“Last night, Mom showed me a picture of when she was young. Half of it was missing. I didn’t want to tell her, but my life is missing that same half.”
Those words have remained close to my heart ever since the first time I heard them, and few things have resonated with me quite so strongly. To have what is basically my life summed up in just a couple of lines was weirdly shocking, because those words make up such a general statement that anybody who has suffered a loss can relate to. But those words were speaking to me directly; I understood them like no one else I knew.
Those lines come from Pedro Almodóvar’s All About My Mother. They are written down in a journal that belongs to Esteban on the morning of his 17th birthday. Esteban, the son of the protagonist, is an aspiring writer who never met his father, and that parental figure is, of course, the missing half he is talking about. Through his own words, we realize that he is not just missing someone in his life but he is missing a part of life itself, a part that he longs to have more than anything else. He asks his mother to tell him everything about his father as a birthday present, and even when she assures him that it wouldn’t be a great present, Esteban lets her know there couldn’t be a better one.
To see an artistically inclined teenage writer lacking a father figure (and whose mother, Manuela, is played by Cecilia Roth, a woman I grew up watching in Argentine telenovelas and who gave me my first memories of being enamored of someone’s acting) hit all too close to home. I felt myself connected to Esteban from the moment I saw him: from his self-aware delusions of grandeur when he goes on about his texts being future Pulitzer winners (God knows the number of times I joked about winning an Oscar) to his cranky complaints about incorrect Spanish translations of American movie titles, I truly got Esteban. So, when he died in the film’s opening ten minutes, after being hit by a car while chasing an actress whose autograph he wanted, I doubted the rest of the film would grasp me in the way that his scenes did. However, the plot of All About My Mother exists in service to Esteban. It follows his mother trying to find his father to tell them about their son, to do what he couldn’t do in life: fulfill his missing half.
Unlike Esteban, I know my dad. He was around for a great chunk of my childhood, but I still understood Esteban’s sense of longing; when I was nine, my parents got divorced, and as often happens with divorces, their separation meant the absence of a father figure in my life. Divorces aren’t self-contained events; they’re not a singular source of trauma capable of completely altering your life. They’re everything that led to it and everything that follows it. They’re a complete reconfiguration of the way you live, see, and understand life, and this rings truest for the children involved. Because at such a young age, what happens becomes imprinted into them and follows them throughout their developmental stages.
Divorce has shaped me into the person I am today. I was pushed through its mold and packed with traits that have become inherent to my personhood. And as I became more and more aware of this—as I realized that my existence was a byproduct of this event—it was through film that I gained a grasp on how to navigate and understand this knowledge. I saw Esteban and I understood that there were things etched into my own self. When he writes that Boys who live alone with their mothers have a special look, more serious than normal, I understand completely what he means—how he had to mature at a young age to brace himself for the challenges that life would throw at him, to protect himself and to protect his mother. This would become a strength that would aid him in facing the future, but it would be a total manifestation in the form of a husk to wrap himself in—a layer that will stunt his ability to be emotionally open to others out of fear of being hurt or ridiculed. It would become a fear that remains present in the search for human connection, where he will not be able to see relationships, whether they be romantic or not, the way that everybody else can. The usage of “he” in this context is objectionable—I am well aware of the fact that I’m using a character with about ten minutes of screentime to express my own reality, hardships, and emotions. But I’ve been doing that my whole life: finding places that convey how I feel because I’m too scared to say it myself; finding places that will fulfill my missing half, even though I know that half can’t be replaced by anything else.
I didn’t comprehend such feelings—or, rather, I wasn’t even aware of their existence, which was marked only by an inexplicable sense of a void—until my last years of being a teenager, when I started reconnecting with my dad. I think it was because I saw a lot of him in me, myriad similarities that went from our tastes (hell, he’s the reason I love film, which is arguably my defining trait) to our personalities to the way we moved; and of course, we even look alike. I found him—and in many ways, I still find him—more like me than my own mother is, the woman who raised me by herself from the time I was nine, which is an insane thought. He imprinted himself onto me; he shaped me in a way that couldn’t be turned back. Not only did his presence during my early life make me into who I was the way that every parent does, but his absence did as well. And even though in All About My Mother, Esteban never met his father, he was also marked the way I was. At some point during the film, we find out that the “father” Esteban has spent his entire life trying to meet is actually his mother, a trans woman named Lola. Lola has managed to imprint herself onto her child by virtue of his carrying of her deadname—the name she had before transitioning.
