Morning Fall
Edward McGinty
This short film was heart wrenchingly sad. My heart has shattered into a billion tiny pieces and aches to be put back together with the understanding of this short. I watched it various times and each time, the piercing gaze of the woman makes me shudder.
Despite the fact that I would love to claim “I wasn’t expecting this!” or “how was the viewer supposed to know?”, there are numerous factors that give us the hint that someone else may have been in the picture. The hairbrush, bright blue and feminine, immediately grabbed my attention. He glanced down at the hairbrush, paused, and reflected. I believed that it might have been the brush of a girl he had met out on the town partying or something of that sort. I also noticed the camera’s focus and blatant visual of the man’s ring. Was he married? Finally, the factor that led me most to believe that he was forgetting a fundamental person, was the shot of him caressing the dear. Deep down, he felt guilt (at that moment, he thought it was for killing such a tender creature), so he apologetically caressed the creature that he killed. This may not be a direct hint into the fact that his wife/lover was dead, but does give foreshadowing of the man’s soon to be shame and devastation. He did in fact kill another a gentle, tender, creature, he just was not aware of that yet.
One of the qualities of the man that I found annoying was his urge to smoke a cigarette. That was the first thing he needed to do when he woke up, barely showing any signs of true anxiety or rationality. He searches for his motorcycle and digs through the compartment searching for matches. He passes up a first aid kit (stupid move) so he can find his matches, and, due to his dismay, he is all out of matches. He then walks into the street and sees a lighter, realizing in moments that he then forgot his cigarettes. The lighter is tossed into the grass, and, ironically, as we learn in the end, lands in the same location as his wife. Cigarettes may have made him think more clearly, which proves that his jonesin’ could have made him have his ultimate realization that his wife is gone, but his urge for a cigarette was bothersome to me. I found it to be very symbolic that he always had one part of the cigarette-lighter duo, but never the other. Ultimately, we learn that he was always missing a fundamental part of his own personal duo.
The calm of the wilderness is an ironic background for this short. There was so much chaos that had occurred the previous evening in this calm atmosphere. I found the way that the end was filmed to be quite disturbing as well. There were various screenshots of the aftermath of the crash: the dead deer, the broken motorcycle, the speedometer (too fast for the mountainous area, by the way) and then the dead wife.
I really enjoyed this short despite the harsh sadness that accompanies it.
