sofiagiudicelli

Oh pathetic sad miserable old man, the price of the debt you owe is so high it’s gonna take you a billion lifetimes to pay it back.

Dr. Facilier thought he was running the game. He thought the Friends on the Other Side were a tool he was using. He thought charm was a substitute for character. He had a whole song about it and everything.

He was wrong. What kind of people disgusting creepy old man goes his whole life forcing people to do his bidding through magic cause they are so miserable with themselves and who they are, that it would be impossible for him to get it any other way.

Let’s talk about what he actually did. Facilier made a deal with the other side the Friends on the Other Side and if you have ever dealt with anything that operates on that frequency, you already know those kinds of deals don’t come with generosity built in. They come with interest. They come with a clock. They come with fine print you signed without reading because you wanted what was on the first page so badly you couldn’t see straight. The debt will be collected. Always. No exceptions. No extensions. No charm offensive smooth enough to talk your way out of it.

He knew this. That is the part that gets me. He knew it and he did it anyway because he was so convinced of his own cleverness that he believed he could manage the debt indefinitely. Keep the Friends satisfied just enough. Keep the scheme moving just fast enough. Keep himself one step ahead of the collection.

He had real power. Genuine, dangerous, earned-through-terrible-means power. The voodoo, the shadows, the cards that tell you things you were never supposed to know. And he used none of it to build something. He used all of it to steal something. He wanted New Orleans. The money, the status, the restaurant, the respect the city had never given a man like him. And instead of building it he decided to take it fast, through someone else’s name, someone else’s body, someone else’s life.

That is always how it goes with men like Facilier. So focused on the shortcut they never ask why the shortcut exists in the first place. Shortcuts exist because the road is hard. The road is hard because the destination is worth something. You cannot steal your way to something built to be earned and expect it to hold.

Tiana understood this. That is the contrast the movie draws so quietly you almost miss it. Tiana worked. Every shift, every saved dollar, every morning she got up before the city did and did it again. She made no deals with shadows. She made a deal with reality, which is the only deal that actually pays out.

And Facilier watched her and thought he could just take what she was building.

And then Tiana smashed the talisman.

What happens to Facilier at the end of that film is not a plot point. It is a theological statement. The Friends on the Other Side do not forget what you owe them. They do not care that your plan almost worked. They do not care that you were this close. You borrowed power that was never yours, you could not deliver what you promised, and now it is time to pay.

He was so clever. Right up until the shadow swallowed him.

The debt he built himself, one borrowed shadow at a time, finally came due. Came time always catches up to you.

The house always wins. Especially when the house is on the other side. He should have known that the people he was messing with, also had their own friends as well, on the other side.