Diva – A French Film takes me back in time to 1981.

Psychoanalysis of Diva, Psychology of Diva, Diva Cinema Du Look 

The summer before I left home for college, I remember sitting in the locker room of the cafeteria where I worked after a long shift and trying to listen to my thoughts.  I was going to a college that promised to “teach students how to think” and I wanted to capture the experience of my mind before college to see if it would change after having had a college education.

I wasn’t successful at recording what my thought process was like.  In that moment, it seemed like there was a big empty space inside my head – not as if there were nothing there, but as if there was a potential space that could be filled with… I don’t know what.  I can still access that experience, but it really wasn’t what I wanted to register.  I wanted to register my mind in action – a much harder thing to do.  Writing is an approximation of that, and certainly I could compare my writing now with how I wrote then, and I could see a significant difference.  But what was I thinking?

Last night the reluctant wife indulged me and, through the wonders of streaming video, we watched the film that I dubbed “the best film ever” four years after that moment in the locker room.  I only vaguely recalled a few moments from it, but I sensed (especially since, though it was well reviewed, no one else that I know of ever put it on a best of all-time list) that my enjoyment of the film would have much more to do with the state of my psyche (not quite how I was thinking – but a good analogue) at the time that I was graduating from college.

Well, guilty as charged.  The film stands up pretty well to time.  It is still a thriller.  It is more violent than I remembered, and it is action and image rather than language based.  The linguistic component is primarily in the form of opera arias.  As I write this, I am aware that this probably describes my thinking – both before and after my college experience of reading my way through the great books.  I think that I was (and still largely am) a visual thinker – and someone who is action prone (not exactly the ideal psychoanalyst – yet another reason I am a little reluctant…).

But the movie taps into my psychic structure – especially at the time.  It is as if it were a direct copy of an undreamt but essential dream that described as much of my psychology as any dream could.  It is eerie to feel this closely connected to a director (Jean-Jacques Beineix) and his work.  Did he and I share the same family?  Is he my long lost twin who was invisible as I was growing up?

In the film, Jules (Frédéric Andréi) is a postal carrier.  He rides a motor scooter to deliver the mail.  He lives on the top floor of a garage behind swinging plastic doors.  He is a nobody.  But inside his apartment, which is filled with fantastic paintings on the walls, floors and ceilings, is a collection of music and the high tech stereo equipment to play it.  He is an opera aficionado.

In the first scene in the film, Jules is listening to, and surreptitiously recording a particular Diva’s public recital, Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelminia Wiggins Fernandez).  Behind him are two gangstery looking Asian men with really bad sunglasses on.  After the recital, he goes back stage to get his program signed, and steals the robe that she sang in.

Hawkins, despite being a world famous Diva, has never allowed her voice to be recorded.  In fact, she believes that if someone were to record her voice, especially against her will, this would be tantamount to rape. 

The recording of the Diva’s singing sets in motion one of two John Grisham-type plot devices that overlap.  In this device, an ordinary person (who usually has unknown incredible powers) falls into a web of mystery entirely innocently.  In this case, Jules, a true fan, is making the recording exclusively for his own use.  But the Taiwanese want the tape in order to blackmail Hawkins into signing a record contract. 

The second Grisham-like plot device also involves a tape.  In this case, a former prostitute in a drugs for prostitutes ring drops a cassette tape into Jules postal bag just before being murdered by the ring’s enforcers.  In addition to being a prostitute, she was the former lover of the ring leader, who just happens to be the chief of the homicide division of the Paris police.  In the tape, she implicates him and he is in charge of the investigation to find the tape.

Each of these incidents has an incredibly low likelihood of happening.  How did Jules get the machine to record into the concert and take it backstage afterwards without getting detected?  Why didn’t the Taiwanese guys record the concert themselves?  Why are the police chasing Jules as the same moment that the Taiwanese guys are?

And then it gets even more farfetched.  Jules sees a young Vietnamese woman, Alba (Thuy An Luu) steal a Jazz album at his favorite record shop.  He follows her to chat her up and find out about her techniques.  He thinks he is building the relationship with her and, when he asks her out on a date, assumes that he is in the lead.  In fact, she is “collecting” him for the man she lives with – a zen master Frenchman, Gorodish (Richard Bohringer) who lives with her in a cavernous loft that has a bathtub, a sleeping area, a kitchen area, and a great sound system – and enough floor space for her to roller skate on and for him to complete a 100,000 piece puzzle of a wave.

So, how did this film connect with my 21 or 22 year old psychic structure?  What can I see in it now that I didn’t see then?  First of all, I identified with Jules.  I, too, believed myself to have an untapped potential.  I believed myself to be an empathic and compassionate person who had deep interests – though they were not as narrowly defined as Jules’s.  I also naively believed that I could connect with women who had great talent, like Hawkins, and help them realize that in a way that they had not to this point.

I also admired Gorodish.  I wanted to be someone who was wise and a strategic thinker, but even more, I wanted someone who, like Gorodish, was a wise and strategic thinker on my side – a kind of guardian angel who would provide just enough savvy to grease the wheels so that my plans – and my goodness – could show itself and positively effect change in the world – without, by the way – and this is more than a little embarrassing – having to change myself; without, in a word, having to grow up.

