Marriage Story: Where is the Divorce?

         

Marriage Story is a film about divorce.  Having been divorced, I suggest you avoid getting a divorce if you can.  This movie starts with the premise that you can, somehow, make a divorce be an integral part of a marriage.  At its very best, I suppose that is what you shoot for.  This movie shoots for that, but I think that the writers are really hoping for a fantasy solution to the dilemma of being divorced – especially when there is a child involved.  They say, in effect, "We have been lovers, after all, and friends, and we both love our child… Why can’t the divorce just be the next step in the marriage?"

I watched this movie with the Reluctant Wife and the younger Reluctant Stepdaughter.  The Reluctant Wife had seen it before, but when the reluctant stepdaughter expressed interest in seeing this rather than the Irishman, the R.W. agreed to watch it again.  What the Reluctant Wife had said about this film is that both of the lead characters are believable and understandable – you can see both perspectives.  There is no bad guy in this film – or there are two bad guys – depending on how you think about it.  This makes for a richer and, I think, more reality based movie.

The film opens with Charlie Barber (played by Adam Driver) and Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) recounting each other’s virtues as they do voice overs reading the descriptions of each other that they have written to start the process of a mediated divorce.  We get to hear what wonderful – and flawed – people they are through each other’s eyes.  We hear the deep affection that these two people have felt for each other.  But they don’t get to hear it – at least not yet.  Nicole refuses to play along with the mediator and storms out of the meeting before either of them reads what they have written.

Marriages are touted as being about living happily ever after.  In fact, they are about learning how to negotiate.  In the old days, men were given, by custom but also by law, the right to determine everything about the direction of the family – including where they were going to live.  This is an indefensible solution to an essential problem.  A marriage is a union between two people, each of whom has their own agenda and, if it is to be a democracy, each party can cast exactly 50% of the votes - with no Vice President to cast the tie breaker.  It becomes a union that is built on a system that can devolve into gridlock.  Oh, sure, you can compromise on some things.  But there are others – Will we live on the east coast or the west? – where there is no half way solution.

The divorce in this movie is based on Nicole’s experience of being overshadowed by Charlie.  Charlie is a great guy.  He is an up and coming avant garde director in New York. Charlie has built a troupe of players who trust him and each other. Nicole is his star actress. She drew the audiences in at the beginning, but he has become the marquee draw.  She wants to assert herself – to explore her capacities as an actress, but also as a director.  Charlie has talked about moving to LA to support her opportunities for roles and he has talked about having her direct works that the troupe presents, but these talks have never turned into action items.  At heart, he doesn’t want to give up what they’ve (and here, I think, what he’s) built.  She doesn’t want to continue to be confined by who they, as a couple have become.

So, in addition to having failed to figure out how to negotiate, the partners have grown in various ways – and the original contract between them does not work so well.  The original contract included Nicole’s being the supportive spouse.  She entered the relationship prepared to support Charlie in his career.  She signed on to be the supporting actress.  Across time, she has begun to think that she is deserving of top billing – and of growing and developing in her own way.  Charlie hasn’t really seen that she has grown – he is still dealing with the version of her that existed when they were first married.  As a result, he continues to think that she will go along with him.  And he does not see himself as being as overbearing as Nicole experiences him as being.

Indeed, it is hard for us to see Charlie as overbearing in the beginning.  In their voice overs, Charlie picks up after Nicole.  She is absent minded and moody and Charlie is the stabilizing force – giving of himself over and over to keep her on steady ground.  She looks like the needy one and he looks like the one who is carrying most of the load – until she steps into a divorce attorney’s office.  The divorce attorney, Nora (Laura Dern), helps Nicole articulate an alternative narrative.  Charlie is controlling.  He has not been responsive to Nora’s needs to develop.  He has, while being incredibly flexible on the small stuff, consistently made the big decisions and he has made them in such a way that he always benefits from them.  He is the Director, after all.  He is used to making the decisions that matter.  "Do it this way – I am the objective observer and I know how this will look to the audience.  You need me to tell you how to do what needs to be done." 

I think this film is based in fantasy.  It is not about what actually happens in a divorce.  Oh, lots of stuff depicted here does happen in divorces.  But the particular arc of this divorce process does not add up.  I think it is about two things, told simultaneously.  The first is something like a process that can occur in a “good” divorce.  It is a process of each person discovering the ways in which they have failed to be the partners that they needed to be.  The second is something that happens in all divorces.  These two people become furious with each other.  “Good" Divorces, I think, involve managing the fury.  "Good" divorces involve feeling the feelings, but somehow managing to limit the impact of them – on the partner, but especially on the child or children.

Nicole and Charlie do a reasonable job of not channeling the anger between them through their child.  Their child becomes a messenger, but he doesn’t get used as a pawn, despite Nora’s efforts to have Nicole use him that way.  And he is the chip on the table that the action revolves around, but not through.  Nora claims that he is a California resident – Nicole has moved him to California to be with her – temporarily in Charlie’s mind – but permanently, in Nicole’s.  Charlie is behind the curve and playing catch up.  He continues to think they will have an amicable divorce long after Nicole and Nora have made it clear that ship has sailed.

Even after he knows that Nicole is pulling out all the stops, Charlie appears to be playing along.  But he finally gets pushed into a corner and he comes out swinging.  He finds his own bulldog lawyer and things get ugly in the courtroom.  But they really get ugly when the two of them try to get together to get things back on track.  Instead of an olive branch, they go at it hammer and tongs.  Here we learn that good old Charlie has, in fact, been quite angry for quite some time.  He has been faithful, more or less, to Nicole at a time when he doesn’t want to be and when she has withdrawn from him.  He hates her.  And she hates him.  And it isn’t pretty.

If we started with an idealized version of this couple, we now see them at their worst.  And they have not seen themselves at their worst.  Charlie spirals without control into rage.  Nicole becomes nakedly cutting and inconsiderate.  This is the scene that, I believe, clarifies that this movie is, in addition to being a film about a divorce, a fantasy.  It allows Charlie and Nicole to say the things that divorcing couples think.  Perhaps the things that all couples think.  When I was in the midst of my divorce, a friend told me that the difference between couples that divorce and those that don’t is that those who stay together want to stay together.  But I also think that couples who stay together don’t say the things that they think at critical moments in order to preserve the relationship – even in the midst of a divorce.  They might refer to them once they resolve – or say, “Wow, you wouldn’t believe how angry I was with you two months ago,” but to strike while the iron is hot is, I think, not a cathartic moment, but a poisonous one.

