Alias Grace: Did She or Didn’t She? Atwood Keeps Us Guessing.

Alias Grace is a novelized version of a completely fictional attempt to unravel what actually occurred during a factual and later sensationalized murder that took place not far from Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1843.  Margaret Atwood, the author, is better known for another novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, about the future.  What unites these two books is an implicit feminist viewpoint on gendered issues. That is, neither of these books contains polemics, or rants, or arguments about why the way that gender has been used is a problem, instead they argue through showing – and this is a particularly persuasive argument because the reader finds him or herself making the argument him or herself – not being preached to by an author.

In the process of writing about this book, I will likely do some of that preaching, so this will be significantly less convincing of the feminist perspective than the novel.  Also, as a man, I will inevitably note the places where the argument fell flat.  More precisely the spell of having the reader take on the feminist perspective was broken.  For instance, at one point the character who interviews Grace, whom I will introduce in a moment, is staying at a boarding house where the hired help has fled for non-payment, the man who owns the house has fled to drinking and carousing, and the woman who is married to the man who fled is indisposed, so he is left on his own to attend to the basics of living for a brief moment.  The narrator, who at this moment is a woman, notes that he is essentially incapable because he has never had to do various tasks for himself.

This would have been a stronger argument if she were talking about cooking, but she was talking about sweeping floors and carrying a chamber pot out to the outhouse and then washing it out.  I think the larger point is an important one that ties the book together – those who are cared for, as the upper crust and professional class were until modern labor saving devices made that no longer necessary, were much more dependent on their help than they knew.  Heck, that is true today.  I was talking with another faculty member about how clueless we were about the administrative structure necessary to run a University as students and even as junior faculty members.  But my point is that in this moment Atwood’s attempt to get us to see this wears thin – she points out mechanical aspects that the caregivers engage in that we could figure out – professors have been doing their own typing since the advent of quality word processors.  On the other hand, we still haven’t figured out how to recruit, admit, orient, and house the students who so regularly show up in our classrooms at the beginning of every semester like clockwork.

At the moment when she points out that character could not do tasks that were within his means, Atwood is, in my mind, an unreliable narrator.  When we run into an unreliable narrator, the narrative they are weaving cracks – we begin to question it.  We wonder about her motives.  At the moment illustrated above, I become aware of Atwood’s wanting to preach, or, more precisely, to use me as the instrument of her preaching – to use me, the reader, to do her dirty work.  The central protagonist in this novel – Grace – is, like Atwood at that moment, a highly unreliable narrator.

Grace Marks – a domestic employed by Thomas Kinnear – was found guilty of murdering Kinnear.  Another domestic in Kinnear's employ, James McDermott, was also found guilty.  McDermott, however, was hung and Marks was not.  She was imprisoned and also spent some time in an asylum, but was ultimately pardoned, released from prison, and mysteriously ended up in Upstate New York.  Neither McDermott nor Marks were tried for the murder of Nancy Montgomery, who was also employed by Kinnear and was murdered at the same time he was.  She was, in addition to being Kinnear's chief housekeeper, his mistress and she was pregnant with his child.  McDermott and Marks were not tried for Montgomery’s murder once they received the death penalty for Kinnear’s murder as it wasn’t deemed necessary to have multiple death sentences.

With these facts, and the sensationalized and contradictory accounts from the newspapers, Atwood weaves a tale that asks the question of whether Marks was guilty of the murders or not.  The foil for determining this is an invented series of conversations between Marks, who is imprisoned and working for the prison governor as a maid, and a somewhat lost physician who is the son of an industrialist; Simon Jordan.  This is the man I referenced above who was clueless about how to sweep a floor.  His father’s Massachusetts company has failed and he is having to live on less and less money.  He has decided to come up with a means of supporting himself by making a name for himself as a psychiatrist so that he can open a humane asylum and actually cure those who come to him.  Grace is the case that will make him famous if he can get to the heart of the question about her guilt. 

Charcot demonstrates hypnosis.

This long novel, then, is dominated by the pre-psychoanalytic conversation between a naïve, but knowledgeable physician who, like Freud, is aware of the work of Mesmer and, more importantly, the work of Martin Charcot – the physician in Paris that Freud studied under and whose work Freud translated.  Charcot was the first successful treater of hysteria – that vague disorder of women.  Charcot used hypnosis – and Freud started with that, but found it not as helpful as something else he discovered – the talking cure.  A treatment that was invented by another mentor of his, Joseph Breuer and Breuer’s patient, Bertha Pappenheim.  Freud would take this “talking cure” and refine it into psychoanalysis.

Now at this point, you may think that my psychoanalytic interests have completely derailed me and that I am making all of this up.  Well, that may be.  But there is another clue here that might be helpful.  One of the minor but key characters in this novel, the only person who knows both Grace and Simon Jordan in their respective homes, is named Dora.  Now this is not a common name, but it is the pseudonym of one of Freud’s five case studies.  It was a case that Freud was proud of because he used his ability to interpret dreams to “solve” the case, but it was also a case that it took him five years to publish because it was a failed case.  Dora fired Freud.  She gave him two weeks’ notice, the same way that a domestic would give an employer two weeks’ notice.   The Dora in this book is, in fact, a domestic.  She was the domestic who quit working at the house where Simon Jordan was staying, and she also worked as a domestic at the prison governor’s mansion alongside Grace and gave her the inside scoop on what this man Jordan, who was so interested in her, was really like at home.

