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Cigarette Candy Character Analysis

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Cigarette Candy Analysis “When I go home people’ll ask me, ‘Hey Hoot, why do you do it man? What, you some kinda war junkie?’ You know what I’ll say? I won’t say a goddamn word. Why? They won’t understand. They won’t understand why we do it.” This quote by Eric Bana’s Hoot in the 2001 film Black Hawk Down puts into words what many veterans have trouble expressing—that the experience of war is something that the normal person can never truly comprehend. This sentiment of being misunderstood is especially prevalent in the 2009 short film Cigarette Candy, which focuses on recently returned Marine veteran Eddie (Jon Orsini). Through visual techniques such as framing and costuming, Dirctor Lauren Wolkstein and her team reveal that while he is ostensibly …show more content…

It has been well documented that Eddie’s uniform is a sort of oppression for him, limiting him to a caricature of a hero that he does not believe himself to be. For the second time in the film, however, we see Eddie without his uniform on, and similar to the first instance, it is only with Candy that he can peel away this exterior and be free from the judgement that he feels around others. Much like the framing does, the costuming in this final scene leaves us with a sliver of hope for Eddie as we see that with Candy, he may be able to avoid isolation, free himself from the shackles of his war memories and the superficial ideas of those around him, and ultimately return to some sense of normalcy. For the majority of the short film Cigarette Candy, both the framing and costuming give insight into Eddie’s feelings of entrapment and isolation. They also, however, seem to leave us with some ideas about how to help those in similar situations. By following Candy’s lead of allowing the person to show their feelings rather than making them talk about them, and by trying to view them as a person defined by more than simply their uniform, we can allow them to open up and feel more at peace as they return

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