Selective Exits

I've found myself fascinated by the idea of selectivity in the graphic memoirs we've studied thus far, and Special Exits is no exception.  Joyce Farmer does an excellent job at selecting scenes and presenting individual panels that work together to clearly express a point without being overbearing about it.  Her expression of Laura's guilt after her stepmother's decline in a nursing home is a strong example.  

After taking Rachel to the emergency room for a blister, we see the doctor telling Laura "the news is all good.  We put a band-aid on the blister and she's ready to go home" (135), to which Laura responds, "Can she go to a nursing home?"  The disparity between the first statement and the responding question is so great that that panel would be absurd in any other context.  Laura is leaning forward in her chair, too, which makes her appear eager.  If one presented that panel as a cartoon in itself, it would clearly be about adult kids who are eager to ditch their parents as soon as the smallest thing goes wrong.  You want to ship your mom to a nursing home because she had a blister?  Wow, you must have had some childhood!  In the next panel, the doctor tells Laura Rachel "can live for years!" and Laura is frowning.   Her hair has also started to droop. She stands up to lean on the doctor's desk and plead her case, with her hair now falling forward.  In the final panel on this page her hair is drooping, but a bit of it is sticking up in front and her eyes look turned down at the corners.  These changes in her appearance make her look defeated.  The fact that she has to explain to the doctor that her stepmother's ability to remember his name is not evidence of her competency reinforces that impression.  The doctor's arrogance in thinking he knows everything about her, after one brief exam is very frustrating.  He claims that Laura's father is clearly taking good care of Rachel, while he can't possibly know that.  He may be doing the best he can under the circumstances, but leaving someone on the sofa to eat, sleep, and empty her bladder and bowels is not the kind of caregiving I want a loved one to receive.   Instead of questioning Laura and trying to understand the situation, including her father's place in it, he judges her, asking "Do you realize what you're doing?" (136).  In the final panel on that page, Laura tells her father, "I'm sick at what I did, Dad" (136).  

Farmer makes it clear that the staff at the nursing home is incompetent in just a few scenes.  Rachel falls out of bed because an aid left her alone in her bed with the rails down (138),  Nobody bothers to call her for two days, and then the person on the phone is calling while eating lunch, which certainly does not show a lot of compassion for either Rachel or Laura.  There are a few panels throughout the book that gave me pause (such as the cat's thought bubbles on page 80, or the nursing home administrator's on page 146) because the narration leaves the more standard memoir form, in which the narrator/main character/writer is present and is either a participant or witness to everything that happens.  This panel is one in which the narration is suddenly omniscient; Laura cannot see what the person calling is doing.  That the caller is holding a sandwich is conjecture, but even after acknowledging that, it seemed to me that it probably is not as heavy-handed as I wish it were.  (On a barely-related note, when my mother arrived at the hospital to give birth to me, her doctor entered the room finishing a bag of Fritos.)  The fact that we care about somebody does not mean that strangers who are paid very little money to take care of them are going to also care about them.  It is likely that Rachel's caregivers see her as another annoying old lady who is constantly demanding something, food and drink, in her case.  

The lack of competence of the staff is also demonstrated in all the tests the doctor orders.  Rachel's fingers hurt from the needles used for unnecessary tests.  Nobody asks her if the vibrating of her bed bothers her, and nobody seems to even consider that she might notice it until she answers Laura's question of how she's doing with, "Good.  My bed's not shaking anymore" (146).  When an aid tells Laura that Rachel does not usually eat, Laura has to tell her that Rachel is blind and must have the dishes handed to her.  The aid's response is, "I didn't know that" (146), even though the sign saying "Blind -- Must be fed" is right in front of her.  This is a different aid than the ones we've seen before.  In fact, there are so many staffers that none of them seem to be there long enough, or to care enough to know very much about their patients.  

When Laura drives away from the hospital after Rachel's hip is pinned, we see that she is thinking "My God!  What have I done to her?  She fell many times at home.  It was only fourteen inches to the soft carpet.  My god!" (139).  The burden of that responsibility feels crushing.  We know she was doing what she thought was best, but now she has to live with the rapidity of Rachel's decline and her part in that.  When she goes to the nursing home administrator to threaten a lawsuit, she says, "So you understand the situation: one, my mother was blind but in good health when she came here" (146).  Only ten pages have elapsed since Rachel's arrival at the nursing home.  It is not clear how much time has passed, but it does not seem to be a lot.  I read this as emphasizing Laura's feelings of guilt; Rachel's decline was very quick, and it all happened after Laura had her taken to a nursing home.  The scenes Farmer presents in only ten pages effectively convey experiences and emotions that leave me feeling almost paralyzed with compassion and pity for Laura.  

On a side note, I want to mention the incredible amount of detail that Farmer put into the artwork.  Every panel, and there are many, is intricately shaded.  There is so much shading of faces and cross-hatching throughout the book that I the thought that there are more than 1500 panels in the book leaves me feeling exhausted.  Again, I find myself comparing this work to others we have read, and Alison Bechdel comes to mind first.  While this book obviously contains a lot of very deliberate work, it somehow does not scream "DELIBERATE!" to me the way Bechdel's work does.  I think that's because the emotion of the story comes through more clearly in Special Exits.  Sometimes it felt that Bechdel was trying to make a statement about graphic memoir in general, that it is a serious medium and that it can be very intellectual.  Farmer does not seem so concerned with redeeming a form of art or proving that she is bright.  She gives us these very intense scenes, but steps back and leaves room for us to inhabit those scenes, to experience them ourselves.  I think this is a great and beautiful accomplishment.