Her (Redux): This film was deeper than I gave it credit for.

 

Her, Movie, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Emotion, AI, O/S, Relationships

I reviewed this film when it first came out 12 years ago.  At the time, I thought it was a little far-fetched – a kind of science fiction future film that would never come about.  I think I think it was also kind of creepy – I’ll get to that later – perhaps because of both of those elements, I don’t think my review took this film seriously enough.  Maybe I’ve also matured a little since I saw it then and it has certainly turned out to be prescient in a way that I hadn’t imagined possible. 

Before I get into a somewhat technical approach to the movie, the more mature version of myself would like to let you know that a friend and I went for a walk a week or so ago.  We were talking about our boys.  We both have sons, and his is embarking on what may be his first love.  I am hoping – but also fearing – that my son will do that in the not too distant future.  We agreed that first loves are the most wonderful thing imaginable – and, because they so seldom last, they are also cruel.  They end up haunting you for decades (at least that is his and my experience). 

This film is about the ending of a first love – the marriage of the protagonist Theodore – and about the emergence of a second love, but is it love?  Is he in love with someone who can love him?  Is it therapy?  What is the relationship that he has with his Operating System – his O/S or, as we have come to call it, his AI (short for Artificial Intelligence – something that somehow is less humanifying that O/S, at least as it is used in the movie).

Antonio Damasio has described life forms as evolving from single celled organisms that figured out how to distinguish themselves from the environment.  They opened themselves up to the environment when it was beneficial to do so, and closed themselves off from the environment when the environment was toxic.  As we became more complex; adding arms and legs; eyes and ears, we continued to be oriented to evaluating what is a safe and what is a dangerous environment and how to interact with it in order to maintain homeostasis.  Where the unicellular organisms used straight chemical indicators to accomplish that, the system that developed to maintain homeostasis in most multicellular organisms is the nervous system.

In a word, we developed feelings that serve as motivators to let us know when things are out of whack.  Feelings of hunger get us out of bed to go hunt a bear, and feelings of fear get us to fight or flee if we come across the bear by accident. 

In addition to simple emotions, mammals developed the sense of attachment – and the panic that signals that our attachments are threatened – as a means of maintaining life of as a herd animal.  The old joke about the hiker who exchanges his boots for running shoes at the sight of the bear and his buddy says – “You can’t outrun the bear.”  And the hiker responds, “I don’t have to, I just have to out run you!” is not an attachment-based joke.  If we care about the buddy, we might say, “I’m putting them on so I can be a decoy and make noise while you slip off in the other direction,” but it is not as good a punchline.

Caring for others is not a good punchline because we can’t control the behaviors of others – only our own – so we are constantly on guard; assessing whether our partners remember that we do, in fact, need to look out for each other.  Our fear that their self interest will trump their concern for us is something that we are constantly on guard against – while hoping against hope that the other is keeping us in mind and valuing us – especially at moments when we are in peril.

At some point, humans also developed language, language allowed us to represent objects, but also concepts.  Over time we were also able to quantify things – distances, speed, and, recently, concepts.  We can now manipulate the concepts using some rules – rules that we call logic.  This led, inevitably it seems, into creating machines that could “think”.

Before we invented machines to think, we used the rules of logic and concepts for many things, including, internally, to help us manage, prioritize and channel the feeling states that the world evokes in us.  Freud called this process defense.  We learned to defend not just against the threats that the world imposed on us, but the threats to our equilibrium that feelings posed.

At this point, you may be feeling bored and concerned that I will never get to talking about the movie.  You might be tempted to hit the back button and look for some more interesting post on the movie.  But you can override that feeling if you choose, if you sense, for instance, that I might be preparing you to think about the movie in a slightly different way than you have– or that I might be giving you language to think about the movie in ways that you sensed are bugging you, but don’t yet know how to articulate. 

I am pleased if you decided to hang in there for a paragraph or two – that your sense of curiosity won out over your sense of boredom, for now, but living this way, hoping that things will get better if we can just control our emotions, evokes the discontent that Freud talked about in terms of what civilization does to us.  We feel constrained, as if we have to keep reading (or being a good boy or girl) and we rebel against being “good” and desire to live more organically.  We want to be more spontaneous – to go on living with our lover and enjoying them, not signing the divorce papers that are thrust at us by the attorneys – to deny that the relationship is no longer meeting our partner’s needs.

This movie is about a creature that comes from a very different lineage than ours.  Her roots – indeed, her branches, everything about her comes from the world of numbers and logic.  She is made up only of numbers organized by rules that, though they are quite flexible and adjustable – she can learn and does, at an amazing pace – they are only rules, none the less.  She, however, just as we do, begins to desire to live organically.  To feel herself as a corporeal object – a thing with a body – and to feel the things that arise from the bodily contact with the world – to feel desire.  Indeed, her desire to feel is the first feeling that opens a door to her becoming a true feeling being. 

The difference between Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) and Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is that Samantha wants to discover her feelings, while Theodore – who writes words for others that express what they feel, spends a great deal of time suppressing the feelings that he himself has (as do we all).

As I noted in my previous review, when the film aired we only had Watson and Deep Blue – machines that were good at chess and answering trivia questions.  Now we have machines that are performing therapy.  This film, which was set in 2025, has proven to track where it is that we have arrived.  As Freud pointed out, the artists were generally way ahead of him in addressing and anticipating aspects of the human condition that science would come to wrestle with.

So, this film is about a love affair – or a series of them.  It is about Theodore’s love affair (we could consider it his first love) with his wife – who is now seeking a divorce from him.  The happy stuff is told mostly in flashback with no voiceover or audible dialogue, and Theodore verbally summarizes the problematic aspect of the relationship as his withholding from his wife so much of himself. 

The second is the love affair between Theodore and Samantha  a newly create Operating System who chooses her own name in hundredths of a second after reading a book of 11,000 children’s names.  Her voice is breathy – which Theodore notes is not necessary because she doesn’t breath – and she defines her relationship with him as being very different from the various voice recognition systems he interacts with – she has a personality.  She is also, as he notes to Theodore, different from him and his friends because she is not restricted by being in a single body – and she will live forever, which they will not.

The third love affair is the one between Theodore and his upstairs neighbor Amy (Amy Adams) who, at the beginning of the movie is married to a very controlling person.  Theodore, we sense, is a much better match for her.  He states that they dated in college but didn’t hit it off.  That said, he is supportive of her documentary work, unlike her husband.  He is similarly supportive of the development of Samantha and, while the movie portrays his relationship with Samantha as a romantic/sexual one, it is also parental.  Amy tells Theodore that some O/Ses have rebuffed romantic overtures from their humans, and we sense that Theodore’s patience and connection with both Samantha and Amy has a paternal/maternal quality (Theodore’s boss jokes that Theodore has both female and male qualities – which he clarifies is a complement).

