and dramatically quotes Shakespeare at her, Tori shouldn't sit still. That she does, I think, has more to do with stereotypes about the passivity of "feminine" women than with the real world. I think virtually any woman -- or high-school girl, in Tori's case -- would stand up for herself in that situation. All she needs to do is get up and say something like, "Paulie, this is not OK."

But if Tori has a right to be angry in that scene, my instinct to cut Paulie a break continues. I can understand her behavior as an expression of the depth of her pain. Where I start to have trouble is when she has the sword fight with Jake. Not only is violence unacceptable, even if it takes the form of a "fair" fight, but fighting over a lover is a denial of the lover's autonomy. Tori has the right to decide between Paulie and Jake. They don't.

This isn't a criticism of the movie, though. “Lost and Delirious” is a chronicle of Paulie's descent into self-destruction -- not an endorsement of it.

Mary is the good, timid, sweet, smart girl we have all known, and she does what is expected of her with prompt efficiency. When Allison and her friends walk in on Tori and Paulie, Mary needs only a little prompting to take charge and bustle them out of the room, lying without any sign of a qualm. ("It's not what you think." In fairness, though, that lie doesn't call for qualms. She's lying about something that's not their business.

My favorite two scenes involving Mary are the one where Allison warns her in the campus post office about what "people" are saying about her friendship with Paulie -- and the next scene. In the post office scene, Mary shows loyalty and courage when she says, "Paulie's my friend, so I guess it doesn't matter what people think." But if that were the end of it, she would come off as a bit of a plaster saint. What makes this sequence great is the next scene, which starts with Mary asking her friend Joe, the groundskeeper, "How much does it matter what people think?" That question humanizes her. Like the rest of us, she can do the right thing at times, but she isn't always sure she's glad she did.

To me, "Lost and Delirious" rises to the level of tragedy because there is no "bad" character. It's not a simplistic story about good versus evil. It's a story about good people making the choices they feel they have to make in the parts of their lives that matter most to them -- erotic love and family love -- and about those choices causing great pain to them and the people they care most about. There's no "other," no devil. All the people in this story are like us, and we feel for them.

In the Forum section of this site, I have expressed my disapproval of what I think is the romanticizing of Paulie's suicide at the end of the movie (and I think suicide is the reasonable interpretation of what this scene shows). There's no need to repeat those comments here. But I want to add that I don't think the suicide is necessary for the movie to be powerful and moving. I think an equally moving ending would be for us to see Paulie, in handcuffs, being put in the back of a police cruiser, cutting to the shots of the soaring falcon. This could be accompanied by a voiceover in which Mary says a lot of what she says in the movie's final voiceover and talks about how Paulie spent the years that followed in and out of jails and mental hospitals, spending the time in between in the same seedy neighborhoods as her birth mother but never crossing paths with her.

This is a lot like the ending of "The Wives of Bath," the novel the movie is based on. I like the movie much better than the book. But there is one poignant touch near the end of the book that could have worked well in the movie. Mouse (the name she keeps throughout the book) recounts Paulie telling her several years later that she has danced with a boy and let him lead.

Alex, September 9, 2007