The Perks of Being a Wallflower was on UK tv recently, so I watched it. Holy shitballs, what a great film! Initially, I thought this is going to be crap American Teen cliche bullshit but NO! I was wrong! Hooray! This blog post includes spoilers of the film, just fyi.
One very moving theme they explore (aside from the whole amazing exploration of sexuality and stuff, which is also done brilliantly), is being with the protagonist as he unlocks part of his own memories of being abused at the hands of his aunt, who then dies which adds to the complexity of what he’s dealing with.
I personally found this really challenging because traumas do kinda work like that; we’re affected by them but don’t always remember them – it’s like the details can be obscured to keep us sane/safe. Then we seem to unlock memories when it’s time for us to face them. And this film helped unlock something in my own childhood which I wasn’t expecting. Blimey. Anyway, moving on …
In The Lithium Comic #2, Charlie and Jack talk about Charlie’s brief history of self harm and Charlie says something like, “We each find our own paths to discovering we are worthy of love” – well the film says this same thing in a slightly different, but wonderful way – someone says “We accept the love we think we deserve” – ie we don’t always accept the full abundance of the love we are offered. In the film this is referenced a few times because clearly the creators of the film believe it’s a pivotal point – and I absolutely agree. We so often accept the love we believe we’re worthy of. Self esteem and identity can throttle us hard and link us to extremely damaging people, all because we [wrongly] don’t think we have much value. We are often our harshest critics, and can discover only very late on in life that our harsh inner critic is actually rooted in some unlockable trauma.
These questions around human value are explored in the One Human, Being comic series – the next comic will touch on it again, and having seen The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I think I’m going to now revisit the script of comic #4 and make sure it’s as clear on this as it can be, before I start making the comic.
Human value and the degradation of ‘the other’ are serious culprits in what we’re currently seeing with society’s turmoil, I think.
So let’s make a sexy comic which also talks to this point! Who’s with me?!!!!
