House of Cards Final Season – Are you still there?

HOUSE OF CARDS, POLITICS, ROBIN WRIGHT, CLAIRE UNDERWOOD, DOUG STAMPER, SEASON SIX, PSYCHOANALYSIS, PSYCHOLOGY, BINGEWORTHY, STREAMING, WOMEN IN POLITICS, GENDER PERCEPTIONS

It is a wintry long weekend here in the Midwest and the reluctant wife and I had planned to settle in to watch Kenneth Branagh’s four hour Hamlet, which had been streaming free on Netflix, only to discover that it was no longer running there and we couldn’t even purchase it on Amazon.  We were ready to watch before dinner and after dinner – so we had a chunk of time available (a rarity) and we considered various options, then remembered that the last season of House of Cards had dropped in October.  We had watched a few favorite series installments in the interim, including the Marvelous Mrs. Mazel’s second season as soon as it dropped in November, but we had been putting House of Cards off. 

House of Cards lost much of its luster as a bizarre tale of intrigue in Washington when reality began to compete with fiction and we had a real estate magnate running for president – and then to become far stranger as that man’s Presidency unfolded – and the penultimate season seemed to be stretching itself just a bit too far in trying to keep up with and perhaps top the very real crazy doings in Washington by having President Frances (Frank) Underwood (Kevin Spacey) appointing his wife Claire (Robin Wright – who is also a producer of the show) to become Vice President with the understanding that she, when she succeeded him as President, would pardon him for all his crimes (including multiple murders) and misdemeanors on her ascension.  On becoming President, she let Frank twist in the wind while she decided whether to pardon him or not.  The season ended with Claire as President and Frank on the outside after she had declared, through the fourth wall, “My turn.”

Meanwhile, out in the real world,  the me too movement happened.  Kevin Spacey was accused of sexual improprieties with a young man, and then other young men followed, and then Spacey was no longer going to be a part of the final season.  This final season was shortened from the previous usual number of thirteen episodes to a tighter eight.  And so we watched all eight shows of the final season last night in marathon viewing that kept us up past our bedtime.  One of many cliffhanger questions that kept us in binge watching mode was the overarching question: Who killed Frank Underwood? 

When, in the first episode, Claire broke the fourth wall to ask, “Are you still there?” I realized that I had avoided watching the show not just because of how crazy it had become, but because Spacey was no longer the star.  And an implicit question – will men watch “male” themed show with a female lead became explicit.  And the show depicts a presidency with a woman at the helm where that woman does not at first appear to be functioning on her own – she has borrowed or stolen or inherited the presidency from her male predecessor and we watch her grow into it to see her put her own stamp on it.  As the President does this, Claire also grows into Spacey's role by continuing to use his trademark asides to bring us into her world through that fourth wall. And the auxiliary question that is being asked within the show itself, "Will men allow a woman who has become president, whether because she was elected or assumed the presidency, allow her to govern?” So the question becomes: does a woman - to succeed in Hollywood or in DC - have to emulate the men who have preceded her in order to succeed at their business?

This series, in my mind, is intended as a kind of yin to the West Wing's yang.  Where the West Wing was too warm, too positive, too idealizing of the way the White House could and should be, this is too cold, too calculating, and too incisive about the kinds of people who rise to the top of the political heap.  If there is a political spectrum from ideal to feared, these two complimentary shows span that arc.  And if the task of a President is to run a marathon – with his staffers performing sprints that keep him or her afloat while burning themselves out (as was depicted in the West Wing), the House of Cards demonstrates what it would be like to be President without a team – to be one against the world  constantly sprinting and having very little room to appreciate that this is a marathon – which feels increasingly like the situation of the current White House.

