Wuthering Heights (2026): Nellie’s fifth business steals the show.

 

Wuthering Heights, Movie, Emily Bronte, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Nellie, Catherine, Heathcliffe, Edgar, Isabella, Fifth Business

I first read Wuthering Heights many many years ago – when I lived in a middle class culture in middle America where class was not determined by birth or by income, but by physical and emotional attributes – we had pretty privilege, and jock privilege and some of us had the ability to be cool – and these were what determined our social standing in our apparently homogenous suburban world.  So I don’t think I could have then understand the central tension in Bronte’s melodramatic story of love across a class divide. 

Emily Bronte could subtly signal the class divide to her readers because they grew up with it.  They knew the boundaries and the third rail that resulted from crossing those boundaries.  I also imagine, not having read the book in many decades, that the sado-masochistic elements in the story were similarly subtly portrayed – perhaps because of official or unofficial censorship – the kind of details that decorum precludes, but because decorum is necessary, readers knew how to read between the lines to access the brutality,both subtle and blatant, that was part and parcel of a rigid class system.

In 2026, with the patriarchy struggling to reassert itself and when decorum has been thrown to the wind, the director, Emerald Fennell, hits us over the head with both the class distinctions, the rot of the upper class spending down their inheritances, the nouveau riche overspending, and the transcendent allure of pretty privilege.  At the same time that these contemporary issues are articulated, by emphasizing the brutality of the public hangings that both shock and titillate, combined with the filth of living among livestock on the heath and the hot and cold running servants of the Victorian era British system, we are able to find the distance to imagine that this is not about us.

The framing of the drama is the traditional frame of four lovers caught in a web of intrigue and a fifth – someone apparently outside of the drama but essential to making it move forward.  The person of this fifth business – Nellie – is, I think, the most subtly acted and convincing element in this particular rendition of the classic melodrama.  The romantic leads are Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie and Charlotte Mellington as young Cathy) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi and Owen Cooper as young Heathcliff), a street urchin “rescued” by Catherine’s  besotted father (Martin Clunes) from his own abusive father, to live at Wuthering Heights as a servant – and who is adopted by Catherine as her pet.  Heathcliff quickly falls in love with the young Catherine and offers himself up to be beaten by her father when she has  kept them out in the rain on the father’s birthday, cementing Heathcliff’splace in Catherine’s heart.

Nellie (Hong Chau with Vy Nguyen as young Nelly), our   person of interest, had previously been taken in by the father.  The bastard child of a nobleman, she is Catherine’s girl in waiting – her maidservant and friend, though she is replaced when Heathcliff arrives as it is Heathcliff now that is Catherine’s favorite and Nellie, aware of Catherine’s fickle nature from her own experience of it, starts to look out for Catherine’s best interests as Catherine, beautiful but unprincipled, lures but then repulses people with her capriciousness.

We then move forward in time, and Catherine is now of marrying age, beautiful, but her father has wasted his fortune on gambling and Wuthering Heights is falling into disrepair around them.  At this point, Edgar Linton moves into town with his vacuous ward Isabella.  Nellie knows that Catherine’s only hope is marrying Edgar, and we quickly see that Isabella is no match for Catherine when Catherine manages to sprain her ankle trying to climb into the garden where Isabella is talking with and trying desperately to engage Edgar who is bored by her.  Six weeks of recuperation at Edgar’s house leads Edgar to visit Wuthering Heights to propose marriage, which Catherine must needs accept.  Indeed, that has been hers (and Nellie’s) goal all along.

The critical scene here is a conversation between Nellie and Catherine where Catherine tells Nellie of the proposal and her acceptance of it, and Nellie sees Heathcliff approaching the room where they are talking and knows that he is listening to their conversation, including when Catherine says that it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff, after which Nellie sees Heathcliff leaving before Catherine protests that, despite his station, Heathcliff is her true love.

Nellie’s pivotal position is one in which she implicitly makes the decision for Catherine about Catherine’s future.  She knows that Catherine loves Heathcliff.  She also knows that what is “best” for Catherine is to accept the offer of marriage from Edgar.  Heathcliff, not surprisingly, based on what he has heard, decides to leave without so much as a fair-thee-well for Catherine, which she takes as a desertion.  She puts off the marriage for a year, hoping Heathcliff will return, but when he doesn’t she marries and moves into a world of untold riches – with a guy who appears to be decent, but who has no chance because her heart belongs to Heathcliff.

Ok, this is pretty stock stuff, What the director has loaded into it are frank depictions of sado-masochism.   The opening scene is a public hanging.  We are introduced to it by hearing the sounds of the dying man before seeing it, and we think we are hearing sex, but we are hearing death.  We then see the onlookers delighting in the death – pointing out the man’s erection and, presumably, ejaculation as he dies.  Heathcliff “catches” Catherine observing a male servant having sado-masochistic sex with a female servant and covers her eyes so that she doesn’t see the consummation of the clearly consensual interaction between the two.

So, when Heathcliff returns five years into the marriage, now a wealthy man, even buying Wuthering Heights, Catherine invites him to her new house, Egar's house, and she plays coy with him, taunting him sadistically with her lack of interest in who he has become.  Pushed to the brink in this interaction, they each hide behind the hurt that they feel, ultimately confessing the love that they continue to feel for each other.  Heathcliff clarifies Nellie’s role in the earlier conversation, and Catherine fires Nellie.  Nellie, not to be outdone, goes to Edgar and hints that Catherine is being loose with Heathcliff, and Edgar bans Catherine from seeing him and from firing Nellie.  Catherine, a prisoner of her position and pregnant with Edgar’s child, withdraws from Heathcliff.

Enraged, Heathcliff seduces Isabella, clarifying the terms of his relationship to her as they enter into it.  He will be having a relationship with her only to hurt Catherine.  Isabella,  who has an enormous crush on Catherine, succumbs to the seduction, perhaps in part to exact her own kind of revenge/love for Catherine.  Heathcliff marries Isabella and spirits her away to Wuthering Heights, which is still in a state of disrepair, and treats Isabella as, quite literally, a dog.  He leashes her and commands her to sit and come and rewards her with bits of food but also sex.

A word about sado-masochism in general here.  There are multiple intersections of S-M in this movie.  On is the current S-M community, about which I know only a little.  A critical aspect of that community is consent.  As noted above, consent is clearly spelled out in many of these S-M interactions.  This is certainly an anachronistic nod to the S-M community.  The idea here is that consenting adults can be brutal towards each other in a kind of play – one where the experience, whether of physical pain, or psychological degradation – enhances the sensory and relational pleasure of the romantic interaction.

The non-consensual Sado-masochistic relationships depicted in the film include the relations between the young Catherine and Heathcliff and Heathcliff’s father, and before that, the sadistic relationship of Heathcliff’s own father with him.  Similarly, Nellie is in a masochistic relationship with Catherine’s family as they “care” for her by making her a servant – a lady in waiting – in a dreary house at the edge of nowhere.  Another is Nellie’s interactions with Catherine, but more about that later. 

The non-consensual sado-masochistic relationships involve differences in power that lead to trauma.  Heathcliff bears the physical scars of the Catherine’s father’s beating into adulthood, but he also bears the scars of Catherine’s taunting him about his inability to learn to read – which is at least partially the result of her inability to empathically teach him a skill that is now second nature to her, having learned it at an age when it was relatively easy to learn.  The problem with this trauma is that it is preferable to the trauma of being ignored.  It is a psychoanalytic truth that the opposite of love is not hate, but disregard.  Being hurt by someone indicates a relationship with them.  Being in that relationship, as painful as it may be, is preferable to not being in a relationship at all.

