Hi, everyone. I thought I was done with my fannish posting, but there’s been big news for us Robert Carlyle fans. The trailer for his much-anticipated indie film “North of Normal” is now on YouTube, announcing a release date of July 28.
The film is based on the memoir of Cea Sunrise Person. She was inspired to tell her story after seeing the success of The Glass Castle. Her upbringing was similar. She, too, was raised in a non-conforming, idealistic family. Her grandfather, Papa Dick, (Robert Carlyle’s role) spearheaded an off-the-grid hippie commune in the forests of Western Canada. Her mother (played by Sarah Gadon) had her when she herself was a teenager. As Cea grows up, she gets more glimpses into “normal” suburban life, and she craves it. Though the trailer doesn’t show it, she breaks away from the family by becoming a fashion model. I hope that will be explored in the movie because it was my favorite part of the book.
Ultimately, though, it’s Robert Carlyle that I want to see. He likes to play morally ambiguous characters, and Papa Dick certainly qualifies. After reading the book, I can only conclude that the man’s name suited him well.
Papa Dick is exactly the sort of person I would have pegged as an admirer of R.D. Laing, the anti-psychiatry psychiatrist I discussed in my review of Episode Three of “The Full Monty.” I’m just not saying that because Laing sometimes treated his patients with LSD and therefore gained a following amongst hippies. Part of Papa Dick’s ideology was opposition to doctors and the medical establishment. Life in his commune meant following his home remedies and diet. It seems only logical that he’d have a similar distrust of the practice of medical psychiatry, but when his own son had a breakdown, he had him institutionalized.
The son’s name was Dane, and in the book, his story is a family secret gradually revealed to Cea. I don’t know if the movie will include him or not, but in case it does...
As I wrote in my previous posts, Laing taught that “mental illness” is a reaction to family or societal hypocrisy. It’s not the only possible reaction, of course. Some people capitulate to the hypocrisy. They become true believers. Rebels, on the other hand, call out the bullshit and find their own way. But when love is part of the picture, as it ought to be in a family, rebellion doesn’t come easily. A mental patient is someone who is too honest to accept the hypocrisy yet at the same time loves the hypocrite so much, the cognitive dissonance breaks his mind.
When Dane was about nineteen or so, he discovered that his father was sleeping with his girlfriend. The two people he loved most in the world betrayed him. On top of that, it put him at odds with the family “religion.” Papa Dick preached sexual liberation, and as head of the commune, he got to sleep with any woman he wanted. Dane was expected to be cool with that. But he wasn’t. The pain of it broke his heart and his mind.
You’d think Papa Dick would have sought treatment for him from the renown psychiatrist of the counterculture, or at least found someone practicing an “alternative” method in Canada. He avoided hospitals in general, so why go to one now? But he turned out to be just like any conventional parent institutionalizing an “out of control” child. It was easier for him to say, “There’s something wrong with Dane,” than admit, “I’ve wronged Dane.”
Perhaps I’m being unfair. Perhaps there really were no other options for them in rural Canada. Or perhaps Dane’s mother, who almost always capitulated to her husband, insisted they keep Dane close to home. I still think Papa Dick was a narcissistic jerk, and he was too entrenched in his own ideology to cop to the living proof in front of him: loosened sexual boundaries aren’t good for human relationships.
I know my fellow dearies are enjoying the new pictures of Robert Carlyle now. One of them even nicknamed the character “Papa Bear.” But in real life, the man was no teddy bear. Like I said, he lived up to his name.