Battlefield Hearth

Saw a couple of good films recently: One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest, Memoirs of a Geisha, and the Virgin Suicides. One of the reasons I liked them so much, (apart from the great direction, especially by Sofia Coppola in the Virgin Suicides) is the recurrent theme of oppression. The oppression in Cuckoos Nest is the one I’m more familiar with: oppressive institutions (in this case a mental asylum) run by people with too much power and insufficient checks, and maybe not enough knowledge. This is the kind of oppression you learn to fight through constitutional/administrative law/human rights law. Memoirs was a bit the same: the institutionalized exploitation of women, through some form of indentured labour, like the original plantation workers in the hills of Sri Lanka.

The Virgin Suicides is about a type of exploitation that’s newer to me, that I'm just beginning to learn about: oppression within the family. I feel more comfortable in dealing with oppression in public/sorta public institutions. It’s a battleground that I’m more familiar with. Familiar with the weapons used. Some types of oppression in families are much more nuanced. Harder to fight, mebbe. The girls in Virgin Suicides were shut off from society, but I don’t know whether the parents broke any laws (except for pulling them out of school, perhaps). And yet the girls killed themselves, and perhaps others do too.

The closest I’ve come to understanding (at an abstract level) is when reading about the artificialness of the public/private divide in jurisprudence/legal theory: The law regulates things that go on in the public sphere. It doesn’t regulate what goes on in private, in family matters. Even when such family matters involve deep imbalances of power…to the point where those who are oppressed think it’s their role in life to be oppressed.