When I first saw the film Pay It Forwrd, I really hated the ending where Trevor dies as a result of his attempts to do good deeds with no expectation of being paid back but simply a desire to make the world a better place. I eventually made my peace with the movie by deciding to view the ending as a literary device, a means to cast light on something.
In the movie, Trevor's death is a means for the author to show how far-reaching his movement was. Though it had not been around that long, the lives of thousands of people had already been touched and had he lived there would have been no convenient means to quantify how far-reaching it had been in such a short time. The concept of paying it forward seems to have been popularized by the movie but, no, the author of the book the movie is based upon did not invent this concept. The television series Kung Fu has an episode where one of the Kung Fu masters does something for Caine and tells him the favor he has done for Caine is a means to pay for a favor done for him and now Caine must do ten favors for other people to pay for this favor. I have no idea how long such an idea has existed, but it's certainly not "new." The book and movie perhaps provided a handy catch-phrase to help the idea spread in a viral fashion, though I don't know if the practice has actually spread and I don't know if it really should. My one experience with someone doing me a favor and telling me to "pay it forward" went down in a fashion and under circumstances that made me feel like it was tone-deaf, insensitive asshole behavior on their part, not planting a seed for making the world a better place.
Literature is a potential means to educate people and get them to think about things in a manner that has some hope of empowering them to really think on moral topics and really change their ways. In contrast, practices like going to church are sometimes a means to keep people mired in toxic social patterns because going to church is marketed as being about morality while attendance has a social component such that following the good advice found in some parts of the Bible sometimes conflicts with social expectation and social expectation ends up being the stronger force.
Some movies and movie snippets have taken me a long time to think through and finally feel like they cast light upon something and "Now I have finally been enlightened by this" instead of just running it through my existing ideas and projecting opinions on it that may have had nothing to do with authorial intent. My first exposure to them went different places for me mentally and in terms of moral judgment than where I later found myself.
The 1964 Bette Davis film Dead Ringer is such a movie.
Edith and Margaret are twin sisters. When Margaret's wealthy husband Robert dies, Edith decides to murder Margaret and take her place.
The film is a case of "Oh what a wicked web we weave when we practice to deceive." After killing Margaret, Edith learns she was having an affair and looks the other way as Robert's dog kills the man so she can cover up the fact that she's not Margaret. When she has to sign some papers, she can't successfully forge Margaret's signature, so she injures her right hand on purpose to cover that fact up.
She just seems to dig her grave deeper and deeper and ultimately goes to jail for Robert's murder. It turns out Margaret murdered him so she could inherit his money and marry her lover.
Margaret was a real piece of work who also stole Robert from Edith by faking a pregnancy to get him to marry her instead of Edith. Edith has been living in poverty in part because of the way in which her sister shafted her many years earlier.
We also learn that Robert put it in his will that Edith would inherit $50,000 of his money upon his death, quite a large sum for the era in question -- enough to pay cash for a house and have plenty leftover to live on. Had she not killed her sister, she would have gotten some funds to help address her dire financial problems instead of going to jail, not for the murder she actually committed but for the murder her sister committed.
My initial reaction to the film was to view Edith as a monster and the film as a story about how she made all the wrong choices. I later changed my mind and felt like she was a victim driven to do what she did. I now think both views are bad takes and it is best to view the film the same way I view the movie Pay It Forward: As a literary device for trying to cast light on certain things, not intended to specifically say anything about Edith per se but intended to criticize societal patterns.
We live in a world where marrying well is the standard answer for how a woman can achieve a comfortable life. Trying to make it on your own seems like an uphill slog with too little pay-off for too many women.
This fact is the root cause of both Margaret's evil actions and Edith's evil actions. They are both victims of a system that makes Robert's money temptation to do terrible things and they both ultimately succumb to that same temptation.
There is also some scene from some black-and-white film, no doubt a movie version of a major classic novel, where a Black man accidentally kills a White woman in order to keep himself alive. She's extremely drunk -- a big no-no for a woman at the time the story is set in -- and he is tucking her into bed when people come home.
He knows that if they hear her loudly and drunkenly giggling and come to the bedroom, he will be lynched for being a Black man alone with a White woman in her bedroom, even though he is acting as a servant to take care of her and is not sexually assaulting her. She won't stop giggling and he puts a pillow over her face to quiet her. He accidentally smothers her and now he HAS actually committed a crime for which he "deserves" the death sentence.
