The Spirit of the Land

by - Hesper79 (Sun Jul 3 2005 01:14:58)

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UPDATED Sun Jul 3 2005 03:42:13
Wow. Thanks so much for your kind and encouraging words. This movie touched me very deeply too
because it speaks about a form of alienation which has become so familiar to so many of us that we have
begun to think of it as 'normal' when it is anything but that. The story of this movie traces one of the ways
in which our dominant culture gradually lost touch with a vital element of life, eventually coming to a point
where many of us are so estranged from our own instincts that we actually make celebrities out of people
like Frank who are still so powerfully driven by them.

At the beginning of the film we see the Indian hunter lift up the dying deer's antlered head to capture its
last breath, to take into himself the essence of the animal's great wild heart, its strength and its courage,
as the deer's spirit leaves its body. The Indian, living so close to the land, needed the qualities of the
deer's spirit as much as the resources of its body to survive. He valued and honored this spirit, and his
wish to possess it reflected his awareness of the sustaining vitality of his own animal nature as an internal
force within his humanity, and in this sense, as long as his people kept to the old ways that honored it, the
great wild spirit of the deer truly lived within them.

The indigenous tribal people, knowing the land to be both sacred and alive, lived with her and with her
creatures reverently, and as their Mother, she nurtured them, both body and spirit. The settlers who
displaced them were 'town' people whose Father God looked down on them from heaven, instructing
them to have 'dominion' over the earth and its creatures. They were the first to 'own' the land, fencing it off
to build farms and produce crops, as earlier generations of Frank and Joe's family had done. In their own
way, they too loved the land and made it fruitful by the work of their own hands, and the land sustained
them also, both their lives and their spirits.

Frank and Joe are the first generation of their family to be defeated by the larger cultural forces which
made this rural way of life of family farming economically unsustainable, and it was their fate to see the
land lost to 'the mathematicians', a new breed of people who produce and honor only their equations of
profit, loss and 'the bottom line'. If 'the numbers don't add up', the land is stripped of the people who loved
it and consigned to absentee administrators -- bankers and corporate accountants who see it only in the
pale and bloodless form of an abstract sum on a balance sheet.

Since economic worth is the only value the mathematicians recognize, to 'maximize' the profit margin of
the 'property', it is worked with synthetic chemicals, pesticides and genetically mutilated seed by
corporate employees who will have no share of the crops that are produced, but work only for wages.
'Farm' animals are confined to indoor gulags, fed on the ground-up remains of other animals and
subjected to such unspeakable conditions that they have to be shot full of antibiotics to keep them alive
long enough to make it to the slaughter house, all of this being perpetrated by the same corporate
interests that stack our supermarket shelves with processed 'foods' many steps removed from anything
that was ever alive, empty of true nutrition and riddled with toxic additives. And then we wonder why so
many of us have bodies that keep telling us they're hungry no matter how much of this franken-food we
may have ingested, and spirits that languish in exile from the earth as we sit before our glowing screens
in our little square rooms and cubicles, mesmerized by an endless succession of electronic facsimiles of
life.

This is the world in which we apparently find the ferocity of 'outlaw' predators like Frank so perversely
fascinating that we write books and make movies about them and turn blood-thirsty video games like
'Grand Theft Auto' into best-sellers because we are desperate to experience some small portion of the
raw, animal, instinctive force that so powerfully drives them and makes them seem 'alive' in a way that so
little in our own everyday experience allows us to be. This is what we've come to.

The movie shows us one small example of the way back from the edge of the abyss where we now stand.
During his drunken night with Frank back on his old lost farm, with his accustomed mental defenses
momentarily down, Joe finally allows himself to remember what his former life was like: "I burned!". And in
the next scene, he says "I wanted to burn again" and we see him digging a little backyard garden. In the
arrowhead which Joe recovers as he turns the soil, we see a symbol that suggests the depth of renewal
which reconnecting with the 'message' of the Indian runner promises to bring to him (and potentially to
each of us): the exhilarating freedom to be, for a precious space of time, his own man again, the pure,
blood-pumping, animal joy of 'churning' the land to receive the seed, and the quiet leaping up of the heart
as the life-force begins to surge again through the deep, long-dormant, ancient roots of an earth-loving
spirit.

This film has so much to say, I wish more people were aware of it.

