Free Deity by Steven Dunne Page B

because she tells her friend Sara, who idolises Miranda, that she must choose someone else to love because she herself is doomed.
    Sara is appalled at this. She is an orphan who is picked on by the headmistress, Mrs Appleyard, because her foster-parent has not sent the money to pay for her lessons and so she is not allowed to go on the upcoming picnic. Irma compares Sara to a deer she found that died, fragile and pale and also doomed to die.
    So things are all set up towards some kind of tragedy at
Hanging Rock and every time we see a shot of the rock the
music becomes creepy, as though some supernatural force is living there. Also, the girls spend a lot of time looking at the sky as though they are thinking about the afterlife and being angels.
    At the picnic, the coach driver tells us his watch has stopped: another bad omen that the Hanging Rock is somehow not natural. Miranda asks a teacher if she, Irma and Marion can go and explore the rock. Another girl, Edith, nags them to come along too. She is not pretty but overweight and she always complains, in comparison to the calm beauty of the other three. As they disappear from view, Miranda turns with her long blond hair and waves at the teacher, almost as if she’s saying goodbye.
    On Hanging Rock the film becomes less natural. There is a lot of slow motion with weird sound effects and odd camera angles which imply that some unseen force is watching them. Also the girls seem very calm and resigned to their fate. At one point, Marion says, ‘Surprising how many humans are without purpose,’ which I take to mean that she sees no point in living. Also Miranda says, ‘Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place,’ as though she knows her time is up and she accepts it.
    While Edith is whingeing again the three friends hold hands and set off further up the Rock. This is in slow motion and there is an unnatural rumbling as they leave. Edith seems to know something is wrong and begins screaming and runs off.
    I found this film very moving. It was quite slow but I couldn’t take my eyes off it. What I found most moving was the calmness with which the girls faced their death. They are the only ones in the film who don’t seem to be suffering. They’re
leaving the world behind. Their pain is over and it is left to everyone remaining to suffer the torment of their disappearance and to wish they’d behaved differently towards them.
    Back in the real world, Mrs Appleyard’s school starts to go bust and she ends up drinking too much and then killing herself at Hanging Rock. Sara throws herself off the roof of the school because she misses Miranda so much and she can’t bear the pain. The director is telling us that perfect love can’t exist for very long and we have to settle for imperfect love or die.
    Interestingly, one of the girls, Irma, is found but she can’t remember anything and her life becomes really miserable again once she returns to normal life. The director might be suggesting she may have been better off dead because now she has to grow old and ugly and live with all her pain. He’s also trying to tell us that a lot of the story may not be real and not to believe what happened because the first words spoken by Miranda are from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe which I found on the internet.
‘What we see and what we seem is but a dream, a dream within a dream.’ This tells us that reality and fantasy are being mixed up, like life may be a (bad) dream but there are different places where you can be happy, including when you go to the afterlife.
    824 words
    By Kyle Kennedy
    Kyle checked through the text and saved it on to his pen drive. He lay back on his bed and flicked at a remote. He was bare-chested, his skinny frame glistening in the evening heat. Music drifted out of the speakers mounted at each corner of theroom – The Smiths. He looked down at the pasty, almost white flesh on his puny torso and pulled on a T-shirt in disgust then gazed at the