I was thinking about Venom this morning before breakfast, like you do, and I keep coming back to how baffled I am that Venom, and apparently everyone else in Eddie’s life, thinks he’s a loser.
I sort of get why, in a Hollywood way, they might. He’s in a bad situation for most of the movie outside of the fact that he has an alien up his ass. But Eddie was a successful journalist with a significant viewership, engaged to a lawyer, an attractive man with a nice house; he’s clearly intelligent and well-educated. And yes, he does a stupid thing and betrays his fiancee’s trust and gets her fired, and she (quite rightly) dumps him. And he ends up living in a shitty apartment without career prospects because a rich guy fucked him over, eating crap food, trying to hustle work, and giving money he can’t afford to people who have an even shittier situation than him.
But the movie seems to equate poverty with loserdom, because Eddie is still the intelligent, educated, fundamentally decent person who believes in justice that he was before he fucked up. He’s just an intelligent, educated, fundamentally decent, justice-loving guy who fucked up once and now has no money.
And I realized, Eddie isn’t a loser.
Eddie is a Millennial.
Millenials are stuck living in a crap apartment, eating crap food, with shitty job prospects through no fault of their own.
Eddie Brock wound up in that situation himself. He went after Drake without credible sources. Of course that was going to get him fired. And of course no other publication was going to hire him with it being known he goes off half-cocked without sources. He used his fiancée and got her fired.
Yes, he was right about Drake. And yes, Drake got him fired but honestly Drake didn’t need to be a part of that equation. If he had credible sources to back his claims that convo would’ve gone differently. Otherwise, why did his boss even bother asking what his sources were?
Eddie has a heart of gold, there’s no doubt about that. But there’s more than enough evidence in the film to demonstrate that the dude has some maturing to do. He treated his fiancée really badly (and it is implied more than once that she’s struggled with being with him but put up with it because she loved him). He can’t remember to feed a cat. He tries to take down a respected and well-liked billionaire with zero credible sources to back his claims up. He can’t take responsibility for his own part in his downfall, he wants to blame Drake for everything. Anne even called him out on that. And when he does finally apologize to her he still doesn’t really seem to understand what he did wrong.
What happened to Eddie was more than him making one mistake. I wouldn’t even call what he did a mistake. He willfully chose to break his fiancée’s trust to get the drop on Drake. It was a choice he should’ve known full well would have consequences for himself AND Anne. He did it anyway because he wanted so badly to take Drake down.
His politeness, his sense of justice, the way he treats homeless people, all of his good traits … those don’t erase his bad ones. And he does have bad traits, none of them being “millenial.” I wouldn’t call him a loser. But he does do some pretty loser things.
(tags: silver-89)
Yes to all this. I really like the way the film holds the line on Anne and Eddie’s relationship – it skates close to very common competent woman/useless dude tropes, but absolutely refuses to fall into them. In their first scene, Anne waking Eddie up, she repeatedly reminds him to feed the cat – because he needs to pull his weight domestically, and neither she nor the film think that “adorable manchild needs woman to take care of him” is acceptable.
Eddie taking material from Anne’s computer is absolutely framed as a conscious betrayal of trust.When he finds the email, the cat is prowling around, and Eddie shushes it – he knows he’s doing something he shouldn’t, that Anne would stop him if she knew. He’s knowingly crossing a line.
And the film keeps reminding us of that. When Drake taunts Eddie, it’s the betrayal of Anne that he fixes on. When Dan praises Eddie’s work (subverting the “ex’s new boyfriend is an idiot” trope), he exclaims that Eddie has “taken down” some impressive bad people. Anne replies, “I was one of them”. As silver89 points out, she also explicitly reminds Eddie that this was not Drake’s fault, this was his. The film won’t let Eddie’s behaviour slide, and I love that about it.
The one thing I see differently to silver89 is the apology to Anne. I can’t remember the exact wording, but I really like that it shows Eddie correcting himself – he starts with something like “whatever I did”, which is a crappy non-apology that doesn’t take responsibility. But then he stops and says, “I’m sorry I hurt you”, which does acknowledge both her hurt and his agency: he did this. I’m not sure that he fully understands all the ways he’s at fault, but he’s not ducking out of it any more.
I like that the film shows this as a process – Venom nudging Eddie into the apology, and Eddie learning to take responsibility by doing that.
good post
I’m really excited that someone looked at that scene from a journalistic point of view. Eddie should have known/recognized that a lot of the shit he was pulling in his attempted to take down Drake were either unethical or 100% gonna get him fired.
Looking in Anne’s email? Holy Hell unethical, probably illegal, but his paper might have published anyways claiming the documents were leaked by an anonymous source. Mostly bc this is a movie and they do stuff like that in movies when it’s a big story.