The danger of this kind of trauma is that it becomes a template for interactions later in life.   We seek out a connection with someone else that includes the kind of harm that we received by those who loved us.  Catherine’s love for her father is just such a love.  She desperately wants his affection – and if she can’t have that, because he is drunk or just plain mean, she will create a scene so that he has to acknowledge her, even if only out of anger at her apparent thoughtlessness towards him – even though that behavior may actually be carefully calculated as a means of enraging him to elicit the very reaction he begrudgingly, but then wholeheartedly wreaks.

In the contemporary consensual S-M relationship, paying very close attention to the exact amount of pain that the other can tolerate enacts the caring and concern that the pain itself conveys in traumatic masochistic relationships.  He or she cares enough to hurt me in just the way that I need to be hurt.  When Catherine’s father dies, she is overcome with grief and rushes to his side torn by the feelings of loss, but then she draws back and kicks his carcass lying on the floor in his own filth twice.  When she confesses her guilt about having kicked him to Heathcliff, who witnessed the kicking, Heathcliff responds that he was amazed at her restraint.  This kind of love is deeply entwined with hate.

So, when Heathcliff has married and abducted Isabella, he repeatedly demands that Isabella write to Catherine (he is still illiterate) with various news that will necessitate her coming to see them – to rescue Isabella, to connect with Heathcliff, whatever it will take to get a rise out of her.  Each of these letters is thrown into the fire by Nellie – who “knows” that Heathcliff is no good for Catherine.  She is looking out for Catherine’s well-being. 

At the same time, Catherine tells Isabella that the child she is carrying is dead.  Nellie classifies this as more manipulative hysterics on Catherine’s part and does nothing to address it, even as Catherine goes on a hunger strike protesting living in a loveless marriage.  Nellie manages all this by instructing Edgar to ignore Catherine’s childish behavior and by chastising Catherine for being such a child.

When it becomes apparent that Catherine is dying from the dead child within, Nellie confesses to Catherine that she has mishandled everything and Catherine dismisses this confession, reassuring Nellie that she has had the best intentions, and Nellie reflectively answers that she does not believe this to be the case.  Suddenly, Fifth Business bursts into the headlines – she is not just propelling the action forward, she is enacting it.  Rather than having been the cool calm collected one, protecting her mistress from self-destructive acts, she glimpses the very real possibility that she has been the chief architect of her misery and that she may have done this for unconscious and but not hard to imagine motives.  Having been severed from her own family at a very early age - her father experienced her as a reminder of his infidelity, she was attached to Cstherine, but then was thrown over as her favorite, and she has enacted sadistic revenge on Catherine directly, if unconsciously– with the cruelest consequence of all, death.  

Elsewhere I have opined, following the lead of James Cone, that using death as a terror device – e.g. the hanging at the beginning of this movie, but, by extension, S-M behavior generally, has the added value of giving the sadist the illusion of having control over life and death.  Nellie is alone in the world.  Her father had an adulterous affair.  In this film, this is marked by her Asian features.  She is not a pure bred Briton.  She must depend on her wits to survive.  She is dependent on Catherine for her survival, but she turns the tables – it is Catherine who is dependent on her.  This reassures her in addition to giving her the pleasure of revenge. She has also then, I believe, enacted her anger against her family - represented by the Earnshaw family as a whole, despoiling them as she was despoiled, making them the hated object of Edgar.

I think the director is also counting on our prejudices about Asian characters – people who, like Nellie, keep their emotions under tight control – to emphasize that Sado Masochistic behavioral dynamics are not just the province of conscious control – nor are we rational in the sense of intentional.  There are reasons for what we do – I have just articulated what I believe to be the rationale for Nellie’s behavior – but this is not volitional on this character’s part, it is something that she only ralizes is the case after the fact.

It is just this sort of component of our character that analysts try to help their patients see.  The challenge in doing this, of course, is that we are often in the position of Nellie.  We are trying to help our patients recognize their own dynamics and, at our worst – or most human – we do not see how our own dynamics play into the situation.  When we play into our patient’s dynamics, we call that an enactment. 

All analyses, at one point or another, have enactments – they needs must if they are to be real relationships between two people deeply engaged in the work that they are doing.  When enactments occur, it is incumbent on the analyst to recognize them, and to acknowledge his or her own part in them as part and parcel of helping the patient become conscious of their own part in the interaction both in the treatment, but, more generally, in life.  Particularly when working with people who have been traumatized, sado-masochistic enactments are liable to occur. 

An early supervisor clarified to me that we are most helpful to our patients when they re-enact their relations with those who were most problematic.  That is, when we are able to interpret the negative transference in the relationship so that the patient can experience us as if we were their tormentors and recognize that they are, on some level, seeking that out, and we can offer an alternative – so they can have the kind of “ah hah” moment that Nellie has before the tragic moment rather than after it, as is the case in this movie.  Of course the danger is that we become Nellie and don’t see our part at all or see it only too late.  Freud thought that our own analysis would inoculate us from this, but he also cautioned that the work is perilous, and I think the latter guide is what we should be bearing in mind.

The Reluctant Wife and I watched the film while crossing the Atlantic when we did not have access to our usual broad array of entertainment options.  It was the film being shown and we both had moderate interest in watching what we had seen advertised as basically a bodice ripping romance.  It was not the most engaging film in terms of the leads – the kids were more convincingly in love than the adults – but the role of Nellie was, indeed, deeply satisfying.  Sometimes by trying to stay above the fray, we actually make it worse and we can hide our own sadism in pity, empathy, superior knowledge, but perhaps also by just standing by and letting things happen on their own.  There is no easy way out of the dramas that take place between humans, including between she and I, nor is there an easy way to be aware of the drama’s that emerge in our own souls.

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Yesteryear - The Novel That Promotes The Very Thing it is Railing against.

 Yesteryear, Novel, Art, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Don't Read This Book, Current Culture, Tradwife, human striving

IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY, I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND READING THIS BOOK.  You are welcome to read the review and decide for yourself, and this is a book that it makes sense to be aware of – it will soon be a motion picture from Amazon starring Ann Hathaway and it is being pushed in all sorts of venues, but the book reading pleasure is limited and you will likely get as much (or more) from the film as from the book.

One of the advantages of belonging to book clubs like the one I belong to, a neighborhood club where the hosts rotate and choose the book when it is their turn to host, is that you get to read a variety of books that you might otherwise not run across.  This book, as referenced above, is likely to be hard to avoid running into, but would not have fallen into my hands of my own accord.  The club was certainly surprised (and many said very pleasantly surprised) to read about prosthetic (glass) eyes when it was last my turn.  It was a book my friend wrote – and a very good book, indeed.

I am glad to have been exposed to the ideas in this book – it helps me get a better sense of current popular visions of our aberrant America that seems to be becoming mainstream, but is – I think and hope – largely performative.  Of course, when it is being performed in the Oval Office, that is a very big stage, but I don’t think our country, as we approach our 250^th anniversary, is currently functioning as itself and I anticipate that this perturbation will resolve into a novel culture – that will be informed by, but not primarily determined by, the current performative, virtual and unreal/surreal culture that this book purports to reflect.

This is not a novel – in the usual sense.  It is a script for a movie.  We are not in the hands of a craftsperson who is writing this – nor in the hands of an editorial team that is concerned about the craft of writing.  This is advertised on the first page.  After a two dimensional introduction of the character who will be our narrator and hero, says "...the radiator was puffing hot air”. 