So, I think we might have an alternate version of the Freud tale.  OK, maybe I’m going over the top, but Freud’s father was a wool merchant – and Simon Jordan’s father’s failed industrial venture was a Massachusetts textile mill owner.  OK, maybe I’m grasping at straws – or threads – but this is either an alternate, failed version of Freud’s method that is on display – or it is a very pointed but very deeply veiled criticism of Freud and how badly he misunderstood women.  And Dora would be the perfect case to use to point out Freud’s ineptitude when it comes to women.

Actually, I think this book is taking on something much bigger than Freud – it is taking on the culture of Canada in the mid to late 1800s – and the deeply misogynistic and highly class based system that repressed not just the Grace’s of this world, but also her partner in crime – or the real criminal – McDermott.  But I think it may well be referencing Freud as an instrument of that culture – something that he certainly was in the Dora case – at the same time that he was in the process of upending that culture by listening to women and reporting what they said.  Jordan Simon listened, but he never had the courage to report what he heard for fear that he would be laughed out of the profession - something Freud had to face head on.

So, let’s get back to the story.  Grace is being interviewed by Simon in the Governor’s mansion.  She is an unreliable narrator because she remembers too much detail – more than anyone could.  She is like Scheherazade, stringing along her listener and staving off her death by doing that.  But she is also unreliable because we can’t always tell what she is telling her listener and what she is simply thinking.  We don’t know what Simon knows versus what we know.  We know a story that is too detailed and too clear and too linear to be an organic narrative.  We also know things – including dreams about Simon – but also memories of “dreams” that took place at Kinnear’s home before the murders – that Grace deliberately withholds from Simon.  We also know that Simon thinks that Grace is withholding things from him, but what he thinks she is withholding is different than what we have access to – and it isn’t clear to us what he thinks she is withholding.  It seems to me that he feels she is withholding the key to understanding what goes on in the minds of women – and that connects up with the idea that Simon may be a stand in for Freud.  As far as we can tell, what we have access to is largely of a piece with what she is telling- except that it hints that she may not be quite as prim as she appears in the tale told to Jordan.

The story of her life that Grace tells is an abysmal one.  She is born in Ireland – but she is a protestant and her grandfather was a minister.  Her mother married a man who drank everything he earned – and her aunt shipped them off to Canada.  Her mother died on the trip over and Mary was left to look after the brood of kids and to try to keep a rein on her father.  They were soon ensconced in a boarding house that might as well have been a chicken coop and she escaped (feeling somewhat guilty about leaving the younger children behind) to work, at the age of 13, as a live- in maid.  Her father agreed to this arrangement because he thought that he would get her wages.  He did collect a part for a while, but she soon became independent of him and lost track of him - she was truly on her own in a new world.

At the house where she landed, she was befriended by Mary Whitney, who also worked there, but Mary was more worldly wise, and Grace learned from her how the world worked for girls/women like her from Mary.  Mary , thought, got herself pregnant by one of the young masters of the house, but then died when her abortion went horribly wrong.  Grace feared that she wasn’t able to let Mary’s spirit escape from the room she died by opening a window in time, just as she had failed to let her mother’s spirit escape from the hold of the ship they were on when her mother died.  Grace moved from this house to other houses, working for one owner after another who tried to seduce and/or rape her, but she kept her virtue intact and she ended up working for Kinnear because she felt befriended by Nancy Montgomery – the housekeeper and, unbeknownst to her at first, lover of Kinnear. 

As we creep more and more slowly towards the murder, we have been treated to a wealth of details about the social lives of the households of the professional class in Canada in the 1840s.  And we have been given a sneaky prism through which to view this.  Grace is a protestant and the granddaughter of a minister.  She is one of us – the class of people who read books.  But she is also, by virtue of her father being a n'er do well, a member of the class that does not read books – the Irish Catholics who were coming from Ireland because of the potato famine and who were seen as not just being members of a different class, but essentially a different race.  We learn just a bit about the recent Canadian troubles – the revolt of the working class against the landed gentry.  McDermott, Grace’s partner in crime – or the bully who did all the killing and then took her as hostage – was a revolutionary.  Grace is branded a revolutionary by association at the trial, but that is not the person through whose eyes we see.  We see the inequalities of this land through the eyes of someone who by all rights could very well be in the gentry class.

We have been seduced by a Scheherazade who looks and feels like one of us.  And so, when she says that she didn’t do it – which her story leads us to in the parts that she tells to an absent Simon Jordan who is off finding objective evidence about what happened – we believe her.  Then when he returns, and she is interviewed in a hypnotic trance by a peddler that she previously knew who is now posing as a physician and hypnotist and she reveals to an audience that includes Simon Jordan that Mary Whitney’s soul traveled into her and performed heinous acts – we believe her.

