Porgy and Bess – A hopeful tragedy

Who doesn’t know the song Summertime?  If you can’t conjure up a feeling state just by thinking about that song, click the link above or below to a Youtube rendition and sit back and relax into a kind of lassitude that is right next to delirium.  My gosh, the Gershwin brothers could craft a tune.  I remember hearing a story about George losing a trunk full of their songs when they were travelling.  Someone asked him about the magnitude of the loss.  He said something like, “Not to worry, there’s a thousand more where those came from.”  Wow. 

Though I have known that song, and a couple of others – I Got Plenty of Nothing – and Bess You is My Woman Now – for as long as I can remember, I have never seen Porgy and Bess, the opera.  The reluctant wife was travelling for business and not excited about seeing it, so I called up an enthusiastic opera loving friend whose partner eschews opera and tagged along with him.  Wow. 

I was afraid that an opera about an African American community in Charleston in the twenties would be dated – and racist.  Would that it were dated.  Oh, the language was dated.  But the themes were current.  Including the power imbalance between the white police and the black public and the power imbalance between men and women.  As a white male, I don’t know that I can speak to the racism and sexism as a member of either club, but I didn’t find that the cringeworthy moments were because of outdated or passé attitudes.  Instead I found they were uncomfortably current.  I also found a story of individuals, a community, and of feelings that feel as timeless and intimate and immediate as opera should feel.  And the music.  Wow.

The music was operatic – this was an opera.  But the songs, as written, were intended to mirror folk songs and spirituals.  Justas Edelweiss is not actually an Austrian folk song, so Summertime is not actually a spiritual, but gosh it feels like it when Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong sing it.  Not so much when opera stars do.  The familiar music is filled with trills and enunciations that Jazz and Folk versions do not contain.  And it takes a little while to get used to folk-like songs getting so gussied up.  But it is a treat to hear an unamplified voice fill a hall with beautiful sounds.  Bring on the gussiness. 

It also feels at moments less like an opera and more like a Broadway show (which it has also been) because the chorus and minor characters have significant parts and there are dance parts that the opera stars look a bit uncomfortable doing.  But the inclusion of more of the company makes it, I think, true to the subject.  Unlike most operas, this is not about the ruling class, but about the lower class.  The king’s or the duke’s chorus are the people – people whose off stage and unacknowledged work allows for the king’s or duke’s life to be one that is apparently self-determined.  

The members of the lower classes are tangibly dependent on each other to survive.  And their collective grief allows them as a group to bear what no one of them could individually bear.  They ante up to pay for each other’s funerals – and they gather together in times of threat- they don’t retreat into the inner sanctum or to the highest vantage point while their minions secure the gates or fight under their direction.  That said, some of these were the moments that felt closest to a potentially racist experience of the play – I think because blacks have been ridiculed for their interdependence.  I think the ridicule is based in fear.  It is threatening to the ruling class to see the connections between the oppressed because it creates strength in a group they maintain power over.  But when this is viewed from a position of connection – when, despite the fourth wall, I was able to experience it not as voyeuristically as I feared I might – I, at least, felt allied with the players in their lives - though I was also aware of the ability to see them as objects - not fellow subjects.

This also doesn’t feel like an opera in the way that the plot is laid out.  Porgy and Bess have enough clock time to actually fall in love.  The emergence of stage romance is frequently incredibly compressed.  This is true not just in opera (I found the speed limit of love to have been violated in the opera Romeo and Juliet earlier this summer, but I think that is the case in the play as well), but also in films (Love Actually condenses a lot of love into a very few weeks before Christmas).  I found myself idly wondering, as I noticed that this opera allows time – not enough, but more than usual – for love to develop, to what extent the quick flowering of love (sometimes in the middle of a song) is a result of the compressed format (though at four hours this opera is not super compressed), and to what extent it mirrors the dramatic culture – groups come together to create magic on tight schedules – they accomplish this – and they manage to deeply engage with each other very quickly as they are doing it (and not infrequently to fall in love with each other while doing it).

In any case, on Catfish row, after Bess is left without a man because Crown, her tough guy, fast talking boyfriend has, in a drunken brawl, killed a man and gone into hiding, she turns – not to Sportin’ Life, who offers to take her in and provide magic dust (heroin or cocaine?) to boot – but to Porgy, the big crippled man who is kind to her and who had never expected to be loved by anyone.  It isn’t necessarily romantic at first, but after a couple of weeks, which is not portrayed, but passes in the context of the play, it has taken a turn in that direction, and Bess, You Is My Woman Now becomes a heartfelt expression of their growing love for and commitment to each other.

At this point, we could have a lovely romantic comedy – but this is opera.  It is also a play about sex, gender and power and how all those things impact love and self-esteem.    We have seen, with the song I Got Plenty of Nothing, how love transforms Porgy’s self-esteem.  He is now proud and happy in a life that was dark and all that has changed is that he is in love.  But Bess’s love is much more complicated.  Though she is clearly smitten with Porgy and their parting before the picnic is laden with the sweet sorrow of their shared and genuine love, she is cornered by Crown on the island where the picnic takes place.  He demands that she return to him, she demurs, he insists – and then he rapes her.  She spends two days in the jungles of South Carolina before returning, delirious, to Porgy, who divines what has happened after Bess is returned to her senses through a group invoking "Dr. Jesus" to help her.

The version of what has happened that passes between Porgy and Bess is at odds with what we have seen.  Bess sings of wanting Porgy to protect her – not from Crown, but from her desire for Crown.  Wait.  Didn’t we just see him rape her?  What the heck is going on?  Well, I think a lot.  First of all, there is an implicit support of a rape culture.  What does a woman find attractive?  A man who is strong and uses his strength not just for a woman’s protection, but against her.  That is the male version of the interaction.  The “Me Tarzan, you Jane” version that is so frequently central to the portrayal of love on the screen in the last century. 

There is a female version of this primitive mating ritual that seems dated in our post-feminist world.  It goes something like, I don’t like being taken, but I am in need of protection – if Crown won’t care for me, should I rely on Porgy or on Sportin’ Life – because being on my own is not an option.  This would seem quaint, except that #metoo movement has exposed the number of women in the show business world who have been dependent on casting directors and producers to support their careers and the behavior that they have had to put up with in order to have those careers develop (and the secrets they have had to keep to avoid losing their status).  And, of course, the independence of women and girls is recent - and far from absolute – so the #metoo movement extends far beyond the bastions of vast power to the places where everyday power imbalances exist – which is pretty much all over the place, especially including Catfish Row.  We could then see Bess’s behavior as a kind of cruel calculus.  Who will protect me best?

