American Hustle and Trump as the Chief Hustler

What is of value?  More importantly, who is of value?  Adam Gopnik and others have posited that Donald Trump chose to run for president because he was so savagely lampooned by Barack Obama at a White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011.  Though Trump has denied this and there is a convincing alternative version of the night, we find the narrative of the reaction to the presumably humiliating moment as the pivotal moment in Trump's decision making compelling.  In that moment, Barack Obama was reacting to a protagonist; Trump was a leading member of the “birther” group who had maintained that Obama was born, not in Hawaii, but in Africa and therefore was not a legitimate President.  It was the week that Obama’s “long form” birth certificate was released, and he was lampooning someone who had long been a thorn in his side and he was, at least as we heard it, being merciless.

To say that someone is not a legitimate President is a grave charge to make.  Isn’t it ironic that there are many of us who do not believe that Donald Trump is a legitimate President of the United States – not because of his birth but because of his lack of qualification for the job?  But the truth of the matter is that he was elected not just in spite of the lack of qualification, but largely because of it.  Many of us are, in fact, disdainful of the office of President – and perhaps no one has offered more disdain of the functioning of past presidents than Trump.  And he has tapped into something that is broadly felt – the Presidency is something that any chump can do.

Our national narrative is that anyone who is born in the United States of America can grow up to become President.   In the case of Barack Obama and Donald Trump, this has proven to be a double edged sword.  That Obama – a person of African heritage – can go grow up to become President – demonstrates the promise of that narrative statement: anyone, even someone who is Black, can become President.  But for many, I believe that having a President with African heritage cheapened the office and led to the alternate meaning – anyone – regardless of qualification or ability – can become President.  From this perspective – even someone who is Black can be President – and here I am relying on the deeply engrained racism that Ta-Nehisi Coates and others and pointed out.  Electing someone with no political experience and no military experience to do what I believe to be the most complicated job in the world is not a problem because – well, let’s face it, if a Black can do it, anyone can.

I believe we need to change the narrative.  It should read something like this: anyone born in the United States who is inordinately smart – not just book smart but people smart – and who dedicates their life to public service and to understanding just exactly how complex both domestic and foreign policy are – and who is able to convince the majority of Americans that he, she or other can effectively manage the affairs of state for four years at a time can become President.  From this perspective, there is, frankly, a very small pool of people who are qualified to do the job and would be effective in it.  We should be picking from that pool.  And, frankly, most of those people – regardless of their heritage – will likely have been leading lives of privilege for a very long time and their understanding of the downtrodden people of this country and the world will be based on exposure and empathy – not on lived experience.

At my University, when one of the faculty members was elevated to the presidency of the University, the faculty rejoiced.  Finally, one of our own would be leading us.  He would understand how a University is intended to be, how it is intended to run.  Within the first month or so he made four very public decisions that created all kinds of difficulties because he was not a seasoned administrator who understood what it takes to run a University.  I was surprised to learn that administration is actually a skill.

So: the consequence of this narrative is that we will have elites in the office.  They may come from traditionally marginalized groups, but they themselves will likely not have been marginalized for a long time, if ever.  But those who experience themselves as marginalized are not going to connect with these individuals as candidates.  Donald Trump – billionaire Donald Trump – was seen as the hero of the marginalized because he was seen as an outsider – as someone who had been made fun of by those in power.  And we believed that he was seeking revenge – just as we would like to seek revenge – for insults that those in power have meted out to us.  We see power as something that is wielded to destroy – not to elevate.  And Obama was doing that at that dinner.  He was at the Dais and making fun of Donald’s little reality television show world from the podium of true power.

How are we going to shift this dynamic?  First of all, I think it highly unlikely that we will.  It is a dynamic that is welded into place on playgrounds and in locker rooms and classrooms in Elementary, High School, and College.  Who is better than whom?  On what scale?  In the movie Stand by Me the weak protagonists, being picked on by the bullies, hurl back that the bullies will never earn more than $20,000 and will be working for the weak kids when they grow up.  Especially in a capitalist society, we are going to conflate self-worth with net worth. 

If we are to shift this dynamic, we need to shift our sense of value.  We need to believe, in some fundamental way, that our lives are priceless – and that we are grateful to have them.  One of the most enduring images from a trip to Nicaragua was being at a potter’s home and studio.  It was incredibly primitive.  His house was kept dry by one of those ubiquitous blue tarps.  He had an outhouse.  He fired his pots in an outdoor oven built of bricks and heated by burning sticks.  And he had received a micro loan of about $150 that had allowed him to purchase a potter’s wheel – and he was now much more productive than he had ever been and he was able to make many more pots in a day than he ever had and they were of better quality.  His comment?  “Thanks be to God.” 

