Group Presentation: Portnoy's Complaint

The other day my English class and I had a group discussion about the novel that we had just finished reading: Portnoy’s Complaint. Each student in the class is assigned a group and will discuss (in front of the class) their close analysis of the novel and how it compares to Woody Allen movies and/or other works. Ever since the beginning of the semester I wanted to make sure that I was in the group that would talk about Portnoy’s Complaint because I knew it was a controversial book from the get go. Let me tell you, it’s a page turner! You seriously don’t know what the author is going to write next. I don’t know if I would call this tasteful literature, but is still interesting none of the less. Makes me question who Phillip Roth really is… do a lot of people think the way he does or is he weird for thinking and writing the things he does or is he just honest? Something to contemplate anyways.

Alright, back to the presentation. I think over all my group did really well!! We all planned everything we wanted to do then put it into an outline so that our presentation would run smoothly. We communicated a lot by email. There was really only one person in our group that did not participate at all or take part in any of the work, even asked to see my paper as to what I was presenting; but no idea stealing here! You don’t do the work you don’t get the slice of cake. But no crying over spilled milk, us girls stuck together!!  For my part of the presentation I decided to show clips from the movie Running With Scissors and how it related to the novel. First off I wanted to show the class the trailer of the movie so they could see the conflict between the mother, son and father relationship. In the trailer we see that the father does not understand his son and that they have nothing in common (it’s almost as if there is the same Oedipus Complex as there is in Portnoy’s Complaint. In Running with Scissors the mother gives up the son, he is still looking for the comfort of a woman and then searches for that in the doctor’s younger daughter. This is exactly like the main character was doing in Portnoy’s when he says in the first paragraph in the book “She was deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seemed to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.” (In other words, the mother abandons her son while he goes to school so he searches for another mother like substitution to replace her while she is not there.

Here's the tralier:


There is another youtube clip that I wanted to share from Running With Scissors and that was the masturbation scene. I think that this film would have made perfect Woody Allen film. It would not surprise me one bit if his name was in the credits (even though it’s not.) However, it looks like a movie that he would write and if he were younger he would have starred in it. It might have actually been even funnier if he starred in it. The doctor’s masturbation is a release for him, a way that he releases tension. That is the same reason why Alex of Portnoy does it too. Alex’s father on the other hand has problems with his bowels and is always blocked signifying the emotional disturbances in his life instead of “letting go.” This all sounds gross I know, but I was asked to analyze this stuff.

Here is the masturbation clip:


Overall, I was so happy to be in this group and the fact that we went first was even better. We could show the class how it’s done. Haha I’m just kidding. It’s nice to be in a group with hard working people. We were all team players. It was great!