Dante , the Gothic , the Abject , and the Grotesque in Mathieu Missoffe ’ s Thriller-Crime Drama Black Spot
room by a breathing machine . Apparently , five years before Laurene and Teddy Bear discover him in his parents ’ house , Bruno joined the nurse ’ s brother Dmitri in raping Sandra in the corner of the gigantic lumber mill that the Steiners shut down in the first episode . Possibly overcome by remorse , Bruno then attempted to hang himself from the tree from which Sandra Chevrier ’ s corpse was hung . However , that Bruno tried to take his own life out of remorse or that he alone was responsible for his hanging , while seemingly substantiated by a police report , remains a mystery to Laurene , Teddy Bear , and the viewer . The key to the case is Dmitri , who has been driven nearly out of his mind by the overuse of drugs , presumably to erase his guilt . As Laurene holds him and prevents him from dying , Dmitri finally confesses to raping and murdering his sister and then hanging her corpse from a tree for threatening to publicly reveal the names of her rapists . Clearly delusional , reduced to a grotesque caricature of his former self , Dmitri embraces a paranoid fear that the immobilized Bruno is coming after him . Indeed , the theory , entertained by Laurene and Teddy Bear , that Sandra planned to pull her patient ’ s life support as a form of retribution , combined with the possibility that Bruno ’ s parents may have participated in Sandra ’ s murder to save the life of their comatose son , is not entirely implausible , particularly among a people condemned to a contemporary version of the Inferno .
Throughout Black Spot , the abject and grotesque are almost always associated with the punishment that women undergo for crossing an invisible line established by the community ’ s ruling white patriarchy . This punishment , generally in the form of savage murders and suicides , is a recurring act in the darkened world of Villefranche and finds its parallel in Dante ’ s Hell , where the condemned must suffer eternal retribution and often carry with them an “ inhuman [ and ] insane
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