Curtain Call

1. What was the purpose of the first scene, showing Michel and her mother Edith sitting across from each other and bantering about Edith’s capacity to take care of herself?
2. What motivates Michel’s production of this video? How are her motivations attached to her concerns about her Mother’s fate?
3. What perspective do you gain on Edith’s character by listening to Michel talk about her mother when Edith was a younger woman? What does Michel gain by dissolving from the image of the young woman, Edith, to the image of the old woman, Edith?
4. In scene 4 Edith provides some perspective on her relationship with her daughters Michel and Wendy. What was surprising about that perspective? How do her comments help viewers identify with her character?
5. What is gained by incorporating the perspectives on growing old provided by the women acting in the play with Edith? To what extent do those segments distract from the main story--Michel and Wendy’s conflict with their mother?
6. How is the basis of Edith’s relationship to her daughter Michel different from the basis of her relationship with her other daughter, Wendy? To what extent is Wendy "trapped" or "limited" by the rigid, pre-defined role her mother has placed upon her? Edith often accuses Wendy of "patronizing" her. What does she mean by that comment? What evidence in the video supports Edith’s accusation?
7. Michel shows her mother in vulnerable, intimate settings (Edith sitting on the bed in the morning, Edith falling on the patio, Edith falling out of her bed). Why does she include these scenes in the video? What perspective do those scenes provide on our understanding of Edith’s old age?
8. How does Edith’s "cane" become a symbol of her resistance to her own aging? Michel opens scene 9 with a close-up of three canes leaning against the wall of her mother’s apartment. Why?
9. What are some of the psychological "games" Michel and her mother play? What scenes best exemplify that form of game-playing? To what extent do the two resolve that history of game playing? At the end of the video Michel says, "The games continue." Evaluate the tone of her comment. Hopeful? Despairing?
10. The first time you saw the women rehearsing the play, The Afternoon Group, what concerns does the director express about the chances for success? To what extent did you share those concerns? At what point in the video did you change your mind about the completion of the play?
11. What was the significance of the tree outside Edith’s window? What did she gain by meditating on the tree in the mornings?
12. What was your response when you saw how Edith climbs into bed? (She lies across the bed on her back, and then pulls her legs onto the bed as she turns onto her side.)
13. Why does Michel confront her mother in scene 15? Explain how Michel’s concerns are deflected by her mother’s witty responses? Evaluate what is "really" going on in this scene between mother and daughter.
14. Scene 17 contains an interesting video technique, the montage. That is, Edith is portrayed in several short scenes as she rehearses her climactic monologue in the play. How does the use of the montage structure affect your emotional response to the subject matter? What does this montage structure reveal about Edith’s character?
15. What is the reason for the family conference, scenes 19 and 20? This time both Michel and Wendy confront Edith. What are the daughters’ agendas in this scene? Evaluate Edith’s response to those agendas. Evaluate the dynamics of the interpersonal communication in these scenes. What was most uncomfortable about this scene for viewers? What was most revealing and positive about these interactions?
16. In scene 21 Michel returns to the same setting that was used in the first scene--Michel and her mother sitting in adjacent chairs in her mother’s apartment. What is bothering Michel in this scene? At the same time, what personal revelation does Michel have at the end of this scene?
17. What was your emotional response to Edith’s performance in the play, The Afternoon Group? What surprised you about her performance? How did the performance provide some resolution for the various conflicts exposed earlier in the play?
18. How does the ending of the video suggest the limitations of adult caregivers? The lack of resolution in complex caregiving problems? The improved basis of the relationship between Michel and Edith?
19. Why does the video end with a scene of Edith in a seniors’ exercise class? Explain how that scene, in miniature, represents on the one hand many of the conflicts and concerns Michel expressed earlier, and on the other hand the character and determination of her mother.

Sample Worksheet

Review the following quotes from the video. In each case, several quotes are grouped according to similar themes. Consider the following questions as you review each group:

1. What do the comments in each group share in common? What do they reveal about the dynamics of mother-daughter conflicts, especially in the context of adult caregivers who are concerned about their mother's increasing frailty?
2. What does the speaker reveal about her own internal conflicts with the specific issues being addressed? What personal revelations are reflected in the comments? What personal revelations are "blocked"?

