Diksha Sundriyal
In ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,’ Linda goes through an emotional and mental rollercoaster while caring for her daughter, who has a feeding disorder. Throughout the film, the circumstances take a turn for the worse. A giant hole appears in the ceiling of her house, forcing her to move with her daughter to a motel. Her therapist becomes exasperated to the point that he decides to drop her as a patient, leaving her unable to talk about her problems with anyone. Her husband is a captain on a ship and is going to be away for the next few weeks. He talks with her over the phone, but it doesn’t look like he empathizes with her situation. All this starts to take a toll on Linda, and in the end, we watch her run into the ocean as she tries to drown herself. The film ends on a note that leaves space for ambiguity about what actually happened to Linda. SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Ending Leaves More Questions Than Answers For Linda
Things reach a breaking point for Linda when she decides to remove her daughter’s feeding tube, something she had been trying to do for a long time. When the tube is removed, she hallucinates the hole in her daughter’s belly healing and closing immediately. She somehow connects it to the hole in the ceiling of her house, and when she goes back, she discovers that the hole has been closed up. Her husband, Charles, suddenly decided to come back, saying that he couldn’t help thinking about her and their daughter and the hole, so he decided to have it fixed. Now that the job is done, he wishes to go back to their daughter, and Linda lies that she left her with a babysitter.
At the motel, Linda tries to stall, but when Charles enters the room, he finds James there and believes him to be the babysitter. Instead of going forward with Linda’s lies, James tells the truth about how the girl had been crying and bleeding, and he was just trying to calm her down because she was scared of being left alone by her mother. Realising that not only did Linda remove the tube on her own, but she also left their daughter alone for such a long stretch of time angers Charles. The guilt doesn’t escape Linda, and with her husband there to take care of their daughter, she finally snaps and runs towards the ocean. It is clear that she doesn’t want to keep doing this.
She doesn’t want to get worse while not being able to see her daughter as something more than a responsibility that has been pushed on her, and which keeps dragging her down. She wants an escape from all this, and the only thing that can happen is dying. She saw Caroline do the same, and decided to wade into the waters, hoping never to come back again. But when she meets the waves, they serve as a wall, pushing her back instead of taking her in. Despite her repeated attempts, the waves throw her back, until she is back on the land. She sees a tunnel with weird light and several voices, one of which is her daughter’s. When she wakes up, she sees her daughter’s face and promises to be better. This shows that she has survived, but there could be more to the story.
The Daughter’s Face Shows Progress for Linda
For director Mary Bornstein, ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’ has a hopeful ending. The part where we finally see the daughter’s face indicates that Linda has finally started to see the girl as her daughter, a human being who is much more than the source of irritation Linda had been perceiving her as. The innocence on the child’s face reminds her and the audience that she is just that, a child, and is going through something difficult, which doesn’t take away from Linda’s journey while also not making things any easier for her. As she hears her daughter’s voice call her back to consciousness and she sees the girl’s face, she is reminded of the love that she is fighting for and that she cannot fight until she is better, so she promises her daughter she will be better.
For an optimist, the ending suggests that nature pushed against Linda’s efforts to kill herself. The waves literally pushed her back, as if telling her that running away is not an option and she must confront her problems in order to move on. It’s nature telling her that she should stop fighting and focus on things other than herself. She has been wound up too tightly inside her own head to gain a wider perspective of the surroundings, especially the people, including her daughter. Thus, the end suggests that Linda has not only survived her suicide attempt, but has also woken up to the reality with a changed perspective where she will try to get better this time and be there for her daughter the best she can.
The Final Shot May Represent Linda’s Final Vision
While this sounds pretty good for Linda, one can’t help but wonder how and why the girl is alone at the beach. We know that Linda had taken out her feeding tube and she wasn’t doing very well when James, and later, her parents found her. So, her suddenly appearing at the beach, with no other adult, especially her father, in sight becomes kind of questionable. Moreover, when the waves hit her hard, she collapses and sees weird lights and hears uncanny sounds, which recurr in the movie under different circumstances. This could indicate that the waves lost and Linda actually drowned. This would explain how her daughter is suddenly there. Perhaps Linda died, and now, she is seeing things that she regretted or wished she had done better.
Being better with her daughter would definitely be on the top of the list, which is why her daughter is the only person she sees. In her mind, death was the only way she could be better, and now that she is dead, things are going to get better. This is also why she is able to see her daughter’s face, because in death, her daughter is not a burden for her anymore. She is the girl she gave birth to, the child she loved dearly before the pressure of caregiving took its toll on her.
The daughter smiling at her is like death smiling and welcoming her with open arms to what Linda might consider bliss now that she is relieved of the burden of life. Still, given all that she has been through, it would be more hopeful to believe that it is her actual daughter. The reason that she sees only her and not her husband or anyone else is because she is seeing the girl clearly for the first time in a long time, and that’s the only thing in her focus, giving her a renewed sense of purpose against death.
Read More: What is the Name of Linda’s Daughter? Why is Her Face Not Shown in If I Had Legs I’d Kick You?
