Interstellar - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Explores Our Fears in Outer Space

The reluctant wife and I decided that it really would be worth seeing Interstellar on the big screen, but its first run was done, so we saw this film at the cheap theater.  Housed in the very back of the biggest mall in our area - a mall that has been a spectacular failure - getting to the movie was, in itself, a post apocalyptic adventure.  One cut rate department store is open - and three decidedly home grown stores in the mall proper, clustered near the front door, and then a very long walk - through empty dimly lit mall corridors, with little heating, through the intersection of the four gargantuan wings, past an abandoned food court, and down another long corridor to a dead end where you buy the ticket from the popcorn maker (and there is no ticket taker), all to arrive at a small screen, largely empty theater where the movie that maintains that our way of life has been precipitously imperiled because almost all food crops have succumbed to some terrible blights - corn is the only remaining food source, and it is only a matter of time before corn fails as well - is believable, and, especially in the bowels of this huge empty space, it is believable that our hubris, our belief that bigger is better, might be a deeply problematic thought.

Despite our preparation and willingness to believe, our credibility was strained by a movie that imitated life - it seemed too big and sprawly to support itself.  It labored under seemingly unnecessary subplots that made apparently tangential points.  Though the ideas played with in these tangents were interesting, and some of the visuals they afforded were the most stunning in the movie, it began to feel like a marathon not because it was long, which it was, but because there was just too much freight to bear.  But the movie opens up when you get closer to the center of it, and the tangents, along with the gripping, powerful action sequences that were riveting, begin to make some sense, despite the fact that they now seem self indulgent, because it takes work, at least for me, to see the center amidst what had distracted us from a deeply searching exploration of the variety of ways that we can cope with inter generational loss and love.

The primary story at the center of this movie is a love story between a father and a daughter.  The love that is portrayed is strong enough to bend time and space.  It is powerful enough to save the human race.  A parallel but less apparent relationship is the one between a father who believes the race is doomed and sends his daughter on a mission that will allow her to live out her own life - even though he believes they can never see each other again and that she will end her life in deep space.

OK, so what happens?  In the post apocalyptic world, our hero, a former NASA flyboy (played by Matthew McConaghey), is now tending corn because technology or biotechnology and mono-cropping - it really isn't clear to me - has led to viruses that have killed all but a few food crops. The crop failures have led to global economic ruin, and turned people against technological solutions to problems.  So the government can no longer publicly work on anything but agriculture - presumably in a low tech manner.  Flyboy is back on the family - in this case the family in-law - farm.  His wife has died and his beloved daughter, who is math/science brilliant (and played by Mackenzie Foy as a child and Jessica Chastain as an adult), is not going to get the education she needs because of the collapse of the educational system, especially around training scientists.  This dead end existence is interrupted by a ghostly/poltergeist phenomenon that, even though Flyboy the engineer pooh poohs ESP as a non-scientific entity - reveals the coordinates to NASA's top secret ongoing project intended to relocate the people of earth, or at least a big chunk of them, to a planet in a galaxy far, far away.

This is where we meet the second father/daughter pair.  The scientist (played by Michael Caine), is working to solve the problem of how to power the mammoth ship they are building.  He sends his daughter (played by Anne Hathaway) and Flyboy ahead to scout things out.  Meanwhile the scientist agrees to teach Flyboy's daughter science and, ultimately, because she is very bright, to enlist her aid in solving the power problem.  The twist (spoiler alert) is that he, and he alone, knows that the power problem for the big ship is (apparently) insoluble.

So the comparison is between a father who leaves his daughter intent on saving her and a father who sends his daughter out knowing that he will never see her again.  The scientist has, however, a different plan in mind.  His daughter - and Flyboy - are carrying human embryos that will populate this new world.  So the real comparison is between Flyboy, who is intent on saving his daughter, and for whom saving mankind is a bonus, and the scientist who knows that he is doomed and that his daughter will have a strange life without him, but that she and the race will carry on.  But the kicker is that the scientist works with Flyboy's daughter for years, deceiving her into believing that she and the other humans will survive and that she may be reunited with her father.

