Response to the Film William Faulkner, a Life on Paper :: Movie Film Essays

Response to the Film William Faulkner, a Life on Paper My first response in general to the film is how utterly scary many of the people interviewed were. Coming from Central Florida, I can honestly say I am not from the Deep South, as there were several instances where someone was speaking in the film and I simply could not figure out what they were saying through their accent. Of the people interviewed who were not locals from Mississippi, many of the Hollywood representatives were decidedly more intelligible yet no less intimidating, many of them men I would not want to be stuck talking to in a party. But aside from such characters, the film created an interesting portrait of Faulkner the father. One could certainly see intent on the filmmakers’ part to cast Faulkner the father in the shadow of Faulkner the author. The film shows interviews with two of Faulkner’s daughters: one full and one stepdaughter. Intriguingly, the latter of these is shown speaking on camera only once, a scene in which she characterized her stepfather’s severe drinking problems and how scared she was of her stepfather during those experiences. Jill, his full daughter, seemed to go along with these sentiments. She recalls one time she tried to stop him from drinking, to which he responded with the most memorable line of the film: â€Å"Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s child,† which apparently was effective in discouraging any further attempts to stop his drinking. Jill seems ambivalent of her father. On the one hand, she knows she is on camera speaking about her famous and beloved father, and is thus expected to like him. And indeed, she does effectively convey some sense of love for her father. But she simultaneously embeds a disconnectedness from her father. If she had not repeatedly referred t o him as Poppy, one would never catch on that she was his daughter. Her revelations and reminisces seem hardly familial, but rather read the same way all of the other memories of him do: enigmatically and unfamiliarly. The film suggests Faulkner does not feel disappointed in having a daughter rather than a son, and I might go so far as to believe that this characterization of the unfamilial child would have existed for a son as well.