Blog 13- my Rough Draft

Kristopher Rodriguez
4/21/10

I am going to show how light and darkness in the movie shows us the mood of the man. It shows in a variety of places and most of them happen when the man is showing a happy emotion or a sad emotion, and you could almost tell each time through the background how he was feeling at the time. In fact I see that most of the characters could tell you how they feel through the background, but it’s mostly focused on the man that is followed through-out almost the entire movie save for the part where they introduce the woman who he’s cheating on his wife with.
Let’s first look at how the woman is introduced, as it plays a part about how her very nature is in this movie. She lives at this point in the movie, in a rundown old shack in the middle of nowhere. It’s very dark and gloomy and a little bit like a place no one would dare catch someone who lives like a queen anywhere near there. The way the background is set-up with hardly any light what so ever in any of her scenes, it gives off that she’s a very lonely city girl and not a girl who was brought up with decent manners.
Usually when a character is introduced in a dark setting they are usually evil in some way or form. This is a common theme surrounding villains in stories like this, because darkness is well associated with evil or evil intentions, while very bright lighting usually shows us that there is a good guy/girl already there waiting to be introduced in the story. This gives film-makers the perfect set-up for how they want their characters to show who they are before they are even introduced into the story.
Let’s go to the introduction of the man. In this background this background you see him in a dark room with only one light in the middle of a table. The walls are dark, he is hunched over to look as though he is dark and even his cloths are dark save for a single white shirt he has underneath his jacket. This kind of set-up shows us a couple of things about this guy. It seems to me the two lights are a symbol for whatever war his soul is having inside of him. On one side he is conflicted between the two women, the one from the city and his wife. You could also say that the darkness all around him is his depression that he is going through with the selling of his crops, and the way he and his wife are with each other now, but that one light in the middle is the happiness he finds when he’s with the woman from the city.
When the husband tries to leave to go to the swamp, the wife is introduced and the situation with the two light and darkness shift a little bit. Now it seems she also shares a bit of gloom with him because he keeps leaving and she knows where he’ll be going all this time and her one guiding light is that her husband will return to her after he’s had his fun. As she sits with the bowl in the same place he was it’s kind of like they switched places and now she carries his grief, his darkness, but it seems they do not have the same happy thoughts that keep them happy or in the case of the wife, a reason to keep going.

(this is my first draft. before anyone says anything, I know it isn't finnished at all. I will post the final later today.)