Hunt for the Wilderpeople

           The movie begins with Rickey Baker, a rebellious city kid being sent to live with a couple in the New Zealand outback. The authorities from Child Welfare describes Rickey as “a bit of a handful, a real bad egg”, however, throughout the movie, we can know that Rickey is actually not a bad boy, just neglected. His foster aunt Bella who is full of warmth and good spirits accepts Rickey without having qualm and assures him that it will be his new and final home. Even Rickey refuses to accept his new foster family at first, but little by little, Bella pierces his hard shell by her warmth and affection. Her every tiny gesture, like listening to his profane yet funny haiku poem and putting a warm water bottle on his bed every night, has make Ricky who has never had a family of his own really feel cared and loved. Although Bella only shows up in the front part of the movie, I believe we all can feel that her loving nature and affection for cast-offs are incredible and completely genuine.

The front part of the movie has focused on the mutual affection between Ricky and Bella. At that time, Hec still keeps his distance from Rickey. However, I would say the most interesting part of the movie is to see how the relationship between Ricky and Hec change from bad to good, and from good to better. This movie tells a story of growth, both for Ricky and his foster uncle Hec. The poorly matched duo run through the bush, and grow closer together over their shared hardship. Rickey learns to hunt, navigate and make camp. Hec learns to accept Rickey, and understand his growing affection for him. The time that Rickey and Hec spend in the bush, although it’s tough, they see it as an enjoyable and cathartic experience they could have hoped for. With each passing day, familiarity breeds affection between the two who at first don’t how to please and understand each other. We see emotional growth in both men, who gradually learns that it is okay to feel for others, and trust in others.

                The movie also reveals the fact that those with a criminal record are often stereotyped as “bad egg” and hard to be reintegrated into society. Like Ricky and Hec, they feel that they are outsiders who are abandoned by society. We know that if they are being arrested for running away will definitely have genuine consequences, and we feel their anxiety – Ricky fears that he will continue to be shuffled through disinterested foster families, and Hec will be imprisoned since he has criminal record. However, towards the end of the movie, the most valuable thing that we can find in both men is their affection and mutual appreciation for each other. 

Grace Is Gone.

Grace Is Gone is a tender and touching movie about a father whose wife, a soldier, is killed in Iraq learns how to cope with grief and summon courage to tell his two daughters the terrible news. This movie evokes many complicated emotions which makes the audiences easily relate to themselves and feel like a fifth member of the family. Inevitably, we all will die one day. This is part of life, even we know that, we can still feel overwhelmed when the day comes. Coping with the loss of someone we love is one of life’s biggest challenges. We may experience all kinds of difficult emotions, such as disbelief, separation anxiety, despair, sadness, anger, guilt and loneliness.

Grief is an emotional suffering that accompany the loss of loved one. Grieving process takes time, it cannot be rushed or forced. Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced the five stages of grief in 1969. She stated that these stages of grief are the responses to loss that many people have, but there is no typical response to loss. Everyone respond to loss differently, there is no right or wrong way to grieve. People do not have to experience the stages in a sequential order, or experience all the stages to recover from grief. Grief is more like a roller-coaster ride that is full of ups and down, rather than an orderly progression of stages.

The Five Stages of Grief:

1. Denial. When Stanley receives the news of her wife’s death from the officers, he denies the fact that the death of his wife has happened and think that his wife is still alive. He brings his daughters to a trip, so he could escape from the reality of his wife’s death. He also makes phone call to home to listen his wife’s voice on the answering machine. This allows him to live in the past when Grace was still alive.                                                                                             
2. Anger. When people come to this stage, denial is replaced by feelings of anger. The anger could be rational or irrational, and projected onto environment at times almost at random. In the movie, we can see that Stanley is out of control when his daughter Heidi who is concerned about her school assignment and her father missing work refuses to follow the spontaneous road trip. Moreover, he almost losses his temper when his brother John angrily confronts him and asks him to tell Heidi and Dawn the truth of their mother’s death.                                                                                                   
3. Bargaining. People at this stage will try to negotiate and hope to do something to reverse the death. There is a scene where Stanley makes another phone call to home and leave a message saying that he wished he were the one stayed in military instead of Grace. He wished his eyes could function normally, so he would be able to stay with Grace and protect her.                                                                                   
4.  Depression. After realizing there would not be any changes to what had happened, sadness and hopeless may come at this point of time. Stanley finally decides to tell his daughters what has happened, he brings them to a beach and tell them of their mother’s death. When they all realize Grace is gone, they hug together and cry, just letting the loss settles in their soul. At times the loss of loved one may be too overwhelming for us to face, so depression is a normal response at this point of time instead of a sign of mental illness.                                                                                                                                          
5. Acceptance. This is the last stage of grief where people accept the reality of loss and are at peace with what has happened. Stanley finally accept the fact that his wife is gone and that he needs to buck up for the life afterwards. The final scene shows Stanley and his daughters at Grace’s grave, implying that they have started to accept the death of Grace and face the inevitable task of changing their lives. 

When we are suffering from a significant loss, so are the rest of our family members. Grieving is a long journey that we need to walk hand in hand. If it is difficult enough for an adult to cope with, and for children, experiencing a bereavement could be even more difficult to cope with. We can help our children to understand grief and prepare them for their experience of loss by gently telling them what has happened. It is better to be honest and tell them the truth rather than covering it up, because it may be more hurtful if they listen from others. We could share their feelings and support them through the heartbreaking time by letting them know how we feel and that is fine to experience such feelings. It is also important to note that every children reacts to loss differently, so be guided by children and let them set their pace.

