Anything is Possible – A blessing or a curse?

Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, Anything is Possible, seems to me to be her bleakest offering yet.  I have written about her Pulitzer Prize winning Olive Kitteridge, which I used to teach personality theory, and this book is structured like that one – every story has some tie – usually many of them – to a single character, but in Anything is Possible, Lucy Barton, about whom Strout has previously written a novel, does not shows up in every stand-alone chapter if only to breeze through as Olive did – in fact she only appears in person in one of them.  There are ties to her – and all of the other characters - in every chapter, though.  Sometimes the ties are are obscure and it is only when the chapter is almost over that we realize, “Oh, that’s the same Charlie who she talked about in the last chapter,” and sometimes we don’t even realize that the selfsame people are being referenced.  Some of the interconnections are so obscure that we are only likely to catch them on a second reading.

So the ghost who is at the center of this book and ties all of the short stories together is a novelist who grew up in the most psychologically and economically poor family in a small psychologically and economically impoverished farming community in Illinois.  She became an unbelievable success and now appears on talk shows and regularly churns out best sellers.  So, we have our first experience of “anything is possible”.  But I‘d like to start at the end of the book, where the phrase is actually used for the only time, to explore the phrase’s underside, which this books seems to explore over and over and over in a variety of ways and with subtle gradations, but with a consistent, haunting theme of decay and demise that belies its surface message of hope.

In the final chapter, one of the truly successful “graduates” of the next small town over, who is one of Lucy Barton’s cousins and used to eat garbage with her out of the dumpster when he would visit in the summer, is now living a comfortable life in suburban Chicago.  Abel Blaine is prosperous, running the heating and air conditioning company that he inherited from his father in law.  He is now a grandfather who has had a heart attack, and he is watching an annual production of A Christmas Carol that he has seen many times before with his family.  Scrooge is played by a bad actor who has been panned in the suburban news that morning and there is a power outage in the middle of the play.  Abel is hungry – he missed dinner because he was late from the office and when he gets home from the theater he wants to spend time with his granddaughter rather than eat, but then he discovers that his granddaughter has left her plastic pony at the theater.  He returns to the theater where the actor playing Scrooge is alone there, lets him in, and then corners him in a locked room, taunting him and decrying his own failures and acknowledging the he, Scrooge, turned off the power remotely in the middle of the performance to introduce chaos into the room.  Lucy’s cousin (and we) sees that Scrooge is unhinged just before Abel has another heart attack, which motivates Scrooge to call 911.  As the cousin is being carried away by the medics, he is struck that the interaction with the Scrooge character was a genuine interaction – and he imagines that, because of this genuineness, they are friends.  The novel then ends ambiguously, suggesting that he feels anything is possible – perhaps meaning that he can die and be free of life’s encumbrances or that he can live and look this man up and begin a relationship with him.

This book continues, in the wake of Lucy Barton, to be a meditation on the need for a writer, but more importantly a person, to be honest true and genuine and the complicated consequences of doing that.  Lucy Barton, the author in the book – and some kind of alter ego of Elizabeth Strout, the author of the book – continues to exhort people who watch her on TV to write truthful sentences.  This is, I think, a moral directive that was given to Lucy Barton by one of her revered writers when they had a chance meeting in a bookstore.  And the truth is that anything is possible – you can eat out of a dumpster when you are a kid (as Lucy and Abel did together), become fat and happy as an adult (as Abel has done – Lucy is lean and not happy but she is also successful), but also that you could then die hungry and lonely in a strange theater where you finally feel connected to someone – someone who appears to be unhinged.  And this comes in the wake of feeling, early in the conversation, that you are just saying the lines – as you felt the actors were doing in the play.  Then you begin to speak honestly – and so does Scrooge – and you are now in your own little Christmas Carol – seeing the past, the present, and, perhaps, the future. 

