Ordinary People - "Teenage Wasteland"

Ordinary People (1980)

K: This movie is an 80s movie. Watching this movie today, it couldn’t have been made in any other decade. Do stories benefit from taking place in a decade previous to when they were made? The Ice Storm (1997) was made in the 1990s but took place in the 1970s. Even though that movie didn’t draw on historical events from that decade per se, it used the music and the feel of that decade to tell a story. We grew up in the 1980s, so movies like The Squid and the Whale (2005) (made in the 2000s about the 1980s) appeal to us because we relate to that time and the feelings that the clothes and the looks evoke.

“Ordinary People” uses Classical music for its soundtrack and it takes bowling alleys and McDonald’s for what they were at that time. If it were made today or updated, it wouldn’t have that feeling.

H: That feeling, the so-called Zeitgeist (spirit of the times), is hard to replicate. Most movies can’t pull it off, “The Squid and the Whale” being a notable exception. Boogie Nights (1997) gets away with it too, but movies like The Wedding Singer (1998) are caricatures of the time, intentionally or not, so they’re overblown and not as genuine (I don’t think Boy George played any weddings).

K: For me, it was like watching my older brother go out on dates. There’s always a teenage boy that needs to accept life in movies and this one felt different from the standard because he wasn’t a smart aleck, he wasn’t funny. He was genuinely awkward. Maybe it’s the way the movie started, with him holding a secret. You know something’s wrong with him.

H: Movies like Thumbsucker (2005) and Little Miss Sunshine (2006) fit into that category, where something’s not right in Denmark, Denmark being the teenage boy character. It really goes back to Hamlet, only in “Thumbsucker” and “Sunshine”, the teenage boys came off as whiney because they didn’t, it turns out, have actual problems. Hamlet’s father was killed by his uncle who married his mom. That’s a legitimate gripe. Conrad in this movie saw his own brother drown and his mom practically hates him. That’s bad news. The boys in “Thumbsucker” and “Sunshine” have for the most part imagined problems.

K: They’re about the whole idea that you can’t expect your parents to give you the love that you want. Excluding Conrad, they’re all wanna be emo Hamlets. Yes, parents have flaws and sometimes they don’t get along, but that’s the time where you grow up and realize that you’re a separate adult.

H: This movie did a good job depicting mental illness and its roots and also the effect it has on a family. It’s like the movie In the Bedroom (2001), where a son’s death continues to impact the family in unpredictable ways. We see death so often in movies bringing people closer together, but I think it’s more realistic to say it often drives people apart because of unforeseen and misplaced guilt and blame.

K: It’s scary to see the behavior of certain characters. I recognized those potentially harmful behaviors in myself and others, like the denial of feelings. The mom wanting to change the subject and make things appear perfect. The discussion that the dad had with the son in the bedroom where he could keep asking questions but instead just wants things to be ok. The whole movie was made up of moments where had someone done something small, like hugging it out, could have had a big positive impact. Instead, they kept brushing away those moments and bad things accumulated. In life when we look back on situations like this, we think if I had just told so and so this, could have stalled an event or changed it - they aren’t as big, but I think that’s what tragedy is. It’s the failure to act, to see things coming and not to act. The point of the movie is life is unfair and no matter how much you’re prepared for things, bad things happen.


H: And yet, the end is rosy, but not completely rosy. We ditch the mom along, as do the dad and son, but the son’s girlfriend seems ready to stick by him and he’s learned to accept his role (or lack of role) in what happened to his brother. What I like about this movie is we see so many people come unglued. I identify most with the dad, because I feel well-intentioned but completely ineffectual. I see things coming and fail to act. When it comes down to it, I can’t seem to help people.

K: It’s refreshing that the movie takes on two characters falling out of love. People in real life are so private that you don’t really get a good feel for the moment that they broke up. You hear that people break up, but you don’t get to see it. In this movie, there’s that moment where the dad vocalizes that if the mom can’t change, he can’t love her as a person. And it makes sense. If it didn’t happen in the movie, I would have been so mad. To actually have a character not change (the mom)…we want to see everybody change or everybody to get along with everybody. We also want to see the bad guy get what he/she deserves. The mom, as the bad guy, gets what she deserves but we still feel bad about that. The amount of loss this family has experienced and then to have the mom leave…

H: It was interesting how automatic the mom was about hearing the dad’s ultimatum and then immediately going to the closet to get her suitcase and pack. It felt like a drill that she’d practiced over and over and then the alarm really did go off and she was ready with a plan. Maybe all along she was preparing to leave and just needed confirmation that she should. I think we do feel guilty about feeling good that she leaves. We side with the dad and the son, but we also realize she lost her favorite person in the world, Bucky.

K: I like that we don’t see her breakdown, we just see a little glimpse of it. We don’t know how she accepts it and moves on. The flashbacks are really interesting. You get flashbacks of the boat scene, of Bucky and mom enjoying themselves, the dad and his sons as kids, but also crucial flashbacks are left out and only referred to – Conrad’s recovery at the hospital after his suicide attempt and Bucky’s funeral.

H: Conrad meets Karen at the hospital and we glimpse through their conversation how they helped each other in their recovery, but we don’t see it all. We get the dad’s interpretation of the funeral and him being miffed about the mom’s disapproval of his socks, but we don’t see this stuff happening. This movie does a lot of public versus private (what the mom allows others to know, what is kept secret) and this even carries over to the past and how we experience it. The characters giving us their spin of these “missing” scenes is far more interesting than seeing them. Conrad looks back fondly on his stint at the hospital whereas Karen doesn’t seem to have liked it there and doesn’t want to be reminded of it.

So we have Karen who’s fond of Conrad but doesn’t really want to spend time with him because he reminds her of her attempted suicide, her traumatic recovery, and her guilt. Conrad can’t hang out with his former pals because they remind him of Bucky and Conrad’s role in his death. The mom and dad, while holding each other close, keep their emotional distance because they remind each other of the guilt and tragedy of their son’s death. The mom keeps her distance from Conrad because I think she blames him for Bucky’s death and he’s a constant reminder of his brother’s absence. Conrad alternately tries to get close to people again and pushes people away.

K: It’s funny how much we invest in activities and people. Conrad wants to please his parents by returning to the same person he was – a member of the swim team, a student at his school, a choir member. I don’t see how he’d want to back to swimming after his brother drowned.

H: He’s trying to himself and Bucky and he realizes he can only be himself, so he leaves the swim team almost as a nod to his brother, almost saying, “The water belongs to you now just as you belong to the water.” He keeps up with choir practice, which was probably more his bag anyway than swimming. Still, swimming probably helped him feel closer to his brother.

K: At least Conrad had the cool guy from Taxi (1970s) for a psychologist and not Danny Devito. Also, Andy Kaufman may not have been a good choice.

H: “Sounds like all you need kid is the restive cure of female mud wrestling."