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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Bugonia: Queen Bees and Wannabees at the Oscars

Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Politics and the Movies, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Oscar Nominated Films for best picture 2025

This week, at our local movie house, we are watching 10 films that have been nominated for best picture.  Actually, I missed one that was only being shown during the day, and we’ll see if we make it to the other nine.  Movies pack a lot into two hours (plus or minus).  The binge watching we have become more accustomed to pushes us along a known track, creating a craving at the end of each episode.  A movie introduces us to a whole world, the way a novel does, walks us through it, and then wraps it up with a bow and delivers us back to our own world.  It is a more intense ride.

Bugonia was a particularly intense ride.  With no background or expectation – other than having seen Emma Stone in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things a couple of years ago – we were introduced to her not as the suicide survivor who was struggling to come of age in an era when women were thwarted, as she was in that film, but as Michelle Fuller the powerful CEO of a company who has little empathy with the poor things who work for her and bring her and the corporation fantastic wealth as a result of their unending labor.

Simultaneously, we are introduced to Jesse Plemons’ character, Ted Gatz, a struggling, loner who keeps bees with his mentally challenged cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) and is concerned about the welfare of those bees as they face Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD as he calls it in his dialogues with Michelle Fuller).  The corporation he works for as a shipping clerk, loading boxes, we learn is also the corporation that Michelle Fuller heads, and it is a pharmaceutical company that also manufactures the pesticides that he blames for CCD.

At this point, after having set up the dynamic, I want to try to step out of describing the plot.  I want to avoid describing the plot for two reasons: partly because it is wacky – a little like Donny Darko, Everything, Everywhere All At Once, or a host of other seemingly low budget, science fictionesque films that use science fictiony ideas as a device to expose something uncanny about our experience of life.  I was not surprised to learn that this is a remake of a 2020 Korean film.

The second reason that I want to avoid describing the plot is because this is a well-crafted movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat.  I was uncertain about just what was really happening as it pivoted from moment to moment and I was constantly reassessing my own reading of the basic plot – so if you haven’t seen it, I don’t want to steal that from you.  That said, I should warn you that there is a great deal of violence, and, though it is not gratuitous in that it is, I think, necessary to the plot, the violence is graphic and while even, at moments, over the top and blackly comical; it is considerable in both its quantity and graphic depiction.

So I will, in effect, try to interpret the latent content of this movie/dream without referring too much to its manifest, observed content.  In doing this, I have a sense that I may be anticipating the “collection” of Oscar nominees for best picture.  This film (and we also saw the Brazilian nominee last night, The Secret Agent) seems to be struggling with the craziness that the world is currently experiencing, even though it has been being planned for over the course of the past five years.  It feels as if Hollywood knew that we would be perched on this precipice.

One theme that is right below the surface in this film is that of toxic masculinity.  Not the type of toxic masculinity that is being modelled by people like Trump, but the toxic masculinity of some of those who voted for him.  There is the sense that competitive women – the women who are no longer taking their place in the kitchen where they belong – are destroying our world.  They are Queen Bees that the men now work for – but in Colony Collapse Disorder, they are the Queen Bees that the workers abandon in droves.  Ted Gatz personifies the disaffected worker who is tired of working for the Wo-man, seemingly forgetting that this trope was defined by masculine mores about what it takes to get ahead, and he has not seen, as we have, that Michelle Fuller is working at full tilt to get ahead and stay there, both mentally and physically, just as, or perhaps, more aggressively than a man would have done.

He also doesn’t quite see the stark emptiness in her life, living in a modern, stripped down, sterile home, surrounded, not by a family, but by well-manicured but lifeless lawns both at home and at work.  Her worker bees are not supportive and warm, but efficient, awed, and a bit scared by her and her power.  She deigns to know them by name, and to grant that, as a new policy, they can choose to leave work at 5:30 if they really have nothing additional to work on – and this will not be held against them, perhaps.

I have to stop at this point and note that the reluctant son is in his first year as an associate at a high-powered law firm.  He likes the law, he has worked hard in undergraduate and in law school and enjoys the work, including at the law firm, but even he is brought up short by the lifestyles of the partners at the firm – many of them rise very early so they can work out and be at work early – they leave to spend “quality time” with their families in the early evening, before getting back to work before lights out.  Even for my hard working son, this feels like a daunting life path to be treading.

Michelle Fuller’s life is contrasted with the home of Ted Gatz and Don.  Not only is it the place where unspeakable things were done to Ted when he was being babysat by a boy who became one of the local sheriffs, it is a rural home that is in obvious disrepair.  Ted’s obsessions with various ideas have led him to invest in tinkering, but not in a way that makes the house a home.  It is, instead, a particular kind of ramshackle man cave, and the bee hives out back are the least toxic components of the environment that Ted has created and the Don inhabits with him.

We are not surprised when Ted wants Don to join him in chemical emasculation so that his sexual thoughts don’t derail them from their mission of fixing the earth.  Ted’s feelings of paternal affection for the earth seem divorced from the kind of care that we would associate with generative paternal functioning.  From a toxic masculine perspective, women have taken over our space, we have defined ourselves not in positive qualities, but as the things that women – our mothers – are not.  We need to develop into a different space.  We do that, only to find that women have already occupied that space and we now have nowhere to live – so we abandon the community.  We don’t have a vision for how it should be, only dissatisfaction with how it is, so we want to destroy the changes that have led us to feel disaffected, isolated and lonely – but we recoil from acknowledging the soft feminine core of that desire for something that feels a lot like dependency and being a little baby - attachment.