In Freud's Mourning and Melancholia, Freud conceives of depression (melancholia) as a failed mourning process.  We become depressed, Freud argues, when we can't let go of the people that we love - when we can't mourn or grieve them.  This happens, Freud maintains, when we have not reached a level of maturity that allows us to experience ourselves as functioning autonomously - and others as doing the same.  He sets this up as a dichotomy - some of us are able to mourn, others can't.  Like most dichotomies, I think this is better understood as a continuum - and I think it is the case that we have different levels of attachment (attachment is a word that wouldn't be used in this way until 20 years after Freud died, so I can't fault him) to different people.  Thus, I think that it is easy to mourn the loss of colleagues, but much more difficult to mourn the loss of a parent or, worse, a child.

In my own case, while I have pretty thoroughly mourned my father, who died almost four years ago, he still "haunts" me - returning in my dreams with a clarity and vividness that is stunning - and reassuring.  When others talk of losing their father, I frequently tear up; sharing their grief, and continuing to process my own.  All that said, there is pathological grieving, and Freud's conception of depression as a failure to mourn, not necessarily a death, but frequently a more subtle but difficult loss, like an unavailable parental figure; someone who seems to be there but really isn't, and so we hang onto this relationship - and deny our disappointments with the other because to acknowledge them and the anger they cause would imperil our relationship to the person that we believe we depend on.  So there is tremendous psychological cost associated with staying connected with an unavailable other.

From this perspective, the scientist has "rationally" mourned his relationship with his daughter - she is a separate person who is capable of functioning autonomously and he wishes her well on her journey.  Further, he has rationally mourned the people of the earth - gravity won't save them, so there is no use crying over spilled milk.  Let's send the embryos and start over.  And I think the writer and director (who are brothers) and we as the audience are horrified by this.  They (and we) are rooting for flyboy and his saving - not people in general - but  this person - my daughter.

Now, here I have a casting problem.  Mathew McConaghey as Flyboy doesn't overtly convey his attachment to his daughter.  He conveys anger and is an action oriented guy.  We have to infer the connection.  Because I was curious, l looked up the casting decision and the casting person said that they cast McConaghey because he represented everyman.  And, OK, I think everyman, especially every man, is stereotypically cast as as being challenged in expressing his attachment.  And, interestingly, I think this is related to Freud's position.  In so far as we don't acknowledge the depth of our attachments, I think his position is that we are more likely to experience difficulty mourning.  Pretending to be a rock, a la McConaghey or Eastwood or Whoever, actually makes us more vulnerable, not less, in so far as we are all (to a certain limit - there are people whose disconnection is so great that they only connect sadistically) remote; McConaghey becomes everyman refusing to let go of his daughter.

And he is rewarded for it.  He finds himself in a space - after giving up both his daughter and the scientist's daughter - towards whom he has feelings - because he is invested in what is best for them - he finds himself in a space where gravity helps him be able to haunt his daughter - to become the poltergeist that he pooh-poohed.  And from this position, he is able to transmit the data that is needed to save mankind - to store it in one of his possessions that he left behind, and this is the right place to store it because this will be hung onto by his daughter.  She will never let go of it - because it symbolizes his connection to her - a connection she will never give up - not because, as Freud would have it, she is melancholic, but because she is human and no grief as intense as that towards a lost father is ever resolved - so we hang onto a totem because of the vestigial connection that we feel - and though it may be vestigial, it is certainly not impotent - quite the contrary, it is hugely powerful.

All that said, I still think that the last twenty minutes of the film are gratuitous.  Having made the connection and saving humanity is enough.  We don't need to see Flyboy connect with both his daughter and his girlfriend.  He's already done what needs to be done.  I think it is a testament to movie convention, which in turn, from this perspective, is a testament to how grounded in our "pathological" - meaning ungrieved - connections to people - to particular people - that we need to have a "happy" ending - an ending where our wishes to stay connected with those we love are gratified- we never have to face the pain of grief.   Especially when we are grappling with the issue of the damage we have caused Mother Earth - when we are concerned that we have irreparably damaged our home - the reassurance that we, like Flyboy, are concerned about those we love, even if that love has contributed in some small measure (and by, the power of multiplication, a great deal) to the impending disaster, and even if we know we should be more like the scientist, we may need the reassurance of the movie's happy ending that we can survive to be able to face the possibility that we won't.

