The Kids are All Right

“The Kids are All Right” is one of those make-you-feel-good movies. Although it tells an unconventional story about how an alternative family deals with a mid-marriage crisis under quite an unusal circumstance, the primary premises it holds are nothing but conventional. Nic and Jules raised a happy family with their two teenager kids, until one day, out of their curiosity, the kids met their biological father Paul who pulled the family into a whirlpool. It is a familiar story: Nic, played by Annette Bening, is the commander-in-chief of the family, capable, ambitious and having a promising career. Jules, played by Julianne Moore, is sensitive, full-of-heart, and somewhat timid, staying at home taking care of the kids. One day, shortly after the family met Paul, Jules is fed up with her boring life and her “unappreciative” wife; she began to have affairs with Paul. The rest of the movie is about how the family deals with the crisis. Will the kids be all right?

Surely they will be, as the title reveals. Perhaps this certainty, and the simplistic optimism implied in the title and permeating throughout the movie are what prevent it from a more profound story. We don’t even need to enter the discussion of the plausibility of a gay person initiating a heterosextual affair (one of gay community’s protests of Ang Lee’s “Happy Banquet” is precisely this issue, and that movie was made almost twenty years ago.) Just listen to Jules’s speech at the end of the movie, in which she proclaimed, with full emotions, the hard work of maintaining a marriage. And that speech, perhaps more than anything else, pulled the family back together. The take-home message of the story is simple: there is nothing special or abnormal about a gay family. Just like any other family, they cherish the same values, go through the same ordeals, and come up with the same strategies to solve problems. A marriage is a marriage, no matter who is involved.

I agree. But I also feel that by emphasizing the universal values, the movie ignores, if not erases, the uniqueness of a gay family. Well, did Tolstoy not educate us long time ago: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way [from Anna Karenina]. In this case, a lesbian family should have its unique issues to deal with. For one, how did the kids grow up without a father? What kind of psychological impact, I mean both positive and negative, this situation has on them? The kids’ effort to find out their biological father at the beginning of the movie already suggests something deeper, yet the story does not develop that dimention further. For another, what about the social pressure on the family. Toward the end of the movie, the drunk and upset Joni (played by the wonderful Mia Wasikowska) yelled at her moms: “What do you want from me? I got all As. I got into every school I applied for. I have shown everybody how perfectly normal a lesbian family is. What more do you want from me?” This rant says something about how much of the extra work a gay family needs to do to make them appear “normal.” Ironically, the movie ends there. The hard work gets reward. There are some down moments, but they eventually get through OK. The kids are all right.

Too easy a solution, to the degree it is not realistic. Even for a straight family, I doubt things can be that easy. Let’s think about another movie, “Little Children,” directed by Todd Field. It runs a similar story: two people, both are in their own marriage and have kids, fall in love and decide to elope. Yet the movie explores much deeper and darker waters about how such a relationship develops against all conventional bets. It honestly portrays a dilemma for the lovers, and for every one of us, a dilemma between responsibilities and personal happiness. For “The Kids are All Right,” they can be easily reconciled and even merged as one. For “Little Children,” far from it.

Finally, let me go to one scene in “The Kids are All Right,” which touches me a great deal. At the end of the movie, the family drove Joni to the college, which was far from home. As Nic and Jules helped Joni move all the boxes into her dorm and tried to unpack things for her, Joni stopped them, saying “I can do it myself.” So the moms left the room. As Joni began to prepare her bed, and enjoyed her rare moment of freedom, she suddently wondered where her moms went. She became flustered and quickly walked out of her room to find them. Eventually she found them with a relief (of course they didn’t leave without saying goodbye.) That little scene betrays something genuine about a teenager’s relation with his/her parents. The kid wants her freedom and independence, but emotionally she still has tremendous bond with her parents, which is all natural. In fact I have a similar experience when my parents sent me to my college. After they helped me organize all the stuff in my dorm and set up everything to their satisfaction (I didn’t say no), they eventually took off. I remember this moment when, upon saying goodbye to me, they slowly walked away from me, with the late afternoon sunlight on their backs, I suddenly felt sad and lonely, standing there by myself watching them disappear around the corner, watching them moving away from my life.

