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End of the World

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Submitted By hottie4334
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This film, written and directed by Noah Baumback, takes place in Park Slope Brooklyn
1986. Some critics claim that the film reflects the writer’s personal experience of his parents divorce. Both were involved in the literary field. The film was cited as a letter of hate towards the writer’s own father. While the film is ostensibly about a divorce and a family in crisis it is in principal a sensitive coming of age story primarily from the perspective of a 16-year-old adolescent. It is also a fascinating portrayal of the obstacles that a parent with narcissistic features can present in the child’s struggle for independence. The Squid and the Whale is about divisions, about clashing forces; the mother and father, the child and parent, the intellectual and the philistine, the appearance of things and their true nature. Underlying each of these conflicts and every scene in the film is the battle between cynical detachment and vulnerability.
The opening lines “Me and Mom vs. You and Dad sets the stage for an excessively competitive doubles tennis. Younger son Frank sides with Mom where older brother
Walter proudly joins the father who gives some questionable advice regarding her backstroke. Competitive games are repeated throughout the film’ boxing, ping-pong. The fiercest competition is the literary competition to publish that both parents are engaged in.
In this area the father condescendingly tries to give advise for his wife to improve her writing. Characters
Bernard the father had formerly published a book and teaches creative writing at a community college. He seems to be in a creative slump. He is contemptuous and egotistical with little awareness of his behavior on others. He seems to be failing in work, his marriage and financially but consistently blames his failure on others; idiots who don’t publish him, philistines, and his wife’s

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