Marina Santana Zorzetto

Professor Agatha Schwartz

LCM 5104 – Topics in World Literature: Narratives of Trauma

December 19, 2019

Acting Out and Working-Through Intergenerational Trauma: An Analysis of the Movie

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children

Introduction

This paper aims to analyze the trauma depicted in the movie Miss Peregrine’s

Home for Peculiar Children (Tim Burton, 2016), as well as its transgenerational

consequences and how different characters deal with it. The film, which was based on the

homonymous novel by Ransom Riggs, follows young a man, Jacob Portman, and his

journey towards working through third-generation trauma. More specifically, the horrors

that his grandfather, along with a group of orphans, suffered during the Second World

War. Their trauma is located in what they called “Peculiarity”: different abilities similar

to superpowers which made them unfit to live in a “normal” society and turned them into

the targets of monstrous creatures. Even though we are dealing here with what is

considered “popular culture” by some, a movie adaptation of a best-selling novel aimed

at teenage audiences, both the book and the movie do an excellent job in presenting formal

concepts such as the passing down of postmemory, the intergenerationality of unresolved

trauma, its consequences on various levels and the acting out through compulsive

repetition as theorized by Sigmund Freud already back in 1914.

Theory and Methodology

 This essay will use terms of psychoanalysis and trauma studies coined by scholars

in both areas, mainly Sigmund Freud, Dominick LaCapra, Marianne Hirsch and Kenneth

Kidd.

From Freud and LaCapra, we are taking the concepts of acting out and working-

through, coined by the former and applied to trauma studies by the latter. LaCapra

explains acting out as “related to repetition, and even repetition compulsion – the

tendency to repeat something compulsively. [...] to relive the past, to be haunted by ghosts

or event to exist in the present as if one were still fully in the past” (P. 142), while working

through is “a kind of countervailing force”, in which “the person tries to gain critical

distance on a problem and to distinguish between past, present and future” (P. 143).

From Hirsch, we are taking the definitions of postmemory and intergenerational trauma,

postmemory being defined as follows:

Postmemory most specifically describes the relationship of children of survivors

of cultural or collective trauma to the experiences of their parents, experiences

that they remember” only as the narratives and images with which they grew up,

but that are so powerful, so monumental, as to constitute memories in their own

right. (P. 9)

And intergenerationality as the passing down of such memories within a family

and involving affection, unlike transgenerationality, which is the passing down through

politics and culture.

From Kidd, we took the explanation of the importance of children and young

adult-focused works in studying and retelling trauma.

In order to present the proposed analysis, a summary of the relevant pieces of the

movie will be given, along with an explanation as to why choosing a piece that is so far

from being canonic. I will base my argumentation on the paper by Argentinian scholar
Juan Sebatián Goyburu Un precipicio de Antes y Después: Sobre la utilización del

Holocausto en Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (An abyss of Before and

After: About the use of the Holocaust in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children),

presented at a 2014 philosophy symposium, and Kenneth Kidd’s article “A” is for

Auschwitz: Psychoanalysis, Trauma Theory, and the “Children’s Literature of Atrocity”.

After that, two different points of the movie’s relation to trauma studies will be presented:

the intergenerationality of Abraham’s trauma, which will be discussed based on the first

chapter of Marianne Hirsch’s book The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual

Culture After the Holocaust, and the appearance of Freudian concepts of compulsive

repetition, acting out and working through in the behaviour of the Peculiars, which will

be discussed based on a 1998 interview with Dominick LaCapra for Yad Vashem and the

essay Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through, by Freud.

The reason for choosing a piece that is not in any way considered canonic or

scholarly lies first in an effort to keep the balance between what is considered both high

and low culture in theoretical studies.

At a 2014 philosophy symposium, Goyburu made a case for the usage of

children’s and young adult’s literature for dealing with narratives concerning trauma. He

argued that works considered as lower or popular culture share the same “experience

zone” as artistic expressions considered part of high culture, but present other “values,

strategies, practices and structures”, and refer to the same history, but as a social

phenomenon instead of academic discipline (p. 4).

