Sweetie: Why it Sucked

So I may or may not have walked in the the showing of the film Sweetie (1989) with a bit of a bias, and not a good one.  I'm not going to name any names (it was you Brian) but I was influenced to dread sitting through this 97 minute adaptation of contemporary.  Let's just say I wasn't disappointed.  (Don't worry I would have hated it all on my own.)

So per suggestion (Brian again), I gave it about 10 minutes before focusing the remaining 87 on why I hated the film so much.  What was so bothersome about it?  What about the characters and storyline irked me to such an intense degree?  I think I came up with a semblance of an answer: a lack of control.

I have found in the last 20 years of my life that control happens to be a pretty big issue in my life.  This is why I find it so surprising that I never noticed this element of the Gothic before viewing Sweetie.  It seems that there is a reoccurring theme of lack of control throughout most of the texts that we have read.  This starts as early as The Castle of Otranto, in the case of Isabella who is at the mercy of her duty to her family, and then to Manfred as she is living in his castle.  Matilda and Hippolita are also controlled in this way, as all women seem to be in early Gothic literature.

We continue to see this idea throughout the earlier literature and on a less general level in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when Jekyll wakes up in the skin of his alter-ego Hyde, without having taken his potion.  By becoming two separate selves, he looses control of the bad within himself.  He completely gives up to the evil within him, giving all of the power to Hyde.

On the same small scale- less to do with a greater society and more with the smaller constructions of an individual family- Sweetie (1989) revolves around characters who refuse to deal with their problems, letting them fester until the infection is so deep that it is nearly impossible to cure.  Jane Campion successfully creates a family dynamic that is, by anyone's definition, absolutely Gothic.  The film deals with very Freudian family issues, as well as self examination of the protagonist and her other, found in her sister who she (not-so-affectionately) refers to as Sweetie.

The title character is absolutely crazy: enter my distaste for the movie.  Somehow, like a two-year-old who badly needs a spanking, Sweetie remains in control of her entire family through the use of tantrums.  Too bad her father's parenting style is the equivalent of the new-aged, punishment-free households that made babysitting hell for me in high school.  He treats his daughter, now a grown woman, as though she can do no wrong.  Which is clearly not the case.  This breeds the competitive nature of the relationship between his two daughters.

Yes, it was the appearance of Sweetie that stirred up my hatred for the film, but it wasn't actually her character that bothered me so much.  It was Kay's reaction to her sister's arrival that made me want to punch the screen.  If Sweetie is a two-year-old, Kay is her whiny, tattle-tail five-year-old sister.  The day after her sister drops by uninvited Kay tells her, "you're supposed to have gone."  I was pulling my hair out at this point.  I'm sorry, but are you kidding me?  This is an adult woman sharing a home with her lover, if she wants someone out of her home, she ought to just kick her ass out.  I love my sister more than anything in the world, but you better believe if I walked into my two-bedroom home to find her having sex with a strange man in my bed she would be on the street.

Then there is an entire section from when they are leaving on their holiday which I've included below:

This is the perfect example of how she is to remain forever a child.  She reacts to things that she doesn't like  in the manner of a toddler, and she is dealt with in the same way.  They are forced to use trickery to convince her to leave the car.  No one is willing to stand up against Sweetie and give her the real-world lessons that she obviously needs as a wake up call.  Yet for some God forsaken reason, they trust her to stay at Kay's home alone for an extended period of time.  Not a single character in this film looks at the situation and takes charge.  Instead they let it remain a "family matter," despite the obvious fact that this method is not working.

At that, Sweetie is constantly saying things like, "I'm not going back," which- although not directly stated- is an implication that she has been sent somewhere to deal with her mental state in the past.  So my question is, if it is has been determined that she is not of sound mind, why doesn't anyone care enough to send her back where she came from?  It is only after she terrorizes Kay, Louis, and the entire family, that they attempt to take admit her to an institution.

I know that there is an implication of resolution at the end of this film, but I was completely dissatisfied.  Even as Kay tried to breath life back into her sister, there was no point in which anyone took control of their own life.  Professor Moglen claims that Kay came to an acceptance of her other in the way she dealt with Sweetie's death, but in my opinion she made no improvements on herself.  Just because she regained her desire to bone does not mean that she grew a backbone.