Back in the ’80s, almost every Hollywood movie had a high-speed car chase. It was as though a movie was incomplete without it such that it was mostly force-fitted into the plot. The term, “cut to the chase”, was born out of this necessity. Fast forward to the 2000’s Hollywood got entangled in another cliche — divorce. Almost every movie today has at least one mention of a broken relationship. It’s something that is considered so prevalent and obligatory and usually added to the storyline even though it may not have any relevance, whatsoever.
“I sometimes wonder whether movies portray divorce because it is so common among people, or, people divorce so commonly because the movies portray it as a common occurrence! It’s still a mystery to me.”
Well, recently we as a family sat to watch, “The Lie”, written and directed by Veena Sud. I tried looking up the reviews before venturing and understood the plot as the parents of a 15-year-old girl, trying to cover the accidental murder their daughter commits. There is a Malayalam-Indian thriller titled, “Drishyam”, which at the outset contains a similar plot. Being absolute fans of the Drishyam series, we attempted to watch this expecting to see a Hollywood version of the same.
While the reviews, commentaries, and plot summaries on the internet highlight the entitlements of the upper-middle-class and the distasteful state of western teens, I think everyone missed the big elephant in the room which is ‘Divorce’ and its ill-effects on our children. I am unsure if the director wanted to subtly emphasize the perils of divorce, but if you observe closely, the movie revolves around the brokenness and the aftermath of the separation of the parents.
The movie begins with the mom, kissing her boyfriend in full view of her unhappy teenage daughter. The movie continuous to show how the girl is uncomfortable in the company of both her father’s girlfriend and her mother’s boyfriend. Later in the movie, the father tells the mother how their daughter was once a cheerful child referring to her change after their separation. The story progresses as the parents are forced to live in the same house due to the murder and the director shows a fairly chirpy daughter when they are together as a family again.
In the end, the daughter reveals how she yearned for her parents to get back together, which is probably why she hid the truth about the murder. But by then, many irreversible damages have already been done. In the end, I realized that the core of the movie was not about parents covering for their child, instead, it was more about the ill-effects of divorce that our teens have to go through.
Divorce, though portrayed as a normal occurrence and hidden under the guile of “freedom of choice”, is a selfish act when individuals choose their own happiness over the mental health of their children. No one talks about the amount of stress and pain children go through when parents separate, while there seems to be so much uproar about child abuse and child labor in underdeveloped countries. People talk against animal cruelty while they subject their own children to unimaginable pain when they choose to separate instead of trying to mend their relationship for the well-being of their children.
The divorce rates are far lesser in underdeveloped countries and the mental health of the children there are much higher than the westerners. Take a look at the literacy rates of our current generation in developing countries versus the developed countries. There is a startling decline in the west due to the lack of a solid organization called ‘family’. It is fragile and dysfunctional with no leadership from parents who themselves are wavering. Where then are the children gaining their inspiration from? Hollywood movies and celebrities, of course, because of the absence of precedents at home.
Divorce is the pinnacle of human selfishness. It is an act of choosing self even at the cost of agonizing their offsprings, which no other living thing other than humans exercise. There are definitely exceptions for divorce that are justifiable but generally taken advantage of, by the greedy and egotistical.
Hollywood, please stop the cliche of divorce in your movies. A good place to start is to eliminate the divorce and examine how it influences the storyline. If it doesn’t, it’s probably because it is unnecessary. Stop projecting it as “normal” and “healthy”. There is not a single child on the face of the earth that does not go through mental torture when the parents separate. It’s harmful, abusive, and excruciating.
I strongly believe the single most reason humanity will become extinct, is selfishness — the act of not putting others above us.