For Ted, his retreat is into a very cerebral world.  He becomes obsessed with a variety of conspiracy theories and finally lands on one that he beilieves to be true, and he comes up with inventive ways to test the theory.  His abduction of Michelle is the final piece that he needs to prove it.  He may not have the resources of the corporation, or indeed much of a community at all, outside of the obeisance of Don, but he does have considerable smarts.  These smarts are read by Michelle (and us) as madness, and she works from within that framework to connect with him, but Ted, as crazy as he may be, recognizes her pandering ploy and will have none of it.  Her offers to connect are clearly a trap – whether she is offering sex or comfort and dependency he knows that this is just more of what he is trying to overcome and he and Michelle are stuck in a standoff.

Michelle’s effective strategy is to offer a solution – one that fits within Ted’s sense of her as both all powerful and withholding – and she offers what we realize is a fatal solution to the thing that he seems most to desire.  She dangles it in front of him, like bait, and he bites.  But even after he knows that it is bait, she still holds him in her thrall because she has the answer to his overwrought, paranoid fantasies about what has led to the upending of the world as we (used to) know it.  He hangs in there even after delivering the most horrendous betrayal any person could lavish on another because his curiosity is so powerful and has such a hold on him.

This view of human nature – that we are driven both by primal nearly unmanageable urges but that reason, the very faculty that we use to curb those urges, can be corrupted.  In current neuropsychoanalytic speak, the seeking urge, the one that leads to and is supported by higher cognitive functions, is also, for lack of a better word, primitive and can override those other urges that would save us, like attachment, to our detriment.  That is, the very thing that Ted is relying on to lead him out of the morass is what proves his undoing.  I suppose I have just described this as a classical tragedy, and the ending would suggest that we, as a species, have internal programming that cannot be overcome.  That which would lead us out will, in the end, be our undoing.  This is not black "comedy" at all.

Just to follow up on one more thread here, women, leaving hearth and home and inhabiting male roles, end up leaving their redeeming qualities at home – so their inhabiting the masculine space is not a solution.  That thread leads me to believe that this film really is, underneath it all, supporting a weird version of the toxic masculine discourse.  I’m not sure whether it is doing that ironically or unconsciously, and whether it is offering a reduction ad absurdum argument (you guys are crazy - women would not be ruthless as you imagine men would be in that position - and men need to be ruthless to protect our sanctuary) – or whether this really is a dim view of what we are capable of becoming as a species.

 

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Rupture and Repair: Research, Clinical Practice, and the Erotic Elements of Life

 

Rupture and Repair, Safran, Muran, Clinical Practice, Applied Psychoanalysis, Applied Psychological Research, Original Sin

At our local meeting of the Association for Psychoanalytic Thought (Apt), we recently had a panel on Rupture and Repair – a concept that emerges out of the research literature to describe an important psychotherapy phenomenon – one that predicts a good therapeutic outcome.  Apt is not, however, primarily a group of people interested in clinical phenomenon.  We get together to talk about the ways that psychoanalytic thought can help us more fully appreciate works of art, but also politics, religion, and just plain living.  We call this applied psychoanalysis, which is a little confusing because psychotherapy itself is usually thought of as applied psychology, but psychoanalysis plays a bit by its own rules and imagines itself to be a particular kind of psychology - a branch unto itself, as it were.

We had a panel on rupture and repair because these concepts had come up when we were discussing the film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.  One of the board members was taken with the idea of Rupture and Repair and wanted us to articulate what is meant by that and to help us have a better sense of what the concepts were and how we might apply them to the works of art that we address in the programs that we present.  Dutifully we set off to make sense of these ideas and to present them to a group that is analytically curious but not necessarily steeped in or interested in being steeped in clinical and research lore.

Jeremy Safran and Christopher Muran first proposed Rupture and Repair as an important set of variables in an article in 1996.  Sadly, Jeremy was killed in his basement by an intruder in a robbery gone awry.  I had an opportunity to interview him before then and reported on that here.  To prepare for the panel, we read a more recent introduction to a book on Rupture and Repair, by Muran, Eubanks, and Samstag (2022). 

As I was mulling over the concepts they described in the chapter, focused mainly on how repairing ruptures helps maintain the therapeutic alliance which, in turn, predicts a positive outcome of a psychotherapy, I happened to listen to a podcast of a lecture about classical ideas of erotic love.  In the podcast, the author of the lecture talked about two models of erotic love.  The first is in Plato’s symposium (which recently caused an uproar in Texas about its appropriateness for a college audience because it deals with LBTQ+ issues) and the second is in the book of Genesis.

In Plato’s Symposium, a series of people speak about love.  The most memorable speech is a fable that is made up by Aristophanes, the Greek Comic Playwright.  Aristophanes proposed that humans were once four legged, four armed two headed creatures who were tremendously strong.  Zeus was concerned that they were plotting his overthrow, so he cut them (us) all in half – so that we would only have 2 legs, 2 arms, and 1 head (the first great rupture).  Even after this, Zeus was afraid we would band together to overthrow him, so he distracted us from that task by creating sexual organs and desire.  We could now repair our lost connection with our other half (Some men yearned for the men they had been separated from, some women from the women they had been separated from, and some men who had been separated from women – and those women, would desire the person of the opposite sex).  So sex became the repair of a rupture.

In the second Genesis creation story, the author argued that the nuclear family (including Adam and Eve’s family with God, but every nuclear family after that) has a centripetal force (or perhaps a gravitational pull) maintaining that family as the center of the lives of all of its members.  It is erotic desire – the wish to connect with someone outside the family – being drawn to them – that is the centrifugal force that allows the family member to pull away – to have a life of his or her own.

