4 - Pariah and Fragile Concrete

 

The movie Pariah gives the audience an extremely well-balanced view of the characters, relationships, and tension that surround our main character Alike and her struggle to find her footing as lesbian and preferring masculine clothing in a family whose demonization of it is as equally vicious as it is silent. The mother of the family is the most outright vicious and paranoid about Alike not being the more femme and non-having-a-lesbian-friend-who-got-kicked-out-for-it daughter she wants her to be, with her showing frustration through disappointment about her choice of clothing. This tension builds quietly with the mother while the rest of the movie continues, ultimately releasing with outright assault on Alike when she says she's gay. 

For the whole movie, even they discuss asking Alike about her sexuality, the parents never even say the word gay or any mention of it at all, even as it is obviously on their minds. Even the utterance of the possibility that Alike may be gay is treated like a mortal sin and shame, showing the fragile structure that is the family structure the mom (and probably dad but they are very different characters) wants to maintain. 

The dad is interesting, he is a classic case of a man who, for many preexisting and current influences, is nearly completely shutoff from expressing his emotions or much of anything, being both concrete and fragile. He shows no direct malice towards Alike's clothing or towards homosexuality, but this is made vague on purpose, most notably in the scene when he takes Alike to the cornerstore, where the man who made disgusting comments towards a masc woman in the store and about Alike seeming lesbian is posted up outside. Alike runs in and out of the store while the dad stares down the man with so much angry silence I thought I was going to implode, and turns like a switch from the previous moment (learning to drive and having fun) to barking at Alike "get back in the car". Here he is defending his daughter and giving the awful man his dose of ocular beatdown, but his thoughts on the subject-matter are left vague. He could either be defending Alike for the man's awful comments of her out of defense for her expression (masc), or out of anger that he call her lesbian because he does not want her to be lesbian. In the end it is even as vague though the question of her sexuality is out in the open, but even here I believe he is still in the same state of vague conviction, though now completely exposed for his anxiety now that his walls are visible. 

Alike by the end is ostracized by her mother, who in her last scene blatantly ignores the absence of Alike at the dinner table (if you cannot maintain the structure by violent-silence and it cracks, then open-denial is always a horrible second option). Alike is now in the place of her friend who the mother did not approve of at all, a horrible cycle completed by the mother herself.