Evan Connell’s Mrs. Bridge and Ava Duvernay and Paul Webb’s Selma – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Connects Two Stories About Race Told From Opposite Sides of the Divide

Mrs. Bridge is a finely told story – one that feels timeless - in Evan Connell’s description of the life of a “Country-Club Matron” in the middle of the twenty century in the middle of the country.  It is a life of privilege but with little sense of purpose – though the latter is not emphasized.  The writer is strangely sympathetic to his subject – allowing her to be – presenting her to us as best he is able – and letting us judge her – and judge it seems we must – without being harsh.

Selma, one of those movies that I should have seen last year but didn’t get to, is about a piece of a very purposeful life – the one of Martin Luther King, Jr.  It is about the strategies that he employed – the tactics that he used – to further his agenda.  It is about his taking on some of the biggest bullies of his time – the sheriffs and petty politicos of the south who wielded absolute power in their districts and President Johnson – a man who knew how to get what he wanted accomplished.

Both have race and power as central dynamics, but before we get there, the other reason to think of them together, other than their crossing my path at roughly the same time, is that both works stay very close to the surface in their descriptions of their chief protagonists.  This might sound, coming from a psychoanalyst, like a criticism.  And there is a wish, on my part, to know more about each character.  But I think it also demonstrates remarkable restraint on the part of both authors – and I think the restraint is, perhaps ironically, intensely psychoanalytic. 

Freud first warned about “wild analysis” in 1910 and contemporary psychoanalyst Fred Busch works to help prevent this by teaching how to stay close to the “workable surface” in clinical interactions with patients.  These ideas have been honored largely in the breach by psychoanalysts all too willing to reduce the complicated trains of events that lead to any human behavior to a particular event like bad toilet training.  We also do this when symbols are given universal meaning without consulting with the author of them (and, yes, I am sure that I guilty of doing different forms of wild analysis in blogs – perhaps I will do that later in this very one…).  But the goal of analysts is to work from that workable surface – from that which is known, and to deepen the experience by noting, with the analysand, defenses against knowing something more about the self.  This requires a relationship of trust.

Martin Luther King, Jr., did not trust his interlocutors in the white world – and many within the African American community – with good reason.  He was engaged, however peaceful his means, in a very aggressive interaction and the stakes could not have been higher.  In one of the most poignant scenes in the film, Coretta Scott King, who has received tape recordings from the FBI of what are purported to be MLK’s sexual interactions with other women, notes that they are a fraud because she knows what Martin sounds like in the throes of ecstasy.  We think, for a moment, that the FBI’s intent, which is to pit the Kings against each other and thus win the war, has failed.  But then she goes on.  She asks Martin if he loves her.  He acknowledges that he does.  Then she asks the fateful question.  Does she love him more than the others?  She knows and he knows that she knows.  There is a pregnant pause, and he states that they mean nothing to him – acknowledging that what the FBI is alleging is true.  Then the test occurs – will this revelation tear them apart?  Is this how the FBI will win?  Coretta and Martin close ranks.  Martin stays back from the fight – even though it is at its most pitched and feverish moment – to heal the connection with Coretta and with his family.  And here, in what may be a bit of wild analysis, Coretta says (in my mind, not on the screen) – this is a problem, but it is our problem and you – the FBI - have no business in it.

This interaction – as fraught and tense as it might be – stays at the surface.  Martin stays at the surface with Coretta – going no further than she has gone in her observation.  He does not engage in histrionics, nor does he deny.  He acknowledges a shared truth that they now hold between them.  The same thing is happening between the production and its (largely white) audience.  The truth is acknowledged – but nothing more.  It is not our business to know what lies beneath – what complicated motivations lead to the very simple action – the very human action – of adultery – nor, despite my attempts to imagine it, what keeps us in relationships when the other has strayed.    We are not invited to speculate.  It is presented as a simple set of facts; just as Martin’s love for Coretta is presented as a simple fact.

Similarly, when Martin decides not to march into the heart of Alabama when the National Guard withdraws at the other side of the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, he does so without words.  His later description clarifies that he does not trust the invitation to move forward – one that is, at this point, against the law.  He wants to get the law on his side.  But I think (and here may be another a wild analysis moment) he is mostly distrustful of an enemy that would offer a breach in the defenses.  He would never offer this without it being a trap.  He is concerned that once through them, he will be surrounded by the enemy – perhaps far from the news cameras that have been on his side.  There is dissent about this decision among the people who have gathered to march, but that dissension is private.  They retain their public support of their leader.  The defenses are not breached.

Mrs. Bridge also demonstrates unfailing support of her husband – a man who is largely absent, both physically, working long hours six and sometimes seven days a week – but psychologically as well.  They inhabit very different worlds – he the world of law – whatever that means – and commerce and she the world of socializing and shopping.  She makes efforts to deepen herself – to create an internal world – buying records to learn Spanish – going to the art museum – she even considers analysis at one point - but other things interfere with following through on these attempts – ones that would broaden and deepen who she is.

