Walk the Line
I suppose I’m lucky not to have parental disapproval, though I don’t always have parental approval.
I probably wouldn’t be thinking so much about it, but in one week, I heard that characters motivated by parental disapproval are a pet peeve of Brenda Chin's. When I heard this, I was reading a book where the heroine faced severe parental disapproval. Her dad was a jackass. She was ready to give up every hope of happiness in love for his approval before she finally told him to eff off and did what she wanted to do. I suppose I can believe this more of a woman who never had love from her parents, who was always compared to her brother. I think it would be harder for a woman to live with parental disapproval. Still, she was a doctor in her 30s, a woman who should know her own mind, right?
Then there was Walk the Line. After JoAnn’s excitement over this movie (how many times did you see it, J?), I fully expected this to be my favorite of the two I watched Tuesday night.
I squirmed most of the way through it.
Admittedly, I brought my own baggage to the movie. Mom had Live at Folsom Prison and would listen to it in the dark-paneled den on her fold-away record player. My parents went through a divorce, my dad was an alcoholic and he moved in with another woman. So you can see why the movie made me squirm. On top of that, Johnny’s excuse for being a womanizing jerk was that his daddy didn’t love him. Okay, I could buy that as a boy, and maybe in his 20s. But in the movie he rarely saw his father, and his self-destructive behavior was at its peak when he was only a little younger than I am now. It did not make me root for him.
(I did like the last scene, a lot, though.) I know JoAnn disagrees and I look forward to hearing what y’all think.
Parental approval is good – life is sure a lot more peaceful with it. But I think giving it to your characters as an issue weakens them a bit, IMO. What do you think?
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13 comments:
I'm in agreement with you, Mary. In my opinion (and this is just my opinion), after a while you have to grow up and get on with your life. If you let something like parental approval rule over you into adulthood then you're just not wanting to face your problems and take charge of your life. And that's kind of wimpy to me.
Mary,
I think Johnny's screwed up psyche wasn't so much his issues with his father (although that did play a part). I think what fractured him at a very young age was guilt over his brother's death. His dad put the final nail in the coffin when he made that "wrong son" comment. Deep down, I think Johnny believed he should have died instead of his brother. The demons told him all his life that he should have been there, but he wasn't. And that holiday dinner scene exposed the issue when he asked his dad, why wasn't HE there.
Guilt like that can be quite devastating and can go on for decades. His dad just fed the guilt. That was the issue.
Ray Charles had similiar problems. His little brother drowned in a washtup of water while they were playing. He carried that with him his entire life. Johnny's father was just a walking reminder that Johnny blamed himself for not being there for his brother. Not that I'm excusing his behavior, but I think his brother's death really affected him more than people may think.
BTW, I watched Walk The Line for the first time yesterday while doing some writerly procrastination. :-)
Tanya
Hmmm. Not sure I agree with you on this one Mary. Our personalities are formed at such an early age and like you say many people have pretty rough periods when they are growing up that their parents contribute to. And if you are hypersensitive or just have a REALLY bad experience, (like the loss of a sibling, parental divorce) then maybe you are shaped by it forever.
I like to see H/h overcoming their past (and now I think about it my current wip deals with H/h who are heavily shaped by their past, including mean parents).
Not that it is a an excuse at the end of the day. Child molesters often have the same excuse right? As a mom I think it just puts more pressures on us parents not to screw up.
Michele, yes. And we all know people who are willing to blame anyone and anything other than take the blame themselves. Not heroic.
Tanya, Baby Brother and I were talking about Johnny's similarities to Ray Charles and I was wondering why Ray's story didn't bother me as much as Johnny's, when both men were not only self destructive but destroyed others as well. I think I probably feel more of a connection to Johnny Cash because I grew up listening to his music. I shocked my husband by singing along to some of the songs in the movie.
BUT for Johnny to use his guilt "I should have died instead of my brother" to ruin his life with Vivian and their three daughters, when he claimed to love her so much, and to use his ambition to become a singer to prove himself to his father was weak and selfish. His brother would never have wanted him to do that. And when he was hanging those pictures of June in the house he shared with Vivian, I wanted to claw his eyes out.
Your post did spark some revelations, though. My father and my uncle, my mother's brother, both had father issues. Both wanted to be brave enough, good enough, because they were the sons of men who fought in WW2. Both of them signed up for the service against their parents' wishes. My grandfathers didn't want their boys to live the same lives they had. So maybe Johnny's perception of his father's disapproval was that his father disliked him more than he did, since the movie was based on Johnny's autobiography.
Sure makes the Nine Inch Nails song he did, "Hurt," have a whole other nuance.
Toni, what a thought, to put more pressure on us as parents not to screw up! Oops! I don't know, though. I'm pretty sensitive, and I had some rough times in my childhood, but I really think I overcame them, and I'm not a particularly strong person. I think I do have a nervousness around men that I might not have if I'd had a normal childhood, but other than that I think I'm pretty emotionally healthy. And I want my characters to be even stronger than I am. Maybe I put too much on that? I don't know.
Wow, that was a lot of typing, and I should be writing!
I can be okay with characters with parental disapproval as soon as they don't make an excuse of it. I like to see emotions, but not "wimpiness."
