Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Smoking in the Boy’s Room

Today’s For Better or For Worse started me down the road of “What could John Patterson have been doing in that bathroom, he couldn’t answer his son?” A whole pile of things popped into my head and quite a few of them were a little nasty. In this respect the strip works on a few levels:

a. Michael is being ignored by his parents. Considering we have spent the last 2 ½ weeks watching little Michael, demon child, this reaction from his parents should not be too surprising. The consistent statement from many observers has been, “Why don’t John and Elly do something to set this kid straight?” Maybe today, Lynn Johnston is giving us the answer.
b. John is doing nasty things behind that door. This is not something which would jump out to the kids reading this strip, but I expect any parents who have gone in the bathroom to smoke, or a lot of other less legal things, would pick up on this particular aspect of the strip. This is the early 80s after all, and John, as a dentist, has easy access to drugs.
c. John Patterson will not even talk to Michael to tell him to go away. This tells you the level to which Mike and his father are separated.

This strip may not be funny, but it reveals a lot about the Pattersons in 3 short panels, and in particular John Patterson. It does paint him as a much more complex character, even if he is also being painted as fantastically bad, dad.

12 Comments:

Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

This comment has been removed by the author.

10:46 PM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

No surprise, there. It's not like John made enough of a connection to his son to favor him with a simple 'Use the one downstairs' like a regular human being. He wants the trappings of family life to hold over his idiot friend Ted but doesn't want to live up to the obligations that entails. He never learned that he couldn't have his cake and eat it too.

10:47 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Amazing how this foreshadows Mike's parenting style of Only Pay Attention To The Children When It's Convenient For Me.

6:49 AM  
Blogger howard said...

dreadedcandiru2,

At this time in her life, Lynn Johnston is probably modeling Rod Johnston and the things he did at the time. Of course, this strip from last year, seems to indicate John Patterson likes to sit in the toilet and read. His improvement in the intervening 26 years is that he will respond to someone’s voice. But back in 1980, Rod Johnston may have had the practice of sitting in toilet to read and he decided, for whatever reasons, not to respond to anyone who tried to talk to him through the door, probably with the hope that by not responding they would go away. In these early strips, it was not uncommon for Rod to take a beating from Lynn, because she would take every little complaint she had about his behaviour and put it in the strip. Sometimes it made for real-life experiences, and other times (like today), it shows Rod’s more eccentric behaviour.

8:29 AM  
Blogger howard said...

dlauthor,

Amazing how this foreshadows Mike's parenting style of Only Pay Attention To The Children When It's Convenient For Me.

I don’t know how much of this is foreshadowing or repetition. To my knowledge, Aaron Johnston never got married or had kids, so the model for fatherhood which Lynn would use, is once again, Rod Johnston.

8:29 AM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

That came through in one of the first interviews she gave. Rod was hovering in the background wondering out loud why she did that. He was upset 'cause he didn't want all his quirks placed on public display. Too bad that he'd become a semi-public figure and had to expect that sort of thing.

9:36 AM  
Blogger howard said...

dreadedcandiru2,

The question still remains about why she did that. There is one viewpoint that her family had to live with her mining their lives for her material, and that material allowed them to prosper financially, so they shouldn’t complain.

There is also the possibility that Lynn shares in the passive aggressive behaviour traits of the Pattersons, and instead of taking up her irritation with Rod in private, she does like Mike Patterson did with the Kelpfroths, and takes her grievances public. Some ladies do that with their husbands when they are at public events or social occasions, where they feel they can lash out at their husband in a protected environment. With For Better or For Worse, Lynn had a huge venue for doing that, if that is what she was doing.

The other possibility is that, since Lynn was doing these 1980 strips while she was living in Lynn Lake, where she hated living, she was using the embarrassing strips as a means to get back at her husband, who loved Lynn Lake.

In general though, John Patterson almost never presented the positive aspects of Rod Johnston and his involvement in bettering his community and his involvement in supporting local colleges or doing dentistry in out-of-the way places. Outside of dentistry, the only characteristic of Rod presented is the trains. John, the character, would have been more interesting if we had seen his involvement in his community, like his alter ego. What we get from today’s strip is that Lynn Johnston had an agenda in how John was presented, and it often was not a positive one. Maybe Lynn thought the negative side was funnier.

10:07 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Actually, I believe Aaron Johnston is divorced. I wonder if the Mike/Dee/Merrie/Robin depiction is Lynn's way of showing Aaron the way she believes things should have gone. (Maybe Aaron married his Rhetta?)

11:22 AM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

Her distaste for small town living and Rod's love of same also showed through in the collapse of Liz's relationship with Paul. He was suddenly grossbuckets because he wouldn't live in the city like a normal human being and expected Liz to waste HER life in a no-stoplight town.

11:46 AM  
Blogger howard said...

aprilp_katje,

Aaron Johnston is divorced? But is he divorced without kids? If so, then the image of Mike’s fathering skills might still come from Rod.

As for Aaron marrying his Rhetta, that’s very possible. In that podcast interview, Lynn Johnston said the whole reason that Deanna was brought back into the picture was so that Mike would be able to experience the same situation Aaron did with his filmed (car accident / public suicide in a tree with a pretty sunset. Take your pick of which story of Lynn’s you believe.). Lynn said she wanted Mike to realize that the person involved was someone he used to know, and she picked Deanna out of her old Mike-related characters for that person to be. Of course, that doesn’t mean that Mike had to marry Deanna, just feel remorse over his behaviour after her accident.

That leads to our other speculations about why Deanna Sobinski instead of Rhetta Blum for a mate for Mike. When you consider that Rhetta essentially fell into the same role as Anthony Caine did for Elizabeth (the high school love interest, who lost interest at university), it seems even more unusual now that Mike would simply throw off Rhetta for Deanna, because he was told second hand that Rhetta went out on a date. After all, Anthony did a whole lot more than that, when he married and had a child with his university girlfriend, and look at the extremes of poor plotting Lynn Johnston is going through to put those two together.

qnjones suggested months ago, that the real reason Rhetta was eliminated was the obvious Jewishness of her last name Blum. I don’t like to think of Lynn Johnston as being biased in this fashion, since she does a pretty job including other races and religions as her supporting cast in For Better or For Worse. Nevertheless, we have hit a period where Duncan was matched with Eva (and not Becky or April), and a lot of what made Paul Wright unacceptable was his status as an Ojibway, and their races’ supposed inability to move to the South. Given this more recent history with Lynn’s plotting, qnjones suggestion seems like a more viable reason than it ever did before.

Do you know if Aaron married a woman with a different religion than Anglican?

1:38 PM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

I guess lapsed Anglican and lapsed Catholic are close enough a match to have the Lynn Johnston anti-miscegenation seal of approval. The main thing is that both of the Pattersons Redux view Sunday as a day for sleeping in till nine.

1:46 PM  
Blogger howard said...

dreadedcandiru2,

We did have a “Merrie in church” strip from last Easter, so I expect the Pattersons fall into the “go to church at Easter and Christmas” crowd. It’s interesting to me that people who consider their religion so lightly would even care if the bride was Jewish. Nevertheless, I have met Christians and Jews who barely practice their religion, who believe strongly about “stick with your own kind.” This may not have anything to with Mike’s choice of bride, but the longer Lynn writes romance storylines, the more it looks like this is her belief.

2:27 PM  

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