ABSTRACT
This chapter concentrates on films that depict emotionally fragile parental figures trapped in trauma, and their children who are forced into the role of surrogate carer. Endowing children with the responsibility of nurturing and trying to heal the inner lost child of a parent - a form of parentification - can have the effect of rendering these ‘innocent’ others, lost themselves. Through this behaviour we are able to see a dual form of victim/protector twinning. The inner child of the parent appears to be nurtured by the corporeal outer child, and the corporeal parent finds nourishment through the child’s prematurely developed inner parent. To demonstrate this kind of narrative, four celebrated Australian films will be analysed: Jennifer Kent’s gothic horror The Babadook (2013), Glenda Hambly’s Fran (1985), Richard Roxburgh’s Romulus My Father (2007) and Tony Ayres’ The Home Song Stories (2007). The nature of the children at the centre of these films relates to the second chapter’s analysis of the grail myth. In their negotiation of, and emergence from, what might be considered the haunted ‘wasteland’ of their parents’ making, these characters personify both the grail (a healing agent) and the protective grail-bearer.
