In an age of horror movies which has seen impressive forays into arthouse directions and allegorical social metaphors (movies which I often adore), it can be nice to enjoy a horror story that's not so stylistically lofty or tonally alienating and is focused primarily on an intriguing weird scenario.
That's what I thought I was watching with The Autopsy of Jane Doe, a 2016 horror film by Norwegian director André Øvredal in his first English-language production. (Many will know him better for his later younger-audiences horror film Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, adapting the notorious books and illustrations of Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell, respectively.) But even though the story of Autopsy was a respectably entertaining supernatural mystery that welcomely never strayed or expanded too far past that initial intrigue, the compelling themes of the story sunk in very shortly after viewing, and since I haven't seen this film interpreted or talked about a lot before, I wanted to throw my analytical eye in to dissect a surprisingly vibrant script.
[Content warnings for this film and my review: themes of torture, depression, and sexual assault, clinical gore and nudity, pet death]
Summary
Tommy Tilden and his young son Austin are coroners in Virginia wrapping up an autopsy. At a crime scene with two grisly victims, however, a third body was discovered with no identification and no seeming relation to the deaths of the others. She was found nude and half-buried in the house's cellar, and there lingers the eerie implication that her discovery by the other inhabitants directly preceded their deaths. This body is taken to the Tildens' morgue for investigation, and the sheriff wants a cause of death determined before the morning. Tommy is fine to stay late at the morgue, but tells Austin to go with his girlfriend Emma for a night out they'd planned. Ultimately, Austin bails on his girlfriend, though, opting to stay behind with Tommy and promising to shift his plans with Emma to later that night.As autopsy proceedings begin, it's clear that Tommy treats his job in a more perfunctory manner, being uninterested in speculating about motive, psychology, or personal lives--all he needs to learn is what factor ended the body's life. Austin, however, is more caught up in the narrative of the person who died, asking questions about the circumstances of her death that Tommy has no particular interest in. As Tommy and Austin externally examine the nameless woman, designated with the generic name "Jane Doe" per medical/legal custom, they find a body that makes no sense to them.
The first clue that something is awry is that Jane's eyes (visible in the above poster) look more clouded and decayed than a dead body in Jane's condition should. Jane's skin is pale as death, but unblemished, intact, and supple, and her joints are still very mobile. Somehow, her eyes would suggest a death that took place further back, but her skin and joints make her seem very fresh. A fly crawls out of her nose, and blood follows (also visible in the poster).
Things become more alarming when Tommy and Austin discover that Jane's wrists and ankles are shattered under the skin. She has also been vaginally damaged. This suggests she was tortured and sexually assaulted, possibly as a sex trafficking victim, but the damage to her bones should have left serious marks upon her skin. They also discover that Jane's tongue has been crudely ripped out, suggesting the torture idea further, and that her waist seems unnaturally small. Peat, a northern type of soil not native to where Jane was discovered, has been found under her fingernails, and one of her molars is missing.
Once the coroners start to cut into Jane's torso, more blood flows, quite alarmingly fluid and fairly pressurized for a dead body, and we get our first hint of a supernatural presence. The boisterous rock music the Tildens have put on the radio abruptly changes to playing the retro song "Open Up Your Heart (And Let the Sunshine In)" and the drawers in the morgue start to open on their own.
As Tommy and Austin examine Jane's organs, they find more impossible injuries--scars on her heart and blackened lungs, as if Jane was burned and stabbed. Tommy is baffled, describing the situation as akin to finding a bullet in someone's brain without an entry wound. These injuries simply should have been indicated by Jane's exterior. Inside Jane's stomach, poisonous jimsonweed foreign to the area has been discovered, as well as a fabric scrap with ritual markings enclosing her missing molar--Jane was evidently forced to swallow the fabric containing her own tooth. It's noted that the fabric should have dissolved in Jane's stomach. Tommy also speculates upon internal examination that her unnatural waist shape was a deformation caused by corset usage. By this point, Tommy is still trying to work with this case and determine a cause of death even though he has to discard the impossibly good condition of Jane's exterior to form any kind of logical hypothesis.
