by Christopher Barr
“Among other things,
you’ll find that you’re not the first person who ever confused and frightened
and even sickened by human behavior. You’re
by no means alone on that shore, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know,
many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are
right now. Happily, some of them kept
records of their troubles. You’ll learn
from them – if you want to. Just as
someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from
you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal
arrangement. And it isn’t
education. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
- J.D.
Salinger, The Catcher and the Rye
“It happens
sometimes. Friends come in and out of
our lives like busboys in a restaurant.”
- Gordie, Stand
By Me
Boyhood is a coming-of-age story about
family and adaptation. It’s about
conformity and regret as well as life in America. The film was shot over a 12 year period with
the same principle cast. Richard
Linklater’s opus, as a result, is a fascinating unique film, a film like no
other. It is wonderfully intimate, while
simultaneously technical, in its Tolstoy-esque scope of life and the search for
meaning as one grows up in another man’s ready-made society.
Boyhood is truly one of the great poems on
film in years; it captures, through a sociological and psychological experiment,
the vastness of the human condition.
This film has no fat, it is as honest a film as one is going to get,
with magnificent performances by the young actors as well as the older ones,
the directing was engaging and in some places, documentary-like, capturing nuance and banality in interesting ways.
The story
focuses around young six year old Mason Jr. as he goes from grade one all the
way through to grade 12, graduating and then finally going off to college at
the age of 18. The film is a bit of
sociological tragedy as it explores the barriers that Mason endures while
trying to find his voice in the world.
Most of the adults in the film suppress his possibilities one way or
another, telling him to fall in line with everyone else in order to be
successful in life. They lament over
their own short-comings, their own failures and do what too many adults do;
they drag the young down with them.
Their inability to except that they so-called failed what society
expected of them, they psychologically sabotage anyone else from succeeding to
avoid confronting the reality of their own disappointments.
The film did
go through the pluses and minuses of education, it explored natural versus
indoctrinating forms of learning, where Mason was presented, confronted and in
some cases forced to choose sides. Here
the film exposed the child abuse society inflicts on young impressionable minds,
how young people are in many cases enforced to comply with their ruling adults’
often destructive ways at looking at the world.
This system is in place to beat the will of freedom out of the young to
prepare them for the workforce, so the power structure can maintain servants
for their property and money gathering apparatuses. 
The film did
deal with the ambivalence of freedom; it explored actual consequences in
society if we were all able to be free. Metaphysics
philosopher Thomas “Man is a Machine” Hobbes saw the devastating effects on
humanity without the safety and comforting walls that civilization provide, he
saw life in the hypothetical natural state as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,
and short.” He felt that humanity is
instinctively self-interested and self-serving; to his credit we simply need to
turn on the television on to see how this has come to pass. Hobbes felt that civilization is necessary to
place restrictions on these instincts.
For him, keeping people in line was the only way for humanity to build a
future for itself.
“Tranquility is found
also in dungeons; but is that enough to make them desirable places to live in?”
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Rousseau
borrowed the idea of the Social Contract proposed by Hobbes and refined by
empirical philosopher John Locke.
Rousseau saw the inequalities and injustices in society all too well, he
saw growing social unrest and unlike Hobbes, he was less pessimistic about the
natural state of things, his rallying cry of “back to nature!” as something
desirable and not brutal was a vital part of the Romantic movement in
literature. “Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.” - was Rousseau’s
challenging declaration at the beginning of his most influential work, The Social Contract. Rousseau’s book asked for a restructuring to
a more alternative civil society where the church, the monarchy and the
aristocrats would no longer be in power, he felt that the business of legislation
should be for all citizens to participate in. This new social contract could promote
freedom through law.
The
political philosopher Henry David Thoreau argued that the individual, to be
good should remain wild and free. He saw
the laws of man as more suppressing to the population than protecting their civil
liberties. In his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, Thoreau proposed the
individual’s right to conscientious objection through non-cooperation and
non-violent resistance. He thought that
the individual should do what his moral conscience - and not man’s laws - tell
him what’s right. He felt that if the
individual did not do this they would fall to the will of the government, the
agents of injustice.
There was a
very telling scene toward the end of the film, where Mason’s mother, Olivia
breaks down over the reality of him moving out and going off to college. She is clearly upset at losing her son, even
for a good cause like furthering his education.
But the telling part is how she sums up her life, essentially the
meaning of what she expected to happen…differently. The reality of real life in all its dread and
existential timeline appear during this scene, crashing down on her.
This recalls
a scene from Pleasantville where Toby
Maguire’s character, David arrives back out of the TV from the 1950’s television
show to find his mother crying in the kitchen.
She tells him that life, her life wasn’t supposed to happen this way, assuming
here that her, along with Mason’s mother Olivia was, involuntarily traversing
the fantasy of the beautiful big house with the white picket fence, the perfect
husband, the 2.5 loving, grateful children and the family dog to the real
world, a world of war and angst, of struggle and let downs. David’s mother in Pleasantville says essentially that these real struggles in life ‘weren’t
supposed to happen to her’ to which David informs her that nothing is supposed
to happen, certainly not in any fate or preordained sense. Life is a struggle because one has to make
their own way in it, the rest of the stuff about the perfect family and fantasy
home is a dream the American government, along with their corporate sponsorship
with money hungry conglomerate companies, disseminate to manufacture hope as
they brainwash the youth of their country to grow up and become obedient
compliers, and everlasting consumers of their products.
In spite of
a number of bad or misguided influences throughout Mason’s life, he turns out
pretty good. He maintains his curiosity
and his ability to be spontaneous, both wonderful attributes for the healthy, growing
mind. While sitting with a pretty girl
far from civilization, she asks him whether ‘people seize moments or do moments seize them’, Mason responds with
‘they are always in the moment’. This is a bit of eastern philosophy about
living in the moment, about leaving the past as a hopeful, lesson-learned part
that came before the moment and allowing the future to unfold as these series
of moments string together and catch up to it.
Here we see that Mason as passed his mother’s line of thinking. She is depressed about her past and what it
all means and sees her future as her inevitable impending funeral. Mason, and what this inspiring film is
leaving us with is; life is not controllable, life happens while most reflect
on what should have happened but didn’t, some seize their moment and learn to
dance in the rain, and that is the over-all point.
“Do not indoctrinate
your children. Teach them how to think
for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.”
- Richard Dawkins
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