 Mary, she doesn't have anyone else. I need to know that I have done one thing right with my life. Delay blessings in the film. Today we're going to be making sense of life through the whale. This is actually the second Darren Aronofsky movie that we've covered, Everyone Being the Fountain, which was also... oh, what a find. Insane. What a jam. So good. So good. Watch it and then check it out. This is the whale and it follows Charlie. Find him, Frazier. Find him, Frazier. He is living alone in his home. He's living with food addiction. Trying to restore his relationship with his estranged daughter, Ellie, who is very angry at him. Rightfully so, because he left when she was eight. I'm not spending time with you. You're disgusting. I am a lot bigger than I was since last time you saw me. No, I'm not talking about what you look like. You'd be disgusting even if you weren't this fat. You'd still be that piece of s***. Dad who walked out on me when I was eight. All because he wanted to f*** one of his students. I love with a man, Alan, who then later killed himself. And that's why Charlie fell into deep depression and started to deal with it through eating. There's only a few characters. There's Liz, Alan's sister, who comes by and nurses Charlie. Then there's Mary, the mother, Ellie, the daughter. There's Thomas. At first we think he's a missionary for... A church called New Life, which Liz, her family, they were all part of the church. Basically, Alan committed suicide. We assume because the church wouldn't accept him. The family wouldn't accept him. Liz left the church, which it looks like is a bit cultish, that then led to her also being estranged from her family. Alan and Charlie being together. I mean, she accepts that, of course. And she was very supportive. They find this bond and create their own kind of family. And she's a nurse and supports Charlie through his health problems, which are brought on by his addiction to food and consequent severe obesity. It's a heavy one. Charlie is an online English teacher, and he doesn't show his face. He turns off the webcam because he would feel embarrassed. Yeah, he says that his camera is broken the whole time, the whole semester. Yes, the camera on my laptop still doesn't work. Believe me, I'm not missing much. I'm still sad. I feel the tears if I start talking. Do you have a phone? My phone's dead. Please just read it. Okay. In the amazing book Moby Dick by the author, Herman Millville, the author recounts the story of being at sea. Whenever he's having panic attacks, we'll read Ellie's essay that she wrote in eighth grade. I actually first thought it might have been Alan's essay. Me too. I thought it was his. I think that's what they try to do. And Alan was one of Charlie's students. That's how they meet and fall in love. And I was like, okay, I get it. We're going to find out it's Alan's. Nope, it was Ellie's essay about Moby Dick that touched Charlie so much that he uses that to calm himself down. And I think he could say kind of like freeze him at the end. What do you think she was about to say? Because it gets cut off. This book made me think about my own life. And then it made me feel glad for a minute. Maybe my dad. My dad. I thought she was going to say my dad. And I think that's what got cut off. Yeah. And that's what finally allowed him to be like, okay, like the fact that she, and that's why he liked it so much because back then the fact that she even wrote that even after he left. She starts showing up and Charlie figures out a way to bribe her basically to keep coming over because he just wants to spend time with her. No, I don't even know why I'm here. I can pay you. You want to pay me to spend time with you. And I can help you with your work. It's what I do for my job. I can help you pass your classes. She sees the talent that she has for insightful, honest writing. If you can do anything right in his life, it's to support her and her talent and support her in life. All right, I'm going to go. Just tell him I was here and I'll... If you leave, I'll feed him the rest of the pills I have in the bottle. What? Yeah. There's like 20, 30 more in here. I'll crush them up. I'll put them in some water and I'll pour it down his throat. You wouldn't actually do that, would you? Sit down. She was just doing the worst things. Yeah. I didn't like how she treated the guy. Commerce, super manipulative. The way she extracted information about his life and everything. I was smoking every day. I had a problem. You were a stoner. You had a hobby. Take a hit. I don't want... If you don't take a hit, I'm going to call the police and I'm going to tell them that you tried to f*** me. Take a hit. If you know that someone was struggling with something, you forcing them or pushing them to engage with this thing that they're trying to heal from. It was really hard to watch because I just felt like you're such an awful person. But at the same time, when you grow up the way that she grew up, my gosh, you're so angry. And her mom is living with alcohol addiction and her dad abandoned her at eight and is living with food addiction. And she's just had a very rough upbringing. If she's so evil, then... What was I supposed to tell you? Huh? That she was off making her classmates cry or