When we are able to live our lives from a position of gratitude – rather than entitlement – when we are able to feel that we get to do something rather than that we have to do it – during these parts of our lives we are generally going to be happier.  When we are grateful to live in this country, under this President – or, to live in this country where we can express our discontent with this President, we are more likely to have a higher quality of life.

Now I know that it is easy for me to say this.  I live a life of privilege.  I don’t need a microloan – in fact I could offer a bunch of them without even needing people to pay me back.  I have been educated – and psychoanalyzed – and my children are relatively happy and healthy.  And it is a struggle for me to feel grateful for all of this.  At times I feel entitled to it.  I have worked hard to achieve what I have.  I have also worked from an incredible platform of privilege, which is hard for me to see – but I think it is hard for all of us to see.  How can we be grateful for all that those who have supported us have offered without feeling so indebted that we are paralyzed?

One reason that a President needs to have lived a life of public service is that this involves sacrifice.  Being a public servant leads one to live a life of privilege and, if one is aspiring to become President, serving as a Senator or a Governor leads to a lifestyle that is very comfortable, but not one that is over the top rich.  A servant leader – not a leader who is served by those who work for him or her – models restraint – and imposes limits on those who have accumulated wealth – including people like me.  I should pay taxes – to pay back what has been spent by the state on my education – and the roads that I travel on – and the safeties that I enjoy – and to pay forward – so that those who are deserving can be supported by the community and so that we can discover those who will lead and produce for us in the next generation.

But this is not enough.  We need to honor and support those with skills that are valuable – and valued – by the country.  The labor movement in this country fought to ensure that a variety of skills were valued, but in a world economy, the means of enforcing that in various industries requires different tactics.  I don’t know what those are – but I think we need to be thinking both locally and globally about how to value the work of all. 

The relationship between money and happiness is an interesting one.  It is strongest for those who have the least money.  Without shelter and food, it is very hard to be happy.  But, as my friend in Nicaragua demonstrated, once the basic needs are met (and what is basic in Nicaragua is very different from what is basic in the United States), the relationship between income and happiness is not nearly as strong.

I think that we would be a happier country if we knew that if things fell apart, there would be a net there to support us (I really don’t feel this way – and I don’t know how much of that is my personal psychology and how much of that is the culture that we live in…).  Finland is experimenting with the idea of giving everyone in the country an income, they would have to tax it back from those with actual incomes – but everyone would know that, if the bottom fell out, they would get a certain amount every month – no matter what.

I was all ready to post this – just needed to read it over for errors, when the reluctant wife and I watched American Hustle for our Saturday night date together (the younger reluctant stepdaughter joined us but fell asleep before we made it to the end).  Because of the length of this post, I won’t review the movie in detail, though it deserves it, but will note that it shoots all kinds of holes in my fantasy of a perfect world.  Specifically, in this tale taken from life, those holy Senators and Congressmen I referred to above can be bought and sold – they haven’t quite given up avarice completely to become public servants.  Even the best among them, those who are engaged in public service because they believe that is in the best interests of all, take a little graft and use it for the public good.  

More deeply, though, this movie portrays the lengths that we need to go to in order to achieve personal integrity.  The two lead characters, Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) and Sydney Prosser (Amy Adams) are con artists whose back stories clarify that they are broken people and the hustling that they do is part of what leads them to have a sense of personal integrity.  The question of what personal integrity is and means in the world of hustling New York, hustling Washington, and ambition in the FBI are asked in poignant and human ways.  Rosenfeld and Prosser actually are portrayed as achieving this integrity – in part by being able to outhustle the powers that be, but more essentially by being true to each other.

The movie also clarifies that not all politicians come from privilege – in fact, in a democracy, many of them are elected because they represent the common man.  The best of them do this well – as Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner who starred with Adams in Arrival) the mayor of Camden, New Jersey was doing – though he did take the money that was offered.  Benjamin Franklin wanted to guard against this by writing into the constitution that representatives and senators would not get paid, thus assuring that only men of means – who supposedly would be above being bought – would serve.  Trump’s shenanigans already indicate that no amount of wealth seems to put some above using office for personal gain.  My hoped for solution is hopelessly naïve because it doesn’t take into account the avarice and humanity of people.

