While critically panned, The Beach (2000) is not as horrid as contemporary collective wisdom such as its Rotten Tomatoes score would make you believe. DiCaprio plays Richard, a young man on a quest for meaning who comes across an off-the-grid island in Thailand that is inhabited simultaneously by marijuana farmers and a cult-like community run by Sal (Tilda Swinton) – with both parties keeping to their respective side of the island. Richard thinks he has found paradise in this community and soon succumbs to madness while trying to protect his utopia from intruders from his past. In this scene of Richard’s hallucination, his perspective is transformed to that of Daffy, a character whom the audience – and Richard – meets at the start of the film and who also happens to be the insane man that started the island cult. Throughout this scene, Richard increasingly loses his subjectivity until his and Daffy’s are one in the same.
The scene opens with a medium close-up of Richard hidden behind leaves, a particular framing that signifies Richard’s loss of identity as well as his loose grasp on reality. After eating a worm, his transition into Daffy’s subjectivity begins. As he looks up, he sees the trees swirling and blurring which serves as a symbolic portal that leads to the mind of Richard and Daffy. Akin to the blurred visuals, Richard’s consciousness has entered a grey area between the sanity he once had and Daffy’s insanity that he will soon absorb. Next, the swirling trees dissolve into Richard’s walking in a hotel hallway whose set design immediately indicates to us that he is walking towards Daffy’s room from the start of the film. While the memorable bloodstained walls appear familiar, spears of light instantly draws our attention to the new addition of a plethora of bullet holes. The simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity with the room creates an uncanny feeling which properly translates into the new, combined subjectivity of Richard and Daffy. Reunited, Richard and Daffy move towards the window together, look out to one direction, shoot at the possible intruders as allies, and eventually merge into one vision in a conscientious shot through a singular pair of binoculars. Daffy and Richard’s victims fall down as if they are bad actors in a death scene, a falseness that gives surreal shape to Richard’s mental image of hallucination. While there is harmony between the two characters’ dispositions, there is a stark dissonance from reality when the viewer sees bodies fall so artificially. The joined subjectivity is further articulated at the end of the scene when Richard tells Daffy, “I’m with you all the way.”
