preview

The Boy Of The Wolfpack Movie Analysis

Good Essays

From a legal standpoint, one wonders whether there might be an issue with Moselle’s introduction to the boys of The Wolfpack. As the moment when she chased them down on the street, most of them were technically minors, and the youngest was only eleven years old (Shone 2015). They were out on the street without their parents, and Moselle, as a thirty year old adult accosts them because she finds them strange and unusual. She then begins to develop this relationship with them, bonding over their shared love of movies, teaching them to refine their filming techniques, filming and photographing them as subjects. One has to wonder whether the boys told their parents about this budding relationship, or whether she ever asked permission from them …show more content…

Her documentary remains a topical piece, telling the story of the brothers who recreate films, and seemingly disregards key questions that crop up in the viewer’s mind. The most obvious of these questions is how Oscar Angulo managed to keep his entire family inside their tiny apartment for so long without anyone intervening. The short answer to this question is that technically, he was not doing anything explicitly illegal by New York laws. “It’s not like they were chained. They were just not socializing with the outside world. They didn’t leave the house because they were scared,” Moselle told the Wall Street Journal (James 2015). It is almost inconceivable how easily Moselle brushes off the family’s isolation in their apartment. They were not just scared. The brothers explicitly mention domestic abuse in their interviews in The Wolfpack. In the film, the boys mention offhandedly and casually that Susanne was slapped around by their father when they would argue, and that they often “got what she got” (The Wolfpack 2015). They also mention his penchant for overindulging in alcohol and bring up instances where he would put them in a room as punishment and they were expected to stay there (The Wolfpack 2015). Moselle was there for the filming of these scenes so she knows what was said. This family is just another example of the way families in New York City who depend …show more content…

As they tell their story, we, the viewers, traverse the boundary between Self and Other as we watch the Angulo brothers share their more than unconventional experiences growing up in New York City and their love for film with the camera. Like us, the Angulo brothers have watched movies all their lives. Unlike us, the Angulo brothers have seen around ten thousand movies and meticulously recreated some of their favorites, all from the confines of their sixteenth story apartment. Michael Atkinson, a reviewer for Sight and Sound, a London journal, recognizes these themes and writes, “the Angulos' developmental Otherness, terribly odd to us and yet immersed in the pop culture we all know just as well, is the film's primary allure” (Atkinson 2015). Their interaction with cultures of the world (not just America) through film allows different cultural norms to permeate their

Get Access