A forgiving twist in the tale
Forget happily-ever-afters. The new millennial fantasy is an apology, from a parent or grandparent, that acknowledges unrealistic expectation, breaks a cycle, opens a door to healing
It’s being called millennial apology fantasy. In film after film, over the past two years — from movies set in the multiverse (Everything Everywhere All at Once), to animation capers (Turning Red; Encanto) and films about future worlds under threat from robots (The Mitchells vs the Machines) — parents are apologising to their children, acknowledging intergenerational trauma, opening a door to healing.
“I see you, Mei-Mei. You try to make everyone happy, but are so hard on yourself, and if I taught you that, I’m sorry,” Ming Lee says to her daughter Meilin, in Turning Red (2022).
“I lost sight of who our miracle was for,” the matriarch of a gifted family says in Encanto (2021), finally acknowledging her not-magically-gifted granddaughter.
It’s another twist in the tale of how pop culture has reflected and promoted new parenting styles. Adages such as “Spare the rod, spoil the child” gave way, in the 1940s, for instance, to an approach that focused on the emotional needs of children. This shift was sparked by American paediatrician Dr Benjamin Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare (1946), which called for parents to replace strict schedules and stiff upper lips with hugs and discussions of feelings. By the time of Dr Spock’s death in 1998, it had sold more than 50 million copies.
By that time, family formats were changing, with the rise of the nuclear family, the two-career family and the post-divorce family. Films such as Mrs Doubtfire (1993), One Fine Day (1996) and Stepmom (1998) offered comforting but trite takes, putting parents in desperate predicaments to allow them to reassure their children of their love. A dad dressed in drag to pose as a nanny. A little boy went missing, sending his working mom into hysterics. A woman struggled with her feelings, entrusted her children to their stepmom, then died gracefully of cancer.
These tales had little real-world relevance, but they were cathartic, and played the vital role of normalising divorce, dating mothers, multi-parent families. They also reinforced what Dr Spock had posited: that being a good parent was not an innate skill. It required learning, and involved mistakes.
The ’90s children raised in those new formats and approaches would come to be called millennials. “As millennials became parents in the last decade, they brought with them a wave of newly compassionate and conscious parenting,” says Sukriti Das, a clinical psychologist and learning and development head at online therapy platform Betterlyf. “Nuclear families had been around long enough for them to be able to introspect, identify elements of intergenerational trauma that they wish to break the cycle on.”
And so, in Encanto and Everything Everywhere…, the cycle is broken on the intergenerational trauma of unrealistic expectations such as magical levels of talent, perfection in behaviour and appearance, a child that will unfailingly mirror the parent. The apologies come as parents acknowledge the damage caused by the sense of conditional love.
In Turning Red, the cycle is broken on the trauma of repressed passion and anger.
In films and TV shows through the decades, this kind of intergenerational trauma was typically mined for comedy or drama (think of Two and a Half Men and India’s saas-bahu serials). The aim there is not resolution or healing; it is to further the plot. Admissions of guilt are conditional, insincere or comedic. Often there are, conveniently, wrongs on both sides.
“A graceful, unconditional apology by a parent helps the child open their eyes and see that there is more complexity to the parent’s story than they perceived,” says Deepanjana Pal, writer, cultural critic and managing editor at Film Companion. “It also acknowledges that the parent’s reactions are rooted in deeper issues of intergenerational trauma. Traditionally coming-of-age movies showed the young set out in search of their identity, forging a new path after cutting ties with older ways. What we have now is an acceptance of intergenerational trauma and an acknowledgment that we are not disconnected from the previous generation.”
This, in the end, is the most interesting lesson: that everyone has a story arc of their own, and the power to alter it, at least in adulthood. As Evelyn Wang says to her father in Everything Everywhere... (2022), “I’m no longer willing to do to my daughter what you did to me.”