#actually movie is about parents neglecting/violating their kids and losing them

[zhivchik]

[placesthatchangedpeople]

Montana Academy testimony

This testimony was found on Reddit. All rights go to the author.

I’m not going to go into the hell that was SUWS Carolina [wilderness], as that is a whole different can of worms, and the boarding school was far more sinister. I arrived at Montana Academy a few weeks after turning 17. I was absolutely terrified after what I had been through spending 9 weeks living in the woods, but I was at least happy that I could use a toilet and sleep in a bed. [To get rid of any confusion later on, I was born male. At this point in my life I was still living as a boy, and trying very hard to convince myself I wanted to stay that way.] When I got to campus I was greeted by my team leaders and paraded through the lunch room as the entire student body looked at me [as all new students are]. I’m still convinced this is a power play devised by the creators of the school to subtly break your guard down. I said goodbye to my mom, grandmother, and my uncle, and began the worst period of my life.

So the Staff of our team was our team leader Dave, and boy, Dave was a piece of shit. He was the type of guy who would get a shit eating grin whenever he could punish you. You could fucking tell he got a semi off of it, and we would all talk about how much we hated him behind his back. I remember the ear to ear smile he got on his face as my eyes welled up with tears when he told me I couldn’t spend Christmas away from the ranch with my mom, because I was short by one signature on my checklist. That’s Dave in a nutshell. The weekend team leader was Sam and I think he was even worse, because he had the amazing ability to make you feel safe and loved one week, and then emotionally beat you to a pulp the next. For instance... There was one weekend where Sam and I had a long emotional talk where I opened up to him about how much my dad meant to me and how I would give anything to have him back. He gave me the biggest hug and told me he was here for me. The week after was rough and I was so excited to talk to him again, but when his shift started, he sat down and immediately screamed at me in front of everybody for not sitting down fast enough at the table, and put me on privilege freeze for a week. This would happen all the time. It was like he got off on building up our trust and hopes and then he would have a bad week at home and treat us like absolute shit.

I started with every intention of bettering myself. I had fully subscribed to the belief that I was broken as a result of “immaturity”, and the Founder of M.A.'s book was so fond of claiming. Despite coming from a broken home, childhood neglect, death of a parent, sexual abuse, trauma etc, it was MY fault that I ended up at M.A. I was ready to do my part. Unfortunately I wasn’t perfect as the staff expected me to be. I tried my ass off to do chores to the militaristic standards that they upheld, but I often fell short. Perhaps I missed a nearly microscopic hair in a bathtub. Sometimes, my sheets were a little crooked. And for each little transgression there was a severe consequence. If you made more than one mistake on your chores within a week, you could kiss all of your privileges goodbye. No phone call to your mom. No movie night. This may not seem like a big deal, but when you’re locked in an environment where you have maybe one tiny thing to look forward to a week, losing it because of something that is often not your fault is the most heart wrenching feeling in the world. Sometimes the punishments would go beyond cruel and just become abusive. About 5 weeks into my stay, I made the grave mistake of telling my team leader Dave that I had finished my assignment because I was having a really horrible day and just wanted to continue reading my book. Unfortunately he decided to double check. When he found out I wasn’t being honest, he assigned me to my first drudgery. That weekend I spent 6 hours outside in 20 degree weather scraping ice off of every single pathway on the entire ranch campus. I asked once if I could stop because my hands were rubbed raw and starting to bleed, and my weekend team leader Sam refused. I shouldn’t have lied, he insisted. By the end of the night, my hands were covered in blisters and I had learned my place. At this point I was broken, or so I thought. I didn’t know it could get worse.

As for therapy… My 1st therapist was useless. She was liable to cry about tragedies that had occurred during her own life. Ironically she was as cold as ice when it came to my issues. When it came to the issue of me being sexually assaulted in the 1st grade, she breezed right past it, and moved on to other issues. When I told her that I had always wished I had been been born a girl, she didn’t seem to give the slightest semblance of a fuck. When I would bring up the death of my father, or my mother’s alcoholism, she would go into how her brother died and start crying, and the next thing I knew I would be awkwardly wondering if I should console her. The biggest breakthrough in our therapy was when she came to the confident conclusion that the root of all my issues was that I was… wait for it… ADDICTED TO VIDEO GAMES… Every therapy session turned into her trying to convince me that I never wanted to play video games again, despite the fact I was drinking heavily and using substances before entering wilderness. After I finally promised her I would never touch another game again, we finally moved on to trying to process the loss of my father, and even that was a useless endeavor.

