[Editorial] I Don’t Want to be Here Anymore: Dealing with Emotional Abuse Through Colossal (2016)

You can never predict the movies that you’re going to connect with on a personal level. When I settled down to finally watch Colossal (2016), a film that had long been on my watchlist, I felt like I knew what type of movie I was sitting down to. But it turns out I was wrong, and what I thought was a simple combination of kaiju and someone trying to get their life back on track was about to hit me hard.

The sci-fi comedy movie follows Gloria, a young woman with a drinking problem who returns to her hometown after losing her job and breaking up with her boyfriend. While she reconnects with her old friend Oscar almost instantly, she has a new and much bigger problem to face, because if Gloria sets foot in the town’s play park at a specific time of day, it causes a giant monster to appear in Seoul which mirrors her actions until it disappears a short while later. 

To begin with, the main focus is on Gloria and her monster as she figures out their strange connection. As Gloria is usually dragging herself home half-drunk after a night with Oscar and his friends, Garth and Joel, the first few nights the monster makes an appearance means carnage for Seoul. The night Gloria causes the most damage is the night she decides to share her secret with her friends, and while she carefully calculates her position so that she’s standing away from civilians, her drunken antics cause her to fall on the city. 

The guilt over what has happened means that Gloria decides to avoid drinking and stay away from the park to keep the people of Seoul safe and get her life back to a good place. However, there’s a slight complication in the form of Oscar. When Gloria introduces the gang to her monster alter-ego, Oscar’s attempts to help her reveals that his presence in the park causes a giant robot to also spawn in Seoul. 

From the very beginning of Colossal, Oscar is pitched to us as the ‘nice guy’. He’s the first person there to help Gloria when she struggles across town with her air mattress. He frequently drops by with new furniture to make her home more welcoming. He offers her a job when he knows she is struggling. From the outside, Oscar is the perfect friend, and anyone looking in on his and Gloria’s relationship would be unlikely to detect any problems.

And yet, it turns out he’s using this nice guy image to control Gloria’s behaviour. He does what he needs to do to keep her in town and ensure that he is always in her good books. Oscar does so much for Gloria(even though she never asks him to), that he believes Gloria will be grateful and in debt to him. Oscar is very aware of Gloria’s drinking problem, and yet he invites her to work in his bar knowing it will exacerbate her issues. He also knows that she is likely to accept the job because she needs the money. He does this because it means they get to spend a lot of time together, he gets to keep an eye on her, and he gains more insight into her life through the drunken conversations the group have, which Gloria usually fails to remember. He often tells her to calm down, usually when she’s questioning his behaviour, to make her seem irrational.

Oscar is an emotional abuser, and while we see hints of this behaviour directed at Garth and Joel, it is Gloria who receives the brunt of his abuse. In fact, we soon find out this has been true ever since the beginnings of their childhood friendship. Emotional abuse can be a difficult type of abuse for those involved to recognise, but I saw so many traces of my own past relationships in what Gloria goes through with Oscar that I felt a lump rising in my throat when I realised what was going on. 

Emotional abusers want to control their victim by discrediting, isolating and silencing them, and ensuring that they have no one to turn to. The result is that Gloria feels trapped. She no longer wants to be friends with Oscar, but she cannot escape him or leave town for fear of what he will do. He leaves Gloria with no choice but to keep an eye on him and he makes her feel responsible for his behaviour. Gloria is stuck in a never-ending cycle which she realises she cannot escape unless she gets rid of Oscar for good.

Oscar feels like a bit of a failure compared to Gloria. He’s never left his hometown, and he’s left running his father’s old bar, even though he’s only able to keep a part of it open due to running out of money halfway through the renovation. In his eyes, Gloria was able to escape and make something of herself with the beginnings of her writing career. 

However, when Gloria returns home with her life falling apart, Oscar is keen to forge a new relationship with her, and perhaps finally be seen as the more successful of the pair. But Gloria’s kaiju friend ruins that, giving her something special over Oscar. Not only is her strange counterpart impressive to Oscar’s friends, but the whole town and people all over the world are glued to the monster’s strange antics. So when Oscar finds out that he possesses the same power as Gloria, right when she’s on the verge of turning her back on it forever, he doesn’t take it well.

Wanting to achieve the same level of fame as Gloria, Oscar decides to switch his persona and manipulate her into participating in showy fights to prevent his robot from causing any more damage to Seoul. Gloria bends to Oscar’s will because she doesn’t want him to hurt anyone else. However, Oscar soon realises that he can use this technique to have even more control over Gloria’s life, and he doesn’t even need to pretend to be nice to her to get what he wants. 

Oscar declares “I’m done being Mr Nice Guy” as he forcibly shoves Gloria to the ground after one of their fights. He sheds the image he has worked so hard to protect in the rest of the movie in one swift movement. With no way for him to turn back or regain Gloria’s trust, he has no choice but to outrightly manipulate her from here on in. He acts as though turning his back on his nice guy image is Gloria’s fault and that she has left him no choice. He constantly tells her this, distancing himself from his actions and placing all the blame on Gloria. For Oscar, he feels like he can justify his actions, pinpointing the moments where Gloria ‘pushed’ him to behave this way. 

Trying to reason with someone who constantly thinks you’re to blame, that they are the innocent party being pushed to extreme behaviours because of you is exhausting. Much like Gloria, you can’t believe what you’re hearing half the time. Your conversations have an air of absurdity to them that makes you question what’s going on to the point that you don’t know what to believe.