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by - Hesper79 (Mon Jul 18 2005 02:45:44

I had the same question the first time I saw the film on cable, since there seemed to be a blip of static that
happened right after Joe says 'My brother Frank..." and a thin horizontal white line flashed across the
frame, so I thought there was maybe a flaw in the film that cut off the rest of the sentence. But I've seen it
three times on cable now and the last two times there was no static or other problem, so it seems to be an
intentionally incomplete sentence.

The final night scene is a long shot of the tail-lights of Frank's car growing smaller in the distance as his
brother does the voice-over. We know that Joe loves Frank, but he can't accept that Frank would allow
himself to go berserk in a bar when his wife is having his baby and needs him. Joe says "I knew I'd never
see or hear from Frankie again. He turned his back on himself and his family. I went home that night,
watered the garden, kissed my baby, and held my wife until morning. Life is good." As he's saying this,
we're watching the tail-lights of Frank's car nearing the horizon line, which is the crest of a hill. Joe says
"My brother Frank...", there is a beat of time, and then we see the tail-lights wink out into darkness as the
car disappears over the hill like a kind of enigmatic punctuation mark.

I think that Frank understands the consolations of domestic life -- earlier we see him nuzzling Joe's baby's
tummy in a way that seems very natural and endearing (and the baby seems to like it). Frank just has a
vastly wider streak of wildness in his nature than Joe does and this is what makes all the difference. It's
this same quality of wildness that Frank seems to be attracted to in his almost elemental wife -- she's
always shrieking at unexpected moments, exuberantly jumping up and down and throwing herself into his
arms, and she does unpredictable things like running to say "hi" to the bearded lady and freaking out after
touching her beard. She seems to be a creature who is alive in the present moment and being
spontaneous and unconventional herself, she can accept and relate to Frank's "outlaw" nature.

But Frank also values her willingness to put him first as we see in the disturbing scene where he makes a
pregnant Dorothy hold an uncomfortable head-stand against the wall while he times her with a stop-
watch, without telling her why he's demanding that she do this. He says only "I gotta know." It turns out it's
a condition that he has decided she must meet before he will ask her to marry him. So what he's "gotta
know" is whether she will put him first, before herself or her own comfort and even before the well-being
of the baby. Not an easy scene to watch or to empathize with, but a foreshadowing of what is to come.

We feel the danger coming closer when pregnant Dorothy sits on Frank's lap to let him feel the baby
kicking. Frank seems okay with this at first -- he says "Let's see. That ain't a kick, that's a punch! That's a
wild son you're getting me." But when Frank gets suggestive: "I've got some skeeter bites need
scratching. Why don't we go fiddle with the hydraulics?" instead of reacting as her usual wild and
instinctive self, Dorothy responds for the first time as the more reserved and demure mother she is
becoming: "Oh Frank, don't talk like that." You can almost see Frank's blood run cold. It's as if he
suddenly sees a trap that's about to spring and take him down. All at once, he's no longer number one in
her life. The baby is turning her from his wild playmate into a mother, a role which seems to include the
authority to disapprove (however gently) of his "bad-boy" ways, just as his own mother once had.
However good his intentions may have been, this is a corner that, now that he has come to it, Frank finds
that he just can't turn. The untamable nature in him that finally breaks free at the bar provides his only
escape from the "trap" of a life that he knows he could never survive.

So Joe, the farmer whose bond with the land has been broken, leaving him to endure as best he can an
indentured existence which is, by contrast, so compromised that his love for his family is the only way in
which he can still say that "Life is good", now finds himself confronted with the unimaginable -- someone
whose alienation runs even deeper than his own. His beloved little brother Frank's outlaw soul seems
capable of resonating only with the most instinctive level of primitive animal freedom. As Frank drives off,
leaving his brother to face yet another deep loss, Joe must struggle to understand what it must be like to
be Frank -- how all of the things which make life meaningful to Joe can be simply more than Frank can
bear. Even the lost way of life on the land which had once so fulfilled Joe was always too confining for
Frank, and the love of family which is Joe's one last consolation, to Frank looks like just another cage.