When it is one against the world, it is important to have an aide who is indispensable – someone who would live and die for you and who will do your dirty work.  The constant through all six seasons – the person who has been there since the beginning for Frank and, to a lesser extent, for Claire, is Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly).  This character, who plays the role of fixer and then of fall guy – is deeply connected with Frank.  He is the son that Frank never had – indeed, in this season, it is revealed that Frank writes an 11^th hour will leaving his entire estate to Doug.  This is largely, like so much else in this series, a plot device – and its presence allows Claire to override it both by stealing it from Doug before he can know about it – though like so many secrets in this season it gets exposed in due time – but also by allowing her to trump it by carrying Frank’s child to term – which will override Doug’s claim while also allowing her to masquerade as caring mother-to-be to the country.  This particular plot twist feels forced - and I think it is an effort to make something happen that can't quite work - the way that dreams - right before they fail - try to insert something that will somehow keep the dream going no matter how preposterous the dream.

The irony, of course, is that Doug is, in fact, the rightful and sole heir to Frank’s estate.  He is the one who is concerned with preserving the memory of Frank as the President who accomplished all that he did which is the only estate that really matters - the material things will rust.  He is the one who would protect Frank’s legacy, not only by taking the fall, but also by keeping all of the skeletons hidden.  When he negotiates to do dirty work, he is negotiating nor for himself, but for Frank - making sure that the Shepherds will fund Frank's presidential library.  And he is the one who would seek revenge on the person who led, in his mind, to Frank’s downfall – Claire.  From this perspective, Claire is seen by Frank as Macbeth’s wife, urging Frank (as Macbeth) on to do things that lead to his ascension, but that also involve both of them being drenched in the blood that gets them to the top.  And she deserves Doug’s wrath and intended retribution for having besmirched and failing to protect her husband’s legacy.

The issue of Presidential pardons is central to this thread of a very complicated tale.  Doug insists not only on his being given a pardon, but on Claire bestowing a posthumous pardon on Frank.  We are also, of course, living in a real world where Presidential pardons could loom large in the question of whether every citizen must abide by the rule of law.  Trump could wield pardons as a mean of springing those whose misdeeds are being used by Mueller as leverage to learn about Trump’s possible misdeeds.  From that perspective, pardons are, like so much else in this series, simply means to an end.  But this series, for all of its starkness and for all of the meanness of its characters, turns out to be about much more than just achieving a means to an end – and the issues of loyalty and redemption lie very close to the heart of what it is about – and what, in the end, redeems it as a series and, indeed, as a work of art.  And how much the redemptive process that is spelled out is about the President, how much about the world of Hollywood, and how much about the reaction of the show to the behavior of its star all overlap in the delicious ways that creative works - our own dreams and works of art - seem to.

Claire is presented as the first female president – and she is presented as needing to be ruthless in order to function in that role.  There is great irony here.  When, in an incredibly staged counter coups, she fires her entire cabinet and replaces them all with women – it is very important (this is a small but not emphasized point) that they are all functionaries - they are career bureaucrats; long term employees and leaders within the agencies that they head, and while she is pushing forward a woman’s agenda that follows the gender stereotype of working cooperatively with others rather than going it alone she is also supporting a culture of rewarding hard work and dedication to an organization with opportunities to lead that organization rather than plopping in political cronies who have not earned, by virtue of their work in the organization, the position that is bestowed on them.  She is embodying (as she does with her pregnancy) the anti-Claire.  This Claire sees the opportunity for a new world – one that is not run by the vile and despicable predator types that include Frank and her current nemeses – Bill (Greg Kinnear) and Annette (DianeLane) Shepherd.

Bill Shepherd is a billionaire scion of a chemical and oil and gas family who is dying of cancer and riddled with the fear that his high handed disregard for the environment and safety that has lined his pockets has also ruined his health.  Annette is his sister and a college intimate of Claire's.  Her meanness and moral depravity is captured by her attempt, despite her right-to-life stance, to kill Claire’s unborn child.  From this perspective, this series becomes a morality play, with Claire’s lack of apparent conscience seeming to be a foil to protect her from truly evil others – whom she immorally disposes of so that she can achieve a greater good.  Though this is present, it is a thin read.  There is much deeper and therefore more complex and difficult to read stuff going on here than a simple good vs. evil with good having to compromise to defeat evil moral.