In real life tho, you would need more sources than that- double what you would usually have since it was a big story. You just have to check all the facts to make sure no one is lying to you. Like theres a saying amongst journalists, “if your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.” Meaning you need to fact check and be certain of every detail you publish, NOTHING can be assumed. So having an anonymous source on a story this big and not telling your editor about it? And still moving forward? Yeah my dude was super fired.
Lastly springing that interview on Drake was also a journalistic no-go, and also would be part if the reason he got fired. As a general rule, planning an interview under the pretense it’s going to be about one thing and then start questioning your subject about something else is not only unethical, it’s also ineffective and bad business. First of all its unethical to lie about your intentions behind an interview. The only exception would be when you’re doing an expose and you know they would never agree if they knew the real reason for the interview. Eddie wasn’t wrong about this part, he did in fact have a serious enough story to break this rule, but he didnt clue in his editor or anything which is 100% enough to get you fired. Mostly bc of reason #2 journalists dont this: the subject is gonna hate you for it and never interview with your publication again, which would have been a problem for his publication since Drake was so high profile. Lastly it’s an ineffective strategy for getting information most of the time. Generally, surprise interviews are only good for getting reactions, not for getting answers. A public official may not be able to rattle off the exact amount of money that was collected through taxes at any given moment. But if they are about to be interviewed about taxes, usually they will look stats like that up before the interview so they can accurately answer the question. As an audience, we knew Drake was behind all this. But that doesnt change the fact that Eddie didnt know that.
TLDR: Eddie did an interview he knew was only going to get him a reaction and zero answers, based on a single source (which he was unwilling to identify or provide) and without the approval of his editors. He did so knowing it would destroy the trust between Drake, a high profile and newsworthy individual, and his publication which might cost them the future interviews.
Eddie I love you, but you got prove where your shit came from before you throw it into the fan.
I do think there’s something deeply relatable about the “make one (1) mistake and it catastrophically fucks up your entire life” part of the story. That’s a feature of life under neoliberal capitalism (and life in poverty at all times) that most of us instinctively recognize: the idea that there is zero room to fuck up and any kind of stability you have can be gone in a flash through poor life choices or just bad luck.
But I also like that the movie is clear that it is Eddie’s mistake, not just Drake being a shithead. (I wrote in another post that Eddie’s recurring problem in the first act of the movie is impulse control–which is why glueing him to a giant ball of id is so great, cause suddenly he has to be the more responsible one.) We see Eddie being both a bad journalist and a bad boyfriend, and there are consequences. Over the course of the movie it doesn’t all magically get fixed, but you can see Eddie making an effort to be a better person.
Tyrannosaurus was not the most dangerous animal in the park. Having imprinted on its handler since infancy, the creature maintained a docile temperament all the way to adulthood, and indeed seemed to prefer feeding from its designated trough to pursuing prey. Its interactions with staff and guests showed at most a mild curiosity, and the only real terror the beast inspired was when it snuck up on trainers to sniff their hats.
The raptors were not the most dangerous animals in the park. Hollywood had greatly exaggerated their size, first of all, and while they had a mischievous streak (one individual in particular was fond of stealin zookeepers’ wallets), they were far from the hyper-intelligent murder lizards everyone expected. Their intelligence was less of the predatory sort and more the comical intelligence of a corvid, devoted mostly to play and caring for their fellow flock members.
The mosasaur was not the most dangerous animal in the park. Though it held no loyalty to the zookeepers, it had taken to training well enough, and would dutifully move to a specific section of the tank when signaled, giving the keepers space to carry out any business they needed to accomplish in its tank without fear of harm.
No, by far the most dangerous animal in the park was the Struthiomimus. Everyone expected it to be easy – what were these animals in pop culture beyond being fodder for the carnivores? Surely the bird-mimics couldn’t be much of a hassle. Sadly, they weren’t just any bird mimics.
No, in temperament, the Struthiomimus mimicked a swan.
Highly territorial and vicious to the bone, more keepers had suffering brutal beatings by the struthis than had been hurt by the rest of the park’s fauna combined. And when they learned to chew through the fences…
Well, let’s just say the Tyrannosaurus never experienced a more terrifying day in her life.
“If it’s in a word or it’s in a look, you can’t get rid of the Babadook. If you’re a really clever one and you know what it is to see, then you can make friends with a special one – a friend of you and me. His name is Mister Babadook and this is his book. A rumbling sound, then three sharp knocks – ba BA-ba Dook! Dook! Dook! That’s when you’ll know he’s around. You’ll see him if you look. ba BA-ba Dook! Dook! Dook! This is what he wears on top. He’s funny, don’t you think? See him in your room at night, and you won’t sleep a wink. I’ll soon take off my funny disguise (take heed of what you’ve read…) and once you see what’s underneath, you’re going to wish you were dead.”
Jab loves robots 