Looping Movie Lucky Discussed and Unraveled. Back in July I brought you a list of looping movies for your review. Looping movies are a lot different than time travel movies in that they send the protagonist back to a certain moment in history, in order to have them repeat the day, or period, over again. I actually wouldn’t include Lucky in this looping movie list, but that is solely because our protagonist in Lucky doesn’t repeat the same period over and over again. Instead, the same things happen to her, again and again. Maybe a subtle difference for some, but enough to me to excise it from the list. Regardless, it still is in this same sort of sub-genre of film.
First though, a shout out to Henry for calling this one to my attention. And the way he did it was PRIME. Check this out:
I mean, he literally challenged ThisisBarry, Film School Rejects, and myself to a race! hahaha. So great. A race it is. And it got me reconnected to Barry – so that is never a bad thing. Love you Barry!
What Is the Secret to Lucky?
Let’s jump straight to the spoilers, shall we? I think it will help as we walk through this movie if you have the deeper, larger picture in mind as we go. So what is the secret meaning of the movie Lucky? It repeats itself for a simple reason. The movie Lucky tells about the daily lives of women… day after day, after day. Not specifically the terrors of rape per se… though that is horrific. And not specifically about the terrors of murder, or abuse, or other terrible infliction’s that women deal with day after day. Lucky deals with a more nefarious terror that insidiously manifests itself in a more subtle, if daily, reckoning. And that is sexism. You know, day in and day out MISOGYNY? The part of life where men (and some women) tear women down bit by bit by not supporting them, not believing in them, undercutting their mental states and their general holds on sanity? That. That is what this movie is all about. The masked, MALE, serial killer, is a stand in for all men. And he represents a daily, recurring, terror that works to tear women down with all that it can. Got it? So now, as we talk a little bit about the different characters, and the different events that occur, maybe it’ll make a little bit more sense then when you first watched it.
The Marriage Between May and Ted
May (played by Brea Grant, the writer and star of this movie) is married to Ted (played by Dhruv Uday Singh). Ted is not even a little bit supportive of May. May is a writer, and she has had to scratch, and claw, and fight for every little advance in her career she has been able to attain. But Ted? Ted doesn’t think much of her “career” as a book author. He thinks that their marriage is unhealthy, he sees her generally as way too sensitive. Ted and May, we actually learn, have a rocky history. That, at one point when May thought that their marriage was over, she had an affair. But she has tried really hard to make up for that indiscretion… to make amends for her mistake. Ultimately though, she has had a really difficult time of making amends, or reconciling with Ted. What is going on here between Ted and May, and their larger marriage disunity? Is it May’s fault???
What Is The Looping About in Lucky?
Quickly, the movie Lucky establishes the repeating pattern that becomes the mainstay for almost the entire movie. Every day, usually at night, “The Man” arrives at May’s house, and attempts to kill her. Generally May, fairly simply, dispatches The Man, generally by killing him, or knocking him unconscious. And immediately afterwards, everyone… mostly the males, all minimize the horror of the trauma that she went through. Ted totally dismisses what May went through and even tells her to pull it together. WORSE!??! He walks out on her because she is being way too emotional… that he thinks she should quit being so emotional. And so, with Ted gone, May heads into a downward spiral of chase scenes, over, and over, and over again.
But the repetitiveness of it is critical to the explaining and the detailing out of the trauma that is Misogyny. And, while I’m the last person that should be explaining this to you… I HEAR that this is something that women are inflicted with day after day. Little slights and marginalization’s. The men in this movie are constantly telling May she is being hysterical. Constantly belittling her. Repetitively telling her that she is utterly crazy. Worse, the police that come, call after call, they are regularly question May… May’s sanity, May’s marriage, May’s relationships, May’s devotedness… etc., etc. The social workers that come imply, time and again, that it might just be something that May is doing to deserve these attacks. And worse, the police leave her, unprotected, and at risk, over and over again. “you should know… you’ve been here after every encounter!”
Elsewhere in May’s story, the men in her life are regularly minimizing her hard work and effort that May is regularly putting out. Worse, May’s literary agent is totally low key about the stress that May is going through about her next book deal. I mean, it seems pretty sane that May would want to know what the next steps would be. He tosses out her concerns as not legitimate, and doesn’t really care about the efforts that May has been going through to make herself a success. And finally, when the book publisher tells her that they want to pick up her next book, May makes it abundantly clear that her success came from her own hard work and dedication. That Luck, had literally nothing to do with it. The much larger point here being, that May is aware that her publisher is silently attempting to take credit for all of her extraordinarily hard work.
Gender Issues and Lucky
Look… I’m a white American, male. I’m the last one that should really be talking about this particular movie. But I do think this topic is important. Reminds me of the book, “Men Explain Things to Me,” written by Solnit… a woman. In her book, she tells of numerous times that men have explained things to her. The most horrifying of examples was the time when she was at a party and another party goer was talking to her. He found out that she had written a few books, specifically a book on Eadweard Muybridge (a photograph pioneer, doesn’t matter)… whereupon the fellow party goer asked if she was aware of this really seminal book on the man… never once imagining that the book might have been written by Solnit herself. I probably would have punched the guy, but I’m… again, a male. Throughout Solnit’s book on the topic of mansplaining, she talks about how even legal testimony is dismissed or discounted by women in many countries around the world. And it’s because of societal perspectives on women that many women remain silent. Similarly, street harassment silences women as well. It’s communicated clearly to most women that it is a man’s world, and the women of the planet are just visiting. Which, seems fairly unjust. But seeing as though there are still locations in the world today where women are required by a guardian (a husband) to obtain the right to vote… cough, we definitely haven’t arrived on this front by any means.
“This keeps women from speaking up and from being heard when they dare; that crushes young women into silence by indicating, the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world. It trains us in self-doubt and self-limitation just as it exercises men’s unsupported overconfidence.”
Solnit, “Men Explain Things to Me”
I mean, if there is any better indicator of this larger gender disparity problem than annual earnings for women as a percentage of white full-time year round workers… then I don’t know what is. I mean, I am a man after all… you should all believe me when I say women are not listened to! (That was called irony. I was ironically telling readers to listen to me. I don’t want to hear about this in the comments. Not even a little bit.)
The Ending of Lucky 2021 Explained
As Lucky winds down, things start to spiral rapidly out of control. Why? Because May begins to see that she isn’t the only one being regularly attacked. Women all around her are regularly being attacked. May and her assistant begin arguing about attempting to save these other women. How can we save these other women when there is no chance of our own survival?? Well, out of the blue, Ted comes back, and he informs May that he was being rational, and was trying to find solutions to May’s problems, but May really hurt his feelings… so he left. And he promised to come back if she calmed down. And so now, he’s back. (hahahaha. Come on, this is fantastic.) Anyway, while they are hugging, The Man arrives, and stabs Ted in the back. After The Man and May struggle and fight together in the house, May stabs The Man in the neck. But this time, she removes the mask, and reveals a shifting facade of faces. Ted, then others, then Ted again, and then others.
What does the changing face mean in relationship to everything else we now know about the movie? Well, I’m sure you guessed it by now, but The Man is a representative of EVERY MAN. All men. The Man is a stand in for every person that would subjugate women under them. It is every man that mansplains, or takes higher pay for the same exact work. It’s a stand in for each male that talks down to a woman or doesn’t take May at her word. But what will happen next, do you suppose? Well, what will happen next is what has happened continuously before. May will wake up tomorrow, only to encounter another fight and struggle with The Man. She will need to kill him on her own, pick herself up, and determine whether she will call for help, and not be believed… or she will struggle silently on her own. Because that is how it will be.
Edited by: CY