We revisited Robin Wright in her early days when the Reluctant Stepdaughter’s latest enthusiastic partner joined us over the holidays and mistakenly stated that he had never seen The Princess Bride.  We were so enthusiastic to show him this shared family treasure that, by the time we had it cued up, it had progressed too far for us to undo it once the boyfriend revealed he had seen it before.  So we once again watched Robin as Princess Buttercup be protected by the dread Pirate Robert – who was a better swordsman than the great Inigo Montoya, outfought Andre the Giant, and outsmarted the brainy Vizziny to ultimately be able to wrest her from the odious Prince Humperdink and ride off into the sunset with her. 

For Robin to move from the dependent and helpless – if likeable and spunky Buttercup to the President of the United States, and for her to move – as Claire - from the pretty prep girl who must choose to forego an excellent sex life to marry the ambitious but self-infatuated and conniving Frank rather than charting her own path to power – she must come to grips with a world that is not filled with good hearted farmhands like The Princess Bride's Westley who only seems to be evil as he inhabits the role of the dread pirate Robert, but instead with the boys in the House of Cards flashback who cut her dress off when she is a tween in order to ogle and perhaps do more to her, and with women like her House of Cards mother who berates her for seeking revenge against her brother who led his friends to do this deed.  She must, one supposes, also come to grips with Kevin Spacey's behavior - and who knows what behavior she herself has more directly faced in the Hollywood culture that Spacey and other's behavior has recently uncovered.

There is, then, a deep fracture in the character of Claire (even if she had never, in real life, been Princess Buttercup).  Whatever maternal feelings she may have towards others feel like they will betray her and keep her from achieving the ends that she has in mind - ends that might right some of the wrongs in this world, because the softer feelings would allow her to be used and discarded by those whose ends are nefarious.  So she must lose that which is most precious to protect it.  And it is in the final scene of the series that this becomes evident (and yes, if I haven’t already spoiled enough, I am about to spoil the whole thing, so be warned…).

Pain is described by Frank as being divided into two types – that which makes you stronger and that which is useless.  Claire amends this to say that pain is of only one type – the useless variety.  When Claire confronts Doug in the final scene, Doug is in pain.  Doug’s pain is the pain of having lost a father – and he lost Frank as a father when Robin froze Frank out of the White House driving Frank to become frenzied and irrational.  Frank was returning to the White House – perhaps to kill Claire.  Doug desperately wanted to head this off.  In order to protect Frank's legacy, Doug chose to kill the person who was threatening it – Frank himself – and Claire divines in the instant that Doug tries to kill her that it was Doug who killed Frank.  Doug confesses that he messed with Frank's meds so that Frank had what appeared to be a heart attack and Claire could claim that he was sleeping beside her when it occurred.  But Claire can see that the pain of killing Frank is something that Doug believes he can only erase by killing her.  To see her as responsible would absolve him of guilt.  But she sees beyond that and realizes that this is a false solution.  Doug, unlike Frank, is attached to Claire - and he can't kill her.  Also, unlike Frank, Doug is connected with all people, especially Frank, and feels, in fact, guilt.  And this is a pain that he can't get rid of himself.

This scene is a powerful one that is hard to reconstruct as I write about it (and I have liberally interpreted what passes between the two of them).  Doug has returned to the White House with the intent to assassinate the President.  She knows this and she has ordered the secret service members out of the room to confront her assassin directly.  She has lied to Doug repeatedly and Doug has brought Frank’s recorded memoir for her to listen to.  These are recordings in which Frank recounts his crimes and misdemeanors and implicates Claire in them.  Claire points out that Doug’s name does not appear anywhere in Frank’s rantings – even though it was Doug who carried out many of the deeds.  Frank has erased Doug and overlooked him.  Doug – whose life revolves around Frank – does not exist as an entity in Frank’s life.  Doug’s deep and powerful love is not reciprocated by a man who cannot love in the way that Frank so desperately desires.

Doug wants to kill Claire – because he blames her for having ruined Frank - and to relieve his own guilt.  But it was Frank’s failure to be the person that Doug wanted and needed him to be that is causing Doug pain.  Hardened Doug – Alcoholic, AA surviving Doug – fixer Doug – unattached Doug – this Doug feels deeply, longingly connected to the slick and competent star that is Frank – a person who was able to trick and deceive people – and one who let Doug see who it was that he really was – and this opening to Doug felt like an act of love – but it ended fueling Doug's desire for intimacy and love - not addressing it.  And killing Claire is not the solution – so when she brutally and lovingly kills him – when she puts Doug out of his misery with the murder weapon that Doug inherited from Frank and attempted to use against her – the letter opener that Doug used to carve his initials in the Roosevelt desk – the instrument that he used to say, “I was here, I mattered,” she was able to end the pain that involved his feeling that he never really had been here – that he didn’t in fact matter.

