There is much hoopla around the coming Kate Winslet movie "Lee" which will be released in theaters next month. It is reportedly a very average movie with a strong performance by Winslet. If you don't already know, the movie is about the life of Lee Miller, best known as a war photographer in WWII. . . perhaps. She was famously beautiful in her youth, gracing the covers of magazines from the age of 19. She was at times the lover of Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, and for years the partner of Man Ray who was both her lover and photography mentor. Her biography is peppered with tragedy. She was raped by an unnamed family member when she was seven and contracted gonorrhea which took years to treat. As a teenager, a boy with whom she was in love fell from a boat before her eyes and drowned. Her father, an engineer and amateur photographer, photographed her in the nude obsessively from the age of seven through her relationship with Mann, the two of them photographing her nude in bed with three other women when she was twenty-three. The nude photos her father took of her were often beautiful--but you will not see them. I came across them years ago on some internet website. Somehow, Miller's son, with whom she had a fractious relationship, has removed them all and taken control of her legacy--from which he has attempted to make a handsome living.
Father's and daughters, mother's and sons. It continues to be a theme here, parenthood and all.
Kathryn Harrison is an author who came through the M.F.A. program at Iowa, the (in)famous Iowa Writer's Workshop. Most of her writing is about her nearly surreal relationship with her mother and father, though she was raised, in the main, by her grandparents. Two of her most read works are "Exposure," written in 1993, and "The Kiss," written in 1997. The first, a novel, is about a young woman and her photographer father whose work features nudes of his daughter as a child. The second, a memoir, is about her incestuous relationship with her father when she was in college, a willing participant in the arrangement. Both works have received high praise and terrible criticism.
Freud's relationship with his own daughter, Anna, was fraught with obsessiveness and control.
I am fascinated, I must admit, by mother-daughter-father triad. I am a great observer. I've watched with tremendous interest. Freud was not wrong, I think, about daddy's little girl competing with mommy for his affection. It is, I think, more obvious than the well-worn Oedipus complex syndrome.
Larkin nailed the whole thing in "This Be the Verse."
I am pretty sure Winslet's movie won't touch on her childhood traumas in anything but oblique ways, but I could be wrong. Such things are just too weird for a general audience and would surely be box office poison.
Having no siblings and no children myself, I am the perfect person to opine about parenting and relationships. Who possibly could know more than I?
So you've said to yourselves many times, I'm sure. But, and this I am confident of, I am more likely to look on in amazement and fascination than those who toil away in familial matters day in and day out. It all seems so curious to me.
And one thing I know. Your children prefer one of their parents to the other. That must be a little odd to deal with. But they do. . . whether they are close to their parents or really just can't wait to get away. I've made a regular study of it, you see. All things are not equal.
But that's enough of that. We make our bed and then. . . we die in it. Or something. So the saying goes.
Still. . . we should take a poll: "What's the weirdest thing you've ever done to your child? Have you ever done anything that might distress others?"
Or, conversely: "What was the weirdest thing one of your parents ever did to you? Is it something you have kept secret?"
O.K. I'll leave it for you all to discuss among yourselves. I need to kick this day in the butt. I have dinner plans for this evening with Tennessee and the black sheep son of a very wealthy family. And OMG--you should hear the stories they tell about their parents. Such things.
"I'll tell you one thing, you son of a bitch--I'd never let my kid stay over at the Neverland Ranch, that's for goddamned sure."
"Well, then. . . ."
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