Pixar’s Soul: How to live, not die, is the message.

 

Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Race, Pixar, Disney, Soul, Peter Docter

 

Pixar’s Soul has received a lot of hype, including that it includes Pixar’s first animated African American in a lead role.  Part of the reason that I was excited about this film is that it was directed by Peter Docter, who also directed Inside Out: the delightful articulation of the mind of a tween, but, by extension, all of our minds.  I was curious what Docter would do with the afterlife.  Given the double entendre in the title, the hype about Jon Batiste writing much of the music, and the concept of writing about death, the Reluctant Wife and I were both excited about the possibilities that this movie held, but we were disappointed in the execution.  I had not planned to write about it until an online psychoanalysis group based discussion led me to a better understanding of the movie and a psychoanalytic “way in” to understanding an aspect of it.

The plot of the movie is pretty straightforward – and was, for me, anxiety provoking.  I kept having to remind myself that it was a Disney movie so that everything would be alright in the end.  Docter, who apparently wanted to explore the nature of how personalities are formed, decided to have his protagonist die at a moment when on the brink of something important so that there would be enough energy to overcome the conveyor belt to the afterlife, or, in the language of the movie, the great beyond.  He initially thought a scientist (perhaps on the brink of a great discovery) would do it, but then decided to have it be a musician on the edge of a breakthrough because that would be more relatable.  Having decided on music, and given the relationship between Jazz and African American Culture, only then did the idea of having the protagonist be African American emerge.

Now this should give us pause.  The protagonist, when he jumps off the conveyor belt taking him to the Great Beyond, lands in the Great Before – the place where souls get stamped with the things that they bring to their lives on earth.  This raises all kinds of nature versus nurture questions that have led us into the very tricky waters, including the theory of Eugenics – and to all kinds of theories about the relative values of the races.  Are all men (and women) created equal?  If not, should we stack the deck so that more valued traits will out?

The movie doesn’t take on these questions.  The newbie souls that have not yet been put in bodies are given attributes that have good empirical support for inborn differences.  Things like being shy versus outgoing.  Intelligence and beauty – these are not addressed, at least not directly.  Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) is the frustrated Jazz Musician who has just been offered both a full time job – with benefits – as a Junior High School band teacher and a chance to play a gig with a world famous saxophonist – and she seems taken with his chops.  Joe’s mother, Libba (Phylicia Rashad) lobbies for him to take the steady gig of teaching – even though she supported Joe’s father’s peripatetic and not very lucrative jazz career.

Sitting on the horns of a dilemma, and emotionally high after having gotten the nod of approval from the saxophonist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bissett) in his audition, Joe has an accident, ends up on the escalator to the Great Beyond, and jumps off in an effort to get back to the land of living, but ends up as an unaccounted for soul in the Great Before.  Here he unintentionally impersonates a mentor, the deceased people in this place who help give the souls here the spark they need to make the leap to living.  The particular mentor that Joe is mistaken for is a great child psychologist, who has been assigned to help 22 (Tina Fey) decide to finally make the great leap to being human.  22 has resisted being helped by the likes of Ghandi, Mother Teresa, and brilliant philosophers.  She, like all souls waiting to be born, needs to get her spark, but no one has been able to engender that and even the most saintly mentors have become frustrated with her.

Joe does not try to "spark" 22 – he just wants to get back to earth, wake his dead body, and get to the first show at the Half Note with Dorothea Williams.  But 22, who is his ticket home, leads him on a wild goose chase to a fourth space – neither earth, the Great Beyond, nor the Great Before, but The Zone.  This is an intermediate space somewhere between earth and the Greats, and it is the zone that people get into when they are caught up in something – like playing a playing a game the way it was meant to be played – or playing an instrument the way it should be played.  Abraham Maslow would say that this is where we are when we are having what he called peak experiences.  It is along the path to enlightenment.  22 and Joe discover Moonwind in the Zone, a hippie sign twirler (he gets into the zone when he is twirling his sign) and captain of a fantasy ship in the zone itself that moves to the cadences of folk rock.

So, I want to stop here and talk again about the racial context of the film.  Docter brought in a bunch of African American consultants to avoid turning Joe into a visual or a cultural stereotype.  They wanted Joe to be a positive and real African American character – whatever that means.  22 states that she is not a middle aged woman, but that she uses that voice because it is the most grating and annoying voice there is – all the better to frustrate the mentors who would encourage her to make the leap to living.  Moonwind – propelled by Crosby, Stills & Nash (in a movie titled Soul, I’m just saying) and 22 are Joe’s guides in the middle of this film.

There is something subtly or not so subtly wrong with this pivotal and essential part of the plot.  Somehow we have gone to back to the sixties – but kept our current Karen on board – to try to build a bridge to African American culture.  The reluctant wife and I speculated that the film makers did not want to alienate a broader audience, so they included a comfortable and known soundscape and cultural vernacular.  My deeper fear would be that the intent is to reduce racist fears by showing that Joe accepts direction from white cultural figures – though to avoid that patronizing position, they have Joe end up in the body of a cat who directs 22, in Joe’s body, to get him to the show at the Half Note.

There is good stuff here.  Lots of sight gags.  A poignant reunion with one of Joe’s students (a child with Asian features) who is a trombonist at heart even though she doesn’t want to be.  And 22 and Joe become buddies as they have to rely on each other to navigate in the world.  And this is where the psychoanalytic perspective sneaks in.  The film is not about death, or even about the anxiety of dying.  It is about a much more paralyzing fear – the fear of living.

