When a Locket Means More than a Locket

Last month, Older Daughter and I went to our first midnight movie together: the opening night of J.J. Abrams' Super 8. She's old enough now to recognize that movies are not just for entertainment; they can be as rich and meaningful as the best of narratives. Take away the pages, the words, the chapters and the binding, books and movies are awful lot alike. If you engage with the film's story as you would a novel or a piece of creative non-fiction, you might find a rich subtext where the filmmaker weaves ideas and messages through the cinematic images. Of course, some movies are pure pop (Transformers, Horrible Bosses), offering not much more than a visual, emotional or comedic thrill. But others give us more by taking on symbol and theme.

Take Super 8, for example. In what some may perceive as simply a high-concept, popcorn movie (an alien on the loose in small-town Ohio), director/screenwriter addresses the thematic idea of emotional repression. Here's the story: Joe, a middle-school kid, and his friends decide to spend the summer making a Super 8 zombie movie, but during a nighttime shoot at their town's train depot, the teenagers witness a horrific train derailment. The scene is captured by their rolling camera and three days later when the film is developed (this all takes place in the 1970's, an era when all film had to be developed in a photo lab), Joe discovers that some kind of monster -- later revealed as a captured alien turned lab rat -- escaped from one of the train cars.

Sounds like your typical summer blockbuster -- and it is. But then, there's this locket. As the movie opens, we learn that Joe's mother as been killed on the job at the steel mill: the first extended sequence takes place post-funeral as friends and neighbors gather at Joe's home. While his repressed father stands in the house, Joe seeks refuge on the swing outside in the snow, fingering a locket that contains a picture of his mother. After Joe's father throws out a guest -- the man who he deems responsible for his wife's death -- Joe snaps shut the locket as the film goes to black. And in case you missed the importance of the closed locket (the film is not subtle --not at all -- but the heavy hand isn't enough to spoil the great moments throughout), there's a loud, echoing boom (the locket slamming shut) on the soundtrack.

In several other spots, the locket reappears (the cameo makes a cameo) and becomes the central symbol of the film. Joe's father, unable or unwilling to express his grief with anyone, wants him to go away from the summer; Joe wants to stay and make the zombie movie. He doesn't speak of his mother to his friends, even thought it's a small town and everybody knows of Joe's misfortune. But Joe keeps that locket, which remains closed, near throughout the movie. And remember, there's his mother's picture in there.

So the locket becomes a reminder that Joe (and of course, his father) remain hopelessly closed off from processing the pain caused by the death of the mother. Later, Joe pursues his crush on Alice Dainard (played effortlessly by Elle Fanning whose performance may be the best thing in the movie), who has been cast as the female romantic lead in the zombie film. Alice is the daughter of the man who called in sick to the mill which led to Joe's mother being called in to work on her day off (the same man thrown out of the funeral reception by Joe's father) and she reveals, in a scene where Joe shows her Super 8 home movies of his mother playing with him when he was an infant, that her father also has been devastated by grief -- yet another emotionally repressed character. As Joe and Alice bond, he shows her the locket; he's getting closer to symbolically opening the locket and consequently, himself.

SPOILER ALERT: This domestic drama is interrupted by the presence of the alien monster escaped from the army train in the derailment and now messing with the town by stealing engines from cars, scaring off dogs and scrambling electricity. And he's got his own version of the locket. In a fairly contrived turn of the plot, Joe and his buddies get their hands on some research films that reveal the monster has been held in captivity for years, the subject of intense research by the government. One scientist suspects that the alien is aggressively violent only because it's scared and homesick. And yet again, a third (or fourth or fifth) character who's cut off, shutting down, acting out.

Emotional repression; it's the big idea of Super 8. And it's a summer blockbuster -- who would have thunk it?

In the end, when the kids go AWOL to find the alien, when Joe's father frantically searches for his missing son, when Mr. Dainard reaches out to Joe's father in an effort to save his daughter, the characters begin to emote and connect, leading to the resolution of the alien invasion. The locket makes a final appearance in the last moments of the film; what happens to it suggests that Joe, his father, Mr. Dainard (perhaps event the monster) have, through the action of the movie, found a way to let go of whatever emotions they've hidden.

Many narratives (films, novels, TV episodes, etc.) have their own lockets -- objects that suggest more than what they are and often, holding the big abstract idea of the story. Woody Allen has his Paris, Stieg Larsson has his dragon tattoo and Super 8 has its locket.