The fantasy of letting it all out is that the poison will be released and you will feel cleansed.  I think the reality is that this much poison kills the relationship. This scene is, then, not a record of what actually happens in a “good” divorce, but is a record of what occurs – especially for the person being left – when the unreality of the situation – the disorientation of things having changed and being out of control – sinks in – and you deal with it.  But it is unreal that this takes place with your soon to be ex-spouse.  It is a continuation of the fantasy that we are still married.

Now there are couples who thrive on conflict and passion and may, in fact, need drama, for lack of a better word, to know that they are loved.  But this is not one of those marriages.  These people need to feel support from those around them – they do not do well when others doubt or confront them. Perhaps because of that they have not asserted themselves across the course of the relationship. If they had, maybe they would have allowed each other to grow in the context of the relationship, but they didn’t.  As the reluctant wife has said on other occasions, in divorce there is a bunch of ugly stuff.  You can eat it, or your kids will eat it, but somebody’s got to eat it.  Here, the couple decide that they will force feed it to each other.

Some things, once said, cannot be unsaid.  This scene includes things that can’t be unsaid. 

My saying that good marriages (and good divorces) are founded on what is not said may sound anti-psychoanalytic.  It certainly sounds that way to me.  Isn’t psychoanalysis about saying the things that come to mind?  Isn’t it about saying those things that you think but don’t say?  I think that this interaction helps clarify that the analytic relationship is an “as if” relationship.  When you say something to an analyst – it is "as if" they are your spouse, your mother, your father, your brother or your sister.  But they are not.  They can talk with you about what it is like to articulate that thought.  They can help you reflect on what you have thought.  And they don’t take personally what you have said.  It is not directed at their actual person, but at the person who it is that they represent.

Part of being divorced is coming to terms with the failure to stay married; coming to terms with failing to be the people that you imagined you would be to and for each other.  Coming to terms with that is ugly and, weirdly, private.  We get married – indeed we love – because we hope that being connected with another will make us better – and we can make them better.  In fact, being married – as rewarding as it is, is also expensive.  And when we acknowledge those costs – and pin them on the other person – we fail.  We move towards divorce.  It is only when we come to grips with our own failings, however, that we begin to have a successful divorce.  When we no longer need to beat the other person up in order to feel ourselves cleansed of the poison – when we are able to digest that poison – then we begin to be whole again.

So the scene is essential.  It is about digesting the poison.  The part that makes it a fantasy is that it takes place between Charlie and Nicole.  That it can occur within the marital relationship.  If that were able to happen, then the divorce would not be necessary.  One of the ironies of divorce – when you have children – is that you do, in fact, never leave the relationship.  In the best divorces, the parents are able to keep in mind what is in the best interests of the child or children and to continue to share parenting them. 

My relieved ex-spouse and I have been able to do a reasonably good job of doing that.  We are in each other’s lives.  But we also are, in some very important ways, not. I think that the kind of love that we had for each other – as in the case of the love that these two people had for each other – could not survive the marriage.  I think titling this The Marriage Story leaves out the important step, in a marriage like this, of becoming divorced.

The movie ends where it began - with the description of Charlie through Nicole's eyes, but this time that description is being read by their son, and Charlie has to help him with the hard words.  He finally hears how much Nicole gets him - how much she has always deeply loved him.  And it hurts him, and I think us, that these two could not stay married.  We are pleased that they are building the kind of post-divorce relationship we should all aspire to.  I think that if we are to achieve it in our real, off-screen lives, we actually need to exercise more restraint than was displayed on the screen.  Perhaps we need to expel the poison – but I think we need to do that in the context of a different relationship – telling a friend (or therapist) just exactly how angry we are with this person that we have totally trusted.  I think the lives of those of us who go through a divorce are every bit as tumultuous as the one’s depicted here – and in that sense this movie tracks with what takes place in a “good” divorce.  But I don’t think that this movie confronts the terribly isolating and lonely process of becoming a divorced person – perhaps the makers feared that would be too difficult for the audience to bear.  

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Vice – A film that contributes to the problem it appears to be addressing.

The Reluctant Son and I were negotiating to see a film last night.  The women in the family had decided to have a girl’s night out.  The reluctant son didn’t want to go out and isn’t a big fan of films – he would rather watch something like sports where the outcome is not predictable.  But the sports menu looked dull.  So we ordered in and explored the top twenty films of 2018 that neither of us had seen.  We agreed that we were interested in seeing Vice together – the film about Dick Cheney and his political machinations as George W.’s Vice President.

 

As the final credits were rolling, we noticed that there were two production teams – one headed by Brad Pitt and the other including Will Ferrell.  And it was the reluctant son who articulated our shared experience.  We had expected a serious film about a serious subject.  We had been surprised that it was presented with a kind of heavy handed criticism, typical of such Brad Pitt films as War Machine, interrupted by the kind of irreverent jocularity that Will Ferrell’s movies include.

As the credits were rolling, we were returned to a focus group that had been used in the middle of the film to encourage “rebranding” such things as inheritance taxes as the death tax.  It had the feel of being an outtake that would have been at home in one of those Will Ferrell movies, but, in the sly, self-conscious way of the film, it turned into a campy fight between the focus group members about the qualities of the film itself.  A liberal and a conservative started fighting about whether the film they were acting in had value – with the conservative suggesting that it was just liberal propaganda.  Meanwhile, two women, watching the verbal spat devolve into fisticuffs, shared their disinterest in the argument – and focused instead on the latest gossip about their favorite pop star.

While this might have been intended as witty commentary on the state of the populace today, the Reluctant Son noted that the movie is a symptom of the problem that it claims to be addressing – the problem that politics is no longer relevant in most people’s lives unless it is a form of entertainment.  This could be conceptualized as: We have a President who is functioning as a reality TV star, not as a real person.  And this movie, a movie that both paints Cheney as a war criminal and a killer of thousands of innocent people, including our soldiers, and a movie that also points out that Cheney was integral to the change in legislation that opened the door to Fox and MSNBC becoming propaganda machines by lifting the FCC requirement that news cover issues in a balanced way, plays its own part in entertainifying these horrible assertions.  Rather than working to help us understand how this state of affairs came to be, it turns into a kind of cartoon.