Group therapy was a clusterfuck. I don’t exactly know a better way to describe it than to call it “conflict therapy”. Seeing as how the entire M.A. operation was based around punishing students for their mistakes it was only natural to pit them against each other. The students of M.A. were each separated into 7 teams of roughly 10 students each. I spent 90% of my time with my team. They were your my friends, but I can guarantee they knew me fucking biblically. During group, it was common for one student on the team to be singled out and for every other student on the team to just fucking lay into them. It happened to everybody. We were all encouraged to tell on each other if we witnessed any rules being broken. I couldn’t trust my best friends with a secret at M.A. because the consequences were so dire. One tiny mistake could land me there for an extra year. Imagine the fucking paranoia that this causes. I was ALWAYS being watched. I began to question every single thing that I did. I began to believe the punishments I was being given were because I was useless, and because I couldn’t do anything right. After about a year I was 100% fucking brainwashed. I because some kind of M.A. Drone and I genuinely believed that I needed them to survive. It was like I was in a fucking cult, and if they had fucking cyanide in the punch I wouldn’t be writing this right now.

I think this next part was the most fucked up. This was the point where my red-pollyped festering cunt of a therapist decided to use me as an example, to teach a fucking seminar. My team was planning a father-son weekend trip. Doesn’t that sound lovely? Well, problem is, my dad’s fucking brain drowned in its own blood and so he’s in a box in my mom’s closet, so I can’t exactly take that out to Bowman lake with the boys. Luckily for me my therapist called me in and informed me that I was allowed to spend a weekend with my Uncle [who I love very much]. I was so happy, I was jumping for joy! A few weeks pass, and the father-son weekend is getting closer. My therapist calls me back in and tells me to sit down, and then informs me that she actually thinks it would be great for my “therapy” if I went with my team on the trip... I begged her to let me spend the weekend with my uncle, but she said it would also be good for the team’s therapy. So that weekend we all went to the lake. It was a really wonderful experience for everybody except for me. For the entire weekend I was alone. Some of my friends and their dads spent some time with me but I honestly wanted to be alone. Being the only kid without a fucking dad on a father-son trip is fucking humiliating beyond words. The worst part was on the last night of the weekend where the therapist held a group therapy session and the whole fucking thing was centered around me and my fucking dead dad, and all the issues that come with having a dead dad. My therapist had some really great and sensitive questions prepared... “Do you miss your dad?” “Do you feel guilty about anything?” “Why do you feel like it was your fault?” “Do you think your dad would be proud of you?” “Do you wish your dad was here?” “How did you deal with your mom falling apart?” “How do you feel that your mom is drinking again?” and the therapist just keeps pushing me and pushing me and pushing me until I’m inconsolable, and having a panic attack, and I just want her to shut the fuck up. I felt so broken, humiliated, and violated. How fucking dare this bitch of a therapist come at me with all of this heavy shit in front of people I've never met, when all she ever wants to talk about in our sessions is how much I like video games. They don’t care in these fucking places. They wanted to give these stupid fucking dads something powerful to witness so they could write a fucking Facebook post about the amazing work that's being done at MA. May they rot in hell.

Medical malpractice was also Rampant. While at M.A. I was struggling with weight and eating issues. My team “suggested” that I run a half marathon because our new team leader liked to run and they love to fucking push even the smallest beliefs and hobbies on their students. The shoes I was training in had literally no insoles. I asked for new shoes and was told to write a proposal. I wrote one and was never responded to by the treatment team [big fucking surprise]. After weeks of training we finally ran the half marathon. Halfway through, I felt a shooting pain in my foot. I told my team leader as he was not too far ahead. He didn’t give me much of a choice but to finish. For the next 6-8 weeks I asked the nurse every day if I could please go to the doctor as my foot was killing me, and nobody ever did anything about it. Finally after asking over what must have been 50 times, they agreed to let me go into town to get an x-ray. The x-ray found that I had snapped the middle metatarsal bone in my foot clean in half. So not only did M.A. make me run 6 miles with a broken foot, they made me do hard fucking labor on it for 6-8 weeks before allowing medical treatment. Care for Transgender students was disgustingly ignorant and based on lies and misinformation. Despite trying to come out as trans to my 1st M.A. therapist, it was just ignored. I tried multiple times to bring it up, but I’m now certain that my therapist didn’t know what a trans person was, and so she just thought it would be easier to switch the subject. When I moved on to the Sky House [the halfway house portion of the program] I said fuck it and just fully came out. This was met with backlash from the therapy team. Since I was at the Sky house now I had a new therapist and he had a lot of info about transitioning. Unfortunately, all of the info was fucking wrong, and he filled my head with misinformation, lies, and half-truths, in an attempt to make it sound like starting hormones was harder than getting a fucking doctorate from Harvard.