POST APOCALYPSE UPDATE:
It is now April of 2020 and we are social distancing during the Covid-19 Pandemic.  We decided to re-watch this film on the small screen we both enjoyed it a great deal.  I remembered that I had posted about it, but not much more.  I reread the post with the Reluctant Wife and we were both surprised by the negative tone of my reading, though we came up with two very different hypotheses about it.

Hers:  It's a complicated film and I sometimes "get" a film much better on a second viewing.  She recommended that I watch all films twice before posting on them.  I think that is a good idea, but not very doable.  I will try to work harder to "get" films the first time through more frequently - particularly keeping characters straight.

Mine:  I think the apocalyptic nature of the place where we saw it and the apocalyptic and believable premise of the film evoked defenses in me.  Rather than feel uncomfortable - and bad for not having done a better job to take care of the planet - I blamed the film for being bad and overly saccharine to boot.  In fact, I think the reunion at the end of the film is essential to the premise.  It is our love for each other as individuals that allows us to accomplish the things that we have and might - including saving the planet.

I think there is something to both hypotheses - and I'm also leaving the post up.  I think it is too wordy and focused on Mourning and Melancholia, which I must have been reading at the time, but I don't disagree with the premise of the role that mourning takes - in fact, I think that may have applied to my own process of mourning our (and my) destruction of the planet that was just beginning.  As silly as it is to feel guilty about that, if we don't, we won't get anything accomplished.  In my viewing of the film the first time I was defended against the message.  In the middle of having a virus threaten us?  Not so much.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Engages in the Guilty Pleasure of a Bad Book

When my little sister started her menses, she was humiliated that, on the way home from a trip to the drugstore, I was reading her tampon box.  She complained to Mom that I was embarrassing her, and Mom clarified that I was just reading print on page - it's what I do - and that it wouldn't have mattered if it was a tampon box, a cereal box, or the paper that was going to line the cat box, I was going to read it.  Not to humiliate her, but because I was then, am now and probably always will be an indiscriminate reader.  This book is, theoretically, about helping people read discriminately.

What reader hasn't fantasized about opening up a book store?  What could be better than to sit in store all day reading - interrupted only by people coming in to talk about books?  And what better place to do this than in some out of the way vacation spot?  Well, be careful what you wish for.  A.J. Fikry opens ups just such a spot in his wife's hometown.  But he is an outsider.  Not just because this is a small town and he looks foreign, but because he is a reader - someone whose nose is always stuck in a book, and he cares more about books than people - and he has particular tastes in books.  And he is in mourning - and he is mean when he is mourning.

The book deepens, in so far as it does, as Fikry begins to recommend books to people based on who those people are and what kind of book they would like.  I have had the experience, first for myself, of telling a bookstore employee what I was looking for (a wonderful fellow at the Little Professor Bookstore - one of the early chains - turned me onto Roger Zelazny, still my favorite fantasy author), and then for the reluctant son (recently a local bookstore helper in the young adult section was able to help latch his interest in sports books onto a futuristic series involving sports yet to be invented).  This service requires the ability to match our own sensibilities with those of another - to imagine not what our reaction to a book would be - but what their's would be.  It is a wonderful sort of match making - I think you would like this book.  And, when it works, there's almost something mystical about it.  We have gotten both the book and the other person.

Melanie Klein, a psychoanalytic theorist who was keenly attuned to the raw underbelly of human existence, claimed that there is nothing we can do that is more hostile than to give someone a gift.  And recommending that another read a book can certainly be a hostile gift.  They will, if they accept the gift, invest their time, the most precious commodity that they have, in something that you have foisted off on them.  Recently I recommended a book to the reluctant wife.  She likes to read, but she is discriminating.  I recommended Beautiful Ruins, a book that includes a weird mash up of fictional characters and Liz Taylor and Richard Burton - actors that she admires.  It also has a romantic/off beat feel to it and it feels allegorical.  It is incredibly well written.  Like Fikry, it is a quick read.  All these elements lead me to think she would like it, even though many of the books that she likes do not fit this formula.  I was right.  She enjoyed it.  I felt relief that I hadn't burdened her - but also some joy - pride maybe? - that I had picked right.

