ANALYSIS
Reflections on Perfect Strangers

Illusions Magazine Number 36 Winter 2004
by Helen Frances (New Zealand)

The eye of a full moon hangs in the sky over a dark moody landscape on the West Coast of New Zealand. This isolated landscape is host to Perfect Strangers, a psychological thriller played out between two main characters. Melanie, a woman unlucky in love, works in a fish ‘n chip shop. She is enticed away one night to an island by a “perfect stranger” who remains unnamed. Bill, a hunter from the coast, later becomes the third in an entrapping triangle. The light of the moon invites the viewer to reflect and introspect, to imagine and associate to the images as a dreamer may do in response to a dream. In doing this nothing becomes totally clear. Images remain ambiguous, polyvalent. This seems to be the nature of dreams and symbols. Researching the songs and re-reading Jungian texts about images of animus and anima also helped me to amplify the meaning of the film.

The moon is often associated with the imagination and madness, cyclical “feminine” consciousness and transformation. To the imagining mind that projects human realities onto outer objects, the phases of the moon represent parts of a whole, for example the phases of human life. Perfect Strangers shows the madness of characters caught in a vicious roundabout where wholeness is compromised. Victim, rescuer, persecutor, idealised and despised images of male and female roles zig-zag, dance and turn across the screen. The film invites the viewer to reflect on how the unconscious internal film people run inside their head can affect external relationships. From this point of view the activities of the characters resemble a dance of shadow boxers – not fully rounded characters but the director’s projections of more or less destructive psycho-social roles. Perfect strangers, through being unknown, may attract strong projections from the unconscious. If the person projecting has an extreme need to have themselves reflected back, there can be a requirement for perfect conformity to these roles, which is bound to fail. As the stranger says to Melanie “I see you better when I close my eyes, you’re nicer in here”, and she agrees that she too carries her lovers around in her head.
Melanie, who carries the point of view of the film, is outwardly a fairly down to earth woman of the world playing along with a seductive, turned frightening, male oppressor. In doing this she has to conform to his projections. She dresses in the stranger’s clothes, his choice of identity for woman, following a ritual candlelit bath accompanied by music from a tragic opera, Madame Butterfly. The filmy black and white evening dress he supplies recalls the negative of a black and white film. She is to be either pure white angel or black devil, not a whole woman. The stranger too dresses in black and white. This is in the realm of primitive splitting mechanisms where a person is perceived as either all good or all bad to relieve the tensions caused through experiencing paradox in another.

Melanie tries to conform to the roles she is assigned through the stranger’s negative projection. In quick succession this idealised, caricature of the feminine becomes angel, tart, mocking persecutor and victim. The stranger may also be an aspect of Melanie’s inner world – a charming, seductive animus figure, full of poetry, music and wisdom about Melanie and her life. With his Italian shoes and “cultured” background he is a romantic, tempting opposite to her, far from her conscious inner and outer experience of life and the rough, tough blokes of the coast who hunt, shoot, fish and fart in bed.

Perfect Strangers plays around from the beginning with the concepts of inner and outer realities and the tensions between different ways of seeing – between interior (subjective, imagined) reality and exterior (concrete, factual data) reality. The opening black screen invites the viewer to imagine and project her own meaning onto sound effects of swishing, sighing and metallic thudding. Through these initiating sounds and images the viewer is invited to feel cut up, to be prepared for a change of state and to imagine meaning. The sudden image of an onion being chopped brings the first external image into view and the shock is almost amusing. During the film other strange images dislodge the viewer from taking this all too seriously. Melanie trudges along the shore with the stranger in a wheelbarrow, alive and dead. She hides in the dunny (long drop toilet) and later leaves Bill tied up in there, using the door for target practice with the help of the stranger’s “ghost”. At this stage, with the stranger dead and anchored inside her head, she chats to his corpse which she has deposited in the freezer/coffin – a problem undeniably on ice for a bit. These unusual, slightly gauche images are like punning dream language that lightens things up a bit and point a way to meaning.

Viewed from a more analytical angle, the onion has been used as a psychotherapeutic metaphor for wholeness whose separate layers may be peeled back to reveal aspects and experiences of a personality – an image of the parts and the whole together. Relating to people and to our selves as projections or part objects can have a dismembering effect and limits the capacity to evolve and to experience a greater sense of wholeness. The opening image of Melanie chopping an onion is rather an image of wholeness dismembered, of pain and anger. This image contrasts with her full, pregnant belly at the end of the film where she is dressed in lunar white for her “shot-gun” wedding. She has got her man in the end, or has he got her, along with the unconsciously destructive dynamic he represents.

Melanie rejected Bill at the beginning of the film. Her “See you around”, is followed by a sliver of song, “ I’m here to say my brother caught you”. And “he” has, both inside and out. The debonaire stranger, Bill’s opposite, a shadow brother, dances with Melanie behind her eyes. “He” remains an unresolved problem who may cause more mischief unless she can make use of his powers creatively. The future is inside her.