slashing her teacher's tires? You didn't want to hear that stuff. I could have helped her. She doesn't want your help. She doesn't want anyone. I want her to have a dad. She adored you. The only reason you married me in the first place was to have a kid. I know that. Very pleased. Even with the mom, I think the mom was just so resentful. And at the end of the day, if you're gay, there's just no way you're gonna force yourself to be with a woman just to try and make her happy. But it still doesn't make it any easier for the people you're leaving behind. You have this broken woman raising Ellie on top of that abandoning your daughter at eight. That is not right whatsoever. That will never be right. So yeah, I think if you put all of those things together, I completely understand why she's so angry. A lot of times when we see people like Ellie, you think, oh my god, men is to society. I don't even want to spend time with her. And a lot of people never really kind of trying to contextualize why someone would be acting that way. She most likely isn't receiving a lot of sympathy. She does say to the dad, you know, a lot of people learn this too late. I learned that people are a-holes. Thank you. You taught me that at eight. These are the people that you're supposed to trust, right? They're supposed to be your security. And if you don't get that from your parents, the people who are supposed to afford it to you, well, if it's not happening in the home, then the whole world is that way. The environment that you go up in, that gives you an introduction to the world. And so if that environment is what she's experiencing, as far as she's concerned, the world is horrible. And so yeah, she's going to interact with people in that way. I also think with someone like that, it was like who she is looking for that kind of attention. Getting people to react to her so that she does actually exist and matter in some way, clearly she's having an impact on people. And that's also, I feel like maybe a theme of the story as well is how everyone impacts each other in ways you realize and don't realize. This essay she wrote years ago, she has no clue how much it affects her father, the things that she says to Thomas, how much it affects him and starts to get him to really self-reflect. Charlie, his actions, how they affected everybody in the movie. She's a terror. And you think it's my fault. Wait, is that why you kept her from me all this time? Because you thought that I would think that you're a bad mother? At first. Despite the fact that Charlie was the one who broke the family, she's worried about how he's going to perceive her as a mother. Even though really she could think well, I'm still doing better than him as a father, but she's still worried about what he thinks of her. She hates him because she cares about him. And at one point she even kind of gets close. I can't remember that. He holds her as she's crying and that made me really sad for her because I was like, wow, you know, she loved this man and this man couldn't reciprocate the kind of love that she had for him. But there is a friendship there on his end, a love for her still. There is an essence of her being understanding and being realistic of the fact that the marriage could not continue. It doesn't seem like there's that kind of conversation where he's recognizing how awful it could have been for her to go through this experience when you are married, there's love, but then there's also that friendship that you have with the person. And so when they leave, you lose a lot. I definitely still empathize with Charlie too. That situation is really hard. Yeah, because if you are part of this community where you realize that they wouldn't accept who you actually are, you know, I'll be ostracized until it just gets to the point where he meets someone and he's like, no, I can't fight my true self anymore. What happens? And then it happens too late a lot of the time. And then it can do a lot of damage. This guy, Jerry, all he had us doing was standing on corners and handing out pamphlets. At the end of each day, he'd be like, look how many people we're helping. But I tried to talk to him about different ways that we can minister. I mean, different ways that we could actually help people. But you could just tell that he didn't need to earn or prove his faith at all. After a while, I was just like, am I really helping? He was dissatisfied with their methods of trying to reach out to people, just handing out pamphlets. He started to go rogue and started to actually communicate and connect with people. He was having more of a difference, but that was going against the accepted method that the church was using. And people want to make a difference, especially if you're doing stuff like that. And I think again, that's also part of the movie. It's like people desperately wanting to feel like something they're doing matters, whether it's Charlie wanting to know that his life mattered by raising a good person or Thomas wanting to believe he could at least save one person or make a difference in one person's life. She's trying to help him. How? Ellie, she's trying to help him. She just wanted to send him home. For Charlie, it helps him accept that his daughter was doing it to help Thomas, but