What’s important to me, however, is not so much the fact that I inherited a lot from my father, but rather how I felt about it, which is: absolutely repulsed. By chance, the day I sit down to write these words, I had an argument with my mother in which she told me how much I was acting like my father. And I saw it, too. What I was doing was totally something my dad would do. But how should I feel about it? My first instinct was to distance myself from it, years of resentment having come to the surface at the thought of being remotely close to him, even though it’s completely natural for a child to act like their parents. Thus, I fall back to the defensive: why can’t I act like my dad? I love my dad. And I think that’s where the issue lies. Loving my dad has been a battle throughout my life, a battle that we’ve both made hard to win. I’ve never stopped loving him, even at times where I thought I did. But that doesn’t mean I’ve never hated him.
If there’s a movie that understands this struggle, it is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, with the character of Frank T.J. Mackey, played by Tom Cruise, who I like to call the ultimate child of divorce: arrogance, egomania, and self-righteousness frailly maintained by years of insecurities, ready to let out the rage bubbling beneath the surface the second his behavior is challenged, or his reality confronted. It’s nearly impossible not to relate to at least a single aspect of Magnolia, a three-hour juggernaut of a movie that swiftly travels across several interconnecting storylines in the San Fernando Valley and deals with topics ranging from drug addiction to loneliness and the pursuit of love. But the main theme is the failed relationship between fathers and their kids, and the impact it has on those kids. Enter Frank T.J. Mackey. Cruise has always been at his best when he channels a bit of himself into his roles, whether that be his relationship with his abusive father or his cult persona, and his character in Magnolia allows him to inject both aspects into his performance.
Nothing I write could introduce you to Frank better than his first scene: Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra kicks off as a spotlight shines on his silhouette. He raises his arms and flexes his biceps to the thundering applause and cheers of men. A banner drops behind him. On it, a drawing of a salivating wolf about to throw himself on top of a cat, below which an inscription reads: “No Pussy Has Nine Lives.” Frank is a motivational speaker and pick-up artist who is teaching a class called “Seduce and Destroy” to a group of men whom we now would describe as incels—men who, much like him, have an animalistic view of women and sex. He starts the class off with a demand to “respect the cock and tame the cunt.” What follows is, of course, not the most favorable portrayal of women. Through his exuberant and electrifying confidence, Frank commands the room as he teaches the men how to ‘win the game’ of seduction, in such a way that they’re all chanting back and following each order he spouts. He’s instructing men in how to have women bow down to them, when in fact they’re the ones showing reverence to him. It’s a frankly homoerotic display, the class cheering on as Frank pantomimes sex by slowly moving his hips.
It’s obvious that this kind of thought and behavior in a man stems from some issues that he keeps hidden deep within, and in Frank’s case we start to understand them through an interview he gives during the lunch break for his “Seduce and Destroy” class. He intends—or thinks—that this interview is simply promotion for his class and his ideology, but the interviewer has different plans: she knows about his past, and he is not ready to be confronted by it. To Frank, facing the past is a way of not making progress. The past lacks usefulness and importance. But to the interviewer, and to the audience, in the past lies the truth, a truth that Frank has tried hard to hide. He tells everyone that his father is dead and that he is very close with his mother. But the reality of the situation is that his mother died almost 20 years ago, and his father is terminally ill. He has nothing but contempt for the man, who left him and his mom after she got sick, for which he hasn’t spoken to his father in years. The interviewer knows that he’s lying, and after deflecting, refusing to answer, and being defensive, Frank walks out of the interview, cussing out the reporter. Frank literally walks out on his past.