I’m hoping that you can see that, despite the ways in which I am ill-suited to be an analyst, I am also keenly oriented towards such a profession, and this film helps articulate that these aspects of me, which I did not at the time appreciate as being uniquely mine (I really thought, at the time about the nature of being human; not about the natures of particular human beings), were in fact pushing me towards a profession like this one.  I resonated with this film because it presented a version of myself that I thought was attainable – and I didn’t pay attention to the complicated plot that was necessary to support such an identity.

This film is considered perhaps the best example of the “Cinema du Look”.  The director creates arresting visual images – the chase scenes are marvelous – the architecture is divine – and the dialogue is almost non-existent.  When Jules convinces Hawkins that he is her biggest fan, they spend an eternity together, but they don’t talk.  They simply exist together in a kind of weightless, tender, close but formal way that allows them to admire each other and their mutual love of opera.  They can just be together.  We can focus on the surface, and in doing that, sense the depths without plunging into them.

Gorodish knows the depths.  He, unlike Jules, is worldly wise and gets how people can be cruel because he is cruel.  But he is also a thinker.  In the only scene that I remembered, he is cutting onions for dinner.  And he is wearing a mask and snorkel.  Naturally.  He thinks things out and plans for them – and this means he doesn’t have to weep.  Jules, in our first meeting with him, as he listens to Hawkins sing, cries a tear.  We know that he can feel – and it is safe to do so because there is a masculine world that is protecting his ability to do that.

This film’s gender politics are very much frozen in the time.  Women are two dimensional objects – and even though there is some reference to this as problematic – the truth of the current state of affairs is all too visible all over the screen.  And so, of course, my 1981 objectification of women – intended as a veneration, but certainly something that RGB and others of that period would point out were shackles – is on display.

Happily I have worked on personal development.  There are certainly aspects of my 22 year old self that are still operative – I did, after all, follow the career path.  If my own analysis taught me nothing else, it clarified that I had more depth, and could put words to that depth, than my 22 year old self – that was focused on and concerned about “the Look” - could ever have imagined.  It also has helped me to look for that depth in others – though, to be fair, I was doing that then.

In the final scene in the film, Hawkins, who has never heard her own voice, is allowing Jules to play her singing for her.  Despite this being the one thing she did not want to have happen – as an artist and as a woman – the one thing we analysts would say she is most defended against – she is allowing Jules into this forbidden space.  Jules – and we – share with her the wonder of her hearing her own tremendous voice –the voice we have been admiring throughout the film – engulf them, together, in what has previously been Jules’s solo pleasure.  How did we get to be so lucky?

 

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Why Fish Don’t Exist: Lulu Miller’s journey to self-acceptance can be writ large.

 

Psychology of Lulu Miller's Why Fish Don’t Exist, Psychoanalysis of Why Fish Don't Exist, Depression and Recovery

 

A friend asked me to read this book mostly to fact check on the chapter that quotes psychologists and psychological studies.  I agreed to do that, and because it felt from the start like a lively book, I offered to read it aloud to the Reluctant Wife (she is also a psychologist) in part so she could weigh in on the psychological chapter, but also as a nice nesting activity (as if we needed more of those in the middle of the pandemic – though it is amazing how little we see of each other given that we are in the same house all day).

Long story short, we were not familiar with the psychologists or the studies that were cited.  The book’s author, an NPR science writer, Lulu Miller, acted as if this research were widely known and pivotal in the field.  If that’s the case, we’re not at the center of the field.  Entirely possible.  But, despite that, we were taken with the book, and, when I was talking this book up with a second friend who is an essayist and is writing a memoir/historical reference, which this is, he acknowledged that he had read it, but was quite critical of it.  “It doesn’t have complete sentences!  I had to include it as an example in my book proposal of something like what I am doing, but I was somewhat embarrassed to be doing that.  It isn’t well written.”

Yet, this book worked well for us, especially as we try to come to grips with a world that is increasingly fluid and as we are confronted with ideas that are novel and, at times, difficult to wholeheartedly embrace on many fronts.  Maybe because we were reading it out loud, we didn’t mind (and frankly didn’t notice) the syntax issues.  Given that Lulu writes for Radio, maybe this is a book that should be read aloud. 

The memoir part of this book focuses on a personal crisis – we might call it a midlife crisis – for Lulu.  She hits a depressive wall that seems insurmountable.  It is partly an existential wall.  A crisis of loss of meaning.  It involves the realization that all that you have believed is real and reliable in the world isn’t quite as stable and reliable as you had imagined it to be.  But the weird part is, what she has been told is not what she believed.  She was not told that you can rely on God, or family, or that the Cubs will never again win the pennant.  Her father told her the same thing that our first friend who recommended the book had been told by her own father.

Lulu’s father, a scientist, told her, when Lulu asked him at the age of seven what the meaning of life is, that the meaning of life is that there is no meaning.  And her father, a big guy, comfortable in the world, used this realization, much as Alexis Rose in Schitt’s Creek uses her knowledge that others don’t really see her, to more freely engage with the world.  His attitude was, nothing matters, so I am free to be whoever it is that I want to be. And he is, somehow, very comfortable with a world that is not predetermined and in which there are no givens – just a set of circumstances, randomly arrived at, that need to be navigated.