it could have also been like she just wanted to cause more destruction and it just so happened that his parents accepted them. People could say like, no, it turned out well for Thomas, but she wasn't meaning for it to happen. Yeah, that's very possible. A lot of the one that does talk about it, right? Yeah, she's like, look at the stuff she posts. She posts stuff about us on Facebook to make fun of us. There'll be a grease fire in hell when he starts to burn. Don't feel bad. I've made quite a few appearances on that thing. She's a strong writer. That's your response? This isn't evil. This is honesty. I think with Charlie, he's realizing that his daughter is most likely just acting out of pain, the pain of his abandonment and him breaking up his family. You can act out in anger and even do damage that doesn't necessarily mean you always do that, but that's always your motive. Or that is who you are. You're just not even a person, yeah. Yeah, I also feel really bad, of course, for Charlie, the situation with Alan. He talks about, I thought if I loved him enough. I tried to save him, Liz. I thought that if I just loved him, that he wouldn't need anyone else. I told him he needed God. I didn't need anyone. It's always understandable when people fall into that wishing that that was possible and then Liz, the nurse, responded with. Nobody could have saved him. Believe me, I spent years trying. I think I believe anyone can save anyone. I think both are kind of right. A lot of times people believe that if you love someone enough, that's going to nurture them out of their misery. With Liz, love on its own doesn't do that. And I totally agree with her because love can't act like, you know how other people are like, okay, well, are you sad right now? Well, let's go out and party and do something fun. That's going to cancel out all of the stuff that's sad. Which it doesn't. I don't believe it does. On the other hand, where Charlie and I think maybe you may be coming from and I think I align more with that thinking as well, is that love can heal you in the sense of Alan comes from a family that loves you conditionally only. You are loved only if you are towing the line of the church rules and only if you're straight. Then he meets Charlie and Charlie gives him unconditional love. But at the end of the day, you're still connected to your family. When you're growing up in a family, your parents are the ones who will determine whether or not you grow up as an adult who has that strong sense of self. And if your parents don't do that, you're still, you're always going to have that emptiness. No matter how many times someone tells you you are loved, you're valuable, because your parents didn't do that and you didn't deal with that stuff, you're not going to believe that. However, once you do find love and you realize that I'm still depressed, I finally have a chance at happiness. So I want to deal with my past and enjoy this blessing that is Charlie. That can give you the courage to actually fight for yourself and heal. You see what I mean? But the person still has to do it. But the person still has to do it. They might not be able to do it. And so that's where if someone you love takes their life, it was never about you. It's always about them and there was nothing that you could have ever done. He feels like he's about to pass away. He decides to just very aggressively send all students a message asking them to write something honest. Some of you saw my post about writing something honest. The things that some of you wrote. Christy, you wrote, my parents want me to be a radiologist. But I don't even know what that is. I like that only a couple because it's realistic that some people would just be like, well, this is too much, right? Because whenever you're trying to bring out the most genuine parts of people or the world, most people will find too jarring, breaking too many walls or structures or realities and people will reject it. They won't react well. When Charlie's like, I love that some of you were honest. I'm going to be honest myself. And I was like, oh, Charlie, I feel bad because I was like, someone was going to whip out a camera and they indeed did. I would wager a guess that those that were filming and probably laughing or mocking or judging were the ones that put in the complaints and were not the ones that were into the honesty assignment. I used to really struggle to understand that people are different from each other. I used to be so confused by why anyone wouldn't be sympathetic to someone like Charlie and wouldn't celebrate him finally opening up like he did in the end. And even as he did it, I felt like, oh, I can't watch because I knew after years of experience now, realizing that just because you think a certain way doesn't mean other people think a certain way. So when he's talking about just be honest, I'm like, what does being honest mean? Most of the people won't even understand that. And they won't even understand that if they said, we hate the fact that you never put your damn camera on. What is this? It's so annoying. We all of us put our camera on and you have the damn lecture if we're crying out loud. They don't even understand that if someone said that, Charlie would probably be happy. And of course, the