This calculus, though, seems to apply later in the plot.  At the moment when she is with Porgy after having been with Crown again, she wants his help in stemming her desire for Crown.  That is coming from a different and, to our post-feminist ear, foreign place.  I think that place has to do with a desire to be loved in a particular way – a way that feels very different from the loving that she gets from Porgy.  I think that she feels herself to have a different kind of power in her relationship with Crown – the power to excite him – the power to elicit desire.  This is, I think, a masochistic love – which is a complex and multiply determined love – and one aspect of that love can be the sense of power that the love provides.

I think that the visceral power that Bess feels in the arms of Crown is like an antidote – in much the same way that the magic dust is - to the powerlessnees of her life as a Negress (as she would have been referred to then) in the deep south in the 1920s, but also – and here I am wildly speculating – we have no backstory on Bess – as a child who did not feel loved – who did not feel herself to be part of the community that is portrayed on stage.  Here her sense of belonging and being cared for by Crown – even when he cruelly cared, feels good.  She became a member of the outcast but superior subculture of drug users, alcohol drinkers, and bar denizens – scathingly portrayed in Sportin’ Life’s song It Ain’t Necessarily so – that disdains the dominant and life giving subculture of Catfish Row that embraced a much more family oriented and deeply spiritually based approach to life. 

The last paragraph suggests a deep division between these two cultures (and within Bess), but the opera clarifies that they are deeply entangled.  Porgy is a master crap shooter.  The most upstanding men tear themselves away from their wives to go to the crap games – and probably the bars – and then they go to church on Sunday and help prepare for and enjoy the picnics.  Though the leads represent white hats and black hats, the chorus helps us see that we are all torn between wanting to lead a life of nurturance and caring, connected to those we care about, and that we also want to express our independence, as it were, from everything – church, state, and even our mortality, by grabbing onto something that will allow us to transcend the tawdriness of our everyday lives.

Bess finds with Porgy something different from that power – she finds a caring relationship (though the idea of belonging – being the property of – Porgy is still very much a part of that) and a different kind of joy – a joy that is not illusory, like the joy of the happy dust, but one that allows her to become generative.  She and Porgy take in a newly orphaned infant and become a family together – a family that gets ripped apart when Crown returns to claim his Bess – only to have Porgy and Bess unite to fight him- with Porgy killing him.  For the second time, the white law man from Charleston comes into Catfish row to root out a murderer, and Porgy is hauled off to identify the body of Crown, but he knows that if he does he that he will be found out as his murderer, so he refuses, and then he is jailed for contempt.

So Bess, once again, does not have a man.  Into this vacuum steps Sportin’ Life, still ready to snatch Bess up and now he plans to take her to New York.  He tempts her with visions of the apartment he can secure on Fifth Avenue with her on his arm, and with happy dust, which she is vulnerable to now that Porgy is not supplying the kind of love that has staved off that desire.  She sashays off with Sportin' Life to New York, leaving the infant, and Porgy, to be cared for by others.  Porgy is able to get out of jail shortly after she leaves (not in the ten years that Sportin’ Life suggested was likely) and he returns to a community that is loath to tell him that Bess has gone.  Once he finds out that she is gone to New York, he wants to hear where it is.  When he discovers it us up north, he heads out to get there, to win his Bess back.

The tragedy of the human condition that seemingly every opera portrays are the ways in which we each butt up against our own limitations in ways that are particular to each of the characters – and the characters are able to sing about their individual and collective grief at this state of affairs.  The tragic endings resonate with the audience members because we are, in fact, infinitely more complicated than any character portrayed on stage, and we have threads that connect with each of the players and we feel their individual and collective grief simultaneously and their grief resonates deeply with our grief – the grief of being human. 

Freud is an uneasy bedfellow for me in part because of his tragic view of life.  Gershwin’s tragic view is subtly and not so subtly undermining of a tragic world view while simultaneously acknowledging it.  Catfish row could not be a more tragic spot.  And yet, it is possible to enjoy Strawberries, Crabs and honey on Catfish row, and to luxuriate in the joy of summer time, when the living is, indeed, easy.  This easy living will inevitably be followed, when the water temperature rises about the air temperature, with hurricanes.  And living in Catfish row is hardly edenic – or is it?  Everyone’s life there is hard – but the strawberries! 

Bess’s external tragedy – like that of the community – is her powerlessness – as a woman and as an African American.  Her gifts include her joi de vivre, her sultry beauty, and her consequent ability to attract men, each of whom wants to take care of her in their own way.  She chooses three different paths at three different moments.  We admire her ability to overcome her “desire” to be dominated by Crown.  We admire her affectionate relationship with Porgy, but we never are quite convinced by it.  We cringe when she is seduced by Sportin’ Life, but I, at least, don’t judge her too harshly – even though I wish it were otherwise.  Her tragedy is that she is vulnerable to the illusion of power and doesn't have the strength to hold out for the real thing when the real thing isn't there to support her.

Porgy is a tragic hero who somehow gets a pass.  He is crippled.  He is a beggar.  He is the bottom rung at the bottom of the heap – but he finds love, and this makes him richer than the richest man.  He has this love pulled out from under him, but this does not cause him to despair – this opera leaves us not knowing his – or Bess’s – fate.  We fear that his quest it quixotic – but he was able to connect with Bess before – will he again?  Will Sportin’ Life’s promises pale in the neon lights of Broadway?  Will Porgy be able to find Bess?  We leave this opera not feeling the despair of the limits of life, but feeling its possibilities, without quite knowing what those might be, even when the deck is stacked against us.

Yes, our life is limited.  But within the limits of that life, we can follow a path that offers much – not just the sweetness of strawberries and honey, but of love.  It may not last – it may not protect us from all the winds that blow – but even if we are at the bottom of the heap, life can be a gift, and we live for the promise of that.