Kidd also makes a case for the value of children’s literature when dealing with

traumatic themes:

Early children’s books on both sides of the Atlantic were largely exercises in

shame and abjection, written to subdue children and curb their sinful nature. In a
 sense, children’s literature has always been both traumatized and traumatizing, at

once an affirmation of evil and its narrative antidote. As Baer likewise notes,

contemporary young adult fiction especially seems preoccupied with social ills, at

once protecting and exposing teen readers to pain, loss and alienation. (p. 145)

Synopsis of the film

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children premiered in 2016, five years after

the homonymous book was released. It was directed by Tim Burton and fairly successful

with both critics and the public. Even though the book is the first of a series of four (to

the time of this writing, but unconcluded), the movie was produced as a stand-alone piece,

which is why it was chosen for this analysis. Before beginning the summary of the story,

it is important to note that in the movie, contrary to what happens in the book, the fact

that the main characters are Jewish is not made explicit, but hinted at by the family’s last

name Portman and through one scene in which Abraham talks about leaving Poland as a

child due to “monsters” coming after him. This erasure did not go unnoticed by the Judaic

community, and was the subject of a post in the website Jewcy, in which podcast producer

Rachel Jacobs explains that without the direct mention to the fact that Abraham was a

Jewish boy running from Nazi soldiers, the movie only seem to present super powerful

children that are free and comfortable inside the loop, without portraying their struggles

and the risks they suffered in the outside world. Failure to directly portray Peculiarity as

an allegory to the status of minority during the ascension of Nazism also takes from the

complexity of Hollowgasts, the main antagonists of the story. Hollowgasts are portrayed

as deformed creatures who are invisible to everyone but a specific kind of Peculiar such

as Abraham and Jacob. The monsters are deformed and have no eyes in their natural state,

and need to consume the eyes of Peculiar children in order to become visible and get their

own human form. Even after completing their transition towards human forms,
Hollowgasts can never change their eyes, which have completely white pupils. If the

movie made a more direct reference to Judaism, the audience could understand the fact

that Hollowgasts are a metaphor of Nazi soldiers, which becomes very interesting when

you think about the symbological relation between eye and soul: people who were after

the “special” children during the Second World War were soulless creatures with an

eternal tint in their essence, and no matter how “successful” they might be as minority

hunters – or how many eyes they consumed –, that would not change the fact that they

had become an unforgivable kind of monster.

The movie begins in 2016 with teenage Jacob talking about how he feels life is

pointless and sometimes it feels like you are reliving the same day over and over. These

thoughts are interrupted by a phone call saying he needs to check on his grandfather

Abraham, who seems to be having some kind of mental breakdown and hallucinating

about some life-threatening danger due to dementia. He arrives at the house, which looks

like a crime scene, and finds his dying grandfather, who has no eyes and tells him to go

to the island and find “the loop” before giving him a date in 1943.

Through a series of flashbacks, we find out that Jacob and Abraham used to be

very close during Jacob’s childhood, and that the grandfather used to tell the boy bedtime

stories and show him pictures of the orphanage he used to live in along with other children

who were considered special and persecuted by monsters with no eyes. Jacob believed

the stories for years, before they were discredited by his teacher and, especially, by his

father Frank.

During the process of grieving the passing of his grandfather, Jacob starts thinking

that visiting the island where the orphanage was might be a good way of dealing with his

grief, or, as he calls it, getting closure. His father accompanies him, but it is clear that he

lacks interest in both the trip and the idea of bonding with his son.
 On the first day of the trip, Jacob searches for the home and finds it in ruins.

Coming back to the city, he is told that is was hit by a German bomb three months after

Abraham left to join the army, on the same date he gave Jacob before dying, and that

there were no survivors. Jacob goes back to the ruins the next day and after being startled

by the presence of others (the children in Abraham’s old photographs), he passes out and

wakes up in a different reality, in which the house is not in ruins and its inhabitants are

all alive – “the loop”.

In the now whole house, Jacob meets Miss Peregrine, the director of the orphanage

responsible for resetting the day in the loop every night when the house was supposed to

have been bombed. That way, she and the children are able to stay alive and safe forever.

On his second day in the loop, Jacob learns about the existence of Hollowgasts,

deformed eyeless monsters who are invisible for everyone but a specific kind of Peculiars,

like him and Abraham. Hollowgasts turn out to be the real-life subject of Abraham’s

bedtime stories.

After a series of events, the children are forced to leave their loop and face the

Hollowgasts in 1943, which ends with Jacob killing the one that killed his father in 2016

and making it as if Abraham had never died. After one last conversation with his

grandfather, Jacob decides he belongs to the loop and ends up finding it after pursuing it

for a long time. The movie ends on an optimistic note, with Jacob, Miss Peregrine and

the Peculiars living safely in a revived sunken ship.