So Claire’s statement, “No more pain,” with which this series concludes, suggests that she has walled herself off from pain – but that she has also been able to be open to her own pain enough that she can engage in a tremendous act of empathic generosity and put someone who is in unresolvable pain out of his misery.  This kind of twisted, powerful, perverse maternal figure – one who would create space for a new, more feminine based means of engagement – can only, it seems, in the universe of the House of Cards, which seems to oddly parallel our own universe, assert that new femininity from a decidedly warped version of masculine power and control.  To end the reign of masculine depravity, one must be not only depraved, but also care for others - one must not just have more strength, but address the true needs of others - to end their hopes for a fairy tale - for a clean and simple world of white hats and black hats, to help them quit desiring something that does not exist.  What she does not go on to do is to articulate how to train a new generation to recognize that we are all compromised, but that we do the best that we can out of that compromise.  I think maybe her all female cabinet will do something she can't do - advise her on how to be a compassionate woman.

If we are still here – can it be we who remain?  Do we want to see women take on masculine roles and carry them out, as it were, with a vengeance?  What does it take for a woman to stand up to a man like Putin?  Or the Koch brothers?  Or to Trump?  Or to Spacey?  Or Harvey Weinstein?  What will we lose in the process of gaining a new, better, more powerful and authentic voice that will lead our organizations and this country?  How will we be able to stay in touch with our deeply based Democratic ideals as we become more powerful and more transparently vulnerable to corrupting influence than we may be able to stomach?  Are we still here is a question to be asked indeed.


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Lucky Boy – A Tale of Attachment

LUCKY BOY, NOVEL, SHANTHI SEKARAN, PSYCHOLOGY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, ATTACHMENT, IMMIGRATION, IMMIGRANTS, NOVEL, MATERNAL BOND, PATERNAL BOND

Shanthi Sekaran’s novel Lucky Boy is an easy read, even if it is long and too artfully and self-consciously constructed to be engrossing.  It tells the tale of two women – Soli, a woman from absolutely nowhere Mexico running to the United States for a better life – and Kavya – a first generation Indian American woman married to Rishi – also a first generation Indian American.  The novel alternates between chapters describing Soli’s trek from Mexico towards the United States and, inevitably, Berkeley, where her cousin lives with her cousin’s two children, and chapters describing Kavya’s life, which includes working as a cook for a sorority at UC Berkeley and trying, without luck, to become pregnant with Rishi.

The Lucky Boy of the title is Soli’s child – who is conceived on the road to the US – perhaps through love and perhaps through rape – both befall Soli on the way.  It is inevitable, for almost three hundred pages, that the lives of these two women will intersect through Ignacio, the lucky boy that is born to Soli.  While reading these pages I both considered giving up on the book – it was pleasant enough but focused largely on telling about the lives of these two women from an objective vantage point – I didn’t feel like I was really getting much access to them – and I was convinced I would not write about it.  There was little here of merit.  That changed at the moment Ignacio was born.

There is something very strange about having a child.  It alters you (or at least it altered me) in the most fundamental ways imaginable.  I was now connected to another human being in a way that I had never been connected to anyone in my life before.  As I have mentioned before, talking with other parents, they get it – but it is like a secret club – you have to have had a child to belong.  Sekaran takes the reader through three very different processes to achieve this result.  Soli’s experience of giving birth to the child she calls Nacho, Kavya’s experience of choosing Ignacio to foster parent and hopefully to adopt, and Rishi’s coming around to connecting with Iggy as his father, long after Kavya has given herself over to him.  The description of each of these three very different but parallel processes of attachment rung very true to me and each of them were emotionally evocative in ways that I had not anticipated they would be based on the writing to that point.

