How Hollywood (finally) took on intergenerational trauma in 2022
With titles like Everything Everywhere All At Once, Turning Red, and The Whale, filmmakers this year began to reckon with painful parent-child dynamics
Film Features Trauma
Everything Everywhere All At Once is a shockingly original movie in many regards. It follows a middle-aged woman hopping through multiverses to save the world using kung fu skills. It gives us the love story of two lesbians with hot dog fingers. It watches grown men race to shove an IRS accounting award up their asses. And it dares to examine the parent/child relationship through the refreshingly realistic lens of intergenerational trauma, something that films prior to this year have largely skirted.
In Everything Everywhere, writers and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (the Daniels) tell a tale of three generations with Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a Chinese-American immigrant who operates a laundromat, bridging the gap between her elderly Chinese father Gong Gong (James Hong) and her rebellious, lesbian, American-born daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu). Previously estranged from her parents after eloping to America, Evelyn now takes care of her harsh, domineering, and increasingly senile father. At the same time she’s navigating her relationship with Joy, whose queerness irks Evelyn, at least in part because she’s worried Gong Gong will judge her for it.
A lesser film would have painted Evelyn as an overbearing, judgmental mother who needed to be taught a lesson and left it at that. Instead, Everything Everywhere serves richer (and more true-to-life) exploration of the Wang family dynamics. Evelyn’s own baggage (her father disapproving of her spouse, her fleeing to a new country, her bottling up emotions) has incubated over decades and given birth to a toxic relationship with her own daughter (her disapproval of Joy’s partner, nitpicking at Joy’s appearance, and keeping Joy at arms length). Evelyn is not an intrinsically bad person, and in fact she loves her daughter dearly. But her own trauma has trickled down to Joy, causing Evelyn, in many ways, to be a bad parent. And while the film never lets Evelyn off the hook for her own hurtful behavior, we clearly see the path pain took from one generation to the next.
2022: The Year of Intergenerational Trauma
But Everything Everywhere isn’t alone in portraying parent/child relationships this way in 2022. Numerous Hollywood titles this year, from Disney’s Turning Red and Strange World, to blockbusters Top Gun: Maverick, The Fabelmans, and even Halloween Ends, to recent releases The Whale and The Son, have grappled with intergenerational trauma. Rather than parents who are good or bad arbitrarily, this new batch of cinematic parents suffer from their own received trauma, explicitly conveyed to the film’s audience, which are reflected in their relationships with their children. In The Whale, Brendan Fraser’s Charlie is an absentee father to Sadie Sink’s Ellie due to the anti-LGBTQ+ persecution of Charlie and his lover from a religious group. In Strange World, father Searcher Clade (voiced by Jake Gyllenhaal) is overly protective of his son Ethan (Jaboukie Young-White) because his own father Jaeger (Dennis Quaid) abandoned him to go exploring. In 2022 films, parents aren’t archetypes, they are people dealing with their own shit.
In film after film this year, the parent/child dynamic has been unpacked through the lens of intergenerational trauma (or “trow-ma” if you’re Jamie Lee Curtis). The “I am an island” ethos seems to have been abruptly replaced by one of “hurt people hurt people” in which pain is easily passed around. Perhaps this is due to the 2022 slate of films being ones largely written and/or filmed post-COVID. During quarantine, mental health awareness rose with more people than ever before seeking out mental health professionals and even those without a therapist spending hours a week on TikTok, a popular platform overflowing with mental health advice (although quality varies greatly). As a culture, we are thinking about parental relationships, trauma, and emotional well-being more critically, and it only makes sense that would be reflected in scripts and films.
Old parents vs. new parents
Previous generations of cinematic parents fell largely into two camps: the noble and the abusive. On one side you have Mufasa from The Lion King, Chris Gardner (Will Smith) in The Pursuit Of Happyness, and Mamie (Laura Dern) in Little Women. On the other, you’ve got the parents from Matilda, Jane Fonda’s character in Monster-In-Law, or Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) in There Will Be Blood. While these movies all use the parent/child dynamic to great effect, they don’t offer particularly complex relationships where we understand both parties deeply. And even in more complicated films like Kramer Vs. Kramer, Lady Bird, and Marriage Story, we don’t witness the parent both receiving and then transmitting their trauma, something intrinsic in all parent/child relationships.