 

Instead of taking an artistic position regarding how it is that Cheney became the person that wreaked the kind of havoc that it and we deplore, the film makes fun of the kind of drama that Shakespeare wrote – briefly writing and acting dialogue between Lynn and Dick Cheney as he is weighing whether to reenter the fray and become the Vice President that is fraught with meaning.  It takes the position that it cannot do this though, it cannot speculate about what motivated Cheney because he was so private and kept his inner world so hidden.  It pretends that it is a documentary, when, in fact, it is a dramatic reading of history – just as many Shakespearean plays were a dramatic reader of history.  And the Bard frequently knew nothing about the actual psychology of the characters he was writing about – his best writing is often pure speculation.  This movie leaves the central figure unexplored and instead simply demonizes him.  It does not help us understand him – and therefore it does not help us understand how we are complicit in electing demons.  It leaves us innocent – in a weird version of American Exceptionalism – because it concludes, essentially, “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?”  Or, on an even closer reading, "How can we be responsible for men who have no heart?"

This film pretends to be a documentary to its decrement.  The Reluctant Son, who saw the four hour documentary Bush’s War as part of his college education, acknowledges that Vice hits the high points of Cheney’s subterfuge and abuse of power, but by turning itself into entertainment instead of art, it turns the most interesting aspects of this insidious character into pure demonology.

One of the central motifs through the film is that Cheney relaxes by fly fishing.  Early on, we see a trout trolling for food.  As the movie builds towards articulating the darkest deeds that Cheney orchestrated, we see, instead of a trout, a dark creature – essentially the Creature from the Black Lagoon – with legs and arms – slipping between the rocks of a trout stream as Cheney is fishing.  The implication is clear.  Cheney is a monster. 

The problem is that this movie does not help us understand why he is a monster.  His final words indicate that he has served us.  He has kept us safe.  The film portrays him as having kept his wife Lynn safe from a life like her mother’s – a life with an alcoholic, abusive husband who ultimately murdered her.  Cheney protected his wife by cleaning up his own alcoholic abusive life – he was headed towards being that abusive, murderous husband, but became a savior rather than a perpetrator when she read him the riot act.  He straightened himself up when she confronted him.

But he didn't really.  The message of the film is also that the murderous, abusive man sought power not to be able to protect her or us, but to afford him an outlet to attack people who could not defend themselves.  He did this from a distance and with the power of his very idiosyncratic reading of the constitution to protect him (and the power to cover his tracks – he learned from Nixon to destroy the evidence – in his case, the emails rather than the tapes).  And in doing all of this, he began a process of undermining our ethical functioning (including recruiting psychologists to do his dirty work).  His assertion that executive functioning, as conceived in the constitution, is unquestionable set us on the path that we are now confronted with.  He created the position that we do not have a President, but an Emperor – a King – a Despot.

It is useful to know, I suppose, where our current constitutional crisis comes from.  But by camping that up, this film ends up concluding that government – like education, parenting, and science in this post factual world – doesn’t actually matter because it is just entertainment.  When we turn it off, we turn the next thing on and life goes on. 

Can art return to helping us realize that life matters?  I think some art still does that – the Overstory, for instance, leads us to deeply feel the urgency to do something about the environment.  We want to go out and hug a tree after reading it.  But this movie suggests we should simply give up and join the Reluctant Son in watching the next game on TV.  Fortunately he has not.  He is studying political science and does believe that good government matters.  I hope he finds enough compatriots to right our badly listing ship of state - something this movie purports to be doing while actually keeping us locked into a kind of hopeless inaction and sense of powerlessness.   

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It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: The Reluctant Psychoanalyst finds Mr. Rogers to be (gulp) creepy.

I have a confession.  Mr. Rogers always creeped me out.  When I was a kid, his Kingdom of Make-Believe just plain gave me the creeps.  Lately, I feel like I’m the only one that experienced this.  I’ve been talking with all kinds of people about him as we’ve toyed with idea of going to see Tom Hanks’ portrayal of him and everybody I talk to seems to be a fan.  The Reluctant Wife is enthusiastic about Mr. Rogers, as are the Reluctant Stepdaughters.  The Reluctant Son has never seen Mr. Rogers.  Which makes sense.  We didn’t watch much live TV.  We watched lots of video tapes.  Mostly of Dinosaurs and Construction projects but also the Sound of Music.  Over and over again.  My students, though, light up when they talk about Mr. Rogers.  One, in particular, remembered the music on the show – music that was largely improvised on set by Jazz musicians whom Fred Rogers supported in their creative efforts.

So you’d think that the movie, “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, would be about Mr. Rogers.  And it is, sort of, but mostly it is about Tom Juno, who wrote a piece on Mr. Rogers for Esquire Magazine’s 1998 edition called “Can You Say Hero”.  It is a beautiful piece.  It positively glows.  And if you just read the piece, you’d think it was written by a fan – maybe even a sycophantic fan.  But the movie, where the fictional Lloyd Vogel replaces the real life Tom Juno so that there is license to tell a story that includes make believe, is the backstory about the irascible, angry and hard-nosed journalist who interviewed Fred Rogers because his editor assigned him to write a puff piece on the beloved children's television host.

The man who came to write the puff piece – 400 words – was angry at his father who had left him and his sister and his mother when his mother lay dying.  He was angry at his editor, because he was a serious journalist who did investigative reporting – and exposed the men he wrote about as being anything but who they presented themselves as being – he didn’t do puff pieces.  He was angry at Fred Rogers because Mr. Rogers, instead of answering his questions and telling him about himself, asked Lloyd/Tom about himself.  And he was lost because he was a new father – and angry enough to recreate for his son the kind emotional distance and pain in their relationship that characterized his own relationship with his father.

So this is a coming of age film for a middle aged man.  He comes of age under the guidance of a kindly guy – Mr. Rogers.  And it has a happy ending.  And along the way, we get to know both of these men, and their families, at least a little bit.  And we see what a kind, sweet, but also self-indulgent man Mr. Rogers is.  Mr. Rogers is the kind of man who will keep a whole crew and studio waiting for an hour as he entertains a kid who has come for his make a wish moment and won't stop trying to attack him.  He is also a kind of idealized father figure – the kind of father figure whom Eddie Murphy could send up on Saturday Night Live as being nothing like the father figures in the hood.  And we, who came from the suburbs, could resonate with Eddie Murphy’s portrayal because our fathers were nothing like the father figure on TV either.  That said, when I became a father, I very much wanted to resonate with aspects of Mr. Rogers.  I think that I missed an opportunity by not watching Mr. Rogers more frequently with my son – I didn't get to reacquaint myself with Mr. Rogers and I wasn't able to talk with the reluctant son about the complex issues - things like divorce and death, with which we were dealing in our lives with Mr. Rogers as a foil which we might have done had we seen the show together.  Instead, we had to muddle through, talking about them on our own.

