Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 68

60

The Popular Culture Review

problematic dialogue in the award-winning films, Ordinary People
(1980), On Golden Pond (1981), and Terms of Endearment (1983). In
these central conversations, parents and children are unable to hear
one another when one of them addresses core relational issues and the
other talks of the mundane. The study focuses on the fabric of human
conversation and the longing for understanding and connection in these
three representative cultural films.
From 1980 to 1987, numerous articles appeared on Ordinary
People, Terms of Endearment, and/or On Golden Pond. The articles
dealt with everything from family mythology to family
disintegration to the patriarchal crisis to the directing talents of
Robert Redford in Ordinary People; from child abuse to cancer to
mother-daughter relationships in Terms of Endearment; and from
mortality to turning theater into film to the backflip as a symbol in
On Golden Pond. Only a few articles addressed the structure of the
films and fewer yet analyzed dialogue. None dealt with all three in
a comparison of theme, appeal, etc. In a particularly incisive study of
structure, Robert T. Eberwein discusses the ghost motif in Ordinary
People (focusing on the Halloween trick-or-treat scene and the
incident during which Beth is startled by Conrad as she sits in Buck's
old bedroom). By dealing with these film situations, Eberwein
engages one of the concerns of this article—the failure of commun
ication between Beth and Conrad. "Now he stands outside the door,"
writes Eberwein, "having come apparently out of nowhere while
Beth engages in her communion with the dead."(4) Although Beth
communes with her dead son, she has lost touch with her living one.
The title of this study, "Displaced People and the Frailty of
Words," alludes to a short story by Flannery O'Connor entitled "The
Displaced Person," a tale about an immigrant, Guizac. As in all
O'Connor stories, the plot is not the point. O'Connor is concerned in
"The Displaced Person" with the failure of communication, the
inevitable misunderstandings that will never be unraveled within
the fictional text. The central example of this failure in the story
involves a conversation between Mrs. McIntyre, Guizac's employer,
and the local priest. While they talk, the priest is startled by the
beauty of several peacocks, which symbolized for O'Connor the
transcendency of Christ: