#where i felt overshadowed ALL THE TIME and i just assumed they’d use other footage

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so….. “see myself in a documentary” was an item on my bucket list that i didn’t know i had but can now be crossed off…….

[dogbearinggifts]

Why Didn’t the Other Siblings Include Vanya?

It’s a question I’ve heard often from fans of this show, and honestly, it’s a fair one. Vanya was deliberately excluded from everything—missions, family photos, conversations. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d awake on Christmas morning to find that her siblings had begun opening gifts without her, or get to her own birthday celebration to see that they’d already blown out all the candles on their cake and were in the process of dishing it up. Why? If all of her siblings were treated badly by Reginald, why did they not band together, support Vanya, and stand up to their shitty excuse for a dad? 

The answer lies in a deceptively simple concept known as scapegoating. 

Of Scapegoats and Other Roles

I say deceptively because it’s probably an idea most people are familiar with. Pick one person, assign them the blame, and let everyone else move on with their lives. Any fan of this show would immediately think of Vanya whilst reading the Psychology Today article on scapegoating, and rightly so. However, as that and many other articles hint, it’s far more complex—and ugly—than one might assume. And it can be difficult to explain, because survivors of child abuse likely never had to articulate it. The scapegoat dynamic was something they knew instinctively without fully comprehending what it was or why it was happening. So, I’ll do my best to explain how it works. 

If you’ve heard the term scapegoat, you’ve probably also heard the term golden child. These two roles are opposites. Where the scapegoat receives most of the blame the family has to offer, the golden child receives most of the praise. Where the scapegoat is painted as deliberately evil or a perpetual fuckup or both, the golden child is painted as a hero who can do no wrong. If you’re thinking of Vanya as the scapegoat and Luther as the golden child, then you’re on the right track. 

However, between those two extremes is a whole spectrum of roles. Sometimes these roles are fluid, but more often than not they’re permanent and only change when the family undergoes a drastic shift. Maybe the family has a Diego, who envies the golden child and jockeys for favor that will always be out of reach. Maybe they have a Klaus, one whose failures would be enough to make them the scapegoat were it not for the current scapegoat’s failures overshadowing theirs. Maybe there’s an Allison, one who is disliked by the parent(s) but manages to be useful enough to escape punishment; or maybe there’s a Ben, who has everyone’s pity and sympathy and is still miserable. Maybe there’s a Five, a rebel who defies the family’s rules and pays the price. 

If none of these roles sound fun to you, then congratulations—you’re on your way to understanding what life in an abusive household is like. 

Abusive Parents Ruin Everything

Living with an abusive parent (or two abusive parents, or—in my case—an abusive mother and her Flying Monkey) is like living with a bomb. The bomb has a timer, but it is constantly reset and doesn’t operate by any sort of internal logic. It might say you have 3 days to detonation when you leave for school, but by the time you return it’s down to 15 seconds. The golden child always has the most time before detonation, and they’re sometimes able to buy a few more minutes or hours, but even they’re not shielded from the blast. 

The scapegoat, as you might imagine, is the one whose presence is usually responsible for setting off the bomb. Maybe this earns them some pity from their siblings, but there’s also something darker: a sick sense of relief that they were not the ones receiving the brunt of the parent’s anger. You see, the parental bomb operates on different rules depending on which child they’re interacting with. Equal treatment in an abusive household is a pipe dream. The golden child has it the best, the scapegoat has it the worst, and everyone else is just trying to get through the day without stepping on any landmines. If the scapegoat triggers one—well, that’s one less landmine anyone else has to step on. 

But what happens when someone defies the family’s roles and treats the scapegoat well? The short answer: Nothing good. 

We learn from Vanya’s memoir that Five was the only one to treat her as an equal, the only one who felt like a sibling to her. Although we don’t see much of the fallout from this, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that there would have been fallout, and it would have been ugly. Remember that Five wasn’t just treating Vanya as an equal, reaching out to a broken girl and giving her the inclusion she craved—he was defying what Reginald saw as the rightful order of things, defying Reginald himself. You don’t do that in an abusive household. You don’t defy your parents. You don’t question why your brother gets better treatment than you, and you don’t tell your dad to treat your sister right. You accept it, or you risk earning the same treatment as the scapegoat. 

Divided You Fall for Everything

Risk of poor treatment (and perhaps permanent loss of position—for instance, Klaus shifting from secondary scapegoat to primary scapegoat) is not the only reason abused kids don’t stand up for the scapegoat. 

