Netflix Medici – The first two seasons: How well do history and soap opera mix?

Fresh off the plane from Florence, the reluctant wife and I set about trying to figure out what we had been immersed in – and what better place to do that than by learning about the Medici – that family that has stamped their crest on every building of note in Florence – and whose private collection of art that is the basis of the Uffizi – essentially tells the story of the history of art – art that they not only bought, but nourished – by supporting schools to train artists.  Indeed, one could make the argument that this family single handedly brought about the renaissance.  They supported Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Botticelli.  Copernicus was the family tutor – and their patronage protected him from being assassinated by the pope.  The Prince, Machiavelli’s how to book of using power, is largely about the machinations of their family. 

We saw the Medici’s art collection, we hung out in their crypt, saw a piece of Jesus’s cross in their chapel, and we got it that they were a big deal for 400 years, but we didn’t get much a narrative about how that happened.  So we turned to Netflix.  Well, that was an interesting muddle.  On the one hand, it was a little like going back to Florence – even though the show used a nearby town as the set for Florence – the square is modeled on Florence’s and it was little like extending our stay (one of the charms of Florence is that essentially all of the buildings in town are 500 or more years old).  On the other hand, the narrative that we received was transparently untrue – so we had to use other sources to pick out which parts were historically consistent and which were not. 

Even more essential to the revolutions of the renaissance, though not in a flashy, Sistine Chapel Ceiling kind of way, this family of wool merchants and then bankers elbowed their way into the power structure of Florence and Rome – a power structure that had long been determined by aristocratic families – and one that was evolving into a republican form of government.  Ordinary citizens were given seats on the Signoria – the governing body of the City State – in somewhat random fashion and for brief periods of time – allowing them to share in governance without consolidating power.  The Medici, however, despite periods of exile, retained great governing power over an amazing stretch of time – and transitioned into the ranks of the royals, while continuing to support the merchant class.

The tension between Royalty, who often no longer had the income to sustain their standard of living from largely agrarian sources, and the merchant class, who gained capital from trade as the isolated villages of the middle ages became reconnected again and as European powers began to colonize the rest of the world, is the subtext for much of the drama in the renaissance.  Shakespeare in Love, the Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman movie, pits the impoverished playwright against a royal who will marry Shakespeare’s love for her money (not that the playwright with a wife in Stratford was free to marry her anyway).  Another line of thinking maintains that Shakespeare was not a poor man from Stratford, but Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who was prevented from writing by his noble station – writing was a means of earning a living – something royalty should never have to stoop to do.  When thought about in this way, Shakespeare’s consistent defense of the monarchy throughout his plays is not just seen as a sop to throw to the author’s royal patrons, but as a self-protective position.

Aspects of this struggle are nicely portrayed in the first season.  Giovanni Medici, the original patriarch, is played by Dustin Hoffman.  His two sons – Cosimo (Richard Madden) the older, shorter, and more ambivalent about his role in the family (patriarch in training), and Lorenzo (The Elder: Stuart Martin), the taller, more randy, and apparently more resigned to his fate as the son of a tyrannical family founder – chaff under Giovanni’s stern and unyielding parenting, even though it is intended to keep them firmly in the seat of power.  We see two stories unfold simultaneously.  One is told in flashback from Giovanni’s murder, which helps us appreciate the various motives that may have led many people to be ready to murder him.  The other moves us forward in time when Cosimo is both trying to ferret out whodunit and to grow into the role of leader of the family and city in the wake of his father’s death.

Cosimo is at the center of this drama.  An aesthetically interested young man with at least moderate artistic talent, he feels somewhat ashamed of his banking family – which his father states emphatically creates wealth through a means that is different from usury – which would be a sin (though the writers never explain to the viewer how the Medici banking wealth is determined – somehow (magically?) having the Pope’s considerable income from the tithes all over Europe flowing through the bank creates wealth for the Medici apparently without usury…) and establishes relationships with artists – and falls in love with a model.  He is no more free to pursue his love of the model than he would be to pursue his love of art than the de Vere would have been to publish under anything other than a pen name.  He was not a royal - but he was wealthy and therefore shouldn't stoop to scratching out a living.  Isn't it ironic that the giants of art that we remember - Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and Raphael - were hirelings being told what to do by their patrons most of whom - with notable exceptions like the Medici - we no longer remember at all.  So, Cosimo's love is crushed by his father, Giovanni, who needs him to marry for political expedience.  And his father’s watchwords are: to achieve a good end, it is sometimes necessary to engage in bad deeds.  What the father’s bad deeds may have been that got him into power are never described (nor is it described how the Medici get to rig the apparent random selection of Signoria members) – but the bad deeds that he does to the family end up coming back to haunt him.

This season, and the next, suffer from an overly pious and boy scout like description of the Medicis and their machinations.  Cosimo’s worst bad deeds are carried out by his fixer, a very likeable Marco Bello (Guido Caprino), but Cosimo is consistently portrayed as trying to do the right thing and it is the fixer, who knows how dirty the world really is, who stretches the orders so that murder and mayhem ensue – Cosimo’s hands are never dirty of the most venal sins.  Despite feeling that this is implausible, we continue watching the series.  While far from perfect, it is good drama and holds our interest, but the fabricated central elements (including the murder of Giovanni) make the taking of this as straight history problematic.  But I think there is something to the construction of this particular narrative in this squeaky clean way that is worth commenting on and this a more central fatal flaw in the thinking of the creators. 

I think that keeping Cosimo’s hands relatively clean while portraying soiled deeds is the author’s way of retaining a hero that his viewership can identify with.  I think this says something about us – the audience of today.  We are imagined and, I think probably rightly, in the mind of the producers and writers and in our own minds as too clean – too pure, to have committed the crimes that Cosimo, Giovanni, and the rest of their tribe, I feel certain, did.  Some of their sins are portrayed.  They supported the candidacy of a pope through bribery and, in the moment that sealed Cosimo as the true heir apparent, blackmail (Yes, Cosimo committed blackmail – and adultery – in the series.  The most centrally despicable thing that he did, though, was to fail to recognize what an asset his wife was.  My use of squeaky as an adjective went too far – but I think the authors are afraid that there are certain sins that we will not forgive).  And the papacy – indeed the entire upper echelons of the church – were rampantly disordered at that point and the Medici were playing on that and implicated in it (and would be for centuries).  But it is important from the position of the writers and director that the viewer gets it that Cosimo is essentially a good guy – and that Giovanni is not.  This, then, turns into a morality play rather than a tragedy.  In a tragedy, heroes are fatally flawed.  In the morality play, the good guy, in spite of his flaws, is rewarded.  Cosimo gets a pass.  We feel sorry for him – he has lost a lot to assume the mantel of the family business – but we do not pity him and we never get to feel crushed by his discovery of his complex nature.

Nor, interestingly, do we pity Giovanni when he dies again at the end of the season.  When we finally get the whole story, we feel some kind of justice has been served.  Interestingly, for me, a different shift occurs.  Through the season, it felt to me that Hoffman was just mailing in the role of Giovanni.  He seemed to be being more Hoffman and less Giovanni throughout.  But the second time through the murder scene – watching him die again – I felt him to be Giovanni.  He had – and since much of the scene had been shown at the beginning of the series – it was the same acting taking place – been transformed, across the period of my watching – into the person who was being killed.  And there was satisfaction – Giovanni (not Hoffman) deserved to die.  Giovanni was a heartless bastard - one whom Hoffman had nicely inhabited - so much so that the character finally transcended the actor playing him.