Now, before I go any further, I want to be clear.  I cried through this movie.  I was moved by it and by the relationship between these two men and by the transformation that takes place in the Lloyd character.  I found Mr. Rogers to be an admirable person and I was moved by his ability to bring the best out of people in general and Lloyd in particular.  When they are riding together on a subway car and the kids on the car recognize that Mr. Rogers is with them and they don’t quite know what to do about that, as kids are want to do, and, they start singing “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”, the song that Fred Rogers wrote and sings at the beginning of every episode, this could go either way.  It could be cruel mockery – Eddie Murphy on 6^th grade steroids – but it turns, instead, into an homage.  Not only do the kids sing, but the hardened New Yorkers, on their way to office jobs and janitorial work all join in and the car becomes, for a moment, the shared space of Make Believe and everyone is aware that they live in the same neighborhood and that they care about each other and about life.  It is a wonderfully Disney – or Mr. Rogers – moment.

So I say all this to acknowledge that I admire this man and this movie.  But I think it is important to assert there is still something deeply creepy about him and about it.  And part of what is creepy about it, I must admit, is something that I worry about and find creepy about myself – something that is related to the reluctant aspect of my being a psychoanalyst – and perhaps to my being reluctant about most everything that I do.  What is creepy about this movie and, I think, about Mr. Rogers, is that Mr. Rogers is a True Believer.  He believes deeply and powerfully in what he is preaching – and he is preaching. 

At a particularly poignant and difficult point in the film, he says “What’s human is mentionable and what’s mentionable is manageable.”  This is a lovely idea.  It is something that I believe in deeply and I think that it comes from the traditions that inform the work that I do – Mr. Rogers counts Erik Erikson, an important psychoanalyst who helped reframe the psychoanalytic tradition to include the impact of people on each other, not just Freud’s imagined unrolling of an underlying biological mandate. 

By the way, Erik Erikson was not Erik Erikson’s given name.  Erikson called himself that to clarify that he was his own father – he disavowed his biological father and his father’s traditions.  Mr. Rogers – and Lloyd – also do this.  Mr. Rogers was brought up in a home where feelings were not talked about.  And he worked to figure out how to articulate his feelings and help others do that.  When he was working with Lloyd to help him figure out how to manage his anger at his father and ultimately to let go of it, to forgive him, he pointed out that many of Lloyd’s positive qualities – his ability to stand up to powerful men and to write the truth about them – came out of the relationship with his father – not just his relating against him, but his modelling himself, in part, after who it is that his father was.  Fred Rogers was, of course, also talking about himself - and by extension Erik Erikson.  Mr. Rogers, if he would have talked with Eddie Murphy about the father figure Murphy portrayed on Saturday Night Live, would have admired that father figure as embodying and caricaturing and celebrating something real and positive about the father figures that we have had, including my own not-Mr.-Rogers father.

The creepy part, here, is that Mr. Rogers believes that his adoptive fathers – the ones he has read about – including, I’m sure, Dr. Rogers – Carl Rogers – the son of a preacher (Fred Rogers is an ordained minister himself), who also cast off the repressive mantel of a non-feeling life to embrace a life of deeply felt feelings and helping others to tap into them – the creepy part is that Mr. Rogers has carried within himself the evangelical zeal of the religious tradition.  He firmly believes that Lloyd will be a better person for embracing his father rather than rejecting him.  He believes – and the movie is set up to show us that Lloyd is a better person for learning how to forgive his father – a task that seems impossible at the beginning of the film.

The task seems impossible for two reasons.  One is because Lloyd’s father is a louse.  Lloyd sees him for the first time in at least ten years at this sister’s third wedding.  He introduces his father to his wife and his son – his father’s first grandson.  His father, drunk and surly, refers to Lloyd's wife as “doll” and asks for some time alone with his son.  Lloyd, who has been seething all night about his father, explodes – and we join him in righteously feeling that his father deserves to be the focus of his wrath – even if that spoils his sister’s wedding. 

But the second and more intractable reason is that Lloyd appears to have no interest in reconciling with his father.  He is intent on nursing his anger – holding onto it – making it his own and justifying his anger at the world through the righteousness of his anger at his father.  He shows up on Mr. Rogers set to do a puff piece on Mr. Rogers – perhaps to expose Mr. Rogers as a fake good father – but not, in any way, to reconcile with his own father.  But Mr. Rogers doesn’t see it that way.  Mr. Rogers understands him to be a person who is in pain – whose anger is separating him from the world and Mr. Rogers decides to save him.  Mr. Rogers decides that this guy needs some loving – even though he isn’t asking for it.

And this is the creepy part.  Mr. Rogers imposes his view of the world on those around him.  He says, in effect, “This is what you need to do in order to get better.”  It is the same thing that he does in the studio when he decides unilaterally that the most important things - more important than everyone getting home for dinner on time - is this kid and his relating to him.

But don’t I do that as a psychoanalyst?  Even more importantly, haven’t I profited from the many people who have helped me with things, even when I haven't asked, in my life?  What is so creepy about this, you might ask.  

Well, my thin defense of myself as an analyst is that people come to me wanting to change.  More precisely, they decide that they want things to be different.  And the difference between those two statements is what collapses my thin defense.  In fact, most people who come to see me don’t want to change.  They want my help in changing the world – in altering their friends or figuring out how to help their spouses change.  And I do something tricky and a little creepy – I say, “I can’t help the world change, but I can help you change.”  In other words, I say something like – “Do as I say, not as I do.  Make the hard and difficult changes that are part and parcel of having a different attitude towards the world while I sit her unchanged and unchanging.”  And this sounds remarkably like what Fred Rogers does.

So this film does not portray what many films about psychotherapy movies portray (Don Juan DeMarco, for instance).  In these films, the person in treatment’s change is contingent on the psychotherapist’s change.  Mr. Rogers does not change.  He knows – from the beginning – what is best for Lloyd.  In fact, the movie begins at the very end, we just don't know it yet.  Rogers imposes his treatment on Lloyd.  

Psychotherapy in general – and psychoanalysis in particular – can, I think, be guilty of this sin.  We can decide, whether based on theory or on empirical evidence, what is right for this person without taking that person into account.  And I call that a sin.  We cannot know what is best for another without getting to know them.  In fact, it is not our place to know what is best for them – and I think Mr. Rogers would agree with me about this – they must come to know what is best for them.  What we can do is provide a space in which they can come to know that for themselves – but also from within themselves.

