Exploring the ongoing shift in our cultural narrative illustrated through film

And why we can’t retreat, for the sake of our daughters, or our mothers either.  

This Movie Salon’s suggestion of films to watch for the upcoming DiscourseParlor:

• Blue Valentine, 2010.  Directed by Derek Cianfrance written by Cianfrance, Cami Delavigne and Joey Curtis.  With Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams.
•  Revolutionary Road, 2008. Directed by Sam Mendes. Screenplay Justin Haythe  from the novel by Richard Yates.  With Leonardo DiCaprio & Kate Winslet.

These two stories tell the tale of the consequences of pregnancy and of the decision to continue that pregnancy, or not, on two young women, which is to say on their young dreams for themselves;  how acting on that decision figures into everything and on everything into their future.  Both narratives throw open the door to spread nuanced, detailed light on this messy and muddied social reality.  And both stories lay out in intimate detail the affects of this intensely personal earthquake on the women and men in them as well as the rippling net of connection, within and without, that’s set in motion by their decision.  Complex, not simple.  As complex as it gets, this bringing, this allowing life.  Or not.  And what is let go of, moved toward, and sometimes, yes, extinguished in the process of balance, or not, between self and other.

The elements on which I’m building this discourse are that woman and man together conceive biological life.  Genetically speaking, so far, we each give a pretty much equal share.  This might serve as inspiration for a certain cultural equality, but we’re a ways from that, mired in a conception of ourselves as living above/beside/in disregard of nature.  Here, in the social, we, women and men together give into our tendency to fall back on inherited and mostly calcified patterns of relation, especially as codified in marriage.  These patterns are deeprooted in the obsession with control and power over as substitution for the arduous work of discovering who we are through actual feeling.

But in spite of these cultural inheritances of suppression and sublimation, we’re already well along in our Westward Ho! of unearthing consciousness through feeling. Because evolving consciousness, intrinsic to our nature, is our work to do here.  Why earth birthed us.  This excavation of consciousness manifests through our relation with one another and simultaneously within each of us alone.  Yes, it is often a trudge, a high energy burn when done in earnest.  And often dangerously unpredictable.  That is, volcanic.  But then, that’s where the new substance of us flows out.

We are arriving at a time and place where the hard won out-of-the cave survival of the species is no longer under constant question – besides the very real threat from our own overwhelming success at propagation.  Finally the discussion has opened on acceptance of non-reproductive sex as a part of our being.  It always has been.  But now we can begin the process of admitting it, taking a good look at it.

A woman’s self determination, in the form of contraception, over how and when to allow biological new life, having children (which can also be a fast track to growth of the self) has risen simultaneously – and this comes as no surprise – with the ongoing and recently exploding exploration of what it is to be female.  (And what it is to be male, too, thank goodness.)  This exploration is the emerging promise of what we are, what we could be becoming.  And this promise is, as it always has been all along our ancestral trajectory, at risk, in the balance.  More delicate, easier to extinguish than you might think.  Something to treasure, for sure, this emerging promise.

And something to encourage in one another and explore in our storytelling.  And just so, because of tsuch narratives as those traced in Revolutionary Road and Blue Valentine, our understanding grows of the emotional resources necessary to allow new life to come through our bodies; and that infinite variety of emotional resources can evolve, and will, in response to the demands of life. 

It is a sort of chicken and egg equation, this intention to recognize and work that trudging, high energy burn of evolving self brought out in, demanded from us by the act of allowing life.  But this is a mainway of the many ways we grow.  The personal navigation of this immeasurable commitment of bringing life, that leap of faith, is complicated, terrifyingly real.  No woman takes it lightly.  Ever.  Which is what makes such leaps fine fodder for story in Narrative’s working out of our becoming…

NEW GROWTH on the branches of our Family Tree of Stories

NEW TO  Reasons to Keep the Faith:  

• White Material.  Seeing through the eyes of a woman ravaged by being on the topside, now become downside, of Colonialism.
•  In a Better World.  A traverse of violence as the default mode in male identity.
• Rabbit Hole.  The story of a mother’s devastation from the loss of her child.  How we remember.  How we go on, or not. 
• And by way of contrast from the wayback machine Ordinary People.  A masterful meditation on the opposite course from that charted in Rabbit Hole of the damage inflicted from the loss of a child.

NEW TO  Periodic Links: 

• The website of Finding Kind.  “There’s a universal truth shared by all females.  A truth that’s been swept under the rug for generations…how vicious we can be to each other…”

NEW TO  Narrative Otherways subpage of  A Female Hero’s Journey?

• Nikita was no Charlie’s Angel.  A Grrl Blog posting by Malory Graham from Reel Grrls on the occasion of presenting an award to La Femme Nikita at Seattle’s 20/20 Awards.
• Sophie Scholl: The Final Days.  In this category of  female heroics, and journeys spawned by them, I’ll submit this tale as more to my taste.