After Finally graduating M.A. I had been brainwashed into believing that getting a script for hormones was like a quest for the holy grail. I had no idea how fucking easy it actually was. I tried to live a normal life. I moved in with my aunt and uncle for a little while until I went off to college. I stayed sober for a few months, but as soon as I got to the university, things started fucking unraveling fast. I realized that I had been horribly abused and that the “therapy” I had been undergoing was nothing more than expensive babysitting. I fucking lost it I started drinking and taking any substance I could. I failed out of my school and moved back home. I drifted around for 3 years drinking, and being a disgusting and terrible person. I had to figure it all out on my own. I fucked with drugs I never should have and fell in with people I had no business being with. I drank too much, and made many regrettable decisions. But I still figured my fucking life out. I figured out that I needed to fucking get it together. I made a goal. I needed to transition. That was problem A. I got sober, went to my Nana [my hero] and found a therapist and within 2 weeks I was on hormones and began my transition, and by pure luck, I found love. It’s been a little over 4 years since I’ve gotten sober and things are far from perfect. I have severe PTSD from going to that hell of a school. I still dream about it multiple nights a week, and wake up in a fucking panic. I never leave the goddamn house because I start to panic, and I have serious trouble holding a job, so instead I work from home as a camgirl, inserting large objects into me for money. I’m lucky though that I now have my girlfriend to help me through it. Without her, I don’t know what I would do most days. Also, its really fucking great to not have to be a goddamn boy anymore. If anyone else had a similar experience [and I know others have] you’re not alone, and good luck.

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/15/2019: THE TALL MAN (2012)

If you do not personally crave movies that undermine both your intelligence and your suspension of disbelief with their totally bizarre bullshit, then please allow me to spoil all of Pascal Laugier’s THE TALL MAN for you. Laugier is responsible for 2008′s infamously hard to swallow MARTYRS, so if you’re acquainted with that, then you may have a general idea of what you’re in for. I had actually seen THE TALL MAN before, and all I could remember about it was my own vague sense of bafflement and annoyance. I’m so glad I chose to revisit it this blogtober, because it is really satisfyingly idiotic!

This incomprehensible rural thriller stars the perennially exhausted Jessica Biel as a widowed country nurse in a decaying northwestern mining town that is suffering from a seemingly endless string of child disappearances. The crimes have given rise to an urban legend about a Tall Man who spirits little kids away to do all sorts of awful things to them. Jessica Biel is too busy to worry about that, being the town’s last human being with a caring heart, until it happens to her--one night, her home is violated, and the intruder absconds with her little boy. She chases the Tall Man into the night, ultimately losing him after being dragged behind his JEEPERS CREEPERS van and having a surprisingly long, action-packed misadventure in the woods. When she is recovered by the FBI (dreamy Stephen McHattie) and dropped off at the local diner, she seems to uncover traces of a conspiracy among the locals, who may all be jointly behind the Tall Man kidnappings. This sends her off on the second leg of her chase, deeper into the gothic industrial recesses of their depressed burg...whereupon, after almost exactly one hour of this sappy but intriguing narrative, Jessica Biel confronts the Tall Man, who is ACTUALLY the mother (Colleen Wheeler) of one of the latest disappeared children (backed by the shifty locals), because Jessica Biel is ACTUALLY the Tall Man! Or at least, Biel delivers a borderline spiritual confession about how she has been delivering all of the town’s children to the Tall Man in order to rescue them from...well, mainly from being raised by poor people. Now that she is jailed for life as a presumed child murderer, in spite of the lack of a single corpse in the labyrinthine caverns beneath her house, the narrative shifts to one of the town’s other denizens, selectively mute teenager Jodelle Ferland (better known to me as Sharon/Alessa from SILENT HILL!) who has been yearning for the Tall Man to take her away from her crappy family. Having expressed her desires to his Jessica Biel, she is warned tantalizingly that if she causes problems, then the Tall Man will “do things to her that (she) can’t even imagine!” (This won’t make any sense later) But now that Biel is behind bars, an actual Tall Man--Jessica Biel’s enigmatic and apparently alive HUSBAND--comes, scoops the girl up like a football, and runs her out to an underground adoption agency whose mission is specifically to kidnap kids out of poor, neglectful families, and farm them out to childless rich people who will give them the perfect childhood. At the very end of the movie, now cultured and fashionable but lonely for her old life, Jodelle gazes DIRECTLY INTO THE CAMERA, allowing tears to fall from her troubled eyes, and asks OUT LOUD if she made the right decision. The end....?!?!?!

