CAROLYN.

    She’s the mother of the family who is very uptight and feels under pressure to make sure her very imperfect life appear perfect. We first see her outside doing her garden, being admired by the neighbours. However the feeling of admiration is not reflected by her husband who only comments on the fact that her shoes and gardening shears match, which is no coincidence. She starts off though as the most normal member of the family because everyone else seems out of the ordinary with her husband and daughter being pushed around to appear completely normal, like a perfect household.

    As the film moves along her relationship with Lester only gets worse with him catching her with Buddy and so on. Even though all of this happens we still see Lester not taking it out on Carolyn like you might expect, she doesn’t seem to know how to have fun or relax. Her life is what appears perfect to others but actually she’s all about image which doesn’t help her popularity with Lester and Janie. As she starts to loosen up she never lets go of her ways but throughout we do see her obvious vulnerability.

    Her being vulnerability is shown in many scenes like when she is desperately trying to sell the house to the two women but it’s just not happening for her, they find many imperfections in the property and this really gets to Carolyn. When they leave she has a personal meltdown where she cries and slaps herself to try and tell herself that she hasn’t done anything wrong. The thing is though that she is just too uptight and we see that just because she hasn’t made a sale she is so upset. She then starts to have her affair with buddy and we can see her best side shockingly. She obviously feels bad for Lester but can’t stand to show him her feelings. She is a prime suspect for his murder but in the final scenes shows that she does love him by losing the gun, not yet realising he’s already dead.

Breakdown scene.

This shows how she is in the dark in her life. She closes the blinds after failing to make her sale and cries. The darkness of the room, which is lit solely by light squeezing in through the blinds, connotes that she is in the dark about something that her family know but she doesn’t. The camera focuses in on her which denotes that she is alone and connotes that she is drifting away from her family at this time. The colours in the scene are very plain so that we focus on her face which has brightly coloured makeup on it. The only props in the scene are the blinds which block out the light likewise she is blocking her family out of her life. She and Lester are growing apart but she is the one losing out as he is just starting to enjoy life.