Estella's Life as a Looper

The other night I went to see a play version of Great Expectations featuring Jim Fenner from Bad Girls, which was reason enough to go. It was very interesting how it was staged: all of the action took place around one set, Miss Havisham's house with its dining table topped by a moulding wedding cake and surrounded by decrepit artefacts and cobwebs. The costumes were really cool too, with most characters emblazoned in mad Alice in Wonderland-style Victorian fancy dress. But the best thing about it, as with anything to do with Dickens, was the characters. Every character in it is so alive that when you read them you can imagine them sitting next to you. Estella is my favourite: a young lady moulded by her ruthless guardian, Miss Havisham, into becoming a man-hating fiend, who'll go through life breaking hearts just to see the pain she can cause, all the while taking solace in the feeling that she has no heart of her own. Estella is doomed to live this life thanks to Miss Havisham's own heartbreak, which made her feel the need to "protect" Estella in such a way that, although she couldn't suffer the pain of Miss H, she could also experience none of the joy of life.

As I'd seen the time-travelling film Looper the night before, I couldn't help drawing parallels between the two. Great Expectations' characters are in a way very similar to those in Looper: fated to live out their existences in a seemingly unbreakable cycle, but forced through their lives by the weight of benefactors' expectations rather than following their own paths again and again as in Looper. In a way maybe Estella is a time traveller of sorts, doomed to live her life forever, in slightly different heart-breaking ways and in different bodies, as each woman in the chain is destroyed by love and passes on their loathing to the next generation, leaving their child cursed to make the same mistakes.