I don't really see it.Nelson killed a kid and Labraccio mercilessly teased and bullied another.(for that matter Rachel's was pretty dumb too).He didn't hurt any of those girls.He didn't expose them,or leak their tapes.Sure it was immoral to do it without their permission but still it didnt hurt them.It isn't as if an old conquest went crazy or killed herself.
share[deleted]
Adultery? Seem to remember him cheating but i might be wrong. Pretty sure it was just the immoral nature of what he did.
"Convoy? Michael, you are hanging around with a man who uses a collective term for a single vehicle."
He wasn't married.So it couldn't be adultery.If he was a Christian fanatic his sin would be pre marital sex
English is not my first language!
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I think he is engaged to a girl but still wants to do other ones until the actual wedding.
shareBut it does hurt them. He didn't rape them even though he lied to get them in bed, but he violated them by filming them without permission.
shareI know this is an old post but I was just coming on to say the same thing in as much as I don't get why they used this as his sin. My main point of befuddlement is that he didn't ever seem to feel bad or have any guilt over it at all so it just seemed like a weak story overall.
Yes, what he did was wrong but it never seemed that it was something he felt any guilt over at any point and the fact that not a soul knew what he had done makes it even more silly that it would become this sort of issue.
Dick, I am VERY disappointed.
Well as to the first point of whether he felt any guilt over what he'd done, I'd have to guess that he felt some amount of guilt somewhere deep inside, or at least knew that what he was doing was wrong. Just as Bacon's character probably hadn't thought about the schoolmate he'd taunted as a kid in years but it was sitting somewhere inside of him unresolved.
As to whether what Joe did should be considered a sin, or bad, or whatever, I'd say this. He manipulated women into sleeping with him, telling them he loved them and wanted to be in a relationship with them, then taped them having sex with him without their knowledge, and then dumped them and moved onto the next conquest. All while being engaged to another woman. That seems to qualify as wrong in my book. So I assumed it was tapping into that realization and understanding inside of himself that the filmmakers were going for. I agree though that he didn't seem at all concerned or conflicted about it before so it didn't fit as a good 'redemption' need for him the way the other ones did for their characters.
"He manipulated women into sleeping with him"
Isn't that code for saying he got game and knew how to use it? It's a casual hook up between adults.
"telling them he loved them and wanted to be in a relationship with them"
People say all sort of crap they don't mean when seducing. Is that now suddenly a sin or illegal/immoral?
Had he targeted teens whom clearly didn't know better you may have a point, but they all looked about his age, so can't pretend they didn't know better.
"then taped them having sex with him without their knowledge"
No exposure, no harm done. They were never affected one way or the other by it.
"and then dumped them and moved onto the next conquest."
Like women didn't do that too all the time, check Taylor Swift.
"All while being engaged to another woman"
Sleazy yes, but until they are actually married...
"I agree though that he didn't seem at all concerned or conflicted about it before so it didn't fit as a good 'redemption' need for him the way the other ones did for their characters"
His arc was not about redemption, but about reckoning (paying the price for his infidelity).
If you notice Nelson, he doesn't look guilty one iota at all, if anything he's enraged he's suddenly expected to pay more than he already did (got taken from his home).
In fact, each character's experience was different:
- LaBrasio: only one whom had an ounce of decency in him (his hallucinations weren't particularly disturbing or nerve wreaking or violent, he simply realized he had an outstanding bill and went to take care of it)
- Rachel: also not guilty at all (despite all the flashbacks about her being told it was her fault), she simply was dead worried about her dad's ultimate fate and state of mind.
- Joe: also not guilt, but simply reckoning with an way overdue bill.
They should have gotten to know him better but he may have misrepresented himself and their relationship with him. He also violated them by taping them without their consent. We don't know if he showed the tapes to others. He couldn't apologize to all of them so they had him lose his girlfriend. She made a point that she was leaving not because he cheated but because she then mistrusted his character.
Fornication was his sin. The atonement they each had were for their most defining "wrongs"
that defined their lives. Rachel's of course was not her "wrong" but her fathers. For Joe, it was using scores of women like cheap meat and degrading himself for primitive pleasures.
"Obamacare: It only works if you don't!"
My problem was Joe never got any closure to his arc. His fiancé left him but it kinda ended there.
shareAll of the hallucinations were compelled by unresolved feelings of guilt. Joe felt guilty for cheating on his fiancée with a creepy fetish involving secretly filming himself pumping multiple women.
In the busy chaos of normal life, it’s very easy to hurtle past uncomfortable emotions and keep them repressed. In the NDE all of that falls away, and suppressed guilt comes to the fore, haunting the Flatliners in their daily lives until they confront the source of their guilt.
Joe’s atonement is slightly different in that he doesn’t volunteer to come clean to his fiancée, but instead he gets caught out. Either way he DOES confront her, and loses her, at which point there is no longer any need for the visions.
It would have been funny is he was like ‘what the hell’ and tried it on with the hallucinations, but when he watched the video tapes back it was just him thrusting into thin air.