Blood Brothers Musical and Classism - Stevie Hardwich

Blood Brothers is a musical set in the 1960s in England. It begins with a maid, Mrs. Johnson,

worrying about her current pregnancy as she already has 7 children she is struggling to support.

Once she finds out she's pregnant with twins, she explains her situation with her employer,

Mrs. Lyons, and expresses her worries. Mrs. Lyons is desperate for a child, but she has been

unable to conceive and her husband doesn't want to adopt. However, he is overseas at the

moment for many months. While Mrs. Johnson explains that she cannot care for both children,

Mrs. Lyons suggests that Mrs. Johnson gives one child to her. Mrs. Johnson agrees, and tells her

children that one twin didn't survive. Mrs. Johnson soon begins to regret this as she continues to

work as Mrs. Lyons maid. Mrs. Lyons thinks that Mrs. Johnson is spending too much time with t

he twin, Edward Lyons, and fires her. Edward meets his twin, Mickey, and they become friends,

despite the mothers' attempts to keep them away from each other. Mrs. Lyons decides that they

need to move away from the Johnsons, and convinces her husband that the countryside would

be better for them. The Johnson family is rehomed to the same countryside through a

government program. Mickey and his friend find Edward once again, and their friendship is

renewed, as is Mrs. Lyons' paranoia. Later, Edward goes to college, and Mickey struggles with

a pregnant girlfriend and loses his job. Eddie comes home, and Mickey realizes how different

they are, and they end their friendship. Micky takes part in a robbery gone wrong in an attempt to

get more money, and is an accessory to murder. He is arrested and diagnosed with severed

depression, which he is medicated for. He is released early, and comes out with an addiction to

the pills he was prescribed with in prison. His wife, Linda, contacts Eddie for help, and he's

able to get Mickey a job and a house. Eddie and Linda get closer and reveal that they have

both liked each other for sometime. Depending on the play, they either sleep together or

simply kiss each other. Either way, Mickey finds out about their affair from Mrs. Lyons, and he

leaves to find Eddie. Eddie is giving a speech when Mickey interrupts with a gun, claiming t

hat he knows that Eddie and Linda had an affair. His mom, Mrs. Johnson, comes in and

explains that they are twins in an attempt to calm Mickey down. Instead, he says,

"You. You! Why didn’t you give me away? I could have been…I could have been him!" He then

shoots his brother, and is shot by the police directly after. 

This story explores classism through the lens of identical twins. One twin is given a privileged

lifestyle and becomes successful. The other twin is born poor, and ends up in prison.

They were identical, and poverty is the reason they were split up at birth, and it led to their

eventual deaths. 

Mrs. Lyons was an incredibly selfish character, despite claiming all she ever wanted was a child.

She purposefully separated the birth mom from her child, and did everything she could to keep

the twins apart. Eventually, her obsession with her son led to his murder by his own brother. 

While the ending was tragic, I don't believe a truly happy ending was possible, unless

Edward had left Mickey behind for good. But they were long-lost twins who became close friends. Had the Johnsons been struggling financially so much, they would've been able to afford both twins, and Mickey wouldn't have helped his brother rob a bank. The plot would be a different story.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Does an Artist Capture? - Jacob Hamilton

  What does the artist capture in his artwork? This question has  emerged  in class on multiple occasions. If  a painter paints an image of  a  chair, what is captured in that  image? One might naively respond that the artist has captured the chair . This answer implies that the artist has tried through his art to produce a duplicate of a chair. If this is the artist’s end, then the artist  is in pursuit  of a frivolous end. To recreate or reproduce a chair via the medium of painting will only produce  a highly deficient chair. One cannot  sit on a chair that has been painted  and it  is  therefore  a very bad  chair.  Therefore, it is  highly  dubious to  maintain  that the artist’s job is to produce duplicates of things .    T he question   remain s , w hen an artist paints a chair ,  what is he trying to capture?   When we engage with objects in the world,...
Read more

Pilgrimage - Julia Allen

 I had for so long in my life misunderstood the true meaning of a pilgrim, and I loved how the reading and discussion in class re-framed what a pilgrim is. Someone who is focused on the experience of their journey rather than an end goal is the broadest definition of pilgrim that I can take away from this. I had only thought of pilgrims as either religious pilgrims or the image of the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, but what a pilgrim really is is someone on a spiritual journey of some kind. In class, we discussed Chris McCandless was a pilgrim going on a journey that people really misunderstood. He separated himself from society and left to find himself, and people struggle to understand actions like this that they see as reckless or dangerous. Pilgrims are liminal, the cease to be productive in society and remove themselves from it in order to connect with nature/god, and in a productivity focused society like ours it is hard to appreciate these people and their pursuit of higher self...
Read more

The Movie Chef - Nikola Kalapasev

Chef is probably one of my favorite movies of all time, and not because of the screenplay or writing, because I've found so many similarities in myself and the characters that it almost seems like this could have been an alternate version to the life I live today. Chef follows the story of a guy named carl casper, who is a hard working head chef at a nice restaurant who is divorced and has a son. [Spoilers ahead] The movie then transitions into a more melancholy state, where chef Casper has just been fired from his job as head chef after getting into a dispute with well known food critic. Chef Casper then goes into a depression, but during this time he doesn't lose his passion for his craft of cooking wonderfully delicious and aesthetically pleasing food. The turning point is when Caspers' son tries a cubano sandwich and tells his dad that it was one of the best sandwiches he's ever had. The movie then springs into an upward march, where chef Casper begins an expedition...
Read more