I think we have a long tradition of public officials being very careful about such issues as ethics and morality.  At the same time, these same officials have privately engaged in heinous actions of various sorts – from our primal sin of enslaving humans and writing that into our founding documents to other crimes and misdemeanors too numerous to mention.  I think that Trumps craziness – NPR’s Mara Liaisson opined this week that he might be crazy like a fox rather than just crazy – I am not convinced – but in any case his straightforward and chaotic style is exposing the inherent problems in our political system – domestic and international.  My system – proposed above – would retain the status quo.  This is my second post on politics – I have left politics to the politicians until now.  Maybe that was an error.  Maybe we should all be paying more attention and thinking about how we want to construct the body politic - knowing ahead of time that it will not be perfect, but also knowing that it is a necessary part of our social functioning. 

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Is President Trump a Terrorist? A call for nuclear disarmament.

The following brief post is a letter to the editor.  I sent it to my local paper, but to date they haven't published it.

September 11, 2001 was a very scary day.  On that day, we learned that men armed with primitive weapons can use our most advanced technology against us in terribly destructive ways.  We also learned (again) how much easier it is to destroy something than to build it. 

The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and his appointment of Stephen Bannon to the National Security council has made it clear that we are also politically vulnerable.  We have put our most sophisticated weapons into the hands of a person who has only been vetted by an individual who lost the popular vote.  What will actually happen as a result of this appointment is, at this moment, unclear.  But what could happen is frighteningly apparent to some.  Our foreign policy could be directed in such a way that we would enter waters that could result in the use of nuclear weapons in what would be seen as a defensive or pre-emptive strike but would, in fact, be naked aggression on our part.

The irony, of course, is that Trump has railed against an intelligence community that supported the position that there were weapons of mass destruction at Saddam Hussein’s disposal.  Those of us who watched the Bush administration present evidence to the UN of weapons of mass destruction knew that the evidence was flimsy.  The fault for the actions that led from the intelligence, such as it was, was not in the intelligence community, but in the political community.  We were ready for war and we convinced ourselves that we were engaging in a pre-emptive strike against a hostile enemy.

What if it were to become apparent to us, the People of the United States of America, that it would be wrong under any conditions and at any time, to use nuclear weapons?  What if, further, we were to take the position that being a military aggressor is something that we have historically done only based on the perception that our actions were actually and deeply self-protective, but that we were sometimes wrong about this?  Would it follow that we would build a military that was truly capable of being only defensive?  What would be the consequences of these two actions? 

Strategically, it would be stupid to unilaterally and immediately announce a position that we would, under no conditions, use nuclear weapons.  But what if we were to announce this as a goal and work vigilantly towards it?  What if we were to work vigilantly towards a goal of disarming ourselves – and all other nations?  What if we were to use our Aircraft carriers as ambassadors of peace (as we do) using them (solely) as mobile disaster relief centers?  What if we made it clear to all that the best way to assure our own safety was to assure everyone’s safety?

OK, I know that almost everyone who reads this will dismiss it as granola head garbage.  The reluctant wife told me that if we actually did this, six months later I, myself, would be railing against it.  There would be a LOT of details to work out.  My guess is that our friends the Quakers and Pope Francis could help us think this through, but we should also turn to tough  minded people like Dwight Eisenhower who did not trust the military-industrial complex.  We need to figure out how to protect us, the people of world, from harming ourselves.

After writing this, I sent this as an email to the reluctant mother.  She let me know of an organization, the Simons Foundation, that is working towards nuclear disarmament.  Full disclosure: it was actually founded by a distant relative of mine.  If you are concerned, as I am, you might want to check out the link to their site.  I am also far from the first to wonder about Trump and his terroristic leanings.  See this post of concern from a christian perspective.

Post Script: Having written about Trump as a terrorist, I am beginning to wonder about the advantages of having a terrorist as president during an era of terrorism.  I think that one of the luxuries of being a terrorist is that you don't have a state to defend.  You can attack without fear of reprisal - or with certainty of being welcomed into a post death hall of fame.  I think that Trump's lack of attachment to his ideas - to people (Stephen Bannon is, at least as of this writing (4/18/17) on the outside looking in) - and I think to the United States in some very real sense (Trump's own business strategies - make a buck wherever a buck can be made - belie his pretending to be invested in the American worker or in a vision of making America Great), allow him to be nimble in ways that his predecessor certainly wasn't.

