The Passenger 2023 - Tumblr Posts
Movie Recommendations for Zero Day (2003) fans!
*Movie descriptions are from Letterboxd.*
1. The Passenger (2023)
RIDE OR DIE. Randolph Bradley is perfectly content fading into the background, but when his coworker Benson snaps and goes on a violent killing spree, he's forced to face his fears and confront his troubled past in order to find a way to survive.
2. As You Are (2016)
Set in the early 1990s, "As You Are" is the telling and retelling of a relationship between three teenager as it traces the course of their friendship thorugh a construction of disparate memories prompted by a police investigation.
3. Klass (2007)
THERE'S NOWHERE TO HIDE. An average guy of an Estonian high-school decide to defend his bullied classmate. This starts a war between him and the informal leader of the class.
4. Thoroughbreds (2017)
GOOD BREEDING GONE BAD. Lily and Amanda, two high school students living in suburban Connecticut, rekindle their unlikely friendship after years of drifting apart. Together, they devise a plan to kill Lily's abusive stepfather by hiring a lowlife drug dealer.
5. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018)
In 1984, a young programmer begins to question reality as he adapts a dark fantasy novel into a video game. A mind-bending tale with multiple endings.
6. Like Minds (2006)
FEAR AND EVIL MAKE DEADLY COMPANIONS. A forensic psychologist must determine if a minor should be charged with murder.
7. Chatroom (2010)
CONTROL. ALTER. DELETE. When strangers Jim, Eva, Emily, and Mo meet William online in his new "Chelsea Teens!" chatroom, they're completely seduced by his fast-talking, charismatic character. But beneath the surface lies a much darker ruth. William is a dangerous loner, channeling all his energies into cyberspace. He's become an analyser, a calculating manipulator who finds it almost impossible to interact normally with others in the real world, instead turning his hand to manipulating people online.
8. Elephant (2003)
AN ORDINARY HIGH SCHOOL DAY. EXCEPT THAT IT'S NOT. Several ordinary high school students go through their daily routine as two others prepare for something more malevolent.
i love the idea of benson being somewhere between 30-40 years old.
he grunts when he gets out of his car and when he lays down in bed at night. he bought his shotgun when he was in his mid twenties and only uses it to hunt, but he can’t ever kill anything. he went to college at 18, dropped out in his junior year, and moved back in with his mom.
he’s worked odd jobs since then. his favorites have been repairing cars and a random construction job an old friend from school needed help on.
with age, he’s become a quieter person. he hates how randy gets bullied at work; it brings him back to his childhood. there’s something deep inside him that burns with guilt after he gets off work after a long day of watching the torment but never stepping in.
his hips have gotten worse, and his knees get weak after a while. he consistently asks hardy for jobs in the back like inventory or stocking the freezer because it means he can sit down and take breaks. when he takes his actual break during a shift, a shitty 30 minutes of sitting with customers while eating cold fries before going outside to smoke, it’s never enough. he’s always tired.
he’s had his eyes on randy for a while. he doesn’t get his hopes up that the boy might like him or even feel anything other than apathy for him. still, randy is something he can look forward to when he gets up in the morning. he’s far from his teenage years and his twenties, but something about randy brings him joy like a crush in elementary school.
since i’m starting to post hcs about the passenger, here’s a little intro to the characters!
the main character is randy bradley!! he’s a very quiet, neurotic, and scared man. he’s around 19-22 years old. he’s bullied by people at work and has an overprotective mother who doesn’t leave him alone. he has trauma from his past, especially from an incident in school, that shapes him into who he is. (a gif of him is underneath this)
the second main character is benson! he’s randy’s coworker at the restaurant ‘burgers burgers burgers.’ he’s somewhere between his mid-20s and late-30s (some people say he’s older, some say he’s younger.) he lives with his mom who he has a strained relationship with. he is quite an angry man due to his past and tries to gain some control back in life by taking out his feelings on others. he truly cares for randy but shows it in a very fucked up way. (a gif of him is underneath this)
this is the two of them together!!
starts gnawing at the bars of my enclosure
“we want elephant posts!” “we want more zero day posts!” “we want the passenger posts!” …and then they all flop…
operationandrephobic
randy’s love language has always been physical touch. when he was little, he used to get hugs and cuddles from his parents. after his dad left, his mom became overbearing and every hug he gets from her feels like she’s trying to suffocate him.