All that said, I feel a much more jaundiced taste in my mouth after writing about this opera than I did walking away from it humming Bess, You is My Woman Now.  I think that there is a divide within our culture - one that mirrors the divide in Catfish Row.  The movie industry - the dream factory - appears to be reflecting back to us what life could be like, but it is, underneath, run by a system that reinforces brute strength over nuance and appearance over substance.  We have, again, a creature of that culture at the head of our country, and I think he is portraying, in code, the forces that are present in this play - and jeering at the citizens that he is governing as objects, and avoiding engaging with them as subjects.  I think he is very much like the producers and the casting directors of the industry that he comes from - and his vision, like that of the entertainment industry generally, is suffused with the not so hidden agenda of subjugation and division while he mouths words that appeal, on the surface, to the spiritual sides of ourselves, while also, in the code, appealing to our darkest angels.  Would that his being crippled in the ways that he has been had led him to Porgy's path, but I fear that it is much more frequent that crippling factors lead us to vindictive and mean paths - paths where we look out for ourselves - and don't connect with those around us.  That is the true tragedy that lurks in the shadows of this uplifting opera.  Despite Gershwin encouraging us to hear our better angels - well, if we are Porgy and we are going off in search of a life that is better because we believe it will be that way, well, it ain't necessarily so...

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84 Charing Cross Road – Love sometimes comes in tiny packages

The other day, I was trying to figure out how to avoid the big project I have been working on this summer and I picked up a slender little book that it looked like I could read in about an hour.  It wasn’t until I was finished with it (I didn’t time it, but it couldn’t have taken more than two hours at most), that I discovered that my reluctant sister had given it to me on my birthday more than thirty years ago.  In her inscription, in addition to sending her love, she also warned me away from the movie starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins (something the book cover trumpets).  I have no problem sending along her advice – I’m sure it is wise counsel, but I must admit that I am so taken with the book that I may be tempted, next time I need a diversion, to see if it is available.

84 Charing Cross is the address of a bookseller in London that, sadly, my quick google search informs me, is now at least partly a McDonald’s restaurant.  It was the place, in the days before Amazon, when Helene Hanff, the (partial) author of the book ordered her books.  One could say it was the precursor of Amazon, but that would be a grave injustice. 

I was introduced to Amazon in 2008 or so by a fellow academic who assured me that it was a tremendously easy and wonderful way to get books quickly and efficiently.  Who knew what it would become? 

Marks & Co., the bookseller at 84 Charing Cross Road, London, was hardly quick but it was efficient in its own quirky manner.  Miss Hanff did not communicate with them via email, but by post from the upper west side of Manhattan, typing her missives not into a screen, but through a manual typewriter onto sheets of, I’m sure, quite thin paper that was sent in the mail, sometimes along with a few dollar bills to cover the costs of the books.

And the books.  Unlike the book that I was holding in my hand – with a very light poster board cover and thick pages of newsprint quality paper glued into a functional if not elegant package – the books she ordered were lovely.  They were on the thinnest of paper and bound by the finest leather with true art work adorning the inside covers and gilt lining the page edges.  They were used – with marginalia from previous owners and they opened to the places that the last owner most visited, something that Miss Hanff treasured.  She liked being guided by an unknown guide to the best spots.

The cover of my clunky paperback promises a “transatlantic love affair by mail”.  Well, that seems to me to hint at a bodice ripping romance, even if the bodice is ripped only in fantasy.  This is no bodice ripper, but the teaser is an apt description.  Miss Hanff does fall in love with Frank Doel (rhymes with the Christmas Noel), her primary correspondent at Marks & Co., but also with his wife and children and with the other staff at the booksellers.  And the center piece of all of that love is the love of books – and with the real lived experiences that those books bring.

A cursory read of the book titles I have reviewed in these posts will clarify that I am in love with fiction.  Not so Ms. Hanff.  She is invested in history.  She wants to hear from those who have lived that history- she loves diaries and memoirs.  Non-fiction is the stuff of her reading life – and her writing life – she was an author who wrote for stage and screen – especially for The Hallmark Hall of Fame.  And this book is, then, appropriately the actual correspondence between herself and her fellow lover of books, Frank Doel (who, I believe, should be credited, along with a few others, as co-author).

And what an interesting and intimate love affair it is.  She idealizes him and the place that he works and lives in – so much so that she never quite makes the trek, even though you expect her to at any moment.  Instead she preserves it as a place she can visit in her mind – keeping it whole and untrammeled.  And we visit it with her.  I could smell the mustiness of the book store that neither of us will ever visit as I read the letters that were written there. 

But the intriguing thing to me is not Miss Hanff's idealization of Mr. Doel and the bookstore, but the remonstrating that she engages in – the good spirited, clearly loving, but also clearly critical tone she takes with him.  He is someone whom she idealizes but also comes ever so close to treating as her personal lackey.  He is in her employ – and he is rigidly and consistently proper in the best British manner – and this allows Miss Hanff, I think, to take liberties. 

Those liberties are invariably in the form of demanding from him the level of service that she believes him capable of delivering.  As caustic as her notes get, they are leavened both by the quality of Miss Hanff’s writing and by the affection that her criticism exudes.  It has the tone of chiding rather than scolding.  She is railing at him for being the very person that she loves.  And he, in his formal English manner, seems to take it in the spirit that it is given.  He is always working to provide the best possible service.

Now it helps that she is also sending gifts – and emissaries – friends who carry her good wishes across the seas.  She is on the side of these people who have been left bereft by the war.  She is embarrassed by the largesse that the Americans are bestowing on the Germans while our English allies can’t, for the life of them, find a decent ham for Christmas.  So when she sends a ham it demonstrates her love.  But the gifts are not intended to balance out her bullying – for her criticism is not bullying – it is a very deep form of affection.  It is the calling forth of the best that one can get from another person – and an appreciation of who it is that they are.

So this correspondence is a lived record of a love – the kind of love that the efficiencies of Amazon will never replace.  For we love people, with all of their quirks and all of the ways that their interacting irritate us.  We love it that we can’t count on a used bookseller to provide exactly what we want, but that what shows up sometimes turns out to be better than what we would have ordered.  The universe sometimes knows what we want more than we ourselves do.  

And perfection is not what we want in a partner – six sigma be damned.  It is clearly what we expect from Amazon, but from the people we love, we want responsiveness – we want someone who thinks about us and knows us and gets who it is that we are – and who cares enough to stay in touch both with who we are and with who we could be.  And that allows us to muddle through – to bump along – enjoying the bumps – while others speed past us on the smooth superhighway of perfection. And it is an illusion - to those on that highway, including ourselves when we are there - that perfection will be a substitute for love.  It isn't.

In closing, I would like to take this idealized relationship into my own sphere and hold it as an example of how the analyst and the analysand should, under the best of circumstances, interact.  Who is whom?  Is it Frank or Helen that is the analyst?  The funny thing is that both are each.  For analysis mirrors life and we both expect the best out of each other and work hard to provide it and at times we may be Frank – whether analyst or analysand – and at times we may be Miss Hanff, but when things are going well, we are thinking of each other, and giving and receiving that greatest gift of all, an unexpected and novel way of looking at the world – just as my sister did some thirty plus years ago.

