Psychological Analysis of the Film Ready to Love

SYNOPSIS:

Marley is a cheerful, successful and single person by choice, in a nutshell this could be the description of the character, a woman with a promising professional career, great friends, and a great sense of humor.

She began to lose weight and experience abdominal pain, discovering that she had terminal colon cancer, with no possibility of cure by traditional methods. Marley meets a young doctor, Dr. Julian Goldstein, who is impressed by Marley’s ability to accept his diagnosis while maintaining a sense of humor and joy.

The film takes place with Marley’s relationship, his friends, parents and the doctor who became his boyfriend. Marley understands that she won’t make it out of this, and after seeing visions of God, a black woman who she imagines as God grants her three wishes.

There is also the troubled relationship with the parents, where there is a lot of hurt from the father for never being there and always working. She decides to live the emotion of her last days. Marley and Julian are in love, and will do anything to make the most of the time they have left. Before dying Marley manages to solve all his conflicts, including his paternal and maternal relationship. The film ends with the death of Marley, where before dying she had organized a party instead of a funeral, while Marley is next to God (the woman she imagines to be God), dancing, smiling and watching the party.

Psychological analysis of the main character

Marley is a girl who wears the persona of “I don’t need any man to be happy”, she lives her love relationships superficially, always avoiding emotional bonds, seeking to satisfy herself and fill her voids with a group of friends to go out and have fun. She is a young girl who prefers to live alone with just her dog. According to Chevalier (2009) there is no mythology that has not associated the dog – Anubis, Cerberus, Garm, among others – with death, hell and the underworld. It is linked to the trilogy of the elements earth, water and moon, which means the occult, the feminine, and at the same time vegetative, sexual, divination and foundation with regard to the concept of the unconscious.

In the encounter with God, she grants him three requests that will be linked to future events (synchronicity).

1st Request was to Fly – She won a parachute flight through a local radio program.

2nd Request was to earn US$ 1,000,000.00, but that with taxes would be US$500,000.00 – Her boss tells her that she is entitled to an insurance that the company makes available to the employee when she becomes sick of R$1,000,000, 00, but with taxes it would be US$500,000.00.

3° Be ready to love – She didn’t want to tell God what the request was, but God said that she already knew what she wanted and that she was ready.

As a great compensation at work, she is very creative and demonstrates dedication to what she does, but forgets about herself, she only goes to the doctor because of her appearance, in which her friend says she is finished because she lost weight and looked tired. This whole way of Marley’s extroverted function worked as a defense to keep her emotional side away and not think about life situations, self-reflection, that she has terminal cancer, and thinking that she could be alone.

Marley shows no affinity with her mother, Marley has been a vegetarian for 12 years and her mother tries to get her to eat a steak, and when she tells her about the disease, her mother cries and asks her to stop making drama, she responds rudely , and does not accept that his mother enters his life only after discovering the disease, but Marley says that he is afraid of becoming like his mother, of getting married, sacrificing himself for marriage and not being happy, making the Mother Complex evident , and negative woman model.

In relation to the father, the hurt is explicit and comes from a young age, since the father was never present, always working and worried about money, when Marley tells about the disease he said that he would pay for the best treatment and that she did not need to worry. Probably due to the absence of this male figure and that Marley repressed all this lack and as a consequence starts to use the figure of these men. It would be a difficulty for Marley to relate to her animus, indicating a father complex.

Due to all these experiences of Marley with his parents, it is possible that the colon cancer originated from these relationships, in which a deep hurt was maintained for a long period, where the maternal and paternal complex is very evident.

Marley finds it in Dr. Julian what completes her. He ends up approaching and their passion seems inevitable, she finds in him the personification of her animus. And self-reflection begins.

Marley talks with God who would be the personification of his Self, in relation to heaven it symbolizes transcendence and organizing order, and being elevated and where no living thing on earth is able to reach.

Before Marley dies, she rescues with her mother several emotions from when she was a child and how she felt when she did things that her mother was crazy about, both laughed and cried together, and Marley asks her mother to keep the dog.

Marley goes to dinner with her father, and both pretend a relationship, Marley says she is tired of it and leaves the restaurant, her father goes after her and reminds her that 20 years ago she said she wanted a better father and he doesn’t know how to be this father, he felt dead after that, says he loves her and asks her please to tell her what he has to do for her to forgive him and she said that by coming after her he had already done, there is then a resolution of the complex paternal.

Marley dreams that he is swimming in a sea, which symbolically can represent contact with his emotions and integration from the unconscious to the conscious.

Reliving the emotions of the past, the father and mother complexes are diluted, and before dying Marley tells Dr. Julian that he loves him. Thus integrating its contents and managing to enter its individuation even at the end of its life.

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