Booksellers have, it is clear from Fikry, from my own experience, and from an article read long ago, played an important role in helping us get to know what books to read.  And they are a disappearing breed.  A good reviewer can also help us determine what to read or see.  When I lived in New York a million years ago, Janet Maslin's reviews of films allowed me to know whether I would like the film.  Sometimes she would not like it, but could explain the virtues in such a way that I knew it would work for me - other times she would like it, but I knew from her tone that it would not be such a good fit.  This requires the reader to get to know the reviewer.

Fikry gets to know his customers - eventually - at least one or two of them - and he is able to put to work his talent for organizing, for categorizing, for putting a hierarchy to the books that he has read - books that he has read in part based on the recommendations of the publishing house reps who get to know what he is looking - oh, one of the reps becomes an important character in the story - but most importantly he uses his talent to leave a legacy - a poignant legacy as it turns out - to his daughter - a daughter who arrives on his doorstep in what is an intriguing and self consciously described plot twist - a daughter who reawakens his interest in others - and his descriptions of the short stories he recommends to her - pithy and tantalizing rather than descriptive - form the introduction to each chapter.  Fikry is able to marry two loves - short stories and his daughter - through the medium of written descriptions.

Reading the book, then, occurs quickly.  It is like eating candy.  It feels good in the moment, but the characters are two dimensional.  I feel somehow guilty about enjoying this book so much.  I have important reading to be doing.  I am not spending time with the reluctant wife but have my nose stuck, again, in a book, and I'm not going to be a better person for having read it.  But it draws me along.  I resonate with the bookseller.  I want to know what the twists will be.  I'm not surprised by the character who is not who he (or she) appears to be in a deep way, but am, rather amused and a little bemused that I have, indeed, been taken in a beat longer than I need to have been.  I should have seen that coming.  And the central mystery is not all that mysterious and the sadness at the ending is somehow not all that sad - I really haven't gotten to know this character on a deep and emotional level.

What I have done is indulge in a fantasy - a light daydream.  It has been pleasant.  And it has made me think about a few things - like why I blog.  Not just to get page views - which have suddenly soared in the wake of my using a different format that allows readers to sample what I have to offer - but also to leave a legacy - something that my own children may be interested in perusing some day.  Perhaps helping others know that psychoanalysis is not something cold and foreign and distant (though it certainly can be), but also something that is warm, immediate, available and very very human.  That I might serve as a match maker between people I don't know and ideas that, despite my reluctant embrace of them, I love.  There is something of Fikry in me - which is consistent with a central theme of the book.  And I could learn to be discriminating - maybe I am practicing that by writing and preserving my reactions to books, movies and life rather than simply letting it wash by...

Fikry's interest in the rep scuttles her interest in her fiancee.  Why?  He points out that the rep and the fiancee don't have the same interests.  His thesis is that love is essentially narcissistic - we love others who share our interests.  We love others who are like ourselves.  But we also love those who are different - he turns the police chief onto books - and the police chief, in turn, turns others who previously had no interest in reading onto books.  We love not just those who are like ourselves, but we share aspects of ourselves that are unlike others - and they come to embrace something that they otherwise would not have known.  And we want to go there.  We want to explore.  We want to expand.  This book is enjoyable because it is circumscribed.  It tells a small story about a small place and a small band of people.  They are introduced in and the plot is developed in a predictable and very pleasant way.  The author pretends (and she has the luxury of being able to do that because these are, after all, characters) that these people can be understood, can be circumscribed, that there is no mystery here.  And yet, of course, in all things human, there is.  Because the book doesn't address that internally I, as reader, am cast out by it to see what in my life it reflects.  I find the organic, the unknowable, in the margins, not in the center - where the author coyly and artificially tells us there is nothing much to see.  A discriminating reader like Fikry would have little use for this book.  I, a less discriminating one, find it a guilty pleasure - a little like watching a favorite sitcom.  Ironically, given Fikry's cry that we read so that we know we are not alone, I am with the author and presumably other readers, but the space we are inhibiting is, like the sitcom space, comfortable but limited.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.   For a subject based index, link here.

