Bernie Character Analysis

The film, Bernie, is about a single, middle aged, Christian, white man named Bernie Tiede who has an occupation as a mortician. Bernie is beloved by everyone in his small town of Carthage, Texas. He is fantastic at his job, a great friend, generous, and an overall kind and caring person. It is believed by some people in the town that he might be gay because he has never had a girlfriend, and he is mostly very friendly to older women, but there is no confirmation about his sexual identity throughout the film. There is no background given on Bernie’s family or his upbringing. All the viewer knows about Bernie is what they see in the film. The film is documentary style with interviews of Carthage’s residents attesting to Bernie’s character (Linklater, …show more content…
A specific woman in the town, Marjorie Nugent, becomes a widow during the film. Marjorie is very much disliked by the residents of Carthage. She is a wealthy, elderly woman, and she is generally rude and unpleasant to be around. She is even referred to as a “Bitch” by one of the residents of the town (Linklater, 2011). After Marjorie’s husband dies, Bernie brings her gifts, and she lets him into her home. They quickly become good friends, despite the age difference between the two. Some people in the town believed it to be a romantic relationship, while others saw it as more of a friendship. Marjorie and Bernie went everywhere together. They took vacations together, went out to lunch together, and picked up dry cleaning together. Bernie ran a lot of errands for Marjorie and after a while it seemed like he was working for her. She became bossy and rude to him, and she expected him to do everything for her whenever she wanted (Linklater, …show more content…
This theory states that people justify themselves when they break the law to explain why it was okay for them to do what the illegal act (Barkan, 2011). Sykes and Matza have established five different techniques that they say people use to justify their illegal behavior. These techniques are denial or responsibility, denial of injury, denial of the victim, condemnation of the condemners, and appeal to higher loyalty. The techniques that apply most to this film are denial of the victim and denial of responsibility (Barkan, 2011). Denial of the victim states that “even if offenders concede that they are about to harm someone or something, they may reason that their target deserves the harm” (Barkan, 2011, pg. 194). Denial of responsibility states that offenders “say that they are not responsible for the delinquent acts they intend to commit” (Barkan, 2011, pg.