Over and over and over again I go on and on and on about “dasein”. And, in particular, how the actual experiences you come to accumulate over the course of living your life can have a profound impact on how you come to view what is “meaningful” in your life.
And this frame of mind becomes all the more apparent when dealing with folks who have had, shall we say, unusual experiences.
Like these guys.
Meet the Angulo brothers. They were literally locked away in an apartment by their “protective father” and came to understand the world that we live in wholly in terms of the films that they watched. Just movies. Which they then acted out over and over again.
Films like, for example, Reservoir Dogs. Or Blue Velvet. Imagine if you thought of the world largely revolving around that sort of thing. Reservoir Dogs is the first film we see them “acting out”.
Yet cinematically they were all over the map – from Casablanca and Citizen Kane to JFK, Gone With the Wind and lots of horror films.
The family more or less lives in the belly of the beast. The Lower East Side. In an enormous apartment complex. And, from the father’s point of view, there was a lot about the world that the kids needed to be protected from. Also, in some respects, the whole “arrangement” was basically patriarchy reduced down to a single household. Father knows best.
In other words, or else.
Still, it’s not that they couldn’t just look out the windows of their apartment and see the world. They could. And Manhattan was all around them. Instead it all revolved around the way in which their father indoctrinated them to view that world. The kids had access to no other point of view but his. Or, rather, his and the characters that they encountered in the movies.
But then, one day, against his father’s wishes, a brother [Mukunda] finally decides to explore Manhattan on his own. And that, as they say, changed everything.
What this film more or less revolves around [from my point of view] is a man who did things in a certain way because he honestly felt that it was the right thing to do. That it really was in the best interest of his family. In other words, his intentions were good. But what he did is so appalling to most of us that this is just not enough for many [including his sons] to forgive him.
There is also one sister here as well. The youngest. But she is all but invisible.
By the way, this is a documentary. This actually happened.
at wiki: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wolfpack
trailer: youtu.be/rDbqcMfUdlI
THE WOLFPACK [2015]
Directed by Crystal Moselle
[b]Brother [watching Pulp Fiction]: It gets boring around here. I write down the lines for the entire film. What each character says. We always say lines from our favorite films. And we kind of thought why don’t we do those films. Be those characters…It makes me feel like I’m living, sort of.
…
Brother: If I didn’t have movies life would be pretty boring. And there wouldn’t be any point to go on, you see?
…
Brother: The Hare Krishna religion. The God is Krishna, and he has ten children with every wife that he has. And our father was, like, enthralled by that. So he had this idea, like, having a big group like our own family, our own community, our own race here. It’s almost like a tribe that we have. And we’re gonna have all of them grow long hair and give them all names of the oldest language on the planest…Sanskrit. There’s Govinda, there’s Narayana, Krsna, Jadadisa, Mukunda, Bhagavan…and our sister, Vishnu. She is very special. She sort of lives in a world of her own.
…
Brother: My parents didn’t encourage us to communicate with society. So we were kind of shut off, always lived only in this apartment, Lower East Side, Manhattan. And we never communicated with people. We were taught by our father not to talk to strangers, but it went further than that. It was like don’t even look at people. [/b]
They were all home-schooled.
[b]Brother: Sometimes we’d go out nine times a year…sometimes once. And one particular year we never went out at all.
…
Brother: Metaphorically, I would describe our childhood as my father being the landowner and us the people who worked the land.
Brother: But if you want a more dramatic setting, we were in a prison.
Brother: Yeah.
…
Mother: You can see the neighborhood we live in is not that great and so we’ve kind of kept our distance from the people who live around here. And it’s not anything like, oh, we think we’re great and they’re not. It’s just that for me it’s not how I was raised. I grew up in the Midwest. I lived in the middle of the farm country.
…
Brother: My father doesn’t like the idea of working. He calls it being a slave to society. This is a country that has gone wrong. He believes the government is a sneaky organization. That we’re all controlled, we’re all like robots. And that we need to break free from that. [/b]
The irony here seems to go completely over his head. At least for now.
[b]Brother: My dad always thought that he was better than anybody. He always said so himself. He said he was God. He said he was enlightened. He said he was the one who knew everything.
…
Brother: When you’re a kid you see things and they frighten you. You don’t know what they mean. So I was frightened. I would hear dad and mom arguing. There always a slap, just…he would slap her. And what she felt, we felt sometimes. I mean we were a part of it. When you are living in that kind of situation you are going to get it too.
…
Brother: Our father is the one who brought movies into our lives. He just filled our heads with movies all day long. We’ve got like, I don’t know, 5,000 movies including VHSs and DVDs. And I think the fact that we went with the idea that there’s another world out there. because we didn’t know the world, so we kind of had no world, and I think the movies helped us to create our own kind of world.
Brother: But we would always know the difference between real life and the movies.
…
Brother: I was 15 years old and I wasn’t allowed to walk out the front door. I wasn’t allowed to go in a specific room I felt like going into. I wasn’t allowed to leave a room when I wanted to. If he put us in a room we have to stay there until he says you can go. Our dad was the only one who had keys to the front door.
…
Brother [the one who finally left the apartment…wearing a Michael Jackson mask]: I went around two blocks, just going in whatever store. Went into a bank, went into a grocery story, went into a pharmacy. Eventually, someone called the cops because someone walking around in a mask, that’s…that’s not normal.
…
Brother [after the cops arrested him, took him to a mental hospital and then brought him home]: I was scared to come home. I think my daddy was frightened of what I just did. No one had ever done that before. That was the day I kind of tore off the soldier necklace and threw it and walked away. Since that day, I said I refuse to talk to you. I refuse to take your orders. We are no longer father and son anymore.
…
Brother: They gave me a therapist after I got out of the hospital. They said I should see a therapists. She’s helped me out getting my email address 'cause I never knew anything about computers. My brothers are also seeing her.
…
Brother: My brother did it again. He just walked out. Then I walked out. And my father didn’t get angry. And then all of us started doing it.
…
Mother: It’s not like it was one day they followed the rules and the next day they were doing whatever. It wasn’t like that. It happened over a period of months, but it certainly opened the way to normalcy.
…
Brother: What did he expect, that when we all came of age we would just go on doing things his way? His system was just like a ticking bomb.
…
Mother: I really understand, totally, where they were coming from. But I can’t, you know, be too candid about that. But, yeah, there were probably more rules for me than there were for them.
…
Brother [after the cops bust down the door and search the apartment for “weapons” – their movie props!]: We had to see our mother get handcuffed and put against the wall. And she was really uncomfortable sitting in those handcuffs. That’s what really pissed me off.
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Mother: They’ve begun communicating and relating to the world. They are probably seeing how the movies are like real, but not real, and how real life is. It’s hard as a child to be influenced by that. Too much of anything is, you know, not good.
…
Father: I didn’t want them to have the pressures, the social pressure. Which is the interest of the country. I wanted them to be free of that. Not to be contaminated by drugs, by any philosophy or religion…One of the things that I always said to them: it doesn’t matter to me what you have. Or what you can do. But the fact that you are in this life, this way…what you are, what we are. This is the most important thing.
…
Mother: I felt good for my kids. I was glad to see them standing up for their own ideas and beliefs. I’m trying to see both sides as well as my part in it as well, but I have felt stuck in the middle for a long time and that’s been a real challenge.
…
Brother: I was so scared going out into the world. I felt so out of place. I still feel out of place. I don’t know if I can ever get over it. Because I was always afraid that I had so little knowledge of this world. Being in my home all the time. That I almost wouldn’t know where to start…My biggest fear was being so ignorant of the world that I just wouldn’t be able to handle it. [/b]