The Brave One Essay

Movie: The Brave One Actress: Jody Foster playing Erica Bane In The Brave One, Jody Foster plays Erica Bane she is the host of a radio show call Streetwalk. The movie starts out showing her happy. She is planning her wedding, picking out colors for invitations. She attends a friend's art show. He fiance show up to surprise her after he says he can't come. They walk home together arm in arm. They then get their German Shepard, Curtis, and take him for a walk in the park. They throw a ball and Curtis runs into a tunnel to go get it but doesn't return.After a few minutes they go to look for him. In the tunnel there are two mean with a video camera and they are holding their dog. Erica and her husband ask for the dog back but they two men start to taunt them. They grab at her and begin to hit them both very violently. They beat them with a metal pipe and all the time they are video taping and the dog is barking. Erica wakes up in the hospital where they tell her that her fiance is dead a nd they have already buried him. She has been out for several days. There are detectives at the hospital viewing a body of a murder victim.They talk to the dead woman daughter who is in the waiting room and her step father shows up. The detectives ask Erica to look at some mug shot and what she can remember but it hard for her to talk about and she doesn't remember much. She returns home and starts having flashbacks of the attack. She wakes up in the middle of the night and takes some kind of pills. A friend calls on the answering machine and asks to take her out to do something but she just ignores the call. When she leaves the apartment, I child on a skate board startles her and she seems agitated.Erica then goes to the police station to see about her case and she is told to wait. After a while she leaves and you get the sense that she feels helpless. She goes and tries to buy a gun. The man at the store tells her that there is a thirty day waiting period. To this she replies that she won't survive thirty days. She gets a gun from some man and he teaches her how to use it. She starts smoking. The detective from the hospital is trying to keep the little girl away from her step father because he is trying to make a case against him and think that he killed the little girls mother because she was going to testify against him.A little later in the movie Erica is in a store and the clerk gets shot. She is in the back and the shooter didn't know she was there until her phone rang. He looked for her and she shot him before he could shoot her. She is also having trouble at work and talks on her show about how she fears New York, the city she once loved, and wonders if she will ever be the person she once was. She is riding the subway and some men start to harass another passenger. He gets off but she stays in her seat. They then start to harass her and she shoots them also.She notices that her hands aren't shaking anymore. She knows what she is doing is wrong and th at she didn't have to shoot them. She returns to the scene after police have arrived and she talks to the detective telling him that she is interviewing him for her show. He recognizes her from the hospital. The police come up with a vigilante theory. Erica becomes friends with the detective and she does a piece for her show about him. She walks alone at night almost seeming to look for trouble and finds herself in a few more situations where she kills people who mean to harm her or someone else.During this time she has become close friends with the detective and he kinda suspects that it might be her committing these crimes. He tells her that they found a ring that was stolen from her during her attack and she looks for the men following a lead from the pawn shop where he ring was found. She finds them and kills them. The detective responds to the shots and he finds her there. He tells her to take the dead man's gun and shoot him in the shoulder and get out of there. He doesn't tur n her in. She gets her dog and the movie ends.I think that Erica Bane has Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. From my lecture notes someone most present at least one thing from each of the following categories. 1. A life threatening event 2. A response the event-helplessness or fear, recurring thoughts about the event or flashbacks, or nightmares 3. Avoidance- problems with memory, decreased interest in activity, foreshortened future, a decrease in affect, and or a detachment from other people through derealization, depersonalization, or dissociation 4.Physical symptoms of arousal such as sleep problems, irritably/anger, problems concentrating, exaggerated startle response, and or hypervigalence Erica's symptoms: -Life threatening event- being attacked and having her fiance killed -She avoids talking about what has happened with the cops saying that its hard for her to talk about -After returning home and throughout the movie she has flashbacks of her attack -She has trouble sleeping an d is taking some type of medicine when she wakes in the night -She doesn't answer calls from friends who want to do things with her -She spooks easily, kid on skate board She buys a gun saying that she has to have it now that she won't survive 30 days -She starts smoking and when a neighbor tells her that it will kill her she says that she doesn't care -She says that she feels like there is a stranger inside her -She has problems at work -Goes out walking the streets alone at night looking for trouble putting herself in more danger