I watched the deleted scenes in the movie North Country a while back. There are plenty of scenes through out the movie that will make the same point I’d like to emphasis here, but there is one in the deleted scenes that struck me.
To give a brief explanation of the movie, Josey is a single mother of a young daughter and a 13 year old son, having left an abusive relationship. The movie is about the horrific way she and others are treated, sexual harrassed, abused. It still happens everyday, and I guarantee happens to someone you know, so pay attention.
The scene that so struck me was when the two kids are playing on the trampoline. The young boy, Sammy, is jumping up and down and the daughter is underneath, playfully yelling stop, but clearly enjoying it.
Josey runs out and starts yelling at her son and pulls her daughter out from underneath.
This is just one tiny point where you can see how abuse has affected Josey and how it comes out in raising her kids. Josey can’t control or take her anger out on the men that have abused her, so it tends to come out on one of the few men she can control in her life: her son. It’s true she shouldn’t do this, she should be more gentle and loving with her son, but I can’t blame her.
Far too often I think we look at someone doing wrong and we tend to place all blame and responsiblity, as well as all anger and hate, on that sole individual. It’s true they are responsible for their actions, but I think very often there are some terrible dark secrets that have affected their lives.
Let’s not be too quick to judge. Let us be more gentle, understanding, and willing to listen. In the end, Love Wins.
Thank you for bringing this up. I too saw the movie and was disturbed by the violence against women depicted…but I also have first hand experience and I think that it is brave of you to post on this movie.
I didn’t see the movie. I taught my son to take out his anger in sociably acceptable ways. (run around the block, pound a basketball, and such). I thought a parents job was to teach children how to become adults. Like the mother bird, pushing the baby bird out of the nest, so it will learn to fly. So I won’t see the scene as her trying to “control” the one “man” she could. She may have been concerned, that her daughter was being abused by the son.
I watch my son-in-law dragging his 1 year old daughter along the floor by her legs, an activity they often enjoy. She yells, “Daddy stop”, to no avail, he doesn’t. That is abuse in my eyes. Because I was abused by men? Or because children have no power against a much, much bigger human being. Like the “tickler” of little children, another form of child abuse.