My (and M's) youngest spawn and I presented a film to a graduate school class, last week. We've done presentations such as this before and have arrived at a style of working. I do a very brief introduction, we show the film, and then she talks about some of her patients and I sit in awe at how articulate and smart she is. Maybe among the nicest things about the Last Quarter along with Welcoming Grandspawn to the Table is getting to see just how smart these newcomers are. I join the discussion as another member of the audience and let the kid rip ... brings tears to my eyes, each time. I mean ... even people at the cusp of the Second and Third Quarters got smarts. How can that be? I remember having a typical reaction to her birth ... she had ten fingers, ten toes and all the hopeful signs of life to come. We parents do silly shit like counting those toes ... yep ... 1, 2, 3, ...., 10!
Thus far, we've shown films about bullying (like Ben-X, a Belgian film) and, this time, Richard Donner’s Film: “Radio Flyer” (Columbia Pictures, 1992).
A simple if painful tale! A father (played by Tom Hanks) of two preadolescent children tells his own pre-teen sons about his memories of childhood. He had been witness to the physical and verbal beatings endured by his somewhat younger brother at the hands of a violent and alcoholic stepfather. The film bleeds violence. The story takes on a fanciful and mythic quality as he recounts how he and his younger brother, Bobby, fashioned a flying machine from found parts jerry-rigged to their Radio Flyer wagon. The now-grown-up-father’s story ends. The younger brother, assisted by him who cannot protect him and with their pet turtle, Sampson, aboard, builds up a head of steam racing down a hill and takes flight over an airfield and into the night. The father (moderator and story-teller) tells his sons that while Bobby never returned home, again, he did stay in contact via postcards sent from faraway places to their mother (Lorraine Bracco, who in later roles would become known as therapist to Tony Soprano).
This would indeed be the end of such a simple if painful tale that a father might recount to his children, the end, that is, if not for certain comments and if not for a singular inconsistency ... a kind of cinematic slip. The father makes a point of reminding the children that “history is in the mind of the teller” and that “truth is all in the telling.” These rules do not fail to impress the children, as one asks: “Dad, is that how we got Sampson?” The movie ends without any fanfare and without discussion of the obvious. If Sampson, the pet turtle, didn’t leave, perhaps it is also reasonable to assume that Bobby never left, as, just perhaps, there was no Bobby. In the “tale,” the older brother explains to his mother: “he made it; he’s gonna be OK now; he’s safe.”
In 1919, Freud expressed surprise at the frequency of a certain fantasy presented by his neurotic patients — ‘A child is being beaten.’ Freud interpreted these fantasies consistently with his belief that these images were the result of a denied cruelty and not based in historical abuse. He was interested, as well, in an alternative version of this same fantasy (p 181) — ‘a small child is being beaten on its naked bottom.’ He concluded that (p 186) the essential character of “the phantasy now has strong and unambiguous sexual excitement attached to it and so provides a means for sexual masturbatory satisfaction” — a primary trait of perversion. Had Freud chosen to emphasize “small child” over “naked bottom,” his paper may have read differently and been more to my liking.
In any case, while Freud had great admiration for writers and playwrites, we cannot know whether he would have been impressed or rather dismayed by Donner’s implicit dramatic interpretation of “Ein Kind Wird Geschlagen,” which after all means “One Child is Being Beaten.” In Donner’s film (or, in any case, in this interpretation of his work), rather than confront the memories of abuse, a child or a child grown to adulthood may choose to split-off and thereby protect a vulnerable (younger) part of himself, One child becomes two. One child is exiled while another is numbed. Vulnerability dies and mastery survives. Alas, such splitting, always comes at a cost and that cost is, in part, the relinquishing of small bits of reality and, perchance, a denial of the impact that such abuse may have on future generations; one can only wonder how Donner viewed a father who recounts horror stories to his children.
The media and people of the 21st C., in general, expend great energies trying to understand trauma and abuse. In a recent study done in Philadelphia, 25% of adults reported being sexually abused while growing up. Lord knows how many are physically abused?
Still, I'm confident many of us have the opportunity to bathe in the glory of our kids' smarts and accomplishments as they grow in their own lives. My Littlest One not only speaks well but has raised three of her own ... 16, 11, and 11 ... each one a little miracle. I've cited Malachi's comments before but once more can't hurt:
Behold, I send to you Elijah the Prophet
Before the Great and Awesome Day of God.
(And what's his job?)
He'll return the hearts of the parents onto the children
And the hearts of the Children onto their Parents.
Geez! Life can be so good.
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