Netflix has a new series about two couples - the men (Robert and Sol played by Martin Sheen and Sam Waterston respectively) have been law partners in a practice that specializes in divorce law for thirty years. They are as different as night and day, and have wives that match each of them. Robert, married to Grace (played by Jane Fonda) is likely the public face of the firm. He is a good old boy who knows the proper thing to say at every moment - but people might question whether he and his wife - a woman who started her own line of beauty products, who is beautiful and incredibly organized, have a marriage or a business partnership. They know how to make an entrance and to look good, but they lack affection. Sol balances Robert. He is goofy but sincere - a real Jewish mensch married to Frankie (played by Lily Tomlin), a hippie dippie Californian whose faith in New Age principles is laughable to Grace (and to us - at times). So, while Robert and Sol complement each other, Grace and Frankie are like oil and water - avoiding mixing whenever they can.
Not just the two couples, but the two families have been intertwined. Robert and Grace have two daughters; the eldest is even more tightly wrapped than her mother and though she is now a soccer mom and married to a physician, she had an early, serious fling with one of Frankie and Sol's two adoptive sons - the white one who is in rehab as opposed to the black one who is a lawyer in the parents' firm. Robert and Grace's younger daughter is a force of nature and therefore has had trouble keeping a job - until Grace asks her to take over her beauty business. Somewhat improbably she is working as the CEO though she has never been able to hold a job due to insubordination, but they explain that she is better at giving than receiving orders...
The families are intertwined in one other way - they share a beach house - because, the husbands said, it was a great deal and it just didn't make sense to pass it up. In truth - it was also a place for them to get together and tryst because they been having an affair for twenty years - and this series begins when they finally admit this to their wives - in a restaurant of all places - when they are all in their seventies. They announce that each is leaving his wife, that they are lovers, and that they intend to marry each other. Well, all hell breaks loose. First a food fight breaks out, then there is fall out, and the fallout is explored through the 13 episodes of the series - which, since this is Netflix, you don't have to wait to see - the whole season can be seen in about six hours if you want to indulge in a Grace and Frankie-a-thon. The series is titled Grace and Frankie in part because these two, who have always thought the other was from another planet, now find that they are the only people they know who have been jilted in just this way - and despite their best efforts to distance themselves from each other they find themselves not just thrown together, but working together to survive and understand a seismic shift that has left them each in their own way struggling to regain equilibrium.
So, this is a tightly woven situation comedy. It doesn't have a laugh track, it has movie like sets, the language is salty and the writing is crisp. Some of the dialogue and plot devices are very Hollywood - the setting is San Diego, but there is a decidedly L.A. feel to the family configurations. That said, I have to admit to a small world midwest connection to this production. My in-laws were introduced to each other by a mutual friend at Cass Tech High School in Detroit, Mary Jean (originally from Paducah Kentucky and certainly not Jewish - nor is she straight - she recently married her lover of more than forty years), who went on to become Lily Tomlin. Their take is that this is the role that seems most like the person they still know and care about as Mary Jean. She was the earliest of the hippies, and goofy and naturally funny, playful, but also genuine (and salty) in her interactions with her friends.
So this comic vehicle asks some very serious and complex questions about the nature of love - including very interesting and confusing questions about fidelity and about the importance of being able to publicly celebrate a union; and the downsides of moving from an affair to a marriage - the ways in which happily ever after turns out to have bumps and twists that no one would have predicted. Though I think the central question is about whether and why it is that we have room for but one beloved in our hearts; why does our love have to be exclusive?
I am now going to construct, largely from my imagination but with clues we have from the present action, the backstories of these two couples: The relationship between Robert and Grace is relatively straightforward. They had a marriage that was largely based on a public union. He was the quarterback, she the head cheerleader and their job was to raise their children and be successful. And they accomplished this. But this left a void for Robert. He wanted more. For Grace, this was enough or, even if it wasn't, it was what you could expect out of life. So, while she resented how hard she had to work, she felt entitled to what she got out of the relationship. Primarily she was respected - she held a valued place in the social order; she also had material goods, and, even if things weren't as good on closer examination as they appeared from a distance - even if she resented her husband - even if she did not feel close to him, and was secretly somewhat disdainful of him and his profession, and even if there were aspects of their children's lives that were mildly horrifying to her, she had made it and had it made. And I think she thought she could count on him. Theirs was a relationship founded on being reliable. Then he pulled the rug out from under her. She wasn't devastated by losing him, but by losing what being married to him meant. And she was furious when her husband - with whom she had sex four times a year like clockwork, "turned out" to be gay.
Before I go on, sexless, or nearly sexless marriages are common. One of the things that I hope to get to in this blog is that an important reason why I like this series is that it doesn't provide pat answers. Why Grace's marriage was sexless is left unanswered. And I don't know that there is an easy answer to that - and the relationship between it and Robert's sexual relationship with Sol is unclear. I don't know that there is a relationship and I don't know that there isn't. I think that psychoanalysts have a bifurcated history. Within the psychoanalytic world, we recognize how complex the human condition is. Publicly, when we offer pat summaries and "reasons" for behavior that are ridiculously reductionistic, we can be as guilty as Hollywood of oversimplifying. All that said, how each partner responds to the sexlessness of a marriage is important. How do they make sense of that? What do they do with their sexuality? In this case, does Grace sublimate - meaning allow her now unconscious sexual wishes to drive behavior - by starting a beauty company where her visage graces every box of products? Does she have a secret sex life - secret even, perhaps, from herself?