Graphically, I represented it like this:

The blue circle on the left represents the family which has been the center of the person’s life and blue circle on the right is the erotic (love) interest, that pulls the person out of the orbit around the family and into a new orbit – now around a love object.  If a friend of yours has ever fallen in love with someone, you will understand this experience (or, of course, if your child has).

Rupture, in this model, is a desired goal.  It is how the child grows up and then leaves home to start their own family.

When I went back to read the current article on rupture and repair, I discovered that Safran and Muran had based their understanding of rupture on a number of concepts in the clinical literature.  They stated that “rupture is intended to be a synonym for: breaches, breakdowns, challenges, derailments, deteriorations, dissociations, disturbances, disruptions, dysfluencies, failures, impasses, misalliances, mis-attunements, miscoordination, misunderstandings, negations, pulls, resistances, splits, strains, threats, and weakenings (Muran, Eubanks, and Samstag, 2022).”

That is a whole lot of condensation that is going on there.  They went on to say that “Rupture is intended to be associated with: enactments, negative processes, projective identification, transference-countertransference, vicious circles or cycles (Muran, Eubanks, and Samstag, 2022).”  Again, that’s a lot of stuff to say that it is related to.

I think that the way that rupture and repair has been applied to this point is that the focus has been on the ruptures and repairs that take place between a therapist and their client or patient.  But that is only part of the picture.  Part of what the therapist is trying to help the client or patient do is to engage in a huge rupture – with their usual way of doing things.  This might be understood as helping them, for instance, break away from their family or origin, much as a romantic interest helps a young person do that.  But it might also be breaking away from a pattern of behavior, or an idea, we might think of it as helping them give up an addiction, or whatever it is that the patient is trying to change.  An author, teaching students of writing about how to write a novel, has proposed that we should be writing about how the person deals with a lie.  In our culture, perhaps the first rupture in the family is when we discover that the Christmas presents don't really come from Santa Claus...

I think this way of thinking about the bigger picture may help us better understand how complicated it is to maintain the therapeutic relationship.  We are trying to help the patient feel heard and understood – which is difficult when something like 70% of the time when we are speaking we are not understood by the person listening to us.  But we are also trying to keep them in orbit around the new way of doing things – to keep them engaged with a whole new way of functioning while an old way of functioning is still exerting tremendous centripetal or gravitational pull.  If we lose our grip – or they lose their grip on us – they risk being pulled back into a pathological (but familiar and therefore comfortable) way of doing things.  But repair is not our central task.  Rupture is.  We are trying, in part through the relationship that we offer, to help them break with something that has been life giving, or order producing, or comfort providing.

So, part of the repair work that we need to do has to do with the relationship we have with our clients/patients, but part of it has to do with helping our patients mourn the way of life that they have left behind.  Often, too, we are inviting them into a world that is tremendously uncomfortable.  It is more difficult in the short run, for instance, for people to tell others what the problem is than to simply ignore those who are discomforting or to figure out how to get back at them in some indirect way. 

So, not only do we help repair the ruptures that occur in the hour with the treater, but also more broadly, we help repair the client/patient’s experience of a larger scale rupture with the world as they knew it, without, however, having them fall back into those old patterns and ways of doing things.  So, when we marry someone, we have to figure out how we, as a family, are going to function.  It would be easiest to just have our family do it the way my family did.  But our spouse's family did things differently.  Not only that, but both of us found some aspects of the life in our family of origin onerous.  So we need to construct a whole new way of doing things, while also borrowing from what worked and what we are both accustomed to and is functional.  

Psychoanalysis comes into this picture by pointing out that we are talking about an operating system (if you will) in each member of the new pair that is largely unconscious.  We don't actually think about whether to have the toilet roll come over the top or out the back, we do it the way we learned how to do it - it only becomes a point of conscious point of attention (and possible contention) when our families did things differently - or we had planned on changing that when we got out on our own.   

 The rupture repair model then can be used fruitfully as a means to understand the coming of age stories that are at the center of so many of the movies and books by which we are entertained, but also enlightened.  The protagonist or hero often learns to connect with the world in a novel way (or to give up the lie, or to point out to others that they are living according to a lie).  Most recently, I have written about Lamia, the hero in The President’s Cake, who must search through embargo isolated and war torn Iraq to find the eggs, flour, sugar and baking soda needed to bake a cake for her class on Saddam Hussein’s birthday.  As she goes about this, she learns that she is capable of navigating in an adult world - that she is less dependent on the adult world than she knew – a lesson that comes far too early for this nine-year-old girl.

It is no accident that the second creation story in Genesis - the one that follows the origin story of light and dark, heaven and earth - the one about Adam and Eve, is about rupture.  Original sin - in this language, original rupture, becomes the foundation for so many stories that come after it.  We feel guilty, but also feel compelled to break with what came before in order to create what will be.  And just as Eve needed a collaborator in Adam to get out of paradise, we need helpers to do that in our lives.  Psychoanalysts, but other therapists, teachers, friends, and family members end us serving this role in novels, movies, and in the lives we lead.

 

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The President's Cake: An Iraqi film made for an audience like us, even if we don't want to see it.

 The President's Cake, Iraqui Film, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Dictatorships, Coming of Age

We watched this Iraqi film on the day that the United States started bombing Iran.  It is a film set in 1990 that purports to document the hardships endured by the poorest people in Iraq, the peasants, as a direct result of the sanctions that the US and other countries had applied to Iraq.  The people were caught between a leader who was, at best, indifferent to them, and foreign powers who flew overhead in multimillion-dollar planes that seated on or two people while they scrounged for basic necessities.

