A Sociological Critique of The Holdovers (۲۰۲۳)

At Barton boarding school, over the Christmas holidays, three human beings who bear no resemblance to a family are forcibly placed side by side: a bad-tempered, lonely teacher; a Black cook who lost her child in the war; and a student whose family has abandoned him. These three, without intending to, begin to reconstruct something resembling a family—but a family built on ruins from the very beginning. The history teacher was once an elite student at Harvard University, but for a reason that is never entirely clarified, he was expelled from that path, and now, at this boarding school, he torments the wealthy students with his strictness. The school cook is a mother whose son was killed in Vietnam, and now nothing remains for her but silence and grief. The bright teenager whose mother did not choose him over a honeymoon with her new husband oscillates between anger and vulnerability. The fundamental point is this: none of these three has a family to lean on, but their problem is not personal—it is structural. The social system that sent Mary's son to war is the same system that expelled Paul from the elite and turned Angus into a dispensable element in his family's equations. They are not victims of an individual mistake; they are by-products of a defective social machine.

The loneliness of each of these three characters is of a different texture, but the root of all of them traces back to a single social structure. Paul represents a specific stratum: an intellectual with high cultural capital who has remained deprived of real power and wealth. In his solitude, he reads Marcus Aurelius and teaches the history of ancient civilizations, but this knowledge has brought him nowhere but to a self-imposed isolation in a school where he detests the students, and they detest him. This is precisely the fate of the cultural middle class in 1970s America: educated enough to be servants to the ruling class, and poor enough never to gain entry into that class itself. Mary, however, is alone in a different sense: her loneliness is that of a Black working-class woman whose son was sent to a war that had nothing to do with her life. She is not even permitted to mourn openly, because she must be strong and attend to her work; this is the very violence that society expects of racial and class minorities: suffer, but in silence. Angus, too, falls into a third category: a teenager from an affluent class who is emotionally bankrupt. His family's money does not exempt him from the war, and the mental asylum is the inescapable fate that awaited his father and now casts its shadow heavily over him as well. The film is too intelligent to examine these three forms of loneliness separately; instead, it shows that loneliness, contrary to popular belief, is not an individual, psychological issue, but a product of the social structures that separate human beings from one another in order to control them more easily.

The film's reference to Picasso's paintings is no accident. After the World War, Picasso no longer painted human faces as complete and orderly; the nose was in one place and the eyes in another. This fragmentation of the face was a protest. The Holdoversdoes exactly the same thing: it shows us its characters, but not as complete human beings—rather as patched-together fragments of social damage. Paul's lazy eye is not merely a physical defect; it is a symbol of a gaze that sees the world in pieces and can no longer trust any unified narrative. His knowledge of ancient history is a refuge for escaping the era in which he lives. Mary, with her heavy dignity and occasional laughter, is a woman whom the system has asked to hide her grief and get on with her work. Angus, too, is a teenager whose abundant intelligence cannot fill the emotional void of his life. These three, like a painting, only find their full meaning when placed beside one another: each represents a part of a larger social truth that cannot be grasped through individual loneliness and isolation. The film tells us that in postwar society, human beings can no longer be whole, and any claim to completeness or perfection is nothing more than a lie.