Unorthodox (the movie): Disruption Comes at a Cost.

      

Those Hats!

Unorthodox on Netflix is a very brief series – just four episodes long – that chronicles the escape of Esty Shapiro (played by Shira Haas) from the clutches of the Satmar Hasidic Ultra-Orthodox Community (or Cult) in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY.  This is a partially fictionalized and psychoanalytically interesting story based on the memoir of Deborah Feldman, Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots.  The title of the memoir captures something of the tension in the series.  Unlike a memoir like Tara Westover’s Educated, where the oppressive family’s culture is idiosyncratic first and we realize only later that it reflects cultural norms, here we have a repudiation of a culture that is internally consistent, depicted with care and even reverence, while simultaneously being questioned, both by the scandalous repudiation of an individual leaving it, but also by the public depiction of the rituals in a respectful manner that exposes the cracks in a system intended to be entirely self-contained.   

As the movie explains, the Satmar group formed in Williamsburg in the wake of the Shoah.   These Jews decided, in responding to unspeakable trauma, that turning away from connecting with a world they had assimilated to and that had betrayed them was the only meaningful way to survive.  They turned back to their roots and, in the process of doing this, looked to antiquated rules of living that predated a modern world.  In this they resemble, to my mind, the Amish who live near us here in the rural parts of Midwest, but might as well be living in another era.  The Satmar, on the other hand, are living in the middle of the most densely populated part of American.  And they are living apart – as if in their own country.

I have never been to the Satmar area of Williamsburg, but I have been to Chinatown.  One time, when I visited in the mid-1980s, it was reputed to be one of the lowest crime precincts in New York, largely because it was self-policing.  As my girlfriend at the time and I were approaching a Chinese restaurant, we, along with hundreds of others on the street, watched as a man was chased  up the street being beaten with sticks by four other men.  A silence fell over the street as everyone watched them corner the man they were beating in a store front across the street from us and continued beating him.  When my girlfriend, braver than I and versed in the bystander effect, shouted “Stop” (and then stepped behind me), they did, indeed, stop.  They ran off down the street, and the beaten man hobbled up the street in the other direction.

The isolation of one group from another – something that is currently much in vogue the world over in part as a response to the neo-liberal value of diversity – has been going on by the Satmar group at least since the Hungarian core of this group immigrated in 1946.  Esty, while privy to this history, is, like her arranged marriage husband, limited in her ability to compare and contrast this world with any other.  When first introduced to her husband, she hesitantly lets him know that she is “different”.  He believes he understands her when he takes it to mean that because her father, who is a drunk (a very rare and shame filled thing in Jewish culture generally) and her mother, who left the community, were unavailable to raise her and she was raised by her aunt and grandmother that she is – as her aunt and mother characterize her – an orphan.  This, in turn, implies that she is grateful to her future husband because she is damaged goods.

In fact, what Esty means is much more complicated and becomes clearer to us (and, I think, to Esty, as the series unfolds).  It means, I think, that Esty finds it, as she puts it, difficult for her to live up to what God has in mind for her.  She is aware of the constrictions that the Hasidic life is putting upon her in a way that she does not yet know is a life destroying constraint.  She is alive and capable in ways that her husband cannot know and does not see until the penultimate scene in the series.

This film, then, documents the cultural repression of women in a culture that is intentionally repressing all spontaneous engagement with the world as suspect and dangerous – so that the repression of women does not stand out, from within the culture, as particularly remarkable.  It is part of the package deal of repression.  The culture is, I think, bound by rules that prevent intimate relationships between that culture and the outside world, but therefore (and I'm not sure that it follows, but it is certainly also the case) between the members of that world, especially the men and women; the husbands and wives.  

As I learned this week from my reluctant co-teacher in a class on Freud, Eve Sedgwick had a lot to say about the repression of difference in the broader culture 30 years ago in a paper on masturbation and Jane Austen that she published in 1980.   In the paper, she proposed that masturbation was the first “queer” identity – and masturbators were universally vilified by all kinds of people – including Freud – for causing their own pathologies, by which Freud meant that broad and poorly defined pathology neurasthenia. 

Esty is then, in this reading, telling her husband, when she says that she is different, that she is queer.  And two distinct ironies grow from this as the series develops.  Esty is queer not because she is resistant to orthodoxy, but because she is so deeply invested in it that she enacts it in her symptoms.  She is not able to have sex with her husband – her basic and necessary duty as a wife that is needed to repopulate the world with the six million that were killed in the holocaust – because of vaginismus.   She cannot allow herself to open herself up enough to admit her husband just as the Hasidim will not open themselves up to let other cultures in.  She is rigidly and perfectly pure.

