Psychology of Call My Agent, Dix Pour Cent, Psychoanalysis of Dix Pour Cent, Psychoanalysis of Bingeworthy TV, Psychoanalysis of Call My Agent, Psychology of Dix Pour Cent
The French are symbolic of all that is artsy, difficult, and
dense. In the world of psychoanalysis
they have contributed an analyst – Lacan – that sought to rehabilitate Freud
and, in the process of doing that, made psychoanalytic thought so complex that
it is baffling.
In Philosophy, Lacan’s comrade in arms Derrida confused us so
thoroughly that he propelled us from the Modern World that Freud invented to a
post Modern world where we no longer have an objective vantage point from which
to view or understand the world. There
is no keel or rudder in this world. We
are adrift.
And French film.
Wonderful stuff – but deeply meaningful – pretentious, even. It is the
stuff of art houses. Filled with meaning
and hinting at greater depth – angst laid bare.
Can we even manage to make sense of a corner of it – or it is above our
heads?
So French TV. Do they
even have TV? Do they stoop to put
things on the little box in people’s homes?
Aren’t they too busy reading poetry and making complicated interpretations of
it to spend time in front of the telly?
Well, if Call My Agent is any indication, not only do they
have TV, they have good TV. Smart and on
target, timely in an unexpected way and, perhaps even more important,
funny. They can laugh at
themselves… Who knew?
The four seasons of Call My Agent, in French with English
subtitles at six episodes per season, flew by in our late pandemic fueled binge
watching. Coming to a hit show late (as
we did with Schitt’s
Creek) can be a blessing because you don’t have to wait for a new season –
and remember who the characters are and what was hanging in the cliff hanger
for six months – or now, an entire year.
It’s just there to turn to for the next hour.
Though this series is funny – it is primarily a drama. Generally dramas have a character or
characters who are having a crisis. The
world around them is relatively stable, but their inner world – or the hero's relationship with another – is falling apart. Of course
when the hero is a national leader – a king or a queen – there can be national
implications, but the personal drives the social upheaval.
The heart of this series is the talent agency that is run by
the four principal characters. Mathias
is the top dog – the one who has the biggest stable of stars, the coolest head
and owns the most shares. Andrea is the
busiest, hardest working woman you have ever seen who is driven by a desire to
create great films. Gabriel is a nice
guy in an industry that is filled with sharks.
And Arlette is the only surviving member of the original Agence Samuel
Kerr (ASK), named after the founder who dies in the opening episode. His death hurtles that agency into four
seasons of turmoil where its very existence is constantly in question – and
political intrigue within its walls and between it and the world of other
agencies and the world of the private lives of the principle actors it represents threatens to tear
it apart in every episode.
What is at risk in this show is not just the lives of the
characters – which is always part of the drama of any show – but the very
fabric of the world that holds them together – and that is the genius of it. From a distance, adult life seems staid and
predictable. You go to work in the
morning, come home at night, and you take two or three weeks of vacation every
year and then you retire. Oh, you might
get a divorce, but you remarry. You might
get laid off, but you find a new job.
Some have opined that men watch sports and follow politics because this
is the only thing in their lives where the outcome is not predetermined.
Then there’s a pandemic. Or a
rogue candidate gets elected President, and suddenly the world does not
seem so stable. And we look around at
work, and it doesn’t seem so
systematic and under control. We are
suddenly exposing
ourselves to risk in order to do our job and we are being paid less for doing
that. And we begin to wonder whether
anything is stable. And this show
clarifies that none of it is. Not just
now, but ever. Adults have been
pretending, essentially forever, that the world is a stable place – and drama
has helped us with the illusion. This
drama proclaims that to have been a farce.
We are, in fact, at the mercy of ourselves and everyone around us at
every moment, and it all can come crashing down – with or without warning…
Mathias, who seems so confident and in charge and concerned
about the agency and the clients – he caters to them in caring and considerate
ways – tries to steal a client from Gabriel.
