 I mean I know cacao is definitely what they use for chocolate but I wonder, what are they use for coffee? Is it cocoa? Is it not cacao? Or is cocoa cacao? Is cacao just cocoa? Cocoa is cacao. Cocoa is cacao. Okay. Well what's cacao? Coffee bean? Coffee bean? Yeah. It's a big green bean that they smash and then there's little beans, you know? Or is that cacao? I'm sure there's a picture. I'm sure it's up there. I'm sure we could like that. I know. Okay. Okay. Welcome back to Life Lessons in Film and today we're going to be making Sense of Life through Honey Boy. Yeah. It is based off Shia LaBeouf's experience of growing up as a young actor. It goes back and forth between, he plays his father in the movie but he wrote the movie based on his experience. So it goes back and forth between basically Shia as a 12 year old getting kid parts in movies and shows and then it goes to, you know, present day where he's in rehab. That's where he's writing the story, this movie that we're seeing. Yeah. It was part of his court mandated therapy and the therapist had him write about his dad basically his life and so this is what it was like for him growing up as a child actor to present day basically to the point where he gets arrested and he's in this rehab and you see that he was living with his dad. His mom is somewhere we never get to see or the parents are separated or divorced and they're not very happy with each other in the movie they call them Otis, right? And so Otis doesn't have any kind of person like parent, any authority figure taking care of him. It snaps back to his past self to kind of reinforce what he's going through during his therapy. I think like the main timeline is him in the present working through therapy and then he remembers, you know, the things he went through as a kid. It's a heavy movie. What a time. It's heavy. Yeah. It's a turbulent way to grow up. In the movie the dad talks about he's like, okay, let me tell you about your history basically because Otis asks the dad, please, you know, just be a dad to me. You know, I just all I want is for you to be a dad literally all the time asking and the dad not doing that, but he does get to a point where he's just kind of like, well, I don't really have a lot, but I'll teach you what I know. And then he's talking about their history and he's like, well, you do come from a long line of alcoholics, you come from a long line of people who were hurt and dealt with their pain with alcohol. And so I feel like, you know, Shiloh both is in that same situation and that's why he's had a lot of challenges. Is that one part of the movie that is, yeah, definitely going to form some troubling issues down the road where Shia or Otis's character, the Otis character is making the money basically for the two of them, right? The father is the chaperone basically, he's the one that gets Otis to all the gigs and, you know, but Otis is the one getting paid basically and he's the one basically keeping them going. And the father I think at one point says, you know, do you know what it's like to have your kid, you know, like be your boss, like you have to work for your kid, you know, you're like the employee of your son. Do you know what that feels like? You know? How do you think it feels for me to have my son talk to me the way that you talk to me, have my son paying me? How do you think that feels for a parent to feel like that much of a failure basically that you have to rely on your 12-year-old, you know? And then so not only is it demoralizing and gut-wrenching and hard for the father, but imagine the kid, right? You want to look out, you want to believe that your parents are able to take care of you and for them to pass on all the things they've given to you. And when you feel like there's nothing that the parent is able to do, you have to do everything and you have to be the one passing on, like trying to fix them versus the other way around. It's a depiction of an emotionally abusive, verbally abusive and sometimes physically abusive father who takes out his perceived failures as a person on his kid, envies his kid for the fact that he managed to succeed because he was also in trying to get an entertainer. There's this constant reminder of lost opportunity as a dad because like, well, you're young, you still have so many. I don't have, I'm not young anymore. So there's definitely no hope for me. But you know, you've got all these, you've got a whole life ahead of you, honey boy, you know, those kinds of things. And he always tries to seem like a mentor, but he's, you know, he says, I'm your number one supporter, basically your mom left, but I'm here all the time. I show up, but he's not really happy about it because there's that constant reminder of him failing in life, constant reminder that you are not as good as you're not as good as dad as you want to be because I think the movie portrays that the dad wants to be good to the kid, but he has his own demons in this 12 step program that he's a part of, he mentions that, you know, I'm doing my best, but I'm in so much pain myself, you know, that whole complicated situation where both of them want, he wants to be a good dad. Otis wants him to be a better dad to him, but he just can't