Coming back to the stage from the break, he’s flustered, teetering on the verge of a meltdown even as he tries to maintain his cool-guy façade. Still reeling from the interview, a minor mistake in the way he pronounces a word and an error on a page number in a booklet send him into a table-flipping fit. Whether he likes it or not, Frank’s past isn’t done haunting him, and he’s going to have to come face to face with reality: after the seminar, he receives a call regarding his father, who wants to see his son now that he’s dying of cancer.
We then arrive at the climax of Frank’s arc, a scene that has been ingrained into my mind since the first time I saw it, a moment that I had pictured many times in my childhood and early teenage years before I even saw the film: a son next to his dying father, to whom he hasn’t spoken in years. Frank is diving headfirst into the source of the relentless inner turmoil that has been with him his whole life. First, his outermost layer: anger. He insults his father over and over again, every word packed with a lifetime of resentment. But the more he talks, the more his eyes start to well up. He talks about his dead mom, the past that he was so reluctant to face just moments ago. Frank hates his dad—he wants him to die and die painfully. But then he keeps talking and the layers around him keep being peeled until he breaks down, and we see what every child of divorce, what every kid with daddy issues doesn’t want to admit they are: a crying, heartbroken child who doesn’t want his daddy to go away. In between whimpers and insults he pleads with him to not die, and he achieves the conflicting catharsis characteristic of a child with an absentee father: cussing out your dad for how much he hurt you but crying because, despite how much you hated him, you really want him there, because you never had him. For the first time in Frank’s story, there is no act, no ego, and no pretensions; he’s coming to terms with the violent emotional battle between the anger from the pain that his dad inflicted upon him and the inherent love that a son will always have for a father.
With All About My Mother’s Esteban, we understand an ever-present longing of someone who never met their father. It’s someone yearning not only for a person they never had, but for a part of life itself they never saw realized. Esteban is a man born, raised, and developed incompletely. And Magnolia’s Frank is a peek into the internal struggle of someone who hates their absentee father, the crushing of the childhood idolization of a father figure. These are examples of who children of divorce grew up to be—the long-term effects that it had on two men’s lives. But to truly understand the consequences of divorce, a look into the event itself and its immediate impact on actual children is warranted.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Chinese Roulette is not a movie about divorce in particular. It follows a bourgeois family that functions as a microcosm of a Germany still dealing with its past atrocities. It’s cold, it’s distanced, and it’s mean, just like the characters in the movie. The camera takes us on a journey in which we’re always floating around the people and their interactions, and even when there’s an extreme close-up on someone’s face—a technique reminiscent of Bergman—we still feel a distance between us and the setting. It’s completely voyeuristic and invasive. The force that drives the film forward is Angela, the disabled adolescent child of a wealthy couple, who has walked with crutches ever since she fell ill early in her life. Knowing that both of her parents are having affairs, she plans for the two of them to visit their rural mansion with their lovers on the same day. Angela is a stand-in for the bitterness and hatred of a crumbling and unfaithful marriage. Everyone in this film is despicable in one way or another, from the parents to their lovers to the housekeeper and her son. But it is the child that embodies, or concentrates, the evil in the family. She reveals the hidden truths in the familial dynamic—she shows her parents what their behavior caused, the monster they created. She is simply reaping what they sowed.
There is a shot near the middle of the movie in which Angela is standing by herself in between two doors in the middle of a long hallway. Behind each door is one of her parents, lying in bed with their respective lover. She takes a peek into the rooms, looking into the reality of her mom and dad’s lives: when she walks into her father’s room, she sees him sleeping while his lover weeps by the window. A look into her mother’s dormitory is met with contempt: the mother barks with disgust, and the child giggles back before leaving the room. A passive and uninterested father and a resentful and bitter mother are all Angela can see when she looks into their lives; it’s all she’s ever been able to see, at least since the accident that made her disabled. She explains to Gabriel, the son of their housekeeper, that her dad started cheating when she fell ill 11 years ago, and that her mom has had her own affair for seven years, ever since the doctors told her that they couldn’t help Angela anymore. “In their hearts, they blame me for their messed-up lives,”she says, a line that encapsulates a lot of the guilt and blame that a child of divorce can carry with themselves at any moment. Angela doesn’t particularly show remorse at any point during the film, but she still expresses the torment and weight that her parents have put on her: they hate her because of her condition, and she is the reason that they became unfaithful. She is the source of their pain.
