M

I found this film very fascinating in how it presented Beckerdt as the victim. For the better part of the movie, the viewer’s sympathies lie with the community in wanting the child murdered dead. However, periodically when we do see Beckerdt while he is wanted, we noticed his bulging eyes, indicative of either fear, madness, or both and his cleanly shaven face which I thought almost gave him a young, boyish appearance. Due to his almost boyish appearance, we see the eyes as fearful, and begin to look at him as though he’s a little boy who has simply broken his mother’s favorite plate, and fears a spanking. The shot of him changing his face in the mirror also gives him a childlike air. It struck me as interesting that the viewer doesn’t see his face as the criminal until the end when he is on trial. It isn’t until this point that I began to really feel he was the terrible bad man the town made him out to be. To clarify, I mean I don’t think that he is characterized that way up until the point of his “trial”. The fact he looks at toys, whistles a joyful tune, it all leads us to think he is truly not playing with a full deck, and we feel some sympathy for him. His passionate cry for help at the end adds to the tug on the sympathy heartstring, but at the same time is almost frightening. The film clearly speaks to helping the mentally ill as opposed to punishing them for things they “cannot help”, and it even, I believe leans more towards the responsibility of what happened being on the parents. Especially with the closing statement of the mothers. Personally, I still find myself believing he is evil, or maybe not he himself is evil, but there is a powerful force of evil inside him. He knows its wrong to kill, clearly, yet he still does. It’s puzzling.