Issue 12: Family Ties
Hey there!
It’s time to wrap up another month and send another issue out into the world, and this time around we’re mulling over stories about families, whether those families be good, bad, ugly, or a tangle of all three. First, Alex discusses the unexpectedly sensitive father-daughter relationship powering Riders of Justice. Next, Claudia digs into the complicated sibling dynamics of The Wednesday Wars and How to Find What You’re Not Looking For.
Alex on Riders of Justice
Riders of Justice, a 2020 Danish revenge thriller, starts out identical to every other revenge thriller you’ve ever watched. A woman, Emma, dies in a train crash, leaving behind a teenage daughter, Mathilde, and a military husband, Markus. Mathilde, who survived the crash, is full of guilt. Markus’s violent streak is compounded by denial and grief. They’re both primed to start something ugly. When another survivor tips off Markus that the crash wasn’t accidental, a bloody search for answers begins.
Obviously, the search leads in unexpected directions. The most unexpected direction, though, isn’t so much in the film’s plot as in its focus. As the bodies pile up and Markus and Mathilde’s tense relationship reaches its breaking point, you start to realize that Riders of Justice is just as much a family drama about trauma and recovery.
It’s also one of the rare-ish action movies that gives its teen girl character a fully developed emotional arc. Plenty of thrillers (off the top of my head: Taken, Man on Fire, You Were Never Really Here, Sicario: Day of the Soldado) feature young girls who represent broken pieces of the protagonist’s psyche. Representative but not dynamic, they kickstart redemption or vengeance without changing much themselves. In Riders of Justice, Mathilde and Markus are doubles of each other, muddling parallel journeys through loss. It’s a small twist that turns Mathilde’s struggle to connect with Markus into the emotional center of the film.
After her mom’s death, Mathilde wants to see a grief counselor. Markus refuses. Mathilde has hopes about an afterlife, but Markus blows them to smithereens: “[Mom’s] nothing now. She’s gone.” He bugs Mathilde about her weight and gives her pacifist boyfriend a black eye. Markus loves his daughter, but he’s controlling and too stubborn to connect with Mathilde on her own terms.
Mathilde is also bad at compromise and connection. When Markus tells her he can’t handle talking to a counselor right now, she scoffs. She has control issues, covering her bedroom wall with post-its as she tries to discover a link between the random events leading up to her mom’s death. Though they’re grieving, both characters are so bad at acceptance—accepting that people grieve in different ways, accepting that terrible things can happen without a reason—that you get the feeling it’s an inborn flaw passed down from father to daughter, and that it’s soured their family for years.
All this stuff could get tedious in a different movie. Usually, I come to thrillers because I want blood and guts and propulsion, and when it comes to its emotional beats, Riders of Justice isn’t exactly propulsive. Mathilde and Markus reach out to one another, then lash out, then stonewall. Wash, rinse, repeat. They constantly revisit old arguments and prod old wounds. In a different movie, they could be monstrous or, worse, a chore to watch.
They’re not, because Riders of Justice is propelled by need—the need for vengeance, sure, but also the thorny needs that come with being part of a family, deeply linked and deeply similar to someone you love but can’t stand. Mathilde is Markus’s broken piece, the bit of relative innocence he’d kill anyone else to protect, but Markus is Mathilde’s broken piece, too. Her anger and stubbornness, which mirror his, are often all that’s stopping Mathilde from giving up on her dad entirely. This lends an urgency to their repetitive scenes together. Every fight seethes with the possibility that this time, she’ll walk away for good.
But—slight spoilers—Mathilde doesn’t walk away. The flaws she shares with Markus bind them together so tightly that by the end there’s redemption in anger and love in stubbornness. Being a teenager was, for me, anyway, the first time I started to realize that you can’t understand your parents without understanding the faults you inherited from them. In its bloody, surprisingly sweet climax, Riders of Justice shows how that understanding might finally melt into the acceptance that’s eluded Mathilde and Markus so far. Turns out Mathilde has been part of her dad all along. What’s changed her is learning to live with that.
Claudia on The Wednesday Wars and How to Find What You’re Not Looking For
Alex and I are the oldest of five, so growing up we were preoccupied with birth order. Both of us fantasized about having an older sibling—Alex wanted a brother, my daydreams never progressed far enough to have a preferred gender—who would be somewhere between a parent and a super-cool best friend. In high school I joked about it with a friend who did have an older brother, and her response still cracks me up: “I don’t recommend it.”
At different points in their stories, the protagonists of Gary D. Schmidt’s 2007 novel The Wednesday Wars and last year’s How to Find What You’re Not Looking For, by Veera Hiranandani, would probably find themselves saying the same thing. Holling Hoodhood’s and Ariel Goldberg’s relationships with their older sisters are pivotal to their understanding of the changing times and themselves, but they are far from easy.
Both books are set in 1967, when radical social changes and the Vietnam War were transforming the fabric of United States culture. Holling and Ariel find themselves pulled between the conservative mores of their parents and the more modern views of their sisters. Holling’s sister is obsessed with Bobby Kennedy, aspires to be a flower child, and criticizes her brother for not standing up to their controlling father. Ariel’s relationship with her sister Leah is initially much closer, but she feels painfully betrayed when Leah runs away to marry a South Asian college student against their parents’ wishes. Reading the two novels together shows how the characters are able to use this in-betweenness to navigate prejudice and opposition and bring their sisters home.
“Mrs. Baker hates your guts, right?” Holling’s sister asks in The Wednesday Wars’ opening chapters. “[Y]ou might try getting some.” The teacher in question actually turns out to be a supportive mentor to him, but Holling still struggles to stand up for himself, especially when faced with his father’s selfish obsession with suburban conformity. When his sister does break free and run away, Mr. Hoodhood is so angry that he refuses to pick her up after her plans fall through and she returns to New York. Finally ignoring his father’s wishes, Holling goes to meet her instead.
“I was so afraid I wouldn’t find you,” she tells him.
“I was standing right here, Heather,” he replies. “I’ll always be standing right here.” The moment is significant, not just because it’s the first time in the book he’s called her by her name and not just “my sister,” but also because, in doing so, he acknowledges and provides the unconditional love and support their parents refuse to.
Ariel’s personal growth also depends on her journey to find her lost sister. After Leah elopes with her husband, Ariel plans a trip to New York City to find her, but is plagued with doubt: “what if you don’t find her? Won’t that be harder?” When she does overcome her fears and finally meets Leah, her shock is poignant, as she realizes that “You never actually thought you’d find her, but you wanted to be able to tell her someday that you tried.” Like Schmidt, Hiranandani uses a stylistic choice to amplify the moment. In this case, the second-person point-of-view used throughout the novel draws readers beneath Ariel’s skin, allowing them to feel the bittersweet ache of her reunion as if it were their own.
Neither book has a perfect happy ending. Holling and Heather are still stuck with a largely uncaring father, and although Ariel’s parents do apologize for their prejudice and mend bridges with Leah and her husband, cultural and religious barriers remain. What these novels do have plenty of is hope. At one point, a bus driver tells Holling, “You’d better meet a whole lot of people who are really kind to you.” The beauty of The Wednesday Wars and How to Find What You’re Not Looking For is that Holling and Ariel are the kind people, and by braving their fears and opening their hearts, they are able to create a better life and a stronger family than what they started with.
As always, thank you so much for reading, and we’ll be back at the end of April with another issue!
Till next time,
Alex and Claudia