Medea – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Watches A Feminist Tragedy ripe for yet another moment in history….

Last night, there was a showing of Lars von Trier’s 1988 Danish made-for-television adaptation of Medea, with Larry Jost, one of our local Philosophy professors, discussing it and the play with a group of psychoanalytically interested folks.  Not having read Medea or seen it performed before, it was very helpful to get some background and, he being an old school professor, gave us handouts that included dialogue from Euripides’ play, which brought to life how Euripides originally gave form to Medea’s fury. 

The version that we saw was, as the discussant characterized it, stark and highly stylized.  Watching it was among the slowest – but also reasonably satisfying – 80 minutes of my life.  As the reluctant wife suggested, it was like watching grass grow – interesting grass – but still.  The getaway scene at the end has got to be slowest getaway scene ever recorded on film or video.

The plot starts before the film – so it was helpful to have Jost, if after the fact, play the role of the chorus and the Gods, filling us in on the back story.  Medea helped Jason and the Argonauts steal the Golden Fleece from her country.  Jason, a Greek, wooed her and they married, not just on paper but in action, becoming true partners as they figured out how to loot her father’s prize possession.  Medea was, as the film characterized her, a practitioner of the dark arts.  To slow her father and his army down when he was chasing after her and Jason, she murdered her brother, dismembered him, and scattered the parts because she knew that her father would stop the chase long enough to gather the pieces and give him a proper death rite.

Jost spared us a film version in which this is graphically and brutally depicted in the opening scenes.  In our version, there is just the title art, which depicts two children hung in a tree, foretelling the central drama of this tragedy.  Then we meet Medea  (Kirsten Oleson) on a bleak, desolate and wind and water tossed shore, being greeted by an Athenian who is sailing into town and will be leaving the next day.  He promises her safe passage, no matter what.  Jost let us know that this is one of the plot devices that Aristotle objected to – he felt that it was too convenient for Medea to have an escape plan provided for what is about to transpire.

We next learn that Jason (Udo Kier), who is an ambitious man, has decided to throw Medea over, abandoning her and her two children, to marry Glauce (Ludmilla Glinska), the daughter of Creon (Henning Jensen), who is the king of Corinth.  This would put Jason in line to the next king.  Indeed, at least in this version, immediately after the marriage it sounded like he would be taking on some or perhaps all of the executive duties of the kingdom.  There’s just one problem – Creon doesn’t want Jason’s ex (or other) wife and children hanging around – presumably as a threat to claiming the inheritance of the crown that Glauce’s children will one day own.  Again, Jost informs us that Medea is loved by the community and has been accepted by them.  But Creon tells Jason that his love for his own child trumps Jason’s love for his children, and he banishes Medea effective today – the wedding day.  When Creon delivers this message, Medea begs for an additional day to get her things in order, which he grants.

Medea accomplishes a lot in her day.  She collects some berries, makes a poisonous mash, which she attaches to her own wedding crown.  She confronts Jason – who argues that in his position as king – even after her banishment – he will be able to better care for Medea and the children than if he weren’t in this position of power (we are left in the film to imagine how pleased Medea is with his generosity – Euripides makes it clear by giving her the words to express it just how furious she is about this gambit).  She seduces Jason (whose new wife won’t join him in the marital bed until Medea is gone), and convinces him to have their two boys take the crown to Glauce as a gift – and in order to ask her to ask Creon to allow Medea and the boys to stay.

Jason and the boys head off on this errand.  Glauce is pleased with the gift – but pricks her finger on the poisoned barbs and dies – as does Creon when he finds her.  Jason finally gets it (boys can be pretty thick) and heads out towards Medea – fearing what she may next have in mind.  And this is where things get interesting in this particular film version.  In the original play, Medea murders her sons – I think off stage – with a sword.  This is enough to get the Athenians riled up.  In the “historical” myth, Medea leaves, and the Corinthians murder her children.  But Euripides solution is so much more economical and horrifying.  She could have murdered Jason.  But instead she uses the boys – whom she knows he loves as only a parent can – against him.  If she had murdered him, that would not have wreaked revenge.  Destroying the things that he loves – not just his new bride and her father – throwing his ambitions into chaos – but his offspring – and making him live with knowing that he has been, through her, the instrument of their destruction – is horrifyingly sadistic.

There is, of course, a small hitch.  They are her children, too.  In the version we watched, they are not murdered off screen with a sword, but, as the title art suggests, they are hung.  The twist is that the eldest of the two boys gets what is going on and offers to help his mother complete this horrifyingly impossible task.  When his younger brother runs away from the tree, he chases after him and delivers him to the mother, who hangs this youngest son, holding him and loving him as she watches him strangle to death – as if she were putting him to sleep for the night.  The eldest son then offers her a noose that he has tied for her to use to hang him, which she again does while holding him in her arms.