Just comparing this year’s crop of family films to last year’s demonstrates the remarkable shift in how movies present parents. In films like Spencer and Dune, the tragedies of the parents weren’t handed down to the kids. Belfast and The Tender Bar doled out glowing reviews to parents in tough situations. King Richard presented an eccentric father (Will Smith, playing the real-life Richard Williams), but one who is ultimately praised for his tenacity, while The Lost Daughter never even introduced Leda’s (Olivia Colman) daughters as characters. Even the most complicated family dynamics expressed in CODA and The Power Of The Dog seemed to lump parent and child together as a unit facing one problem, even if they have different solutions (drink in bed vs. poison your step-dad with asbestos). Disney’s 2021 hit Encanto is the only major exception as it tracks the grandmother’s domineering grip on the family back to her husband’s murder and then traces it down through her children (like Bruno) to her grandchildren.
Trauma served three ways
By comparison, the 2022 slate is bursting with so many intergenerational trauma films that I had to categorize them into three groups.
Trauma from the Great Greats: In the first group, which includes Everything Everywhere, the parent/child conflict doesn’t stem from any single outside force, but just from the standard wear-and-tear of unexamined trauma over multiple generations. The parent hasn’t sorted out their own emotional baggage and passes it onto the child, often for several generations. Both Strange World and Turning Red, in which three generations of women turn into pandas and can’t talk about their feelings, also fall in this camp—as do Armageddon Time and The Son, both of which star Anthony Hopkins, playing two different grandfathers of extremely different temperaments. In Armageddon Time, the experiences of his Aaron Rabinowitz’s character as an immigrant moving to America in turn make his daughter (Anne Hathaway) practical and strict, which make his artsy grandson (Banks Repeta) buckle under the pressure of school. In The Son, Hopkins just plays a stone-cold bitch, who leaves his son (Hugh Jackman) woefully inept at parenting a depressed child.
Trauma from violence: In group two, the parent’s trauma is much more acute. These parents are often trying to process, hide from, or drink their way through the horrors they’ve sustained, and those impact their kids second-hand. The Whale is the perfect example in which Charlie (Brendan Fraser), as a closeted gay man, felt forced into a straight marriage, then left his wife for a man who died due to anti-gay religious extremism. Grappling with the pain, he binge eats, becomes a recluse, and can’t be the father that his daughter needs him to be. Women Talking presents a similar arc in which mothers, sexually assaulted and essentially held hostage by a cult, are unable to parent well due to their own circumstances. Trow-ma expert Jamie Lee Curtis’ recent Halloween trilogy also falls into this camp, as her Laurie Strode was unable to mother well because she siphoned her energy into murdering Michael Myers. And Top Gun: Maverick sees Tom Cruise’s Maverick stumble as a surrogate father for Rooster (Miles Teller) due to fear of losing him in the same way Rooster’s father Goose died in the original film. Even box office horror hit Barbarian gets in on the intergenerational trauma action, although the generations are more difficult to parse out in the monstrous maze below the Airbnb.
Trauma from everyday life: Lastly, there are a handful of 2022 films where the trauma doesn’t seem sourced from grandparents or tragedy, but just from the world as a whole and the parent’s inability to cope with it. In Catherine Called Birdy, Birdy’s (Bella Ramsey) father (Andrew Scott), burdened by money problems and the everyday terrors of medieval life (serfs, the patriarchy, no plumbing), drinks heavily and tries to sell his daughter off in marriage. In Bardo, a father’s fame and multi-national life causes issues with his kids. And in the trifecta of The Fabelmans, Blonde, and Aftersun, each parent’s mental health issues make it hard for them to be the parents they desperately wish they could be. Sometimes just living is a lot of work, and adding the exhausting task of parenting to the mix is just too much.