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Cats – Fond Memories Compete with the Trailer

Cats was the big thing the year that I moved to New York City after a year of trying to scratch out a living in New Mexico.  I had a real job in a real city – I was working as an actuarial trainee – and I was, by every standard of my life to that point, rich beyond my wildest dreams.  I had a salary of 16,000 dollars.  I was living in a big brownstone in Brooklyn – it was possible then to do that (splitting the rent with two others) – and feel rich beyond belief on a salary of 16K.  Don’t think that can be done now.  Cats had just opened – it was the hottest thing – and I took my parents and grandmother – who all came into town – to see the show.  My aunt and uncle, who lived in Jersey, came too (I don't think I was rich enough to pay for them, too, though). 

T.S. Eliot had written poems about cats.  The only one that I had really liked was the one about the naming of cats and their three different names – including the inscrutable name that only they themselves knew.  The poems were written to entertain kids – maybe his kids (though the rest of his writing seemed so inscrutable and dreary to me I could hardly imagine him having kids) – maybe his nieces and nephews – and maybe some random neighborhood kids.  I also imagined that he was writing for English kids, because the poems were a bit cute but also a bit – I don’t know – impenetrable, like much of the rest of Eliot’s poetry that was aimed for intellectuals.

So it was a glorious surprise that, when they were put to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, and enacted by talented actors with great voices, they – both the poems – but also the cats depicted in the poems came to life.  I liked every song except the Memories song – the one poem Webber himself added - I thought was screechy, but it was the only one to hit the airwaves.

Was there a plot?  I don’t know.  There were a bunch of people playing at being cats – arching their backs and dancing and singing, and the Winter Garden Theater was turned into an alley – not just on stage but throughout – and there were cats all over – in the aisles and on pedestals in the audience.  It was fun.  It was a show.  It didn’t have depth or change my life – but it was cute – and in a good way.

That was 1983 and this is now 2019 and the trailer dropped for the movie version coming out at Christmas.  And it is getting widely panned.  And the movie is still 6 months away!  But I get it – there is something winsome and attractive about all of those alley cats just being themselves.  Don’t mess that up with CGI and I also get the criticism about casting a mixed race actress to play the white cat.   Will the songs win out?  It seems there is now a plot – the cats are singing to see who will get a new life.  Was that there before?  I don’t know.  If so, it was not played up. 

I have written before about how some things simply need to be on stage – the screen is not the right vehicle – and this may be another of those things.  Partially because, in this case, these poems, like short stories, are vehicles for descriptions of characters.  We may not be ready to look too closely at characters, feline or human – we may need the bit of distance that the theater affords – even the Winter Gardens made to feel more intimate than it actually was.

On the other hand, the music may carry – I don’t know – the characters.  We may be able to see them in spite of the garish colors and the weird perspective – they appear to be putting the people playing cats in furniture that makes them appear to scale.  Will that work?  Maybe when we see the film... I don't know. 

Of course, one of the concerns is the CGI – the features of the cats seem too human.  The irony, of course, is that the cats ARE human characters, thinly disguised as cats.  And yes, cats do have personalities, but the cats in Cats are cool cats – and, yes, they have the personalities of cats – and of people – and that’s what makes it delightful.

Will this version work?  Will we like it?  Let’s wait and see (and please don’t judge it by the Memories song which is the highlighted song in the trailer – that really is the worst song of the lot).  But I’m guessing we won’t like it, which is a shame.

I am working on an academic paper in which I am trying to defend the importance of having therapies that match the characteristics of each individual rather than creating, as some academics are doing, one size fits all therapy.  The Rum Tum Tugger does not need what Skimbleshanks needs.   Each of their next lives will turn out to be very different.

The question, I suppose, is whether either one needs to be seen on the screen, or whether they should just be seen in person…  I guess we’ll have to wait until December to find out.

(By the way - a weird coincidence - one of the cats dancing on the stage - she didn't have a singing role - later became one of my students.  This is a very weird and very small world we live in.  At that moment neither one of us was on track to become a psychologist - it was one of many options - that we ended up in the same room again twenty years later is just a little bit crazy...)

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Florence, Italy – Cradle of the Renaissance and Rebirth of Humanism – III: New York City and Middle America

Uffizi Gallery - Florence.

The Reluctant Stepdaughter spent her last semester in college in Florence, Italy, where her school has a campus.  We joined her for spring break and discovered a gem of a city.  The Uffizi museum gave us a crash course in renaissance art and the instrumental role that Florence, and the Medici family played in it.  Since coming back to the United States, I have managed to check the story told there in some of our own great museums.  I have spent time in the galleries of paintings that, truth be told, it has been my habit to sprint through on my way to the good stuff.  I have long been a fan of Rembrandt – and almost every museum seems to have at least one Rembrandt.  But I am also a fan of the impressionists – I am nearly in heaven in the Chicago Institute of Art and MOMA – heck, in MOMA I don’t have to race through those rooms, they don’t exist!

But since Florence, I have taken the time to linger in the rooms that I normally race through.  I have looked for the Middle Ages and early renaissance paintings and sculpture.  I have been curious about the emergence of the person – how we have developed from iconic representations to the intimate, warm, psychologically rich depictions of people that Rembrandt still epitomizes for me.  So, in Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Toledo and Cincinnati, as I have gone to conferences, picked up other children at college and visited friends and family this summer, I have stopped into the local museum and lingered in the rooms I once rushed through.

Florence plays a prominent role in each of those rooms.  The collections vary – there are a surprising number of Botticellis  sprinkled through the Northeast and Midwest – and there are the precursors – different artists in each place, but it is possible to pick up bits of the narrative that the Uffizi tells so well.  No place, of those I have visited, does this better than the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  And it was a good thing that we decided to linger there – the Rembrandts and the impressionist rooms were being restored – and by the time we finished lingering we were done with the exhibit!  Oh, the rest had been moved to a special exhibits section, but they weren’t where they belonged!

Memling 1470

The New York narrative mirrored, but deepened the Italian narrative about the emergence of art.  In Florence, you really would think that Florentines had invented art and the rest of the world discovered it from them.  In all of the museums, you see more works from other Italian cities and hear about developments there – especially Venice – that the Florentines play down.  But what the Met points out is the really intriguing interaction between Florence and Northern Europe.  The Dutch and Germans – even in the cold northern climes – were having a similar emergence of new, richer, bolder art.  They were starting to “get” how perspective worked, though it was the Italians that schooled the Germans and Dutch in this area, but the Germans and Dutch had a better sense, earlier on, of portraiture, and the Italians learned more than a little about how to represent the human on the canvas from them. 

