I have a very specific vision of Mrs Bradley and I don't think a lot of people have this vision, but I love this idea of her and I think it's so interesting, and a lot of people make her too normal...(and tbf this take is her to the extreme but i like to do that to characters/relationships so bear with me)... you don't get a person like Randy from a normal parental situation. sure he had the whole dramatic story, but that cannot be the only thing that made him like That, and feel so powerless, and have this total lack of autonomy over his body and his decisions. Just the way that he is makes me think that there's something going on. I just think that is also more of an interesting and a darker depiction of Mrs Bradley because I don't think that she's normal at all, and his relationship with her over his young life has created randy as who he is through dependency, fear, a lack of physical ownership over his own being, and an intense fear of making decisions. i cant believe this all just came from the incident.
First of all I think that she definitely has got some kind of mental illness, a psychosis or extreme paranoia, also mixed with I imagine crazy postpartum stuff going on + stress and that definitely fueled the dependence on having control over Randy, like too much. and I also think that when whatever happened to his dad, cuz I don't think his dad still around, whether he died or he left them or whatever, I think that that also caused her to be very like "you can't leave I have to keep you in my life by making you scared of the outside world" cuz there is that cut scene where she comes and freaks him out about everything going on outside and just she's telling him all these things to scare him, but so she can “protect him” in ways the dad couldn't/didn't. shes scared randy is gonna be taken from her.
Here's another take of mine that's not very popular, I don't think I've ever seen it, but I think that she's got some sort of, at least when he was a kid to a teen, munchausen by proxy with him, keeping him very sick and weak. She wanted to make him so dependent on her so that he couldn't leave her and he couldn't be taken/hurt by the "outside world" and also that he couldn't hurt anybody else after the miss beard situation. Little randy, who barely speaks, who hates himself for the ways he has hurt mrs beard and for his own emotions, who is too sick and tired to play and spends all of his time in bed Thinking and getting all mixed up in the things his mom tells him and the things he hears from the sermon station that faintly plays on the radio on the other side of his wall. And she just wants to take care of him, but he just keeps slipping away from her, Theyll take him away from her.
But as he gets older, people are talking more, and randy’s proven his obedience and loyalty to her through her incessant phone calls and check ups when he's at school, so she lets him get a job instead of him going away from her to college, something small and close enough to home, but it's something outside of that house. Now, hes got some health problems, he cant stomach food right due to intense nausea, chronic migraines, he can never quite gain enough weight, hes shakey all the time, etc etc. He doesnt know that shes got something to do with all of his "unkown" childhood sicknesses that were never given a reason or diagnosis. he thinks its just what Happens to him when hes 'bad' or distant.
There's a lot of fear there, so she's doing these things out of what she thinks is well intentioned, it's not like she's trying to be evil, but she just needs him to have this dependence on her and this like lack of autonomy. She seems like she feels a righteousness to randy and his being. I just think that this is a interesting, darker side to the potential character of Miss Bradley I wish was explored/played with. cuz I think that with the way that Randy is and the relationship that he has with his mother and the way that his mother is, there could be so much potential there for such an intense relationship.