I think that having bad guys and good guys – and hiring people to do our dirty work who turn out to be dirtier than we have ordered them to be – helps us maintain plausible deniability.  When we are using drones to our dirty work – when wars are fought in remote parts of the world and we don’t see the impact of what we do – I think that we can stay soundly asleep.  And I think this modern portrayal of some of the stinkiest times in our history as reasonably clean – helps keep us asleep to our contributions to problems an ocean away or in our own backyards.

  

The second season picks up after the apparently forgettable period of Piero the Gouty, who was Cosimo’s ungroomed son.  The hero of this season is Lorenzo the Magnificent (Daniel Sharman).  If the first season was a morality play, this season is pure melodrama – or soap opera.  It is a compelling story, and the relationship between Lorenzo and Botticelli is interesting (why did they leave Michelangelo out?), though the extracurriculars between Botticelli and the woman who posed as Venus are apparently made up, it certainly keeps the pot stirred and it is interesting to imagine what muse must have driven Botticelli.  The final drama in this season does seem to be based on actual political events and it also makes for incredibly compelling theater.  That said, the same criticism of the first season’s relationship with the audience applies here, but even more compellingly.  Lorenzo has changed the family motto to something like “Let’s do good in order to create good.”  A nice motto when you can afford it – but I find it hard to believe that a mercantile family who were just trying to do good was all that caused the royals to become murderously infuriated with the Medici.

Again, Lorenzo is not a purely likeable figure.  His relationship with his wife – mirroring Cosimo’s relationship with his wife in the first season, is marked by infidelity, though he comes to view his wife as an ally in a way that Cosimo is not portrayed as having done.  On the other hand, the virtues of both women are clearly on display to the viewer - did Cosimo's wife really ride into the Signoria to save his life? - Was Lorenzo's wife really so pure and chaste and yet worldly wise?  The women are more clearly two dimensional characters in the aspect of their goodness – and I suppose that is the center of the disappointment that I experience with this compelling and educating series (the viewing provides a narrative arc, the fact checking supplies the true education). 

Perhaps the central gift of the renaissance is the ability to portray three dimensions on a flat surface through the use of perspective.  As is the case with Rorschach scoring, where perceiving perspective on the cards is related to being able to take emotional distance from problem solving – and also to see deeply into difficulties, gaining perspective in painting was paralleled by perspective taking in the other arts, including in Shakespeare’s plays.  And if Shakespeare was an English nobleman who traveled to Rome in his youth, which the setting of so many of his plays there so accurately would support, we may have learned from him through the Italian playwrights something of what it means to be human.  The renaissance led us to be able to see ourselves in ways that we hadn’t been able to consistently engage in since the time of the Greeks and Romans, and also propelled us into entirely new ways of seeing ourselves and the world around us and this, in turn, led us to harness the world in ways undreamed of by the ancients.  Unfortunately, this series does not continue or even reside on that developmental arc.  In a time when we need the arts to help us consider how to prepare for an age of artificial intelligence and greater leisure, wealth, but also environmental threat than we have ever faced before, holding up an overly purifying mirror - one that fuzzes our view of ourselves rather than sharpening it – does us a disservice.  It keeps us comfortable at a time when we ought to be struggling with very uncomfortable truths about ourselves.

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Hamlet – Kenneth Branagh’s take on Shakespeare’s most elusive – and greatest - character.

Kenneth Branagh’s (1996) Hamlet is a four hour feast that the reluctant wife recently saw was being offered for free on one of the streaming services.  It was the only complete Hamlet to be filmed at the time and is still a brilliant and seemingly contemporary enactment.  By the time we found a four hour block to devote to it, it had been pulled from the free slot and we couldn’t find it offered anywhere.  Our anniversary weekend, we found it again and thought that watching it would be a lovely way to spend time together.  It was, but it was hardly the stuff of romance.  As Harold Bloom noted, Hamlet is in love with no one – not Ophelia (whom both the reluctant wife and I had thought was Hamlet’s sister – how did we not know she was his lover? – OH, he didn’t love anyone – this isn’t Romeo and Juliet), not his mother, not even his friends.  He stays Horatio from killing himself in the last scene not because he cares about Horatio, but because he wants Horatio to live to tell Hamlet’s tale after Hamlet realizes that he will die. 

Oddly, though, and perhaps because Hamlet does not love the characters around him, this feels less like a tragedy – which I heard described recently as the audience knowing before the hero does that his end is near – and more like an inevitability – one that the audience and the hero share knowledge of.  And, yes, despite having forgotten the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia, this play is so familiar that the last scene with all the dead bodies strewn about the stage is in my mind from the beginning, but I think the viewers connection with the hero is much deeper than this – and I think that Bloom, again, leads us in a useful direction.  In his book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Bloom’s thesis is that Shakespeare created the human subjectivity that Freud (and many others) would later plumb – and Hamlet is the quintessential example of this – the iconic human, filled with contradictory feelings and thoughts that need to be weighed and, as Socrates exhorted almost two millennia before - examined.  I agree with this thesis, but believe that Bloom does not push the idea quite far enough.  I will do that in a moment.

It is propitious for us to be watching Hamlet at this moment.  We have just returned from a trip to Florence and Rome, and we have been learning about the Italian renaissance.  If Shakespeare was not the kid from Avon, but Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, which I find a convincing argument, he would have been exposed to the Venetian state as it was at war with Milan and in an uneasy alliance with Florence.  He would have been rubbing shoulders with the art of the renaissance – art that was returning man as  an object of study central to the artistic endeavor - art was in the process of being released from the bonds of informing the illiterate masses of important religious stories.  In a side note, I also wonder, in terms of the idea that Edward de Vere might have had a workshop of people composing the plays, whether he would have seen the workshops of visual artists where the work of art was a product of a team rather than an individual and may have fashioned his way of working, his process in human interaction – in addition to focusing his subject matter on this thing – this human – this mind – that is so tuned to interacting with others - that he was becoming fascinated by.

Bloom places the writing of Hamlet at a pivotal moment for Shakespeare (whom Bloom definitely sees as the man from Stratford).  This play, which appears to have been a reworking of an earlier now lost play, perhaps by Shakespeare (whoever he or they was or were) himself, but perhaps by another playwright, is written at the juncture between Shakespeare’s early, light work and the great tragedies that are about to emerge from him.  This hero, this Hamlet, though, is unlike his jolly and outwardly facing Falstaff; Hamlet is an inward person – not someone resonantly connected with the world, but a person who is connected – or more precisely – trying to connect - with his internal world.  In this way, I see him as being very much like the reluctant children.  They seem impervious, in their late adolescence, to the best advice that I have to give them (as Laertes might be to Polonius), and they dive off in directions unknown to me – in the case of the reluctant son – because he tells me about the important events in his life only five years later, and in the case of the reluctant stepdaughters – about whose lives I know much more – because their decisions – which they articulate – are based on premises that are frequently opaque to me and, I think, often to them.

So, seeing Hamlet – at least in the first four acts – as the adolescent that he is – a twenty year old who is just wanting to head back to University at Wittenberg and not be bothered by all the craziness of his life at home (for instance his mother’s marriage to his uncle not two months after his father’s death and his girlfriend’s rejection of his affections - some typical, some not so typical adolescent concerns) – but who feels compelled, against his will and by his father’s ghost, to discover if his father really was killed by his uncle so that he can follow the ghost's dictate and exact revenge by killing his uncle - who is now his (step)father (not such an ordinary dilemma).  Were it up to him, we suppose, he would simply head back to Wittenberg and bury his head in his books.  But he gets caught up in the intrigue and has to keep his wits about him – he can trust no one – everyone except for Horatio is a spy for his parents – and so he appears to lose his wits to deceive the court and get himself out of town after accidentally killing his girlfriend’s father Polonius when he was talking with his mother.  Hamlet assumed that it was his uncle who was spying on him from behind a curtain and killed his girlfriend's and Laertes' father the latter would turn out to be his future  killer - again not the stuff of the typical adolescent coming of age tale. 

