‘The Lovely Bones’ by Peter Jackson is a film which has an unpleasant character called George Harvey. The director utilizes the character of Susie his victim, the character of George Harvey, key scenes, and the setting to create this unpleasant character. Susie Salmon is a 14-year-old girl from Norristown, Pennsylvania whom her neighbor murders at the start of the film. After her death, Susie narrates the film from in-between (her heaven) as she observes her family and friends struggle to move on as well. As well as taking care of her unfinished business.
Firstly, the director utilizes characterization of Susie Salmon to make the audience undergo animosity regarding Mr. Harvey. In the film, Susie Salmon is revealed as a strawberry blond-haired person with round angelical blue eyes, and throughout the film is exhibited with yellow bell-bottom pants, a red pullover sweater, a royal blue parka, a button-down floral print blouse, as well as a colored stripe knit pomp hat with ear flaps and bells. Susie’s costume, particularly the bells in her hat and her blue eyes, constructs this sense of innocence, selflessness, and childlike young girl. Her blue eyes symbolize youth, naivety, inexperience, and purity of soul. This forms further abhorrence upon Mr. Harvey because he stole everything from her, her costume emphasizes how innocent and sweet child she is, and his killing her at her youthful age is horrendous. He traumatized terrified first in the bunker, then give her assurance he will not do anything, and then murdered her; this revealed his vileness. Moreover, later in the film, when Susie is in heaven and comes to fact an agreement when her death the director added the dialogue: “These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence the connections… often magnificent… and I began to see things in a way that let me hold the earth without me in it. The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life”. Susie may not have a body on earth, but the connections made between the people she loves constitute a symbolic body. Without her death, these relationships would not exist. Seeing these lovely bones helps Susie to recover from her own death and move on, leaving the human world. She is grateful for the ‘body’ and she knows it could not have existed without her. This body has also helped her loved ones recover from the grief of losing her; it is a support system for them as they grow stronger in the wake of her death, leaving Susie to their memories. This constructs repugnance about George Harvey because she was forced to grow up via his actions and mature at a youthful age and by sayings “and I began to see things in a way that let me hold the earth without me in it” communicates her loss in life and the loss of the people that were around her family.
Secondly, the director applies the characterization of George Harvey to induce aversion from the audience facing him. In the film, Mr. Harvey throughout the film is portrayed with dull colors, including grey and beige, and his costume includes glasses and gloves. The glasses are illustrated as a symbol of intelligence, insight, old and harmless, and many characters with glasses are portrayed as having advanced intellect or mental faculties, as Mr. Harvey was. The gloves embody power and protection from the police in his cases, as well as daring. However, gloves can also be mysterious and can show someone’s expertise. As he had murdered many people and had not got caught. Beige exemplifies has traditionally been seen as a conservative, background color and the director really made Mr. Harvey fade in as no one knew it was him for a while. This composes higher malignity upon George Harvey because his character had chosen to wear this costume to fade in, to not be caught, to get in with his daily life, and to capture more victims. This shows that is a mental routine for him which simply nauseates the audience further. In addition, subsequently in the film, after the murder, Mr. Harvey feels so comfortable with what he has done, completely at ease. He can go about his normal daily life and has everyone, even himself nearly, convinced he is innocent. This exhibits Mr. Harvey, the serial killer, who has killed and gotten away with it so often that he almost believes his own innocence. It is in this deception and this facade that we find that it is the most disturbing and evil about the character of Mr. Harvey. This demonstrates higher unpleasantness upon George Harvey because it shows that he doesn’t care about what he has done and it disgusts and frightens us, how calm and elected Mr. Harvey is and how much of a thrill he gets out of the murder.
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Thirdly, the director makes use of the camera angles of Mr. Harvey drawing Susie to the underground bunkers to make us experience extended malignancy against him. In a scene, many low-angle and close-up shots were used to show Mr. Harvey and high-angle and close-up shots of Susie are used to demonstrate the emotion or feeling towards the subject, which they are looking at which was each other. His facial expressions illustrate his aggression fore-coming and his emotions changing, this is the moment that we realize his intentions have altered. This also shows his superiority in the scene as he had the power, his physical size means he is dominant, overpowering, and in control. Unlike Susie, where the low-angle shots made her look vulnerable and weak. Immediately later, we get a high-angle of Susie realizing that his intentions changed, which immediately closed her up in a way that her emotions change into sensing the danger she has positioned herself in. Shots very quickly change from one to the next, making it slightly unclear to the audience if Susie is managing to escape or not. However, the use of high-angle shots looking down at Susie trying to climb the ladder and make it out the exit suggests she will not make it as to the characters, the audience is unreachable, and as the audience, we are fully aware of this and feel helpless. This indicates additional repellence towards Mr. Harvey since he was abusing the power he had, using it to benefit his sexual desires. Supplementary, the director puts to use the color of Mr. Harvey drawing Susie to the underground bunkers to make us experience extended malignancy against him. Also in the scene, they used a fractional part of the town light, warm colors where her house and family were, and dark cold colors where Mr. Harvey was. Furthermore, in the bunker, it had a fiery, orange tone. The director's utilities juxtaposition between cornfield and town to show heaven and hell, darkness, and light. The nightmare which Mr. Harvey was bringing her into and since in that scene no one was around made an impression that something monstrous, devil-like was approaching. The going into bunker shot symbolizes she was going down to her grave, and the fiery tone and candles for Susie made it seem as if she was passing into hell. Although, as the audience, the point of view of Mr. Harvey from these colors made it feel like more of a romantic and passionate setting, this increases our irritation for George Harvey because Susie was 14 when it happened, which makes her insignificant, and for him to see her as a love interest aggravates us even more.
