In a previous film review, I left one thread unresolved: developmental arrest.
Not long ago, I organized a death-themed experience for a group made up entirely of stand-up comedians. The process asked them to face twelve subjects around life and death. Even while throwing out punchlines, comedians tend to have their own peculiar way of thinking. I have always been curious whether the logic of stand-up is better at “deconstruction” or “construction”—a topic for another time—so I paid close attention to the way they expressed themselves.
One comedian became visibly emotional when talking about his childhood. The comedian friends who knew him well, seeing him cry over it, dismissed the tears as “crocodile tears.” In their descriptions, he was someone who did not know how to speak properly, who held obvious double standards, who had very low emotional intelligence, and who often did things other people found impossible to understand.
He described growing up as a left-behind child. The happiest thing for him, he said, was when someone called him “older brother,” because that was the moment he felt needed.
That craving to be needed later transformed into him working several jobs at the same time, all of them related in some way to “service”: delivering food, moving packages, doing physically useful work for others. He had turned himself, in relationships, into something almost entirely functional. Yet in relationships he considered intimate—such as with his stand-up friends—he became the opposite: a boy who spoke without restraint.
The keyword we eventually gave him was “glass marble.” A glass marble is one of childhood’s most precious treasures. Every child wants to have it. But in the adult world, it is no longer needed. He had kept treasuring the moment when he was wanted, while sealing himself inside that transparent marble. What remained there was a pure kind of “boyishness.”
It is reasonable to guess that a part of him “died” at that moment: in the childhood when he was left behind, at the age when he most needed company, he had no choice but to act like an adult and take care of himself. So he kept searching for the feeling of being needed. Perhaps there was a day when, after school, he was bullied by a few local thugs and dragged his bruised body back to an empty home. Perhaps fear and loneliness hardened into a shell, wrapping the mind of that child inside a core where no one could hurt him again.
That is what I mean by developmental arrest.
But the “death” I am talking about here does not have to come only from bullying or neglect. It can also come from humiliation.
When I was in primary school, like other boys my age, I played games on the climbing bars at school. We chased one another across the bars without touching the ground. To force someone to let go, we often used low tricks, such as pulling down someone’s pants or spitting at them.
One time, a classmate lost the “match” and could not accept it, so he reported us to the teacher. After we were scolded, I became the designated culprit. Once the first student accused me of being the one who “started spitting,” the others involved, in order to protect themselves, began pointing at me too. I argued that everyone had done it and refused to “confess.” The homeroom teacher decided to make an example of me.
The teacher asked everyone who had supposedly been spat on by me to come up and stand in a row. Some of them had actually played the climbing-bar chase with us. Some had merely had conflicts with me before. Some simply disliked me. One after another, they insisted that I had spat on them.
I kept resisting. The teacher then commented that “spitting is something a shrew does; as a boy, you shouldn’t behave like that.” Seeing that I still showed no intention of admitting fault, the public denunciation eventually became a public apology. I had to cry while bowing and apologizing, one by one, to the row of classmates standing at the front of the classroom.
This was not, in any ordinary sense, a “big deal.” Children fight. Children have conflicts. But at that age I could not understand that my resistance, and the public punishment that followed, was itself a kind of “death.”
Shame is the experience closest to death. When shame happens, our connection with others is cut off all at once. We lose the affirmation others give to the self, and because of shame, we may also lose the affirmation we give ourselves. The self collapses; connection is severed. In its function, this resembles death.
Perhaps part of my own mind also “died” in that moment. Even now, there are many surface-level symptoms left behind.
For example: I believe spitting in public is disgraceful. I dislike climbing to high places. I am very afraid of saying “sorry,” and sometimes instinctively tear up when I have to say it. I reject the feminine traits in myself, because the teacher mocked spitting as the behavior of a “shrew.” I dislike children, though this is probably an extension of self-disgust. When a stranger stands somewhere high, I sometimes imagine, in disturbing detail, the entire process of pushing him from behind and watching him fall from a building until his body is smashed beyond recognition—perhaps an unconscious attempt to erase the childhood memory.
Because I could not resist at the time, I spent a long period habitually sealing off my real thoughts. After that incident, I rarely joined group activities that involved only boys.
That childhood experience of separating myself from myself made me into the “observer” I am now. What looked at first like the tiny beginning of a butterfly beating its wings eventually helped construct the person I became. Of course, many other experiences intervened along the way. But that event was like a large hole in the ground: after growing up, I might be able to fill it with cement, yet its material would never again be the same as the surrounding soil where seeds can still be planted.
So can it still be called a “small thing”?
There are places in me where a certain “boyishness” remains. It is like a bug in a program: it only activates under specific conditions. But my version of “boyishness” is closed in on itself and turns its aggression inward. Once it is triggered—when I am falsely accused, for instance, or when I am asked to apologize just to keep the peace—the black box inside me starts running.
If I had not gone through the process of dismantling and examining myself as an adult, perhaps I would simply have called it my “bottom line.”
Maybe everyone has a moment like this: an experience in which some part of them “died,” and from that point on, what remained was mistaken for so-called boyishness.