Egads – My Wife is a Member of the Deep State!

 

VA, Deep State, Red/Blue Divide, Civil Service, Patriotism, U.S. Government, Psychology

Reluctant Wife's Office View

I was raised in a solidly Republican home.  My father came from a small town in rural Illinois and his father and grandfather before him had run a department store – they sold women’s clothes, and their cousin’s store sold men’s clothes.  They would travel to Chicago and buy what was in style for the regions, take it back, and they would be sold through departments that included things like sports clothes, formal wear, and lingerie.  Each department had employees who specialized in the department and they would serve the community and the surrounding rural folks who would come into the “city” to get the ready wear clothing they needed.  Being a retailer was lucrative and my grandfather and great grandfather were pillars of the community, contributing to the development of such things as a children’s home, but also a country club.  They went on regular vacations and educated their children at good schools. 

My mother was raised in Chicago.  Her father was an insurance salesman but also an early actuary, assessing risk in order to set rates.  I know that he, too, was successful, though it was a struggle to raise a family, especially during the depression.  He only had an employee or two, unlike my other grandfather who employed many, but he was an entrepreneur whose fortunes rose and fell with the economy but also as a result of the hard work that he put in, he was a believer in a country where people are free to raise themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Both families fancied themselves members of the upper middle class – less because of their income levels, which put them in this income bracket – but more because they were educated and hard working (actually, my paternal great- grandfather was self-educated – including learning and employing a new word a day throughout his adult life).  They were small business owners who were interested in a government that was small, in part because they didn’t want to pay more taxes, but also, I think, because they considered themselves to be moral members of a basically ethical community and didn’t see much need for governmental oversight of their conduct or that of their peers.

My father’s family believed in small town values – and believed that the local community was best situated to take care of their own because they knew who was worthy, who was not, who needed support and who needed to be taught a lesson.  My great-grandfather did not start his business on his own, but was backed by others and he, in turn, supported other ventures once his was up and running.  In addition to business support, my family contributed to local causes and individuals in need.  My father contributed to the United Negro College fund across the course of his life, and regularly donated blood.  Both sides of the family were involved in scouting and they lived by the scouting creed.

I grew up with a great deal of pride in being an American, with a sense of the importance of self-government, but also with a distrust of governmental institutions.  I remember that the word “bureaucrat” was said with a certain sense of disdain, and I associated bureaucracy with the government, saw it as a drain on the economy, and believed that bureaucrats sat in cushy government offices not doing much except creating “red tape” and waiting to retire so they could collect their handsome pension checks.

So, who would have thought that I would marry a member of the deep state?  Certainly not my mother.  She asked me how my sister and I grew up to be liberals.  I reminded her that she had us listen to Pete Seeger’s records as children, and that her lived values – her care and concern for others – values that are shared by the entire family – are liberal values.  What we differ about is how best to translate those values into actions and who should administer them.

The Reluctant Wife is actually my second wife.  We first met when we were both married to other people and she was working with my first wife at a local University based psychological practice.  I sometimes did some moonlighting work at that practice, but did not know the woman who would become my second wife at all well.

Years later, I was the chair of the department of psychology at another local University, recently divorced, and was called to the state capitol to evaluate whether to continue requiring a year of post-doctoral training for graduate students before they could be licensed to practice psychology.  My position was that students should be license eligible at graduation, based, in part, on their having completed a full-time year of internship as a pre-requisite for graduation in addition to three years of part-time practice before that.  I had personally engaged in three years of highly structured post-doctoral training that I found essential to my development as a clinician, but most post-doctoral positions were, in my experience, little more than excuse for more indentured servitude on the part of trainees, many of whom were already deeply in debt.

My future Reluctant Wife was now the director of psychological training at the local Veteran’s Administration (VA) hospital.  She, too, was called to the capitol to address the issue of post-doctoral training.  The future Reluctant Wife was in charge of that last year of training before, in the model being proposed to the government, former students would become license eligible.  Nationally, about half of all psychologists do their internship training at VA hospitals.  Her position could not have been more different from mine.  Seeing students practice during that year before they graduate, she recognized that many of them still did not know what they were doing and she was concerned that they needed additional supervision before being licensed to practice autonomously.  She was more focused on the well being of the citizens of the state and protecting them, while I was more focused on protecting the well being of the students – not wanting them to be exploited.

Well, sparks flew.  We were at the center of the argument and both passionate about our positions.  I accused her of simply wanting to sleep better at night knowing that someone else was watching over the trainees that she was concerned about at the end of their training with her, and she agreed that this was the case.  Shortly after the argument, she invited me to speak at a staff training at the VA.  Mostly because she thought I would do this without compensation, which was true.  But she greeted me so warmly that I assumed there was more than professional interest on her part.  What she was actually doing (she didn’t know that I was divorced) was just being her usual warm, inviting self.  That said, she did respond to my invitation to a meal together, and the rest is history.

