4 Minutes, Family, And Perceptions Of Reality

4 Minutes, Family, and Perceptions of Reality

Last week, before episode 6 aired, I was itching to pen some thoughts about breaking down family ties in 4 Minutes and how I thought themes like intergenerational trauma and filial piety (I stay so typical here on this blog) were affecting each character.

I'm glad I held off, and it's still probably just too soon to write this kind of analysis without knowing the entirety of the story. But this post by @cookie-kat777 about Great and possible present depression has me thinking at least about family, the way we are raised, and how our upbringings at least contribute to how we see the world as adults.

In this past Friday's episode, with @cookie-kat777's post on my mind, Great struck me as lonely and sociopathic -- and did Bible Wichapas ever do a HELL of a job acting out Great's generally questionable reactions as compared to everyday, normal social expectations of behavior surrounding INCREDIBLY intense and traumatic exposures to literal murder and/or death. At least we see him taking meds, but those giggles at the dinner table with his family were clearly off-putting and indicated that Great is not quite “there” in the head.

Even if Great didn't know about the illegal gambling business that built his wealthy lifestyle -- the choices, separately, that his father and his mother made to ensure their existence as a wealthy and important family certainly had brutal impacts on Great as he grew up, as well as, we assume, their emotional neglect of him during his upbringing.

(And, if I can bring up an example from the previous timeshift of earlier in the series, we know Great's parents used money to literally buy him happiness by way of toys that had no emotional meaning to him. Money may have bought him protection from consequences, but we've known from the start that it's never brought him happiness.)

Great's perception of what's SAFE and morally/ethically RIGHT, or at least, ACCEPTABLE, in the wider world, versus his own internal world, are UTTERLY OFF. While @cookie-kat777 absolutely lays out how that mental state could affect Great internally vis à vis depression, I'll also posit that it was Great's family environment -- his mother, his father, and Korn growing up knowing that he'd inherit at least some of the family business -- that also is fucking up his perception of the expected binary of "right" and "wrong" of society. We don't know quite how his mother clawed her way to Great's father's side, without Korn's mom present, but I'm going to guess it was brutal -- especially, as we see in this latest timeshift, Great's ability to walk away from death multiple times, and his father's angry ease in making death "go away," as it were (and let's throw Title in there, too).

A child's understanding of the world, how to go about in the world, how to interact in the world, how they relate to the external world, comes so much from their upbringing. An upbringing of a child creates relativity for that child. As children, we see the world as our caretakers interacted in it, and we're inclined to repeat that behavior -- until we are challenged by external forces to change our behavior and our viewpoints. Just as the four minutes from the time oxygen is cut off to a brain creates a new sense of perception, a specific upbringing of a child -- by parents, by grandparents, by a foster family, by an orphanage, etc. -- will have direct impacts on how that child grows up to relate to its world as an adult.

Tyme is the person that offers a challenge to Great's understanding of and relation to the external world and, subsequently, Great’s internal world as well. In this new timeshift of episode 6, I appreciate how Tyme seems so much more bitter, transactional, and "real" in straight-up using Great -- all while Great admires Tyme's tenacity to fuck with Great's family, as if Tyme were doing an action that Great has longed to do against his own family. Great ultimately does something, a one thing, in saving Tyme, but Tyme still walks away from Great, and Great is still left alone.

But in that process of being left alone, AGAIN, this time by someone who challenged him -- Great then moves forward to challenge his own existence and upbringing, confronting, finally, his parents for their decisions, and driving away from his mother. ...

... only to get shot by a grieving person in Tonkla, someone seeking revenge for a murdered brother that Tonkla simply loved. No matter where this story goes, at least we know that Tonkla loved Dome, to the extent of murdering others on Dome's behalf. While this storyline also isn't fully revealed, the Tonkla/Dome storyline narrates back to us, in another strange way, how family and familial ties can drive a person to go utterly haywire in their existence to survive and understand the world.

And, finally -- we learn that Tyme's parents were possibly the kingpins of the Sriwat illegal gambling business. How Tyme sees the world, in whatever timeshift he's in, has now also gotten jacked up with this piece of potential truth. What is his new reality vis à vis what he's been told? What is his capability to survive, especially after being saved by Great?

Like I said before, ha: I think it's too early to write this post without knowing if we'll be given a final, central narrative line about how all of these timeshifts link up. But I am LOVING, in this FABULOUS show, how we're being shown that the truths of how our families lived their lives can have such great impact on the way WE live OUR lives as adults, and I'm taking that theme away as something this show is commenting so very sophisticatedly on.