I cannot know if the powerful emotions evoked in me would be evoked in someone who has not gone through the attachment process with a child.  That attachment process, as exemplified by Kavya and Rishi, does not have to be a birth process.  I think that my sister went through a similar experience as she became the aunt to my son, and I know that my friends who have adopted describe a similar fundamental shift – a seeming movement in the cosmos.  Everything feels different as a result of this attachment.

Sekaran uses the attachment of each of these people to this boy to play out the plot in the second half of the book.  The attachment is the glue that holds the last half of the book together.  What that plot is does not, on some level, matter.  What matters is the glue and Sekaran's ability to describe it in such a way that I remember such silly things about my own attachment process as hearing every love song on the radio as the song expressing the love of a parent for a child – and avoiding watching television for a year because the violent deaths of every person on every show depicting it were the deaths of someone’s child – and that I remembered much more solemn things – the sense that my life was no longer my own – that I was living, at least in part, very much for someone else and that I could no longer treat my life with the same casual disregard I once had done.  And it is this solemn attachment  that drives the drama of the last half.

I am dismissive of the particulars of the drama, but appreciate that they exist at this moment on another level.  Despite my observations about my own sense of attachment to my son in the immediate aftermath of his birth (and vestiges of that still bind us together twenty years later), I found myself disconnected from the immigration crisis and the forced separation of children from their parents.  I’m not sure what kicked in for me during that process – how it was that I did suddenly become aware of the cruel implications of what we were doing – how it was that I somehow hadn’t known before at all either professionally (see my post about Daniel Stern’s work) or personally (see the paragraph above) just how devastating the impact of that separation would be on the infant and on the parent. 

This book, at times with too much detail, works hard to humanize its protagonists.  We cannot dismiss Soli as an other - as someone essentially foreign to us, nor Kavya, nor Rishi.  I think we identify with them through something much more powerful than the laboriously drawn descriptions that Sekaran provides – though the background may be important.  I think that we connect with them through the descriptions of their reactions – the felt experiences that they have in the context of having a child enter their lives in the way this child enters into each of their lives.  I think we would have had that experience based on Sekaran’s ability to create within us the feelings that she is attributing to her protagonists.

That said, I think that the long read is not wasted.  We learn a lot about these three people, imaginary though they may be.  We also learn about the experience of being both a documented child of immigrants and an undocumented immigrant and we learn about the justice system, including the various injustices that it metes out.  But all of this is ultimately in service of learning, once again, that it is the bonds of attachment that connect us and that this boy – whom some might pity based on all that befalls him – deserves to be considered lucky because of the attachment that he has experienced with these three adults.  

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Springsteen on Broadway - Appearances Are Deceiving

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, BROADWAY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, PSYCHOLOGY, AUTHENTICITY, SELF PRESENTATION, ROCK AND ROLL, FOLK, PERFORMANCE ART

First a disclaimer.  I am not now nor have I ever been a true Bruce Springsteen fan.  That said, while Springsteen’s music has not hung in the place of honor, it has been the wallpaper in more than one room of my musical life’s home.  His reputation as putting on the best live show of any rock and roller of his generation has also made me feel guilty about never having scored a ticket.  The friend from whom I cribbed the disclaimer at the opening of this post is a fan, and he is convinced that in one of the shows Springsteen picked him out as one of the people that he was singing the show to – and – whether that was true or not – I think it speaks to a particular connection that audiences have felt to Springsteen in his performances – they have felt a particularly close bond to him as a performer and as a person.

The recording of the Broadway show, recently released on Netflix, which follows on the heels of and apparently plays with themes from Springsteen’s autobiography, itself starts with a disclaimer.  Springsteen claims that he is a fraud.  He has written lyrics about things – like being a factory worker – that he has never been.  He presents himself as a Carney – telling the people what they want to hear - and says that this is a magic trick, but then he proceeds to put the songs that he has written into the context of the life that he has lived in a way that allows us to glimpse their integrity, honesty and genuineness – or he is one hell of a liar.  And it is hard to imagine that he is not also that – he notes that in coming to the theater every day for this show is the first time in his life that he has worked a steady job and he acknowledges that he doesn’t like it.  And being as bare and raw and intimately connected as he is with the audience in this performance night after night, working from a script, is he talking to us?  Is he performing for us?  Or is he playing a part?  Of course, he is doing a bit of all three – and he is convincing in each role as he plays the parts.