When I first saw the clip, it struck me as tragic and sad. It struck me as unfortunate.
It struck me as situational -- this Black man trying to do the right thing and be a decent human being, taking care of an extremely drunken woman in an era where women were not supposed to get extremely drunk. He's a man also trying to survive in a racist world and -- oops! -- things go terribly, terribly wrong.
It took me a long time to come to another conclusion and to feel poisoned by systemic racism for not seeing it sooner.
The White woman who is drunk and won't stop giggling knows just as well as the Black man that if he is found in her bedroom it is a death sentence for him and there will be no trial. Just like him, she also hears people coming home, yet she makes no effort to stop giggling.
Drunk or not, her actions amount to callous disregard for his life. It is callous disregard rooted in racism, where she takes it for granted that he should help her while drunk but she feels no obligation to even value his survival.
I stopped feeling like it was sad or "unfortunate" that she died and began feeling like she was a monster for making no effort to stop giggling, knowing this could cost him his life. She brought her accidental death upon herself by putting his life in danger to begin with -- his bitter "reward" for foolishly trying to be kind to her.
There was some other movie set in South Africa during Apartheid whose name is long forgotten by me. One scene of the film really stood out to me in particular: As local constables enforcing the curfew approach them, a White man who is against Apartheid loudly tells two Black men to do something for him as if they are his servants.
The thing he tells them to do had nothing to do with why he was talking to them. It was an excuse to get them out of trouble because they are out past curfew and he takes responsibility for it as a privileged White person and they go along with it, knowing he is actually protecting them by visibly pretending to be a racist White man treating them as his servants in a way and to a degree that would be abusive of them if it were real.
While living in Kansas as a military wife, my Georgia car tags expired while my husband was deployed to Saudi Arabia. I thought "No big, I have a power of attorney. I will take care of this."
No, it turned out Georgia was one of the two WORST states in the US for having problems with the DMV and my GENERAL power of attorney was worthless. I needed a SPECIAL power of attorney that I was in no position to readily arrange and my husband would be back from Saudi about the time it would be possible to get me said SPECIAL power of attorney.
Long story short, I ILLEGALLY drove about a thousand miles with expired plates to my sister's house to attend her wedding and then PARKED the car and borrowed hers, trying to sort my issue. At the DMV, the Black woman helping me asked me all the standard questions and the OFFICAL answer according to the OFFICAL rules was "FUCK YOU, DOREEN, you CANNOT get plates. Too bad, so fucking SAD."
At wit's end, I finally blurted "I was BORN in this state!" and the Black woman walked a few feet over to her White supervisor, lied and said "She never got her bill." at which point I was finally allowed to pay for my plates so long as I also paid a small late fee of $10, which I was perfectly thrilled to do at that point.
I told this story later to my parents and a Black man they were friends with happened to be there at their house when I told it. He said nothing, but the look on his face and his small giggle said volumes. Blacks in the state of Georgia apparently are all too familiar with how broken the system can be and sometimes lying or otherwise breaking the rules is the only way to NOT shaft someone dealing with "the system."
I thought that's just how life is supposed to work. The two Black people had insight into how broken the system was and were sympathetic to how fucked I was and I got the help I needed, kind of like the scene in the movie set in South Africa where someone pretended to go along with racist social norms in order to defy racist social norms.
I certainly would help a random stranger regardless of skin color myself if I could and I certainly have done such things many times over the years.
But then I ended up extremely poor and found that, no, Black people aren't all sympathetic and helpful. Some of them saw my low social status as the perfect opportunity to vent some of their anger over systemic racism and intentionally hurt me, knowing other White people wouldn't give a damn about them hurting me -- knowing they would most likely get away with it.
Bits and pieces of this post have been rattling around in my brain for a lot of years and it's taken me a long time to get to this point. It's not like I haven't written about some of this before, but I didn't know how to say that I am tired of Black people intentionally hurting me without sounding like "I expect Black people to all play servant to me because I'm White -- I expect Blacks to still be below me on the heirarchy, even though I'm low woman on the White totem pole due to my financial situation."
That's not what I expect. That's not it at all.
