"Magnolia", the 1999 film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, is a mix of intertwining vignettes all taking place in Los Angeles on one fateful day. It also presents a particular character who, it can be shown, was psychologically damaged by a poor paternal relationship early on in his life, which manifested later on in more destructive physical or social ways. A child's early relationship with his or her's father is delicate and vital to the child's emotional and social future.
The characters are all loosely connected, whether by friendship, family ties, work relationships, or mere coincidence, and together their stories create a running narrative of events that eventually culminate in a bizarre storm of sorts, serving to unite many of them. The film's center, really, is around two families: the Partridges and the Gators. Earl Partridge is a dying man. His body, ravaged from years of smoking, is failing him, and he finds an existence only of agony and loneliness as he lies in bed, waiting to die. His current wife, as she freely admits, married him for his money, but she finds herself losing her mind over the thought of losing him. Her guilt over not loving him from the beginning drives her every action in the movie. Earl's son Jack, estranged from his father for years, has taken to calling himself Frank, and leads seminars on how to seduce women, called "Seduce and Destroy." He is the ultimate misogynist, and freely admits it. His hatred for Earl is great, for when Frank's mother fell ill with cancer twenty years before, Earl left her and remarried, leaving young Frank to care for his mother alone, and to watch her die. Throughout the movie Frank is being interviewed by a newsmagazine, and while at first we see the depths of his depravity, when he's further pressed on his hidden past we see him close up, shut down and refuse to acknowledge the interviewer. Thus the hurt he's carried in him for years is displayed, and for someone that lives his life off the basis of having no sensitive side, it's devastating. While this interview is taking place, Earl's caregiver is on the phone, trying to contact Frank so that he and his father can have some form of contact before Earl's death. The movie closes as Frank goes to see his father, now left in a coma, and vents his rage and extraordinary anger at him. He dies, and Frank starts to drop his misogyny, it seems, now that he's endured such catharsis.
The movie is also about another failed paternal relationship, that of game show host Jimmy Gator and his daughter Claudia. Jimmy is the host of a game show called "What Do Kids Know?", and is a national celebrity. His daughter Claudia, who'd left home many years before in a rage, is now an unemployed cokehead, and claims that Jimmy had molested her as a child. Jimmy, like Earl, is dying, and doesn't have much time left, so he tries to reestablish contact with Claudia, and goes to her apartment to find her with an unfamiliar man and cocaine strewn all over the place. Her life is pitiful, and he knows, in his heart, that he may have caused things to go this way. The movie's denouement features Claudia's mother leaving Jimmy and reuniting with Claudia, while Jimmy attempts suicide.
Critical reviews of this film have ranged from high praise to crys of "I don't get it." But several reviewers were able to point out more of the subtle, psychological points of the film. Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times wrote: "Many of the characters are involved in television, and their lives reflect on one another. Robards plays a dying tycoon who produces many shows??ise is Robards' son, Frank "T.J." Mackey, the star of infomercials about how to seduce women; his macho hotel ballroom seminars could have been scripted by Andrew Dice Clay...The connections are like a game of psychological pickup sticks. Robards alienated Cruise; Hall alienated Dillon, Bowen is alienating Blackman." (Ebert). However, mass-media reviews are more inclined to write on a film's basic plot and style. For discussion of subtler meanings in the film, several online sources provide several well-thought points.
"Sick-Boy, on his film website, points out that "to try to pick a center to Magnolia's story would be ludicrous. There isn't one. There isn't a main character, either, and not all of the roles intersect with each other. Some do, but most don't. Some relationships between characters are implied but never shown during the film. The only similarity in each character is that they all are on the run from their past, whether they realize it or not. If anything, Magnolia shows the effect of damaged relationships between fathers and their children. Each character is directly messed up as a result of their paternal bonds." (Sick-Boy)
Reviewer Brett Alew, on his personal movie website, identifies the irony of Anderson's film: "Whereas some infomercials offer Chia Pets or food dehydrators, Frank's promote a chauvinistic program of picking up women called Seduce and Destroy. Superficially, it is a further commercialization of sex, transforming it into a primal, territorial play for male dominance. However, it serves Frank as his own juvenile way to regain his masculinity and confidence after a childhood of paternal neglect. The tragic irony is that, by treating women as possessions which indicate the owner's power, he is on the same ego trip which has left his father in a state of regret." (Brett Alew)
It's that ego trip that some researchers may think was caused by his father's relative disinterest in his early years. Scientifically, this makes sense. Research demonstrates that the father's relationship and the quality of that relationship can have long lasting, far-reaching physical and psychological effects. In Father-Child Relations, A. Magdalena Hurtado and Kim R. Hill find that in some civilized economies with well-developed health-care systems, the absence of a father only negatively affects the health of the child, while in less civilized cultures that absence can actually have a positive statistical affect (31).