So, yes, anything is possible, but would you want the eventualities this would bring?  Those who postulate the existence of infinite universes caution that there is then, an infinite number of ways in which misery can be expressed.  But I think that Strout is proposing that to be the case within this one universe of ours, with its infinite possibilities, but also realities – realities that are harsh and lonely.  And, I think, she is proposing that the hope – and I think this is a very American Dream hope – that anything is possible – is a cruel hope – one that keeps us hanging in there, hoping against hope that the next relationship, the next job, the next moment, will bring happiness.   That hope is never quite realized, but we manage to squeeze enough juice out of it to keep us going – we realize that we don’t need happiness, perhaps all we need is hope, but that means that to honestly and directly articulate our experience as it actually is will deplete us of that hope and leave us withered and alone, as impoverished as Lucy Barton ever was in the worst moments of her childhood.

This feels to me to be an awful and cruel vision, but also, on some level, a true one.  We build dams against time, we accomplish a great deal, but in the end, we have also built dams between ourselves, we are isolated and alone, and what we cherish – what we hunger and yearn for, is not what we have invested ourselves in pursuing.  We have been distracted by shiny objects, we have worked to protect ourselves when protection wasn’t needed, and we have thus alienated those we love. 

As I have posted on Elizabeth’s books twice before, and the last time I did, a friend sent me an interview with Strout about her writing process.  Strout does not map out a book ahead of time.  She writes bits of it as they come to her, in longhand on pieces of paper and she arranges the pieces until the book has formed itself.  She writes from within her characters and allows herself to be distracted, when writing Lucy Barton, for instance, by Lucy’s acquaintances, and to write about them when they come to her, and by the time she has finished the one book, the other is almost written as well.  In that process, I think that Strout is searching for truthful sentences.  And she uses these as building blocks to write truthful stories. 

I think that we can sometimes write stories – and deceive ourselves in the process.  They have happy endings.  Don’t get me wrong.  Happy endings are a good and maybe even necessary thing.  In my profession, Dr. Karl Menninger exhorted us never to underestimate hope – the kind of hope that the phrase “anything is possible” engenders.  But I think we also have to be truthful.  I think that sometimes in these posts and sometimes in my work with my students, my patients and in my role as a parent and a spouse, I am less than truthful.  I want to believe that anything is possible.  And I think that Strout is pointing out the essential role that hope plays – but also that it can veil the truth of the thinness of the life we are living from us.  We can live for tomorrow – for the American Dream to play out – but in order to do that, as a recent spoken word artist pointed out in her performance – we have to be asleep.  And sleep walking through life creates holes where filled spots should be. 

In another part of the interview,  Strout maintains that this book is partly about the people who stay.  Most of them are women are she is writing about a time when women had to stay – when it was harder for them to leave.  And I think she may be talking about the things that help them stay – the ways in which they promise themselves that things will get better.  But she gets that this is not just the phenomenon of the woman – Abel has been making himself stay at his job and with his wife – though he does get moments of pure pleasure with his granddaughter – when he is doing what he wants – when he is feeding himself what he is truly hungry for.  But these moments are few and far between.  Because they are possible, we hang in there.  And even in our dying moments we hope for more of them and they end up being enough to sustain us – but, truth be told, there are times when that is all they do, sustain us – they keep us hanging on until we can find the next moment that will provide some sustenance – never enough to fully satisfy, but enough to keep us alive.

  

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

I have previously posted about Strout's other books My Name is Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge.

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Get Out! Fear and Horror

Fear:  this is the predominant subjective experience of African Americans as related by DorothyHolmes, an African American Psychoanalyst, in her Plenary Address to theAmerican Psychoanalytic Association. 

Horror: what better means of conveying fear to an audience within a movie setting?  The master of horror – before it became a cheap thrill industry – was Hitchcock, and it was Hitchcock’s conscious intent to induce in the audience the fear he felt as a five year old child when he was taken to be locked in the local constable’s jail cell for an overnight stay after some infraction that he had committed at home.  Apparently his father was friends with the constable and thought this would teach young Alfred a lesson – boy did it ever (btw, there are various versions of this tale, I don’t know which is true – I offer this one less as a historical note than to illustrate that movies can be used to communicate emotions – and fear is one that Hitchcock traded in – apparently from some early trauma which induced fear in him).

