Well, I haven't seen all of it but I am guessing from how Katie's father is reacting, that he must have abused Katie's mother when she was little and Katie has forgotten about it maybe. We are shown signs of it or at least his controlling behavior in the beginning. This is not unusual in dysfunctional families where serious physical, mental and emotional abuse abound. Is her husband really abusive or is she drawing him into her unconscious memories of her father abusing her mother or vice versa. I did see the rest of this film and I was a bit right about it. The ending was not that believable as in a court of law today, especially in North Carolina, you would likely get life imprisonment, although there are numerous cases of people who were serving life terms for murder getting paroled. Seeking help in these situations is very difficult as women and female children are nearly always blamed in one way or another for the abuse and they think they have to bear it anyway so why bother.
Was it Jimmie? We are so focused on what is happening to Katie and we aren’t shown, so we don’t see, what was happening to Jimmie and why he became an abusive man, why? It’s excusable?
I found a book on PTSD that described such a scenario ascribing the fault for the results of sexual abuse to female children, completely ignoring the sexual mores some young boys and young adult males are taught about sex and how an entanglement can leave young girls appearing to act in over-sexualized ways, these to me are transferences from the abuse itself. It was poorly written and should have gone into those aspects of the situation as it left this lay person thinking they were putting the burden on the victim. This is why so many young women fail to report sexual assaults. There are also aspects of mind control that go on in these situations and unless you are aware of them you can hardly defend yourself against them. Passing on the script is also another issue. I know a lot about it from experience and reading about psychology, psychoanalysis and mind control. Often these transferences make us feel as if we are like the perpetrators although we can't act them out as they were acted upon us yet in some situations it does happen, especially among gay men or women.
As an acquaintance once put it, "it is a sick fit". It looks like Jimmie was just another evil man by the manner in which it was presented to us on the television. But when you start to take it apart and really look at it, you begin to doubt Jimmie was acting of his own free will. It was alluded to but would only be clear to an astute perceptive viewer. One could get the opinion Jimmie was a bad horrible person and not a victim himself, thus responsibility and guilt are ascribed to him for the cause of his crimes and the cause of his wife's actions toward him. He loses his life because of irresponsibility on the part of both families likely. Thinking the thoughts is more dangerous than acting them out although acting them out onto another human being is an unhealthy way to manage a situation and can lead to horrible circumstances such as is demonstrated in this film.
Once acted out the thought process is no longer active, the emotional energy has been expended. Discharging the thoughts by admitting them is the key to disarming them. This I learned in Alcoholics Anonymous, but I also learned there is a paradox involved in this process, the potential to reprogram the same thought process back into the brain and mind. Sitting and confessing one's wrongs is not enough to change the behavior, there must be an alternative behavior. This is why guidance is necessary and why a moral and/or legal approach is necessary to prevent further tendencies. Witnessing someone go to jail for committing a crime is more beneficial than permitting someone to go free, unless you are training a killer or military personnel.
The act of seeking assistance is also part of the cure, training the person to inhibit his or her tendency to act in a violent destructive manner and to seek someone with whom he or she can talk about whatever is bothering them. These feelings may not even belong to the person who is suffering but awareness of them makes them somewhat responsible in that they must act in a constructive manner for their own self protection. This is the manner in which an unknown anxiety or emotional distress should be handled.
Now, having said this, one must ask, should Jimmie's wife have been freed of any charges or responsibility for her actions? She failed to seek intervention for her husband and herself. Was it gas-lighting that caused her to fail herself and her child when her sister approached her numerous times regarding Jimmie's behavior. There were so many opportunities for change to have happened I simply stopped viewing the film for several hours. Was there some masochistic need on the part of Jimmie's wife for her lack of action to protect herself? One would have to say something was at the root of her own behavior. What will happen in the situation as it was left? The wife will either seek help or seek another husband who she will either draw into her, now truly contaminated script or her marriage will end in divorce because the new husband is unwilling to participate in her destructive dance. If she gets help she has a chance at a happy existence with her child and can then seek a new life partner.
These days there are kinds of love, a healthy love and respect and sometimes a masochistic love where one seems to enjoy having pain inflicted upon them and even a sadistic love, when another enjoys inflicting pain on others, which you often find in the consumer/merchant relationship. The merchant is there for one thing only, your money, often blindly to the point of putting you in debt to him, in which case no one wins. The housing market comes to mind, but they were really loving those they sucked into the sham eventually causing a collapse. I can't help but think of Conway Twitty when he too collapsed during a musical performance.
These people seem lost to themselves or unconscious to real, positive love, affection and respect. Those who are unconscious of their dilemma are acting out some developmental script they didn't overcome before adulthood and need outside intervention. They don't feel alive unless they are in some negative state which makes them feel they are loved, human or even alive. These are people who are often self mutilators, their self-esteem is so low you couldn't peel them off the pavement or their modus operandi is such that they are always making another person responsible for who or how they are, like Katie convincing everyone killing her husband was her only choice and Jimmie always making Katie feel like she was the cause of his behavior. Sometimes neither is aware of the arrangement but most often one is aware which keeps the arrangement one-sided and an ongoing thing because there is a pay-off for the one conscious of the arrangement. Games People Play, by Eric Berne, describes this as Now I've Got you You SOB or Rapo I think. Of course you have to beware of the game Switcheroo, in which one has something of value another might want and the other will seek to make one think the other actually possesses these things, causing one to project them away from the self. These people live in a world of only their own existence and everything else is an object to be manipulated at their will. This of course is an infantile state of development but many people never outgrow this state to see others as human or capable of feeling pain, they lack empathy. I recall my brother biting my sister. My mother witnessed the event and then bit my brother. He didn't do it anymore. He learned what he did hurt and caused pain. so often others must feel pain in order to know others experience it too. I've noticed types of music are used in this way. Sometimes inflicting pain can tip the scales too far in the opposite direction.
