Cheater Ex Has Cancer, She Has Conflicted Feelings

The Saddam-in-a-hole comparison is perfect. I remember when cable news kept that scene of him moments before execution on a loop and I couldn’t stand it. As evil as I knew he was (as the Kurds whom he mass-poisoned knew too well), he just looked like a scared old animal. In the same sense, I would have trouble watching a dying hyena even though hyenas are probably the least lovable creatures on the planet.

But then, see, I’m not a Kurd nor a lioness who just watched her cubs torn to pieces by a hyena pack. So I agree with CL that Forty Years has license not to be moved by her ex abuser’s current pathos.

She also has license to be very uncomfortable with her sons’ reactions to Saddam-in-a-hole (just like Kurdish survivors of atrocity might be frustrated and unsettled by anyone’s view of Saddam as pathetic).

Lately, I’ve been hearing so many stories of abusers trying to inculcate their kids and turn them against victim parents that it’s giving me nightmares and making me mull and brood on the issue a lot, look into social research on it (Dr. Emma Katz on Substack, Dr. Christine Cocchiola on Youtube) and, when I still can’t quite wrap my head around it, also collect cinematic or literary analogies.

Injustice like that terrifies and infuriates me and, considering how diabolically manipulative abusers are, it’s reasonable to fear they can steal critical allies from victims. But, in this case, I somehow sense this father/son reunion isn’t going to go down quite as Kumbaya as 40 Years fears. In fact, by the end of it, I have a feeling these sons are going to have even greater respect for their mother and what she’s endured. There’s always the risk that one of the sons may be tied up in knots and bamboozled with grief and guilt but something tells me that would only be temporary and things would right themselves.

The reason I think this is that my gut tells me that even if ailing dad has hit rock bottom in his life and finds himself alone and ill and temporarily humbled, at some point he’s going to start grasping for ego kibble. Less likely is that he’ll be wallowing in thorough regret. But, either way, it will highlight what a paragon 40 Years has been all along.

One of my youthful ambitions was to be a theater and film director (until I found out it wasn’t a shield against rampant sexual harassment in the industry) and I still watch life with a director’s eye for character motivation and perspective or collect and file scenes or performances in films and plays which I think capture something most people find impossible to describe.

And because the experience that 40 Years is going through is one of those impossible to describe dynamics, please bear with me while I resort to the weird exercise of filtering it through “art”. Heads up for lots of spoilers:

So imagining that I’m directing scenes in which adult sons have suspended their resentment of their traitorous father while the latter endures cancer treatment, I realized that a creep like this would not be satisfied with “mere” care and attention. Nope, that’s impossible because baked-in creeps like this do not get sudden character transplants in my experience. Instead I think he’d continually nudge and prod and pry– whether subtly or brazenly– to try to exact total absolution for all his crimes from his sons, including trying to hijack approval for his misogynistic sleaziness and victim-blaming. Over time, I imagine the sons would start to feel slightly nauseated like they were being exposed to toxic emissions and being inculcated into disrespecting their mother. From the sound of it, 40 Years’ sons– since they managed to make it to adulthood without being groomed or spellbound by their abusive father– wouldn’t appreciate the attempt to turn them against their mother or to be roped into applauding their dad’s trashy exploits.

Given the usual characters of FWs, I think that’s the most likely scenario. At least one of my favorite directors (aside from Jane Campion, Ingmar Bergman, Agnieszka Holland, Istvan Szabo, Mararethe Von Trotta, too many to mention!) Robert Altman seemed to think that was the most likely outcome when you’ve got a dirtbag old dad and a son who somehow isn’t a “chip off the old block.” In any case, he wove a scene with similar elements into his film Short Cuts. The dynamics were a little different, involving a loser dad (mercilessly played by Jack Lemmon) foisting his presence at the hospital bedside of his young grandson and emotionally holding hostage his estranged adult son. But the sticky patheticness of Jack Lemmon’s character and his need to extract complicity from his humble, upstanding, grieving son– maybe even a kind of backslapping admiration– is the theme and actor Bruce Davidson’s face says it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA54HPoUtpM

Altman was a veteran director and obviously a veteran of life. From his brilliant Gosford Park, Altman obviously enjoyed giving rapey bastards their comeuppance, including an unvarnished, tragic view of the harm they cause for generations. Another brilliant but clearly less life-experienced director might be Paul Thomas Anderson who shows two alternative outcomes for cancer ridden old FWs in his film Magnolia which, like Short Cuts and Gosford, is about intersecting lives. There’s the dying old FW who refuses to admit he raped his daughter when she was a child and, because of this, is abandoned by his wife who finally sides with her daughter. Meanwhile, the other dying old FW played by Jason Robards is wallowing in regret for how he treated his wife and somehow manages to drag his estranged son (surprisingly great performance by Tom Cruise https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3VH5wfAoKA) to his deathbed for a moment of redemption.

I thought the film was clever in how it showed generational reenactment, where Cruise ends up a kind of Andrew Tate guru for misogynistic Incels, presumably because he was abandoned by his FW father and left to care for his dying mother when he was too young to process. I thought it was pretty insightful to show how this kind of rapistic misogyny is forged in childhood by abusive male role models, not by the moldy old Freudian “monstrous mommy” trope.

Cruise’s character expresses both rage and love for the comatose dad he ended up ironically emulating. But, to be honest, as well-intended as this story line in Magnolia was, I found it all too redemptively pat and I think Altman had the sharper grasp of how these things go down. Either the son becomes hardened by mistreatment to the point he has no “redemption” to offer his old bastard of a father or else he’s not hardened and will be made queasy by his father’s attempts to hijack redemption and complicity.

Anyway, as a kid I wanted to be a director because I felt that, at its best, art exposes profound truths that even psychoanalysts dither over and frequently get wrong. And by exposing truth, art can provide consensus and heal. Kind of like food, I think if art doesn’t heal, it kills and ain’t art. So I hope it’s a little reassuring to 40 Years that, at least according to an Oscar/Cannes winning director, adult men with genuine integrity are unlikely to be drawn over to the dark side even by a dying con artist father playing on their heart strings, largely because the dying con artist won’t be able to completely mask his own fetid ego for long.