Grace is guilty – and not guilty – but of what?  In both versions of the story, her own and “Mary Whitney’s”, she did not kill Kinnear; McDermott did that.  In her version of the story, McDermott also killed Nancy, but in Mary’s version, Mary helped McDermott with the final murder.  To be legally minded for a moment, Mary is not guilty of the only crime that she has been tried for.  She may or may not be guilty of the murder of Nancy Montgomery, whose statute of limitations has likely run out – but no matter – she is innocent.  But Simon Jordan does not have a legal mind.  He wants to know if she is guilty – and so do we – but of what?

Mary Whitney’s story fills in blanks in Grace’s story – particularly those moments when Grace doesn’t remember – or dreams of being outside and being touched sexually but chastely by McDermott or maybe Kinnear.  In Mary’s version, when Mary is in control of Grace’s body, she gets Grace to seduce both Kinnear and McDermott – and puts McDermott up to the crime.  Nancy has decided to fire them both, and Mary eggs McDermott on to murder them and take the valuables and they can escape to the States together.  In this version, McDermott must have been confused by the contrast between the lustful and conniving Mary and the chaste Grace who primly objected to whatever advances he would make. 

So, we are asked to choose between two versions of Grace (who takes the alias Mary Whitney when she runs away from the murder with McDermott), and to judge her.  I think that if we judge her guilty, it might be as an accessory in the murder of Nancy - which she can't remember, but not of Kinnear.  If we were to judge her innocent, we could do that by blaming her alter ego or the ghost inside her of instigating the murders and of having a hand in them - or we could determine that the ghost was a ruse and that her version to Simon and then to us is real, and she was innocent. 

But I think that if we do either, we have not gotten something essential about Grace.  Grace – and the name is no accident – moves through her life – at least as she reports it – without being buffeted by the currents around her.  All the sexism, classism, neglect, and abuse that she experiences doesn’t alter her essential goodness.  But it also leaves her as a character who is essentially passive.  Freud – unlike Simon Jordan – does not see the women that he meets with as blameless.  Dora is, according to Freud, passionately desirous of all the men in her life – each of whom, including Freud, uses her to their own ends.  Grace, left to her own devices, and in her own mind, I think like Freud's Dora's view of herself, is innocent – and not, as Freud would have her be, lusting after the men who are forcing themselves on her.

Grace – her essence – is blameless in so far as she really has no interest in the ways of men.  She would, thank you very much, like to lead her own life.  She would like to be free to make a quilt –a quilt pattern adorns each chapter, which is named after that quilt pattern.  She would like to stitch a life of her own making, but she is not free to do that.  I think that Atwood is encouraging us to create a world where Grace could become who it is that she is.  I think.  Perhaps the greatest feat of this book is that Grace – and Atwood – can be guessed at, but not known.  I think that Atwood would have us not be able to assign guilt – or Grace, but instead to be stumped by this mystery.

And that, I think, may help understand the power of this book.  The essence of it is that Grace remains unknown, despite the best efforts of others.  The tragedy, too, is that she remains unknown.  If knowing another is to love them – and loving requires a reciprocal engagement with the other – a process of getting to know each other, perhaps Grace’s strength is to resist being known by those who would force themselves upon her.  In a world where love is, perversely, seen as taking knowledge of another from them – either through raping them or through interviewing them to get at their secret – she avoids the degradation that both would subject her to. 

Simon Jordan is not so lucky.  He is seduced, essentially against his will, by the woman who is boarding him.  He is known by her and gets to know her – but the knowing is false and shopworn.  He desires to know and be known by Grace.  But he does not have the tools, nor do they have the platform, from which to get to know each other.  He ends up feeling isolated and alienated within the context of a non-loving erotic relationship – and this ends up being his fate in the afterward of the book.

The cost for Grace is that she remains unknown.  When she is finally pardoned, she is shipped to Upstate New York to become the mail order bride of the boy from the next farm over from Kinnear’s who had a crush on her, but then betrayed her at her trial.  She forgives him and they marry.  But what gets her husband horny are tales of her mistreatment in prison.  He is in love with having saved her – but still not with her.  She is a morally superior being – consistent with her tale of innocence, but an unknown one – the cost of being the virgin (vs. the whore, in the age old dichotomy).

Women are, in this book, the stronger sex.  They endure more, they survive – Grace is the only one left standing, along with the boy next door – from the Kinnear household, which she notes (including the boy next door) early in the text.  She also remains intact, which Simon Jordan does not.  Guilty or not, she survives – and, in the bleak world depicted in this text, that is an accomplishment.     

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Two Popes - Fictional Movie Narratives can be Useful

The Francis Effect.  It has been huge.  One small piece of it is an uptick in applicants for the priesthood.  The most recent applicant whose psychological testing I completed tied his interest in reaffirming his faith to seeing Pope Francis when he last came to the United States.  Francis is, as they say, a rock star – but a weird kind of rock star.  His fame is based on being self-effacing rather than self-aggrandizing.  He espouses a church for and by the people rather than one that serves the priesthood.  He emulates the Christ that he, as the head of the church, represents.

