MovieChat Forums > Griff the Invisible Discussion > Does he actually have powers?

Does he actually have powers?


Or...

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I'm trying to figure out that as well. I'm trying to categorize it for the site I work for and if he has powers, it's Science Fiction, if not, it's Contemporary Fiction.

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it's hard to categorize, because to do so spoils the movie.

No, he doesn't have powers - he has a vivid imagination and lives in a fantasy world - he may even be schizophrenic

SpiltPersonality

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Oho...





Killing people is easy...if you can forget the taste of sugar.

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its only a matter of time before his schizophrenia becomes psychopathic and he goes around murdering ppl in the name of justice

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Although it may not get quite that far, Melody helping him indulge in his fantasy world that can actually affect his life in reality only makes things worse for him in the long run.

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Just for the record, schizophrenia and multiple personality disorder are completely different conditions. Common mistake.

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SpiltPersonality is my username, not what I wS categorising the character. Aditionally, It's spilt, not split - and the term split personality is no longer used.

SpiltPersonality

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So it is! My mistake. Which one of you do I apologise to?

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Either of us. We get along very well :)

SpiltPersonality

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For the record, he doesn't have multiple personality disorder which is actually now called dissociative identity disorder. If he has a mental disease, it is schizophrenia. He clearly sees things that aren't there. He doesn't have an extra personality.

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It's almost a category to itself, but the broader genre to which it belongs is called "slipstream" by critics and serious readers of genre fiction.

There's a broad tradition of fantasy stories, and especially horror stories, where it's entirely up to the reader whether stuff was real or hallucinated. And of course you see this in films, too. Some classic Twilight Zone stories did this (although more often Serling would put in a twist where the main character found physical evidence that it was real). The recent film The Babadook is a tremendously good example of this: whichever scares you more, actual monsters or psycho moms, you can see the movie that way.

The term for this is "liminal fantasy."

Griff the Invisible is liminal science fiction. I can't think of another example off the top of my head, and for a good reason: it seems to be less satisfying to the reader or viewer. You need hallucinations or delusions that can be parsed in terms of sci-fi rather than fantasy or horror, and by the nature of sci-fi, we do want to know whether it's real. A big part of the appeal of vampires, zombies, werewolves, etc. is that they may or may not be real, but sci-fi gets its appeal strictly from its believability as real.

This movie would be easy to categorize as a straight drama if it weren't for the ending. Shared delusions are so common in psychology that they have their own diagnostic category, shared psychotic disorder, and a classic fancy term from older psych - folie à deux. All the stuff about Griff being invisible plays like classic shared psychosis. They are collaborating in creating the delusion.

However, as others have pointed out, if there actually was a parallel reality where this was real, they would appear to be delusional even though they weren't. And when Melody falls through the door, that is either hard evidence that there is a parallel reality where they have superpowers, or it's the all-time king of shared delusions, one they made up spontaneously together in a moment of joint emotional anguish. Did Melody actually open the door and fall backwards into his apartment, with both of them hallucinating that she fell through it? It's certainly possible, but it's a stretch. Of course, it's not any more of a stretch than the notion that they do have powers in another plane of existence.

And of course, it is immensely touching either way: either they are so in tune with one another that they hallucinated this together, or they are not delusional after all.

It's pretty perfectly liminal.

Now, the term "slipstream" has become a blanket term for works that cannot be comfortably classified as either straight drama, fantasy, sci-fi, or whatever. Slipstream proper is the stuff that actually leaves you feeling weirded out about how to interpret it: basically, you're reaction to the question, what genre is this, is "WTF?" So this is not "hard slipstream." We're not confused about what genre to assign it to; we see that it is poised perfectly between straight drama and sci-fi. But I have found the term "slipstream" to be very useful to encompass hard slipstream, the liminal, magic realism (where the fantastic element is culturally and socially normative), surrealism, postmodern fabulation, and borderline genre (tales where the fantastic element is small enough that one can argue whether it deserves the label).

Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.

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she doesn't insist on having the final word during an argument?

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Well, we don't know if it happens or not.

I did find it slightly curious that they left that open to interpretation - they kept switching from Griff and Mel's POV to Griff just wearing a variety of odd outfits, or goggles instead of his superhero mask. But they never showed us that she definitely couldn't walk through walls.

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She couldnt walk through walls. They are crazy. remember?

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I'm not theorising that she could. I just found it curious that the director never actually showed that she was imagining it in the same way he showed that they were imagining Griff's invisibility and superheroics, which makes me wonder if he wanted it to be left open to interpretation for some odd reason.

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she did keep falling off chairs for some strange reason. Honestly i think he left it open to interpretation that griff the invisible was INVISIBLE but in the other universes that she talked about and thats where the people he was fighting were. And she had the power to move through things as evidenced by the falling off chairs a few times throughout the movie (when she never seemed clumsy or uncoordinated other then that)as well as the falling through the door part.

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eh? Griff only thought he was invisible. He imagined he was walking around the office at night unseen but his colleagues could clearly see on the camera an individual in all white overalls.

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Remember the speech early in the film about how cats live in several realities at once?

He is also split between realities, and in the other one he has super powers.

But she can only see the other reality. It's not until the end that she's able to fully immerse herself into it (when she fell through the door).

So does he actually have powers? Perhaps.

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The reason she falled through the door to me I interpreted it that Griff started believing in his delusions again.

"If god ever existed then he's DEAD now"

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but....what happened when she went "through" the door!? did she actually open it and run through really quickly then fall over? did she ever leave the room?! how would it have looked to any normal person watching?!

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I was wondering about that too. With alot of these movies, like Defendor, where the characters are most likely crazy they do something at the end of the film where you're supposed to wonder. I was waiting for something to happen, like that bully was going to come back and Griff really was going to kick his ass or something.


I would think the director would give a non-answer like 'it's up to the viewer to decide'. Even is someone else saw it we saw it the movie some people play along, like Melody's dad in the shop, or are delusions, like the villians Griff fought.

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"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world." -Buddha


Combine the car conversation with the conversation at the dinner table about cats and the multiple universes. And you get an idea of how to view their superpowers.

It seemed to me there is no definitive answer, but they went so far as to say it is POSSIBLE the "delusions" they experience are actually occurring simultaneously in another reality. When Griff went "normal," there was a shot of costumed bad guys gathering outside his place. Which, either means they were gaining strength because he stopped protecting the other dimension, or it means, even as a newly "normal" adult, he still harbored his delusions. Both possible, but that is the point--even the far-fetched version is a possibility.

Melody's fall through the door, without an explanation, suggests their "fantasy world" is just a different reality, where Griff really is a superhero.

This movie may be made from the perspective--all we know of reality is our own ideas, so it is hard to say whose version of reality is more accurate.


The biggest argument against "the fantasy is actually a different reality" is, if Griff is meant to protect this other dimension, why doesn't he just exist there in the first place? It doesn't make sense he would have to fight the evils of one reality from different reality. But, I think this criticism misses the point of the movie. We aren't meant to determine if the fantasy is real or not, just to understand we can't be sure it is not.


I just finished this 15 minutes ago, so take this immediate interpretation with a grain of salt.

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