The Descendants

The movie. A friend and I took my sister and her husband to see the Golden Globe Award-nominated movie at Kapolei, Oahu’s second city. The Hawaii-filmed movie has George Clooney playing the role of a laid back de-machismo-sized descendant of a royal Hawaiian/haole marriage, unfamiliar to us who associate the debonair Clooney to Oceans 11, but a role not uncommon among Hawaiian percentage descendants, particularly those associated with the humanities, the arts and the Chardonnay-sipping crowd.

Clooney plays the sole trustee of an ocean cove property that would financially benefit a network of diverse cousins.

The Hawaiians.  We hanged out in Honolulu’s Kalihi neighborhood in the ’90s with some “descendants” including representatives of the rainbow ethnic coalition—Chinese-Filipino-Japanese-Portuguese-Hawaiian, et al  (before the LGTB crowd appropriated the image).

One of the early successful asbestos class suit lawyers made a bundle and built a helipad, a house atop a hill on one of the islands. Being one of the ’90s progressive Christians sympathetic to the Hawaii-for-Hawaiians cause, I joined to protest the cavalier attitude of our new well-to-do who neither submitted an environmental impact statement prior to his construction, nor honored the sanctity of the land he inadvertently desecrated.

A close friend lives in Maui, my Dad briefly pastored a community on the southern tip of the big island, Mom cooked for a juvenile delinquents’ halfway house, a sister nurses at Kapiolani Children’s Hospital, a brother was professionally assigned to Kauai, Waianae, and Kalihi, another brother works in the state penal system where a lot of Hawaiian blood reside, a nephew attended Obama’s Punahou, and I briefly bumped elbows with the powers-that-be while planning workforce development in the City of Honolulu. 

I do not feel uncomfortable or uninformed when discoursing on the displaced Kanes and Wahines of the Pacific realm to their spotted descendants portrayed in Michener’s Hawaii. Also conversant on the Pacific Islanders’ issues in Polynesia and Micronesia, I went to see the movie with heightened expectations on (DE)OCCUPY land issues.

The Victorian-Freudian modern family.  The movie did not add a whit to my social studies know-how but it challenged my social psychology on the descendants of Victorian propriety and Freudian guilt. Clooney’s movie wife was a woman who ventured into the edge of ecstasy as an expression of her femme liberte, while Clooney lackadaisied himself in the legal profession, oblivious to the desires and yearnings of an evidently gregarious wife, a budding teenage daughter, and one just crossing the threshold of puberty.

In a kamikaze lifestyle, the wife lies in coma at a hospital after a boating accident.  The movie portrays what happens when legal obligations from her will, the doctors sworn duty, and common sense led to unplugging the life support system so that nature takes its course. It turns out that the “good daughter and faithful wife” was carrying on an affair discovered by the teenage daughter, revealing the prevailing family dysfunction.

The soap opera that follows is authentic enough to exceed anything Korean TV dramas have yet to air, and with a wisecracking teenage boyfriend of the elder daughter, our innards were not immune to the movie plot as it unraveled on the silver screen the reality of the challenged Ohana.

My family.  Like any good movie worth remembering, The Descendants’ virtue in this January evening is in the manner it evoked existential identification among the audience. My visiting colleague has been a sole trustee of inherited land in the Philippines, and I watched her strategize and maneuver for four decades through real estate issues that involve a bevy of cousins; I wondered what was on her mind. 

But I was more aware of my own dysfunctional family, from among my own siblings around a 91-year-old mother of waning alertness ensconced in an elders’ apartment in Oahu’s Aala refusing public nursing care, to those of my progeny and relations that is multi-extended and diverse, with whom my continuing engagement covers the whole gamut of emotional state, none of which may be characterized as stable!

This is not a movie review so one will have to wait until the movie makes it to Saipan’s Hollywood theatre, or it comes to our local DVD rental office.  But I know that in my perspective, the question of what descendants claim as part of their memory and anticipation has moved out of cause-conditioned tradition, or chance-determined luck, into the arena of freedom where choice reigns paramount.

Many worry about the legacy they leave behind. As I live the last score of my 86-year journey, my descendants understand that their lives are what they make of it, out of their own virtues and standards, values and expectations, aims and objectives. 

When I go, I am expected to sum a zero balance in memory and anticipation. There shall be no wrangling over inheritance. There won’t be any. Only, we are now, and will be all, thankful.