The film The Two Popes centers on a fictional account of a series of conversations between Pope Benedict XVI (Played by Anthony Hopkins) and the future Pope Francis, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce).  The conversations did not take place, but the dramatization allows us to take a peak at the shifts that occurred in the church as the result of the resignation of Benedict and the election of Francis.  This view is a personal perspective, abeit an informed personal perspective, from the screenwriter, Anthony McCarten and the director Fernando Meirelles.

This post is also a personal appraisal of that enactment, so you should know a little bit about me and the perspective that I bring to it.  I was raised an Episcopalian and I teach at a Jesuit University.  Before working at a Jesuit University, I started to learn about the Catholic Church from a liberal psychologist friend who is a Benedictine Hermit.  This was before the time of Francis.  My friend, who was no fan of the Jesuits, was concerned about the direction of the church.  He felt that it was in the hands of men who were out of touch with what Catholics were truly concerned about.  A priest in Nicaragua echoed these concerns when Benedict was Pope, saying that the Pope was surrounded by “Crows” who were cackling to him and distracting him from the true needs and mission of the church.

The film opens with the election of Benedict.  This serves the function of immersing us in church protocol.  For Catholics, and those who follow the church, my guess is that this feels comfortable or even comforting as Pope John Paul II, who has died, is mourned and a new Pope is chosen by election of the Cardinals from among their own ranks.  The ritual of the black and white smoke – black if no new pope has been chosen, white when one finally is – is explained by newscasters so that, for those in the audience who are new to the ritual, they can understand it.  Benedict is the “conservative” candidate choice, while Bergoglio is pitted against him, something that some sources see as an invented controversy, but it is one that foreshadows the action.  The action is also foreshadowed by the location of the vote – it takes place, as it always does, in the Sistine Chapel.

Benedict and Bergoglio are both Cardinals at the beginning of the film.  Much has been made of Francis being the first Jesuit Pope, and there is a very good reason a Pope has never been a Jesuit before.  To become a Pope, you have to be a Cardinal, to become a Cardinal, you have to become a Bishop.  To become a bishop, well, you have to nominated.  When Ignatius Loyola started the Jesuits, he recruited very smart and capable men to serve in his order, an order that he dedicated to education.  The Church, badly in need of the reformation that Loyola and others were putting in place – in part in response to the protestant movement started by Luther - had many priests who were marginally competent.  The Pope saw that Loyola had many good priests in his order and asked Loyola to nominate a few to become Bishops so that the church could get healthier.  Loyola told the Pope he would get back to him about that.

When Loyola did get back to him, he told the Pope that giving him priests to become Bishops would not be in the best interests of the order, and therefore would not be good for the “Greater Glory of God,” or “Magus”, and he refused.  They were Loyola's priests, so the Pope couldn’t override him, but he was furious, and the Jesuits are the only order that have to swear their fealty to the Pope as part of their ordination.  And they are the only order that almost never lets one of their priests become a Bishop.  It is considered bad form within the order to promote oneself – one would only get “promoted” to being a Bishop if the head of the order tapped you – and that tap almost never comes.

After Benedict is installed, we fast forward seven years and Bergoglio is more and more disaffected with the Church and with his role as a Cardinal in it.  He wants to step down and sends letters to the Pope requesting the opportunity to talk about this, but they are never answered.  Frustrated, he books a flight to see Benedict, even though he hasn’t been invited, and then finds out that Benedict does now want to see him.  (The plot, including this bit, from here forward is apparently all constructed, though most of the historical material about their lives referred to in the dialogue between the two turns out to be reasonably factual).

When Bergoglio arrives in Rome, he makes his way to the Pope’s summer castle and makes his case to retire and return to being a parish priest.  As he does this he talks about why being an Archbishop feels more and more out of step with his own experience of what he has been called to do by God.  Benedict refuses to accept his resignation.  Benedict explains that his resignation would be seen as a rebuke of Benedict and all that he stands for.  And we have heard that this is the case.  Bergoglio has a rebuttal, frequently with a scripture quote attached, to every statement that Benedict makes about what the Church is becoming.  We get it that Bergoglio is a malcontent and his leaving would be experienced by many as a moral condemnation of the Pope and of the church as a whole.  But we also resonate with his plain speaking style and the scripture passages that he quotes.

After an afternoon spent in the garden arguing, Benedict retires to eat alone, as he always does.  Bergoglio “joins” him by eating alone as well.  They then get together for social time.  They look for interests they might have in common.  Bergoglio loves soccer, but Benedict has no taste for it.  Finally Benedict entertains Bergoglio by playing the piano.  Benedict catches Bergoglio out by pretending not to know the cultural significance of the Abbey Road studio where he once made a recording.  There is a sense of play and a sense of two men getting to know each other.  Bergoglio brings the letter with him, but Benedict ignores it and refuses to talk about it.  He does encourage Bergoglio, though, to tell him about how he came to the Church, and Bergoglio talks about his love for a woman, Maria, and the fated calling that he heard, and how he joined the Jesuits and warmly describes his relationship with his formation director.

