The Prisoners!!!!!!!!

Soooooo, Saturday September, 21st my fiancé and I decided to take some much needed alone time and go see a movie together. We pulled up Fandango on our phones and searched through the movie options and both decided we would like to see the movie, The Prisoners. It's safe to say that I had seen the preview for the movie multiple times and found myself intrigued but I did not realize how intense of a movie it would actually be. This movie was not necessarily scary but much more realistic and that I think is what got to me the most.

This movie was based around two young girls that were abducted from their neighborhood one evening and their parents pursuit to find them and get them home safely with or without the help of the law. They had a pretty good idea of who they thought took their children or who at least knew due to the fact that they had been caught climbing on a strange RV outside their homes by their older siblings. The law tracked down the RV and found that a young man in his younger 20's most likely used it for fun on the summer nights. They took him in for further questioning only to learn that his IQ was one of a 10 year old. Well, this information was not exactly good enough for one of the girls' fathers. After the young man was released, the particular young girls' father went to the young man's house and abducted him for his own personal questioning and torture. To make a long story short, the young girls were found. They were abducted by the young man's "Aunt" who actually turned out to be his own abductor.

Now, keeping in mind that the young girls were indeed the prisoners in this movie and some may even argue that the particular detective assigned to the case was the prisoner but I personally would argue that the real prisoner in this movie would be the young man with the IQ of a 10 year old. This young man was taken himself when he was not much older than the girls by his "Aunt". She kept him and "raised" him to believe that he was indeed hers and that he needed her. He was brain washed and he was neglected to the point where he never grew intellectually. He was set up by this woman that he so called his "Aunt" to where he drove the RV, in this case the get-away vehicle and she was never to be seen inside leaving him to be the one that is seen as the kidnapper. This, in my opinion, led to the young girls father abducting him from outside of his home and taking him to a secluded, condemned, old apartment complex to torture him until he gave up the known whereabouts of the young girls. Needless to say, he never spoke a word about their whereabouts and he was tortured to death.

While everyone in the movie theater including my fiancé anticipated the rescue of the young girls, I anticipated the mercy and rescue of the young man only to be disappointed. I know what you're thinking, "How could you even care about a soul-less individual such as he! Wouldn't you do the same to if they were your little girls!?!" Now let's take a moment to reflect. This young man had a KNOWN and ACKNOWLEDGED IQ of a 10 year old by law enforcements. He himself was abducted by his "Aunt". Whether or not he knows the whereabouts of the two little girls, which in the case he did, he is not the one that should've been pursued as he was. I'm sure he himself had been threatened and he was terrified not only of his "Aunt" but of the parents of the young girls and the law that honestly believed that he was responsible. He was truly stuck between a rock and a hard place. Next, we should know that yelling and scaring a sensitive individual will not force him or her to give over any answers that he or she may know. By torturing him, that only made the fathers situation worse. You cannot scream at an individual, especially and child or in this case a young man with the IQ of one, and expect him to trust you enough to relay the information. Torturing him did not bring those little girls home. Patience and professionalism did. Those little girls got to return home safely to their warm beds and loving families and he was left to die. Hearing his screams for help during this movie wrenched my heart. If my children were taken I would be lost, devastated, anxious, bitter etc. but I would also know that torturing a clearly innocent, mentally disabled person would not bring my children home and at the end of the day, I could not sleep knowing what I had done. It is not my choice to decide who lives and who dies. Believe me when I say I would protect myself and my family in emergency situations and if harming someone in the process was what I needed to do then I would, but let me also say that I would have to KNOW for a fact who committed such things against my family or have caught him or her in the act and I still most likely would have a hard time sleeping at night knowing that I had to make the decision on someone's life.

                                (the young man being pinned down by the young girl's father)

Rising and Converging

     This story, in my opinion, was very understandable but at the same time it seemed to baffle me in many ways. It wasn't so much the mother character in the story but the son. The story was an easy read compared to some of the previous stories we have read and seemed to keep my attention pretty well.
     The mother character in the story seemed to feel a very high sense of personal worth. So much that she believed that 95% of the people she encountered were inferior to her. She was caretaker of her son whom of which she struggled to raise and put through college. To most, struggling does not sound pleasant but she clamed to have enjoyed struggling. The neighborhood they lived in at one point had been a nice and respectable place to call home but over the years it had seemed to have taken it's toll and no longer was the respectable place she still saw it as. Integration had taken place but it something she had refused to acknowledge. For the life of her she just could not understand why anybody would believe that dark-skinned people would be beneficial to the world in any other way but slavery. Her son, on the other hand, almost seemed as if though he wanted to disown her. If he could find a way to be rid of his mother or to replace her, I'm sure he would've. He was very ashamed and embarrassed by his mothers actions. He was very angry with her for being so polarized with her thoughts. It's almost as if even though the whole world had to change and accept new things she was the one exception to that rule. He felt as if though it were his responsibility to teach her a lesson. To show her that her ancient and close minded ways of thinking needed to go and that meant doing everything in his power that he thought would accomplish just that. He spent his days trying to clean up the mess his mother made in the lives if others. Specifically, African Americans.                
     Although, all of this is not hard to understand, the part that I cannot seem to wrap my mind around is why was he such a sour person? I understand that his mother was a arrogant, condescending, patronizing, snooty and etc. but why did he feel as if he needed to take on her wrong doings? Why did he allow that to get him down so much that he would take himself to an imaginary world just to get away from her? He was not his mother but for some reason it's almost as if he acted like he was her and he realized how wrong his actions were and he was trying to spend the rest of his life making up for them. I understand that any normal person who had a mother that behaved like his would be very off-put and upset but to understand that it's not your problem, it's the other persons and move on or get as far away from it as you can and realize that there's nothing you can do to change them and they have to change on their own, now that, that is what he should've done.

The Lone Ranger

     Since beginning this semester, as well as Sweeney's Lit Reader, we have read a handful of short stories. With each short story being unique in it's own way I found a way to read between the lines and relate to each story someway or another. Although I found it easy to relate somehow to each one I found that one in particular seemed to catch my interest quite a bit more than the rest.

     The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. This story, to me, had many many hidden feelings and emotions that which were only briefly surpassed by the writer leaving it up to the reader to pick up on each comment and take them into consideration to better put together this story. When I personally began to think of the meanings behind the feelings I realized how relatable his feelings are to many others, including myself. I feel as if though he just felt stuck. As if life was just predestined in every way. The character was a Native American, clearly a minority, doing his best to exceed and surpass his native ways by attending high school with another race as well as dating a woman of another race and attending college with another race. He tried hard to succeed in ways that differed from what he would have following his native roots and in a way I guess it could be argued that he did indeed do just that, by going above and beyond the typical Native American ways, but inside he was still just trying to find where he fit. Although he was Native American, he acted as though he was Caucasian by attending Caucasian schools and dating a Caucasian woman but never forgetting his roots.

     I know that that was a very fast and brief explanation of the story but being as this is a blog entry and not a novel explaining the story it will have to do but there's just one major point I would like to make. Aren't we all a minority, individually? There is only one us and each one of us never really "fit" into everything we desire to do or become throughout our life. We have all at one point or another experienced loneliness and the feeling as if we are a minority in a certain environment but choosing to be brave and continue on with our lives just as The Lone Ranger chose to do and accepting our failures and getting back up to follow through with our desires no matter how daunting or how many people you may have pulling against us we'll find that we will eventually some way or another make it in the end. I do not know how this story ended but if I had to guess I would say he eventually found himself by accepting his individual differences and by accepting them did he learn that he truly fit anywhere he wanted to be because no one is indeed the same.