Growing Up

What I was most interested in in Friend was the progression of age and what this had to do with the females involved in the film.

The first chunk of age may well have been marked by the boys' discovery of the dirty/adult magazine. It is their new obsession, their new interest--here, the female figure is either a mother, a schoolmate, or a sexual interest very detached from the real world. They are perhaps too young to be interested in dating their fellow classmates, and the sexualized woman in the photographs is very distinct from this.

Next, we see the same friends re-united post middle school in high school--and they are swooning over the girls in Rainbow. Each friend 'dibs'es a girl. Their sexual interest has been projected onto some physical being that is nearby.

There is a large jump from this space in time--in which they boys' feelings of the women are nothing but pure admiration and desire--to when the relationship between the two turns rotten for some of the friends. The one figure who before had meant so much was being abused by her drugged-out husband; everything had lost its sparkle as far as the women went.

As the gangster friends gained riches from their endeavours, we see the women's positions change once again. Now they are merely accessories that sparkle in the background. Their job is to look nice and add to the luxurious atmosphere. Even females who have been shown throughout the movie have little to nothing to say when they are

The relationships have gone from purely fascination to desire to abuse to being used solely as accessories.

I wanted to add something that this reminded me of: the colour palette. As the movie progressed through the time span, it started off with a primarily black and white colour palate, and slowly more and more colours were added. Finally, at the end when the gangsters have lots of money and a flashy lifestyle, the colours coordinate...but there is a recurrence of the colour red, representing blood. It makes us wonder whether the black-and-white times, though lacking in colour, were where we'd want to be.