It's always tough to pinpoint the root of dislike, but my working theory is that it stems from failing to connect with Cebe. And that in turn begs the question, why. The obvious answer would be that she's a belligerent punk, but I think my problem has more to do with what she
isn't than what she
is. We're introduced to her character in the brief moments leading up to the disaster, but before it happens there's already a sense that things are
off. Here's a kid dressed up as a clown, which in my mind is child's Halloween costume, but the dialogue is anything
but childish. It's raunchy enough that you gather Cebe is more mature than the costume would indicate. The scene to me was anything but endearing. The whole time it just felt weird.
In the next scene we jump ahead however many years and Cebe is doing her Gorgeous shtick, which is also not at all endearing, just weird... and now antagonistic too. And all the scenes that follow that, for me, were varying degrees of the same attitude.
This, I think, was the first hurdle. A lack of... hmm, not redeeming moments, but simply moments that were not self-destructive or destructive to somebody else. A glimpse of Cebe's repressed humanity. A bit of her old self shining through the scarred exterior of her current persona. In a sense it's as if Hopper lopped off the first 15 minutes of the film, leaving a character arc that starts at bad and gets worse. We're left to guess when things started to go wrong. In that way the "tragedy" of Cebe had no impact on me. I never
knew that which was lost, so how can I be sad about having lost it?
Scenes became redundant because of this. They seemed to serve no purpose but reinforce my opinion of the character (belligerent, weird). I did not have a sense of what Cebe was struggling for, or struggling towards, or what she wanted from people or from herself. She seemed committed to her own self-destruction. So having only ever known her to be a nasty person I could hardly bring myself to lament that trajectory.
In the end I struggled to imagine what the message of it all was. The sins of the father are passed on to the daughter? That's an idea worth expressing, certainly, but the way it was presented was very repetitive for me. Rather than a story it felt like a series of examples with verying degrees of potency, and little to no through-line. I can only speculate as to whether the storytelling was unconventional by design or by mistake, but either way it was not effective (for me).
I get the sense you did not find Cebe quite so unforgivable as I did. Would that be accurate? Did you sense some goodness in her that I did not?