As freeing as her father experienced his realization to be – it had the opposite effect on Lulu.  She was made of different stuff than him.  Even or maybe especially at seven years of age, she wanted the things that she did to matter.  She wanted to live in a world where she could make her mark.  A world where she could be important.  A world where one's value could be determined by where you were relative to others.

As she grew older, it came to be that a particular aspect of that world that mattered is that she should be a person who was attractive to men.  When she, as a young adolescent, was judged to be unattractive – to not be at the top of the heap of attractive women – she felt (as many of us did) crushed.  And she bought into this evaluation that others had heaped on her – and she evaluated herself as being unworthy of others’ affection.

When, then, as a young woman, she fell in love with a “curly haired man”, he became someone she loved from a distance, pursued, and finally, much to her surprise and delight, captured.  The world was finally right.  He was just the kind of man she had always wanted to have a relationship with and, to her surprise, when she suggested that they have such a relationship, he was receptive.  She was now OK.  But then she screwed up.  She found herself attracted, in what seemed like a meaningless way, to a woman and she was, for one night, unfaithful to the curly haired man. 

Though in her mind this should have been forgivable, it was not.  The wonderful curly haired man was cut from the same cloth as she.  He apparently measured the world in terms of categories.  She was a woman who was reckless – he didn’t want to be with a reckless woman.  Not spoken, but perhaps thought: he didn’t want to be with a woman who was attracted to other women.  That would put her in another category.  I don’t know.

In any case, Lulu now found herself cast back into her feared space of being unattractive – at least to the curly haired man who now shunned her.  The attachment to the curly haired man had given her life meaning by putting her into a variety of spaces – being attractive, being connected and being able to rely on his support as an anchor point that helped her know that she was a chosen person – just as, ironically, her attachment to her father and all his goofy ways (that included the idea that none of us are chosen – we are all just randomly inhabiting spaces) had also given her a sense of being connected and living a life that had meaning.  But to return to her father’s ways and to accept her father’s conclusions about the meaning of life?  This would have felt like a self-betrayal.  She would become a chaos person – and this would mean that she was not chosen – that she was not at the top of somebody’s heap.  Instead it felt too close to feeling, as she did, that she was on the trash heap.

So, in a sort of compromise, Lulu began exploring the life of a scientist who was the antithesis of her father – an ichthyologist – a fish scientist.  She read a bit about him and his passion for organizing drew her to him.  He claimed to have identified fully one fifth of the species of fish known to man by the end of his life.  And even when his specimens were destroyed by the San Francisco earthquake (an earthquake that coincidentally destroyed my great-grandfather’s collection of North American bird’s eggs), his faith in his ability to organize and categorize was not shaken and he worked to fight against the chaos that Lulu’s father, relying on the second law of thermodynamics, assured her underlies the apparent order of the universe.

So, Lulu immersed herself in the world of David Starr Jordan, a person whom she hoped would be the anti-Dad.  A scientist like her father, but a person like herself who realized that the universe has order and, within that order, a hierarchy of meaning that organizes the world and clarifies who (and what) has value and who (and what) does not.  David Starr Jordan, the ichthyologist, the man who, when told by his puritanical parents to give up categorizing bugs, switched to categorizing flowers, the first president of Stanford University; a paragon of scientific credibility and determination; and a man who believed in a set order, became Lulu’s hero and obsessional focus of interest.  She would dig herself out of the hole she was in by using the spade that got her there to begin with.

And this was my second friend’s second criticism of the book.  Jordan was, in his mind, despite Miller’s attempts to pretend he was going to save her, flawed from the get go.  He could, he maintained, see the twist coming from a mile away.  OK.  I don’t deny that I could, too.  But I think my attitude toward it, like Lulu’s Dad’s attitude towards life being different from hers, was different from my friend’s.

I didn’t like David Starr Jordan from the get go.  Maybe I didn’t like David Starr Jordan because it’s just that I am, by nature, a messy guy.  Maybe I was jealous of his scientific and academic success.  Maybe I was envious of the home in Northern California that Stanford provided, and that he filled with plants and animals, easily moving from indoors to outdoors in that world with no winter. 

Unlike my second friend, I gave Lulu a pass on choosing a flawed hero because I wanted her to knock Jordan off that pedestal.  But I don’t think I was alone in that.  I think Lulu hired him to be the guy who could be knocked off the pedestal.  I think that I wanted what she did; to somehow find a way to come back into the orbit of her father – on her own terms, I hoped – not just because her father was a much more likeable guy than Jordan initially was and certainly than he turned out to be, but because we both know, to our dismay, that the world is entropic.  Indeed, part of the reason I am a reluctant psychoanalyst is because of the scientific, and therefore limit-based nature of the field.