This year, filmmakers have gone out of their way to tell stories of parents and children differently. They’ve interrogated the notion of parents as all-knowing beings, questioning the “honor thy father and mother” maxim and dichotomy of them as either saints or sinners. Rather, through the use of intergenerational trauma, they showcase parents who are ordinary, broken, and often failing—but who the audience can now empathize with. They try their best, but aren’t let off the hook. They cause pain, although now we know why. And they need to apologize, even if they deserve apologies themselves. Because after all, parents are just people too.
58 Comments
With titles like Everything Everywhere All At Once, Turning Red, and The Whale, filmmakers this year began to reckon with painful parent-child dynamicsOne of the many reasons-but one of the strongest-that contemporary movies have ZERO appeal to me.Suck it up, get on with life and don’t infect your significant other and/or kids with the bullshit dumped on you.
FINALLY!
finally!!
what were we talking about?
If someone got paid to write this shit then I’m clearly in the wrong line of work, I can write shitty articles too give me a chance.
I’m down for any article that praises Everything Everywhere. It fucking deserves it.
An article which fundamentally misunderstands the movie’s core message, however…
Does it? I do think the article is a little over the top in its “this is the first time movies have ever done this” nonsense, but I fundamentally agree that Everything is about multiversal conflict as a metaphor for generational baggage and trauma in a way that by all rights should not work at all but somehow does.
Baggage, absolutely. Trauma? Not in the slightest. We’ve broadened the definition to the point of meaninglessness, and Everything is all about finding meaning. If anything, it comes down to acceptance — the acceptance you hold for yourself and the people in your life. But lazy writers like the author will always flatten that kind of nuance into “trauma.”
If we ignore the multiversal stuff, this is a woman who is about to lose her daughter because she’s too afraid of the judgement of her father and about to lose her business and possibly her freedom because she’s too ashamed or proud to admit that she doesn’t speak english well enough to handle the tax laws. I guess we’re quibbling over definitions here, but I don’t see how that doesn’t add up to “trauma”.
If that’s your definition, then most movies are about trauma just because they contain conflict.
I like how your only definition is “not what you are saying”. Like if destroying your relationship with your daughter because of your own unresolved issues with your father isn’t trauma, I don’t know what is? Does your definition say it needs to be violent? Like what counts?
“we don’t witness the parent both receiving and then transmitting their trauma, something intrinsic in all parent/child relationships.” Only if you expand the definition of “trauma” to cover essentially any life experience or challenge. Which seems to be what this writer is doing judging from the rest of the article to cover basically any parent/child conflict. “Trauma” is getting to be as overused in the critical community as “toxic,” like how horror movies lately keep getting recast as “mediations on trauma.” Seems like a cheap way for a critic to give their analysis an odor of prestige or the appearance of novelty. Sure, there have been movies about the relationships between parents and children since the start of Hollywood, but only now are we covering inter generational trauma! Which is different for some reason!Because really, what is Indians Jones and the Holy Grail if not a haunting mediation on intergenerational trauma?
It’s “concept creep”:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_creep
Re: horror movies—yeah, “elevated” horror that is clearly a metaphor for trauma or mental illness is so overdone at this point that I’m kind of sick of it. This writer notes even Barbarian touches on generational trauma, but that movie felt like a breath of fresh air in how wild it was and how it didn’t try to beat you over the head with a message, it was more subtle and subtextual. In contrast, Smile was effectively scary but its messaging was so obvious with nothing really new to say. Felt like it was trying to hop on the It Follows/Babadook/Hereditary train several years late.
I like the concept of big T and little t when people talk about trauma.Feeling at conflict with your parents when you’re younger because your values feel different might amount to a little t, and might be simpler to process. Your parents rejecting you because you are Queer, abusing you, etc. will probably cause you to inherit some big T. Big T’s probably inform a lot of your decisions and is more apparently intergenerational, and will be harder to work though.
