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that punishment, to show that although we were devastated by his punishment, we were being punished by someone who had suffered his own childhood traumas.
One of the most painful things to realize in making the film was that we all inherit so much sorrow and hurt from our parents. We aren't the product of perfectly balanced adults; we are each created by people who have a legacy of their own, which goes back through each family line. On my good, days, I try to believe that each generation rids itself of a bit of the violence of the prior generations, that with education and greater material well-being we wouldn't have such widespread abuse. But unfortunately I think the solutions are extremely complex, and I can see that simple notions like education are hardly an answer.
MacDonald:
The most obvious example of your ambivalence is the source of the title, which refers to the incident of his throwing you into the pool for you to "sink or swim," since you wanted to learn to swim. At the end of that story, you admit you've remained an avid swimmer.
Friedrich:
But the swimming was fraught with all kinds of anxiety, which is why at the end of the film I tell the story about wanting to swim all the way across the lake and realizing that maybe I'm not physically capable of it, and am certainly very frightened at the thought of doing it, but feel compelled to do it anyway, because of him. It's at that moment that I finally say, "No, I don't have to do that. I can enjoy swimming, but on my terms, and I won't take on his standards for what makes a good swimmer or a brave swimmer," and then I swim back to shore.
MacDonald:
Although there's an irony there, too, because you swim halfway across the lake and then back, which means you actually swam as far as all the way across.
Friedrich:
I think the ambivalence reveals a great deal about the stubbornness of human nature. Many children who are born into situations that undermine them in certain ways still manage to survive beyond the situations. The question is why parents build that degree of uncertainty and anxiety and fear into the family setup. If you want your children to learn something, why not teach them in a way that is constructive and supportive, rather than by terrorizing them? It's been standard practice for parents to get children to learn to do something by scaring them in one way or another about what will happen if they don't learn to do it. I don't think that's the way people learn. It's certainly not the way you learn to do something you later enjoy.
MacDonald:
I think in his generation there was this feeling that unless you were capable of terrorizing your kids a little, you weren't a serious parent. Scaring them was almost a way of demonstrating how much you cared. As a young parent, I remember debating in many situations whether I was wimping out and doing my child damage by not being