Meanwhile, Benedict is embroiled in a scandal having to do with leaked papers about the papal finances.  His chief minister in charge of finances is arrested.  Benedict is called back to Rome and Bergoglio joins him in his helicopter.  There is more playful play between them and some disapproving glances from Bergoglio about the trappings of wealth and power that go along with being Pope.

On arrival, Benedict asks to meet with Bergoglio in the Sistine Chapel.   This is an incredible place for them to meet.  It is, as we know from the beginning of the film, the place where Popes are elected.  It is also one of the great artworks in history – Michelangelo’s ceiling is a masterpiece.  So much so that it overshadows the great frescoes on the walls by other giants of the renaissance.  And there is a tension between the walls and the ceiling that mirror the tension between Benedict and Bergoglio.

The frescoes on the walls connect the stories of the Old Testament to Jesus, clearly making the case for Jesus as God’s chosen one, the Messiah.  They then go on to show Jesus handing the keys of the kingdom to Peter and from him, the first Pope, to all the Popes that follow.  This is the pictorial proof that the Pope speaks as the leader of the one “Catholic and apostolic church” that was referred to in the Nicene creed that I recited as a child in the Episcopal church.

 The ceiling, though, is a celebration of Human Beings in all of his and her glory as an incarnation of God.  And the first man is made, front and center, in God's image.  The ceiling speaks to the humanity of every one of us – and points out our failings, our weaknesses – the things for which we will be damned – and our triumphs – including the very earthy bodies that are on display.  The ceiling is a celebration of the glory of the diverse individuals we are, each in a powerful reflection of some aspect of the creator.  The ceiling is about the actions of humans, what they have made of themselves – not what they have inherited.

Benedict calls Bergoglio here to this sacred space to tell him a secret.  A secret that Bergoglio must keep.   The secret is that the Pope will step down – not unprecedented – it happened 900 years ago – and he would like Bergoglio to take over for him.  Now this is a grand and, I think, fantasy laden moment.  First of all, Benedict can’t appoint his successor.  We started the movie with the process.  But more importantly, Benedict, before he was Pope, was a man, Ratzinger; a lifelong scholar from Germany, who is so deeply embedded in an authoritarian mindset that this would be a true reformation for him as a person.

The movie proposes that Benedict has, indeed, changed.  Benedict lets Bergoglio know that he is planning to step down and, in a reversal of roles, Bergoglio tells him that he can’t do this.  The Papacy is, he says, bigger than a person.  He says it is Benedict’s job to stay in the Church.  He is mimicking back some of the objections that Benedict was offering him 24 hours earlier.  But Benedict is insistent – and insistent that Bergoglio take on the Papacy himself.

Bergoglio begs off.  He can’t do it.  He was the head of the Jesuits in Argentina during the “Dirty War”, which was a rule by a ruthless military junta in which many people were “disappeared” – they were killed and dropped from airplanes flying high enough over the seas that their remains were destroyed on impact.  One of Bergoglio’s chemistry professors was disappeared, despite his efforts.  More personally damning, he renounced two priests, including his formation director, when they refused to follow his and the junta’s orders to shut down a collective for the poor.  Without the protection of the church, the now ex-priests were tortured.  Bergoglio, meanwhile, to protect the rest of the Jesuits, was seen as colluding with the junta.

When Benedict asks about the outcome of all of this, Bergoglio acknowledges that he has done penance by serving as a parish priest for ten years, and that his formation director has forgiven him and performed mass with him, but acknowledges that the other priest has not and he feels deeply guilty about his actions.  Benedict offers him absolution.

About this time, the tourists come into the chapel.  Benedict and Bergoglio beat a hasty retreat into the sacristy.  There they continue their discussion.  Benedict states that he no longer hears God.  He also notes that he reassigned a known pedophilic priest to new parishes after it was discovered that he was molesting children in one place – inflicting him, in the process, on other children and Bergoglio is horrified. Benedict formally asks Bergoglio to hear his confession.  He starts, but then we don’t hear all of it as his voice fades.  There are, I guess, some things we just shouldn’t hear…

The high point in the film, for me, then occurs.  Bergoglio and Benedict emerge from the sacristy and the gruff and retiring Pope Benedict is immersed in a sea of people, people who adore him and want to take selfies with him.  He embraces this, under the watchful eye of Bergoglio who protects Benedict from his underlings who would whisk him off to his next duties.  We then see the coronation of Bergoglio as Francis, who refuses the Red Papal cape and Shoes as he makes his way to greet the world, saying the carnival is over.  A year later, the two Popes are seen together sharing the joy and agony of watching Germany defeat Argentina in the world cup.

As much as I think this film does not portray the truth of what happened between Benedict and Bergoglio, it does portray what should have happened.  And it portrays a shift in an institution that has seemed hopelessly mired in institutional muck and completely divorced from the congregation it was created to serve.  It portrays a sea change – but I think that institutional inertia is likely to turn that into a bit of a shift rather than an about face.  We will see how long one man’s vision can inform the formation of an institution.

