surfwise

July 18 movie: Surfwise. Documentary about the Paskowitzes, a large family who dropped out of conventional life in the late 1950s, lived in a camper for decades, raised 9 children and surfed all the time. It was really interesting. At first it seems like a funny story about this cool family on a lifetime adventure. Gradually it comes out that the father was a violent, abusive control freak who forced his entire family to live out his bizarre ideas about the natural state of man, and then blamed them for not thriving in his grand experiment. Abject poverty, not enough food, not enough clothes, no education whatsoever, eleven people living in a 24 foot camper. What could go wrong?

One very telling moment in the movie comes when the subject of sex comes up. Several of the children talk about their parents' regular practice of having loud sex pretty much every night, right in front of the kids. (remember, 11 people in a 24 foot camper.) They described it as traumatizing. One of the sons describes his elaborate method of tucking and folding his ears in and pressing a pillow over his head, trying to block out the sound of his parents going at it. Then in a separate interview the father describes it as this fun, wholesome thing where he and his wife are expressing their healthy sexual urges while the kids sit around giggling. He clearly has no clue how his children actually felt.

I felt a little frustrated that the movie left so many questions about the wife unanswered. Why did she go along with this? How was she able to run such a household? Where did the money come from to buy what little food and clothing they had? Was this as difficult for her as it seems like it must have been? There are hints here and there -- for instance, a friend of the family says "Whenever you went to their camper, she was inside cleaning." One of the sons says he was the only one who ever helped their mother (though I think he means the only son who helped; I got the impression the one daughter did a lot of work). Then much later one of the children points out a family photo and says it's his favorite because "all of us were in the water, even Mom." Which seems to suggest that Mom didn't get to swim and play like everyone else did all the time. One of the children mentions almost off-handedly that by the time they were teenagers the mother was "beaten down" by it all. The father seems incredibly selfish, just up and decided to give up his career (he was a Stanford-educated doctor) so he could surf for the rest of his life, and threw the entire burden of caring for a huge family on his wife.

It comes off sounding a lot like those ultra-controlling patriarchal Christian marriages, where "the husband is the head of his wife as Christ is the head of the church." In the very beginning of the movie the wife says that for 10 years she was either pregnant or nursing or both, every single day. And the father says that he instructed her to behave like the apes do -- if gorillas nurse their children for two years, then she better nurse his children for two years. I don't think the patriarchal Christians are into imitating animal behavior, but this dynamic where whatever wacko notion the husband gets into his head, the wife has to obey without question -- that sounds just like them.

Maybe I'm making it sound like I didn't like this movie, and that's not true at all. I greatly enjoyed the movie; I just didn't like the father. It was really interesting to get a look at one of these domineering relationships which I've read about but (thankfully!) don't know anyone who is involved in one. I do have to say that the wife does not express this view of the relationship. She concedes that her husband can be difficult to deal with, that he was too harsh with the children and that "there were a lot of tears in the early years," but she seems happy with him. Then again, the daughter believes that her mother is able to remember the years in the camper as happy by blocking out a lot.