At all times, Chinese Roulette’s characters expose the meaninglessness of the institution of marriage. When Gerhard and Irene (the husband and his mistress) walk in on Ariane and Kolbe (the wife and her lover) having sex, they all immediately start laughing. A crumbling family is a laughing matter—it’s a game, even, as proven when Ariane playfully aims a gun at her daughter and calls it target practice. Like all good films about fascism, this one leans into its anarchy and debauchery, and it does so by showing the destruction of the family unit, with Angela exposing its darkness, the cluttered psychosexual behaviors that everyone is displaying and the fractures that have been growing for years.
If Chinese Roulette is about a family that is falling apart, The Squid and the Whale is about one that already has. Like a lot of Noah Baumbach’s filmography, its main cast can be unlikeable and off-putting. The characters are all showing their worst traits, making it infuriating, uncomfortable, or straight up obnoxious to watch them. But when I see it, I understand. I have a personal attachment to this movie, a bond that is going to bleed through what I write now whether I want it or not (as if this whole text hasn’t been an overtly autobiographical and intimate piece of writing) because it’s the first piece of art that really drove me to ask what is essentially the question of this essay: “Why am I the way that I am?” It’s not the first movie that led me down a path of self-reflection, but it is undeniably the first one that made me want to completely dissect myself. It introduced questions that had never been asked, and it made me find patterns and behaviors that had been present throughout my entire life in the characters that I was seeing onscreen. Thus, I understood their universality, as Baumbach drew from his own childhood experiences when making the film. And not only did I sympathize with what he was telling—not only did I get him—in a way… I was him. As melodramatic as that sounds, I kept juxtaposing my own life with the picture. When characters spoke, they were saying what I needed to hear, what I needed to tell myself, lines that I still need to remind myself of sometimes. Their situations were my own, their emotions were my own, their words were my own, and their detestable behavior was especially my own.
The unpleasantness of the characters is explained by their context: The Squid and the Whale is a film about the life of two young brothers, Walt and Frank, in the wake of their parents Joan and Bernard’s divorce. The movie sets itself up from the opening line: “Mom and me versus you and Dad.” In the context of the scene, this is just Frank, the younger brother, picking the teams for a family tennis match. But in
reality, this will be the defining thread throughout most of the film.
Even before the divorce, Walt, the older brother, idolizes his father to the point of trying to be exactly like him. The pedestal he puts Bernard on is so high that thinking his father could be less than anyone else is inconceivable. Both of his parents are writers—his dad used to be more successful but now his mom is gaining some notoriety, and when his younger brother brings up the possibility that “maybe Mom is better,” Walt flat out refuses to consider it, or even call her a writer. To him, Dad is the writer, and Mom is just taking inspiration from him. This deification of his father is of course amplified when they separate, and in many ways, it’s aided by Bernard himself, because this is simply a trait Walt is taking from him. Walt keeps calling Bernard a misunderstood genius whom editorials don’t appreciate, and he keeps dismissing his mom because that’s what he hears Bernard say. His dad is a pretentious megalomaniac—he despises philistines, meaning pretty much everyone outside of his own pseudo-intellectual bubble. He’s angry, bitterly competitive, misogynistic, and emotionally immature. He blames the split entirely on Joan, and Walt models all his own behavior around these traits. Not only that, he also takes Bernard’s word as gospel, going out of his way to parrot his dad’s opinion on books and films despite not having read them. He’s supposedly the more artistically inclined son, but we never see him really consume any media aside from the Pink Floyd song “Hey You,” which he claims ownership of when he performs it at a talent show for prize money because he feels like he could’ve written it, “so the fact that it already was already written was kind of a technicality.”
