Todd Solondz may use large doses of
absurdity, but I cannot help but be deeply affected by this film. Maybe it’s
mostly that the experience of school as a place of unthinkable cruelty
resonates strongly with me. School can be a place of almost surreal degrees of
distress, and no amount of passing time can truly help one forget this. The
fact that childhood is normally set apart as a formative stage, a phase of
non-sense because it is still forming the order, sense, rationality and alleged
civility of adult life, allows it to be dismissed as unworthy of serious
dwelling-on. And yet, imagine the horror conjured up if one were confronted
with a world in which grown-ups are as openly cruel to each other as kids are
on a regular basis, a world of name-calling, of constant picking-on and
bullying, a place of untamable violence, where it is normal to break into
physical altercations and display your discontents publicly.
Yet this film’s handling of the topic of childhood is not summed up by the above. Throughout the film we are reminded of the penal and corrective nature of our lives, particularly the role that schools play in this. Perhaps ‘corrective’ is the wrong term to use here, for it suggests a reform, whereas in fact these institutions are there not in order to reform a subject gone wrong, but to form the subject in the first place. This system attempts to rein in the child’s chaos and ill-discipline, and turn it into a good, model citizen. When Dawn is taken to the principal’s office along with her parents, she is reassured that no-one is there to get her; this is swiftly followed by a reminder that this is the sort of incident that could go down in her permanent record and affect her chances in college and in other ways for the rest of her life. Her brother, meanwhile, is preoccupied with his adult future as though everything he does in the present holds value only insofar as it affects his future as an adult, that point where he will actually get to live life, as it were, where life will finally carry intrinsic value in relation to its present state, unlike childhood, which is merely a means to an end and not an experience in its own right. How stifling for this poor girl, grappling for survival and gasping for air on a daily basis, to have to be confronted with the thought that this struggle must be affecting her future irreversibly and without her knowing how to do anything about it. Worse still, she is incapable of articulating what kind of future she would like to form for herself in its stead.
“I always felt as though God would come into my life at some point, but he never did”, said Tommy Lee Jones’s character in No Country for Old Men, and this reflects for me the way I have so often lived my life and still do: forever waiting for that point in the future when I will finally come into myself.
Yet this film’s handling of the topic of childhood is not summed up by the above. Throughout the film we are reminded of the penal and corrective nature of our lives, particularly the role that schools play in this. Perhaps ‘corrective’ is the wrong term to use here, for it suggests a reform, whereas in fact these institutions are there not in order to reform a subject gone wrong, but to form the subject in the first place. This system attempts to rein in the child’s chaos and ill-discipline, and turn it into a good, model citizen. When Dawn is taken to the principal’s office along with her parents, she is reassured that no-one is there to get her; this is swiftly followed by a reminder that this is the sort of incident that could go down in her permanent record and affect her chances in college and in other ways for the rest of her life. Her brother, meanwhile, is preoccupied with his adult future as though everything he does in the present holds value only insofar as it affects his future as an adult, that point where he will actually get to live life, as it were, where life will finally carry intrinsic value in relation to its present state, unlike childhood, which is merely a means to an end and not an experience in its own right. How stifling for this poor girl, grappling for survival and gasping for air on a daily basis, to have to be confronted with the thought that this struggle must be affecting her future irreversibly and without her knowing how to do anything about it. Worse still, she is incapable of articulating what kind of future she would like to form for herself in its stead.
“I always felt as though God would come into my life at some point, but he never did”, said Tommy Lee Jones’s character in No Country for Old Men, and this reflects for me the way I have so often lived my life and still do: forever waiting for that point in the future when I will finally come into myself.
