Endnote 290: the room's verdict on Blood Sister's scars
Whether the girl’s hideous facial burn-scars are the result of a freebase accident is never made explicit in the film. Bernadette Longley says she kind of hopes that’s the case, because otherwise the scars would function as symbols of some deeper and more spiritual wound/hideousness, and the symbolic equation of facial with moral deformity strikes everybody over thirteen in the room as terribly gooey and heavy and stock.
Context
The E.T.A. kids' critical verdict on Blood Sister's burn-scarred girl: facial-deformity-as-moral-symbol is "gooey and heavy and stock" — the novel's own audience pre-rejecting the theme's laziest reading. The kicker is the hoped-for alternative: a freebase accident, precisely the kind of literal cause the book keeps ambiguous about Joelle's face, preferred by teenage viewers because a literal cause beats a symbol. JOI's film anticipating, and his son's cohort policing, how deformity is allowed to mean.