I expect most people to be decent to each other, regardless of skin color or economic status. I grew up seeing a LOT of that and I don't know where it seems to have disappeared to in my life in the past decade or two nor why.
In the movie, Trevor's death is a means for the author to show how far-reaching his movement was. Though it had not been around that long, the lives of thousands of people had already been touched and had he lived there would have been no convenient means to quantify how far-reaching it had been in such a short time. The concept of paying it forward seems to have been popularized by the movie but, no, the author of the book the movie is based upon did not invent this concept. The television series Kung Fu has an episode where one of the Kung Fu masters does something for Caine and tells him the favor he has done for Caine is a means to pay for a favor done for him and now Caine must do ten favors for other people to pay for this favor. I have no idea how long such an idea has existed, but it's certainly not "new." The book and movie perhaps provided a handy catch-phrase to help the idea spread in a viral fashion, though I don't know if the practice has actually spread and I don't know if it really should. My one experience with someone doing me a favor and telling me to "pay it forward" went down in a fashion and under circumstances that made me feel like it was tone-deaf, insensitive asshole behavior on their part, not planting a seed for making the world a better place.
Literature is a potential means to educate people and get them to think about things in a manner that has some hope of empowering them to really think on moral topics and really change their ways. In contrast, practices like going to church are sometimes a means to keep people mired in toxic social patterns because going to church is marketed as being about morality while attendance has a social component such that following the good advice found in some parts of the Bible sometimes conflicts with social expectation and social expectation ends up being the stronger force.
Some movies and movie snippets have taken me a long time to think through and finally feel like they cast light upon something and "Now I have finally been enlightened by this" instead of just running it through my existing ideas and projecting opinions on it that may have had nothing to do with authorial intent. My first exposure to them went different places for me mentally and in terms of moral judgment than where I later found myself.
The 1964 Bette Davis film Dead Ringer is such a movie.
Edith and Margaret are twin sisters. When Margaret's wealthy husband Robert dies, Edith decides to murder Margaret and take her place.
The film is a case of "Oh what a wicked web we weave when we practice to deceive." After killing Margaret, Edith learns she was having an affair and looks the other way as Robert's dog kills the man so she can cover up the fact that she's not Margaret. When she has to sign some papers, she can't successfully forge Margaret's signature, so she injures her right hand on purpose to cover that fact up.
She just seems to dig her grave deeper and deeper and ultimately goes to jail for Robert's murder. It turns out Margaret murdered him so she could inherit his money and marry her lover.
Margaret was a real piece of work who also stole Robert from Edith by faking a pregnancy to get him to marry her instead of Edith. Edith has been living in poverty in part because of the way in which her sister shafted her many years earlier.
We also learn that Robert put it in his will that Edith would inherit $50,000 of his money upon his death, quite a large sum for the era in question -- enough to pay cash for a house and have plenty leftover to live on. Had she not killed her sister, she would have gotten some funds to help address her dire financial problems instead of going to jail, not for the murder she actually committed but for the murder her sister committed.
My initial reaction to the film was to view Edith as a monster and the film as a story about how she made all the wrong choices. I later changed my mind and felt like she was a victim driven to do what she did. I now think both views are bad takes and it is best to view the film the same way I view the movie Pay It Forward: As a literary device for trying to cast light on certain things, not intended to specifically say anything about Edith per se but intended to criticize societal patterns.
We live in a world where marrying well is the standard answer for how a woman can achieve a comfortable life. Trying to make it on your own seems like an uphill slog with too little pay-off for too many women.
This fact is the root cause of both Margaret's evil actions and Edith's evil actions. They are both victims of a system that makes Robert's money temptation to do terrible things and they both ultimately succumb to that same temptation.
There is also some scene from some black-and-white film, no doubt a movie version of a major classic novel, where a Black man accidentally kills a White woman in order to keep himself alive. She's extremely drunk -- a big no-no for a woman at the time the story is set in -- and he is tucking her into bed when people come home.
He knows that if they hear her loudly and drunkenly giggling and come to the bedroom, he will be lynched for being a Black man alone with a White woman in her bedroom, even though he is acting as a servant to take care of her and is not sexually assaulting her. She won't stop giggling and he puts a pillow over her face to quiet her. He accidentally smothers her and now he HAS actually committed a crime for which he "deserves" the death sentence.