As we watch these first four acts, we get to know a whole ton of characters.  And they are interesting characters:  Claudius, his father-in-law, is cunning and not to be trusted.  Polonius is a dolt.  Ophelia, Polonius' daughter, apparently in love with Hamlet, is a fool who listens to Polonius and bars her doors to Hamlet.  Hamlet’s mother is bewildered – well intentioned (perhaps - we have our doubts), but clueless.  Laertes is an earnest and dutiful son who is prepared to make the best of himself and seems truly concerned, though a bit judgmental, about his sister Ophelia.  But where is Hamlet in all of this?  He seems to be the water that these other characters swim in.  Bloom, who has read the text much more closely than I, maintains that Hamlet changes his perspective on almost everything from line to line.  While those around him are characters who run true to their predictable type, he remains free to roam – to wander and to wonder - to consider things from many perspectives – but he is also, therefore, famously limited in his ability to act.

Bloom maintains that the seven soliloquies  are the places where Hamlet is able to hear himself think.  This is where Hamlet is discovering who he is.  And this sounds like a very psychoanalytic experience.  Not just that he is talking and in the process hearing himself – which is a central component of the psychoanalytic technique – but also that this is the way the psychoanalytic mind is constructed – it is a mind that acts without words – and the words that articulate what we think come after our thoughts.  We discover our most intimate and dear thoughts and feelings by putting words to them – they are not constructed by a mind that thinks primarily in words – words' function is to allow us to communicate – and here Hamlet is communicating both with the audience and himself – but also, and here again, I am indebted to Bloom, with Shakespeare.  Even someone as wordy as Shakespeare forms his words to describe his thoughts – and I think this is what Bloom means by Shakespeare inventing the human.  In this play, I think Shakespeare (whoever he or they is or are) is inventing himself by writing his thoughts – by giving words to them which, in turn, allow him to know them - and by that means to know himself.  And it is helpful – as it is to the mere mortals among us – to hear our characters speak to us – as we do in dreams when the people that we dream of, whom we necessarily have created and given scripts to, tell us stuff that seems both novel and important to hear – even if we can’t quite divine what the meaning of those words is.

In the space between the fourth and fifth act – the space of only two weeks in actual lived time – Hamlet discovers a plot against his life, dispatches those who would kill him (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – two characters that are confused – and confused with each other – characters who are not yet human and characters that we duplicitously leading Hamlet to his death), and resolves – in one of those soliloquys at the end of the fourth act that propels us into the fifth - to quit fooling around and get down to business.  By the end of those two weeks, Hamlet has aged from twenty to now thirty years old, by the reckoning of the gravedigger, and, when he returns and responds to his uncle/father’s request to duel Laertes, who would revenge his father and sister’s death, he agrees to do so with certainty – he has been practicing at swordsmanship, but also, we think, at court intrigue and at being a competent courtesan - and he engages as a knowledgeable and decisive man in the actions that bring the plot to its close.

This play is considered to be a play about revenge, but I don’t think it is.  I don’t think the characters on the stage are actually people – I think they are characters – internalized figures that Hamlet/Shakespeare must wrestle with in order to move on with his life – not to die on the stage – but to let the part of himself that is meek – that is afraid to assert itself and take action – to die – so that the part of him that has not yet written his greatest tragedies – can come forth.  His old self – the adolescent self in whom turmoil foments - needs to be remembered – by Horatio – and by us as we listen to this play – but also to be replaced – by Fortinbras – the king from Norway who has come to fight the Danes only to find them lying dead all over the stage – and to take his seat – unopposed and uncontested – as the king of the country – or, in Shakespeare’s case, the king of the stage.  Hamlet has not died – he has been transformed.  He has lived through his adolescent angst, he has gotten his pins under him – and he is ready to move forward into the most productive and definitive period of his life.  No longer will his adolescent – but also deeply human – conflicts and uncertainties chain and delay his actions – they will serve as a springboard - as the furnace in which great plots and great characters can be fired to be forged by the hammer blows of Shakespeare’s brilliance into the plays that we most highly value.

Hamlet is driven by the ghost of his father to avenge his death – for Hamlet to kill his father’s killer and cuckolder.  But when did the cuckolding begin?  Bloom clarifies that Freud saw this as an Oedipal struggle – but we need to ask with whom?  Is Claudius his father?  Is Hamlet, his reputed father – merely the man who was married to his mother?  Does he wish for a more cunning, smarter, more modern father – one who (unlike stodgy old me with my adolescent children) could be understood as cool and conniving and someone whom his mother could love – rather than the draconian ghost who simply demands of Hamlet that he be like his namesake and kill for honor’s sake?  Does Hamlet need, at the same time, to get past the idealized (and despised) father whom he fears is in competition with him and has stolen the limelight from him?  Does he need to remain detached from the world in order to find out who he is and so is he – oddly to everyone but himself – a cold fish?  Do we, in our identification with him, realize that he feels frighteningly free if he is to cast off the demands of all of the father (and mother) figures in his life and forge his own new – subjectively determined – life?  What if he writes about people as he experiences them rather than using the tropes of the stage?  What if, when he creates his own ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, it will be a play that will be seen not just by the priests and cardinals and popes in the inner sanctum of that chapel- not just by the royals at the court of Elizabeth, but by those in the penny gallery? What if those plays encourages every(wo)man to think of him or herself as divine – as Michelangelo has encouraged those in the Chapel to imagine what it really means that God has created man is his image?  Michelangelo's images spill out from the inner sanctum to become iconic beacons that draw us from all over the world to behold who it is that we might be and what it is that we are capable of.  What if we are all gods?  What if we end up imagining that a penny actor from Stratford could create the greatest works in the English language?  Where will this end?

One place it will end is in this particular – I believe magnificent – production of Hamlet.  I have not been a big Branagh fan.  I have also seen this production once before - many years ago – but this viewing of it spoke to me in ways that were surprising.  This movie bears rewatching – on at least an occasional basis.  As Roger Ebert notes, the unabridged text used here allows aspects of this play that get swept out of the way in more typical productions to come to the fore – and enrich the experience of the internal world of Hamlet by exposing us to the richness of the characters around him.  Play on!

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Educated – Tara Westover’s account of growing up traumatized.

Psychology of Educated.  Psychoanalysis of Educated.  Tara Westover, Educated, Trauma.

Educated is a memoir about trauma.  It was recommended by a friend and, if it had been described in that way, I don’t think I would have read it.  Reading about trauma is enough to make me blanch because, for a psychoanalyst, reading about trauma is a busman’s holiday.  Though we are drawn to the work in this field because of our interest in the human condition in its manifold forms, our work involves helping people make sense out of aspects of their lives that don’t make sense – and the experience of being traumatized is disruptive of everything sensible, especially when you are traumatized by people you love.  And a lot of what we work with intimately is the downstream effects of trauma, especially intimate, family based trauma.

