Reep pointed out to me the other day that I have a bad habit of making eye-contact with him a lot in the scene leading up to his line, "you haven't looked me in the eye since you got here." It's true; I've noticed it myself.
The problem is that I have put so much emphasis on Jack in my text-work, that it seems as if Jason is constantly going to be looking for how Jack is responding. To constantly be pursuing objectives relating to Jack seems to cause me to look at him a lot.
And maybe a lot of his objectives do have to do with Jack, but Jason has also come home to win his family over. That's fairly clear from the presents he hands out, and from how freaked out he gets when Santos takes away his power by questioning the pig, essentially causing all the family to abandon him.
Maybe I've put too much emphasis on Jack. Maybe Jack is often more of an obstacle to Jason than the target of his objectives. His objective for scene 2 may be to win his family's respect as a whole, and the fact that Jack is the most resistant to that makes him both the obstacle and the last piece of the objective to be fulfilled (though ultimately of course, the objective is defeated).
I worry that I've been ignoring my family members when Jason, particularly my Jason (as opposed to Kyle's Jason) values the connections to his family above all else. When Jack starts to fuck with me, I should be constantly looking around for support from the rest of my family, like, "You believe me, right? You guys are on my side? I'm the victim here."
This is sort of just a jumble of thoughts right now, but I worry that in the past when I've looked away from Jack I've looked at the ground. I should be looking for allies in my other family members instead.
Feel free to comment with any thoughts on this.
Interesting comments, Thomas. I think you have to make a distinction between looking for Jack's love/support and looking at him in the eye. I definitely think Jason has a strong need for Jack's support as a father/son relationship, but he also struggles with the fact that things haven't been the same since Jason "jumped him from behind" the last time they saw each other, and this causes Jason to really struggle with looking at Jack in the eye - because looking at someone in the eye brings up all the old feelings and histories that you had with that person.
ReplyDeleteI also think it's interesting what you are saying about Jack and Jason competing for the family's love. But I don't think you are putting too much emphasis on Jack - as the instigator of Jason's problems, it definitely seems like you should always have your relationship with Jack at the bottom of what you say and do, and this will affect the way you view the rest of your family.
Thanks for your response, Brian. Yeah, there definitely is a focus on Jack--I think I just meant I need to be careful of ignoring the rest of the family.
ReplyDeleteresponding to "Jason has also come home to win his family over" - I agree, but I think its much more than that. Jason knows he going to kill himself when he comes home (hence Kyle's line "instead of shooting myself when i got home like I planned to...") so he probably spends a lot of time trying to make things right before he dies, not just with Jack, but with everyone. I think he is desperate for forgiveness for the majority of the play.
ReplyDeleteResponding to the looking Jack in the eye thing- Males (and other animals) often show aggression by looking at each other straight in the eye. Since you don't want another fight to go down between the two of you, and because you're probably sorry and embarrassed for what happened, you have a lot of trouble looking him in the eye. You can still have a big focus on Jack, but the circumstances make it hard for you to look at him directly.