Trauma and postmemory in the film

In the first chapter of the book The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual

Culture After the Holocaust, Hirsch questions “Do children of survivors [...] have

‘memories’ of their parent’s suffering?” (p. 31) to which she responds that even though

we do not literally carry the memories of others’ experiences, postmemory can be passed
down to the next generations in the form of narratives, rituals and culture, She

distinguishes transgenerational and intergenerational memories: the first one being passed

down through symbolic systems while the latter one is directly transmitted from survivors

to their descendants. Coincidentally or not, the example used in the chapter is the graphic

novel Maus (Art Spiegelman, 1980), in which the son of a Holocaust survivor learns about

the horrors that occurred through his father’s bedtime stories, the same way Abraham

passes down his memories to Jacob in the movie analyzed here.

In Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, we see Jacob being marked by

his grandfather’s magical stories from a very early age, but eventually distancing himself

from as the other adults in his life convince him that the stories are made up. One very

significant fact in the film is that Jacob’s father has a completely different relationship to

Abraham and his stories, which explains why even though both descendants can be seen

carrying intergenerational consequences of Abraham’s trauma, it affects them in distinct

ways. While Jacob ends up literally reliving his grandfather’s trauma, Franklin becomes

an absent, distracted father due to the lack of caring and affection experienced in his

parental relationship, which Jacob tries to justify with Abraham being afraid of being

close to anyone due to the trauma of having his orphanage family die in the bombing. The

wounds cause by Franklin’s relationship with Abraham become especially clean in the

scene in which the former states “He was a wonderful grandpa, but not such a greats dad”,

and shares his suspicious that Abraham may have had another family, which Jacob only

fully understands once he walks into the loop.

For Jacob, the intergenerational trauma is experienced in a completely different

way, especially because as a grandfather, Abraham was not at all absent. We later learn

that, knowing Jacob was a Peculiar too, Abraham tried to pave the way towards telling

the whole truth through children stories.

 As argued by Hirsch, one important way of building postmemory is through

photographs. In the movie’s case, the photographs served a double purpose: firstly, they

were supposed to prove the existence of the magical humans in Abraham’s story.

However, they fail to do that due to Franklin’s lack of trust in his father and – yet again

– the intergenerationality of the kind of issue: Franklin was so distrustful of his father that

he made an effort on trying to pass down the lack of trust as well. Once Jacob reaches a

certain age, Franklin tells him that the pictures are not real, but some kind of trick picked

up in a trip, which serves for both denying Abraham’s stories and also criticizing the

frequency of his trips. When telling Jacob about the Hollowgasts, Emma’s first action is

showing him their photographs, too, which reveals how powerful and significant this kind

of media is for the story and for creating post memory.

Hirsch further discusses a dichotomy presented by the use of photographs to

narrate traumatic events: the photographs act towards emptying the significance of the

event and distancing the viewer from it or does the repetition caused by them actually

bring the viewer closer to the story, to the point of even passing on the trauma? (p.8).

Hirsch goes on to explain that she has seen such kind of media having all the described

effects depending on the situation. The film exemplifies the process of transference of

postmemory by having the photographs seeming to act as wound-openers, carriers of

trauma and bad memories. Even though they were a source of awe and entertainment in

his childhood, they ended up being the trigger for discrediting Abraham in Jacob’s eye

by Franklin and the teacher, so they may represent a sort of rise and fall in the grandson’s

relation with his grandfather and admiration for him.

As will be discussed later in this article, having an underlying trauma brought to

light is not necessarily a bad thing. That is why even though the photographs do seem to

have a triggering effect not only on Jacob, but on Emma, too, they serve a very important
purpose: it is only by showing Jacob the pictures of the Hollowgasts that Emma is able to

talk about them, which, according to Freud’s principle of the talking cure, is a huge step

towards working-through. For Abraham, even though his trauma does not seem to have

been dealt with until Jacob saver his from death and they have a deeper, more serious

talk, the pictures of his Peculiar family make it possible for him to tell his grandchild the

stories in this case. This is the main difference between the parental and grandparental

relationship, in other words, the difference between being a distant father and a caring

grandfather may be credited largely to the showing of the photographs and subsequent

telling of stories.

