Father Figures
Film critic Owen Gleiberman said of the abusive father in the movie Sunset Song, "There’s a place for that kind of character, and that kind of truth. But in Sunset Song, as soon as Peter Mullan [John Guthrie] shows up as the patriarch of the Guthrie clan, a simple farmer smoking his pipe by the fire with too much heightened tranquility, my thought was: of course he’ll turn out to be a complete monster. This father doesn’t just beat his son with a belt – he makes sure to use the metal buckle. And his desire, against his wife’s pleas, to impregnate her, over and over, may be the first example in movie history of fertility used as sadism."
My wife Maria and I watched this movie. The cinematography reminded me of David Lean's and Robert Bolt's Ryan's Daughter. Sadly, what caught our attention, what riveted us to the screen, was not the beautiful scenery. It was John Guthrie, the father figure of whom Gleiberman writes.
As Gleiberman says, "There’s a place for that kind of character." The place for this kind of character for me hides in the darkest recesses of my memory. I never recall these memories on my own volition. They pop up like unsolicited ads that cover a text that I am reading. They are brought back to me by reminders, spontaneously, like suddenly remembering while driving that I forgot the cellphone on the picnic table and it's about to rain after I’ve driven a couple of miles from home and I have to find a place to turn around to fetch it. The place for this kind of character for me was in a secret place about which I kept silent for nearly sixty years until my father's death in 2013. This movie father figure represented everything dislikable, no that is too weak a word, loathsome, about my grandfather's and father's generations; the two male role models that I observed and was expected to emulate growing up.
My experiences with the men of these generations is why I disagree with George Will that there is a Greatest Generation. There are only great men and women, great individuals in any generation, and there is slime in every generation too. This is why I so hesitantly opine the good old days segregating my memories out of fear that my shame stains the goodness of an archived moment worth protecting from the slime. The slime is gender neutral. I have known a few slimy women in my life. The slime aren’t only of one race. I have known slime from all races. The slime inhabit all ethnicities, nationalities, religions.
At my father's memorial, my cousin spoke about how she saw her father and my father as "the real men" by which she measured all other men. Her words made me sick to my stomach. I felt the slime on the rise.
I knew her father, my uncle. He was raised as a farmer but he never was close to the land as conservationists are. Farmers don't feel close to the land. They don't have the construct of conservation or preservation unless it is tied to their financial interests. The weather is an adversary not a joy. It dominates their every day lives and they resent it. It provides a reprieve from their day’s labor and guilt for the pleasure they take from having a day off. They feel in conflict with the land and fight to take everything they can from it. They kill animals that stalk their chickens like fox, weasel, and hawk and any other animal for the sake of the kill.
My uncle like my father was a type from that era. He was an unempathetic person who despised the educated, the book-learned, and who felt that he could accomplish anything by sheer brut force. He saw sports as the true measure of a man and only those of sport like Pete Rose who gave 100% of their body deserved to be honored.
There are women who like these types of men; women who get lit up by the strength of a man's domination, by their uncomplicated simple mindedness; these women who can lure these men by scent like a dog is lured to a spot by another dog’s mark. I see these types of women as accomplices to a power structure that refuses to relinquish its male dominance. Feminists should target this group of women rather than the male gender as a whole because there are good men out there it is just that they are hard to find. These women aren't victims of male oppression; they have learned how to succor the slime of simple minded men. They themselves are oppressors, collaborationists, informants. They sup on the droppings of male dominance. It is this male dominance that reverberates throughout our culture in so many negative ways from guns to child abuse to White Supremacy.
How is the father in Sunset Song so recognizable for me? First, the father beats his son with the same measured dedication and with the same measured enthusiasm as my father beat me and his instrument is the same as well...his belt. Child abusers measure their enthusiasm out of fear that their excitement betrays them and that they be noticed. The father takes his son to the barn so that he and his son have privacy. Afterward he threads the belt back through his belt loops in front of his son in the same perverse way my father did as if returning a fine, calibrated tool to its proper location so that it would be easy to retrieve the next time it was needed. The difference is that in the film the son is fully grown and clothed except he removes his shirt and is lashed across the back. I was about four when I received my first belt burns over my buttocks; with every hit, my hips shoving my little bollocks into the soft mattress. It took years for me to ever lie on my stomach out of fear that my father might surprise me with a lash.
Secondly, the father treats his wife as sadistically as my wife's father treated her mother. My wife's mother was twenty-seven when she died in childbirth in the mountains of Puerto Rico because her "macho" husband wouldn't let her go to the clinic. The doctor had asked for her two weeks before she died but my wife's father refused to let her go because of his jealousy. My wife says, "He was as jealous as the sun is of the moon." He sat in his chair while his wife, Maria Rita, bled to death in their bed. He made seventeen children with two different women. My wife almost never speaks of this. It is too painful. My wife's father left the family after his wife died abandoning the children. My wife was seven when he left. She lived on street for a time eating mangoes, bananas, and Spanish limes that had fallen from the trees or that had been tossed off of trucks hauling fruit down the mountain to San Juan.
As Gleiberman says, "There’s a place for that kind of character." Yes, in film there's a place and there's even a place for these characters in history books but there is no place for these characters in the postmodern world. It is the 21st century and time for our species to enter its adulthood; an adulthood whose maturity has been postponed because only half of its members have been allowed to grow. It's time for men to willing hand-over their power. Time for the species to see what glory women can bring to the world through their leadership and if history has proven one thing, we can be sure that as members of the human race, women too will commit their own atrocities and perhaps prove that there really is no difference between men and women.
There might be but one truth. We all are fallen. We all possess a touch of the slime that lays dormant in us like a cancer. Perhaps what is true for each of us is not what is true for all of us but what has meaning for each and every one of us is what we need to find. If we can find that elusive meaning, we will have found the golden thread that binds us. George Will is wrong; Bonhoeffer is right. The German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it is not right for us to forget that we are always utterly alone, always individuals, who in the last resort can only decide and act for ourselves.
Once that thread that bound us was the grace of God, then as we grew more secular it became a national common cause, now it is an identity that celebrates what we look like more than what we believe, what our lived experiences have been, or from where we come. That’s like condemning someone to eternal damnation because they don’t like the taste of fish. In the end, I think mankind's search for meaning will depend more upon its appetite than upon its taste. We are starving for meaning in our lives but we seem to be looking in the wrong places. Maybe that's because there's no place left to look. The slime has prevented our access.
