Review of Ocean's 8

The movie is about taking the jewels of a very grande dame -- a Queen, of some grande past age -- and slicing them into little bits, and sending these bits across the globe. The thief designated to do this crime, is the only one shown suffering under an indomitable mother. Our brains don't quite miss this. Before this, the jewels are deposited around the neck of a woman, who herself represents a queen of a sort, someone so important she commands centre stage of America's most important gala and has a life imagined as picking and choosing from people willing to give up their lives if only to be chosen to offer service to her. She -- this queen-duplicate -- finds herself in a bathroom, bent-over barfing, with a wash of someone slipping behind her and putting hands around her neck, and the whole bathroom being identified, centrally, as about shit-steerage. Drawn and quartered, disembowled, guillotined, and left in the end in shit... this is a lot of displaced mother-hate to inflict on tokens/totems that represent her. The thieves get rich, and the person -- or, to use the movie parlance, the mule -- that normally is put forward in films to absorb any sense that the thieves -- our avatars -- shouldn't feel overwhelmed with guilt, is put forward to plant it on: a strikingly good-looking and successful, rapscallion, man, whose deceptions in this case put a woman behind bars for years while he tasted only lofty living. The amount of time she had to serve -- almost six years -- is measured out so that it seems to justify what he will be afflicted with: total responsibility for the crime, which is, as described, the worst one imaginable... not theft, but mother-murder. But this device for displacing our own guilt is beginning to become... conscious; our superegos will no longer cooperate in our necessary but sick game, and the guilt rebounds very threatening to begin to sit with us.

So what the film does is have the queen herself suddenly agree to be complicit in the crime, with the excuse that it's good to have girlfriends for a change. The mother is imagined as perhaps liking us, even if she knew of our crimes against her, because we would be agreeable to her if she suddenly sat next to us and could receive some honest chat.

Old women at one point enter the film to deposit the bits of the venerable mother across the globe. I think that the young would be seen as insufficiently empowered to counter the power in the bits. This would seem the opposite of Frodo, but note that Frodo was old from the start... no Pippen or Merry, he.