"There is a certain moment in the film when the son is in the nursing home and he goes to the television and turns it off because he sees himself in the image"
About this Quote
Egoyan is pointing to a tiny gesture with the force of a confession: a son killing the TV not because it’s noisy, but because it’s too accurate. The television, usually a device for distraction, becomes a mirror with the volume turned up on identity. In that nursing-home setting - a place culturally coded as the future we refuse to picture - the image of “himself” isn’t flattering recognition; it’s an ambush. He’s staring at a version of his own aging, dependency, and eventual disappearance, packaged in the safe, familiar grammar of broadcast light.
The intent is surgical. Egoyan isn’t interested in melodramatic speeches about mortality; he wants the flinch. Turning the TV off is an act of denial that masquerades as control. It’s also a small cruelty: by shutting down the communal screen in an institution where time is managed and entertainment is rationed, the son asserts agency at the expense of others, revealing how fear can curdle into selfishness.
Subtextually, the moment riffs on Egoyan’s larger obsession with mediation - how screens both protect us from reality and deliver it in forms we can’t easily refuse. Seeing yourself “in the image” suggests more than reflection: it implies complicity. The son isn’t just afraid of becoming old; he’s implicated in the system that warehouses old age out of sight. The power of the scene is that it catches a modern reflex: when confronted with an unbearable truth, we don’t argue with it. We change the channel.
The intent is surgical. Egoyan isn’t interested in melodramatic speeches about mortality; he wants the flinch. Turning the TV off is an act of denial that masquerades as control. It’s also a small cruelty: by shutting down the communal screen in an institution where time is managed and entertainment is rationed, the son asserts agency at the expense of others, revealing how fear can curdle into selfishness.
Subtextually, the moment riffs on Egoyan’s larger obsession with mediation - how screens both protect us from reality and deliver it in forms we can’t easily refuse. Seeing yourself “in the image” suggests more than reflection: it implies complicity. The son isn’t just afraid of becoming old; he’s implicated in the system that warehouses old age out of sight. The power of the scene is that it catches a modern reflex: when confronted with an unbearable truth, we don’t argue with it. We change the channel.
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