The songs that he performs are acoustic versions mostly of his standards that are sometimes hard to recognize because of the arrangements.  He uses an acoustic guitar or a piano to accompany himself and, on two songs, he and his wife Pattie Scialfa.   There is no band and no screaming from the audience – they don’t even sing along.  His music struck my ear, in this setting, as folk or maybe blues based, and the reluctant wife heard the tunes as sounding more like spirituals.  The music though, is largely secondary.  What is primary is the talking – the storytelling.  In his autobiography, Springsteen reveals that he has been working with a psychoanalyst for the past twenty five years.  This performance does not feel like psychoanalytic free association – but it does feel free – the words trip off his tongue effortlessly and you would think that he would take more pleasure in the poetic turns of phrase that he includes, but his mood is somber.  Indeed, his bearing is very much like what I would expect from his father – a hardworking and hard-drinking Irish Catholic man from small town southern New Jersey – at the end of his life. 

It felt like a completely different guy that we found on a Youtube rendition of his “Dancing in the Dark” video where as a young cute guy with a cute curl over his forehead, he pulls a starry eyed  Courtney Cox (before she was on Friends) out of the crowd to dance with him.  He is now old, tired and somber.  He still takes great joy in life, but it is circumspect joy.  He weighs the joys of life against the difficulties that come with it.  He acknowledges how hard it was to be his father – and to be raised by him.  But he is also able to share something of his mother’s joy – her pride in her work as a legal secretary and walking buoyantly home with her – head held high – after a day at work.  And he remembers her dancing - something she does even now that she is 93 and stricken with Alzheimer’s.  Her presence is an energizing counterpoint to his father’s gloom.

In another special we watched recently, Ellen DeGeneres’ Relatable, DeGeneres begins by noting the concern that viewers will not relate to her stand-up routine because her net worth is so much different than ours.  Well, both she and Bruce are estimated to be in the 450 million dollar range – and Bruce does not talk about raising kids with all of that wealth – and all of the complications of being a father with whom many millions of people feel like they have a personal relationship.  Instead he relates to us as if we do, indeed have a personal relationship with him – and talks about something that we can relate to – the years when he was growing up and then, once he was grown, how hard it is to love and be loved.

Like seemingly all modern pop singers, love is at the heart of Springsteen’s songs and his rendition of his life, but Springsteen’s love is not the light and seemingly effortless love of someone like DeGeneres – and perhaps his mother.  Springsteen’s position in the show and in his music is that letting someone else have access to the parts of oneself that one doesn’t even like about one’s self is, to say the least, difficult.  So instead, we present brilliant disguises to each other and hope that the other sees through them but simultaneously fear that they will.  In order to love each other – as he and Scialfa have done – we need to be tougher than the rest.  And the love that they portray, as they sing the duets together – is one that has some rough edges.  There is affection – and wariness – and even a little awkwardness.  I found myself thinking of the relationship between Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash as portrayed in the biopic I walked the Line.

There is a level on which this performance feels very real and a level on which it also is very much a play – a construction that we are witnessing.  It is both an intimate view of the most private parts of the artist – and there is a ton of who we know that he must be that is not included.  We don’t hear about the glitzy parties and hanging with other celebrities – we hear about growing up one hour from New York, but it might as well be on the other side of the moon from it – no one would think of going there.  We learn about all the uncles and aunts that lived within a two block radius – but we don’t hear – as we do with Ellen – what it is like to skooch across a thirty foot bathroom on the bathmat because the marble floors are too cold to walk on…  We also see someone acting and being (in some odd combination of both) sincere.