Peabody Museum

Last time when I was in Salem, I did not have enough time to visit Peabody Essex Museum there. The museum has nothing to do with the witchcraft trial. Rather, it connects to another aspect of Salem’s history: its maritime trade with Asian countries since the 17^th century. Consequently, PEM houses over 10,000 Asian export products, witnessing a period of increasing cultural exchanges in the global context.

That was the impression when I visited the museum early today. Most of the exhibitions are in the Asian context. PEM even reconstructed a certain Chinese house of the Huang family in the region of Huizhou (徽州) named Yin Yu Tang (蔭餘堂). Meandering inside the house, I was perplexed with a strange feeling of loss. The reconstruction appeared to be a collapse of time and space: it aimed to preserve the original settings and configuration of the house, yet a house is a peculiar form of art because unlike painting or sculpture, it changes along time. Hence I saw a piece of 18^th century furniture, an early 20^th century textbook, and quite a few portraits of Chairman Mao on the walls. Perhaps the juxtapotion is a sober reminder of the vicissitudes the Huang family experienced in the tumultuous past. As I walked out of the house and entered the main hall of the museum, with the sunlight piercing through the glass ceiling of the modern building, I had a sudden, odd sense of dizziness and realized that how much our perceptions could be altered once we moved things out of their contexts.

In the PEM, I spent quite some time in an exhibition about Man Ray and Lee Miller’s partnership in Surealism. I did not know the two until I walked into the exhibition, and was rivited by their story and their art. Both Ray and Miller were American expatriates in 1920s Paris (yes, the legendary circle of artists and writers including Picasso and Hemingway). Ray was already an established avant-garde artist, while Miller was a young, pretty, model-turned photographer. They fell in love, collaborated extensively in their works, and after a few years, broke up. Miller came back to America, leaving Ray agonizing over their relationship in Paris. That was the period when Ray produced some of his most powerful and memorable art. In one piece, he painted a huge pair of lips, undoubtedly those of Miller’s, floating in the sky with a tiny image of the observatory in the background. The work, titled “Observatory Time,” seems to reveal that there was no other time but the time set by Miller’s luscious lips that mattered to Ray. Another body part of Miller that Ray was obsessed with is her eyes. Here is a piece of ingenious device by Ray: he attached a picture of Miller’s eye onto the pendulum of a metronome, and set the pendulum in motion with Miller’s eye swinging back and forth. If a viewer thinks that this was the way Ray tried to remember Miller forever, he/she is surely mistaken. Because Ray intended to eventually demolish the whole apparatus as a decisive way to exorcise Miller in his life. Nevertheless, Ray was unable to execute his plan until one day he was “helped” by a group of radical students in Paris. As a gesture of protesting the deterioration of modern art, the students stole the metronome and smashed it right in front of Ray. Furious but unwavering, Ray made a hundred copies of his original and distributed them to many places around the world.

Whatever the means Ray took to struggle with his relation with Miller, he eventually got over it and developed a genuine friendship with Miller, which lasted for the rest of their lives. Later Miller became a war journalist during the WWII, reporting its devastating cost on humanity. The painful experience tossed her into a swirl of depression after the war ended, and that was the time when Ray produced many art works to cheer his friend up. At the end of the exhibition, I saw a fascinating juxtapotion of two pictures of Ray and Miller. The first picture was taken in Paris in late 20s when the two were lovers. Ray was using his toy rifle to aim at something in the direction of the viewer, while Miller was watching with a gentle, nonchalant smile. The second picture, taken half a century later when the two reunited in a conference, shows the two fragile elders looking at each other with amiable smile. Of course they had lost the vigor and playfulness of the youth, but deep in their eyes I saw something truly caring and touching, something only time can create and attest.