This is not a person who has lived with radiant heat.  She does not understand HVAC – or perhaps more accurately, she is used to living with modern HVAC and has never been cognizant of what it is like to have a radiator heat a room.  And she is about to tell us what it is like to live in house that is heated by a fireplace? 

The craft of writing springs from a visceral understanding of the human experience.  I became an analyst because of a hunger to understand that visceral experience.  In this, I think I emulated Freud who, as a bench scientist, wanted to scientifically understand people.  Of course, people are not the kinds of relatively simple systems that scientists study.  They are complex and gushy, not neat and clean.

Neal DeGrasse Tyson, in his latest book about extraterrestrial life, suggests that if we want to demonstrate our own perhaps puny understanding of the universe to E.T.s, we should communicate in the universal language of the universe – math and physics.  Even if another species can’t decode the symbols for the elements, they will understand the shape of the periodic table as something that is familiar to them.  The elements are universal and any other civilization will have had to figure them out and arrange them - in just the way we have done.  

DeGrasse Tyson goes on to explain that while physics and math are the basic building blocks, human life is just one form that life might take.  There is no evidence that our DNA produces the ultimate living creature; indeed, other biological worlds might create creatures that don’t even have DNA!  And DNA creates a wide range of creatures who then create cultures who then create an infinite array of individual subjectivities, and it is the writer’s responsibility to capture something about the particulars of a few of those subjectivities and illustrate how they interact. 

I am not a writer because my understanding of the human condition is clunky and, as Freud said about every one of his discoveries about the human condition, the artists had beaten him to that discovery.  Frued (and I) are just able, when we are lucky, to articulate some aspect of the human condition in clunky terms.

Well, this author is clunky, and I don’t think I would have minded reading this book if she was, as it were, a good engineer – but she doesn’t understand HVAC, much less the human condition.  That said, there is a nugget buried in the middle of this mess that I think is worth thinking about, so a quick rendition of the plot, as it were, and then on to the meat:

A woman goes off from Idaho and being poorly understood by her family to Harvard where she is poorly understood by the people that are assumed to be her peers, but, in fact, have no kinship with her.  For a masterful first person telling of this kind of experience by someone who lived it, please read Educated, by Tara Westover.  In the current, Yesteryear, rendition, the shy, smart Christian girl, upset by the vacuous ways of the cultural elite girls she is thrown in with, becomes smitten with a stupid, rich, vacuous son of a Senator.

Realizing that she has made a huge mistake, she gets his father to invest in a ranch for them in Idaho where she can hide this embarrassing idiot away from the world, and then decides to advertise her presence in this remote wasteland by streaming her experience as a tradwife to the world – pretending that her family and ranch life is ideal when, in fact, she and it are a fiction – one that she is creating almost in spite of herself.

Not surprisingly this flimsy construction crashes.  What seems promising about the novel is that the heroine is telling her tradwife story in the past tense – as recollections – then in alternate chapters is moving forward in time in an alternate universe where she is actually living in a frontier home – not one that she has created – and she (and we) see how grim that existence actually was.

OK, that is an interesting vehicle – and I won’t reveal the twist that we as readers are trying to figure out through the book.  If you’ve read it, you know, and if I haven’t convinced you not to read it yet, I don’t want to spoil it for you, except to say that I didn’t see it coming because it didn’t actually make any more sense than a radiator puffing heat.  I’m just saying.

So, the meat?  Or perhaps, rather, the morsel?  The central thing that author promises is that we are all experiencing ourselves as living in a maze with no way out.  We feel trapped in a world that is controlled by billionaires who have no understanding that it is our labor that allows them to have the wealthy perks that make their lives seem so enviable.  Having a tradwife be constructed as having the perfect life on social media helps us whether we have “traditional values” which conflict with our actual, miserable existence; or, we have more elite, snobbish values that allow us to look down on the traditional world so that we can believe that our vacuous existences are worth living – even though the pleasures they provide are thin and we are headed towards the grave without having found any meaning in our lives.

I think this is a trope, but a powerful one, used by the media and politicians alike to inform us that we are not what I believe us to be: humans living human lives.  Until 200 years ago, most of us lived not so differently from the domesticated animals that were likely sharing our living quarters.  And we were, if not happy, deeply invested in our lives and the continuation of the species.  Unlike the spoiled protagonist in this book, who whined and whimpered about her previous superior life when confronted with a lack of creature comforts, we strove to improve our lot – we were deeply engaged in our lives; nasty and brutish and short though they may have been.

Similarly, I think that, as much as we complain about not having enough time, money, or pleasure, we are currently living lives that kings and queens would have envied.  We can travel in ways that were unimaginable until recently, and we have more information in our pockets than were contained in the greatest libraries of all time.  Are we happy?  Not necessarily.  Happiness is a feeling state that comes and goes.  But are we invested in our lives?  I think we are every bit as invested as our ancestors were – and we are every bit as ambivalently as they were.

Sometimes this means that we are invested in our online lives - as if those were our real lives, rather than pale imitations, and distortions, of the lives we are actually leading.  Am I concerned that the opinions I present in these posts are two dimensional or don't reflect all that I feel about any subject?  Am I too pollyannaish, including in this current evaluation of our condition?  I think all of those criticisms are accurate.  The truth of the human condition is complicated, and our minds do much better with manipulating simple things, like how pure chemicals interact in pristine environments.  Hydrogen and oxygen makes water.  Simple and clean.

Human life, on the other hand, continues to be messy – and I anticipate that it will be as long as it continues.  Living viscerally in that life, as complicated and challenging as that is – is our fate.  Art’s role is to help us in that struggle.  This book articulates a vision – the maze and then later the labyrinth – that is certainly a way of reducing a very complex relationship of our lives to our culture, and creating a simple equation to describe out engagement with a new and very complicated future – but it neither provides a way out, nor does it accurately describe our current halting complicated trek through it.  Instead, it celebrates, reifies, and simplifies the complexity of living, reducing it to a kind of periodic table of the human elements that is the very thing it appears to be railing against.  We deserve better from our artists and the empires that billionaires are exploiting to expand their influence, which might, with a certain amount of irony, actually be the point of this book…

I am curious if a movie version will actually enhance it.  Will Ann Hathaway bring something to the character - as an actual human being enacting an imaginary one and thereby infusing the imaginary character with life - unlike the conceptualist - which I think this author is - creating a cartoon and putting it through its paces, an actress will have to confront, as she engages in the role, the complexities that it exposes in herself.

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Amistad and the importance of an independent judiciary...

 

Amistad, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Judiciary, Independence, Social Contract, Independence

I have long wanted to see this film, and when it popped up on our queue, the reluctant wife and I agreed to take a look.  It is a Steven Spielberg film that, along with Schindler’s List, is one of those films that you ought to see, but, that said, do you really want to?  It is showing, in this case, in living color, how corrupt and brutal we can be.  I also “ought” to see it because one of my high school buddies was one of the film editors.  When Spielberg said cut here, he did.

Much to our surprise, this film packs a powerful contemporary message in Trump II’s America.  Yes, it is about slavery and the slave trade, yes, it is about a boat full of Africans illegally enslaved and illegally transported.  But mostly it is about the need for an independent judiciary.  Again and again, the eleven year old Queen Isabella of Spain (Played by a very young Anna Paquin in a minor role) is held up as being a more powerful ruler than our President, Martin Van Buren, because Queen Isabella controls her courts while Van Buren does not, try as he might.