As in the opening scene of the film, the tribal hunter breathes in the wild, free spirit of the deer, so Frank,
as the Indian Runner, "becomes the message" -- the wild, free spirit that can't be touched, not by jail or
even by a wife and baby, who remain for Frank (to Joe's bewilderment) "outside parties". In the end,
Frank's sole satisfaction comes in surrendering to a thirst for freedom so untamable that it drives him
away from the small, conventional joys of life which are all that stand between Joe and total desolation,
and draws him out instead into an unknown dark future, somewhere over that far hill where blood is still
free to thrill at the sight or sound of prey. To Joe, such a desperately solitary spirit can only remain an
enigma and so for him, "My brother Frank...?" stands as a question to which he receives only one last
melancholy response, as the outlaw's lights wink out at the horizon and he's gone

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Frank: A Tribal Soul in Exile?

by - Hesper79 (Mon Jul 18 2005 02:45:44 )
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UPDATED Mon Jul 18 2005 03:01:52
Frank: A Tribal Soul in Exile?

The Tribal Soul

I've been thinking about the figure of the Indian Runner in this film and how it seems to symbolize that
elusive 'something' that makes it so hard for Frank to tolerate the kind of life that he was born into. At the
beginning of the movie, as the tribal hunter is pursuing the deer, a voice-over tells us that the hunter knew
that deer ran in circles and so was able to anticipate where the deer would go and run it down. If you think
about it, following the circles and cycles of the way of nature was a key factor in the survival of all tribal
people.

As hunter-gatherers, the indigenous people of America were nomads, following the migration cycles of the
game animals which were based on the recurring seasons in which various types of wild plants, nuts and
berries were ripe for eating. They traveled on foot originally, then later with horses, carrying with them
their shelters and everything else they needed to sustain them on their journeys. Their survival depended
on being aware of the locations of their staple food animals and being able to anticipate their movements,
so their senses would have been sharply attuned to the messages of sight, sound, and smell which all the
creatures they lived among were constantly providing to them.

Seasonal variations in temperature and the extremes of weather: wind, rain, hail, and snow storms would
have been a much more visceral experience for these people, with only buffalo-skin teepees to shelter
them. And they lived an existence in which, every day of their lives, they were acutely aware that, just as
they were hunters, they were also potential prey, as encounters with predator animals and with other
warring tribes would have been a constant threat. And then of course, came the days when the 'white
man', confident in his 'manifest destiny' to own and rule the continent, began the long, brutal attempt to
exterminate these people and their way of life, forever.

So imagine what it might be like if, the moment you woke up in the morning, you were immediately aware
that you had to be alert at every moment, always on the look-out for any lurking threat that might be
waiting to ambush you, your ears always tuned to any sound that might mean the approach of danger.
And in any encounter with an animal or anyone outside of your tribe, there would be that immediate,
instinctive moment of life-or-death assessment -- can I take you? Are you going to attack? Do I need to
attack first? Would it be better to run? This was a kind of life where the experience of that instinctive
sense, the one that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when it perceives a threat to your
survival, could easily have been a daily occurrence.

Frank: A Tribal Throw-Back?

I think there are important parallels between the necessary temperament of a tribal person and what this
movie tells us about Frank. Some things that Joe's parents say suggest that Frank may have enlisted in
the Army as part of an agreement to avoid going to jail. The parents seem as mystified as Joe is about
Frank's temperament and the (unspecified) troubles that he apparently got into because of it before he left
for Vietnam. Joe tells us that he was close to Frank when they were kids, but that later, when his wife and
farm were occupying most of his time, Frank came to be the hellraiser of the town, before he went into the
Army. When Joe finds out that Frank is coming home, he tells us that in one of his letters, Frank
"complained" that his fellow soldiers were disturbed by the killing they'd seen. Putting it in a very telling
way, Frank wrote: "Guys over here expect their hair to stay dry in the rain".

This doesn't conform to the story we are usually told of the combat veteran who has been traumatized by
the horrors of war. In fact it suggests another, less often admitted reason that many men say they find it
impossible to talk about their war experiences with people who haven't been through it. For these men,
their time in combat was nothing less than the high-point of their lives. They are not brutes or
degenerates, but ordinary people like you and me. And yet they tell us that they never felt so intensely
alive either before or since their combat days, and if you notice the look in their eyes when they speak
about this, you will see not rage, fear, guilt, sadness or regret, but something that looks like spiritual
exhilaration or holy awe, and I believe that's exactly what it is.

In my own experience and understanding, there are two general ways (excluding drugs) to break through
the boundaries of normal ego consciousness and attain the kind of luminous, direct, intellectually
unmediated experience of reality which religious or spiritual traditions call "ecstasy" or "enlightenment".
The way beyond ego starts with the highest levels of spiritual aspiration and draws you "up" and "out" of
the ego and its world of sense perception and into a direct energetic/spiritual "participation" in what lies
beyond, above, and within our "ordinary" sense of reality.

