Charlie’s Complex
A horror, slasher film, set in the 1974, in a small town in Mississippi. Charlie, young
teenage boy, who lives with the estranged parents of his father. Until a year ago, they were
not aware they had a grandchild. He moves out to live with his grandparents after he
witnesses the death of his mother. His father loses his job and his mother becomes the one
to support the family. Living with the pressures of a patriarchal society, his father can’t
handle the humiliation and degradation, one drunken night, in a fit of rage he beats his wife
to death then with a kitchen knife, kills himself. The film starts a year after his parents’
death. Charlie is a shy, introverted type of boy. He behaves in a way that’s different than all
the other kids, he doesn’t speak to anyone, and has no friends. All of the students at his
school make fun of him and his feminine looks. There is one girl, Katelyn, who is always
sweet to Charlie. She develops a small crush on him. She, and a couple of his teachers
are the only people amongst his peers that don’t put him down. The small town gossips
about Charlie and him feel unwelcomed simple because he doesn’t look or act like any of
the other boys. Even his own grandparents neglect him and pay no attention to his needs
and wants. They embarrassed of the ridicule they receive from the people of the town, and
treat him as if he’s a stranger. They have trouble understanding his strange behaviour. As
the days progress, the teenagers and other residents of the town are dying in a string of
mysterious ‘accidents.’ The local police are having trouble finding any clues to a suspect.
Late one night, Charlie arrives at the school dance with Katelyn. They get judging stares
and disdaining whispers from all the kids at the dance. Later when Katelyn and Charlie are
grabbing some punch from the punch bowl, one of the school jocks, Curtis, who was once
Katelyn’s boyfriend, comes up to Katelyn asks what she’s doing with a ‘freak’ like Charlie.
The jock grabs her by the wrists and tries to pull her away. Charlie tries to defend Katelyn
by pushing Curtis away from Katelyn. Curtis grabs the punch bowl throws it over Charlie’s
head and pushes him to the ground. Curtis and all his jock friends laugh at Charlie and
Curtis picks up Katelyn and takes her away. After she finally gets away from him, Katelyn
goes looking for Charlie. She can’t find him anywhere. She looks in the school’s basement
hoping he’d be hiding there and to her horror she stumbles upon the dead bodies of a
couple of the jocks that laughed at Charlie earlier. A frightened Katelyn begins to run away
to find help. She runs into Curtis who is limping with a knife in his leg. He’s yelling out in
terror, his words are jumbled and confusing to understand. All Katelyn can make out what
Curtis is saying, is things like ‘he’s a she,’ ‘he’s a sick psycho.’ Katelyn asks what’s going
on and what happened to his leg. He pushes her out of the way trying to escape and
suddenly a partially nude Charlie is standing over Curtis who has fallen to the ground at this
point. Curtis pleads for his and life and Charlie thrusts the blade from a paper trimmer into
Curtis’ back. Katelyn and we (the audience) discover that Charlie is in fact a girl and all the
other killings were done by him. Through flashbacks of Charlie’s memory we find out that
he is biologically a girl, born with the name Charlotte. After witnessing the murder of her
mother she is determined to hide her sex. She quickly becomes fearful of anything
associated with being a woman. To avoid any discrimination or harassment against her
sex, she dresses as a boy. Her grandparents have not only accepted her transformation,
they enforce it. They hadn’t expected to raise child they never knew before. And they
definitely were not happy with the obligation. But if they had to raise a grandchild it most
certainly wasn’t going to a granddaughter, so they changed her name to Charlie and forced
her to wear boy clothes. They make her act and treat her like a boy. They wanted to
replace their son, who had just died with their new grandson. Which, according to his
grandparents, it was Charlotte’s mother’s fault he was dead, and Charlotte reminded them
so much of her mother, she must become just like her or his father.
A story like this shows the reflection of the society of the time. It’s necessary to
make this story into a film. In the 1970s the sexual identity of anyone is a big issue, much
less for a teenager. Part of the social issues that society has to deal with is patriarchy,
gender inequality, social and sexual identity. There’s the theory of women being the ‘other’
to man. In Simone De Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex,’ she discusses this idea. Woman is
basically defined as not man. We know what it is to be a man, therefore, what it is to be a
woman is the opposite of that. As explained in the ‘Cultural Studies’ book by Chris
Barker, Patriarchy is defined as “the structural subordination women.” The idea that males
are superior over females. This idea is embedded into the minds of women in cultures from
around the world. A practice that has been going on since the beginning of civilization.
Women grow up believing they are not equal to man. That it is he who makes the decisions
on how to live, and in what manner. That man has all the power and women have nothing
but the male companion to protect and help them survive. In the article ‘The Patriarchal
Gaze,’ by Laura Mulvey she talks about the look of cinema coming from a male point of
view or gaze. That women live their lives as spectacles and the man is the spectator. The
camera always assumes a males perspective. Women are objecfied in perspective, while
men are usually the subject.
In ‘Using Literature to Help Troubled Teenagers Cope with Identity Issues,’ by Jeffery S.
Kaplan, The
idea of “identity achievement” is discussed. Adolescent children are naturally going to go
through a process of exploration of one’s self. To find their identity status in their society, or
to find out who they are, what they like, their beliefs. As young adolescents this exploration
is more fluid, their feelings and ideas could change. However, as they get older and grow
out of the adolescent stage, they become more committed to what they’ve discovered.
When an individual is successful in exploration and commitment, then they have
accomplished the “identity achievement.” All of the topics just discussed are issues the
society deals with in this time period of the 1970s. Having a story like this told will bring
attention to social injustice. To educate individuals on a male dominant world and to maybe
instill a little fear in the antifeminist,
the person that sees women as an inferior race.
The story relates to all these issues. For example, Charlie/Charlotte lives not only in a home
that is very patriarchal but her all of her surroundings, the town, the people she associates
with, her strange family, all have views and beliefs that women are superior to men. Her
grandparents believe that it’s better to be a man in the world they live in. That they rather
have a young boy to raise over a young girl. In their eyes boys are definitely better than girls
and are definitely not equal. The entire town and everyone in it, with the exception of a few
have this idea embedded in their minds. For example, the gym teacher at
Charlie/Charlotte’s high school has the boys and girls separated, each of them doing
different activities. Activities that are ‘appropriate’ for each sex. The girls P.E. uniform is
much tighter and shorter than the boys uniform. Sexual inequality is prevalent in the story. In
fact, Charlie/Charlotte reason for killing stems from witnessing his mother’s murder. Who
was murdered simply because she was equal, if not superior, to her husband and that is
not the way of life. This causes Charlie/Charlotte to change the appearance of her sex and
anytime she witnesses female discrimination or male dominant abuse towards women she
kills. Men who sexually objectify women or even women who objectify themselves become
Charlie/Charlotte’s victims. In the story , it starts off with the assumption that this is from a
male’s point of view, yet in the end we come to realize that point of view is that of a female.
The story has new perspective in cinema. A perspective that is not the patriarchal gaze.
Women objectivity is an issue, yet it is shown negatively, which is something that is rarely
done. The fact that Charlie/Charlotte has changed his/her sexual identity is a reflection on
the teenagers in society. Always exploring news to define themselves; trying to define
what’s right and what’s wrong. Charlie/Charlotte is your typical teenager trying to define
explore all of these issues. The difference between her/him and the common teen is that
Charlie/ Charlotte takes matters into her own hands. She decides what’s right , what’s
wrong. Unfortunately for some individuals she also decides who lives and who dies.
