Arsenic and Old Lace

It was a definite change of pace to examine a work that had a male protagonist for once in this class.  It was interesting to examine the way society in the film treated a single man versus the way society treated the single females in the other works we have looked at in this class.

I think the movie had some interesting contradictions.  Initially, Mortimer had a negative opinion about marriage and he lived the kind of glorified bachelor life style.  But then he does a complete 180 and marries Elaine.  He seemed like he really did love her, but some points in the movie kind of threw me off, he made a couple comments about not wanting to be with her which I found confusing.

The spinster characters in the movie (Abby and Martha) are portrayed as crazy and out of touch with reality.  This is definitely fitting with our past discussions of how society views older single women as "defective."  It's interesting that although they were single themselves and seemed content, they felt like they were doing older single men a "charity" by killing them.  So what is this movie really trying to say?