Carol – A Movie about Culture, Homosexuality and Telling

Carol is an odd love story.  Three love stories really.  First, it is about the love of woman for her child.  I think this love (as a man, I have only known the love of a parent for his child) is the first, primordial love. I know, that doesn’t make any sense.  Shouldn’t the love of a child for a parent be the first, primordial love?  But it isn’t.  The love of a child for a parent is like wall paper.  It is always present – but in the background.  And romantic love, the other two loves depicted centrally in this film, is a yearning – a yearning for the other.  Someday I will write about Peter Fonagy’s description of this love – it is the yearning to know another – to bridge a void – to be (for a man, concretely) inside another – physically and psychically.  But the love of a parent for a child is a deeply felt desire to care for somebody – somebody unknown, novel, not yet formed, yet already uniquely special and particularly ours.  Someone that we bond with not because of who they have become, nor even who they will become, but because of how we are related to them – and that relationship is determined by forces that are primordial – the forces that allowed us to cradle and protect a dependent being so that it can grow to become human – the force of connection that allowed our species to become the dominant species on the planet.

Carol (played by Cate Blanchett) is a high society woman in New York City in the early 1950s.  She is divorcing a guy –they live in a mansion in New Jersey – and they have a daughter.  Their daughter is no longer an infant; she is old enough to want a doll of her own.  Carol goes Christmas shopping for her in a Manhattan Department store and meets Therese (played by Rooney Mara) who tells her that the doll her daughter wants is out of stock, and suggests that her daughter might like a train.  Carol buys the train, and leaves her gloves, which Therese returns, and they start an affair.

This movie is terribly anachronistic.  In the year (or so) after gay marriage has been legalized – when a majority (!) of the population of the United States approves of gay marriage (though the strength of the opposition to homosexuality by those who hold to that should not be underestimated) – this movie seems to be about a time that is antediluvian.  Not just because it seems (OK, if I were gay this would not seem so long ago that something as essential about myself as my sexuality was publicly repudiated) to be so last week as closeted sexuality (as if that weren’t very much still an issue), but more centrally the relationships between the central characters seem so stilted, so formal, so devoid of anything approaching psychological intimacy, this seems to be the kind of movie that was made in the 40s and 50s – a movie that is heavy on plot and light on character development – and relational development.  We are left to imagine the internal worlds of the characters as we see just hints – and puzzling hints – about who they are from their actions, not from the articulation of their thoughts as they speak to each other.

It is not only a movie out of time, it is also a movie out of space.  It was not filmed in New York, but in Cincinnati – a Midwestern City with a downtown that has skyscrapers and other buildings that can stand in for Manhattan in the 1950s.  Cincinnati is a city that the reluctant wife and I know well, so as the movie went by at the pace of paint drying (it is filmed at the pace of a film made in the 1950s), there was plenty of time to try to figure out which part of town was actually being shot (The department store is the old downtown Shillito’s, the factory in the background when they are on a road trip is Proctor and Gamble’s original Ivory Soap factory).  And this lent the story a weird sort of universality.  The story is not one that was just being played out in an exotic place like New York, but, I think, even in the humdrum Midwest, where the strictures and mores were, if anything, more rigid than in a place that was large and anonymous enough that Cincinnati can serve as a passable stand in for it because there is so much of Manhattan that even those of us who have lived there or travelled there often have not explored.

This picture then depicts a time and place that, though modern – they had indoor plumbing, telephones, and cars, and familiar – the buildings that they lived and worked in still exist and we still live and work in them, is foreign.  And the romantic love stories that emerge are, though on some level universal, oddly foreign; unknown to us because these women remain, by current standards, largely unknown to each other.

The love that Carol feels for Therese is not the center of the story.  Carol has had a previous, brief affair with a woman – another woman of privilege – a friend.  It is mysterious, this affair, through most of the movie, but is ultimately revealed to be something different than the love that she feels for Therese.  It was a romp; a roll in the hay; something that, uncomfortable though it may be, her husband and even society might be able to understand.  But this love for Therese is different.  It is self-destructive because it is forbidden.  It threatens her love for her child – her husband, whom she is divorcing, will be empowered to take her child away – to label her a pervert and seek revenge for her not loving him by cutting her off from the love that is most cherished by her.  So this love – this desire – for Therese is something that she experiences as both essential to who she is – it is powerful enough to counterbalance her love for her daughter, and alien to her – she ultimately cuts herself off from Therese in order to try to salvage her connection to her daughter.