She and her husband successfully copulate only once – when, after a year of failure, she encourages him to press ahead no matter how much it hurts her.  He does – and experiences so much pleasure at his first climax that he is blind to the pain and isolation that she feels at having been violated.  But this is not new – it mirrors his failure to understand the pain she has felt as he has violated her confidence by continually informing his mother of their marital difficulties – and not working them out directly with her.

The tragic loss of intimacy between them gets finally enacted when Esty races home early from a Seder dinner to test her pregnancy, discovers joyously that they have been able to meet the dictates of the community, only to have her husband preempt her telling him that they are pregnant by announcing to her that he intends to divorce her because they have so consistently failed to be sexually intimate.  The psychological gulf of intimacy between them at this moment could not be greater, and this propels her to enact her scandalous separation from the community.  Though she does this (as the reluctant co-teacher pointed out) at a moment that is culturally significant - she is escaping from her own Egypt as her people are celebrating escaping slavery at the hands of Pharoah.

Now, I have to admit to no small sense of empathy for her husband.  He really is, I think, a nice and humble guy – sensitive to many things – everything it seems but Esty.  He is, I think, blinded to her by a culture that disregards the value of the subjective being of women, though also I think of men – and instead would dominate and control the subjectivities of all of the members of the group.  Ritual is used to contain and direct libido into serving the rules of God.  The little irony contained here is that the husband turns to his mother for guidance.  But my personal theory – not unrelated to others’ theories – is that it is the power of the maternal connection – the power of women to procreate – the power of women to decide whether they will let the man in or not – and our relative powerlessness in the face of all this power that has led us to dominate them.  To constrain and define women's power as subservient to our aims and to focus on helping them limit their field of operations to areas that are in our interest.  It is only recently, as we have felt less at the mercy of the natural world, that we have felt we don't need to control women as well as nature.  It would fit with this narrative that the Hasidim's fear of the greater culture, grounded as it is in trauma, leads them to revert to a greater need for control, which includes controlling women - and controlling our wish to connect with the world more generally rather than to do what we are driven by our libido to do - to connect indiscriminately.

The second big irony, of course, is that the Hasidim are the queers in the mainstream culture.  They, with their funny side curls and crazy black hats – and $6,000 mink hats on Sabbath (see the wedding picture of the groom) – are the bizarre ones who are aberrant and unnatural.  And I think that this represents an extreme version of Freud’s observations in Civilization and Its Discontents, outlined a bit in the paragraph above, that we need to limit our libidinal wishes in order to enjoy the advantages of being a member of civilization.  In the case of the Hasidim, we need to do that so severely that we become constricted, not only in terms of our relations with the outside world, but also in terms of our relationships with each other.  So the Hasidim become a queer mirror of the culture as a whole – or a looking glass into our past that may allow us to see the versions of our selves that persist into the present.

But the present that Esty discovers in Berlin couldn’t appear more different, on the surface, than the Williamsburg community that she left behind.  Welcoming and warm, embracing queerness of sexual orientation, and the queerness of Jews in Berlin, it is also hostile – warning Esty that she does not belong among the elites because her sheltered/repressive existence has prevented her from exploiting her natural talents to the extent that she has not practiced what it takes to belong with this exclusive group that is explicitly inclusive of queers.  Of course, because she is also different in yet another way, we see that this may not quite be the case – that this woman, this excluded and queer member of a queer culture has a voice that needs to be heard – thus creating a parallel between the imagined Esty and the actual Deborah Feldman, whose voice was her writing.

When the class was discussing the masturbation paper, it became clear to us that the transition from masturbation – from Freud’s narcissistic love to the love of objects – from, in this case, the cloistered and smothering love of Esty’s husband, with her (and their child, when he discovers that) as a narcissistic object – one who would fulfill his purpose of repopulating the world with people like him, to the love of Esty for a world that includes her queer mother, who turns out to be more whole than she or we could have imagined – is a transition that involves both opening up – allowing others in – but also narrowing our focus, not, in fact being in love with everything that crosses our horizon, because this is too distracting.  We need to focus – as the musicians do – to create the kind of beauty that humans are capable of producing both in art but also in relationships.  Freud’s acknowledgement of the tragic constraints that are part and parcel of being a member of civilization hold true.  And, while we cheer the choices that Esty makes, we also recognize that they are, indeed, scandalous.  They break the bonds that allow us to do as we were intended to do – so that we can, we hope, better serve a higher purpose and, in Esty's case, connect, on a deeper level, with her Jewish heritage of breaking free - living with self defined rather than other defined constraints.

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