In the past week my older kids have watched a couple of fairly deep movies with their dad. Citizen Kane (they’ve seen this one before) and Mildred Pierce. Like serious books, serious movies bring psychological insights and exploration of universal themes. Movies have an auditory and visual language, not the written word like books, but something more in the genre of drama. I don’t think the cinema genre has maximized its potential yet, and I think there is plenty of twaddle and dreck out there, but the best ones bring truths to life and provide the catharsis that Aristotle spoke about centuries ago.
I personally watch few movies. Movie-watching is something they do with their dad. It is definitely a social, dialectic experience for them, not a solitary passive thing. They have a habit of telling me their reactions on the day after the movie, and it’s interesting to try to piece together the story and theme from what they say, particularly if it’s a movie I’ve never seen.
Mildred Pierce seemed to strike them all in a similar way. It’s a sort of tragedy about a middle class woman who is so devoted to her children that it brings all kinds of sorrow. First, Kevin (husband) told me: “Mildred Pierce spoiled her daughter rotten.”
A little while later Clare came and told me something similar.
Then Sean came up during breakfast and said. “Mildred Pierce was a psycho.” (something like that). “She ruined everyone’s life, including her own. Her husband told her that she was letting her kids get away with too much, and that sometimes he wanted to hit them because they were so bratty. So she got rid of him. They got a divorce.” Then he went on to narrate the salient points of the story. I wanted to write it down because I couldn’t help noticing how he moved from a general point to a slightly more specific one and then gave particular examples of the course of the plot, which well illustrated his thesis. Though the language was informal, the substance of it was almost classically correct format composition to make a point. To wrap it up, he compared it to Citizen Kane which he had indignantly discussed the other day. The mother in that movie also betrayed her child, though in a different way — by detaching rather than excessive attachment. Both had materialist components in their mistakes though.
The other defining characteristic of his narration was the moral indignation. If you have early teens or pre-teens you probably notice how moralistic they are. They have not quite learned to temper moral outrage with insight either into themselves or the mitigating factors in the other person’s circumstances. Actually, my children are usually pretty good by early teens about not judging people who they love. Sometimes they are partial, in fact. But in circumstances where they observe a situation from the outside, they can be almost like Old Testament prophets. I think this is completely developmentally appropriate and a great foundation for discussions and practicing ethical reasoning. I can still remember how glad I was that my mom listened to all my teenage rants. She would dialogue with me, not contradict me. She was honest if she didn’t quite agree, but in an interactive way. I learned so much both by vocalizing my own judgements and by listening to her take on things.
This is pretty much all I have to report academically for now. Kieron is reading as many Boxcar Children books as he can find on our shelves, and working on his Bionicle comic strip. Paddy is voraciously listening to as many books as we find time to read to him. Clare is trudging through square roots. We haven’t done math or Latin or hit any of the normal “lesson” books recently, though I hope to get back in the swing of things next week.
The weather was wonderful until yesterday, when it got cold and started snowing!