And Lulu did have to knock someone or something off a pedestal in order to get better.  Freud’s description of mourning – which he likens to depression – which is what Lulu described herself as fighting – involves an interminable fight with an object (a representation of a person – or people – that have lodged themselves in our brain).  The fight is interminable because we can neither kill the person off (and be alone) nor can we rely on them, because they are no longer there.  So we get stuck in an endless battle that never seems to resolve.  If she had to cut someone loose to get free herself, I wanted it to be Starr.  But I think I knew she also would, in the process of doing this, loosen the tie both to her Dad and, weirdly, to herself.  But those ties would be loosened, not severed.  I was rooting for her to sever the tie with Jordan.

By the way, we are also of course talking about transference, that psychoanalytic concept that Freud observed where we discover in new people aspects that are reminiscent of people we have known before.  In this case, Lulu was hiring David Starr Jordan to stand in for the curly haired man – but more centrally for her seven year old self.  She wanted to emulate Jordan, to collect and organize and create a well-tended world, one where she was on top of it (including, perhaps, being the apple of her father’s eye) but this would mean that Jordan would, like the curly haired fellow, not have created a place for her as she actually was rather than as she wanted to imagine herself to be – and she, oddly, would also not be able to keep that place for herself.

OK, that was a bit heady, but the essential idea is that we have to get over ourselves.  But we absolutely do not want to do that – because we fear that this means that order that has supported and sustained us will disappear beneath our feet.  We will be lost without the organizing structures that school, and scouts, and our (not quite so scientifically oriented) parents have provided us with – and perhaps, Lulu argues, with the parts of our brain that are built to organize the world.  We create a sense of order where we have a necessary and important niche to occupy.

And this is perhaps the most useful part of this book – something that I think I (and we) have to learn over and over again.  To move forward, to learn something new, we have to unlearn what we already know.  We have, as a species, been working on this idea for a long time – I think the Platonic dialogue Meno includes this as a central theme – to be a good student, to be a virtuous person, to be someone of excellence, we have to recognized that what we know – what has held us in good stead – what we have relied on to get us from point A to point B – has been serviceable, but we need to get it that it is not the most effective means of transportation.

When we are seven, and our mode of transportation is the only one we have access to, being told that we should shed that vehicle is too scary for us to do.  How will we get from here to there without this particular boat?  But when we are thirty, things shift.  We begin to appreciate that there are multiple craft that will get us across the river – and that we might want to trade rowing for sail, especially when the wind is at our backs.

What Lulu learns is that being rigidly attached to categorizing leads to all kinds of hell.  Is it any accident that David Starr Jordan, the king of categories, let’s things slide when one of his buddies doesn’t follow the rules?  Does is make sense that he bullies those who would call him on it – threatening to point out that they are gay and ruining their careers?  Is it a surprise that word leaks back and Leland Stanford’s wife prepares to take David out of his job?  And does it surprise us that he responds by (perhaps) murdering her? 

(What?  Did I just say that the wife of the founder of one of our great institutions of learning – the Harvard of the west – was murdered?  By its first president?  Did I not warn that this was a spoiler alert?  Did I just drive us off a cliff?  Was this, though, the cliff – the details of which we couldn’t make out – but the outline was there – that both my second friend and I saw coming?  By the time it arrives, isn’t it a forgone conclusion?  Hasn’t Lulu already spoiled it?)

So dethroning David Starr Jordan is just the beginning (Oh, he is much worse than just a murderer.  There are other abominations that he is involved in that I won’t spoil for you with the particulars.  But they can all be traced to his incessant need to categorize and organize so that he ends up being at the pinnacle of every org chart).  And it is not really David who is being dethroned.  In the vernacular of the analyst, he is the transference figure and the anger that is directed towards him is displaced from the real person she is directing it towards.  And certainly it is the curly haired man she is angry at.  Or is it?  Perhaps he, too, is a displacement of her own categorizing wish – and the person that she needs to dethrone is none other than herself and her own judging ways with herself.  And that she is able to do this is, I think, the genius of this little text.

It is one thing to dethrone Jordan. We can say bad things about him and whoever else it is that does unethical and immoral things and we can disown him as one of those people.  It is quite another to recognize that he is, in fact, a mirror – a reflection of our own wishes, desires and nefarious capabilities.  We are not guilty of the sins of our ancestors because we have inherited their wealth, but we are guilty because we think and act like they do – and we don’t even know it.  The beauty of  Plato’s Meno is that we have to be stung – we have to be paralyzed – we have to realize that our way of functioning is problematic.

The beauty and the strength of this book is that Lulu is able to make that transformation not because someone makes her do it.  And she doesn’t make it completely.  The chance that she will not just metaphorically but literally kill herself continues to haunt her.  Maybe just shedding her earlier version of herself is not enough.  Maybe that earlier version is still alive and hostile enough towards her to judge her as guilty of having committed a capital offense.  She asks herself, then, if she has done something that is a crime against nature.

So it is reassuring for her to discover that the category of fish does not exist.  It turns out – much to her (and my) surprise, that biologists recognize that scaly things that swim is not a legitimate category.  That lungfish (there it is, right in the name) are more closely related to elephants than to tuna.  Go figure.  Nature does not appear to agree with what to us are very apparent categories.  The surface structure of things is not the same as the underlying order - and order that needs to be discovered through hard and careful work in a world that is constantly shifting and changing.