My psychoanalytically informed interlocutor cited Adam Phillips’ work “Missing out: In Praise of the Unlived Life and James Hillman’s “Suicide and Soul”.  For me, it was Thomas Ogden articulating these ideas in such books as “Dreaming Undreamt Dreams”.  The idea that all three share, I think, is that the analytic process can help an analyst and analysand appreciate together how dead the analysand feels.  How closed off from life they are.  And the analysis can help them appreciate why and how the analysand is feeling dead.

The movie illustrates one of the ways this can happen.  In order for an unborn soul to be ready to be born, it must pick up the characteristics mentioned above (shyness or outgoingness), but it must also pick up the final ingredient: the spark.  This sounds like a passion – and many of us become passionate about something.  22 was mentored by many who had not just been passionate, but their passions, combined with their abilities – and their privilege - had led them to become household names.  But instead of inspiring 22, these models had led her to feel shame.  She could never live up to them as models.  Joe (and I as the viewer) became confused about this when the spark was explained.  It was as if the spark were a calling – the thing that would make this soul happy.  It is as if we are born to be a trombonist or a scientist - though I think the spark is something much more powerful and broad - it is the ability to seek and engage and discover something about which we become passionate - based in part on who it is that are, including what we are apt to do.

What 22 experienced when she was inhabiting Joe’s body is something different than accomplishment.  She learned just how wonderful it is to simply be alive; to notice the sunlight streaming down, to see a maple seed spinning through the air and to hold it in your grasp.  This became the spark for her. 

Joe thought that playing the gig with Dorothea would be his spark.  When they finally play the gig at the Half Note, it is a transcendent session.  They are in the zone – and the crowd is there with them.  Dorothea herself commented that the set was rare - and out of this world.  Joe, trying to ride that Peak Moment, wanted to know what was next.  Dorothea stated that, in her experience, they would come back and do it again the next day.

This is a powerful, but also over-communicated message.  Be here now.  Be mindful.  Be one with the Force.  Don’t focus on the outcome, focus on the process.  But, and this is where the intersection with race could have been really powerful, someone has to mind the store.  If we are just being mindful of the moment, someone else is likely to grab the power and use it so that what we have the freedom to become mindful of becomes smaller and smaller. 

James Cone, an African American theologian, points out that the blues, which is played not nearly enough in this movie, reminds the African American that though his or her body may be chained, their soul is not.  And what form of music is more free than Jazz?  Isn’t it the assertion of the freedom of the soul in the face of physical and psychological oppression?

22 comes to grips with her shame and fear of not being able to perform when she is reminded of the maple seed.  Just being is enough to push her over the edge – to want to live her life.  And Joe is finally resigned to his death when he realizes that the goal is not to be the best Jazz musician, but to be the best Joe – which he has been by connecting with 22.  And, ironically, for helping 22, he gets a reprieve and promises to live each moment to its fullest.  But isn’t that really what he should have been rewarded for – living a moment to its fullest? 

Yes, the aesthetics of life are important.  Yes, the soul should be free to live – and therefore live, not wander like the dead through life, being too afraid of life to be open to it.  But shouldn’t the point be that living is an active verb – not a passive one?  Or that it can be.  That in striving, we may never produce a number one hit – but we may, at one moment and then another, be in the zone, doing whatever it is that gives us the spark.

I think this movie is wrestling with really big issues – character/personality, race, the opportunity and the oppression of living – and I think it is trying to make those issues work for a broad audience – and to do that it makes sure that it doesn’t offend anyone; that it doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable.  And this means that it will likely, also, not challenge anyone.  It will not, therefore, bring us to life, even though we will admire 22 for coming to life – and Joe for facilitating that process, with 22 and his trombone student and Dorothea.  And we might even, like Joe, one day stand up to a maternal figure who would tell us to take the safe road and instead we might choose the uncomfortable route that will challenge and reward us more.  But we will be more likely to do that in response to another interaction, another movie, another work of art – one that moves us not just to tears, but to the kind of discomfort that leads to action.  

This film will doubtless be watched many, many times by kids (and their parents).  I think the kids will be trying to distill from the film its essence - we want to know what the film has to tell us about the world (at least I think something like that is going on in those repetitive viewing sessions - I'm not really sure).  In this case, I hope that kids are able to get the surface message - you are OK and living is OK and when you live, when you get your spark, the rest will follow.  Perhaps the message I want them to get is that when they use their spark to find their passion, they will not only spend time in the zone - they will also connect with people around them in ways that are not on another plane, but very much in this one.  That the people who benefit from Joe (and I think the choice of the name Joe is important - he is just an average Joe) include the people around him who are sparked - Dorothea, the trombonist, and, ironically, 22 - the antisparker.  The one who is so afraid that, when he spark is released, it is likely to start a conflagration.

The sad part is that, if this message had been crafted from within the African American tradition, rather than grafted onto it, I think it could have been a much more powerful, and potentially transformative message.  One that might even have appealed to the Karens - and future Karens - among us.

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Schitt’s Creek: Character Development becomes the Paddle that Propels the Series

 

Psychology of Schitt’s Creek, Psychology, Psychology of Sitcoms, Psychoanalysis, Schitt’s Creek review, binge watching

 

The thinly veiled scatological double entendre of this sitcom turned me off.  So did the characters as I dropped in on the Reluctant Wife watching it.  I found them abrasive, full of themselves, and generally unlovable.  Of course these are the characteristics of the characters at the heart of Seinfeld, perhaps my favorite sitcom of all time, but these were more so – and the small town setting seemed just a bit too campy – not unlike the mockumentaries that the leads in the series, Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, have played in.  But the Reluctant Wife stuck with watching it, and over time I was taken with it enough that I starting watching it more and more in earnest.  And, when she had finished the run, I proposed that we start over from the beginning and she agreed.  Sheltering at home has been difficult, and having an absurd universe to visit was quite pleasant – but, and this may sound strange, there was something happening here that was novel and interesting.  Instead of the characters staying stuck throughout the course of the series, they grew – and on re-watching, it was possible to track this.

