Hamnet: Maggie O’Farrell’s Novel of Shakespeare's Female Sensibilities

 Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell, Hamlet, Shakespeare, Femininity

Maggie O’Farrell’s novel Hamnet focuses on the process of grieving.  She does this by imagining Hamnet as a twin – both of his sister, but also, I propose, of his father.  O’Farrell most completely imagines the grief of Hamnet, though, through the eyes of his mother, Agnes.  Agnes does not overtly, I don’t think, imagine him to be her twin, but mostly to be her child.

Hamnet is, of course, a version of the name Hamlet, and O’Farrell is writing about Shakespeare of Stratford's son, a child named Hamnet who she imagines to be the model for his Hamlet (That said, O’Farrell never calls Shakespeare by name.  To treat Shakespeare as a character in one of her novels felt profane to her.  I will refer to him by that name to avoid confusion but also to articulate the ways that the absent Shakespeare deeply affects the arc of the novel).  O’Farrell imagines Hamnet to have been felled (mild spoiler alert) by the plague.  She imagines this because Shakespeare, apparently, never once mentions the plague in any of his plays – which just doesn’t make sense. 

The plague was rampant not just in England but throughout Europe.  It was the hallmark of the Renaissance; a symptom of the improved trade routes that the Renaissance afforded, and (from a very current perspective) perhaps nature’s way of trying to limit the expansion of the European version of humankind that would, one day, so perilously endanger her.  Be that as it may, I do wonder about how the plague and its concomitant losses may have strangely fueled the artistic blossoming of the Renaissance, and that is part and parcel of O’Farrell musings about this boy.     

I don’t think Shakespeare came from Stratford: I am an Oxfordian.  But I do think that the idea that Shakespeare came from a small town has spawned a great deal of very interesting thinking about him and about creativity.  Maggie O’Farrell’s vision is less of Shakespeare and more of Anne Hathaway (whom she considers by the name Agnes – for there is some evidence that was the name of the name of the woman married to the man whom some take to be Shakespeare).  This book turns out to be incidentally, but crucially about Shakespeare while it is primarily about Agnes and the ways of women.

Agnes is, in O’Farrell’s imagining, a witch.  She is a seer.   When she first meets the boy Shakespeare, who is the loser son of a shady glove maker in a small town coming to her family’s house in the country to tutor her brothers in Latin, she takes his hand in hers, as she does with many people, and reads, by pressing between thumb and first finger, him.  She discovers within him vast vistas; distant horizons, and she seduces him, becomes pregnant, marries him, and they ultimately have three children; an elder daughter and then twins – a boy and a girl.  Having three children confuses her because she sees herself in the future with only two children.

Agnes is an herbalist.  She grows her own herbs and harvests wild ones.  She dries them and makes tinctures with them (something that is still practiced by women: see the book Educated).  She then dispenses them to the people in the town, to the consternation of the physicians, whose competence at neither treatment nor comfort is as great as hers.  She does not accept payment for her cures and treatments, but instead appreciates gifts that come from the labors of those she serves.

In this she is different from her Shakespeare and from her oldest daughter Susanna.  The two of them are shrewd business people with heads for figures.  They amass broad holdings that Agnes inhabits but doesn’t value.  Agnes, like the younger twin, Judith, is, in these matters of the world, simple.

Just as in a Shakespearean play (we saw this in Midsummer Night’s Dream just last night), there is both a symmetrical relationship between the characters and then something that throws that off.  Here, Shakespeare and Susanna are “twins” (alike in their having urban and urbane sensibilities) and Agnes and Judith are “twins” (alike in being creatures of the earth – organically rather than transactionally attuned to others).  The twins at the heart of the story – Hamnet and Judith - are deeply organically entwined with each other, but Hamnet is deeply grieved by both Agnes and Shakespeare.  Oddly, Agnes accuses herself of having been out of touch with Hamnet when he needed her most (against her character) and Shakespeare, too, imagined and feared that Judith, not Hamnet, would be lost.  Agnes imagines that Shakespeare does not feel the loss of his son, but ultimately they are, of course, united by their grief.

