Submitted by: Submitted by megib
Views: 10
Words: 2331
Pages: 10
Category: Philosophy and Psychology
Date Submitted: 10/09/2016 02:16 PM
Life As A House
The movie begins when all George's repressed anger erupts on the day when he is fired from his job. Outside the building, he collapses. At the hospital, this bitter middle-ager learns that he is terminally ill with only three or four months to live. George decides to use this spiritual emergency as an opportunity to act upon a dream he's had for years — to tear down the shack his father left him and build a new house he's designed. He orders Sam to join him in this mission, realizing that it is a chance he has to get to really know his boy and express his love since he hasn’t really made an effort to be part of Sam’s life before and now that he is told that in a few months he will be dying he regrets all the time lost and tries to make it up in 4 short months.
Robin Kimball's, who is George's ex-wife and Sam’s mom, is now married to a wealthy man named Peter, who is a successful business man but is far apart from his wife and step kids, and a corrupted parent-hating rebel named Sam. Peter calls Sam a queer and pretty much just hates him. School is about to end for Sam and Peter is going away on business trip.
As the story progresses and Sam goes with his dad to build the new house, more characters with unique qualities are introduced. For the purpose of this paper the character I selected that I believe reflects my personality and method of dealing with life is Sam’s stepfather, Peter Kimball.
In my opinion, during this movie Peter is very undervalued as a character. Compared to George and Sam and Robin, Peter is almost irrelevant for most of the story line. Although in a psychological perspective many of the other characters are easier to analyze, I believe that Peter has a lot of things going on with his personality as well, that require analyzing.
Peter, being an adult between the ages of 40-65, according to Erik Erikson’s stages of development, is now going through “Generativity vs. Stagnation”. During this stage we establish our...