The client has been told that she is too old to star in a Tarantino film
and quits Gabriel in a huff. Mathias
manipulates her into trying plastic surgery to salvage her looks, knowing that
it will interfere with the essential beauty of her acting – the subtlety of her
emotional expression – but it will land the big American dollar contract (and
make her his client, not Gabriel’s).
Mathias pretends that his wife has had the surgery and tells the actress
where to get it. When she freaks out at
the surgeon’s office and runs out the door without the surgery, Gabriel is
waiting there to pick her up – to remind her that she does not need the surgery
– and to re-sign her as his client because he knows who she is and what she
really needs, which is not a big time contract from the Americans. Crisis averted. But now we know that Mathias is not to be
trusted (or we should know that – I, more naïve than not, continued to be
surprised by the characterization from the other agents that Mathias was a
cutthroat, just as I naively continue to assume that my co-workers are
primarily interested in the good of the institution – when some of them are
there primarily there out of self-interest).
Andrea’s entry is powerful.
She is a dynamo of activity all day long, driving her assistant to quit
from the pressure – so that she hires another woman on the spot – not realizing
that this is the bastard daughter of Mathias (sorry about that spoiler – there
will be fewer here than in most of my reviews, but it is important to realize
the incestuous/nepotistic quality of this work place – friendships, family, and
colleagueship are all in the stew in various ways for each character). Andrea works hard all day and then parties
hard at night, picking up women and then tossing them aside. As much as she likes sex, she likes her job
more, and her partners don’t like playing second fiddle to her work, but she is
able to replace them readily. Gabriel is
her close friend. As compassionate and
caring as he is about his clients, she is about her movies. These two are motivated by what is best, if
not for the agency, for something outside of themselves. Gabriel – rare in this industry – actually cares
for his clients. Andrea cares about the
quality of French Film. In this, she
would seem to be the most French of the characters, but if this is true, it is
modern, cutthroat French, not the old (and here I have my tongue very much in
my cheek) lovely, soft French who’s every act of living is a lovely esthetic
exercise.
Gabriel is a good guy, but this also means he is a bit of a
sucker – and he gets drawn into a relationship where he is in way over his head. His assistant, Herve, is poignant fellow who
helps manage the clients but also Gabriel.
And the assistants, Mathias’ assistant Noemie, Herve, and Andrea’s
assistant (and Mathias’s daughter) Camille exemplify what the agency is about
and in many way live its ideals more so than the partners. They truly believe in the work that is being
done, while the agents are all a bit more jaundiced about it. The functioning of the assistants then,
mirrors my experience of many of the support staff at the institutions that I
have worked with – they idealize the institution while knowing the failings of
the professional staff; they “live the mission” in terms of serving the
clientele of the institution, and while they are viscerally identified with the
institution, and make it run, they also have clearer boundaries between
themselves and the institution. On the
weekend, they are just Mom or Dad – they aren’t attending some business function
(though in this piece the assistants are all interested in becoming agents, so
their lives are as consumed by the agency as the lives of their bosses).
The final agent is Arlette.
Arlette is lovely character. She
is the only surviving member of the original agency. She was the other agent with Samuel Kerr when
it opened. Her clients are less high
profile – and she is less involved in the squabbles between the up and comers. She lends critical support to the other
agents when the situation at the agency is dire – especially in the fourth
season. She seems almost an afterthought
as a character, yet she (and her dog, who substitutes for not having an
assistant), serves an essential role of being able to take the long view and to
not be too stirred up by this crisis or that.
She is a woman who chose a career at a time when few women had that
freedom, and she is proud of the life she has led, even if she does have a few regrets. She also, I think, exemplifies
the old fashioned French esthetic – living life as it should be lived – sipping
the wine, finding it divine, and holding her secrets closely.
