[hijack]
I’m sorry, but that doesn’t stand up to my experience with military and retired military personnel. He strikes me as a Marine who perhaps never had combat experience (a good compromise between our theories?) but pumped himself up with fantasies of combat and badassery, holding himself to grueling physical workouts, and living in the black and white world of good and evil.
The need to discipline the son is something I’ve seen personally in the military: the father often feels compelled to ensure that his son doesn’t “end up like” him. A very common comment overheard when discussing one’s son is “I ain’t gonna let him make the mistakes I made.”
Someone who never served in any capacity would have to be seriously unwell to keep that haircut, that vicious discipline, that physique, etc., for so long without some sort of outside pressure. The character, as far as I read him, was a perfect product of brainwashing and/or extreme amounts of regimented life and heavy training.
One outside possibility is that his father served, or sent him to military school at the first sign of his “abnormal” behavior, and that the early behavior conditioning stuck.
As for the OP [/hijack], she’s telling the truth. The whole film was about how our fantasy selves often write checks that our real lives can’t cash, and that it is often that disparity that causes so much pain in the world (“It didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to”). Her overt admission that–despite all her fantasies–she knows next-to-nothing about what is truly pleasing to men is much more poignant than the alternative.