Experimenter

The movie Experimenter has reminded me a quote from Albert Einstein – “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” Curiosity opens doors, which lead us down to new path and keep moving forward and doing new thing. The main character in the movie – Stanley Milgram is filled with curiosity or even obsession that got him to keep searching for truth and understanding of human behavior. His curiosity has become his secret weapon to ignite the spark of his every great idea of experiment.

One of his well-known experiments is obedience experiment, which investigates people’s tendency to comply with authority. His obedience experiment seems to have answered his question of how human beings come to participate in inhuman acts such as genocide. His finding is meaningful yet annoying. He discovers the dark side of human nature and explains how our mind transfer the responsibility of our actions to the person giving the orders. It is ironic that Milgram himself also manifests some of the same characteristics he finds so ugly in his subjects. When he is accused by a student in his Harvard class of being deceptive monster, he reacts by shutting her down and objecting to her description of him. His obsession with obedience seems to has blinded his eyes to see how his own methods might be interpreted as an abuse of power.

Despite the annoying finding, Milgram’s obedience experiment has encouraged us to think deeply whenever we are wondering how any human could ever behave in such an inhumane way. One of the important lessons that I learned from Milgram’s works is never let go our curiosity because it allows us to understand the world we live in today. I have always found psychology fascinating, and wondered why people behave in a certain way. Being inspired by Milgram's work, I’m interested in how human being would react when they are in a life-threatening situation like plane crash. Especially when survival resources such as lifeboats and lifejackets are limited, will people sacrifice themselves to save others or will people sacrifice others to save their own life? We heard of “women and children first”, which is a code of conduct whereby the lives of women and children are to be saved first in a life-threatening situation. However, what if survival resources are limited, and there are no vulnerable groups like children, elderly and disabled people in that situation, would people still sacrifice themselves to save someone who is physically as strong as themselves?  I’m thinking whether there is some kind of struggle between selfishness and self-sacrifice, because at times people would not think too much and their instinct will lead them how to behave and respond to such a situation. If I were allowed to conduct a social experiment without concerning about financial and ethical issues, I would like to create a fake plane crash to see how people (passenger) would actually react and respond to such a situation, especially when there's no vulnerable group on plane and all the passengers are the same age and same sex.

Amadeus

Although the title suggests Mozart to be the main character, the film in fact center around his secret rival Salieri and whose mind we are invited to enter. The film is named after the middle name of Mozart instead of his last name that is widely recognized. I guess there is meaning behind that the name is chosen as the title of the film. The name Amadeus means “love of God” in Latin. The film is not meant to trace Mozart’s genius; rather, it depicts the envy of Salieri who was not talented as Mozart could only desire for God’s grace and admire the gift that God had chosen to bestow on someone else.

The film Amadeus delves deeply into the character’s inner world, which focus on the circumstances, motives and internal action of the character. The film starts with Salieri’s suicide attempt as he is overwhelmed by his guilt over causing the death of Mozart. He recounts his tale as confession to a young priest in a mental asylum. He goes on to explain the motivation of his action and the force behind Mozart's financial difficulties and death. Because he believes that Mozart's genius is a gift from God to tease his musical mediocrity. From his tale, we can find that he often associates his life to God's will and seek for God's will when he is planning to do something. However, it seems that the influence of his belief in God has driven him crazy and make him go too far, in which he justified murder to be a God's will.

Throughout the plot, we can find that Salieri is filled with painful inner conflict. He has been struggling between his jealousy for Mozart and his heartfelt admiration of his genius music. He condemns Mozart’s childish and libertine behavior, but there is a part of him that admires him for his independence. Perhaps Salieri has developed a love-hate relationship with Mozart.  Even until he decides to plot Mozart’s ultimate ruin, he still remains as a devoted admirer.

Everyone has an ideal self – the one you feel you should be like (Rogers,1959). Most people wish to reach the top of career, profession, and want to be like a particular role model. Just like Salieri, he wishes to become the person like Mozart who produces great music. It is fine if we try to emulate our role model and succeed, but it is also fine if we try and not succeed. Things will only go wrong when we are too obsessed with our ideal self. When we try to reach and maintain the ideal self but not succeed, we feel bad about ourselves, then mental stress such as despair and depression will arise. In other words, if a person’s ideal self and real self are not consistent or have little overlap, more than likely the person will experience certain amount of dissonance and have lower sense of self-worth (Rogers, 1959). As we want to see ourselves in the ways that consistent with our self-image and also reflects our ideal self, we may develop defense mechanisms such as denial or repression to alleviate the undesirable feelings caused by it (Rogers, 1959). In the film, Salieri devalues his own works and misattributes his musical mediocrity to unjust God and blame Him for not helping him create better music. We can have an idea self, but the key is we should be aware of and accept the fact that the ideal self may not be sure to be achieved.

One of the interesting parts of this film is that the story is entirely recounted through the perspective of Salieri, which is at times subjective and clouded with envy and resentment. If we follow the rhythm of his tale, we will be led deep into his mind and experience his tragedy. Through all of this, I feel empathy for him, and thus it becomes harder to label him as just villain. Because Salieri is the person who shows us ourselves, and we can see ourselves in him. The desires to succeed, to be great, to earn reputation, we all are looking for something that gives us meaning in the world.