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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