And this gives her some of the measure of the freedom that her father enjoyed to re-categorize herself.  She does not have to be the best or the brightest to be loved – and, somewhat paradoxically, to have value.  She actually doesn’t, in very fundamental and important ways, end up changing herself or her nature.  She simply seems to – as occurs in the most successful analyses – more fully inhabit herself.

So my reluctant wife is intending to use this book to help people who are struggling with issues of diversity equity and inclusion – especially members of the dominant culture.  She believes that this is a model of acceptance of disowned aspects of ourselves that will lead to acceptance of others.  If we recognize that we are all queer – if we recognize that we are all, in fact, prejudiced (for instance) and that we rely on prejudice to keep us afloat – but that it is an artificial buoy we are holding onto – this book may help us let go of that and lead more joyful lives.

That is the hope, anyway.

We let the first friend know that the psychological research cited in the book was not known to us.  We have not yet had a chance to talk with her about the book.  We will finally be able to get together without masks on soon and we are looking forward to being able to discover the ways in which she has both been challenged by and enjoyed the freedom that goes along with being raised in a family where the parameters of the universe were open to interpretation...

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Shtisel: Synchronous Anachronicity Brings Our Own Times into Focus.

 Psychoanalysis of Shtisel.  Ultraorthodoxy, Misogyny and Xenophobia.  Institutional Mysogeny.  Multiculturalism  

My ex-graduate school roommate, who is Jewish, recently insisted that I watch Shtisel.  The Reluctant Wife and I got started on this Netflix series, but, frankly, it was like watching paint dry.  Very slow drying paint.  I complained to my roommate about this and he insisted again.  It will get better, he reassured us.  Gamely the Reluctant Wife and I plodded on. 

At this point you should know that not only is my ex-roommate Jewish, so is my wife.  I was raised in the Episcopal Church.  My wife belongs to a Humanistic Jewish Synagogue.  The stained glass windows there are of the Big Bang.  The values and precepts resonate deeply with my own.  But the traditions – the shared sense of history – is quite foreign to me. 

I am, as much as I might hate at certain times to admit it, as WASPY a male as they come.  When I was a child, Bagels were called an “ethnic” food in my home.  Though my mother spent a considerable part of her growing up period in a predominantly Jewish suburb of Chicago, her social connections, and those of my father, were much more stongly their church than is the case in my generation. 

Shtisel is about an Ultraorthodox Jewish family in Jerusalem.  It includes the actress who played the primary protagonist from the Netflix series Unorthodox, but this time, instead of running away focusing on someone running away from the culture, these characters are staying very much inside the community.  Sometime while we were watching, the third and final season of the series dropped, and we were relieved to be able to see these characters, who did indeed grow on us (a lot) as the ex-roommate predicted, were nicely able to wrap things up.  

I grew up in a world that was not just racially segregated, but one that was ethnically and religiously segregated as well.  So, as a goy watching this series, I was very aware of the foreignness of what was being portrayed.  The two central characters, Shulem Shtisel (Dov Glickman), the rabbi and patriarch of the family, and his youngest and apparently most inept son Akiva Shtisel (Michael Aloni) live together in an apartment.  Shulem’s wife, Akiva’s mother, has died, though her ghost shows up now and then to keep things interesting.  Akiva is inept because he can neither hold a job nor can he land a wife. 

We watch Akiva engage in the painful courting ritual of the Ultraorthodox: getting a recommendation from a matchmaker, meeting in a hotel lobby, having stilted, awkward conversations, and then the conversations between the parents about whether the matchmaking process would move forward.

Akiva starts teaching at the school where his father is the headmaster.  This school is a full time Hebrew school – meaning that the curriculum revolves around religious teaching and includes other issues at best peripherally.  It becomes apparent that the functioning of the school and the community in general is focused on maintaining a rigid and “originalist” interpretation of the Bible and the traditional practice of Judaism.

Central to this practice is the role of the father as the head of the household and the final authority within the family.  We are witness, in this show, to an anachronism – but one that operates in the opposite direction of most anachronisms.  Instead of seeing modern words in an older setting, we are seeing ancient traditions being followed in a modern one.  We are travelling in time to a time not so long ago when women’s rights were not just limited but essentially non-existent.  Culture revolved around men and their practice of religious life and, to a lesser extent, the life of commerce, and women’s roles were subsidiary to and supportive of that.

Not surprisingly, then, when there is no one to restrain an authority figure, that figure becomes despotic.  Shulem being a widower heightens the isolation of the head of the family.  Despite Akiva’s clear veneration of his father and his wish to live up to his father’s demands, he can do no right and his father is openly demeaning of him – though also clearly fond of him.  

Meanwhile, Akiva, as such things must, becomes taken with a woman, Elisheva Rotstein (Ayelet Zurer), the mother of one of his students – and a woman who has been twice widowed.  In Shulem’s mind there could be no worse match for Akiva.  Not only does she not enter through the approved portal of the matchmaker, but she already has a child, she has been married twice and she works for a living!  Mein Gott in Himmel (Yiddish – a language many of these folks speak in addition to Hebrew - for My God in Heaven).  To complicate matters for Akiva, it wasn’t clear how attached to him she was to him (and her two ex-husbands, who liked to sit at the breakfast table and talk with her when they weren’t off somewhere in the afterlife, weren’t so sure she should marry again).