The 'Divine' Pull of the Instincts

The way "beneath" or "before" ego is found at the level of the very rudimentary beginnings of human
consciousness, before ego boundaries are securely established or when they are temporarily breached
by extraordinary conditions. From here, in moments of extreme instinctive fear/pain/horror/rage, you are
taken "downward" or "inward" into a pre-egoic state of "participation mystique" in which you find yourself
embedded in the pre-moral, pre-self-conscious world of the animal instincts.

This is a natural world, innocent of intellectual objectification and moral judgment, where you are
immediately aware of the many faces of a mysterious and powerful Spirit inhabiting and animating all
living creatures (including the rocks, the water, the air, and fire), just as you feel its power permeating and
sustaining your own being and connecting you intimately and irrevocably with everything around you. It is
a sacred form of reality and consciousness in the sense that everything is seen to be alive,
interconnected, and radiating a spiritual energy and power which is perceived outside the boundaries of
strictly human consciousness and therefore also outside all human, moral determinations of "good" and
"evil".

This is the pre-egoic form of ecstasy which can be experienced at moments when the extreme limits of
physical endurance or pain are exceeded, and also at moments when the immediate instinctive necessity
to "kill or be killed" rises up so forcefully that it submerges ego consciousness in part or even altogether.
The result can range from a heightened, highly colored, piercingly "alive" and exhilarating level of
experience, all the way to a full "black-out" of consciousness, since intellect and memory cannot record
what happens if the ego is not in a position to be consciously aware of it.

This is why, as Viggo shows us so vividly, after he beats the bartender into a pulp with the chair, when he
first looks up and around at the faces of those who are watching him, his expression still reflects the
triumphant challenge of the predatory animal consciousness which had taken him over, while his human
consciousness resurfaces and regains control only gradually as he registers the expressions of horror on
the faces of the witnesses to his attack. At first, he reacts to their horror of him with surprise, as if he
doesn't understand the reason for it, and it is only when he looks into the mirror and sees his own bloody
reflection, that he becomes afraid and comes back "to himself", to a normal enough level of awareness to
realize what has happened.

:The Indian Runner

When we see the symbolic figure of the Indian Runner during this attack, he seems to be running in a
straight line, confined by an enclosed circular conduit of some kind. It is as if all of the instinctive power of
his being -- which would normally reach out its energetic feelers to connect him in a protective way with
his intensely experienced, natural, tribal world -- has found nothing in the modern world to connect with
and so, denied and suppressed from its natural positive expression, it finds itself subverted by default into
the only channel which remains open to it, a channel in which it is narrowly focused and hyper-
pressurized, so that there is only one possible form in which it can find release: explosive, rage-fueled
violence.

In Frank's modern world, the natural instinctive awareness and behavior which are so necessary to the
tribal hunter's survival have no natural, socially sanctioned function or culturally approved release. He
lives in enclosed, square rooms, no one of which would be much different from any other, drives from
place to place encapsulated in a metal shell which cuts him off from most sensory connection with what is
outside and reduces that part of the natural world which stretches between the beginning and end of any
trip to a meaningless blur, an empty, inconvenient obstacle to "getting somewhere else". His food comes
commercially ready-made, or wrapped in plastic at the grocery store, his work provides him with no sense
of accomplishment or meaning. The only potential predators he faces are other humans and his
instinctively challenging attitude towards them, whether they are on his same wavelength or not,
inevitably triggers the "unprovoked" violence which defines him as an "outlaw".

Where Frank 'Fits'

In the Army, in a noncombat situation, he would face many of the same problems, but in a war zone, he
would be in his element, all of his natural instincts for survival and unhesitating talent for violently
overcoming potential threats would not only be sanctioned but honored and rewarded. When we first see
him when he is just back from Vietnam, he looks great -- clear-eyed, confident, no sign of any kind of
trauma or wound to the spirit. It's only in the context of the artificially sanitized and tame version of life that
he faces in "civilized" society that he becomes an incompetent, wounded misfit.

