This time, the movie with superpowers is not Chris Evans, but he still saved a person’s life. This person is a seven-year-old girl who lost both parents, missing three incisors Mary, is his niece, a math prodigy. After Mary’s mother, Diane, dies by suicide, her uncle Frank, played by Chris, raises Mary alone until she is seven years old. The first day of school at age seven, Mary was born with an amazing talent, and in class orally calculated 57 times 135, and smoothly put the number of scores also opened a square. And so they were exposed. Grandma Evelyn appears and goes to court with Frank to fight for custody. There are many stories about child custody in movies and TV shows. The Americans have strict laws and regulations to protect minors, trying to ensure that children grow up in the most suitable environment, and recently the country loves to say that Kotaro Isaka’s phrase “it’s terrible that parents don’t have to take a test”, this kind of legal consideration of custody can be seen as a make-up test. It’s like drawing a line in the middle of a blank sheet of paper and making a list of “good” and “bad” things, such as occupation, income, relationship, alcoholism, bad record, etc. They analyze the weight and score of each item to determine parenting ability, like holding a small weight with tweezers. Weights are added one here and subtracted one there. Kinship is not the heaviest weight at all, not even the child’s personal will counts.
But the question of “child welfare” is not math, not physics, after all. Ross in “Friends” also took a blank sheet of paper and tried to list the benefits of a new girlfriend after he broke up with Rachel. There are millions of benefits, but only one bad thing: “She’s not Rachel”. Love is the variable that can never be calculated precisely in such topics.
So most of those adoption stories explore the tragedy of “reckless disregard” that can result from such laws. The American dramas “Chicago Fire” and “The Night Doctor” both have similar subplots: a loving and well-meaning couple wants to adopt a child, and the child has developed a strong bond with the adopter, when the biological parents show up and claim they want the child back in a lawsuit.
There are more stories about adoption in same-sex movies and TV. The movie “Lust for the Stars”, like “Girl Genius”, ends with the child’s uncle taking the child away and raising it himself. In the American drama “Gay and Lesbian”, Mike and his professor lover want to adopt Hunter, a street kid. They try hard to be nice and impress the investigator who comes to visit their home, only to have Mike’s loud mother come over and a few people happen to get into a fight over trivia, and the investigator arrives at the height of the fight. Mike and his husband were very frustrated, thinking that the adoption would be over if they saw such a bad side. The female investigator said, “My mother and I also fight like this, so I know that what I see is not a fight, but love, I see a loving family.
Whether the parents are gay or straight, children need a loving, stable, materially sound environment.
But how much influence does “material things” have in the environment they grow up in? This influence is another variable. Sometimes, there is no substitute for the role of the person a child loves most. In the movie “I am Sam”, the little girl Lucy played by Dakota Fanning, was taken away from her mentally handicapped father by social institutions and placed into the home of a wealthy adoptive mother in a privileged environment, and the adoptive mother also gave Lucy great love and tenderness, everything was so perfect, but still could not keep Lucy’s heart, she risked climbing out of the window every night, walking a few blocks home in slippers, insisting on sleeping with her mentally handicapped father.
And for Mary in Girl Genius, things are a little worse. Grandma Evelyn’s purpose for taking Mary is clear: it’s not her granddaughter she’s after, it’s a “girl genius”.
Frank has no money, lives in a shabby house, has no piano, lives on the docks fixing boats, has a low income, and has no health insurance.
Evelyn is rich, lives in a nice house, has a piano, has a high income, and has health insurance. And she herself is a senior Cambridge mathematics student, has the financial resources, energy and willingness to properly cultivate Mary, but also got the biological father’s designated official authorization (although this one is the most useless).
Substituting the above known conditions into the question “who is better suited to raise a child”, it is clear who will win the child.
But Mary says: He wanted me before I’m smart.
(It’s like Steve Rogers saying: Bucky loves me before I’m strong. “When I had nothing, I had Bucky.” Only Bucky loves not Captain America, but the six-foot-four Brooklyn beanpole.)
What a penetrating statement from the little girl! Right to the point. Whoever underestimates the intelligence and judgment of a child is a fool. No one plows the lean field, and some fight to open it. Mary knew very well in her heart that her grandmother’s love for her and her imperative desire to possess her was utilitarian. The grandmother saw her talent rather than her.
