Carol – A Movie about Culture, Homosexuality and Telling

Carol is an odd love story.  Three love stories really.  First, it is about the love of woman for her child.  I think this love (as a man, I have only known the love of a parent for his child) is the first, primordial love. I know, that doesn’t make any sense.  Shouldn’t the love of a child for a parent be the first, primordial love?  But it isn’t.  The love of a child for a parent is like wall paper.  It is always present – but in the background.  And romantic love, the other two loves depicted centrally in this film, is a yearning – a yearning for the other.  Someday I will write about Peter Fonagy’s description of this love – it is the yearning to know another – to bridge a void – to be (for a man, concretely) inside another – physically and psychically.  But the love of a parent for a child is a deeply felt desire to care for somebody – somebody unknown, novel, not yet formed, yet already uniquely special and particularly ours.  Someone that we bond with not because of who they have become, nor even who they will become, but because of how we are related to them – and that relationship is determined by forces that are primordial – the forces that allowed us to cradle and protect a dependent being so that it can grow to become human – the force of connection that allowed our species to become the dominant species on the planet.

Carol (played by Cate Blanchett) is a high society woman in New York City in the early 1950s.  She is divorcing a guy –they live in a mansion in New Jersey – and they have a daughter.  Their daughter is no longer an infant; she is old enough to want a doll of her own.  Carol goes Christmas shopping for her in a Manhattan Department store and meets Therese (played by Rooney Mara) who tells her that the doll her daughter wants is out of stock, and suggests that her daughter might like a train.  Carol buys the train, and leaves her gloves, which Therese returns, and they start an affair.

This movie is terribly anachronistic.  In the year (or so) after gay marriage has been legalized – when a majority (!) of the population of the United States approves of gay marriage (though the strength of the opposition to homosexuality by those who hold to that should not be underestimated) – this movie seems to be about a time that is antediluvian.  Not just because it seems (OK, if I were gay this would not seem so long ago that something as essential about myself as my sexuality was publicly repudiated) to be so last week as closeted sexuality (as if that weren’t very much still an issue), but more centrally the relationships between the central characters seem so stilted, so formal, so devoid of anything approaching psychological intimacy, this seems to be the kind of movie that was made in the 40s and 50s – a movie that is heavy on plot and light on character development – and relational development.  We are left to imagine the internal worlds of the characters as we see just hints – and puzzling hints – about who they are from their actions, not from the articulation of their thoughts as they speak to each other.

It is not only a movie out of time, it is also a movie out of space.  It was not filmed in New York, but in Cincinnati – a Midwestern City with a downtown that has skyscrapers and other buildings that can stand in for Manhattan in the 1950s.  Cincinnati is a city that the reluctant wife and I know well, so as the movie went by at the pace of paint drying (it is filmed at the pace of a film made in the 1950s), there was plenty of time to try to figure out which part of town was actually being shot (The department store is the old downtown Shillito’s, the factory in the background when they are on a road trip is Proctor and Gamble’s original Ivory Soap factory).  And this lent the story a weird sort of universality.  The story is not one that was just being played out in an exotic place like New York, but, I think, even in the humdrum Midwest, where the strictures and mores were, if anything, more rigid than in a place that was large and anonymous enough that Cincinnati can serve as a passable stand in for it because there is so much of Manhattan that even those of us who have lived there or travelled there often have not explored.

This picture then depicts a time and place that, though modern – they had indoor plumbing, telephones, and cars, and familiar – the buildings that they lived and worked in still exist and we still live and work in them, is foreign.  And the romantic love stories that emerge are, though on some level universal, oddly foreign; unknown to us because these women remain, by current standards, largely unknown to each other.

The love that Carol feels for Therese is not the center of the story.  Carol has had a previous, brief affair with a woman – another woman of privilege – a friend.  It is mysterious, this affair, through most of the movie, but is ultimately revealed to be something different than the love that she feels for Therese.  It was a romp; a roll in the hay; something that, uncomfortable though it may be, her husband and even society might be able to understand.  But this love for Therese is different.  It is self-destructive because it is forbidden.  It threatens her love for her child – her husband, whom she is divorcing, will be empowered to take her child away – to label her a pervert and seek revenge for her not loving him by cutting her off from the love that is most cherished by her.  So this love – this desire – for Therese is something that she experiences as both essential to who she is – it is powerful enough to counterbalance her love for her daughter, and alien to her – she ultimately cuts herself off from Therese in order to try to salvage her connection to her daughter.