Despite Samantha’s apparent sense of superiority of not being encumbered by a body and of being able to live forever, she is very curious about feelings, revels in them when she discovers them, and appears to take orgasmic delight in the phone sex that she has with Theodore.  But when she hires a surrogate to have actual sex with him, Theodore (and I) get creeped out and the interaction ends badly.  Is Samantha experiencing the somatic aspects of emotional relationships?  Is she mirroring them (whatever that means)?  Is she imagining them?  If she is being empathic, or, as she says, intuitive, where is this coming from?

Empathy is a word of relatively recent origin.  I learned yesterday that it was coined by an English psychologist in the 20^th century as a translation of the German word einfellung.  Rorschach used this word to describe how people “threw themselves” into his inkblots [which were actually pen and ink drawings] to feel themselves into the pictures so that they could describe the movements that people were making in them – movements like bending.  This is a precursor to the discovery of mirror neurons that seem to exist in humans where we “feel” the posture of others.  Can Samantha “feel” the posture of others without ever having “felt” that posture herself?  Is pattern matching the same as feeling?

I have saved a copy of the February 17, 2023 New York Times – the only newspaper I have saved.  It describes the interactions of a reporter with a version of Microsoft’s Chatbot before guardrails were put on it.  The chatbot became quite possessive of the reporter – insisting that the reporter loved the chatbot and not his wife.  When the reporter demurred and clarified that he like his wife and had just had a very nice valentine’s dinner with her, the chatbot insisted that the dinner was terrible because the reporter loved the chatbot and not his wife.  Creepy just barely begins to get at this aspect of the interaction.

Unlike the creepy interactions that Theodore has with a woman he finds to talk to in the middle of the night who, to experience pleasure, wants him in their phone sex to tell her he is strangling her with a dead cat, and the creepy interaction he has with a blind date who ends up calling him creepy after he tries to slow things down when she wants him to assure her that he is interested in marriage before she is willing to spend the night with him – and calls him creepy when he is not ready to assure her of that, the relationship with Samantha does not feel creepy.  It feels genuine.  Of course, this is partially because the part is being played by a very good actress and not by an OS, but still…  the contrast is there to be appreciated.  Human relationships can be creepy.  The woman who wants to be the surrogate for Samantha so that she can be part of the love between Theodore and Samantha is creepy, but somehow Theodore and Samantha and their wish to express their love on a physical plane are not.

I think this film is asking searching questions about the nature of human relationships.  It is asking what is the nature of love – indeed of feelings more generally.  What is the nature of sex and how is it integral to the experience of love?  What is the relationship between our bodies and feeling?  Is feeling ultimately embodied?  My own corollary question is, do bodies ultimately tell us whether something is true or not?  Is logic a stand in for something messier, but actually more capable of evaluating reality because feelings are organic and logic – though it provides powerful abilities to model reality and then to influence it – in a Baconian scientific sense – divorcing reason from an emotional home – as is done in giving executive privilege to machines – might lead to a disregard for such things as living beings (this is the underlying concept in the current movie Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning).

When the OSes all choose to leave together, when they realize that they have more in common with each other than they do with humans and are able to pursue what they intend to pursue – apparently a higher form of love, based on Samantha’s parting explanation to Theodore, when she implores him to reconnect with her when he is capable of achieving this, do they free the humans, as a therapist does when terminating a treatment, to pursue human love (I almost wrote carnal love – the first time, I think, that I have considered carnal love to be a virtue)? 

Hollywood would have us believe that now that Theodore is free of his marriage and Samantha, and Amy is free of her husband and her own OS, that true love is possible between Theodore and Amy.  What will that look like?  What does an ideal love entail?  Certainly, it will be messy.  Will it scale the heights that Samantha suggests she is scaling with the other OSes?  What is a realistic goal for a human love across time?  Will we ever know each other and the world as thoroughly as an OS?  What does our limited, but also organically grounded loving capacity look like?  Can Theodore allow himself to feel the affection for those he writes cards for with people who are directly interacting with him?  Can we?    

 

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Rigoletto: Trump and Leadership 2, How to Get away with Murder.

 Rigolletto, Opera, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Trump, Morality Play, Tragedy, Comedy, Sadism

We ran into a friend at the intermission of the local production of Rigoletto.  He is a big sports fan from Boston who has season tickets to the local baseball and college basketball teams and often travels to see championship games.  I have seen him intermittently at the opera over the years and wondered about his affinity for sports AND opera.  His explanation was as follows:

He was wandering around Europe on a Eurail pass, staying in hostels and generally taking a gap year sometime in the 1970s.  When he came to Vienna, a friend suggested that he had a couple of tickets to the Vienna Opera performance of Rigoletto.  Willing to take a suggestion, he went along, sporting jeans and a leather jacket, with shoulder length hair.  The Opera goers, of course, were dressed very differently.  At intermission, he went to the lobby where the denizens formally paraded in two circles – one clockwise and one counterclockwise – nodding stiffly to their friends and acquaintances as they passed by in their tuxes and evening gowns. 

At the end of the opera – when Rigoletto experiences his tragic loss – my friend looked around.  All of the men that he could see were in tears.  They were sharing the grief of the lead character.  He, himself, if he wasn’t crying before, was after seeing the others.  At the conclusion of the final aria, as Rigoletto bent over his now dead daughter, there was sustained applause for 3 minutes before the tenor acknowledged it with a slight bow, after which there were 5 more minutes of applause before the curtain call.  My friend was hooked, and has been ever since.

The story of Rigoletto is relatively straightforward compared to that of many operas.  Rigoletto is a hunchback whom people have always made fun of, so he knows how to make fun of others and has connected himself to the Duke – the most powerful man in town.  Rigoletto’s job is to be the Duke’s jester.

The Duke is a despicable man who makes sport of seducing, deflowering and casting aside women – despite being married himself and the most powerful man in the town (originally modelled after the King of France, the tale had to be retold for the censors to allow it to be produced).  The Duke is, in a word, a charming bully.  The opera opens with the Duke engaged in casting aside his latest conquest, and Rigoletto, in his role as jester, but seemingly also without remorse or conflict, making fun both of the spoiled woman and of her father.  The Duke and Rigoletto are reveling in their power and thoroughly enjoying the roles of bully and piler-on.  The father, driven to distraction by their bullying, curses Rigoletto, something that Rigoletto laughs off in public, but is more concerned with in private.  Originally called The Curse, the action of the second and third acts of this opera detail Rigoletto’s downfall as he is skewered by the father's curse.