Another interesting display of vicarious trauma at work in the movie is the fact

that Jacob is only able to get inside the loop, that is, fully experience his grandfather’s

reality, after seeing the ruins of the orphanage, going back to the city and hearing the story

of the bombing. It is a very particular way of depicting second-hand trauma, because the

usual means of intergenerational trauma and passing down of postmemory is directly

from the traumatized person to their descendant. In Jacob and Abraham’s case, however,

Jacob’s completion of the understanding of how much Abraham suffered came from a

third person, the pub owner who tells him about the bombing. Only after getting what

seems to be the whole story is Jacob able to enter the loop and begin his and the Peculiars’

process of dealing with the trauma of the bombing.

Acting out in the film

In his famous essay Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through, Freud

discusses the importance of bringing unconscious processes to a conscious level. Freud

describes two main ways of shutting off traumatic experiences: in one of them, the person

actually knows what happens, but does not think about it, while in the other, there is not

even something to be remembered, because nothing was forgotten in the first place.
Instead, the analyzed subject simply failed to notice an event or situation or its

seriousness, but that does not stop it from being there and causing consequences.

Freud also talks about what he calls the “compulsion to repeat”. He means here

that people who are dealing with unresolved trauma tend to put themselves in situations

similar to the ones that led to the traumatic event in the first place, or that they have the

same behaviour towards someone or something else. They may also relive the situation

through dreams or flashbacks, which later became two of the main symptoms of

posttraumatic stress disorder, a term which had not yet been coined when Freud was

writing, but can define Abraham’s state and the reason for what the rest of the family

called “breakdowns”.

In the case of Abraham and the Peculiars in Miss Peregrine’s orphanage, the

characters are very likely to have undergone different traumatic experiences throughout

their lives. For one, the time in which they are living, right during the Second World War;

and second, their status as orphans along with their Peculiarity, which made each of them

something resembling a circus freak. This, again, is dealt with in more details in the book

(one of the characters was literally sold to a circus by her parents), but there as elements

of it in the film as well.

Despite the fact that all the children in the orphanage seem to have had their own

share of trauma, there is one main traumatic event for the group, which is obviously the

bombing of the house they live in. However, because Miss Peregrine turns back time by

twenty-four hours every day just before the bomb actually hits the house, they end up not

really living this trauma, which reminds us of Freud’s description of forgetting. That,

even more than the story’s logical explanation of how Miss Peregrine’s Peculiarity makes

her capable of manipulating time, can explain why the children are doomed to relive the

exact same day for decades without getting a chance to grow. There are even some funny
moments when they know what is going to happen just before it does, because they are

so used to it. In addition to it, one interesting thing about the Peculiars is that they act as

normal children even though the loop started in 1943 and Jacob arrived in 2016, which

made it so even the youngest ones should be in their seventies, but none of them seem to

have matured at all in the loop. That may have been a consequence of never having the

chance of dealing with their issues and always having had Miss Peregrine taking care of

every logistical details.

When Jacob arrives at the loop for the first time, the viewer can see that the whole

routine in the house is closely controlled by the director. She reminds the children of their

respective chores, sets the time for meals and seems to care for all their needs. The

compulsion to repeat is, therefore, almost literally represented in the film: Miss Peregrine

and the Peculiar children relive the day that led to the bombing and destruction of their

home every day for seventy-three years.

During his interview to Yad Vashem, Dominick LaCapra, who applied the

previously discussed Freudian concepts to trauma theory specifically, makes it clear that

acting out, or having the compulsion to repeat, and working-through are not a dichotomy.

Trauma, therefore, cannot be fully resolved, but a person can make it a meaningful part

of their lives. Acting out and working-through are intertwined, and a traumatized person

may be able to take reasonable distance from the traumatic event and live a life that does

not revolve around the trauma all the time, which is what ends up happening with the

Peculiars.

Working-through

Working-through may be viewed as the final goal which the victim of a trauma

should try to achieve. It involves identifying repetition patterns, working towards

acknowledging the past situation that put the subject in a traumatized position in the first
place and learning how to deal with it at a conscious level in order to break the past taking

over the present.

One main difference between Freud and LaCapra when it comes to their views of

working-through is that Freud seems to believe that the presence of a therapist is

indispensable if someone is trying to achieve some kind of closure or distancing from a

traumatic situation. LaCapra, on the other hand, talks about changes in perspective, but

does not state directly the need of professional help.

