{"id":359,"date":"2009-12-27T14:17:08","date_gmt":"2009-12-27T19:17:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/tatar\/?p=359"},"modified":"2009-12-27T14:19:20","modified_gmt":"2009-12-27T19:19:20","slug":"cleaning-up-the-lovely-bones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/2009\/12\/27\/cleaning-up-the-lovely-bones\/","title":{"rendered":"Cleaning Up The Lovely Bones"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"zz0d3263e7-440x374\"<\/p>\n

Before he made the film M<\/em>, Fritz Lang thought long and hard about the worst crime imaginable. He came up with the murder of a child, an answer so obvious that you wonder what took him so long. The Lovely Bones<\/em>, directed by Peter Jackson and based on Alice Sebold’s novel, tips its hat on two occasions to Lang’s film, first with shots of the crime victim’s never-to-be-used place setting at the family dinner table, next when a rolling ball stands in for the murder of another child. As in M<\/em>, the murders of children happen off screen. What we see in M<\/em> is a balloon figure trapped in telephone wires, a rolling ball, a place setting, and a mother’s desperate cries for her child. In The Lovely Bones<\/em>, we see Susie racing away from her killer, and for a moment we believe that she has escaped.<\/p>\n

Representing the murder of a child seems to be one of our last cultural taboos. James Whale’s Frankenstein<\/em> of 1931 is one of the very few film that actually shows a child being murdered, with the monster drowning the child named Maria. That scene was cut from the film and not restored until 1986.<\/p>\n

The image above shows George Harvey (played by Stanley Tucci) surrounded by the dollhouses he builds. Tucci gives a magnificent performance in a film that creates gumdrop-colored versions of heaven and offers rainbow promises of redemption in a world so steeped in pathologies that even a serial murderer of children fails to be brought to justice in a meaningful way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before he made the film M, Fritz Lang thought long and hard about the worst crime imaginable. He came up with the murder of a child, an answer so obvious that you wonder what took him so long. The Lovely Bones, directed by Peter Jackson and based on Alice Sebold’s novel, tips its hat on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2125,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6252],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-359","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storytelling"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2125"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=359"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":362,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/359\/revisions\/362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=359"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=359"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/tatar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=359"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}