‘What Josiah Saw’ and the Tragic Nature of Shared Trauma
Shared trauma bonds you in a way few other experiences do. You become tethered together, entrusting each other with the weight of the past while wading into murky waters of recovery. But trauma also breeds dysfunction, soils emotional relationships, and stunts growth. In Vincent Grashaw’s psycho-drama What Josiah Saw, the Graham family is ripped to shreds, and no one emerges unscathed. In fact, the children 一 Eli (Nick Stahl), Tommy (Scott Haze), and Mary (Kelli Garner) 一 are so deeply wounded they grow up to be broken shells. Try as they might to forget the past, what happened haunts their every waking moment.
The trauma they endured as kids affects them in dramatically different ways. From their mother Miriam’s (Pamela Bell) suicide to their father Josiah’s (Robert Patrick) alcoholism, they’ve certainly been put through the wringer. Tommy, who discovered his mother’s body hanging from a tree, has severe boundary issues. When he divorces his wife, the court orders a restraining order against him for basically stalking his son Tanner, and he turns to booze to numb the pain.
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It’s been a year since the split, yet it still burns just as hot. His delusions manifest through the ghost of Josiah, who wanders around the house as if nothing has happened. Even the audience is led to believe Josiah is very much alive until a turn of a screw in the final act.
Eli barely manages to exist. He succumbs to sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll to alleviate the misery. He’s also a frequent gambler and has racked up a handsome debt to hungry loan sharks who don’t take too kindly to being made out as fools. Having served time in jail for statutory rape, he’s as grimy as they come.
What Josiah Saw also suggests he had an incestuous relationship with his sister Mary, as well, an added coating of sleaze to an already horrible situation. His self-medication (mostly sex) does little to squelch the anguish he feels throbbing in his head every single day. Along with Mary, Eli had a hand in killing their father after first pinning Mary’s unwanted pregnancy on him. Their murderous affair perhaps stems from never quite feeling the love as children they should have, paired with clear patterns of mental illness inherited from their mother.
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On the surface, Mary seems to have her life together. She lives in the posh suburbs and has an adoring husband. After trying and failing to have a baby of their own, they turn to adoption. The seemingly idyllic life can’t hide the pain forever, though. Deep inside, there are bubbles of unresolved trauma and loss. In brief moments, Mary’s mask slips just enough to expose the truth: she is definitely not okay. She’s suffering and attempts to piece together the life she never had growing up. She buries the past, but it never stays dead, does it?
When they each receive a letter from an oil company seeking to purchase the family farm, their separate paths converge again. And it’s not a pretty sight. The past regurgitates itself all over their lives like a bucket of maggots squirming inside a stuffed pig. The reunion reopens old wounds and causes secrets to be revealed. Eli, Mary, and Tommy haven’t been the same in the decades since childhood. Their deterioration is an all too familiar path I’ve found myself plummeting down, spiraling in a way that I have no control over (or at least it’s felt that way for some time).
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Growing up in an abusive home, I witnessed my father beating my older sister on more occasions than I care to count. Violent strikes frequently erupted into blood-curdling screams. I can hear them even now ringing in my ears. When it was all over, we never spoke about it. It was like nothing had happened at all. I have a vivid recollection of one particular moment in the aftermath of abuse. A black eye and bruises dotted my sister’s skin, and I shook right where I was standing. I learned to fear my father. I learned to never speak up because I knew that wrought suffering and more fear. It was a tangled web of emotions. My father always made sure we were wanting for nothing, but he wasn’t a good person.
Out of such hurt, my sister and I have this sacred link between our beings. It’s like having an umbilical cord made of chain, an uncuttable string of trauma responses connecting and feeding one another. We’ve recognized how to navigate the present through a painful lens, as though the world is forever cast in a blood red hue, and the process in itself一to let go, to heal, to forgive一is pushing a boulder up a hill. In many ways, we have grown closer over the last few years, yet I still see the past reflected back in her sad, sunken eyes.
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Morally, we lie at opposite poles, so I find it hard to let her into my life completely. I know what could happen if I do, or perhaps, it’s all in my head from past patterns and cycles of behavior. So I keep her at an arm’s length, forging ahead with my own life so as to further distance myself from hers. I bury so I can forget, and I forget so I can heal一in my own way, at least.
In the last two years of my father’s life, he lost the ability to walk, to speak, and to breathe on his own due to a viscous disease known as ALS. It stole his life right from under him. But it also stole being able to have meaningful conversations. You always believe you have more time, and there’s never enough time to say what you need to say, or ask the questions you desperately need answers to. I wanted to know why he was so cruel to my sister and how he could sleep at night knowing he was such an abuser. I guess I’ll never know.
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Maybe in the afterlife, I’ll come across those answers floating out in the cosmos somewhere. For now, I’ll continue nursing my wounds in therapy and learning how to better let go, heal, and forgive. I may be able to forget one day, too. And even if I do all these things, I realize overcompensating seems like the new normal for me. I’m work-obsessed, overly ambitious, and attach quickly and severely to other people. I feel things so deeply it’s like taking a sizzling hot iron to the heart. There’s desperation that emerges out of the ruin, and I didn’t really know it was happening at first. I’d masked the misery behind a wall, bricked and isolated from the rest of the world. It was comfortable to pretend. But eventually, things come back around and you wake up.
That’s probably why I identify so deeply with Mary. She’d endured immense heartache and processed all the tortured thoughts and emotions by overcompensating in her life. She left the farmhouse behind for a better life, a more satisfying existence, and the promise of a baby of her own. In her mind, the only way to move forward was to hide the trauma away and leave it unconfronted, allowing it to mutate into an entirely bigger monster. If you let trauma fester, it only gets worse. It grows inside you until it oozes from your pores and seeps into every facet of your life.
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When Eli shows up on her doorstep, wielding a letter of his own, it’s like replaying that awful time in her life all over again and again. What she thought had been put to bed is finally coming back around to collect on the emotional and psychological debts. You have to pay for it sooner or later, and my sister and I have divided up some of that expense. But there’s plenty more to be paid.
What Josiah Saw beautifully captures how shared trauma affects your life, often shoving you down dangerous, toxic avenues. Even romantic relationships and friendships are incredibly difficult to keep intact. You don’t realize how the trauma has affected those connections until you look around and find yourself alone and lonely. Mary, Eli, and Tommy deal with that pain as best they can but ultimately live unfilled and unrealized existences. The past might be cold and dead six feet under, but the ghosts gnashing their teeth in their brains will haunt them until their last dying breaths.
Healing is about confronting and accepting what is. With an unexpected two-hour runtime, What Josiah Saw plunges you into the darkest depths of tragedy, and their pain is damn near pulverizing. Typical chills and thrills are replaced with three separate but connected character studies, and by the finale, it just might provoke you to finally deal with your own trauma. It certainly forced me to think differently about mine. And for that, I’m grateful.
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