The RGS Gazette The Arts 12 ------------------------------------------- JACOB Male chicks are put in there. They’re discarded. DAVID What is ‘discarded?’ JACOB That word is difficult right? Mm... Their meat is bad, they don’t lay eggs. Males have no use. So you and me should try to be useful, right? ------------------------------------------- And in one throwaway comment, the struggle of Jacob as a father comes bursting to life from the silver screen. Whilst ‘Minari’ is, primarily, a story of family, it is also the story of Jacob trying his very best to be ‘useful’; to start a farm, to pay the bills, to look after his family, to make enough money to satisfy his family, to weather the storm and keep trudging forward no matter how hard the going gets in order to keep the four of them together. It is his desire to be useful that drives them to what might as well be the end of the Earth in Arkansas; it is his insistence on the farm and its usefulness that drives a wedge between those he loves most. It is a story not told enough by Hollywood, but lived by every provider on the planet. Utility and pragmatism motivates us for better or for worse, myself included. We are lucky to live in a time where we are walking back on previous doctrines of masculinity in search of better, healthier solutions, but despite this new wave of progressive discourse, ‘Minari’ so quietly and profoundly puts into words what hundreds of minds couldn’t. Jacob is unwilling to compromise on his farm, because compromise is not useful; he neglects spending time with his children in order to work, because time ‘wasted’ is not useful; he avoids honestly baring his heart to his wife, because, as for many other men, feelings are not useful. They don’t make money, put food on the table, keep the lights and water on. He is obsessed, and his mindset is clearly unhealthy. And yet, ‘Minari’ does not end with the same crushing message it begins with. As the story concludes, one of the final scenes of the film is a quiet one between father and son. They smile, share silence and fatherly wisdom. Over the top of the scene, the song ‘Jacob and the Stone’ plays softly in the background like a prayer. The sun is shining. He is ready to start again. Book Corner: 'The Road': A Review by Jake Brown (Year 12) As the dark and mysterious person I am (I think I’m Batman), I recently found myself searching far and wide for a dark and depressing novel to read, and although I closed the book with tears in my eyes, I can say that I think I have found one of the most emotionally altering novels of the 21st century. In his powerful novel, 'The Road', Cormac McCarthy paints the bleak image of a father and son, trying to survive through an apocalypse, battling the oncoming forces of weather and the effects of a world stripped of all resources. Evidence suggests that the apocalypse was caused by a meteor strike, but it is left largely ambiguous. The story portrays the powerful bond between a father and his young son, as they make their way through America, trying to reach the coast with little to no hope of salvation. With McCarthy’s sparse writing style and simple narrative, I still found myself invested in the events of the novel, trudging forward with them through every page turn as they traverse the forgotten land that used to be America. One of the most standout features of Cormac McCarthy’s writing style is that he refrains from using excessive punctuation or quotation marks, mirroring the desolation and minimality that overshadows the novel. At first, the lack of quotation marks during dialogue was slightly jarring and difficult to read, but upon getting used to it, it became a part of the novel’s nuance and style. It portrays the intimacy between the father and the son and the Image from The Road (2009), directed by John Hillcoat
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