| RATING: | 60% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
we need to talk about something, but this is not it!
Not a warning against poor potty-training, but one against potty training as such.
Trying to make children fit an ideological niche rather than one for which they are more naturally suited increases the tension between parent and offspring - as if raising children were the same as house-training dogs. Dramatized here by a mother who really did not want children and who, thus, offers her son no parental means of achieving self-hood through useful guidance from her. The desire to control her son rather than accept him ends disastrously when the child-raising-a-child produces the inevitable, mass-murdering monster.
Despite the narrative and psychological insight on show here, there is also profound cultural and political cowardice.
Most of such people are White - globally - produced by a culture obsessed with repressing its emotions as a vain means of demonstrating genetic superiority over non-Whites. Physical adults behave like emotional children - with little good being done to, by or for anyone.
The drama, like its antagonists, is locked deep inside the prison of a culture frightened of its own nature, structure and underlying purpose. Reducing any empathy we might like to feel for the central characters plight in both mother and son being victims of their choices and their environment, respectively: Tied to one's oppressor; living an empty life through one's children because of failure in one's own life.
Making familial parasitism seem universal and natural rather than merely specific and cultural emphasizes the vampire quality of a polity bereft of an objective and consistent ethical code. Unable to raise their children in a tactile manner; offering a performance of humanity rather than the real thing. A house, but not a home, in a culture that has begun to eschew the supreme value of the extended family for the emotional poverty of the hermetically-sealed world of the nuclear - the latter lacking good experience to pass on to the next generation.
(One is reminded of the fatuity of the advice Dr Spock gave his readers, advice that eventually made his children hate him for using them as objects in a scientific experiment, instead of subjects of parental love.)
This film describes brilliantly but does not explain; hence, the quintessential failure of this drama to involve us in the unemotional - a whole lot of hand-wringing to a problem but no solutions.
The real lesson to be learned here is that if you cannot love; do not have kids - only suffering will ever result. More troublingly, there is an anti-Feminist implication that women cannot juggle careers and motherhood. Is the nuclear family eating itself because it was never tenable?
Just as good or as bad - depending on your point-of-view - as Elephant, but not an improvement on it.
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