Batac,Louissee Diamond S.

HUMSS -E
Reflection Paper (Movie: Lake House)

The movie “Lake House” posits a man and woman who are unable to find love and yet–
through the magical interference of an inanimate third party–are able to literally transcend time
and find each other as secondary partners. In "The Lake House", while Kate is waiting in the
restaurant, that scene is interspersed with some skating. It does all this switching back and forth
between Kate waiting in the restaurant and athletes skating on ice potentially focuses Philosophy
as Phenomenology.
The skating field emptying over time and the skaters getting fewer and fewer is then used
to emphasize the passing of time that Kate waits in vain and the tilting of the situation from
romantic anticipation to sad disappointment. Experience, in a phenomenological sense, includes
not only the relatively passive experiences of sensory perception, but also imagination, thought,
emotion, desire, volition and action. In short, it includes everything that we live through or
perform.
At the end, there is only a single couple left dancing on the ice, which Kate stares at,
envying them for the love they apparently share and that she thought to find herself, too but
which she disappointedly didn't find this evening not knowing the sad reason for Alex's
disappearance. One can see such topics such as freedom, love, and empathy from different points
of view.
So, to sum up, the skaters weren't just interspersed with the real scenes, but were
observed by Kate in reality and served the purpose as a classic romantic winter symbol and the
development of the skating field and its inhabitants underlined the emotional stages Kate went
through on that evening. One finds and intuits life as it really is, and allows the openness of
viewing it from a different way.