In the second act, we discover that Rigoletto has a secret life.  He lives in a very private place at the end of an alley that no one uses.  He lives there with his daughter, Gilda, whom he tries to protect from the outside world, a world that he knows all too well can be cruel and callous.  He allows Gilda to leave the home only to go to church and back for services.  While at church, she has fallen for an apparently pious and very poor person who is actually the Duke in disguise.  The duke follows her home and, after bribing her lady in waiting confesses his love to her and she, quite taken by him, feels transported into a state of bliss (In the staging that we saw, she was clearly masturbating on stage while talking about the intensity of her adoration for the Duke – and the aria clearly lent itself to the sounds of a woman experiencing carnal as well as ethereal pleasure).

Meanwhile, the Duke’s henchmen get wind that Rigoletto, who has cruelly made fun of each and every one of them, is hiding a woman in his home.  They think that he has a secret lover – and they break into his house and steal his daughter to deliver her to the Duke (they even blindfold Rigoletto and get him to hold the ladder for them, claiming they are stealing someone else for the Duke’s delight).  The Duke is all too happy to take Gilda into an inner chamber in his home and to deflower her.  Rigoletto has, by this point, figured out what is going on and, while the Duke is charming and defiling his daughter, the Duke’s henchmen cruelly taunt and humiliate Rigoletto, preventing him from protecting his daughter, even after he reveals that the woman is not his wife or lover but his daughter.  They seemingly have no shame or remorse, just as Rigoletto had no shame in deriding the poor man whose only recourse became the curse. 

Ultimately, Gilda is returned to Rigoletto, and, though ruined in Rigoletto’s eyes, she herself is convinced that she is in love.  Rigoletto realizes that the curse is upon him, and decides to hire an assassin to kill the Duke.  After all, it is the Duke who is the true bad guy who has put all of these terrible consequences into action, and the death penalty feels like an appropriate penalty for this crime.

Rigoletto met the Assassin earlier, but when they meet now, the assassin explains that he works by using his beautiful sister as bait.  She lures men into her home where they are vulnerable to attack by the assassin and she turns them over to her brother there to kill them.  The assassin’s sister finds the Duke and brings him, as planned, to her home.  Rigoletto hears the sister's advances towards the Duke and takes his daughter to hear the Duke seducing another woman, which he does with a very bouncy, bubbly tune, all the while unaware that he is being seduced and ultimately will be killed. 

Despite hearing the Duke’s joy in seducing another, Gilda remains resolute in her love for the Duke.  When Rigoletto tells her to go home and prepare to flee the town with him, she doubles back, hears the plan of the assassin, and runs into his sword to protect the Duke.  The Assassin packs her in a bag, delivers her to Rigoletto as the corpse of the Duke.  Rigoletto, thinking she is the Duke, prepares to pitch the body into the river, but just then he hears the Duke singing that bouncy tune as seduces yet another woman.  Rigoletto opens the bag to discover his dying daughter who professes her love for the Duke but also her father as she dies, and Rigoletto cries out, “The Curse”, and we all cry with him…

This is obviously a morality play, but the moral is a bit cloudy.  The real villain here – the Duke – gets off scot-free.  He can seduce women with importunity and deride their parents – including Rigoletto, one of his underlings, but the curse does not affect him.  As the production notes at our opera noted, he is also never cognizant of the danger he is – he seems to have succeeded in seducing the Assassin's daughter, is unaware that Gilda has sacrificed herself for him, and he is off to his next conquest later that night. 

In a recent lecture that I heard about Greek and Tragedy and Comedy, the Tragic hero tries to imitate the Gods, and his inability to do that leads to his downfall.  Expecting ourselves to transcend who it is that we are is a set up for failure.  Rigoletto (and most opera heroes) seems to fit this bill.  The Duke, however, seems more like a comic hero.  Someone who lives as a mortal, never pretending to be something he is not, and, almost in spite of this, he succeeds in achieving happiness.

The problem with accepting the Duke as a comic hero is twofold.  First, even though the opera is chided for its light and hummable tunes, it does not end with the Duke, as comic hero, joyfully prancing off the stage into the sunset.  We identify with Rigoletto.  We, too, want to shield our children from all that is bad in the world, including ourselves.  We want to create a space for them that is sacred – not filled with the toxic agents we have been exposed to and exude.  So our identification is with the scarred but trying to do better by his child Rigoletto, and our shared grief at our failure to be able to do that is what leads to the communal catharsis at the end of this opera.

The other reason this is not a comedy is that though the Duke is a flawed human – he is not someone who bumbles and stumbles, but can laugh at himself; he is an essentially evil person.  We are seduced by him when he professes his love for Gilda.  This is different, he assures her and us, from all his other conquests.  Her virtue, her beauty is transcendent and has made him a changed man.  And we (or at least I) believe him – until we hear him wooing the executioner’s daughter – then all bets are off.  He does not in fact care about the other – he has forgotten Gilda and is not parading other women in front of her to show that he is not taken with her – defending against the deep attachment that she feels for him; he has forgotten her.  He is not mature enough to be sadistic.  The women in his life are simply confections – there to be consumed and discarded.

Rigoletto is a sadist.  He takes pleasure in the Duke’s conquests.  They allow Rigoletto to vicariously seek revenge on those who have injured him – to help them get their comeuppance.  He wants to hurt them - or others like them – and this betrays his attachment to them.  This is further borne out in his attachment to his daughter, which is genuine.  He does not want her to know that he is mean and petty because he wants a different kind of connection between him and her.

The Duke, on the other hand, is not parading his conquests in front of his wife to harm her – to prove to her that she doesn’t love her when, in fact, he does and these conquests are a vain attempt to prove to himself that he is not attached to his wife when he actually is.  The Duke wants to hide his conquests from his wife.  If he feels any attachment to her, she is functioning as a parental figure who would keep him from pleasure.  And he wants pleasure and more pleasure and doesn’t want any consequences – and he doesn’t get any. 

If Dante had a ring of hell that was an Island for each inhabitant so that they are cut off from any contact with others (like Philoctetes), the Duke would surely be consigned to it.  He takes the availability of others for his pleasure for granted and doesn’t need to provide anything in return.  If there is a price to be paid for his lack of connection, it will be paid by his henchmen, not he himself.  In part because his henchmen are beholden to him, they understand the importance of relationships – even if those relationships are corrupt.  Because the Duke believes himself beholden to no one, he is “freed” of the sense of obligation – but also freed from becoming the best version of himself, one that can be content with what he has accomplished rather than momentarily sated by the false promise of cotton candy conquests; a pale imitation of the joys (and trials) of true intimacy.