he avoids everyone’s touch. when someone passes by him and hits his shoulder, he feels like dying. when hardy slaps him on the back, trying to be supportive, randy feels like he’s gotten the wind knocked out of him. even when he’s working front of house and someone sneaks behind him, their slight touch makes him jump.
it changes when he runs away with benson, though. benson’s touchier than he’d like to admit. his hands are always cupping randy’s face, rustling his hair, and wrapping around his waist.
after a while, randy becomes comfortable with the contact. he doesn’t get goosebumps or back away from benson when his hands come near. when they’re laying in bed in some random worn down motel, randy wraps his arms around benson’s neck and lays his head on his breast, listening to benson’s heartbeat and feeling the rise of his chest. on days when they drive for hours, randy intertwines their fingers and traces patterns on benson’s skin.
it’s subtle, but randy’s in love with it. the touch makes him feel grounded, as if they aren’t escaping from the police.
randy constantly asks questions to the point that benson has to genuinely tell him to be quiet from time to time.
he used to do it when they worked with one another. he’d ask if he was doing things right, if he could have help with a task, if he could swap places with someone. now that him and benson are on the run together, it’s only gotten worse.
his memory is horrible, especially when he’s anxious, so he says the same things over and over, meaning that benson has to answer him over and over.
when they stop at motels, randy asks if they’ll call the police, if they have bed bugs, and if they’re safe. when they park at gas stations to sleep, he barely rests because he’s constantly wondering if they’ll get towed or get asked to leave. when they’re on the road and randy starts worrying about dumb things, benson just turns up the radio.
listen… he loves randy, he truly does, but he cannot deal with nonstop concern. one time he got mad and compared randy to randy’s mom with her constant honing and panicking. safe to say, they didn’t speak for the rest of the day until benson apologized.
hostage
The Passenger (2023) : COLOR THEORY ANALYSIS
Check part 1 -> Composition, environments and parallels.
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Five colors stands out : green, yellow, blue, red and purple.
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Yellow/green
One color, or rather a pair of colors, that engulf the whole movie are green and yellow. These two can be pretty hard to discern once yellow is darkened a bit, since dark yellow is basically green, so I chose to kind of bring these two into a common point. We could say yellow alone may represent Benson though. Benson is wearing his fluffy dark yellow/greenish cardigan, and that goes along with his Chrysler and its sand color that we may qualify as yellow to some extend. We also get to see him with a predominant yellow wall behind him once.
Besides the artistic choice behind it, the overall color scheme bringing the movie together in terms of photography, both of these colors are a heavy presence that I found may actually mean something. Especially in contrast to the final climax scene. Green is in the tint of lights, on Benson and Randy outfits, and it follows them through their journey in the car with the landscape's colors. Benson also picks a green girafe to decorate (and considering how he customs it, how it all tells us so much about the nature of his trauma). Green may represent this state of stagnation in their lives, how haunted they are by their trauma(s). At the burger fastfood Randy and Benson stand in green lights. Green is also the color of the jacket Benson gives to Randy. This could be a metaphor about Randy being forced to see how drowned he is by his trauma, the same way his lean body swims in the green jacket, hides in it. And once he gets rid of it, it's only when he makes the move to act, to make a choice. He abandons it right before calling the police, and leaves it behind him in the restroom at the restaurant. He won't be stuck in it anymore. At the end we see Randy have kept Benson's jacket. Of course it means he doesn't want to put all that happened behind. Benson has been the only one around him capable to see him, the real him buried under all the self inflicted punishment, and to pull him out of his situation. But if we keep the symbolic in mind, it may also represent the fact that he's capable to live with his trauma now, he can leave it aside for a moment to enjoy life again, make his choices, and then carry it around with him, draped over his arm instead of disappearing under it. (This brings me so many feels, help)
Later, they go to the Animal Fun-Stuff Workshop, which is fully green, yellow with touches of red and blue, and a very few purple ones. The fact that the place Lisa work in is dedicated to children activities just echoes with the traumas Randy and Benson are carrying. Everything brings them back to childhood, and that choice is so brilliant. They stood out so much in this place. Both looking so different compared to the clean and vibrant colors.