Jordan Peele is the director of Get Out.  I know his work primarily from the Key and Peele show, which I generally am seeing streaming on the T.V. when the oldest reluctant stepdaughter is watching it.  The show is witty and sometimes downright funny, but it can also seem loose and it occasionally beats a joke to death (I’m thinking of the sketch about weird names associated with African American football players).  He is the more rotund of the pair...

This movie is not loose.  It is incredibly tight, well-acted, and the plot is so well crafted that the ending is a delightful blind side – this movie is Hitchcockian in both the intense suspense, but also in the production value.  So, if you haven’t seen it and intend to, stop now before I ruin your experience and come back and read this once you’ve seen it.  I will let you know that it is a bit gory in the more modern horror tradition, but not over the top gory – in fact, the reluctant wife who saw it with me and is more uncomfortable with violence onscreen than I currently am, found the gore to be almost cathartic.  That said, there are some surgical moments that she and I had to look away from (and now I am coming close to the spoiler time, so if there is a chance you will see it and haven’t, really do stop reading).

Before the opening credits, we are treated to a violent kidnapping – one that takes place not in the inner city, but in the suburbs, and the violence is done by a helmeted – though it could be a KKK hatted – white against an African American male who is freaked out by being in the suburbs - and knows that he is vulnerable there.  Without explanation, we transition after the credits to a wonderfully warm interaction between a black man, Chris (played by Daniel Kaluuya) whose photographs adorn the walls in his hip apartment and his white girlfriend Rose (played warmly, authentically and then chillingly by Allison Williams) as they prepare to go to her home in the country to meet the parents – who have not been told that the boyfriend is black.  This is the first warning signal to Chris – and to us – that something might be amiss.  Rose reassures Chris that her parents are liberal – her father will tell him that he would have voted for Obama a third time – but Chris – and we – are uneasy.  This is her first black boyfriend she is bringing home and we know that will be an issue.  Perhaps even more so for a family that denies their own racism.

Chris and Rose meet the Parents

After killing a deer with their car on the way up – which we just know is foretelling what is to come – Chris enters Rose’s parent’s home like a deer in the headlights.  After being treated to a tour of the house by Rose’s father (played in as straightforward and comfortable a fashion as I have seen Bradley Whitford play a role), where Chris learns that Rose’s paternal grandfather lost his chance to race in front of Hitler because he was beaten by the great black track star Jesse Owens – and that “he almost got over it”, and seeing the kitchen “where a slice of Rose’s paternal grandmother” remains – in the form of the black maid who cared for her when she died, and the black gardener who cared for the grandfather is also still working on what is beginning to feel like a plantation – we get more worried.  And it all seems a little too weird that Chris and Rose are to bunk together in Rose’s room – there’s an “it’s cool” vibe that feels forced.  Yes, she is an adult.  Yes adults can choose who will sleep in their rooms.  But she is going home to her parents and they, who don’t even know how long the couple has been dating, are fine with them sleeping together?  Oh, and there’s the reunion party this weekend that Rose didn’t know about – like she should have figured it out and of course the parents didn’t need to mention it when she talked about coming up.  Huh?

Creepy...

But the part that is the spookiest and that clues us in (as if we didn’t know from the advertising) that this is a horror movie, is the behavior of the black servants.  They looked hypnotized or drugged or something – and they don’t act black. Or maybe they are acting old time black – where they are subservient in an obsequious manner – but they don’t drop this when they talk with Chris – another African American… They are odd.  And oddness is the hallmark of horror.  Something isn’t right – and over time we discover what that is.  In the worst horror movies – and I have been treated to Texas Chainsaw Massacre – what is not right is so over the top that the movie falls apart and you can laugh at it – or so my friend claimed who promised to meet us at the Chainsaw Massacre film to laugh at it – as if it were a comedy (and then my friends never showed - the joke was on us, I guess).  But generally, at least for me, by the time the thing falls apart I am so horrified, grossed out, and nauseous that I don’t gain any pleasure from how thin the premise is that is holding the movie together.  So I expected that the secret behind the odd behavior of the blacks would be the unravelling of the movie.

