Butcher - The Patriarchs and the Sons in Witness and Mosquito Coast

There is a scene in Witness, when Eli is sitting with Samuel at the kitchen table with Book’s pistol and bullets laid in front of them. The camera is looking at them face on, and they sit close together, while the pistol appears far away on the table. Eli is the patriarch in their community, and Samuel’s role model. After his mother caught Samuel handling Book’s unloaded pistol with curiosity, Eli found it in his patriarchal duties to address Samuel’s fascination with the gun. Eli tells him that this gun is meant for “the taking of human life,” something which they in the Amish community believe to be wrong. Samuel respects his grandfather, but tells him that he would only use the gun to harm a bad man. Samuel lost his innocence when he witnessed a murder at the beginning of the film, so he claims to know badness through his experience. He has witnessed something that the patriarch has not. The question is now whether Samuel would kill, essentially become a bad man in Eli’s words, in order to protect his community. Eli must pose this philosophical question to enforce the Amish values taught in their community. The bonds that persist in the Amish community are strong, and Samuel must figure out whether these bonds are strong enough to overpower any of the badness that the city has revealed to him.

Contrary to Samuel, Charlie does not loose his innocence until the end of the film. Charlie holds his father, Allie, on a pedestal for half of Mosquito Coast, claiming in his voice over that his father is a genius. Allie drags his family on an adventure that transitions from bad to worse. In an effort to build a utopian society, Allie ends up destroying his perfect community and putting strain of his family, who, by the end of the film, simply wish to go back to the United States. After Allie builds fat boy and attempts to bring ice to the native people out in the jungle, Charlie begins to realize that his father has taken a turn for the worse. In the final scene of the film, after Allie sets fire to the church, the Fox family is floating away, down the river. Allie is lying down, paralyzed. When he comes to consciousness, Charlie rushes to his side. He appears above his incapacitated father, visually showing how Charlie has risen above his father. His father tells him that “the human body is a bad design,” that we’re not tough enough. In Charlie's final voice over he states, "Once I believed in father and the world seemed small and old. Now he was gone and I wasn't afraid to love him anymore. And the world seemed limitless." Charlie has seen the fault in his father, constantly seeking an unattainable perfection, and accepting that his father is not perfect, can move on.

Koeferl- Witness and The Mosquito Coast

The scene with Samuel and Eli with the pistol illustrates the change that Samuel has experienced since he lost his innocence by witnessing the murder. The scene immediately before this one is important; Book and Rachel try to hide the pistol after Samuel finds it, but Samuel is so intrigued by the weapon that he looks for and finds it again. When Eli asks him if he would ever take a life, Samuel replies, “If it’s a bad man.” He is expanding himself beyond the teachings of the Amish and creating his own set of rules. The dominant in the beginning of this scene is the pistol, since that was the focus of the previous scene; the eye is then attracted to Samuel and Eli. In terms of character proxemics, the two are very close because Samuel is sitting on Eli’s lap. Eli is worried that Samuel will abandon the Amish code, and is trying to get him to believe that all forms of violence are bad. Although in this scene the two are physically close, they are emotionally distant.

In The Mosquito Coast, the moment where Charlie understands that his father isn’t the great man he thought he was is when he watches as the three men die in Allie’s monstrous creation. This scene rotates between the machine and the different family members, namely Allie and Charlie. The dominant is the machine itself, and it symbolizes the mental debilitation of Allie as it burns to the ground. The character proxemics show the audience that none of the family members are very close to each other; they are all just watching hopelessly as the ice machine blows up. The look on Charlie’s face suggests that he regrets helping his father kill the men, and feels bad at the same time that everyone’s hard work in building the machine, along with Allie’s hopes and aspirations, were destroyed.

This is a parallel to Witness, because John Book also has to deal with three “bad men” (although only two of them die in Witness). The difference between the two instances is that John Book had to kill the men, because if he didn’t, they would have killed him. The three men in The Mosquito Coast might not have harmed the Fox family physically, even if they were being very obtrusive. Although they were very threatening with their guns and hardened attitudes, Allie made the first violent move. Samuel lived by the Amish code for his entire life, and started to think independently from it when he witnessed a murder. Charlie lived his life believing everything that his father believed, and started to question his beliefs when he witnessed his father murder the three armed men. Both Charlie’s and Samuel’s experience learning from the patriarch and then exceeding the knowledge of the father involved violence.