Because the book was described as an incredibly well written memoir that speaks to the power of education (which it is); without quite knowing what we were getting into, the reluctant wife and I agreed to read this book together – actually I read it out loud to her at night as we were preparing to sleep.  We both recoiled from the story that is told – and sometimes we took a break for a while to let the last bit subside before we picked up the next harrowing chapter.  I kept asking her if we should stop (though we have both worked with traumatized folks, we have a low tolerance for traumatic literature and film and hers is a bit lower than mine), but her response was that “it is like watching a car wreck – I can’t bear to watch it, but somehow I also can’t look away.”

We couldn’t look away because Tara Westover is, indeed, a tremendous writer.  And how this came to be is a little hard to understand – she had no formal education to speak of until she went off to college – more about that later.  She is the seventh of seven children – the second girl - who grew up on the Westover’s family home on the side of a mountain - Buck’s Peak - in the middle of nowhere Idaho.  Because the family is living largely off the grid (so much so that Tara does not have a birth certificate and does not know her actual birthday), the mountain itself is a character, looming over her family, watching out for them, providing space for them to work in and to retreat into.  Yes, they live on the side of a paved highway.  Yes, there is a nearby town.  Yes, they shop there and one set of her grandparents live there and Tara even, against her father’s wishes, works at the grocery store for a while, but I think her pull is towards the mountain, away from civilization – as her true home.

The Westovers are a strict Mormon family.  They are also preparing for the “end of days” by stockpiling necessary supplies and they believe that the government – indeed all institutions of modern America, especially medicine – are the enemy and that the outside world should be avoided as much as possible so that the family can live a self-sufficient life and live by the Mormon code as they interpret it.  And they interpret it in idiosyncratic ways.

I don’t know the relationship between how the family practices Mormonism and Mormonism in general.  Westover could help us with that – she ends up being a scholar of Mormonism – but that would break the thread of the story.  This book is not about the practice of Mormonism – it is about a particular family functioning in a particular way.  And it is about Tara’s place in that family with the rules that are defined by the family – and by her father as the leader of that family.  I think it is important that the rules bear some relationship to an extant set of rules governing family relations- and Tara ends up studying the ways that the rules of Mormonism are tied into other nineteenth century doctrines of the family, but as a child, she has so little contact with the outside world that she (and we, as we hear her working to remember the world through the eyes of the child she was) conceptualize the world as defined by her family and their rules.  We see, pretty quickly, that her Dad is crazy, and we wonder how much of what he is saying is consistent with organized religion and how much is an expression of his craziness.  This is because we cannot only look through Tara’s eyes (which very dimly and over a long period of time recognize his craziness) any more than we can only see the world through our patient’s eyes – we necessarily see what she is seeing by passing that through our own conception of it as well.  Indeed, the author herself, while trying to remember what it looked like as a child is also necessarily seeing what she is seeing from her position as the adult author who has her own perspective on what she was seeing – and she wants us to see what she has seen in ways that are different from what she was seeing – she wants us to know both that she didn’t know that it was crazy, and she wants us to recoil from the craziness of it all.

There are two villains in this story whose sins are acts of commission and two whose acts are those of omission – or perhaps acts of aiding and abetting.  The primary villain is Westover’s father.  His malice is largely based, at least initially, on a complete and utter lack of empathy for others and a subsequent disregard for even the slightest of safety measures.  His Mormonism is a very egocentric view of a God that is looking out for him as a saved individual, so he, weirdly, does not have to look out for himself or his children.  He is scratching out a living by salvaging metal from old cars and other scrap but also by building barns and other outbuildings on the cheap, and this means cutting corners and using child labor.  All of this is dangerous work – it involves working with huge machinery that tears metal apart, working with volatile chemicals like the gasoline left in the tanks of the cars that are being dismembered, and, in the case of the construction, working on roofs and lifting heavy objects into the sky with a rickety old forklift rather than by using a people lifter.  And children are doing work that grown men would not do without basic safety equipment like hard hats and automatic shut offs.  This means that there are a lot of injuries – most of which – all but the most severe – are treated with disdain or, at most, an herbal tincture made by Tara's mother because of a basic mistrust of the governmental and medical establishment and a deep faith in the direct impact of God and his creations - the tinctures - on the individuals in the family.

The primary way in which her father is a villain is more insidious though.  He is misogynistic – but this is articulated as a defense against the overwhelming power of female sexuality that must be, literally, covered up and prevented from being expressed at all costs.  This results in a code that seems crazy to a reader outside of the culture, but also to other Mormons when Tara finally makes it out of her family and into BYU.  But within the family, all sin emanates from women.  This means that the true villain, Tara’s brother, who consistently berates her, beats her, chokes her and leaves her fearing for her life on multiple occasions is exonerated from all wrong doing – indeed, her father blames Tara when she calls the issue, and her father bans her from the family when she refuses an exorcism that he offers her to free her of the devil that is leading her to accuse her brother.

Her brother Shawn, then, is the perpetrator of most of the intentional horrific threats that Tara and her sister and later Shawn’s wife survive.   When the family is in not one but two car wrecks that almost kill them because they are driving in unsafe conditions without seat belts because, according to her father, the protective angels can outrun any harm that might befall them – the danger seems chaotic and awful, but not primarily malicious, simply crazy.  When her brother, whom Tara regards initially with devotion, twists her wrist so hard that she passes out from the pain ostensibly because she is using make up and talking to a boy and is therefore a whore, but more immediately to demonstrate his dominance over her and others and as a channel for an otherworldly rage, and when he berates and demeans his girlfriend in High School, we are confronted by a particular kind of cruelty – the cruelty of a bully who is intentionally making others subservient to him and who is doing this to consolidate his apparent power and might.  He apparently thrives in a family system that exonerates him, but that also, through failing to confront these behaviors, leads him deeper and deeper into fits of rage that he cannot control. 

When Tara calls him on his behavior as an adult and he threatens to kill her or to hire someone to do that, we fear for her life – but we also see that he is exposed as a weakling who cannot tolerate being questioned.  In one of the many many brutal moments in this book, but one that feels all the more brutal because Tara has all but gotten herself out of the system only to reenter it – when Tara asks her father to rein Shawn in, Shawn arrives for a meeting (in the presence of her mother and father) that Tara did not want and is not prepared for and hands her a knife covered in blood and encourages her to use it on herself so that he doesn’t have to.  What she doesn’t know until later is that the blood comes from Shawn's favorite dog whom he has just killed with the knife in a fit of rage when he is called to the meeting by his father.  What is implicit but never stated is that killing Tara would lead him to lose the support of their father – this would not be forgiven – so he must vent his rage elsewhere and use intimidation to try to get her back in line – something that she is finally unwilling to do.  Meanwhile her mother and father engage in more and more convoluted logic and rewriting of history to change what they observed happening between the two of them.

So, the sins of omission are committed by Tara’s mother, but also by her sister.  They both collude with her father, pretending when talking with Tara that they will stand up to him and demand that he put a stop to Shawn’s behavior, but when push comes to shove, they cave, and join with their father in repudiating Tara.  This failure to support her leaves Tara teetering on the edge of madness.  Unable to accept her father’s reality, and feeling betrayed by her attempts to assert her own, she retreats into a world of binge watching terrible television.  But I am getting ahead of the story.

The hero of this story is clearly Tara.  Despite living in her father’s world and following his code in large measure without question, she senses a broader world and seeks it out.  When she is a teenager, she discovers that she has a good singing voice and performs against her father’s prohibition to publicly display herself – confident that he will both come to her performances and be proud of her – which he does and is.  She also seeks out other opportunities to connect with people in town – and then, eventually, she applies to BYU.  She does this without a lick of schooling.  As one of her brothers who has gotten out says - tell them you've been home-schooled, they won't know better.  And, later, when she is given the grant to study overseas, her father is puzzled that she doesn't credit her homeschooling as the foundation that got her there.

