The character of Wade Whitehouse in the movie Affliction is that of a police officer in New Hampshire town who is suffering from excessive emotional baggage with a painful tormented childhood and struggling in his middle-age with all his emotional relationships souring and breaking down. He has an aggressive and bitter attitude towards his ex-wife and is attempting mostly unsuccessfully to develop a meaningful relationship with his daughter who is intermittently exasperated or afraid of him. The two meaningful relations in his life remain with his younger brother and girlfriend. ‘…..
ho repeatedly edges towards insanity, and then pulls back, as if afraid of what he sees.Schrader's film documents Wade’s short but convoluted journey from eccentricity to madness. ’(NG D) Character Structure Whitehouse’s character at the very core appears to indicate intense self-destructive properties. After struggling to gain custody of his daughter he kidnaps but reacts savagely to her attitude of fear and resistance. After this he feels so intensely guilty that he sends his daughter back to her mother from whom he has taken her back in the first place.
‘Watching Nolte's performance is like watching a rabid animal tear itself to pieces.The animal, suffering from intolerable dementia, must find some kind of relief. So, in an act of merciful suicide, it claws away at its own stomach until its intestines pour out onto the ground. It's a form of self-destruction that, in a perverse way, is really a form of self-preservation.
Like the animal, Wade is afflicted with something unspeakable. And it is inevitable that one day, he will have to destroy himself in an ultimate plea for peace. ’ Another aspect of his character is his hatred of his father with whom Whitehouse has a history of abuse and trauma which has left him marked.An important part of this hatred is his hatred for himself because he sees parts of his father in himself.
This is most apparent in the scene mentioned earlier in which he lashes out at his daughter is struck by guilt and remorse and sends her back. Another part is his obsession to discover a plot and conspiracy behind various events. An example of this is when a wealthy businessman is killed in a hunting accident Whitehouse investigates it with the intensity of obsession which confuses everyone around him. Process ‘According to the cognitive model negatively based cognition is a core process in psychological distress.This process is reflected when distressed patients typically have a negative view of themselves their environment and their future. They view themselves as worthless, inadequate, unlovable and deficient.
According to cognitive theorists people excessive effect and dysfunctional behavior is due to excessive or inappropriate ways of interpreting their experiences. The essence of the model is that emotional difficulties begin when the way we see events gets exaggerated beyond the available evidence, this manner of seeing things tends to have a negative influence on feelings and behavior in a vicious cycle’The source of worthlessness for Whitehouse appears to be his father to whom he transfers a great deal of blame for how his life has turned out: Influence on intrapersonal and behavioral factors: Physical environment affects behavior and intrapersonal factors , Family members serve as models, reinforcers, punishers. Unlike other social environments, there are financial and legal entanglements. (C. B. M) ‘Distortions in self-efficacy, in either direction, results in dysfunctional expectancies.
What one actually does is more often the result of self-efficacy beliefs than either knowledge/skills or outcome expectancies. ‘Reciprocal determinism is Bandura’s term to explain the interaction between the Person (P), the Situation (S), and the Behaviors (B). One’s beliefs about the world, and about themselves will influence their behavior and the environments they place themselves in. Feedback from the environment and behaviors will confirm or disconfirm one’s beliefs. ’ Whitehouse’s characters hatred is focused on his father whose violent and destructive behavior gives him enough reason to do so.In the movie the visual impact allows us to see what powerful influence his father has on him and how at times to seem to grow: He even seems to grow taller and fatter with each scene.
We are clearly watching through Wade's tainted eyes, but we never know to what degree. Blurring the distinction between cinematic objectivity and subjectivity, Schrader creates long stretches during which reality mingles freely with Wade's mind’ At times his behavior and cognitive processes are influenced by hallucinations. The viewer at points is unsure whether or not to believe what Wade’s character is saying or whether what is happening are his delusions or really what is actually happening.For example: We first begin to suspect Wade when his younger brother (Willem Dafoe) can't remember a crucial incident from childhood that Wade insists took place.
It was during a snowstorm when they were kids. Their father, drunk as usual, forces them out of the house to stack firewood. "One day, boys, you'll thank me for this! " he intones above the howling winds. But the firewood is buried under thick ice, prompting the boys to give up.
Angered by what he sees as girlish cowardice, he furiously beats the young Wade. Or did he? ’ However this incident and others do mould his cognitions his attitude and then his personality.When frustrated by his daughter’s fear of him he almost inadvertently lashes out at her. Cognitive-behaviorists generally believe in the role of social learning in childhood development, and the ideas of modeling and reinforcement.
People's personalities come from these experiences in which they are involved in critical learning, identification of appropriate (and inappropriate) thoughts and feelings, and imitation of these behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. (G. M. J) So Whitehouse is almost unaware of any other way in which way to behave.His hatred for his father the fact that he continuously plays torturous childhood incidents in his mind despite further social learning makes him unable to let go of his childhood and all his learned experiences from them. It is to be noted that Whitehouse has grown up with extremely negative impressions about his father and himself and is still influencing his decisions.
