Robert Parrish - Tumblr Posts

i never do fic recs but nu yur nu meh etc. i’m in the mood so here we go for some pynch goodness - I’m just focusing on complete stories rn as I was going to include incomplete works and then realised that that would be a lot and take more time than i have rn, so hopefully I’ll make another post with those at a later stage. i’m also just posting these three stories as a lot of my other complete fic recs are much more popular/generally rec’d so i thought it might be nice to give these a boost (they’re all relatively recent too) 

not that damn impossible by @douxamers​ / douxamer Rating: E | Length: 15,909 ‘I was thinking,’ Adam says eventually. ‘I’m lucky. That we’re friends.’Friends, Ronan thinks, and the word shakes him back to earth. He’s supposed to be Adam’s fucking friend. non-magical au, ronan pov, pining/slowburn, robert parrish warning   - ronan is so wholesome, the barns is so wholesome, it starts with an alternate beginning to ronan and adam’s friendship and evolves into catching feelings and i cannot, but also you know that the shadow of robert parrish looms large in the background so there is also deep dark concern. i could read more and more of this a+ character work Witchcraft Celebrates by eheyeh (anyone know this author’s tumblr url?) Rating: M (though there’s an additional extra scene in the series which is E) | Length: 42,117 A slow burn, assholes-to-friends-to-lovers au, featuring cameos of Gansey being Gansey, but mainly about Adam and Ronan. Well, to be honest, mainly about Adam. But that makes it about Ronan. Or maybe it's the other way around. There are feelings and bad music and boys throwing things. Also pie. non-magic au (though persephone is her all-knowing self), mixed pov, set in new york, as above assholes-to-friends-to-lovers, robert parrish warning - while this is a non-magic au, the author does a really interesting job of altering elements of canon, particularly in relation to adam’s arc with his parents, to make them gel in a really realistic way. again character work is fabbb (i really liked the mention of the gadgets that ronan created as a prolific insomiac) & also adam’s approach to ronan’s birthday left me deceased

Walls and Bedrock by @douxamers​ / douxamer Rating: M | Length: 15,835  ‘Adam?’ said the therapist, with maybe a tinge of impatience creeping into her voice. It wasn’t – it wasn’t like if he said the wrong answer she’d tattoo Adam’s forehead with ‘fucked-up.’ (Ronan had said that this morning. Well, garbled it through a mouthful of eggs.)  Author’s Note: Non-magical AU, except Ronan's still a dream-thief. Set in the summer and fall between junior and senior year – Ronan has dropped out of school and is living alone in the Barns, while Adam is in an apartment and in school/working. Some things from canon are the same, some are different. WARNING: In this fic Adam mentally re-lives many scenes from his abusive childhood. The abuse itself is not re-lived but there are several references to violence. Adam and other characters discuss, in depth, the psychological effects of his abuse. adam sees a therapist, adam pov, adam feels unknowable, established relationship, hurt/comfort, secrets, non-linear narrative, sickfic, mental health and relationships, adam and ronan are good with kids, flashbacks to violence, flashback to animal cruelty in chapter 11 - this fic is heavy on the feels. ronan is extremely supportive and gentle and loving in an extremely ronan way. adam struggles to be on the receiving end of this and with his own understanding of his ability to love him back, or to think of a future where they’d grow a family of their own, due to the nature of his childhood. tbh i felt the way the books ended the storyline with adam and his parents was sort of abrupt? like suddenly his trauma evaporated or something. as a result, i’m completely here for adam not being suddenly okay, with him dealing with his past and seeking therapy and struggling with this. it’s tough and adam falls apart and ronan aches for him and it’s all expertly executed, you should read it if you can. 

literally everything in Adam’s pov makes my heart ache all the time but something that really struck me as the most Relatable Abuse Survivor Feeling were these passages, the first one being right after Adam pressed charges against his father and left the trailer at the end of TRB: 

Logically, Adam knew that he had nothing to miss, that he effectively had Stockholm syndrome, identifying with his captors, considering it a kindness when his father didn’t hit him. Objectively, he knew that he was abused. He knew the damage went deeper than any bruise he’d ever worn to school. He could endlessly dissect his reactions, doubt his emotions, wonder if he, too, would grow up to hit his own kid. 