I hope that by now, you understand why I feel compelled to lay out every single beat of this ridiculous story. The experience of watching this complete nonsense unfurl is fascinating; The movie is richly atmospheric, and Jessica Biel’s evocation of physical and moral weariness is strangely effective. But then it has to be about...what’s it about exactly? Jessica Biel and her spouse, who has vanished himself in order to perpetrate this elaborate crime, claim to rescue children from dire circumstances, but it isn’t really explicit what the kids are going through, other than the town-wide economic depression. OK, so Jodelle Ferland’s home life kind of sucks, but the idea of a teenager on the verge of adulthood deliberately submitting herself to a human trafficking ring so she can get adopted by rich people is so inherently comedic to me that I just can’t take it seriously. Also, as Colleen Wheeler explains to Jessica Biel in jail, just being poor and imperfect shouldn’t make you a candidate for being deprived of your family. As the film’s latter revelations unfold, we see several photos of Jessica Biel and her husband serving in Save the Children-type organizations around the world, including a picture of them surrounded by smiling black faces. I don’t know if the implication is that Mr. and Mrs. Tall Man went to places like Haiti and the Congo in order to snatch children out of their poor mothers’ arms--it’s hard to imagine that the rich and childless of Seattle would be as interested in them as they are in a little white cherub like Jodelle--but it’s an icky thing to add to the mix. And about Jodelle, who has infiltrated the Tall Man scheme in order to get herself some less drunk and pugnacious parents: Her closing V/O monologue is mortifying in its pseudo-poetic prose, but more than that, what am I supposed to think about her epiphany that getting illegally adopted might have been a pretty mean thing to do to her birth mom? The movie is gravely serious at all times, but I’m not sure what about. It feels a little like writer-director Laugier explained his latest movie idea to somebody, and that person said, “Wait, are we supposed to admire Jessica Biel? This seems like kind of a bad, judgmental thing to do,” and then he just wrote in all this hemming and hawing about what the meaning of all this is supposed to be.

So not only do I feel confused about how I’m meant to feel toward the characters in THE TALL MAN, but I feel confused about what it’s about metaphorically. There are lots of genre movies about childhood and parenting, understandably, since it is such a potent subject. There are evil little kid stories, about the reasonable suspicion that your precious offspring is actually a separate and independent person from you. There are stories about bullied little kids who turn out to have an epic destiny, that help us combat our feelings of ordinariness and anonymity. Adjacently, stories about evil parental figures who must be vanquished stem from a similar desire for self-validation. There are also stories which sort of mix these two ideas, about children getting to go on a magical adventure that is ultimately NOT preferable to the comforts of home--iterations range from THE WIZARD OF OZ to any number of Slenderman narratives (of which this almost is one). Then there are stories, usually distopian sci-fi or fantasy products, about adults who have to fight for their right to breed against a fascist government that aims to prevent undesirable children from being born--which in turn are adjacent to stories about parents who try to artificially produce the perfect child, and who inevitably pay for this transgression against god and nature. It’s easy to see what real feelings and experiences inspire each of these stories, but I have no idea what THE TALL MAN is about. I would think that there isn’t a big and reliable enough audience of, say, people who think you should need a license to have a kid, for somebody to make an entire movie about what if you could remove children from parents who are unstable, oh but like also what if you can’t really tell WHO is or is not a fit parent, but then like what if you were a kid and could pick your own parents, would you be sad later if you tried it??? ...I just mean to say that I don’t know what THE TALL MAN is an allegory for, or even just what it wants me to think or feel. And for some equally idiotic reason, I seem to enjoy the only emotion I am left with, which is confusion.

PS With this viewing, I managed to watch two movies in a row that end with spooked out kids speaking directly to the camera, and that just makes me feel totally and completely cursed.