Movie Demolition: Can You Fix Broken Things?

This movie, “Demolition” gave many things to think about. It is a story of a very successful banker who experiences deconstruction of all the things he once knew after the death of his wife. Out of shock for the death of his wife in a car accident, he starts to disassemble broken things. He starts to demolish malfunctioning things in the notion that if you can disassemble everything completely, then you can find out the malfunctioning thing and you can fix it.

He starts to disassemble things around him and also he starts to disassemble his own memories to figure out what went wrong. Why is the toilet door making noises? Why is his computer not working? Why did the vending machine in the hospital fail to give him what he paid for? Why are there so many broken things? While he was looking at the broken things outside and tried to fix it, he realized that there are many broken things in his memory and in this life (especially in his marriage life). How can I know what went wrong? To know what is wrong, first he must disassemble everything and put everything apart to find out broken parts which cause problem.

To figure out what went wrong in his life, he first take apart his office life. He break himself away from all the familiar things around him in his office: his office and things he used to use, the workers around him, and most of all his boss and also his father-in-law. He tries to redefine all the relationship he once had known. Not only that, he start to break down the private space in which he spent his marriage life with his wife, that is, his house. He starts to break down the windows, doors, TV sets, walls, drawers, everything in the house.

The more he breaks down things, the more difficult it becomes for him to put things together. While disassembling things, what he find out is that there is no answer to fix the problem, and neither is there any way for him to go back to the original condition. His demolition reveals that fixing is out of the question. And the only thing he can do is to demolish everything completely and in that way he can start from the scratch. Now at the end of the movie he is demolishing things, not because he wanted to find the answer or to fix the problem, but just to break down everything which belongs to his previous life so that he can start a new life.

In life you cannot fix anything. And if it goes wrong beyond your control, demolish it so that you may build a new one. Whether you are happier or not, it does not matter because there is no other way to make your life go on. Can you fix broken things to make it work? Perhaps or perhaps not.