“I love you, Dad” has a different ring to it now. It is sober, profound, and knowing. Kim said this to Bryan during an embrace with him outside the LAX (Los Angeles International) Airport as they departed following a busy 96 hours of him raging through Paris to find and rescue her from the traffickers.
Two days prior, she had been a giddy 17-year-old living safely at home with her mom and rich stepdad, unaware of the wider world. She was unaware of what her father did for a living. Out of interest, she had asked her mother, who ominously instructed her to ask her father. She never did because she was afraid it would turn out to be something she didn’t like. Then, in the car with Bryan as he drove her to LAX Airport, she decided to make the leap and ask. He told her that he was a preventer. A preventer? What do you prevent? Bad things from happening. You’re like a spy or something? Yes. So, you do something good? Yes. Okay. She may also have been unaware that her stepdad did “business overseas through multiple shell corporations that could earn” him enemies, and that he was “involved in an oil deal with a bunch of Russians that went south five years ago” – according to Bryan. It would be her father’s occupation, however, which later proved to be a significant game-changer. That was all still to come.
For now, Bryan found himself in a losing battle competing with Stuart for Kim’s affections. Stuart was winning the fight both as a husband to Kim’s mother and as a substitute father to Kim herself. For one thing, Stuart was present where Bryan had been absent. However, now, Bryan sought to re-establish a close relationship with his daughter, but was somewhat at a disadvantage for not having up-to-date knowledge about Kim. He had shown up to Kim’s 17th birthday party with a karaoke machine based on past knowledge of her interest in being a singer. In response to this, Lenore dismissively retorted:
“That was when she was 12, Bryan. We’ve moved on from that.”
As if to reinforce the point, Kim promptly put down the karaoke machine and ran off excitedly to meet Stuart when he showed up with a horse. She hugged Stuart, exclaiming: “I love you! I love you! I love you!” before going on to mount the horse. Later, Stuart strolled over and was greeted with the warm reception of a delighted Lenore, unlike the reception she had given to Bryan. Then Stuart said to Bryan:
“She’s not a little girl anymore, huh?”
Bryan replied: “I guess not.”
Later, Stuart invited Bryan to join them for lunch, but Bryan declined. Then Stuart and Lenore departed, leaving Bryan to stand alone looking at the karaoke machine on the ground beside him – aware that in the distance, his daughter was perched on the horse that her rich stepfather bought her, riding around happily.
Exactly, how far was the distance between Bryan and Kim at this moment? Physically, it was within a reasonable walking distance, so it could be said that it wasn’t too far. It’s safe to say that we are not talking about physical distance. The distance in this case represents separation, displacement, and estrangement. The film does not give Kim the responsibility of openly and directly rejecting her father or holding him to account for his absence. We see no behaviours indicating mistrust or avoidance that might have come about because of trauma or emotional scars. Rather, she readily welcomes him without reservation, which is shown by her display of excitement whenever she meets him. Is this down to a personality trait? Is it because she has no residual anger, disappointment, or sadness to lay at her father’s feet for not having been around? To an onlooker, the level of excitement displayed is excessive for an offspring in adolescence. The closest we get to any semblance of a reactive behaviour from her would be when she throws a wobbly, storming out after Bryan refuses to sign the consent form for her to travel to Europe. This again is an unexpected response to the immediate situation. It is an over-reaction to a father holding back his consent out of concern for his daughter’s safety.
There is much to be understood from these two patterns of behaviour, where, on the one hand, Kim warmly and excitedly welcomes her father after a long absence, and on the other, she reacts with upset, showing strong emotional pain when he withholds his ‘yes’. Although the first part is not as obvious as the second, when taken together, these are strong indicators of a child living with unmet emotional needs and lacking the assurance of her parents’ love, in this case, that of Bryan. Kim expresses exaggerated positivity toward her dad following their reunion, a reunion that may serve to fulfil a memory of longing for reconnection after their separation. However, his departure and subsequent absence have proven him to be unreliable. Now, when he denies her something she wants, her response is not to negotiate or accept the situation with dignity – such responses require emotional resilience and self-regulatory capabilities that would come from understanding that his love for her is permanent, even though he is saying ‘no’ to her.
Kim’s stepfather, Stuart, offers her options. He is generous and provides stability, but he is there because of his marriage to her mother and could exit her life if the marriage doesn’t work out. Therefore, she may be in a kind of emotional limbo; stuck between the inability to commit her emotions fully in a relationship with her stepfather and experiencing intense emotions for a father whose permanence she has learned cannot be relied upon.
Anyway, this was all internal. Bryan had stumbled into a situation that called for change, as heralded by Joy Denalane’s ‘Change’ that was playing when he arrived at Kim’s 17th birthday party. Soon, a situation would arise that called for his “special skills”. Then would come changes that revolutionise this entire dynamic, catapulting Bryan into a position of significance and re-establishing him as the main father in Kim’s life, as well as potentially wiping the slate clean between him and Lenore.
Following the party, Kim had gone on to witness her best friend, Amanda, being kidnapped before her very eyes. Next, she herself was kidnapped; pulled from under the bed where she had hidden, screaming and calling out visual clues about the kidnappers according to her father’s directions, who was on the other end of the telephone line listening helplessly.
“Beard! Six feet! Tattoo, right hand! Moon and star!”
