Skytrain Single Mom

When I walk into the skytrain station, I see a small, dark person, and a tiny, blond child. The child is maybe three but still with the stature of a toddler no more than two, and the larger figure is hitting him or her across the face - slap, slap, slap. After the fourth slap, the little child cries out in a defensive wail.

I want to intervene, but I remembering living in Thailand, where babies and children are slapped, not spanked. I cringe, because cross-cultural interventions scare me, and because I don’t know how to tell someone that it’s not okay to beat a child. Walking away, I see that the person I thought to be an adult is an older child. A sibling. I try and relax. I hit my sister all the time. She turned out okay. Suddenly the mother appears, whacking the older girl upside the head and grabbing her arm in tow.

On the train, they take up three rows, each alone alongside their luggage.

Crossing over the Fraser River, the the mother turns to her older daughter, “I thought you said the train went under the water.”

The girl looks around, and then turns, thoughtfully, “no, the other water, on Granville, that’s where the train goes under the water.”

“Well, the train just went over the water.”

“No, mom,” the daughter explains, with pauses and gestures, about how she hadn’t been thinking about the Fraser River, which we’d just passed over, but about False Creek, a part of the ocean, under which the tracks would later pass. The mother bristles defensively, and explains that, well, she just thought, cause she saw we’d passed over the water, that maybe she was wrong...

I think of my coworker, who grew up abused, and smoked crack in the bathroom while her tiny children sat on the other side of the door and cried. Her children are teenagers now, and she tries with all of her being to be the parent she never had, but barks defensively whenever she feels threatened, which is often. I think of how lonely it must be, just wanting to love and be loved, but to alienate everyone by oozing anger and hurt from every pore.

I think of the older daughter, and how adult she seems, and I wonder if she’s even ten. She has the weight of adult responsibility all over her face.

The mother is checking the map, and checking the signs. The mother and daughter argue over which stop is which. A food bank is mentioned. The tiny child makes eyes at me - giant, saucery eyes. He says something which comes out “bla wa wa wa wa” in perfect monotone. I smile and make my mouth big. He repeats his cryptic sentence, then turns away.

After yet another trip to the map, and discussion of stops, then worried glances to see what station we’re at, I decide to intervene.

“Which stop are you getting off at?” I ask, and the mother and daughters turn, a bit taken aback.

“The man said, Broadway City Hall.” The mother says, regaining composure.

“Okay. That’s the next stop. This is King Edward, and then the one after that is Broadway City Hall. But you have a few minutes - the stops aren’t too close together.”

The daughter is grabbing bags, and then returning to her seat, and then grabbing bags again. They discuss where to catch the 99 bus.

“Don’t worry,” I say, again interrupting, “the bus stop is right outside of the station. Just right out front. You can’t miss it.”

“Thank you.” The mother looks at me, and then at her daughter, and back again. “I don’t like traveling at night.” I nod. “I rely a lot on her. I don’t like to rely on her, but...”

“Yeah, but it’s nice to have a buddy. I hate transit - especially when you don’t know the route too well. It took me months to get comfortable.”

At this, the small child is up again, looking at me, and meaningfully telling me something that I cannot understand.

“Oh, he says, we were on the ferry, up top.”

“Oh!” I reply, suddenly understanding, and feeling terribly guilty. “On the ferry! Did you like it?”

“We were on a truck and then a ferry up top something something Grandma.”

“Wow! And now you’re gonna go on a bus!”

At this he smiles, and then shakes his head dramatically, at which his mother laughs. The older girl is standing next to me in the aisle, lugging a suitcase with a blond-haired doll on top.

“We’re going to my grandma’s. This is her doll. It’s an old doll.”

“Oh, it’s beautiful. Is it porcelain?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s really nice.”

The troop departs. The tiny child is competently lugging a suitcase in the wrong direction, and is yelled at, then trots back to his mother and sister at the elevator. The mother smiles and waves at me, and I wave back. Ten seconds later, the girl turns and sees me and waves, and I wave back, and the skytrain pulls away.

War Horse, or "Animals Being Harmed, the Movie"

It’s Oscar season, which is time to reflect upon the movies - good, bad, and horrible - that have come and gone in the year that’s past. There are many surprising gems nominated for best picture, and there are some giant, festering turds, too, and too many snubs to count. It’s the way of the Oscars - beautiful, bedazzled, severely retarded award show that she is.

It’s only in measuring up my favourite and most loathed movies of the year that I’ve come to an odd realization - War Horse, Project Nim, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes are all kind of the same story in different forms, despite one of them being a badass blockbuster, one been an art-house documentary, and one a terrible Spielbergian schmaltz-bucket. (In case those adjectives were unclear: War Horse is a bad movie. Don’t see War Horse.)

Each movie has an animal in the starring role. Each animal is used and traded by various humans for their own gains, and while there are good, caring humans, and there are bad, callous humans, they’re all cogs in an unsympathetic system that cares not for the animal’s fate. We see the animals abused, neglected, scared, and horribly alone. And only in one movie do we get to see that animal plot his revenge and wage war against his oppressors, humanity, giving us a cathartic victory instead of gnawing void.

Spielberg has made a long career out of taking heartbreakingly sad events in history and making them unbearable sentimental and three hours long. It’s cheesy, and it’s unnecessary, and it’s our own damned fault, because we keep giving him awards.

Schindler’s list was a good movie, sure, but did Liam Neeson sobbing “I could have saved one more...and...I didn’t!” (a scene which has no historical origins) really enhance our understanding of the Holocaust, or his character?  And do we really need a chained African man in an early American courtroom shouting, “Give us us free!” over and over again, while the orchestral music swells, in order to get that slavery is wrong? And don’t we already all know that World War One was terrible, pointless, and wrong, and even have a universally acclaimed movie to illustrate the point? Can’t you leave that one alone, Spielberg?

These are all rhetorical questions, I guess, because All Quiet on the Western Front still exists, but so does War Horse.

It’s World War I, told through the eyes of a helpless animal in the most cliched way possible, so that Spielberg can teach us all that the Great War was sad and innocent people died and got hurt for no good reason. Which we already knew. Thanks.

And despite it’s unabashed corniness and deliberately sentimental plot, I cried.

Why? Because the damned horse watches his best friend die in front of him, in the mud, having been worked to death hauling artillery to the front lines, and our titular horse tried to save him but couldn’t, and now watches him die and then looks on with giant horse eyes clearly portraying a sadness and grief which can never be properly explained or understood, because there is no explanation for why, or how, this all happened, or how the world could ever right itself again...and I’m not made of stone, people. It’s sad.

...And then, moments later, the horse gets spooked by a bomb, then a tank, and runs, panicky, into the front lines, where he gets hopelessly tangled in barbed wire. And then it’s not so much sad as cruel, to the animal and the audience, and I feel more pissed off than sad. Because the movie is clunky, and manipulative, and despite its aesthetic beauty (it really does have nice cinematography), it left me feeling abused.

So abused, in fact, that I couldn’t properly put my emotions into words. So I made up a picture, instead.

This is what comes of watching War Horse.