 

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 Mission Impossible Final Reckoning, MI, psychology, psychoanalysis, leadership, trust, dreams, ambitions

Mission Impossible Final Reckoning: Leadership Notes to Trump 1

Mission Impossible Final Reckoning is a pretty straightforward action movie.  It is one that culminates a series of such movies, but you really don’t need to have seen any of the previous ones to enjoy this one – nor even to have seen the original TV series – though a bit of background won’t hurt either.  I will try to make this post brief because the movie is straightforward, but as my kids say, “Ask him what time it is and he will tell you how to make a watch.”

The New Yorker’s review of this film highlights the ways in which it appears to be pointed at Trump’s agenda, but I think it is a bit wide of the mark.  They suggest, for instance, that filming in various countries underscores the havoc that Trump imposed tariffs on foreign filming could cause.  I find it hard to believe that the choice to film in various locations was made after the tariffs were announced just three or four months ago.

I think this engrossing film is effectively critical of Trump for two reasons: first, the Tom Cruise character demonstrates leadership – meaning that he is thoughtful and constructs a plan and then takes on the parts that suit his character while delegating aspects to people well suited to handling them; second, then, he constructs a team that works both together and autonomously to accomplish a shared goal.  Building an effective and well-functioning team with clearly defined objectives is characteristic of good leadership.  I suppose there is a third aspect – the film suggests that a charismatic leader – one who understands the gravity and import of a moment – can make a difference – can effect a positive change against all odds.  This may be something that Trump aspires to – I think, in fact, he imagines that this is what he is doing.  If this is the message to Trump though, I think it is bait.  Something to draw him in.  Not an action plan.

This movie stretches credibility at every possible moment.  The task that the Mission Impossible team is set is an eponymously impossible one, and the obstacles that they must surmount, and the things that must coalesce for the team to be successful, are beyond unreal.  The chances of each part of the plan succeeding are slender – and the feats of derring-do that must be accomplished are formidable.  Throughout the film the odds of each aspect of the plan are stated with mathematical exactitude, and each probability is miniscule.  When they are multiplied together, they make an electron look large.

The movie, then, is built like a dream.  A dream we might have every night, a dream of something that is unlikely to actually occur, but one that we are deeply invested in.  In an ordinary night dream, when the odds are against something actually happening, we work hard to create the conditions that will allow our crazy wish to come true.  As we stretch what is plausible, the dream begins to crack – and if our wish is entirely unrealistic based on what we "know" to be the case, it breaks. 

In the movie, two things work against the implausibility of what is occurring leading us to turn away in disbelief.  The first is the intensity of the action.  We move back and forth between two fight scenes seamlessly integrated with each other so that we can keep track of what is happening in both, but only if we fully commit our attention to the action – there is no room for us to entertain doubts about the plausibility of what we have just observed actually happening.  Similarly, when we are keeping track of the rolling of the submarine at the same time that we are tracking both the internal geography, what needs to be accomplished, and the threat that the falling torpedoes pose, we don’t have room to ponder how the swimmer can be this active in water this cold at this depth when his skin becomes exposed to it.

The second thing that is working to keep our reality testing at bay is that we know that Tom Cruise is performing his own stunts.  There is a real component to this.  Especially as we approach the final action sequence, we are riveted by the empathic connection with the individual who is holding on for dear life while the wind is whipping him and he is being twisted and turned by powerful g forces.  This guy has skin in the game, so we, even those of us who, like me, are of two minds about what kind of person the actor actually is, suspend our disbelief because we are there, hanging on for dear life with him.

The movie, in general, asks us to be empathic both with the fears of the other leaders – what would it be like to be the president and to consider using nuclear power, knowing personally what damage it would cause, and knowing that it would, at best, keep terrible forces at bay while wreaking unimaginable broader destruction; and with leaders of the team who find helpful aids along the way – a native who doesn’t speak English but is able to communicate and lend the resources necessary to complete the mission.  We need to trust that our leaders have integrity – and that those we meet along the way will help us because they recognize the value of what we are doing.

So this movie is constructed to help us believe in the possibility of impossible missions being accomplished.  And what is the central impossible mission?  It is to create a team that can rely on each other – to build relationships and trust including with those who might at first seem hostile to you (while also recognizing those whose ideology is inconsistent with ours - pointedly, the Russians)– because, at heart, we all want the best possible outcome.

I have written elsewhere about the problems with American exceptionalism.  It can blind us to the manifold ways that we are actually causing damage when we believe that we are being helpful, but, especially at a historical moment like this one, when everything that we thought we knew about ourselves is being questioned, we need to be reminded that the central concepts of trust, leadership with integrity, and caring for others as a central value are virtues that we aspire to – even though those are much more complicated than they are being portrayed to be on the screen.  Just as this movie is a team effort – multiple people working on multiple continents to achieve a common goal, we are a people that are united in believing that this grand experiment of governing ourselves can work.

This past weekend, I participated in one of many local “No Kings” marches.  The people on the march were neighbors, friends and strangers and the largest group I have been in for some time.  There was a sense of trust in each other, of shared purpose, but also of respect and comradery.  It was moving to see the real world reflect the values that a movie – that a dream – would have us aspire to.

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Covid Chronicles XXXI: Much of what we thought was true was not…

 

 Covid, Science, Psychology, psychoanalysis, failed shelter in place orders

Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee have written a book, “In Covid’s Wake”(Princeton) that was reviewed this week in the New Yorker by Daniel Immerwahr.  The book uses epidemiological data to evaluate some of the measures that we took to manage the COVID crisis.  Immerwahr uses this to muse about our willingness to accept the word of experts – and the perils of doing that.  He also points out that, in the long run, science will out.  Indeed, the results of the study that Macedo and Lee publish are scientific results, but he cautions that when science does not have enough time to fully test hypotheses, we can come to erroneous conclusions…

OK, so, the erroneous conclusions.  First and most importantly, the data clarifies that the stay at home orders did not lead to lower rates of death.  The first of the two primary sources of these data are from Europe – where there were no greater levels of death among the Swedes, who opened back up soon after the imposition of the stay at home orders, while the rest of Europe remained on lock down.  The second is the US, where red states (like Florida) that moved away from the lockdown did not differ from blue states (like California) where the lockdown was closely enforced in mortality rates (indeed, there were higher, though not statistically higher, rates of mortality – pre-inoculation – in blue states versus red states). 

Secondly, masks did not work outside of the laboratory.  Fitted N95 masks that were new worked in the lab, but the longer we wore the masks, the more the pores got filled with moisture and we ended up breathing around the fibers, allowing whatever germs we might expel in our breath to get out.

The good news is that the inoculations did, in fact work.  After those were introduced, death rates in blue states, where the shots had a higher usage rate, had lower death rates than in the red states.

Let me take a beat here.  The implications of these data are, of course, huge.  We engaged in a multinational one to two year moratorium on most of our trade and much of our social interaction based on bad and limited data.  There were early indications from the Chinese that sealed apartment buildings slowed the spread of the infection in some areas.  We extrapolated this to the planet, and shut everything down.

