Fences played in our local theater years ago and I wanted to
see it then – and wanted to see it again when it came out on the screen last
year. Watching it in the intimate
theater of the small screen in our home recently, we finally became acquainted
with the play – and this movie production seemed confined by the play – it seemed
to be bursting at the seams of the small movie set that was created for it –
but also not to be quite big enough for the screen that it would burst out onto. It is a powerfully intimate play that should not be as broadly populated as a
movie screen allows. The production thus
interferes with the pleasure – if you can call brutal confrontation with the
realities that our circumscribed lives dump on us a pleasure – of engaging with
this material because it seems oddly remote, unreal, and therefore, as it were,
staged. And this is too bad, because this
really is very good theater. I am glad
to have had a shadow experience of it – though rue not having seen it in its
natural setting. (See another discussion of the difference in experience based on venue here).
The play (and it is hard to think of it as a movie) is set
in Pittsburgh in the 1950s. Troy is a
fifty something year old black man who is currently employed as a sanitation
worker – he picks up garbage – with his best friend and wingman Bono. In his youth, he played baseball in the negro
leagues and he had a season that was truly exemplary. He complains that racism kept him from
playing for the New York Yankees – but we discover later that his break-out
year came late in an athlete’s life – after he had served 15 years in prison
for robbery – where he had met and befriended Bono. In that break out year, when he was a star
and had his pick of women, he chose Rose, who insisted that they marry, and
they have led a hardscrabble life. They
now live in a shotgun house in Pittsburgh, a house his disabled brother Gabriel has
recently moved away from into a neighbor’s home. Gabriel’s settlement with the federal
government over his war related head injury paid for the house. Rose and Troy live in it with their high
school age son, Cory. They also live near Troy’s son Lyons from a pre-prison
relationship. He is having an affair,
which he denies to Bono (and implicitly to Rose), but can no longer deny when
it produces a child.
This play is a tragedy – or rather a set of them. The central tragic figure is, of course,
Troy, whose anger about his own treatment, by his father and then by the white
establishment ends up isolating him in an angry stew - he becomes fenced by his
anger – and this, in turn, chases away those who love him. His anger is toxic and it eats away at and destroys the winning aspects of his personality. He tries to keep it directed at imaginary enemies like death, but it all too often gets directed at the people who love him. Not only do they love him, he loves, needs
and depends on them. He does not
articulate all of this, however. Instead
we infer it – we see it – and we also see and recognize that he is defending
against being dependent – defending against his needs – at least in part
because acknowledging them makes him weak or vulnerable and he expects that
weakness will lead to others taking advantage of him – taking away all that is
most valuable to him. He cannot see that
it his own actions that are bringing about the very thing he most fears.
Rose, too, is a tragic figure. She has hitched her wagon to a man who is
bigger than life – someone who is bursting the boundaries of what it means to
be alive. He is guy who hit more home
runs than anyone else, and had a higher average – and got seven hits off of
Satchel Paige in one season, but he is also the man that she is trying to fence in – or rather
to fence the world away from – a world that tempts him away from her. She has subjugated herself to him – but she
decides not to do that any longer by supporting Cory’s wishes to become a
football player and accept a scholarship to college. Troy thwarts this attempt, refusing to allow
Cory to play and refusing to allow Cory to talk to the recruiter. Rose must live with Cory’s decision to leave –
to go into the Marines – and she decides to raise Troy’s daughter when her
mother dies in childbirth – but she locks Troy out of her heart in order to do
that. She chooses a life that is smaller
than the one she would have had in order to make things work.
Cory is also a tragic figure – but in the modern meaning of that
word – not the classical Greek sense.
Instead of being betrayed by his own character he is a victim of
circumstance – of the ways that his father has been mistreated and now treats
his son – providing everything that his son needs except love and affection –
and envying him as a result – which the son finds confusing. How can his father both despise him – think him
unworthy – and envy him – want what he has that the father finds to be of such
little value? Cory’s tragic experience
is one of confusion. But it also opens
the door to the overriding tragedy – the tragedy of the larger circumstances in
which the more classical tragedies of Troy and Rose play out. They are trapped by racism, by gender roles, by
their economic conditions, and by the inter-generational violence that plays
itself out in front of our eyes. We see
that they are victims as well as perpetrators of their isolation and despair.
Troy’s quixotic engagement with the world is symbolized by
his opening anxiety about losing his job after asking why he can’t be a garbage
truck driver just because he is black.
He is called into the commissioner’s office and we, along with Bono and
Rose, assume that he will be fired for insubordination. Instead, he is promoted. But even this turns out to be, at best, a
mixed blessing. He is separated from
Bono, with whom he was paired at the back of the truck, and he has no one to
talk to – and he is now seen as an authority – just one of the many pieces that
leave him more and more isolated – but in this case particularly from
Bono. Michael Balint, in writing The
Basic Fault, noted that we much prefer to be Don Quixote to being Sancho Panza –
the role of Bono – who keeps Don Quixote tied to the real world. Troy’s other Sancho is, of course, Rose, and
he is separated from her as well. The
tragedy that Troy endures is that of isolation.
As much as he wanted to be the great baseball player – the adulation
that brought is a substitute for what he truly needs – the grounding
influence and connection he feels with Rose and Bono.
After watching the movie, the reluctant wife and I agreed
that we both identified with the Rose character more than the Troy character
(though we are also, at least theoretically aware that we play Troy in
significant chunks of our lives – and had earlier agreed that we would rather be
Don Quixote than Sancho Panza). Even
though I imagine that Troy is modeled on real people in the playwright’s life, I think
he is alive in the ways he is because Wilson has imagined himself into the
character in writing him– as has Denzel Washington and, once upon a time,
James Earl Jones in playing him. I
admire all three men for doing this. Seeing ourselves in the mirror of demanding fealty and getting loneliness instead of love is intensely painful, indeed Don Quixote was defeated by the night of a thousand mirrors. Being Don Quixote also involves being unconscious of how that looks from the outside so, when we are confronted with image, as we were in this movie – we escape into identifying with Sancho. Being Quixote is no longer fun when we are confronted by the problematic aspects
of being the isolated, tyrannical Don, so we can flee even further, into being victims in the
broader, Cory-like sense. The power of tragedy; however, and Freud’s realization and
characterization of the tragic quality of living our lives – is that realizing
our own part in a tragedy – no matter how disempowered we actually are and further feel – is all the leverage that we may have. Ultimately, especially when we are disempowered, we cannot change
others, but only ourselves. In our roles
as Sancho Panza (and both Bono and Rose exemplify this) we can, at best, put
things in front of the Don to see – as they did with Troy, and as an analyst
does with a patient. It is the patient
who is empowered to make the change.
What is remarkable about our government is that we put in
place a powerful check on the rule of the majority – the court system. I heard in an NPR story once that we
frequently counsel other countries not to include this check in their
constitutions because it is such a headache.
And it is. But if we don’t build
in a means for the minority position to be heard, if we don’t, as Troy,
recognize that it is we who are, in fact, not just put upon, but putting upon
others, if we don't hold up a mirror and recognize ourselves, we become despots, and this will always end tragically for all involved.
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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