Themes from 'Klute'

Here are themes from the film 'Klute'

Klute is a 1971 crime thriller directed by Alan Pakula and starring Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, and Roy Schneider. 

Detective John Klute is hired to investigate the disappearance of Tom Grunemannn who is connected with the deaths of 2 New York prostitutes. The only clues to Grunemman’s disappearance are letters he sent to a New York call girl named Bree Daniels who also had contact with the man responsible for murdering the prostitutes connected with Grunemann’s disappearance. Bree is an aspiring actress who also suffers from insomnia because of a john that beat her a couple of years ago. She is also an expert at catering to men’s darkest fantasies. Not until she meets Klute does she realize that she also has a dark side and the closer Klute gets to her the blurrier the line between Bree and Peter Cable, the murderer, becomes. 

Acting

Bree Daniels, like Peter Cable, is an actor, hiding her true self behind a fabricated image.

Why Bree Daniels wants to be an actress

• To protect herself from feeling and being hurt
• She’s insecure with who she really is
• Having power of others’ feelings and perceptions makes her feel powerful
• She can’t remember the john that attacked her because she doesn’t want to experience or ‘feel’ the incident again. Acting is a metaphor of how she distances her emotions in relationships with men.

Why Bree feels uncomfortable with Klute

• He sees who she really is, without her makeup and phony confidence. He sees her afraid, vulnerable, weak, and insecure

Why Bree can’t land an acting job

• She can’t get an acting job because she shuts down her emotions when others are in control. But she is a great actress when she is in control of the situations such as when she caters to the fantasies of her johns.  

Peter Cable

Like Bree, Peter is also an actor who hides behind a make believe image. This is why the film reveals him as the killer early on and also why he doesn’t become a suspect until the end of the film. As a business executive, Cable is rational, professional, stable. Most of all, his decent image doesn’t match that of a maniac killing prostitutes. 

Bree shows her dark side

Fear

Underneath all the numbness, Bree is a human being and whenever she shows this side of herself she throws up a wall between her and Klute. This explains why she returns to Frank who represents a barrier of protection between feelings and those who can potentially hurt her. And this also explains why she uses heroin to hide feelings.

Bree is frightened by the feelings Klute brings out of her, weaknesses she is used to exposing in her clients.

Anger

Bree tells her therapist that she becomes angry at Klute for making her feel. This is why she stabs Klute with scissors. Cable’s anger comes out the same way. At the end of the film, he accuses Bree and the other whores of exposing his fantasies and weaknesses. “I was never fully aware of mine (his moral weaknesses), until you brought them out,” he tells her. 

Letting go of Inhibitions

Bree gets Cable to free his moral inhibitions and brings out his murderous tendencies. She does this by pretending that she cares about him the way she pretends to care about the commuter in the hotel:

• She asks the commuter what he wants and he whispers it in her ear, too shy to say it out loud. We never get to know what he wants but she says with a smile “That sounds fantastic.” 
• But when she stops to ask him for payment upfront, the commuter’s face changes to disappointment because he knows that Bree is only acting

Klute gets Bree to reveal her real self by simply caring for her. She needed someplace to sleep and he let her sleep at his place; he protects her; he accepts her despite her being a prostitute; he doesn’t judge her; he helps her kick her drug habit; he doesn’t leave her when she insults him and leaves him to run back to Frank twice!

In real life, people sometimes become violent when they find out that their partner or spouse is unfaithful. The person who opened themselves up feels deceived, tricked into believing something false. This is also an analogy explaining Peter Cable’s actions and Bree’s hostility towards Klute. Bree got Cable to show his dark side to her even though she cared nothing for him; on the other hand, Klute gets Bree to open up but unlike her his concern and feelings are real and in her world real concern is just part of the “hustle.” 

Money can’t buy love or friendship

Having gotten by by acting, Bree has no one she can talk to and be herself with. Neither her paid therapist nor her favorite john are available when she really needs them. In the end, it is Klute who saves her from Peter Cable.