MovieChat Forums > Aurora (2013) Discussion > Rapey Inception (spoilers)

Rapey Inception (spoilers)

posted 9 years ago by matt-baen
4 replies | jump to latest

On the one hand it's very artfully done and well acted, on the other, the story is very rapey and creepy. (Rapey The Cell would be more accurate, but less people remember The Cell.)

- Doesn't say who he is in her mind, whether he's a memory, figment of her imagination, or real person, but has sex with her despite confused state
- Continues relationship even after clear she thinks he's her husband
- Doesn't share details of experience with research team, which may have been critical to treating or perhaps reviving the patient
- Nearly sexually assaults his girlfriend and later beats a prostitute
- Gets turned on by watching the comatose patient's body get rubbed down with lotion, revealing horrible bedsores
- Traumatizes her by beating husband to death in front of her, revealing that he's been someone else all along leading to further trauma - keep in mind her coma may be psychological in origin
- She then decides to reminisce over some past sexual encounters and then wills herself to die. But hurrah, the protagonist lives. But why should we be glad about that? He's an unethical piece of garbage who sexually exploited a vulnerable patient and exploited a research program in order to do it. Her death may well have been preventable if not for his bad behavior.

[–] emvan 9 years ago

I think you're being a little too hard on him, and not being forgiving enough. I think we have to take it on faith, as a premise of the movie, that a fundamentally good person would find this experience so unusual and disorienting that it would alter their behavior, and in a negative way.

At first he's just having an experience. It gradually becomes clear to us, as viewers, that he is re-enacting memories she has of interactions with her husband. But note that at one point she tells him, essentially, that at times she is aware of the true him rather than her husband (I think she says "you're not you"), and that she likes that. Furthermore, among their re-enacted versions, at least one crucial event is altered for the better: they don't crash the car, he isn't killed, and she isn't put into a coma. So from his POV, he is trying to help her recover. This goes disastrously wrong, of course, when he kills the husband (at a point, BTW, when she seems to be aware of the dual identity).

But I think the big thing you're missing here is that you've got the film's big causal arrow backwards. He didn't mess up the experiment. The experiment messed him up.

The litany of his bad behavior (that you run down accurately) was meant to show us his mental deterioration, and it's pretty clear that it is participating in the experiment that is causing that.

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

[–] spookyrat1 9 years ago

... that a fundamentally good person would find this experience so unusual and disorienting that it would alter their behavior, and in a negative way.

I don't think the OP has picked up on this at all.🐭

[–] spookyrat1 9 years ago

He's an unethical piece of garbage who sexually exploited a vulnerable patient and exploited a research program in order to do it.

LOL! He's drafted in as point man in a revolutionary new neural science program, after the team leader, guarantees there won't be any side effects (sure there won't). Sexually exploited? It's all happening in their heads!! No one's going to charge him with any thing.

Her death may well have been preventable if not for his bad behavior.

Unlikely. She was permanently comatose; what we generally term "brain dead".🐭

[–] emvan 9 years ago

And those are very good points that I had forgotten.

People love to point the blame at one person, when the point of any mature narrative is that when things do go wrong, the blame is almost always shared.

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