Maybe this is a New England thing, but I was raised around people like Olive. She's just a stiff upper lip, New England Yankee and I don't doubt for a minute her goodnes. She's no-nonsense and doesn't suffer fools gladly but she's about as honorable as they come. People like Joyce (Olive's son's mother in law) are the ones you need to watch out for.
shareShe is a clinically depressed, nasty, joyless, pain in the ass who hates anyone who gets any joy out of life. She is the fool. She is the thief. The petty vandal. The child abuser. I felt very sorry for her. She needed help so desperately but refused to seek it and instead made everyone around her miserable.
What we got here is... failure to communicate! share
She was pretty damn mean to her son & husband but I think she & Henry balanced out nicely, a cockeyed optimist/sentimentalist & a down to earth tell it like it is pull no punches realist. Henry stayed with her for a reason. She may have made her little comments about his involvement with Denise but she never once forbade it. She never bad mouthed Sue to Christopher. She had alot more class than many of the other more "proper" characters. Henry needs to take care of people, that seem vulnerable, since Olive is so resolutely stubbornly cold, unreachable. Olive goes around sniffing out people like her Dad (including that asshat she was going to run away with) & prevents them, in her way, from his fate. You have to admit, Olive never said anything that wasn't true. Her son seems to have turned out all right. No one is perfect - all good, all bad- we are all flawed. We can blame our parents for screwing us up with their mistakes or get on with your life & pull up your own pants. As far as abuse, yeah she could've been warmer but have you ever KNOWN any families from New England? Geez they are frosty. Must be the tough winters. But I think contemporary parents, like that twit beer swilling Anne, do much more damage by not setting limits for their kids or teaching them any respect. Olive gave the kid a smack; the mom (& Dad) couldn't be bothered to physically make the kid stop yanking on her as he was obviously not going to listen to anyone! Really now, which is worse? We are all so on out high horses about not smacking kids (no I'm not a smacker) but this new age touchy feely self esteem preservation stuff is CRAP. WHY should Olive apologize & not the brat? And then Anne has the balls to lecture Olive about her life & her parenting methods! Good lord! What mother in law WOULDN'T hate her!
KZK
Yes, they balanced out, saint and devil. Denise came along after many years of abuse, so you really can't use that as a reason to speak ill of Henry, who only had a fantasy od Denise anyway. Olive had no class, I'm not sure where you get that. I have a lot of relatives from Connecticut, Maryland, and Massachusetts and none are like Olive. Check that, I do know one friends mother like her, another obviously bipolar manic-depressive. Beating children and animals is wrong. Period. Her son was obviously very traumatized by his childhood. It's easy to tell people to just snap out of it and feel better, so why not tell Olive that? She's the one who made everyone in her life miserable.
What we got here is... failure to communicate! share
I don't think it's as black and white as that (hitting/slapping/spanking kids or animals). There's a big cultural component, and that's not just about saying "my culture's ok, your culture's ok." Let's talk about a child who grows up in a culture that widely accepts spanking, for example. Most of his friends get spanked, at least once in a while. It's not considered odd. When that kid gets spanked, he feels pain, but he doesn't feel shocked. It's an expected consequence of certain behavior. It's not a sign that his parents don't love him.
Now consider a child who grows up in a modern American culture where spanking is widely frowned upon. When a kid is spanked, it's surprising. When he talks to his friends, none of them get spanked. When he gets spanked, he realizes this is not a "normal" thing. Other kids who do the same behavior do not get spanked, which makes it seem random and spiteful. He thinks maybe his parents don't love him as much as other parents, or that he's a worse kid.
I don't advocate physical discipline. Even if it's accepted widely in the culture, I think it promotes an idea that violence is an acceptable solution to conflict. However, there are panicked moments in which it is understandable in any culture to slap, such as if a child was about to do something very dangerous like grab a hot pan.
In short, I don't think it automatically makes someone evil if they hit a child or a dog.
In short, I don't think it automatically makes someone evil if they hit a child or a dog.
We'll have to agree to disagree on that one. Especially when you see a dog that flinches when you go to pet it, or a child that walks around stoop shouldered from being smacked around all the time.
What we got here is... failure to communicate! share
Cultural context is relevant, but the level of damage done to the psyche has a lot to do with more intimate context. Such as the kind of spanking, since no child is spanked the same, which is the case for most forms of physical engagement. What is the parent's state of mind when they spank you? Do they spew epithets before or during it? Is their face beet red, with an expression of hatred? Do they do it publicly? Is the spanking a form of humiliation? How long does it go on? How forceful is it? Bare behind or clothed?