The center of the story, then, is Therese’s love for Carol.  Therese has a boyfriend, but he is a bit of a dolt, and she is not encumbered by the love for a child.  Therese sees Carol in a way that Carol does not see Therese.  Therese observes Carol – and she comes to love her not as an object, but as a subject.  Therese is cast as a shop girl who would become a photographer – but one who is afraid to photograph humans.  Through the course of their affair, she uses her camera to capture Carol.  She also captures her, really gets her, through listening to her and observing her.  Therese, who looks like a young Audrey Hepburn, seems less taken by Carol’s beauty (Carol’s husband comments at a party that Carol is, as always, the most beautiful woman in the room) than by her person – who she is – how she inhabits herself.

So Therese is moving towards an intimate love of Carol.  What keeps it from being a more contemporary intimate kind of love is that she infers Carol’s internal state from her actions – Carol does not confess how torn she is between her two loves – Carol does not describe how difficult it is to be who she is while others observe her and imagine her to be someone she is not.  Therese allows herself to see Carol and to create Carol based on what Carol presents – a perilous undertaking - and weirdly the undertaking of the parent of the preverbal child – because actions are ambiguous in ways that words are not.  Therese creates an interior – a creature that she can touch and come to love – through careful observation of the exterior.

Carol stays more on the surface.  When she first sees Therese nude, she comments, “I never looked like that.”  Therese is the other – the unfamiliar.  The contrast between the heavy, clunky jewelry of the society women and Therese’s unadorned wrists, fingers and neck – her simple cotton compared to their heavily tailored and thick wool clothing underscores how different, how foreign, she is; just as Carol’s love for her is foreign.  It is something other, something that is for Carol unwanted, on some level, but also very much her own.  It will out, despite Carol’s wishes that it could be otherwise.  And the dramatic edge in the film – the moment when the pacing picks up and this becomes a contemporary film – is the moment when Carol owns this part of herself – when she uses it to assert her love for both Therese – or perhaps more precisely her love for that part of herself that loves and desires Therese – and her love for her daughter.

The force of Carol’s love for Therese – a force that smolders and smolders before it erupts – but once having been expressed is bottled up again – and emitted in a most controlled and distant fashion – is the force of the repressed.  It is the force of what is hidden, of what is shameful, of what is most private and vulnerable about us.  It is the force of what drives us to go to therapy and to analysis – to articulate our inchoate selves.  And the conditions under which we do that are that what we say in that hour is confidential – sets up and creates the very situation that it would relieve.  The analyst agrees to keep what is said, that which is most private – so private that we don’t even allow ourselves to know it – private.

In the film, the lovers most intimate moments are made public.  That which they want to keep most hidden – that which Carol fears being known so much that her love for Therese is stunted – she can’t see Therese for who she is because she is so focused (I believe) on managing this force that leads this woman who always exerts near perfect self-control to confide to her friend that she doesn’t know what she is doing as she tears her life apart, becomes known.  And in the moment of self-reclamation, Carol chooses to risk that privacy becoming public for a host of reasons.  On one level, I think, she recognizes that this is ultimately not something to be ashamed of.  On another level, it is something that she can turn against those who would publicize it, and she uses this very effectively.  But on a completely different level, I think there is a wish to trumpet that which is private – to articulate it – to let it be known.  Now if this last is the case, that would be a very unconscious desire – and one that we would see borne out societally, not in this case, but as gays and lesbians worked across decades to create a situation in which a movie that is describing something as explosive as the conflicts that this one is describing could seem passé.

And the need for the analyst to contain the secrets of the consulting room is counterbalanced by a need to tell them.  Not salaciously, but in a variety of forms – through describing the interaction in supervision, through writing up disguised cases, and through using the principles derived from the consulting room to inform our understanding of the world more generally, including as I do in this blog.  And the purpose of that is educational.  We need to know.  We need to know about love in all its forms.  And we need to distinguish between that which is simply socially unacceptable but has been labelled perverse, and understand how it is that this came to be the case, from that which is truly perverse.  And we need to help those who experience perverse love find ways to express love that will enhance them and not harm those who are the unwanted objects of their desire.  And the only way we can do this is to tell.