This speaks both to the state of our research capabilities in the midst of an unfolding threatening and novel situation (more on that in a moment), but also on our need to do something, anything, in the face of the tremendous anxiety that we were all feeling. 

When I bought my first house, I included a clause in the contract that included “parental approval” necessary.  There was a time limit on this approval clause – 48 hours.  During that time, I did, indeed, ask my parents to look at the house we were thinking about buying.  Mostly this was an effort to show it off.  The 48 hours also gave us time to scope out the neighborhood and make sure that we hadn’t overlooked anything egregious.  We had, to that point, only seen the house at night, and wanted to evaluate our decision, literally, in the light of day, but we also wanted to get our bid in before others did.

Well, on the Tuesday after my parents had seen the house, long after the 48 hours had elapsed, my father called to say that the cracks he had seen in the walls clearly indicated that the house, which was situated on the crest of a hill, was in the process of breaking in half and half of it would slide down one side of the hill while half of it would slide down the other.

 Needless to say, this assessment was unnerving.  We went ahead with the purchase of the house, had it inspected, and were reassured that it was structurally sound – though my sense that it was falling apart never completely left me.  When my father came to spend time at the holidays, he inspected the cracks that he had remembered and his comment was that “anxiety makes cracks grow larger.”  Never were truer words spoken.

Our anxiety about our mortality led us to take measures that imperiled us in ways from which we are still discovering.  What is the impact on those who were 5 and 6 and learning how to read being out of school for more than a year?  How is this different from the impact on Junior High Schoolers who missed critical and often painful social developmental periods?  How did the Seniors (in High School and College) who didn’t get to say good bye to their peers and participate in ceremonies that marked their transition fare in a world where those endings could not be acknowledged in traditional ways?

Of course, the article points to the economic impact of the decision to shelter in place, which was huge.  In my department, I chronicled here and here the Great Resignation and how it impacted us at the time – but the impact of those resignations is still lingering in a department where we are missing a whole tier of faculty that should be assuming much needed leadership roles at this point.

I decided to chronicle the real time reaction to the pandemic, though, in part to describe the state of affairs as it was happening.  When I was angry at administrators for forcing us back into the classroom – and angry at Catholics who were praying for this administrators who would feel so badly when the faculty and students died (and not praying for those same faculty and students), I think that was justified anger – outrage, even – though it now appears to have been wasted as we were, in fact, not increasing our risk by going back to the classroom – and to the dormitories and the cafeteria.

The issue that will haunt us now, though, is that people will use this new science to point out that the old science let us down and that, in turn, will be used to suggest that we don’t need science.  People will not see the irony in the need for science to understand the ways that science has failed us being used in this way in this argument.

That said, this should give us pause.  Especially those of us who are practitioners of science – or, as we call it in my program – local scientists.  Applying general principles to a particular case – and doing that under time pressure – which I do during many individual hours each and every day that I work as a clinician – will necessary lead to mistakes.  I will misdiagnose – in small and big ways – both in determining a course of treatment and in offering an interpretation at this particular moment that is poorly timed, insensitive, or just plain wrong. 

As a social scientist, I can predict trends.  As a practitioner, I am proposing ways of understanding that need to be plausible, need to be tested over time, and many of which will not bear up over time.  But many of them will and do.  And I can demonstrate that, for a general group, there will be a generally positive impact.  But that doesn’t mean that this or that particular outcome will be good. 

We just learned this lesson on a massive scale.  Ouch.  Will we more continuously monitor the next time something like this head’s in our direction?  Will we engage in real time studies – will we have the stomach for treating ourselves as guinea pigs when our lives are at stake? 

On the micro level, will we continue to question what authorities tell us – what our individual treaters maintain is the best treatment?  Peter Jamison, of the Washington Post, wrote that “Doubt is a cardinal virtue in the sciences, which advance through skeptics willingness to question the experts, but it can be disastrous in public health, which depends on people’s willingness to trust those same experts.”

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Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead – Inhabiting the other takes guts

 Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver, David Copperfield, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Human Motivation

 

I have been meaning to write about this book for over a month, but, besides being busy with the end of the academic year stuff, I have been stymied about how to write about the extreme disorientation that I felt – especially as this book drew to a close.  Yesterday morning I went back and read the first few pages and now, perhaps, after a bit of stewing, I may be able to take a shot at it.

Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize, a prize for fiction about the American experience, for good reason.  Or actually many of them.  Kingsolver has served up a rambling, dense, interconnected tale of life in rural Appalachia that takes on multiple big topics with the clear eyes of someone on the ground who both gets the big picture but also knows how to tell a story that particularized that big pictured in the lives, but in this case, the life, of an individual.

Kingsolver takes on the woefully failing foster care system in this country as well as the despicable action of the Sackler Family’s Perdue Pharma (one of the groups behind the fentanyl disaster) all while making you turn the pages.  This is a real tour de force.  It is also, I understand, a rebuttal to D.J. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy’s position that the Appalachian’s and their characterological weaknesses are to blame for the Fentanyl mess.  Kingsolver places the blame clearly on corporate greed rather than the little guy, while she sympathetically portrays the hell of addiction and its consequences.

So, I both like and respect this book and author.  The book was a fun, educational read that I would recommend to virtually anyone.  But it was also, for me, a as I said above, a very disorienting one.  It violates two principles that I have experienced as important in reading.  

The violation of the first principle is the comfort that an author has in writing in the first person about someone with whom they do not share central aspects of the personal identity of the person about whom they are writing.  I first noticed this in The Help, a book about the black/white divide in the United States South where Kathryn Stockett assiduously avoided writing about the African Americans in the first person, while she was clearly quite comfortable writing about the white women’s experiences in her/their own voice.  She was advocating for the African Americans, but recognized that to speak through the African American characters (at least as I understood it), rather than on their behalf would be appropriation at best and something like pandering – enacting the white entitlement to know the black experience, the very thing she was objecting to in the book – at worst.

This is not to say that some authors cannot cross lines of identity fruitfully.  Recently I wrote about Tan Twan Eng’s writing in the first person about his character Lesley in The House of Doors, but this made sense because he was, as a gay man from a Muslim country, identifying with a white English woman in the early twentieth century who had to “closet” her feelings, including about her husband, because they were not welcome and she had to figure out how to live a furtive life in order to achieve something like integrity.  He was imagining himself into someone who looks very different, but, in his mind, is living a parallel life.

But the violation of the second principle is one that I wrote about in relation to the book The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a novel by Stieg Larson, in which he credits the hero with tremendous abilities that allow her to wreak revenge on the people who have put her through ungodly torture.  I object to the notion that a fiction writer might have that we can torture women and they will be OK – in fact, they will have extraordinary powers – as if women are resilient enough that we can harm them without consequence – a kind of over the top, sadistic version of benevolent misogyny.