In the Peculiars’ case, something in-between both theories happens: Jacob not

only is not a trained therapist but is actually someone suffering from the same trauma as

the children in the loop, albeit from a different source – postmemory instead of one’s own

experience. Nevertheless, he is the catalyst for the children’s change in perspective, which

happens not only in their attitude, but also physically, when they leave the loop in order

to look for a new place to live. The timing for the behavioral shift calls for attention, as it

coincides with the arrival of Jacob, the first person to cross the barriers towards the loop

since Abraham. The inhabitants of the house find themselves in need to explain about

loops, the bombs and the perpetrations of their persecution. The viewer can see that they

have been avoiding these topics for some time, even after Jacob starts asking questions.

This shift happens for a number of reasons, which include a pragmatic necessity,

since Miss Peregrine is not present to reset the day and a Hollowgast has found out where

they are, but it can also be credited to a deeper personal need of change. After being stuck

in the past and reliving the same day for seventy three years, something finally change

when the children got the visit of someone new – Jacob –, and that shift in what used to

be a very steady routine may also explain the rupture with the acting out patterns and the

will towards change.

 Most of all, however, what Jacob’s presence achieves is to encourage the

inhabitants of the orphanage to talk. Once someone new is there, asking questions and

requiring deeper explanations about things that had been out of sight for decades, feelings,

experiences and their relation to their trauma are bound to go from the unconscious to the

conscious mind. Once that happens, the Peculiars are able to learn how to deal with their

trauma in a new manner.

One thing that LaCapra emphasizes repeatedly during his interview is that

working-through is not a final destination, but a repetition process on its own, although

in a more mindful manner, knowing and respecting what happened to someone and

coming to terms with it. The means that working-through should not be viewed as a

“cure”, but part of a process, just as acting out (p. 143).

This is very relevant when considering the end of the Peculiar children’s story:

they did not leave the loop to go on living in regular time, to grow up and get old like

everyone else. Instead, they faced their former threat, rescued their protector and went on

to live in another loop. That may be interpreted exactly as per LaCapra’s explanation of

coming to terms with a traumatic event: being able to distance oneself and acknowledge

what happened, but not “forgetting” the trauma.

Another thing that is interesting to observe from the point of view of Trauma is

that despite not having been in the orphanage during the original bombing, both Jacob

and Abraham feel like they needed to be present in the loop. For Abraham, that may

simply be attributed to love and desire to protect his Peculiar family, but in Jacob’s case,

he is drawn to the loop even before meeting its inhabitants, and ends up deciding to leave

his family and former life in order to move into the loop with the other Peculiars. It is

interesting that both the people affected by the main traumatic event and someone who

was struggling with the consequences of intergenerational trauma would end up dealing
with their issues in similar ways. We can understand this with Hirsch and her definition

of postmemory as a process that “approximates memory in its affective force and its

psychic effects” (P. 31), which means that even though the carrier of postmemory never

directly experienced the traumatic events, the consequences after having its memories

passed down can be quite similar to the ones of first-hand experience.

The fact that the second loop is a ship is a beautiful metaphor for the fact that the

Peculiars are no longer stuck in place. Even though they still need to live in a loop and

repeat a specific day, being out of the bombed house and in a mobile space, especially

surrounded by water, which is a symbol of cleansing and redemption, can be seen as a

new different take on life for the children survivors.

The change induced with Jacob’s arrival exemplifies Hirsch’s words on

intergenerational trauma and its effects on the postgeneration:

Perhaps it is only in subsequent generations that trauma can be witnessed and

worked through, by those who were not there to live it but who received its effects

belatedly, through the narratives, actions and symptoms of the previous

generation. (P. 12)

Conclusion

In this paper, we were able to demonstrate that the story of the characters from

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children offers multiple points of traumatic acting

out and working-through as well as illustrating the mechanisms of postmemory and

intergenerational trauma.

Even though it is mostly labeled a fantasy film, which is not a genre widely known

for dealing with serious matters such as trauma, our analysis demonstrated the contrary.

This paper, along with other that analyze cultural works produced for a younger

audience, especially twentieth and twenty first century productions dealing with the
Holocaust, suggests that some pieces of literature and cinema that are not considered

“serious” at first glance can be a valid source of discussion for academic themes. It is

important to include them next to more serious, classical pieces, not only to have a larger,

more varied source of materials, but also to try and demystify cultural and literary

research and make it more accessible.

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(1911-1913). Vintage, 2001, p. 147-156.

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Holocausto en Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” [An abyss of Before and

After: About the use of the Holocaust in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children] I

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