Protagonist Reflection

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Jessica’s Yu’s Protagonist. I was almost initially turned off by the Greek drama elements, although the puppet characters played well against the heavy subject matter of each individual’s reflection of their pasts in the film. The opening scene is in Greek with subtitles, and I almost turned it off before it even really began so I didn’t have to struggle through an hour and a half of subtitles. I soon discovered that only the transitional pieces were in Greek, and the more they played, the more I actually enjoyed them. They connect to each character in the film and played a dual role of setting the context at the onset of transitional themes (of which there were 13 total: character, provocation, opportunity, turning point, fever, certainty, threshold, doubt, catharsis, reversal, reflection and resolution).

What stood out to me the most the Joe Loya, a Mexican man whose childhood was so tumultuous despite the fact that he was a good kid who was pious and he suffered abuse at the hands of his father whom he revered. In one particular scene, Loya describes a card he made for his dad. Yu actually included the card (or a reproduction of the card) which moved across the scene as Loya spoke. The card said “I love you even though you hit me.” Loya drew two pictures in the card. One was of a belt and other was a picture of his father walking on top of what looked like a snow globe of the world. I don’t know why it touched me so this dynamic where he worshipped his father who beat him and his brother and blamed the two of them, children, for their mother’s kidney failure. I actually cried as I listened to him talked. I found it tragic that a young boy so full of love and life was stripped of his positive potential and ended up suffering from his own psychoses and inner turmoil that drove him to cast fear into people the way his father did him. He actually took pleasure in having people shaking in fear at his hands.

I do feel too that Yu did a great job at giving a full sense of the lives of each of her character studies. The themes of self-control and taking your life into your own hands are prominent to the viewer in a way that they could never be for each of the protagonists, each of whom were consumed and victimized by the circumstances of their own lives. That being said, it could have been a bit shorter. A couple of questions I have are one, why did a female writer focus only on male character study. I want to know what she might have gotten out of this project. Having asked this question, I also want to point out that I understand the circumstances of abuse and exclusion can happen to anyone. I guess I ultimately want to know how Yu personally related to these men’s stories. I also am intensely curious about Klein’s life. His has the most societal impact and follows a timeline that parallels actually political events. His reflection gave new perspective to the terrorist attacks of the early 80s. I am not versed in the political of that region at that time, but still, the opportunity to fill in gaps, even if his recount is flawed by the lapse of time and biased, has to be an ethnographer’s wet dream. I am also curious as to Loya’s current relationship with his father. It wasn’t until about partway through the film that I realize he had not actually murdered his father. I wanted to know if he has contact with his father now that he has grown and actually recognized that he possessed the same neuroses that his father displayed during his youth.