The Curious Case of Lori Cranston

Movies have enriched our lives with such a wealth of stories and characters, behind which talented writers, directors and actors operate like drivers behind the wheel.  By and large, it is all fiction, but to the extent that movies as an art form can illuminate things about ourselves, each other, and the world around us, then they serve a very real purpose.  This week I look at three curious characters, who, in each case, figure in the profound human drama that they inhabit and define.



Tenderness is a 2009 film by John Polson, based on the Robert Cormier novel, and it intertwines the lives of three people with surgical efficiency and precision:  Russell Crowe as Lt. Cristofuoro, Jon Foster as Eric Komenko, and Sophie Traub as Lori Cranston.  Every scene, every image and remark, have a purpose.  It's as taut as a human drama can be, and it reverberates with a mixture of hope and despair, not to mention murderous tension.

Cristofuoro:  My wife likes to say there are two kinds of people, those chasing pleasure, and those running from pain. [Lori] Cranston is running. Running from all kinds of everything. Probably has been her whole life.

Lori is a troubled 16-year old.  Off the bat, we see her with her shirt lifted up over her breasts and her manager sitting at his desk, masturbating to her.  Soon thereafter we get unmistakable hints that her mother's new boyfriend is also pursuing and abusing her:  He slips into the bathroom while she's taking a shower, for instance.  Later on, she suggests that he fingered her sexually, while they were on a private camping trip.  No doubt, Cristofuoro is right:  She probably has a history of such abuse, so it's no surprise that she walks about with such a despondent, sometimes pained look. 

Eric murdered his parents at age 15, and the judge tried him as an adolescent.  He had been taking Zoloxia, and he took into account the possibility that this antidepressant contributed to the gruesome homicidal impulse.  So now that he is age 18, officials must release him and expunge the crime from his record.  Cristofuoro has had an unusual obsession with him, not only from his arrest and throughout his imprisonment, but also after his release.  He knows the young man is a psychopath, and will kill again.

Lori and Eric were fated to collide.  So when the news breaks of his impending release, Lori immediately takes note.  She was in the woods, watching him and a girl kiss intimately, and that has had a lasting impression on her.  She was witness, too, to his killing that girl, which remains an unsolved murder.  What's more, apparently he had posthumous sex with her, according to the coroner's report.  Afterwards she maneuvered to run into him on the bridge, and they made small talk in passing.  She was so taken by what she saw that she drew the couple kissing and she collected articles about the murders in her scrapbook. 

Lori longs for caring and intimacy.  This is what drives her to hook up with him, finding her way to his car by whatever means necessary.  She even persuaded a random guy at the gasoline station to give her a ride, in exchange for some kisses, and she stole his wallet in the meantime.  She waited all evening in the rain outside his house, before stealing into his car.

On my first watch of the film, I thought Lori also had a palpable death wish.  What better way to fulfill that than by hooking up with a murderer?  After watching it again, and studying it further, however, I saw that the will to live and have fun, to connect and be intimate, was a more powerful motive for her.  At least at first.  She certainly tried numerous ways to win his affections and get him to do whatever he wanted to do to her, that is, sexually.  She responded pragmatically but flirtatiously, when he said he wanted to be alone to focus and get a fresh start:

It doesn't get any fresher than old Lori. I'm basically a virgin...  Think of me as a dry run for a real girlfriend, somebody important.

There is tragic irony, wrapped in tragic irony in this film, which to me makes it a far more deft and brilliant film than critics and audiences gave it credit.  Let me explain the psychology - what I call The Human Algorithm - between Lori and Eric:

Lori's efforts to win Eric's affections ultimately fail.  Her efforts are frankly misguided, because she has no clue that what happened that afternoon by the river was an altered state for him.  He is not turned on by a girl, at least not in the normal sense and certainly not in the way that Lori had imagined.  Consider the following screen shots from the film, with Cristofuoro explaining the young man's psyche:

Three times, nevertheless, Eric slipped into that trance and aimed to kill Lori:  (a) by strangling her at the rest stop, (b) by beating her with a hammer, and (c) by suffocating her with a pillow.  But every single time, it didn't happen.  He somehow missed the chance to kill her, or alternatively put, she somehow managed to evade his killing her. 

In fact, on the bed in the motel room, with her feeling rather distraught at how things were turning out between the two of them, she goads him into using his hands to kill her and exposes her neck for him to choke the life out of her:

Do it.  Dissolve me.  Do it.

But he is stunned, and her outright wish for him to kill her jars him out of that murderous trance, unexpectedly so.  There he sat beside her, pillow on hand, and ready to snuff her.  But he is not in control, and this is not how it should go, so amazingly again he does nothing. 

Sigmund Freud theorized that in each of us were the opposing drives of thanatos (death wish) and eros (life instinct, sexual impulse).  At the end of the day, Lori was literally Eric's eros.  She even saved him from a questionable sting that Cristofuoro set up to put Eric back in prison, and in his subdued way he was more than thankful to her. 

But thanatos was never far away for them.  All else having failed, Lori falls back into the lake, from a boat they had stolen, and drowns herself.  He, alarmed and frantic, desperately tries to rescue her.  He extended the oar, but she refused to grab it.  He jumped in, but after several moments of looking for her underwater, he found her slumped face down.  He drags her limp body back to the boat, where ironically he displays the greatest intimacy for her:  He embraces her tightly, hoping she were still alive, wailing furiously and intimately.  He realizes that she is truly dead, so he lets her go into the water, just as he did with that girl in the river years before. 

The irony for Cristofuoro is that Eric was again involved with a girl who died, but this time had no responsibility for it.  The incident landed Eric back in prison, however, where Cristofuoro felt he belonged all along.  Because he was a killer psychopath, after all. 

The irony for Eric is that he felt genuine affection for a girl, in such a way and to such a degree that he probably had never felt before.  His failure to kill her was testament to how much of a life force she had been to him.

The irony for Lori was that dark Freudian drive fulfilled.  But she literally had to take matters into her own hand, and the caring and intimacy she longed for so terribly came at last, but only after she had died.