And there are also moments where we don’t have access to important – even critical - pieces of the narrative – moments when Springsteen hides in plain sight with a brilliant disguise.  He is clear, for instance, in his description of writing “Born in the USA” that this is not his song – he puts to music the experience of others – in ways that are, I think, deeply satisfying to them – to him – and to us.  But as he is talking about Vietnam – and losing friends who died there – he is also talking about being drafted and going with two of his friends to the draft board and they all did what they had to do to avoid being inducted.  He shifts from this quickly into a description honoring our veterans so that we almost don’t see the sleight of hand where we don’t know what he did to avoid serving.  Now, to be clear, I am not trying to judge him, but I do think he is avoiding the potential judgement of his audience through a finesse.  He keeps parts of himself hidden – parts that he might not like – and that he fears we might not like as well.

And yet this show is deeply satisfying.  The person that is revealed to us – certainly not the whole person – is a person that has a certain kind of integrity.  It is a version of the person that we know this man to be and a credible one.  He tells a narrative that hangs together.  In a text that I am teaching psychoanalysis from, Morris Eagle is talking about “narrative creation” as one of the ways that some have come to characterize the goal of psychoanalysis.  And creating a narrative description of our lives that holds together is, indeed, useful – but also, I think, a useful fiction.  A grander, more romantic integrity – one in which this man who looks like an aging steel worker but who is also an aging rock star and is also a caring and devoted (or intermittently so) husband and father and is also a ne’er do well (I am making this up) and a poet who is proud of his poetry – and is whatever else he might be – is a kind of integrity that analysis – in Freud’s mind before he invented it – might have afforded.  But in the modern and post-modern world, such an integrity is harder – perhaps impossible to achieve.  Indeed, Freud himself came to think of himself in a much less romantic – much less grandiose way – after writing what, ironically, he thought of as his greatest work – The Interpretation of Dreams.  There he proposed that we are inevitably and inexorably internally inconsistent.  We are neither simply heroes nor villains but both and so much more – and while Springsteen tells us that he lies to us – that he portrays people he is not – we also see that he has lent himself – or part of himself – to the portrayal of these people – including the person that he is portraying onstage – and that this is part of what makes his songs, his concerts, and this stage performance compelling.  He lets us in on the joke, but tells it none the less – and can’t not tell it.  No matter how he portrays himself it will not be who he is.  And we walk away humming the tunes of our life, enjoying a well told tale – with just a few whiffs of Sulphur to interrupt the pleasure that we feel in having gotten to know someone so intimately – and so partially.

As I reflect on this piece, which emerged in a way that is different than I expected it to, I think that what kept me from thinking about the piece in the way that I have written it while watching it is Springsteen’s sincerity.  He really wants to be who he is portraying himself to be – and he really wants you to connect with that person and there is actually a deeply winsome quality to the way that he performs.  He wants us to take him at face value despite his warning that we should not do that.  The lyrics to his songs – and the closed captioning helps me hear them – sometimes for the first time – tell a story of duplicity and complexity – while his talking, singing and, in his concerts, dancing and performing, tell a much simpler story – of a person who values connection – and values being loved by you and will do just about anything to get that love from you and to connect with you so that you will give it freely.  And I think we really want to give it to him, even though we all know that on some level it isn’t quite what it appears to be because he is not, and we are not, quite what we appear to be – despite our best efforts.

Addendum:  So, a friend read this post and let me know that the memoir addresses many of the aspects that I have noted are left out of the performance - including the details of draft dodging and the raising of kids - including hiding their parents fame from the kids for as long as they could!  Tough job, that.  While I may get to the memoir at some point (my friend highly recommended it), I think the points that he makes about what is included there that is not included here actually underscores the challenges of a performance piece - including the need to connect with an audience on a different level - one that requires certain sleights of hand that aren't necessary in a written piece.  There is room, in a written piece, to operate inside the mind of the reader - within limits - to create psychological and emotional space.  When performing, the performer (same person, in theory, as the memoirist) is experienced as an other - as a separate person - not as the narrator within the mind of the reader.  And the savvy performer - which Mr. Springsteen certainly is - takes this into account in the way that he crafts the presentation - there is a need to be winsome in a different way - not through appealing to rational/cognitive empathy, as one can do in writing - something that is analogous to the way we engage with our own thoughts, but by appealing to the desire to connect with another, the way that we do with our children when we know that they have done something bad but we continue to love them in spite of that. 

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