Haven't seen the movie but I have a friend who's seen it like four times in the theater then had a watching party the day it came out on video =)
so I can't comment on it but I have a book that part of the conflict is parental disapproval. *blush*
*going to nurse a headache* =)
There are a lot of us who have serious parent issues, whether it was their disapproval of us or our disapproval of them or their actions, but I think the key when you have these issues with a character it to show them overcoming it and not using it as and excuse of why the character is weak or can't do something. I think as a society we're always looking for excuses and others to blame, and we'd be a lot better off if we just dealt with our problems, sucked it up and got on with life. Sometimes that requires professional help; sometimes it just requires us being more mature than our parents.
Exactly, Olga! Yes, I want to see the characters hurt, but not to make their main goal in life parental approval!
Cece, I hope that's an "I've been partying over my sale" headache and not a "Mary gave me a headache" headache!
Trish, interesting about our disapproval of parents, too. Exactly right. Characters need to overcome this in a believable way. I think another part of what bothered me about Johnny is that he felt like June was his strength. He couldn't find the strength inside himself.
Back to wrestle with my taxes. Now I remember why I put this off.
Hmmm... I can be okay with characters who have issues with parental disapproval sometimes. I think it just depends on how prevelant the disapproval is in their life. I mean, did they diapprove of their crappy teenage friends, or is it something bigger, and does it extend into adulthood. It's all so variable.
But I definately don't like it when it's milked and made into a crutch. I prefer to see it make a character stronger and more independent, I think.
Mar, I wrote in private all the things about the film that I feel, so I won't go into it in detail here. Yes, I saw it four times in the theater, and last night was five. :) Is Johnny a hero? Not in a romantic hero sense. But he is a hero in a human sense, because he screwed up so bad, and then spent the rest of his life trying to make up for what he did...and on some levels, he succeeded. That's what you don't see in the film.
Like Johnny, the death of my brother when I was 12, and the sense that if I'd only been smarter, quicker, whatever, I could have been able to stop it, took everything in my life afterward and colored it with that shade. It is something that takes a child and warps them into something not easy to recognize from the outside. Johnny's dad was a jerk, but that was not his main problem. It only put fuel on the fire of his self-blame, all the time, more and more fuel. It took me a long time to heal from what happened with me, and parts of me will never be fully healed...the parts that are convinced that I am alone, and that I can never really depend on anyone to help me or be there for me. BUT...I had my own June inside me, and over time, I did heal. The fact that Johnny needed someone else to help him get there does not make him less in my eyes. He at least tried to go there. Many people give up and never try to heal. They live their lives in destruction, and often die in it. He didn't.
Johnny's life with Vivian...she attended the high school where I teach, did you know that? I was just looking at her picture downstairs the other day. I can see exactly what that was about. When you come from a childhood like his, one of the ways to go is to be hell-bent on having the perfect vision...of creating the ideal family you didn't have. And you jump on it like a cat on a junebug, with the first person you love enough to ask. The film makes it clear that they didn't know each other very well, that they were in love with the idea of love. And that makes so much sense to me. He wanted that white picket fence life he'd missed. But he didn't realize he wasn't in a place where he could hold up his end of that vision. He tried, but failed miserably. He hurt her and the girls so much. He hurt himself, too. Should they have stuck it out, or did they try to stick it out way too long? They married before they knew who they really were. Viv was just out of high school when they married, and he was young as well, and very scarred emotionally. They hadn't seen each other for two years, but got married anyway. NOT a recipe for a good marriage. I thought he was nuts hanging pictures of June...what was he thinking? But he wasn't thinking. He thought it was over for good, and it was like a memorial to what he'd wished for. Stupid move. But he was pretty deep into stupid at that point. A real mess. Only a guy who is a mess would do something like that. NOT a romantic hero, to be sure. But a messed up, flawed human? Yes.
Do I want my characters to wallow in their problems? No. I want to see them overcome them. I know what it takes to do that. But I do want to see them truly suffer, because it's in that denial, suffering, pain, that real conflict comes in. You have to let your characters hurt hurt hurt. THEN you can let them bloom again. But the hurt has to come first, and be deep and real, in order for the payoff at the end to have real meaning and impact to the reader. IMHO.
J
On the other hand...I can totally, totally understand your feelings, Mar, in light of your dad's choices and the impact they had on your life.
Back to your original question...I wouldn't give parental disapproval as the main problem to my character. I might use it as the root out of which their other problems grew, but not as the main one. Just as I don't think it was Johnny's main problem. That lay with his self-blame and self-hatred, that his dad only helped keep burning. I love the end of WTL, because at the end you see that he has healed enough to forgive his dad and move forward in his life in freedom, without having his brother's death and all that came from it rule his life anymore. I got there, too. :)
Hugs,
J
I had no idea Vivian went to school here! Wow, that's pretty cool.
Your perception of why he married her makes sense. He wanted a normal life, and love, and someone he could talk to like he talked to his brother.
Fred's mom came over tonight and she looooooves Johnny Cash. I started talking about the movie and Fred looked at me and said, "Well, if you didn't like the movie, you sure have thought about it a lot, so that makes it a good movie." So I guess it was. Maybe next week I'll watch it again with Fred's mom. My son hasn't seen it yet, either, because he had homework Tuesday night. His own fault!
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