Eddie’s switches from gray to golden and reminds us that humans indeed romanticise captivation be it under drugs, behind bars, or nature
Imagine a drug changing your life from a scraggly loser to an austere presidential candidate. Imagine a drug redeeming all your broken relationships (now that might set your dopamine racing). Imagine using 100% of your brain, a euphemism for living your life to the fullest.
With all the chances of prevailing as a hero through a pharmaceutical miracle, you could imagine, it’s possible to at least make peace with a movie character who goes from gray to golden after taking a stimulating drug that lets him have full access to the brain.
He’s Eddie Morra, a broke barely living off as a writer in a filthy apartment with the manuscript of a sci-fi book yet to find words. Now as the story crawls slowly up the ladder to your receptors losing out on self-esteem, you should take note of how Eddie casts a shadow on every other aspiring youngster in the contemporary economy to be limitless. In fact, Eddie strikes off as the man who doesn’t just want to jump off the building even though he’s living as one of the worst people on earth: a writer.
Eddie throws you off the cliff into the waters, makes burgeoning deals with the corporate cowboys, impersonates Bruce Lee’s fighting lessons against gangsters, avoids any threats by fast-forwarding the present with such mental clarity and shine that it cripples your neuro transmitters to start acting fast as well. This character not only prompts you to question your instincts as a vulnerable person but also wants you to explain Eddie’s journey of becoming the master of the world. Would you call it fiction?
The way Eddie rolls on with the daunting situations like the side effects on health and a potential threat of death, it’s almost predictable you’d root for him to win. Whether he wins or not is the story part. What lies underneath the plot is the psyche of an addict and a mix of fastrack action that we have watched ever since TV started glorifying Pablo Escobar in place of Mogambo. As a matter of fact, we have never seen an addict living the life of an addict for a lifetime unfazed by the existent risks that follow in every other story.
Eddie presents an anti-archetype demeanour with such precision that it sent the world scrubbing all of Google search box and drug stores to find those enticing tablets of brilliance. Your sceptical eyes will always try to find the faintest of rays of hope of translating Eddie’s fiction into the real world.
Will Eddie save the world? You want him to but the more interest you take, the farther he gets from reality. Did he earn it? You want to approve here but the more you run through the daily ballads that call out for an absolute prohibition, the more you want to deny. If Eddie seems real and human, what about the brainiest of them who clock brilliance with ephemeral contributions almost every day?
Eddie leaves us with a lingering thought that questions the fiction he possesses. We all want to be Eddie, right? And that’s where he draws the line. This package of intelligence and fate doesn’t come cheap to anyone but if it ever did would you care to stop and take the pill and be limitless?
Character Canvas has been one big revelation in my writing when it comes to getting close to the skin of any character/plot of the movie.
Its always a good feeling to study the characters rather than just watching them!
Hope you are safe. Thank you!
Enigmatical 