The comic relief centered around one explanation of the black servants.  Chris’s friend Rod (played by Lil Rel Howery), whom Chris calls to talk about this creepy place he is staying, keeps howling that they are using the blacks as “sex slaves” which makes sense because Rod is hearing the description in phone calls from Chris, but if he were actually seeing these spaced out creatures, he would never imagine that – these are the least sexual beings you could imagine.  They are all but dead.  But they are creepy.

So things just get more bizarre when Chris gets up in the night to go outside to smoke a cigarette and the groundskeeper comes running at him at a million miles an hour and the maid looks at him sidelong out the window and then he is hypnotized by Rose’s mother (played by Catherine Keener) who is a psychiatrist.  He has a deeply disturbing experience in which he remembers his mother’s death and then feels himself falling into despair – and he is suspended in space – unable to return to the room – but then awakens in bed and it all feels like a bad dream, except that he has no desire to smoke – one of the promised benefits of the hypnotism that he had, the day before, refused when it had been offered.  Chris now, as Rose’s father promised he would after hypnotism, wants to vomit just at the thought of smoking.

The reunion party turns out to be an odd collection of people who interact with Chris around his blackness – in ways that are incredibly creepy.  He meets another weird black guy – one who is so not black that he returns a fist bump with a handshake.  When Chris takes a flash picture of the man, he becomes black and tells Chris in genuine terror to “Get Out” (he is, btw, the person who was abducted in the opening scene, so we are now beginning to put pieces together).  After the black man is calmed down – returned to being not black - Chris and Rose go to have some alone time while the adults play Bingo, which is, in reality, an auction and we just know that they are bidding on Chris.

And this is one of those places where a horror movie should break down.  Who would collude to get together and auction a person?  Civilized people would not do this, right?  But of course they have.  The myth of the old south, promulgated by films such as Gone with the Wind, is that there was never a higher nor more honorable society than that one.  And one of its bases was, of course, the buying and selling of slaves.  This horrific movie, which is going to tell us about a fictional and unsupportable reality, is actually based on an ugly truth that we can’t erase.  This film, when it should begin to fray, becomes tighter.  We are now locked into something that is both unbelievable and undeniably true.  How can this be?

So, the next step – the horrendous moment when this becomes Frankensteinian and we should scoff at it, becomes oddly chilling.  And the gore that accompanies it – the gore of the surgery that will allow the highest bidder to occupy the majority of Chris’s cranium and keep just enough of him (a sliver) around to run the arms and legs and work the sensory apparatus becomes difficult to watch – as I mentioned before, we turned away – and this helps this most difficult part of the film seem oddly plausible – even though the notion of a surgery this complex taking place in a basement with only one assistant who is unreliable is incredibly ridiculous.  We are turning away not just from the surgery but from the unreality of what is happening onscreen.

And the other gore that occurs – the vengeance of the black man done wrong – of Chris who uses the cotton that his ancestors picked to stop his ears and prevent the continuing hypnotism that is leading relentlessly to his psychological death – is welcomed, even by those of us who are averse to violence.  We do not look away but take some joy in the retribution.  This is violence in the name of good over evil – until we see the cops come and just know that Chris is going to be blamed for all of this and go to jail for ever, especially when Rose finally quits being the cold trawler for black booty that she was all along and goes back into an act, this time pleading with what we know will be a white officer to save her from this brutal beast of a black man – and we are suddenly terrified not by the family nor by Chris and his violence – but for Chris.  We know that he will be done wrong by the system – by the man – and there is nothing that will save him.  At this moment – and it only lasts a moment – the filmmaker has, I believe, achieved his goal.  We have an empathic moment with the black man whose life is in peril not because of what he has done, but because of what he has been pulled into.  And we somehow know what it means to be scared because of who we are – not because of what we have done.

