![[personal profile]](http://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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."
no subject
Date: 2009-07-11 03:52 pm (UTC)The evil woman wasn't universalizing; she was rationalizing.