I run a documentary film club. We meet twice a month to watch and discuss documentaries. My cinema club, I think, is the most visited in Russia. Every time 80-100 people come to the hall, and these are always different people. And it’s been that way for four years. In my opinion, the main thing that attracts people outside of cinema is that they can say whatever they think with impunity. And in the end, after watching a movie, we always talk about ourselves.
Do you know which movie got the most people? So much so that the people almost hung on the chandeliers and sat in all the aisles on the steps. Most of all came to the film, in a brief announcement of which it was written that it was about psychological violence in the family.
And human rivers began to flow into our hall, because it was with the theme of violence that they resonated. No other topic had such an effect: neither a movie about war, orphans, the homeless, doctors, disasters, policemen, nor the topic of the death penalty, patriotism, guest workers and HIV. All other films of the audience were much less interested than the opportunity to look at a family where they put pressure on children.
And you probably want to watch this movie. It’s called “The Mousetrap”.
It is not publicly available, only the trailer. In the center of the film is a family: a mother and four children. Daughter Dasha, 18 years old, eldest son 15 years old and two more boys about 6-7 years old.
At the time of the film, the girl is being treated for drug addiction, the eldest son is waiting for a trial for robbery, and the younger ones have not yet been seen in anything like that. At the same time, the family is not at all marginal, as one might assume, but clearly intelligent, both adults and children with good faces and speak complex literary Russian.
The main setting is a large country house where the family spends the summer. Lots of wind, grass, birds, horses and children’s laughter.
The mother leaves the child with a feeling of failure and uncertainty, probably counting on the educational effect
Here is an episode where the whole family is going to eat watermelon on a sunny morning.
– Mom, I washed it (watermelon), – the boy says.
– What did I tell you to do? Mom asks.
– Wash the watermelon.
You won’t eat watermelon until you use your brains.
– You told me to wash the watermelon, I washed it … Aaah! We need to clean those cans!
“Come on, come on, go to the banks and stay there.
Mom cuts the watermelon and arranges it on plates.
Mom, tell me what you asked me to do.
– No.
“I really don’t remember.
– Go and remember.
I don’t know how to remember.
– If you don’t know, then go to bed.
“Mom…” the boy says pleadingly.
Mom silently cuts a watermelon. The rest of the kids act like nothing is happening. Dasha helps lay out slices of watermelon.
Mom to a boy:
You are now playing the circus. Everything.
She nods her head to the others. This is a signal for children to take apart the watermelon. They begin to eat, all but the boy, who never remembered. He sits at a distance, holding his head in his hands.
The rest walk around him, eat watermelon, tell him: come on, eat watermelon.
The boy sighs loudly.
I can’t eat watermelon until I remember.
Rub your eyes.
Before my eyes, a scene is unfolding in which the mother sets the child an initially impossible task and deliberately leaves him for a long time with a sense of failure and uncertainty. At the same time, she herself probably believes that this will have some kind of educational effect.
The most cruel thing a parent can do with words is to refuse a child, to refuse him love.
Episode two.
The eldest son enters. The mother pretends not to notice him, and says to her daughter in front of her son:
He doesn’t need a mother anyway. He needs cigarettes, it shows.
The son is right there in the room, he hears everything, but is silent.
Mother:
“I don’t understand why I have to put up with a stranger at home.
Has he become a stranger to you?
I don’t feel related by blood. I feel a kindred spirit. For me, all good children are mine. And all the deceitful and evil children are not mine.
Dasha does not look at her mother, but somewhere up, with an absent look. The son perfectly hears this conversation about him.
Before my eyes, the most cruel thing that a parent can do with words is being done – to refuse a child, to refuse him love. I know very well what it is. When one day my father told me that he no longer loved me, it broke our relationship forever. So I personally know exactly how much such words weigh in reality – the very ones that the mother says in this film.
Further discussion of the film began in the film club. People repeated one after another that they didn’t see anything special, that they were preparing for a bigger “tin”. It was as if the opinion prevailed in the hall that if a person is not broken in the head and not passed through a meat grinder, then there is no violence. We have seen worse, the audience said, and this is so, bullshit. So what if the mother breaks down on the children, yells at them and manipulates. So what if one child runs away from such a life into drugs, and the other into crime. It’s just that a mother wants development and discipline from her children.
One girl in the hall even stood up and said: “I am shocked by the number of people who did not see any violence…”
Another said about her mother: “Well, tell me directly what you need. Why sigh, approach from somewhere on the side, intrigue and make scenes? My family has it too.”
A family where children are manipulated and in which they all the time feel like nothingness seems ordinary to us, in it “as they know how, they love”
Many sided with the mother. Yes, they said, when it comes to manipulation, forcing a child to eat healthy porridge is manipulation and, in fact, violence for a child, but is there at least one mother who did not resort to this? No, there won’t be one. “Manipulation is normal for education”, “I can’t blame my mother – she wanted to develop discipline, so she yelled at the children and forced them.” Etc.
Traditionally, quite a lot of psychologists come to the cinema club – or simply there are a lot of psychologists and they are in any hall. Spectators-psychologists give out exact formulations: “I saw the denial of feelings: the girl is trying to tell what she feels, and her mother says no, everything is wrong, it seems to you … Thus, the mother denies the reality of the girl, her feelings. Mom needs the boy to feel guilty and hurt in the scene with the watermelon, she needs power over the child, who is completely dependent on her. It was in my childhood too. They throw you away, but not far: you need to come back and ask. And then, growing up, we build relationships according to the same scheme, we choose those that are discarded.
Then there was a poll. I ask people to raise their hand if what they hear is about them.
“Raise your hand, those who were beaten in childhood” – half of the hall.
“Raise your hand, those in whom the parents did not believe” – a third of the hall.
“Who was humiliated?” – a third of the hall.
“Who had an absolutely prosperous childhood?” – also about a third.
“Who was manipulated as a child?” Most people raise their hands.
At the airport, you can always find out the queue for your flight. Only in the Russian queue children are yelled at and beaten. I’m not surprised. This is the world in which I live since childhood. And for some reason we do not have fine settings that determine domestic violence. Because a family where children are manipulated and in which they all the time feel like nothingness, a family from which one escapes into drugs and the other becomes a criminal, seems to us ordinary, in it “as they know how, they love.”
If there are no bruises, then the destruction of the personality is trifles for us.
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