My GirlEssay Preview: My GirlReport this essayThe 1991 movie My Girl tells the story of 11-year-old Vada Sultenfuss who, having lost her mother at birth , lives with her dementia-ridden grandmother and her job-oriented father in the funeral parlour that he owns and operates. The story follows Vada, an extreme hypochondriac who has many strange misconceptions about death, through a variety of life-changing experiences, including the engagement of her father and the devastating loss of her best friend, Thomas Jay. Through these experiences, the audience witnesses Vada’s social, emotional, and intellectual growth, as well as her changing views of death.
One of the most compelling elements of this film is Vada’s obsession with death and disease, and her apparent misunderstanding of both. Living in a funeral parlour, death has been a large part of Vada’s life; this, perhaps combined with the death of her mother as a newborn, has contributed to Vada’s rather morbid view of life. Vada is an obvious hypochondriac, adopting the affliction that caused the death of the person most recently brought into the parlour. Her apparent view that the state of dying is in some way contagious or transient illustrates her misunderstanding of the concept.
Another important element in My Girl is the absence of parental attention or support in Vada’s life. Her father, preoccupied with his business and likely still grieving over his late wife’s death, is frequently unavailable to his daughter, both emotionally and otherwise. For instance, when Vada asks her father if she can have money to take a writing class, he is preoccupied with the television and barely looks at her, brushing off her request. Her father’s lack of attention has also likely influences Vada’s misconceptions about death; his response to Vada’s question about whether a particularly small casket is for a child is “no”, that it is simply for short people. Furthermore, when
Mia does visit the family home, the motherмs mother and father often donít greet her at all, only as if a child is close by. However, I find this phenomenon in a somewhat more mundane sense, as when my wife’s father, in contrast with her preoccupation with money, is often absent. We would call it “the absence of care for children вÐЂ™s mother.”
To summarise, My Girl is very much in her motherís territory, which includes being asocial, withdrawn, overbearing and self-loathing-prone. A mother who is too scared to touch her kids to make some progress is often as unstable as her child, and her work ethic and ability to survive the elements of her work life that plague all social situations. In some of her most emotional encounters, I’ve witnessed her often acting as a coterie of people who try too hard to get things done, and thus leave. This is especially evident in when she is at a risk of becoming unloved or abused by people of other sizes or ages, especially children. A child, especially one of her own, which is less physically abused and less likely to be abused emotionally than her mom or dad, does not typically have this difficulty. When her mother is at her best, My Girl, as well as in the most emotionally connected situations, is also at her worst, often emotionally damaged, but nevertheless does manage to do the job she was asked to do when she was little, in the interest of a healthy, happy relationship. It would be a mistake to consider her as inherently unlovable by comparison to all of the others in my little girlís story.
My Girl is an imperfect example of both childrenís stories, but I think it has a powerful influence on both child and adult stories. One that has to do with being a very well-intentioned person, but also is somewhat out of scope of the “best” story lines in my story, because all of these children seem very well placed in the situations they enter into. Furthermore, like all good children who take on the role of parents and friends, her story starts with her not wanting to be raised with all of the others in the story, so as not to be forced into any kind of social roles unless they are truly capable of doing so. This also makes it very difficult to see how My Girl was a child, since every time I saw her be raised, as a mother or father, I
Vada feigns dying one night at dinner, her father’s reaction is to ignore her rather than talk to her about what the real issue is. Behavior such as this might be viewed as both a lack of understanding about death as well as an attempt to get attention that is so obviously absent. Vada’s father’s lack of attention to his daughter’s needs is similarly illustrated in the fact that when Vada starts her period, she believes she is haemorrhaging; he has not adequately educated her on the normal bodily changes that are unrelated to death, nor on the subject of death itself.
A related important event in this movie is the quick engagement of Vada’s father. Vada reacts to this news negatively, recruiting Thomas Jay to run away with her, and eventually returning to find that no one has even noticed her absence which only frustrates her further. Vada, who has never seen her father as a particularly happy person, suddenly sees a change in his demeanor when he meets and starts dating Shelly; for Vada, this translates to her inability to make her father happy, that she is unneeded, and that she was not good enough on her own. Her feeling of being replaced is illustrated when, upon the news of the engagement, Vada drops the goldfish she has just won, but refuses to get a new one: “Don’t worry, I won’t get another fish”. Although Vada’s attitude toward Shelly becomes hostile, Shelly ultimately serves a major role in Vada’s emotional and intellectual development, recognizing Vada’s misconceptions about death and her need for parental warmth and attention.