The death of a child is unimaginable.  When my son was born, I could not watch TV for a year.  The death of a character (which happens more frequently than I ever knew) was the death of somebody’s child.  When asked at Julliard to write about what terrified him, the author of Rabbit Hole said, “I got nothing.”  And then his child was born. 

O’Farrell has had to live with the reality of her one her three children being consistently on the verge of death.  When O’Farrell was taught that the death of Hamnet was not a significant event for Shakespeare, she recoiled from this idea.  She reimagines Shakespeare as being; yes, a creature of the theater and of London, and therefore urbane, but also as someone who is tied to the earth, as someone who is resonant with flowers and winds and water, and she imagined his domestic life – and his marriage to Agnes – as the conduit for this.  And out of this imagining she conjured what became, for me, a spellbinding tale.

Freud noted the importance of doubling to the sense of the uncanny.  He was describing what causes us shivers when we hear ghost stories, but also when we recognize something as true.  We feel something Heimlich (Homelike or canny), something familiar, in something novel.  This might be a version of the link that Aristotle was pointing to when talking about tragedy – we connect with the hero and feel a sense of catharsis because of an identification with them.  For Freud, the sense of identification and the sense of canniness are both linked with a sense of a double – a person in the present who is very much like a person in the past.

Kohut, a psychoanalytic thinker whose writings in the 1970s and 80s opened entirely new ways of thinking about people and analysis, noted what he called a twin transference.  I am imagining the twin transference, in this moment, as a doubling, as it were, of the self.  Seeing in someone else not a version of a familiar other, but seeing in them a version of ourselves.  There is an uncanny sense that I am not alone (the way that I generally feel), but that I am connected with someone who gets me not because they have some kind of concept of me, but because they are shaped like me.  They get me because they are living within a bone structure that is the same as my own.         

O’Farrell’s really good story telling becomes movingly, powerfully excellent when Hamnet offers himself to Death, who is walking around the room as Judith is dying of the plague.  He trades himself for her.  As he and Judith are lying, entangled in her sheets as she is fighting with the plague, “He feels again the sensation he has had all his life: that she is the other side of him, that they fit together, him and her, like two halves of a walnut.”  Perhaps those of us who are not twins imagine this connection more powerfully than those who have lived as twins and sense the yawning differences between each other as well as the similarities – and I have no evidence that O’Farrell herself is a twin – so perhaps this is the wish, the hoped-for twin transference rather than the thing itself, but it is a convincing rendition of the sense of not being alone that the yearning for another or the feeling of connection with them can bring.

And I think this is an important part of the intense love that is part and parcel of becoming a parent.  There is the sense of this other creature – a creature that is dependent on me in a way that no other creature ever has been; a creature that is deeply connected to me – and yet is an autonomous being – and there is a sense of caring for this creature in a way that is unlike any caring that we have experienced before.  We would, as Hamnet does for Judith, offer ourselves up to death so that this creature could go on living.  When God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, there is no greater sacrifice that can be asked – and part of the power of the Christian narrative is God’s sacrifice, in turn, of his only son.

In O’Farrell’s imagination, this loss is so great that it drives Shakespeare away, he cannot bear to be in the presence of the reminders of his lost son, but Agnes is therefore left to suffer her grief alone – losing her connection to Shakespeare in the process.  She then imagines him as unaffected, and we imagine him (in our psychoanalytically informed minds) powerfully defending against this immense loss.  Agnes can sense the hands of other women on Shakespeare when he returns home, and we don’t doubt those hands to have been there.  But we also glimpse his care for her – his concern – including the way that it is expressed in his careful wooing to win her back.   We also see his transactional care as he directs Susanna to acquire more and more things for them in his home of Stratford - only at the end of the novel do we appreciate that London has never become his home, despite the time that he has spent there.

It is the play; however, that stands as his testament of love to a child he could not have known – a boy, eleven at his death, who had not become a man. O’Farrell provides an interesting portal into that play.  She posits that Shakespeare imagined his son having grown.  She imagines (I think – this is not explicit) that the father has imagined that he has been able to sacrifice himself so the son can live.  He returns then, in the play, as a ghost.  A ghost who is able to direct his son, perhaps as he could not have done in a real life cut short.