The original form of the movie was a memoir, one that was written in the 1950s about events that took place in the 1940s.  The courage of the author to tell, to inform, to teach – was impelled by the kind of love that a parent has for a child.  We love them just as they are.  We fear that they will be corrupted as they move into the world.  We hope that they will embrace the world – and love it and themselves as they do that.  And so, we tell them about the world – about all of its beauty, but also about the things that are wrong with it.  And we hope that they will be able to chip away at those things that spoil the beauty – so that they can ultimately live in a world that is more complicated, difficult, but beautiful and peaceful than the one that we live in.  We owe a debt of gratitude to the authors like Patricia Highsmith who wrote the book The Price of Salt which later was titled Carol for helping us come to see that love that causes damage only because of our societal restrictions is not perverse at all, but a love that, like all love, should be celebrated as a sacrament.

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Saving Mr. Banks – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns About Psychotherapy from a Master Story Teller.

Walt Disney provided a third of the soundtrack of my middle childhood.  Mary Poppins was one of the regular albums that we played as kids, along with The Sound of Music and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  Actually, my parents had a credenza filled with classical music and Broadway musical soundtracks and we listened to those some of the time (Bernstein’s recording of Peter and the Wolf and Peer Gynt were favorites), but Mary Poppins was one of the big three.  That said, it has always been a weird movie.  My Mom pointed out that the sweetness of Julie Andrews did not square with her experience of Mary in the book (a book I have never read).  Mary Poppins, as envisioned by P.L. Travers, was apparently a very proper British nanny with a touch of magic who brooked no nonsense.  

P.L. Travers, as played by Emma Thompson, brooked no nonsense from Walt Disney played by Tom Hanks in the (of course) Disney Studio’s dramatization of the interaction between them about his wresting the rights to the story from her so that he could tell the story in a musical that, despite being part of the soundtrack of my childhood, never quite held together in my mind.  So when the reluctant wife and I were looking for a movie to watch, her recent time spent travelling led me to recommend a movie with Tom Hanks trying to join the million mile flyer club, but we could not find it on Netflix or Amazon, and so decided to watch Saving Mr. Banks as a fall back, and thought it would be a nice first feature on what would be a two movie date night – vaguely thinking it would be a light fluffy appetizer.

This movie, though flawed, turns out to be a meaty and satisfying main course.  Emma Thompson introduces us to a version of the Uptight, British lady, but she is not just uptight, she is mean and remote, dictatorial and difficult.  She has what Disney wants and, though she needs his money, which she is horrified to admit, she also wants to tell her story on the big screen (maybe), but if it is to be told, it will be on her terms – and therein lies the crux of the movie - what is her story?  And how will it be told?  On the surface, it is the story of Mary Poppins, the nanny who brings order and perhaps a bit of proper British love to a proper British household that seems terribly devoid of it.  But Travers, who appears to be a most proper British matron, is, we know from her flashbacks, an Aussie from way out in the outback.  Her Dad was a delightful dreamer and an awful and incurable drunk who was employed, when he could stagger to work, as a banker, and her mother was a flimsy and somewhat distracted woman who was caring for Helen (Ginty) Goff (the girl who would take the pen name Pamela L. Travers as a woman) and her two younger siblings.  Into this picture swoops her Aunt, who brings order to the chaos of the household (and has an umbrella with a parrot handle).  We discover this story through Travers, who experiences it as a kind of nauseating dream while she is in Hollywood, where she has been whisked by Walt Disney who is trying to impress her into signing over the rights to the movie.  We experience her father as a playful, imaginative ne’er do well who intensely and deeply connects with his daughter, but also bruises her (though not as brutally on film as I’m betting happened in life – this is a Disney film after all)  by his drunken insensitivity.

This movie, on one level, is a good mystery, and there were plenty of clues as I was watching to who Travers was and what Mary Poppins is really all about, as there should be in any mystery (Btw, I was quite familiar with Mary Poppins, but the reluctant wife had never seen it – the movie tells the story enough that you don’t need to have seen Mary Poppins to appreciate, understand and enjoy it).  This movie makes lots of sense in retrospect, but at least I did not see all that was coming, and pieced it together as the movie played out.  That said, I don’t know how to put it together in this post without laying the pieces out, so if you plan to see the film, this would be a good place to stop reading this post and to come back later. 

