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Showing posts with label the feminine mystique. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the feminine mystique. Show all posts

Friday, March 4, 2011

About the Revolutionary Road

2009-02-05T03:30:31.210+05:30


the special folks on Revolutionary Road

"The Feminine Mystique" and "The Female Eunuch" and my thoughts and feelings when I first read those books a long time ago, rushed back to my mind with a vengeance, when I watched Kate Winslet and Leonardo di Caprio in Revolutionary Road. Disturbing. disturbingly real. too close for comfort. "the emptiness and the hopelessness" of it all. a land where the only sane voice is that of a certifedly insane man. I couldn't even cry while watching the movie. does that mean i have developed a thicker shell? or that i am too numb to want to react? i resisted, to be frank. didn't want to be reminded of that old "revolutionary" young asha.

Kate and Leo are trueto life, as the special couple Wheelers. hypnotically real. we all think we are special, don't we? esp. those of us who have been told so when we were kids. the thing is we are not allowed to be special like we want to. there are these expectations -- the question is, whose have the way of right? anyway, we learn later that we are not that special after all. life gets to us. be it in the form of an imaginary sense of obligation to one's dead ancestors, like where Mr. Wheeler warms up to the idea that his dead father must be proud of him when he, the son got a promotion in the same company that his dad worked. and then of course, we become realistic about things. and the children. the born and the unborn. motherhood.the blamings. the brandings. the burnings on the stake. certain ideals ought not to be ever questioned! the guilt, the burden, the justifications, the defiance.

poor Mrs.Wheeler, and her husband, and her kids, and her neighbors. the unrealized dream. Mrs. Wheeler's Paris. Madame Bovary's Paris. some other housewife's New York . the more practical among us opt out of dreaming and out of thinking too! because don't we all know that it is thinking that gets us into trouble? so, even though, for a while some of us hope that there's something good, meaning something that will make us happy, just around the corner. soon, we kill that thought too. there's nothing around that corner. except old age and death. and one feels old suddenly.

Looking back, age was one of the reason I rooted for Hillary Clinton, even though she isn't old to me. apart from the fact that she is a woman. i identified myself with her. easily. ageism and sexism was rampant in the election process, i felt. the media circus.and i am against racism as much as against the other two isms . now i wonder what made it so easy for me. that is, to identify with another generation. after all, i am not in that generation. i belong to the new President's generation. but then i realize, it is the death of dreams that makes one age faster. but then, this too shall pass.