Sam had reported that the Moon and Star tattoo was a group ID used by the kidnappers. What is the meaning of the ‘moon and star’ combination? A recurring theme from various contexts is ‘balance’. In astrology, the ‘moon and star’ combination represents the necessary balance between hope and faith in confronting our deepest fears and traumas. In culture, it encourages individuals to integrate both their feminine and masculine energies to achieve harmony within themselves and their relationships. In geomancy, it calls for courage amidst uncertainty, trusting intuition and the guidance of a higher power to navigate life’s uncertain terrain. In religion, particularly in Islam, the crescent Moon and Star together symbolize the balance between the material world and the spiritual world.
Kim had spotted the Moon and Star on Marko’s right hand. Like the Moon and Star combination, the right hand signifies meanings across various perspectives. We will assumptively focus our analysis on significance based upon ideas of the masculine and feminine, and simplify in consideration of roles in this story that characterise male predators and female victims. Energetically, the right hand represents action and masculine energy, while the left hand represents receiving and feminine energy.
The story depicts apparent purposeful destruction of the feminine by the masculine. Kim was drugged, transported, and sold for sex slavery. At the point of her rescue, she’d had a knife at her throat by a sheikh, making a bid to conserve his life when faced with a determined father trying to get his daughter back. What a life it was that the sheikh had been trying to preserve. Moments before, he had been about to feed this girl to the bottomless pit of some unknown entity that requires the ‘using and disposing’ of young women to keep it going. Such was his master. For he did not serve himself. Not really. His proclivities for using young women did not effect expansiveness to his world in any way, shape, or form. He could only cause ruin. So, was that the objective? In whose interest could it be to pervade the world with such deeply scarring harm?
Yet, it was the prospect of such harm being visited upon his daughter that activated the expression of Bryan’s “special skills”. Another perspective on the Moon and Star combination is the tarot, which emphasizes the importance of embracing both the light and shadow within oneself, recognizing that without darkness, we cannot fully appreciate the brilliance of the stars. Should we interpret the light as the image of Kim that motivated him to keep going forward and sustained him even as he was shot? Then what about the shadow? Can we look upon all that happened with the traffickers as an externalisation of the shadow within himself? Could the goal that he hoped to attain regarding his daughter have been so powerful? For she had been lost to him even before the traffickers’ interception. It had all been about him and Kim. Except for Isabelle, the girl he took from 10me Apr. Rue De Paradis, none of the other girls that he saw, who were also taken, existed for him; and Isabelle only got a look in because he saw her wearing Kim’s jacket, and knew that she could give him a lead on finding Kim. When he told Isabelle that Kim was his daughter, she sobbed a little. A father. . . She, too, was somebody’s daughter.
The moment of Kim’s rescue might have been a moment of salvation for her, but it was also redemptive for both of them.
Bryan had shown up and shot the sheikh, causing him to release Kim. Then she turned and looked at her father – her expression initially like someone doing a reality-check on her perception. Her father’s arrival had long been awaited – so long awaited that she might have lost faith, though hope remained enduring.
Now, he was here, and at the realization that she was indeed seeing her father, she gave words to the overwhelming emotion that overtook her:
“Dad. . .You came for me!”
Bryan responded in kind, going towards her as she advanced toward him. As they drew close, he looked intently at her because, in that moment, he too was making realizations of his own. He was seeing her, the little girl he’d been searching for, erupting in floods of tears as she confronted her traumas suppressed over the years, now brought to the fore by recent events.
“Kim. . .I told you I would.”
He must have done, but it was a conversation that we, the audience, were not privy to. Let’s assume that he made this promise to her back when she was a little girl, like in the photo showing him sitting with his arm proudly wrapped around her. He had seen the photo in Kim’s diary from her drawer as he darted around her room like a hound looking for clues to help him go on the hunt for her following her kidnapping. He gazed upon this photo for a brief but significant period before putting it back and continuing his search. A photo of her 5-year-old self with daddy in her diary; a journal of her personal thoughts and experiences. . . Interesting. But she was now 17 years old. There could have been other pages in the diary reflecting the passage of time up to her current age. Or, perhaps, all was as it seemed, and time had really frozen for both father and daughter alike.
Bryan’s strongest feelings of attachment to Kim go back to when she was five years old. As the masculine, Bryan represents authority, power, and divine favour according to the biblical symbolism of the right hand. Let us further assume a connection between father and daughter at this stage of her life through a process of reciprocal exertion and reception of attachment where the father exerts, and the daughter – by intuition – receives and holds in place; for the feminine energy symbolizes intuition, receptivity, and emotional intelligence.
Mario Mikulincer & Phillip R. Shaver‘s ‘Attachment in Adulthood: Structure, Dynamics, and Change‘ describes the processes of attachment-system activation and deactivation; ‘integral parts of a person’s regulatory efforts’ that‘play an important role in shaping his or her emotional responses‘. The goal of the system, which involves proximity-seeking, is to attain a sense of protection and security, and ‘is made particularly salient by appraisals of an attachment figure as not sufficiently near, interested, or responsive‘. The attachment system is de-activated when the goal is attained ‘and the individual can calmly and coherently return to non-attachment activities‘.
Bryan was here fulfilling a promise – he came for her as he told her he would. The attachment system can be resolved. Redemption.
Kim is older now. Her experiences have broadened her horizons and fast-track aged her into her 17 years. Her disposition post kidnapping, near-trafficking experience, and subsequent retrieval by her father is a departure from her earlier giddy girliness, comprising a more mature and solemn constitution. It is at this point that her father reconnects with her. He had intercepted the would-be theft of her growth-trajectory and redirected her focus so he could be part of her continued development. He found her.
“I love you, Dad.”
This has meaning, potency; there is a specialness to it for the two of them.
“I love you, too.”
Leave a Reply