Memling 1470

The most wonderful example of this at the Met is a pair of paintings by Hans Memling.  They are of a married couple – and the man is, get this, the northern representative of the Medici bank!  The two were painted on either side of a central panel – looking at the panel – demonstrating their piety – but also, with the jewels and clothing particularly of the wife – demonstrating their wealth.  Painted in about 1470, these two portraits would certainly have traveled home to Venice to be admired by the Medici and by the artists who worked for them.  “Why can’t you paint a portrait like that of me?” they might have asked.  And the Italians seem to have set to work to do just that.  

Botticelli 1480

Unfortunately I don’t have good before and after pictures, but the Botticelli, a depiction of the resurrected Christ, from the Detroit Institute of Art, is painted 10 years after the Memling (in 1480).  While the Memlings may or may not have been seen by Botticelli, you can see that there are similarities – the hands of all three people are remarkably rendered.  And the face of Christ is an interesting portrait, but it has neither the quality of depth of the Memlings nor does it give the person being seen room to exist in his or her own space.  Admittedly this is a religious painting, so may be intentionally using some of the existing means of depicting religious figures, but there is still an aura of iconography around him, a sense of the person as cartoon, not as a fully realized and psychologically three dimensional person. 

Rembrandt circa 1650

The point here, and the Met makes it remarkably well, is not that the Northerners or the Southerners were superior to each other, but that each profited by the trade with the other.  The north gained the tools to accurately depict depth on a two dimensional surface.  The south gained an entrance into a world that would allow later artists – Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo (both of whom painted in the very early 1500s) and then later artists – Titian and Caravaggio – to engage with subjects – to present the subjectivity of those subjects in much richer and deeper tones.  Ultimately, Rembrandt himself, but up in the north, would render Christ – as seen as the Philadelphia Museum of Art – as a psychologically rich person – not just an icon who has suffered and is now forgiving with an other-worldly grace, but as a person, alive and full of personality.

The narrative at the Met goes on to mourn the loss of the connection between the two art worlds as Protestantism arose and then the reformation and there was a split between the north and south.  In Detroit, this was depicted in a different way.  Florence, but the other cities in Italy, were part of the Grand Tour that especially English nobles made – during the late renaissance and into the period of the reformation.  Italian painting, sculpture, and other art objects became something that the aristocrats travelling in Europe could bring home to adorn their homes.  It was kind of the travel slide show of the day.  Some of the stereotyped views of St. Mark’s Square in Venice would be examples of this.

While I have just made the case that the Memling paintings likely found their way to Florence and likely influenced the painters there, I think it important to distinguish between a lively trade not just of art but of artists that is necessary to sustain a fertile relationship (as an analyst I feel it incumbant upon me to say: intercourse is a necessary component of fertility).  Just as reading can help one engage in self-analysis, and such analysts as Karen Horney wrote books to help people who did not have access to analysts learn to think about themselves analytically, it is not the same thing to engage in self-analysis as it is to engage with another person in an analytic process.  It is neither as terrifying – this person may sees things I cannot see – nor as nurturing – this person can care for me in a way that I cannot care for myself.  A painting as a tutor is useful in some ways, but sterile in others.

 

There is a great deal of evidence that one of the tools of the classical painters was the camera obscura, which was essentially a pinhole camera that the painters would use to project an exact image of the person or object they were painting onto a screen so that they could sketch or paint that object.   Just seeing someone else’s painting is not going to help you invent the camera obscura yourself – much easier if they tell you about it.  Ironically, the emergence of actual cameras – and the impressionist revolt against studio work and photographic realism in favor of capturing the feel of what was being seen likely broke the chain of painters teaching their students about the camera obscura.

The practice of psychoanalysis, like that of painting, involves learning how to help bring someone to life (O.K. that sounds a bit dramatic – but it is also true.  It is not the analyst alone that does this – any more than an artist can paint things that are not wanted by the person who will buy the paintings – Van Gogh being the exception that proves the rule – though Gadsby maintains that this had to do with Vincent’s art being supported by his brother’s love of it – and him).   Psychoanalysis, like art, evolves across time.  I think that analysts today are more likely than those of a hundred years ago to be helpful to those they work with.  But those who pillory analysis frequently do that based on readings that are at least one hundred years old.  We analysts need to understand how our art developed.  To know what its roots are – but we also need to be learning from current masters – from people who have taken the early techniques and built on them.

Frankly, the last paragraph felt both like a reasonable conclusion and a left turn from what I set out to write.  I think that it is amazing that the development of the ability of artists to depict the three dimensional aspects of a figure’s psychology is documented at the major museums of our cities.  I thought I was going to end by noting that I think that the Metropolitan – next to the Uffizi – does the best job of doing this in the sample I have – with Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and Cincinnati, in that order, presenting less well articulated versions of this emergence - and acknowledging that I have not sampled Washington, Boston, LA and many other cities.  But it is remarkable the care that we have taken to preserve this tremendous period of growth and change.  We went from two dimensional highly crafted work of cartoon art to three dimensional works in a short 100+ year period (see the post on the Uffizi to access Italian illustrations of that transformation), and within a few short years of that, we have Rembrandt’s likenesses.

Rembrandt 1660

In New York, we did visit my favorite Rembrandt, even though it was not hung in its usual spot.  It is a self-portrait – and Rembrandt produced more than 100 of these.  But this is truly magnificent. Like all of the art reproduced here, you really have to see this to believe it.  The eyes follow you around the room – a trick that many artists master – but this – like many of the best Rembrandts and a Velasquez portrait we also discovered at the Met – has a face that turns towards you as you walk around.  And the face changes expression – it is more open and cherubic from straight on – a bit sterner from the one side – and downright poignant – there is a sense of loss – perhaps in the painting, but certainly in the viewer – that Rembrandt is both here and not here – as you view him from the other side. 

Perhaps because it was hung in an unusual spot, this was the first time that I had noticed the changes wrought by a restoration.  I have seen this paintings a few times since that restoration, but had not noticed that taking off layers of varnish left it much less dark and murky – there is an openness to the representation that wasn’t there before.  Weirdly, I think I liked him more in the dark.  There is less gravitas in this more accurate version of the painting as it was painted.  I guess I prefer mystery - perhaps part of my deep, if ambivalent, attachment to the art of psychoanalysis.

