The Lovely Bones

I went to see the movie “The Lovely Bones” today. For those of you who have no idea of the plot, and who don’t want to know even the basics, I suggest you stop reading right about now.

The story is constructed around the main character, a fourteen-year-old girl who is raped and murdered. Because it wasn’t graphic, it was easier for me to watch than it might otherwise have been.

One of the things that struck me most was the way she hesitated before going with him, at some level aware that something was wrong and yet pushing that aside. I know all too well what that’s like, that feeling, and the consequences of naively believing that nothing could be wrong. How you later feel like you were so stupid, even though it’s really not your fault.

The most poignant moment, however, was the look on her face when she realized what was going on, a sick sort of terror mixed in with the feeling of pretty well knowing there’s nothing you can do.

I, of course, have never been murdered, so I can’t claim to know what that’s like. I have to admit, there were many times after what has happened that I wished I had been murdered, so as not to have had to live with it. However, after watching what the girl’s family went through, I have to say I’m glad I was not killed. As the girl says of her killer, he stole her life from her. What was taken from me was not as precious as my life, after all.

But that doesn’t make it any easier to forget.

I sometimes worry that I’m weak or a bad Christian because I can’t put these things aside, learn to forget, to leave it completely behind me. While I don’t actually feel angry (which my psychiatrist thinks is a problem btw, a ‘lack of appropriate rage’), the things that have happened still suffuse my life. So when the killer tells the girl she’s pretty, it makes me feel a little ill. And I feel deep inside of me, in that part still holding onto it, the painful recollection of things I’ve tried to lock up, hide away, and bury. Yet, like the killer, I return to these mementos in a sick fascination, an obsession that seems to make them live forever, captivated in a way that makes things repeat rather than turning me away from them.

I will never understand why people like the killer do the things that they do. I’ll never know whether or not they hurt someone on purpose or simply don’t understand that they’re hurting someone. But I do understand what it means to be caught up in the same moment, stuck within the space of a memory, and both wanting and not wanting to move beyond it.