It was about here that a strange thing happened.  These people, so foreign and moribund to begin with, began to feel familiar and very much alive.  Shulem became both formidable, but also, weirdly, a person that I could empathize with.  He was trying to hold something together in a world that was hostile to it.  The stasis of the beginning of the series seemed less like a sign of an inherently uninteresting story but rather an introduction to a world where, on the surface, it looks like nothing ever changes.  What could be more boring?  But it turns out that, to maintain stasis requires a ton of energy.  You must be vigilant and crafty and politically and socially and psychologically adept.  And you have to wield your power, because you are, after all, also an old, uncertain, and, at least in brilliant moments of teaching, compassionate man, with grace and caring.  But inevitably your caring, driven by the anxiety that someone you love will do something that is embarrassing, or worse, comes out more sharply than you intend it – as criticism. You, as the head of the family, frequently feel more like a bull in a china shop than the caring person you would like to be, but you are caught because if you let up for an instant, who knows what fool thing will occur.

Just as I was learning to empathize with Shulem, Akiva grew from being an awkward and remote barnacle stuck to his father’s ship into a sweet, endearing, and sincere young man who was sensitively engaged with the kids he was teaching (though also needing help from his father about how to manage his authority) and someone who could see what he wanted and pursue it.  Elisheva, radiant and haunting, became a person of interest.  Clearly a doting mother, she was also a sensitive person – someone that it made sense for Akiva to gravitate towards.

Also, at this point, the second main plot emerged.  Shulem’s married daughter Giti Weiss  (Neta Riskin) is left by her husband, Lippe Weiss (Zohar Strauss).  Because he was working abroad at the time, no one in the community knew that he had taken up with a shiksa (a goyish woman) in another country, and Giti works to create the charade that he is still involved in the family, living overseas and sending money home.  Meanwhile she figures out how to go into a shady business as a means of maintaining the family integrity in his absence.

Another funny thing happened.  In those scenes where the characters interact outside the community - with modern Israel - I felt overwhelmed by the speed and the shiny colors and the noise of this garish world - the world that I live in!  It felt like the moments in a period piece movie like Tess of the Durbervilles where Tess walks out of a scene and into the production area of the movie and we are jolted into the future.  I want to return to the place that is depicted - a place that now feels (oddly) familiar - and comfortable and safe.

So now we have been presented with two families that are hemmed in by the rules and dictates of a social order that is apparently set in concrete, but in fact is lived in the context of both a larger world that is unpredictable and fluid, but even within this sanctuary we are dealing with humans and all of their vicissitudes.  We painfully follow Giti’s pulling the wool over everybody’s eyes in order to maintain the integrity of her family, not even being able to talk to her father about it.  The only person she can confide in is her daughter, Rucahmi (Shira Haas - who plays the protagonist in Unorthodox).  This, of course, complicates their relationship.  While Rucahmi shares the secret, she also is harshly critical of her mother.  We feel for Giti in her isolation, but also for Rucahmi in hers.  When Lippe comes back into orbit, the issues – and the power dynamics within the relationships that form this triangle – become more and more complex.

Simultaneously we see, as Ruth Bader Ginsberg helped the Supreme Court Justices see, that a society that represses women also represses men.  Shulem’s isolation and pain are evident.  Akiva’s difficulties with articulating who it is that he will become escalate in difficulty as the seasons progress.  Indeed, not to spoil things, but we even see that mental illness as something that is shameful interferes with the well-being of the community.  And I, despite having lived with a Jewish roommate, dated two Jewish women, and married one of them, am able to experience, across these three seasons, an attachment grow not just to the characters, but to their crazy traditions and rituals.  These seemingly bizarre aspects of their lives become familiar, comfortable and what was once alien and off-putting becomes a sticky piece of the complex attachment that I feel to these characters.

I don’t think that this process would have taken place if the three seasons of drama could somehow be condensed into a single movie.  The power of the new on demand and well-funded productions like these – especially those that originate in foreign countries like Call My Agent and Shtisel – is that they can allow for more than the development of a single strand of a character – they can flesh out the complications of characters interacting across time – not just in moments of crisis (even though the crises drive the later, more dramatic appeal of this series).  Shakespeare clearly strained at the constraints of only having two hours of time - not just with Hamlet, which can play at 4 hours when uncut, but in his historical plays that follow families across time.

And the power of the on demand dramas is that they, like movies, are asynchronous.  We can talk with our friends about the show – and, instead of our friends having to join the show mid-season and try to figure out who the characters are, they can start at the beginning, like going to a movie theater, and see the whole thing.  And because the serialized dramas can count on an audience to have watched every episode up to the present one, they don’t have to have each episode be self-contained, bringing the pieces together in the way that a sitcom does.  Instead they can have cliffhangers, as novels do at the end of each chapter to keep us reading/watching.  But more importantly, they can have loose ends that lie around for episodes at a time before being tied up, just the way that things are in life.

