Damage Travels
The Nickel Boys, A Real Pain, and how inherited stories seep into the marrow of our lives.
Deep Life Reflections | Essay 103 | James Gibb
Loss, trauma, and regret can pull us apart, but also tether us to others.
“The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. All those lost geniuses—sure not all of them were geniuses—but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.”
—The Nickel Boys
Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The Nickel Boys is a novel about the lifelong legacy of institutional abuse in the Jim Crow-era south. In 208 lean pages, Colson Whitehead tells the story of Elwood Curtis, a bright, curious Black teenager in 1960s Tallahassee, Florida. Raised by his grandmother and inspired by the teachings of his hero, Martin Luther King Jr., Elwood believes in himself; he knows he is as good as anyone and has his sights set on college.
But this is 1960s America. And one innocent mistake, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, changes everything. Elwood is sent to Nickel Academy, a reform school that claims to shape boys into ‘honourable and honest’ men. Instead, it is a place of cruelty, where boys are broken: emotionally, physically, and, in some cases, permanently. Some never leave at all.
From the moment Elwood arrives at Nickel, there is already a sense of dread. We know from the novel’s prologue that Nickel Academy carries a wicked secret: a graveyard full of broken bones on a “patchy acre of wild grass between the old work barn and the school dump.” Locations within the campus—The White House, the iron rings—become sinister and synonymous with fear and appalling acts of violence. The teachers, all men, are linked by their cruelty and ideology: a sense of public duty that wayward boys must be re-educated the Nickel way.
But this re-education isn’t through instilling a sense of self-worth or growth—academic, spiritual, or otherwise—but about fear, docility and subjugation. Free-thinking or, even worse, ambition to better oneself, are dangerous pursuits in Nickel. As Elwood soon learns.
Yet, Elwood refuses to conform. The words of Dr. King remain loud and potent, especially the album, Martin Luther King at Zion Hill, which Elwood calls “the best gift of his life.” This collection of King’s speeches on persecution, humiliation, segregation, and the right way forward give Elwood his moral compass and strength. It’s the spine of the book. Nickel Academy is 1960s America in microcosm: segregated, unjust, and governed by the unspoken threat of maximum violence. In this context, Elwood’s steadfast belief in the teachings of Dr. King can be seen as both a lifeline and a liability.
His relationship with Turner, a fellow inmate, is pivotal. Turner is more cynical, more street-smart, less idealistic. The two boys share a journey, a bond, and a set of experiences that culminate in an ending that really hits hard.
What makes The Nickel Boys even more poignant is that it’s based on real events. The novel was inspired by the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida, a state-run reform school that operated for over a century, leaving behind a history of abuse and unmarked graves. Whitehead acknowledges this in the book’s afterword, citing the real-life survivors and the stories that compelled him to write about perseverance, dignity, and redemption. He quotes a former Dozier inmate, Danny Johnson:
“The worst thing that’s ever happened to me in solitary confinement happens to me every day. It’s when I wake up.”
Early in the novel, long before Nickel, Elwood is thrilled to win a contest where his prize is a set of A-Z encyclopaedias left behind by a travelling salesman. He can’t wait to learn about the world until he realises only the ‘A’ volume contains any words. The rest—B through Z—are blank. A manufacturing defect, an aborted business, we never know.
Elwood only gets a fraction of the world. Just the ‘A’. The rest is empty, closed off to him.
For all those at Nickel, and the real-life boys who suffered the same fate, that is their story.
But through this novel, now they have the rest of the words.
Nickel Academy leaves its mark in ways that are immediate and undeniable.
But the story doesn’t end there. Trauma doesn’t stay contained. It seeps into what comes next, into relationships, into identity, into the ways people move through the world.
A Real Pain shows us that second act.
A Real Pain. Directed by Jessie Eisenburg
David and Benji are two cousins who are more like brothers. They are also oil-and-water opposites, living completely different lives.
David, played by writer-director Jessie Eisenburg, is slightly neurotic, with a good job, wife and young child. He’s careful and constrained, a provider, the responsible one following a more conventional path through life. Benji, played by Keiran Culkin, is a free spirit, untethered and unpredictable but capable of charm, wit, and the kind of directness and honesty that can be both disarming and annoying. He ignites things, in both the best and the worst way.
Both men ironically want to be like the other, desiring something the other has. David, grounded and stable, envies Benji’s fire. Benji, restless and reckless, envies David’s rootedness. But neither can cross the divide. It’s not who they are, and this tension of opposites sits behind every exchange; the push and pull of affection and frustration.
The film reunites the cousins in New York and takes them on a pilgrimage to Poland to honour their recently passed grandmother, the source of Benji’s grief. She grew up there and survived the Holocaust. They want to learn about the country, her past, and the experiences of those who lived through it.
Arriving in Poland, the cousins join a small tour group, all American, except for one, a Rwandan who recently converted to Judaism. Their British guide, James, is a likeable and knowledgeable man who has all the stories and facts as well as tact and empathy. The other tourists all add to the film in a human way, mostly patient and understanding, but sometimes curt and ambivalent when Benji pushes too hard.
A Real Pain is a gentle film, exploring the meaning of life and balancing humour, pathos, and warmth. Its strongest attribute is the depiction of character, revealing people’s duality; the light and the shadow, and everything in between. This is represented most acutely in Benji, with an Oscar-winning performance by Culkin.
We’ve all likely known a Benji in our lives, someone who speaks with fearless charm and wit but is just as capable of ill-chosen words, histrionics, and worse. Yet, their honesty and courage are frustratingly admirable, demanding both respect and envy in a world far from honest.
A Real Pain deals with some heavy themes. Some are explicit, like the Holocaust, loss, grief, and remembrance; others more under the surface like regret, depression, and suicide. In the visit to Majdanek, the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp, no dialogue is needed.
A key theme throughout is pain, sometimes loud, sometimes quiet, but always present. Benji appears to suffer the most. He lashes out, disrupts, demands attention, but he is far from alone in his pain. The film’s title carries multiple meanings: Benji is a ‘real pain’ to others when he kicks off but he’s also living with real pain: his grief, his regrets, and possibly something even deeper. Then there is the larger, existential pain that lingers over everything: the Holocaust and the weight of history and past trauma.
Eisenberg the director never pities Benji, but nor does he elevate him to someone wise and oracle-like. He’s a shade. Benji is unbearable at times, but he also makes some good points, and he is genuinely interested and engaged in other people’s stories.
The verbal sparring of the cousins is enjoyable and there is a yin and yang. They’ve drifted apart in life, taken different roads, but they are still connected by a deeper thread that won’t fray, no matter how much time passes. There is a weight between them, a reminder that all aspects of our existence—loss, trauma, regret—both shape us individually and tether us to others.
They might pull us apart, but they are also what bind us together.
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