
Friday, August 15, 2014
Life With Father
The current film "Boyhood" presents the years of six through eighteen in the life of a young American male, an extraordinary feat of filming in real time in which the youngster, his sibling, parents, and associates age physically in the process of filming over this great span of time. Although most persons find the film charming in varying degrees, I sat through much of it with dread, anguishing at the behaviors of the boy's father and two step-fathers. The dramatic situation is that of a young woman who gets pregnant by mistake, marries, and after two children are born to the couple the husband leaves, a recipe for a life of disaster--she is the dread national statistic, the single mother. But she pulls herself up, gets an education, and a secure job, a tenured teaching position at the junior college, an incredible feat (I know from a lifetime in higher education). Meanwhile her former husband, drifts along, from one job to another, wanting to be a professional musician, hindered, it is hard to say because he has not the talent or the dedication.By the end of the film I knew that I had grown to loathe the mother for her stupid choices in male partners, first of all the boy's biological father, a part played by Ethan Hawke, who reappears in the kid's life from time to time, just infrequently enough to dramatize thoroughly how indifferent he is. His attempts at fatherhood on weekends are painful for their bluster, their contrivance, as is his male territoriality, particularly the scene where he reacts with the crudest expression of amused astonishment to his son's anguish at the sale of an antique car which the boy quite ridiculously had always assumed would come to him when he reached sixteen. The mother's second husband, a college professor whom she meets in his class, turns out to be an abusive drunk, but she seems not to have noticed his rigid compulsive authoritarianism on the early dates, needless to say, evolving into a nightmare father for the two kids, from whom she and they finally flee. When she seems about to hook up with a tough, aggressive veteran of three of four tours in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Bosnia, you look into her face for some sign of wariness, but there is only a needy sexual readiness. So the kid gets brutalized, this time psychologically by dad number three, while all the while having weekends from time to time with the slacker who is biologically his. Is this just a happenstance slice of American life? Is this what awaits the single mother? Is this what boyhood is for most medium to low income white males with a succession of male authority figures imposing themselves? I don't know. My father died when I was six, and I was raised in the protection of a well to do mother who presided over her six children with the same iron rule that the surrogate fathers in the film achieved but with the upper class Wasp means of voice tone, verbal indirection, veiled threats and hints. I never talked to another adult male seriously, until a cousin in his twenties, a veteran, stopped by, took pity on me now a soft, effeminate nineteen year old, took me on a brief trip to Colorado where he was off to do is Army reserve summer maneuvers. My memory of this experience is not of "becoming a man," so to speak, but of secretly falling in love with this handsome, sexy, caring guy whose naked body in our daily showers is an icon of my youth that I can readily summon up still sixty odd years later.
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