More supernatural disturbances occur. The Tldens' cat is grievously attacked in the vents and Tommy has to put him out of his misery, quickly breaking the cat's neck before cremating him. (As a cat lover, it's probably the roughest scene to watch in the movie and I think it certainly could have been less on-camera if it was even necessary. It does serve a purpose of making Tommy start confronting the identities of the dead he works with and it establishes the presence of the crematory, but a more graceful depiction of the cat being put down would have been all okay with me!)
Things become more alarming when Tommy and Austin discover that Jane's wrists and ankles are shattered under the skin. She has also been vaginally damaged. This suggests she was tortured and sexually assaulted, possibly as a sex trafficking victim, but the damage to her bones should have left serious marks upon her skin. They also discover that Jane's tongue has been crudely ripped out, suggesting the torture idea further, and that her waist seems unnaturally small. Peat, a northern type of soil not native to where Jane was discovered, has been found under her fingernails, and one of her molars is missing.
Once the coroners start to cut into Jane's torso, more blood flows, quite alarmingly fluid and fairly pressurized for a dead body, and we get our first hint of a supernatural presence. The boisterous rock music the Tildens have put on the radio abruptly changes to playing the retro song "Open Up Your Heart (And Let the Sunshine In)" and the drawers in the morgue start to open on their own.
As Tommy and Austin examine Jane's organs, they find more impossible injuries--scars on her heart and blackened lungs, as if Jane was burned and stabbed. Tommy is baffled, describing the situation as akin to finding a bullet in someone's brain without an entry wound. These injuries simply should have been indicated by Jane's exterior. Inside Jane's stomach, poisonous jimsonweed foreign to the area has been discovered, as well as a fabric scrap with ritual markings enclosing her missing molar--Jane was evidently forced to swallow the fabric containing her own tooth. It's noted that the fabric should have dissolved in Jane's stomach. Tommy also speculates upon internal examination that her unnatural waist shape was a deformation caused by corset usage. By this point, Tommy is still trying to work with this case and determine a cause of death even though he has to discard the impossibly good condition of Jane's exterior to form any kind of logical hypothesis.
More supernatural disturbances occur. The Tldens' cat is grievously attacked in the vents and Tommy has to put him out of his misery, quickly breaking the cat's neck before cremating him. (As a cat lover, it's probably the roughest scene to watch in the movie and I think it certainly could have been less on-camera if it was even necessary. It does serve a purpose of making Tommy start confronting the identities of the dead he works with and it establishes the presence of the crematory, but a more graceful depiction of the cat being put down would have been all okay with me!)
The two resume the autopsy, and as Jane's abdominal flesh is turned open to reveal ritual tattoos on the underside of her skin, the lights shatter before the corpse drawers turn up empty, immediately convincing Tommy he's messing with the supernatural and getting him to give up on the autopsy. Then, a threatening storm seals them inside the basement mortuary when the elevator goes out and a sycamore falls on the external cellar doors. The other corpses reanimate and stalk the coroners and attack Tommy, but he is okay for the time being.
Tommy and Austin elect to destroy Jane's body, but are foiled. She has rendered the crematory inaccessible and their efforts to burn her with chemicals and a match set everything but the body on fire.
They try to flee to the elevator, only to find it not working. One of the corpses approaches and Tommy strikes it down with an axe, only for it to be revealed the figure was Austin's girlfriend and that Jane's spirit manipulated what they were seeing.
Distraught in the elevator, Tommy talks about his late wife, who everyone called Ray because she was a ray of sunshine. It turns out that Ray was suffering with depression for an extended period, but maintained such a sunny demeanor that Tommy was unable to notice her pain until she killed herself.
The coroners decide to go back and finish the autopsy. When they open Jane's head and take a piece of her brain, the view on the microscope disturbingly indicates Jane is still alive despite being entirely inert, heavily injured, and now clinically dissected. She has become one of the most metaphysically horrifying aberrations imaginable: a consciousness attached to a body that's more than 50% medically dead. It's like the furthest conceptual reach of the real locked-in syndrome disorder and the worst possible exaggeration of anesthesia awareness in one. She feels every step of the operation, and her autopsy is really, impossibly, a vivisection.