In his dad, Walt sees the absolute truth, so when Bernard puts 100% of the blame for their split onto Joan, arguing that he did everything he could’ve done, so does his son, who refuses to even go stay in her house (their old house) after a while. Bernard is always bad-mouthing his wife, revealing to his kids everything bad that she did during their marriage, like her series of affairs. But Walt doesn’t just mimic the way his father talks about Joan, he also replicates his behavior with other women. Bernard is always reducing women to their sexuality and their physical traits, and even starts a relationship with one of his students. Walt sees these patterns and incorporates them: he’s embarrassed about his girlfriend, Sophie, because she’s “not gorgeous, but she’s cute,” letting go of her hand when they walk together and another woman walks by. He points out how ugly her freckles are. He doesn’t think she’s really smart, or see a future with her despite her having actually read the books he pretends he knows about. This is not only conduct that he gets from Bernard, but also behavior that Bernard supports, never really complimenting Walt’s girlfriend and telling him that he’s young and has the opportunity to sleep around—advice he repeats after Sophie praises Joan’s new article in The New Yorker because, obviously, his ex-wife’s success frustrates him.
As Walt and Sophie’s relationship begins to crumble throughout failed attempts at sex and Walt’s indifference towards her, Sophie hits him with a line that, to me, encapsulates a fear and a reality of many children of divorce: “You don’t have a very good model for relationships because of your parents.” This is, while not extremely profound, a universal feeling, because it can resonate in so many ways. In Walt’s case, we’re talking about him replicating the anger and conflict that he sees amidst his parents’ dissolution, but it can evoke a vastly different reaction in each viewer—the impending doom of each relationship you have ending in failure because that’s all you really know; the hesitation of even starting a relationship to avoid getting hurt the way you’ve seen people get hurt; the knowledge that the context of a relationship can bring out your worst (maybe most violent) attributes; the fear of starting a family yourself, because what if your kids will see in you what you saw and took from your parents?
While Walt leans heavily on his father during the split, his brother Frank is firmly on his mother’s side, and who can blame him, really? Bernard has a clear affinity towards his older son because Walt has—or pretends to have—the same interests that he does, and Bernard shows a complete indifference towards what Frank has to say. Frank likes sports; he wants to become a tennis coach, which to his dad is not a serious profession. Bernard dismisses Frank’s wants and needs—when his son has a headache, he seems more annoyed than concerned, and doesn’t even give him enough money to buy Tylenol; when he’s decorating his son’s room in his new house, he gets pictures of athletes the boy hates. More notably, he leaves Frank alone for a full weekend, forgetting about him when he goes on a road trip with Walt and one of his students, who’s moved in with them.
Frank, of course, completely rejects his father’s company. He refuses to call the house where he lives his own, and wants to spend all of his time with his mother. To rebel against Bernard, he leans even further into what his father would call a philistine’s lifestyle. He likes to play sports, and he likes to hang out with his tennis coach, whom Joan is now dating, something that infuriates his dad. But Frank, much like Walt, is also showing some erratic behavior: he can’t stop cursing wherever he goes, and he starts drinking beer before moving on to whisky. The worst attribute that he’s developed, though, has a lot to do with the stage of life that he’s at: as a 12-year-old boy going through puberty, he’s starting to discover his sexuality, but he’s not doing it in the healthiest way. There’s an Oedipal motif surrounding Frank, who seems to enjoy imagining and talking about his mother having sex with all the men she’s had affairs with, which is only more solidified when he breaks into her room when she’s not there and starts trying on condoms after lining up her lingerie on her bed. Another way he expresses his newfound sexual urges is by masturbating at school and smearing his ejaculate all over the books in the library and on the locker of a girl he likes.
While Frank is trying to model his behavior after his tennis coach, and his mom’s boyfriend, Ivan—the total antithesis of his father—in actuality, a lot of these traits are more likely to be found in Bernard. We never see Ivan be inappropriate, get drunk, or even raise his voice at anybody; he’s one of the few central characters that remains passive and kind at all times. There’s a moment in the film where Frank and Joan are in front of a mirror, and the boy says that they have the same bone structure, something Joan shuts down, explaining that he has his dad’s. “I thought I had your bone structure,” Frank retaliates. No matter how much he tries to escape it, how many men he can find as a parental figure to replace his own father, the 12 years that he spent with Bernard have been implanted into his self, and Bernard’s excessive cursing, competitiveness, and sexual impropriety are what’s being reflected on his son.