The film centers on a day when a nine-year-old girl is tasked with finding more than necessities.  This girl, Lamia, who is cute as a button, is an orphan.  She lives with her grandmother, her Bibi, in the marsh country in Iraq.  She travels to school in a beautiful but very simple canoe-like-boat with a high prow and aft that is like those of everyone else, that she pushes, paddles and steers with a single long oar.  Her Bibi has instructed her on various ways to avoid the raffle that will take place in school, one where the “winner” will be required to bake a cake on Saddam Hussein’s birthday – an annual ritual. 

Despite her arriving late to school, but not, unfortunately, before the raffle, and despite her telling the teacher that she has to go to the bathroom at the beginning of the raffle, she is forced to write out her name like all the others and put it into the pot.  Her friend, Saeed, the son of a cripple – almost as humiliating as being an orphan like she is – suggests she should have said that she had diarrhea.  In any case, as we expect, she wins the lottery, meaning that she must find flour, sugar, eggs and baking soda; all nearly impossible to come by.

Bibi & Lamia Hitchiking

Bibi takes her by the hand and leads her to the city.  The only way to get there is by hitch hiking and they are picked up by a taxi/mail/wedding/funeral driver who introduces himself as a saint and a devil, depending on how you see him, but in the movie he plays the role of the family’s patron saint, helping them out of various jams across the course of the day, and ultimately helping them return home that night.

I was reminded, in the film, of interviewing for my first job as a paraprofessional.  When I decided to apply to graduate schools in psychology, I thought it would be a good idea to do some clinical work to see if it suited me and if I was good at it – could I help people?  I applied to work at a halfway house for runaway teenagers and the head of the agency, when interviewing me for the position, informed me that if teenagers would not phone their parents to get permission for us to house them or, if the parents didn’t give permission, they would have to return to the streets and he wanted to make sure that I was OK with that.  I assured him I was. 

“What if they are twelve and it is late at night,” he asked.  I felt terrible.  I had been picturing a 17 year old high school senior stopping by in the middle of the day.  I must have looked crestfallen, because that was, in fact, what he was looking for.  He trusted that I would follow the rules, but he wanted to know that I got it that we were dealing with a vulnerable population and that sometimes we would not be able to protect them from the vagaries of the world and that this would (of necessity if we were suited to work there) be distressing to us.

This is, in many ways, a coming of age story.  We have been exposed to these ever since we read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.  It is a different thing to see a nine year old navigating a world that is much more complex and frightening than she is prepared for, but also one that is, I trust, generally more supportive than we might fear.

This film has been criticized by an Iraqi critic as one that “rehearses known stereotypes and corresponds to little that is real. Instead, it fulfills misconceptions of morbid Oriental cities reduced by despotic regimes to decadent theaters for the corrupt.”  It is certainly, in his telling, a mishmash made for the foreign audience.  He particularly objects to both the careless connections across time and space (Baghad, where Bibi, the girl and the boy face all kinds of difficulties, is far removed from the marshes and the kind of corruption depicted did not occur until later), but I do think that the film speaks to a larger truth, if only found in our country when children confront ICE members: those on the margins are not able to protect their children from sociopolitical harm that corrupts cultures and individuals that would once have sustained those selfsame children.

I don't object to the use of geographically distant places to be mushed together.  This happens in dreams, but also in movie making.  My home city (where Mark Twain claimed he wanted to be when the world ends, because everything here happens 15 years after it happens everywhere else) is frequently used a set for New York in the early 1900s, as in the movie Carol, because our skyline is so dated.  His point is a little more subtle than that, but still, I think some license is warranted.  But I am more curious about the salutes to Saddam - both in the classrooms and on the street.  Is this a warning to us about the cult of Trump and what we might be in for in a dictatorship or is this a realistic representation of daily life in that particular dictatorship at that time?

Of course, as I was watching the film, I was unaware of the very broad license that was being taken to pull at my heart strings – I just felt them being pulled, as I did in the interview at the agency where I personally never had to turn away a 12-year-old runaway during the year that I worked there, though I’m certain that it happened.  Instead, I experienced anger at a President who cared more for his own well-being than that of his country and the people in it (and in that sense I do think the film is intended to speak to both an Iraqui audience and an international one).  

Btw, the Iraqi reviewer was using the empty theater where he saw the film in Iraq as evidence that it wasn't a realistic representation of Iraqi life, but there were only two other people in the theater with the reluctant wife and me here - I think this level of despair is hard to muster a large audience to be enthusiastic about on any continent and in any city.  

But there was a lot more to it than that being a depressing movie about a dictatorship and its consequences.  This is a tragi-comedy.  This girl is plucky and I won’t spoil all the ways that she sees through the shenanigans and plots of the adults around here, though I will say that she has seen the cruelty of children – including her friend, the crippled man’s son.  His inconstancy and meanness to her is countered by their loving connection and pleasure in each other’s company.  Their game, of staring into each other’s eyes until the one blinks – a game the boy always wins – is the image we are left with at the end of the film when, rather than staring into the fate that awaits them, they stare into each other’s eyes and the boy doesn’t call the game when she blinks, but they keep staring.

Last night, at a local French restaurant, they were playing a French farce in the background without sound.  It was clear that the ineptitude of the police was central to the humor.  This film relies on this and similar tropes, but in a much grimmer and more unsettling background.  This is not farce, even though it borrows from it.  It portrays a world that still has remnants of the threads that bound a great civilization. 

