MovieChat Forums > The Slap (2011) Discussion > The backstory of Harry is a cheap way to...

The backstory of Harry is a cheap way to ......

posted 10 years ago by saneman1
6 replies | jump to latest

balance out the outrage. While I thought Harry shaking the kid was fine, slapping the kid that hard was out of line. A quick light firm slap on the lower body would have been tolerable response to a kick in the shins by the kid. Sometimes a kid should know a reaction has an equal and opposite reaction. But if I found myself slapping the kid that hard mistakenly(sometimes the action outweighs the off the cuff intention), I would have apologized sooner than Harry did. But other than that, I actually found him to be one of the more tolerable characters on the show until..... they showed the episode where he is depicted as the guy who broke his wife's jaw. Way to make it easy for the stupid women to justify their overreaction towards Harry though at least in Aisha's case, she is shown as not seeing a correlation between the two incidents. Still, she clearly eggs on her friend regarding the slap for most of the series instead of taking the rightful stand of not caving in when Harry hit his wife.

They do show Harry losing his temper once in one of the early episodes. That would have been enough to put enough grayness in his other positive features instead of making an outright wife beater.

[–] Ezrateach 10 years ago

Harry is obviously a guy filled with rage, one who has a vicious temper. That's obvious not only from the flashback of his wife's broken jaw but also from the scenes in his episode when he wraps his hands in Sandy's hair and painfully pulls it, hurting her, which his son witnesses. He also has a mistress he treats roughly, so he's not exactly Mr. Faithful, is he?

It seems like you just want to make excuses for an abuser.

[–] crooked_spoons 10 years ago

It seems like you just want to make excuses for an abuser.

Um no, OPs point was really quite clear and how you got that they were trying to make excuses for an abuser I'll never know. He acknowledged that Harry was an abuser, that was the entire point of the OP......

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[–] SWLinPHX-2 10 years ago

He is a "Type A" macho Greek guy raised with some Old World values. He definitely has anger issues but they did say he never hit his wife again after that. He does have a temper though.

[–] kay_cee_d 10 years ago

It seems like you just want to make excuses for an abuser.

I don't see the OP as saying that at all. From what I gather, they're saying that its kind of an easy way out to make Harry an abuser who broke his wife's jaw. Them doing that makes the situation perhaps a bit more "black & white" and excuses the hysterics of Rosie and her husband?

I don't know…I'm kind of on the fence about that. It does seem easy to make the character a wife abuser. But it does make the situation complicated because despite most of the audience saying "WTF, he shouldn't go to jail for that!!" they're also thinking "Well he did hit his wife….this could happen again…"

Not sure….it is an easy way out but it also plays with the audience's emotions and loyalties.

[–] lornamd-1 10 years ago

One of the more tolerable characters?

He pulled his wife's hair and frightens her which their young son witnesses and he is very rough with his mistress. He was shown as an abuser before the revelation about breaking his wives jaw. All that showed was that he was even more extreme than we were previously shown.

I don't think it justifies Rosie's behaviour. It doesn't change that she was irresponsible, never disciplined her son and that her obsessiveness over the incident probably further traumatized him.

Harry's abuse doesn't justify her actions anymore than her irresponsibility justifies his.

[–] ToHelenBackAgain 10 years ago

I think the show's actually demanding more from the audience, not less, by revealing that privately Harry really is an abusive man.

Because someone who isn't like that could have lost it and slapped the child, too, in that extremely trying moment...

So we're forced to step back from the easy knee-jerk response of "Oh well, he was terrible, he deserved all this," and ask ourselves, "But did he? Did he really?" Even though he was terrible. We're made to examine our own reactions, and separate the two.

"Who is Brian Keith?" "NOW you're just trying to piss me off!"