I think the film offers a tremendously charitable view of Benedict.  It portrays him as someone who is aware of his shortcomings – and is able to not only acknowledge them but to embrace someone with a seemingly opposite view – but one that he can see is based on a devout and true vision of the church – one that he, an isolated and very smart boy – was never able to achieve within himself or the church he shepherded, but one that he, too, would like to participate in.  But Benedict did not believe he would change his own spots to be the leader – someone else would have to lead with a vision that he acknowledged to be superior but could not live.

If this is anything like what happened, then Benedict belongs in that rare and small class of people – a class that Dora Maria Tellez in Nicaragua pointed out includes George Washington and Nelson Mandela – people who worked hard to acquire power and then worked equally hard to walk away from it. A very small class of people who are able to see the office as greater than themselves.  Based on this film, Benedict is every bit the leader that Francis is.  Of course, it is also the case that Benedict was embroiled in scandal and needed to get himself and the Church out from under it.  There may have been no other way to do that than to resign.  But in so far as even a part of him realized the opportunity to have a leader like Bergoglio take the reins of the institution is true, that is a testament to a very impressive legacy – one that also includes all of those things that he confessed to and that we couldn’t hear – and those that we could.

This film, then, is a story not just of two Popes, but of two remarkable men.  Men who have worked to achieve power, but also recognize that the purpose of the power is for a greater good – and that the path towards that good is one that can best be trod by following in the footsteps of Christ, the person from whom they have inherited the keys.  Together they are portrayed as uniting the seemingly disparate depictions of the Sistine chapel.  They respect the legacy that they together share enough to have it reflect what it is that they and the congregations they lead can aspire to becoming.  Even given that the path towards this action is certainly less clear than the movie portrays it to be, this vision should give us pause – and hope – that we can, at least for moments, transcend those forces that would prevent us becoming who we might be.

The film is also based, from a psychoanalytic perspective then, on the ability of an ego ideal - a beacon of truth - to keep us oriented.  Though Benedict and Bergoglio have very different visions of the Church, they share a love of God - and of the idealized Son of God.  It is this idealized vision - one that is depicted perhaps most movingly on the front wall of the Sistine Chapel, in the form of Christ separating the sinners from the saints in the Last Judgement, that perhaps brings these men together.  They are, like all of us, fallen.  They have committed not just small sins, but big ones in the process of navigating their lives.  These sins have been shaped by who they are and have shaped who they have become.  And yet, this movie maintains, it is possible for them - and by inference us - to rise above our ourselves - above who it is that we have been - and to radically revision ourselves.  Though the analyst in me thinks that process is more complex and difficult than the one depicted here, there is something miraculous about the power of the ideal to move us.

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The Irishman: Are we all gangsters?

The Irishman is the latest in a long line of Martin Scorsese gritty films centered on the lives of men – sometimes in the mafia – most of which I haven’t seen.  I was drawn to this film, however, because it is based on a narrative about our American history about which I know very little.  The film is an enactment of a book – supposedly a confession – but actually a tale about 20^th century gang life that appears to be largely the concoction of a small time Philadelphia mobster, Frank Sheeran (Robert DeNiro) that was published in the book “I Paint Houses”.  The tale has been at least partially debunked by Slate Magazine, but it is still, even if it contains a great deal of fiction, a very good tale.

Slate Magazine points out what I felt to be true about this movie, it is a seamier version of Forrest Gump.  Frank Sheeran walks through a life – he calls it the life of a working stiff – and events happen around him.  Though he is the trigger man in many of these events, he is never really an actor in them.  He is stolid, unmoving, and passive while murdering, maiming, and creating mayhem.  He is never the mastermind; he is always carrying out orders. As my grad school reluctant roommate pointed out to me, the violence is never lingered over.  It happens and it is done with.  Things occur seemingly out of necessity, not out of love of gore. And it always seems to be just a job – a thing to be done.

So this three and a half hour film, with a slow and deliberate pace, is a lovely movie that tells an important tale.  And it glides by – it does not seem to be as long as it is.  It walks us through a version of history that, though certainly inaccurate, exposes us to some ugly truths – but these are less truths about teamsters and gangsters but truths about us – the American people.  We are complicit in acts that we witness – indeed, that we have executed, but that we, because of our American Exceptionalism, can deny as essential to our view of ourselves.  We were just doing our jobs.

At the end of his life, Frank is depicted as confessing to a priest, but he has little to confess.  He feels no guilt – he knew none of his victims – except one, Jimmy Hoffa, who proves to be an important exception.  It is as if his conscience has been exported into the mind of his daughter, Peggy (the older version, played in a three line role, by Anna Paquin).  Peggy is on to him from the moment when he drags her down to the corner grocery to watch him brutally beat the grocer who had pushed her out of his store after she got out of line.  He beats the grocer and breaks his hand because he laid a finger on his daughter.  He takes her with him because he wants to show her that he will protect her, to give her a sense of safety, but instead he collapses her world - she now fears him – but more importantly knows that she can’t ask for his support because it will be violent.  Peggy also knows – when everyone else in the family denies it – where the family wealth comes from.  And Peggy, the favorite of close family friend Jimmy Hoffa, sends her poison darts wordlessly in her father’s direction as she links what she sees on TV to his absences.