There was an article in the Sunday New York Times  where the authors of House of Cards, Veep, Madam Secretary, and Scandal to discuss writing "reality" politics show in the age of Trump.  This is challenging.  Many years ago, I quickly tired of watching the show "Thirty Something".  As I told my friends, "Why watch what I am living?"  The authors have all, each in their own way, made politics absurd.  So it becomes challenging when the real politics are more absurd than what they can cook up.  Their conclusion?  The most improbable and therefore best plot line would be for Trump to become a great president.  (Will Frank Underwood become a popular president who is actually good for the country?  You heard it here first....)

Trump the disrupter, by being a terrorist at the helm of the most powerful first world country in the would could, improbably, rewrite what it means to be a diplomat.  Of course he will be doing this without a diplomatic corps - without a team - he is a one man band who does not want to be constrained by conducting the other players.  I don't think the model is sustainable, but it might wake the world up to, among other things, just how crazy it is that we have nuclear weapons lying around ready to be used by the likes of  Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump.

Post Post Script:  I wrote the above before Kim Jong-un and Trump faced off.  The opportunity there is that Trump, unlike most past President's, does not seem greatly attached to the welfare of people in general, but rather to this in his immediate family - and he pledges loyalty to those he calls his base - though his actions don't seem to have that base's interest in mind.  In any case, I don't think that Trump feels much connection with the people, for instance, of South Korea or Japan.  This is both an asset and a liability in negotiating with another terrorist - a dictator.  Trump (as I have constructed him in this paragraph), like the other dictator, is not hamstrung by concern about damage that might be wreaked by, for instance, a nuclear face off.  He might even be less hamstrung by it, for a change - so the possibility of blackmail diminishes.  Of course, the danger is that the other negotiator might feel that his power is being unacknowledged and might do more than simply fire missiles - he might cause real damage to show his intent.  This way true madness lies....

Post Post Post Script (8/15/2019):  I think I keep returning to this post and adding to it as a way to prevent my blog from being clogged by thoughts about Donald - the way everything else seems to b these days.  I think the seminal idea for it is a good one, though, and I would like to return to it and state it more clearly.  Donald Trump was never a politician.  In fact he despised them.  By being elected, he inherited a political machine - a party - with all the power that goes with that, but without a sense of responsibility - and with disdain for the idea of government and governing.  He has used the power of the office and the power of de facto party chief to cow the party into doing his bidding - because congressman are more concerned with keeping their jobs than with doing the jobs they were hired to do.  Now to a certain extent this is defensible.  If they don't toe the line, Trump will support someone who will either a) serve as a complete henchman in undermining the system or b) not get elected in the general election after winning the primary, undermining the power of the party.  So one could provide a rationale that waiting him out - and being there to resurrect the party when he falls apart, is in everyone's best interest.  But the central issue is that we have someone in the white house whose avowed mission is to destroy the process of governing.  This is an inside job revolution that we are watching unfold before our very eyes and we appear to be powerless to stop it.  It, like 9/11, is, when viewed with enough emotional distance (very hard to find in the era of Trump), brilliant.  We have had a bloodless coup and the head of our country is a potentate who has seized power without firing a shot.  

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A Man Called Ove – Cartoons capture something very real about being human.

This book is a cartoon.  It is a very good cartoon, but a cartoon nonetheless.  It is not literally a cartoon - it is a novel.  It tells an emotionally evocative tale about a loveable 58 year old Swedish curmudgeon, filling in his back story at the same time that it moves him forward into a brave new world that he has no interest in entering.  After the death of his wife and the loss of his job – the two things that gave meaning to his life, he would just as soon end his life.  Ove is not given to thinking deeply (and he hardly talks at all – he is taciturn) – but he longs to reunite with his wife and the plot follows him as he botches one suicide attempt after another after another – something that seems highly improbable given this man’s extreme competence in the world of things.

I found myself envying Ove as I was reading about him.  He is a character – and I have often wished that I were a character – life would be much easier if that were the case.  Characters (and here I guess I really mean curmudgeonly characters) don’t have to think about other's feelings – they don’t have to weigh and sift and measure – they are action prone, judgmental and decisive.  I remember one of the stated goals of a very early treatment that I was in – group therapy in high school – was to reduce manipulative behavior.  A curmudgeon wouldn’t need this type of treatment – he just says what he thinks and acts in order to get what he wants.  They might need to learn a little bit of social manipulation – and social nicety.  Charm school might be more important than group therapy for Ove.