At the time of this film, the transatlantic slave trade was illegal, but slavery was alive and well in the United States.  Slavery here would not be outlawed until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 and then, after the civil war, the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution in 1865 banned slavery entirely.  Kentucky, near me, outlawed selling slaves relatively early in the 1800s, but most of the legislative action up until the civil war was granting exceptions to the law so that particular transactions could take place.

The Amistad was a ship carrying Africans that had been transferred from the illegal transatlantic ship Tecora to a local ship in Havana, Cuba, a Spanish Colony.  The Africans commandeered the Amistad, sparing two crew members who agreed to take them back to Africa, but those crew members instead steered them into American Waters, where the ship was commandeered by the US Navy and taken to Boston, where a series of Judicial proceedings took place.  The first trial was a criminal trial to determine if the Africans were guilty of murdering most of the crew.  As the killings of the crew members took place in international waters, the court decided it did not have jurisdiction.  But that left the matter of what to do with the Africans.

Queen Isabella supported the claim of the remaining crew that the Africans were indeed slaves and belonged to the crew members and that they were being ferried between Spanish colonies and should be returned.  Martin Van Buren, both to support his relationship with Spain, and to curry favor with Southern Voters, supported this claim.  But an abolitionist group became concerned about the Africans.  They approached the retired president John Quincy Adams to defend them, but he demurred, preferring to stay away from the issue of slavery and wanting to remain in retirement.  So, they hired a local attorney, played by a young Matthew McConaughey (who did a credible job, losing his Texas accent by the end of the movie); an expert in property law which, much to the chagrin of the abolitionists, was exactly what they needed when the court was considering the Africans to be slaves.

The complicating factor here, is that the Africans did not speak English.  The attorney was able to find an ex-slave who spoke the language of some of the slaves – the Africans had broken into tribal groups in the group prison cell and Cinqué (Djimon Hounsou) became their spokesman (at least as portrayed in the film).  The attorney found a sympathetic ear in the judge, so Van Buren changed judges, but that judge, too, was swayed by the discovered documentation of the Africans having been illegally transported from Africa, and released the Africans.  Van Buren, again trying to hang onto the South, appealed the case to the Supreme Court.

At this point, John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) finally agreed to get involved.  He argued the case before the Supreme Court.  Historically, he had 4 and ½ hours of opening arguments, and 4 hours in his closing arguments.  The filmed version was more concise.  It was also what I would like to focus on in thinking about the film.  In doing this, I am not addressing the brutal (but also historically accurate) depiction of the middle passage from Africa to the Americas.  I am also not addressing the issue of people as property - for that, see a discussion of James Cone’s the Cross as the Lynching Tree.

The issue of an independent judiciary is both political and, I will argue in a moment, intrapsychic.  Trump had the judiciary in his pocket when he arrived for his first term.  As the New York Times recently revealed, Chief Justice Roberts ushered in the era of the shadow docket when he put the kibosh on Obama’s use of the EPA to reduce the use of coal in electricity production and thereby blocked the transition to renewable energy sources by 2030.  After that, Mitch McConnell oversaw the revamping of the federal judiciary including the Supreme Court during Trump I, and the court has become a rubber stamp of the more and more outlandish executive orders of Trump II.  The No Kings marches are partly an objection to Trump’s having achieved the position that Queen Isabella enjoyed – the court that matters does not disagree with him, and will disagree with itself to support him.

John Adams, in his closing statement, argued persuasively that we need to remember the founding fathers.  The power of this statement was amplified in that one of those founding fathers was his own Dad.  These men, many of them slaveholders, argued for the freedom of men.  He was reminding the justices of the principles that are the cornerstone for a free country and the importance of following the law.  In this case, even in a country that continued to own and trade slaves internally, it was internationally illegal to enslave and trans-oceanically transport slaves.  The rule of law supercedes the will of the majority – at least it used to.  Everyone, including the President, was required to live within the confines of laws that were determined by Congress, a body that was representing the people.  The only exceptions are when Congress enacts laws that violates the constitution and rights that are spelled out in that document.  The People’s will, therefore, is at the heart of the law.  We have a social contract not with a king who commands us, but with ourselves – or more closely – with each other and with our better angels, as spelled out in the constitution, and especially the amendments to it.

When we enter into a social contract, we agree to tame our instincts.  Freud famously argued that this was the source of our discontent.  Yes, we are less happy in the moment when our internal judge rules that this or that action is out of bounds because it simply is not allowed as part of being a member of society.  Hopefully, we are also connected enough with the members of our society that we would not want to harm them.  This higher form of moral functioning, one that is based in basic attachment, is not one that Freud had conceptual access to, but it should be something that we are evolving towards, individually, and as a state.

This week, the reluctant wife, who used to be a member of the deep state, cohosted a meeting in our house of a group of people meeting to discuss the ideals – the principles (not the policies) that make us America.  A central component of that, in my mind, is that he, as citizens, enter into a social contract and, as an essential element of that contract, no person is above the law.  The question to the group was whether we have outlived the ideals that were influential in founding the country.  We may have done that in some areas, but this movie helped me realize that the rule of law – and the independence of the judiciary is not something that we can afford to give up.  This is still, in my mind, an essential part of being an American.

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What We Can Know: Ian McEwan ponders deeply psychoanalytic questions.

 

What We Can Know, Ian McEwan, Psychoanalysis, What Can We Know?, Philosophy of Science, Psychology, limits of knowledge

Ian McEwan titles this book with a statement, but it is implicitly a question, and the cover representation, with the font clear on the outside but fuzzy inside the mirror/window, clarifies that this is a meditation on what is, to my mind, a very central question to psychoanalysis, to science, and, especially given that the book takes place in various liberal arts institutions, the human condition.  What can we know and how can we know it?  In particular, what can we know of others – what is their character, but ultimately, also, what can we know of ourselves.

I have recently started working with a patient whose hope is that psychoanalysis will help him with this very question.  He is hoping that it will help him make contact with the sensory world, which currently feels blurry or inaccessible to him.  Even more centrally he wants to have more direct contact with his feelings – to know, with much more certainty than he currently does, what he feels.  We could see his, and the characters in McEwan’s book, uncertainty about what they know as symptomatic of a depressive personality style – of being repeatedly disappointed by a world that does not line up with what we expect to be, indeed feel entitled to be, knowable. 

Seeking help, my patient is looking to break through the miasma that separates him from the world and from himself.  The characters in the first half of this book seek this clarity through scholarship, something their students have little faith in, and their efforts to engage their students in understanding the value of what they are trying to do only adds to their sense of ennui.

In order to tread a line between enticing those who have not read the book and engaging in a conversation with those who have, I will be intentionally vague in this post.  This book is filled with delightful twists that feel more like reveals of what we already knew than surprise turns.  There is a sense of opening a Russian Doll to find another version, smaller but still the same, inside the first.  Or perhaps, to follow the analogy, it feels like moving towards the heart of the matter and gaining more and more clarity about what sits at that heart; and feeling more and more satisfied that what we are coming to know (which will still contain mystery) is what we have been in search of.

To reiterate, then: This book does not so much lead us into new spaces (though it does do that) as it unfolds, opening up the spaces that were hidden by the folds, letting light into them, helping us move closer to something that feels deeply true – but also something that is deeply human, and thus more mysterious the more we know about it.

