What Lies Beneath: Mercy as a Cultural Muse and Why She Had to Die

Scott Caan’s film Mercy (2010) is often described as a romance, but I believe the film reaches beyond that, and at its heart, is more rightly understood as one man’s struggle with identity.

While there is a romance at the core of the film, the crux of the story is an exploration of the interconnectivity between people and how they understand themselves and their place in the world. At the center of this exploration is Johnny Ryan (Scott Caan), a writer of romance novels who doesn’t believe in love. “I write about love as I see it. Fantasy. Fable. It’s called fiction for a reason it doesn’t really exist.”

But what is fiction and what is fable comes into question when Johnny meets Mercy (Wendy Glenn) and falls in love.

The film is divided into three parts: Before Mercy, With Mercy and After Mercy. All three parts are woven together in a tangled non-linear structure that gives viewers only glimpses into Johnny and Mercy’s life together. We see them fall in love. And then we see Johnny reacting to her absence. How we interpret the missing pieces, how we perceive in what manner Mercy might have broken Johnny’s heart, reveals a great deal about the viewer’s own assumptions about what a romantic narrative looks like and how we expect those narratives to end.

The movie opens with no words, just a vision of two people obviously in love. It is an idyllic scene complete with the giving and accepting of a ring. At the same time, it’s informed by a musical backdrop that dips repeatedly into minor keys, an indication that while momentous, this particular moment in time is not what the movie is ultimately building to, nor one that is going to last. The melancholy undertone the biggest clue that a “happily ever after” most likely won’t be found here. Even before the romance has started, we’re already anticipating its end.

The first words we hear Johnny speak, indeed the very first piece of dialogue in the movie, sums up Johnny’s feelings about romantic entanglements and sets the stage for his journey to follow. In reference to the woman who’d shared his bed the night before, he says, “She left. Good girl. I love it when they leave.” From the scene before, we already know Johnny is going to rue the day he ever said those words. But at this point in time, before Mercy, Johnny bases a woman’s worth on their sexual availability and emotional detachment. Her willingness to leave when the sex is done with no expectation of a future.

This scene is immediately followed by Johnny’s friend Erik (John Boyd) relaying the story of how he drove through the night to find his ex girlfriend, who he’s positive is “the one,” in an attempt to put their broken relationship back together. Erik clings desperately to that which Johnny has disavowed—the notion of true love, the culturally familiar origin myth as told by Aristophanes in The Symposium that states people spend their lives searching for their lost other halves. The Yin to their Yang. The one person who completes them and makes them whole, i.e. the very backbone of most romantic fiction.

There’s something important I want to state here. In this film, investment in the trope of romantic love is not gender specific. Women are not hardwired through their DNA to be invested in love and marriage. Men do not by nature view marriage as a ball and chain. Johnny wants no strings attached sex. Erik pines for love. This may seem obvious. But in my experience, it’s pretty rare to find such open awareness that these ideas are constructed, not biological imperatives. It is always a delight to see Caan dive straight into complexities rather than accept the status quo. And it makes his work far more interesting to analyze than more mainstream film and fiction.

Johnny is a man who believes in free choice. His life story speaks to the myth of individualism and the self made man. As related by his friend Dane (Troy Garrity), Johnny chose to stop drinking. He chose to stop being a menace to society. He chose to write. He chose success. Johnny believes that men and women act on their own agency. Their decisions are theirs alone. If a woman sleeps with him, it’s because she wants to - her choice. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter to him if she says yes or if she says no. If she doesn’t want to, he’ll just move on to someone who will. For Johnny, before Mercy, life is not complicated.

Johnny never considers the possibility that it is in fact the actions, beliefs and influences of others that have spun him down the path he’s walking. It doesn’t occur to him to dig into the reasons why he prefers to maintain emotional detachment from women, why, to put it crassly, he prefers to fuck women, rather than talk to them. Why, as Johnny explains it, women’s speech is garbled gibberish, unintelligible to his ear. Chris (Alexie Gilmore), Dane’s wife, is the only woman he appears to engage with on an intellectual level.

Enter Mercy. She’s unimpressed by Johnny’s suave and wheedling flirtations. She’s assertive and sure of herself. Uninterested in hooking up and “getting intimate.” And perhaps most significantly, unapologetic for it.

Caan does not judge or shame Mercy for possessing these character traits, traits which have, culturally speaking, often been used to signify a woman as unfeminine, and therefore unworthy. Traits that have marked that character an easy target for mockery. But here, Mercy is a benchmark in the film, a guide for the possibility of what could and should be.