Tommy and Austin elect to destroy Jane's body, but are foiled. She has rendered the crematory inaccessible and their efforts to burn her with chemicals and a match set everything but the body on fire.
They try to flee to the elevator, only to find it not working. One of the corpses approaches and Tommy strikes it down with an axe, only for it to be revealed the figure was Austin's girlfriend and that Jane's spirit manipulated what they were seeing.
Distraught in the elevator, Tommy talks about his late wife, who everyone called Ray because she was a ray of sunshine. It turns out that Ray was suffering with depression for an extended period, but maintained such a sunny demeanor that Tommy was unable to notice her pain until she killed herself.
The coroners decide to go back and finish the autopsy. When they open Jane's head and take a piece of her brain, the view on the microscope disturbingly indicates Jane is still alive despite being entirely inert, heavily injured, and now clinically dissected. She has become one of the most metaphysically horrifying aberrations imaginable: a consciousness attached to a body that's more than 50% medically dead. It's like the furthest conceptual reach of the real locked-in syndrome disorder and the worst possible exaggeration of anesthesia awareness in one. She feels every step of the operation, and her autopsy is really, impossibly, a vivisection.
Austin then discovers the letters on the fabric scrap Jane swallowed overlap and spell out a Bible verse when the cloth is folded over itself, and the verse relates to the condemnation of witches. Jane comes from the Salem Witch Trials, explaining the corset deformation, and foreign soil and jimsonweed. [Well...kinda. The corset thing does not actually correspond with fashions of the time, but I give it a pass because it still works in a fun conceptual way as a reveal that she's super old and not just, like, goth]. The woman on the table was tortured for being labeled a witch, only for the ritual to trap her in stasis between life and death and grant her horrific supernatural powers. She has been, in some manner, conscious and sensate for the entire autopsy which has taken her apart in ways that would be unimaginably painful for a spirit still partially alive.
Tommy is horrified to learn Jane is still alive and at the fact that he has been subjecting her to another round of torture. He reaches out to Jane, speaking to her directly, and silently offers to take her pain, to suffer what she felt so she can be put to rest. Under his skin, he gradually starts to undergo the original tortures Jane did while the body on the table heals and closes up. The last mutilation he needs to suffer is the removal of the tongue, but as Tommy gestures to the scalpel, Austin takes it and plunges it into Tommy's chest to end his suffering.
Austin hears rescuers, but they turn out to be manifestations of Jane's spirit, and a vision of Tommy's corpse causes Austin to stumble back off a balcony and die. The weather looks beautiful and the radio proclaims it's another of several days of sunshine as the sheriff wisely orders Jane's body out of his county. On the car ride, she changes the radio to her favorite song and her toe wiggles.
Tommy is horrified to learn Jane is still alive and at the fact that he has been subjecting her to another round of torture. He reaches out to Jane, speaking to her directly, and silently offers to take her pain, to suffer what she felt so she can be put to rest. Under his skin, he gradually starts to undergo the original tortures Jane did while the body on the table heals and closes up. The last mutilation he needs to suffer is the removal of the tongue, but as Tommy gestures to the scalpel, Austin takes it and plunges it into Tommy's chest to end his suffering.
Austin hears rescuers, but they turn out to be manifestations of Jane's spirit, and a vision of Tommy's corpse causes Austin to stumble back off a balcony and die. The weather looks beautiful and the radio proclaims it's another of several days of sunshine as the sheriff wisely orders Jane's body out of his county. On the car ride, she changes the radio to her favorite song and her toe wiggles.
Analysis
The film is a pretty clear commentary on misogyny and the abuse and ignorance of pain that affects women. It's obvious down to the title: the unidentified impossible body was deliberately chosen to be a woman, and her ultimate nature is that she's a victim of the Salem Witch Trials, a time period defined by structured misogynist paranoia, abuse, and torture. While Jane has become a monster with dangerous powers, the narrative throws sympathy to her and ultimately discusses the unjust imperfection of society in recognizing pain and crimes that women suffer.A Jane Doe could not be a more apt symbol for unrecognized female suffering. Socially and legally, the Jane Doe is a woman almost erased. A dead person who cannot speak for herself, often a targeted victim of violence, and a person who has lost her name, identification, and advocacy, internally and externally. It is important that the body in the film is as silenced as possible (dead and inert with her tongue being removed beforehand) but still manages to tell her story and achieve empathy from her lead coroner. A far lesser horror film would have shown Jane shifting positions and moving onscreen early and often, and one of the film's greatest strengths both in compelling atmosphere and in theme is the choice to keep Jane inert. She only moves at the last second, and even that is done with beautiful restraint. The filmmakers perfectly understood that Jane could be a presence and a force, a supernatural threat and a tortured human, without indulging in cheap shots of the body moving.