Travers travels to Hollywood and goes to the Disney Studios where we hear the Disney songwriters writing the songs that we (or those of us who can play it in our heads) know will be in the movie – and yet her iron will – her downright meanness – convinces us that she will never sign over the rights.  She insists on absurd conditions – there can be no red in the film - and she is opposed to animation.  We know that the whole gang jumps into a picture and that Burt dances in a red striped suit, no less, with the animated penguins - but she insists this won’t happen.  We are trapped in believing that history will play itself out in ways that we know it hasn’t.  This is very good story telling.

 

We believe, because both Disney and Travers say it, that Mary Poppins is something that Travers does not want to part with – Mary is all Travers has.  And Disney remembers when Mickey was all that he had and someone wanted to buy Mickey from him and he wouldn’t sell.  He used Mickey to build his own studio and then his own empire.  Travers doesn’t have the wherewithal to do that, but she does have the gumption to refuse him, no matter how seductive he might be.  He deeply identifies with her and recognizes the level of power that he is up against, and he is convinced that she won’t sell.  His identification with Travers, however, also leads him to respect her and ultimately to get her – to understand what she is fighting for on a deeper level.  This helps him put up with her even when she is indescribably maddening (though he attributes his patience to the fact that he has promised his daughters that he will produce the film Mary Poppins for them and a father never goes back on his word – of course, because I think that the unconscious mind is a complicated place where multiple intersecting and sometimes contradictory pieces exist, I believe both are true – he connects with her and with his children to manage his exasperation with her).

As in all good mysteries the obvious answer, that Mary is what she is hanging onto, is not the answer.  And, as is also the case in all good mysteries, the answer is hiding in plain sight.  It is not Mary that Travers is hanging onto, but Mr. Banks – the banker father in Mary Poppins.  We get the clue we need (though I wasn’t smart enough to get it) when Travers begins tapping her foot – and then dancing (!) to the tune “Let’s Go Fly a Kite”.  When Travers gets wind of those dancing animated penguins, she leaves Hollywood, fleeing to England.  Disney chases her there and confronts her.  They, it turns out, have the same secret – they both need to preserve the goodness in a father who was also abusive to them.  Perhaps because it was not depicted, but only told, Disney can describe the horror of his own childhood straightforwardly and can clarify something that we have had access to all along – Travers' father (whose first name she took as her pen name – an important clue for Disney) is deeply loved – but also hated.  I think not just because he, in a drunken state, rejected her poetry, but because she is ashamed of the very thing she loved him for (and loves in herself) – the ability to be playfully, whimsically engaged in the world.  Mary Poppins is her effort to stamp out the wish and desire to play – something that she hates because it causes him to be unstable and to fail to care for the family – but desperately and deeply loves.  So she sides with the aunt – the order imposer – against, though it just about kills her, her father and, even more so, against herself – with the play coming out only in the books whose nanny, stern as she may be, is irreverently engaged with reality – so much so that she can do nonsensical things like slide up the banister and fly.

This actually helps me better understand the structure of Mary Poppins – a movie that has always felt jumbled up and confusing.  Bert, Mary’s friend from the world of magic, is not some random guy.  He is the alter ego of Mr. Banks, the children’s stern father who works at the bank (this is enacted in the film when Dick Van Dyke plays a bank director in addition to playing Burt).  Travers wanted her father to be stable and steady like Mr. Banks.  Travers was critical of the Bert figure as Disney portrayed him – critical that Dick Van Dyke was going to play him – Dick Van Dyke was an insubstantial actor in Travers’ eyes – not an actor with gravitas - like Olivier.

In the scene in London, where Disney confronts Travers with the truth about her past, and reassures her that he will (OK, this clue was right out in the open – the title to the movie) Save Mr. Banks, he is functioning as her therapist.  It becomes apparent, as he talks about the role of storytelling, which, of course, he is very good at, that storytelling is, in his eyes, therapeutic.  He preserves the goodness of his father in Mickey, the diminutive mouse up against the world, but with a twinkle in his eye.  It is his belief that we need, through the medium of the story, to save the goodness in those who have traumatized us – to know that the world can be the kind of place in which we can be both productive AND happy – and happy with them – connected to the ones we love but who have terribly disappointed us.  And he was clearly quite successful at selling this brand of therapy to the American public.  Despite my not having graced either of his theme parks the little bit of Disney stock that a generous uncle bought for the reluctant son when he was born to be a nest egg for him and to allay my feelings of spending so much on Disney products across the course of his life, has appreciated at a tremendous rate – outpacing the market by a bunch.