From Frank’s position, he is merely defending his daughter, indeed his whole family, from a violent world that would consume them.  He learned that the world was dangerous and to manage that in the army.  He fought the Second World War in Italy, and he was assigned to illegally kill German prisoners of war.  He continued to do this for the mob and then allegedly for Jimmy Hoffa when he was hired as Hoffa’s body guard.  Frank is of Irish descent.  He learned a little Italian in the army and this helps him connect with the Mafia, but he can never belong to it.  He works as the representative of the mafia for Jimmy Hoffa, but he is not there primarily as a gangster nor as a teamster, but as muscle.  Ultimately, though Frank has a lot of connections across various divides, he is an isolated man.  In his mind, he has isolated himself to protect his family - but Peggy's anger with him clarifies that he does not feel connected even at home.

Jimmy Hoffa (Played by Al Pacino) is an enigmatic figure for me. Before the film, I knew that he had disappeared, that he was likely killed by the mob, and that he was somehow connected with unions.  Al Pacino’s portrayal of him captured the charismatic leader of the Teamster’s Union at the peak of its and his power.  He delivered a simple but very persuasive message – we need to be united and then we have power because the country is entirely dependent on goods delivered by the truckers and warehouse workers in the one million strong union that he led.  And this union, and Hoffa, were in bed with the mafia.  Not just because mafia members drove trucks and rose through the ranks, but because Hoffa had amassed a huge pension fund and he controlled how the funds were invested – and the mafia needed financing for, among other things, the casinos in Las Vegas – financing that was hard to get from traditional sources.

Hoffa is portrayed as a murky kind of good guy.  He works to protect the working stiff from exploitation by the man.  When the working stiff sticks it to the man, by having a few goods fall off his truck, Hoffa has attorneys who can help protect the working stiff.  On a bigger scale, he is able to demand reasonable wages and health care and that pension plan.  He is a union organizer who, in this film, is completely identified with the union – it and Hoffa are one.  Hoffa’s tragic flaw is that he experiences this identification as providing him with the power that the union has – he believes himself immune to threats, including from powerful mafia bosses who don’t like his trying to shut off increasingly shady and low or no income producing loans from the fund.

The film intimates that JFK was whacked by the mob.  JFK is connected to the mafia through his father Joseph who amassed a chunk of his wealth through bootlegging during prohibition The mafia believed that they delivered the election to Kennedy – particularly through the Daley political machine in Chicago.  As I have mentioned elsewhere, the Daley machine prevented my grandmother, a lifelong republican, from voting in that election, and Chicago turned Illinois, which, in turn, delivered the Electoral College to Kennedy.  Then, once elected, JFK’s brother Bobby, as the Attorney General, went after the Mafia.  He also went after Hoffa, who had financially supported Nixon, and Hoffa was jailed, only to have his sentence commuted when Nixon was later in office.  Meanwhile, many Mafia Dons went to prison and the mob decided to seek vengeance in the way that it does.

Whether the mob hired Lee Harvey Oswald is less important to me than that power requires working with power brokers.  And the power brokers in this country include some corrupt and ruthless entities.  That both Nixon and Kennedy were, in different ways, beholden to corrupt figures should come as no surprise.  But it does.  The Trump phenomenon, through this lens, looks like business as usual.  The governing of this country is not the high-minded stuff of 1776, but the back room dealing of Hamilton, and the only difference is that Trump is dealing with the Russian mobsters of New York real estate more or less in the open.

Hoffa, meanwhile, is portrayed as a genuine and loving person.  Peggy opens up to him as a child.  They have a wonderfully cute engagement sharing ice cream sundaes and he is the father figure she can’t let her father be – and that she doesn’t trust Frank’s mafia boss, Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), to be.  Joe Pesci’s Bufalino is a wonderfully oily character.  He is a conciliator who gets things done – he knows how to fix a truck and he knows how to fix a negotiation that is going badly.  He takes care of business, and only uses muscle when it is needed – and calls in the muscle (Frank) with an innuendo – and more frequently has to let Frank know NOT to whack someone as Frank is sensitive to the needs of his boss.  Peggy, despite Russell’s giving her lots of expensive gifts, doesn’t like Russell.  Just as with her father, she smells a rat.

Who are we to trust in this world?  Hoffa increasingly comes to trust Frank.  Frank protects him as a body guard and by doing his dirty work.  Frank accompanies him when he goes to meetings, and he takes care of Frank, giving him a union leadership position.  And Frank does his job on the up and up.  He is a man of integrity in the union.  And when Frank’s union service is recognized, Hoffa, who is not yet allowed to return to a leadership position in the union, but who is pulling strings that are making it harder for the mafia bosses to get no interest loans, comes to his celebration.  And there we see Hoffa's tragic pride – his sense that he can’t be touched – come into play.  Hoffa is warned that he needs to back off.  Frank all but pleads with him to let things go. But Hoffa has not gotten to where he is by backing off.  He is full of bluster and loves attacking issues head on.  He loves the Union and he doesn’t want to see it pilfered by the mob.  He also believes himself to have the backing of those million strong members – and doesn’t believe the mob will do him in.