I was envious, though, on another level.  Ove ends up becoming a kind of unwitting Pied Piper, drafting various people in his wake, including the local newspaper reporter.  He is both a minor hero and a minor celebrity – neither of which he has any interest in being.  I, on the other hand, would love to have little children light up around me, found a gang, and be written up in the paper for being a hero.  I am able to live vicariously through the parts of Ove’s life that he would just as soon do without.  Ove and I seem to be made of very different stuff.

I cared about Ove in another way.  As we learn his back story, Ove has pluck.  He lost his mother at a very early age and then his father died before he finished school.  Ove took over his father’s job at the railroad, and learned how to fix the dilapidated house his parents left him by working evenings in construction where the workers, after telling him what a dummy he was, would teach him how to do carpentry, wiring and plumbing.  Meanwhile he built his muscles and became more and more taciturn, especially after he was swindled out of insurance money and the white shirts prevented him from fighting the fire that consumed his house after he saved the grandchild next door.  The white shirts wanted to condemn his property to build a suburb and the fire was convenient for them.

Despite all the hardship, Ove maintained a desire to live – indeed to live right.  His father taught him basic morals and, despite the corruption around him, Ove stayed true to them.  Ove’s courtship of his wife is a truly lovely thing.  He becomes a puppy dog following a beautiful and well-read woman who had a father much like him – she could appreciate his silence and devotion and he became a willing and appreciative audience for her.  She directed the relationship – and him.  His relationship with her gave his life meaning, but more importantly joy.  And he made the mechanical aspects of her life easy in return.  She, for her part, loved him, but was puzzled by him and his taciturn ways.

Ove’s primary male relationship is with the neighbor- another curmudgeon who, instead of driving a Saab, drives a Volvo, and then goes and buys a BMW.  Well, there can be no reasoning with a man like that.  Or so we think at first.  The relationship – its ups downs – gets fleshed out in the back story that is told in chapters that alternate with what is currently occurring.  As is gets fleshed out, it becomes somewhat more real – but these characters never become three dimensional.  I think what Backman, the author of the book, is attempting to do is to have the characters come alive inside the person reading the book.  We are intended to feel what Ove can’t or won’t feel.  We do Ove’s emotional work for him – as his wife likely did when he was alive – imagining his inner states even when he can’t quite do that himself.

This occurs in my treatment of men with some regularity.  I experience them as closed – unavailable.  I may have trouble following what they are saying in sessions – and may find myself getting sleepy as I listen to them.  Then, if the treatment goes well, I begin to wake up.  I find things of interest in their inner worlds.  They begin to relate emotionally lively material.  The task of the treatment – and perhaps the task that Ove accomplishes in this book – is to be able to own the feelings that are warded off – for the patient to begin to feel the excitement that I am feeling – for them to begin to care about themselves as a person – to believe that they have a subjectivity – an inner life – that is of interest to them – and potentially to others.  They may also become interested in the inner lives of those around them.  This awakening is more than just a return to a former way of functioning, it is frequently a discovery of a whole new way of being. 

Ove gets dragged kicking and screaming into a new world by his neighbors – and primarily by the neighbor across the street – a woman from Iran named Parvenah.  She cajoles and demands and goes toe to toe with him  Meanwhile, he also connects up with a stray cat, a couple of stray boys – including one who is bent (presumably a British euphemism for gay – having this book translated by a Brit gives it an odd foreign feel – it should feel foreign – it is about Sweden – but it shouldn’t feel British) and the aforementioned newspaper reporter.  They stand with Ove as he fights various forms of despotism in the form of various men in white shirts, a bit of bad luck, and truckers who are covered in tattoos.

This cartoon is well constructed.  I found myself laughing and crying and rooting Ove on – all the while feeling manipulated myself.  Backman wanted me to feel these things.  He was putting them in me.  He was almost as cold and calculating as Stephen Spielberg was when he created E.T.  And yet I was willing to have him do this – and actually think that this was an organic experience.  Because, as I alluded to earlier, I don’t think that people like Ove actually can tolerate the feelings that are stirred in them.  They end up stirring feelings in the people around them – because, and this is a weird truism from I know not where – feelings need to be felt in order to be real.  And if our feelings aren’t real, then we aren’t either.  So we act on the world in such a way that it (actually the people in it) feel our feelings if we ourselves are unable to stand that.  And when we do that, we come to life.