Songs and music appear regularly throughout the film suggesting meaning and creating atmosphere. But in an atmosphere of disorientation one wonders how best to relate to the message of these “inner voices”. For instance as Melanie accompanies the stranger to his boat in the dark a male voice sings “Anchor me in the middle of your deep blue seas”. She wakes up to find herself literally and figuratively in the middle of deep blue seas way out of her depth. Her Cupid with his winged shoes from Italy has spirited her away into an experience that is far from anchoring. He ensnares her and makes her his own through the spilling of his blood. He visits her after his death and, like a vampire, returns to his coffin in the freezer before dawn – a nightmare, death in life. Marion Woodman, a Jungian analyst, observes that the negative animus (masculine image) in women is cold and impersonal. His sole purpose is to lure his victim out of life, to keep a woman enthralled and ‘wailing for her demon lover’ (The Pregnant Virgin, p. 132[i]). The roles played by both the stranger and Melanie seem to fit this description.

The island shack is the antithesis of received ideas of romance and security. This is where the stalker acts out his nightmare with the woman victim, where she turns the tables on him, kills him, takes on many of his attributes (his clothes and rituals) and herself becomes a rescuer and scheming persecutor. Melanie has gone into the bush she says she fears where men go to hunt and kill. The bush could also be an image for the unknown territory of the unconscious, both of Melanie and the stranger. The darkness of the landscape, lit by the occasional smile of light reflects the intense and changing moods of the stranger and the desperateness of the situation. The island could also be seen as the site of a woman’s animus complex where she is confronted by aspects of her inner masculine. Patriarchal images of masculinity can be killers of personal growth - oppressive, critical and disempowering of women. In thrall to her own inner demons, created through early childhood neglect, Melanie is compelled to play female lead in the stranger’s internal film. Killing him however only buys into the complex and Melanie sinks into further unconsciousness when he dies. The boat sinking into the sea could be an image for this as well as an image of deep emotions – of grief, of falling in love or being in the grip of fear - and of other savage depths.

According to the fairy story the stranger tells Melanie, the wicked Queen, her mother, abandoned Princess Melanie at an early age “with nary a backward glance”. Her father played around with “courtesans” and she was generally neglected. Then a stranger arrived and rescued her. She doesn’t challenge the fairy story and later asks him how he knows so much about her. The story is a plausible scenario for a woman who seems to have such low self-esteem. “You need to feel good about yourself though” is a “self-help” mantra she repeats to herself later with little conviction.

Melanie, abandoned by both parents is likely to have negative internal images of both male and female and have trouble forming a secure sense of self. She is easy prey for the kind of inner and outer drama that the stranger hooks her into. She may continue to search for the unconditional love she lacked, trying to fill the emptiness inside through sex. Insecure early attachments to parents mean she has trouble committing to an adult relationship. As the stranger says “your secret is safe with me – you’re afraid of commitment”. The fears, longing and internal abuse he represents is part of her problem.

A woman may fantasise about being rescued but may just repeat the experience of being abandoned and abused by her unconscious choice of partners. Melanie’s former lover Adrian left her for another woman. She may also buy into the dismal stories these inner characters tell her about herself and her life. Melanie’s wisdom lies in knowing when a man is a sleaze or a tease, but the dark compulsion to repeat earlier abuse is seductive and attracts her to men who keep playing it out with her. Bill, the man she rejects earlier in the pub, is perhaps too safe for her, but she will get him to collude with murder through his desire to rescue and to have a warm back to snuggle up to.

Once she has got him, Melanie initiates Bill into the victim game, as she was by the stranger, who is now more fully active, if unconscious, inside her head. She violently chops another onion and plays the aria “One Fine Day” from Puccini’s opera while he soaks in a candle lit bath. The aria sings of the heroine’s longing to be reunited with her husband Pinkerton who has been absent for years, leaving her to raise a child. When they first met, Madame Butterfly was a geisha girl, serving men, as Melanie has done and will continue to do both inside her head and in the outer world. Madame Butterfly eventually stabs herself to death with the knife her father committed suicide with on learning that Pinkerton has married another woman. Her father committed suicide at the Emperor’s command – the reigning patriarchal principle. Madame Butterfly dies, unable to evolve into a full enough adult woman beyond her identification with the negative aspect of a patriarchal culture, a culture that both idealises and devalues the feminine.

Madame Butterfly, Melanie and Bill are caught up in a stunting cyclical pattern. During cycling there is usually potential for growth, opportunities to become aware and do things differently. Transformation, however, can take many moons. What is popularly called the way forward actually involves going around and around while being conscious of the process. Perfect Strangers illuminates a corner of the New Zealand psyche in a complex and creative work, full of references and nuances, which elicits further exploration and reflection about ideas of wholeness, consciousness and the roles internal images of masculinity and femininity play in relationships.

© Helen Frances 2004. All rights reserved.
Published in the July 2004 issue of Illusions - an academic New Zealand film magazine.

[i] Woodman, Marion, The Pregnant Virgin : A Process of Psychological Transformation (Studies in Jungian Psychology, Issue 21) Toronto, Canada : Inner City Books, c1985