Joe lost the farm after Frank left for Vietnam, so this is the first time that Frank has seen him since he
became "the law". When Joe first drives Frank in his police cruiser, Frank says "Got to admit, it feels kind
of strange riding up front in 'the man's' car, no handcuffs." Jail is another environment where Frank feels
"at home", since he is surrounded there by men who are mostly just like him, ready to indulge in violent
behavior, or urge others on to doing so on the slightest pretext, but really mostly just to blow off steam
and determine who is "top dog" in the pack. I thought it was interesting too that most of Frank's tattoos
seem to be either Indian symbols or animals, as if at some level, he understands that this is a part of his
nature which has no positive outlet. After the first time that Joe brings him home from a fight at the bar,
when Dorothy asks him what happened, as he's leaning over, bleeding into the kitchen sink, Frank laughs
and says, as if to himself, "I miss jail."

Why He Has to Leave His 'Angel'

Frank has a vulnerable, tender feeling side too. We see it in his playful moments with Joe back at the old
farm. And after his father's suicide, when he gets so drunk that Dorothy asks Joe to come and talk to him,
Joe finds him naked with a gun "practicing my draw". His explanation is "Somebody was boring me. He
was me." But when Joe says he'll take him to see his lady, Frank cries. And later after the first bar fight,
when Joe is driving Frank home, Frank makes a manful effort and tells Joe "I guess what I'm here to say
is that I'm sorry about all the sh*t. I'm sorry about Mom, Pop, and uh...I just, I ain't said it. So, um, uh, I'm
saying..." and he chokes up and then pounds dash in frustration that he's crying. To a mentality that
believes that only the strongest survive, it might be hard to see crying as anything other than a sign of
weakness. And as Frank seems to understand, this is a kind of 'weakness' that can leave him vulnerable
to being trapped in a situation he knows he can't survive.

When Joe and his wife arrive at Frank's house after they're told the baby is coming, we see that Frank's
car backs out of the driveway as soon as they're in the house, as if he's passing the responsibility for his
wife and child on to Joe. In his final confrontation with Joe in the bar, Frank says "Go on back there. Go
see my angel be born. Life must be great -- laugh it up. I'll just stay here and drink it down. There's only
two kinds of men in this hell, heros and outlaws. Which one are you?"

Frank knows the answer to that question, and he also knows that even if he allows himself to feel all of
the emotions that he has about the birth of his "angel", in the kind of world that he'd have to live in to be
with them, his temperament would still make it impossible for him to be anything but an "outlaw" and it
would only be a matter of time before he would have to leave them anyway, one way or another.

Frank vs. Caesar

The last scene in the bar shows exactly the kind of struggle Frank would be up against and what part of
him would win. With Frank, you get the feeling that most of the time, he just can't help himself when his
urge to violence builds up and is finally triggered, and in spite of the immediate relief which violent acts
give him, he doesn't feel good about himself afterwards. He still seems to have an essential core which
remains in some way innocent and potentially good, which is what makes him such a compelling
character and not just a by-the-book "bad guy".

Dennis Hopper, on the other hand, plays Caesar the bartender as a man who, though he is much like
Frank, seems to have a better handle on the moral aspect of the inability to control the drive towards
instinctive violence. But in the way that he uses this knowledge, he crosses over to the dark side in a way
that Frank, despite his violent acts, never has. Caesar knows that Frank is powerfully torn between his
wish to be able to live up to his brother's hopes for him, and his own inner certainty that there is just no
way he could survive that kind of life without exploding in a way that might do harm to his wife and child.
Between this conflict and the influence of way too much alcohol, Caesar knows that Frank is primed to
snap.

With his calculated, semi-demonic smile and the 'crazy intense eye' thing that Dennis Hopper does so
well, Caesar seems like he's so pumped up with the drive to kill that he's just barely restraining himself
from jumping out of his own skin. His speech on sin went something like this: "Did you ever want to kill
someone...just out of rage? But you didn't...out of fear? Fear of the law, sure, but mostly fear like in sin?
Sin with God?" (Both men smile at this.) "Yeah. Almighty God. But what if he ain't almighty? What if he
ain't sacred? You might just as well have done the fellow, right? 'Goodness.' (He laughs) Maybe it ain't
nothin' but fear, you know?" This is the equivalent of calling Frank "Chicken!" and Caesar knows it.

