The Abusive Fathers of Fences and The Glass Castle

Fences (2016) and The Glass Castle (2017) are two recent examples of beautiful, emotionally charged filmmaking. Both focus on the troubled and troubling relationships between a larger-than-life, though abusive, father and their wives and children, who struggle to discover their place in the world (read: his world).

In other words, they struggle to find a space to occupy in these bombastic men’s lives. Denzel Washington as Troy Maxsel in Fences and Woody Harrelson as Rex Walls in The Glass Castle each offer tremendous performances that dazzle and frighten the audience as they do their wives and children.

In The Glass Castle, during a tender moment of family unity in the desert, Rose Mary (Naomi Watts) rushes to a Joshua tree that she declares the most beautiful tree she’s ever seen. As she paints, she tells Jeanette, in what is a distillation of the main idea of the film, “It’s the struggle that gives it its beauty.”

This is certainly true in the case of the Joshua tree and its struggle against the natural forces of wind, sun, and lack of precipitation. However, a big issue that remains after watching these two films is this very equation of the harsh natural forces that shape trees to the physical and emotional violence of damaged and abusive fathers.

These films appear to suggest that the abuse was natural and justified, in a sense, because it produced strong, beautiful children.

Confinement

At the heart of both films is a metaphor of confinement. Troy (Washington) harps on his son Corey (Jovan Adepo) for not helping him build a fence around their backyard. Rex (Harrelson) and Jeanette (Brie Larson, Ella Anderson, and Chandler Head) spend time throughout the film planning a glass castle in which the family can live happily ever after.

As each film progresses, it becomes apparent that the fence and the glass castle are not about protecting the family or keeping them united in a voluntary or loving way. They are instead meant to represent the feeling of confinement that Troy and Rex create in the lives of their families.

By being Big Men, charismatic and controlling, they effectively destroy the lives of those around them. They grow to subsume all available emotional and physical space. Fences and The Glass Castle are intimate portraits of exactly this confinement and destruction.

Two Films, One Abuser

These films contain many apparent differences, in style and tone, the scope of the story, and the socioeconomic seas in which the stories float. However, they both ask one eternal question: Do the ends justify the means?

Furthermore, the same instantiation of that same great question in each film is this: does having successful and determined children justify the abusive means these fathers employed to raise such great kids?

By concluding with heartfelt celebrations of the recently deceased patriarchs, both these films both appear to answer in the affirmative. At least in cases where the father is a big, loud, lovable braggart with innate abilities to fill all the available space around him.

The Abuse Cycle

One aspect of these films’ beauty is the sincerity with which they portray Troy and Rex as abusers and abused. Troy recounts to his oldest son, Lyons (Russell Hornsby), and his best friend, Bono (Stephen Henderson), that his own father used fear as his main parenting technique. On one occasion Troy’s father attacked him in order to sexually assault his 13 year-old girlfriend.

In a terrifying scene in The Glass Castle, the audience witnesses Rex’s son, Brian (Charlie Shotwell) being molested by Rex’s mother, Erma (Robin Bartlett). It becomes clear that Rex, as a child, was the victim of similar sexual abuse at the hands of his own mother.

The main perpetrators of abuse from both films have clearly been victims themselves. These revelations help the audience to understand why Troy and Rex may be as they are. However, they do little to excuse the violence and abuse that these men perpetuate upon their own children.

Physical Violence

Both Rex and Troy often become violent, both with their wives and their children. Troy grabs Rose’s (Viola Davis) arm after her wrenching monologue about how she let parts of herself die in order to support him as a man. Rex destroys Rose Mary’s paintings in a scene in which she ends up dangling from the second storey window of their West Virginia hovel, presumably thrown by Rex.

Both men are likewise shown to be violent with their children. Troy snatches a baseball bat from Corey and chokes him with it. Rex throws Jeanette into a swimming pool to ‘teach’ her to swim, and later yanks her out of the backseat of the family station wagon in order that he can go drink.

But even during these men’s violent outbursts, the audience is often given a means by which to sympathize with Troy and Rex. Throughout Fences, the racial and social injustices that he has been the victim of make up a regular part of Troy’s loud rambling and rants. Similarly, in the scenes in The Glass Castle in which Rex becomes violent with other men (a doctor, a swimming pool manager, Jeanette’s fiance), he does so while bemoaning social and racial injustices.

This contextualization of Troy’s and Rex’s violence is honest and heartbreaking. While the violence is jarring, the audience is able to grasp the reasons behind these men’s inability get things done without pushing someone weaker around.

Emotional Abuse

Their abuse isn’t limited to the physical kind. Both men are arrogant and all-knowing when it comes to their children’s desires and dreams. They feel themselves the owners and proprietors of the bodies and lives of their wives and children.

Troy refuses to sign paperwork that would allow Corey to be recruited to play college football. He does this out of a sense of generational payback for his own baseball career that never-could-be due to the the racist institutions during the years of his athletic prime. Or possibly out a sense of protection for Corey based on a refusal to understand that times were, in fact, changing (at least a bit). Either way, Corey is unable to live his dream.

Throughout The Glass Castle, Rex consistently fails to feed or properly shelter his children due to his alcoholism. He steals Jeanette’s money that she had saved to escape his West Virginia home to pursue her dreams of being a writer in New York City.

Both men feel that they have the superior knowledge and the inherent right to determine what kind of future their children will have. In both films, the children must physically escape their fathers’ gravitational pull and control in order to determine their own futures.

Celebrating the Abusive Father

Forgiveness and redemption are noble objects in art. Especially in any family drama, if it is to be honest and meaningful. The problem with these two films is not the forgiveness of an abusive father.

The problem is that the last scenes of each movie show the victimized-and-therefore-reluctant children celebrating their abusers after their deaths. Troy is welcomed into heaven by his brother Gabe’s trumpet-signal to St. Peter as his three children and Rose look on, in awe. The members of Rex’s family, both during his death-bed scene and then just after he dies, laugh and cry, remembering him fondly and gratefully.

The children who endured years of abuse seem to have come to Rose Mary’s enlightenment of the Joshua tree. “It is the struggle that gives it its beauty.”

Each person has a right to forgive and celebrate who they will. But as an audience member, I can’t help but feel that a more meaningful ending to these films would have been an explicit celebration of Rose and Corey, of Rose Mary and Jeanette.

That is, a celebration of the successes and happiness that the victims achieved despite their abusers, not because of them.