Family TiesThere were several things that I took away from Affliction, one of them was the title "Affliction". Affliction literally means "something that causes pain or suffering". Wade was a character who's mind was causing him to suffer. How he was haunted was memories of growing up with a dysfunctional family. To me family environments and the conditions someone grows up in can drastically shape how someone turns out later in life. Shrader spends a lot of his movies targeting the father figure. In affliction the father was an abusive alcoholic who constantly traumatizing his kids and wife. Wade is someone who unfortunately turned out like his father. Mr. Whitehouse wasn't the person who truly pushed Wade into insanity. It's really Wades brother Rolfe who happens to be our narrator. Rolfe's encouragement to have Wade investigate this accident which in Wade's mind is turning into a conspiracy theory. This is what finally drives it home causing Wade to completely freak out and go crazy, starting fights, accusing people or even pulling out his own tooth. Shrader did something pretty cleaver with how he demonstrates different time periods or thought processes. What I mean by this is all the flashbacks and conspiracy theories had different camera lens. All the flashbacks had this grainy old-fashioned camera shots which really helped bring out how Wade and Rolfe were treated as kids. Another aspect was whenever Wade would visualize how this conspiracy really happened it would be shown in black and white. Shrader used this to show how different and crazy Wade was actually thinking. There's one more camera function that I believe showed Wades true insanity, which was the shot from which Wade was pulling out his tooth. The camera was frozen in place during the even however the shot (on top of the action) was very uncomfortable. We see his eyes watering and getting red and the his hands shaking during the action really showed how painful the action really.
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