OK, now I am going to play a bit with the play itself in a way that O’Farrell does not.  Shakespeare, imagining a child whom he did not see to manhood, imagines him as a fatherless child – one who did not benefit from having known his father.  As such, he is uncertain.  Visited by his father’s Ghost, he does not trust the ghost, nor himself.  He does not know how to proceed; he does not know how to manage the powerful feelings that are moved inside him by the machinations of his uncle and the treachery of his mother.

To mix a bit more of O’Farrell’s backstory into the play, Shakespeare’s betrayal of Agnes (falling into the arms, though apparently not the hearts, of other women in the wake of Hamnet’s death) is reversed.  He distances himself from his own philandering by accusing her – Hamlet/Hamnet’s mother - of betraying him with the uncle.  He absolves himself of the sin, while preserving the feeling of the necessity of it. 

How can two parents who, together, created this child not be reminded of that child whenever they are intimately in contact with each other?  Must they not distance themselves from each other in order to manage the intensity of the feeling of loss?  But doesn’t this seem like a further betrayal?  An additional loss heaped on top of an already unbearable loss?

Is Shakespeare also imagining himself into the role of Polonius, the foolish father of Ophelia and Laertes, who, despite his foolishness offers some of the sagest advice ever, including “To thine own self be true” and “Never a borrower nor a lender be”?  Might this be the longed-for advice that Shakespeare would have liked to have given Hamnet? 

Is Shakespeare mocking himself when he characterizes Polonius as someone who cares only about appearances (Polonius states, “Clothes make the man”), as O’Farrell imagines Shakespeare is mocked by Agnes for putting on the airs of the city and is Shakespeare mourning having run off to London when Polonius pines for his earlier life ("Old friends are the best friends")?  And as Shakespeare, the writer, is finally able, after a period of intense but distant mourning, to re-inhabit the mind of his son, does he experience himself as spying on him the way that Polonius spies on Laertes and, ultimately fatally, on Hamlet himself?

I offer these O’Farrell inspired musings not to substantiate her particular take on Shakespeare (and Agnes), but to acknowledge that they fit into a tapestry of mystery that surrounds the transition that Shakespeare marked, the transition that the Renaissance promoted in the arts more broadly of taking the individual as an article of study – to know more about what it means, in its particulars, to be an individual human; and to value that perspective. 

I remain an Oxfordian, but I am appreciative of the ways in which O’Farrell clarifies that Shakespeare’s voice can be better understood by wrestling with the ways that it is influenced by his feminine identity – the self that I am viewing O’Farrell as having embodied and split off from him in the person of Agnes. 

O’Farrell portrays the young Shakespeare as ignorant, even stupid about plants.  Who taught him?  Did a woman?  A witch?  Is his appreciation for the subtleties of the human condition informed by the desires of women, not just of men?  Was he, as a passive observer of the human condition, twinning with a woman?  With his own feminine perspective?  Isn’t the world of hearth and home, the world of deeply felt connection, the world of women?  How did women shape the mind of the man who allowed humans to think so differently about themselves?  This book offers interesting and arresting ideas about this while telling a poignant and evocative tale that would stand well on its own. 

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Severance - Work and Life Bisected

 Apple TV+ Series Severance Psychology Psychoanalysis Meaning of Work and Work Life Balance

What if you could not remember the color of your mother’s eyes?  Or any other details about her?  What if you could not remember your own name, or anything about your life outside of work? 

The creators of Severance, a gripping new series streaming on Apple TV+ asks us to grapple with the impact of this experience – and in so doing, they expose multiple fault lines in our actual work/life balance, while simultaneously making a powerful political statement.

Interestingly, in a series that severs its players from the rest of their lives, it evokes many, many other series and films – as if it were offering homages to them or perhaps appropriating them while having a look and feel that is also very much its very own. 