We, too, believe that we are in the right.  We believe that we are on the side of God (Unlike Lincoln who prayed that God would see him as doing the right thing).  We support our country.  We, like Peggy, root for the Hoffa’s of this world.  But, when push comes to shove, we do what is expedient.  We live in very small worlds and we do not take the long view.  Like Frank, we do what needs to be done to keep our own families safe and we really don’t have a sense of the havoc that doing that wreaks on the rest of the world.  We are implacable – unmoved by the fate of others that we do not know.  We supported Kennedy, and then Nixon, and now we are surprised by the level of support for Trump.  “How can they not see?” we ask.  But Trump is doing what has always been done – but he is doing it nakedly and boldly.

This came home perhaps most vividly when one of Frank's truck driving gigs is to transport material for Howard Hunt.  This military hardware shows up on the shores of Cuba in Kennedy's misguided Bay of Pigs attack.  Howard Hunt, working for Kennedy at the time, ends up being a critical link in the Watergate case with Nixon a decade later.  Frank does a job.  Its a job he's been asked to do.  He gets paid for it.  But what occurs is beyond what he could have imagined when he woke up to go to work that morning.

As I am writing this, we are in diplomatic stand offs with Iran and North Korea.  Trump, to this point, has, if anything, been less assertive than other leaders.  As depicted in Madam Secretary, we are forever engaging in carrot and stick diplomacy as the biggest bully on the block.  We dictate terms to other nations – and we don’t respect their sovereignty.  Because we have played power games well and because we were isolated from major structural damage on our mainland during the last major war, we have enjoyed a long run as the biggest bully on the block.  We like to think that we have been the good guys during this time – rebuilding Europe and supporting the growth of economies – and feeding people – all over the world.  Going to Las Vegas – and enjoying the fruits of the collusion between the teamsters and the mafia – like going to Europe and enjoying the fruits of the post war rebuild is evidence that power brokering can support me – and I, in turn, support it.  I put my dollars into the slots and into the hands of the international tourist industry.  I pay my taxes and support the execution of our national agenda, and I vote for the leaders who execute a national agenda that undercuts the ability of other countries to function autonomously.

My complicity in the double edged sword of protecting our lifestyle and imposing damage on others by the very act of doing that is of a different order of magnitude than that of Frank.  Buying an IPhone that is constructed by a person earning slave wages is not equal to whacking a mob boss – except perhaps in the eyes of Peggy.  She, like our conscience, is not particularly articulate.  After Frank kills Hoffa, she refuses to have contact with him.  She doesn’t make her case, she simply withdraws and condemns him from afar.  I think that we are alienated from that part of our conscience that knows the enormity of our smallest actions – or more precisely – knows that we don’t know the enormity of our smallest actions.  Most of the time we don’t know the people that we whack.  But the chilling part about this movie is the implication that, by engaging in multiple actions that alienate us from our consciences, we end up being unable to feel meaningfully guilty about the actions that we engage in against those who are closest to us.  We become blind to the ways that we hurt those we love.

This film uses cutting edge technology to allow actors to appear young again.  It is a last hurrah – a last ride for this group of men that enjoy working together (Even though Scorsese has never directed Pacino before).  The technology gives them and us the illusion that we can turn back the hands of time.  The movie itself, though, chronicles the ruthless effects of time.  The vibrant men who have worked so hard to make their worlds safe end up aging poorly in prisons and, if they are lucky, nursing homes.  They are stuck in a kind of joyless suspended animation as they wait to die.  Perhaps the central tragedy is that all of our efforts – and they are expensive efforts – to create a safe world, are, ultimately, for naught, at least on a personal level.  Of course, Hoffa helped support a lot of working stiffs earn a middle class life.  Even the Russell’s of this world, with the help of Frank, helped create meaningful lives.  I certainly wouldn’t have wanted us to sit out the Second World War, even though it taught Frank how to be a house painter (someone who can whack a guy without getting splattered with blood).  I suppose I am glad to have greeted the New Year with a movie that has worked to keep the line to my conscience humming…

I do think there is something important about gender roles in this movie - not that the roles have to be played out in this way - but that they have been played out this way during the twentieth century.  Men were responsible for acting - and we did that with gusto.  Women's roles were more domestic, but, as depicted in this film, also moralistic.  They were responsible for instilling values in boys - and they did, as Peggy does, act as the consciences of men.  As women take on more leadership roles - as they take on responsibility, will they be able to retain their functioning consciences?  It is much harder to see the impact of our own actions - to see what cads we are being - than it is to see the actions of others.  As women assume leadership roles, will they help us be more circumspect about our actions?  Can they, in those leadership positions, retain their ability to feel part of a community, rather than to feel more isolated - to feel that they are going it alone?  Will this sense of community help us to truly work together rather than pretending that we are doing that while actually extracting what we think we need, and without thinking about the consequences of our extractions?

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