martes, 26 de abril de 2011

Equus - Family

To what extent is Alan´s family responsible for his worship of horses?

Alan sees his father as a personification of prohibition: He interrupts Alan´s first experience with horses, he forbids him from watching TV, he does not let him bring his girlfriend home, he pulls off the poster of Jesus from Alan´s bedroom without previous warning and worst of all, Frank takes him out of the porn – cinema. That´s when Alan realizes that his father is not such a hard worker, that he spends his free time watching pornographic films instead of going home while his wife is waiting for him. In addition, he´s resentful towards his dad because he´s obliged to work at the shop.

His mother works with her religious influence over Alan with disastrous effects, always reminding him that “God sees you, Alan. God´s got eyes everywhere.” This statement is the trigger for Alan´s worship of horses, as Frank says in the following passage: “…it´s the Bible that´s responsible for all this […] A boy spends night after night having this stuff read into him: an innocent man tortured to death…”.

Alan Strang lives in two very different worlds: On the one hand, he lives his parents´ world, the one which is influenced by religion (due to his mum) and prohibition (due to his dad), in which all his desires are repressed. Nobody has ever treated him like a normal person, except from Jill, the girl he meets at the shop. That is the first person who really takes him seriously, and that shows Alan´s relationship with his family.
On the other hand, he lives a world of satisfaction and joy when he´s with horses, free to feel and express himself as he wants. It is such the devotion he has for horses, that he blinds them after having sex with Jill.

To conclude, we could say that Alan´s family is highly responsible for his worship of horses, repressing his thoughts and beliefs through a strange mixture of religion and social mandates.

Nicolás Tarocco and Santiago Sartori Prósperi

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