Fourthly, the director enforces the sound of Mr. Harvey attracting Susie to her death to display deeper botheration unto Mr. Harvey. At the moment, the director uses the diegetic sound of the cornfield not home, the sound of nature, and the bunker to apply further disturbance toward him. The sounds of nature, such as birds chirping and leaves crunching, illustrate an environment that is safe and therefore would have released our stress, but at the moment, it showed that no one was around to come and save her, she was defenseless and unprotected. The director also uses the contrast of the cornfield to her home to show how oblivious the family is. They are going on with their normal lives while Susie is at approaching death experience. Lastly, when George Harvey leans across Susie to pick up a bottle opener before opening it near her face, these actions and the way they were shot meant that the audience felt unprotected and sorry for Susie as he is invading her personal space. The sound furthers our discomfort for George Harvey as the sound creates tension in the audience, tension which needs to be calmed, and it is not. This makes the audience feel hatred towards George Harvey for providing those uncomfortable feelings towards her. The director makes us of the non-diegetic sound when Mr. Harvey was luring her into the bunker to make Mr. Harvey seem more unpleasant. The music stops when she loses the mysterious note – a love poem from her would-be boyfriend. This is the point where she hears and sees her murderer, a neighbor, who wants to show her 'something cool that all the kids are gonna like'. Mr. Harvey with no help from music or sound effects. In fact, his character is more effective that way. It is no accident that the music starts again at the pivotal moment when she decides to walk with him. Now the tension increases, in part because the music is replaced by sound design elements – abstract sounds that seem to emanate from her imagination as she realizes her entrapment by the increasingly strange Mr. Harvey. The use of heartbeats also indicates death fore-coming, as the faster it beats, the closer she was to death, and her panic towards her situation as she was helpless. The music was building more suspense and emotions creating more sympathy for Susie by evoking the audience's emotions. Thus, making Mr. Harvey the villain clearer, and his actions in the scene stand out.
Finally, the director exposes the setting of the in-between to make us perceive more sickening sentiments toward George Harvey. In the film, the in-between is a special kind of 'tailor-made' heaven, only it is not. The in-between is like heaven's 'waiting room', a purgatory of sorts, a resting place for lost souls to abide until they are ready to move on. It is a place for those like Susie Salmon, who still cannot cut herself off from what she left behind. Here, in Susie's personal paradise, the sun never sets, dogs run freely through fields, and there are balloons, flowers, snow, magazines, etc. This highlights Susie's childlike behavior because in her heaven it reflects her innocent, caring, and cheerful nature. The use of vibrant color and delicate, angelic music also made her also seem more youthful. This produces further appalling feelings towards Mr. Harvey because although she used to be a joyful, bubbly girl, her tragic experiences have left her understandably bitter and angry. Additionally, the director uses the effect of Mr. Harvey in the in-between to create more malicious affection towards him. When Mr. Harvey comes to the picture, the in-between turns into a dark, gloomy place. Dark tree trunks, shadows, overhanging limbs across the paths, and clumps of bushes. Susie's mood also changes as all the cute dogs, balloons, and colors are ripped out, along with all her dreams. The terrific memories come back to haunt and places in there fall apart. Lastly, it's where Susie Salmon sees all of Mr. Harvey's victims. This exemplifies Mr. Harvey's negative effect on Susie because anything to do with him would make her turn from happy to enraged. Her short time with him on earth created this traumatic being with hate being, the only emotion she had left. This makes Mr. Harvey the villain clearer because Susie was a young teenager who probably did not even know what the word 'hate' even meant, but Mr. Harvey turned her into this soulless spirit who only had hate in her heartless heart.
In conclusion, ‘The Lovely Bones’ by Peter Jackson is a film which has a revoltingly character called George Harvey. The director utilizes the character of Susie his victim, the character of George Harvey, key scenes, and the setting to create this distasteful character. Cruel, calculating cold, and cunning, Mr. Harvey is the very symbol of evil in ‘The Lovely Bones’ and helps to show the audience how eel and present evil is, he was an exceptionally effective character. This itself is a confronting and distressing thought that there are people in society such as him, that may be hidden right next door. But the director uses Mr. Harvey as a symbol of evil in this way to create awareness in her readers. Mr. Harvey is a hard character to understand, his motivations and intentions are so foreign to us. We cannot comprehend how or why a person would want to so violently and abusively, yet so calculatingly make an attack on the world around us.
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