Post script:  Recently the New York Times magazine  published a piece noting that the number of independent book stores is on the rise again - they were in serious trouble after the big box bookstores and then the online bookstores and books emerged.  This is good news for readers everywhere.  Indeed, the thesis of the article is that while the industries that got art out to us have taken a hit or been reconfigured, this may actually have been in a way that allows us to have more direct contact with artists - and maybe even for more artists to flourish.  See a review that touches on this phenomenon in another medium - music - here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...

Marilynne Robinson’s Lila – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads About Loneliness

Lila is the third (or maybe fourth) book in the Gilead trilogy.  I’ve not read the others and found this to be a compelling if emotionally difficult read, but certainly not one that is dependent on having read the other books - it stand nicely on its own.  It is an emotionally difficult read because it is so bleak, especially at the beginning where the protagonist is stolen away as a baby from a home where she is not adequately fed, not kept clean, and where she is put outside when she is crying so that she doesn’t disrupt those who are inside.  The woman who steals her is a migrant worker who carries her from place to place with a loose band of people who lead a marginal existence until the dustbowl hits, and then things get really bad.  At some point, her caregiver, Doll, settles into a town for a year so that Lila can learn to read – something that she is drawn to, but doesn’t get much practice with until she steals a bible from a church – but that is getting to the end of the story, which is also the beginning.

This book could be read on many levels and, especially as an analyst, a book that is written from the perspective of having access to Lila’s thoughts raises interesting questions about our ability to know what goes on in the minds of others, especially those that have had such impoverished backgrounds when we who are writing and reading books like this most likely have not.  What Robinson does is to describe a mind that is filled with poorly understood memories that flow into each other in ways that would be confusing if they were being handled by a less masterful writer.  We are propelled through this woman’s experience – both her current experiences and the past, which passes in front of our eyes in a beautiful unfolding of her experience and the intermingling of the two becomes the story that we are forced to create almost on our own because the narration feels so ungrounded by time and place.  We are given hints, our appetite is whet, and then we learn more, but never all that we might have known.  We never, for instance, get a good picture of what this woman looks like.  And that feels consistent with the story being told essentially from her perspective.  She is a woman without mirrors, physical or psychological – a girl and then a woman being moved forward by forces very much beyond her control.

So, there are two questions about her inner world that spring to my mind.  One – despite the fluidity of her memories and the shifting of time that seems consistent with a mind that has never known clocks or calendars, but instead days and nights stretching into seasons, there is a central sense of self – a certainty about who she is – that seems to orient her – to keep her upright – she has a deep keel despite having slipped through pretty shallow water most of her life.  This is supported by the consistent relationship that she and Doll maintained – she felt loved and valued despite not having the same roof – and many times any roof – over her head.  The other is whether she could realistically have the kind of bookish interests that this character has – and here I think we must imagine that a woman very much like the author has been born into a local universe that does not contain books.  And I think if we believe that – and what else could be the case – then this may be a reflection of what could have happened.

I’m sorry for that jag.  You see there are questions about the Romantic vision – one first put forward perhaps by Rousseau – that the natural state of man is one of being at one with nature and that if we were raised by wolves we would be even more human than we can be when we are the products of our citified lives.  Mowgli of the Jungle Tales would be the quintessential example of this.  But could it be that if we were raised by wolves we would simply be primitive – our animalistic selves would predominate?  Doll is not a wolf – but there are a lot of wolves barking at the door – or lack thereof – in Lila’s early world and she knocks around a great deal – but she is, in this book, baptized – not just in the religious sense, but also in the sense of being washed clean, and this is a decidedly mixed experience for her – but I think it exposes her essential goodness – and maybe even her puritan or more to the point Calvinistic goodness.  And are we essentially good or evil?

