I don't intentionally try to seek out substantially dramatic subject matter for the films I make but I have naturally gravitated towards such subject matter when the inspiration has struck me. This past summer I shot (and premiered at the end of September) a film titled "Our Worlds Collide" which delved into the bonds of people as well as domestic violence. I followed this by shooting another film titled "When Living Without" which delved into the withdrawal struggles of someone facing prescription drug addiction. So one can say much of my recent film work has been focused on strong social issues. Not really knowing what would come next I found myself struck with inspiration by total chance. I've begun screenwriting on a new piece that I hope to have finished in the next few weeks so I can prepare shooting for it. But in the past couple days I have found myself effected in a much more profound way that I thought would occur, even considering the darkness and pain of the subject matter.
Starting at the beginning, the inspiration, I was looking up some videos on YouTube. I can't remember exactly what I was looking up, it was something sports related, and sadly there are so many, let's call them fetish type videos out there that they pop up seemingly no matter what you're looking up at some point or another. While engaged in one of these searches a "fetishy" type video popped up in the listing which regarded itself as a video of a mother making out with her daughter. It was obviously a staged video with a younger woman and an older woman using, apparently, the concept of the disturbing nature of incest in a sexually appealing way. Having just stumbled across this video I was struck by the possible reality of a mother and a daughter becoming intimate with one another, but from a more realistic place, meaning a mother engaging in physical/sexual abuse of a daughter. Now what made me start thinking about this was the fact that is appeared so rare. When one hears about a parent assaulting their children it is more often the father than the mother and when it does involve the mother it tends to more often occur with their sons. Looking up statistics I found that only about 5% of all parental sexual abuse on their children involve mothers with their daughters. But when we think of the astounding number of parental assault claims and reports made in America, even 5% is a remarkably high number of people.
I found that my lack of knowledge and understanding as far as the effects of a mother engaging in sexual abuse against her daughter was common for pretty much everyone, be they a man or woman. In fact, looking up psychological writings done on this one of the complications raised by many is the fact that so little is known about abuses of this type because they are more rare than in other types. This inspired me to possibly begin writing a screenplay about a woman who was assaulted by her mother, not just because it's a major issue that I feel deserved recognition but specifically because there is such a lack of knowledge and in many ways a disbelief that women (or mothers) can be sexually abusive towards their offspring. What drew me even more to the idea of writing a piece about a daughter who was abused by her mother was the effect that I found it had on that daughters perspectives of becoming a mother herself. The one thing that a mother/daughter sexual experience has that all other types of parents sexually abusing their children doesn't have is that it involves a mother, who gave birth to a child who, in turn, could also have children herself in the future. I was drawn in and heartbroken reading about women who suffered so being abused by the very one who brought her into the world that they fear they may create the same thing for their own possible children (even though this has been proven to be incredibly rare).
After researching the effects and such of someone who experienced something as awful as this I began structuring the character and where the film was going to go. But after developing a general outline, a direction for the piece to go I felt I hadn't quite fully developed a character that would be a strong representative of someone who had gone through something so terrible. And that, of course, is of the utmost importance to me, so as to create a realistic portrayal of what parental sexual abuse can do to someone so that people will take greater notice of it, especially for people in society who were not sexually assaulted as children who will have a stronger tendency to not think about it. I grew up in what I didn't realize when I was younger but understood when I was finally in my 20s, but it was a dysfunctional home. Both my parents had three siblings and yet they were the black sheep growing up. My mother's mother was a chain smoking alcoholic who constantly berated here which led to my mom beginning to work full time when she was 16 just so she could be away from home and when she was old enough she moved from here northern California town up to the Portland, Oregon area where she has lived ever since (as do I). My father's father was a prime example of many fathers in the middle of the 20th Century. On the one side he worked very hard to support his family and he took them on vacations. But on the other end he was a bit of a task master and with my father being his eldest son my father got the bulk if his criticism and hostility. I'm sure to this day my father will still argue none of this to be the case but he is very good at using rambling to justify his actions. My parents were married in 1990 and stayed together for almost twenty years but the problems began within those first few years. When my parents were divorced it threw my life into instability even though I was 22-years old at the time. I became estranged from my father, just leaving home one day and never coming back after my mother moved out. I those years to follow I discovered how little my parents did to truly care for me and prepare me for the world. For instance: paying for college. Going back to when I was 12-years old it was an understanding between my parents and I that if I tried hard enough and got scholarships and grant money for college they would help cover the rest. But they established a college fund for me in 1989 of which my grandmother placed $1,000 into. When I had to dip into that money seventeen years later my parents hadn't put a single dime in there over that time. Furthermore, after my mother and her brother, my uncle, sold their parents home my uncle gave me $5,000 out of his chunk to put towards my schooling. At this time my bank account was in my parents name… surely you have an idea as to what happened. We fell onto hard times and my parents spent all that money, not only without even telling me, but then they said point blank that they wouldn't reimburse me for the money. That's just one example that shows how off kilter my parents were. Now in the years to follow my parents divorce I was very lost and full of anger over how bad I had begun to feel my parents were. I bickered and complained about them a lot, mostly just to myself. Like a lot of people, I used the divorce of my parents as a way to justify my own pain and blowing up their actions into something much worse than they were.
Well, in the past few years, I have put much of my past and my upbringing into greater context and have adjusted to and understand it much better. In having researched in this particular case of parents sexually abusing their children it has helped me put my own life experience into even better perspective in realizing that certainly my parents weren't perfect and created lots of struggles for me when I was growing up, my experience could have been so much worse. My parents never abused me (physically or emotionally), sure we fought every now and then and sometimes one of them would lose their cool but I was never beat or left feeling abandoned or uncared for. At this point in my life I don't complain anymore about my past and my upbringing even though, pushing 30, I still struggle in some ways as far as fully having total control over my life. But now I feel I have little to nothing to complain about when I see the experiences that others went through.
In the past few days, in trying to better develop my character, I have looked on various sites and forums and have read numerous postings from women who were assaulted sexually by their mothers and it's been just a jarring experience even after trying to prepare myself for what I might see going in. But it's fully changed and elevated the drive and purposes I have in my mind as far as why I am pursuing such subject matter to produce a film on and how hard I want to push shooting such a piece. I am, at this very moment, still reading some of these true experiences and will possibly write more on it and get things prepared to shoot something that is going to be very powerful. So certainly I will likely write more on this here.
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