For 2 hours, the 1977 film Looking for Mr. Goodbar depicts how the people in Theresa’s life resist her unconventional lifestyle in which she has casual sexual relationships with men. Then in the last 15 minutes a new and critical character is introduced whose diegetic narrative is parallel to Theresa’s. This character ends up brutally raping while stabbing Theresa.
Why is he introduced in the last 15 minutes?
THERESA
She defends and asserts herself against the grain.
Her father is critical of her lifestyle, including her unwillingness to marry and have children, and tells her he does not accept her the way she is.
The men she dates act threatened when she creates boundaries and when she communicates that she wants the relationship to be casual.
Theresa’s father denies that Theresa’s scoliosis is congenital. He refuses to believe it could be “in his blood” because his mother had “four perfect boys”, but finally he acknowledges that one of his siblings, a sister, also had scoliosis and committed suicide. He then asks Theresa “How do you get free of a terrible truth?” In this scene she tries to make her father confront the truth, suggesting that it will take away the power of the stigma.
As the film progresses the pace quickens, the events are less predictable and the shots less static. Theresa starts to lose control and her personal life begins to seriously interfere with her work.
THE MURDERER
He is introduced in a fight on a crowded street on New Year's Eve, dressed in
drag. He pushes his way through the crowd to a man, ripping off the clothes
and putting on his regular, “normal” clothing. He yells at the man
to never ask him to wear drag again and hysterically screams in his face, “We
are a couple of freaks! We’re freaks!” As he leaves, he yells at
the sobbing man, “I’m a pitcher not a catcher and don’t you
ever forget that!”
He goes to a bar where a male stranger introduces himself. He responds angrily,
“You think I‘m a queer don’t you?” Then he smashes the
stranger’s hand and calls him a freak.
THEY MEET
They meet for the first time at the bar and go to her place. Everything is fine
until he can’t get an erection. He can’t perform.
She tells him it is probably her fault and it happens to everyone. She asks
him to leave and he says he won’t because she wants to get laid. She responds,
“What are you trying to prove?”, bringing
him back to his earlier state of anxiety and igniting his anger.
This moment defines for him the meaning of his night. He tries so hard to assimilate
that the pressure becomes too much and Theresa becomes a symbol of his conflict.
In a gratuitously long scene, he simultaneously rapes and stabs her while repeating,
“This is what you wanted.” The subtext is: this is what
the world wanted. The sub-subtext is: repression leads to violence.
He sees himself reflected in her but refuses to acknowledge it.
He attacks the source of his fear and anxiety.
He gets power by enacting violence on her.
Two things resolve the issues that the film brings up: Theresa’s life violently ends and that the cause of such brutality is by a repressed homosexual male. These two people, although and because they share a similar experience of being marginalized, erupt when they intersect.
He murders her when he sees the part of him that he tries to repress, reflected in her.
He embodies an internal conflict that causes him to be in an agitated, skittish, combative and defensive state because he is confronted with his own abjectness. Repulsion towards the abject is caused by an inability to define something even while it is so intimate and familiar. He is threatened by the external factors that manifest inside him.
Theresa and the murderer show two possible directions a minority
subject can take to negotiate their identity.
She, herself, represents two paths intersecting - her own values with social
values. This tension motivates the plot, pushing towards the peak of the film’s
meaning when the two characters' lives cross. At this intersection the symbolic
meaning is the most obvious and serious as it is resolved through death and
a statement is made about the type of situation they exist in: that the
ideology is strong enough to silence people.
The POV changes from the protagonist’s to the murderer’s at the moment that her reality shifts which is the moment she truly loses control. This shift is just one way that the film folds in on itself, reaffirming the intricate and interconnected nature of identity formations.