Please, be in contact with the art that you love.  Allow it to contact you and learn more about it.  As you do, you, as I have, will learn more about what it means to become human.


Related posts:
Florence Italy: The Uffizi Gallery
Rome, Italy: The Sistine Chapel

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Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order of Things – Feelings are at the heart of our functioning.

One of my intermittently reluctant cousins is a “hard” scientist.  He is a biologist and also, nominally, a faculty member at a high powered institution.  I say nominally because his teaching contract involves being in a classroom for one clock hour a year.  He is, in fact, a teacher because he has a very active laboratory and teaches the graduate students who work with him how to do science.  He is an educator – but as an educator he functions more like a tutor than a traditional college professor – in part because he is, essentially, a researcher.  What does he research?  A number of things, but when I visited him a few years ago he talked with me about his study of mitosis – that basic cell function that old fogies like me first saw on film strips when we were kids – and now can be seen on YouTube.

It turns out that, while mitosis has been illustrated forever, we really haven’t known much about what was going on that the cell was able, as my cousin put it, to tell the genes to line up.  We also didn’t know how it knew when they were lined up so that the separation could begin.  The language that he was using made it sound to me like he was anthropomorphizing the process – as if the cell had some kind of ability to think and communicate.  He was saying, “How does the cell say, ‘OK guys, time to split.  So, everybody go to your places.”  Somewhat foolishly, then, a few weeks after visiting him and becoming excited about what he was doing, I sent him a link to some material about plants and other entities without central nervous systems “communicating”.  Oh, boy.  Big mistake.  He thought I was a really flaky “soft” scientist – mostly soft in the head.  He patiently explained to me in a return email that the ideas about cells “communicating” in anything like the way that we do is pure poppycock.

Reading Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling and the Making of Culture, I finally found out what was going wrong.  My cousin, it turns out, actually was seeing, literally on a microscopic level, the basic processes of life.  These basic processes – and Damasio spends most of his time talking about the basic process of homeostasis – get played out, Damasio argues, in larger and larger scales with more and more complex faculties at work, but, if we step back a bit, we can see that these basic processes – and especially the process of homeostasis – are precursors to increasingly complex processes and his thesis is that complex communication patterns within and between organisms are based on, reflect and follow the rules of earlier, more primitive systems which are designed to maintain homeostasis.  My cousin was not anthropomorphizing the function of cells; the function of cells gets played out in human ways all the time – we communicate by saying, “O.K. Everybody line up” when we get ready to serve food to a group of hungry people, and we ask each person what they want, and each person takes what they need and this helps them maintain their energy and body weight, which mirrors – in a very eerie sense – what a cell does when it seeks out food – or when it reproduces itself using mitosis.  Even though the cell can’t, in fact, say line up – it uses chemicals that are produced in response to internal and external stimuli to create the needed order (just as plants, which don’t have central nervous systems either, but do have shared homeostatic needs, communicate using various chemicals).

My cousin was decoding which chemicals were used when in order to “communicate” to the parts of the cell that it is time to line up.  My cousin’s ruminating about the communication process was anthropomorphizing, but it was also, in a weird way, anticipating what would evolve from these basic processes.  And the anthropomorphizing was not just a ridiculous poetic attribution of intelligence but, according to Damasio, recognizing a system of communicating that would be mimicked at each successive level of complication as we evolved into more and more complex beings so that, by the time we get to people and to consciousness, and to talking and to social systems, we are still working to create homeostasis and still using homeostatic mechanisms, though they are vastly more complex.  All that said, my cousin was absolutely right, there is no central nervous system, no consciousness, and the genes do not “hear” the command to line up.  Similarly, as dramatized in the novel Overstory, plants do, in fact, release chemicals that other plants react to, and these “communications” enhance the homeostatic functioning – generally of both plants.

Damasio proposes that the ability to achieve and maintain homeostasis is the central marker of life.  Does this mean that our homes – with their thermostats that help them maintain a constant temperature – are alive?  Yes and no.  Thermostats are homeostatic devices for inanimate objects, but this kind of homeostasis is not living homeostasis because living homeostasis involves not just maintaining things as they are, but moving into new and better spaces: living homeostatically involves both maintaining and growing.  Homeostasis is the mechanism behind evolution – on the grand scale – and going to a rock concert because that is “fun” on a more prosaic level.  We seek something better – for ourselves and for our offspring – and have had to do that in order to achieve the level of functioning that we have.  Over and over in this book, the things that we think of as most human – cognition, culture, space flight – are traced to the natural culmination of incredibly primal motivations – the motivations of bacteria which include, across time, becoming multicellular organisms and, my cousin would add, finding out how to replicate oneself through the process of mitosis.

Damasio maintains that the driver of homeostasis, in the transition across evolution from relatively simple chemical interactions to, for us humans (and probably for many other complex organisms) is the more much more complex system that registers to our conscious experience as feelings.  Emotions are hardwired into us as a means of sensing and integrating huge amounts of information from various sources and applying valence to them – is this particular state good or bad for us?  Should we proceed further – proceed with caution – or retreat?  Is this desirable – is it beautiful – or is it dangerous?  But our feelings are not just flight or fight – they are sensitive and intricate responses to images – images that can come from our senses, from our imagination, and also – and this he emphasizes - from our viscera – and, because of the importance of the messages that they convey, they have the power to interrupt – or to disrupt – ongoing processes.   “I can’t think about that now – I am in pain and need to attend to the pain first.”  “I had a thought, but then I looked out the window and noticed a brilliant sunset and now I am entranced by that and need to attend to it.”

What is most revolutionary about these ideas to me is that this is a bench scientist – a highly logical and rationally driven person - saying that we are primarily and essentially feeling beings.  It is our emotions that primarily determine our functioning because they are what is monitoring – essentially all the time – our homeostatic functioning.  Thinking is a very important part of being human and accomplishing what we do, but our primary drives – even our ways of knowing – are essentially, he states, emotional, not cognitive.  The statement, “I feel that to be true” illustrates the idea.  We very rarely decide on something based on a proof and its final Q.E.D. statement that allows us to know that the proof is true.  Indeed, in mathematics, those proofs are always contingent on assumptions – on axioms – and the axioms, in turn, are based on how we imagine the world – both through our senses, but also through our visualizing the world as it appears and as it might be.  This is not to diminish our cognition as a tremendous asset that has helped us achieve dominion over all the lands, but it does say that cognition serves our emotional needs, not the other way around.  And that is just the motivational side – the other side of the equation is that reason is used to satisfy our hunger for order – for things that feel right – and it is the feelings that are the determining factor in our thinking process – not the thoughts.  We are finished with a problem when it feels right.

