I’ve watched movies with Christian Bale (he is a really good actor and yummy on top of that) that are eerily so close to reality, my reality.
American Psycho
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0144084/
If you take aside the murders, Patrick Bateman is really similar to my father, it’s eerie. Just like Bateman, my dad had a lot of fun in the 80s too. My father was materialistic and wanted to become a millionaire. Sure, as long as my mother was with him handling the money everything was fine, but after she rightfully ditched him (I was 6-7), my irresponsible father went on the way side… fast. He was so vain and shallow, he was all about physical appearance and well, women found him hot. He was doing a lot of karate, even started his own karate school, so physically, he was in pretty good shape, going regularly to the tanning salon to perfect his tan, especially here in Canada with our 6-months-a-year winters, we are a pale lot generally but my father was wearing a good tan all year long. He was always about doing the "in", "cool" things to do, and in the 80s, that meant having sex every night with a different woman (and two if he could score more of course), partying, drugs and alcohol. He was also violent, abusive and manipulative on top of that. He never really cared about us, my brother and I, which I always made me wonder why he just kept coming or why he didn’t leave us and disappeared or something. But as they say, the good ones always go first (which I know very well too with my very nice grand-mother who died when I was 3 while the evil wicked one is still breathing).
And my father was very narcissistic too, he was persuaded he was perfect or something. He was rewriting what was happening at the moment it was happening and he was always giving himself the good roles, or the victim that cannot be blamed for anything. So whenever something was happening, it couldn’t be his fault, others had to be blamed, and that meant of course my brother and I were getting the guilty roles as usual and would get punished. He was terrifying us. His manipulation and schemes were not working on me so my father told me I was the one with problems and he wanted me to see a shrink so this one would give me medication to make me more compliant, that one never happened though, I doubt my mother would have let this one pass.
When my mother left him,, she left him everything, the house, the car, the furnitures, even stuff that belonged to her, all she took were a few luggages and me (my brother stayed with my father). She was a single-mother with a sick and disabled child to take of and my father was giving her a miserable amount of money per month. He was too busy spending his money in partying, the booze and the drugs. He did make some money true, but frankly, we’ve never seen the color of it. My brother and I had to "prostitute" ourselves to dad to get a little dollar here and there, my brother (he was 10 at the time of the splitting) working like a slave doing all the chores and doing all the work (like painting the fences, shovelling, etc,) when my father was barely feeding him, and me I had to deal with the psychological mind games he loved playing and plenty of psychological stuff he loved doing to people (my mother was barely paying for the rent and the food and cloth so if I wanted something extra I knew only dad could get them but on dad’s rules). The only thing my mother has managed to make him pay were my retainers, and when he was signing the check (50$CAD monthly payment), and this is when he was paying, he was acting as if someone was gutting him out. At some point, over a silly matter, he just stopped paying the miserable amount of money he was giving to my mother.
When the 90s kicked in, and sanity came back (finally, I really hated the 80s), my father went after the next "in" things to do like organic foods and going to bio stores. When my mother was still with our father, dinner time had to be silent, my father was not tolerating a word, or a laugh or a smile during dinner, never, ever. Yet, in the 90s, our father complained we were never talking during dinner and told us communication was key (a new "in" thing from the 90s) and that we had always talked around dinner before and always and that the two of us were a bunch of ungrateful kids filled with personal problems and he just didn’t know what to do with the two of us. My brother and I gave each other that look that said: "What is this new thing of his?"
My father kicked out my brother out of his house when he got to 18, telling him that legally he didn’t have to take care for him anymore. My brother ended up at my mother’s place, and poor her, it was just to much, she had to take a second job to pay the bills and she ended up having a burnout and a depression. On my side, I stopped all contacts with my father at 18. I’ve never seen or talked to him again. Still, a funny part, which is totally him, is that at first he would call me and give me a message on my answer machine telling me he was forgiving me, because in his mind of course, he never did wrong. He ended up going bankrupt after all.
Laurel Canyon
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298408/
This one is again about my father, my irresponsible immature father who was still acting like a 15 years old and never really grew up and never took his fatherly responsibilities. I find the movie interesting and personally I’ve sided with Sam the whole time. It’s very unhealthy to children when children are forced to mature and grow up very very fast and end up parenting their parents because these ones are incapable of the simplest things (and I really mean that one). Like Sam, I’ve made my best not to repeat my father’s very long list of mistakes, especially when your father wonders when you’re at 16 why you’re not having sex with all the boys at school and not drinking and taking drugs… I’m sure other kids would have loved to get my father’s approval to fool around but in my case I was shocked. He even went as far as telling me that this is what Latins do and that my Latin ancestors were turning in their graves because I was not doing the same things like him and that I had nothing but ice in my veins. What I dislike most with the movie is that the director seems to side with the disturbed and psychologically immature mother saying that Sam is being too traditional here (when he is just being mature and sane) and that he should just suck it up and deal with it, which is I think a very bad and negative message to give away.
I’m saying that because I got lucky, it could have been worse, heck I know worse. I know someone, a woman, whose mother’s very deep immature and irresponsible nature have put them, her and her brother, in worse problems than those I’ve had. She is so bad she let them being abused and beaten up, being raped in very angle possible and this without ever lifting a finger once to protect them for years and from anyone. The brother, after over a decade of abuse, at 15, he turned into a heavy case of schizophrenia (it’s very rare for teenagers to get schizophrenia but he did), I guess he had no other choice but to lock himself into a mental bubble to get himself out of there (pretty much like when Sam goes underwater at the end of the movie to get away from it all). The mother, more irresponsible as ever, didn’t mind to have sex with male friends of her teenage daughter. Even today, she is incapable to take care of herself and I have no idea how her daughter manages to still talk to her, I would have dumped that one pretty damn fast like I dumped my father.
In other words, not once do I feel sorry or anything for Sam’s mother in the movie, she can go to Hell for all I care.
This is a past blog entry from MySpace.
Strange Realms' Random Thoughts 