Jordan Peele releases this tension quickly – he does not hold us in it – but let’s us return to a reality where good people don’t have bad things happen to them.  He has terrified us enough in the film and with this moment.  We are like the black men who have been awakened by the flash only to return to being docile – because if we aren’t docile the whole of civilization will come tumbling down.  We need to go back to being in denial and we need to have a happy (ish) ending.

Fortunately this movie is not yet over for us.  Yes the credits roll and we leave the theater or turn off the T.V., but we stew about it.  And we put pieces together as we reconstruct it from the vantage point of knowing what was really going on.  So when Chris describes his parents by saying that his father was never in the picture and that his mother died when he was 11, I realize that I was played for a mark.  My prejudiced thought – something like this is a typical back story for an African American male – hides that this is the intent of Rose – to find someone with no family ties because they will be vulnerable to the kidnapping and destruction.  But then, to fold it back out, my prejudice is based in part on fact – the fracturing of the African American family has – what? – made African American men terribly vulnerable to, for instance, being jailed and losing the better parts of their productive lives.

This film is a deep and disturbing commentary on race in America at the present time.  In this commentary, it is the connections within the African American community that will protect vulnerable men like Chris.  These are, I think, being portrayed as being shredded by the assimilation of blacks into white culture that occurs when African Americans move into the mainstream culture.  I think that the Zombie like performances where the whites have taken over the black brains is a not too subtle reference to what Dave Chappelle noted in his Emmy winning Saturday Night Live monologue the week after Trump was elected.  He compared successful blacks to Brooklyn where, as their success increases, the blacks  in their lives move out and the whites move in.  Now this sentiment, if it is there, is deeply coded.  I don’t know if this last interpretation is correct.  But I think this movie serves a platform for many thoughts like that – and it can give us pause as we struggle with how to view current race relations in the U.S.  

  

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

Another Peele movie, Nope, is discussed here.

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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

Philomena: Relationships at the Movies...

     

         

This small but mighty movie about a woman reclaiming a part of her life that was taken from her caught my attention in part because I am thinking about it very differently than I usually do films – I am thinking about it through an interpersonal rather than an intrapsychic lens and that turns it into a different way of understanding the intrapsychic.  OK, I know that just sounded like mumbo jumbo, so let me talk about the film and then get back to this point when I have a way of talking about it using the film to illustrate the ideas.

Philomena, played very sensitively by Dame Judi Dench, is a simple Irish woman who “dropped her knickers” for a young man when she was at a fair.  She became pregnant without knowing that intercourse led to pregnancy, but believed that she had sinned because it felt so good – it had to be sinful.  She was taken in by an order of Nuns who cared for her until she had her child, and then she was indentured for four years’ service to pay them back for caring for her.  Her child, Anthony, was raised by the nuns and she able to see him for an hour a day.  Anthony was adopted out, without her consent, by a family who had come to adopt Anthony’s best friend Mary – he was adopted in a package deal when he wouldn’t let Mary go.  Little did he realize (at age 2 or 3 or so – and a painfully cute kid he was) that his attachment would sever his relationship with his mother.

Martin Sixsmith (played spot-on by Steve Coogan) is an upper class English gent, “Oxbridge” educated – as Philomena pokes him by conflating the schools into one – who has lost his political spin job in the government because he has been tarred with having said something he denies having said, and now he cannot get his old job back at the BBC or anywhere else and, rather than just writing a boring book on Russia, decides to take on an investigative/human interest journalistic endeavor to help Philomena find her son – something that is so clearly beneath him that his politeness towards Philomena all but delivers his contempt on a tray.