Jane was tortured and lost before the film, but the entirety of the film also depicts Jane undergoing a torture unnoticed--the coroners are causing Jane agony with every incision and dissection they perform, unaware she is conscious and supernaturally alive and sensate. Her revenge makes sense as a woman scorned in the past and also in the present, and this is why Tommy offers to take her pain from her. He is not just addressing the sins of his forefathers--he is atoning for the pain he has caused and failed to see in Jane, as well as the pain he failed to see in his wife. It's a genuine sacrifice that almost wins Jane's favor and gives her peace…but Austin prioritizes his father and acts to end his suffering before the debt to Jane can be fully repaid, denying her full rest. Even when one man fully sees a woman's pain and achieves empathy that can help her heal, another can take it away.
The two men also have reversed paths of character development--Tommy starts off perfunctory and only interested in the mechanics of death before gaining true empathy into the circumstances of death and the personhood of the victim, while Austin starts off interested in the story of a death while ending up willfully blind to Jane's pain and personhood in favor of helping his father, damning him to his own imminent death. Both also lose someone to Jane in a way that they react oppositely from--Tommy loses his cat, but this opens him up to considering the life and pain of the deceased and he turns to Jane with openness once he understands her plight. Austin, meanwhile, loses his girlfriend to Jane, at the hands of his father, no less, but this loss causes him to lose any sympathy for Jane and try to save his father. I think Austin's turn is foreshadowed well, though--when given the opportunity to be with his girlfriend for a nice night or to help his father by working late, he snubs her by choosing to work with Tommy, therefore showing his allegiance will be foremost to the other man in the story, rather than to the woman who wants his acknowledgment. Even when the other man shakes him by inadvertently killing the woman he loves, Austin stands by the man, thereby turning on both women in the story.
It has been debated whether Jane was a malicious witch before her torture, but the film's thesis and the in-story hypothesis from Tommy points toward her vengeance and powers deriving solely from being an innocent target of a ritual that transformed her. It wouldn't suit the message of looking past a veneer of calm to find someone's struggles, the themes of listening to and helping women, if Jane's fate was remotely justifiable. On the surface narrative, that might be ambiguous, but looking into the theme seems to roundly prove she was innocent and mundane before her torture. And this is why theme and subtext is extremely important to narrative interpretation, because it establishes the ethos, message, and intent of a work and can clear up surface ambiguities in the events that take place. Recognizing the story theme of victimhood and disguised suffering in Autopsy means it simply does not and should not make sense to view Jane as having been tortured and transformed for any good reason.
It has been debated whether Jane was a malicious witch before her torture, but the film's thesis and the in-story hypothesis from Tommy points toward her vengeance and powers deriving solely from being an innocent target of a ritual that transformed her. It wouldn't suit the message of looking past a veneer of calm to find someone's struggles, the themes of listening to and helping women, if Jane's fate was remotely justifiable. On the surface narrative, that might be ambiguous, but looking into the theme seems to roundly prove she was innocent and mundane before her torture. And this is why theme and subtext is extremely important to narrative interpretation, because it establishes the ethos, message, and intent of a work and can clear up surface ambiguities in the events that take place. Recognizing the story theme of victimhood and disguised suffering in Autopsy means it simply does not and should not make sense to view Jane as having been tortured and transformed for any good reason.