An added bonus is that these series are being produced in and by the countries that are represented.  It is clear when the series within the series portrays the difficulties in getting the ultraorthodox to act that the actors are portraying a culture that they don’t belong to.  But it is one they live next door to and share a very long tradition with.  It is a variant on their culture, if you will.  And even if those who are writing about and portraying this culture are not from it, they have essentially been assimilated into it.

And this is the case with the Jews that I have known (and married).  But here they have been assimilated into “my” culture – and me into at least aspects of theirs (Mein Gott in Himmel is a saying I picked up in New York when I lived there for a year, long before meeting my roommate or wife).  One of the things that drew me to my wife was the similarity in our families of origin.  Both of our fathers spent the middle parts of their careers as corporate salesmen working in technical fields.  Both of them tired of the corporate rat race and went into business for themselves – something that was difficult for each of them.  Both my wife and I were scholarship kids in college in part because our father’s businesses did anything but boom coming out of the blocks.

So I think that we connected over our similarities.  I don’t think this is unusual.  The longer we have known each other, the more we have discovered our differences.  I think, in this sense, all marriages are cross cultural.  Even if you grew up next door to your future spouse, at some point you are going to discover that your family had the toilet paper roll fall to the front and hers had it fall to the back…  The differences emerge.  When those differences are signs of a wider cultural difference, there is a little extra oomph to that difference.

In this film, working from the difference to the similarity – reversing the process of my courtship of the Reluctant Wife - led to an appreciation of, for lack of a better phrase, our shared humanity as I began to connect with Akiva and with Shulem.  This was a very good thing from the perspective of using the foreign as a means of connection – or a way through to seeing connection.  It is much easier, even in a marriage, to use the foreign as a means to disconnect.  Starting with the disconnection helps in appreciating the other.

Will watching Shtisel help me understand the misogyny and the radically conservative politics of the ultra-orthodox?  I think it can help me connect with ultra-orthodox folks as people, rather than as misogynists and tribalists.  I think it can help me better understand the costs of institutional misogyny and xenophobia.  Being able to connect as people and to wonder with them about the benefits and costs of both of these simultaneously is more likely to help us bridge the gap than simply being put off by those who are so different.

 

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COVID Chronicles XVII: Surviving COVID and Lack of Leadership.

 

COVID on Campus, Post COVID Morale, College Finances and COVID decision making, COVID and the liberal arts, COVID and Education, a psychoanalytic perspective.

I Survived!  I turned in my grades yesterday and the (first?) year of COVID is over.  After better than a year of teaching first from isolation and then in a classroom of masked students who migrated to the zoom screen that was also in the room, I survived without (I don’t think) having gotten infected (one of my peers did return from China with a severe cold that I caught shortly before the shutdown.  I was absolutely drained of energy for four or five days.  Was it COVID?  Who knows…).  I am now vaccinated and preparing to teach a summer class.

I was anxious about being in the classroom.  Earlier, I wrote, snidely, about the Catholic Educators stance that we should empathize with the Catholic administrators who would be sending their teachers to their deaths in the classroom and would be feeling guilty about that in a year.  We didn’t die.  Or at least I didn’t.  And there is a tendency, then, to doubt that my anxiety was real.  See, the thing you feared didn’t occur so the feeling that you had that it would wasn’t a fear of an actual thing, so your anxiety wasn’t valid.  That’s the crazy making aftermath (to this point… We ain’t out of the woods yet).

And yet my anxiety was valid.  It was risky to be in the classroom.  And it was risky to invite students from all over the country to come to campus and live together in close quarters and to come to class which I was mandated to teach in person – though the students ultimately were able to choose whether or not to come to class.

How did we get to that point?  The Jesuits whose order is responsible for our school have a number of watchwords to describe their educational mission.  Cura Personalis is a cornerstone of the approach.  This translates from the Latin into care for the person, and the personal touch is something that we are encouraged to engage in with all of our students.  We should see them as individuals and care for their needs.

A less well publicized aspect of the Jesuit mission is Cura Apostolica: care for the institution.  Last summer these two values – care for the individual students (and faculty and staff members) was in conflict with the care for the institution.  We rely on income from room and board to meet our operating expenses – not just paying the mortgage on the dorms and buying the food we serve in the cafeteria, but the “profit” from this helps to pay teachers’ salaries.  This situation arose because we have steeply discounted our very high price tag tuition – by offering scholarships that allow us to compete with other schools.

To save the institution, the leadership of the institution decided to bring all students onto campus to live and learn together.  Having made this financial decision, the President and his executive committee tasked the middle managers of the institution with making the experience safe for students, faculty and staff.

Our President is ending his tenure this year.  He has been President for twenty years.  Like all leaders, he has strengths that prepare him for his task and he has liabilities that he brings to it.  He was a highly sought after teacher when he was a member of the faculty, something that he did for years before he became President.  This means that he has retained a sense of what it means to educate a student, not just run a University.  He is a Jesuit Priest, so he knows the order and is connected to it.  Not only that, but as a Jesuit, he does not answer to the local bishop, but to the order, and so he was able to assert some autonomy from dictates that the Church might impose on the University.  He is also a very charismatic speaker, something that he retained from his days as a teacher.  He has a rhythm and a cadence to his speech that is directly related to the functioning of his mind, and you can literally hear him (apparently confidently) thinking as he speaks.