The plot of this show is relatively straightforward.  The Rose Family, headed by Johnny Rose (Eugene Levy), who made a fortune with the Rose Video chain, and his wife Moira (O’Hara), a pretentious former Soap Opera actress, lose their fortune when their unscrupulous but trusted business manager absconds with their funds after failing to pay their taxes.  Their only remaining asset is a town that Johnny bought as a gag gift for his son David (Dan Levy).   Stripped of their funds, Father, Mother, Son and Daughter Alexis (Annie Murphy) retreat up Schitt’s Creek.  “Ownership” of the town entitles them, apparently, to two rooms in a rundown Motel from which they have adventures every week.  So, rather than talk about the plot of the 80 shows in the series (good thing we were able to binge watch when we were too brain dead to do anything else), I will talk about the characters and how they developed across our months with them.  Each character had one (or more) foil in the small town.

Roland and Johnny

Johnny Rose is the patriarch of the clan.  Sincere, and, like most of us who have some success, convinced that his success is due to his hard work and integrity of character, he is indefatigably optimistic while battling his sense of bewilderment that his world has crashed.  Further, he has to face the ignominy of living without the adulation of other self-made men and the creature comforts that his success afforded him.  It is also forcing him to spend time with his children who, previously, were simply required ornaments of a successful man’s life – tended to by nannies in a far-off wing of the house while he loved them from afar.  Actually being in touch with them allows him to discover them – and his capacities as a father. 

He is mirrored by Roland Schitt (Chris Elliot), the blow hard mayor of Schitt’s Creek and, obviously, the titular namesake of the town – one his grand or great grandparents founded it and Roland is, then, as attached to the (very local) fame that his name has brought him as Johnny is to the broader recognition of the Rose name.  Roland came up with the idea of selling the town as a kind of con to bring income to a place that has no natural source of revenue.  This is not spelled out in any way, but I think that Roland honors his false promise by providing lodging (though neither he, nor anyone else, seems to pay for it).  Thus he, like Johnny, is sincere and more or less honest, but unlike Johnny, he has never seen his actions lead to anything of consequence and he is incredibly lazy, relying on his wife (to be introduced in a moment) to carry the day for him socially and at home while he mooches off of others in his “professional” life.

In the first season, Roland and Johnny bond over the vagaries of being parents to kids whom they do not understand – when Johnny becomes drunk he acknowledges that having a son who is attracted to people of all genders is confusing – despite his tangible support of that son and his sexual identity.  Despite their moments of bonding, Johnny is disdainful of Roland.  The shift in their relationship, and the beginning of the shift in Johnny’s character occurs at the end of season one when he gets caught in making a lie to avoid having dinner with the Schitts and ends up having to share a meal with them and a couple from his former life that they all end up at the “high class” restaurant in the nearby town.  After watching Roland make gaffe after gaffe at the meal where the guests are making fun of the rural ways and ridiculous local names, including of course, Schitt’s creek, we are surprised to hear Johnny defend the Schitts as true friends, unlike the high class mucky mucks who have never called after his debacle but pretend comradery with him at this chance meeting.

Johnny’s shift into not just accepting, but embracing his fate will, of course, ultimately become his paddle, but it also provides a keel as the rest of the family begins their slow movement from disdain and distancing to discovering their own path (to trample the metaphor) in, through and around the town.  Johnny takes to managing the Motel, and, when he figures out that this is what he is to do, he does it with gusto.  And when Johnny needs support at a critical moment in re-entering the entrepreneurial world, it is Roland who provides it – and we see that Roland is not just cowed by Johnny (which he would never acknowledge openly, though we have known it all along as he has played at being the bigger man and failed), but is both reverently related to him and every bit as deeply attached to Johnny as Johnny is to him.

Jocelyn and Moira

 Moira Rose (O’Hara) is a force of nature.  She is so assured of herself and her abilities – even though it is apparent to us and even to the people of Schitt’s Creek, whom she assumes are stunned by her every move (and her endless string of designer dresses combined with her wacky wigs is a consistent source of fascination – how did she fit so much stuff in the trunks they were allowed to pack up while the feds were stripping their place?) that she is, at best, a B list actress with B list talent, credentials, and a history of way less than impressive roles.  What is impressive is her vocabulary.  Coming from a town very much like Schitt’s creek, she has risen far above her station, even if that involved considerable money through marriage and the pinnacle of her personal achievement is in the very weird world of daytime television.

Moira’s foil is Jocelyn Schitt (Jenn Robertson).  Jocelyn is as plain, simple and grounded as Moira is flighty and self-involved.  Jocelyn is as deluded about some of her husband’s attributes (e.g. his sexiness) as Moira is about herself.  But both women are also able to realistically appraise those same objects – Jocelyn feels the Schitt family traditions are stupid, and Moira, for all of her self-involvement, is tolerable because she is also acutely and accurately self-aware.  She knows that she has been a terrible mother – overinvolved with her son and incredibly disconnected from her daughter – Moira has lived for whatever glory she can get as Johnny Rose’s wife and a B list actress/celebrity.  And as grating as her self-involvement is (mirrored in a reversed image by the sometimes sickly sweet and cloying kindness of Jocelyn), it fuels her efforts to achieve grace when there is very little of it to be had, just as Jocelyn’s emotional connections with those around her cause her to be a loved and respected leader in the community.