When Gloria hits the dirt after Oscar pushes her, I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me as well. It can be hard to admit that someone who played a huge part in your life has the capability to emotionally abuse you to get what they want, and yet I recognised it because it has happened to me. Seeing the switch flip in Oscar and him letting the real side of his personality come to the surface is a terrifying sight, and something I have experienced first hand.

When Oscar forcibly stamps all over Seoul with his giant robot, the action never moves to Seoul itself, instead focusing on Gloria lying on the ground, crying and in pain. Her experience and how she feels are what is important in this situation. We know it will be Gloria that feels the guilt over the death and destruction Oscar is causing. While he is likely to forget about it, she will carry it with her, feeling the whole situation is her fault. Meanwhile, Oscar stomps through the play park like a bratty child, never once considering the wider implication of his actions, but instead looking to hurt and control Gloria.

Once you realise the type of behaviour that someone is capable of, you start to look back on old interactions with them in a new light. You suddenly pick up on subtle digs that you missed, or controlling behaviour that you didn’t question at the time, and you find it hard to trust anything that’s happened throughout your entire relationship.

Similarly, once the audience knows what Oscar is like, it’s easy for us to look back on things that were said or done to Gloria in the past and see their true nature. Oscar makes sly digs at Gloria’s writing career, he uses the fact he knows her drunk memory is terrible to repeatedly insist about things they have discussed or that Gloria has agreed to, and he twists conversations to get the result he wants. 

Gloria soon remembers a moment from their childhood when Oscar offered to go into the woods to retrieve her school project which had been blown away. However, thinking he’s unseen and carrying an inferior project of his own, Oscar decides to stamp on Gloria’s project and ruin it. 

This memory shows Gloria that this was the moment both she and Oscar were gifted with their monster powers, with both being given the oversized avatar of a toy they were carrying in their school bag. As a child, Gloria was angry with Oscar, but they were both knocked out by the magical lightning storm before she could confront him, causing her to forget the incident altogether. 

As well as showing her that Oscar has been manipulating their relationship from a very young age, it helps Gloria realise that she has the power inside her to defeat Oscar. Gloria is never shown as a weak person. She is strong, willing to fight Oscar, and willing to stand up for what is right and will help keep others safe. And yet, Oscar is still able to exert power over her because he knows he can twist the fact that she is a good person to his advantage. This is perhaps one of the most important parts of Colossal and shows that you aren’t weak just because you end up involved with someone who has the power to manipulate you.

The way Colossal is initially pitched, it can be easy to assume that the monster in the story is Gloria herself, or even the effect her drinking is having on her life. While Oscar’s reveal as the real villain of the piece is incredibly shocking, it makes complete sense because these sorts of abusers hide in plain sight. This type of damaging behaviour can come from the people you least suspect and knock you off your feet in a moment.

Through Oscar’s behaviour, Gloria finds herself trapped in a life that she cannot seem to find an escape from. Even though she is trying her best to get control of her own life and her own problems, Oscar tries to knock her back to square one at every turn, especially when it comes to her drinking. She cannot even find privacy in her own home, with Oscar hiding the fact he had a set of house keys the whole time until he can use it to his advantage. He aims to occupy her every thought, cut her off from her friends or those who could help her, and ensure that he is the only constant in her life.

I’ve experienced this constant pressure, this inability to escape, to even grab a moment’s peace from the situation to give you the time you need to think about what needs to be done. For Gloria, there’s a time limit to her decisions, knowing that she only has until 8.05 am each morning to try and stop Oscar’s quickly accelerating and destructive behaviour.

In the end, Gloria shows that she has had the power in her to fight against Oscar all along, whereas Oscar has severely underestimated her. At this point, Oscar has ground Gloria down so much that he thinks he can exert full control over her and force her to stay in town. Gloria chooses to face off against Oscar’s scarier side by confronting his robot avatar in Seoul. For Gloria, this fight is nothing compared to fights she’s had with Oscar’s uglier side in person.

However, Oscar hides behind his power to manipulate Gloria, and so he isn’t ready to battle with Gloria at full strength. Gloria takes what was once seen as her weakness in the form of her monster and her connected alcoholism, and uses it to fight against Oscar. Gloria takes the things that Oscar tried to use against her and shows that even with her flaws, she is a powerful person. Rather than allowing the things that are wrong with her life to turn her into an ugly and abusive person, Gloria shows that a bad situation is not a good excuse to hurt those around you. 

As Colossal finishes, Gloria is able to breathe a sigh of relief as she has finally removed Oscar from her life. She soon realises that she still has work to do on herself and her issues, but she no longer has Oscar pushing his own problems on her at the same time. Instead, she will have time to focus on herself and what she needs, rather than worrying so much about others. 

While I didn’t have my own giant monster to help me escape my situation, I did find the strength within myself to do what I knew was right for me and distance myself from the people that hurt me. And yet, the sense of relief was the same. As was the feeling that I could now move on with my life and think about what I needed rather than being pulled in multiple directions by others. 

Every morning throughout Colossal, Gloria wakes up in pain, regretting her decisions from the night before and having to deal with the negative effect of those decisions. I hope that after ridding herself of Oscar, Gloria was able to wake up and feel excitement for the possibilities of her new life. Because I know that feeling, and it’s honestly the best feeling in the world.

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