Throught the film, the concept of good and evil was being played with. However, it seemed as though the major points of good were forced and artificial. From the start, we have the smiling fireman waving to us as the truck drives by in the bright, colorful neighborhood. The kids are playing and the old man is watering the lawn. Suddenly, the old man drops down seemingly dying and we catch a glimpse of reality as we move through the grass finding the writhing bugs underneath. I feel as though this transition describes the movie well. We see all the good that's being brought forward to us until something bad happens which points out all the bad we couldn't see before.
This forced good is brought up again at the end of the movie where we go back to a similar scene. The family is all happy and together, completely ignoring the terror they just experienced and the robin which represented happiness sits right in front of them. The robin is clearly fake which sticks out the fact that all of the happiness is artificial. We see Dorothy happily playing with her son looking completely normal while we apparently ignore the fact that she was recently running around naked looking for her secret lover while her husband was being killed. We end on the same image of the fireman that we started with, using a recycled image so they don't have to recreate the happiness.
The black and white view of good and evil brought on by the Reagan era is looked at by the film in this respect. It forced a label onto things which gave them an artificial view. When the choice is limited to two things, we generalize them and put them into categories we wouldn't necessarily go near. The film really explores this idea with the different characters. With Frank, he is regularly described as being evil and dangerous but it's never explained, only declared. We even see the main character, Jeffery, being labeled as the good guy when he is regularly not acting as good as he should be. It's these clearcut distinctions that mess up views on right and wrong and it starts to carry over into peoples ideas.