Then there's the context in which spanking occurs. For example, if it's inconsistent it appears as if you're a target because you're wrong, period, rather than because you've done something wrong. Because then it's about the parent's mood, not an external violation, if one even exists. Compounding the confusion is if you're told that you're hit out of love.
It's simply a lazy way to teach a child. Society only seems to tolerate children being tortured this way. Is a child pulling on your skirt? Don't stop what you're doing and give him a talking to, smack him upside the head. It's such a time saver! Then the children can learn how to deal with such petty annoyances when they deal with each other.
What we got here is... failure to communicate! share
She didn't hurt the child; maybe she surprised him since he was used to being coddled. He had problems and acted them out all the time. Even Chris mentioned how difficult he was before Olive met the family.
shareHow do you know if it hurt? You sound like a sadist, too.
What we got here is... failure to communicate! share
Spot on.
BTW, if anyone's interested in a fascinating read on the nature of evil, I found a lot to chew on with What Evil Means to Us, by C. Fred Alford, 1997. The book covers the spectrum for everyday acts of evil to atrocities (supplementing Hannah Arendt), and has some interesting things to say about the popularity of vampires vs. the older and deeper tradition of the devil. Alford interviewed inmates in a max security prison, as well as ordinary "informants." His basic thesis is this:
"Evil is an experience of dread. Doing evil is an attempt to evacuate this experience by inflicting it on others, making them feel dreadful by hurting them. Doing evil is an attempt to transform the terrible passivity and helplessness of suffering into activity…Thinking about my own mother in these terms made sense. I think it does for Olive as well. share
"The experience of dread which so many call evil stems from what the psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden calls the “formless dread” of our presymbolic, preverbal experience…the fear that the self is dissolving. Doing evil is not just about inflicting this dread on others. Doing evil is also an attempt to shortcut our access to this, a dimension of experience that is a source not only of dread but also a source of vitality and meaning in life. In doing evil, the evildoer seeks vitalizing contact with this dimension of experience while avoiding its price, and awareness of human pain, vulnerability, and death. In a word, evil is cheating...
"Not only do humans deny the dread that is our doom, our death, but as Rank puts it, 'The death fear of the ego is lessened by the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other, one buys oneself free from the penalty of dying, of being killed.' One difference in my argument and theirs is that I see dread as rooted more in fear of life than of death, though surely they realize this too. Another difference is that I am primarily concerned not with killing but with the thousand ways evil aims to sacrifice the soul of another...
"Doom is one’s death; dread is abstract doom – pain, abandonment, and loss, as well as their existential correlates, meaninglessness and nothingness. Dread is fear of a living death...
"Most informants approached evil as an experience of dread. From this perspective evil is not a moral or theological problem. It is a problem of life, more practical than theoretical: how to know and live with an uncanny presentiment of disaster which sneaks up on one from time to time… Most informants did not equate criminal violence with evil, reserving the term “evil” for an experience of dread whose locus was unclear…
"The impulse to do evil – that is, the impulse to inflict our dread on others rather than know it in ourselves – cannot be eliminated. We live with it by giving it symbolic form. For many inmates, the capacity to symbolize is restricted to the body, their crime a physical acting-out of their dread. If we can learn to express our evil more abstractly, in stories and pictures, we shall be less likely to do it. It is the task of culture to provide symbolic forms by which we may contain and express our evil in ways that do not inflict it on others."
To a lesser extent, this is the kind of dread Chris would have been faced with, or any child who grows up in a violent home.
What we got here is... failure to communicate! share
Whatlarks, this is fascinating, helpful and sort of beautiful. It also reinforces my support of my son talking about, drawing and play-fighting things that scare him. To me, it seems much better to call our fears out in the open, give them heft and color, and talk about what we should do with them... Than to deny their existence or importance. Excellent thread inspired by a gorgeous but heartbreaking show. Thanks all.
shareI whole-heartedly agree on all points.
shareFunny, I said to my dil when we were watching the first 2 parts that it's the cold weather that makes 'em mean up there. My Vermont grandmother was the real wicked witch of the North.
Olive was not honorable, imo, though. Having an affair and thinking that just because it was emotional and never consummated while staying married to Henry and making his and Christopher's life miserable. Puh-leeze.