What do we make of this therapy?  And what does Travers make of it?  She sells him the rights.  But is that because of his speech or because she needs the money and she realizes that the movie will never be the one she would produce?  In the film, despite not being invited by Disney to the opening (who could blame him, really), she travels back to Hollywood and watches the film.  She cries as she watches it.  I experienced her tears as reluctant tears of joy.  My reluctant brother experienced them as tears of sorrow.  Wikipedia just notes that she cried at the opening.  I think it quite possible (again, I am invoking the complexity of the unconscious and its ability to harbor competing feelings) that both interpretations are accurate.  I think she may have been highly ambivalent about this thing that Disney created, this thing that included Dick Van Dyke, with the red stripe suit, dancing with animated penguins – with just the kind of whimsy that her father would have greatly appreciated.

Disney tells Travers, “George Banks and all he stands for will be saved.  Maybe not in life, but in imagination.  Because that’s what we storytellers do.  We restore order with imagination.  We instill hope again and again.”  And that is all that we can do.  And it is painful.  Travers has walled off parts of her father.  She has separated the good from the bad, as best she can, and stuck the whimsy onto her aunt who brought order to her life – giving her the power to fly and to have a talking umbrella.  But she kept it under tight control.  And Disney set it free – and clarified that it was not the children who were being saved, but the father – the one thing that her aunt could not do.  So Travers, as storyteller, saved him, and Disney promised to do that as well. 

Was Disney a good therapist?  Travers certainly profited financially from their arrangement.  She also continued to write.  What about the people who see his films?  Have we had our order restored?  This film helped me put together what had gone wrong for me in Mary Poppins – and while I could make a case that Mr. Banks and my father are a lot alike – in fact just thinking about that allows me to see lots of parallels – I think that, in my experience of the movie, it was the hard working Mr. Banks who came out to play – not the ne’er do well Burt who was able to lead a creative life – that led to a sense of relief – I never connected Burt as a father figure, though on reflection it actually works.  This second story – the saving Mr. Banks version, then – leads to a different kind of restoration of order for me.  It involves actually a kind of tragic vision of my father, of myself – as enslaved by the mundane world – not actually achieving the joyful life we might have had we engaged the world in a more carefree manner.  Perhaps that was the message Disney meant to be sending to Mrs. Travers, though I don’t think she received it.

In one of the helpful after notes that Amazon provides, one of the song writers suggests that it was not “Let’s Go Fly A Kite” that got the real Travers toe tapping, but “Feed the Birds,” a song sung to the children by an old woman who sold bread crumbs to feed the pigeons around St. Paul’s Cathedral.  If this is the case, it may be that what allowed Pamela to sell the script was that there was room in it to save Travers – her father’s first name that she had taken as her own.  The song has a wistful quality and it would be the kind of thing her father, in his generous moments, would have encouraged her to do – saving not he as the banker who could play, but she as the daughter who could be beloved while doing what she wanted to do – feed the birds. 

I think Disney, both as portrayed in the movie and the corporation that he spawned, is interested in saving Mr. Banks – creating a make believe world where it is OK to play all day and money will come raining down.  But neither of the Travers portrayed in the film believed that would happen.  They were both sad but very much aware that they lived in a world where you need to work for a living.  Therapy with Mr. Disney, as with all therapists, becomes a co-creation - it has a little (or a lot) of the therapist in it.  I think that Walt Disney's Mary Poppins saved a version of Mr. Banks that suited Mr. Disney quite well.        

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Eye In the Sky – Alan Rickman’s Final Performance

In the movie Eye in the Sky, Alan Rickman turns in a final, wonderful performance in a beautiful and difficult film about drone warfare.  Rickman’s sneer was his signature facial gesture and the dominant emotional stance of the characters that he played – his attitude of disdain permeates roles from movies like Love Actually and the Harry Potter Series to roles on Broadway.  But it is the complexity of the characters that Rickman played that drew him to them – he commented that he loved playing Severus Snape because he was loved his ambiguity.  And we are ultimately drawn to his characters not by his disdain, but by the deeply felt attachment to human life that his characters feel – including and perhaps especially the British Military General he plays in this film.  The General who is responsible for managing the relationship between the British and American military coalition and the British lawyers and politicians who oversee the military action in this incredibly tightly told tale that escalates dramatically from what was to be a capture situation, observed from a safe distance, to an urgent need to act in ways that are plausible but unpredicted.  While this is a tale; it is, I think, also a reasonably apt description of the process and perhaps the underlying dilemmas present in the real life of modern anti-terrorist warfare.