Abusive parents are masters of pitting their kids against each other, and the primary way they do this is through selectively limiting the information they have. In Vanya’s case, I think Allison was the only other sibling who even knew Vanya had been locked in a soundproofed room in the basement. From the look on Klaus’ face when he sees her, it stands to reason that he had no idea—his horror, pity and rage are those of a man who just now learned his sister suffered the same fate he did. To that point, he probably believed, along with the others, that she was sick and had to be kept quarantined. 

That half-truth changes everything. If you knew your sister was locked in a soundproofed room in the basement for no reason other than that your dad was afraid of her, you’d understand why she emerged broken, and why she later become resentful. But if you thought she had a contagious disease, and was simply kept off on her own for her own good and the good of the family, her attitude upon emerging might come across as downright bratty. You had TB, Vanya! What were we supposed to do, parade through your room sharing your straws? Did you want the rest of us to catch it too? 

I have no doubt that Reginald used selective manipulation of the truth in other ways too. Maybe he told Luther that Klaus refused to learn to control his powers, leaving out any of the horrific mortal wounds Klaus remembered seeing on the ghosts who appeared to him. Maybe he told Allison that Diego was always throwing a tantrum about this or that, conveniently failing to mention that his refusal to bend on unreasonable rules was the cause of those outbursts. There are countless ways Reginald could have set his kids against each other, and he would have exploited them all. He would have known, instinctively if not consciously, that if they ever sat down and honestly discussed the shit he put them through, then they would realize they were all victims—and they would band together to unseat him. 

They Deserve It And Other Lies We Tell Ourselves

There’s one more piece at play here, and this is probably the darkest of them all: cognitive dissonance. 

You’ve probably heard that term too, but in case you haven’t, it’s “the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.” In an abusive family, it means stuffing your empathy deep down inside and convincing yourself that your siblings deserve what they get. Even if you know they don’t. Even if you’re not sure. Even if you’ve suffered the same treatment they’re getting. You tell yourself they earned it—because your parents tell you that you earned what you got. 

Fortunately, cognitive dissonance can be overcome. We see its beginnings when Allison sees Vanya off by herself in all of the surveillance footage. The sight engages her sympathy, shows her where she’s gone wrong, and inspires her to make a change. We see it again when Klaus and Diego witness her locked in the soundproofed chamber and lash out at Luther for putting her there. They’ve seen the truth, and they’ve realized that things are far worse than they let themselves think. They knew it all along, but they’ve at last seen just how horrific things really were. 

Conclusion

The question of why the other Hargreeves siblings didn’t include Vanya is a simple one, but its answer is anything but. And the thing is, it should be simple. Why did they leave her out? Why didn’t they realize how wrong it was? Why didn’t they love her enough? 

I think they did love her. But in abusive households, love is never as simple as it should be. Abusive parents don’t make love simple. 

And that’s the problem. 

[voicesnotheard-blog1]

11/4/17: Takeoff

Wow, I’m really getting used to this flight thing these past few months. I wonder if I’ll be flying this often my whole life, or if this is just a highly-concentrated period. It’d be pretty dope to get to travel a lot IF I get to actually enjoy the places I go. Traveling all the time just for work sounds bad though, cause the whole airport process kinda sucks.

Anyway, I’m in the air this time because I’m doing a pretty amazing thing I’ve never done before: TOURING with a film I made. I definitely NEVER would have thought this would be happening a year ago, or even six months ago. For most of the time I was making this film, I thought I wasn’t even going to finish it, actually.

I made the film after receiving a grant from my university to make a film about youth climate activists at COP21. As the leader of the Fossil Fuel Divestment movement at Northwestern University, youth climate activism was really important to me, and as a student  just starting to do film, I thought it would be an awesome opportunity. My co-director Miranda and I traveled to Paris for 10 days and immediately hit the ground running, talking to everyone we could until we met Amalen, a Malaysian activist who became the subject of the film, along with his group, the Malaysian Youth Delegation. We followed him as he navigated the complexities of the COP negotiations, and eventually decided to get involved in direct actions there, working to create a voice for countries like his from the Global South that are often overshadowed on the international stage by powerful Western nations, despite being the most affected by climate change.