school system is also very contaminated. Let's be honest. If you've gone to school, you know early on honesty is not going to get you far. It's not going to get you far. What's going to get you far is to follow the rules. Which I think is why most people would reject it because they're like, this is a test. You're trying to trick me. I'm going to get a bad mark. So I'm going to go against this because this feels wrong against the programming. Even when it seems like people hate your guts, it's because there's there's caring and people will do so much for the people to care about. I think it's true. I think under all the indifference and apathy, there is a lot of caring there, but it's been stifled. It's been pushed down. It's been... Or it presents in a way that doesn't look like it's caring, even though it is caring. Yeah. What the f*** did you do? What's wrong with him? So call someone. That's caring. That's caring. Yeah. I feel bad for Liz. She lost her brother. She's also losing her family. Her and Charlie are family to each other and she's finding out all of these things that are so devastating. I could have gotten you anything you needed. Special beds, physical therapists, f***ing health insurance. Last winter, when my pickup broke down and I had to walk through the snow to get your groceries I offered to get your truck fast. Yeah, and I refused because I thought you had $700 in your bank account. And why is it for Ellie? It's always been for Ellie. If there was ever any kind of emergency, I wouldn't give you the money. Would you? Of course she's invested in him staying. She cares about him. And you had all this money. You could have gone to the hospital. Why didn't you? Yeah, you could have... My car. Yeah, you could have also helped me out too. Yeah. You know, but then that would have then blown his secret of keeping all the money for his daughter. But Liz is like, but I'm the one taking care of you. I'm the only one seems to really care about you. Yeah. She also had to leave the church that she was part of, which... She lost her family too. That was never an easy thing to do. I don't know. I feel like Charlie wasn't really speaking very clearly. I think the mother was right when she said like, you're so selfish. It's either like you or the daughter. You don't care about anyone else. Exactly. I just wanted to see her, Mary. I've always just wanted to see her. It's all about you, even now. I truly believe that he was so selfish and so blind to how many lives he was negatively impacting. Liz is family and is in this horrible situation of watching someone die, begging you to not die and is supporting you in any way that she can, fighting for your life that you're not fighting for. You need help in there? What are you sorry about? I'm sorry. I don't know. Just sorry. And all you say is you're sorry. Sorry does not mean anything if your actions aren't saying it. Let me tell you Charlie, don't say you're sorry unless your actions are changing. Therefore, if you recognize that you're harming other people, take actions that counter. It's harm. And if you're not countering that harm, but you keep saying sorry, you're not sorry. Clap for Charlie. Living with addiction is brutal. Also, food addiction is a really tough one because I think, especially when your body shows or at least hints at some kind of addiction. People are so repulsed by you. They are repulsed by your appearance. First of all, like the guy who drops off his pizzas finally he waits for Charlie to see who is this person that I'm always talking to. And he sees him and he has that look of disgust which then throws Charlie into a tailspin. We could try and give it to Charlie because I think Charlie is in a lot of ways very compassionate and optimistic and a good person. Why it seems so selfish towards some of the people that care about him? Addiction can make people selfish. Being unable to be there for Liz is like, bring me the food. She's the one that brings me the food that's all I care about. It really bogs you down. It's hard for you to be considered of other people. It was really hard to watch him struggling that way and knowing what he was doing to himself and not caring. You repulse yourself. You can't stop. You can't get yourself out of it. He's a smart guy, Charlie. You can be smart in that way yet be totally helpless or hopeless or stuck when it comes to deep rooted oppression. I have money. Just go to the hospital. Both though that that money is for Ellie. What's that? I need to know that she's gonna have a decent life where she cares about people and other people care about her. To save myself and spend all this money or to save it for her to give her a better chance at life and I mean I did mess up her life. I think that was at least an understandable decision whether or not it was the right decision. I don't know but I think it was coming from a good place. Anyway, I'm done. No more talking. Before recording you were like I don't know if you want to have anything to say about this. I know. Oh no. But that was some stuff that we had to say about the whale. But what did you guys think? Have you seen it? Let us know in the comments down below. Please share your thoughts on our thoughts until next time. Thanks for watching. Let's wrap. Bye.