I'll confess to falling under the same fallacies as the characters, though. Until the reveal, my two hypotheses for what Jane was were that she was never human and she was put down, however temporarily, by people who genuinely needed to protect themselves, or that her body had become possessed by a demon who was antagonizing the coroners for destroying its vessel. While I was correct the spirit did not want the body to be physically cut open and taken apart, my read on it wasn't sympathetic or empathetic. The further the story developed, the further I felt from seeing Jane as tragic, even though her victim status, proposed from the very start, never actually ceased to be true. I got close to the truth but missed the view that she was suffering rather than malicious. To be sure, the film plays into tropes of malevolent spirits that aren't going to direct your guesses to be very charitable to Jane, and like Austin, the death of Emma is likely to make you think she's a total monster, but it works to make you go through that realization that Jane is hurting and has been the whole time.
I also respect a message that isn't undermined by production. The role of Jane Doe is an inert, silent, mostly dead nude woman who was the victim of misogynist abuse, and is taken apart by men, but surprisingly, to me, she overcomes those massive hurdles and avoids feeling objectified and disrespected by the work. Very notably and impressively, she's portrayed by an actress, Olwen Kelly, the whole time, which lends her more presence and power on the screen. Kelly being the body helps to make Jane feel aware, aiding both the supernatural twist and the message. Jane's face anchors several shots in the film (and the poster) to keep her as active and emotive as a motionless body can be. Jane never feels absent. She's framed as a driving force and not just dead matter. Making a dummy to portray the corpse would be to literally objectify the character and spoil the human element the story strives to illuminate in her. It wouldn't look as real or give Jane as much power had she not been portrayed by a real person.
I also respect a message that isn't undermined by production. The role of Jane Doe is an inert, silent, mostly dead nude woman who was the victim of misogynist abuse, and is taken apart by men, but surprisingly, to me, she overcomes those massive hurdles and avoids feeling objectified and disrespected by the work. Very notably and impressively, she's portrayed by an actress, Olwen Kelly, the whole time, which lends her more presence and power on the screen. Kelly being the body helps to make Jane feel aware, aiding both the supernatural twist and the message. Jane's face anchors several shots in the film (and the poster) to keep her as active and emotive as a motionless body can be. Jane never feels absent. She's framed as a driving force and not just dead matter. Making a dummy to portray the corpse would be to literally objectify the character and spoil the human element the story strives to illuminate in her. It wouldn't look as real or give Jane as much power had she not been portrayed by a real person.
Having a real woman there also implicitly lends her voice to the proceedings. Olwen Kelly was present onscreen and could maintain agency on the portrayal of Jane. The nudity of the body is also not sexualized. Jane is not made to be eroticized and is more clinically shot by the camera. Despite partially being a sexual assault victim, the autopsy torture she undergoes during the film is not framed as triggering misogynist violence--it is torture and it does harm her, but the worst and most upsetting of her ordeals is a past event that is not depicted onscreen in any form beside the remaining damage the coroners discover. The film doesn't feel exploitative of Jane as it explores her trauma and undiscovered pain.
(Even though Autopsy is not an art horror film, Jane Doe herself is a candidate for one of the most "arthouse" character performances in all of horror. Olwen Kelly acts in the nude for a whole movie, performing primarily by doing nothing, and it's an incredible execution of a truly challenging role. CGI assisted her, sure, but Kelly had to put in a lot of the effort herself to portray a believably lifeless body and success with a challenge like that is laudable. She deserves so much credit for her work and I mean that with complete sincerity.)
Let's go into the last aspect of theme which I was very pleased to have noticed, as it fully spells out the message--the danger of sunshine.
Let's go into the last aspect of theme which I was very pleased to have noticed, as it fully spells out the message--the danger of sunshine.
I picked up while watching that "sunshine" was the most prominent symbolic word in the script, and every time, it appears to refer to a veneer of calm or happiness that other people don't realize is covering serious pain and issues--an obstructive veneer that deserves to be subverted so good can be done.
