Refiner’s Fire: Ordinary People Is an Extraordinary Hoax

The movie assumes that family disintegration is the natural result of Protestant values.

It is no accident that the family father’s name is Calvin in Ordinary People. Nor is it an accident that the movie’s first action scene finds the troubled adolescent in the church choir singing dignified Protestant hymns. The father’s name is a reminder of a founder of the Protestantism whose values underlie the successes of our society. The movie’s main characters are supposedly living embodiments of Calvinist values, caricatures designed to attack and destroy those values.

Ordinary People is the story of the Jarretts, an upper middle-class family in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest. They are highly attractive people—mother, father, and son—but they are in the process of disintegration. The older son is dead by drowning, and the younger son has just emerged from a four-month stay in a mental hospital following attempted suicide.

The Academy Award-winning movie has received high praise from the very beginning. A long, early New York Times review and interview with the film’s director, Robert Redford, clearly underscored the movie’s purposes. Redford goes to the heart of the issue when he says the movie “could be about people’s inability to deal with their feelings. About what we pretend to be, versus what we are. About the status quo, and whether it’s worth the trouble it takes to maintain” (NY Times, Sept. 21, 1980; emphasis added). Thus we are not just dealing with troubled individuals who could be found in any environment; a whole way of life is on trial.

Analyzing Ordinary People is not simple. In its 124 minutes it so subtly intermingles truth and falsity (and, we might add, with good acting) that one must go to great lengths to disengage the two.

The truth here is that mental distress abounds in our society; and it is skillfully portrayed in this work. In scene after scene we see a growing erosion of the sense of reality. The mother lives in a fantasy in the carefully preserved room of her dead son—and is startled when her living son enters. We are continually being made aware that these people move through life mouthing clichés (“Oh, let’s go to London for Christmas. It’ll be just like a Dickens novel.”)

In fact, the movie makers would have us believe that the Jarrett family’s disintegration is but the natural result of a culture founded on artificiality. The older son drowns because the boys do not take into account that they are humanly vulnerable and can perish in a storm. The younger son slashes his wrists because he cannot meet the artificial standards set for him (he is not the athlete his elder brother was). The mother’s sparkling façade breaks down because her withdrawal from the realities grows increasingly to greater depth. The father, who cannot relate to his wife as he once did, finally says to her: “You’re a beautiful lady, but I don’t know you,” a declaration that drives her to leave.

The Jewishness of the psychiatrist,` Berger, is no more accidental than is the Jarretts’ Protestantism. It is the doctor’s function to carry forward the writer’s opinions by standing outside of the so-called artificial culture and to challenge its values (and to misrepresent traditional Jewish values, too). When Conrad, the troubled son, goes to him for treatment, he learns that he must express his feelings even though they are bad form. Berger is explicit: when Conrad explains his reason for coming for treatment as a need for greater control in his life, Berger replies, “I’m not too strong on control.”

Vincent Canby, who wrote the 1980 New York Times review, is just as explicit when he refers to “the contemporary white Anglo-Saxon Protestant psyche when, by accident, such perfect order is destroyed.”

Two main falsities must be singled out. The first is that the mental illness displayed is fundamental to the Protestant heritage; the second is the definition of what constitutes mental illness.

The movie hammers away at a theme that describes this culture as one that denies both individuality and true emotional expression. Conrad’s attempted suicide supposedly is brought on by his inability to measure up to the performance expected of him. But has our traditional culture actually done this? Could American progress ever have taken place without appreciation of the constructive potential of individual differences? Any intelligent businessman must know that his business could not exist if it were not for the cooperation of diverse personalities—the outgoing salesman and the introverted bookkeeper.

This was true historically for none other than Benjamin Franklin. In his autobiography he tells how, as a young boy in the early eighteenth century, his father took him on visits to various craftsmen in order that he might find an occupation suited to his tastes and as a result work more successfully at it. Our modern American industry has made possible a wide range of choices in personal development.

Yet in this movie we have parents who are never heard to utter anything that would indicate any understanding of their son’s individuality. A father’s successful career in tax law and a mother’s community social life are both impossible without some sophisticated appreciation of individual differences.

The traditional culture is portrayed as squelching genuine emotional expression—an issue that is the psychiatrist’s main line of attack on Conrad’s difficulties. The troubled adolescent should cease being so proper. Yet the very church hymns we heard at the beginning prove this to be false. Here we find not repression of feeling, but feeling in even greater depth. It is a feeling that is better channeled—not expressed in destructive outbursts, but subordinated to creative purposes, greatly varied, and adding up to the building of a nation. When there is finally an emotional explosion at the movie’s end, it is an argument filled with obscenities, and it leads to the family breakup.

The movie depicts mental illness as flowing from traditional culture, when in actual life the mentally ill personality behaves in a manner that is destructive to all that the traditional culture cherishes: worldly success, home and family, individual growth. It creates fighting that diverts the family from constructive effort, and worldly success suffers as well.

Creators of movies portray family disintegration with some pretense of being concerned with these problems. But a genuine concern should emphasize portrayals of intelligent, constructive efforts, like the kind that must take place if one is to become a successful tax lawyer. Suspiciously, we see no such efforts. The parents of Ordinary People are passive, and they simply allow themselves to disintegrate.

The mother says: “We’d have been all right if there hadn’t been any mess.” Or in other words, the people in this cultural context are quite incapable of dealing with life’s difficulties, life’s realities. But if this were true, then such a family could not have made the prolonged effort necessary to achieve what they did.

We need always to be alert to those who use truth for the purpose of untruth.

BERNARD RIFKINBernard Rifkin is a pseudonym for a Jewish writer in New York who works with Christians on moral issues.

Have something to add about this? See something we missed? Share your feedback here.