Or some words can have multiple meanings, even multiple meanings of largely varying degrees. A bruise is trauma, and so is a gunshot wound. Trauma here just means injury, and so long as you understand what the injury is, the extent of it can be inferred. Psychological trauma is the same way, and it doesn’t somehow weaken the term to use it to describe babies who were deprived of touch (see The Atlantic article about Romanian orphans) the same way we use it to describe people who are raped.
PTSD seemed for a while to simply be a modern term for Shell Shock, and I remember more than a few soldiers and veterans getting angry when the term gradually started being used for civilians who hadn’t seen combat. That’s because even though soldiers experience very acute and specific types of trauma, they’re not the only ones who experience it. Understanding the degree of trauma is important, but not so important that it means lesser traumas have to be downgraded to just “conflict”.
No one in their right mind is excluding touch-starved infants from their definition of trauma. What people are raising their eyebrows at is the push to elevate stuff like “my parents were somewhat strict with me” into said definition.
This is the internet: “slightly unpleasant” = “traumatic”.
Spot fucking on. This is (among the many, valid reasons) why people hate millennials. This, right here.
ATTENTION 30 YEAR OLDS! HISTORY DID NOT START FIVE MINUTES AFTER YOU STARTED PAYING ATTENTION
The Godfather trilogy?anyone?
Eh that’s just about a bunch of mobsters leaving their cannoli laying around.
Chinatown?She’s my sister! She’s my daughter!again, anyone?
Matthew….sweet Jesus dude. Maybe climb out of your own ass and quit smelling your farts.“Intergenerational trauma”. Also known as “regular life”.
This was written by someone who thinks history began in 2016.
That’s impossible. Everyone knows history ended in 1995.
poison your step-dad with asbestosAsbestos is a mineral. Anthrax is a pathogen, as well as an NYC thrash-metal band.
In Armageddon Time, the experiences of his Aaron Rabinowitz’s character
as an immigrant moving to America in turn make his daughter (Anne
Hathaway) practical and strict
I did not get any impression that she was “practical & strict” because of Aaron’s experience moving from Liverpool to America. That’s just how she is, and she doesn’t give any indication of inherited “trauma”.
“Finally”? Have you seen a movie?Upon actually reading the article… this may be among the worst this site has ever published. Classic example of indulging confirmation bias just to get words on the page. Embarrassing.
Especially silly that they cite Dune and King Richard as being explicitly not about intergenerational trauma. Paul’s entire conflict is being handed 1) his father and family’s legacy 2) generations and generations of colonialism/bene jesserit social engineering. And now I’m mulling over Power of the Dog, a movie that hinges on cross-generational repression and passing down a veneer of stoic masculinity to hide one’s true self. Heck, nearly a decade of “elevated horror” movies are about inheriting and/or processing trauma. Shit, it’s almost as if *most* stories can be distilled to an examination of the havoc we wreak upon one another and how we try to break those cycles. Young Frankenstein, Ghostbusters, Jaws, Star Wars, Psycho, Avatar, Oceans Eleven…I’m literally just naming movies.Overall I appreciate the thrust of the article, but framing it as a bold, new shift is an unnecessary flag to plant.
Yeah, I think generational trauma is definitely thematically prominent in many films this year and seems trendy at the moment, but to say it’s never been examined well in film before this year is a clearly wrong overstatement. This piece would’ve benefitted from a narrower scope. The shift in children’s movies is more clear (I’ve heard someone joke that Disney’s new thing is fairy tales where parents apologize to their children), but that has still been happening over the last few years.
Yes, typically “intergenerational trauma” has really only been in stories of noble and royal houses. (Don John in Much Ado About Nothing springs to mind: because he was the bastard he stirs up trouble about sexual fidelity). Dune is 100% about the sins of the mother (and the father) being visited on the child.Really the article ought to be about the “democratization” of intergenerational trauma: we can now examine it outside of the lens of a political (or literal) dynasty.
To be fair, Disney and Pixar have been at this for a while. What are Encanto (2021) or Coco (2017) if not stories about inter-generational trauma within families and the attempt to reconcile and heal it?
