Lars_and_the_Pink_Room

Engish Drama Essay October 22, 2010 Lars and the Pink Room The color pink is universally accepted has a symbol of love, compassion and purity. The use of the color pink throughout the movie, “Lars and the Real Girl”, draws our attention to the importance of that particular scene. The pink room emphasizes this importance with its overabundant use of pink, which seems to envelop Lars with its womb-like quality. The pink room reveals significant meaning as it functions as a connection from Lars to his mother and to Bianca. As a result, from these connections that happen in the pink room, lead Lars into finally opening his heart to love. The pink room first belonged to Lars’s mother, who died while giving birth to him; died “in the middle of things”. The loss of a mother is traumatic, especially if the child feels responsible for the death as Lars does. The lack of a maternal bond and an emotional bond from his grief-stricken father, lead Lars into an isolated and disconnected life. He comprehends no other way and has created his own safety cocoon, allowing no human contact through touch, bonding or interaction, essentially sealing off his heart. In order for Lars to grow, he first must learn to nurture and cultivate an understanding of his own self which leads him to accept nurturing and affection from others. He finds a way to do this and break free from his cocoon through Bianca. The pink room has now become Bianca’s room. Lars wants her to stay in this room to keep her purity. Lars’s bond to Bianca is purely emotional love and not physical. Lars tends to nurture Bianca in an almost maternal way. He reads to her in the pink room, he makes sure Karen bathes and dresses her; he cares for her well-being, the way a mother cares for a child. Also, having Bianca staying in the pink room causes Lars to come out of his shell more by bringing him into the main house to interact more with his brother, Gus and sister-in-law Karen. In doing this, it allows Lars to use Bianca as a conduit for other interactions in his community, essentially letting people in and accepting emotions one feels when forging friendships. The more Lars does this the more it allows him to grow and open his heart and decrease his dependence upon Bianca. The shift in Lars’s dependency on Bianca is shown when she is unconscious in the pink room. Lars’s reliance upon her is dying, therefore Bianca is dying. He stays all night with Bianca in the pink room where she has come to die. He is allowed to have those final sacred moments with Bianca on her deathbed that he did not have with his mother. Lars has been allowed to experience this with a loving and compassionate support system a support system he did not have with the death of his mother. In being allowed these things Lars has accepted closure and in essence finished things where they left off with his mother. Therefore, this allows Lars to unseal his heart and move on and be a participator and not a voyeur in relationships. The substantial use of the color pink in the pink room reveals the significance of the connections from Lars to his mother, to Bianca, and to the opening of his heart. Love, compassion and purity, the symbols that the color pink represents, are exhibited through these connections in the pink room. Through his showing of pure love and nurturing of Bianca when she stayed in the pink room, Lars was able to grow and find closure with the death of his mother. Through this he was able to allow others in to give and accept their love and compassion. Finally, Lars was able to open his heart and break free from his cocoon.