Yes, as Freud pointed out, these threads restrain us, but they are also what allow us to travel unmolested – and to raise children who are trusting but wary.  These threads allow us to offset the base drives that Freud encountered beneath the civilized veneer – pure aggression and sexual desire – with other, powerful but more subtle drives, like attachment.   Just as in My Friends, a book by Fredrik Backman, it is the children who step in with the attachment when the adults fail.  Coming of age involves transitioning from a defensive position of harming others to protect oneself – pointing out anything that others do that sets them apart so that they can be ridiculed – to recognizing one’s vulnerability as similar to those around us and banding together with others who realize this to protect the group – and sometimes that is just the dyad – through mutual support, rather than through attacking others.

This developmental process is enacted over and over in films, books, and plays because, I think, adults wish to pass this knowledge along – to get the developmental process started early, to teach and prevent the continuity of the cruelty that is a seemingly earlier and more powerful force – the force that comes from fear and isolation and that ends up powering some of us to rise through the corporate and political ranks to the pinnacles of power.

It has been said that Buckminster Fuller wondered if our technology’s useful products could stay ahead of and prevent or remediate its destructive aspects.  He thought that, if we were to survive, this would be a neck and neck race to the end.  I think similarly the race between our goodness, affection and attachment to each other is in a similar race with our more dangerous aspects.  Films like this, though they may collapse complicated components of that balance into familiar tropes and generalizations, portray our vulnerability and the importance of banding together in ways that are, I think, on balance useful to us as a global community.  

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Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore: A Micro and Macro Path Forward

 

Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami, Coming of Age, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, review no spoilers

I was recently in San Francisco at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s annual convention.  While there, I went to Japan town to a stationary store.  My obsession with fountain pens leads me to also be interested in ink and paper, and the Japanese make some of the finest paper in the world (one of their secrets, apparently, is to mix some hardwood into softwood pulp used to make paper – allowing for incredibly thin paper that is non-absorbent and doesn’t bleed through to the other side).  After being a little overwhelmed by all the washi tape and stamps and other accessories for sale in the store, I walked across the hall to a Japanese bookstore.

I probably should have asked one of the storekeepers for help, but instead, standing in front of the fiction shelves, realizing that I had not, to my knowledge, read any Japanese literature, I Googled Japanese novels to read.  The first review was about some current book, but the author of the review mentioned having read Murakami – including, he or she said, “of course, Kafka on the Shore.”  Well, when I looked at that book on the shelf and compared it to the other Murakami books, I thought, “Oh no, another one of these long, difficult masterpieces that is going to be impenetrable.”

I have read War and Peace – I quite enjoyed it actually, but I am currently only halfway through Moby Dick, and Infinite Jest took, to my mind infinite patience to read, and I gave up 3/8ths of the way through it.  Coincidentally, one of my patients mentioned on my return a recent New Yorker article that I also haven’t read suggesting that books like Infinite Jest are marathons intended to test the reader’s endurance – their ability to take on another’s perspective and look at the world through their eyes.  Well, some tests are too long, some bars are too high, and some perspectives are a bridge too far for me.

I thought about picking up one of the shorter books, but I was in San Francisco alone, had just finished a book, and I had a long flight home – so, why not?  Let’s see if I can make it to the end of this one…

Surprisingly, this book was, for me, a real page turner.  I looked forward to returning to my hotel every night to re-enter this magical, nearby world that was both mildly foreign – Japan is a different country, but it has highways and towns and cities and forests – and totally, completely different and yet, somehow, familiar as a dream scape – as the kind of world that you discover when, as a young man, you take off and find out that the world is both held together all over the place – and also infinitely variable and your place in it moves from relative certainty to being unknown and open to question almost everything once you step out of the door (or through the back of the closet).  And the feeling of this space is both terrifying and exciting and also terribly lonely.  You feel cut off from the rest of the world – as the hero in this book becomes – but also as the reader, I became. 

It felt odd to be reading a book that I so thoroughly enjoyed – while feeling that so many people that I know might not like it at all – they might feel too threatened or disoriented or repulsed by the raw violence or the raw sexuality – that the dream scape that this artist creates would be one that many readers would want to be wakened from because of its nightmarish qualities, but that I was consuming like manna.

I suppose my reading of 100 Years of Solitude – a million years ago and long before I could make sense of it (or even thought of blogging) – was like this reading, only at that time I was so confused I just wanted the dream to end, though, even then, I was compelled to finish that book (and I sense this means I might quite like it now).   

Because this book reads more like a dream than a straightforward narrative arc, I don’t know that I will be able to give a veridical account of what happened in it.  Or rather, if I give my account it is unlikely to match yours, and that is fine.  This is not, by the way because the book lacks structure.  It is very well organized and structured – like the best dreams… But like the best dreams, it can be accurately interpreted in multiple ways and, because Murakami is a consummate story teller, it becomes our dream – we participate in it with our own mind, so our experience of it is valid, even if it doesn’t square with someone else’s valid experience.

(I serve on a research committee.  It is a psychoanalytic research committee – but the explanation I offered above would simply not fly with a research committee.  We propose only testable hypotheses, they would say, and when we test them, we discard those that would not work.  The tension between that position and the more analytic position about flexible realities I have taken above is part of what makes serving on that committee both delicious and frustrating.)

