The Great Santini
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The family in the movie The Great Santini (Carlino, 1979) is dominated by the father, Bull Meecham, who is himself ruled by the military and by a military view of life. He sees things in terms of a hierarchy. In the military, he has his place in the chain of command. At home, he is the top of that chain, the ultimate arbiter. He has certain precepts by which he lives and by which he expects his children to live, most notably his son, who he sees as a developing version of himself without any concern for the vision the boy might have of himself. He is most in his element in the opening scenes of the film, when he is in the air and unwinding in a bar after the mission. At home, he tries to recreate the order and discipline that marks life in the Marine Corps. Satir (1988) describes how the married couple are the architects of the family. The relationship between the husband and wife in the film is strong and offers the support this family needs, while the relationship of the father to each of the children is more problematic. The relationship with son Ben is the most difficult. Ben would like to please his father, but Ben would also like to be his own man. He constantly tests the water. For instance, early in the film he asks his father what the father would think if he did not go into the Marines, and the father adamantly insists that the son will go into the Marines after four years of college. Meecham recognizes no form of weakness on the part of his family.
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oldest and is also the greatest threat to the father. The mother realizes this, telling Ben that his father is playing basketball in the rain because he knows he is getting old and wants the son to know that he will have to practice to beat the boy in the future. She also tells the boy, "You have a strange father." She clearly loves her husband, and she and Meecham are indeed the architects of this family. However, her acceptance of the father's strangeness and her inability or refusal to get him to change in key respects is one reason why this family unit has developed as it has.
The mother is an enabler in many ways for she works to protect members of the family not by correcting bad behavior but by finding ways to accommodate it. She says of the father, "You've got to interpret the signals he gives off." She does not tell the father to treat his children better but insists that the children conform around the father's behavior. Forward (1989) notes that there are spoken and unspoken rules in the family unit:
Spoken rules may be arbitrary, but they tend to be clear . . . But unspoken family rules are like phantom puppeteers, pulling invisible strings and demanding blind obedience (Forward, 1989, 170).
These unspok
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1715
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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