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The Essence of Story Assignment 4 by Colleen Forrest =A9 June 7, 1999 Level: Beginner
Subject: Splash Splash is a romance, so the conflict is a romantic one, forbidden = love. That conflict begins for Allen Bauer twenty years before the main portion of t= he movie begins, so the movie starts with a flashback to that time. Allen is an adolescent= boy on a ferryboat who falls overboard into the water, then falls head over heals = for a little mermaid girl he meets under the water. But before the relationship can go= any farther, Allen is "rescued" by the well-meaning passengers on the ferry.= The problem Allen has is that he's unable to commit to a relationship.= The first scene shows us why. His first love, the little mermaid girl, whom he committed = to at first site, was taken away from him, or rather, he was taken away from her. From that= incident, Allen learned that commitment means separation. Then we're brought into the present day, where we see how that bit of = errant knowledge has effected Allen's life. He's unable to make a verbal commitment to the= women in his life, though he makes an emotional one, assuming that they'll always be t= here, until the day they leave. He doesn’t make the verbal commitment to his current= girl friend because he doesn’t want the relationship to end, but his lack of ver= bal commitment caused {GF} to leave. Since Allen made the emotional commitment (they wer= e living together) and then she left, Allen again gets his false assumption that c= ommitment =3D separation is verified yet again. What saves him from this endless cycle is the mermaid he met twenty ye= ars ago in the first scene. The sudden rift in their relationship when Allen is "re= scued from drowning" has to be healed. It is when Allen commits to the mermaid = and jumps into the water after her, determined not to be "rescued" this time (= the movie explains that, through some mysterious mermaid magic, Allen will be able = to breath under the water as long as he stays with her). |
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