Wow.  What a deeply, intimately, horrifying moment.  As one of the audience members in our conversation pointed out, the movie director did not give us more information about the boy, so anything that we say about the child’s motives would be projection.  Unfortunately that shut the conversation down because I think that is a critical addition that this director has made and he is inviting us to project into this (and much else in this tremendously pared down version of the play) what we are experiencing (As kind of footnote to that comment – it is just possible that a modern depiction of this tragedy doesn’t require Medea (or the boy) to articulate all that she is feeling – we may be better equipped than the Greeks to imagine what it feels like to have power in play in our relationships – and the variety of responses that we generate may help us realize where we are as we struggle with it).

I think the boy, like his mother, has been discarded by his father and knows that.  He knows his connection to his father has been irrevocably severed by his father, but, like his mother, he knows that this is a surface and that, underneath that surface, his father is also irrevocably connected to him – even more than his father is connected to his mother.  The only way for the father to know how deeply he is connected, though, is for the father to be the victim of the severing rather than the perpetrator of it.  It is only in this way that his father will come to know what he has actually done – and this is the only way that the boy – as well as his mother – can wreak the revenge that they both want – to remind the father of what they both (and each) mean to him.

How’s that for projection?  Well, I think it is too much.  It is worthy of Melanie Klein when she is ridiculously insinuating what the infant is fantasizing.  But it also seems to me to have a bit of the ring of truth.  So where does it belong?  I think this is something like what the Director intends – and I think it is something like what Medea must be thinking on the son’s behalf.  She is expressing, I think, not only her rage – the rage of the jilted wife – but also the rage of the jilted son – and she is acting on her own behalf, but also on his.  The son’s death becomes the vehicle of his own (real, imagined, future and/or present) rage.

A modern version of the Medea play is Tony Morrison’s Beloved.  In this novel, which I read so long ago that I cannot bring it to life here (and I am too mired in the middle of the semester to re-read it), a runaway slave kills her children – who are also the children of her master – as revenge against the master.  This drives her crazy – and Morrison writes – as I remember it – from within that craziness.   The killing of her children – as one of the discussion members last night pointed out - allows the mother to re-own herself.  She thrusts off the yoke of having born a man’s children that he does with as he will – negating her ability to own even this – the product of her body.  The only action she is left with is a destructive one – one that destroys not just the child but a part of herself.  Unfortunately, when we re-own ourselves in this way, we realize ourselves anew – and all that we are capable of.

Would that this were just fiction.  Would that this were just a tragedy on the stage.  One modern version of it has been characterized as “Parental Alienation Syndrome”.  The name is unfortunate because it medicalizes something that is much more human and tragic than it sounds.  Parental Alienation occurs in divorces when one of the parents uses a child or children to wreak revenge on the other parent – by, for instance, getting the child to accuse the other parent of sexual molestation.  This can result in a Medean equivalency, where the accused parent is jailed and prevented from having contact with the child. 

Of course, we are watching, in 2018, this film in a larger context.  The midterm elections are looming and we do not know whether the misogynistic unholy alliance of the current administration with congressional representatives of the desire to keep women and other marginalized people under control will be upheld.  As if to prove that the more things change, the more they stay the same, Medea’s children would never be Greek citizens because she in an immigrant.  The urge to have power over others – and the terribly destructive reactions that may feel like (or be) all that is left as the available alternatives to disempowerment continue to reverberate today.  Sometimes those who are drawn to power don’t realize that sharing it might enhance rather than diminish that very power, and that not sharing it - keeping others from ownership - might have tragic consequences; having nothing, one means of reclaiming yourself is destroy what has been taken from you.

At the end of this film, Medea meets the man from Athens at his boat, which is sitting on dry land.  While Jason is chasing around, finding out about the havoc she has wreaked – she waits serenely for the tide to come in – for it to lift her and her boat and carry her off to a new place and, in at least one version of the myth, a new life as the wife of the captain of the boat (where more mischief will, of course, occur).  While she is re-owning herself, Jason is driven mad by the discovery of his sons’ deaths.

Postscript:  While I have labeled this a feminist tragedy - and I think it is - it is important to note that it was written by a man at a time when women had no voice.  It is what a man imagines it must be like to be scorned.  This movie version is also written by a man - as an homage, in fact, to another man's interpretation of the tragedy.  I am reminded of the feminist who objected to Caitlin Jenner's feeling comfortable determining what it means to be a woman - from a perspective that was originally that of a man.  Succinctly she said, "I am tired of men determining what it means to be a woman.

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