do it because he hasn't gone past his own pain. He hasn't accepted his life for what it is. It really is harder than it sounds, I think, to break the cycle. The cycle, yeah. You know, if you're given the tool, if your parents are alcoholics and they don't really know how to raise you and then what tools do they pass on, like you really, it's hard to make your own tools and or hard to know where to find other tools or better tools. But I also do like when Otis says that his dad would even just kind of make up his stories when he'd go to AA. They weren't his own stories. He would just take from other people's stories and then makes them into his own, which I think the pain is real. I think Otis's dad did have, like I think he was honest about coming from a long line of alcoholics and having a lot of pain that he hasn't dealt with, which means he can't be a good father to Otis. But at the same time, there is that part of him that either because he's still avoiding the pain that he needs to deal with, that's why he just makes up stories or he's just someone, maybe he's a compulsive liar or who knows, you know, like a compulsive liar can still have a lot of pain, but then they still will lie and just make up a lot of stuff that actually happened to them. You know what I mean? Like it's like, you don't know how much is true about their pain, but you know that, like, they're clearly in pain. She'll beat you over the head until she broke her hand and just keep laying it on you. Just did not give a shit. Do it again the next day. Always remember handing it a cast. Drama, just drama, you know. Mother fell out of a window, laying it on a freeway. Otis at one point, the friends, another young girl who lives kind of in their complex, housing complex. I think they both take to each other because they see that there's another wounded soul that they can just maybe find some closeness with. Yeah, we don't know what she does, but she seems to be like a lady of the night. It's not something that's clearly depicted, but obviously both of them come from traumatic childhoods, but they do find comfort in each other. At one point when he's Otis is with the potential lady of the night or just friend, they're at a pool and there's like a snake, I think, going around the pool and she just kind of like says to him about the snake. Like, you know, it's interesting that seems like, you know, you can, what is it? Like you can walk on water until people tell you you can't, basically, that's what she says. You can walk on water until someone tells you that you don't know how to. You understand. Yeah. I think that's probably my favorite line in the movie. Yeah, so many. Yeah, because it's like one of those things where sometimes you have faith in yourself, right? You have so much faith in this one thing, maybe you were really good at it, or you enjoyed it a lot. And then someone tells you that, oh, you really suck at that. And then it just, especially when it's someone who, it could either be with someone who matters to you, or it can just be a random stranger. Or a stranger, yeah. Yeah, because it depends on where you are in your life. If you're not confident enough in yourself, then what people think of what you're doing does matter. And so you just kind of see that that's who she is. These are people who have been battered and don't have that self sense of confidence enough that anybody who says anything about them could just, it wouldn't matter, you know? She's probably had that happen to her many times. And I think everyone grows up initially having a lot of dreams and faith in themselves and wanting to believe that they can do whatever, and it is the world or parents or other factors that then chip away at their faith in themselves and being able to achieve whatever. I think whenever you meet people who are adults and they are a certain way, there's so much history that you aren't really aware of. And at the end of the day, whatever it is that you were raised, however you were raised is gonna have an impact on who you are in the present, you know? I am always sensitive to people who do live with addiction. So I have empathy for the father because of the fact that he is a symptom of his own traumatic childhood. And so as he's parenting Otis, you understand that this guy hasn't really had the tools himself to be the dad that we can see that he wants to be. There's so much guilt that you can see in the way when they are relating to each other. There's so much guilt. And the thing about when you're living with addiction and now you have the responsibility of being a dad, having that child obviously can be a beautiful thing and an opportunity for you to grow because it may be that one thing that you get that the universe throws at you and says, okay, this is your chance to make something of yourself and or to become better because now you have an entire life to take care of. But I think the thing about it as well, especially when you haven't gotten the support enough to deal with your past, once you do become a parent living with addiction, the kid becomes more a reminder of your incapacity because you can't feed them, for example, and it beats you down, the feeling that I'm not a capable parent. And