A question about Jessica Lange's character (possible spoilers)
At some point in the beginning of the movie, Tommy Lee Jones's character says that his wife had ran away from home when she was young, but doesn't explains why. Although it's never been actually said in the movie, did Jessica Lange's character run away because she was abused (physically or sexually) by her father?
At the start, it was already a bit confusing why she would always mechanically lie about her past or exaggerate it. It was as if it had become a custom of hers to make up stuff about her childhood and her family, or in other words, avoid dealing with her childhood and her family by making up her own. Besides, if she were in fact mistreated in any way by her father, that would partially explain her excessive promiscuity and why she seems to need men's attention all the time, to the point of cheating on her husband with men she doesn't care for at all.
Moreover, throughout the movie, I got the feeling that she never really grew up. In her marriage, she acted more like an immature daughter than a wife and Hank acted more like a father than a husband. And most of the time, instead of calling Hank by his name, she called him "Daddy". Although I've read in some posts that some wives call their husbands that way for numerous reasons, I felt that, given her behavior in general, she was calling him "Daddy" because that's exactly how she saw him: the good father she never had (probably the father by whom she finally gets to be spoiled). (There's even a scene in which she calls one of her daughters "Sister", which I think joins the idea that she kind of froze at a certain age and doesn't see herself as a grown-up)
The reason why I believe it must be due to abuse by the father and not to neglect specifically is because of a very interesting scene at the beginning of the movie, where the family is moved to another base, and Carly freaks out, takes the car and enters a shop, and Hank follows her. When he finds her, she is hiding and protecting herself with her arms, visibly afraid. She sorta reminded me of a little girl curling up in her room and hiding. Her husband doesn't seem the least surprised by how defensive and scared she is. He then tells her he's not going to hurt her, as if she would have reasons to believe she would be hurt if she misbehaved. As Hank doesn't seem like a violent person, she might have grown to have these reasons because of another man who hurt her, possibly her father.
Although that is not really relevant to the whole movie, I was really curious as to why she was behaving the way she did, and I expected the reasons to be revealed at some point, but they never explained it. Would it make sense to say that she was in fact abused? It might explain as well why her husband was so tolerant and forgiving with her all the time, despite how badly she treated him sometimes. Anyways, what do you think?