Looking further down, a great, great, great old tragedy was unearthed. It was a man-made tragedy. Diane, a math genius, grew up confined to her mother’s home to study math, no entertainment, no partners, no school, no sports, no summer camps, no Girl Scouts …… everything her peers had that she couldn’t get. When she was seventeen, her first love took her to elope and ski, and her mother, Evelyn, callously called the police to report her partner’s kidnapping. With zero socialization and no discernment since childhood, Diane later had a haphazard relationship with an irresponsible man, became pregnant, gave birth to Mary, and eventually committed suicide.
So Diane didn’t commit suicide, but “chronic homicide”, killed by her mother’s suffocating genius development program over decades. What’s even scarier is that the mother didn’t think she was at fault, and wanted to continue the tragedy by killing her granddaughter’s life. In the courtroom, this terrible woman, like the prophets and martyrs of history who were misunderstood and judged by the vulgar, said righteously: Diane is not like ordinary people, she is a genius out of a billion, so my responsibility to her is more than mother and daughter (I have a responsibility to guide her and spur her on to live up to and not throw away her genius). The great discoveries that have driven human progress have come from a very small number of people, without whom you would still be crawling in the mud!
As for killing her daughter’s love affair with her own hands and her attempted suicide, Evelyn raised her aging neck and repeatedly stressed in a more aggressive tone: It was nothing! Then she said even more smugly: Diane later thanked me for interfering in the matter and admitted her mistake.
Then Frank lost Mary, and she was placed in foster care with a much wealthier family. He walks around the foster family’s clean, ornate (compared to his bachelor doghouse) mansion woodenly, looking at the material life he cannot give Mary, and listening to the strange couple’s somewhat nervous, slightly ingratiating lectures about how much care they have taken to prepare Mary. The sad, lilting song sang: Fly away little pretty bird, my sweet little bird is going to fly away …… At this moment Frank was convinced that he really could not give Mary a good enough life and should let her fly away from his hands. Until one day he finds out that Mary’s beloved one-eyed cat has been sent to a stray cat center by a foster family.
The one-eyed cat is an interesting symbol for its crippling incompleteness, complementing the self-loathing (well this is debatable) Frank and the fatherless Mary as if they were one of a kind. Talent is an anomaly, and so is one-eyedness. Monroe said, “If you can’t accept my bad side, then you don’t deserve my good side either. Those who do not accept the one-eyed cat, they do not have love in their hearts, so they do not deserve Mary. In the grand finale, Frank flew to Mary’s rescue and opened the door, and Mary was trapped in the middle like a little prisoner by her grandmother and the mathematicians, her pale little face gloomy and bitter.
He rescues her from her bad fate like a hero. They embrace, cry bitterly, and promise never to part.
I cried especially hard while watching this film, because I have experienced a similar “genius training”. My father was an ordinary worker (as a daughter, I can’t say he failed in life, just say he had a bad life), two years after I was born, he thought he “found” my talent in literature, so he began to train me, I have to read all day, no play. Like Mary’s mother, Diane, all childish fun and games were a waste of time in my father’s eyes. I didn’t play with any of the neighborhood kids. I read in the house and often listened to them singing and dancing outside the window, feeling that heaven and I were separated by this wall and this window, and that deep loneliness and frustration was indelibly etched in my heart. And since then, I feel that there are two groups of people in the world, one is the normal ones and the other is myself.
My father always watched and monitored me from afar, and as soon as I finished eating and put down my chopsticks, he immediately ordered me to stop wasting time and go to your room to read a book. In the eyes of all my relatives, friends and neighbors, I was an eccentric girl who was always reading in silence in the house.
My father made me keep a diary from the age of three until I was a teenager, during which time I was randomly checked and scolded or beaten if he found that I had forgotten to write. He raised a kitchen knife at me in a fit of rage. I remember he made me do an over-age book of language questions, the answers to which were in his hands, and I was given a fixed number of questions each day, and if I got more than one wrong, I would be scolded and even beaten. Every night he gave me the answers to that small period of time, I cowered and waited, feeling suspended by a hair above the fires of hell, feeling like a prisoner waiting to be shot …… life is worse than death, death are a little easier than that taste.
