sep26wk1

Week 1 Discussion Example

The Invisible Man

For my week 1 discussion post, I selected the movie Invisible

Man. I watched it on a whim with some friends a couple

weeks ago, and I was very impressed with it. The movie was

directed by Leigh Whannell and stars Elisabeth Moss, who is

best known as June from The Handmaid’s Tale. I'm going to

say this is a spoiler alert first. The film focuses on Moss's

character who had an abusive boyfriend, a mad scientist and

the inventor of an invisible suit that uses advanced optic

technology. She runs away from her abusive boyfriend in the

first scene. Later, her ex-boyfriend is reported to have died,

and she is left a hefty sum money from him and his trust

upon his death. She then begins to feel the presence of even

though he was supposedly dead. She tells her friend, James

Lanier, a police officer, what she is experiencing. She also

confides in her sister, yet everyone chalks up her experience

to grief and her post traumatic stress from living with an

abusive partner. Eventually, she takes matters into her own

hands and turns the tables on her ex, killing him at the very

end of the movie. Viewers are left questioning, however, whether she was being tortured by her ex-

boyfriend or someone else—I’ll leave that up to you to determine for yourself!

The film employs several rhetorical strategies to organize the film. One is compare and contrast. The

film explicitly compares and contrasts the ex-boyfriend and the other possible perpetrator mentioned in

the above paragraph. Moss’s character discusses these experiences through her dialog of the story. She

draws connections between the characters as she tries to argue that her ex-boyfriend is invisibly stalking

her. Secondly, the movie uses narration. Any film really uses narration, but it uses narration to raise a

larger question pertinent to all viewers of the film: How do we know what is real? The Invisible Man

explores this by engaging a real life invisible man, thanks to a scientific suit that manipulates optics, but

the question still applies in that all people experience things that others did not or even cannot

believe—so, how does the person who experienced the phenomenon know it was even real?

My evaluation of the film is positive. It was suspenseful and unpredictable. Too often, horror movies are

overly predictable, but The Invisible Man flips the script. Secondly, horror movies often rely on blood

and gore to create the sense of horror, but this movie focuses on the more classic psychological aspect

of horror and fear of the unknown. Instead, this film relies on solid acting, suspenseful moments of

psychological terror, and a philosophical question: How do we know what is real? These three elements

together make this a compelling film.

References

Whannell, L. (Director). (1920). The Invisible Man [Film]. Blumhouse Productions