Frankie and Sol, on the other hand, are very intimately connected with each other. While Grace and Robert share values that are based on appearances, Frankie and Sol are connected by threads of what is internal. When, after the break up, an earthquake hits, Sol knows just how upset Frankie will be and also how to soothe her. He runs to her side to provide what she needs - to talk her out from under the table, and the tenderness between them is palpable. Even as we are a bit dismayed by Frankie's neurotic behavior, we sense that Sol is not - he gets her and her loopy approach to the world and he loves her not in spite of that , but in part because of it. Frankie, too, appreciates Sol. She loves the spelling bee because he loves it - and more poignantly and subtly it is she who works to help Sol realize that their relationship is over and she knows how painful it will be to him to disconnect from her, but that he must to that - even though she herself is not ready to do it - and she does this while she is immersed in her own pain of having to be separate from him - something that she does not completely understand.
So what is the brittleness in this relationship? Why would Sol want to leave? Sol seems to be in love with the world. He is an incurable sentimentalist who is worried, after he moves in with Robert, about having his in- home office in Robert's daughter's room displace her (where was Grace's in home office?), and has to have lots of evidence that this daughter is really not much attached to the room or the mementoes there. Sol is the one who explains to Frankie what happened between he and Robert- that they were drawn to each other at an out of town conference when each of them had been drinking too much and they fell into each other's arms in an elevator - but then went to their separate rooms and couldn't even figure out how to speak about it for some time. If we think about homosexuality as existing on a spectrum, Sol seems to be firmly in the middle - not so much straight or gay as in love with people, with humanity. He is overjoyed to be able to publicly acknowledge his love of Robert, and his homosexuality, and, at least on the surface, he appears perhaps somewhat more traditionally gay (neither character swishes, though their gay friends do), but this may have more to do with a pan sexuality than one that is more heavily located in one place or the other.
So why can't Sol have it all? Why can't he have his cake and eat it too? Why does Robert have to give up his relationship with a person who knew how to make an entrance - something he clearly appreciates - and something that Sol recognizes is a loss for Robert - both losing Grace the person and losing a Graceful partner - Sol is too sincere to play the necessary roles. Why can't they be civilized like the French, maintain their public marriages - do that sincerely - and continue with their private affair?
Part of the motivation seems to be in the obvious pleasure that they get from being in each other's company. They really have trouble not being able to be apart - and not being able to publicly share the infectious love that they feel for each other. Sol talks at one point about the dilemma of feeling simultaneously profoundly guilty for all of the chaos they have wreaked in their families' lives, and feeling tremendously joyous to be united with his lover. And this is the kind of conflictual complication that makes this series feel genuine despite some moments that strain credibility. There is a pleasure to illicit love. There is something delicious about being in another's arms without being allowed to be. And there is a pleasure in connecting with a spouse. There is a moment in the movie "The Ice Storm" when the character played by Kevin Klein starts talking after having sex with the wife of a friend about office politics and she coldly says to him - "I already have a husband. We are having an affair, not a marriage." But this relationship between these two men does not seem to be about being lovers, but being more fully partners - even being business partners is not enough for them.
This depiction, of course, goes against stereotype. These are men who are being portrayed as being straight - having straight values - and having a love for each other that is, by and large, as pure as the driven snow. And I think there is clearly a political motivation for this depiction. When we are in the midst of transitioning as a nation to supporting homosexual marriages, we need models of the kind of relationships that we mean to be supporting when we do that. This feels, despite the Hollywood mores, to be aimed directly at Middle America. And that requires supporting the model of marriage that Middle America embraces - the one about 'til death do us part. And so this series, one about blowing up just those sorts of marriages, also happens to be about creating them. Fortunately it does so with Grace, humor, and the messy stuff of life. I find myself identifying with aspects of each character, and laughing and crying with them at the absurdity of living.
But I am still a bit mystified about the apparent axiom that a man or a woman can only have one true love at a time. Of course this isn't the case. Sol still is clearly in love with Frankie. Robert is mourning the loss of Grace, but that is a bit different. Theirs seems to have been a marriage based on mutual respect and a fair amount of affection, but little true romance. So why can't Sol stay married to Frankie and just add in Robert? Psychoanalytically, I think this is reduced to the family romance - that we have the fantasy of an exclusive relationship with one parent - and we relinquish this as part of the Oedipus complex - where we acknowledge and connect with the other parent and then go on to acknowledge other interlopers, including siblings, but we continue to harbor a deeply held belief that someday we will have someone all to ourselves and we powerfully, axiomatically believe that this is something that we will be able to achieve at some point. Of course, in a traditional marriage this fantasy bubble is burst when kids are born and we have to compete with them for our spouse's attention. In Sol and to a lesser extent Robert's fantasy, they will maintain their relationships with friends and children and ex-spouses, but have a different central relationship. Making that transition proves to be every bit as complicated as one would expect - including the complication that I have not focused on - that of the title characters coming to know and love each other. Who would have predicted that?
I am satisfied neither by Hollywood's pat answer - that gay men and women - indeed all men and women - enjoy greater pleasure in publicly acknowledged and supported dyadic relationships, nor by psychoanalysis' pat answer - that marriage is a publicly supported throw back to an infantile unrealizable fantasy no longer consciously held but still determining our behavior. I think both are partly true - they each, in the vernacular of the social scientist account for some of the variance (and each for a different amount within each particular marriage) - but even together they are at best a partial truth. Both because all marriages, despite similarities, are built in subtly and sometimes profoundly different ways, but also because all marriages are more complex than simple formulae will ever allow us to comprehend. So, even though this series, by virtue of the limitations of the arts to accurately reflect life, falls short of answering the questions that it raises, it gives us, by its willingness to muck around in the sticky complications of life, plenty of fodder to explore what it is that we mean by love.
To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here. For a subject based index, link here.
No comments:
Post a Comment