Fortunately, I’m not that gifted, I’m not a prodigy. It is also fortunate that there is such a thing as “school” and my father is not so bold as to keep me out of school. If he had been a Cambridge graduate like Diane’s mother, I would have been out of school.
As for Evelyn’s smug comment that “my daughter thanked me,” that’s for sure, because when a child doesn’t know better, he or she is just a recorder for his or her parents, and he or she won’t resist their instructions after being repeatedly indoctrinated and brainwashed. When I was a child, my father used to boast to friends and relatives that his strict and high-handed education did not turn me off, and how much I enjoyed the life he arranged for me to study. He even asked me in public, “Tell me, do you like it this way?
But people do grow up. Later, after I understood, I tried with all my might to correct and heal the damage and lack of ability caused by my father on my own, and I struggled with these things almost every day for more than ten years. But some things are lost are lost. A small foot that has been wrapped and then released is still a half-sized foot, and you have to fill the shoe with cotton. That’s how I padded the cotton, with a residue that only I could feel.
The recent movie “Wrestle it! Dad”, some people objected to the fact that the father raised his daughter to wrestle, because it was a forced choice made by the father for his daughter, and the daughter was actually a tool for the father to achieve his dream, and many people said that this objection was too sensitive and too on top of the line. I think in this criticism, even if there is excessive sensitivity, but also a good thing, because in the change of customs and customs and the concept of a major transformation, overkill is the way to go.
I guess those who are oversensitive to this “expecting a child to become a dragon” model may have had similarly strict parents and unhappy childhoods.
Genius is a gift, but it is also a heavy burden, even painful, especially when the person carrying the “gift” is a teenager. In the Swiss film “The Piano Boy Who Wanted to Fly,” after the six-year-old prodigy Werther reveals his genius for the piano, his mother is told in all seriousness: “You have a great responsibility as a mother, and it is your duty to him and to the music world to raise him well. Later on, Werther, increasingly distressed by his talent, said to his grandfather, “I don’t want to be a genius, I want to be someone else, an ordinary person. Grandpa said, “Then you have to give up something first. So Werther preferred to jump off a building and pretend to be injured to lose his talent, rather than to be a prodigy again. He got into an ordinary school and made ordinary friends, as he had hoped.
How, how, how, how I wish that all little children could truly and heartily be a little child, be himself, and not a substitute for their parents and elders to realize their unfulfilled dreams, or a tool for anyone to create a sense of accomplishment.
Love your children, and love them for no reason. Don’t invest in and run children as a profitable business. That way when your child is not as good as you want them to be later, you won’t storm out and say things like, I worked hard for you all your life, so you must ……
Genius is like pregnancy, it will be revealed naturally and will give birth to good results after a long time. But you can’t rape it and make it happen.
If a child shows talent, be grateful for the gift of God, but it is not appropriate to treat talent as a curiosity to be lived in. That gift is for the child, not for the parents, don’t treat it as your asset. Don’t use it as a capital to gamble on your child’s life.
So how do you not “fail” a genius? I don’t know, but I think the most important thing is to give him everything that a normal person can get, such as friends of the same age, and everything that he should do and enjoy at that age.
Will this delay the development of genius? Will it delay human civilization by a few years? No! Mo Yan became Mo Yan even when he couldn’t find books to read as a child. Besides, is it true that the civilization of mankind is being advanced by genius? Perhaps a discovery by a genius at a certain point in time did give it a push, but “advancement” is a historical necessity. With you or without you, humans will eventually eat cooked food, use electric lights, drive cars, and connect to the Internet. Maybe, maybe we will lose a Mozart, but that’s just a “maybe”!
To hell with the elusive “genius” and “changing history” than a child’s life and a life that can’t be started over!
Girl Genius” is not a first-class film, there are a lot of things that are not good. But I liked it. How I wish I had a father like Frank. I wish all children in the world had a father like that. Whenever I see someone who thinks about their children with such dedication and care, who talks endlessly about how to raise them properly, who questions them in every detail, I feel heartbroken and relieved. I am no longer a child, but the child who did not have a normal childhood is still inside me, like a ghost with an unfulfilled wish on earth that refuses to leave. Years later, although this ray of sunshine did not reach her, when it lit up the smiling faces of other children, she felt her lost joy was reborn there.