Yet, it's the effects of the fatherless household and the amorality that it produces can have real and serious affects on the future of a child. In Father's Influence on Children, Marshall Hamilton describes a conscience development survey involving 497 seventh-grade white children. In the six months leading up to the project, 25 of the boys and 28 of the girls had no father figure in their home. It was found that the boys without fathers scored lower on "maximum guilt, internal moral judgement, acceptance of blame, moral values, conformity to rules, and higher scores on overt aggression." M. L. Hoffman conducted a study that reasoned that the lack of a paternal model had been the problem for these fatherless boys. (27).
Researchers Christine Winquist Nord and Laura Spencer Loomis, in their bibliography on Child Support information, describe a study in 1992 that was included in the "Parents Without Partners" (PWP) membership magazine. The study was conducted on a group of noncustodial fathers "who have had no contact with their children and are content with this situation"(Nord/Loomis). In the study, a group of 103 noncustodial fathers filled out and returned questionnaires concerning their satisfaction in the amount they see their children. Eighty-nine of the fathers responded that indeed, they would want more contact with the children, while fourteen of the fathers responded that they weren't interested in more contact. Of those fourteen respondents, half said that "their own issues" were the reasoning for them not seeing their children. The study also looked at the differences between the 89 fathers who wanted more contact with the 14 who didn't. Nord and Loomis write "There was some indication that a history of domestic violence was more common among fathers not wanting more contact than among the fathers wanting more contact (this difference was not statistically significant, however). Fathers who did not want more contact with their children were also found to have been less involved in their children's care before the marital separation, to feel "indifferent" about their children, to think their children also felt indifferent about them, and to not have kept informed about their children's well-being."
The author of the study theorizes that some of these fathers may feel "rejected and feel they are unimportant to their children. This may be a result of factors that originated during the marriage (e.g., domestic violence, lack of involvement in child care) rather than, or in addition to, factors associated with the marital separation itself." At one point in Magnolia, an interviewer brings up the fact that Earl Partridge had abandoned his son and his wife during her illness, and that young Frank was forced to care for his mother at the end of her illness. From there, their relationship was poor, if anything. Frank later grows up into a sort of testosteronic monster, unrepentantly dispensing advice on how to "Seduce and Destroy."
The film demonstrates Frank Mackey's misogyny quite clearly, leading one to suspect that his romantic relationships weren't typically healthy. At one point in the film, when speaking of sexual relationships with women, he says "In this life, it's not what you hope for, it's not what you deserve -- it's what you take." Frank seems to be disillusioned with the concept of true love in a relationship, as are many children of divorce. Research can back this up, as researcher Noelle Wood found in her study on the effects that divorce can have on a child's future romantic life.
On Wood's site on Hope College's website, she lists several studies that indicate that children that come from broken homes have problems maintaining relationships. Wood refers to a 1990 study by K. M. Franklin, R. Janoff-Bulman, and J.E. Roberts that looked at the impact of divorce on future beliefs. University students completed questionnaires on trust and themselves. They found that the adult children from broken homes were more pessimistic about their own future success with marriage. The researcher found that "children of divorce focus their opinions of marriage on the roles of others, rather than themselves like those from intact homes." Their consensus was that marriages end, and that being a "fine, worthy person oneself is not a guarantee of marital success, and marriage is not a guarantee of trust between partners, but an interdependent venture that might fail." (Wood)
Wood also looked at S.G. Johnston and A.M. Thomas's 1996 survey of undergraduate students of children from both intact and divorced home situations. They looked into those people involved in exclusive dating relationships and their perceptions of the relative riskiness of their relationship. The study found that grown children from divorced homes trust their partners less than those from intact homes, and that people from families with conflict, divorced or not, considered their relationship as high risk. (Wood)
T.L. Orbuch, and J.S. House conducted a similar study in 1995 that Wood also includes, on adults who were in their first marriages. The participants were questioned about their how they lived as children, like who they lived with and why. Then they were asked to rate the levels of happiness and stability in their own marriages. The results showed that among adults in a less than happy marriage, those whose parents were divorced had higher divorce rates themselves. Also, children of divorce in unhappy marriages were more likely to have less, or strained "patterns of interaction" with their spouse. They were also more likely to think their marriage was failing. (Wood)
Indeed, on Harbinger Press' website, in promotion for a book called "Where's Daddy", they list several facts culled from official studies. According to volume 60 of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, "Men and women who have had warm paternal relationships have better, longer marriages and engage in more recreation." The site also brings up moral issues, which it can be seen were clearly affected in the movie. In various psychological studies, it shows that for boys, "there is a very strong positive co-relation between moral development (sense of right and wrong) and a positive father relationship comprised of validating feelings and encouragement." In Magnolia, of course, the relationship was as negative as can be conceived of. Similar studies also say that "boys and girls with an involved father accept responsibility for their own behaviour, and behave more responsibly. They are less likely to blame others or "bad luck," and have a greater sense of their own potency."