‘Thus, much of what happens to us is non-conscious, but influential. After we follow the process delineated by Hofstadter to develop a theory of meaning - e. g. , an attitude towards the world formed into mental representations housed in memory.A ‘representation’ is a theoretical object that bears an abstract resemblance to something outside of itself. Thus, we create a representation [actually a multiplicity of representations that make up a theory] of the world, our ‘reality’ on data and inferences, almost all of which becomes non-conscious.
The trouble with this is that organization tends to commit us to a particular way of doing and viewing things. Organization often creates rigidity. ’ ;People are constantly interpreting new situations in terms of old ones. It is this process that allows for the enlargement of our understanding of the world.Analogy-making is going on constantly in the background of the mind, helping to shape our perceptions of everyday situations; It is hard for Whitehouse to break free without completely destroying a part of himself which is what the climax can be seen as symbolic of. His childhood wounds are very deep.
Growth and Development The character of Wade Whitehouse is shown changing in the movie. The character not so much develops as it is sparked off by external circumstances. The shooting accident with which he becomes more and more obsessed ignites deep seated issues with which Whitehouse is still struggling.His relationship with his daughter and girl-friend deteriorates. The climax of the movie is when Whitehouse finally is pushed over the edge by his father whom he then murders and then goes on to burn the corpse. It is almost as if he is destroying the putrid part of himself and purifying himself.
The movie ends with Whitehouse just disappearing , we are not exactly sure where he ends up but there is a final sense of peace. Psychopathology Whitehouse earlier on in the movie shows various symptoms of clinical depression..He is a heavy drinker smokes pot while on the job and is oppressed by childhood memories some of which his brother claims never happened and the looming figure of his father in his life. He is involved in a single negative train of thoughts: ‘Thus we refer to people as being hostile or depressed.
What we are really saying is that they have so absorbed a single perspective, that they cannot see the star for the cubes, much less see other perspectives’ However as the movie progresses he becomes gradually more and more obsessive and his displays of anger become more and fierce. ‘A hyper-emotion theory of psychological illnesses is presented.It postulates that these illnesses have an onset in which a cognitive evaluation initiates a sequence of unconscious transitions yielding a basic emotion. This emotion is appropriate for the situation but inappropriate in its intensity.
Whenever it recurs, it leads individuals to a focus on the precipitating situation and to characteristic patterns of inference that can bolster the illness ’ This is relevant to Whitehouse’s case because when he analyzes his life sparked by the hunting accident he realizes he has gone wrong somewhere and he reacts with anger against his father and himself.But this anger reached an extreme pitch and he ends up murdering his father. There is no error in his reasoning as far as he can see it is logical it is his extreme reaction which is dangerous. ‘It provokes rumination, and depending on the nature of the loss, individuals reason in ways that make sense given such an extreme emotion. Their style of reasoning is in essence confirmatory: They accrue evidence for the conclusion that the loss cannot be made good. As they think about the loss, their criteria for what would count as an acceptable substitute become more stringent—to the point that they infer that the loss is irreplaceable’Here the loss is of the ability to live a normal life and develop close emotional ties and being destructive towards one self and others whom he cares about.
There also comes a point when the lines between reality and his minds creations get blurred and the viewers get the impression that Whitehouse is becoming delusional: ‘Information processing, representation, adaptation, transformation, storage, retrieval, activation are necessarily conscious events. Perception is surely the most richly detailed domain of conscious experience. However, as we have already indicated, such perceptions are not necessarily reality.There is much evidence that people sometimes manufacture memories, images, perceptual experiences, and intentions that are demonstrably false.
Conclusion It is important to note that Wade Whitehouse is a fictional characters and preformed mental models affect our analysis and study of the character. ‘If traits are presented that contradict the categorization, they are more likely to attract the reader's attention and suggest conscious decategorization if presented directly, since indirect presentation is more easily disregarded or reinterpreted to fit the categorization’External factors other than family members also play a role. For example as far as biological factors the toothache is a contributing factor to his negative cognitions as is the bleak environment in which he lives. ‘Higher order consciousness arises from primary consciousness- it supplements it, it does not replace it’ The movie keeping in line with the entire tone shows a very depressing setting for the film However far more dominating is his father and his perception of his failure of relations with his daughter which contributes to the negative thought processes running through his mind.These have warped the entire structure of his character.
His belief in his worthlessness created since childhood has rendered him emotionally inept. The growth of his character has been influenced by these negative cognitions. He is depressed and then drives himself to obsession which results in the violent expression of a deep-seated rage against himself and his father when he finally murders his father.