When Moira discovers the Jazzagals, a local singing group led by Jocelyn, she is shocked to discover that she is required to audition to become a member.  Before her audition, she is able to see a rehearsal – and has to follow an act that a competent musician would have trouble doing.  Not surprisingly she falters.  Though she is accepted into the group, where she continues to put on airs, she is knocked down several thousand pegs.  Rather than let this show, she continues to steam ahead as if she were the prima donna – and when she is offered a part in a terrible Croatian movie with a director who is uninvested in the movie (at best), she rallies him and the movie – and uses this little bit of nothing as leverage to push her daughter’s career along (she begins to actually see her daughter as a person a bit – though she also tries to compete with her) and is ultimately able to use this platform she has been afforded to discover and reassert her actual value in the world of daytime television.

The most damaged characters, who are actually saved by their plunge into Schitt’s Creek, are the children.  Their foils are more complicated.  Rather than just needing one mirror, they both need two, and Alexis, the most damaged of them all, needs three (four, if you count her brother).  The parents have each other.  The kids do not have them and, though they have each other, they need to strike out on their own, and it is very hard to do this when their family isn’t a firm foundation to push against.

David and Stevie

David Rose is a winsome, lovely fellow who wears the most stylish sweaters anyone has ever seen.  Summer or winter he wears them with style and panache.  He has a long history of failed relationships.  His neurotic self-involvement and precarious self-esteem interfere with his ability to really see or connect with others around him.  His former friends and lovers were attracted by his father’s money and ultimately failed him.  He, like his mother, is always the center of attention – and yet he feels transparent when others look at him – as if they can see through his sweaters and his skin and recognize his flaws and failings and know that he is not all that he would present himself as being. 

His first foil is Stevie Budd (Emily Hampshire), the proprietor of the Motel.  She has become as hardened to the world as David is.  They have both been knocked around a lot and have learned to create themselves as arch people who are above (in David’s case) or disinterested (in Stevie’s) in those around them.  And for both of them this archness is a pretense – and a defense against the tremendous yearnings that each feels to be known and loved.  For Stevie, this tension is played out at the end of season five when she is cast, seemingly completely by mistake and against type, as Sally Bowles in Cabaret and we discover her haunting desire to be admired, but more essentially, to be loved.  Despite a brief sexual liaison including a weird sex triangle, David and Stevie learn to appreciate each other and become each other’s first and best friend.  

David finds love in the gaze of Patrick “Pat” Brewer (Noah Reid).  Pat is able to see David for who he is and to love him, not in spite but because of that.  Pat has not previously been aware that he was attracted to men.  He is as grounded as David is at sea.  They first become business partners.  They open a locally sourced general store of consignment products. Patrick minds the books and David attends to the aesthetics.  And they argue over placing products for profit or ambience.  Pat also happens to be a wonderful singer and, in an amazing scene, publicly sings of his love for David, and we see David’s archness melt out of him.

Ted, Mutt, Alexis and Twyla

Where David thinks he is transparent, Alexis Rose knows she is opaque.  Never having been an emotional object for her mother, she realizes that people often don’t see beneath the surface and so she operates without concern about their discovering who she is.  She has a history of having dated every one under the sun, beginning when she was too young to be travelling alone internationally but, since her parents weren’t paying attention, she did what she would. 

In the second season, when David is worried about having to take a driving test, Alexis reassures him that the examiner won’t be paying attention and won’t know that he has made a mistake if David doesn’t call his attention to it.  This pivotal moment immediately precedes an awkward lunch with one of David’s potential clients – a producer of goat’s milk cheese; a woman who is now dating Alexis’ ex – a veterinarian who proposed to her twice, but Alexis was to unsure of herself to recognize the value of his love.  Caught in the embarrassment of being across the table from the woman who replaced her while she still has unacknowledged feelings for her ex, she is able to leverage the relationship with her to secure the contract that David so desperately wants – choosing to use her wiles to help her brother – a much appreciated first.

Alexis’ foil is Twyla Sands (Sarah Levy – yes the last name is familiar, this is Dan Levy’s real life sister), who is the chief waitress at the local coffee shop.  Twyla is the overlooked one – jealous of Alexis’ clothing, her stylishness, and her jet set past.  Twyla, like Jocelyn in her relationship with Moira, is both star struck and accommodating – overlooking Alexis’ faults as Alexis fails to see Twyla, but relies on her.  Twyla, for her part, keeps a secret throughout the series that helps them achieve equal footing in the final season as Twyla finally is able to turn to Alexis for real help – and Alexis is able to recognize Twyla – and refuses to exploit their friendship.

Alexis’ initial love interest is Mutt Schitt (Tim Rozon), Roland Schitt’s son – who is as unlike Roland as one can be.  Competent, confident, and attuned to the world, Mutt is a back-to-the-lander who lives in a barn.  He is also attractive, which is what draws Alexis in, and she drops him when he shaves, losing the beard, which is what she loves about him.  Having established herself as shallow, Alexis next falls for Ted Mullins (Dustin Milligan) the aforementioned veterinarian. 

Ted turns out to be the love of Alexis’ young and lover filled life.  Despite her early and repeated rebuff of him, he continues to hold a torch for her.  He has always been seen as the catchiest of catches in this small town.  Where Mutt was the bad boy, Ted is as good as the day is long.  He realizes that Alexis is self-involved and careless in her affection for him, and yet he believes in her – not just as an attractive object, but as an attractive and potentially capable person.  He supports her in getting not just a High School Diploma (including in the classes she takes with Jocelyn), but a community college degree that gives her the credentials to launch herself as her mother’s publicist.

Alexis is an endearing character.  She is cute.  She trusts her ability to charm her way out of any situation.  And by the end of the series, she is able to express genuine caring and concern for her family, her friends, and to feel both closeness to and pain at the gulf between she and Ted.  All while developing, in parallel with her brother, the skills that are needed to navigate in the real world – skills that they were protected from needing to develop by their wealth.      