Part of the power of this book is that the movement towards clarity occurs on multiple levels simultaneously.  Just getting oriented at the beginning of the book is tough.  Where are we?  What is the time frame?  Even though the years are there in black and white, we are both in more or less current times and we are one hundred years in the future, in a world that feels familiar, but also very different from the one we live in.  The dystopian world of the near future feels organic.  Yes, there were catastrophes, but we have, more or less, recovered from them.  If the world is not what it once was, it is not uninhabitable, by any means, nor is it unrecognizable, even if it is vastly different.  And it is recovering, slowly.  And one of the exercises of that recovery is the study of what the world was before it became what it is now, just as has always been the case.

So, we join a world of scholars who are interested in a prior world of scholars.  Just as Woody Allen imagined a world of artists that he would have liked to live with (in Midnight in Paris), the focus of the central scholar is on a particular evening – when the coolest of the cool in the world of poetry and scholarship gathered for the (second) immortal dinner.  What took place there?

When I was in college in the late 1970s, the cool places were CBGBs and Studio 54.  Especially during my year in Maryland, kids would go up to New York to one or the other of these places.  One friend, who was particularly thin, would buy very skinny jeans then sit in a bathtub with the hottest water he could stand so that the jeans would shrink to fit hoping that this would lead to his being picked out of the line of wannabes to be admitted to Studio 54.

The world of scholarship creates similarly exclusive clubs that people want to belong to.  The original version of this club cited in the book was the first immortal dinner of 1817.  John Keats, William Wordsworth and Charles Lamb attended it.  The second immortal dinner, imagined in this book, was Vivien Blundy’s 54 birthday party in 2020 at which her husband, Francis Blundy read his Corona poem – a gift to her memorializing his love for her.  He had written the poem on a piece of vellum – and had destroyed all drafts and other copies of it and, after reading it, he presented it to her.  It has not been seen since. 

The immortal dinner at which the poem was read has become legendary.  The dinner itself, and speculation about the poem is the focus of Robert Metcalfe’s scholarship in 2119.  We learn about Metcalfe in part through his understanding of the dinner – an understanding culled from the preserved email records between all of the attendees.  The details clarify that the dinner was not quite as exciting as it appeared from a distance.

Metcalfe is driven to understand both the dinner, but also to try to discover the poem.  If he were able to do that, it would clearly make his career – a career that is, at best, dreary as he tries to engage the interest of halfhearted students in their studies while simultaneously maintaining the interest of his halfhearted lover Rose Church, in himself.

Thomas and Rose are like the youtubers who have posted videos of Studio 54 in its heyday, remembering a decadence that they never had a chance to live in.  Frances and Vivien are, then, like Andy Warhol and the other glitterati, including Liza Minnelli, who populated Studio 54 – or the Ramones and Debbie Harry at CBGB.  Theirs was a world that we pine for – enhanced, in this case, by Thomas and Rose’s life in a post-apocalyptic world that has less biodiversity, land mass, and economic and political stability.  Those were the days, my friends…

But were they?  What are the qualities of a lived life?  Are they what they seem?  When I have taught the history of psychology, I show Hamilton at the beginning of class – to illustrate that Lin Manuel Miranda uses the current hip hop vernacular to lend emotional life to the actions of the founding fathers.  They (and the folks who founded and shaped our science) were passionate people.  As were Vivien and Francis Blundy, and the others who attended that immortal birthday party.

In the first telling of that party, pieced together by his scholarship, Thomas Metcalfe paints a picture of those around Blundy and their experience of the party – and we discover Blundy’s passion to be directed primarily towards himself.  He is a generational poet, able to use his words to entrance multitudes and to describe the human condition.  This gift sets him apart – he belongs in the pantheon. 

Vivien, his wife, gave up her own promising academic career to tend to his needs.  And she appears to have become subservient to him, and to feel, on some level, that the poem does not really capture her or their love together, but is, instead, a testament to his poetic genius, and it is.  A corona is a poem that is made up of stanzas – a long corona would be seven stanzas long – with each last line being the beginning line of the next stanza, and the last stanza being a simply a reiteration of first/last lines, now in a stand-alone stanza that has integrity.  Francis’s corona for Vivien is 15 stanzas long.  It is an heroic poem.

This book is about a lot of things.  It is about the period we are living in – and it is a cry for us to preserve it because it is a tremendous period but also one that is threatened by, among other things, climate change.  I regularly thank my stars that I have lived during this period.  Could the world be a better place?  Has it been?  Will it be?  It is pretty darn great right now and, as I tell my students, we have more information in our pockets than emperors, kings, and presidents have ever had, we have more personal mobility than they ever did and (relevant to this story) we haven’t yet destroyed the environment.   Wow.

But the question the book asks – What can we know? – is not really about the kind of knowledge in our pockets, but the kind of knowledge that is in our heads.  It is the knowledge of who we are and who the people around us are – the people that we care about and rely on.  And that question gets honed here to what can we know about ourselves and what can we know about each other in terms of our fidelity.  There is a lot of unfaithfulness in this novel.  Rose is unfaithful to Thomas, the members of the supporting cast of the second immortal dinner have been unfaithful and faithful to themselves and to each other in a whole variety of ways.

As an example of faith, one of the guests at the dinner is an unlikely member of the group – he sticks out, in fact, like a sore thumb.  He is a carpenter and general handy man.  We think at first he is there because his wife belongs in this circle, but later we learn that he was not initially welcomed at the Blundy’s – Francis almost banished him for his use of the word hopefully.  At his next visit, he used it again, and Francis went into high dudgeon mode about what an unlearned fellow this carpenter was, and the carpenter started talking about adverbs and Blundy said he didn’t need a lesson on adverb’s from him – a carpenter – but the carpenter insisted that he did, gave him the lesson, and from that point forward was welcome at the table.  He had, in fact, through personal fidelity - showing himself to be equal to the bully - earned his place at that table, even if we did not know that initially.

I was impressed, in my reading of this novel, with the variety of infidelities and fidelities that emerged across the course of it.  Some interpersonal disloyalties were forgiven – some did not seem to matter at all, even if my sensibility was disturbed.  The central infidelity seemed to be the corona.  It seemed not to be a record of Francis’s love for Vivien at all – though it was presented as a present to her – and I was fully committed to the belief that she was offended by its failure to acknowledge her as a person independent of who Francis was.

As we later came to understand the poem, it was offensive – sort of in the way that imagined it – but, at least to my read, Blundy turns out to have been, in Vivien’s view, a romantic who yearned for something from her that he could not have, not because she did not have it to give and would have given of it freely, but she did not give it because he could not adequately receive it, the poem articulated that.  It was, in a weird way, a testament to Vivien's autonomy and Blundy's inability to match it.  In addition to it being about a Vivien, who was not the Vivien of the relationship with Blundy, it was so much about the true kernel of their relationship that Vivien rejected it because it spoke all too directly to what bound them together.

Across the life of a couple, what binds us together, what helps us maintain what fidelity we can, is complicated.  In Vivien’s mind, and, I think, in most of our minds, there are ties that are not to be spoken of, even in they are known.  The ties may be shameful in and of themselves, but I think also, once those ties are verbalized, there are a host of other ties that become visible – ties that we don’t want to know.

One of the many levels of knowledge and self-knowledge that this book touches on includes the self-knowledge of the author.  This book could easily be dismissed as a thinly disguised roman a clef with Francis Blundy as the author’s alter ego.  After all, McEwan is as accomplished as Blundy if in a parallel field.  As much as he admires the corona as a poetic device, McEwan’s vehicle (and I’m guessing his more highly valued art form) is the novel – prose.  He can get just enough distance writing about a poet to indulge in some pretty serious, and self-congratulatory navel gazing.

