MovieChat Forums > Land of the Blind (2007) Discussion > secret of room 12?

secret of room 12?

posted 18 years ago by mckavelly
12 replies | jump to latest

In the posts i read before, the consensus seems to be that Joe imagined the whole thing about Maximillans deaths. But what about room 12? We were never told about what happens in room 12. Everyone he asked simply refused to answer about what happens there. Because he did not crack under routine torture, he was eventually "promoted" to room 12 methods.

Joe did not imagine the whole thing. Room 12 was an attempt to make him believe that he was crazy. The interrogators in there have been chosen because they looked like the Maximillans.

In the end, he is still imprisoned in room 12, the lighting in pure white is the same as when he was first thrust into it. His "daughter" was also a plant, chosen for her resemblance to a waitress from his memories. He met the waitress from Year 3. But when they show his "daughter" in the end, he is in Year 21 and she has not aged at all. He does not show any affection towards his "daughter" because he knows that she is a fake. She is crying in the elevator because she feels guilty about trying to fool him.

I know this is a very conspiracy type explanation, but watch the ending again. It makes sense. Is there anything to refute this?

[–] Seikan 18 years ago

Uh-uh. I was agreeing up until then. When we see Joe at the diner, it's not Year Plus Three. As far as we know it's a flash-forward, and we cannot tell when it is. When we see Joe at the diner he has a marking on his wrist, yet I believe he was convicted not long after Year Zero. My assumption is that the girl who came in at the end WAS his daughter, and that she was upset because her father shows no affection. The girl at the diner is after he gets out of prison, sometime in the future, where she has lost recognition of her father (or playing to the conspiracy theory, she too has had her mind erased of certain elements).

But I agree that the people in Room 21 were simply decoys, fakes resembling the Maximillians whom are there to make Joe believe that all that had happened... didn't.

I still think your assumption of the "Year 3-Year 21-daughter" issue is convolluted and flawed (do you see how God damn old Joe is at the diner? CLEARLY it's after he's been released).

[–] Seikan 18 years ago

Now I'm thinking more after having just rewatched it...

The place in which Joe sets up his typewriter just at the start of Thorne's reign, and then when Joe is typing at the end of the film... he's in Room 21, but when the door opens, you notice that it's the inside of his apartment, and that Joe's daughter, as she walks from his room, is walking along the balcony of Joe's apartment building, where we saw Joe stride along when he was called to meet Thorne over the issue of the Loyalty Act.

I now believe that Joe had gone insane, and that they had constructed his apartment in the shape of Room 21 to keep him from dying on the outside, since he had driven himself to believing that he was a prisoner.

In short, he had gone insane from the re-education camps, Thorne's last act of the preserving of Joe's reputation being that his involvement in the murder of Maximillian was erased, and in the nick of time so that when the third rule came into power, the reinstatement of the family of Maximillian, proof had been erased of his involvement in the killing of Junior. But Joe had gone insane already from the torture and such.

The film is about the state of governments and the like, but that's on the surface. I truly believe that the film gives a surreal view of just how far governments go to drive a man to insanity to preserve their nation's straight-forward view on the world.

Joe was a danger, the proverbial David Hicks of the unnamed country in Land Of The Blind, the diner scene was his imagination at his current state in Year Twenty-One, the image of the girl at the diner coming on from his daughter's presence in his artificial cell.

I don't think you can pin any conspiracy theories on this film. I'm discovering new things each time I watch it, and each time I watch it, the possibility of any kind of conspiracy is eliminated... unless you define "brain-washing" as a conspiracy.

[–] mckavelly 18 years ago

Year 3 being a flash-forward does not jell, because the rest of the film is sequential. There were no other flash-forwards, so the diner scene would have to be an exception.

Joe could have got his tattoo from other reasons, the tattoo does not imply that he has been released. He is never ever released. Near the end we are shown how the people who come to visit him, all end up closing/locking the door when leaving - the friend, the politician, even the "daughter". This is a clear sign that he is NEVER released, because the "political climate" never allows it.

[–] 18 years ago

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[–] Seikan 18 years ago

But you fail to acknowledge that Joe looks as old if not older than he does at the end of the film when he's in the diner. This clearly means it's a flash forward, and since he seems to be on the outside at such an old age, we can safely assume it's after the final scene.

[–] mckavelly 18 years ago

If it was a flash-forward, he saw the waitress AFTER his release. How then, could he see her as his "daughter" while he was still in jail?

He could have looked aged because of the stress of the times.

[–] MrSkurge 18 years ago

When he see's the waitress, he is already released from prison. Though he still believes, he is in prison. That was the objective of room 12 to kept your mind imprisoned, even after the release of your body. The scene with his daughter is truly after the diner scene, not a flash forward.

[–] foolosopher 17 years ago

What if the diner scene is a flash-forward, but the waitress is NOT his daughter. (there is really nothing that clearly indicates that she is his daughter)... All she says is that her mom also went to a camp, therefore she's sympathetic to him. He might feel a connection to her cause she reminds him of his actual daughter.

[–] alfabetizado 17 years ago

But one thing. On room 12 the lights are really strong right? Also, on the diner scene the lights are the same way as they are in room 12 and as they are on the place where his writing. Was his meeting with his daughter at the diner real? Because the impression I get is that he's never really released.
Also, stuff that happens on room 12 seems to be part of some sort of induced alucination to brain wash him. Not that they actually hired someone that looked like maximillian and his assistant or joe's wife.

[–] MrSkurge 17 years ago

Interesting observation, but the conclusion could be different. The bright light can symbolize the effects from room twelve in those scenes. I have to watch this again, there is just so much to think about. It was definitely one of the year's best that I watched, along with The Propostion.

[–] astragale 17 years ago

This movie has a great number of references to many revolutionary/dystopian society portraits (French revolution, Russian revolution and of course 1984 which is an anticipation of the Russian Totalitarian regime that Orwell foresaw following the Communist betrayal of the Anarchist revolution in Spain). I believe that room 12 is simply a reference to room 101 of George Orwell's 1984, which is literally a double-think-tank.

But instead of using the fear of the Rat cage, room 12 uses an even worse method of past-negation used to instill doubt about the protagonist's sanity, and in the process, we the viewers are also submitted to the same process whereby the outcome of the film itself is unclear: Does Joe really get out of the camp and see his daughter in the diner, or does he imagine it? Does she really come to visit him in what appears to be more a mental institution in which his father has indeed become crazy, or once again does Joe imagine it? Is Joe in fact in a mental asylum and completely crazy as the result of the negation of what has really happened, or still sane and in prison as a political prisoner about to start the story all over again with the black guard?

In fact, most of the second part of the movie is very reminiscent of 1984, including the scene in the diner, which might simply be a reference to Winston's having a drink in a “prole” coffee place after being let out of the Ministry of Love after he admits his treason and agrees that 2+2=5, which in a way the "What is better than a big juicy steak" is a play on, as the answer, “nothing”, can be interpreted in two different ways.

All in a all I think it is a very thoughtful, apt and depressing film about the inevitability of the totalitarian state because of Man's inherent drive for power, which led the French revolution into Bonaparte’s imperialism and the Bolshevik revolution into the Communist party Totalitarianism.

I think it deserves better than the rating it got on IMDB, surely because of the fact that it is a too depressing mirror of the new rising fascism of the new world order and the practical impossibility to get out of the paradoxical conundrum that it is either the exploitation of man by man, or the other way around. Such bleakness rarely gets a very high rating...

[–] 17 years ago

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