“You think you hate me but I know you don’t,”Joan says to Walt after he keeps rejecting her attempts to try and be together. Like I touched on with Magnolia before, there is often a juxtaposition between the love and the hate that a child of divorce can feel for a parent. Walt is hurt badly by his mom seemingly tearing their family apart through successive bouts of cheating, but he soon comes to realize how much his mother kept the family together. In a meeting with a school psychologist, to which Walt is forced to go after he gets caught ripping off Pink Floyd, the psychologist asks for a happy memory. All the memories that Walt can seem to recall are of him and his mother when he was a little kid: seeing movies together and going to the Met, back when they were pals. But the memory that really captures him, the one that really starts putting pieces together is the one that gives the film its title: at the Museum of Natural History, there’s an exhibit of the squid and the whale, one that Walt was so terrified of when he was a kid, he would have to look at it through his fingers. When they got back home, Joan explained what they had seen, and as they talked about it, the exhibit became less scary. During all of this, his father wasn’t there. He was never there. The squid and the whale make him realize she’d always been the one who was there to protect him.
After this, Walt sees Bernard for who he is. His father comes home and somewhat forcefully undresses the student that had been living with them. Walt now wants to go back to his mom—he reflects on his entire life, from his childhood before his brother was born, to recent events his dad influenced, like breaking up with his girlfriend. He realizes his mistakes, the mistake of not letting the idolized version of his father go. When Bernard asks him to stay by his side, Walt runs to the museum to see the squid and the whale, this time in full view, without his fingers covering the scary parts.
The last act of the film is about the realization of who your parents really are. Neither of them are perfect, and neither of them are monsters. You look back at what you thought was a great memory and you understand how much pain it caused you, pain that you were being shielded from by someone else. You assess who was there for you when you needed it, and that person might not be who you really thought.
Even though the movie ends with Walt finally seeing the squid and the whale fighting with nothing to cover it up, I don’t think looking back on a divorce can have this moment where you finally see everything, where it all clicks and you understand. Yes, there are moments of grand discovery where you finally see so much of what you weren’t seeing—as happened to me when I first watched this film—but even when you think you have it all figured out, you keep bumping into situations that challenge your own perception of self, and let out behaviors and characteristics that are a direct result of being a child of divorce. It can be a personal moment that affects the way you view yourself, your body, your mind; it can be a shared or intimate moment that shapes how you form relationships with others, no matter their nature.
Humans absorb everything around them, and that’s not a new discovery. I’m not pretending I’m inventing constructivism. But there are events that work as catalysts for a majority, if not the entirety, of what we are. And, more often than not, in children of divorce, it is exactly this dissolution and its subsequent happenings that function as that catalyst.
I started understanding myself when I realized what shaped me, what gave me form. In the quest of “why am I the way that I am?,” I found myself thinking about the philosophical concept of the four Aristotelian causes. This is, essentially, how Aristotle explains what made something how it is. Thus, he develops four answers to this “why,” the first being the material cause—what something is made of (exemplified by the wood if we’re talking about a table). Then, the formal cause—what gave it that shape and structure, what made it appear the way it does, what gives it its essence (which, following the example of a table, would be its design). The efficient cause is, effectively, what pushed it to become a thing—what caused the change that made it into something (a table’s carpenter). And lastly, the final cause, its sake and purpose for a thing to be what it is, its objective—which, to finish with the table comparisons, would be anything from leaving things on top of it to eating a meal.
Through that explanation, it becomes apparent to me that all of my causes were effectively the same. My material cause: divorce, which made me into the person I am today. My formal cause: divorce, because it gave me so many of my core attributes and traits that have become affixed to my sense of self; features that I appreciate having and ones that I’d love nothing more than to get rid of, but regardless, things that I feel or do every day whether I want to or not. My efficient cause: divorce, the driving force that caused all of the changes in my life that have effectively made me into the person I am today. And my final cause: divorce, because I want to make sure my future child never understands what it’s like to go through something like that. Esteban’s opening quote in All About My Mother about missing a half of his own life eventually evolves from a mere reflection of myself, and it becomes a life mission. In the future, when I show my children pictures of when I was young, I don’t want there to be a missing half, because I don’t want anybody else to miss that half.
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