My Next Guest Needs No Introduction: Is Donald Trump’s Presidency the David Letterman era’s Legacy?

David Letterman has hosted a series of six conversations that are currently streaming on Netflix.  He has titled them, “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction.”  The guest list is an august one:  Barack Obama, George Clooney, Malala Yousafzai, Jay-Z, Tina Fey, and Howard Stern.  Plus there is a follow-up interview with Jerry Seinfeld - but this one has a slightly different turn as Jerry interviews David as much or more than the other way around – and this is the interview that I would like to start with.  Jerry maintained that David Letterman changed US television.  He did this, I think Jerry maintained, by introducing a style of talking that was new and different – it was immediate, genuine and real.  David was not “playing at” being the host or emcee of his show, but was being himself, in all his native Indiana goofiness, and trying to evoke from the people he was interviewing a similar kind of honesty.

Jerry stated that he resonated with Letterman’s approach and that he emulated this ideal in his own work.  Jerry, in writing for the Seinfeld show, used the test of “If this is funny to me and Larry David (his co-writer), that’s good enough for the audience” to determine what to put in the show.  Jerry then noted that David did things because he thought they would be fun or funny – he dropped things off of buildings – he solicited the population for stupid pet tricks – and stupid human tricks (an acquaintance of mine bent back a broom to shoot an album cover out from under four eggs sitting in paper holders and they neatly dropped into the waiting water glasses that the album cover had been sitting on in one trick that aired) – and he brought his mom from Indiana on the show (and sent her to cover the Olympics).

David, in another interview – the one that, to me, seemed to stand out from an otherwise all-star cast, noted that he himself had emulated the work of Howard Stern – who was known as a “shock jock” – the D.J. who would and did say anything on air, including things that the FCC fined him for in increasingly huge quantities.  I had always seen Stern – in the limited exposure that I had – to be a petulant adolescent who refused to grow up, fixated on adolescent interests like sex and fart jokes.  In the interview, I was surprised to discover a reflective man who had an impressive level of self-understanding (which he attributed in large measure to his psychotherapy) that included a sense of what had driven him to engage in the outrageous behavior that he did and how that stuff was no longer necessary in his continuing drive towards – wait for it – authenticity.

Howard Stern maintained that his approach to radio was to be pure id – to say whatever came into his mind at any given moment and to give vent to it.  Because he was extremely angry at the time – a lot of what he said was suffused with rage.  Interestingly, his broadcast icon was an early conservative talk radio host – a person who predated Rush Limbaugh and his generation – but a person who was able to exude anger at a time when the airwaves were dominated by false nice voices – voices that, to Howard Stern’s ear (and I think to Letterman’s, and to Seinfeld’s, but I think also to millions of listeners) were saccharine and false – inauthentic – and he wanted to portray something real – something genuine – emotion that meant something – on the airwaves.

The format of Letterman’s new show, one in which the interview lasts for an hour, more or less (more, but it has been edited down and, with some of the interviews, other material is included – for instance, David goes horseback riding on land that used to be federally protected before Trump did away with that on the interview with Howard Stern that derided many things about Trump) is a format that mirrors in some ways the interviews that Letterman did on late night television – there is space for the guest to hawk their current project.  But, in addition to the length, the arrangement of the seating is different.  On his talk show, Dave sat at a desk and his guest sat in a chair that was angled towards him, but placed in front of him, so the guest had to awkwardly crane their neck to see Dave – and when they were engaged with him it was hard to keep their usual decorum – the awkwardness seemed to pierce at least a piece of the persona that they intended to present to the world.

In the current rendition, which is noteworthy for Letterman’s gigantic Santa Claus-like beard, he and his interviewee both sit in comfortable chairs at the same angle towards each other on a bare stage in a small auditorium with a crowd that is limited to the main floor – the balcony is empty and there is a feeling of intimacy.  There is also a kind of intimacy in the interviews.  Letterman seems to be intensely attuned to affect.  There are moments when he detects something and he stops the person and asks them to amplify something.  There are also moments that have intense affect that are deflected with humor.  We get to know both the guest and Dave – and then we don’t – there are areas he is comfortable exploring in detail and others that he closes the door on.  This interviewing style – one that follows the affect in the conversation – is a very psychoanalytic interviewing one.  It creates what we call a deepening of affect, but also, by being attuned to the intensity of the emotion, allows for protection from overwhelming feelings, though in this case it seems to be the case that Dave is frequently protecting himself rather than the person he is interviewing from feelings that – if not overwhelming – would be inconvenient to address.