Salem

I have noticed that my previous posts have strong philosophical orientation. I figure if I engage another discussion on the meaning of life or human mind, I myself may begin to roll my eyes. This piece gets back to history, which I have deep affection for.

Last Thursday, I went to a small town near Boston called Salem. Salem is famous for the notorious witchcraft trials that took place in 1692. A simplified story goes like this: In early 1692, several girls in the house of the Reverend Samuel Parris in Salem villiage began to have fits that could not be stopped by regular medication. A physician (named William Gribbs) was called in and pronouced that the girls were bewitched and nothing could alleviate their symptoms except that the source of witchcraft was identified. An extensive search ensued and a special court (the court of Oyer and Terminer) was established for the trials of the accused. Eventually nineteen people (fourteen women and five men) were executed by hanging, and one was crushed to death by stones (Giles Corey) because he refused to show up in the court. The Salem witch trials is the largest of the type in American history (still dwarfed by the European counterpart).

When I visited several museums in Salem, this is the basic story that was repeated with vivid narrative and sensational details. The executed were portrayed as innocents, or even heroic martyrs, who were the victims of an age of ignorance, intolerance, and great fear. I was a bit disappointed that almost no artifacts were left from the tumultuous event: the original execution site, called Gallows Hill, has become a baseball field, and no relics of these victims can be found. Instead, these museums offered artificial props, with wax figures and imaginary settings, and tours that explained the story to a curious audience. The commercial atmosphere was manifest; they always ended the tour with the giftshop. And after visiting the first museum or two, I found the story began to repeat itself and become hackneyed.

But this does not mean there are no interesting things. There are plenty. At the Salem Witch Museum, I found a display of a potpourri of herbs that were used by witches at the time. The labels explain the medical and magical property of each of these herbs. For example, daisy helps headache, and also brings luck. Another example: basil can ease stomach cramps, insect bites and fevers. In the magical realm, it can banish negativity and help keeping in love. Interestingly, I found another herb called star anise, which can ease stomach disorder and ward off the evil eye. Star anise is called daliao in Chinese, a household spice in Asia. How come this commonplace spice in Asia turned into a magical herb in America? I have no clue.

When I was at the Witch House (the name is misleading, since this house is only tenuously linked to witchcraft), I found an intriguing object that the witch presumably used in the 17^th century to cast spells on a target. It is a stuffed human miniature made of cloth, with a needle on the site of nose. The idea is that the witch used this miniature, in the form of sympathetic magic, to exert injury to her victim. Again, this is a form of magic that is not unfamiliar to a Chinese audience. For one case, in the famous novel The Story of the Stone, the malevolent Ms. Zhao employed a certain Lady Ma, a witch type of figure, who taught Ms. Zhao to write the birth date of Baoyu (the protagnist of the novel) on a human miniature made of paper, and together with five ghosts (also made of paper) hide it in his bed so as to cast curse on him (chapter 25). Wherever its origin, which can be traced back to antiquity, I believe this particular kind of witchcraft has wide currency around the world.

Final anecdote. Nathaniel Hawthorne, the famous 19^th century writer who wrote The Scarlet Letter, was a Salem native. His great-great-grandfather, John Hathorne, was one of the executors who participated in the Salem witchcraft trials, and never regretted his actions. Because of this, Nathaniel added a “w” into his last name in order to distant himself from his infamous ancestor.

So many tidbits of information. But let’s go back to the original story. After all, nothing left to these days except this story. Obviously, what happened in 1692 in Salem was terrible and unfortunate, another familiar story in human history in which the weak and the unorthodox were unjustly crushed by the powerful and the conventional. Subsequently, the modern narrative tries, somewhat hastily, to rectify the mistake and reveal the truth, that is, to emphatically show the innocence of the prosecuted weak. Surely there is a sense of redemption here, by getting the story “right.” After all, the people, who gave me the tour or worked at the giftshop, are the descendants of the people who initiated the trials 300 hundred years ago. In a way, the Salem story not just reveals, but also acts as a redemptive trope for these people to absolve their collective guilt. Perhaps.