McEwan has previously written an intentional roman a clef – the book Sweet Tooth – in which he wrote about the 1970s, which he thought of as the best time in his life, but embroidered the story in a variety of ways that weren’t consistent with his life.  In so far as this is a roman a clef, the second half of the book goes a long way towards rehabilitating the author’s perceived narcissism – a perception shared by the reader.

If you grant the roman a clef premise for a moment, the second half of the novel both redeems the author, but it also clarifies the depth of his guilt.  This man has committed (or thought about committing – which, in order to write this book he mast have done) some heinous acts.  He is a bully who feels that the ends justify the means, and he values his profession over personal relationships, something that is ironic because much of what he is writing about is the value of relationships.  Frankly I think many psychoanalysts and therapists of many stripes could identify with aspects of this man’s character, myself included.

So, how does the second half redeem him?  His self-knowledge and the knowledge of the impact of what he does on others allows him to come across as warm, concerned, and caring; again, therapists would be able to identify with this, again, myself included.  We are complicated critters.  As self-knowledgeable as Blundy and Vivien are – and for that matter, Thomas and Rose – the historian and his lover who go off in search of the corona – their self-knowledge does not protect them from living complicated and, in many ways, dreary lives.

My next thought, you may be anticipating, is to apply this summary statement to the lives of those lucky few who made it through the ropes at Studio 54 or were hip enough to be in the mosh pit of CBGB’s.  And you would be detecting a note of schadenfreude; joy or pleasure at other’s displeasure.  You wouldn’t be wrong, but I think most importantly, that opens the door to the realization that we all; Rock Star Poet, glitterati of the non-nerdy variety, or lowly blogger, are vulnerable to both moments of incredible hubris – where we miss those around us (as Vivien was missed, but then moved to center stage in the second part of the book (though Blundy still loomed large)), but also that, despite our hubris - our narcissism, we are decent blokes, at least at heart.

To state that differently.  McEwan is a proud climate change activist.  This book can (and has been) read as a climate sensitive book.  Yet he casts Blundy as a climate change denier.  In so far as Blundy reflects McEwan, he reflects the things about McEwan (and me) that he (and I) would most like to deny and distance ourselves from.  I am a climate change activist who booked around trip flight to New York just to see a play that I wanted to see… ye Gods!  And we, famous or not, have to wrestle with how to integrate – how to know – those parts of ourselves that we least want to acknowledge.

Post Script:  I thought about this overnight and, if this is a kind of reman a clef, it is a corona, and the sensitive treatment of Vivien - something I haven't talked much about above - his careful attention to her and to the feminine perspective on life with men, life with famous men, and women who are living with a man after having lived with the love of their life, are all meditations on the life of another - a loved other and a demonstration of his love and care for her.  

On the other hand, McEwan claims, in the last note in the book, that there is nothing buried in this book - a reference to it being nothing like the content of the novel.  He, and other readers, might say I am digging where there is nothing to find...

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One Battle After Another: Reaction Formation takes center stage.

 One Battle After Another, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Reaction Formation, Defensive functioning, review

The Reluctant Wife and I have just finished a marathon viewing of the 10 films nominated for best picture and I have already reviewed two of the others (Bugonia and The Secret Agent).  I found all nine of the films I watched riveting, and my wife assures me that the 10^th, Train Dreams, was perhaps the most visually glorious of them all.  I have decided to write about one final movie from this group, One Battle After Another, not because it won best picture, but because it illustrates a psychoanalytic defense that I don’t think I have written about to this point, one that I rarely see in treatment, but one that is more prevalent than I think we give it credit for (do I overlook it in my treatment of my patients?), and, when it is present, a virulent problem.  The defense is Reaction Formation.

This post contains all kinds of spoilers.  It is intended for folks who have already seen the film and want to think about it.  If you haven’t seen it yet, the Academy (Oscars people) and I recommend it – it is suspensful and contains lots of chase scenes and a fair amount of violence.  The Reluctant Wife, who can tolerate violence when it is not unnecessarily cruel and when it is plot based, not gratuitous, survived viewing this film.

One Battle After Another is a film in the thriller tradition.  It grabs you in the opening scene and keeps you in breathless thrall from that moment until the resolution.  There are little eddies to the side of the rushing stream, but you need to be wary when you are in them because you sense that the lulls are there to give you a slight respite before the roller coaster drops you over the next cliff (indeed, the central chase scene is, quite literally, a roller coaster ride through the pitched roads of the California mountains). 

We begin with an attack on a refugee camp near the American border in what feels like contemporary America, but necessarily must have been twenty years ago if the rest of the film is contemporary.  The attack is both chaotic and extremely well-orchestrated.  The eddy in the midst of this rushing torrent is an encounter between Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a very attractive African-American who gets sexually aroused during her revolutionary acts and Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), the person responsible for securing the Detention Center she is liberating.  She breaks into his tractor-trailer command center and lords her power over him – commanding him to have an erection, which he dutifully does before she clarifies to him that she is the person in charge of him ties him up (I think) and runs off with the rest of the commandoes and the people who had been incarcerated.  This Sado-Masochistic interaction between Perfidia and Steven unleashes the central relational tension that drives the rest of the film.

The aspect of this interaction that I would like to highlight is less the sado-masochistic component, though that is very worthy of analysis and description, but more the way in which that ongoing interaction ignited by this first brush is an obsession that Col. Steven Lockjaw is both deeply invested in and, I think, intermittently unconscious of.  That is, Lockjaw may be hiding (in plain sight) an extremely high level of disavowal about the nature of his feelings towards Perfidia Beverly Hills and perhaps even the actions that we see him engage in.

We learn, much later in the film, that the pinnacle of career success for Col. Lockjaw would be membership in the elite secret cadre of the Christmas Adventurers Club.  This club is a White Christian Nationalist group that has, as a central tenet, the separation of the races.  Miscegenation is a cardinal sin of this group – and, just as “interbreeding” was forbidden and a common practice when white masters raped their slaves in antebellum days, Col. Lockjaw is entranced by that which, by transitive logic, is morally repugnant to him.  He also goes to great lengths to cover up his actions which are, I believe, in tension with not only his stated, but also his avowed beliefs.

Now this raises the issue of a Christian organization engaging in Unchristian activities, something that has been going on since before the Crusades.  Why would a spiritual leader who preached love for others – others of all kinds – even tax collectors, be used as the vehicle for war, hatred and persecution?  This is a very big and important question that any fifth grader should be able to pose, and yet we have not been able to find an answer that allows us to deconstruct the seemingly airtight rationales for things like miscegenation prohibition, attacking of Muslim countries, and the prevention of immigration of those with different religious beliefs into a country founded on, among other things, the principle of religious freedom.  So, Col. Lockjaw’s psychology is, I think, worth our interest.

Unfortunately, the best lived example that I have to understand his behavior was seemingly intractable.  There was a family in Topeka, Kansas that was incredibly homophobic.  They received national attention when they would travel to funerals of prominent gay men during the AIDS epidemic and throw red paint on the mourners.  On a more local level, they would do disruptive things like texting the same black sheet of paper to the local courthouse over and over so that the printer there would run out of ink.  They also set up signs at prominent corners in town deriding gays.  The family owned all of the houses on a city block and, instead of having fences that demarcated different yards, the fences went from house to house creating a common backyard, or compound.