Though this sounds very psychoanalytic, in one way it definitely is not.  Damasio maintains that feelings are necessarily conscious – indeed they are integral in the formation of consciousness.  Damasio is not proposing a dynamically unconscious feeling system – with feelings taking the place of Freud’s drives.  Damasio proposes that the feelings inform drives – while Freud sees feelings as pointers towards unknown and basic drive processes.  In this position, I think that Damasio is aligning himself with another neurologist, Mark Solms who maintains that Freud’s id is, in fact, conscious.  And, like Solms, Damasio is working to understand how consciousness and subjectivity operate neurologically.  Reading along with Damasio (and Solms), then, is like reading a detective novel as much as a work of science.  Damasio uses observation, in much the same way that Darwin did, but his observations are about how the mind (and – in one of the strange things the book points out – we have a second, semi-autonomous mind – a largely independent nervous system that governs the functioning of our gut and that is responsible not just for digestion, but is an important component in our emotional system) and the nervous system more generally work and then imagining that into our conscious functioning.

Damasio is asking big questions in this book and he is bringing intriguing data to bear on addressing those questions.  He is asking why we have consciousness, how it works, and what it means to be a subjective being.  He is asking how we sense the external world, but also how we sense our internal, visceral world, and what the relationship between those two highly interrelated sensory systems is.  He is not primarily a clinician, but he is asking questions that have clinical relevance.  He notes, for instance, that most of our serotonin sensitive neurons are in that semi-autonomous gut mind.  Could it be, I wonder, if the positive impact of SSRIs has as much to do with calming our gut as impacting our cerebrum?  And this leads to questions like the relationship between eating (and overeating) and a sense of well-being.  In an age of plenty, have we been poorly prepared to thrive by our long evolutionary history that has focused on gut well-being along with – or even above – all else? 

This is not, I don’t think, a definitive work – especially in the section on the making of cultures.  Yes, homeostasis is relevant to the creation of culture and that is a useful lens – though I think the further into the book we get the more speculative his thinking is.  But I don’t want to be critical of that.  If we are to explore subjectivity – if we are to get a handle on what it means to be human – we need to make some leaps.  Being strictly and tightly bound to the empirical evidence will only get us so far.  We need to feel our way into being human – and into understanding what it means to be a human being, even if the process of doing that can make me feel self-conscious under the watchful eye of my hard scientist and occasionally reluctant cousin.

I report on watching Damasio and Mark Solms speak at the 2020 American Psychoanalytic Association meetings here.

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Seven Samurai – What wisdom is stored in the stories of masters…

Seven Samurai, directed by Akira Kurosawa, is a movie that I have long wanted to see.  It was the well spring for an American knock-off, The Magnificent Seven, which I saw not too long ago, but I was hungry to see the "original".  When the reluctant wife and I were looking at a list of 100 films recommended by Rotten Tomatoes, The Seven Samurai jumped out.  It is a movie that I have so much wanted to see that I imagined I had – but then the images started rolling and I realized this was not the case.  It is another long film – even longer than Kenneth Branagh's unedited Hamlet we saw recently, but at least 10 minutes of the almost 3 and ½ hour viewing time is an intermission.  It is also paced in such a way that it doesn’t seem as long as its running time.  Perhaps because it was made into a Western in its Hollywood incarnation, it had the feel of being in the saddle of a horse that was not going anywhere fast, but it didn’t matter because the scenery was great.

Before going much further, I should caution you that this movie was made in 1954, was shot in Black and White on a square screen, and it is in Japanese with surprisingly modern language in the subtitles, at least on the criterion version that we saw (is “slut” a word that the Japanese used in the 1500s when this film is set?).   The plot is simple and familiar from the Magnificent Seven – but also I had somehow known it even before then – perhaps by osmosis – perhaps from a well-meaning friend who gave a particularly animated description of it way back in college.  There is a small village of farmers that is regularly attacked by bandits.  The bandits show up right after each crop is harvested and they demand the lion’s share of the crop.  The farmers don’t have enough rice after the bandits steal the rice harvest, so must survive on millet until the next crop – barley – comes in.  A village member overhears the bandits planning to come back after the barley harvest to take that crop as well.  The farmers, in a panic, consult with the village elder about what to do.  The elder remembers a time when a village hired samurai to defend it against bandits and this particular village survived because of that.  There is much discussion of the merits of hiring samurai, but there is agreement that something needs to be done, so four villagers are sent to secure the services of five samurai.

It is important to note that the samurai were essentially Japanese knights errant.  The villagers are actually sent after rōnin, who are masterless samurai – knights for hire.  The samurai are known for the long, tempered steel swords that they carry.  These swords, as I remember from reading The Ascent of Man in high school, were particularly strong because when they were forged, the steel was folded in half-length ways and then beaten to the same size, then that process was repeated numerous times.  This was used as an example of the power of exponential growth – the number of layers was equal to the number of folds squared.  The samurai are also known for being the models of the Jedi in the Star Wars franchise – they are warriors who have done more than secure strong sabers – they are well trained in the art and psychology of warfare.  They are also, like the Jedi, determined by birth – they are royalty and have much more class power than the lowly farmers they serve in this film.  So when the farmers are tasked with hiring them, they need to look for warriors who are down on their luck – and will work for meager wages for low caste employers – not a hopeful mission.

In town, when they approach the most down and out samurai, they are shamed by him.  But they do find a wise and grizzled old Samurai named Kambei (Takashi Shimura) who uses subtle subterfuge to save a child from a robber who is holding the child hostage.  In these scenes – and many throughout the film – there are masses of people who follow the leads around, watching, commenting, and interacting with the leads and with each other.  They function as a kind of Greek chorus, but also as a window into the culture, first of the town and then of the village.  They are a kind of mass of people.  It would be easy in this age of reducing cultural differences to catchphrases to see them as representing the collectivist culture – and there may be more than a grain of truth to that – but I think there is something else at work here.  Especially in the midst of watching so many western dramas – especially historical dramas – that focus on lead the four characters that are recognized by the Oscars, I have become tired of the idea that history is made by heroes.  As far back as War and Peace, Tolstoy was arguing that history turns not exclusively on the brilliance of Napoleon, but on whether this soldier picks up the flag at just the right instance to turn the skirmish that is at the center of the war – and the flag ignites the group to perform at a level that it otherwise wouldn’t – the flag bearer is less a hero than a catalyst.  And in this movie, a movie that we know will focus on seven heroes, it is useful to know that there is a larger cast at work.  That this is a story of a community.  And we are introduced both to the larger culture and to the local one through these mass scenes, but also through seeing the villagers interact with other patrons of the inn they are staying in and other chance scenes that are also facilitated by the length of this film.  It takes time to get to know the context in which the action will take place.

