Boyhood meets Childhood

There are two cover photos for Boyhood. Both reveal an isolation, a state of being that is cut off from the world. While by the end of chapter two, when John is 10 years old, the state of his feet have become unlike the other classmates' hardened feet that do not blister. "He alone has soft feet, and soft feet, it is emerging, are no claim to distinction. All of a sudden he is isolated—he and, behind him, his mother." (Boyhood, 11) The same question emerges in Schooldays where labouring does not seem fit for their bodies. Traveling with six-year-old Davíd, who does not fit into school, leaves the question open: what is one's vocation, purpose, meaning in life? Is it to be "analphabete" (5) or well read or capable to work for a living? Their, that is, Simón and Inès' decision, is to try to "be common laborers for a week." To work in the orchards. From a young age, are we destined to fulfill a certain role in society, whether as manual labourer or desk worker, an intellectual life or a leisured life? What is Davíd's role and can we know it already in his boyhood?

They visit the orchards and are initiated into the mysteries of the shears and the pruning knife. David is wooed away from their side and disappears, who knows where, with the other children. He returns at supper time with scratches on his arms and legs. They have been climbing trees, he says. (5)

 Male subjectivity, according to Kaja Silverman, can find itself subject to different guises. There are different forms of power, however. Violent power is one kind of toxic masculinity, rhetorical or political another. The feet may be soft, the heart hard. Scratches on the arms and legs, a wooing away from the labour of the common worker, point to a softness, a weakness, an embodied form of vulnerability that lightens the load. Inés and Simón work in the vineyards, Davíd plays in the fields. Silverman's Male Subjectivity at the Margins is at work here. Which cover photo for Boyhood best represents this form of masculinity?