Donald Trump and the movie Spotlight: Psychoanalysis of bullies with different collars.

The Movie Spotlight is a mildly fictionalized account of the Boston Globe successfully exposing the pedophilia of the priesthood.  Donald Trump for president is a reality show that is becoming all too real for party leaders and for many of us in the US and across the world.  What do these two events have to do with each other besides playing concurrently?  Both are about failures among those entrusted with power to wield it in ways that benefit those among us who are most vulnerable.  Spotlight is about a group of reporters at the Boston Globe who worked in a unit that was charged with doing deep investigative reporting into problematic situations.  They chose their own work and, with the support and prodding of a new editor, they chose to work on the Roman Catholic Church’s cover up of what became increasingly apparent was an incredibly widespread practice of reassigning priests who were discovered to be molesting children to other parishes where they would do the same thing.  The Donald Trump phenomenon – one that appeared not too long ago to be a side show – is about a man with the power to do it saying things that are not politically correct and a huge portion of the voting population agreeing with him – enough to make him the expected nominee of the Republican party despite the fact that the party does not want him to lead it.  People are experiencing him as being on their side against a problematic, perhaps corrupt, incumbent political system.

First, let me acknowledge that there was a time – 1983 – when I was a casual fan of Donald Trump.  I lived in New York City from 1982- 1983 testing out whether I could survive in an urban environment.  It was fun, but also tough.  New York was in a down period – it was dirty and not a little dangerous.  I was living in the highest murder precinct in Brooklyn – and the Brownstone I was living in was broken into while I was in it.  Besides teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the city had a hard time getting a variety of things accomplished.  One of the emblems of thiswas the Wollman skating rink in South Central Park.  It had been closed for years – maybe decades.  People had been hired to fix it – they had stolen funds and then gone missing – and no one seemed able to get the unions to work with the contractors to make the thing work – so it just sat – a potentially beautiful skating pond – it was (and is) much bigger than a rink – sitting on prime real estate, unable to function.  Trump, who was just beginning to become himself, boasted that he could take care of the problem – and he did; updating the rink under budget and ahead of schedule.  He talked tough with the unions – cracked heads – and got the people who hadn’t been able to work together to work together.  At least that was the version of the story that I got as I casually read the paper – perhaps it was in the Post headlines across the subway aisle -  on my hour and a half commute to work in Jersey.  And I thought, “Goody for him.”  So, more recently, when I have flown into LaGuardia and seen his plane tethered there or gone by his gaudy building on Fifth Avenue, I have thought about the size of his ego, about the outrageousness of him, but I have also had a warm place in my heart for him – as the guy who can get things done.

I have been less sanguine about the Roman Catholic Church.  I work at a Jesuit Catholic University – I have written about the Jesuits elsewhere – and am thankful that they stand between my institution – at least sometimes – and the church.  Spotlight characterizes the situation in many parishes in Boston as one where kids from large families who were economically limited and whose parents were overwhelmed in various ways would do anything for the priest – someone who was God’s representative – and then would get groomed into engaging in sexual acts with them.  It was also the case, though, that privileged kids were seduced, though this was referenced but not emphasized, and I’m pretty sure they were stating that it happened at a Jesuit High School - Boston College High School which is a very preppy, expensive High School.

So there is lots of blame to go around.  The film takes a variety of positions regarding culpability.  The lead writer of the first story that broke the news, Michael Rezendes, played by Mark Ruffalo, is alternately angry at the individuals who callously put kids in harm’s way and the mouthpiece for a priest who has been investigating priestly abuse for some time – a person who notes that celibacy is an unnatural vow to take and therefore has empathy for the plight of the priests.  This priest notes that 50% of Catholic priests are sexually active – the majority of them with consenting adults – but a significant minority are abusing kids.  What he doesn’t say is that when a person is perverse – and homosexuality is included in church doctrine as a perversion when a person engages in homoerotic behavior (not when they are a homosexual; the reasoning is God loves the person but not the act) – they can be drawn to the priesthood because there is no place for them to practice their sexuality anyway – they are told by the church that they have to be celibate – and then the church has a job that requires celibacy.  It is a set up.

One of the few false notes in the film took place in a scene that the reluctant wife thought was unnecessary.  It took place between Ruffalo's character and one of the other reporters on the team - the sole woman.  Ruffalo goes to her home late at night - her husband is not pleased to have work - and perhaps this attractive man - intruding even further into their home life, but suggests they go out to the porch to talk together.  Both reporters are lapsed Catholics.  To explain an angry outburst over a delay in publication - one of the moments when I wondered if the story would get squelched by the Globe - the Ruffalo character describes his hope that he could return to the church some day - that he feels badly about discovering how corrupt the institution is and, in the process, destroying his image of it as a haven that he can access later.  I think it fails to ring true (and here I could be wildly off) because Ruffalo, as he lived in the character more than his character as written, does not feel an attachment to the church. I think that our inability to destroy something that we truly love is one of the cornerstones of morality and part of what creates the dramatic tension in the film.  These people actually do ambivalently love the institution they are going to bring down and so we fear that they may not have the stomach to pull it off.

