A woman came into the shop yesterday and admitted to being a Virgo. Even though she was aching to read the final installment in Steig Larsson’s absurdly successful Millennium Trilogy, the size of the current trade-paperback was putting her off. The thought of having a third book on her shelf, which didn’t match the size of the first two, was overwhelming. She’d rather starve.

My own father, also a recovering Virgo, toiled similarly under the tyrannical reign of such extreme orderliness. You could hear him the whole length of the house away, restacking the dishwasher and swearing at the recklessness of our original design – the sheer idiocy of the way in which we’d placed the special ceramic cups next to the saucepans, the single-bloody-minded blasphemy of our plate order. In the garden outside, the pegs on the clothes-line were colour-coordinated – red red, yellow yellow, blue blue etc and the cracks between the bricks were cleaned of moss and other non linear, rhizomatic forms of rebellion, no exaggeration, with a small metal implement made painstakingly in the garage for just such a purpose. It was a way he had of keeping chaos in order, a way that brings to my mind the orderly rows of human bodies we tend to line up after some shocking disaster. Lists and straight lines render the terror, at least in part, manageable.

For many years, especially the ones during which I was listening to a lot of Rage Against The Machine, my father represented an absurd order, against which I was waging chaos. (I must have been reading Lacan at the time, if I remember correctly, because I also spent inordinate periods of time looking at myself in the mirror.) We inherit the world of our parents, after all, and it takes about 15 years or so before we realize what a mess they’ve made of it, what a diabolical system of stupidities and inequalities they’ve abided, and abetted and bequeathed.

Two films reminded me recently of this enduring and universal tension between fathers and sons, between the order, which "The Father" represents, and the chaos, which his literal replacement, "The son", promises. These divisions are by nature, reversible, of course. The Father’s order weakens upon closer examination and is revealed as chaos. It is The Son, so to speak, who must teach him the new order.

Not long after Hugo Weaving was the voice of an evil robot / car, in Transformers, he became Kev, a struggling father and thug in Glendyn Ivin’s wonderful, Last Ride, a film which disappeared somehow without a trace, and without winning every single Australian film prize, for which it seemed destined. The ride in question is a desperate lurch through South Australia, undertaken by Kev and his young son Chook in a series of stolen cars, while the forces of consequence and disaster gather and close on them. Kev, charged with the job of protecting and teaching his young son, struggles against his own erratic cruelty, even repeating in one sublimely terrifying scene, the vicious methods of his own father, by abandoning Chook in the middle of a salt lake.

The Road, John Hillcoat’s rendering of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, might be viewed in this context as an auspicious companion to Last Ride, it’s strange mirror. The road tells, similarly, the story of a father and son who travel across a bleak, beautifully rendered desolation toward nothing really.

According to the historian and sociologist Theodore Zeldin, Humanity’s job has always been to produce more humanity. To begin with, this was a matter of numbers – of survival and procreation. Gradually, it has become a question of dignity, of humaneness. Amidst the chaos, these films ask by extension, how do we find ways to order our most noble impulses, to institutionalize dignity, to extend, even by a little the amount of goodness in an already broken world bequeathed to us by the previous generation?

At the end of his book, Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, proposes one such possibility:

“Learn and seek to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”