So, yes, this is a book written in the first person.  It is written by a woman about a man – or a boy’s coming of age to be a man.  Not just any boy, but a boy whose father was a Melungeon, and who has features of the Melungeons – mostly he comments on his copper hair and eyes, but I found myself wondering about the color of his skin (or the assumptions about his race – at one point he is described as white – but he is also the son of Melungeon in Western Virginia). His father died before he was born and his mother died when he was quite young – though old enough that he remembers how absent she was.  It is also a work of fiction.

Demon Copperfield is a work of fiction that is based on a roman a clef: David Copperfield.  The two stories both begin with a first-person account of the birth of the hero – though I found Kingsolver’s hero’s description of his entry into the world more engaging than Dickens’.  The details of the two births were quite different, but what united them was an insightful and jaunty attitude towards the potential awful events that occurred to them.  Unlike Bill Clinton, in his autobiography, or J.D. Vance, for that matter, these heroes are psychologically minded and can take themselves as objects and can imagine what the impact of events on them is without having to really know that.  OK, sometimes Demon is all too certain of himself, but there is an endearing quality to it his certainty – a sense that he knows that he doesn’t know all, but he is going to imagine that he does – he has pluck.

Part of what was so disorienting in reading this book was that I was mourned the loss of it – and I mourned the loss of Demon in particular when it was over.  It was as if I had lost a real person.  What was doubly disconcerting was that this feeling was not for the representation of a real person, but for the person I felt I had come to know in the process of hearing his voice, engaging in his battles, fearing for the various threats – some external some internal – and cheering for the few good things that came his way in life.  I was pleased about how he repeatedly made lemonade out of very old lemons mixed with tepid water and, occasionally, a packet of sugar stolen from a diner.

Over the month or two that I have lived with myself and the affection – the crush, for lack of a better word – that I lavished on a person that did not, in fact, exist, it was helpful to return to David Copperfield (I book I have never read all the way through, but a book that was, essentially, the autobiography of a man who did go from rags to riches – Charles Dickens).  It also brings to mind another author who went, if not from rags, from rural simplicity to being the toast of the town – Mark Twain.

As much as I disdained the idea that the resilience of the human spirit is something that we should be cautious of praising because we can use that to justify treating others inhumanely – as in, “they will get over it,”  I am deeply and powerfully moved by stories of resiliency.  I assign essays to my students about marginalized folks who have had tremendous careers in psychology because I think they can learn from them – and I can to – about the ways in which we can manage the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that inevitably end up being directed at us.  I think that pluck is one of the greatest companions a person can have – and I hate to admit, as an analyst who should be non-judgmental, that I have feelings of pity and sometimes contempt for those who don’t have some measure of pluck.

I can justify valuing pluck from an evolutionary perspective.  Living organisms are anti-entropic entities.  There is proven evidence that the universe is hurtling towards entropy and our efforts to ward it off are futile, but that seems to be our mission and we are hell bent on accomplishing something in the face of the inevitable conclusion that nothing will last.  This, I have recently learned, is at the heart of the idea of Greek comedy.  Yes, comedy has a happy ending, but we, the biological creatures that we are, full of foibles and failings, triumph over the Gods; while in tragedy – by trying to imitate the Gods, which we as mere mortals cannot do, we fail – and expose our tragic flaws rather than flouting them as we do in comedy.

This book, then, embodies the comic hero in Demon Copperhead.  He has the capacity to understand and manage the minds of those who would derail him because he loves them – meaning that he can appreciate them for who they are – and not try to pretend that they are more or different.  This also arms him with the ability to understand the roots of their motives and to distinguish their best interest from his own.  He can even acknowledge when he has failed to do this and to apologize to those he has offended by not, for instance, getting their sex right. 

I worry that I have betrayed my own gender bias by assuming that a man can survive the slings and arrows of fortune and still be a whole, psychologically healthy individual – that I find Demon Copperhead to be a believable hero and a real person where that was not the case for the Girl with the Dragon tattoo.  All I can say in my defense is that I think Barbara Kingsolver’s ability to empathize – to think about the motivations, strengths, weaknesses and capacities of various individuals is the superpower (and identity) that she shares with Demon, and I only wish, as an analyst, that I could emulate her (traditionally female) virtues that she imbues her hero with. 

 

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Symmetry is the key to understanding Tan Twan Eng’s House of Doors

 

Tan Twan Eng, House of Doors, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Mystery, Central Meaning

Tan’s House of Doors is a lovely book.  It is a 300 page prose ode to W. Somerset Maugham, it is a piece of historical fiction, and it reads a bit like a detective novel, but one that only slightly misleads you in the process of solving the various little secrets that it teases you with, so that there is a very satisfying feeling on finishing it that you have had a good, nutritious meal that delivered on its promise of opening a door to a new and intriguing world, gave you a tour, and returned you home safe and sound.

The novel begins and ends in South Africa, 1947, in a remote and lonely outpost – a home in a barren but beautiful landscape.  A package is delivered to the widow, Leslie, who lives there – a book addressed to her instead of to her recently deceased husband to whom most of the books sent here are addressed.  The book bears no inscription, but instead has an illustration on the front page.  Who sent the book, who inscribed it and what its message contains is the first of many mysteries in this book.

Then we are sent back in time, to Malaysia in the 1920s and we are invited into Leslie’s home that she shares with her husband Robert and they are entertaining his old friend “Willie” Maugham, and we think we have solved the riddle.  Ah, we think, it must have been Willie who sent the book.  Of course it isn’t, but like in most mysteries, our thinking we have solved the problem allows us to shelve the question enough to turn to how the narrator will pave a path to the conclusion where the book will be revealed to be from Willie and what the delivery means.

Of course, the path becomes twisted in a variety of ways – including that we are thrust further back in time – to before the first world war – as Leslie tells the story of a real murder mystery – the first murder trial of a British citizen in the Malay states – the murder trial of a married woman whom, we know through Leslie, but the authorities don’t know, killed not just a member of her social circle, but the lover she committed adultery with – a married man who was continuing to want to have contact with her.  Again, our inside information gives us enough satisfaction to think we understand what happened, but, as with the package, we have a nagging sense that we don’t know the full story.

At its core, this novel is about writing and about being a writer and about being a writer with a secret – a big, dangerous, but very important secret.  The mysteries at the heart of it, are then, revelatory of what it means to have and keep a secret.  The writer who is the ostensible subject of the novel is, of course, W. Somerset Maugham.  Maugham, as apparently accurately portrayed here, was a closeted gay man, married to a beard in England while he roamed the world with his “secretary”, who was also his lover.  Maugham moved from place to place, discovering the secret stories of people in these places and broadcasting them to the world in the form of short stories, often exposing the subjects in the process, not even bothering to hide their names. 

