What do you feel when you watch this? I feel like NORA (Carstensen) has got it all. She’s beautiful, young, has a nice home, family, decorating the Christmas tree and her husband is getting a new promotion as a bank manager. And Nora likes to shop, spend money. But when a trip to Italy she paid for to save her husband’s life earlier comes back to threaten her quaint life, she gets defensive and shifts the blame onto her dead father and husband. And leaves her marriage. Because she resents TORVALD treating her like she’s a possession? No. Because as a woman she’s powerless.
Nora Helmer (1974, Rainer Werner Fassbinder) is like the perfect material for Fassbinder. Nora is constantly trying to assess the situation she’s found herself in and do her best to gain the life she wants. But the paradox is she feels like it’s all fake. Like playing house. The artifice of domestic melodrama. Where the feelings are the only thing that’s real. Is this the problem with women?
At times I can see how someone would take Nora’s side. The whole dramatic conflict is the result of her saving Torvald’s life. She has sacrificed to be a good mother, loyal wife. She’s getting ready to look her best for the ball with Torvald. And I wanted to see this as an argument against the oppressive nature of a woman’s place in the home, but I missed it. And lest I sound like a misogynist for lacking fempathy, what’s so bad about Torvald?
Nora is misguided, self-justified, and gets on my nerves. She says finally that neither her dead father nor her husband ever loved her. I don’t know man. I don’t believe anything she says. I think Nora took advantage of Torvald when he was a lawyer to get her dad out of some shady business dealings and then took advantage of her dad by forging his signature (over his dead body) to have him stand surety against her 4800k loan. Her dancing was exceedingly naturalistic is a way of saying women are conniving ambitious selfish fickle snakes. I mean not in real life of course just in the context of this fun little drama.
And we don’t know what KRISTINE said to KROGSTAD to get him to mail Torvald back the promissory note, but I feel like the real point is that in life things that often seem overwhelmingly bleak usually get resolved and the storm passes. Back to normal. But what about DR RANK? So he had a whoring syphilis dad whom because of he now is dying and has a crooked spine. Which could mean this film doesn’t exclusively hate women or anything. What else? This motif of parents morally poisoning the children? Except no, Rank has physically inherited his father’s disease, not morally. Is this to say that Torvald’s accusations against Krogstad aren’t entirely plausible? Does it matter?
Because despite all Torvald’s moral condemnation against Nora, what harm does he actually do her because of it? What’s important however is Nora’s indignant resentment of his moralizing. I think she’s the poison. And when Nora threatens suicide, not only does Torvald laugh it off as a joke, but throws in that her father used to say the same things. Are we supposed to hate Torvald? I love that there’s this dark suicide talk and he lightheartedly calls her bluff. I see Fassbinder’s film here as yet another of his examples of dismantling the institution of marriage to show how it can’t work. And how everyone who tries to use this couple for their own personal benefit are trampled upon and left for dead. Back to it’s all business. And everyone loses in the end. The couple don’t lose their finances, health, reputation in society, no none of that. Nora leaves because of some illegal money scam she got into behind Torvald’s back that he finds out about, even though she ends up off the hook for it. It’s like she leaves because she’s exposed as being the fake. And that’s the kind of tragic irony that ultimately I can find that I care about her through.
At times I can see how someone would take Nora’s side. The whole dramatic conflict is the result of her saving Torvald’s life. She has sacrificed to be a good mother, loyal wife. She’s getting ready to look her best for the ball with Torvald. And I wanted to see this as an argument against the oppressive nature of a woman’s place in the home, but I missed it. And lest I sound like a misogynist for lacking fempathy, what’s so bad about Torvald?
Nora is misguided, self-justified, and gets on my nerves. She says finally that neither her dead father nor her husband ever loved her. I don’t know man. I don’t believe anything she says. I think Nora took advantage of Torvald when he was a lawyer to get her dad out of some shady business dealings and then took advantage of her dad by forging his signature (over his dead body) to have him stand surety against her 4800k loan. Her dancing was exceedingly naturalistic is a way of saying women are conniving ambitious selfish fickle snakes. I mean not in real life of course just in the context of this fun little drama.
And we don’t know what KRISTINE said to KROGSTAD to get him to mail Torvald back the promissory note, but I feel like the real point is that in life things that often seem overwhelmingly bleak usually get resolved and the storm passes. Back to normal. But what about DR RANK? So he had a whoring syphilis dad whom because of he now is dying and has a crooked spine. Which could mean this film doesn’t exclusively hate women or anything. What else? This motif of parents morally poisoning the children? Except no, Rank has physically inherited his father’s disease, not morally. Is this to say that Torvald’s accusations against Krogstad aren’t entirely plausible? Does it matter?
Because despite all Torvald’s moral condemnation against Nora, what harm does he actually do her because of it? What’s important however is Nora’s indignant resentment of his moralizing. I think she’s the poison. And when Nora threatens suicide, not only does Torvald laugh it off as a joke, but throws in that her father used to say the same things. Are we supposed to hate Torvald? I love that there’s this dark suicide talk and he lightheartedly calls her bluff. I see Fassbinder’s film here as yet another of his examples of dismantling the institution of marriage to show how it can’t work. And how everyone who tries to use this couple for their own personal benefit are trampled upon and left for dead. Back to it’s all business. And everyone loses in the end. The couple don’t lose their finances, health, reputation in society, no none of that. Nora leaves because of some illegal money scam she got into behind Torvald’s back that he finds out about, even though she ends up off the hook for it. It’s like she leaves because she’s exposed as being the fake. And that’s the kind of tragic irony that ultimately I can find that I care about her through.
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