But lying in the black of the night, all he could think was, My mother will never speak to me again. I’m homeless. 

And then you have this in TRK when Adam accidentally ends up back at the trailer and reflects on the trial results: 

What Ronan didn’t realize was that the victory hadn’t been in the punishment. Adam didn’t need his father to go to jail. He had merely needed someone outside the situation to look at it and confirm that yes, a crime had been committed. Adam had not invented it, spurred it, deserved it. It said so on the court paperwork. Robert Parrish, guilty. Adam Parrish, free.

And in the TRK epilogue:

It was perplexing to Adam how he had regarded this as normal for so long. He remembered how the neighbors used to turn away from his bruised face; he used to think, stupidly, that they said nothing because they thought he had somehow deserved it.

Because it doesn’t matter what Adam knows objectively about his abuse, it doesn’t matter what logic and rational thinking are telling him. He knew all the way back in TRB that he was abused and what the effects of that would be, but even in TRK, when he has developed and healed so much and come so far compared to where he was in TRB and TDT, he needed that outside validation. Because abuse survivors are constantly doubting those seemingly objective facts, constantly believing that they’re making it all up in their head and that it’s ridiculous to call it abuse because really, it’s not that bad, and they probably deserved it anyways (in fact that’s something that Robert Parrish uses against Adam in BLLB and probably many times before that - “You think they’re really gonna look at you and see an abused kid? Do you even know what abuse is? That judge will’ve heard enough stories to know a whopper. He’s not gonna blink an eye.”), and that’s why other people’s opinions matter. 

They matter to the point that Adam literally did not care whether or not his father went to jail, he only needed some sort of acknowledgement that what he went through was real, that he hadn’t invented it or deserved it. And that part of the reason Adam regarded abuse as something normal for so long and that contributed to him blaming himself for it, was the silence and the inaction and the victim blaming from the people around him who clearly saw that he was being abused. And from the results of the court case he receives the acknowledgement he needed so badly, and in the epilogue, a whole year after he moved out of his abusive household, he’s finally able to fully realize that it was all his father’s fault, that he wasn’t the one who “made it ugly,” he’s able to forgive his past self for being afraid and recognize that he saved himself.  

Also tbh he relates very heavily to this text post which like, same.

THE MOB (Dir: Robert Parrish, 1951).

A tough gangster movie-cum-film noir thriller. The Mob stars Broderick Crawford as Johnny Damico, a tough New York cop who poses as a longshoreman to bust up the corrupt union activity polluting the city's dockyards.

Based upon the novel Waterfront by Ferguson Findlay, The Mob covers similar ground to the more famous On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954). Pre-dating the latter movie by three years it is more of a pulpy crime drama that Kazan's socially conscience classic.

In his second outing as director, former editor Robert Parrish has crafted a hard hitting, at time brutal thriller which still packs a considerable punch seven decades later. It is a tough movie, with tough guys talking tough. William Bowers' screenplay is interspersed with some smart hard boiled dialogue, delivered in suitable pithy fashion by the excellent Broderick Crawford.

A year after his Oscar winning performance in All the King's Men (Robert Rossen, 1949) Crawford is dynamite here; perfectly cast as a hard nosed cop, ruthless in his mission to bring down the mob. Also impressing in an early role is Ernest Borgnine as thuggish mobster Johnny Castro. As his right hand man, Neville Brand is equally effective in one of many maniacal bad guy roles.

Often categerised as a film noir, The Mob feels closer to a gangster film than a true noir; its staccato pacing and overall theme evoking the Warner Brothers mob movies of 1930s. It presents an evocative, shadowy world of backstreets and dive bars populated with shady characters It is surprisingly violent at times, especially in its realistically scrappy fist fights.

It may not rank among the greatest thrillers of its era, but it is an exciting and engaging minor noir, or rather a gangster movie in noir clothing. Deserving of far more attention than it generally receives, The Mob is neat little crime flick with a cracking screenplay and a first rate cast. To my knowledge, the movies only official home video release is as part of Spain's Columbia Classics range. This may make The Mob a little difficult to source, but it is well worth the effort!

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