When I was in training in Topeka, I played on a recreational basketball team in town.  There were no other mental health professionals on the team.  The players were all “Townies” who had grown up in Topeka.  They had gone to school with the children of this family and, in their gossip about the family, it was clear that were concerned about what took place in the family – in the compound.  One of the family members was, according to my friends, routinely masturbating in class.  They assumed, as did I, that this elementary aged girl was in an oversexed environment.  And the efforts of the family were to point a finger at others that they claimed were oversexual appeared to us – professional and nonprofessional alike - as likely a result of projection and, as I will explain in a minute, a particular form of projection, reaction formation.

In the film, Perfidia Beverly Hills exerts power over Col. Lockjaw.  She holds the gun and stands above him, confident, cocky, and full of a defiant sexuality.  Col. Lockjaw’s evident arousal betrays his desire for her – for what she has.  He imagines her, I believe, to mirror him. To be, like him, self-assured, organized, angry (but also, like him, seemingly in control of that anger, as evidenced by the control of the people and forces around each of them).  As Col. Lockjaw obsessively watches Perfidia, he becomes aware of her white lover, Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio). Lockjaw imagines himself as a superior person, in part to manage his envy of Pat.  Lockjaw demonstrates he is a superior person when he captures Perfidia and trades sexual pleasure for her freedom.  He is now in the position of power and she in the position of the needy and therefore, at least in Lockjaw’s mind, desiring one.

The issues of power, control, and sexual desire in the movie are all now in play and interacting with each other.  We can think of these as interpersonal forces, but, as a psychoanalyst, I am aware of them as intrapsychic forces as well.  Lockjaw (and the family in Topeka) publicly present themselves as being in control of these forces – indeed, they publicly deny that they are operative within them.  And yet they are drawn to and focused on the behavior of others – behaviors that they want to stamp out.  This is a classic example – in both cases – of the reaction formation defense.  In this defense, the person denies interest in the forbidden area, and their consistent efforts to eliminate the forbidden thought or action in others allows them to think about the forbidden material and thus satisfy their own forbidden desires.  At least in theory the defense should help prevent action on the part of both Lockjaw and the family in Topeka.  Certainly in the movie, the defense fails to ward off action, and, in the case of the family in Topeka, both the townies and me worried that it may not have been adequate there either.

Lockjaw lives an austere life.  He is not married, he does not have a family.  He is the consummate soldier, focused on getting rid of those who are undesirable.  He is also clearly drawn to and fascinated by those he despises, betraying his desire.  Perhaps the closest we come to seeing folks like this in the clinic on a regular basis is when we treat incest offenders.  These individuals invariably know that what they are doing is wrong.  They feel ashamed about what they are doing and try to hide it, including telling their victims not to talk with anyone about what they are doing.  But they are also powerfully drawn to act on desires that they feel uncomfortable with.  From this perspective, reaction formation might seem less damaging.

The problem with reaction formation is that it is a defense that keeps the defendant from realizing the perversion that is at the base of it.  Rather than exploring the fascination with the otherness of people who are different from (but also in important ways similar to) oneself, we deny the connection to them and their actions and stand firmly on the side of the right rather than the wrong that others engage in.  This means that we do not seek help for our position – our position is, after all, the healthy one, the right one.  Why would we ask for help dealing with being in the position of the right?

Reaction formation is, then, a partial answer to that fifth grade question of how can Christian organizations profess Christian beliefs while acting in what would appear, from the outside, to be decidedly unchristian ways.  When we define others as sinners, we can protect ourselves from their heathen ways so that we can lead Christian lives.  We are pure, and they are misled, and we can send missionaries to fix them while we stay safe within our Christian nation.

Lockjaw’s defense against his interest cracks when Perfidia Beverly Hills lords herself over him.  He then, I would posit, uses what we call vertical splits to try to keep his interest in her at bay.  He generally is able to rationalize his surveillance of her as part of his job.  Apprehending her is also clearly part of what he needs to do.  Once she is apprehended, he acknowledges to her and, apparently, to himself, his interest in her, but, in the long run she successfully wards him off.  He can then, for a very long time, deny that he had the interest.  The concern, though, is that there may be evidence of his interest and, when he is called up to be in the Christmas Adventurers Club, he has to discover if that evidence exists and, if it does, to erase it.  As is often the case, it is the effort to cover up his misdeeds that proves his undoing.

At this point, you may be a little confused about defenses and how they work.  The idea here is that Lockjaw has an impulse – a very human impulse.  He is curious about people who are different from him.  Jaak Panksepp, via Mark Solms would suggest that this is a result of the seeking drive.  Conveniently, the sex drive is a subsystem of the seeking drive, so all of this stuff is nicely nestled together deep in the human, but we might as well call it the animal, part of the brain.  Wanting to know more is a way that we and other animals learn about the environment around us, and this enhances our ability to survive.  Civilization mandates that we not be too nosy – we need to curb our enthusiasm, as it were, so we learn to limit our curiosity.

A big part of limiting our curiosity is discovering that there are dangers out there lurking in the unknown.  So, we are simultaneously drawn to and afraid of the unknown.  In part to get rid of bad feelings that we are told not to have, we can begin to attribute those feelings to those who are unknown.  We can project our unwanted or socially unacceptable feelings onto an entire class of people that we don’t know.  We are told not to be aggressive – “don’t hit your brother!”.  Obediently, we deny that feeling, but still sense it, but we sense it as arising in someone else.  It is then a simple step to try to help this unknown other with this terrible feeling that they have.  “Stop hitting,” we might say to these others – or “Stop watching pornography, it’s bad for you”; “Stop having sex with other men, that is a sin”; or “Stop being attracted to white people, that is a bad thing for you to be doing.”  And the sneaky thing is that as we do this, we observe and/or imagine the forbidden activity and we are able to deny that the activity is something that we are interested in, except to stop it.

In so far as Lockjaw does use reaction formation, it doesn’t work very well.  He decides that, if he has control over the other person, he will be able to keep his interest contained as well.  Unfortunately, when he puts Beverly Hills in the witness protection home that he believes she won’t leave in order to avoid being killed by her own people that she has ratted out, she has other ideas and flies the coop.  Of course, the child she had after the sexual interaction when he first picked her up might be his, so when he is tapped to be in the organization, he has to find out if that is the case, and, if it is, he has to get rid of the evidence.

When he is asked about the match between his DNA and Perfidia’s, Steven makes up a lame story about having had his sperm stolen against his will.  This is not reaction formation, it is just bad rationalization. The Christmas Adventurers Club and they quickly see through his ruse with terminal consequences.  His reaction formation – the projection of his desire onto Perfidia – is not successful any more than the reaction formation of the family in Topeka, blaming everyone else for being sex obsessed when they themselves may very well have been sex obsessed.

I hope that this tricky defense is a little clearer after having had these two examples of it, but I also hope it is clear that defenses in general are just that, defenses.  And like walls in a castle, they are not always successful in keeping things out (or, in the case of drives, in).  Our defenses leak all the time.  This leads us to engage in symptomatic behavior – and also to be able to create gripping works of art such as One Battle After Another.

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The Secret Agent: Survival takes a village

 

The Secret Agent, Brazilian Film, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Dictatorship, Brutality

What can I say?  The most succinct description of this movie comes from the brilliant reluctant wife who stated that the hero of this film, Armando, who has to go by the name Marcelo (played by Wagner Moura), is the secret agent because he doesn’t know that he is an agent.  What could be more psychoanalytic?  A secret agent who doesn’t know that he is?  It is very much like our experience of having an unconscious determining huge swaths of our experience and, because that agent is unconscious, we don’t know who is running our own show.

