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A Lost Opportunity

SPOILER ALERT -- I'm going to disclose a major plot twist in a movie now in theatres, so if you plan to see AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY, with  Meryl Streep, and you want the various twists and turns to come as so many surprises to you DON'T READ ANY FURTHER!!!


Indeed, if you want to read further you'll have to scroll down a bit, past the movie poster.






Photo, taken 2014-01-13 11:28:18




The film was quite dark, with flashes of humor and a lot of great acting. But what struck me was the theme of incest. Two of the characters are portrayed as deeply in love with one another, as exhibiting the sort of sweet young romantic feelings that we always applaud at movies -- that many people go to movies to celebrate. There is only one couple in the film who could be described that way.


We understand through most of the film that they are first cousins. In fact, we understand that so early in the film that this isn't even the plot twist I was warning about. It is something of a given. Ivy and "Little Charles," are cousins. [The twist is coming. LAST WARNING!]


The various artifices of the movie and presumably the underlying stage play are employed to get us to hope for the best for these two as a couple, to hope even for a marriage and happily-ever-after for them, even knowing this. One helpful bit of stage-setting is that the genetic issue as taken off the table because Ivy, the character played by Julianne Nicholson, has had a hysterectomy.


The big twist, near the end, is that [I warned you], Ivy and Little Charles turn out not to be cousins after all, but to be half-siblings, the illegitimate offspring of the Sam Shepard character's fling with his sister-in-law. 


So .. why did I title this blog entry "a lost opportunity"? It's just that if I were a conservative, the defense-of-traditional-family sort of conservative especially, and if I were disposed to develop conspiracy theories, I would present this play and movie as part of a conspiracy of left-wing Hollywood elites to undermine the traditional family. "First they got gay marriage, now they're pressing to make incest seem okay, next it'll be a man-and-his-camel."


But nobody seems to be saying that. I probably shouldn't either. But I doubt many of the folks who would launch such a theory read my humble lil' ole blog anyway.
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