It feels like a David Lynch film, but the eeriness in this is not that like what David Lynch provides - images an unprocessed dream – a dream where the symbols are left without any referents (except maybe the baby goats); instead the vision is that there is a sense that there is an underlying order that the writers and directors want to help us understand.  Furthermore there is a sense that, in so far as chaos lies very near to what is being described, that chaos is the chaos that we all are in contact with and trying (perhaps desperately) to keep at bay, and the writers and directors are as afraid of it as we are, not in league with it, the way that David Lynch sometimes appears to be. 

Using the Bell Labs office building designed by Eero Saarinan as the setting for Lumon Industries puts us in an interesting space/time dimension.  Futuristic when it opened in 1962, the building still feels futuristic and therefore vaguely impersonal, like the sets of the film 2001 A Space Odyssey.  Like Bell Labs, which was tremendously successful, breeding Nobel prizes and products like cell phones that would be tremendously successful and profitable, the venture was doomed – as we hope that Lumon industries will be, too.  We strongly suspect that the attractiveness of the above ground facility hides a cancerous underground menace.

The actual office layout that the severed workers descend to under the modern edifice feels even more blatantly anachronistically futuristic, with its lavish use of space, outdated and slightly mod but off colors, fluorescent lighting, 1980s computer consoles and graphics, and rat maze hallways that create a sense of claustrophobia - a sense that we are trapped in a space that is essentially hostile to our existence as organic creatures – not something that is supportive to human life.

The people who inhabit this space that seems akin to the space in the movie Office Space, people who have been severed from the rest of their lives, including memories of their mothers and fathers and siblings and children, live lives that are centered on their work experience.  Even though they have no memory of who they are on the outside (their outies), the innies are not children playing together in a play space, but fully formed adults – adults who “remember” how to have a personality, even if they don’t have the memory of how that personality was formed.

The relationships between these “innies” is reminiscent of our work relationships.  They are half-formed.  There are work parties that feel forced and odd and are fun, kind of.  Kind of the way my work parties feel.  People don’t expose themselves at work parties the way they exposed themselves at birthday parties when they were two or four or six, nor in the ways they exposed themselves at peer parties when they were 16 or 18 or 20.  These are fully formed adults who know how to protect their secrets, even though they themselves don’t have access to them even when they want to.

The mechanism behind this is a chip that is inserted in the brain and we watch the outies transition to innies in the morning, after they change into their work clothes at their lockers and after they are checked to make sure they are not taking contraband down to their work station.  They close their eyes and we can see their outie persona melt away as they return to their work environment in what seems to their innie to have been only a moment. 

Of course, when I return to work, it is as if I never left, but that is because I have been worrying about it all night – sometimes quite literally.  What have I forgotten to do?  How can I understand this thing that is at a tight spot in this therapy?  How can I work out how best to teach this concept?  Or deal with this administrator?  It is as if I never leave…

The work that the innies do is odd.  The work of those we follow most closely, in the “Macrodata Refinement” department, sort numbers into bins based on an intuitive feel for those numbers.  What they are really doing is anyone’s guess.  It seems quite odd, but there are quotas and rewards for work well done.  There are also promotions – we join Mark S. (Adam Scott) on his first day as the leader of the four person department on the day after his best innie friend Petey (Yul Vazquez) leaves the work for reasons unknown.  He inducts a new innie, Helly R. (Britt Lower) in the first episode into the organization to replace Petey and join Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Irving (John Turturro) to complete the department.  The department is overseen by the menacing Harmony (Patricia Arquette) and her henchman, Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman). 

While the work they are doing is mysterious – and there may be meaning to it that will be revealed in later seasons – their primary role, in the first season, seems to be being severed workers.  Their true job is to prove to a skeptical world that the amnestic work world is productive and acceptable – perhaps even useful.  As an aid in this endeavor – since it is we, the audience, who need the most convincing, we follow Mark S. as he transforms into his outie Mark Scout and discover that he is a grieving history professor who lost his job when he could no longer concentrate in the wake of his wife’s death.  He chose to sever his work life in part because he couldn’t find other work, but mostly as a means of making a third of his life – if not unbearable, at least off limits. 

