Bookworm (2024) is a compelling story about a precocious, adventurous 11-year-old girl connecting with her absent father as they search for one of Aotearoa’s only cryptids, the Canterbury Panther. Through the story’s twists and turns, the daughter Mildred and father Strawn get to know each other in their most vulnerable moments.
Reader be warned, spoilers below
One of the most striking moments in the film is when young Mildred makes a confession to her father. She relates that she’s always felt an outsider, even with her mother. She confesses that she used to wish that her mum would disappear and that her father would scoop in and be the figure who understood her completely.
This scene speaks a deep theological truth about the human condition, community, and belonging. On the one hand is the teenage—the Freudian analyst might add Oedipal or Elektra—impulse to push away from their known parent figure. And on the other hand, there’s the reality that our parents (literal or metaphorical) are flawed, but they are a part of our story nonetheless.
As humans, we long for the unknown that might be better, that grass that is definitely, certainly, indubitably greener just over that fence. And yet, as Mildred finds out, her father is not the competent, caring dad she’s been longing for. Exactly the opposite. He’s almost the definition of incompetent—in his career, his parenting skills, and street smarts. Moreover, he does not understand her. He does not get her. He does not see her at a spiritual level with a preternatural recognition borne from a filial bond. Again, it’s almost the opposite. Mildred is just as strange to Strawn as she is to everyone else. But what this movie does do brilliantly, is show that there is more to life and love than belonging and understanding.
Despite the two not understanding each other at a deep level, the two bond through shared ups and downs in their quest for video footage of the panther. The relationship the two have is not built on a cognitive understanding of the other, or even of relating to each other from shared past experiences, i.e. trauma bonding. What the film does particularly well in that it avoids the well worn trope of two misunderstood outcasts bonding over their shared societal marginalisation.
Echoing a lesson of alterity from the phenomenologist tradition, understanding of the other is not the goal of relationships of any kind. Meaningful relationships start with recognition of the other as other: completely infinite in their otherness, completely unknowable as a complex human being. The beautiful paternal-filial relationship in the movie begins not with recognition of similarity—what Levinas diagnoses an “imperialism of the same”—but recognition of difference.
I am not sure if it’s an universal experience, or just one that fictional Mildred and I share, but I have definitely felt that longing to be fully known, to be understood. I wonder though, how much of that anxiety of being understood is a product of the discourses, myths, and even theologies that flow out of our culture. The myth goes something like: if only someone understood me, I would not feel alone. But what this film shows is that the cure for loneliness is not being understood; it’s a commitment to show up, to recognise the other as strange and flawed and see their foibles. We may never be fully understood. We may never fully understand ourselves, let alone another. But that should not keep us from walking together on the adventurous, tumultuous, and hazardous paths life has set before us.