{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03115264797507788, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0007189072609633358, 'mean_word_length': 4.470511140235911, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A Separate Peace: Filming the War Within

I John Knowles's A Separate Peace is probably the closest that any novel has come to recreating that particular love-hate relationship between adolescents that is undergirded with envy and fear-filled rivalry. The apparent deviation from ordinary life in this story merely conceals a deeper, more universal psychological truth: that the boy who never loses his innocence, that is, who does not "grow." does not survive - especially in a world on the brink of total social and moral disruption. In the calm before the storm of World War Il Gene and Finny are, whether or not Gene admits it, "best friends." But this is merely the eye of another storm, an intrapsychic one. Gene is stopped from calling Finny his best friend "by that level of feeling, deeper than thought, which contains the truth" - the truth being that Gene hates Finny as much as he loves him. What Gene fails to realize is that more often than not. best friends are best enemies, and must therefore not only nurture their love but work out a "separate peace" for their enmity. But it is first necessary to become aware of the underlying battle. Gene's initial ignorance of this feeds his fear of himself, of his inner aggressions. The distant trumpets of war that increasingly penetrate the ivy-league isolation at Devon coalesce with inner pressures to summon these highly ambivalent motives into the open. Since the adult Gene is the narrator in the novel, we see everything from his point of view. Although in the film he is retained as narrator per se. he intrudes only at the opening and close, thus depriving us of a retrospective viewpoint most of the time. In neither novel nor film do we know anything of what is going on in Finny's head, but at least he is never shown to contemplate anything deeper than apparent good will to all; to him "there was no conflict except between athletes." Thus, his choice of Gene as best friend is not complicated by his friend's reservations. Out of the rivalry on which this typical adolescent relationship is based springs a not-so-typical profound identity-projection by each boy of his feelings onto the other. This projection originates with Gene; he wants not only to excel academically, utterly outshining Finny, but also to at least keep pace with him in his own forte, athletics. Thus. Gene can never refuse joining Finny in his whirligig of physical activities. When Gene puts Finny out of the athletic running, he takes Finny's place, an act symbolized by donning Finny's pink shirt. Finny, on the other hand, accepts the respective gifts with which he and Gene are endowed; he has no reason to consider Gene athletic competition and simply bows out of the intellectual competition. However, when confronted with a life-time of disability. Finny, too, strongly identifies, telling Gene, "Listen, pal. if I can't play sports, you're going to play them for me." Larry Peerce's film, like the novel, does a wonderful job of conveying the surface camaraderie of the boys, but does not disclose Gene's hatred seething underneath. The film shows the manifestations of identity-projection, but not the awakening rivalry so explicitly described in the novel: I found it. I found a single sustaining thought. The thought was. You and Phineas are even already. You are even in enmity. You are both coldly driving ahead for yourselves alone. You did hate him for breaking that school swimming record, but so what? He hated you for getting an A in every course but one last term. You would have had an A in that one. Except for him. (p. 45) 1 We do not consider these omissions from the film intentional, since Peerce does attempt to convey hate, as in the added deliberation (though not nearly agitated enough) with which Gene undresses before climbing up the "funereal tree." supposedly to join Finny in a double jump into the river, but actually to push Finny to his crippling fall. Even in the very opening of the film the mature Gene, seeing the tree again, practically clobbers the audience with the recollection of the "fear, the anger, the senseless rivalry [that ] reminded me of Finny" - words Peerce added. …