An illustration of a moment where Rogers creates a space for Lloyd to do this kind of work occurs when Mr. Rogers takes Lloyd out to lunch in a Chinese Restaurant in Pittsburgh.  Mr. Rogers suggests that Lloyd observe one minute of silence so that he can reflect on all the wonderful things that people have done that have led him to become the person that he is.  The beautiful and creepy part of this particular moment is that everyone in the restaurant recognizes that this is what Mr. Rogers is doing and they support him in creating the silent space so that Lloyd can inhabit it.

Mr. Rogers comes to know Lloyd in profound ways.  And Lloyd profoundly profits from it.  The real life Lloyd – the tough guy who was softened by Mr. Rogers, Tom Juno, is part of the P.R. team hyping this film.  Juno sees the film as capturing the essence of the life changing experience that he had in his relationship with Mr. Rogers.

When Freud called Psychoanalysis an “Impossible Profession”, he compared it with education and politics as the other impossible professions.  Mr. Rogers was an educator and, in the moment when he convinced congress not to cut funding to public television, a politician.  But he was also a member of a profession that Freud notably didn’t include – the clergy.  And it is ironic that Freud didn’t include the clergy as an impossible profession.  On the surface, Freud’s position makes sense – he derided religion as trying to reassure us rather than help us face what is essentially difficult about the human condition.  But it is ironic because Freud’s creation of psychoanalysis has often been likened to a religion – and treated by psychology, for instance – as a religion rather than a science.

Freud wanted his adherents – his believers if you will – to have faith that the principles he articulated would serve them well as they worked to engage with the terrible forces that his technique unleashed in the people that analysts serve.  He wanted the folks he enlisted to treat the human condition to know that they were doing the right thing because their patients would experience them as doing something violent to them.

I think that Mr. Rogers, in his own quiet, patient way, was every bit as violent in his interactions with Lloyd/Tom as Lloyd/Tom’s father had been with him.  It is Mr. Rogers certainty that this is best for Lloyd/Tom that I find creepy and perhaps enviable.  I don’t feel as certain as Mr. Rogers, or Dr. Freud when I am helping people uncover the powerful feelings that stir inside them.  My lack of certainty may, then, do them a disservice.  At times I may shy away from something that needs to be said because I am not certain that the pain of hearing what I have to say will be outweighed by the relief that the exposure of the feared experience will bring.  Or maybe I want to respect my patient's ability to articulate what they believe to be their own truth in their own time.  Or maybe that last statement is just a justification – a way of distancing myself from my own belief system that may be somewhat fuzzier or more flexible than that of Mr. Rogers and Dr. Freud, but underneath every bit as hard and unforgiving.  

So I end up in a paradoxical spot.  I need to have faith to do what it is that I do.  My patients trust me to know what I am doing.  But too much faith - too much certainty - puts me in the camp of being an evangelist - imposing my beliefs on others.  I think Juno would object that he is better off.  He has stated that he has finally figured out what Mr. Rogers wanted - he wanted us all to pray.  And for some of us, this is the answer.  But is it the answer for all of us?  Would Mr. Rogers have been OK with a wide range of prayer?  I'm sure he was, at least on the surface.  But I think there is something creepy about all of us striving to be helpful to others, ostensibly by helping them broaden their range of freely being themselves - but the risk is that they may become as much our puppet as Rogers' King Friday the 13th.  This continues to give me pause, and continues to give me the same creepy feeling I got as a kid.

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Titus Andronicus: Psychoanalysis of Projection and Revenge in Elizabethan Times - and Our Own.

Titus Andronicus is one of Shakespeare’s bloodiest and least frequently produced plays.  Whether penned by a player from Stratford or a nobleman, it is generally agreed to be an early and simplistic play.  I had not been wild about seeing it, but we have a local company that has been producing the plays for a long time, they are only one of four companies in the U.S. to have produced the entire canon of 38 plays, and they have recently moved into a new building – their old theater was terrible.  The new one is a smaller scale version of the Globe and it is lovely.  We have been wanting to see a performance in the space for some time and this nicely fit into our need to have a date.  As a kicker, this play has been produced recently at the Stratford Festival in Canada – where they often choose plays with an eye towards helping the U.S. think about just what the heck it is currently doing.

If it is true, as Allan Bloom claims, that Shakespeare invented the human – at least on the stage, but perhaps more generally – this plays counts very few humans in its cast.  This makes sense from the perspective that it is a play from a playwright who is not just learning his craft, but is about to set about upending it.  But first he has to produce something recognizable.  And the odd thing was that this play was easier to watch for me, a person who is far from a Shakespearean specialist, than many of the later, greater plays (Hamlet as perhaps the greatest) have been.  The language was more immediate.  The plot is straightforward, and the characters are cartoons – with the exception of Aaron – the moor.  Aaron is a black slave who creates chaos and disruption – and whose motives are unclear – unlike everyone else on the stage.

I think that the pleasure we had – if you can call watching people get brutally murdered one after the other for three hours pleasure – was greatly enhanced by the staging.  The director chose to set the play in some nebulous time in the silent movie era – and had witty silent film synopses projected ahead of each scene, as well as using projection to let the players and the audience know what had occurred off stage.  We were also invited to participate as Roman Citizens watching the play and rooting for various characters – and helping others at various points – our votes were being courted or we were hiding planted evidence that would lead to miscarriages of justice.  And the characters were played as cartoons – they weren’t enhanced or complicated – in fact they were played as types rather than as persons.  It felt almost campy - but not in an arch way - instead it felt like camp was how this play was intended to be played.

Titus Andronicus returns from a war with the Goths.  He has been successful, but at great cost.  He brings back Tamora, queen of the Goths, her three sons and her moor/slave Aaron as a set of war trophies, but he also brings back the ashes of 21 of his 25 sons, each of whom has died in battle, as well as his four remaining sons who also fought.  Titus' first act of celebration on his return is to execute Tamora’s eldest son in front of her and the Romans as a means of celebrating his victory.  He does this despite Tamora’s entreaties, and we see that she is bent on revenge.