If we are lucky, we find someone like Parvenah who isn’t cowed by our feelings and doesn’t walk around on eggshells around us, but metabolizes our feelings and then returns them to us in a form that we can tolerate.  As we hear about our own feelings from this other. we begin feeling the feelings are not quite as nasty as we imagine them (and as she experiences them) and this allows us to imagine that we might not be quite as toxic as we have presumed ourselves to be – and as others may have experienced us as being. 

As a therapist, what I like about working with people like Ove is that they don’t realize that they are sending these feelings out into the world – and would be both astonished and embarrassed if they realized that they were.  Their intent is to be autonomous.  The suicide attempts demonstrate this – as carefully scripted as he could make each one, with plastic laid about to prevent a mess and instructions for what to with everything left behind make them seem like they are to have as little impact on others as possible.  But the intent of them – to reunite Ove with his beloved wife – betrays the underlying wish to impact – and connect with – the world.  The autonomy of these guys looks like it is how they are made – but they, in fact, are made of the same stuff that we all are – and, in spite of themselves, they actually want desperately to be connected.  When Ove figures out how to connect with Parvenah’s kids, not just by being pestered by them, but by actually sharing interests with them, we see the beginnings of the feeling states that will make life rich for Ove and we are very pleased for him.

And this is what transforms guys like this.  And it is just fine that he is presented as a cartoon.  In fact, that is in some ways useful.  Were he painted more particularly, we might diagnose him as having an obsessional style – or being Aspergery, or as a schizoid type.  Or we might even call him bipolar with angry affect.  The point is that he is all and none of those things.  What he needs, regardless of how we “diagnose” him, is to connect with the world around him.  As malformed as he has been by fortune and DNA, the treatment he needs is organic - to heal the internal rifts that have been formed so that he can be comfortable with himself - and with others.  Fortunately, he finds a group of people who like him and who he can take a liking to.  He becomes humanized by those around him.  He could also go into a therapist’s office – and you’d be surprised how many guys do.  They realize they aren’t happy and they’d like to know how to get there.  Frequently, at least in my experience, they do become happy not because they are cured of Asperger’s, or schizoid personality, or obsessive personality disorder – they are still very much themselves – but they become able to use themselves to better connect with those around them, as Ove does.

This cartoon, like Charlie Brown, or your favorite cartoon, tells us something very important – and very endearing – about ourselves and the people in our world.  It also translates well to the screen.  The reluctant wife and I watched the Swedish version with subtitles last night.  The movie is quite faithful to the book, though many details don’t make it in.  And the actor (Rolf Lassgård) brings a pathos to the part that is lovely.  I was unprepared for how the violence in the book, which seems muted as I read it, became quite shocking in the film – especially given that this is a nice quiet little story about a Swedish man and his wife living in a quiet middle class suburb.

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Arrival: Contact with aliens is a good thing

The movie Arrival is one that I have wanted to see for some time.  OK, its just seemed like forever.  The family has not been as excited about seeing it, and the reluctant wife took pity on me on Friday and went with me to see it (she liked it - a lot).  The most enthusiastic encouragement came from a colleague who suggested that it was a "new kind of movie."  Somewhat skeptical, I was also intrigued.  It was in the water that it was about contact with aliens - and the aliens turned out to be benign - and that it required a woman to figure this out - and to embrace them.  This led me to believe that it was a Kumbaya movie which, while I felt it might be timely to our installation of Trump as an isolationist president, and that it might serve as a hopeful alternative view of how to react to aliens - be they Mexican, Muslim or extraterrestrial, might be too simplistic to be a persuasive alternative vision.  

My advance intel was fine as far as it went, and, thankfully, it spared me from the disorienting/orienting plot twist that I will try to spare you as well.  This film stands as a powerful rebuke to the notion of isolationism, but it is far from a simple feel good film.  The engagement that it endorses is complex and will lead to deep and powerful shifts in the functioning of the protagonists, and to the viewers, if they take the underlying messages to heart.  It is a complex film - more complex than it appears at first.  I left the theater feeling disappointed by the movie - that it hadn't lived up to my colleague‘s hype.  As I have chewed on it, though, I think it has more heft and many more layers to it, though it was a plenty satisfying movie to begin with. 