Also Brave, The Incredibles, Tangled, hell, even Frozen, Ratatouille, and Finding Nemo/Dory all deal with intergenerational conflict (which seems to be what the definition of “trauma” has been expanded to).And don’t get me started on all those princesses with dead or absent parents.
I mean, sure, if you stretch the term real thin.My examples are pretty specific about it, though: a formative trauma for one member of a family (Mama Coco’s “abandonment” by her father, Alma witnessing Pedro’s murder by extremists) echoes psychologically through multiple generations, leading to a dysfunctional dynamic in the present day that the younger protagonist has to decode and reconcile.
I don’t know about some of these. How is Tangled about intergenerational trauma? Or even intergenerational conflict? It’s a kidnapper and her victim. Finding Dory is about a girl who just got lost and has a memory condition. I can sort of see Finding Nemo, as the dad did lose his wife and almost all his children in one fell swoop, and that trauma caused him to over-protect and over-control his son (which is sort of similar to what happened in Encanto). So anyway, some of these are a bit of a stretch.I think Frozen definitely counts though, though mostly Frozen 2 as that’s where they deal with the ancestral stuff.
I’ll be the first to admit I’m stretching, but Rapunzel believed Gothel was her mother, so I made that leap.
She did, but intergenerational trauma is when a trauma happens to the older person and then that has results for the younger generation. Gothel didn’t have a trauma. She was just a psycho and a bitch. And Rapunzel’s trauma wasn’t intergenerational. She was just a kidnapped and abused child. I suppose you could argue that her real mom’s sickness, which caused her to ingest the magic flower was a trauma because the flower manifested in Rapunzel’s hair, but I don’t know about that because they don’t really talk about the sickness in terms of longstanding harm to mom.
Yeah, Disney and Pixar, along with plenty of movies by plenty of filmmakers for decades
“With titles like Everything Everywhere All At Once, Turning Red, and The Whale, filmmakers this year began to reckon with painful parent-child dynamics”Yeah, because the parent-child dynamic isn’t just about the MOST-USED THEME in movies.
I mean, for fuck’s sake…
Alright, straw that broke the camel’s back. I gotta find a new site to read with discourse on media. Any recommendations? I loved this place in the 2012-2018 stretch but it’s a shell and it makes me unhappy to read it.
https://the-avocado.org/
Yes, please. I mean, I get some of my pop cultural content over at the Ringer, but yes.
wow. you really blew the lid off of trauma.
Yeah, if there’s one thing I’ve just been waiting and waiting for, it’s definitely Hollywood taking on intergenerational trauma.
This is dunderheaded even by contemporary AV Club standards.
Isn’t the MCU built off of generational trauma?
Finally? I take it this is the first year you’ve ever watched a movie, then?
Wow, an old school A.V. Club examination. Really, really well done.
I REALLY hope you are being sarcastic, or just Mama Huff being proud of her little trooper no matter what!
I’d say you probably just read the headline and not the article underneath, but even the HEADLINE to this thing had me going, “Finally? Even for modern-day, G/O fucked AV Club, that’s a dumb as hell take”
Finally? In addition to the hundred or so other movies that other people have mentioned in their comments, some of them arguably canonical for film-folk, did you somehow miss Star Wars?
so sick of this shit
Dynamics between generations has been happening in movies since the beginning of silent films, not sure why you think this year is any different.
Dune literally has the line, “There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.”
“Finally”? If these comments are to be believed, seems like it would be easier to list the movies which don’t somehow involve intergenerational trauma.Heck, depending on how far we want to stretch a term even A Hard Day’s Night has the bits with Paul’s grandfather.
As ridiculous and easily debunked as this article’s premise is—let’s place the blame where it belongs: with the editor who allowed it to be printed.
It’s not Matthew’s fault he’s apparently twelve years old and has a breathtakingly limited perspective on cinema.
As ridiculous and easily debunked as this article’s premise is—let’s place the blame where it belongs: with the editor who allowed it to be printed.
It’s not Matthew’s fault he’s apparently twelve years old and has a breathtakingly limited perspective on cinema.