so i'm still thinking about death of a unicorn. specifically about the scene where [MAJOR SPOILERS] the mother is on the table, about to get eaten, and she wants her son to shoot that arrow and make the oxygen explode, but he just apologizes and goes away. and she gets disemboweled in what's probably the most terrible death in the whole movie because even though i HATED that woman, i saw her struggle with everything she had, determined to go on her own terms, and in the end it didn't even matter because her son refused her.
and this is connected to the previous scenes where she tried to tell him something, to have the classic speech a person might have with their loved ones when there's little to no hope of getting out alive, but he kept shutting it down. nothing mattered except the unicorn and what it represented: wealth, power, immortality. what they had was not genuine love and affection, but a play: they had their part and played it, everything for show. and that makes me think that even when she was trying to talk to him – to tell him, what?, that she loved him? i 'm not sure – she was just keeping up the act. not consciously, i'm not saying that she didn't feel anything for her son; i just can't help but feel it was all performative, like everything else she said. doesn't matter, though, because he didn't care about the play anymore.