Tara has been taught at home how to midwife and mix herbal tinctures by following her mother around and “learning” from her, though Tara’s description of her mother’s wisdom is jaded – she describes her mother making decisions about what treatment to prescribe – indeed what ails people – based on "muscle testing" which involves asking a question and seeing how her body responds to it.  She has learned to walk on tall structures without fear from her father, and she has learned from her older brother how to study like mad on his own to be able to apply to school.  She follows his lead, takes the ACT and is admitted to BYU, where she is a fish out of water.  Despite not having the first notion of how to study or having a context in which to put information, she is able to build a network of knowledge and move from barely hanging on to functioning reasonably well in a college setting – and writing well enough to get the attention of and be accepted into a fellowship at Oxford college.  This, in turn, leads to a Gates scholarship to Cambridge and then admission into a PhD program at Harvard in history, though she earned her Ph.D. from Cambridge.

Her memoir, then, is the product of a classically trained historian.  A historian who is aware of the pitfalls of constructing a history.  It is a history with central elements that are remembered very differently by the key players who were part of them (and she footnotes some of these incidents, noting the differing memories of each participant).  Tara does, I think, a masterful job of describing her lived experience, and working to articulate what happened in her life in as balanced a manner as I can imagine such a thing being done.  She does this with the help of numerous heroes.  The first of these is John Stuart Mill – a proto feminist whom she reads when she still thinks of feminist as the worst kind of insult.  She also reads Mary Wallstonecraft, and then numerous more modern feminists and begins to identify with them.

On the home front, the older brother whom she watched study and get out of the house refuses to repudiate her – and so does an even older brother who also left the family to pursue an education.  So the family ends up split between the three children who have “escaped” through education, and the four who are still dependent on the family business, which has morphed through an interesting, and typically horrific twist.  Her father, working to dismantle one of the cars in the salvage yard, did not take account of the gasoline left in the tank and ignited it with the acetylene torch he was using.  The ensuing explosion severely burns his face, hands and lungs.  He hangs barely balanced between life and death for months – and he is never hospitalized.  Instead, he is treated with his wife’s tinctures and salves.  His survival is seen as a miracle – literally – one that propels her business into a new level.  Her medicines – and her books about them – are now in wide demand, and the family employs not only their children – they have become the largest employer in the valley since the economic downturn – and Tara finds it hard to muster allies even outside the family, except among those who have, for instance, been fired by her father in one of his fits of rage.

Westover is a good writer, but it is still a bit of a mystery how she can write well about trauma.  Freud remarked early in his career that when you take a case history from a “neurotic” you should expect to find gaps in that history.  I believe that Trauma has a toxic effect on people’s ability to remember and articulate their experience.  When this is combined with living in a closed culture, where people are not supposed to tell others about that culture, “tell-alls” frequently become enthralling because of the content of the story, not the way they are told.  In Hillbilly Elegy, a memoir about a closed culture– the Scots Irish Appalachian culture – the author, despite being very bright (a Yale Law graduate and successful ex-Marine), tells the story of his culture somewhat flat footedly – I think partly because of unprocessed trauma.  James Cone, an African American theologian, who has deep insights into the American culture, uses the sing song preacher tone – an almost hypnotic – but also hard outer coat approach – to articulating his ideas about the lynching of his people.  Min Jin Lee, a Korean American writing about the suppressed Korean-Japanese in Pachinko, uses the third person omniscient to avoid articulating the thoughts of her heroes – and captures something of their shame at articulating who it is that they are by doing that.  Ta Nehisi Coates, in contrast to these other voices, speaks in a comfortable tone and uses mainstream language to paint a picture of his internal experience that is resonant and full.  But he has been raised with a supportive marginalized family that has facilitated his ability to talk about the trauma that has been done to his people – he does not talk about the toxic effects of trauma felt first hand without a sympathetic ear to help him process it.

While Tara takes the position that she is able to free herself from her family and to write about them in the ways that she does because of her education (and also, a bit, because of helpful psychotherapy), I don’t disagree, but I think that, ironically, it may be that she is able to speak with a voice of calm authority that is closer to Coates' partly because of having been raised within the family that she was.  As crazy as this sounds, I think that Tara’s mother and father loved her.  And I think that she knew this in a very deep and intimate way.  She knew and could count on her father’s love.  She therefore feels deeply betrayed by him when he casts her as the source of evil that she knows she is not, but she also gets (after a great deal of psychology - though she might say historical - work) that this is not the result of the crazy malice that drives her brother, but the crazy organization of the world that drives her father’s view of the world – one that keeps him at the center of that world and blinds him to other viewpoints.  Her mother, despite knowing of Shawn’s behavior towards Tara over the years and being deeply disturbed by it, is caught in the vortex of her husband’s world view – a version of which she came to the marriage pre-steeped in – and one that she chooses over the view that Tara doesn’t have the resources of time and volition to win her over to.  Again, Tara feels betrayed – but, when she has worked hard and long enough to articulate fully her experience – she is also able to experience the range of her parent’s experiences – she is able to remember their humor and their love as well as their failings – as a result of the work that she does to remember all of who it is that they are – and the work that she does to live outside her dependence on them – and through the capacity to reconnect with functional parts of her family – not just her brothers, but also her mother’s brothers and sisters.  Tara is able to come home again.

I can’t stress enough, that part of Tara’s ability to become educated – to think through, reflect on, and move away from her family is because Tara had a home that had certain qualities – a certain rationale - to begin with.  The rationale for what happened to her was crazy, but it was a rationale.  And it was a rationale that had a basis, no matter how tenuous that basis was once it was filtered through her father’s paranoia, in providing a foundation that helped her rebel against the very forces that built that foundation and also trapped her in a body killing, but also a soul killing space.  Her mother is remembered as privately supporting her going to college, “you were the one I thought would burst out of here in a blaze.”  But her mother also did not directly disagree or cross her father.  Her mother’s failure to support her was consistent with the woman that Tara knew her to be – as disappointing as that was.  These people who were here family were complicated, tangled, but reliable people that had her best interests, as best they were able to express them, in mind. 

I think it would be possible to take from this story that the process of creating a narrative is an essential part of healing from trauma.  Again, I don't disagree with that.  In fact, I think that is an important and relevant conclusion.  But I think there is more to this story.  I think that this is also a story about what it takes to develop the capacity to articulate a narrative like this one.  And I think that, as much as we may be troubled by this, it takes not just a strong constitution and brains, but also the good intent of a loving, if misguided, family and/or culture.  Mahatma Gandhi was able to free the state of India because he was able to use the English sense of morality to highlight their immoral actions.  Tara does not accomplish what he does - she does something harder.  She uses the sensible parts of what she learned to distance herself from those that are insensible, and to see them as that, while retaining a sense of who her family was and who it is that she is becoming.  And she knows, as feminists have been knowing for centuries, that the person she is becoming, though unapproved of by the family or the culture represent what is best about the family and the culture - that our goal is to support the kind of becoming that occurs in this book so that our children, whom we may not even recognize, are living out who it is that we could only hope that they will become.

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Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar – Distorted Images allow Truth to be seen.

The beginning of Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar involves electrifying foreshadowing – her heroine, Esther Greenwood, a thinly disguised version of herself, is obsessed with the Rosenbergs, who are facing electrocution.  Esther can think of no worse way to die – and, over the course of the next few months as she contemplates first one, then another, and finally hits on a surefire method to kill herself that almost does the trick, she is revived, and the bell jar of depression is lifted, by a series of jolts of electricity that she receives in the universe that parallels Sylvia Plath’s treatment at Boston’s McLean Hospital.