This show, like Schitt’s
Creek and unlike Seinfeld,
allows its characters to develop. Each
episode is focused on the escapades and foibles of one or two French Film Stars
(playing themselves) and in one episode, an American Film Star. This creates a sort of campy effect as we
deal with the whims or neuroses of this character or that. The issues of the treatment of women in the
industry are addressed, though not particularly forcefully. It is not really, I don’t think, about the
film industry, or even about agents and their role in the industry. It is more about life on the edge. The ways that individuals who are too busy
keeping their business from falling off a cliff to think about what the costs
of doing that are – to the business, but most importantly to themselves. There is a sense in this series – as in life
– that a great deal of our lives simply flows through our fingers and we don’t
quite have time to grasp it.
That said, there is something about the campy way that it is
presented. Despite the high production
value and the effort that goes into crafting both plot and character, there is
a quality of – let’s get everyone together and put on a show. Let’s hang up a curtain over a wire, bring in
the other kids, and see if they like it.
There is an immediacy to the acting that makes it seem realistic – these
are the people at my office, and occasionally they are doing the stupid, inane
things that I do – and simultaneously it feels staged; is as
if the actors are amateurs because surely trained professionals would not be as
clumsy as you and me?
The French Stars (and the one American - in the penultimate episode) amplify the campiness. First of all, they are not dolled up - including with plastic surgery. They are real. They have real gaps in their teeth. Their hair can be a mess. And they make fun of themselves. They amplify (or create?) their neuroses and exaggerate their narcissism (is that even possible for a movie star to do?).
The series, then, has felt both mildly unsettling (my dreams
have included more than a little franglais being used to explain some inexplicable
mess in my life) and oddly validating.
It is not because I am living in a flyover state that voted for Trump (what
were these people thinking?) that I feel like my life is being lived on the edge – life is lived on the edge, particularly by those of us who care enough
about what we are doing to invest ourselves – and therefore all of our
shortcomings, our egotistical stuff, and the unknown parts of ourselves – in
the work that we do. We are fighting
with each other over scraps. We care, to
varying degrees, about the institution, about ourselves, and about those we
work with and for (both our bosses and the people that we serve). And all of these things are constantly in a
fluid dance of priority – and often take up much more space in our days and in
our thoughts than do our families… As
Andrea points out, she will dash across town to get just the right shoe for one
of her clients to wear on an evening out, but she often doesn’t put the same
effort into getting home on time to be with her daughter.
Often at this point in a post I would talk about the plot of
the entire sequence as a means of illustrating this or that psychoanalytic
point. Here I would like to present the
series to you as an opportunity to experience what it is like to be an analyst. We don’t know, from moment to moment, what
will happen. We don’t know what will
emerge to upset the apple cart once things have just started to feel stable,
nor do we know what stabilizing force will emerge when we are just about
convinced that everything is going to fall apart. The roller coaster ride is the analytic
experience.
I have already compared aspects of this show to my own
life. My thesis is that you will find
this to resonate with yours. In the
spirit of that, I invite you to reflect on the madness that is in this series –
and to see how it parallels – or doesn’t – the madness that is part and parcel
of living the very modern (or postmodern) life that we are living (even when we aren't on COVID lockdown)…
Post Script: On reflecting after posting about this, there is one other thing that I would like to call your attention to. While all of the actors are reasonably attractive, they don't, with the possible exception of the man playing Mathias, have leading role movie star good looks. They look like, and are playing, character parts. Perhaps one of the differences between the French Dream - portrayed in their films and now TV - and the American Dream - portrayed in our Movies and TV - is that the French dream of themselves more as they are, while we dream of ourselves more as we would like to believe we are. Don't get me wrong, one of the French actors is lured by the possibility of playing in a Bond film - we all want to be ideal versions of ourselves - but we Americans may not quite have gotten over the fact that we can't always be that. Perhaps that is part of American exceptionalism. And perhaps that keeps us from seeing just how limited we - and the institutions we create and belong to - are. The French, after all, while sharing our love of liberty, have had to achieve it more recently, more bloodily, and don't have the geographical splendid isolation that we share with our British forbearers. I am making too much of a single movie, but I think that we see the imprint of the culture on the individual - and certainly also on the films and television that the culture produces.
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