The tragedy of family ‘slaves’: those who, in life and/or in their mind, undergo their coercive parents commands without finding their own path. They are slaves of a mentality, a way of thinking, certain behavioural manners, of an ongoing judgement and a risk, looked upon it as high and unacceptable, to be one day left away from that overwhelming circle called nuclear family. These slaves, when they are 40 or more, live like children in a middle-aged body, maybe in an old one – it also depends on Mother Nature, at least they should be a bit white-haired. Actually, herein I’ll refer to men in particular, perhaps the weakest of the species. At that point, why should they throw their hat in the ring, after not doing it for 4 decades, just to cut the horrible umbilical cord that kept them tied and sometimes squeezed but also gave them the impression of being protected by the uncertain? Why leaping into the void? Why to grow, to make it on our own and to face the world only by means of their head and heart? Often, they don’t think of it, at times if they do they are terrified, other times, if they don’t understand that it actually is terror, they just tell themselves they are ok, whilst the rst of the world is wrong. Basically, it’s easier to question the whole world rather than our ‘I’ and the ideas we classified as certain and indisputable for years and years. Though those ideas came from outside the man he took them for his moved by fear. Fear of thinking by using his head only and a different point of view from those who generated him which he fears to lose. Fear of himself. The enormous pain and the uncountable time effort he, this kind of physical-mental-emotional blocked person/man, should undergo would be an act of mere heroism at almost half of his life. And from his perspective it would not be ‘valued’ enough: thus, he prefers to seat on his throne, built in years of family ‘subordination’ and protected by a tall rail made of iron and based in time on the here mentioned ideas he inherited from his most coercive parent, which is generally the mother for the ..male. Coercitive parents to whom ‘no’ was never said: that’s the dilemma of the new slaves, who are rather weaker than who raised them but above all in love with themselves and totally not inclined to fight for their true value and for their establishment in the world, which thing, as many boys, they were to begin already during their adolescence. When I saw the movie PHANTOM THREAD, by Paul Thomas Anderson with an always more charming and technically insuperable Daniel Day Lewis, I was bewitched by the human psyche perfectly designed for the two main characters who are apparently ‘normal’, but in reality two lonely souls: in a totally sick relationship they gather and find themselves and they give birth to a family. There’s a baby yelling in Reynolds (Lewis) – and to his sister, in a powerful unforgettable scene of the movie – who screams he wants to go back to the status quo ante, read as when his strict and admired mother lived e he was a child, and to the misleading sensation of a serenity gone with the aging. That baby cries for he doesn’t want to face the present and its deriving responsibilities. When the lead’s future wife catches the real and deepest essence of the man she had even feared feeling almost in awe of him, her approach toward him changes radically in a sick way: she makes him fall in love with her, reversing power roles. Reynold’s relation with his mother isn’t fully investigated, but his visions of her, repeatedly at night, and his parent-son relationship with his sister are a clear clue of his involution and unsolved personnality. Now, the connection between the movie and the theme seems easy to guess. See this eekish movie.
Trailer ENG: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUlc2Y3ctxA
A mix of the movie best scenes: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BW-mJABq9A
