Edgar Allen Poe and Will Smith

Reading The Tell Tale Heart, by Edgar Allen Poe, I focused on the importance of reciprocal ownership of body parts and senses.

The narrator’s fears are based on the projection of his senses and body parts onto the elderly man he victimizes. First, the old man’s clouded eyes reflect the clouded, distorted perspective the narrator has on the situation he describes, starting with his own sanity. He sees himself as sane, logical, even brilliant. The more he labors to convince the reader of his superior sanity, the less sane he appears and it is clear that although the old man is physically unable to see clearly, the narrator can’t stand the appearance of the old man’s distorted body part because he is aware of the flaws in his own perception, at least subconsciously. Second, there is something fascinating about a murderer mistaking an innocent heart for his own. Besides going back to his clouded perception, this serves to equate the murderer’s heart for one which has stopped beating. This narrator is not heartless, he is rather dead at heart. Or, the mistake could imply that the narrator isn’t satisfied with his kill because the old man’s heart is not the one he really wanted to stop. That particular inference also implies that the narrator’s exaggerated sense of superiority over the old man is a reversal of what he actually feels-a sense of utter self-loathing and inferiority.

In this way, it can be said that metaphorically, the murderer and his victim are effectively sharing ownership of the same body parts. That being said, who saw Seven Pounds over winter break? Who else showed up expecting a thrilling mystery only to find themselves on the other side of anticipation in the first 20 minutes?

Despite the slight letdown of the almost immediate disclosure, the secret pertains pretty blatantly to the plot of Tell Tale Heart. The film follows a guilt-ridden Will Smith who intends to farm out his vital organs to seven deserving people in order to atone for a car accident he caused while texting behind the wheel. He is looking to turn his one failure of a life into seven success stories, in honor of the seven people who died in the accident his lol/btw/ttyls caused. Most of the story revolves around the woman he intends to give his heart to and the man he intends to give his eyes to. The situation in the film is morally inverse, but so exactly dissimilar that it is difficult to ignore. By sharing his organs, he is effectively living on through other people, while the narrator, intending to kill the perspective that haunted him, his own, actually killed something healthy. There is also the concept of suffering. Both Will Smith’s character and the narrator were hunting themselves. They both saw death at the end of the struggle and only Will Smith is relieved from his suffering, when in fact he is the one who dies. Life and death face each other in the mirror between these two characters and they move in unison, doing the exact same thing, but exactly backward. One murder results in happiness, the other in misery, yet both Will Smith and the narrator of The Tell Tale Heart are murderers, planning carefully to kill the person they despise most in the world: themselves. The only difference, which sends their plots spiraling in exactly opposite directions, is that the narrator missed his target…by a lot.

Glenn Hoban