We empathize with Mark Scout.  Not only is he grieving, his sister is married to a complete idiot who is so narcissistically involved that he doesn’t realize that his self-published self-help book is a complete waste of time, as are his pompous and clueless friends.  Mark is so depleted, though, that he relies on his sister, her social life, and alcohol to simply survive one day after another.  He seems genuinely relieved that he has no access to his work life, for it would surely complicate the rest of his life, and he is already failing to manage the minimal complications that this life presents.

Our complacency does not last long; however.  We see how shallow and lifeless the work of the innies is and we detest Lumon, the corporation that would pit them against each other – in this case, using the myth that the “Optics and Design” department attacked the Macrodata Refinement department in a failed coup years ago.  Irving, the most loyal of to the organization of the Macordata Refinement deparment – the person who can cite chapter and verse from the Lumos Bible – is attracted to Burt (Christopher Walken) in O&D.  This leads the group to bond over fighting to connect with the other severed workers against Harmony and Milchick and ultimately the entire weight of the Lumos Corporation.

So, this series, like Office Space and The Truman Show, becomes a story of man against corporate America.  The Macrodata Refinement department begin swashbuckling like superheroes, and the chinks in the corporate armor emerge, as does the stench from the lies and moral compromises that support it.  All of this is ripe for interpretation: Why would we become subservient to a corporate master?  Perhaps more chillingly current, why would be become subservient to a dictatorial government?  But I would like to focus on a different aspect – how is it that we relate to our work selves?

The metaphoric space allows for the depiction of two parts of ourself – the “real” self and the work self.  Helly R. (as her work self), during her first day of work, appeals to her outie (her real self) to free her from the dismal and abusive workplace.  Her outie, through a recorded message, refuses her request and encourages her to continue on doing the work.  And don’t we do this to ourselves – we fail to empathize with just how difficult the work is for us to do – as we drag ourselves out of bed to return to the work – and linger in the evenings (perhaps binge-watching Severance) to extend the time of our freedom – even if that will make it harder to get up in the morning?  Isn’t the hope of releasing ourselves from this miserable cycle part of what lies behind the Great Resignation?

From the view of this metaphoric space, though, we not only fail to empathize, we disown and despise – indeed we might even feel disdain for – our working selves.  They do stuff that is not worth doing and they do it in a hermetically sealed environment that is severed from our “real” lives.  Even though our “real” lives may be bleak, or shallow, or filled with pain, they are real and this allows us to value them more highly than our work selves.  Certainly, our partners or our children can do this – I despised my father’s work – I devalued it – and did not want to emulate his life – one of apparent drudgery where he went off to provide for us.  He also seemed to resent it – complaining that we constantly demanded more stuff so that he was forced to work harder – but I think I questioned whether he was actually working for us or whether he was more drawn to the work than to being with us.  Perhaps our shared disdain was directed towards his love of working (and my wish to avoid emulating him was a way of acknowledging that I, too, could be drawn into that seemingly hateful but apparently very attractive vortex).

All of this gets encapsulated in the ways that work becomes a sort of religion for us.  It is what gives our lives meaning.  We are accomplishing something at work that helps us matter.  When Helly R. finishes an assignment, the 1870s founder of Lumos, Kier Egan (voiced by director Ben Stiller), visits Helly, in one of those cheesy 1980s video representations, as a bird who lets her know that she is loved by him before he flies off to give good wishes to other Lumos workers.  Helly and the other three members of the department stare at him with rapt attention.  They have been visited by the founder!

This, of course, would allow us to enter the series as a commentary on religion, which I think it is, but if we stay in the work/life vein, we can see that it is commenting that work has taken on the role of religion in our lives.  It provides a sense of purpose, of being part of something greater, and of contributing to something that will live on after us – the corporate – the embodied – being that is representative of us collectively and individually.