Donald Trump is articulating something that a lot of people are resonating with.  What is it?  He is not speaking politically correctly.  Instead, he is speaking the “plain truth”.  What is this plain truth?  Well, it appears to be whatever is on his mind at the moment.  And a lot of it seems to be uninhibited by the kinds of attachments that make it hard to destroy things we love.  He says things that are outrageous – inconceivable in someone who is going to be the commander in chief.  In the debate where he talked about the size of his hands, which got all of the press, he also stated that he would order military officers who would report to him to engage in war crimes.  On national television.  In a political debate.  Like many of the other unfiltered things he has said, he later took this back. 

Who is this kind of talk appealing to?  One constituency seems to be a group of people who have been excluded by the concept of political correctness.  They have never bought into the idea.  Trump seems to be speaking to them indirectly.  By saying things that are outrageous and then denying them he is using a classic maneuver that Le Pen and other far right European politicians have used.  Bill Meyers, in his book Social Science Methods for Psychodynamic Inquiry (2016), has posited that this is a way for a subversive communicator to communicate with fellow subversives.  His position is that in these other individuals, unsaying was not really a way of taking things back – it was a way of having put them out there for others to see.  At first, Trump's listeners were being painted as the uneducated – the tea partiers of the Republican Party.  But he is winning in the suburbs – well educated and high income suburbs.

So how is a coded message appealing to such a broad range of people?  Part of the issue may be that the message gets decoded by various constituencies in ways that are congruent with their own needs.  Trump and his “misstatements”, which everyone “knows” contain the real truth of what he is thinking – but even these, we know, have to be coded because if the powers that be saw them for what they are they would be afraid (witness this extra-long post by a psychoanalyst who is afraid), means that people decode the apparently genuine off the cuff comments and hear them in ways that are consonant with their own world view.  Is Trump not releasing the transcript of the interview with the New York Times because he told them that he was exaggerating his rhetoric to get votes and that he is actually a reasonable guy when it comes to immigration?  (This was one of my thoughts as I was listening – perhaps I am the only one, but this could be the internal experience of many – people who reassure themselves that he is actually “safe” while others are reassuring themselves that he is suppressing the information because it shows that he will keep us “safe” by excluding foreign nationals).      

My discomfort with the church as a social institution goes deeper (or shallower – I’ll let you be the judge) than that.  The church, and its parochial schools, seems to me to have supported a kind of authoritarian culture in which what matters is what the rules are and what the authority’s judgment about those rules are rather than helping individuals internalize a sense of right and wrong in order to manage their own behaviors.  This is a sweeping and broad generalization and one that certainly does not hold in all places, but I think Spotlight focuses on this aspect, particularly in poor neighborhoods of Boston with large families and with little oversight of kids.  The priest was, as one of the victims recounts in the movie, like God.  Getting attention from the priest was as good as it got. 

The priests, as local Gods, must have experienced, on some level, their sense of difference, of privilege, of being special.  And if they did not have an internalized sense of right and wrong – the one priest interviewed in the movie noted that he never raped the children – as he had been raped by a priest as a child – so the sex play he was doing was not problematic – they cannot pass that along.  Knowing right from wrong is more than just knowing the rules – it involves an internalization – the Stone group has proposed that women’s ethics are internalized through relationships – but I can’t imagine that all truly ethical behavior isn’t internalized through loving relationships.  Feeling valued in a particular way leads to being able to value others.  Feeling valued in other ways can lead to a feeling of entitlement that can lead to exploiting others – even as one believes one is loving them.

Our social world is more divided now than we imagine it to be.  Racial and sexual diversity is depicted on television and in the movies with great regularity (despite there being much room for improvement as the Academy Awards, among others, that has been highlighted this year).  This does not necessarily represent our lived experience.  The public schools today are differently racially segregated than they were at the time of Brown vs. Board of Education, meaning that we no longer have segregation imposed by the state, but, especially in the north, where school districts are by city rather than, as is the custom in the south, by county (you can see how this played out in my own segregated upbringing here), white flight has led to suburban enclaves that are white and inner cities that are black and most of our children and many adults work, worship and learn in environments with people who are much more like them than different.  I remember in graduate school in the 1980s, nobody among my peer group had voted for Reagan: nobody.  But he was elected twice – by large margins.  Trump is speaking to people who have not voted for anyone – perhaps in their lifetimes.  They have voted for people they believe to be the lesser of two evils if they have voted at all.  And they don’t know anyone who has been in favor of whoever has been elected.  Some of these people are highly educated and live in high income suburbs.  They have been taught to value diversity, but it may be that they live in all but hermetically sealed worlds where difference scares them - where, because of a lack of true connection with those who are different, they don't love those who are different but fear them. 

