i’ve been thinking about the artful dodger since i watched it a week ago and can’t stop ruminating on why the romance is so compelling. the first thing i thought of was the carnal imagery, the gore, white sleeves covered in blood and a connection that crosses the boundary of the ribcage. the aesthetic concept: yes, awesome.
but the characters. jack, who has risen above his station and pretends untouchability and performs it near-perfectly, is filled with insecurity. he feels the unfairness of the structures he lives inside and knows he is better than they say he is, but still can’t rise above the jabs and dismissals. before the duel jack confidently thinks he’ll just knock sneed about a bit, but the nature of the situation is quickly revealed to be life-threatening because jack doesn’t have the knowledge of high society in his arsenal. the choice to duel showcases jack’s surety in his competence, being a reckless but calculated decision to stick it to the elites in a safe way, but ends up proving his terrifying vulnerability.
ambition is a compelling push-and-pull in jack's relationship with belle. his ambition is more revelatory than hers, with its first indication shown on the hospital steps when he calls their shared achievement extraordinary. this is because before meeting belle, he figures he’s reached the limits of how far a lowborn thief can ascend. the revelation comes from mounting physical evidence that the status quo can be changed: the clean hospital, the use of ether. in contrast, belle’s ambition constantly brims inside her, connected to (but not a symptom of) her awareness that she is dying. the shape of her identity is a result of the need to defy limits. she acts without regard for societal rules because she perceives misogynistic suppression as the completely arbitrary condition that it is, an awareness that is only fuelled by the realisation that no one is going to help her.
her voice isn’t taken seriously except as an extension of her father, demonstrated when she claims her father sent her to inspect the hospital as an excuse for sanitising the ward. jack was correct to assume this change would mean losing his job if he was the one to implement it. this clash of expectations (belle's confusion about how jack could possibly allow the hospital to remain in such a state contrasted with jack’s assumption that belle’s change will never be permanent) is totally indicative of how they each conceive the potentialities of the world around them.
the scene on the steps—what we did in there was extraordinary—not only shows how jack’s ambition is realised through belle, but encompasses their shared narrative purpose: break barriers in surgery and society. belle’s determination to push past roadblocks is passed on to jack, and jack’s grounded perspective of class boundaries is a source of illumination for belle.
digging deeper, i got stuck on belle's repeated denigration of theft. jack tells belle that she’s never seen anyone dead in the streets from starvation, rightfully pointing out that harm done in the name of survival isn’t really the choice belle perceives it to be. he gestures to the inherent violence of the class system, where the elites at the top control who gets what and leave the people at the bottom to survive any way they can. this concept he explains without hesitation.
but jack doesn’t entirely believe in the correctness of theft itself and struggles to justify it in his own circumstance. after they help red escape, belle discerns something in jack: the crime, it’s not just for survival. you actually love it. he responds, the worst parts of me do. having found his way to a position of some standing, he no longer sees the morality in baseless theft—the philosophy that fagin lives by. fagin fully embraces his class position and refuses to care about having a respected position within the system the way jack does, and prefers to remain a chaos agent without regard for how his actions impact others.
so perhaps jack’s comment that the “worst parts” of himself love thievery is wrapped up in a traumatic dissociation from his younger self (who used to seek cheap thrills from pickpocketing) and as these thrills formed the foundation of his relationship with fagin, his experience of theft became tied up with his experience of abandonment. the worst thing jack ever did was trust fagin—so for jack, stealing is a difficult philosophy to believe in. even though the euphoria of theft relates to embodiment, like pulling a middle finger to the people that want to crush him, the theft itself is nevertheless anchored in the symptoms of his difficult past. so jack is ashamed that he's drawn to it.
belle, who re-reads hobbes’ leviathan as she tries to understand the necessity of state violence and finds his arguments sufficiently lacking that she must write in the margins—and receives a blow of reproval from red that her family are the biggest thieves in port victory—is still so influenced by her preconceived notions that she questions this undesirable impulse in jack.
but she doesn’t challenge it. the back-and-forth that they are hopeless, they’re unsuited encapsulates their clashing perspectives. still, they spark change in each other without meaning to: feelings of ambition, changes in priority. hope, for belle, that someone is coming to save her. their shared evolution is rooted in how they use each other to change the world around them; they cause trouble for the system. their relationship is incendiary.
and that’s why they’re so compelling.
baratheonpilled
jacobvanloon
theartofmadeline
janainaart
germansingergirl
