THE SAVAGES depicts family members dealing with anxiety by cutting off from each other. The family history and its members depth. In THE SAVAGES, a brother and sister reunite after their father’s decades-long girlfriend (a woman they never met) dies in a Phoenix retirement village. The father is without funds and on the fast track to senility. In their forties, neither of the siblings are married. Both are involved in thin, unfulfilling relationships–her with a dedicated (well, sort of) married man; him with a woman living in Poland.
Anxiety: The response of an indivual when threatened. The response can be to a real or imagined threat. Usually, the threat is imaginary. Usually, the threat is fear that the way we see ourselves may be challenged. The twittery self-esteem problem.
When THE SAVAGE family is together, their conversations are awkward and joyless. There are no children, grandparents, or relatives of any kind, not even ideas to catch up on. Neither speaks of the book they just enjoyed, or a movie, a play, a friend who just got back from somewhere, something funny someone said on the bus. It’s as if each lives an empty life hardly worth sharing.
When a family manages ANXIETY with distance, the family becomes like a small grouping of palm trees without roots. Figures sticking out the earth, but who can be blown over into nothingness by the slightest wind.
MS would never thumb her nose at anyone’s attempt to deal with anxiety and especially the anxiety that holiday togetherness can spawn. I am jumpy and don’t sleep too well during these times. And I come from an easy family–no substance abusers, no malcontents, not even anyone who’s slightly unkind. Still, I can be a wreck. I remember stopping for lunch at a Taco Bell one Thanksgiving on a road trip in Arizona. I remarked to my companions that it was most relaxing Thanksgiving I’d ever spent. That was my immaturity and difficulty managing my anxiety showing. Sure, I’d like to say I wasn’t anxious because I didn’t have to deal with all those OTHER crazy, anxious people in my family. The truth is, I have some work to do to stay myself and as relaxed around my family as I am around friends.
Distance is the most popular way of managing anxiety–like the person who says, “I do fine around my mother. I haven’t seen her in years.” But some families cannot be together without getting “overly close.” In these families, people acting as individuals make others uncomfortable. “Why do you do it that way? That makes no sense! How can you hold such ridiculous political ideas? Well, you’re just wrong!” In these families there is a great deal of bickering (exhausting) often “resolved” by instituting the distance solution to anxiety.
Distance-Butt-in-ski-ness. Two sides of the same coin.
From the Writer’s Bench: I once read (and, painfully, have never been able to forget) that “the problem with writers is that they think everything that ever happened to them is interesting.” THE SAVAGES is a case in point. What happens to this family happens to all of us in one form or another. Sometimes watching ordinary life experiences dealth with by heroic or unusual people or even people with a sense of humor can be captivating. Not so with THE SAVAGES. The characters in this film are not likable or kind enough to forgive their shallow approach to a life change. Characters need some LIFE.
1 Comment
January 4, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Hi. I like this approach.