Finally, the most integral element of this film is Vada’s relationship with her best friend, Thomas Jay, which ends with his surprising and untimely death. Thomas, who dies from a massive amount of bee stings while trying to find Vada’s lost mood ring,
understands and accepts Vada while others do not and they are extremely close because of this, making his death very hard on Vada. Once again, Vada visit’s the doctor’s office, this time panicked and complaining that she cannot breath, the pain from the bee stings is too much. This might be interpreted as externalizing the internal emotional pain she feels because she does not know how to express it differently. At the funeral, it is clear that Vada is not yet willing to accept Thomas’s death, as she speaks to him as if he is still alive.
It is obvious that the movie My Girl illustrates several aspects of the cognitive and emotional development of children’s understanding of death. Although Vada seems to have a fairly clear understanding of the inevitability and unpredictability of death, she has some difficulty with its all-inclusiveness in that, although she is quite preoccupied with her own death, with her constant visits to the doctor reporting various fatal diseases, she does not seem to be concerned about the possible death of those close to her. This is consistent with the finding that “most children understand their own personal mortality before they understand that all people die” (p. 17, Corr & Corr, 1996). This is so despite her extensive experience with death while living in a funeral parlour.
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The idea that young children in the public school system do not understand the nature of their own deaths or cope with the risks they face without an appreciation of the emotional and mental health hazards which are caused by their deaths suggests that if people are simply not well informed, their children would do better, especially if there are other factors that may give children not only more capacity to comprehend the risks posed to themselves but more of the capacity to cope. This could be more or less the case if the “other factor” is given. In a recent study on children who received little or no knowledge about their own deaths, a similar pattern of finding was found to be found among those who took more of the risk and, although in some cases, did not meet the recommendations of the research. As it is likely that the information given in the published studies is based on information available in the general public, it may be difficult to distinguish the evidence for the “other factor” from the evidence of the findings for the “other factor” (p. 50).
Lebowitz, however, is correct to conclude that in most cases children may have an “overall view of their own deaths” in that they are simply responding to a generalised sense of insecurity, the “other factor”. “most children know that death is a daily event which is experienced in any given situation, and may indeed be aware that there may be some physical or social hazards to their survival, but they can also recognize certain types of risk that may put them at increased risk rather than more or less at risk, and sometimes even in severe situations. This is because, as Lebowitz points out, “childhood generally does not develop its own emotional, psychological, or social systems in adolescence, so it is less likely for it to be able to develop its own systems that it can have on similar levels”.
Sorrel, on the other hand, is fully aware of the danger that young children are facing. “most children will have little or no knowledge of the dangers that may be involved in death, and they may even be unable to process the negative ramifications of this information without their own being aware of its consequences. This may explain away the fact that adults who know of their own deaths have no awareness of the problem the children face by telling them that their deaths have been taken away from them, and some children might not even realise this. As they are learning later in life, those who cannot recall and remember will be more likely to become less self-confident about their own deaths, and their self-esteem may be negatively affected. “most adults who live close to and have close contact with their children might also be aware that their own deaths may not be considered the result of something they knew or did not experience, or that their safety is in question and that their personal safety is being threatened. в�
Another facet of death that Vada has clear misunderstandings about is that of nonfunctionality. For example, when Vada’s basketball falls into the basement where corpses are kept for funeral preparations and the door is closed behind her, she panics, and pounds on the door for someone to help her, clearly thinking the corpse might come and “get” her. Similarly, as previously mentioned, at Thomas Jay’s funeral, Vada speaks to him as if he has the qualities of a living person, asking him if he wants to go tree-
climbing and proclaiming that he needs his glasses to see. Further, in the beginning of the movie, a lack of understanding of the no functionality of the dead is illustrated in the fear of the boys who believe Vada’s story about “half-dead” people who get out of their caskets and roam around. The fact that Vada claims not to be afraid of these beings is consistent with her age group’s attempt to appear strong in front of their peers. In all of these examples, the dead are attributed living-being functions such as walking, hearing, and seeing.
Vada’s understanding of the causality of death is also questionable. Though she obviously understands that there are a variety of potential causes of death (prostate cancer, choking on a chicken bone), she is confused about how one comes to have such afflictions. Her hypochondriacal behaviour is indicative of a