by Christopher
Barr
“Feelings of love and gratitude arise
directly and spontaneously in the baby in response to the love and care of his
mother.” - Psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein
“Thank god we can’t tell
the future, we’d never get out of bed.”
August: Osage County is a heartbreaking and hard film to
watch but a therapeutically rewarding one.
It’s the story of the lives of three sisters that had to go back to their
Oklahoma house where they all grew up in because of the death of their father,
while there they have to deal with their, cancer-stricken, pill-popping highly dysfunctional
mother who raised them.
The Weston
family and those that married into that family are subjected to various uncomfortable
and sometimes humiliating encounters with the formidable matriarch of the house, the venomous and vindictive Violet, played
masterfully by Meryl Streep, whose
husband killed himself to likely be free of her tormenting manipulative ways. Violet is a vicious, hateful woman but not
evil, she’s a product of her psychotic parents.
She’s what happens to a mother who doesn’t lead a fulfilling life, she’s
an unhappy person. Yes, she brought up
three children and that’s hard and there’s a lot of sacrifice, but life is hard
and taking the path to enlightenment doesn’t always necessitate a pilgrimage on
foot in Northern India, reading books has always been a great start.
This film is
not in any way about a functional family, generally those families involve one
or both parents being educated in some capacity, that’s not to say that all
functional families require this attribute but it’s usually a must for any kind
of serviceable hope.
“If we are to teach
real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we
shall have to begin with the children.” - Gandhi
The true
fallacy within the family is uneducated, uninformed people having children that
are by default, uneducated, uniformed people.
My mother was a mean/caring mother, a nurturing/distant person and that
was the biggest problem a child should have to endure. Psychological child abuse generally comes in
the form of an inconsistent upbringing, where your mother or father or both are
at one point loving, funny and protective and then the next point tell you you’re
a mistake, they hate you and they wish you were never born.
A child is
still trying to find their footing in this world, learning its language, its
customs, its laws and also trying to understand him or herself, their own motor
skills and their own tastes. Parents are
your first line of defence in a world you know nothing about, and a world that
can be potentially harmful to you.
Whether it’s from dangerous people, improperly cooked food or the common
cold, your parents are your only method of survival for the most part.
So to have a
parent beat you with a belt or tell you you’re no good for nothing, and then
moments later tell you how sorry they are and it won’t happen again, only for
it to happen again three hours later, is mentally abusive to a growing
child. That type of household breeds
children who fear their own behaviour because they believe in their little
minds at the time, that they are the cause of their parents’ misery. They learn to hate themselves; they learn to
hate who they become.
Now grown
up, they likely will have to struggle in social situations or become funny to
mask their fear, either way, they have to fight to navigate the social world
because they, as an adult, still carry the psychological burden the younger
version of themselves carried, when they didn’t know whether to leave mom alone
or to tell her they loved her, fearing a slap in the face or a reminder of what
a waste they are.
There are
varying degrees, but this is most
people. On a more broad scope, being
born and brought up in this world is its own form of child abuse. If you have a child that wants to do what it
wants to do and you stop that child from running into traffic, that’s a good
thing, a protective thing, but that doesn’t translate well in the mind of the
child. The child wants to do what it
wants to do, rules be damned. The job of
the parent, as protector, is limiting the scope of a child’s freedom for its
own protection. As an adult we can all
absolutely agree, we don’t want children all running into traffic because they
want to.
This makes
us all neurotic and unsettled in our environments as we get older. What we do to combat such a psychological paralysis
certainly varies from person to person, family to family but the one thing is
for sure, this cannot be escaped or forgotten, drugs and alcohol notwithstanding. This is who we are, this is where we are
from, now this may not entirely define us, as we might have escaped the
trappings of our parental heritage and got an education, and have been able to
see the reality of who we are and where we are from. But like in The Eagles’ tune Hotel California,
“You can check out but you can never
leave”.
The one
thing I suppose we should be thankful for our upbringing, other than we
survived it, is our defining characters.
All our little bumps and grinds are the leaves on our trees, stemming
from the roots of our backgrounds, our childhoods. Some would certainly disagree such as all the
paranoid people out there, and those people that can’t love because of the
Stockholm Syndrome-type childhood they escaped, and wish never to return to in
the form of a relationship or marriage. If
they are to return to it as an adult they risk and fear repetition, they don’t
want to find out how far the apple has fallen from the tree so to speak. Tragically, more times than not, people
become the parents they loathed because as children, we are copy magnets and
our parents are what we end up copying.
“It is easier to build
strong children than repair broken men.” – Frederick Douglass
The tragedy
of some of our parents is they didn’t get out of their own parental trap. The one that their parents sucked them into,
they have also the methodical ability to drag their own children down with
them. In my own experience, and from
what I understand many other peoples, my mother begrudged her children for
their youth and their freedom, she recriminated and resented my sister for her youthful beauty
so in turn punishment had to be assigned.
Rather than dealing with her own journey in her own life she, fueled by
immaturity and ignorance, sabotaged the happiness of those around her, even
that of her husband, my father.
We are
tethered to this abusive past and often are bound by the duty of family to
remain later in life, as adults, maybe not in their homes but in their lives,
until our parents die off. As children
we took the abuse with the same spoon we took the joyful times because it’s all
we knew and it’s all we had. As adults,
guilt lingers as we are reminded of our messed up childhoods but also that our
parents are who gave life to us in the first place, ingratitude is not the
approach one ought to take when analyzing their own childhood.
August: Osage County is about the destruction, ignorant
and uneducated people can bring to their family units. The fact they were unable to psychologically
understand the dispositions of their own family members is a testament to that ignorance. The mother, Violet Weston, was a woman that
made so many mistakes and barely understood why, then just went into denial and
blamed her daughters and those around her for the problems they possess and why
she is living such a horrible existence.
Shifting the blame often allows one to reconcile with their own self
image.
To put this
as blatantly as possible, if we continue bringing up stupid children because their
stupid parents are too dumb to know better, then we are lost as a civilization
for prosperous growth as we move forward into the future. Ignorance is a disease, a virus that is
contracted in the very beginning stages of life. Most grow up without ever having the opportunity
to cure themselves or be cured by others.
Some, unfortunately very few, grow up and are influenced or spontaneously
pulled away from the virus and cured.
Only after the cure can one see the truth behind the psychological lie
as an ever growing work in progress. It’s
sad but in most of these cases you have to save yourself and run for the hills
or at least maintain a proper distance, and that’s certainly not what family is
about but one must give up the loyalty of ignorance in order to survive the
challenges of growth. Julia Roberts’ quite bitter character, Barbara
Weston, at the end of the film tearfully realizes that very sacrifice.
“Nature knows no pause
in progress and development, and attaches her curse on all inaction.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
No comments:
Post a Comment