You see, the beginning and end of this book is that Lila – a wild one if there ever was one – a person who was all but abandoned, was stolen, lived on the run, loves and is at one with nature, but is also a person who, as a woman, became a prostitute to survive when Doll left her, who became a domestic and who was on the way to returning to the wild – leaving St. Louis behind to get back to the nomadic migrant life in Iowa – fatefully stopped at a Calvinist church in a medium sized town in Iowa and fell in love with and married the minister – a man who had been widowed for forty years – a man who was probably thirty or more years older than she – a man who had been as bereft and alone as – well as Lila was once Doll disappeared from her life.

To write that thumbnail sketch of the plot above makes this book sound farfetched, and yet it is not.  Of course it is an intentional allegory.  Lila steals the Bible and retreats to the abandoned farmhouse where she is squatting and she writes out the lines from Ezekiel – a book of the bible that I was not the least familiar with – and the metaphor comes home to her – of a baby that is covered in blood and dirt and that is washed clean by the lord – the baby is Israel – the baby is Lila and the minister is cleansing her – and the baby is you and me – cut off from those around us and hungering to be connected – to be cleansed and brought back into the fold.  And the allegory when put out there by a plodder like myself – seems like an evangelical tract that you would run from, but in the hands of this author the allegory and the plot work – on the personal and the religious level without feeling preachy or forced.  We are happy to both suspend disbelief – or rather to believe – on many levels.  And partly this doesn't feel preachy because it becomes clear that faith is a very complicated thing.

The plot works because the minister is very sensitively portrayed – he gets Lila – her wildness and her skittishness – and, most profoundly, her loneliness.  And he gets that he can be with her without having to force his way in – she will, in her own sweet time, out.  And this relationship - to my ear like the relationship between analyst and patient – unfolds slowly and beautifully.  There is at the center of this story one of the most touching and sweet love stories I have read – and I can’t imagine a more romantic rendezvous than the afternoon of Lila’s baptism. 

But this is not a Romance Novel.  Lila’s baptism comes at a great and terrible cost.  She is separated from the people she has loved – first and foremost from Doll, but from all the unwashed whom she has known and loved.  As she is transformed to the 1%, she leaves behind the 99% that have sustained and loved her.  At one point, I found myself thinking that this is, among all the other things that it is, a reflection on the guilt of privilege – on what it means to be one of the select – whether that is religious or economic or, on the level of the changes that a therapeutic relationship with a lover have wrought, of psychological health – to realize that there is a loneliness of privilege as well as one of poverty. 

This is also not a Romance Novel because of the disparity in the ages between the lead characters.  Lila must face what life will be without the person that she has connected with and we watch as she teeters between preparing to return to her former life and figuring out how to imagine living within the confines of her current one.  It is the minister that makes her citified life bearable.  She has lived in cities before – real cities – but never connected with anyone.  Here she is connected.  Will that connection take?  It seems to be taking, more and more, as the novel progresses, but we don’t actually learn her fate in this novel – perhaps in the others we do – but in this one that question is left hanging nicely in the air.

Robinson has imagined herself into a life and invites us to do the same.  She is also opening up a big part of her experience and of ours – what it means to be alone.  What it means, in the midst of that loneliness to sense the presence of others – whether a maternal figure – a paternal/romantic one – or the presence of God – and to be skittish in the presence of that other.  To fear that who we are cannot be accepted by that other – to fear that being accepted will lead us to lose what we already have.  On this most essential level, the novel works.  It articulates a kind of essential loneliness – one that Sullivan calls prototaxic – the loneliness of awe – of having no words to articulate the experience – but it also articulates the process of learning those words – so that this story could be the story of each of us developing – coming to find the words – to find the story – that best articulates our experience – even if that will cost us dearly it will also allow us to connect with that which is available.  Can we hope for more?

     

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here.   

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), if you are on a computer, hit the X button on the upper right of this screen and, on the subsequent screen, hover your cursor over the black line in the upper right area and choose the pop out box that says subscribe and then enter the information.  I'm sorry but I don't currently know how you can subscribe from a mobile device - hopefully you have a computer as well...