The ensuing drama of finding out what happens to Philomena’s son – and how the two protagonists react to it – is drawn from the real life engagement between these two people.  And that is the nub that creates the dilemma that I opened with.  You see, as John Le Carré talks about in an interview with Terry Gross, and as countless other fiction authors have recounted, the characters in the story are aspects of the author’s self or persona.  The book is then a well-crafted dream in which the aspects of the person dance with each other.  Now adaptations of history can serve this purpose – in Hamilton!: The Revolution, Lin Manuel-Miranda acknowledges that both Hamilton and Burr are representations of his own personality.  So interpreting a play or movie rarely goes too far off the tracks, in my mind, when it is viewed as an interpretation of the dream of the author – as if it were just what goes on in his or head – that is, the intrapsychic in the introductory paragraph.

The Real Martin and Philomena

The problem with this perspective is that movies and books (and our analysands) are portraying real or imagined events in real or imagined lives in which people do not just inhabit their own minds, but are actually interacting with each other.  While I might be able to forgive – as the Martin character does in this movie – my own cold dismissal of an attendant who is waiting on me and doing her best to be helpful; other people – in this case Philomena – might notice that this is a cold and heartless part of me and might a) not like it and b) notice that I sometimes direct that same arrogance at her and c) point out to me that I can be insufferable – that I am an angry person – and that, while I might be able to rationalize to myself that I am suffering fools around me, as one of those fools, Philomena can point out just how damaging the behavioral aspect of whatever intrapsychic stew it is that produces my intolerance can be both to those around me and to me.

Watching the movie as an interaction, then, gives a new vantage point on the intrapsychic.  It is not just a lovely mélange of stuff that can be understood, but it can also be a complex fortress with arrow slits that allow us to defend ourselves, but a fortress that can also cause damage – damage that isolates us as much or more than the outrageous arrows of misattributed quotations.  The movie, thankfully, does not leave Martin in this prison.  Philomena ends up being the vehicle of his (very partial) release.  Employed in a task which he finds repugnant because it will appeal to the basest of the instincts of readers he despises, he none the less finds himself caught up in the story – and in the ways that Philomena has been abused.  And she has been abused.  We are distressed to learn that it was worse than we would have imagined – more so than we would have expected as the plot creates twists that the simple romance type novels that she relates to Martin could never have duplicated.  We are appalled at the behavior of the nuns.  And so is Martin.  And he is angry about it.

Philomena is angry, too.  But she turns out to be a much more complex character than her apparent simple engagement with the world (and her romance novels) led us to believe.  She has internalized a remarkably pure meaning of the Christian message that has been handed to her on a very perverse plate – and she is able to employ it to keep her bearings in a world that might cause others to reel.  Philomena ends up, I think, using Martin to express aspects of her concern – is it concern?  Is it anger? – about the situation, while being able to forgive rather than crucify those who have harmed her.

Perhaps because this is based on real events, Philomena comes off as being somewhat saintly in the other worldly sense.  She is certainly much wiser about various aspects of Anthony’s later life than Martin or we the viewer would have expected her to be.  She displays a comfort with the complexities of personal living while also being able to function on a level that is more simple, direct and immediate than anything Martin can muster.  Her capacity to see things as they are and to deal with them – not to imagine that they should be different or to be put off because they aren’t – is remarkable (that said, she is rather put out by Martin – and I think she does wish that he would be more civil).  But she also uses Martin’s anger, outrage and skills to broadcast her story.  Philomena’s internal world – no matter how simple her exterior demeanor – is quite complex, but it is also, oddly, less on display; we are left admiring, but on some level not knowing, Philomena.  While we get to know Martin, and get to see him making subtle shifts, we don’t have a sense of how that will play out for him.  Philomena, we feel confident, will turn out just fine, thank you very much.  How she achieves her groundedness and keeps it while all around her have lost their base is left to us as a bit of a mystery.   I think this ultimately has to do with the intrapsychic.  The book this film was based on was written by Martin.  We have much more access to his mind here than to hers; what we access of Philomena includes how she was helpful to Martin to see the world in new ways.  We may have to wait for her book to understand how she was able to do that.  But, in the meantime, we get a bit of the intrapsychic from Martin, and a big dose of the corrective interpersonal from his interactions with Philomena. 

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

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