The first time we hear it used is when Jane takes the aux cord and plays "Open Up Your Heart (And Let the Sunshine In)" for the first time. The song is a twee 1950s/60s positivity anthem which can easily be seen as naïve and obnoxious in the way any song telling people to be happy can be. Nobody likes to be told to cheer up, and it's very easy to hear the word "just" hidden at the start of any "be happy" mantra. It's certainly with intentional irony that Jane chooses to play the song. It almost sounds like a rightfully bitter woman parroting a sexist microaggression--the song could echo the tone of "you should smile more", a sentiment commonly used by men who don't want women to be complicated and emotional, or, in other words, don't want to have to invest in and question what matters to women. A bitter spirit using the song seems to direct us to the thematic idea of it being possible to fake happiness or calm, or the idea that unconditional positivity is unnatural and wrong. An unsettlingly cheerful song that says to look away from those nasty downer thoughts matches well with a body who hides serious alarming problems under an untouched skin. And it's Jane's outer appearance that has to be dismissed for the Tildens to figure this out and recognize her pain. Her problems are only visible once the Tildens look under the skin, and her story only makes sense and approaches the truth when Tommy's hypothesizing discards the factor of her external appearance outright. Rather than ignoring a glaring flaw in the theory, it turns out Tommy is actually doing the exact right thing by speculating without that factor in play, because Jane's external appearance is a direct obstruction to the truth of what happened to her--it's a pleasant visual, an unnatural sunshine, that needs to be looked past to help her.
The first time we hear it used is when Jane takes the aux cord and plays "Open Up Your Heart (And Let the Sunshine In)" for the first time. The song is a twee 1950s/60s positivity anthem which can easily be seen as naïve and obnoxious in the way any song telling people to be happy can be. Nobody likes to be told to cheer up, and it's very easy to hear the word "just" hidden at the start of any "be happy" mantra. It's certainly with intentional irony that Jane chooses to play the song. It almost sounds like a rightfully bitter woman parroting a sexist microaggression--the song could echo the tone of "you should smile more", a sentiment commonly used by men who don't want women to be complicated and emotional, or, in other words, don't want to have to invest in and question what matters to women. A bitter spirit using the song seems to direct us to the thematic idea of it being possible to fake happiness or calm, or the idea that unconditional positivity is unnatural and wrong. An unsettlingly cheerful song that says to look away from those nasty downer thoughts matches well with a body who hides serious alarming problems under an untouched skin. And it's Jane's outer appearance that has to be dismissed for the Tildens to figure this out and recognize her pain. Her problems are only visible once the Tildens look under the skin, and her story only makes sense and approaches the truth when Tommy's hypothesizing discards the factor of her external appearance outright. Rather than ignoring a glaring flaw in the theory, it turns out Tommy is actually doing the exact right thing by speculating without that factor in play, because Jane's external appearance is a direct obstruction to the truth of what happened to her--it's a pleasant visual, an unnatural sunshine, that needs to be looked past to help her.
[Side tangent: this is my second time encountering this song and it's the second time it freaked me out. I've had the song burned into my brain, against my will, since my childhood. I heard it featured in an episode of The Flintstones, which my mom got me into. The episode features a plot about the toddler characters Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm turning out to secretly be able to sing this song (they don't otherwise speak) and they get famous for performing "Let the Sunshine In" on television.
(I won't rest until someone agrees this scenario is horrifying.)
At the end, Fred Flintstone wakes up, revealing it was all a dream, and he is relieved his baby Pebbles is just an ordinary toddler and not growing up too fast. I was distraught by the portrayal of the babies as secret singers; it was such a freaky idea to me (remember, this scenario was presented as reality for most of the episode), and for whatever reason, at the time I thought it was the final episode of the entire series, which gave me major whiplash and upset me further. I don't know why, when it was apparently the first episode of the last season, but somewhere either the DVD collection or my viewing order back then gave me the impression it was the last episode and it devastated me.
So yeah. I will never look sweetly upon that song. Good choice, Autopsy.]
"Sunshine" makes its next unique appearance with the discussion of Tommy's wife. Ray, short for "ray of sunshine", was suffering with depression that killed her before anyone could notice, and her behavior masked it so well that everyone thought she was still happy. Ray was another woman who looked fine on the surface like Jane, but something should have been done to probe through that veneer and recognize her pain. Ray also shows someone who was actively harmed by shutting down the negativity and "facing it with a grin". Had she communicated her distress and pain to people, she could have been helped. Her positive demeanor obstructed her and those who loved her from preventing her suicide. Ray's story directly illustrates that the sunny philosophy within the song Jane plays isn't balanced or healthy. It's an unfortunately common reality that suicidal people simply aren't recognized quickly enough to help them, and while they may deliberately obscure their struggle, there is always going to be a sense of responsibility for the people around who didn't look deeper or accepted a happy face and failed to notice their issues.