Though she was the director of training, the central focus of her job was clinical.  She worked with Veterans who had alcohol and substance abuse issues.  These are veterans who are difficult to treat – they often have histories of trauma from war and/or their earlier lives and they are not socialized to engage in psychological treatment.  She worked on an inpatient unit and then followed some of the veterans after they left the hospital.

To be clear, despite my also being a psychologist, this is not work that I could imagine doing, certainly not for as long as she did.  At the beginning of her own internship experience, when she and the other interns were deciding which rotations to take, she was challenged by one of the staff members on the alcohol and substance abuse unit who said that this is a rotation for the brave.  She liked that challenge.  She was able to be compassionate and clearly cared about her patients while setting clear limits with them and challenging them.  They were very tough men (and occasionally women) with problems that seemed intractable, but she was able to connect with them and was able to appreciate them as needy individuals beneath their crusty exteriors.  She also had a respectful attitude towards their ability to accomplish what they needed to – both to address their addictions and to manage their lives.  She helped them feel safe enough to acknowledge the wounds they had received and caused and to come to grips with leading a sober life.

The reluctant wife’s family background was both similar to mine and very different.  Her father was an engineer who worked for GM and then IBM but left the corporate world to start his own business – a print shop – and then – as he used to say, his life went to hell.  That is an exaggeration, but the business did not do as well as he had hoped, and, being his own boss, he worked himself very hard and did not reap the rewards he expected.  He had married his High School sweetheart, who was a teacher, and she came to work with him in the print shop.  I should mention that my father, too, had worked for a big corporation and then had gone into business for himself, a transition that was difficult for him as well). 

Both the Reluctant wife and I went to college when our parent’s finances were in pretty bad shape.  She went to the local state school and commuted from home.  Meanwhile, her brother went into the Army.  So, after going to going to graduate school, doing the internship at the VA, and then doing a little private practice (where, as I mentioned before, she met my first wife), she was ready and willing to return to the VA.  She believed in the mission of serving veterans.  And she was good at it.  That said, after fifteen years, or so, of working with one population, she felt that she was running a bit dry – she found herself re-using the same metaphors and feeling a bit like she was mailing it in rather than genuinely investing herself in her work.

At about that time, a former mentor, who had started a national organization development consulting firm within the VA, invited the Reluctant Wife to join the group of consultants.  She was at first reluctant to take this position – she was concerned that it would involve a lot of travel while our kids (we were, by this time, married) were in school, but, when the director assured her that she could minimize travel through the school years, she accepted a position within this office.  She took to this work like a duck to water, and she also enjoyed managing the consultants and, within a few years, she became the director of the organization.  This meant that she was in charge of 40 or 50 consultants, but also that she was now a member of the team of leaders that runs the VA Health System from Washington.  I warned her that Washington would soon recognize her gifts and hard work and invite her not to just come to Washington once a month or so, but that they would want her there in a more permanent position, but she just pooh-poohed me.

Her first turn at being a member of the deep state came in the fall of 2020.  As Jon Stewart pointed out on his show, Fox news decided to support the idea that Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) curricula should be villainized.  Critical Race theory – something very few to that point had heard about – was fingered as threatening the very fabric of the nation.  Fox called on the President to root Critical Race Theory out of the Federal Government.  Then they riled up his base to oppose the use of DEI curricula in schools.  Well, nineteen days later, Trump answered Fox’s call, stating in a speech that Critical Race theory should not be a part of any Federal Government activity and then quickly cobbled together a remarkably unclear executive order demanding that DEI efforts by offices reporting to the President should cease and desist until they were vetted by a yet to be seated group of overseers.

Now the VA serves a very diverse patient group and they do this with a very diverse staff.  The Reluctant Wife had been instrumental in overseeing the design and implementation of a DEI coaching pilot program for leaders to help them improve workplace interactions across racial, gender, religious and other potential barriers to providing high quality service and/or collaborative work relationships.  This program had already been well vetted within the organization, but now, with just a few months remaining in his tenure, Trump had issued this poorly worded edict that could have been interpreted to mean that she and the office she oversees should cease and desist in their efforts.