So Schitt’s Creek grew on me (and many other people).  I even came to feel some affection for the title.  The characters – marooned up Schitt’s Creek without a paddle - are able to figure out how to maneuver within it, and how to paddle back out of it with a semblance of grace and even a bit of charm.  More importantly, they take the sitcom to a new place – an exploration not just of static character, but of character development.

The sitcom has been a staple of American – and my – life for my entire lifetime.  The final episode, however, has usually been an anticlimax.  The final episode of Schitt’s creek famously swept every major category in the Emmy’s, eclipsing the number of awards by the previous record holder, The Marvelous Mrs. Mazel.  Like Mrs. Mazel, this should perhaps be classified as a sitdramcom.  And the final episode seemed like a fitting end and wrap up – it was very satisfying.

M*A*S*H, the longstanding dramatic sitcom that introduced the idea of telling two stories instead of one in each episode, and that was a commentary on our involvement in endless wars, was an endless piece of entertainment.  It introduced ideas and new characters, but the characters were static – they deepened as the writers and actors got to know the characters better, but they did not grow and change as a result of their experiences in the sitcom, so the last episode was sad, as we said good-bye to the characters in a variety of ways, but it was the sadness of a high school graduation, where the members are drifting to the winds.  The Mary Tyler Moore show ended in much the same way – sending its graduates off into spin offs – which became the new way to avoid feeling the loss of a familiar face on our television. 

Seinfeld, which took MASH’s ability to tie two plots together and upped them by two or even three plots, all resolving, in the best episodes, into a single final chord or note, could not end gracefully as its characters were dead set against development and could only be held responsible for their actions – but as they felt no remorse for what they had done, we were left with a distinctly dissatisfying taste.  Perhaps it was Friends that began the march toward sitdramcom with the developmental shifts that were part and parcel of being mid-twenty somethings in New York City.  Did they have a compelling wrap up?  I should know, but I frankly can’t remember it.

This show – this inane piece of froth about a family we should not care about – the Kardashians of this world – living on so much money that, when it is taken away, they don’t have basic survival skills – teaches something about what it means to become a family and, as this is part and parcel of that, something of what it means to become an individual who is no longer dependent on that family but is ready to stand on his or her own two feet and move out into the world with the kind of skills that middle class – or no class people in the broad Midwestern regions of our continent – the fly over zones – know how to do.

And yet these pampered, self-involved, vain, and therefor interesting and unique individuals also have something to teach us Midwesterners about being true to oneself as one develops.  Something to teach us about living with style and grace even when stuck in a world that doesn’t appreciate that.  And a lot to teach us about how to develop – how to grow – while remaining true to oneself.  How to deceive oneself just enough to believe it possible to achieve what should be apparently unattainable.  And most importantly, to do that through reconnecting – or perhaps connecting for the first time – with our family.

Moira’s faith in Johnny – and in herself – is ultimately noble.  So is her faith in David – and the pain she feels for him when others make fun of him – and her pleasure when he comes into his own.  As we reconfigure our own family – welcoming back members who would have only been guests were it not for the pandemic – we have an opportunity as adults living under the same roof – to connect with each other in new and different ways.  Sure, the old ways will out, and we often end up being less than stellar versions of ourselves, but because we are family we stick it out, just as the players in the sitcoms do.  And because we are human, we might just grow from that experience, as the Roses managed to. 

    

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News of the World – Imagination, Literature and Film

 News of the World, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Book, Movie

Paulette Jiles’ book News of the World was recommended by a friend, and a number of others echoed that it was a good book.  When my copy arrived, it had “Soon to be a Major Motion Picture” emblazoned on the front.  I promptly forgot that, read the book, and idly thought about angles that would be worth writing about, but also didn’t feel deeply compelled by it – stirred, but not driven.  Then, last night, I was blindsided by an ad for the film.  It was in the middle of Jeopardy and the Reluctant Son, with whom I was watching it (and against whom I was competing) noted that it looked like a violent film.  Well it did, but I assured him that the book was not essentially violent.  But the trailer was doing an additional, particular kind of violence to my reading of the book.

The trailer for the film led to a collapsing of the images that I had created as I read the book.  These images were still fresh and vivid enough that they could be destroyed – and they were.  The book is told in the third person, but from the perspective of its hero, Captain Kidd.  He is a veteran of three wars, and he is described as having, “a clean shaven face with runic angles, his hair was perfectly white, and he was still six feet tall.”  It is 1870, he is living in Texas, and makes his living moving from town to town and reading, you guessed it, the news of the day.  He puts up signs advertising his readings, rents a hall, collects newspapers from around the world, selects items that will entertain and reads from them to a packed house by lantern light for about an hour.  He is partly informing, but mostly entertaining by bringing news of far-off and imagination saturated spaces that the audience is not familiar with.  This is more in the tradition of bed time stories than the evening news – in fact, he becomes angry when people complain that he is not including more local and politically divisive material – and he tells the audience in no uncertain terms that they are to listen and not to interrupt – which they do, with pleasure.

I’m not sure what kind of picture has begun to emerge in your mind of the captain after the last paragraph.  I had a lot more to go on, but I thought he was lean, to the point of being gaunt.  He had, after all, survived the war of 1812 and the Civil War.  The Civil War soldiers were nearly starving.  He is living on the frontier – in the Hill Country of Texas – and he travels through what was then called Indian Territory and is now called Oklahoma.  Civilization barely existed.  One of the haunting themes of this book is that government is sparse and patchy.  The confederates who governed Texas have been dismissed.  The Captain has to assert order in the towns when he is reading because there is neither order based on external authority – on law – nor on internal authority – the people are focused on survival and this creates a rawness in most of them (the exceptions in the book are women who are probably poorer than the men, but certainly more generous).

