The Lying Life of Adults; Elena Ferrante; Video;
Psychoanalysis; Psychology; Bracelet; Beauty
I read The
Lying Lives of Adults a few years ago and posted on it. It is a tremendous coming of age book set in Naples
and Milan in the 1980s. It is also a
complicated book with manifold complex characters interacting in intriguing ways. It was a difficult read for me – not just
because of the complexities, but because, I think, of the crossed cultures, and
the crossed genders (mine and the lead character’s) in interaction with the
cultures.
When
my post on the book The Lying Lives of Adults suddenly started getting
hits, seemingly out of the blue, I knew something must be going on. Well, it turned out that the Italian film had
dropped as a six-episode series on Netflix. Thank you internet for this wake up call!
The Reluctant Wife and I finished watching the series last
night, and what a satisfying watch it was.
Despite one possible elaboration, the fidelity to the book went beyond being
technically on target, it brought the spirit of the book to life in ways that
my Midwestern US male imagination wasn’t quite able to construct from the page. So, I will take a second whack at describing
the impact of the book as interpreted by the film…
Twelve year-old Giovanna (Giordana Marengo)
begins to awaken when she overhears her father Andre (Alessandro Preziosi)
saying that she is as ugly as his sister, her Aunt Vittoria (Valeria Golino). Vittoria is the sister that her father (Andreas
in the book) left in the gutter when he ascended to the heights of Naples,
rising out of the ghetto by virtue of his education and marrying well.
Giovanna responds to the broadside from her father by
seeking out the shunned and ignored Vittoria who becomes the family truth teller –
calling things out as she sees them, helping Giovanna see through the lies of
everyone around her. Vittoria has the grit
and clear vision of the ghetto perspective.
But, it turns out, she has been lying about herself. Giovanna asks why she has been lying about
her own life, and Vittoria responds, “Because the lie is more beautiful than the truth.”
The book and the movie, then, can be understood as working
from an aesthetic perspective to ask questions about life and love and how to
live. Is a beautiful life a well-lived
life? And who is to determine what is
beautiful? Should we deceive ourselves
(and those around us) to create the illusion of beauty? How would we live a genuinely beautiful
life? These questions are especially relevant
in a world that is, in so many respects, ugly.
I think that the film allowed me to more viscerally
experience many aspects of the ugliness of Giovanna’s life than I could imagine
them on the page. Most immediately, the
boorish behavior of men – the constant objectification of women – is somehow clearer
when depicted on the screen than when seen on the page, at least for me. Also, the particular aesthetic of both Naples's industrial
core and its bourgeois high rises is hard to imagine from a different
continent.
It is also clearer on the screen that Giovanna, who is
deftly portrayed by a woman in what appears to be her first screen appearance,
wants to be appreciated not as an object by others, but to have her subjectivity
be beautiful. She wants to be
appreciated by the powerful men in a world where they value each other based on
the beauty of their words. She wants to
be appreciated as one of them.
This does not mean that she is unaware of her physical beauty
or the beauty of those around her. She is afraid, after all, that her father no
longer finds her beautiful at the beginning of the film. It means, I think, that she comes to lose faith
in physical beauty, works to be appreciated for her words, and is exploring, as
adolescents do, what the meaning of the physical contact that proceeds from
either to provide evidence of love really means.
The most immediate cause of her confusion about the meaning
of love is not her own explorations but the dissolution of her parent’s
marriage. Vittoria encourages her to
closely observe that marriage – and she can see it falling apart, perhaps
before her parents can. Vittoria then sees evidence of the fractures that Giovanna wouldn’t understand – and pushes the marriage
over a cliff. She notes that a family
heirloom – an indication of love, has been given by Andre not to Giovanna, as
Vittoria thought would happen, nor to Giovanna’s mother, Andre’s wife, but to
another woman (The details of who this woman is are available in
the post on the book, here I am going to avoid the complications of describing
the manifold players).
Giovanna is crushed by her father’s infidelity and shuns
him. He, given a chance to be with her,
complains that SHE is not empathic enough with HIM. It is suddenly clear that this man she has
always admired and modelled herself after is much less mature than he appears –
perhaps less mature, and certainly less able to manage his emotions, than she
is. And, to stay true to the central
theme of this post, his immaturity and weakness make him ugly. In a word, his pursuit of beauty has made him ugly.
Vittoria acts as a helpful corrective here – she acknowledges
that Andre’s raising Giovanna – his ability to have instilled in her an ability
to appreciate beauty – is a testament to his own aesthetic value. He must be beautiful to have brought such
beauty into the world. (Not an argument
that the #METOO movement – in terms, for instance, of the value of the aesthetic
products of boors - puts much store in!).