While Titus was away, the emperor of Rome has died, and Titus brother has convince the Senate to allow Titus to run against the two sons of the emperor in a three way election for emperor, but Titus – demonstrating his fatal flaw of fealty to authority – instead endorses and for all practical purposes enthrones the dead emperor’s eldest son, Saturninus, a vain and shallow fool, as the next emperor.  Saturninus was played with somewhat effeminate airs in the production that we saw and they called attention to the essential silliness of the character.  Titus’s choice is a bit of a surprise as the younger son, Bassianus, is betrothed to Titus’ daughter Lavinia, and it would have been a better family based choice to have nominated the younger son, and this underscores that, for Titus, there was no real choice.  The eldest son will lead.  And, more centrally, Titus will do what is called for by culture, tradition, and those who are in power.

No sooner does Saturninus get elevated to the throne than he plucks Lavinia from his brother and insists that he will marry her despite her love for Bassianus because he loves her and he is, after all, emperor.  Bassianus, who is the beloved of the people, and who is annoyingly and simperingly good natured and well intentioned, is, despite his conflict avoidant style, mortified by having his bride stolen from him – as are Lavinia’s brothers – Titus’s remaining children.  Titus sides with the emperor, continuing to be the dutiful and rule bound man that he is – and is so furious with Bassianus and his children that he fights with them to convince them to support the emperor, and, in the process, kills his youngest remaining son (I did say the play  was bloody, didn’t I?  Just wait...).  After Saturninus has set Titus’ family against itself he recants and decides instead to marry Tamora, who is elevated from war trophy/slave to empress by this move – and Titus is now ruled by and must, according to his own code, show fealty to the woman he has defeated, and to the woman who has sworn vengeance against him.

As in King Lear, all of this set up to the motion of the play takes place in the opening scene and before we have really settled into our seats.  And, as in King Lear, the rest of the action is an untangling of these events and the seemingly preordained way that this must needs happen.  This play, though, really does that ruthlessly.  In due time, Tamora’s remaining two sons murder Bassianus and frame Titus’s younger two remaining sons.  After they have done this deed, they rape Lavinia who implores Tamora not to let them do it, but Tamora, intent on revenge, eggs the boys on.  After raping her, they rip out her tongue and cut off her hands so that she can neither speak nor write about what they have done to her.  Meanwhile Titus is told that he can save his boys who have been sentenced to death by cutting off his hand and sending it to the emperor – which he does, but this turns out simply to be a ruse cooked up by Aaron to increase Titus’ pain.  The emperor sends the boys heads and Titus’ hand back to Titus in bags and Banishes Titus’ remaining son from Rome.    

Not surprisingly, next time we see Titus, he appears to be mad.  He is, however, still, underneath it all, the crafty general and he has discovered that it was Tamora’s sons who raped his daughter and killed her husband, and he knows that the emperor killed his children, so he has hatched his own plan for revenge, sending his one remaining son – somewhat crazily, in my mind – to lead the Goths back to Rome to fight the emperor (why would the Goths welcome as their leader one of the people who just defeated them in order to go on a quest to kill their queen?).  In any case, when Tamora comes calling dressed as revenge and brings her sons dressed as rape and murder, Titus, playing the mad man, appears to be taken in, and allows the sons to stay with him – where they plan to cause more mischief, but he turns the tables on them and kills them, bakes them in a pie, and invites the emperor and his wife – their mother, for dinner.

Meanwhile, Tamora has given birth to a child but that child has black skin.  The child is Aaron’s – and Aaron is, completely uncharacteristically, totally taken by it.  He falls in love – as father’s do – and becomes an idiot, cooing and loving on it.  Tamora’s plan had been to kill the thing, but Aaron will have none of that and, instead, he substitutes a white baby from some local Goths and kills everyone who knows anything about the actual child.  He then heads back to Goth, all in love with his child.  Unfortunately, he runs into Titus' son, who apprehends him.  Before he is put to death, he entices the son with information that he knows – so the son gives him a temporary reprieve to hear the information, and Aaron confesses to being behind the killing of Bassanius, the framing of Titus’s other two sons, the cuckolding of the emperor with Tamora, and seems to be quite proud of all this.

The final scene is a doozy.  Dinner at Titus’ place – the emperor and empress eating crow pie.  When they discover what it is, Titus kills his daughter in order to undo the shame that he feels at her having been defiled by the empress’ sons before killing the empress, then he is killed by the emperor, the emperor is killed by Titus’ son, and the son, crowned emperor by his uncle, sentences Aaron to be buried up to his neck and left to starve to death – an ancient Greek means of killing the most evil of people.  Order is restored.  The end.

Wow.  I think that is the most time that I have spent in any post spitting out the plot of a movie, play or book.  I think that is because I really wasn’t interrupted by much that was of psychoanalytic interest, and I think that, in turn, is because this is a very plot driven rather than character driven play.  The people here just aren’t that interesting.

I think it is mildly interesting that there are two prominent female characters.  Lavinia is mostly a prop though, and her suffering – as anguishing as it is – is not understood or appreciated by her father.  Despite their appearing to be of one mind about the revenge (not hard to appear to be in agreement when you can’t speak any lines), the harm that has been done to Lavinia is experienced by Titus as having happened to him – not to her.  His daughter – his pride – his property – was despoiled.  Her chastity was violently broken – as if her unwillingness were not at issue.  I think this can help us appreciate how deeply and for how long women have been blamed for rape and have borne the disgrace of it.  Lavinia's death, of the many deaths on the stage, was the only one that truly surprised me.  I suppose that is good – and a sign that we as a culture have moved along a bit – but it is also concerning, because I should have known that she would be blamed – including by her father – for this action.  If you want to know why more women don’t come forward about such things, we need look no further than this play.

Tamora is also interesting because of her duplicity, but that is relatively straightforward.  She is called forth to be the vain and foolish newbie emperor’s bride and she, no fool herself, knows how to use him.  But it feels a little like putting a formula one race car driver on a tricycle.  Yes, the driver will win the race, but the competition from six year olds is hardly a challenge. 

So Aaron becomes the character of interest, but largely out of curiosity.  He is, at least in this production, largely outside or above the idiots around him.  He is, by far, the strongest and most lithe of the players.  He is also the smartest, coming up with the plot to frame Titus' remaining sons.  He is most off balance in his interactions with Tamora, where he is more smitten with her than she with him, which seems out of character.  Or perhaps she is more focused on revenge, which Aaron has some investment in – but he is, after all, a slave of the Goths, not a native of the country that was defeated by Titus.  We hear no pronouncement of his attachment to Tamora’s son who is executed – at least in this production his body language suggests that he doesn’t have a dog in that race.  Does he carry out the revenge plot just to stay in the good graces of Tamora?  Is he merely trying to butter up his paramour?