But let’s go to the next level. What can we learn from such an event? A tour guide at the Salem Witch Museum proposed the following equation: fear + trigger = scapegoat. She further elaborated that this equation recurred in our history, unfortunately. In recent time, examples include McCarthyism, blaming of the gay community for AIDS, and the portrayal of Muslims as terrorists after 9/11. This is a fine comparison. At least it brings up an interesting issue – the perenial fear in humans, fear of the unknown, fear of the dissimilar, fear of each other… But if communism, AIDS, or terrorism is the concrete origin of fear for the 20^th century Americans, what was the origin of fear that trggered the whole Salem trials? Not so clear. You may say witchcraft. But witchcraft was a common practice in the 17^th century New England, not unlike the current fad of alternative medicine. Something deeper, I surmise. Surely there was a component of misogynism and racism in the event. Tituba, the servant in Parris’s house who was one of the first accused of practicing witchcraft, was a black slave from Barbados. The gender difference among the executed manifests an overwhelming prejudice toward women. But these are no surprise to anybody, given the general social context of the 17^th century New England.

Several pieces of information is relevant. The first person who was executed, Bridget Bishop, was by no means a conformist. For one thing, she remarried four times. By the contemporary standard, she was an incongruous oddity, if not a sheer lascivious evil. Moreover, that poor guy Giles Corey, who was stoned to death, was a man of rebellious nature and with explosive temper (his execution was a testomony), often associated with fights and misdeeds. No wonder he was an easy suspect. Although we don’t know an aweful lot of the Salem victims, except the saintly Rebecca Nurse, it is perhaps plausible to speculate that these people were victims of the community long before they were executed for witchcraft. Their unconventional behavior, non-conformist way of life, and sometimes previous misdeeds made them a dangerous existence that fomented fear in a suspicious and intolerent society. Hence they were marginalized, maligned, and if necessary, eliminated. Sounds familiar? Yes, the anti-Semitism in the early 20^th century Germany. In fact, in both cases, we see a dark side of democracy: if the popular sentiment gets off the rein, astray it can go.

Finally, let’s go to the other part of the equation, namely, the trigger. In Salem’s case, the trigger was a few girls from Parris’s house who had bouts of fits. Most of people arreasted and executed were the ones these girls pointed out, sometimes by spectral evidence (that is, imaginary vision). It was not until these girls pointed out the governor Sir William Phipps’s wife as a suspect of witchcraft did the whole farce come to a speedy end. Later evidence indicates that these girls were not sick at all. They may just play a game to entertain themselves, perhaps imitating what was shown in a witchcraft manual, to which they had access in their house. A play with devastating consequences! As I suggested earlier, the popular prejudice towards the weak and the unconventional may play an important role in the event. But what about these kids? What about this “trigger,” without which the whole event could not unfold? Of course, the Salem narrative does not highlight this part, since kids are always depicted as immaculately innocent, as if they belonged to a different species (just listen to how President Obama ended his touching speech after the Arizona gunshot early this year). But after all, I think children are just part of us adults. Any criteria to separate these two categories are superficial. We can be as good as kids be evil. Of course I don’t want to hold these kids responsible for what they did, but to get them completely off the hook in our historical thinking is somewhat unsatisfactory and unsettling to me. To explore the historicity and mentality of children is another grand topic that I cannot tackle here (the recent movie “White Ribbon” by Michael Haneke seems to be quite relevant, which tells a story of a group of children who were ritually suppressed in pre-WWI Germany), but when I looked into the eyes of those evil-kid dolls displayed in the gift shop, I could not help contemplating what were behind those mesmerizing eyes.