Vittoria’s unexpected support of Andre comes at a moment in
the film after Giovanna has demonstrated a fidelity that Vittoria predicted she
would not able to manage, and I think Giovanna also surprised herself at having
done this, and she was a little undone at having done this. And this is the turning point in the series,
one that is predicted in the opening sequence that takes place before the
opening credits. In that scene, Giovanna
swims to the bottom of the sea, searching for the bracelet. She finds it after much searching, but then
she leaves it behind as she swims back to the surface.
The bracelet signifies, among other things, the false loves
that we seek out, the false loves that express, in a word, the lying life of
adults. The bracelet was originally
stolen from Vittoria’s lover’s mother-in-law to be given to Vittoria – a testament
to her lover's extramarital love for her. It made him feel good to show off his admiration for
Vittoria, even though it caused pain for his wife and children. And Vittoria’s lie is that
his love for her was true love – a love that she has remained faithful to, despite her
lover’s death. A beautiful lie, but a
lie.
The question that we are left with at the end of the film
(and the book) is whether Giovanna can construct a beautiful life not on a lie,
but on some other foundation. In order
to do this, she must become an adult, and she concretely arranges to do this in a way that
will be painful, brief, and weirdly reparative.
In her exploration of her attractiveness to men, she flirted
with and then avoided a repulsive but insistent man whom she cruelly ridiculed
for a physical feature – and she purposely repaired that rupture in the
relationship with him when she used him to cross over into becoming an adult. This interaction was clearly not an act of
love in the conventional sense, but at its heart there was affection and
concern – something that Giovanna expressed throughout her two-year journey of
questioning the lives of adults.
The beautiful life that
Giovanna would pursue would, then, include genuine interactions, but these
would be founded in the kind of brutal honesty that Vittoria demonstrated when
she came clean about lying. What form
might this take?
We get snapshots of this.
Her father’s communistic and leftist views are exposed as hypocritical
by his bourgeois striving. The glowing,
deeply spiritual character’s Christian values are exposed as hypocritical by the
looseness of his sexual mores. Giovanna demonstrates
Communist and Christian values while staying appropriately critical of both
institutions.
At the end of the book and film, Giovanna leaves on a trip, perhaps
to a new life, with Ida, the younger sister of her close friend – a writer. I speculated before that this might be
Ferrante. Giovanna has been appreciating her writing, she loves it, and this friend
has been writing about a beautiful world.
Giovanna has appreciated her ability to articulate beauty, even while
they are both struggling to survive the deceit of the adults they have relied
on.
Lies are, I think, essential to human life. We lie first and foremost to ourselves. We do this because we live in a harsh world. Telling ourselves little falsehoods, mirrored perhaps on the loving falsehoods that our parents tell us, help us navigate the world. Giovanna's father's lie that she was beautiful - and his lie that she is ugly - are the wellsprings of the tension in this film. The actress playing Giovanna vacillates smoothly between moments of physical and spiritual beauty and ugliness. The truth is that we are constantly moving along a variety of spectra - we are neither this nor that. Any attempt to pin us down, to encircle us, the way a bracelet encircles the wrist, through a precise representation is a lie, because it is a static description of a dynamic being that, at best, captures a facet of who it is that we are.
Recently, in writing about the
White Lotus, I commented on the psychology of the lies of omission – the things
that we don’t tell people because they might hurt them. The lies that are told here – many of them
are lies of omission, but many of them are lies of creation; creating or
implying beauty where there is none - do not, in fact, create beauty. I
think that Giovanna’s lie to the repulsive man is a lie to create a false but
healing moment. She has learned how to
lie – and to do that charitably, but I hope that she will be using lies as infrequently as possible –
working instead to be that rare thing, an adult who can be reasonably truthful and
beautiful.
In the spirit of not lying, I have to admit to unsettled
feelings about the depictions of nudity in this film. At the beginning and end Giovanna is depicted
in the nude. It would be a lie to say
that 16 year olds don’t have sex and aren’t sexual. And I think my interest in response to these
images may be part of what is driving my discomfort. I don’t know how old the actress is. But I am concerned that a movie that is championing
female sexuality and power as up to the task of fighting with masculinity shouldn’t
have to pander to the male gaze quite so frankly. On the other hand, perhaps my discomfort is
the director's intentional use of my own male gaze to help me realize that I am not so
different from the men depicted in this movie.
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