Each interview has its own dominant feeling state.  The interview with Howard Stern was matter of fact.  Both David and Howard seemed quite comfortable in their own skins and with each other.  It was like two good old boys sitting and talking.  The conversation with Jerry Seinfeld had an edge – partly because Jerry was trying to interview Dave, who was not all that comfortable with Seinfeld turning the tables, but also I think because of tension between them – perhaps a kind of competition.  Tina Fey, whose verbal skills are impressive and whose voice was calm, chose to sit on the edge of the comfy chair with erect posture, she did not sink into it.  She was alert and wary, and David worked hard, I thought, not to threaten her.  But it was the interview with Jay-Z, who also sat forward in his chair, that had the most poignant feel.  Jay-Z felt vulnerable and uncertain – wary, but not cagy like Tina Fey – he seemed on the edge of something that felt very soft and uncertain – yes he was wary, but it was unclear how much he was wary of Dave and how much he was wary of himself – or what he might say that he would regret – seemingly not to us, the public, but to David, whom he appeared not to know well.

In what might have been the rawest moment of that interview, when Dave was asking Jay-Z to talk about what it was like to have his – Jay-Z’s – behavior threaten to blow up his family – David let Jay-Z off the hook by talking about how he felt about his own behavior coming close to blowing up his own family – and Jay-Z was left to assent.  With Jerry, who was guarded, David was even more guarded, but with Jay-Z, who was incredibly vulnerable, David used his own vulnerability to protect Jay-Z, who could then assent to what Dave said, without having to reveal the particulars.  Jay-Z was able to say that he and Dave, unlike his father who left when he was 10 or 11 and whom he was angry with for years, stayed.  And he was able to do this without blaming his father, but acknowledging that not having that as a model complicated the staying, which is hard to do, even if leaving involves even greater pain.

A theme that runs throughout these discussions, and one that is clearly a dominant realization for Dave, is the ways in which having a child taught him what love is and that it humanized him.  He sought reassurance from Jay-Z that he had experienced this as well and he tried, in many of the interviews, to dig out of people the ways that having a child changed them for the better.  Most of them complied (except for Malala, who has no children).  I certainly resonate with the experience he is describing and I know as a clinician and a researcher that the impact of early attachment on later functioning is huge for the child, but it was as a parent that I realized how huge it was for me as an adult.  

We are currently having a national crisis of identity around the issue of separating children from their parents when the parents are caught immigrating illegally into the U.S.  We know that the separation will cause real and lasting damage.  I remember how heartbreaking it was to leave my child at preschool when he was three just for a few hours – I can’t imagine him alone with no ability to contact me then or when he was 10 or even 15.  His first year at college has gone well, but we have been in pretty frequent contact by phone, text and in person.  Recently I had a chance to talk with him about the experience when he was three of being dropped off at preschool, and he still remembers it as something that he hated for at least the first half hour that he was there - day after day.  Connections between children and their parents – genuine, authentic connections – complicated connections - are vitally important.

I think that Dave is critical of Trump because he threatens these kinds of connection on a broad scale (with the immigrant situation being just one example), but it was Stern who pointed out that Trump was actually the perfect person to interview because of his authenticity.  To Stern, Trump always told you exactly what he thought – he was completely genuine.  In some ways, with Trump, as with Dave, what you see is what you get.  This is a strange kind of post psychoanalytic world – one in which the romantic curtain that we drew between our best intentions and the more sordid parts of who we were allowed us to convince ourselves that we were more noble than we actually were.  Hamilton – the man and the musical – is an example of the complexities of human functioning being played out first on the political stage – when he introduced us to our first sexual imbroglio – and then on the Broadway stage when his portrayal from a post Freudian perspective allowed us to imagine him as noble while realizing he was also very human.  Politicians have always lied to us – as Trump and many others have pointed out – but when Trump lied to us, it was transparent.  We knew he was lying.  When someone has convinced themselves that they will do something, they are convincing liars, but liars none the less.

Hillary Clinton was called lying Hillary by Trump repeatedly.  She may have lied about this or that substantive issue, but her wish to be elected drove her to try to appear to be what people wanted in a presidential candidate.  Trump – like Letterman and Stern and the angry voices of Republican and Libertarian radio – did not try to court people by telling them what they wanted to hear – he told them what he and they wanted to hear by being straightforward – being the person he actually is.  As intolerable as that person is to many of us, it is a refreshingly genuine person – someone who is what he is.  We have seen what genuineness from a celebrity looks like – Howard, Dave – I would add Roseanne and Oprah into that mix as well – people who don’t say what they should say, but say what the “really” believe – meaning that they are speaking with the public as if they were in a private room with them – not editing what they say.  From this perspective, the id is not so much unconscious as it is something that is private and hidden from others, as Mark Solms maintains.

My friend, the reluctant co-teacher, who taught a Freud class with me this spring that I have written about elsewhere, maintains that what Freud did in creating the psychoanalytic consulting room was to create the Shtetl, the Jewish village in Russia, where, after a long day of cow-towing to the Russians, the Jews could let down their hair and say what they really think.  And as we have heard people like Stern say what they really think – no matter how gross or disgusting – we recognize a kindred spirit.  Someone who is able to say publicly some of the things that we think in private but would never dare articulate, except to close friends, and when we hear someone speaking in our own voice, we identify with that person and we move towards supporting them, even if they don’t agree with all of the voices in our minds.  We feel connected to a genuine part of the person – and this kind of connection is worth its weight in gold and worth a vote in an election.   

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