The interrogation of suburbia’s facades is barely new fodder for Hollywood or impartial filmmakers. The Academy Award–winning Ordinary People of 1981 was hailed as an incisive foray into middle-class malaise; it garnered praise as a subtly artful critique of family ideals and the need for appearances and areas to the sustenance of bourgeois culture.
The middle- to late nineties witnessed a number of films with similar goals of laying bare the pitfalls and contentions of suburban life. These films, however, have for the most part surpassed their predecessors in conditions of their ambitions to expose or redefine subject material heretofore regarded as taboo in mainstream movie theater. Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm (1997) explores preadolescent sexuality against the setting of the baby boomers’ disenchantment with the enterprise of free love. Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) dramatizes the collusive forces of home, college, and media to degrade or destroy your body image and self-esteem of adolescent women. Greg Motolla’s Daytrippers (1996) chronicles a family group outing that facilitates another sort of “outing” –the husband’s closeted homosexuality.
- 14 – The hallmark of a lovely person is that they always see beauty in others. Omar Suleiman
- Soaps containing hand oil
- How long do you want to last with chipped nail varnish
- Gets more tender or unpleasant
When our physical is wounded, the physician must use his scalpel to open up the wound, clean it, and apply medication. We have to do the same with our emotional bodies by using truth as our scalpel. It will be painful and it’ll cause some suffering. But if your emotional body is wounded, you’re suffering anyway. Not only that, but these wounds make your psychological body so delicate that you run out of every situation that you perceive as a potential threat.
You can never be at peace nor can you ever set up a true reference to others if you’re obsessing over protecting yourself. You need to start by being truthful to yourself. But how come this so difficult? Compare this with peeling your physical pores and skin off your body. The psychological epidermis is an assortment of lies and truths we’re telling ourselves, and it hurts peeling it off because that’s our protection. If you were abused, you might be in denial, informing yourself that it never happened or looking to forget all about it.
But, in the final end, you have to handle it because it still influences your perception system. Even if you’re ignoring the fact that you were abused, you may believe that you are not worthy of love, and doesn’t that still distress? The truth may hurt, but it will liberate you also. Let’s go back to our exemplary case of abuse.
When you’re being truthful so you recognize that you were abused, you’re also acknowledging that it was not your fault that it could really happen to anyone. Can you assess those around you for being abused ever? Of course not, because they had nothing to do with it. The only path to completely clean your wound is to forgive.