Mr. Reindeer wrote:I went with Red. The Audrey and Sarah "resolutions" are rather jarring from a traditional narrative standpoint, but I actually kind of love how DKL left them. The ambiguity is clearly a conscious choice, and I far prefer it to the overexplaining of stuff like Judy and the Blue Rose. In a weird sense, the final Audrey shot in the white room is sort of the spiritual sibling to the monkey whispering "Judy" in FWWM -- a powerful wtf moment we can all debate and wonder over for the next 25 years.
But Red was introduced and then just tapered away. Becky's weird too. And while I've been an advocate of enjoying TR as a series of slice-of-life shorts/vignettes as opposed to demanding that every scene "mean something," I have to say that the soapy scene with Beverly and her husband wasn't strong enough to work on its own merits, and it led nowhere, so I really wonder why it was there. OTOH, the Ben/Beverly "listening" scenes have a romantic eerie mood, and for me, those scenes work on their own and don't need a "resolution."
Agreed completely. I think Beverly's character does feel unresolved without another scene - mostly just because the scene with her husband, as you say, wasn't very interesting by itself and seemed to be planting a seed for further development of Beverly whether at the GN or at home... I mean, it wasn't a self-contained little vignette that you could watch on its own and gain satisfaction. Her story seemed to be left hanging mid-air, though I agree at least we got the great scenes with Ben... But it still seems an odd choice.
And also, even her relationship with Ben could've been followed up on. What did happen with them? Did Ben give into her flirting and his temptations? After all, in Part 10, after taking Sylvia's call Ben suddenly calls out to ostensibly Beverly - even though we neither see nor hear her - and very directly asks if she'd like to get dinner. I actually have always seen this as ambiguous and likely a rhetorical question / Ben talking to himself. Not only do we not know if she was there, but we don't know if they did go to dinner, if there was an affair. I don't think it can be assumed just from that utterance, which has an almost theatrical, very self-conscious ring to it, making me doubt he's talking to anyone else - it sounds like a man entertaining subconscious desires very consciously, but not actually going all the way. As if his solitary calling out to Beverly was, after the stress of Sylvia's call, really a kind of "acting-out" out loud of what he'd like to do at that moment - but which he may be too morally upright to actually do in reality. So I don't think he was necessarily literally asking her because she was actually in earshot. It reads to me as a self-depreciating bit of desperation/self-pity on Ben's part, like "Ahh, okay, I give up - might as well do dinner, Beverly!" before putting his head in his hands in frustration. I think if L/F meant for us to think that dinner actually happened, that line isn't enough to go on.
But ANYWAY, Red. Absolutely do think it's odd he wasn't touched on again, wasn't seen. Even if he wasn't some big important source of all this magical or Lodge-infused drugs coming into TP, he had some kind of supernatural ability, and beyond that was simply an odd, fascinating character who you'd think we'd see again at least because of 2 factors - him dating Shelly, and simply the length and seeming importance of his first scene (which technically speaking causes the hit-and-run to occur). I really enjoyed Getty's scene in Part 6 and would have loved to have seen more. Honestly, he seems like a more intriguing villain than Mr. C was revealed to be, IMO, though admittedly that's partly because we only have a small glimpse of him.