Nora Marcus
Company employee or another second? I've always thought the latter.
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Charlie
Company employee. Murray Hamilton says so to Hudson during his final, frantic phone call to Rock, trying to convince him to chill out after his cocktail party meltdown.
shareNOOOOORRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.
Did Nora perhaps really like or was attracted to Tony?
What was the meaning of her anger in her last appearance (at the end of the party) when she yells at him, "Who the hell do you think you are?" Did she imagine that she could have transcended her employee role and have a real relationship with him if he hadn't blown his cover?
I think she did, or else why would she have been so upset? In fact, on the DVD supplements, Salome Jens mentioned she tried the scene two ways - one version had her start crying, and the other version was what we all ended up seeing. As for the character, as opposed to the actress, why would she be so personally involved in the crack-up of who was essentially a lab rat if she didn't start to care for Tony Wilson?
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked.
It was a good, well phrased question though - especially as the drunker "Tony" got the more "Arthur" was leaking out. Perhaps she could of asked "Who IN hell do you think you are!?"?
shareThat brings up the question: did Nora merely like the "packaging" of Tony or did she also like the real person inside (Arthur)? She knew he was a "reborn" so she knew - or should have known - the difference.
Perhaps she was in denial about the whole situation, just as Tony tried to kid himself that he had really changed.
First off apologies for the grammatical faux pas in my last post. As HG Lewis once confessed to Jonathan Ross, "'Enery 'Iggins I ain't!"
Yes Nora. Quite a puzzle there. If as Charlie insists she is a company employee (and I can't think of an argument against it) then she has a very sophisticated approach to her work. I can't decide whether she was meant to stabilise the increasingly restless and confused Tony by offering him a relationship, or bring out his inner Arthur and fast track his eventual reassignment to the recycling process. Did the company instruct Nora to beguile Tony so that he falls in love with her: or, as previous posters suggest, did she miscalculate and because of the "meaningful" conversations and the shared tenderness after the orgy develop much deeper feelings for him? Perhaps her apparent anger at his drunken breakdown was a way of dealing with the sadness of realising the Tony Wilson project was going to fail and that his fate would be bleak and inevitable?
This still perplexes me because I don't think I fully understand the philosophy behind the company. I can't work out whether failures are more profitable than the successes. Did they have any bona fide satisfied customers? Certainly the reborns at the party looked like a glum lot and the rows of sombre looking men waiting for news of their supposed second (or should that be third?) chances wouldn't inspire a lot of confidence.
I wonder what others take on all this is?
The business model of the company is never described in detail. (Maybe it is in the novel?) It's hard to know how many people it's attempting to "renew." However, there are about fifty or sixty people in the "day room." The company doesn't seem to have dormitories filled with hundreds of them waiting to be recycled.
In any case, we only know what Arthur/Tony knows about the company, and we have to make some guesses about it from that.
Likewise, we really don't know much about Nora. I wonder if her story about leaving her husband and kids might be true. It seems like her present job is a strange one, but maybe it appeals to her.