I then spent a year and a half editing mostly on my own, as Miranda had gotten a full-time job after graduation. At one point, my hard drive with all our footage broke and I thought I was screwed,  but by the grace of some benevolent deity, the data was recoverable. But, as a full-time student with lots of other things on my plate, I kept putting editing on the backburner, and eventually the film just became a giant weight on my soul, a project that I had never finished and felt super guilty about because I had received so many resources from Northwestern and taken so much of the Malaysian Youth Delegation’s time and energy. It was a year after the negotiations, and I was feeling like the film wasn’t even relevant anymore. But then a horrible, horrible man was elected to be President of the U.S., and in June of 2017, he made the decision to make our country the ONLY COUNTRY IN THE FUCKING WORLD to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accords.

That sucked. But, a weird silver lining was that it made my film totally relevant again. It felt like a final chance; if I didn’t take this opportunity to finish the film, I never would. So in the throes of graduation chaos, I kicked it into high gear editing mode, molding the script to make Trump’s withdrawal a framing device. I also worked with an awesome Malaysian filmmaker named Sydney Chan, a friend of one of the people in the film, to do follow up interviews in Malaysia with Amalen and his other teammates and get their reactions to Trump pulling out of the Paris Agreement.

In the final month or so, I decided I needed to give myself a real deadline. I was planning to travel in Asia after graduation, so I reached out to the Malaysian Youth Delegation and told them I wanted to come to Malaysia and screen my film for them. Keep in mind, the film was not yet in existence. But they were pumped, and scheduled a date and time and even a room. That was the last kick in the ass I needed; I knew that if I didn’t finish and showed up in Malaysia without a film, I’d really look like a butt. So in the last 3 weeks, as I traveled through Korea, Hong Kong, China and Laos, I woke up at 6am before the day’s travels and worked worked worked. Some nights, I stayed up long after my roommates had passed out, editing away. And finally in July 2017, about a week before arriving in Malaysia, with a final stroke of the keyboard, I hit export on my final film.

So it’s been quite a ridiculous ride. But once I did finish the film, I figured I might as well do something with it. After all, this isn’t some personal art project for my own emotional exploration. This is a documentary with a message. And a message is pretty useless if nobody hears it. Plus, it would’ve made me sad to have done all that work and gone through all that shit, just to have my film wither away on YouTube.

At first, I was just gonna submit to film festivals. I started that process in August or so. But then I started realizing that these festivals were pretty pricey, and there was no guarantee I was gonna get in. In fact, after spending $400+ dollars on application fees, I probably won’t get into any. So I was like “fuk dis, what else can I do?”

And then I remembered that some former work colleagues at Northwestern had said they’d be down to help me set up a screening. And I started thinking that if I was in Chicago anyway, I might as well screen it at other schools too. And THEN I started thinking that maybe people outside of Chicago might also be into learning about climate activists. And wub a lub a dub dub, whaddaya know? They def were.

I connected with schools through friends, listservs and Facebook groups, and soon enough I was juggling emails left and right from interested peeps. Of course, just like any good college event, a ton of peeps said they were down and then proceeded to ghost me. BUT, I’ve still ended up with 11 schools confirmed on this tour, and a few more with high potential to be added in!

I did my first screening this past Wednesday at American University in DC, and there was about 25 people there, including a bunch of my Northwestern friends that live in DC now, which was really nice. We watched the film, and then afterwards I spoke for a while and answered a lot of really great questions. I also felt really good because when I asked people what they felt like they’d gotten out of it, they brought up things like having a way better understanding of the COP process or understanding the power dynamics of old white people making all the decisions.

I definitely got a lot out of it, but afterwards Mandy brought up the really good point that it would be great if I facilitated the discussion so that everyone would be able to get something more out of it. And it got me thinking that this is a huge opportunity for me to make these screenings something people haven’t experienced before, more than the typical screening+Q&A format that we’re all pretty used to.

My intention with these screenings is to educate people on climate justice and the realities of the power dynamics at the COP negotiations. I also want to make people think about what they can do as activists, especially young activists in their own communities, and see the power they have, rather than assuming these world leaders will take care of it. Basically getting people to start talking about youth as the voice that should be centered, and Global South youth as the priority in that group.

I also want to really listen to people and hear their reflections on the film, their questions and create a space where young people can talk about how they’re feeling about activism and climate change in the political context we’re living in. It could potentially be a sort of cathartic space, where people could really express doubts, fears, concerns about environmental organizing, their future and the future of this country and planet, and other important things. I’m gonna come up with some facilitation questions to have more group discussions, and see where it goes.