At the end, he is, as the reluctant wife pointed out, unrepentant.  He cares not a whit that he has been directly responsible for the deaths of three men, about whom he cared little, and that he has cut the hand off a fourth.  Though he thought that the rape of Lavinia was a childish act on the part of Tamora’s boys, he did not prevent it.  We might think that he is cunning – or perhaps psychopathic – meaning unmoved by the experiences of others.  But he is so totally taken with his own child – we realize that a human heart beats under that black exterior.  And the issue of his skin color – despite those (including myself) who consider race to be a US invention – is vivid in this play.  He is black – and this blackness becomes a stain on his child – it marks his child, just as it has marked him.  And it is equated, in the language of the play, with evil.  But I think it is also equated with his being an outsider – an other – the excluded one.  The one who has no legitimate seat at the table.

Part of Aaron’s glee at having a child is general, but part of it is specific.  His child is the child of a high born woman – the queen of the Goths and the empress of Rome.  His child is royalty.  How could that have happened to a man who is a commoner – indeed, a slave?  On the one hand, all of his machinations as an outsider have bought him the ultimate insider ticket.  His progeny is in the inner circle and carries not just free but royal blood.  He, who has been the target of racist erasure of who he is – he who has lurked outside the wheels of power, has been able to exercise puppet master expertise in manipulating situations and he does not feel guilty – he feels proud.  If murder and mayhem be the cost of inclusion, give me the bill, and I will pay in full.

So why do the Canadians want us to pay attention to this play?  Do they see us, at this time when impeachment is in the air, as having the fatal flaw of fealty?  Do they want to remind us that just because someone has the title of emperor or president, that doesn’t mean they deserve the title?  That was my initial thought – that they identified us with Titus and wanted to remind us to watch out for the king.  But I think that, perhaps, they may also have wanted to warn us that there might be an Aaron in our midst.  Aaron, the second son of Adam.  Aaron, the one who was passed over – and who responded with murder.  The one who was blinded by his having been excluded from the family, and so destroyed it.  Are they pointing a finger at our president who pursued the office not to do good or out of any kind of ideological verve, but rather out of a wish to finally be included – to be considered up to snuff.  Were they exposing the snake in the grass?

My hunch is that this is what they had in mind – or should have had in mind.  That said, I am worried about the use of race as a means of marking outsiderness.  I think that we have done this since, well, I guess at least since the time of Shakespeare.  But I think that this is a vehicle for a deeper truth.  Yes there is enmity between races, and between Goths and Romans, but this play is about the enmity of an individual being excluded from a family – even though he was able to demonstrate that he was not only up to snuff but above the members – and attractive to the queen.  I think that whites (whatever they are) have long projected their disowned aggression against oppressed others – frequently people of color – and then justified their continued aggression as a need to contain the projected aggression. 

If this play is a flat footed first attempt at tragedy – it was, I don’t doubt – popular with those who lusted for blood and revenge (as referred to in Shakespeare in Love).  Perhaps more importantly, it portrayed quite clearly the prejudice and aggression of a culture against those most disempowered within it – the women and the slaves.  It is shocking but not surprising to find this so clearly spelled out in a play from so long ago.  

  

I have posted about other Shakespearean Plays including: Hamlet, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew, and a fanciful and lovely film about an imaginary Shakespeare in Love.   I have also posted about the controversy about who Shakespeare might really be based on the books Will of the World and Shakespeare by Another Name.  

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

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Horror! “Bride of Frankenstein” as a portal to thinking about the Genre from a Psychoanalytic Perspective.

Matt Bennett is the president of our local Association of Psychoanalytic Thought (APT).  He is also a professor who teaches about film and film interpretation from a psychoanalytic perspective.  What a treat it was to have him teach us about film interpretation in a recent APT meeting during which, in part since Halloween is approaching, we screened a seminal 1935 film “Bride of Frankenstein”.

“Bride of Frankenstein” seminal?  Horror as a genre worthy of study?  Perhaps in part in response to the second question – and because our beloved psychoanalytic library is being refurbished and there weren’t books surrounding us as there usually are when we screen films – Matt passed around a stack of books that interpret Horror films from a psychoanalytic perspective.

I never would have thought.  Matt began the conversation by asking us to think about horror films and what leads us to categorize them as that.  We named a number of films –Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho, Alien and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  And suddenly there are subgenres – slasher films, suspense, science fiction, and camp/parody films.  Subgenres!  Of Horror!  Oh, the horror…

Matt clarified that some people object to classifying any film as a horror film.  The whole idea, for these people, is that horror is transgressive and so putting boundaries around what is and is not a horror film flies in the face of the transgressive nature of horror.  He noted, though, the large overlap between science fiction and horror, and went on to say that both Frankenstein (Mary Shelley’s novel and the movie), and Bride of Frankenstein, (again the novel and the movie), are warnings to us – warnings that have been around since at least the Greeks and the myths of Icarus and Prometheus – warnings that too much technical knowledge can lead to a very bad end.  One of the audience members took this all the way back to Genesis and the eating of the tree of knowledge.

Matt asked us to think about what horror is and what makes a film evoke horror.  We agreed that horror is a bodily feeling – it is corporeal.  This led us to think about our hair standing on end.  It is also related to terror, to the feeling of the uncanny (about which Freud had a lot to say), and with some help from a quote from Stephen King – to disgust based on being grossed out.  But we also noted that horror – especially in horror films – is right next to the ridiculous.  We find many of the horror situations ludicrous – and horror audiences are notoriously garrulous – saying out loud, “Don’t open the coffin!”

Horror films have tropes that help us to experience horror.  It is not just the plot and the dialogue, but the lighting, the use of frame (when the horizon is at an angle, we feel unbalanced), music, lighting (lighting faces from underneath, as with a flashlight when telling scary stories, distorts the features of the characters), and also the physicality of the actors – the quality of the make-up.  Frankenstein’s monster – though the film was in black and white – is often portrayed on posters with green skin. 

This lead into a discussion of the monster – and for the first time I thought of Joker, a film that I we saw recently and that I just posted on, as a horror film.  And as I was thinking this, we talked about the identification of the audience – that it can be with the people being victimized, but it can also be with the monster, and that we may feel both kinship with being traumatized, but we may also master that through what is glibly called identification with the aggressor – we find the monster more interesting – something that is certainly the case in Joker, but then showed up in unexpected ways with Bride of Frankenstein.