This movie, as you will know from the trailers, is about a linguist.  And she is called upon – the trailers make her seem more passive than the movie portrays her – she steps forward – to engage in a novel process – to learn the language of and to teach our language to – extraterrestrials.  This seems like it should be pretty straightforward.  When I was a kid and lived in West Palm Beach, Cubans who had escaped Castro came to our school and I was tasked with teaching one of them English.  I didn’t go to some class (English maybe?) and instead hung out with him in the courtyard and pointed at things and tried to get him to learn the English names of them and to elicit from him their Spanish names.  What I didn’t know at the time was that his parents had told him NOT to learn English as they were Cuban and Spanish was their language.  Even if he had been willing, it would have been tough.  The extraterrestrials seemed willing enough – and competent enough to bring 12 ships to earth and have them perched at various places and to engage with the people at each of these 12 places who then would intermittently connect with each other as they tried to figure out what this contact was all about.

I’m not sure, but it seems to me that the aliens, like the Cuban refugees, might have been playing dumb.  They were competent enough to bring 12 huge ships to earth from someplace quite distant and to have them hover in pre-selected places.  The cover story is that they have to find shared referents and need a chalkboard to do this, but how hard can it be to share data?  As one aside pointed out - the Fibonacci sequence is seen as being universal.  Let's start with numbers - or pictures of stuff just outside the ship.  

I think that, in so far as they were playing dumb, they might have been doing this to buy time - because their wish is for us to really learn their language, not some pidgin version of it, and it requires immersion in their language in order for the communication between earthlings to take place - communication that is essential to our working together.  And we need to actively do this work - it is not something that can be done for us.  So, the movie makers created a great deal of suspense around the efforts of the terrestrial central pair, the linguist Louise Banks (Amy Renner) and the physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) who work diligently to teach and learn the foreign language to the central alien pair whom they nickname Abbott and Costello.  Part of the apparent problem is that they don’t know what shared referents they have.  In fact, as it turns out, this foreign language is not just a new set of words, but requires – or enforces – a new way of thinking in order to become fluent in it.

I have often thought of psychoanalytic training as learning a language.  Psychologists generally, and psychoanalysts in particular, share a vocabulary – a jargon.  That jargon is something that we try to avoid using in describing our patients in, for instance, test reports.  I teach my students to write in Plain English.  That is all well and good, but it means that we are in the position of translating not just jargon (which we need to do anyway, since people use the jargon in confusing and idiosyncratically defined ways) but a way of thinking into plain English.  Because, you see, psychologists, but especially psychoanalysts think differently about the human condition than run of the mill mortals do.

As Louise and Ian learn the language, as they immerse themselves in it, it begins to alter them.  Ian asks Louise if she has started to dream in the alien language.  Louise hesitates to acknowledge that she has done that, but as she does, we see that she has a waking dream – an hallucination – where Ian looks like the aliens and sounds like them.  She has gone native; or, more precisely, alien. As the movie progresses, it becomes clear that the aliens have brought many "gifts", but the primary one is their language.  Interestingly, then, the consensual translation at multiple sites of this is "weapon".  Language, in so far as it structures our thinking, is integral to who it is that we are.  Learning a new language has the potential to destroy us - to invade us - to create an alternate version of us - we know that we have been caught in the cross hairs of the weapon when we begin to dream in the new language - we have become someone different from who it is that we once were.

The structure of the alien language in the film is different because it bears a very different relationship to time – using this language leads us to see our way into how it is that things in the future will come to pass.  The movie takes a literal interpretation of this.  But I think it is worth thinking about this as a metaphor.  I think all language allows us to see our way into the future because it allows us to articulate what it is that we are imagining and it facilitates that imagistic process as well.

Psychoanalysts view time differently than others do.  They see the past as present and assume that what was done then is informing and shaping what is done now so that what we do now is necessarily shaping what will come.  Altering the ways in which we function by default – the thoughts and behaviors that are a product of reacting to what he have done and what has been done to us – occurs over time and through effort to create new ways of being with another person – that person, the analyst, then becomes a new touchstone – a new cornerstone on which to construct a way of functioning and a new way to create the future.

Psychoanalysts and their patients create new languages.  They have names for concepts – and for things that have occurred – that are idiosyncratic to the pair. This works its way into the functioning of the analytic pair – they dream and think about each other as they learn this new language that is dominated by the patient’s native tongue, but is certainly influenced by the language and person of the analyst.  As they learn this new language, new ways of thinking about the future open up.  What had been a relatively static expectation of the future becomes fluid and filled with options that weren’t previously imaginable.