The center of the story, then, is Therese’s love for Carol.  Therese has a boyfriend, but he is a bit of a dolt, and she is not encumbered by the love for a child.  Therese sees Carol in a way that Carol does not see Therese.  Therese observes Carol – and she comes to love her not as an object, but as a subject.  Therese is cast as a shop girl who would become a photographer – but one who is afraid to photograph humans.  Through the course of their affair, she uses her camera to capture Carol.  She also captures her, really gets her, through listening to her and observing her.  Therese, who looks like a young Audrey Hepburn, seems less taken by Carol’s beauty (Carol’s husband comments at a party that Carol is, as always, the most beautiful woman in the room) than by her person – who she is – how she inhabits herself.

So Therese is moving towards an intimate love of Carol.  What keeps it from being a more contemporary intimate kind of love is that she infers Carol’s internal state from her actions – Carol does not confess how torn she is between her two loves – Carol does not describe how difficult it is to be who she is while others observe her and imagine her to be someone she is not.  Therese allows herself to see Carol and to create Carol based on what Carol presents – a perilous undertaking - and weirdly the undertaking of the parent of the preverbal child – because actions are ambiguous in ways that words are not.  Therese creates an interior – a creature that she can touch and come to love – through careful observation of the exterior.

Carol stays more on the surface.  When she first sees Therese nude, she comments, “I never looked like that.”  Therese is the other – the unfamiliar.  The contrast between the heavy, clunky jewelry of the society women and Therese’s unadorned wrists, fingers and neck – her simple cotton compared to their heavily tailored and thick wool clothing underscores how different, how foreign, she is; just as Carol’s love for her is foreign.  It is something other, something that is for Carol unwanted, on some level, but also very much her own.  It will out, despite Carol’s wishes that it could be otherwise.  And the dramatic edge in the film – the moment when the pacing picks up and this becomes a contemporary film – is the moment when Carol owns this part of herself – when she uses it to assert her love for both Therese – or perhaps more precisely her love for that part of herself that loves and desires Therese – and her love for her daughter.

The force of Carol’s love for Therese – a force that smolders and smolders before it erupts – but once having been expressed is bottled up again – and emitted in a most controlled and distant fashion – is the force of the repressed.  It is the force of what is hidden, of what is shameful, of what is most private and vulnerable about us.  It is the force of what drives us to go to therapy and to analysis – to articulate our inchoate selves.  And the conditions under which we do that are that what we say in that hour is confidential – sets up and creates the very situation that it would relieve.  The analyst agrees to keep what is said, that which is most private – so private that we don’t even allow ourselves to know it – private.

In the film, the lovers most intimate moments are made public.  That which they want to keep most hidden – that which Carol fears being known so much that her love for Therese is stunted – she can’t see Therese for who she is because she is so focused (I believe) on managing this force that leads this woman who always exerts near perfect self-control to confide to her friend that she doesn’t know what she is doing as she tears her life apart, becomes known.  And in the moment of self-reclamation, Carol chooses to risk that privacy becoming public for a host of reasons.  On one level, I think, she recognizes that this is ultimately not something to be ashamed of.  On another level, it is something that she can turn against those who would publicize it, and she uses this very effectively.  But on a completely different level, I think there is a wish to trumpet that which is private – to articulate it – to let it be known.  Now if this last is the case, that would be a very unconscious desire – and one that we would see borne out societally, not in this case, but as gays and lesbians worked across decades to create a situation in which a movie that is describing something as explosive as the conflicts that this one is describing could seem passé.

And the need for the analyst to contain the secrets of the consulting room is counterbalanced by a need to tell them.  Not salaciously, but in a variety of forms – through describing the interaction in supervision, through writing up disguised cases, and through using the principles derived from the consulting room to inform our understanding of the world more generally, including as I do in this blog.  And the purpose of that is educational.  We need to know.  We need to know about love in all its forms.  And we need to distinguish between that which is simply socially unacceptable but has been labelled perverse, and understand how it is that this came to be the case, from that which is truly perverse.  And we need to help those who experience perverse love find ways to express love that will enhance them and not harm those who are the unwanted objects of their desire.  And the only way we can do this is to tell.

The original form of the movie was a memoir, one that was written in the 1950s about events that took place in the 1940s.  The courage of the author to tell, to inform, to teach – was impelled by the kind of love that a parent has for a child.  We love them just as they are.  We fear that they will be corrupted as they move into the world.  We hope that they will embrace the world – and love it and themselves as they do that.  And so, we tell them about the world – about all of its beauty, but also about the things that are wrong with it.  And we hope that they will be able to chip away at those things that spoil the beauty – so that they can ultimately live in a world that is more complicated, difficult, but beautiful and peaceful than the one that we live in.  We owe a debt of gratitude to the authors like Patricia Highsmith who wrote the book The Price of Salt which later was titled Carol for helping us come to see that love that causes damage only because of our societal restrictions is not perverse at all, but a love that, like all love, should be celebrated as a sacrament.

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