Our political establishment has been culled from the elite.  Our Presidents are graduates of Harvard or Yale.  Their thoughts are shaped by the current environment, which is shaped by members of what Jeff Daniel’s character on The Newsroom embraces as the “Media Elite”.  There is a kind of bubble that grows up around people who live and work together and admire each other’s work.  And there can be a kind of insolence that can go along with that.  The faculty members of my department assume that our students will develop out of their “immature” views on such things as diversity, with our help, through education.  And yet, we have students show up every year who are at best naïve – never having lived or worked in an integrated or poor neighborhood, much less a ghetto – and at worst actively bigoted.  Derald Sue has written about the cultural people mover that keeps delivering people with bigoted attitudes on our doorsteps.  And the cultural elite have been disapproving of these people, educating these individuals (have you seen the commercial where one father says “I am your father” and the other one says “No, I am your father?”), and we feel that gays being able to marry anywhere in the country indicates that we have moved forward and we treat the legal clerk who refuses to process marriage papers for homosexual couples as an aberration – and look down on her.

Donald Trump does not look down on ordinary people – he hops into the soup with them.  He is not one of the culturally elite.  In fact, he is making a mockery of the people who have claimed that position for themselves.  A recent New York Times article has proposed that the reason Donald decided to run was that Obama mercilessly rode him for thinking that he could join the club at the White HouseCorrespondents Dinner. Well, Donald denies that this was a turning point, but he certainly knows what it feels like to be excluded and, if the current mess is any indication, he knows how to get even.

The victims in Boston were excluded.  They were locked out of a church they once highly valued.  They felt both guilty and angry about what had been done to them and what they had done.  Their lives were frequently derailed – or they were able to seal a part of their experience up and cloister it from the rest of themselves, as best they were able.  Spotlight shone a light on them, and gave them a platform from which to work.  The movie ends by noting that the group published 600 articles about the events.  They didn’t note that the church was forced to sell many of its most valuable assets to cover the costs of the lawsuits that resulted.  A structure that – despite my concerns – also did a tremendous amount of good, was brought to its knees by the bad behavior of the priests, but more importantly, by the callous behavior of the administration that – perhaps with good intention (the church teaches forgiveness – and the members of the church hierarchy may have been empathic to the plight of the priests) failed to pay attention to the needs of the congregation that it was serving – especially to the most vulnerable members of it.  In a twist, and I won’t reveal the unraveling of it here, the Boston Globe contributed to the extension of the abuse by not putting the pieces together when they first could have.  In watching the movie, I had to keep reminding myself that I knew the outcome, because I was constantly convinced – not so much that the church would prevent the story from getting out, but that the Globe somehow would.  That the news makers were too afraid of the impact of their words to let them out.

Has the Republican Party failed to let others know what has been happening?  Has the media elite been cowed by a man who attacks reporters – putting them in pens at his rallies and heckling them and encouraging his supporters to heckle them?  Have they lost their ability to be heard?  Do they not see that Trump is a bully – are they inhibited about calling it as they see it for fear of retribution – or because they are fed up with the system, too?  Has a do nothing congress, a bipartisan NAFTA focused agenda that takes into account the economy as a whole but not the well-being of those most vulnerable contributed?  Has the two party system – where extreme positions are excluded as the two parties try to draw as close to the middle – a place where few people passionately live – to get votes, which is also a system that excludes minority voices (Trump could found his own party if we had a parliament, a la Canada); has the two party system led us to a place where screaming is the only way that people feel they will be heard – and when they hear someone screaming they join in – thoughtlessly mimicking the cry without heeding the message?  Are some hearing the message loud and clear – a message that is sent in code so that it can be interpreted in a whole variety of ways?  All of these factors and many more may be contributing to this runaway train.

If we learned nothing else on 9/11, it should have been that it is easier to destroy than to build.  Governing a country as complex as ours is not accomplished by putting “my friends” into place to run things.  It is not done well by people who are cynical about its complicated structures and the tremendous tact that international diplomacy requires.  People who feel excluded can be tremendously destructive – if for no other reason than to let others know exactly how they feel.  Donald is intent on destruction, and my fear is that he continues to be the guy who can get things done.

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