So – this book is structured as a description of the movement through time of two individuals.  One of them, Kafka, is a fifteen year old boy.  His are the odd numbered chapters.  He has led a bleak life as the son of a remote sculptor whose wife (Kafka’s mother) and daughter (Kafka’s sister) left him when Kafka was so young that he has at best fragmentary memories of her.  The father destroyed whatever pictures there were of his mother (save for one that is hidden and that Kafka discovers) and was so bitter that he lays an Oedipal curse on him.  Kafka, not surprisingly decides, with the help of his alter ego, Crow, to run away from home and seek his fortune.

Though I worked at a halfway house for runaway teenagers, I never ran away from home.  That said, I did go hitchhiking and I had the fantasy of putting a canoe in the Olentangy River and taking it out only when I reached New Orleans.  This Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn fantasy was realized when I rode my bicycle (with a friend) 1500 miles home at the end of my Junior year of college.

The other individual, who is the centerpiece of all of the even numbered chapters, was injured by a supernatural event – or perhaps by something much more personal but traumatic – in either case he is left in a state of helpless, but very sweet dependence.  His superpower is his ability to talk to cats – but also to wait indefinitely.  He is in no hurry to get anywhere, has had most of his cognitive abilities erased and he refers to himself in the third person.  “Mr. Nakata would be happy to find your cat,” he might say.

These stories, the story of Kafka seemingly straightforward, and the story of Mr. Nakata filled with magical and other worldly events, seem to be related – and when they cross over it seems almost accidental – as if the author didn’t see it coming any more than we did.  Indeed, in the anniversary edition of the book that I read, the author had a preface in which he stated that his writing of this book (and I think his writing in general) involves a sort of taking of dictation from what he describes as another world – going over to this mysterious place and bringing back the writing from it.

The magical quality of this “shadow” story appeals to both my more childish self – the kid who believed in all kinds of magic – from Santa Clause to ESP – and to my analytic identity with its affinity for dream images where the shackles of empirical living have fallen off.  Is it plausible that Mr. Nakata is speaking to cats and that fish fall out of the sky when he opens his umbrella?  No, but it is equally implausible that he lives in a place where, when he decides to go on a trip, people are taken with him – they feel compassion for him and comfort in his presence and they not only buy him meals but take up his crazy quest – they, too, believe in magic and get back in touch with aspects of themselves that they have shed in order to enter into and live in the adult world.  And yet, that is the world that I want to live in and have more often than not.

I was listening to a podcast about erotic love this week, and one of its central theses is that the Genesis story is about how erotic love creates centrifugal force that pulls children out of the centripetal force field of the nuclear family.  I think that what gets depicted in this book, with its Oedipal theme, is a kind of have your cake and eat it too coming of age story. 

To get through this novel, you have to survive both the violence – and it comes from the unexpected source of kind Mr. Nakata and the awful world he gets pulled into before heading off to somehow meet up with Kafka, and the sex – this is an Oedipally constructed tale.  And it is not just Oedipus, but Jack Daniels, Colonel Sanders, and Elvis, along with a host of other Western artifacts that make their appearance here.  I suppose I should not be surprised after having recently seen a Five Guys restaurant on the Champs Elysee, but the mixture of Western and Japanese culture into something that feels like an intentional blend helps support the other worldliness combined with the familiar that makes this feel uncanny – that connects me, as a western reader, to a foreign world that is infused with familiar objects.

Despite the violence – I felt strangely comforted by this polyglot world.  The Anime invasion that I see at comic- con events feels less intrusive and more like the Japanese are returning the favor of our cultural sharing/intrusion.  Perhaps we are moving towards a world that is interconnected and reasonably comfortable with that as a way of functioning, creating the discomfort that is leading to conservative efforts to thwart international trade.  It feels like it is too late to close that door and we will learn that soon (or perish). 

But there is also a kind of calm that feels distinctly Japanese.  Mr. Nakata, in particular, feels safe as he travels across the country.  There is a sense of community and caring for others that feels expected and reliable – something that takes place without fanfare.  There is also a comfort with getting to know strangers and looking out for them.  Ironically, this may be partially driven by a monoculture.  Perhaps one day we will have a global monoculture?  We will be able to trust each other because we know that, wherever we grew up, we learned how to be human.

Though that last sentence is, I think, largely true now.  I think if we were plopped down into a village - a ghetto - or a suburb anywhere on the planet, I think we would discover different ways of achieving goals, but I think we would find common values and would be able to recognize how those were being expressed - and recognize that they were functional to a greater or lesser extent.  Over time, we could interrogate our differences and achieve the Jimmy Carter approved message in Voyager 1 that though we are still a bunch of nation/states we are working toward "a single global civilization.universal/world government."   

Ultimately, though, the story is, I think, about the process of transitioning away from the family romance to a kind of courage to function autonomously while being in contact with those around us.  Perhaps because of reading this book, I was musing about the folly of the Japanese attaching the United States during the Second World War.  Japanese autonomy, like British autonomy, emanated from a small island country that imagined itself capable of manhandling those around it.  Of course, since then, the world has become a much bigger place.  I am drawn back into musing about the macro – who isn’t, these days – and about the U.S. imagining of itself as the dominant world power that doesn’t need to rely on others.  We need to be autonomous and in contact with – supporting and being supported by – those around us.  Achieving this delicate state of balance is challenging for both individuals and for nations.  

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Manet and Morisot in San Francisco

 Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Art History, San Francisco

Immediately before the American Psychoanalytic Association’s San Francisco midwinter convention, there was a forecast of snowmageddon that might shut down numerous airports.  I rescheduled my flight from Monday to Saturday, and my hotel was happy to accommodate my staying a couple of extra days, so I found myself to be a footloose San Francisco tourist.  I had been there with the family long ago, when we did things the kids wanted to do, like go to Alcatraz, and things we dragged them to, like SFMOMA, and I had been the year before also to the meetings, but my experience was largely limited to downtown and the north shore.  So I decided to walk from downtown out to the Legion of Honor, a traditional art museum in the northwest corner of the city, stopping to indulge my fountain pen and stationaryinterests in Japan town along the way.

