White Oleander is a beautiful and somewhat frightful story of the trials, tribulations and adaptations of a young girl named Astrid as documented through her experiences with her biological mother and three foster families. The film follows her as she grows and morphs to fit the molds of the many lifestyle changes she encounters due to her mothers seemingly insane style of parenting and stint in jail for the murder of her boyfriend. Throughout the film every new surrounding offers Astrid new struggles and challenges that force her to grow further apart from her mother and more importantly her true identity.
Despite not ever discovering her real age it becomes quite easy for one to understand the dramatic differences in her maturity as the film progresses, and this mostly due to her interactions with her jail ridden mother. The further into the movie the viewer gets the further Astrid grows apart from her mother. However, the realization that her mothers parenting techniques were selfish and authoritarian were not truly recognized until she was place in a foster home with Renée Zellweger’s character Claire Richards.
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After being shot by her first foster mother Star, Astrid is certainly ready for a more loving home, which is what she gets when she arrives at Claire’s home; however, Astrid has no idea the hardships and issues that will face her and her foster mother in the months to come. Most notably Claire is a permissive or indulgent parent meaning that she places little to no behavior restrictions on Astrid and demands virtually nothing from her all the while being incredibly loving and giving (Santrock, J.W.). Permissive parents are incredibly responsive to the child, or in this case teenagers, needs because at the end of the day they just want the child to like him or her (Feldman, Robert). Claire would take Astrid shopping and play, if you will, with her all day, but never expect her to do anything in return. Unfortunately for Astrid, she had never experienced a parenting style that was so involved and loving so she mistook it for true love when in reality Claire was simply wanting a friend due to her failing marriage. For example, there are many times while the two were together that the viewer would find Astrid actually giving advice to Claire as opposed to the other way around! Claire would spend the majority of the time that she was not pampering Astrid talking to her about her issues with her husband and speculating about an affair. One of the most striking displays of Claire’s want for a friend and not a daughter is when the two are arriving from a day out-on-the-town and Claire sees that her husband is home from filming overseas. She immediately jumps out of the car leaving Astrid behind so as to go greet her husband who only a few scenes ago she was hypothesizing about a possible affair. Astrid serves only as a distraction from the pain Claire is suffering from enduring a rough marriage. Dr. J.W. Santrock even states that, “the influence of their spouse affects parenting style” (Santrock) and this could not be any more apparent than through Claire’s behavior with Astrid. Similarly, the most awful yet apparent display of Claire’s struggle with her marriage and utter disregard for the relationship she has created with Astrid comes after Claire and Astrid’s mother, Ingrid. One morning Astrid wakes to find Claire unconscious and after only a few moment of investigation realizes that Claire has killed herself and Ingrid was responsible for planting the seed that led to this tragedy. Some may argue that after everything the two had gone through the selfishness of this act displays characteristics of a neglectful parent, however, it is very apparent that previous to this unspeakable act Claire cared for Astrid a great deal. As stated before spouses have a great deal of influence on permissive parents and Claire was completely controlled by paranoia of her failing relationship not that she was unsupportive of Astrid (NPSA). Even after the fact Astrid believes wholeheartedly that the suicide had nothing to do with the relationship that Claire and her had and that it was strictly the influence of her mother Ingrid over a weaker woman in Claire.
To continue the discussion on Astrid’s mother Ingrid one should look no further than one of the finals scenes in the movie when Astrid is asked to come and talk to her mother about testifying in order for her mother to get out of jail early. This is one of the most powerful scenes in the film and serves as an explanatory and educating scene where the view learns all of the skeletons in Ingrid’s seemingly massive closet. There are a countless number of psychological theories that could be applied this scene, but the one that explains Ingrid’s actions, behavior and personality the most clearly is the self-serving bias. The self-serving bias: “refers to the tendency to take credit for our successes and to deny responsibility for our failures” (King 448). This social psychology theory provides an explanation to nearly all of the topics brought up during the heated conversation between this mother and daughter. Astrid is simply seeking the truth from her mother who has kept nearly everything that has happened to her since she was born a secret, and the more Astrid digs the harder it is for Ingrid to respond. For example, Astrid asks her mother who a woman named Annie is and Ingrid instantly breaks down into tears. Astrid comes to find out that Annie took care of her while Ingrid took a year long hiatus from being a mother because it was too much to handle and she did not understand the consequences or responsibilities of becoming a mother. Because of the self-serving bias Ingrid instead of understanding that she made a mistake and trying to make the best out of her situation instead blamed her unhappiness and the difficulties of being a mother on her child and abandoned her for over a year in order to live the life she used to live before having a child. Self-serving bias tends to be thought of in more casual terms, however, in Ingrid’s case she is a self-empowered artist with an enormous ego and perhaps blaming her inability to parent on the child is helping her maintain such a high self-esteem (Miller & Ross, 1975; Roese & Olson, 2007). Additionally, Ingrid even states that Astrid’s conception was purely to try and keep Ingrid and her husband (Astrid’s father that she never met) together. She believed that by having a baby that the love of her life would never leave her and when he did instead of taking into account the impact it would have on Astrid’s life she only thought about how it would impact herself. Astrid comes to find out that when she was eight years old her father attempt to visit her, but her mother refused to let him see her because of what he did to her. Once again we see Ingrid attempting to protect herself by damaging her daughter. By not letting Astrid meet her father she is keeping a massive part of her a secret and in doing so has no understanding for the impact it is having on Astrid, and only seeks to preserve her self-esteem and happiness.
Ultimately, Astrid’s struggles and eventual triumphs tell a tale of many twisted minds, and the fact that she had the strength to survive and prevail after all she had been through is astonishing. Whether it is Claire’s permissive parenting style that led her to a false sense of love or her biological mothers self-serving bias that kept important life secrets from her only to protect her oversized ego, in the end Astrid was happy with the exception of not being able to see her mother. This movie provides incredibly clear and strong examples of many important and life altering psychological principles particularly in the fields of parenting styles and social psychology.
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