Hulu Series The Great, Catherine the Great, Peter III, Russia, Bingeworthy fare, psychology and psychoanalysis of The Great.
The Hulu series The Great is a campy, anachronistic vision of the beginning of the end of the aristocracy in Europe told from the vantage point of Russia and the 18th century Tsar, Catherine The Great, but also from 21st Century views of diversity, equity and inclusion. More essentially, I viewed it, as I walked through the TV room while the reluctant wife was watching it, as a high budget soap opera carried along mostly by badly choreographed softcore porn.
Sadly, I became hooked…
but, then, it turned out to be more interesting and to have (some) more
depth than it initially appeared to. The
story is originally subtitled “An Occasionally True Story”, but by the end of
the second season it is more truthfully subtitled “An Almost Entirely Untrue
Story”. Catherine (Elle Fanning) is a naïve
ingénue bartered into marriage by her scheming mother (who has married off two
of Catherine’s sisters to kings and has the remaining one in the wings to marry
the king of France). Catherine, raised
to rule as a member of the German aristocracy is married to emperor Peter III (Nicholas Hoult), son of
Peter the Great.
Peter, to use Freudian vernacular, is pure id. Never having been constrained and now being
the head of a powerful but brutally primitive nation, he is who Trump imagined
himself to be: someone who can kill whomever he wants in broad daylight on
Fifth Avenue and get away with it. This
Fifth Avenue is, of course, the court of Russia and he is not killing random
citizens but members of the court and scheming to kill his new wife, who has
nothing but disdain and loathing for him.
Catherine is the ego to Peter’s id. She is educated and wants to bring this backwards Russian country into, well, the 21st century. She wants to curb and redirect the Russian
passion towards expressing love rather than simply naked aggression. She wants to replace superstition with reason
and enlightenment. She is also
consistently flabbergasted that Russia attaches itself so powerfully to its primitive
and backwards ways.
This morning I was reading an account of the brain as
understood by neuropsychoanalysts (Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing – Mark
Solms is the titular head of this band of intrepid scientists). One of the points they made is that we don’t
have a single brain – but multiple brains that have very different
purposes. We have an invertebrate brain
that becomes hungry, and then a vertebrate brain that knows how to move us from
here to there – clumsily at first, but then, as it learns how to navigate the
world, with more grace. The greatest
chasm is between our ancient feeling brain and the much more recently acquired
conceptual one; the latter can organize and anticipate and, for all intents and
purposes it manages the older more primitive one. All of these brains (and others) are kludged
together (I guess kludge
is one of those super technical neuropsychological terms). Antonio
Damasio tells us the disparate parts are “mediated” by the hypothalamus – I
guess calling fouls when one part of the brain oversteps the bounds of another
part – or doesn’t respect its position, but also integrating them, when we are
at our best, so that the parts function not as warring factions but as a
symphony of complimentary parts.
So this series kludges Catherine and Peter together. He is full of appetites – sexual, aggressive,
and gustatory. He loves truffles – both
hunting and eating them. He imagines
that he truffle hunted with his father – who would in fact begin the truffle
hunt, but abandon him to fornicate with whatever lovely had caught his eye that
day. This leaves Peter the son with a
hunger for a father figure and, in the age of gender bending, the very, very
feminine Catherine may be just the father figure Peter is looking for.
Peter, wanting to live up to the legacy of his father, is a
person who has always had great privilege but he also is, in fact, just a
spoiled little boy who is cruel and spiteful.
The courtiers who surround him love the power that they might wield as
he focuses on his rather narrow and petulant interests, leaving the running of
the country to them, but also by his embodying the unbridled passion of
Russia. They want to retain the status
quo, one that supports their debauched ways and allows them to live lives that
are unrestrained by concern for the citizens of the country – or for the plight
of women.
Catherine, on the other hand, is the embodiment of the enlightenment. She believes that reason, and love, will
conquer aggression and cruelty. Catherine
gathers an odd assortment of allies who are concerned about Peter’s inability
to lead. She convinces some of her group
that reason should be the wave of the future, though some go along with her to
get rid of the chaos of Peter’s reign.
Together she and her group depose Peter and, though still married to
him, she imprisons him in his quarters.
At one point, Peter prevents Catherine from killing him by
gifting her Voltaire as a courtier and she is all agog. Catherine begins a
school for girls and threatens to free both the serfs and women. When she impetuously frees the serfs in
reaction to her frustration at the pace of introducing real reform, chaos
ensues and she is ashamed of not having been better able to control her
passions. Ironic? You betcha…
While Catherine and Peter are presented as diametrically
opposed forces who are the embodiment of very different characters, they are
also both human – and are able to appreciate each other and, across time, to
recognize themselves in the other.
Church and state also force them to produce an heir and, when they do,
Peter’s maternal connection to his son belies who has been to this point. Meanwhile, Catherine’s rationality and
convivial approach to international relations becomes sorely tested and she
goes beyond being impetuous to becoming murderous.
Catherine takes on aspects of Peter, though she uses her
drives that mirror his to further the dictates of her goals and aspirations. She becomes, by the end of the second season
(when this post is written), a truly duplicitous and therefore effective ambassador. The vehicle for this transformation,
ironically, is her love for Peter. Meanwhile
Peter’s transition to being a loving father and admiring partner is his love
for Catherine, something that seems to occur almost in spite of himself. Of course, despite his attachment to her, he
cannot help being himself, which creates one of the critical tensions at the
end of the second season.
In so far as this series was nominally grounded in the
biography of Catherine the Great, this premise is strained as the writers,
producers, actors and directors pursue a timely and relevant commentary on…
what? I think this may be a sophisticated
commentary on our current political state – an international crisis of
transition from the modern aristocracy of the developed world’s middle class, a
privileged class that imagines itself to be moral (in the United States, to be Christian), while exploiting the resources and labor of those in less
privileged countries, to a new order that promises to be more equitable. Whether we will achieve this new state of
affairs is very much a question. While
we paint the plutocrats, in this rendering, as the devils making this state of
affairs continue, we are all complicit.
From this perspective, the series portrays the kludging together of the
old and the new social orders.
While I think the series works on the level of social
commentary, I think its appeal is more visceral. I think the kludging that I have outlined above
of the aspects of the self; the integrating of our disparate “brains” on both
the metaphoric level of Catherine and Peter representing the single entity of a
person at war with themselves, and on the level of the individual characters of
Catherine and Peter coming to terms with aspects of themselves that they had
worked to ignore, these kludgings ring true for us. We know what it means to struggle with
curbing our drives – while not even knowing that we are doing that. We also know what it means to have acted on
our drives without restraint.
The beauty of art – even this art which rather clumsily
appeals to our prurient interests (clumsily presumably because of safe guards
instituted to protect actors in scenes that imitate sexual interactions without
quite being those interactions – though I do wonder if the clumsiness is, at
times, an intentional commentary on that process of imposed restraint)- is that it is much more
interesting than reading a journal articulating the brain mechanisms that are
related to the action of this drama and the drama of our own lives. The interesting thing is that both represent
something essentially human, and therefore of interest to us. (More on this particular primal attraction in
other posts…).
