Mr. Neville's return

In order to have some proof that Neville forced himself upon her (remember the pomegranate juice..). So to have the men set upon him during the night, Mrs. Herbert had to sleep with him.

Brilliant film about sexual politics the artist's vanity.

Oh, poor Mr. Neville and his glorious "eye"--the one so accurate and untouched by emotion or intellectual influence. Human perspective is never as he wanted it to be; what we see, believe and remember is often so innacurate, that Mr. Neville, convinced he somehow circumnavigated this human condition in his work, was just a sitting duck waiting to be a scape goat. In attempting to ignore his human "weaknesses", he simultaneously ignored the reflexes that went along with them--including the ability to recognize "motive" in others. As a result, he unknowingly fell into being totally manipulated in all the ways you can effectively manipulate a human; pet their vanity, coddle their vulnerabilities and stimulate their desire.

"Why does Mr. Neville come back at the end of the film? Neville seems to think that he has a shot with the rich widow, but why? Mrs. Herbert gives no sign that she finds their "liaisons" anything but odious, and why should she, when he strove to make them as degrading as possible? I assume that his motivation in demanding them was not erotic, but rather the opportunity to lord it over a member of (and also the property of) a higher class. He seems to regard this as revenge for a variety of wrongs done to him by rich, land-owning Protestants who have previously pushed him and his kind around. He's vain and overconfident, but I am finding it difficult believe that he's stupid enough to think Mrs. Herbert harbors a soft spot for him, or would consider marrying him and putting him in possession of her property. I suppose it's two kinds of vanity that bring him down: sexual and political. He may actually have convinced himself that she enjoyed their trysts (because he's such a stud) and he may be making the fatal mistake of the powerful, which is to persuade themselves that the people they dominate will come to welcome the domination. He's incapable of seeing that just as he resented the power that the higher classes have exercised over him, so do the women in his world resent the men. He thinks he has been underestimated, even as he underestimates Mrs. Herbert and her daughter."


What Neville wanted was to reprise and re-live the enjoyment that he had. He was not particularly looking to become the next man of the house replacing Mr. Herbert--He is not that ambitious, farsighted, enterprising or intelligent to the extent that he was not aware of the danger of coming back to the scene of his 'crime.' The stupidity of his was not that he was so ambitious as to dream that he could replace Mr. Herbert but that he was blind to the danger of coming back where he had insulted so many people and to boot a capital crime had been commited that he could extremely well be pointed as the perpetrator.


'So, actually, the one thing I really don't understand is why Mrs. Herbert sleeps with him again after the commission has been fulfilled and her husband eliminated. Is it just to keep him around long enough for the other men to lynch him? Any thoughts?"

Mrs. Herbert's intention was so that she could put Neville at ease--the thirteenth drawing for the thirteenth sexual favour. It would help blinding Neville, neither very intelligent nor vigilant in the first place, to the danger of situating himself of all places at where the body of the victim--whom he was the top suspect of murdering!!!--was found.