Having given up on the acting career whose pinnacle was brutalization at the hands of Otto Preminger on the set of The Cardinal, followed only by roles in films of diminishing budget and prestige, he knew he had other personae to draw from.
When he wrote his novel, Tryon was in a state of reinvention. And that’s the hardest thing to live with. The answer, of course, is that there’s no right or wrong in the world laid out by source-novelist and screenwriter Thomas Tryon only things as they are. Victoria, who probably thought she got lucky when she was adopted into the Perrys while the family was prosperous, marries and has a beautiful baby but loses it in the most mortifying way. Her mother Ada assumes responsibility for the way things degenerate and sacrifices herself trying to fix them, failing horribly. Mother Alexandra, widowed by her own child, watches as things go south from there and ends up like Niles.
Niles tries to be good but causes unimaginable suffering to the ones he loves and ends up in an insane asylum that is, the family home. Holland, all eleven years of him, covets, lies, and kills, and is still idolized by his twin, Niles. Take this family, the Perrys, in this movie, The Other. From my perspective, nobody deserves what they get. His dad dead eight months, his brother four, and traumatized Mother rarely leaving her room, who’s to teach him how to be a father and a man?Ī friend of mine once said nobody gets what they deserve. At the cusp of adulthood and the opportunity it offers, he remains unformed, never to emerge from his pupa like the Mexican jumping beans he gives Alexandra as a gift, to her dismay: she knows what he doesn’t realize he’s telling her. The image is counterpointed in the film’s last shot, situating Niles looking out the window as the family barn and apple cellar, symbol of former fruitfulness, are bulldozed. This is what had become of the 2001 Starchild in just four years, a monstrous, clearly fake symbol of not limitless possibility awaiting realization but constrained grotesquery, stillborn. One of the few indelible images in director Robert Mulligan’s 1972 film of The Other is that of Niles in the freaks’ tent at the 4th of July fair, gazing at the Hydrocephalic Boy in a jar.
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