GROUP 1:

• MICHEL: "What if you’re still sharp as a tack but you’re not eating right, you’re suffering from malnutrition, you’re a danger to yourself in the house because you might fall." Edith says, "I think a lot of that is exaggerated."
• MICHEL: "Let me get this straight. You don’t want to see any homes and get any idea of the home you’d like to go to? You don’t want Meals on Wheels. You don’t want us telling anything what to do with your life until you are, as you put it, ‘bonkers.’ " Edith laughs
• MICHEL: "Do we as adult children have the right to tell our parents how to live if we think they’re in danger? If we don’t step in, is that neglect?"

GROUP 2:

• EDITH: "Up until then I had been friends with my daughters. . . . Suddenly they weren’t friends anymore. They were people who were trying to look after me, and I didn’t want to be looked after."
• MICHEL: "She was right about that. Wendy and I acted out of fear and panic. We never asked her what she wanted. My sister and I had become the enemy."
• EDITH: "Sometimes I feel that I’m a case history. I know she’s saying it for my own good." She describes a certain patronizing cheerful attitude that Wendy enacts when around her. Edith thinks, "That’s the way I talked to her when she was ten years old."
• MICHEL: "She doesn’t want anyone thinking of her as an old lady."
• WENDY: "All seniors are living with risk, and it’s just varying degrees of risk"--from high to low risk. "We may think that Mom’s at high risk. The family always thinks it’s more serious. . . . The risk will have to be really great before we can do something about it. . . . From her level, she’s doing just fine for herself."
  

GROUP 3

• EDITH: "This was always my one hobby. So when I wasn’t doing it, I missed it terribly. . . . So I feel great joy in knowing I’m not completely finished. Maybe this will be the last thing I ever do. But so what?"
• EDITH: "It’s a form of meditation, I think." She describes the tree outside her bedroom window. "I sit here in the morning because it starts my day. I feel that I can pull myself together and realize what I have to do. It gives me a feeling of ‘I can do it.’ "
• EDITH: "Once you get the habit of ‘poor me’ it’s awfully hard to get rid of it when you’re old. Don’t fall into that trap!"

GROUP 4:

• MICHEL: "What happens the next time? Will her hip break? And how long will it be to someone finds her? How can I not intervene?"
• EDITH: "I didn’t fall. I’ve learned to fall very easily, and I don’t hurt myself. I’m afraid the girls may think she should go to a home. I can fall very easily, and I can move myself over to the bed and get up. There’s no need to worry. It was just a dumb thing I did."
• EDITH: "I don’t like to be told by Wendy and by you two that I’m being selfish. I don’t think that I am." Michel tries to explain their point of view again. Suddenly we hear Wendy off-screen, "By not trying to be a burden you are being a burden. . . . By not accepting help from others means we have to pick up the slack."
• EDITH: "When it comes to my priorities, I have a feeling that what you say is the way it’s going to be."
• MICHEL: "You’re not listening to us! You’re not listening to our fears. I want you to live alone. I want you to be happy. But it scares me that you’re blind to the dangers around us. And that’s foolish!" Her mother cuts her off: "But I haven’t got any dangers around me, dear."
• MICHEL: "I’m turning into a spy and a nag. ‘What did you eat for lunch today? Did you turn off the stove?’ " She concludes, "Who am I doing this for?"

GROUP 5:

• MICHEL: "And now back to the practical, everyday things, getting up, watering the plants, carrying on. I’d love to be able to say that everything’s going to be all right; unfortunately, life’s not like that. But through all this we learned from each other."
• MICHEL: "I admire my mother’s spirit and determination. I hope that same spirit runs through me."
• MICHEL: "In the end I go back to my life and she is left alone with hers. Am I doing what’s right for her? I don’t know."

The Great Circle of Life--Home Page

Text of The Great Circle of Life: A Resource Guide to Films and Videos on Aging, copyright © 1987, 1999, 2005, Robert E. Yahnke. All photographs copyrighted by Robert E. Yahnke.  All rights reserved.  Contact author for permission to copy photographs or reprint portions of text.

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