HOLLYWOOD SHRANK THE AMERICAN FAMILY UNIT ni

 AND NOW THE TREND HAS CAUGHT UP IN MALAYSIA, TOO. AND WHERE ARE OUR PSYCHOLOGISTS AND THINK TANKERS?
By Mansor bin Puteh



Where are the psychologists? Where are the think tankers? They have been sleeping and looking elsewhere., so interesting and important issues like these escaped their attention. And what can we say of all of them? Not much really.
Y

They are not aware why the Malaysian family unit has shrunk over the years, yet, as reported by the media recently from 4.9 persons per thousand in 1970s to 1.8 persons today and worse, they do not know what that happened.

So, let somebody with film background hazard a guess and let him tell why that is so.

One needs not go very far to see why the problem happened; one only needs to see some films that were produced by Hollywood and one can see where the problem started and from them, one can also see how the same problem can be solved.

And this why many Malaysians including the psychologists will not be able to see how this trend was created in the first place and for sure no one can blame Hollywood for what it had done to the shrunk family units in America and in the countries their films have been shown.

The views they have are stereotyped and could be guessed, ranging from lifestyle change to attitude change. But this is not the whole story on the matter or problem. There is more to it than meets the eye that only someone trained in film can decipher.

My father had two wives who bore him twenty children with his first wife and after she died, married my mother. And most of my uncles and aunties too have many children.

I majored in film and had studied the history of Hollywood and watched many films produced by them in the different eras of its development.

And this is where the psychologists and think tankers in Malaysia can never be of any use to talk about the issue of the shrinking family unit in Malaysia, because they never saw anything else in any films other than as a medium of entertainment.

Unfortunately, it is not. It is more than that.

In the many old Hollywood the depiction of the American families were those that had many children and they also had their uncles and aunties and cousins to make films that deal with the traditional family unit.

However, soon afterwards, especially after the Second World War, the family units in Hollywood started to shrink and the characters of uncles, aunties, cousins and grandparents disappeared.

The same happened in many old Malay films especially those produced by the studios in Singapore, where the traditional Malay family units too suffered and shrank.

Most Malaysians from the time when local films were the rage and some Hollywood ones started to be distributed in the cinemas throughout the country became entranced by what they saw, and they didn’t realize that their values and attitudes towards the family were greatly affected.

So it was not a surprise to see how many Malaysian families are now a lot smaller than those of the generation of our fathers with our aunts and uncles too having many children.

The influx of films from Hong Kong which often depicted the families in the same manner as those seen in Hollywood films that influenced their producers, too, started to portray the families in like fashion, so even from the early 1980s we could see many Chinese couples having one or two children.

This is one disadvantage that Hollywood films have brought about on the viewers where they are shown all over the world and has created the shrinking of the family unit in those countries.

The producers in Hollywood who did not know better prefer dramas that revolve two persons, and they disdained having characters that have too many children and their cousins and uncles and auntie and grandparents in the story because it will be very confusing.

In fact, most Hollywood films had started to get rid of religious characters and scenes of anyone giving a confession in church since the late 1970s.

I remember seeing a priest in the last Hollywood that had such a character in a film I watched in a cinema in Kuala Lumpur in August, 1978. And afterwards, there were not characters like this in Hollywood films.

The last few American film or drama serials that portrayed families that were large are ‘A Little House in the Prairies’ and ‘Partridge Family’ and the local film that had a real family unit was ‘Abang’ directed by Rahim Razali. 

And we can never find any Hollywood or films produce in the west which are all influenced by those that they see produced in Hollywood, that feature families that are large, because this is not the trend anymore; individualism has started to overcome Hollywood screenwriters and their producers too long so everybody else has to follow that trend.

Individualism and narcissism is what Hollywood films are all about and to be an individual is all that matters.

And we can already see this in many Malaysian films today, made by those who did not know better. Unfortunately, the worse has yet to come when more and more films that deal with such issues – individualism and narcissism continue to be produced, when the family unit is destroyed even more when the individuals or protagonists and antagonists act as though they appeared on this earth without having parents.

And to make it worse, when these characters are given too much color that they loose the original colors that they were born with, and they also lose their identity and although they still have to speak in the own languages to suit the local viewers’ own language, but their accent and slang would show how they are also rejecting that language to pretend that they are speaking in an alien language.

Comments