This is one of those novels that everyone my age should have read.  I think I started it at some point- the early chapters were familiar – but if I did, I am certain that I never finished it.  Sylvia Plath’s own suicidally depressive episode began in 1950 when she was on summer break from Smith College and interning at Mademoiselle Magazine in New York.  It continued throughout the fall and ended – or seemed on the verge of ending – in the winter. 

My own brush with McLean hospital occurred when I interviewed for an internship there in 1989 (they didn’t hire me).  It was shabby chic – the clinical offices that had two sets of doors to protect the confidences told within them – and the grounds that were designed by Frederick Law Olmstead – had the elegance and grace of New York’s Central Park, which he also designed.  It was, as it is portrayed in the novel, a place for the rich set – and had amenities that the denizens of the nearby state hospital would never have imagined. 

Before you get to thinking that Sylvia Plath was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, know that after immigrant professor Dad died when she was nine, she and her brother were raised by her mother in her grandparent’s Wellesley Massachusetts house.  Her grandfather was gone all week working as the live-in cook at a nearby country club where she would go on Sundays and dine on bits of purloined caviar, dreaming that she would one day have a wedding with unlimited caviar, all the while knowing that this would never happen.  In fact, she felt that her last happy days had been with her father, who was too mistrusting of insurance salesman to provide for her.  While she was winning awards for her writing in high school and becoming a Smith college scholarship student and then interning as a writer at Mademoiselle magazine, her mother was encouraging her to learn short hand so she would have a trade to fall back on – so that she would be able to feed herself.

What strikes me (and about every reviewer everywhere) about this book is its close resemblance in tone and structure to another must read novel for my generation – J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.  Both books are incredibly well written.  Both authors have a remarkable capacity to observe and then to translate those observations into fluid language that is evocative both of the external world they are seeing, but also of their internal feeling states.  And it is here that the parallels seem strongest.  Both narrators – each story is told in the first person – seem arch, knowing, and above it all – and, certainly as a teenager reading Catcher in the Rye – I wanted to identify with this position.  I longed to know what Holden Caulfield, the hero of that novel, knew.  I wanted, likely Holden Caulfield, to be knowing.  Of course it also the case that both narrators are deeply troubled.  As an adolescent I was more aware of Caulfield’s arch coolness, but, as an adult (and, as a friend who read this with me pointed out, perhaps as a parent and clinician), I resonated more closely with Esther Greenwood’s pain (and assume I would now feel more of Caulfield’s as well).

The not so hidden part of this novel and Plath’s life is that she didn’t really want to have a big wedding with caviar.  She didn’t want to get married at all.  And despite her arch dismissal of her mother’s advice, there is some soundness to it.  This is an era when Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who was a member of the Harvard Law Review, could not find employment at a law firm anywhere in New York City because she was a woman and the big firms simply didn’t hire women lawyers.  Sylvia/Esther wanted to become a poet (as did my friend Phil, whom I asked, when I met him, how are you going to make a living doing that?)  and yet we learn in a very brief aside from Esther that she (as Sylvia) is juggling children while trying to write this book.  How did that happen?

Well we know how that happened.  It was the destiny that this girl with all this talent would inevitably stumble into – and not be able to find her way back out of.  Even though she is taught this new secret and still illegal (in Massachusetts) thing called birth control – there is a predictable destiny that awaits her.  What is less predictable and somewhat intriguing is how she got into a private hospital.  And that was because she had a guardian angel – a poet – who read some of her writings and wanted to use the profits from her own books to pay forward to the future by supporting a poet who had a voice worth hearing.  Plath/Greenwood absolutely savages the writer, her benefactor, as a hack.  It is no wonder that the book, which came out in 1963, at about the same time that Plath used gas to kill herself in England, was published anonymously and only there – not in the states – presumably to protect Plath’s benefactress, and everyone else she had come in contact with and wrote about during that tumultuous year.  Her mother – one of those who does not emerge unscathed – suggests that Plath had greater regard for the people in the novel than the writing suggests.  I think this is likely true – but the novel likely portrays what they looked like through the bell jar.  

Reading Plath these many years later, both the knowing attitude that she takes about herself and the world that she lives in – the United States in 1950 – seem incredibly limited and therefore naïve, perhaps all the more starkly because of that knowing writing tone itself.  It is not just that we have had an information explosion in the time since she wrote this novel (roughly my lifespan) so that we can access more “knowledge” about the various ways that one might think about some of the dilemmas that she faces from the phones in our pockets than she could have hoped to glean from the New York Public Library, and that we have worked to deconstruct stereotypes that she uses so unselfconsciously to articulate her own “knowledge” of the world (her face, after she has been crying, looks like a “Chinaman’s”), we feel, on our better days, that we “know” that these stereotypes are based in large part on an organizational system that is practiced not just by her but by the entire dominant culture so that things can run smoothly and efficiently and that her use of them just perpetuates her own marginalization that she is fighting to stave off.  Marginalized voices, including hers, will help us come to realize the dangers of marginalization, and to be able to wince at the unknowing ways she herself marginalizes others – carelessly.  Voices like hers are just barely beginning to be heard, so that her efforts to articulate both her inner world and the world around her, though absolutely stunning in their clarity, also betray a particular lack of knowing – living inside a bigger bubble than just the bell jar – or perhaps a bell jar outside of and beyond the one that she writes about.

I am reminded of a recent, brief conversation with a psychologist who works with patients undergoing sex change operations in San Francisco and we were both wondering what it was like for trans people before there was a trans community and before there were surgical means to alter the biological substrate of someone who didn’t believe that they were inhabiting the appropriate gender.  My guess is that many people who have read this book have – as I did with Caulfield – deeply identified with Esther Greenwood – the heroine whose first name, Plath Intimates in the writing, was chosen because it has the same number of letters that her own name does – and they, who knew of Plath’s death – and sensed or knew that Esther was her alter ego, may have wondered what path their own life would take:  whether they would, as Plath did, make it out of the bell jar, as she appears on the brink of doing at the end of this book – and whether they would, as she did, succumb to it at a later time.  But I think we can also wonder whether we as a culture will make it out from under the larger bell jar and the one beyond that before it (or they) suffocate us.

Bell Jar with Butterflies

So, what, then, is the bell jar?  A bell jar, somewhat confusingly, can be two things.  In Victorian times, it was a glass case that was used to cover a collectible item that was being highlighted – a clock would be displayed under it.  In physics, the bell jar creates a space that air can be pumped from – a vacuum can be created – so that there is no air left under the jar.  Both of those meanings seem to be relevant – though the latter seems closer to Plath’s experience of the jar coming over her as an image of depression – a psychological feeling state where she feels she does not have the emotional oxygen to live.  But she is also someone who puts herself on display – she is proud of her good grades and her ability to write, but also feels that these are not leading anyplace that she wants to go.  She does not want to be a Doctor’s wife – to be on display as a bauble - one of the options that presents itself.  Is this because trusting another man the way she trusted her father doesn’t make sense?  Or is it just that Buddy Willard – the kid from her hometown with a crush on her who is studying medicine at Yale - fails to inspire anything like a romantic longing in her? 

