LaPorche Carlisle-Quote from movie

In the 2007 film “Perfect Stranger” Halle Berry plays a young reporter whose life changes after she is forced to protect her self from being discovered as a murderer. Her life revolved around secrets and insecurities that caused her actions toward people. The film has a twist because it seems that Halle Berry is playing an innocent, positive character, where instead she is pretending. She is actually devious, hypocritical and manipulative. Her past as a child is tied to her ways because she was sexually abused and forced to hold the secret of her mother killing her father because of this abuse. Early on she finds out that her secret is not her own, but that her next door neighbor saw her and her mother burying her father. Her adult life was being blackmailed by her neighbor who forced the character, Rowena, which Berry played to be another person. That situation and an unconscious ill feeling against men added to her murdering the neighbor and living different lives.
This movie has scenes and quotes that relate to organizational changes and constraint for now and the future in regards to understanding self because peoples actions reflects on how they live and how they function in certain situations.

“It’s a world where you think actions have has no consequence where guilt it cloaked with anonymity where there are no fingerprints, an invisible universe filled with strangers interconnected online and disconnected in life. It will still you secrets, corrupt your dreams and co-opt your identity, because in this world where you can be anything you want, anyone you want and you just might lose sight of who you are”. In this quote from the movie, Rowena was at the end of her journey as covering up for her actions and she was writing a story that was based on her reality.

That quote reminded me of a concept in Chapter 2 of the book called the situated individual. In the text it is described as “a person who is conducting everyday business of the maintenance and construction of the social realities in which we live”. All through the movie, character Rowena was going on with her life as if it was “normal” while being three different identities, with different motives that were all working towards covering her tracks. Rowena was in fact playing herself, Katherine Polk (a name she used to work), and her chat name Rocketgirl. Also in the book it was quoted that someone by the name of Anderson, said that the situated individual is connected to others through a network of shared, mutually, negotiated, and maintained meanings. And that the meanings give location, identity, action and purpose to the individual. It tells where I am, who I am, who I am doing, how to do it and how. The text lastly summarized the situated individual as an actor who thoughts and action are based on contexts, as having more than one context exist contributing to actions, and that it can reveal sources of creativity, constraint, meaning, interpretation, and context.

The character Berry was playing showed all those 3 steps. She was an actor. She was playing roles to justify what she had done and to cover it up by leading a normal life to others looking in. Also her actions were based on her background as a child and her interpretation of men, being controlling and in charge. Two, she has multiple reasons as to why she has this ill feeling toward men, because of her past as a child and because of her experience as a reporter. Seeing how men were “protecting men” as said in the movie did not sit well with her. So she acted accordingly to prove to herself that she is appreciated. Three, all of her actions from becoming an alias and working under a different name to get information, murdering her childhood neighbor because of a secret she knew, and chatting online as someone else.

I chose the quote from the movies because I thought it really related to how changes in persons actions can have an impact on how a situation plays out. The reasons why she was action so irrationally and committing negative acts had to do with her past, her present state, and how things could possibly turn out for her in the future. She manipulates people and set them up because her interpretation of life was that she must be accepted and not understood. Meaning that she will do what she has to do to be acknowledged but kept her skeletons in the closet so that people would not reveal her reality. It just shows how being the situated individual as understood by me from the reading, is to be put in a situation by society or family and acquaintances that causes your actions to be negative and confusing to yourself and the world because it is contradictory of how your real life is.