Once, after a cross country bicycle tour with a friend of mine in college, he and I got together to review the pictures from the trip.  A few months had passed (this was in the ancient days when pictures were made in cameras with film that needed to be developed).  I had very vivid memories of that trip – made all the more vivid because they were not just visual images, but they were multimedia events – the images were accompanied by memories of the feeling of my palms against the handlebars, my pelvic bones against the seat, and the smell of the area we were riding through, heightened by having given up smoking to make the trip.  There were sounds that rounded out the memories – and the memories of that trip were among the most vivid of my life – until the pictures arrived.  I could feel them melting and recrystallizing around the “objective” images that came out of the camera.  The narrative experience of the trip was being reduced to a travelogue and I was powerless to prevent it.

Now, many years later, the more visceral memories have returned.  Not with the same vividness they once had.  The memories of the photographs, ironically, are more faded – patchy.  I can remember just one or two.  As I was reading this book, I was thinking that the author, when she wrote it, may have had its being made into a movie in mind.  It is written in such a way that the visual is given prominence, despite it being a very internally focused book – a book that explores such things as loneliness, loss, and grief, and also how culture creates us a creatures – but that even below that there is a primal self – one that cries out for attachment – both early in development – when there aren’t words for it – and much later, when we have a beautifully descriptive language available and therefore can explain much of that away – even though it keeps knocking away at us as we ride across the country, as the captain does in this book - and looks and sees the land around him - which is beautifully, vividly - and visually described by the author.

A friend of mine, an English literature professor, a person who was one of the best readers of fiction that I have known, confessed that the written word did not conjure up for her a single visual image.  I still do not know how she managed to keep a story in her mind – or more accurately, to follow the story as it unfolded.  And, for what it is worth, she was terribly jealous of those who were able to experience images from reading.  I do not read a novel so much as let the words prompt my visual imagination so that I, like the listeners of the captain, am swept away to a place that I create – as I created the High Plains and the Hill Country of Texas as the captain rode through it.  Oh, there are parts of this territory that I have traversed, but not in a wagon, not on a bicycle, but in a car, zipping past the bluebells of spring and enjoying, with airless comfort, the visual pleasure of fields and hills – but never testing myself against them in ways that this text allows me to feel, to appreciate not just what they look like, but what it feels to gallop towards a swollen stream in the hope that the momentum will carry us towards the other side when the horse's hooves lose contact with the streambed and we are floating or to feel what it means to scale a hill – a word that makes it sound so tame – but when the horses are straining and the wagon threatens to pitch backward you realize it is not just a bump, not just a hill, but a fortress.

And yet the words matter.  The narrative that holds the images together is important.  When listening to a patient’s dream, I write down what they say, as best I can, word for word.  What I remember months and years later are visual images – and, when they come to me, it is in reference to what the patient and I are now talking about at this moment.  And those images are important – but they important in part because the words that are used to describe the dreams has allowed us to communicate about what the dream means to the patient.  My image of the dream, conjured up as I write down what is said, is my production – not the production of the dreamer.  Could she or he see my image, they might not recognize it as their dream.  So the common starting place for us to understand are the words they have spoken.  Though they may be pale representations of the visual experience of the dream, they allow us to know, together, what the dream means (at least in certain respects – the dream will always contain private aspects that we are never going to be able to share).

And when we discuss a book, it is the words that we can agree are our common text, as it were.  This is where we take off in our particular way to experience this work – whether we “see” it or simply know it as a story.  A film, on the other hand, starts with the image as the shared text.  It is the image, and secondarily the sound – the dialogue and/or narration that we share.  But, in so far as it is the image, in the film it is the non-verbal that we have in common.  And this image creates something concrete in our minds – something that is not pliable – the way that images in dreams and the images that emerge when we read are.

So, spoiler alert, when I saw that Tom Hanks will play the captain, my image of the captain, but the images of the whole book were threatened.  Tom Hanks is a fine actor, but he is a round person – not gaunt.  Yes, he is eager to be loved, but he wears that eagerness on his sleeve – he does not hide it under layers of protection the way the captain does.  Tom Hanks does not, in my mind at least, have the gravitas – the grit (True Grit was an association as I read to this book) that the captain has.  And the entire enterprise is threatened. 

The film is not out yet, and it may prove to be a lovely experience, but I fear it will not be the vehicle the book is.  We will not get to know the flintiness of the captain in quite the same way.  We will see that he is an upstanding man in a world that is chaotic and filled with people who are uncivilized.  We will see smatterings of civilization, but we will not see those through the eyes of the child he “rescues”, a white girl who was adopted by the Kiowa and who became thoroughly Kiowa in the few years she lived with them so that she finds “civilization”, which we experience as approximate at best, as a dangerous and oppressive force that we, because of having seen the Dallas Cowboys play football, know will obliterate this wild world that can only be scaled by force of will and turn it into something that is non-threatening to those who have no appreciation for their own essential wildness. 

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My Octopus Teacher- A nice family evening

 

My Octopus Teacher, Movie, Netflix, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Love, Psychology of My Octopus Teacher

 

The Reluctant Stepdaughter has been home from school since Thanksgiving and will be through January.  Last night she told her friends she was going to have an evening doing what Hot Girls do and stay in.  One part of being a Hot Girl apparently included watching a movie.  Now family movie nights have been a boondoggle since our first movie night as a blended family 14 years ago when I recommended Harvey.  Oops.  I have never lived that down – though when Harvey shows up as a cultural reference now, the girls are sure to mention that they are well prepared to remember it.  Back then it was a horrifyingly creepy film about a creepy guy with an imaginary friend.