Outside of analysis, we worry about the minds of millennials.  They are being programmed by the devices that they are using.  The static baseball cards of my childhood have been replaced by MLB games in which the batting average of every player on every team is available and referenced every time that you, playing a pitcher whose stats you also know, face them.  This will, as the movie points out, irrevocably reprogram the mind – not just with content, but with how that content is accessed – externally in terms of the devices, but internally – how do we have a mind that can hold that much data?  We need new ways to think.  A classroom is suddenly a very dull place to gather data.  But isn’t it a great place to integrate it?  Well, maybe, but it requires a different way of interacting –not with a device, nor even just with a human, but with a whole group of them.  This can be scary for those who are used to using devices to communicate.  So we have to teach old skills in new worlds.

The film is filled with tension precisely because the future is unknown.  Somehow seeing one’s way into the future does not mean that the future is inevitable.  In fact, in a climactic moment, it is essential that something in the future occur in a particular way in order that something in the present can happen in a way that we certainly want it to.  And the decision to live one’s life in a way that will allow what has occurred to occur is still an open one.  The tension between a future focused language and a world which is not determined is not worked out in detail in the film other than through the realization that people may – or may not – choose to follow through on the paths that are open to them - and knowing a particular path that is open to us - not as a fantasied future in which everything is perfect, but as an actual, lived experience with all of the heartache that every such experience includes, means choosing to live with the good, but also the bad and the ugly. 

What determines what will happen, then?  Ultimately it is the character of the people who are making the decisions.  And the film’s greatest commentary on current events – and our President who would be an isolationist – is not that the aliens need us all to work together so they give each of us a piece of the puzzle – though that is surely applicable – but that our stereotypes and prejudices are played on.  We think we know who the bad guys are and why – and when we actually meet them, they turn out to be very different than what we believed would be the case based on their portrayal by the media.  Actually living life, actually engaging with others, leads us not to reduce them to a stereotype, but to appreciate just how complex and rich they are.  (Could it be that Donald Trump is more than just a flagrant narcissist?)

The reluctant wife recently read a book about the Supreme Court – The Nine - and one of the central theses of the book is that there is a correlation between the justices who have become more liberal during their time on the bench and the amount of travel, especially international travel, that they do.  It seems that actually having contact with people from other cultures leads us to have more faith in humanity.  When we don’t have that contact, we fear strangers.  We let our prejudices, and our frequently unearned faith in the tribe, trump our need to connect and be interdependent.

This movie is ultimately a film that teaches us to embrace rather than fear life: to live fully despite or maybe even because of the fact that we will die.  Its final message is that living life – being alive – not some weird final destination – is what we are here for.  If there is an aim, it is to support others having a chance at this incredible thing.  And this message – this very Buddhist or alien message – is one that frequently comes to us from a source like science fiction – a source that is disorienting – where things are – as this film portrays – literally upside down but, despite that, the film has the gravity to make the case that we should engage in life, one moment at a time, appreciating it for what it is, while preparing for what is to come.

The reluctant son was born in 1999.  This is no accident.  In the seventies, I read a book, The Limits to Growth, that predicted the world would end in 2000.  We would be suffocated by smog or run out of coal and gas or we would be inundated by Uranium poisoning - all of their models led to the prediction of doom and gloom.  This movie would, I think, have encouraged me to go ahead and have a kid, even if the future was dark.  I doubt that it would have convinced me.  But I appreciate the film makers making the effort.  Simultaneously, the film supports the idea that we have to work to make the world a place that our children will want to live in.  There is both a commitment to creating the best world possible and an acknowledgement of the limits of that world - even with clear sight, we cannot avoid what may - and in the case of death - must - befall us.


Post Script:  It is now some time later and the DVD has come out.  It, apparently like the first release of the film, does not include 8 minutes of footage that are critical to some of the observations I have made above - particularly about the openness of the future.  The film as first released and currently available on the DVD that we saw makes it look like the future is inevitable - and the alien language simply articulates what will necessarily occur.  I like the longer version better - it is much more subtle and, I think, true to life.  When we see how the gears mesh - when we recognize how our lives have been determined by the forces that have guided them, we have some degree of freedom to rethink our future path.  This freedom is likely quite limited - we are more like ourselves than not, even after engaging in something as arduous as an analysis - but we have a skosh more freedom.  The movie is suggesting that, even knowing what we are walking into it, we can still embrace it.  This is a powerfully optimistic message.

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