The Father/Son Relationship in KOS.

One way I saw this film was as a portrait of relations between the main character and his son. At the beginning, we see a father (not the main character, though) chastizing his son for not coming to the defense of his brother and preparing himself for becoming a man. This kind of established a certain motif that would run throughout the film.

Then we see the Stan and Stan Jr. not having any kind of positive interactions. The main character chastizes his son twice in the film; Stan Jr. leaves abruptly at the dinner table during one scene and is often absent and/or away in many scenes, and the mother calls Stan Jr. to no avail near the end of the film. But the father has positive interactions with his daughter (she massages him and accompanies him on the trip to get the car engine). The father is closer to the daughter.

In one scene with the daughter and son at the dinner table, the son is eating cereal, pouring lots of sugar on it, and tells his sister, "I need money!" I began to wonder if the son had some kind of drug problem . . . or if it was just simply a reflection of poverty, or both. You could see a kind of woundedness in his face.

I was wondering if anyone else noticed the estranged relationship between the father and son, how Stan Jr. was absent or away in many scenes, and how the film opened with a father lecturing his son which kind of introduced a certain tension between fathers/sons. And the uncle didn't care about his nephew being kicked in the head, neither. Is this film in some way also concerned with black male woundedness and the loss of rites of passage to manhood?