So my first offering – watching Paper Chase, the 1970s film depicting Harvard Law School life anxiety - starring John Houseman – who worked on the script of Citizen Kane in the film Mank that we saw recently – was met with the usual less than enthusiastic response.  The Reluctant Stepdaughter thinks that movies about Harvard Law School begin and end with Legally Blonde.  So my next suggestion came via the Reluctant Sister – someone the Reluctant Stepdaughter likes and feels a certain kinship with – and it was a documentary to boot, which is the R.S.’s go to movie genre: My Octopus Teacher. 

Jackpot!  Not only does she like documentaries, she likes octopi.  So, when we asked whether the Hot Girl was going to join us at the movies, we were told that we could watch what we want to – but if we watched something else on the family TV, she would be watching My Octopus Teacher.  We let her know that we had been intending to watch it and would love to watch it with her.

This lovely film is quite short, but the pacing is so languid that it feels like a feature film.  It stars Craig Foster.  He is the main and almost only character except for the octopus, a few sharks, and a bit role by Craig’s son.  The film documents a year in his life – a year that followed two years of living hell, the details of which we don’t get, that came in the wake of filming and editing a film about the Kalahari bush people.  Foster returns to the home he grew up in – a bungalow in South Africa that faces, and at high water, is partly covered by, the Atlantic Ocean.  

Craig is returning to a world that is much more in touch with nature than the world of film editing – a world that he experienced as being devoid of nature - cut off from it.  As he narrated his return and we saw him swimming, without a wetsuit or tanks, in the frigid waters (48 degrees Fahrenheit) of a Kelp forest, the Reluctant Stepdaughter observed that this was going to be a film about him – and not about Octopi.  Fortunately, she hung in there despite this.

Craig presumably was recovering from a two year depression.  He talked about the cold water reorganizing his brain circuitry.  I don’t doubt that getting into that water and swimming for an hour or two would be shocking – and, though ECT is a proven treatment for severe depression – he wasn’t inducing seizures with the cold.

Craig would be understood by Sydney Blatt – a brilliant Yale based researcher – to have an introjective style of depression, which he distinguished from an anaclitic style.  The introjective style – really more of a personality style than a type of depression, but a personality style that can lead to depression – is caused by internalizing very high standards for one’s self and then becoming depressed when one doesn’t live up to those standards.  The introjective style includes not just high standards, but valuing thought and thinking over emotion.  It is not that these individuals are not deeply emotional; they are (in fact we all are), but that they approach problems imagining a cognitive solution.

The problem Craig encounters is an octopus – don’t ask me how he knows it is a female octopus – whom he discovers in a ball at the bottom of the ocean with shells stuck to herself on all sides so that she looks like a weird piece of beach art.  Even the fish near her seem as puzzled as Craig about what she has done and who or what she is – and when she sheds the shells and speeds off, we are introduced to Craig’s Octopus teacher.

The movie now shifts to being more about the octopus or, more precisely, about the developing relationship between Craig and the Octopus.  When Craig, after befriending her, scares her off, he has to learn to think like an octopus to find her again.  He lets us in, a bit, to the world of the octopus.  She is a mollusk without a shell – a predator who protects herself with her wits – based on figuring things out (octopi are solitary creatures whose life cycle prevents their being taught by parents) and she is incredibly creative.

Craig’s focus on the octopus led us to worry about the state of his marriage.  He is able to connect with his son about the sea and all things in it.  Is he connected to his wife?  She is a shadowy figure in the background.  If the octopus is not just his teacher but his therapist, his wife is giving him room – as a spouse does when a patient goes into treatment, but especially into analysis - room to become very intimately connected with another.  And the Octopus becomes all consuming.

And this turns out to be a good thing.  We learn early about the life cycle of an octopus.  And we learn about the ways in which this brief life – octopi only live for about a year – allows Craig to see the cycle of his own life – to live out in the relationship with the octopus coming in contact, growing, having advances and setbacks, recovering from the problems along the way, and regenerating a will to live. 

Again, this seems like a metaphor or analogue for treatment.  We live out, in a relationship with a therapist, a relationship with a beginning, a middle and an end, and that relationship, which is initially based on the paradigms of relationships that we have lived before, becomes a new template – a new way of living in relationship with others.

There is another way in which this metaphor works.  Craig goes back, each day, to the same clearing in the forest.  He gets to know not just the octopus, but the other denizens of her space.  When friends ask why he doesn’t sample different places with his daily dive, Craig rejoins that plumbing the same place allows him to truly get to know it and, by implication, to better know himself.

Especially in psychoanalysis, we frequently cover what seems to be the same ground again and again, and yet, each time we traverse it, it has the potential to reveal something new.  And when this happens, we get to know that piece of ground just a little bit better.

There is an odd distance that Craig feels from the Octopus.  He greatly values his relationship with her, but he does not intervene on her behalf – even though they are friends – when she is in dire circumstances.  Craig does not, to me, clearly explain this.  It is a scientific distance that he is keeping – but is he a scientist?  Is he gathering basic data? Or is his distance part and parcel of the introjective personality style?  Is he walking with, and next to, and touching the Octopus, but is he also keenly aware that she has her own life to live – and that that life is not his – only his to observe?

In this stance that Craig takes, I think that this is less about “science” and being a “scientist”, and more about coming to grips with a much more essential existential fact – that we are, essentially, alone.  Even though others are there and can comfort us, we fend for ourselves, feel for ourselves, and live and die largely by ourselves.