Like other films nominated for best film by the Academy (Bugonia, One Battle After Another, and Sinner, though Frankenstein and others could fit here) and other foreign films like The President’s Cake, this film is carrying a not so concealed message about the craziness of the times we live in, even though each is making tangential rather than direct commentary.  In this case, a Brazilian film, in Portuguese (with a little German) and with good subtitles, is talking about the period of craziness in Brazil during the 1970s and 80s.  My interpretation that it is commenting on our current experience could be projection – as is the case when making an interpretation in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis – and that means it could land, or not.  In this case, we’ll see if it squares with your take.  Because I am relying on that and don’t know that you will have seen this relatively obscure film, I will talk about many details in it.  If you intend to see it, you may want to stop here and return after you see it.

The events depicted in the film are not of earth-shaking consequence.  There is a contract made to take a person’s life and it is carried out.  This could just be a gangster film.  But it is not.  It is a film about what happens when the government, instead of protecting the people and supporting them in the moment, but also in the long term, becomes blind to what is going on or, more pointedly, becomes open to corruption and removes its oversight of human affairs.  I think it is no accident that the Academy nominated this film.  As splendid a film as it is – and it is a splendid film – it has essentially no chance of winning the award, but it is important that American audiences see it, and nominating it assures that at least some of us do that.  So, my interpretation of this being relevant may more accurately reflect the minds of the members of the academy than the film makers themselves, who may, frankly, be more interested in exploring the consequences of the lack of oversight in their country than in warning us about what will happen when we take our eye off the ball.

On the other hand, from my very brief sojourn in Nicaragua, where the US was on the front pages of the newspapers there every day, I am keenly aware that the rest of the Americas do have their eyes on us.  They know what is going on, and, having lived through corruption, I think they may well want us to know what it looks like. 

In this movie, a member of the privileged class, a scientist – not an award winning scientist, but a solid University professor scientist and department chair who has a patent to his name that would be of use to people interested in building an electric car – it has something to do with improving the functioning of a lithium battery – is pushed, along with everyone in his department, out of a job so that a pirate can “relocate” and use for profit the parts of the department that are useful to him.  He apparently has the ear of a politician or something that allows him to be a thug. 

The thing is, being a thug isn’t enough.  He feels insulted by the scientist and his wife, also a scientist in the same department.  He is angry enough at them that the scientist must go into hiding and take on an alias for fear that he will be brought up on trumped up charges and put in jail.  The wife has the good sense to die of pneumonia (please forgive my releasing her carelessly – she is only seen on screen in brief flashbacks – this is really a movie about the scientist) because the thug, not satisfied with upending the scientist’s life decides to end it.  Perhaps he fears that, if the scientist remains alive, he is vulnerable to being exposed.  We really don’t get to see what his motives are, just that he hires the hit men.

Perhaps the most engaging part of this film is the way in which what I have sketched out above emerges over the course of the more than two hours of the movie.  At the beginning of the film, we follow Marcelo on a trip through Brazil at Mardi Gras time in a yellow VW Bug, watching as a human who was murdered trying to steal from a gas station is left to rot in the sun, and as he is intimidated by highway patrolman who want him to bribe them to make them go away.  We feel disoriented and uncomfortable as he sneaks into what he equates to a US Safe house and connects with other “refugees”.  Some are legitimate refugees from other countries and some are refugees within their own country – as he is.  Minding his own business, operating his own department, he was not only thrown out of his job, but he is now a hunted man.

As I watched the film, I didn’t know how safe or unsafe he is.  The title of the film suggests he is a secret agent, but is he a spy?  I identify with him and I begin to feel unsafe and, as it becomes clearer and clearer that he is no more a secret agent than I am, I am brought into sharing his feeling of naivete, and therefore the feeling of uncertainty swells.  What have I done wrong?  Who can I trust?  Is there a rule of law in this country?

We might not think that could happen here, just as we might have thought the Chinese Cultural Revolution could not happen here, but after the events of the last year, as the chaos seems to increase day by day, as institutions of higher learning that are the envy of the world are held hostage by our President who is openly using his office to make money for himself, including by apparently selling state secrets to advance his own financial well-being among many other schemes, and who is regularly pardoning known criminals, how long will it be before people realize that they can get away with murder and how long after that will it be that they start acting on that?

Instead of “Marcelo’s” situation becoming clearer as the movie progresses, it becomes murkier.  “Marcelo” is set up with a job, apparently one he has asked for in the department of government that issues identity cards.  But that branch of the government is being used as a cover by a person who is presenting himself as the “Chief of Police”, but is he really?  He is deposing, in the government identification office, as if it were his own, a woman who did not tend to her servant’s child when she sent her servant out to get supplies.  The child wandered into the street and was hit by a bus.  Apparently, this “deposition” was staged so that the mother could arrive and complain like a crazy person, which the photojournalist could record, put in the paper, and sway public opinion away from the mother’s plight. 

Justice is apparently not blind in this corner of the world.  Indeed, it seems that justice may have taken to the streets, with public opinion about cases being more important than the jury – or maybe you sway the jury before the trial.  One of the chief of police’s misdeeds shows up in the form of a human leg in the belly of a shark.  Perhaps the body was chopped up and put in the sea?  In any case, the leg takes on a life of its own and, in one of the distracting scenes in the movies, hops around the park where couples meet to have sex interfering with their privacy.

Marcelo is offered a fake passport to help him get out of the country, but he is suspicious of the motives of the people supplying it.  None-the-less, he is interviewed and describes the events that led to his having to go into hiding.  We are confused and outraged by the thug’s behavior and that of his son as they steal the department from the man we now know is actually named Armando. We are also listening in with current day researchers who are listening to the tape of the conversation.  They, in turn, deliver to the tapes to Armando’s son, a physician.

The discussion between the researcher and Armando’s son helps clear up Armando’s interest in finding the identity card of his mother – she had been essentially a slave of his family with whom his father had an affair, and then he was raised by his grandparents as neither the maid nor the father were old enough to be parents.  Was she fired?  What happened to her?  And now, the son does not appear to be that interested in his father.  We saw his affection for the father when he was child, right before the father was murdered.  But now?  He has no memory of his parents – his grandparents raised him and are, effectively his parents.  The child is now a physician and he is running a blood bank.  Perhaps the filmmaker is trying to help him restore his interest in his father – and his country’s interest in what happened in a time that feels long ago and perhaps irrelevant.

The most poignant scene in the movie is when Marcelo, in a late evening hanging out with the other’s in the refugee building, lets them know his real identity in an act of trust.  They reciprocate, telling their own stories – and risking being ratted out by doing that.  We discover how diverse they are, the various types of corruption they are running from, but there is a greater sense of community – a feeling that others share their plight.  The woman who is the angel who protects them describes her own experience of surviving the Italian dictatorship during the war, she demonstrates that we can survive – and remember.  Perhaps know what others are going through can help us feel so not alone, and knowing that others have survived can help us feel hope, even during dark times.

I am finishing this post the morning after the Academy Awards.  The theme of the awards did parallel my reading of this movie.  The arts can help us remember who it is that we are and what it takes to get us through hard times.  In her acceptance speech for the first award for casting directors, the woman who was awarded (and everyone who was nominated was a woman) asked all the women in the auditorium to stand up – to thank them for their contribution to the industry and for their work together to make the industry a place where women’s contributions are recognized and valued.

  

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