Laboratory Bell Jar with Vacuum Pump

All that said, Sylvia/Esther is far from the first or last woman to sense that she may well rue having given up the opportunity to live a life of relatively careless luxury.  So in this sense, the bell jar is a gilded cage.  I think the bell jar may also be an expression of an awareness that she is not as all knowing as she pretends to be – that she is, in fact, cut off from much of what would make her life rich, full and alive – ironic given how lively and aware her writing is – and in that sense this is a deeply tragic book.  If someone with her capacities can’t figure it out – what chance do the rest of us stand?  Shouldn’t her ability to portray the baffling beauty of her friend Doreen, whom men can’t not want to bed, bring her into contact with men who can’t not want to touch her mind?

Sylvia/Esther’s virginity, then, becomes a burden to her.  She must lose it.  It trundles around, exposing her as someone who has never had an affair – as someone who has never been touched - as a person even lower than Buddy Willard, who, after all, had a summer fling with a waitress.  She burns not from her loins, but from a sense of injured pride.  She wants to lose the loathsome label that is advertised as a compliment: she has the virtue to stay within the bell jar, but that is, in her mind, actually an indication of her being essentially unwanted.  She distances herself from the failure of the simultaneous translator to pick up on her interest in him – and she later saves herself from being raped by a different man – not so much, I think, out of a sexual or even physical fear as out of a simple awareness of the loathsome quality of the rake – only to unburden herself with a random philandering academic.

Esther’s “recovery” is, we know, temporary.  She will, as Sylvia, die.  Her treatment at McLean helps raise the bell jar, at least for a moment.  Her psychiatrist there, a woman, is perhaps the only person in the novel that feels like a warm spot.  There is a breath of something human, real and authentic.  But it is not their interaction that seems critical in her recovery; she is finally competently treated with ECT (an earlier effort was mostly sparks and evoked the Rosenbergs – this second is administered more or less as it is today – and ECT is still used as an effective treatment for what is called “treatment resistant depression”).  The thing she fears most (electricity coursing through her veins) seems to be the vehicle that allows her to escape a worse fate, at least for now. 

As I am rereading the first pages of the novel, I am more deeply struck by two things – first that this is a well written book – and second that it is written in a freely associative style – the kind of free association that I have come to associate with the successful conclusion of a psychoanalysis – indeed, I have offered it as a psychoanalytic definition of mental health.  And yet this is an author whom we know is on the brink of suicide as she writes – that if the bell jar hasn’t descended as she is writing that it soon will – so her free association is certainly not an adequate single measure of stable mental health.  This is then potentially a tragedy for not just humanity, but my conceptualization of psychoanalysis and its curative power!  (Tant pis, you may respond).

So how are we to understand Plath’s reversion to the bell jar?  Writing the novel – reliving the experiences – may certainly have re-triggered the emotional and cognitive pathways that led to her original state.  She is also burdened with two children and a failed marriage, now a divorce, to another philandering academic, one who has been blamed in her demise.  And this set of circumstances indicates that she is not out from under the larger bell jar – she is still at the mercy of a social system that is oppressive.  And this system, by the way, does not just oppress women – it oppresses all of us.  And while my earlier ideas may have suggested that we have found our way out from under that particular bell jar and moved into a wider space of “knowing” (would that it were true), I think that each time we lift the bell jar we find another one hovering over it – a depressing image if there ever was one.

So, why do we read this novel?  It incites us to empathize with a trapped heroine – one we know is more deeply trapped than even the ambiguous ending would suggest.  It helps us get a sense of the size of the foe we are up against – it is one that can fell someone as sensitive and competent as this (and we could turn away from her – blaming her sensitivity for her downfall – a course that would condemn us to a hardened shell of a life if we are to survive – hardly a desirable outcome).  It helps us realize that the struggle we are engaged in – and it is a struggle – to live an authentic, clear sighted life – is all but impossible even in the best of times and under the best of circumstances.  Doesn’t Esther have New York City under her thumb when she is hanging out in the starlight lounge and interviewing the best poets of the day?  So we must gird our loins to lift bell jar after bell jar – and recognize that, no matter how many we lift, there will always be one more.

One of the important weights on top of Esther/Sylvia’s particular bell jar is the death of their father when they were 9 years old.  Death is an integral part of life, but untimely death derails development. As she said, “Constantin [the simultaneous interpreter] drove me to the UN in his old green convertible with cracked, comfortable brown leather seats and the top down. He told me his tan came from playing tennis, and when we were sitting there side by side flying down the streets in the open sun he took my hand and squeezed it, and I felt happier than I had been since I was about nine and running along the hot white beaches with my father the summer before he died.”

What is the point of getting the best grades when the person I most want to show them to isn’t there?  How do I translate the opportunities that I have been afforded by these grades into something that I will find fulfilling when what I would find fulfilling – the simple feeling of flying along in the presence of another who loves me – will never come from the source that I feel is the one source that will satisfy that desire?  I do not want “knowledge”, or a job, or to articulate the sadness that I feel about this loss, but I want to know what I know and to articulate it in the context of a relationship with the one person who is and always will be unavailable to me.  And that is unchangeable.  So I go on – and I look for those moments when something like that occurs – and I report them – and all the other moments that are so much not like them – because that is what it means to be alive.  To be the particular me that is at the focal point of all these existentially meaningless but totally defining forces that create the person that I am and that I want to, and do, express – even though these words will fall on thousands of ears that might as well be deaf to me.

And so we read, we listen, and we hear a voice.  And this voice – the strength and clarity of this voice – this particular voice – allows us to access more of our own voice.  To hear and know ourselves a little better.  And to be able to communicate a little better.  To lift our own bell jar – if only for a moment – to see what it feels like to breathe a little oxygen – to let the wind come rushing into our convertible – to feel alive – and to see if we can hang on to this part of the ride long enough to get into another place where we can take another breath and go on breathing, go on living our way into a future that she, sadly, could not imagine.

In a related post, I discuss a book about the failed psychoanalytic treatment of Plath’s contemporary self-revelatory poet, Anne Sexton.

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Avengers End Game - Intimacy and Coming to Grips with Mortality Hidden in an Epic’s Conclusion

A close friend, who has had tremendous success in his life both as an athlete and as a businessman, was, as a child, somewhat surprisingly (to me) a big comic book aficionado.  Growing up, my friends who read comics were, like me, nerds.  He was not – yet he read Marvel comics in particular, and he continues to be disturbed when his heroes are harmed – they are, after all, Iron Man or Thor and they are heroes who are there to demonstrate what it means to be a hero: to be invincible, unvanquished, unconquered – and perhaps even more, unconquerable.  It is ironic, then, that this friend of mine is also, in our pick-up games where he is the go-to guy and I am the role player (at best), is an advocate for not overplaying – for deferring when the opponent has gotten a rebound and dropping back on defense – don’t make a bad play worse by trying to make up for it all at once, is his philosophy – be a thoughtful hero who takes his mistakes in stride.  Live to play another day.

Avengers Infinity Wars left us with a universe that had lost half of its population to Thanos’ (Josh Brolin) use of the infinity stones – something that he, despite being a bad buy, seems to have intended as a kind of do over for a universe that he believed to have been overpopulated.  Unlike earlier ensemble pieces, notably Age of Ultron, that left the family putting the plot twists together in the car on the way home from the movie and puzzling over them for days to come afterwards, both of these last two installments seemed relatively straightforward in their plots.  The complications came more from the efforts to include all of the spin off characters that have been added to the Marvel Movie Universe along the way.  And though the movie threatened to topple under the weight of all these characters, it never quite did.  And despite the usual battle scenes and overwhelming CGI effects, this movie ended up feeling somewhat tender and even intimate.