Sadists often think of themselves as like kings and queens, superior to others and that another will never live up to their high standards. They inflict harm which keeps them in their position of power but hurting themselves more in the end. They are really powerless and they project this powerlessness onto others forcing another to feel powerless and of low worth. This keeps their victims bound to them. Crimes of Obedience speaks to these kinds of positions in relationships through the events during the My Lai Massacre. It speaks clearly to slavery and marriages such as Jimmie's and Katie's. Unfortunately it doesn't tell you how a positive loving marital relationship should be. An excellent book and I am sure there are thousands of books out there with positive guidance. Fairbairn and Grotstein also talk about these positions in their books or object relations.
When you look upon Katie and Jimmie as victims you begin to have some compassion for their situation. When you see one or the other as bad and wrong, it tips one's own emotional scales and one then begins to think and feel more like a sadist or masochist. I am guessing 90% of the people who viewed the film would be in the sadist category, wanting to inflict harm themselves on Jimmie.
The film Point of No Return comes to mind also. It is similar in that an abandoned young female criminal, Nina, is taken in and turned into a weapon for some secret agency like the CIA. There is no love, there is just the woman as a performer who acts according to the training she has received by the agency, killing various people. She meets a man who does know love and begins to change her life.
As a society we are lucky there are those who do know and have experienced some form of real love, they can pass on to society, otherwise we could be lost forever in a sado-masochistic world of constantly inflicting or receiving pain. Locking one’s self into believing this is the only way to exist is dangerous but of course many people do this to their own detriment.
Mine Ha Ha and the Fine Art of Love is another excellent film on the subject. In music I think Eric Satie's Gymnopedies are an expression of love.
Given the numerous films and television episodes addressing these kinds of issues the film almost seems a waste of time, BUT; it was interesting to see a woman get off free for killing her abuser when so often they do not and are often blamed for their abuse in a court of law as I stated before. They are often the victims of mother-transferences. They are in symbiotic relationships with their husbands where the husband wants to be controlled yet resists, using the wife to work out that which he was unable to work through with the mother for whatever reason. They seek to be pampered, permitted to gad about like teenagers or attempting to fulfill some fantasy they have conjured up in their minds without testing it against the real world. The wife assumes most of the responsibilities in the marriage, when, in reality, these women are equal partners and work and contribute and do not expect to be burdened with the husband's poor parenting. In this case, it is irresponsible on the part of the husband to demand such care from his wife, she is not his mother, she is his life partner.
Loving someone excludes beating on someone, but so does killing them. Will Katie raise her child to believe it is ok to kill someone because they are being beaten? Some people are incorrigible? I don't know about that. We are what we perceive in our brains and minds. Still some people will choose to do evil no matter how much love they are shown. No one should ever tolerate being treated badly by anyone but if you love someone you certainly wouldn't want to desert them. You help them get help. In Jimmie's case he was the victim of his parents problems and their failure to communicate with each other effectively. The same goes for Katie's family in that her mother was the victim of a form of abuse she never spoke about. Katie is re-enacting her mother's silence while Jimmie is re-enacting his father's bullying behavior and maybe even Katie's father's bullying behavior as he is a cop and if you have ever dealt with the law you know they are capable of abusing those they deal with. Even though we do not see either set of parents doing awful horrible things to each other, it is insinuated there are problems on both sides of the family and Katie's father considers hurting Jimmie himself. We don't know if Jimmie truly failed to love Katie from his heart. We do know he is riddled with lots of mental problems he was unable to manage without help. Maybe he was entangled in some problem one of his friends had, it seemed he felt laughed at by his friends because he was saddled with a wife and a child and not free to gad about like his unmarried buddies. We don't know if he was influenced by something they said. No normal human being beats on another. Think brain activity. Jimmie's heart may be more pure than Jesus' for all we know. We are born innocent, evil does not dwell in the heart of a child. Katie does take the child and leave in an attempt to save herself and her child but then she goes back to try and make it work and in obedience to her marriage vows, until death do us part. "I found love on a two way street and lost it on some lonely highway" - Lezli Valentine.
These kinds of marriages end up draining the wife's life energies and often result in divorce. At least the wife did have the support of some of her family, while Jimmie seems to lack it. This scenario also happens with women who are looking for a sugar daddy, someone to give them what their parents could not or did not often putting the family deeply in debt.
Have we been shown a truly mature marriage relationship or are we all just fumbling in the dark?
Acting Out, The Neurosis of Our Time, Goldman and Milman
PTSD, A Clinical Review, Sidran Press
Dissociation