You might think this is a COVID fueled conjecture (and in part it certainly is), but I think it is a realization that occurs, in one form or another, in most effective treatments.  We go to someone else for help and discover that what they can help us do is to make better use of ourselves – they cannot make it easy for us.  In this case, Craig is taught this not by what the Octopus does or doesn’t do for him – but the other way around, by what he does or doesn’t do for her.  He learns through an empathic experience of what it means to be a creative, brilliant creature on one’s own in a very scary world.

This, then, is both a very comforting and an oddly disquieting film.  We are drawn to Craig, and to the Octopus, and to their relationship.  We admire their bond.  And we wonder at what separates them – but also what bonds and separates Craig and his son – Craig and his wife – and we, ourselves – what bonds us to the world and the creatures around us? 

The film reaches a nice dramatic conclusion – we were all satisfied.  The Hot Girl had a very satisfying Hot Girl night with her parents – who knew that was possible?  We enjoyed connecting in a space that worked for all of us – knowing that this space – extended by COVID – is still limited.  We will carry away from it, as Craig does from the clearing, a better sense of who we are – individually and collectively, just as we do from any other meaningful relationship, including a psychotherapeutic one.

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First Complete COVID semester done – COVID Chronicles XV

 

This last month at the University where I teach has seemed like a race to the finish.  When we decided to meet in person for the fall, we set the schedule to minimize students’ travel away from school and attempted to shorten the time spent on campus.  This meant that we started school a week or two early, dropped Fall break and various other holidays (Labor Day) and introduced two midweek skip days, and the students headed for home at Thanksgiving.   They then did remote final exams and grades were due earlier today.  Whew!

I looked forward to this arrangement – not only would it minimize students heading home in the middle of the semester – the semester would be over early which would allow for a longer Christmas break and that would allow me to work on some projects that have needed my attention.  I have also always thought of things like Fall Break (a random Thursday and Friday in the fall with no classes) as kind of silly – Spring Break, too, for that matter.  My clinical work continues during these “breaks” and I experience them more as a bit of a lull rather than a true break.

Well, I don’t know whether it was sprinting through the semester, or the strain of COVID, or the weirdness of this political season, but by the end of the semester, I was all but wrung out.  I have not slept so consistently soundly in years.  By the end of day I was tired, and by the time bed time rolled around, I was deeply exhausted, as if I had been hard at work all day out of doors.  I have not posted on this site in over a month, which is unusual for me – and a sign of not feeling like I have had time to do anything but work on what needed to be done.

Another feature of this time is that I have been completely at home except for the six clock hours each week that I was on campus to teach two face to face classes (these were simulcast on zoom – and the last two weeks I was the only person in the classroom – my other class was online throughout and I “broadcast” from our home office).  I have been spending less time on campus in recent years – but even recently, I have been on campus for 30-40 hours each week – seeing patients at home – and working at home on the weekends.  It made a huge difference to be working at home all day every day.  There was no shift in place to work.  Before there was a sense on the weekends that the work I was doing was “not work” because it was at home.  Now home feels like the work place and it feels like I am always at work…

Of course, this is a first world problem, and in the first world, especially now, there could be way worse problems!  The bad news, of course, is that this won’t be over soon.  The novel vaccines are being pushed through the pipeline, but it will be a logistical nightmare to get them to us and we don’t yet know how quickly they will be produced.  To most effectively prevent the continued transmission of the disease, they should go to front line and essential workers.  We’ll see how they are actually distributed.  And we don’t yet know what it will mean to be inoculated.  For instance, one question that has not yet been experimentally addressed is whether a vaccinated person can be a transmitter of the illness.  A corollary question of mine is can a person who has had the illness still carry it?  But of course, we don’t yet know how long having had the illness will provide immunity or whether it will provide immunity from other strains.  And getting to the point Nationally, much less internationally, where enough people are inoculated that this thing will die out will take months or perhaps another year.  

If you detect an increasing line of hysteria underlying the questions above, your radar is working well.  As a dear friend and analyst once told me, living in the world of the unconscious means that we are more, not less prone to the fears, follies and foibles of being human.  The Reluctant Wife just calls me Captain Calamity.

I started this line of posts with the intent of tracking, in real time, my experience of the pandemic.  Especially in the wake of revelations that we really don’t know much about the public’s reaction to the 1918 influenza outbreak, I thought it might serve a useful purpose.  A recent NPR spot on a book about the Spanish flu clarified that part of that had to do with a national media blackout orchestrated by President Wilson who, not wanting the backlash that Lincoln received by allowing reporters to travel with the troops in the Civil War, kept a lid on the news about both the world war and about the ensuing flu.

On our own smaller home front, my fear at the beginning of the semester had to do with being in front of a classroom full of students some of whom likely would be sick.  Very quickly, my classroom was largely empty, as I reported earlier, because the students chose to participate by zoom.  But when one of our reluctant children came home from school to spend a week with their paramour, the paramour’s boss and co-worker became sick, so the paramour was tested and found positive – so the adult child was tested and fortunately turned out to be negative, both on testing and symptomatically, as were the reluctant spouse and I.  Why did we duck that bullet?  Was the reluctant child's spring illness really COVID though she tested negative at the time?  

Based on a near miss, we were more cautious at Thanksgiving – having only nuclear family at our celebration.  This meant that there were about half as many people at the table as usual – and we could hear each other talking!  We also spent the rest of the weekend masked in the house after kids starting connecting with others to celebrate the holidays.

Our world is smaller – and will stay that way over Christmas and the New Year – but more intimate.  Were it not for the sameness of the days, sheltering in place hasn’t been a bad way to live.  The Reluctant Wife is not travelling, so that is a real bonus.  But the uncertainty, the compressed schedules, and living in fear for family members are all things I could live without.

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text. 

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.