After watching "Brick", I couldn't avoid developing another Allegorical interpretation, also related to American matriarchy's roots, as my previous "Donnie Darko" Theory explained.Yet notwithstanding "Brick" is a twisted noir-genre story, the plot is constantly sprayed in cold surrealism, so now, my "Brick" Allegorical Interpretation:
"For me Laura's character (Nora Zehetner) would be the "Fatale
Princess" who turns into a Matriarchate figure, why? Because in my opinion, Tug's character would stand for Strength (Physical),
The Pin (Lukas Haas) would stand for Decadence and Brad Bramish would stand for Status/Social Power. And thinking about it Laura owns these three qualities by herself: Strength (she has a bright mind), Decadende (that comes from her sexual manipulation/politics) and Status/Social Power too -she hosts exclusive parties and "knows everybody" in town-. Therefore Laura is destinated to be the only winner in the Drug Ring of San Clemente, until... Brendan enters her world because he is looking for Emily/for vengeance/for truth.
And in the end the only winner is Brendan (a moral winner?), although he keeps being an outcast/loser, why? Because he keeps not accepting the truth he has found out. Inferring some subtleties from Rian Johnson's script, I see Brendan as the antihero who lives disconnected from real world, because he despises it, not in cause of fearing it. I think Brain plays the role of Brendan's rational well-oiled mind, the part that prevents Brendan of an emotional collapse and otorgates him survival.When did Brendan get disconnected from real world?
Probably, after leaving his association with Kara, whom his rational side -The Brain- qualifies as "the evil one", Brendan constructed a mental refuge for distancing himself from female dangers. Somehow, his early freshman days spent with Kara provoked on Brendan a personality split, reason why he lunchs at back of school, "not liking anybody" as Emily reproachs him.He's practically immune to Laura's manipulation for this motive, he suffers of a "schizo" process after being exposed to an evil femenine universe.
Kara and Dode are satellite characters in the story, on one hand Kara stands for Decadende (although minor compared with The Pin's or Laura's) and Dode stands for a minor Decadence (consequence of his drug consumption), but meanwhile Decadence makes Kara strong, makes Dode weak.
Emily (Emilie de Ravin) would stand for Purity (a purity symbol),
contaminated mercilessly by the Real world -which Brendan has run away from-. Brendan learnt the dangers from the "spider women" -another way of naming femme fatales- soon after knowing Kara's ensnaring practices, and he wishes to liberate Emily from the Hell she has been immersed in. I think Brendan fell in love with Emily because she was special, and she was in love too, but she was tempted by the Real world's underworld, she "couldn't stand" her love towards Brendan, because that love existed in certain way in a No Real world/scenario, only in Brendan's world, which she couldn't access in cause of Fear (of love, Brendan's isolation, loss of freedom ...)Jerr's bringing down by Brendan confirmed Emily about his cold head/ruthless "operative" and thereafter she chooses not to listening his reasoning, becoming more and more emotionally torn/disoriented. Her disorientation is used by Laura (whom had already known Jerr -this isn't mentioned in the film, but in the script) in a definitive destructive way that leads Emily to death.
Brendan is tougher than Emily, he doesn't need a drug-induced alternative world to isolate himself, but Emily needed more time to adapt to Brendan's misanthropic universe, and in the learning road, she crosses paths with Laura and is seduced by her. So thereafter, Emily's behaviour is similar to Laura's regarding her sexual "dancing", differentiating that Emily is trapped in a sexual self-deprecation cycle playing Laura's game. I mean, Emily is self-destructive meanwhile Brendan isn't in essence, he is aware of the destructive mechanisms of real world (the school favoritism/politics) and of underworld (drug dealing) and he resists, how? being destructive and/or destroying everybody else around him. Anyhow, after Emily's death he seems to pursue a self-destruction path, oblivious to his fate, but Laura's greed and subsequently the disintegration of The Pin's and Tug's society , turns into a victory for Brendan.Brendan doesn't admit the truth he was searching so anxiously/irrationally and, like "Memento"'s protagonist, chooses to live in denial, chooses to lie to himself after Laura's confession, and orders his Brain go to sleep, closing the Emily's episode -the only thing he loved- without accepting that dirty word, which despite of being literally "Motherfucker", it echoes clearly to "Motherkiller" (imo), in the sense the very Brendan's extreme isolation from reality leaded Emily to death and to his own defeated life after that."
I know it has been a looong theory, but I hope you like it. And I found an article about the femme-fatale figure, linked randomly to a matriarchate. Some excerpts from it:
"In a place, then, where there is no room for the solar hero, female figuration takes the initiative in the story, seizes the dark kingdom of film noir and broadens the blurred morality of the genre: seducers, frauds, killers with a kiss, they also block off any attempt at a linear plot and ruthlessly hurl the hero towards a desolate dead end."
"Indeed, the femme fatale uses the whole female world of appearances to deploy her devastating power: behind an initially friendly appearance, a host of angel faces —Jean Simmons, but also Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven or Jane Greer in Out of the Past— anxiously delay the moment to show their dark side, the devastating part that overturns any domesticated feature. But the ambiguity of each gesture reigns supreme among these creatures, always ambivalent, always surprising, as expressed in the image of Gloria Grahame’s split face in The Big Heat where, a sibylline courtesy by Fritz Lang, the scarred side is the character’s impulse to good."
"The femme fatale, whose progress is similar to the gangster —suddenly sidelined by the intrusion of the detective story— does not only accommodate to an idle society; her ambition is to have the world in her hands [...] As in the case of the hero of the gangster movie, the femme fatale attains everything she has set out to, but that easy rise also involves an inevitable fall. It would seem at this point that the femme fatale lacks the strength to lay out a symbolic constellation of her own. On the one hand, her attitudes and ambitions are a logical regenerative response to a corrupt masculinity at a time when the solar hero is in crisis. On the other, Hollywood uses the femme fatale as a vessel for the tragic spirit that defined the gangster. It is not just a moral drawing of the rise that demands the fall; it also has more external traits such as humble origins, common manners, disproportionate ambition, unbridled passion, inevitable self-destruction."
"But having reached the point where we can state that there is a femenine imagery behind the femme fatale, why not also consider the possibility that there might be an imagery in those creatures that responds to the rule of night, linked to matriarchy, where the antidote to time is not to be found in taking up weapons but in capturing the vital forces of the future?"
