JB makes a painting of Willem, and Jude is seeing it:
“… In the painting, Willem’s torso is directed toward the viewer, but his face is turned to the right so that he is almost in profile, and he is leaning toward something or someone and smiling …”
In another time, Harold (father) says to Jude (son):
“… “I think we should work on a project together,” I told him that fall (he was still doing pro bono work with the artist nonprofit, which – when I went to volunteer there myself- was actually more moving that I had thought it would be: I had thought it would just be a bunch of untalented hacks trying to make creative lives for themselves when it was clear they never would, and although that was in fact what it was, I found myself admiring them, much as he did – their perseverance, their dumb, hardy faith. These were people no one and nothing could ever dissuade from life, …”
He asks Jude; Jude is a terrifying successful cutting-edge lawyer, who believes that he doesn’t deserve happiness. He believes he is disgusting.
The novel is called – A Little Life, and life in 800+ pages have everything, happy, sad, dry, high, low, suicidal, on top of the world, in love, abused, recovering, simple and complicated days.
And then I watched Stuart Little
I had no idea of the connection I saw; I was watching it for the second time, the first being when I was a child and being scared of cats and dark trees.
The first scene – it’s a boy reading Little Women, knows about people living there, an observer of good qualities in everyone, knows what emotional stages the to-be parents pass through on their first visit to an orphanage to find their the one.
Stuart almost dies in the washing machine, I just remembered Wonder, The Fundamentals of Caregiving, Munnabhai MBBS & other movies and shows with characters with medical ailments and there was always a mishap, some time to adjust with each other.
It was also funny, and cute, and I felt little tears coming to my eyes…
The boat race, the iconic boat building together and then race, just a scene to show that every person has a skill, whatever it may be.
When Snowbell tells him, we had a great time without you, Stuart believes it, he is like Jude. From their experiences so far, they have faced rejection in the form of ignorance or abuse.
I don’t deserve a happy family. The child with extra needs believes it.
That is the metaphor.
The question is not whether it’s a mouse or a boy, it’s a memory, from movies and heard stories, of bullying, a child being called a mouse for being stick thin or small, an elephant for being too large. In the book, it’s a boy who looks like a mouse.
I was called dumb by the teacher for not being able to score well in physics, but I was depressed, I didn’t fit in, parents by then had left us to our studies and friends, only concerned with us not straying to boyfriends and tight jeans.
Last scene, in the Snowball & Stuart vs the street cat’s gang fight at Central Park:
Stuart accepts that Snowball does not like him, he says in his innocent seeing the best in people style, “You don’t even have to like each other, look at Snowbell. He hates me, and still, he is trying to save me.”
Jude, getting adopted at the age of 30, falling in love with his best friend but unable to have sex and his partner being fine with it, after Willem’s death, he reverted back to his old angsty self at the core of which he believed, that I am a monster, because he was used physically.
What Reddit discusses about this metaphor?
A woman giving birth to a rat; I don’t get why parents would adopt a rat instead of a child and give him a loving home; metamorphosis(like, why?) etc etc.
Brilliant idea, director Rob Minkoff
What I am gonna watch next? Mixtape
There was a painting discovered – https://www.timesnownews.com/entertainment-news/did-you-know-1999-film-stewart-little-helped-discover-an-iconic-painting-that-had-been-lost-for-almost-a-century-article-100988557