Ahhh yesss...The American Dream (Cannibalism) #horror #Parents1989 #filmanalysis #videoessay

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]I'm sure you'll acquire a taste for it.

[00:00:03]Your mother did.

[00:00:06]I learned to love it.

[00:00:08]Well, man-boy nice, you say, that all sounds like a typical story of a boy learning that his parents are cannibals.

[00:00:14]Three people. Where's the social commentary in that? Maybe we should call you man-boy wrong and dumb. Well, it just so happens Parents is an allegory for the barbaric inhumanity under the shiny facade of American life and the pressure put on those who don't conform to the status quo. See, Michael, we have to fit in. By using cannibalism as a metaphor, Parents exposes the cruelty of the systems undergirding the American dream, patriarchy, imperialism, and conservatism. One of the main ways these ideologies are able to attain and sustain their status as the default social and political paradigms is by obscuring the harm they cause by hiding in plain sight. For example, initially Dad's job is super vague. Michael doesn't even know what he does for work.

[00:00:59]What does your father do for a living?

[00:01:01]I don't know.

[00:01:03]He wears a tie and clocks in at the chemical plant. Presumably doing regular dad work stuff, par for the course, super normal, status quo. How do you know what your father really does all day? He goes to the plant. Yes, but how do you really know? But when Michael visits his dad at work, our little hero learns that there's more to Dad's job than meets the eye. Now, you take your standard jungle outpost, our planes fly over and drop a concentrate of this stuff. And then what happens?

[00:01:30]Your first light rainfall and the catalyzed resin goes to town.

[00:01:36]48 hours this jungle is mulch. So, yeah, Dad's seemingly innocuous job at the plant is actually [music] pretty evil. He's a cog in the military-industrial complex engineering chemical weapons designed to turn enemy combatants into human sludge. And this work is casually compared to the wondrous possibilities afforded by the fundamental nature of free-market capitalism. Did you know that if I took the exact same chemical that make up this pen and recombine them, I could make, I don't know, an automobile. The whole world is made up of chemicals, Mike. You can make anything with them.

[00:02:11]But if you're smart, you'll make opportunities.

[00:02:16]Designing weapons of mass destruction is just another opportunity to them, as innocuous as designing a pen. A pen, an automobile, napalm, it's all the same.

[00:02:26]Anywhere there's a market and someone willing to buy, there's an opportunity in America.

[00:02:31]>> [laughter] >> By the way, today's video is brought to you by Ned's Nerve Gas, America's most trusted way to cause cataclysmic organ failure in your enemies. Use promo code kill to get 50% off this month only.