Free Essay On The Emotional Consequence OF Parental Choice

Parents have a distinct role in shaping the psychological, emotional and social development of their children, and more peculiar is the lack of choice that children have in this relationship. During the early years especially, parents can demonstrate the difference between right and wrong and set the precedent that will define a person’s inner motivations and understanding of the world around them. In film, a character is not fully understood without paying proper mindfulness to the person’s childhood, and most films will make at least minor reference to it. Some films position themselves so that the parent-child relationship is a major theme, and such is the case in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and East of Eden.
Brick Pollitt is a brooding, callous man that seems would rather stare into his drink than the crest of his wife’s bosom. As the family is introduced, one thing becomes clear: everyone is after Big Daddy’s money; everyone, it seems, except Brick. At first, Brick’s emotional habits seem a reaction to the varying circumstances. On the surface Brick denies his father by rejecting interest in his money and as Maggie becomes an object of Big Daddy’s desire, Brick denies her also. Upon further examination of the character of Big Daddy and Brick, there is a parallel.
Brick and Big Daddy see hypocrisy the same way and this informs their realist attitudes. Big Daddy claims he’s spent forty years living with “high-pocrasy and lies” and has trouble accepting his wife’s affections, revealing a certain paranoia about intention. If she be honest, he has already resolved not to accept her love as a truth. Brick proceeds the same way toward Maggie. He cannot accept that she is truthful despite her continuing pleas for affection. “Why do you drink?” his father asks. Brick will soon reveal his darkest issues, but the two men are suffering the burden of doubt in the same way. They do not trust the intentions of others and they have both swallowed it down and lived with it. It has nearly killed Big Daddy, and Brick has become dependent on liquor waiting for that “click” in his head. For both men, there is a yet unspoken issue, and the parent has taught the son how to bury down those feelings.
Cal suffers much more apparent emotional damage to psyche in East of Eden. His parents are two extremes on opposite ends of the spectrum, mother running a brothel, the other a righteous religious man that has deceived his boys into believing their mother had died. Cal’s father’s religion seems to square off against his mother’s ideals in his mind, and Cal settles somewhere in the middle. In a mental likeness with his mother but a physical proximity to his father, Cal seeks the acceptance that Adam would not allow his mother. Cal’s brother Aron and his girlfriend Abra are caught up in Cal’s mental state; Abra settles easily into the emotional chasm left empty by Adam’s father. Aron comes to endure this burden as well, and his drunken reaction to the truth about his mother causes him to set out for perils of war. These boys are victims of their father’s ideals as he stows away the truth about his wife. To him she’s as good as dead and better believed to be sent away to heaven. His coping mechanism might allow him emotional stability, but it does not guarantee his sons the same sanctuary.