Often, even a household that contains a father might not be in the best wishes for the child. Take, for example, the case of Adolf Hitler. Hitler's relationship with his father, Alois, was always strained at best. "Adolf was apparently beaten by his father, perhaps sometimes over their disagreement about Adolf's wish to become a painter (Hamilton, 73)." Hitler, Hamilton writes, was a "mother's darling", who hated his father with a passion. He was constantly belittled by Alois, which may, in some form or another, shed light on Hitler's future views that the "strong" will survive (73).
Walter Langer of the Office of Strategic Services, in a case study of Hitler's psyche, suggests that a passage in the Fuhrer's masterwork, "Mein Kampf", was a thinly disguised detail of what life in his household must have been like. According to Langer, "in Mein Kampf Hitler tries to create the impression that his home was rather peaceful and quiet, his 'father a faithful civil servant, the mother devoting herself to the cares of the household and looking after her children with eternally the same loving care.' It would seem that if this is a true representation of the home environment there would be no reason for his concealing it so scrupulously."
Langer also relates that only once, in the entire thousand page manuscript, does he imply that his household contained more than one child. Yet, later on in the work, Hitler describes, in great detail, a hypothetically lower-class family situation supposedly culled from the stories of Hitler's close friends:
"Among the five children there is a boy, let us say, of three... When the parents fight almost daily, their brutality leaves nothing to the imagination; then the results of such visual education must slowly but inevitably become apparent to the little one. Those who are not familiar with such conditions can hardly imagine the results, especially when the mutual differences express themselves in the form of brutal attacks on the part of the father towards the mother or to assaults due to drunkenness. The poor little boy at the age of six, senses things which would make even a grown-up person shudder. The other things the little fellow hears at home do not tend to further his respect for his surroundings??hings end badly indeed when the man from the very start goes his own way and the wife, for the sake of the children stands up against him. Quarreling and nagging set in, and in the same measure in which the husband becomes estranged from his wife, he becomes familiar with alcohol.....When he finally comes home... drunk and brutal, but always without a last cent or penny, then God have mercy on the scenes which follow. I witnessed all of this personally in hundreds of scenes and at the beginning with both disgust and indignation.(Langer)"
Langer theorizes that because we know there were five children in the Hitler household, and that his father spent time drinking heavily at the village tavern, that we "begin to suspect that in this passage Hitler is, in all probability, describing conditions in his own home as a child." Langer makes a good case for this argument. Hitler claims to have "witnessed all of this personally in hundreds of scenes", yet Hitler, it seems, had few friends, and no intimate friends at all. Langer concludes that "one wonders where he had the opportunity of observing these scenes personally, hundreds of times, if it was not in his own home." Indeed, much of Hitler's background, and his poor relationship with Alois and it's effects on his outlook, can be taken from these passages:
"The other things the little fellow hears at home do not tend to further his respect for his surroundings. Not a single good shred is left for humanity, not a single institution is left unattacked; starting with the teacher, up to the head of the State, be it religion, or morality as such, be it the State or society, no matter which, everything is pulled down in the nastiest manner into the filth of a depraved mentality.(Langer)"
Langer goes on to make several points that seem to parallel Hitler and Frank Mackey. Both fathers have an outside persona, far removed from the home. Earl Partridge is a successful TV producer. Alois Hitler was a dutiful, decent civil servant, who to many people appeared as a "pillar of society whom all should respect and obey." (Langer). But their private personas are different, as Earl essentially abandons his child and sick wife, and Alois turns mean, unfair and inconsiderate when he drinks. According to Langer, "under such circumstances the child becomes confused and is unable to identify himself with a clear-cut pattern which he can use as a guide for his own adjustment. Not only is this a severe handicap in itself but in addition the child is given a distorted picture of the world around him and the nature of the people in it." Such was the case for Adolf Hitler, the results of which played out upon a world stage. Frank Mackey, a crude, mean misogynistic pig, plays out his alienation as well.
Magnolia ends on multiple bittersweet moments, as families are reunited and paths are straightened out on one strange, surreal evening. Frank, in his own way, is allowed his chance to make unleash his demons, as he confronts his now comatose father. In tears, he lets out much of the frustration he carried with him for years, and redeems himself in a way, as he goes to the aid of his stepmother, who's in a hospital after a suicide attempt. Yet it's his father, in a deathbed apology, who goes through the greatest redemption in the film. When he speaks, bittersweetly, of his first love, his wife Lily, he tells his nurse, ever so softly, "I'll tell you the greatest regret of my life: I let my love go." Had he not, perhaps he and his son could have spent his last years together, rather than separated by guilt and bitterness and shame.
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