He also cleverly pokes fun at the cultural unease with women and anger. While Johnny’s latest romance novel gets rave reviews from the Hollywood trades and major newspapers—the gatekeepers and purveyors of cultural norms, there’s one bash. One lone voice that stands out. It floors Johnny even as Jake (Dylan McDermott), Johnny’s agent, urges him to ignore it.

“Was it written by a woman?” Jake asks. [He nods knowingly] “It was. Written by an angry woman.”

There is no easier way to dismiss a woman than to accuse her of anger. It implies lack of self control. Dismisses her as overly emotional, unstable, and irrational. It is the ultimate in verbally shaming a woman into silence.

Except Mercy is not silenced and it’s Jake who is summarily dismissed as Johnny runs off to face his “accuser” and ends up listening to what she has to say, even making a “date” so he can hear more. It may be the first time Johnny has ever made plans with a woman to simply have a discussion, and no one is more stunned than Johnny himself. He suddenly finds himself engaging in the very unfamiliar act of self-reflection.

“Talk,” Mercy prods Johnny. “Who are you?”

And for the first time Johnny begins to truly explore the underpinnings of his own history. To tease out the things in his past that helped make him who he is. To understand that everything from his perception of women to his disbelief in love are constructions. So Johnny, as he begins writing a new book, begins the process of rewriting his own life. That process shifts the ground beneath his feet and makes his life before Mercy one to which he can’t return. Perhaps even more importantly, one he has no desire to.

Just as Johnny and Mercy are becoming a couple, as Johnny is tentatively embracing the new path Mercy has shown him, the movie time shifts. Johnny, who was happy one frame, is bitter, angry and depressed in the next.

We are given one cue as to what might have happened. As Johnny’s sitting in a bar, aggressively interrogating the bartender about his love life, the bartender responds by guessing, “What happened, your girl left you? Clocking someone else, huh?”

Johnny responds by assaulting the bartender, landing himself in jail. When Dane bails him out, Johnny finally breaks down, admitting that he misses her and that he no longer knows what he’s doing.

This particular time shift plays with absence, most especially Mercy’s absence and its lack of context. Her name is never spoken, her existence barely referred to. Where Mercy is concerned, the voices of Johnny and his friends are largely silent. The bartender is, in fact, the only character to venture an explanation. And it’s one that calls back the very origin story of Johnny’s misogyny. Women are not to be trusted. Love is a lie.

There is no doubt that Johnny’s life has been shattered. The carefree player we met in the beginning is gone. But the absence of that Johnny is not something we, or he, mourns. In fact, if anything, this particular time stamp lays bare the void that already existed in that life. Earlier in the film we met Heather (Whitney Able), a cocktail waitress Johnny had been heavily flirting with for weeks, the culmination of which fell through when Heather witnessed Johnny flirting with Mercy. 

When we first met Heather, she was “sweet” and “innocent.” What one might generally term a “good” girl. She was charmed by Johnny’s attention and eventually swayed by his persistence. But when she realized Johnny’s attention wasn’t meaningful, she was surprised and crushed. You probably recognize her—she’s the girl who plays the lead in most romantic narratives, the girl who turns the “bad boy” good.

But when Johnny runs into her again, she’s a changed woman. She’s fully absorbed the societal imperative that her value is based solely upon her body and sexuality. Heather is the woman Johnny had desired, but he’s no longer the man who can enjoy her. But just as Heather’s value is based upon her sexual availability, so is Johnny’s, and in this regard, he is sorely lacking. Their attempt at sex is an utter failure.

Heather is flabbergasted. In disbelief she mutters, “That’s a first.”

But when Johnny turns to her and demands, “What’d you just say?” Heather stares straight back and says, “Nothing.”

With nothing to say to each other, Johnny leaves, and turns his back on that version of himself for good.

It’s at this turning point in Johnny’s life that he meets Robin (Erika Christensen), a friend of Chris and Dane’s. Like Mercy she’s assertive and smart. And while this meeting is most definitely a set up on Chris’ part, it serves a larger purpose within the film’s narrative, for it’s in Johnny’s reaction to Robin’s story about the death of her husband, in his outpouring of grief-fueled anger, that we’re finally given a glimpse of how the gaps within Mercy and Johnny’s story will be filled. 

But Johnny’s journey isn’t finished. There’s still a wolf at the door. One man who has haunted Johnny’s story from the beginning: his father. When we are introduced to Gerry Ryan (James Caan), Gerry has already met Mercy, and it becomes clear that Johnny has visited his father again with one purpose in mind, to hear what his father will say when he finds out Mercy is gone.

Introducing Gerry in the after Mercy timestamp exposes the monster lurking in the shadows. Gerry’s words call back Johnny’s assertion early in the film that love is a fiction, and because love is a fiction, women have no intrinsic value.