When I first saw the clip, it struck me as tragic and sad. It struck me as unfortunate.
It struck me as situational -- this Black man trying to do the right thing and be a decent human being, taking care of an extremely drunken woman in an era where women were not supposed to get extremely drunk. He's a man also trying to survive in a racist world and -- oops! -- things go terribly, terribly wrong.
It took me a long time to come to another conclusion and to feel poisoned by systemic racism for not seeing it sooner.
The White woman who is drunk and won't stop giggling knows just as well as the Black man that if he is found in her bedroom it is a death sentence for him and there will be no trial. Just like him, she also hears people coming home, yet she makes no effort to stop giggling.
Drunk or not, her actions amount to callous disregard for his life. It is callous disregard rooted in racism, where she takes it for granted that he should help her while drunk but she feels no obligation to even value his survival.
I stopped feeling like it was sad or "unfortunate" that she died and began feeling like she was a monster for making no effort to stop giggling, knowing this could cost him his life. She brought her accidental death upon herself by putting his life in danger to begin with -- his bitter "reward" for foolishly trying to be kind to her.
There was some other movie set in South Africa during Apartheid whose name is long forgotten by me. One scene of the film really stood out to me in particular: As local constables enforcing the curfew approach them, a White man who is against Apartheid loudly tells two Black men to do something for him as if they are his servants.
The thing he tells them to do had nothing to do with why he was talking to them. It was an excuse to get them out of trouble because they are out past curfew and he takes responsibility for it as a privileged White person and they go along with it, knowing he is actually protecting them by visibly pretending to be a racist White man treating them as his servants in a way and to a degree that would be abusive of them if it were real.
While living in Kansas as a military wife, my Georgia car tags expired while my husband was deployed to Saudi Arabia. I thought "No big, I have a power of attorney. I will take care of this."
No, it turned out Georgia was one of the two WORST states in the US for having problems with the DMV and my GENERAL power of attorney was worthless. I needed a SPECIAL power of attorney that I was in no position to readily arrange and my husband would be back from Saudi about the time it would be possible to get me said SPECIAL power of attorney.
Long story short, I ILLEGALLY drove about a thousand miles with expired plates to my sister's house to attend her wedding and then PARKED the car and borrowed hers, trying to sort my issue. At the DMV, the Black woman helping me asked me all the standard questions and the OFFICAL answer according to the OFFICAL rules was "FUCK YOU, DOREEN, you CANNOT get plates. Too bad, so fucking SAD."
At wit's end, I finally blurted "I was BORN in this state!" and the Black woman walked a few feet over to her White supervisor, lied and said "She never got her bill." at which point I was finally allowed to pay for my plates so long as I also paid a small late fee of $10, which I was perfectly thrilled to do at that point.
I told this story later to my parents and a Black man they were friends with happened to be there at their house when I told it. He said nothing, but the look on his face and his small giggle said volumes. Blacks in the state of Georgia apparently are all too familiar with how broken the system can be and sometimes lying or otherwise breaking the rules is the only way to NOT shaft someone dealing with "the system."
I thought that's just how life is supposed to work. The two Black people had insight into how broken the system was and were sympathetic to how fucked I was and I got the help I needed, kind of like the scene in the movie set in South Africa where someone pretended to go along with racist social norms in order to defy racist social norms.
I certainly would help a random stranger regardless of skin color myself if I could and I certainly have done such things many times over the years.
But then I ended up extremely poor and found that, no, Black people aren't all sympathetic and helpful. Some of them saw my low social status as the perfect opportunity to vent some of their anger over systemic racism and intentionally hurt me, knowing other White people wouldn't give a damn about them hurting me -- knowing they would most likely get away with it.
Bits and pieces of this post have been rattling around in my brain for a lot of years and it's taken me a long time to get to this point. It's not like I haven't written about some of this before, but I didn't know how to say that I am tired of Black people intentionally hurting me without sounding like "I expect Black people to all play servant to me because I'm White -- I expect Blacks to still be below me on the heirarchy, even though I'm low woman on the White totem pole due to my financial situation."
That's not what I expect. That's not it at all.
I expect most people to be decent to each other, regardless of skin color or economic status. I grew up seeing a LOT of that and I don't know where it seems to have disappeared to in my life in the past decade or two nor why.