This story moves between multiple interlocking and parallel scenes on four continents as a decision is made, on the fly, about whether to engage in an act of warfare.  In each of these far flung and isolated places, different but related moral, ethical and psychological dilemmas are played out while the communication between them – essential though it is – is minimal, indirect and, in one tremendously important subplot, one way only.  It is only the viewer of the movie that gains access to all of the ways that these interlocking scenes generate, each in their own way, a variation on a central theme – one that I think is critically important as we decide who the next president of the United States should be (as I have also opined in another recent post about Trump).

The central theme of this movie, I believe, is best captured by the “incidental” family caught literally in the crosshairs of the central drama – though the family is completely unaware that they are in any way involved.  This family is Kenyan.  They live in a very poor neighborhood recently taken over by a fundamentalist sect.  The father’s central concern (and, indeed, that of every other character in this drama) is protecting his daughter and her love of life – her engaging in learning and playing – from the fundamentalists who would have her be covered from head to toe or be beaten – who would take away her books – and who would prohibit anything as free and unrestricted as playing with what may be her sole toy – a homemade hula hoop that she artfully flings around with her body – they would stop her from joyfully being a ten year old girl and imprison her in a world that her father does not want her to live in.

This is a film that is told from the point of view of the west.  It is about our fight against fundamentalism and terrorism.  The terrorists here are the bad guys – they want to kill, hurt and maim us and to strike terror in our hearts.  We want to destroy them before they destroy us.  There is no question about the need to do that.  And yet this movie is not a condemnation of the entire culture.  Since the fundamentalists have moved in, the neighborhood is safe – it is patrolled, but also the law is clearly now enforced (even it that includes using sticks to beat women whose wrists are showing), and maybe it wasn’t so much before the fundamentalists move in.   The “soldiers” themselves – scary when we are trying to infiltrate their stronghold – turn out to be quite human and responsive when the need arises.  The film, rightfully, I think, targets the terrorists as people who need to be killed – but also rightly leaves broader moral questions about the goodness or badness of the respective cultures murkier…

And the ability to target individuals that drone warfare provides ends up being the pivot point around which the drama of the film rotates.  We are no longer fighting a war with other states – but instead with clans, groups, paramilitary entities, or splinter cells.  Most legitimate governments are at least nominally our allies in this fight – or we make them so.  Drone warfare is, then, kind of a fun house mirror version of terrorism.  Where the terrorist would strike fear by having an entire populace fear that they are the target, drone warfare is intended to target the perpetrators of evil – with as little collateral damage as possible.  We are no longer carpet bombing the Germans, a tactic Kurt Vonnegut abhorred, but we are engaging, or trying to engage, in surgical strikes.

But war is, inherently, messy.  And this film is grippingly and intensely focused on that fact.  And on the ways in which that messiness interferes with our ability to engage in it precisely because we are all united with the father in wanting to protect his little girl’s world.  The General begins and ends his day picking out a toy for his granddaughter.  He doesn’t care which toy it is, but he knows that she does, and knows that he has to get the right one.  Just as the father in Kenya knows that his daughter will delight in the colorful hula hoop that he creates for her.  We all want the same thing – protection – which requires violence to enforce, and therein lies the rub.  This film articulates the complexity of weighing the competing qualities in psychologically compelling ways.

In America, the drone’s pilot, a man, and his navigator, a woman, are vividly and eerily aware of the possible consequences of their actions as they voyeuristically join the lives of the people they can forever alter.  Their US commander’s response to the intensity of the dilemma they have faced, and the valor of their actions in the face of it, is delivered with a diametrically different attitude than the British Colonel – played by Helen Mirren – has towards her subordinate who must engage in a parallel activity under considerable pressure from her.  The reluctant wife noted that it was nice to see the Colonel’s role – the person who continues to propel the action towards the necessary – and necessarily violent – action, being played by a woman – noting that we need to know that women can be good soldiers.  I think it is no accident that she is also, though, able to own the tragic, complicated aspects of her actions more thoroughly and completely than her male counterpart in the U.S.  I think that women in our culture do not have to disavow various aspects of their experience (more about that in a blog post soon about the psychological treatment of men).