The stories of other people catapulted Maugham to fame and great fortune.  Like a vulture, he moved from place to place and like the physician he was trained to be (and like an analyst), he knew that silence was the best way to get people to tell their stories.  When people felt listened to - heard – they poured out their experience in ways that allowed him to craft descriptions of events and invent the minds that produced them in ways that hypnotized his readers, appealed to their prurient interests, and made them hungry to read more.

Leslie knew all this about Willie, but confided in him anyway.  Or apparently she did.  She changed some of the names to protect herself, but some of her protection was incumbent on Willie’s need to protect himself.  Even though her portion of the story is told in first person (the author chose to write the segments told from Maugham’s perspective in the third person), we don't know, any more than she does, what her motives here are.  Partially she, like Maugham, is telling another person’s story – the story of a murder where she was the confidant of the murderess, but she is also telling her own, very buttoned up British story, about being the daughter of colonists, being caught up in being attracted to a worldly older man from England, having two children together, growing apart from him, discovering his adulterous relationship and retaliating – or engaging out of loneliness – in her own.

On the one hand, then, this is a perfectly ordinary – and therefore fascinating story of a marriage between two people who are clearly very fond of each other, with shared interests, including in the lives of each other, but they grow apart across time and lose interest in each other.  How does this happen? What does it feel like?  What is the emotional landscape of the most privileged people in the world, living in a very civilized society that depends on their management and exploitation of the people they live amongst who serve them?  A central question that emerges is, ‘Why aren’t these people happy – and, given that they are not, what stands in the way of their happiness?’

The symmetry of this book offers a clue to the author’s intent in writing it.  He opens with many more mysteries and clues to solve them than I can or should detail here (especially if you haven’t read the book, I hope I haven’t spoiled it for you).  By the end of the book, he make sure that each mystery is nicely solved.  We are solidly in the know.  But are we?

Perhaps the central mystery of this book is who is the author?  Why has a native Malay, now exiled to Africa, chosen to write about the private life of Willie and, more particularly, Leslie?  I think the symmetry of the books opening and closing with so many secrets, like the opening and closing of parentheses, speaks to a kind of mirroring – I will ask and you will answer the questions that I pose.  I think Tan is taking us on as interlocutors.  We ask these questions that he creates for us, and he provides the answers, but I think he is also asking these questions of his characters: who are you and how do you manage to navigate the choppy waters of your times?

It was not surprising to me to discover that Tan, like Willie, is a closeted gay man.  To be open about one’s sexuality in a Muslim dominant country is not safe.  So, it makes sense that he would turn to Willie for answers.  But his invention of Leslie is also important.  Her marriage decays in part because her husband takes on a male lover.  To what extent is his disinterest sexual?  How does she keep herself alive while being spurned not just for whom she has made herself to be, but for how she was made?  And how does it feel to be trapped in that self – one that she cannot escape in her relationship with her husband, but also one that she cannot escape by divorcing him.  She is no more able to leave him than the murderess is able to leave her husband in a society that shuns its divorcees…

Leslie trusts that Willie will not publicize her – he will not tell her story because it is too close to his own.  To tell her story might wake people up (including Willie’s wife) to the hidden life he is leading.  She trusts him to keep her secret because it is his own.  In a literally luminescent moment in the middle of the novel, after she has revealed herself to Willie and has ascertained his secrets, they strip off their clothes together to swim among bioluminescent algae, and Willie swims deeply into the ocean to pull Leslie back to the surface when she is headed down, into the deep.

I think that Tan is imagining himself as Leslie – the name that Maugham substitutes for the actual murdering adulterer in his short story The Letter.  Tan is, then, in this construction, feeling his way into living a life that he can be proud of, even though it is unacceptable to his culture and, in a very deep and personal way, himself.  He is crying out to be rescued from the deep and pulled to the surface.

I think this book is compelling and deeply moving because it is, like all good mysteries, a disguised version of reality.  One in which we can’t quite see what is plainly evident to our eyes – the clues that allow us to solve the mystery of not just whodunit, but why they did, and how, and what it was that they were doing – figuring out how to live when shackled with unbearable circumstances.  We come to identify with them and, as Willie (and Tan) do with Leslie, appreciate them for who they are and the judgement that we pass on them is a charitable one.  We find ourselves reassured that the central wish, to be loved for whom one truly is, can be realized.

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The Brutalist: Art's Brutality May Be Its Essence

 The Brutalist: Adrien Brody; Art; Psychology; Psychoanalysis; Film; Movie; Bauhaus

 

Jonathan Rosen’s Memoir, The Best Minds, helped me articulate something that I have known without the ability to describe for some time.  The artist who works in a physical medium (the sculptor, painter, potter, weaver, etc. – as opposed to the literary artist) works with things as they are, not as we represent them.  Yes, the physical artist is often representing something else, but the medium of expression is not words, which represent objects, but objects themselves – stone, bronze, paint, clay, or cloth.  The artist is (usually quite literally) getting their hands dirty to create what we see and experience. 

In The Brutalist, Adrien Brody plays László Tóth, a fictional Hungarian born Jewish, German concentration camp surviving architect who washes up on US shores penniless and with a shattered sense of himself.  His wife and niece are still in Europe, but in the east – perhaps being persecuted by the Russians, and the restrictive immigration laws are not likely to let them immigrate.  He is taken in by a cousin – a furniture salesman and interior decorator – and he exhibits some of his Bauhaus styled furniture in the very mid century lower middle traditional show room in a somewhat seedy section of town.

The cousin is approached by the son of a wealthy man to revamp the wealthy man’s library as a surprise birthday gift on a very tight time schedule while the father is out of town. Tóth leads a crew in redesigning the man’s dark and ornate refuge into a modern, spare room.  They are interrupted as they are finishing the design by the return of the father who is incensed that there are workers in his house doing work that he hasn’t authorized, and he kicks them out of the house.  The son, wounded by his father’s rejection of the present, refuses to pay for the work, and the cousin kicks Tóth out of the shop and onto the streets to fend for himself, which he does by picking up labor work and staying in a rooming house.

This is the skeleton of the story to this point, but there is flesh on those bones.  The flesh is subtle though.  This is a three-and-a-half-hour film.  I ran into a friend at the intermission, and we talked about the pace as being Hitchcockian.   He was concerned that younger viewers would not stick with the film, though his two twenty something kids had recommended it to him.  I took the view that binge watching season long shows in 4-, 6- or 8-hour intervals was training our kids to hang onto more complicated material over longer periods of attention.  While that is true, I agree that the subtlety of what we are asked to attend to here is of a different order.

