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Originally Posted by issybird
The meeting of Nicole and Dick on the funicular was heavily symbolic of their relationship. Fitzgerald explicitly tells us that the funicular works by having the descending car pull the ascending car up. I thought that was beautifully done as foreshadowing of the course of Dick's and Nicole's marriage.
I only half agree with you, though, on the nature of their feelings for each other. I do think Nicole drained Dick, but I also think he really loved her--the reason he resisted Rosemary to the extent he did. Both Rosemary and her mother are quite pernicious, by the way. Anything for the experience and damn the cost to others.
Does anyone else think that Rosemary also had an early sexual experience, not incest per se, but that she was pimped out by her mother? And yet she, unlike Nicole, was able to move past it.
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I absolutely agree with what you've said about Rosemary and her mother. And I love your link between the funicular and Dick and Nicole's relationship. I guess you'd say that Nicole's rise was sponsored by Dick's fall - that Nicole used him in a much deeper (although inadvertant way) than Rosemary and her mother used him.
I do think in some ways though that he was designed to be used. He was absolutely fed by admiration and fawning and it seemed to me that if you supplied enough of it, he responded (especially if you happened to be a pretty girl).
With Rosemary, I do think she was probably "pimped out" by her mother to get a start on her career. She was a product of her mother. I didn't spend too much time thinking about Rosemary though because I began to think of her as a handy instrument of destruction rather than a character in her own right.