And the action in this story turns on the a story of a community of samurai that is built after the kindly and smart samurai is convinced to take on a quixotic mission of saving a village all to get a bit of rice.  Because this film is so long, we are given the chance to get to know the seven characters (as well as the village members) in detail.  As each one is brought into the fold, we see that they have particular assets.  Though the villages have been sent to procure five samurai, the wise leader, Kambei, decides, after hearing a description of the layout of the village and that there are forty bandits, that they will need seven.  After a total of six have been recruited, a seventh begs to be on board.  This samurai, Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune), has been rejected by Kambei multiple times as inappropriate to the group, and is revealed to be lying about being a samurai, but he simply won’t go away and he follows the group back to the village, making a fool of himself along the way, and the group takes him in to make seven (though on the battle flag they draw up, the samurai are represented by six circles – with Kikuchiyo represented by a triangle).

As the samurai are headed back to the village, two of the villagers race ahead to tell the village that they are coming.  One of them cuts his daughter’s hair off and dresses her in men’s clothing to protect her from the samurai.  This causes a stir in the village, and when the samurai arrive, the villagers have all hidden from them.  Kikuchiyo begins to display his worth here as he bangs the alarm drum and the villagers appear as if from nowhere begging the Samurai to protect them from the bandits.  Kikuchiyo, whom we come to know and appreciate in spite of his boorish and unbridled character, is revealed over time to have come from a village like this.  He is able to understand the villagers in a way that the samurai cannot – and he is able to act as a comic go-between, respecting both cultures and presenting each to the other.  In this instance, Kikuchiyo is able to help the samurai realize that, for the villagers, they are making a deal with the devil – with a force that, like the bandits, is stronger than they are, but that they are therefore at the mercy of, just as they are at the mercy of the bandits.  Kikuchiyo is able to ferret out the stockpiles that the wily villagers have set aside, both the grain and sake they keep hidden – so hidden that they themselves believe themselves to be more impoverished than they are (I think), as well as the armor that they have taken from samurai vanquished by them in the past.  Kikuchiyo helps the samurai recognize their role in past atrocities and realize that the theft of the armor and the duplicity of the villagers is necessary, from their perspective, for their survival in a world that doesn’t value the importance of their humble but essential function.   Kikuchiyo helps them (and us) see the other’s perspective – a hallmark of the Kurosawa film Roshoman.  That short film has been used to name the psychological effect having only our viewpoint from which to see the world – and reminds us of the problems that ensue when we do that.  

Kikuchiyo, in his role as perspective taker, is the bridge that allows the samurai and the villagers to come together and to work towards vanquishing a common enemy.  Of course, this enemy is not a foreign contingent for the samurai, but actually a version of themselves.  As a result, the tragic form of this drama is constructed – it is not the villagers that we pity – not the people who are at the bottom of the food chain – it is the samurai – whose work – so exquisitely on display here as they prepare for battle, prepare the village to fight with them, and then function as the fine warriors that they are – is ultimately destructive, not constructive, in the way that the villagers joyful planting, so merrily portrayed at the end to the film, ultimately is.  Kambei is able to realize this tragic element, as are we.  We revel in the battle – in the wonderful craftsmanship that goes into planning the fight and executing it (and filming it – this film is dated in some areas, but the action sequences are spectacular), but we also realize the toll that it takes.  And the final shot, if we haven’t gotten it yet, underscores that toll. 

Of course, there is another toll.  The villager who has tried to protect his daughter does so for a reason – one that is tragically portrayed as the plot unfolds – and he ultimately is not able to prevent the thing that he fears the most.  And even though it happens in the loveliest of ways – love between castes proves as problematic in Japan as anywhere else in the world.  And, of course, this film portrays, in part by the absence of significant actresses except for the star crossed lover, the disempowered status of women.  Were it shot today, that might have been portrayed differently, but I don’t know that this isn’t a veridical portrayal of gender roles at the historical time portrayed and probably more certainly at the time of filming.

Central to this film, though, is a deeply anti-violent message.  But it delivers this message without shaming those who would engage in war.  It honors them every bit as much as Kikuchiyo helps the samurai realize the honor of the villagers and their own complicity.  We revel in the noble samurai and their protection of the village – but we also see that war is ultimately not a productive undertaking.  Made as this was less than ten years after the war, in a country that was deeply reflecting on the costs of that war and the nuclear peril that it unleashed, being the only country ever to have felt the destruction of nuclear weapons used against them, this movie seems to me to be a very deep reflection on the costs of war. 

Kurosawa is rightly praised for creating a film that introduces all kinds of important tropes into the movie maker’s arsenal – including the forming of a team that seems to be part of every action film up to and including our current Avengers series – but I think his technical skill as a moviemaker should be seen as merely a support of his functioning as a hero – a comic hero - Kikuchiyo - or a psychoanalyst - someone who sees and appreciates the lure of war – of terror – of the costs of aggression (and he does put this firmly in the hands of men in this film – the gendered references give men the destructive power that they misuse so egregiously), and heroically urges us to recognize that, as much as we have organized our culture to glorify and honor those whom we place at the top of the cultural hierarchy because of their ability to engage in it, that this is an abomination that ultimately does us no good. 

Given that this film’s imitators have, I think, used the tropes to glorify the good guys and their triumph over evil – rather than to help us see, as this film does, that we are all complicit in the bad stuff, I am tempted to see Kurosawa as having failed.  But I think, by that metric, we are all failing, psychoanalysts maybe more than anyone, to help us learn to acknowledge, live with, but not to act primarily on baser instincts that we have glorified out of deeply held, essentially instinctual fears.  The task of becoming human – in the sense that many of us use the word – as the base of humane, and humanistic – as the exemplar of all that we can do that is great, gets overshadowed by our preoccupation will all things dangerous – and our delusional belief that hiring a monster that is bigger than the feared monster, the belief that the hired monster will save us, rather than realizing that it is our connection with each other – including those who are foreign and appear to be allied against us – trying to find out how to genuinely connect along the lines that will help us all – is our true calling.

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