'Affliction' Analysis: The Horrors Of Long-Lasting Trauma
“The greatest damage done by neglect, trauma or emotional loss is not the immediate pain they inflict but the long-term distortions they induce in the way a developing child will continue to interpret the world and her situation in it. All too often these ill-conditioned implicit beliefs become self-fulfilling prophecies in our lives. We create meanings from our unconscious interpretation of early events, and then we forge our present experiences from the meaning we’ve created. Unwittingly, we write the story of our future from narratives based on the past…”
Trauma isn’t something that is easily overcome, and even understanding it still carries a level of difficulty given how deep it often traces back to moments of a childhood an individual had little to zero control over. Any minimal control they did have probably served its basic purpose of survival as opposed to the deeper contemplation necessary in preventing the long term effects trauma can have on a person’s life and their outlook on the world that essentially becomes an inescapable reality.
As a filmmaker, Paul Schrader’s writing has never shied away or held back in portraying mentally tormented characters who are riddled with the kind of inner trauma that denies them the ability to live or even believe in a life that could be better for them or the people closest to them. ‘Affliction’ is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Russell Banks, and it tells the story of a mentally unstable local police officer, Wade Whitehouse played by Nick Nolte, who while in the midst of a divorce takes it upon himself to set his sights on an accidental killing with a lot more intricacies than is let on, essentially giving it room to evolve to that of a conspiracy only he can see and ultimately resolve. It’s basically his own hero’s journey, and one he wants everybody to see so that he can shine in all the redemptive ways a broken person can hope for as a justification for their existence.
On a simple level, the idea of a conspiracy revolving around an accidental killing where the victim’s demise served as a major benefit to a group of financial fat cats is nothing new within a Neo-noir crime thriller, which Affliction plays off of. However, when looking at Schrader’s dance with devils as crazy as Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle, First Reformed’s Ernst Toller, and The Card Counter’s William Tell, perception is the key factor and the window into the soul of the very madness Schrader has often used to characterize these complex and deeply troubled men. In the case of the madness drenching a man like Wade Whitehouse, this all centers itself in the roots of a childhood trauma that not only destroyed the entirety of his sanity, but it initially carved a path of destruction around those closest to him, so much so that by the end of the story, any sympathy that could’ve been attributed to his rambling tirades throughout the film was watered down to nothing more than a modern tragedy sowed through that of abuse and suffering.
The opening narration of Affliction features Wade’s younger brother Rolfe (Willem Dafoe) prepare the audience for what is nothing short of a tragic story that was written long before the final straw was cast. “This is the story of my older brother's strange criminal behavior and disappearance. We who loved him no longer speak of Wade. It's as if he never existed.” It’s strange to speak of a person as if they were some far-off distant entity rather than an actual human being. But this all boils back to the impression they left and how little they were given to be recognized in a more dimensional light. The opening scene of the film shows Wade in the midst of a divorce and a very strained relationship with his daughter, and although like any noir character, despite their flaws, we are made to believe that the story will present them with a moment or a quest for their self-redemption. There was a possibility of believing that in the case of an accidental shooting where a local hunting guide, Jack Hewit (Jim True-Frost) claimed that the man he was out hunting with Evan Twombley, was accidentally shot. From the moment in what seemed like the inciting incident of the story being introduced, Wade became suspicious and even obsessed to an erratic degree of irrational persistence that it only unraveled more and more of his own internal damage and how Affliction is more a story about trauma than it is about a man solving a mystery and bringing a semblance of order to what is clearly a chaotic life.
A deeper look into the past that defined Wade’s early life is showcased through flashbacks of his abusive father Glen (James Coburn) who never shied away from giving off the essence of the kind of monster whose own evil escalated into the type of long-term trauma that very much became part of the madness Wade carried on and even replicated, so much so that by the end of the film, after his obsessive conspiracy theory, combined with immense social dysfunction has shattered his already delicate relationship with his daughter and his girlfriend Marge (Sissy Spacek), that the old man actually expresses how proud he is of his son for finally being “a real man.” The horror that defines this kind of honesty is itself a travesty because of how revealing it is on not just the graphic depiction of trauma that Affliction tackles, but how it can have long-term consequences that go way beyond the effects on the abused and how they can create a perpetual cycle of pain that becomes inescapable, even when the very source of that pain has itself been vanquished.
Satisfying as the film’s conclusion might have a viewer feel by having Wade finally step up against his unsympathetically abusive father and kill him (every abused child’s secret dream), the reality is within the tragic conclusion even Wade acknowledges as he sets his father and the rotten home he grew up in on fire, only to then willfully accept the greater element of his madness as it is later learned that he killed the man he had made the center of his conspiracy right before disappearing. This is further made clear through the concluding narration Rofl gives “You will say that I should have known terrible things were about to happen. You will say that I was responsible. But even so, what could I have done by then? Wade lived on the edge of his emotions. He was always first to receive the brunt of our father's anger. He had no perspective to retreat to, even in a crisis.” As easy as it would be to look at a person like Wade as a chaotic individual with their own sense of agency, which is the case regardless of how deep childhood trauma is, Affliction’s careful approach to depicting it in a more nuanced way doesn’t excuse so much as offer a more layered understanding of the kind of long-term effects trauma can create within a person who experienced the full brunt of it at an early age while having no way of contemplating the psychological severity in which it ultimately instilled in them.
This analysis on the nature of trauma is something that the physician Gabor Mate has spoken about in great detail when tackling the focus of child development and the many factors involved in the early stages. Most of this has revolved around the subject of ADHD and how it has been inappropriately characterized as an illness. He clarified the much more textured nature of trauma when he appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience and explained how “Infants can’t help but absorb the stress of their parents, they can’t help it. What does an infant do? Could I have escaped or fought back? Could you have? All we could do is tune out. But when is this tuning out happening? When our brain is being developed. And our brain — this is the part that nobody taught me in medical school . . . the human brain develops under the impact of the environment. So, the most salient feature of the environment that shapes the circuits of the human brain is actually the relationship with the parents. And if the parents are present and emotionally attuned and available, child brains develop properly. But if the parents are stressed, the child absorbs the stress, what can they do with it? They tune out. And that tuning out then gets programmed into the brain, and then 10 years later or 50 years later we say, ‘You got this disease.’ No, you don’t. You’ve got a coping mechanism — that’s no longer working for you, but it had a function when it first came along.”
That is very much the case with Nick Nolte’s Wade Whitehouse, who absorbed the full frontal assault of his father’s abusive and toxically masculine venom, so much so that in addition to his drinking, his erratic bouts of violent anger, he then immediately reverted back to this happy go lucky demeanor in an attempt to reconcile with the people he hurt rather than acknowledge the reality of the damage he caused. It is this inability to face or confront the reality brought on by trauma that Affliction captures in a degree so horrifying, that even the seemingly simple intro of a father’s mildly strained relationship with his daughter serves as merely a prelude to the sad protagonist that this film follows up to a point where his downfall is witnessed and gradually accepted as the tragedy that it was pretty much guaranteed to be.