“To the inevitable,” Gerry says in toast to Mercy’s absence. “The truth…you did seem happy. I didn’t want to say anything because I knew sooner or later you would find out. It’s just not going to work. The funny thing is that I almost believed you. I almost remembered feeling the way you felt about your mother. You know the feeling, that everything, one way or another, is going to be just swell, just as long as we have each other. But yet, here we are. Love is a myth. Unfortunately it does not exist.”

Of course, Gerry is not wrong. Love is a fiction, so overwritten by cultural values that even Gerry’s language is cliché. Traditionally speaking marriage, children, family: these are the endgames of romantic love. It is not Gerry’s indictment of love that’s a problem. It’s the way that indictment was turned against women, as if the collapse of that mythology was her fault and hers alone. But it doesn’t question the myth itself. Gerry’s anger stems more from the fact the myth was stolen from him by Woman’s betrayal than that the myth was never real to begin with.

In the next scene, Caan pulls us back into the past to watch the final act of Johnny and Mercy’s love play out. They are beautiful and their love is beautiful, and Johnny takes Mercy to meet his father, to show him that he was wrong. That they were wrong. Love does exist and it’s a beautiful thing, even if Johnny can’t explain it.

“She is the last thing I ever wanted, and since meeting her I wouldn’t be able to tell you who I was without her.”

Gerry is unconvinced, but he is charming to Mercy nonetheless. But it’s a charm that has lost its allure. In the shadow of Gerry’s misogyny, his casual flirtations are hollow at best. But watching Gerry interact with Mercy is like watching Johnny before he met her. It is easily apparent just how much Johnny was Gerry’s son. It brings into sharp relief the power fathers exert over their sons. And how easy it is to not recognize that one’s identity is not autonomous, but immersed in the belief systems of those closest to us.

If the movie ended here, with Johnny giving Mercy a ring, walking down the traditional path of marriage, we’d still see Johnny turning his back on his father’s misogyny, of making a remarkable inroad to not repeating the cultural oppressions of the past.

But it doesn’t. Mercy dies. And we see Johnny spin in an entirely new direction. Though he’s angry and confused, he doesn’t fall back into his old life. He is a man without a mooring, his sense of self completely shattered. Not just facing the question of whether or not love is a myth, but engaging with the possibility that life has no meaning. This is the path to nihilism and despair.

When Johnny returns to his father after Mercy’s death, he’s standing on that crossroads. He’s looking for meaning.

“The minute you catch yourself thinking that it [love] does [exist]…well, it’s just a question of time before you realize the hard fact of life. We just don’t mix. Fuck her son. Fuck her wherever she is. So deeply filled with sorrow and regret…but… Fuck your mother too.”

When Gerry gives Johnny’s loss the same narrative structure as his own, it draws into stark relief its artificiality. Gerry treats his belief as a universal truth. But here’s the thing: That’s a choice. The fact that choices are rarely free does not negate that choice exists.

And recognizing that your choices, your identity, is wholly tied to cultural/personal influences does not negate the need for identity. And identities are never born in vacuums. They are bound to language, to names, in the ability to comprehend the world around us. This is exactly why the systemic displays of sexism and racism and homophobia are the hardest to combat—because they are the hardest to see. They’ve been so naturalized and normalized by culture we can’t even recognize them for what they are: these are cultural constructions that can be named and refused.

In losing Mercy, Johnny is unable to move simply from one cultural norm (the misogynistic playboy individualist) to another (true love and marriage). Johnny moves into a space that is something else altogether. His life doesn’t end with Mercy.

After confronting his father he stands on the shore, watching the sun rise, his face bathed in light. For the first time in his existence he is fully conscious and aware. The man he was before Mercy is gone. He’s a man who now writes books that demand people think. He’s done with shallow and popcorn endings. And while there are plenty of people who have no interest in engaging with a work of depth, there are those, like Robin, who will. Who want to talk and discuss and communicate. It is not a given when Johnny and Robin walk off together into the night at the end of the movie that they are destined to be together. They are two people engaging in dialogue, and while the pull of the romantic in me is strong, and the thought of Johnny and Robin together makes me smile, the movie leaves its characters’ lives a question. And leaves us pondering the narratives that inform our own lives.

I can’t bring this to a close without commenting on the powerful performances in the film. There is not one weak link in this cast, both Caans and Troy Garrity in particular give standout performances. The film is also beautifully edited and scored, and the director, Patrick Hoelck, gave the film both the time and space it needed to reach the depth of the written material.

Mercy is one of those films in which I find new insights with every viewing. It’s not a film to be watched once and put away to gather dust on a shelf. Like a good piece of literature, it is something that calls to be returned to over time.