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. 

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