Of course there are problems with this formulation, but the central problem is that we are going to die no matter what we do.  Being angry at ourselves for having wasted the better parts of our lives is a way of managing the anger that we feel about having been given this tremendous gift of life, but with the caveat that we only get to enjoy it for a limited and indeterminant amount of time. 

Poignantly, when a Lumon employee is fired, quits, or retires, they disappear.  When they go up that elevator for the last time, their work lives and all that life contained (in the case of Burt, his love for Irving) disappears.  As I approach my retirement(s) (one from teaching at the University, the other from clinical practice) the question of how to bring a career (I never wanted to have a career) to a close is a complicated one.  What will happen to the work relationships – the relationships with other faculty and staff, with students, and with patients?  I have friendships with fellow faculty and staff that I trust will survive.  I expect that we will, ironically, largely talk about our families.  Will we continue to care about the issues that have fueled our professional lives?  How can we not?  How can we continue to?  Will the work of our lives die with our retirement?

My mother has recently put all of the old family movies, slides and photos into electronic form.  This is a tremendous gift.  I can remember – or remember for the first time – moments of intimacy with my grandfather, who died when I was youngster but whom I have carried with me through my entire life.  I can see interactions with and between my family members with new eyes.  I have memories, but they are from my perspective – not through the objective lens of the camera.  What will be the record of my work life?  My resume – or, as we call it in academia – my curriculum vita?  What kind of record is that?

The grim view presented in this gripping series is that we will have no relevant memories of our working lives.  We will struggle to integrate our work life with our personal life – and perhaps in coming seasons we will see whether this is a triumphant vision or a more tragic one.  I think it should be clear by now that I believe the tragic vision is not written into the bylaws of the corporation, but into the very joints of the natural world.  It is our task to knit together an existence that, what?  Allows us to traverse the span our existence with some sense of style and grace – to join with others in a revolution against something that is inevitable, but also cruel, and to try to wring some sense of joy and genuine purpose out of a life that is replete with the eerie specters that would pass as providing real meaning.

I fear that I am leaving those of you who haven't seen it with a bad impression of this series.  It is gripping theater.  The striving against the oppressive corporate forces leads to a tremendous denouement that I don't want to spoil for you - and one that is open enough for us to sit on our seats for a season and wait for it's resolution when the next season drops.  In the meantime we will continue to toil, in our own disparate ways, to fight off the oppressors!  Good luck to us all as we do.

 

 To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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Good Luck to You, Leo Grande: Are sex and love necessary partners?

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Sex work, transactional relationships, sex and love

 

The Reluctant Wife is working out of town frequently these days, and she flew in very late Thursday night.  On Friday, we had nothing planned for the evening, and she suggested streaming “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” which had been flitting across our feeds for a few days.  It meant we could stay in, which I know she values after being out of town as much as she has been (and I don’t mind given the current rate of COVID, especially among the students in my summer class).  My only preparation for the film were what the headlines on the clickbait were screaming – that Emma Thompson has a full nude scene as a 63-year-old woman…

 Emma Thompson is, of course, the ubiquitous actor whose screen presence is endearing in part because of her ability to simultaneously portray vulnerability and pluck.  Her role as the cuckolded wife in the family Christmas favorite Love Actually is but one example of this.  Pluck and vulnerability are on vivid display in this tightly scripted and acted film – though it feels more like a play.  Her character, Susan Robinson, who adopts the nom de boudoir Nancy Stokes, is a two-year widowed woman who hires a sex worker whose nom de boudoir is Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack). 

 The action takes place mostly in three scenes (or acts) in the comfortable but bland hotel room she has secured for their rendezvous, with one scene in the hotel’s coffee shop.

 Really?  A play about sex work?  And the man is the sex worker?  Hmm….  The uncomfortable part of this film, for me, is that the sex work looks very much like psychotherapy.  This film has much more in common with a series about therapy like In Treatment than with a movie about sex work like Boogie Nights.  It is a play about a very repressed woman who sets about claiming her sexuality, something that she has never done before.  And the vehicle for this is an intense, powerful interaction with a gorgeous, young, virile man and, though there are nude scenes, the intimacy is largely psychological and mostly occurs when both actors are clothed.