The slice of San Francisco – Geary Street – that I traversed felt like a bigger, more sprawlly version of two towns near me here in Ohio: Athens and Yellow Springs.  Both are college towns and have a bit of a hippie vibe, and the housing and shops in all three seem to have a sort of Shabby Chic, with fresh paint not seeming to be in high demand.  It is as if the choices in color that were made a generation ago have only improved with age while fading into a comfortable, lived in tone.

Rodin -
Christ and the
Magdelin

The Legion of Honor is approached by making a right turn through a public golf course that looks, to this non-golfers eye, to be challenging if, for no other reason, than that the changes in elevation are considerable.  Had I made a left turn a little earlier, I would have gone to the DeYoung Museum of American Art.  Apparently DeYoung (who, along with Hearst, had an eponymous downtown building) was competing with the benefactors of Legion of Honor.  I can’t speak to who won, because the DeYoung was closed on Monday, when I intended to visit it, but the Legion of Honor is a Solid museum outlining the history of Western Art with a particular focus on a very nice collection of Rodin sculptures, including an erotic marble sculpture of Mary Magdalen bring Christ down from the cross – one that the curators note is his only overtly biblical sculpture.

But the reason to write about this museum trip is not to describe their standing collection, but instead to highlight a special show reimagining the relationship between Édouard Manet (1832–1883) and Berthe Morisot (1841–1895).  Manet was older and used the younger Morisot as a model, and he convinced her to marry his brother.  The received wisdom is that he was her mentor and guide as she entered into and joined the impressionist movement that Manet had helped to found.  This narrative allowed Morisot to get somewhat lost in Manet’s shadow.

Manet - Berthe Morisot 
with a bouquet of
violets

The show brings together paintings and describes them as artifacts of a relationship in which Morisot pushed and propelled Manet every bit as much as he instructed her.  The curators present them as peers, but my read, informed by them, was a bit different.  I think that Morisot was trying to instruct Manet, an exemplar of the male gaze, in how to appreciate the female perspective.  Another way of saying that is that Morisot was anticipating Freud’s female patients by about fifty years. 

Freud’s patients helped Freud move from the objective point of view of treaters of the day like Charcot, who would hypnotize his patients and show them to his fellow neurologists to marvel at the vagaries of hysteria – a supposedly female disorder.  When Freud listened to, instead of observing, his female patients, he discovered that the, too, had a hysterical personality.  Indeed, that he had an entire inner world that had been unknown to him.  That said, he also imposed the dominant masculine perspective of the day on the women that he treated – and he seemed, later in his career, to recognize that he never truly was able to see the world through their eyes.

Charcot hypnotizing

Similarly, Morisot had a willing student in Manet, but one who continued to value the masculine perspective, never quite being able to make the radical shift that completely taking on the female gaze might have afforded him.  Like the feminists who would pick up Freud’s work – horrified by it, but also drawn to his attempts to understand women and using his insights as a springboard to more clearly articulate women’s minds – Morisot, in her own work, painted with the mind of a woman, pushing Manet forward, but also appreciating women as engaged with the world, not simply observed by it.

Manet - Luncheon on the grass

Manet was a well-established painter, if one teetering on penury, when he first crossed paths with Morisot.  Two of his masterpieces had shocked the Parisian art world when they were shown.  He submitted The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) to the Paris Salon of 1863.  It was rejected and shown in the Salon des Refusés (Salon of the Rejected).  It depicts a nude model sitting in a Parisian Park with fully dressed gentlemen.  While it references classical subjects, it does so in a novel way and is credited with being the first example of Modern Art.  Depicting contemporaries rather than classical subjects per se or famous or important figures was part of what distinguished this from the accepted style of the time.

Manet - Olympia

Manet followed this with Olympia in 1865, a depiction of a nude, but not as a chaste alabaster skinned near goddess, but, again, as a contemporary – and as a prostitute.  Someone who was brashly displaying herself, even as her African servant delivers flowers from an admirer.  A cat, also a symbol of female sexuality (a friend from France assures me that pussy is used to the same effect in French as in English) further underlines the overt sexuality of the painting.

So, Manet is both breaking with tradition – portraying people as they actually are, rather than idealizing them, and he is taking a traditional approach – the women in both of these paintings, while they observe us observing them, are clearly on display; they are objects to be viewed, primarily by men.  This, of course, is mirrored by Freud, who, forty or fifty years later speaks frankly with women about their sexuality and their sexual experiences and fantasies, breaking tradition, but retains a kind of tin ear approach to what these women are saying, filtering their words through his world view as he describes them to his medical peers.

Manet-
The Balcony

In 1868, Manet meets Morisot and he begins to paint her and to admire (and edit) her work.  His first portrait of her is a group painting of three people in the light and one in shadow.  Morisot is the woman on the lower left of the painting The Balcony.  She is a member of the upper class, and Manet is not, and he depicts her as an object – perhaps, some have speculated, of desire.  The shadowed figure, by the way, is a man who is the child of Manet’s father’s (August) lover.  The lover, after the death of his father, became Manet’s lover.  It is not clear whether the child, then, is Manet’s half-brother or his illegitimate son, but he is an illegitimate relative.

