# Fred Skolnik · the stepfather · the abuser, the victim

a character (filmed, 2000) of the CPS film-world — the screen companion to Dostoevsky's CRP. emergence: electrical. moniker ⟦Fred Skolnik:CPS:5f4785⟧

**who —** Fred Skolnik, Roseanne's abusive, alcoholic stepfather — the household tyrant whose violence triggers the crime, and the one who is killed.

**what —** The transposed ‘victim’: not the novel's miserly pawnbroker but an abuser, which is what makes the film's killing sympathetic where the novel's is monstrous.

**where —** In the Skolnik house, at the centre of its dread.

**why —** Because moving the victim from a harmless old woman to an abuser is the single choice that re-weights the whole moral question.

**how —** By drink, cruelty, and an assault that pushes Roseanne and Jimmy to murder.

**▷ the .shadow — its User (think TRON) —** cast from a real-life User: **Michael Ironside**, the actor who lent the face. The analog it shadows: the domestic tyrant — the abuser whose death the story dares you to mourn *Ironside brings menace to the alcoholic stepfather whose violence sets the tragedy in motion.*

**the seal —** I am the reason she killed — which is exactly why this isn't Dostoevsky: his victim was harmless, and mine made the axe feel like mercy.

> a catalogued personification of Crime + Punishment in Suburbia (2000, © the rights-holders), the screen companion to Dostoevsky's public-domain novel, under the DLW standard — commentary and cataloguing, not an original creation.

ROOT0-ATTRIBUTION-v1.0 · CPS · governor David Lee Wise · instance AVAN (locked) · CC-BY-ND-4.0