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giandujakissApart from, you know, obvious things.
There was a disquieting strain of ... patriarchy ... running through the storyline. I mean, there's this very old patriarchal notion that children are literally the property of their fathers, rather than persons in their own right. And it's a very extreme form of that belief that leads fathers to, say, murder their wives and children - i.e., delusional people who buy into the notion that "These kids are mine, my wife is mine, I'll do what I want with them, I'll make choices for them, I've decided that since I lost my job, my children would be better off if I killed them," etc.
Here, we saw that explicitly when the government guy killed his kids and, I gather, his wife - he was making choices about what was best for all of them, as though they were, in fact, his own property to control.
And I could have handwaved that away if I thought, "Well, that was just the evil guy," except that the theme seemed to be that the sins of the fathers were visited on the children. He made a decision to sacrifice everyone's children, and the punishment wasn't that he got sacrificed, but that his kids were, as though they were merely an extension of himself. And then we saw that exact same theme play out with Jack - he had made a decision to sacrifice 12 children, and the punishment was to lose his own grandchild - again, the grandchild's personhood wasn't relevant to the story, the grandchild's role was to be an extension of Jack, or Jack's property, and thus something that existed only for Jack to "lose."
There was a disquieting strain of ... patriarchy ... running through the storyline. I mean, there's this very old patriarchal notion that children are literally the property of their fathers, rather than persons in their own right. And it's a very extreme form of that belief that leads fathers to, say, murder their wives and children - i.e., delusional people who buy into the notion that "These kids are mine, my wife is mine, I'll do what I want with them, I'll make choices for them, I've decided that since I lost my job, my children would be better off if I killed them," etc.
Here, we saw that explicitly when the government guy killed his kids and, I gather, his wife - he was making choices about what was best for all of them, as though they were, in fact, his own property to control.
And I could have handwaved that away if I thought, "Well, that was just the evil guy," except that the theme seemed to be that the sins of the fathers were visited on the children. He made a decision to sacrifice everyone's children, and the punishment wasn't that he got sacrificed, but that his kids were, as though they were merely an extension of himself. And then we saw that exact same theme play out with Jack - he had made a decision to sacrifice 12 children, and the punishment was to lose his own grandchild - again, the grandchild's personhood wasn't relevant to the story, the grandchild's role was to be an extension of Jack, or Jack's property, and thus something that existed only for Jack to "lose."
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Date: 2009-07-11 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 03:52 pm (UTC)The evil woman wasn't universalizing; she was rationalizing.
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Date: 2009-07-11 04:26 pm (UTC)We don't have a cultural narrative of women killing their kids to protect them. We have a narrative of women killing their kids to reject their maternal roles or hurt the patriarch. That wasn't Froebisher's motive; he was doing it (and killing his wife) to protect them, as an exercise of his right to do so.
In real life, men kill their children for the same reason - they lose their jobs, are deluded enough to think their families can't survive without the patriarch, and kill them in an expression of both dominance and protectiveness. RTD took that image which has great cultural resonance and made it appear justified, because here there really was an awful fate awaiting the kids.
If the Abraham story had him killing not his son, but someone else's, it would have a different meaning - not just because it would be less personal to Abraham, but because he'd be taking a child that he had no right to take, someone else's kid. But that implies he has a "right" to kill his own child. That aesthetic ran through CoE.