¿INFLUENZA?, AJA Y QUE MÁS....JAJAJ (Photo credit: Immer_Lebend)I am sick. My mom can't stop reminding me that I should have gotten a shot. I had already figured that out on my own.
Anyway, as long as I'm home, I'm trying to get through my draft for next week. I already have one draft, but it's crummy. My thesis doesn't work. Maybe it's got the flu, too.
I can't concentrate very well, thanks to the fever, so I'm not getting very far.
Right now, I'm thinking about anger and violence, and anger and power. And, how it all connects up with the masculine ideal. It seems as though this comes out in the Lonergan character. He only gets visibly angry once in the entire film, and that is when no other men are present. When there are, you can't tell if he's angry, or even irritated, for that matter. This seems to be part of a cultural image of strong men. So, it's obvious that I need to think a lot more.
Angry Talk (Comic Style) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)We're back from spring break this week, and I've turned in my annotated bibliography, but there's something funny about that: I'm not going to be able to use too many of the sources I listed. I have to change my focus. There just wasn't enough material on the fathering angle, at least not the things I wanted to talk about. And then it hit me that there is something else interesting going on, which is how each of the men in the film deal with anger.
For one thing, anger seems to be Dolarhyde's default setting -- it's like he's permanently pissed off. Lonergan is a good contrast to him: he only rarely gets angry, and he doesn't automatically react to new threats with anger; he's more interested in dealing with the problem. Doc gets angry out of frustration, mainly because he has no power to change anything, given the situation. Nat, despite his attachment to Dolarhyde, doesn't use him as a role model. He's actually more like Lonergan.
So. I spent spring break doing fresh research, and I came up with some good articles. I'm going to mix the material on anger with the basic men's studies material, and I'm pretty sure it's going to work this time. It better-- the draft is due in a couple of weeks.
Image via WikipediaI've been thinking a lot about the father-son thing. It looks to me as if Dolarhyde is responsible for all of his problems with Percy -- he's created a monster there (yeah, I know, DUH!). I think it all boils down to him being clueless about fatherhood, and that shows up best when he's interacting with Nat and the kid.
It seems that he told Percy a bunch of stories about his military experiences (Percy uses these to threaten people, talking about how his father knows how to kill people "real slow"). When Nat, with a smile, says that he remembers hearing him tell them, Dolarhyde gets angry, and says, "they were for my son!" meaning, not for Nat. Anyway, when Dolarhyde is talking to the kid, he tells him a story that no responsible adult would tell a child, and it's impossible to tell what his point is in telling the story. He seems frustrated that the kid doesn't get what he's trying to communicate, and this is probably what happened with Percy while he was growing up. What Percy got out of the stories was that his father is a badass, that he will never be as tough as his father, and that the world is a very scary place. And that's how you make a bully.
