June 11, 2005:
Her life is one long Spanglish moment. "When is anyone in this damn house, in this damn life, going to consider my feelings?"
The DVD commentary is generous to the point of disingenuousness. "She's at a wildly insecure point in her life. And she starts to... go off." "It's possible for a working woman to have an early midlife crisis, and go batty."
This isn't the dynamic. The other characters are finely attuned to the eggshell life imposed upon them by years on end of Debra's self-involved dramatics. Except for being forced to interact with her more often, their lives are not changed by her unemployment crisis.
"And she's wrestling with her demons with no malevolence." If this is true it's only because she has so little mental attention invested in others that it doesn't occur to her to be malevolent toward them.
The movie in this way is about the triviality of evil. Evil in its mundane everyday aspect. Where "evil" means, The struggle to prevent others from being what they could be. Where "mundane" means, Lacking the power to manifest on a more cosmic scale.
The key scene being the one in which Bernice receives her gift of too-small clothes. The key moment being the look on her face.
In reality, a person like Debra would have exerted every strength to negate the accolades received by her husband. It would have been war at home. She would have made him pay, and pay, and pay, until she felt he'd been brought low enough to remove the imbalance between them.
"Honey, lately your low self-esteem is just good common sense."