I am currently trying to sketch this shot from Drive 2011 that absolutely destroyed me. It’s from just after the elevator murder scene when the lift is about to close between Driver and Irene, sealing their separate fates for good.
I think it’s the desperate street-dog-like ‘please don’t abandon me even though I mauled this guy in front of you’ look that just ruins me. Literally watching the door close on Driver’s escape from the cycle of violence is just….
I will elaborate on my thoughts on this once the sketch is done (for my many thousands of adoring fans who all care so much about my bullshit) but my main problem atm is actually just that the lighting of this shot is insane and I am struggling. Why is he lit from three different angles and none of them are front!!!!
maybe swinging a bat here but i do think the opposition to driver being portrayed as stalking/obsessive/unaware of boundaries results in an overcorrection that i’d say is perhaps even more dishonest to his character, and arguably in a more harmful way.
at the core of it, i do of course agree that canon driver is not the obsessive possessive stalker that some fics portray him as — though i will also gladly make the argument that those fic writers can do whatever they want and characterise blorbo however they like in their free works made purely for the love of the game, whether or not i personally like it. same of course goes for the characterisation i’m about to criticise, i just take issue with it being presented as a more honest/canon version of driver when, in fact, it’s just him stripped back to be more palatable. dishonest in the opposite direction, and harmful in how it handles and represents a badly traumatised character.
just as driver isn’t a violent obsessive stalker, he also isn’t an utterly gentle angelic madonna. he is kind and caring and selfless and diligent, and also sharp and violent and avoidant and cynical. he is traumatised. he’s a career criminal, long before he gets into it to protect irene and benicio.
like, yes, driver does the things he does to protect the people he loves — that’s the driving force behind all the excessive violence we see him enact, though that also doesn’t cleanly absolve him the way some people pretend it does. but he is also deeply, deeply traumatised. and trauma fucks you up! driver is fucked up!
he watches people. it’s one of the most solid pieces of his character that we see, consistent between the books and the movie. he watches people — people he knows and strangers alike — and takes careful notes of their actions, follows them, listens in on conversations. he is hypervigilant out of a mixture of trauma — we’re told in the books that he had to learn to watch people like this and take notes to survive in his abusive childhood home — and a heavily autism-coded desire to mimic other people, to trace the stem of their humanity and simulate it for himself.
(though this too could be trauma — autism and severe childhood trauma have heavily overlapping symptoms, and this in itself should probably indicate that they aren’t things to be stripped away in the name of making a character “unproblematic”.)
driver is avoidant even with the people he likes, arguably especially with them. he is terrible with communication. he’s dishonest and distant and awkward. he assumes the worst of people and then trusts them too easily. he has no regard for his own safety, was homeless at fifteen after being in foster care, began drinking fairly significantly at maybe sixteen when he moved onto a stranger’s — an older man’s! that he met at a bar! — couch. he witnessed his mother slit his father’s throat as a young child. he kisses irene in the elevator scene without so much as making eye contact with her, let alone establishing clear consent; he climbs on top of blanche and hits her repeatedly to make her listen to him, threatens her, covering her mouth as he does so. the violence he enacts in the elevator scene is animalistic, protective, but the scene with the hammer in the strip club is calculated. slow and quiet and vicious. it’s the very message of the movie that this is his nature, something natural and comfortable to him in the moment. he’s used to it.
and, yes, undoubtedly he does these things not out of any malice, not out of calculated cruelty (aside from the characters who driver deems to deserve it), but he genuinely lacks the boundaries to recognise where violence begins and ends, to know how to communicate effectively, to trust people. he doesn’t understand! he literally was not raised! violence is the only language he understands, the only language he was taught to speak, and it’s what he immediately defaults to when pressed. his nature. he was raised without bodily autonomy, and then ignored entirely. he was raised violent and neglected and unwanted and hurt.
realistically, he doesn’t have healthy boundaries, he doesn’t even know what they are. he doesn’t know how to talk to people, he lies, he keeps walls up, he disappears. he is soft-spoken and vicious and mistrusting and sweet and inhuman. he wrapped benicio in his own jacket to carry him to bed and crushed a man’s skull beneath his own heel. he is a deeply traumatised, deeply nuanced character, and as much as i hate to see him made hyper-violent and hyper-masculine, i hate more to see him pared toothless and wholesome when that is frankly insulting for someone so badly traumatised.
meetcute where they meet at a bar and grace gets some liquid courage and gives driver a smooch before disappearing and it haunts driver until he can find grace again....
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