Finally, at the end of the film, the radio claims it's been several consecutive days of sunshine, despite this contradicting what we experienced with the cast. It's likely the radio isn't incorrect, per se. We never left the building for a single camera shot during the storm to be sure the scary weather was truly occurring outside, and it's established that Jane can warp people's perceptions. However, to me, this discrepancy doesn't mean the storm, and importantly, the imprisonment the coroners were undergoing weren't real…but they were things that only the Tildens could perceive. I think how it worked was that anybody visiting the scene, like Austin's girlfriend Emma did, would have observed no hostile weather and no cause for alarm while the coroners were suffering. Jane put them in an invisible hell just like the ones she and Ray Tilden had suffered. But when you think about it, several consecutive days of pure sunshine (what everyone else saw) is a little weird, isn't it? The specific number given of four consecutive days is kind of the perfect number, because that's probably the precise point where repetitive weather would turn into monotony, unwelcomeness, or suspicion for most. But for really nice weather, why question it? That's how a storm can rage under the surface.
"Sunshine" makes its next unique appearance with the discussion of Tommy's wife. Ray, short for "ray of sunshine", was suffering with depression that killed her before anyone could notice, and her behavior masked it so well that everyone thought she was still happy. Ray was another woman who looked fine on the surface like Jane, but something should have been done to probe through that veneer and recognize her pain. Ray also shows someone who was actively harmed by shutting down the negativity and "facing it with a grin". Had she communicated her distress and pain to people, she could have been helped. Her positive demeanor obstructed her and those who loved her from preventing her suicide. Ray's story directly illustrates that the sunny philosophy within the song Jane plays isn't balanced or healthy. It's an unfortunately common reality that suicidal people simply aren't recognized quickly enough to help them, and while they may deliberately obscure their struggle, there is always going to be a sense of responsibility for the people around who didn't look deeper or accepted a happy face and failed to notice their issues.
Finally, at the end of the film, the radio claims it's been several consecutive days of sunshine, despite this contradicting what we experienced with the cast. It's likely the radio isn't incorrect, per se. We never left the building for a single camera shot during the storm to be sure the scary weather was truly occurring outside, and it's established that Jane can warp people's perceptions. However, to me, this discrepancy doesn't mean the storm, and importantly, the imprisonment the coroners were undergoing weren't real…but they were things that only the Tildens could perceive. I think how it worked was that anybody visiting the scene, like Austin's girlfriend Emma did, would have observed no hostile weather and no cause for alarm while the coroners were suffering. Jane put them in an invisible hell just like the ones she and Ray Tilden had suffered. But when you think about it, several consecutive days of pure sunshine (what everyone else saw) is a little weird, isn't it? The specific number given of four consecutive days is kind of the perfect number, because that's probably the precise point where repetitive weather would turn into monotony, unwelcomeness, or suspicion for most. But for really nice weather, why question it? That's how a storm can rage under the surface.
In all of these cases, (a blindingly cheery song, a woman with a constant happy demeanor, a body in shockingly good condition, and several consecutive days of pure sun) something pleasant on the surface is weird in its manifestation and turns out to be an obstruction to a vital darker truth. Nobody should smile all the time. Weather ought to change. Internally damaged bodies shouldn't be in good outward condition. But these are nice things to perceive, so it's easy to not push at them and look under the surface. Why would we want our songs sad, women complicated, weather messy, and corpses disgusting?
Well, it's not about what we want. It's about reality. And in The Autopsy of Jane Doe, we see just how the sunshine blocks out the problems, particularly facing women, that need to be acknowledged. Solving these problems and having empathy for the suffering isn't going to be easy on us. It's much easier for us to not probe into the issue and take on the pain for ourselves. Helping people through trauma and depression is intense and difficult and hurts us, but it is right and just and failing to follow through will leave the original sufferer trapped where they are.
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