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What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is a memorable story of desire colliding with responsibility. Discuss.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is a memorable story of desire colliding with responsibility. Gilbert Grape must look after Arnie 24/7, but also stop himself from becoming like his father, with no hopes or needs. This fine line is sliced by his relationship with Betty Carver, who has her own problems or desire and responsibility conflicting, but repaired by his new relationship with Betty.

Gilbert Grape is a prime example of the conflict between desire and responsibility. His responsibilities include looking after Arnie to “keep him out of trouble” and to “keep up the repairs” of the Grape family home. After Gilbert becomes involved with Becky, he wants to spend a night with her watching the sundown but needs to bath Arnie. Gilbert attempts to teach Arnie to wash himself so that Gilbert can go to Becky, but this fails. Arnie spends a miserable night in the bath, because he is unable to understand Gilbert. Here, desire collides with responsibility and wins with bad consequences, because Gilbert does not yet know how to balance the two.

Gilbert attempts to keep everyone happy – having a love-less affair with Mrs. Carver and looking after the house. In this case, Gilbert’s attempts to keep Momma ignorant of the house’s state are successful but his repair jobs are unable to fix the problems. This leads to guilt, and eventually an implosion in which the house is destroyed, along with his previous life.

Mrs. Carver has responsibilities to her family, but she ignores them in order to fulfill her desire of Gilbert. Whenever Gilbert appears, she tells her children to go outside and “play”. By ignoring her responsibilities, Mrs. Carver creates tension in her family home and eventually this is reflected in Mr. Carver’s heart attack. However her desires ultimately lose to her responsibilities because Gilbert stops obeying her orders.

Becky is the catalyst of change that provides a new outlook on life for Gilbert. She asks Gilbert what he wants, but he replies with all the things his responsibilities to his family require of him: “for Momma to go to aerobics classes, for Amy to have a new job.” When she asks “What do you want, just for you?” he replies “I want to be a good person.” This is a major turning point in the film. After this, Gilbert starting thinking of his own wellbeing more, but still fulfils his responsibilities. At the very end of the film, a year after Arnie’s fateful 18th birthday party, Gilbert takes Arnie (symbolizing his responsibilities) and joins Becky and her Grandmother in their travels around the world (fulfilling his desire). The conflict between desires and responsibility finally ends and a peace is brought to Gilbert’s world.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is a film presenting desire colliding with responsibility with different results. Gilbert himself is the main target of this collision as well as Betty Carver.

Another year 11 english essay.