then on top of the fact that now your child is in Hollywood and making money and you have to ask your kid for an allowance, again, reminds you, nevermind emasculating, I think this would be the same thing for any parent, like a mom, you know, because, and so the things that you see, the emotional abuse and the neglect and physical abuse as well, it's this frustration manifesting, right? The frustration of not being able to support his kid in the way that he wants and then a constant reminder. One thing that was also interesting was when he's in therapy and he said, and the therapist talks about, you have PTSD and he's like, what PTSD? I thought that was only for people in the army. And that was also, that was really, really interesting because it's just, I think people, a lot of times when you grow up in an abusive home or come from a traumatic experience that isn't commonly perceived as such, you don't really understand what you've been through. And then of course, there's also the fact that you grew into this. And so this was normal for you. And so you don't actually have any other yardstick to measure your life against. And so you think that this is normal, right? And so the idea of PTSD is such a foreign thing. You think you should have been at war, seeing people getting amputated and all of these things. Even without physical abuse, there's a lot of that, people who may have come from neglectful homes. Things like, even if the dad, we see that the dad does physically abuse him, but it's not consistent. The consistency is the emotional aspect of their relation, the emotional abuse and really the parentification because that on its own can be a traumatic experience enough that it could induce PTSD, like the self-parenting and it becomes complicated because it's like, while you weren't really beaten, all your parents did was to force a whole lot of responsibility on you or they neglected you, you were alone. Him always seeing his parents arguing on the phone and then having to lie about his dad, oh, he was at work today, yeah, he was there. Having to cover for your dad. Knowing that your dad lies and seeing how the things play out, the manipulation, those kinds of things. And yes, being the in-between between the dad and like that conversation when the mom calls and the mom is complaining. He's just repeating what the mom is saying. And then the dad fights back and then same thing. He repeats what the dad is saying to the mom on the phone, that kind of stuff. Those things, even without the physical abuse, that is abuse, that is neglect and that is something that will arrest a child's development and have a ripple effect throughout their lives. The world doesn't ever, doesn't really recognize things like neglect or parentification of children as something that is worthy of being taken as seriously as PTSD caused from things like war. PTSD coming from a war zone wasn't even accepted for the longest time. So now we take that as almost like a truism. Like if you are in a war zone, you're going to get some of PTSD. It's just something that's so traumatic for someone to go through. But back in the day, it wasn't taken seriously. So now it's like, maybe years from now, it'll be the same kind of thing with neglect or some issues with family. It's like, well, of course you went through neglect and of course you'll have PTSD. So maybe we're getting there. The whole time he's asking the dad for affection in different ways, be a better dad. Why don't you hold my hand? I don't want to be a sissy. And then that moment when the dad has his arms wrapped around him, you can see that he's just kind of like... This is what I want. Yeah, we can finally relax. Yeah, this feels right. This is what I... And that was really sad. It doesn't seem like there's finality. The movie I don't think is really trying to depict any kind of like a beginning and an end. It's just depicting a reality. People who do go through those kinds of things when you meet them, it's really kind of unfair or unjust to expect that they would be clean at one point of their past and that they could just now move through the world as though they never went through that because obviously you're thinking they should work through it. Yes, they should work through it. Once you're an adult, you can be looking at your mom or your dad to help you out and to... Fix the mistakes of the past. Fix the mistakes of the past, even though they caused them. Because even if your dad says, I'm sorry, you know that your dad loves you even though he's living with addiction and is treating you unkindly. You know that he loves you, you know that he isn't capable. And even if he does apologize, the pain is still there. You still went through those experiences. It only really kind of helps you maybe mend your relationship with your parent. Doesn't necessarily heal your pain, all that might help slow, but you still have to... To deal with it. Get through it, work on that. But that's what we got from Honey Boy. What would you guys think? Have you seen it? Yeah. We miss anything? Do you agree or disagree with what we had to say? Let us know. Yeah, please comment down below. Yeah. And share your thoughts on our thoughts. Do the next time. Okay. Bye. Bye.