Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 70
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The Popular Culture Review
"Father Flynn!" she said in a voice that made
him jump. "I want to talk to you about something
serious!"
The skin under the old man’s right eye flinched.
"As far as I’m concerned," she glared at him
fiercely, "Christ was just another D.P."(6)
Committed to a belief in the holiness of Christ, the priest can no
longer avoid the raw unconcern Mrs. McIntyre feels for the displaced
of the world. The semiological puzzle is to some extent solved when
the two realize they are interested in different things, but the two
speakers remain isolated and estranged from one another.
Popular films with expert screenplays contain many such
encounters and use dramatic monologue masterfully. When the stakes
of missed communication are high, as in parent-child or romantic
relationships, the failure is especially excruciating. In an essay
entitled "The Museum's Furnace," Eugenio Donato acknowledges the
"dream and hope of a total, finite, rational domain" of human
wisdom but says that all must "come to realize that not only is
knowledge as a given totality unavailable," "any act of totalization
is by definition incomplete, infinite, and everywhere marked by
accident, chance, and randomness."(7) In the flawed kingdom of film,
failures and limitations are represented by human interaction,
revealed in dialogue. Through pivotal conversations in which
family members are unable to hear one another, one person often
addresses core relational issues while the other talks of the mundane.
For example, the priest and Mrs. McIntyre in "The Displaced Person"
sound a great deal like Conrad and his mother, Beth, in Ordinary
People as they strain to talk to one another in the back yard of their
plush suburban home.
Beth sees Conrad huddled outside on a lawn chair. In an
uncharacteristic effort to reach out to her son, Beth goes outside and
tells him to put on a sweater. Conrad tells her how much he would
like a pet; she interrupts and tells him how much trouble a neighbor's
dog is. Reduced to rage that his mother does not understand his need
for something to belong to him, Conrad shouts over his mother's voice,
and when she continues talking, he begins to bark. She looks at him
stoically and calmly tells him to put on his sweater if he plans to
stay outside. Moments later, Conrad follows his mother into the