The woman welcoming them at the school wears a full green outfit. If I stretch things a bit here again, it could symbolise how Randy feels, coming back here, seeing this woman who was probably already there when he was a kid, just another person reminding him of it all. And then, at miss Beard's house, when she receives the call from the school, she goes into her kitchen and learn about Benson's doing, where the lights are yellowish. Benson's color.
And last but not least, the color of the vice principal clothes. It's so close to the shade of Benson's cardigan. It tells us everything we need to know.
Blue
Blue is another color that follows us through the movie, making appearances in the form of colors touches rather than lights that bath the place. At first we see Randy waking up, still in the dark of his room, his grey shirt appearing blue. It's light, yes, so that's probably just a stretch from my mind. In this scene, adult Randy is presented to us in a greenish room, little red details around him.
Then we get to see Randy's car, who's a light blue, with a very thin red line running along the sides of it (this detail may have its importance when we'll get to that color).
When Randy is at the fastfood restaurant, he's not wearing any blue, but blue elements are placed around him, somehow linking it to him. We can spot those blue spots during the morning “motivational” speech from the manager, when he speaks to the Manager in his office, and the head of the spray bottle he uses to clean things. Later, Randy will be wearing a grey Motorhead t-shirt, with a blue and red logo on it. He also chose to pick a blue crocodile to custom at the plushies store. At this point, I believe blue could represent Randy. Plus, in the final scene, we see him with a blue shirt and omg look at our babyboy, he's wearing his own color like he found himself again ಥ_ಥ
I like how the blue's presence can hold meaning sometimes. Like when they sit at the plushies store, and Benson is sitting in front of a blue wall, it kind of feels like by the presence of that blue Benson is retreating literally and figuratively from the moment, leaving it to be Randy's moment. Plus, the moment he goes by their table to interrupt, the yellow is bright and takes a lot of the background space behind him. He's back in charge. Green being the color separating both of their colors on the walls is making me a bit weak. Like, they are meeting and mix a part of themselves together, lines blur, and the result is green. The color of stagnation in life and struggle and being haunted. Their common ground. Like, oof, right in the feels, man.
Red
When we see red, it's hard not to think about blood. And there is quite a lot of blood in this movie. So, yes. But it's also one of the colors we get to see in the decor, always so noticeable. Quite vibrant. To me it could represent the trauma(s) itself. The few elements in Randy's room. The line along the side of his car. Little red notes of objects in Benson's car. So much red inside Benson's home. The objects in the plushies store. The red on the facade of the elementary school, along with blue, which to me screams RANDY and TRAUMA. And the vice principal's car a cherry red color that stands out.
Purple
This. Color.
Damn do I love how it's used.
Well first, I'll speak about miss Beard. As explained earlier, she's the embodiment of recovery and hope. To me this color is so heavy with symbolism in the way it's used. I see change, healing, facing and taming trauma, and why not a return to reality. So miss Beard is wearing a complete purple outfit, so of course it's a choice. It makes her stands out in such a nice, soft and meaningful way. Even her flip phone is purple. The very cell phone Randy will use to call the cops. I mean... CHANGE. HEALING. And I love it. I love it. I love it. And little note on her necklace, the tiny blue flower, I have a hard time not assimilating it to Randy. And UH it breaks my heart a bit. In this warm and peaceful setting, Randy faces his trauma and the consequences of it. It's a stark contrast in intensity of the scene at the restaurant.
And of course we have the final climax scene. Literally bathed in purple light. So saturated and intense. Change will happen here. And sure enough, change occurs. Randy decides to make a choice. He confronts Benson. He tries, really tries to open Benson's eyes too. And we know by now that Benson's trauma is something still tearing him apart. The color intensity feels just as raw as Benson's inner turmoil. It's suffocating.
When Randy stands up and faces Benson, he's fully in the purple lights. While Benson is standing with purple on one side, and green on the other. He's struggling so hard. He's blinded yet he's forced to face the reality of what he did. There is no more pretending that he knows what he's doing, that all this will lead somewhere. He's trapped. He will never step out of this realization, of this purple light, alive.
Last tiny point, the person sitting in the restaurant the first time Benson and Randy goes there, wearing purple, along with the neon light circling the roof, like a sign of the scene to come at the end of day. And let's not forget Marsha with her purple work uniform, who will play an important role in the climax scene.
And this is it! If you've read all of this, well first, thank you! And I hope you enjoyed all this rambling :)
Check part 1 -> Composition, environments and parallels.