Her petty and vindictive revenge on Sue for talking about her behind her back? An honorable person would confront that directly.
Exactly. So petty. Everything she did was low class. Eating nuts at the wedding. Cutting her potato during Henry's speech. Beating her dog. Even for such a sick, depressed person these were awful things to do.
What we got here is... failure to communicate! share
yes she had to invalidate everyone around her. You're not important. Bringing up Sue with the what's her name bit. She really did not deserve to find someone in the end after making everyone else miserable for so many years. LOL. But since I've seen it happen in real life, what can ya say?
You are exaggerating. She didn't beat a dog. Took a swat at a dog . . . once.
She wasn't sick. What's with all the "sick" comments about her in this board? She was cranky and often sad. I think she was at her worst at her son's wedding, especially in stealing the shoe, the earring and marking up things in the closet with the pink marker. She knew it would make Sue crazy . . . watch Sue searching the back of the dresser for her precious earring.
I'm married to a psychologist. This woman was sick.
What we got here is... failure to communicate! share
Are you joking....did you absorb your husband's knowledge during the wedding ceremony? that is the most asinine comment I have ever seen on a msg board, and that's a really low bar. oh wait if we get to define our selves by our husband's accomplishments, then I am an expert statistician and you have a 0% chance of knowing *beep* about psychology. And my mom is a lawyer. Oh wait, she is, because she ACTUALLY WENT TO LAW SCHOOL. people like you (woman or man, but women especially given what we have to go thru to be taken seriously as individuals apart from a man) make me sick. you could learn something from olive, she may not be perfect or even "nice" but at least she has integrity and some actual personal accomplishments to claim. You are probably just jealous of her, that she has individual personhood and doesn't just live as an adjunct satellite to her man. Why don't you go ask your psychologist husband what is says about you that your only claim to authority is his academic and professional accomplishment. And then go back to school and gain some legitimacy of your own, or else keep your mouth shut.
we love you trolls, oh yes we do.
If she was a typical New Englander, I'm glad I live in Texas. She was the meanest, most despicable, petty, harsh, tyrannicaL, judgmental human being who did her damndest to ruin every life that she touched. You can't really believe that her son's mother in law was a worse human being than Olive. The mother in law was trying to do her best to make an artificial situation work while Olive was doing grown up things like hitting a little girl, defacing her son's clothes, stealing his shoes and her daughter in law's earring. Wow, please tell me you really don't believe what you wrote.
shareMy people are 12 generations of Mainiacs having gotten here in 1632. Olive could have been my Dad's mom to the T, the absolute coldest woman on the planet. Fiercely independent and lived by the absolute of never depending on anyone for anything. Pretty sad as they never learned how to connect with another human being. One of the ironies is that they marry people whom they secretly (and openly) despise as a means of reinforcing all of their innate prejudices. Just another example of a control freak who is lives their life in a secret fear that it will all go away and there is nothing they can do about it. Anyone who likes this drama should go online and listen to the News from Lake Wobegone podcasts. Keillor has created a whole town of Olive Kitteridge type characters.
I think my percentage of Chimp DNA is higher than others. Cleaver Greene
Olive was goddamn mean, but if I were to know her personally, I think I would get along with her better than I would with Sue's mom. Sue's mom was superficial, which confuses me and makes me feel judged. I have a hard time coming up with conversation with people like that, when it seems like what they really want to talk about is the lovely weather and the awful hat their neighbor wore to church can-you-imagine! People like Olive might be abrasive, but at least I always know where I stand with them.
shareOlive judges everyone too.
What we got here is... failure to communicate! share
and does anyone have any doubts about where they stand with her? nope. she's not a liar. at least you don't go into an interaction with her thinking she is your friend. new england honesty isn't for everyone. because some people are superficial liars. guess we know which sort you are. bless your heart.
we love you trolls, oh yes we do.
I agree. I've met plenty of people like Sue's mom and they're just exhausting. Vapid, showy and, most of all, insincere. Like you said, Olive may be abrasive but at least you wouldn't doubt her sincerity or be forced to humor mindless drivel.
share
One of the first things I said was how much I loved how they captured the New Englandness of it all. Both visually and just the way the people behave. I have known a lot of people like Olive. And she definitely has a good heart. Be glad she is honest and up front about what she thinks.
http://theodd1sout.tumblr.com/post/100863016868/facebook-twitter
She was monstrous toward her child and an absolute bitch toward her husband.
share