I found myself weirdly envious of Mrs. Bridge – wishing that I could live in the idyllic time that she was living in rather than our current frantic and uncertain time – and then realized that the time that I was envious of was the time of the great depression – perhaps our most uncertain time as a nation.  Mrs. Bridge’s wealth and privilege, both of which are almost completely invisible to her, insulate her from harsh realities that surely exist not very far from her front doorstep.

Indeed, the racial divide exists in her own home.  Her most constant companion across time is her African American housekeeper – whom she barely comes to know.  Her middle daughter – the child who most clearly punctures the haze of her living – Corky – befriends the African American daughter of a man who works next door on Saturdays.  They get along famously – for years it seems - until Mrs. Bridge becomes aware that Corky is older now and that socializing with an African American just isn’t done – so the relationship falls by the wayside – it is not forbidden, nor does it end – it simply withers, indirectly suffocated by Mrs. Bridge’s subtle criticism.  When Mrs. Bridge hears something of the adult friend, Corky has only mild interest that quickly fades.  The defense of Mrs. Bridge is the clouding of consciousness – the obliteration of interest from within the family that might lead to connections with undesirable elements outside of it.  The threats that escape her notice are those that seem familiar – that look like natural extensions of their lives, not ones that are clearly demarcated by color.

Martin strove to bring into sharp relief the things that white Americans did not want to see.  He recognized that the Civil Rights Act, as important as it was, meant nothing if African Americans could not vote.  African Americans needed political power to protect themselves and to join in as citizens in the country.  He did not wait, despite Johnson’s entreaties, for a convenient time to assert this need, but did it when he had the political capital and the proper launching point to create the momentum that he needed (though I am aware that it may well have been in Johnson’s interests to enroll voters who would likely vote for his party).  But he did this from behind a wall – the wall of (non-violent) confrontation – confrontation that would expose the violent need of white society to suppress – to disavow – to distance themselves from the recognition that we are all human – that we all struggle to survive, while exposing relatively little of his own inner life and struggles.  He dreamt of a time when a person would be judged by the content of their character, but he knew that he did not live in that time.  Mrs. Bridge, caught dead center on the opposite end of that divide – living the life that denies all struggle – becomes an odd mirror for Martin – each of them living on a surface that they were unwilling and perhaps unable to dig beneath. 

This week’s Sunday New York Times includes an article by an anthropologist who has lived among and studied the wives in the Upper East Side of New York – perhaps the wealthiest and, in some ways, the most privileged people on the planet.  These women, married to very powerful men, are characterized as devoting their lives and considerable intelligence and training to the competition of getting the best education for their children, largely through volunteering time – whether as teacher’s assistants, for the PTA, or with various charities.  They are given bonuses by their husbands – sometimes based on carefully articulated contracts.  And they live largely apart from their husbands – lunching and dining with each other, not with the men.  The author points out how disempowered these wealthy women are.  In another section of the same paper, the concept of “Throwing Shade” is described as the ability honed by slaves unable to speak directly about the indignities of their situation, to insinuate ambiguously the foibles of the other.  But I wonder whether our modern, liberated upper east side women, despite better educations and undoubtedly many analyses,  and our African American entertainers throwing shade, rich and famous beyond Martin’s wildest dreams, are as isolated and lonely as Mrs. Bridge – and perhaps Mr. King himself.  To be able to connect, both within ourselves, but also with those around us – in the messy ways that include the stuff that is ugly, directly and unambiguously, requires trust – trust that our humanity is shared by the person we are connected to – and produces the joy – and certainly the curse – of true freedom.

Neither Mrs. Bridge nor Mr. King lived in contexts of trusting relationships.  But each has found a trustworthy narrator in these two works of art.  We get to know each of them - not as they were, in all their depth - and not as they were known by each person in their lives - but to some extent as they knew themselves, or could let themselves be known by others.  There are moments of true intimacy for each - I have not focused on those here - moments when each connected with their spouse - Mr. King as he was preparing with Mrs. King to receive the Noble Peace Prize and for Mrs. Bridge when she tried and failed to produce a special dinner for Mr. Bridge - and he responded by bringing her a dozen roses the next day.  But their lives - and I feel embarrassed comparing the ordinary life of Mrs. Bridge with the extraordinary one of Mr. King - in the ways that they needed to be lived as dictated by the times in which they lived them - called for very different but eerily mirrored responses - hers to keep things the same - his to change them.  They both needed to protect their own integrity - something that helped their cause but hindered their personal development - and something that I need to write about at greater length soon.     

Post Script:  I have ended up writing about the integrity (or lack thereof) of the psychology profession in a series of three pieces about psychology and torture which can be accessed here,  here, and here.  I also wrote about Harper Lee's version of integrity in Go Set A Watchman.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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