So we watched the film with a few tools in our pockets.  It is a brief film – 1 hour and 9 minutes running time – but it was the longest 69 minutes of my life.  It reminded me of watching Monty Python episodes when I was in High School – those were the longest half hours of my life.  I think both Monty Python and Bride of Frankenstein cram a lot into a relatively few minutes – but I also think that neither of them follows a linear narrative path.  Indeed, Bride of Frankenstein, the Movie, seems to be made in much the way the monster is – with bits and pieces of this and that all mashed together – and there is a strange coherence to the whole – but it is, not just in the content, but in the jangliness of the whole thing,  unsettling.  It feels like a dream that takes random bits and pieces and projects them one after the other and says, in effect, “Here – this is the dream.”  And you, as the one who have watched the dream, have to say, “Oh, OK, that’s it then.  Huh…”

The movie begins with Mary Shelley telling her husband Percy Shelley and Lord Byron that there is more to her tale of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster.  As they gather round her, we are reminded of the highlights of the original tale, with Dr. Frankenstein’s monster running amok through the countryside, but coming to his apparent end, along with Dr. Frankenstein, on Dr. Frankenstein’s wedding night in a great fire in a windmill.  As we pick up the story, neither the monster, nor Dr. Frankenstein is actually dead.  Dr. Frankenstein is revived when he is brought to his home, and the monster comes to life and starts killing people wantonly again.  Dr. Frankenstein is nursed back to health by his future bride, while his monster goes looking for help in the world – but finds that people have decided he is a monster so they try to hurt and kill him. 

The monster saves a little girl from drowning, but is discovered by hunters and shot at. He tries to get help from gypsies, but is burned  Then he is captured by police and hauled off to a dungeon which he promptly escapes from.  Ultimately he finds brief solace with a blind man in the forest – his savageness is tamed by the blind man’s violin playing.  The blind man also teaches him some rudimentary words – including, quite poignantly, the word friend. 

Dr. Frankenstein, meanwhile, is pursued by his friend and mentor Dr. Pretorius who wants his help in crafting a bride for the monster.  In one of those odd, dream-like moments, Dr. Pretorius shows off his ability to create life – four or five miniature human beings he has grown from some kind of basic organic matter.  This is an entertaining and odd kind of side moment.  And somehow Pretorius views the monster that Dr. Frankenstein has created as greater than his little dolls – and he works to convince Dr. Frankenstein to return to his building of monsters – something that Dr. Frankenstein is loath to do.

While collecting a corpse to bring to life, Dr. Pretorius and the monster, who has been fleeing a mob, discover each other.  Dr. Pretorius lets the monster know that he wants to create a mate for him, and the monster becomes his ally against Dr. Frankenstein, first threatening Dr. Frankenstein directly to get to work, then kidnapping his wife, whom Dr. Pretorius assures Dr. Frankenstein will be unharmed as long as Frankenstein works with him to create the bride.

So, create the bride they do.  Igor secures a heart from a living person, they add that to a corpse and to the brain that Pretorius has grown and, right on time, a storm kicks up, lightning starts, the bed is raised into the air, lightning strikes the kite – and Frankenstein has his bride.  There’s just one hitch.  When she – played by the same woman who played Mary Shelley at the beginning of the film, but now with iconic hair with white streaks – sees the monster, she, instead of swooning, screams. 

The heartbroken monster goes on a rampage, destroying the laboratory – but he decides to release Dr. Frankenstein and his wife – telling them that they should live – while he keeps Dr. Pretorius and his mate/monster in the tower with him – and destroys the castle, condemning the three of them to death.

So this film is part horror, part melodrama, and, thanks in no small part to a character I haven’t mentioned – one of Dr. Frankenstein’s household servants – an hysterical woman who swoons and screams and preaches – a comedy.  It is a bit of all over the place.

Matt described a number of interpretations of the film, but the one that I liked the best was one that is based in queer theory.  From this perspective, the director, who was an openly gay man in the queer embracing Hollywood of the thirties, tells a story of two men – Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius – who want to make a baby without having to bother to include a woman in their scheme.  They do this bit of alchemy with the intent of starting their own race – but it goes wildly wrong – and they pay the price. 

The problem with this interpretation, as one of the audience members repeatedly pointed out, is that the book, which the movie is faithful to, was written by a woman.  But it is interesting to me that this woman is portrayed, in the opening scene, as someone who is being courted by both her husband and his friend – as if the boys want to connect with each other through this female go between – supporting the queer reading.  More centrally, though, Mary Shelley is a woman in a man’s world – a world where men have all the power – except the power to make life.  Wouldn’t it be nice, she might think, if, from their perspective, the woman – that envied and secretly powerful other – could be eliminated from the mix?  And wouldn’t that square with a larger, societal queerness – that we envy each other’s different capacities rather than admiring them – and that we are looking not for diversity, but for sameness – for mates who mirror rather than compliment us?

Whether we read this as a queer film or not, it does contain some other important attributes of “otherness” that are part and parcel of later films and also of our lives more generally.   In particular, the monster’s mates scream when she sees the monster.  What is that about?   Is she afraid of him?  Or is she afraid that, in looking at him, she is seeing herself?  Is there some kind of recognition of our own monstrousness in the other?  In this reading, is Mary Shelley as guilty of wanting to create a world in which procreation is mechanical, not organic, just as the men around her my wish to be able to do?  Wouldn’t a woman want to avoid the harrowing difficulties of pregnancy and childbirth, but also feel guilty about not wanting to use her superpowers?

Even before we get to the final scene, the monster, who has been so monstrous through the first film, becomes much more sympathetic.  He really seems to be reaching out to the people, trying to connect with them, but isn’t he, like Christ (and the images are there in the film to support this reading) rejected by the people who, instead of welcoming him, want to crucify him?  How do we understand our rejection of the message of love that comes from a figure like Jesus?  How do we justify turning that, in the myriad ways that we do, into a call for violence and aggression?

Despite, or maybe because of the primitive means that movie makers had available to portray this material – it gets at some deep and profound aspects of our existence – all the while feeling campy and unreal.  Matt reminded us that the gaze of the camera is a masculine gaze – seeing things as objects and appealing to men who come to the theater to look at stuff while being safely protecting by viewing that stuff from behind the lens – so that they are able to see objects – not subjects.  And horror invites us to become subjects – to feel afraid – to be scared.  To live inside our creeping skin.  No wonder it has to be ludicrous – we can’t stand being confronted by the inner gushy guts that we stick our hands into in haunted houses – and at the movies when we go, seemingly against our wills, to be titillated by horror.

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