Morisot, too, became a relative.  While Manet was painting Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets (1872), Manet successfully convincing Morisot to marry his brother, which she happily did.  He also managed, during this time, though, to thoroughly anger Morisot.  She had nearly finished a painting of her sister and mother which she intended to enter into the Salon, but she was dissatisfied with it.  Manet came to her studio and, on the day the people were coming to pick it up, reworked the figure of her mother in ways that did not suit Morisot at all, but there was no time to undo the damage.  The painting was taken to the salon with Manet’s mangling (in Morisot’s mind) of it.  It was accepted and shown, but Morisot told her mother that she would rather be at the bottom of the Seine than show the work as her own.

Morisot -
Young woman at her window

The art historians who put together the show in San Francisco (and it will travel to Cleveland after that, so we in Ohio can see it in our neighborhood) made a case for Morisot communicating with Manet in a variety of other ways.  For instance, they maintain that her Young Woman at Her Window is a direct response to The Balcony.  She is saying, in effect, what would it be like if we were to look over a woman’s shoulder – to be curious about what she sees – rather than to look at her, and therefore to be focusing on what we see?  She is not just saying this about women, but also about men – much later she used the same approach to seeing what her husband saw when he was looking out the window.

It was at about this time that Morisot introduced Manet to painting en plein-air.  This was the style of working outside of the studio and catching changing conditions of light – something that Morisot went on to promote as a central figure in the impressionist movement.  She is the artist who showed in the most impressionist shows – more than Degas, Monet, or any of the other impressionists.  She also was central to this revolutionary movement in a way that Manet never was, even though his step into modernism was what allowed for the emergence of it.

Morisot - View of Paris from
the Trocadero

The historians went on to provide multiple examples of the ways that Morisot provided a template for Manet to follow – but I would like to focus on one.  In this example, Morisot’s View of Paris from the Trocadero (circa 1871-1872), includes a little girl with her back to us, presumably taking in the sights of Paris.  The art historians propose that Manet copied this device in The Railway (circa 1872-1873).  Though the other figures in the two paintings could not be more different.  The women in the View of Paris are impressions of people – and the woman facing us in The Railway is carefully rendered.  In fact, she is the same model as in Olympia, but the tenor of this painting is very different.

Manet- The Railway

I am here about to take significant license.  At the APsA conference, my research group was presenting information about the differences between in person psychanalyses and telehealth psychoanalyses.  We proposed that the zoom screen, or the telephone receiver mediates between the psychoanalyst and the patient (just as the air, but also the room that the analyst provides for an in-person meeting mediates the therapeutic relationship).  The goal of analysis, we proposed, is to have an unmediated experience – an experience of presence – with both the analyst (to feel present not just to the person, but to their mind) and for the patient to feel present with their own mind (to appreciate the functional elements of the mind that are usually available only through things like symptoms more directly – to feel things that they usually defend against).

So, I am going to try to have an unmediated experience of the Railway – to imagine my way into the mind of the artist.  He has presented us with a work of art – it is mediating between his mind and ours.  And if I draw on Wilfred Bion, an analyst who proposed that consciousness is finite and the unconscious is infinite, I will propose that my musings may have something to do with the infinite process that Manet was condensing – working and reworking to condense – in The Railway.  I am fully prepared to admit that it may actually have noting to with what was in Manet’s mind at the time, but it just might, so here goes…

The woman in The Railway is facing the viewer, but what she is displaying is a feeling that, to me, speaks of world weariness.  We cannot see the child’s face, but we can imagine that she is excited about the possibilities of life – that she may travel to places far away – that the world is an oyster waiting to be opened.  The woman in front of us has opened her oyster and found inside a book and a dog.  They are both on her lap.  They are the adventures that she has had – and they are much more circumscribed than the little girl imagines her adventures will be. 

I think it might be going to far to think that Manet is sympathetic to the plight of 19^th century women and the constraints that are placed on them.  Perhaps closer to home is the idea that he, himself, is more constrained than he would like in the ways that he sees and understands the world.  In two paintings painted near the end of his life, one by Morisot and one by himself, he paints Morisot’s daughter Julie in a classical pose atop a watering can in the family garden.  Morisot paints Julie playing with the watering can – using it as a prop in the game she is playing.  Despite his ability to move art forward to be “modern”, transitioning to engaging with the world more directly, to appreciate it in the moment, as Morisot does, he is still than creating a staged experience of it, the present still lies beyond his reach.  He still wants to manipulate objects rather than allowing himself, and us to be moved by them but also to play with them (I am aware that I am asserting this despite my having played with The Railway).

Perhaps my musings are influenced by my sense of Freud.  He, like Manet, was a brilliant man who imagined the mind in ways that others had not fully done before.  He is largely responsible (I think) for the sexual revolution and for our becoming a society that is much more accepting of the ways in which our animal roots play out in the ways that we construct ourselves and interact with each other.  Despite this knowledge, I don’t think he was able to transcend the limits that his own repressive background visited on him.   I guess I am proposing that the male gaze is a kind of prison that is very hard for even the greatest among us to work our way out of…

I must also confess that I prefer the work of Manet to that of Morisot.  Manet's painting was characterized by the curators as "overworked" while Morisot's is immediate.  I am in the minority in my family - the reluctant wife and mother - and by the mother's report, the father, all prefer Morisot.  I like the concrete - the care that Manet puts into creating a particular picture, that I can then imagine a world into over the less worked, more carefree characters that Morisot captures - or rather sketches - in the moment.

 

       

                                                                            Morisot -

In England (Eugene Manet on Isle of Wight), 1875

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