The Reluctant Wife and I had differing reactions to this film.  Her position was that this film did a nice job disentangling sex work from moral strictures.  It presented sex work as just that, a business arrangement and, as such, it is making the argument that sex work is honest work and should be treated as such.

I agree with this position in principle.  But I question whether sexual interactions can ever be simply transactional.  It is my assumption that sexual interactions involve something above and beyond the mutually shared pleasure – that something is a more deeply felt emotional attachment that occurs as a necessary side effect of sexual interactions.

My wife agrees that this can be the case, and is for us (which validates my experience of the sexual relationship within our marriage), but she does not see this as a necessary component of any sexual interaction.  She believes that consenting adults can have a mutually satisfying and simultaneously circumscribed sexual interaction that is what it is and nothing more.  Friends with benefits – or, more to the point, individuals with benefits that are bought and paid for.

 I think this film explores this question and provides supportive evidence for both of these positions, even though they are mutually contradictory.

The interaction is on Nancy's turf (she has secured the room) and she is the one paying for the service, thus the symbols of power lie with Nancy, not so subtly underscored by Leo’s being dark skinned.  Nancy is the owner, Leo would appear to be the sex slave (as it were) from the way that the relationship is “objectively” articulated.  But Leo’s apparent comfort with the situation, and Nancy’s apparent nervousness seems to more than balance the apparent power differential.

 Leo is smooth.  And gorgeous.  He is comfortable in his own skin – at least when Nancy is in the room.  We see little cracks in his confidence when she absents herself to freshen up in the lavatory and at other moments when she is distracted by, for instance, a call from her daughter.  When not in relationship, when not in contact, Leo is just a shade less comfortable.

Leo, though paid to be a partner, seduces Nancy by drawing her out.  He needs to know more about her so that he can be of service to her, but this also furthers the power imbalance in his direction – he knows more about her and he knows how it is that she needs him.  In part to balance this situation, and to create – I think – an emotionally as well as physically intimate space, Nancy turns the tables and draws Leo out.  This is OK, up to a point.  But Nancy crosses a line.  She works to discover who Leo “really” is, and he sees through this as an effort on Nancy’s part to put him into his place as a broken whore.  And he re-establishes the boundary, firmly.

 I would like to take a second pass at this. 

 Nancy comes into the relationship wanting to explore aspects of her sexuality that she has never experienced.  Sex in her marriage to her husband was perfunctory, quick and efficient, but it was not pleasurable.  Nancy would like to experience pleasure, but she is not sure that she can do this – I think in part because she is not at all certain that she is an attractive woman.

 Leo, in his seduction of Nancy, reassures her that he finds something attractive in each of his clients.  He notes that she is far from his oldest client.  His sexual interest in her, he assures her, will be genuine.  He does not specify that he is attracted to her, but that he will be.  He is certain of that.  He will discover something in her that is attractive. 

Failing to specify what he will find attractive is actually quite useful.  It allows Nancy to imagine what it is that he will find attractive; to think of herself in novel ways.  It also, I think, allows her to think more freely about what she finds attractive about Leo – she can begin to play with fantasy – to imagine, to dip into and out of what is and what might be.  In the thinking of Tom Ogden, Leo is helping Nancy Dream Undreamt Dreams.

Leo’s backstory, which Nancy draws and then forces out of him, does not quite square, in my mind, with the high-quality therapist that he turns out to be.  Maybe I just want to imagine that my job as a trainer of therapists is not in jeopardy.  I do think that much of therapy is “instinctual” and some people have a better knack for it than others.  And there are parts of the Leo character that are quite believable, including that he would learn to be so good at his trade in part because he is so attractive.

I think that attractive people have power.  The world reflects their attractiveness back at them and they feel confidence from knowing that they are attractive, and this confidence, in turn, makes them even more attractive.  This loop is, I think, a powerful one that helps attractive people manage the feelings of self-doubt that dog all of us. 

