On Amazon Prime I recently re-watched a movie I had seen in the theater in the early '90s, where a battered wife fakes her own death to escape her husband.
Then today I streamed a 2006 TV-movie where a soon-to-be-ex-husband fakes his own and his young son's deaths so he won't have to share custody with the kid's mother. (A little extreme, right?)
The wife / mother has been believing her ex and little boy died and then she accidentally finds out, 14 years later, that the son is probably still alive on a tourist-type island out in the ocean.
So she goes looking for her son. This is when I started to think about that earlier movie -- even the means of faking the death was the same: out on a boat on the ocean, a storm comes up, and --
1990s film: wife "apparently drowns during the storm"
2006 TV-movie: 4-year-old son and dad "apparently drown during the storm."
In the battering-movie, the husband discovers by chance, from someone's remark that his wife knew how to swim, after all...! Similar to the mom in the other movie -- she sees an 18-year-old guy in some friends' vacation pictures and is sure that's her son.
Is this believable? Too much of a coincidence? I don't go that deep -- I'm not there to "fight with" the movie. If it's well-told and I'm hooked on the suspense, I'll go with it.
The mom is off to that island to look for her son -- just like the Hitting-Husband in the earlier movie takes off across the country, from the East Coast to the West Coast, so he can find his Disappearing Fugitive Wife.
He wants to either batter/bully her into submission or kill her -- the Searching Mom wants to just find her son. And -- tell him "I'm your mom, I love you" and she's probably pretty mad at the ex-husband.
But I don't have the impression that she wants to batter or kill him.
She doesn't seem super-angry: it's more like she's in a sort of "Trance of Grief." She's a little bit like a soft-spoken robot.
In the earlier movie, there's that moment when the wife realizes her husband may have been in the house where she's living now -- he may have found her.
It's not unlike in the other one, where the ex-husband and father hears some info from the son over the phone and realizes his ex-wife is onto him. His facial expression of "uh-oh!" is similar.
He tells his son to leave immediately and meet him on another island. (They have boats.)
I don't know how the Lost-Son one ends, yet -- I had to go to work.
One wonders, did the writers "copy" the idea from the earlier movie? On the other hand, there are theories that only a certain number of story-lines exist, in humanity.
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Google: "number of plots in literature."
Many academics, most notably author Christopher Booker, believe there are only seven basic narrative plots in all of storytelling -- frameworks that are recycled again and again in fiction but populated by different settings, characters, and conflicts.
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1. Overcoming the Monster
2. Rags to Riches
3. The Quest
4. Voyage and Return
5. Rebirth
6. Comedy
7. Tragedy
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But -- What about faking your own death in the ocean during a storm...? I guess I'm caught up in the specifics, and Mr. Booker is speaking more generally....
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