In Africa, the girl’s father’s closest ally is a man he has never met – a Somalian who goes to heroic lengths – and puts other’s in harm’s way, both to save the girl and to get the bad guys – meanwhile repeatedly putting himself in more and more perilous situations.  And all that time that he is exposing himself to physical harm – the politicians are arguing about which outcome will cost them the most political capital.  And their delays put people at risk – and are intended to save people – and they have complex motives – motives that are self-interested and those that are more altruistic – and we see them play against each other – and paralyze them – in very human, and very British, ways.  And above it all, Alan Rickman’s General observes and pushes, cajoles and reacts, helping us to appreciate the intensity of the need to act and the necessity to consider the consequences before doing so – and the frustration of it all – culminating in his assessment of his own role in the process, a truly splendid moment of acting.

This film, then, is a rich and compelling one in part because the characters are real and complex.  Often films, like dreams, assign one aspect of the psychological functioning of a person to a character – and the character might be funny or morose – but it is a character rather than a human – while the roles in this film feel richer – even the stock roles feel filled with the complexity of containing all of those contradictory aspects of being human in one skin.  And there is an irony here – this is a film in which the long view is taken – literally.  People are empathizing with someone that we, the audience, knows up close, but they only know from, literally, the 30,000 foot level.  And she is black.  And she is African.  And, for all they know, she may be a child of the enemy.  She is also, really just by chance, exposed.  There are people nearby.  People could saunter by after the missile is launched.  There are people inside the houses nearby, unseen, who could become collateral damage.  But she is visible.  And she serves as a deterrent to action – to murder.

The irony is that, from the long view, we can also become terribly inhuman.  Freakonomics is a book that I am currently reading with my son.  In it an economist looks at human motivation through a statistical lens.  He also asks moral questions in crazily inhuman ways.  For instance, he suggests that violent crime started to drop in the 1990s because of Roe vs. Wade, which, he provides compelling evidence for, helped low income women who likely would not have been able to care for children abort them rather than birthing them and then being unable to care for them, with some of them turning into murderers.  He then poses the question, “What is the ratio between aborted fetuses and prevented homicides that makes sense?”  He acknowledges that framing the question in this way makes little sense, and I completely agree – the long view can frequently lead us to become removed from the human nitty gritty and the difficulty choosing a course of action in trying circumstances.  He would reduce that human moment to an equation – one with, presumably, an answer.

This movie uses the long view to humanize a situation that, from a distance, could look coldly and absolutely precisely answerable.  The kind of situation politicians are fond of giving as examples of being clear cut.  And, by the time the situation is described to the US Secretary of State, his take on it could not be more succinct (and rightly so, given the portion of the problem he is asked to address).  But it is hardly clear cut at all.  It is messy and complex and layered.  And, as limited as the information is, it is generally used by the players to engage in a process of restraint – one in which every moment is used to check and countercheck, to delay, to consider, and to pass things up the line to someone with more authority.  As much as we might laugh – or sneer- at the prevaricating of the bureaucrats, we side at first with them, but then become more and more uncertain about that as the urgency of the situation rises – as the military necessity becomes clearer and clearer.

On Monday morning, when this, if it ever does, makes the papers, we will have an opinion about what should have been done, and it is quite likely that we will take the position that the action taken was the right one or the wrong one.  And some of us will be quite certain of that.  I certainly have a position about the action that was taken.  I don’t think it changed as the movie unfolded, but it is one that is at odds with the central premise: that we are working to keep that little girl safe.  And if I had taken the other position, that, too would have been at odds with it.  There simply is no right answer here.  And yet we must act.  All the cerebration, all the emotional commitment and human attachment and compassion in the world won’t keep us from having to face terrible decisions with awful consequences.  Pretending that we can avoid the consequences or know the “right” answers is something that we like to believe all the time, I suppose, but we seem somehow to being particularly vulnerable to reductive and simple solutions to complex problems when politicians promise that they will work.  I pray that we don’t fall victim to that kind of thinking – simple, centralized thinking has led, time after time, to draconian “solutions” that we have had to labor for generations to redress.  I am grateful to Mr. Rickman and the rest of crew that brought this tale to life for engaging us in this lesson on the complexity of action.

Other posts on movies with Mr. Rickman include Love Actually and Bottle Shock (maybe someday I will post on Harry Potter...) and I also posted on Mr. Rickman in the Broadway play Seminar.

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