Content at having planted this poisonous seed in Frank's mind, Caesar waits in tense anticipation for the
moment to fully ripen when he can provide just the right stimulus at just the right time to push Frank over
the edge. As Frank sits slumped almost in a stupor at the bar, you can see Caesar savoring the
anticipation of the power he knows he holds to 'detonate' Frank like a bomb. Like Frank, Caesar has the
predator's sensitivity to sound and is exquisitely aware that, as Frank almost hypnotically watches Caesar
wiping Joe's blood off the bar, the repetitive "skritch, skritch, skritch" noise which he is making with his
cleaning cloth is clearly beginning to work on Frank's nerves.

As we hear the "skritch" sound matched by the resonant repetitive pounding sound which that machine at
Frank's job site makes, we understand that these are the two choices that Frank faces. Finally, Frank
throws his money on the counter and gets up from the bar, fingering his wedding ring. As he walks away,
the pounding machine sound is loud, as if it's echoing in his head, suggesting that he's thinking about
what he faces if he tries to live that life. Then there is some other sound -- is it a cue ball breaking the
racked up balls on a pool table?

The pounding stops and the "skritch, skritch" sound suddenly becomes unbearably amplified, Frank
stops, turns, looks back and we see Caesar's fixed grimace of a smile, as he's wiping, wiping, wiping...just
waiting for all hell to break loose. Is this what anyone else in the bar would see, if they were paying
attention? Or is this just the picture in Frank's mind that sets off his fuse? Caesar doesn't seem to be
paying that much attention as Frank comes up behind the bar with the chair. Is this Director Sean Penn
playing his 'ambiguity' game with the audience at the last possible moment? Perhaps so. But if we accept
the Frank's-eye-view version of events, there is a certain satisfaction to be had in his selection of prey.

An Apology

I apologize sincerely that this got so long -- I just felt like I had to get it out of my system. But I think I'm
done now. I really think this is an amazing film on many different levels. but I think that the real reason
that it has the power to 'hook' some of us in such a compelling way is that this whole dilemma of how to
make a creative accommodation with the instinctive life force of our nature, in a world which seems to be
increasingly denying it its legitimate place as our essential family tie to Mother Earth, is one of the great
challenges that we are going to have to meet if we hope to survive into the future on this planet in a form
that will be genuinely and fully human.
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As his wife is in labor, Frank again tires to drink away his sorrow at Caesar's bar. Joe leaves Dorthy's bed
side & finds Frank almost drunk.

Frank claims that the world is a pathetic, miserable place:

" Go on back there. Go see my angel be born. Life must be great -- laugh it up. I'll just stay here and
drink it down. There's only two kinds of men in this hell, heros and outlaws. Which one are you?" .

Joe replies "there are only two kinds of people, brave and not, and your not brave" .

Before leaving Jo cuts his hand open (bllod dripping on the bar top) & tells Frank that in life blood (family)
is what's truly important.

Later (just as his son is born) Frank puts on his wedding band, having chosen to give Jo's way of life a
chance. But as he turns around he sees Caesar wiping away Joe's blood from the bar top & laughing.

Frank has a moment of madness where he seems unable to control what he is doing, when he regains
control he realizes that he has killed Caesar with a bar stool. Frank then drives off in his car like a wild
man.

Eventually Joe chases and catches up to Frank as he is about to drive across the state line. Joe gets out
of his car but is overcome by a vision of his little brother, not as a blood soaked killer, but as the little kid
who played cowboys & indians with him. Frank sees Joe looking at him in his rear-view mirror, turns away
unable to stand his brother's gaze & drives off.

Again we hear Joe in a voice over

"I knew I'd never see or hear from Frankie again. He turned his back on himself and his family. I went
home that night, watered the garden, kissed my baby, and held my wife until morning. Life is good. My
brother Frank......."

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Frank & Joe are brothers who seems polar opposites. Joe stayed in the small town he was raised in, first
as a farmer & then as sheriff (after the bank took his farm). Joe married Maria his child hood sweetheart &
is now a father. Frank on the other hand was the town hell raiser who left home, enlisted at 18 and served
two tours in Vietnam.
After Frank's dishonorable discharge (for striking his superior) Joe tires to get him to come back home
and start a family with his young pregnant girlfriend Dorothy.

For Frank who is forever angry, on ordinary life is hell, none the less he gives Jo's suggestion a try. Frank
marries dorothy & moves into the empty house Joe & Frank grew up in. As Frank slowly starts to slip back
into his patterns of alcohol and violence his new life is doomed to fail & all Joe can do is look on
helplessly.