Was his brother a virgin!?
Man that is so sad...
Spoilers!
Of all the things to comment on about how sad Charles' life was and all you can come up with was that he never had sex...not that he was a weirdo that still lived with mommy and he was eccentric and abused and blah blah blah...naw, none of that compares to never having sex.
So...if I was still a virgin and my whole family was killed in 9/11 and my legs blown off with a shotgun...what would be more sad?
charles could really draw...maybe even better than robert. its a shame he locked his talent away.
share[deleted]
Anyone can have sex. Thats not sad.
Its the intimacy and love he couldn't find with another person that is sad.
When you feel like a freak its easy to push people away.
These are some movies of mine. Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/lanser87
@sjin, I don't think you understood - as a child himself, Charles was sexually obsessed with the child actor. There's a part of the film where he describes his adolescent attempts at relationships with girls, so there's really no indication that he is a pedophile. I found it very moving how candid all the brothers were about their sad lives and inner demons. It would have been easy for Charles to keep his secret to his grave - at least not to broadcast it to the world on a documentary. It took some guts (that the whole family seem to have) to lay out everything for people to judge.
shareCharles Crumb was born in sometime in 1942 according to Wikipedia, and if I recall correctly, it was said in the film that that viewing of Treasure Island on tv was in 1955, when Charles was about 13 or so. Bobby Driscoll was born in 1937 and Treasure Island was released in 1950, so unless it was filmed a few years before it was released, Charles was lusting after a boy roughly his own age when he saw the film on tv. The orginal obsession definitely doesn't make him a pedophile; it makes him a boy attacted to another boy. It wasn't pedophelic lust but homosexual lust that at least *began* Charles' fear of and withdrawal from the world of the sexual.
But Charles's obsession with pirates continues for at least a few years, and Robert, at least, claims it was all fueled by the obsession with Driscoll. This would mean that, depending on how long the obsession persisted, Charles would age into older teenagerhood and the feelings for Driscoll would be more in the realm of pedophelia. Exactly who or what kind of person or persons Charles was lusting for as he grew up, we can't know, we have only Robert's testimony in the film to judge. But, given how stunted Charles clearly was, as we see directly from him in the film, him being stuck in the obsession for many years doesn't seem unlikely at all.
I don't recall anything in the film demonstrating, perhaps even intimating, that the Charles of the "present" -- the Charles we actually see in the film itself -- was obsessed with Driscoll or any other boy. He claimed to have no sexual life (internal or external) at all. It's entirely possible this particular obsession died at any point in his life prior to the filming.
Who can know?
Matthew
We should also separate the term 'paedophile' from 'child molester'. 'Paedophilia' is effectively a psychological illness which doesn't make the sufferer a bad person per se. What makes someone bad is acting on those urges. People who feel sexual attraction to children need help, not scorn, to some how cope with and suppress those feelings.
Child molesters however are truly evil, and conversely not all of them are necessarily paedophiles. They are wicked, predatory, exploitative and generally opportunistic people. For instance the various entertainers, like Role Harris and Stuart Hall, who abused children also sexual assaulted adult women. Children simply make easier targets for sexually predatory types.
Even if Charles still had sexual feelings for Driscoll as an adult it sounds as if he was suffering from a form of arrested development rather than an attraction to children. Some people are stuck in childhood/adolescence because of the pain of later years and do become fixated with the figures they were attracted to as kids, and in some cases that may have been fellow kids. Clearly that obsession is deeply unhealthy (for them) but it doesn't make them dangerous or evil. It just means they have a hard time growing up. It would only be dangerous if they then preyed on other children that reminded them of their childhood obsession, but since most people aren't stalkers, and fixations tend to be very specific anyway and not related to age, that seems unlikely.