But he is also an uncertain man who has been charged with caring for a very large institution.  He is a history professor who is not so certain about how to make his way around a balance sheet.  He is, despite his seeming confidence, quite anxious about the responsibility he has been entrusted with.  And this translates into his blowing in the wind.  Agreeing with whomever is in the room with him at the moment, but when that room changes, so does he.  And in this crisis, he decided to manage his anxiety about running the institution by erring on the side of fiscal conservation – valuing Cura Apostolica over Cura Personalis.

Fortunately, when he tasked the “middle managers” – the Deans and Associate Deans and the Building and Grounds managers and the Directors of the Health and Wellness offices on campus – with keeping us safe, they rose to the occasion.  They procured the needed equipment to be able to broadcast from classrooms so that we could teach virtually and in person simultaneously, so that the number of people in a room would not exceed CDC guidelines.  They made sure that there was a mask policy on campus that was enforced – not with penalties, but with cultural pressure.  And they set up a reporting system of sorts to track those who became ill and those who had been exposed to those who were ill.

So not only did I survive, but, for the most part, at least as far as I know, we survived.  We were all given a pay cut.  We wore masks and, when we met individually with students, we met by zoom.  We kept the reported levels of illness down despite the high numbers in the community around us. 

The President ordered staff who could work from home onto campus to do their jobs to enhance the esprit de corps – something that made no sense to me.  Endangering people’s lives does not increase their motivation to work.  The Provost, a woman who has not been in a classroom in a very long time, derided us as incompetent teachers for complaining about the complications involved in teaching to a classroom that was split between in person and online – all while wearing a mask.

Was this the best move for the institution?  Fiscally, yes.  Towards the end of both semesters this year it was apparent that students were fried.  Faculty morale is very hard to judge.  There are very few opportunities to congregate – and virtual congregation does not lead to the kind of private discussions that allow us to read each other’s experiences.  The students have been isolated.  Classrooms that have served as connecting points – places where people would talk before and after class and gather in the parking lot to continue a discussion – have two or maybe three students in them – the rest on zoom with the majority having their cameras off. 

I don’t have a good read on how students experienced dorm and apartment living this year.  My guess is that it was strained and odd.  We had a graduation gathering yesterday to celebrate our graduate students’ achievements.  It was by zoom.  You’d think that would mean that all of the students could attend, but we actually had fewer there than when we have an in person event and especially our Doctoral graduates have had to fly back from other parts of the country.

We will have a new president starting in July.  The first woman and first non-Jesuit president of our University, she will be assuming the reins of an institution that will need to rebuild its culture.  She comes from having been a president at an institution that was struggling financially.  She slashed and burned there – firing employees, selling off artwork, and reducing the tuition to attract more students.  She also dismantled the liberal arts core that has been at the center of the teaching at our University and Jesuit Institutions generally.  Essentially, she repackaged her former institution as a vocationally focused institution rather than one of higher learning.  Our board, in hiring her, seems intent on continuing a movement away from the liberal arts based curriculum that has been our hallmark for close to 200 years.  Could she do that here?  Do we have the cultural will to prevent her from doing that?  Especially in the wake of a year of disconnection and undermining our motivation in a variety of ways, I think we are vulnerable to a leader who could, if she chooses, whip us into submission.

So, one of the questions that the pandemic poses is what impact does social isolation and chronic anxiety have on a culture.  Nationally, I hear Joe Biden saying to parking lots full of cars that are honking horns that he is excited about the opportunities that present themselves at this moment.  It is hard for me to see him as a vibrant man comfortably radiating the enthusiasm that he maintains he is projecting.  I am more likely to see a tired man in front of a tired nation proposing an agenda that I’m not sure we are emotionally prepared to buy into, and I fear that if his enthusiasm is not met, naysayers – those who would simply dismantle what has served us so well for so long – will get the upper hand again.  So I want to weakly cheer Joe on – but is my heart in it?  Are others?

If the faculty decides to fight for what at least some of us value, will we have the vigor to pursue that fight?  At least Joe Biden – for another 3 and ½ years – controls the levers of power (though some of those levers may slip from his hands in a year and a half).  Locally, we may be confronting a president who more effectively controls the levers of power (she will answer only to a board that is largely made up of successful business people who have been big donors and have more interest in the bottom line than in the education of our students).  Can we make a case for what we believe in?

I suppose I feel this both as a psychoanalyst in a culture that wants quick fixes, as a faculty member in a department of psychology that is, like virtually all departments of psychology, convinced that a science of humanity is more dependent on numbers than empathic connection, and as a citizen who is concerned that we are shortsightedly amassing wealth while destroying the planet.  I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson, and the idea that “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”  Finding those shared truths involves much more convincing and energy and verve than self-evidence would suggest – of course for his group it meant going to war.  Will we do that to achieve our ends?

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.