Film reviews

Joy Luck Club

Our battle against our physiology

Generational trauma is the one disease you are born with. Victims can range anywhere from someone with two loving parents all the way to an abused child in an orphanage. Unlike your standard disease, its effects and symptoms can differ incredibly, even in ways that contradict each other. One person's trauma can manifest in an overly protective trait while anothers could be a complete loss of possessiveness, the only universal similarity between them all is the ability to spread uncontrollable and it's inevitability.

The knowledge of generational trauma can itself cause paranoia of avoiding being like your parents which will manifest as its own unique trauma. Knowing all this you may begin to wonder how one avoids generational trauma and the truth of it, you can't, no one can and everyone in the world will always deal with outside effects subconsciously affecting them. What you can do is learn and seek forgiveness, forgiveness that will relieve your trauma. Forgive your parents and seek that very forgiveness out of your children.

The Joy Luck Club is a film that fully understands this philosophy of forgiveness, through its many tales it shows how one little girl's mistreatment can lead to several generations of children being affected. The film also teaches that you can't fully blame these people or even the generations above them, they're all a victim of the naturally occuring evil and death in this world which has led our brains to adopting a learning method which is ineffective in the modern world.

Imagine for a second you are a human from before civilization was established, you as a child have an almost deathly interaction with snakes which leads you to avoiding tall grass, when you have kids they copy this behavior and carry it onto their death. This little story is the evolutionary reason for generational trauma's existence, and the reason why no one is truly at fault for what they subconsciously teach their kids. Replace high grass with love, and snakes with betrayal and you have a common trauma for children of divorced parents.

Throughout the movie we see a pattern of trauma developing early on for the mothers and we then see how it affects their kids' growth. All these problems stick with the children until later in life when they learn to talk it out with their mothers and find relief after a long struggle. The trauma for some develops as a feeling of underappreciation and for others feeling as if they were betrayed or put on a pedestal, the way the film goes about exploring these topics is through culture.
The generational trauma most often resembles a culture shock and disconnect between Chinese mothers and their American daughters. Values and standards from China are viewed differently in America but the mothers ignore it in the privacy of their home while America teaches them their own and creates a disconnect from the daughters to their mothers. For the children this disconnect from home and the outside world can generate trauma such as secretive behavior or disregarding Chinese culture in public while for the mothers despite America being an improvement over their situation in China, the adjustment generates trauma and hate for the outside world which can sometimes extend to the daughters.

Immigration is possibly one of the most terrifying experiences one can go through, leaving your safe country with its unique identity and going to one completely different from yours will, for a short while at the least, negatively affect you. That's if you're lucky and adjust easily but most don't, most after immigrating put on a facade and bury their discomfort and confusion in deep because admitting you're scared could mean admitting you're wrong and from a purely scientific point of view your brain never wants to be wrong. If your brain was wrong and you made the wrong decision, especially on such a big thing like moving to a new country, as a safety measure your body releases chemicals that reinforce self doubt because it's unaware if you can be trusted to make decisions. This is it's last line of defense and once again, in the wild this saves lives but in our civilized world it does nothing but hurts everyone.

Emotions are strange, they're confusing, and they're scary and this movie perfectly showcases how strong an emotion really is. No person with logic would senselessly kill a child, if a reward were offered an emotion called empathy would step in and stop it, but empathy is an external emotion in that though it affects you it's cause is derived from an outside effect with no relation to you. So what is the one thing that could drive a person to senselessly kill a child, even their own child? Emotions, specifically internal ones, ones that affect you more harshly because their outside causes directly affect you, emotions so strong they can override your internal safeguards such as empathy and force you in a fit of rage and sadness to murder your own child, this is the cruel reality Ying-ying St. Clair must deal with when she kills her child as revenge against her husband.

The Joy Luck Club is a very dark movie. From its surface value scenes having disturbing imagery and plots, to the deeper themes of generational trauma and cultured shock, all the way down to the unintended but amazingly represented physiology vs us battle that occurs everyday within each and every one of us. The film perfectly represents these things by showcasing very real and raw emotions. The plots descent from light topics such as small fights between a mother and her kid to leaving children in a war torn country, rape, and murder, is representation of the snowballing effect generational Trauama has. Our own physiology is out to get us, and only by forgiving, accepting, and moving on but never forgetting can we overcome this battle with our inner workings and subconscious.