[ SECRET POST #5889 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #5889 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 35 secrets from Secret Submission Post #843.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Secrets you don't want to make...

[(Anonymous)]

That movie made me uncomfortable too, though I don't have parents who blatantly lied to me. Because that guy's son would have every reason to think he was pulling those stories out of his ass. And there was never any recognition on the part of the dad that if he valued raising kids who could tell the difference between outlandishly implausible tall tales, and things that actually stood some chance of having happened, he should have provided more than "I tell you it was so" as proof that it did. He made his son have to choose between taking anything a trusted person asserted on faith, no matter how badly it contradicted common sense, and deciding his dad was a shameless liar. And I see no benefit to it. And also ... fictional stories can assert that absolutely anyone is justified, simply because of the way the writer has complete control over the reality they're describing. So, the fact that this story deliberately went "and the dad was right all along" told me more about the author's biases than it did about what felt reasonable or likely to me, and sort of rubbed me the wrong way, throughout.

At the same time, I'm aware that this is heavily dependent on personal interpretation. Because, despite how much of Big Fish involves typical dad-isms, it reaches my mom in a completely different way. She grew up as a third culture kid, spending sizeable chunks of her life in radically different countries, and has a lot of experiences that involved other people and weren't anywhere near as tall-tale-ish as what this guy went around saying, but she has painful memories of people not believing her about all sorts of stuff (or not until years later when she'd stopped caring whether they did or not) because when she grew up, people did a lot less traveling, and were a lot less open to the possibility that "the way everyone does things here" wasn't really "the way humans do things everywhere." So the same movie hits radically different notes for her and me.

Sorry about the length of this reply, I just haven't gotten to talk to people about this as a theme in movies, and apparently I had a lot to say.

Re: Secrets you don't want to make...

[(Anonymous)]

Please don't apologize for this excellent response! It made me very happy reading something so heartfelt in response to my secret about a movie that I think doesn't really get remembered or talked about.

I do have a lot of like trauma experiences that for some reason people find unbelievable so I understand not being understood... But at the same time, my parents are habitual liars who expect me to believe everything they say even as they reject my own experiences, so eh... I know what it's like to be on both sides on things as well, but I still don't know how to feel about this fictional dad from the movie, haha.

I would've never have thought about things from the perspective of a third culture person, but yeah, that would indeed be reaffirming! Thank you for the different insight, it was very interesting. :)

Re: Secrets you don't want to make...

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

I'm glad my reply made you happy.

I think a lot of people have been through something traumatic, and then their sense of being alone with it was compounded by other people not believing them. This is part of why groups advocating for social change put so much emphasis on outreach about NOT immediately jumping to the conclusion that survivors are lying or brought it on themselves. I don't think enough attention gets paid to doing that responsibly, as opposed to in a knee-jerk "all skepticism is bigotry" way, but I think when people first hear about something horrible and threatening that they had no idea existed, often their immediate impulse is to just insist it's fiction. Or at least being misrepresented. This is still a problem in relation to a lot of abuse that's not well-recognized as abuse, like social mobbing or sexual assault of men. And, in a sense, I feel like repeated lobbying campaigns to the effect that "X group of people has a real complaint" is an awkward and unresponsive solution to people not doing a very good job listening to each other and feeling out when to empathize in real-time.

No, but ... given that children tend to believe their parents by default (even when what they say is outlandishly unlikely), and only disbelieve them if something important keeps contradicting their assumption that this person is trustworthy, I keep feeling like that's a pretty different thing than what's going on in Big Fish.