At the beginning of this film (yes, this will include spoilers – if you want to see the film first before reading, please do), the universe (though we really only see this on earth) and the Avengers are recovering – or more precisely failing to recover - from Thanos decimation.  There is a palpable pallor over creation with some heroes (Captain America – Chris Evans) offering vapid bromides in AA like meetings in an apparent effort to help people rally – and some, who have lost more (Hawkeye – Jeremy Renner) having turned to the dark side, wreaking havoc as only a superhero can, apparently because despair somehow leads to harmful violence. 

Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) are marooned in space but rescued by Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) and Iron Man’s arc of recovery is notably different than the others.  He is reunited with Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) and they retreat to a woodland hideaway and have a child.  Iron Man, the son of the military industrialist who designed war weapons, has never been comfortable in his own skin.  He has been so uncomfortable that he has avoided other's touch whenever he can.  But here we finally see him at play – doting on his daughter and connecting with her in a truly loving fashion.  So when a group of surviving Avengers approach him about undoing the devastation of Thanos, he is unwelcoming on two levels – first because they failed before and he doesn’t want to be reminded of his failure – and this is consistent with the Iron Man of old – the super hero who can’t be scratched, much less defeated – the one who doesn’t defer, but plays for the win in every moment.  But when he comes around (was there any doubt?), he includes a caveat – that the clock can’t be reset to the moment when Thanos won and so many creatures died – because that would eliminate his daughter – but those who died must be returned in current time.

Well, as it turns out, it is a good thing that Iron Man put the current day parameter in the works because that is the way, in the Marvel universe, that time travel works.  In a send up of all the films about time travel (no mention of Einstein or any physicists musings – we are in the world of science as depicted in films here – though Hermione’s time travels in Harry Potter is a notable lapse in this overly encyclopedic rendition of past movies), we discover that time travel cannot change the past – it will only change what happens within this dimensional reality.  So, we have introduced infinite universes (never discussed) and we have abandoned at least one other, with all of these heroes in it, to languish without the resolution that is being offered on this track (I think even condemning them to a track that prevents this resolution) also never mentioned.  But I have been derailed by my musings (perhaps erroneous) about time travel in the imaginary Marvel Universe.

To make an epic ending short, the group travels through time, retrieves the infinity stones, and Iron Man uses them – in an act that imperils his own life – to restore to life those who were destroyed by Thanos.  And, despite Thanos’ self-proclaimed inevitability – the Avengers team – including Captain Marvel who could have single handedly cleaned up the whole mess but arrived late – works as a team to undermine and defeat Thanos, freeing the universe – at least this particular version of the Marvel Universe (there are infinitely more out there to be mined for prequels and sequels and other superheroes) – from Thanos forever.  So there is no teaser in the trailer – quite a disappointment to the reluctant wife and I who, with a family of four next to us – were the only ones from the packed house silly enough to think that this tradition would be continued in this last installment.

So what do we make of Iron Man’s demise?  More precisely, what do we make of Tony Stark’s – Iron Man’s host ego – demise?  Tony has the opportunity to travel through time and, as he does this, to meet his father just before he is born.  He is able to share with his father the anxiety of having a child – having recently survived doing that himself.  He is able to reassure his father that he will indeed be a competent father – even though Tony will, as all children do, suffer at his hands.  He is also able, as an adult, to see the competent and compassionate man that his father is – something that he wasn’t able to see within the traditional arc of his life because his father died prematurely – but also something that we can never do as the child of our parent – for we can never put aside the parental role that our parents play in our lives and see them simply as people – no matter how much time and psychological work we put into doing that.  The chance meeting between father and son – before the son is born – offers this magical moment of connection.

On the other end of the spectrum, Tony is able to take his leave in person only from Pepper – who arrives on the battlefield to support him after he has spent himself channeling the power of the infinity stones.  He says goodbye to his daughter as a pre-recorded hologram.  Hardly a moment of traditional intimacy, but in this age of social media – who knows?  He tells her – harking back to a moment of tenderness at the beginning of the film – that he matches the unfathomably big batch of love that she has for him.  And we believe him.  But there is also great sadness that he, like his own father only at an even earlier age, is irrevocably leaving her.  What Tony wanted to prevent happening at the beginning of the film – the erasure of his daughter’s life – has been accomplished, but only sort of.  Perhaps as an iron clad hero Tony doesn’t get that the other part of the equation is the importance of his presence in that life – that the development of our children is a co-created and relational development.  We are integral to the appreciation, but also the arc of that life and part of the experience of love is the living of it and in it across time.

I think the film captures – in the demise of Tony, but also in the life choices of Steve Rogers (Captain America’s host ego) something important about the healthy developmental arc of the narcissistic heroes that we have become so enamored of and attached to – in the end, they are people and it is the connections with the important people in their lives that are most important and end up being sustaining - assuming they are lucky enough to value those attachments enough to be able to invest in them.  At this moment, I am feeling a resonance with the words of a friend – words of his that were read at his funeral – where he talked about learning – in the last six months of his life when he was sick with cancer – that people cared for him as a person – not just or even primarily because of all the things that he had accomplished in his life.  This was a revelation to my friend – and I think it was a revelation to Stark and to Rogers – though less so to Rogers who had long expressed his yearning for a family life.  Both Stark and Rogers, then, were driven not just by a wish for glory, but a wish to accomplish the goal of attachment through duty - through doing what was expected of them - and when that expectation was met - of feeling - finally - whole.  I think the conclusion of this movie, then, may also be a somewhat ironic nod to Stan Lee – the creator of the Marvel Universe – who reveled in his late life notoriety (including taking Alfred Hitchcock-like cameo turns in the movies) while he may or may not also have been a pawn in some kind of battle over his estate.  It was Lee's desire to be human and to have human connections - to be loved - that shines through these alter egos of his.

Heroes are important to us.  Men like Alexander Hamilton (and Lin Manuel Miranda, who brought him back to life for us) help us imagine our ways – even fight our ways not just into new spaces, but into new ways of being.  We love – if love is the right word – admire? - them for doing that – but we also stand a few paces back from them.  They often have a level of self-confidence, while simultaneously exuding the need for adoration - sometimes in ways that they seem themselves to be unaware of - that interferes with our being able to be in touch with them – to know them as people who are comfortably flawed as well as competent - even, at least in their imaginations, perfect creatures.  This film, despite its continued love affair with the crime fighting heroics of the lead figure's alter egos, ends up urging us to realize that what the host egos most want may not be realizable through their heroics, but through much simpler and more human pleasures.  And the transformative effects of the various radiations and energy sources that have given them the powers that we ogle at and are awed by have also distanced them from something more essential.  And this essential humanity – which is what I think is articulated in a much more accessible way in the Marvel Universe and so makes it much more appealing than most of the DC comics universe (and not the quality of the CGI)– ends up being a double edged sword.  While this film checks all the boxes – it is was also, at least for me, a bit disappointing to walk away from.  I, like my basketball friend, want to be able to hang onto heroes who are invincible.  Even as a psychoanalyst who believes in the value of connection, there is something about a film that celebrates the triumph of interpersonal connection over heroic immortality as the ultimate force that should rule a universe that we would want to live in leaves a kind of void.  I am, perhaps like most people, drawn, almost against my will, to a world of fantasy where we live on forever doing good things - perhaps that is why I write about the experiences that I have - in the vain hope that this self, writing these words, thinking these thoughts, and perceiving this world will live on forever.  Would that this movie franchise could more consistently support my particular delusion.

I have written also written about Captain Marvel, Age of Ultron, Black Panther and, in the DC Universe, the movie Wonder Woman.

Of course, I have written about many other things as well - to access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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