 Other things can help us manage our feelings of self-doubt as well, of course.  Whatever competences and skills we have are appreciated by those around us and this affords comfort as we manage the residue of various slights, failures of empathy and traumas that have led us to doubt that we are competent and able to fully inhabit ourselves.

Leo’s trauma is significant.  He was disowned by his mother for acting out his sexuality as a teenager and his mother now does not acknowledge that he exists.  I imagine that his sex work is a revolt against her and her disapproval, an affirmation of his value as a sexual creature, and a make shift defense against her critical voice.  Nancy’s crossing of Leo’s boundaries dismantles his makeshift defense and he collapses, momentarily, into a state of brokenness, from which he quickly claws his way back out.  And to make sure that he does not return to it, he imposes a rigid boundary in the relationship.

 So, many are things are at play in this relationship in addition to the apparently simple desire of Nancy to get in touch with herself as a sexual creature.  There are significant power dynamics and there are deeply felt esteem issues, and these are tangled together.  Leo and Nancy deftly untangle them, leading to the conclusion that sex work is both noble and ennobling.  Or it could be…

I wonder whether this movie is a fantasy – or, if you prefer – a think piece.  An examination of what could be and how sex work could be reparative rather than dirty and shameful, not to mention illegal.  Perhaps Leo has learned through the school of hard knocks various tricks of the trade.  He has learned that maintaining good boundaries is essential to doing this work.  He has learned that self-respect and respect of his clients and their integrity is essential to the work.  He has also learned how to manage a relationship with someone else while being authentic, present, and spontaneous in his interactions.

What I am describing in the last paragraph sounds suspiciously like what we teach our graduate students as they prepare for a career in serving the needs of people who have experienced and internalized slights, failures of empathy and traumas.  It helps for our students to explore through their own psychotherapy how they have dealt with their own histories and their own endowments and deficits – and psychoanalysts are required to undergo a personal analysis to engage in this exploration first hand.

I am not saying that the school of hard knocks could not have taught Leo Grande the skills he needs to do the work he does, but I think it would be terribly difficult (and inefficient) to learn these skills through trial and error, and I think it would be helpful to have a community of like-minded workers to support him through difficult periods/ relationships/ episodes.

I also think that this task is easier for Leo Grande than it would be for most sex workers because he is a man.  The social judgement of sexually active men is, of course, positive in a way that it isn’t, to this point in our history, for women.  Even without the Supreme Court’s decision to clarify that women’s bodies are something that men or the state or religion – anyone but women -own, sexual behavior on the part of women is condemned.  So, for the women who are doing this work, the opportunities for training and support (traditionally, at least in movies, provided through brothels and fellow sex workers) are even more essential to the well-being of the workers.

It is also the case, somewhat paradoxically, that we have ample evidence that having sex with a therapist does tremendous damage to our patients. Indeed, this is the third rail of psychological interactions.  Among other things, this movie is asking an inverse question, “Is psychotherapy possible in the context of a transactional sexual relationship?”

But I would like to go back to the opening question: is it possible for us to have transactional sexual relationships?  The somewhat paradoxical answer from this movie appears to be: yes, conditionally.  The paradoxical condition is – we can have transactional sex in the context of a carefully tended and mutually respectful relationship.

When leading man Hugh Grant was caught with a prostitute, he was asked (if memory serves) by Johnny Carson why he made use of prostitutes when so many women would gladly sleep with him.  His reply was interesting.  I think he said, “If I pay them, they will leave in the morning.”  He was clearly indicating that his sexual needs could be bifurcated from his relational needs.  This movie might add a small caveat; that his relational needs might also be met, at least in part, in a transactional sexual relationship – but his position would be that, just because he has sexual needs (and perhaps relational needs), he does not need to enter a long term/committed relationship to meet those needs.

 Nancy gets her needs met in the relationship with Leo in a deeply satisfying way.  She learns that her sexuality really is her own, and she is free to take that with her from this relationship.  We also learn that she has not only repressed herself, but she has oppressed others in her role as a teacher.  She revisits that, and also helps Leo re-own himself as a competent and useful worker.  Would that our therapeutic interactions could more frequently have similar outcomes!      

 

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