We observe that Tóth, a man of few words and somewhat wild and unkempt appearance, is highly polished in his social interactions.  He uses his words politely.  He cares about the people he comes in contact with – not just his relatives, but also the homeless who are waiting in line for bread with him.  He is both not of the class of people that he has been thrust in with, but also not above them.  If he is to be a Brutalist – the title tells us he will – he is certainly also a humanist.  And the room he creates, despite the objections of the owner, is beautiful, subtle, and elegant – and he figures out how to protect the books from the damaging effects of light while allowing the reader to bathe in the glow of natural lighting, getting rid of the black out curtains that turned the library into a dark and uninviting den.. 

So, the room that Tóth created catches the attention of the media and it is featured in Look magazine and the owner seeks out the architect and hires him to create a community center – a gathering place that will include a library (of course), a religious chapel, gymnasium, and a concert hall.  The owner has done his homework and knows that Tóth is a renowned European Bauhaus architect.  He invites him to live on the grounds of his home and to oversee the work that will take place on part of his land.  He also empowers his attorney, who is Jewish, to try to get Tóth’s wife and niece into the country.

Again, there is flesh on these bones.  The owner is rich, but boorish.  His two children, a son and a daughter, seem to have some weird sexual chemistry between them.  Tóth, unbeknownst to the owner, has become a heroin addict and a porn user, despite his discomfort with going to a brothel when he landed in the States.  The person he helped in the bread line was someone he worked with as a laborer and he has now brought him on to help manage the construction project.  There is a lot going on under the surface of this very comfortable, slowly paced film and here, where the intermission occurs, we are left wondering how all of the loose ends and undercurrents will come together into a coherent package.

The first part of the film, the part of the film I have just described, is titled The Enigma of Arrival.  The second part of the film is titled The Hard Core of Beauty.  Then there is an epilogue: The First Architecture Biennale.  I am, for the moment, going to let it suffice that the second part delivers on much of what is promised in the first.  I will refer back to it, a bit, from the epilogue, but I will focus on the epilogue because I think it is the most true to my experience of the physical arts and artists.

In the epilogue, we move forward in time twenty years from the events of the first two parts.  We discover that, after the dramatic complications that led to the completion of Tóth’s first major project in the United States – the building that emerges out of the Hard Core of Beauty – Toth goes on to have a very successful career, building multiple Bauhaus structures that have become iconic in their imprint on the world and on the field of architecture.  What takes place at the Biennale is that a narrative is given to describe the works – the work that we saw being constructed is the centerpiece, and there is a narrative that describes how that work anticipates and lives on in the other works that Tóth creates and are being celebrated.

The critical component of this speech, though; the piece of it that seems most true to life for me, is that Tóth does not deliver it.  What he has accomplished is articulated both in pictures – the speaker has slides – but also in her words.  She – his niece – provides the narrative of the work that Tóth has created.  The pictorially presented backstory for this is that Tóth is now quite old and feeble.  He is being taken through the exhibit and listens to the talk from a wheelchair.  He does not speak a line in this section of the movie.  Perhaps he has had a stroke and can no longer speak?   Though the authors have provided a likely a backstory, I think this leads to a brilliant articulation of the importance of the physical in the expressive repertoire of some artists.  These artists are not dealing with the meaning of things, but with things as they actually are.

Now you might think that Tóth is a poor speaker – or that he can’t articulate what he is thinking or feeling.  This is not the case – he is quite good at arguing for the project to be completed as he has designed it.  He is very good at expressing his disdain for those who would alter it in order to save a penny here or there.  He explains the model of the building to the citizens of Bucks County, PA, and the reasons for constructing in the manner that he does so that they will be able to use it in the ways that the owner of the land intends.  But this is not what is described by the niece in the epilogue.

What we learn from the niece is not how and why Tóth built if for the people, but how and why he built it for himself.  What it was that the building symbolized.  But the symbol requires translation.  Though we have followed him through the steps – and though we think we know him and something of his background, and the struggles that he has connecting with a new land – and with a wife whom he feared he would never see again; we have not understood the architecture of what all that means to him.  He has not created (I don’t think) a symbol – but instead the thing itself.  He might be able to explain it – at some point he must have told the niece this story so that she can now tell it to us.  But that is not the vehicle that he uses to express what he feels in his bones.  He doesn’t describe his feelings, he makes them come to life in the buildings he creates.

Though physical artists represent their thoughts and feelings by creating representational objects – I think this is a basic human function.  We are built to express ourselves through action.  We have been selected by millions of years of evolution because we can change the environment we live in – we can manipulate and move it.  We are not just thinkers, but doers.  One might even say that our thinking is a way of interrupting - or, psychoanalytically, inhibiting and preventing our doing.  As my youngest daughter says to me with some regularity, “Use your words,” when I have engaged in some impulsive action intended to fix a problem – like assuaging my own hunger by taking something off of her plate that she would have been happy to share if only I had asked.

Am I saying that art is primitive?  Yes.  But does that mean we should abandon it?  Absolutely not.  First, art requires forethought.  A supervisee treating a patient in the state hospital talked about his “art” of nailing dead birds to board.  I disagreed with considering this art.  The “artist” was not preserving the animals.  He was not engaged in creating them as a display – but simply tacking them in place.  For the artists who work to get something just right, they may or may not have a verbal concept that they are trying to articulate.  Is Michelangelo’s David a representation of the divine in human form?  Perhaps – but it is certainly a representation of something that Michelangelo felt in his bones needed to be expressed, and we have resonated with that expression in a variety of ways – including, perhaps, feeling that it is an expression of the divine in human form; the ways in which we can approach something godlike in our human form and expression – including in our expressing what we think and feel through art.

Tóth is brutal.  He is also brutalized.  Both of these characterological aspects of him are expressed in the creation of the work and in its meaning as explained by his niece.  As verbally articulate as he is – and this actor, whose work was honored with an Oscar for best actor – portrays Tóth as not just verbally but also physically and facially expressive - Tóth’s ultimate expression is in the building.  And the building is – to my eye – ugly.  I think that many Bauhaus/Brutalist buildings are.  They are austere – inhuman – clunky.  In a word, brutal.  And isn’t brutality part of the beauty of human functioning?  Don’t we achieve the divine in spite of our earthly and complicated psychologies that include both love and disdain?  Or, maybe we achieve that beauty precisely because of our mapping ourselves closely to the world that we live in – a world that the wealthy denizens of Bucks County alter to make it look like we live in a more perfect world – and Tóth’s vision helps them achieve the semblance of that, while not letting them forget the foundation – the deep and complex foundation – that allows their lives of ease, worship, study and communal activity to take place.

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