The VA reports to the President.  The Secretary of the VA sits on the President’s cabinet.  That said, the funding for the VA comes from Congress, so it also reports regularly to congressional committees.  The Reluctant Wife is a good soldier and works will within a highly structured hierarchical system (another difference between us – I am better suited to being a faculty member who has a private practice).  When given a set of directions, she is very good a carrying them out.  So, the President’s order created a dilemma for her.  She deeply believes in the importance of working to treat all individuals equally, but she is also aware of just how difficult it is to do this and how much support we need to have in order to do it effectively.  My father, for example, despite his good intentions behind supporting the United Negro College Fund, treated African Americans as a kind of exotic species and would often ask individuals that he met embarrassing questions clearly based on stereotypes. 

As much as my wife believes in following orders, she also believes – or primarily believes – in doing the right thing.  In this case, it was clear to her what the right thing to do was to continue to provide a well-vetted program with preliminary positive outcomes that supported the mission of the institution for which she worked.  She put mission over marching orders and very publicly told her office to continue doing what they had been doing.

The Reluctant Wife also informed her supervisor that she planned to ignore the executive order.  She continued that she fully understood that this might mean that she could face disciplinary action for doing this, including termination of employment, but she intended to support her team in offering the kind of education that they had deemed was essential to the optimal functioning of the agency.  Her supervisor agreed with her that this was the correct course of action and acknowledge that she, too, might face disciplinary action for not correcting the Reluctant Wife, but she was prepared to do that as well.  I think this went up the chain to the Deputy Undersecretary with all the bureaucrats signing off on it and acknowledging that there might be consequences for having done so.

Ultimately there were no consequences.   Shortly after this, Trump lost the election and enforcing executive orders from a lame duck president who was in total denial that he had lost the election was the last thing on anyone’s mind.  But this action, along with her general competence, was noticed by the leaders in the organization and, when there was a need to fill one of the top positions in the organization, she was tapped to be the acting Chief of Staff of the Veteran’s Health Administration.

This is a big deal.  It is the highest position that a non-physician can fill in the organization without a Presidential appointment.  One way of explaining this is to compare her position in the organization to mine in the University.  I report to the chair of my department who reports to the Dean who reports to the Provost who reports to the President of the University.  She reported to the Undersecretary who reported to the Secretary who reported to the President.  Another way of thinking about this is that she was a member of a three person leadership team that was responsible for the functioning of 172 hospitals and almost 1300 outpatient sites of care across the country with over 400,000 employees working to serve millions of veterans.

Shortly after she was installed as Chief of Staff, a new Undersecretary of the VHA was appointed.  Though this undersecretary had worked for the VA as a presidential fellow early in his career, he had spent most of his career working in Hospital Administration in the private sector.  He was tapped by the Secretary (a former Chief of Staff for President Obama), appointed by the President and approved by Congress to run the VHA system.  The VA actually has three branches – the Veterans Health Administration, the National Cemetery Administration, and the Veterans Benefits Administration, and each of these branches has an Undersecretary to run it – all of them under the oversight of the Secretary.

The new Undersecretary is an ambitious and highly competent man with big plans for the organization, but came in with a steep learning curve to understand the functioning of the VHA as an entity – and of the Federal Government in general.  Part of the Reluctant Wife’s task was to help support his acculturation – to help him learn the ropes of this new organization.  So, for instance, she walked him through the hiring process for senior executives with which he was unfamiliar.

One of the first big organizational agendas for the Undersecretary was an ambitious plan to re-organize the governance structure to align it with the priorities that he had in mind for the organization.  The governance structure had been recently – within the past few years – reorganized and was just beginning to figure out how to function in this new system.  The Reluctant Wife had been closely involved in this project as a consultant and she had seen the organizational chaos that ensued when new relationships between subgroups had been articulated.  She told the Undersecretary, who was very invested in his proposed changes, that she did not believe this was a good idea – that he should use the existing structures that were just becoming effective to support his agenda because changing the governance structure again would mean that there would be two more years of realignment work before the new structures could support his agenda and, by that time, a new administration could be in place and, as a political appointee, he could be replaced by another Undersecretary.  The Undersecretary responded that this wouldn’t matter because his priorities were good ones and they would be consistent with the priorities of whoever it was that would replace him.  The Reluctant Wife (who agreed that his priorities were good and that they made sense) responded, “That’s what they all think.” She proposed, instead, that he set up Tiger Teams to work quickly on his priorities and to connect that work to the existing structures.  This would be a more efficient and effective way to implement his priorities.

To his credit, the Undersecretary was able to hear this very blunt assessment of his plan, to not take offense at it and hear it as insubordination, and he avoided throwing the system into chaos and made use of the feedback, recognizing that it was based on institutional knowledge and concern for the wellbeing of the organization and its ability to carry out the virtues of his priorities.  I’m not sure I would have had the maturity to go along with her suggestion were I in his position (something that can cause friction in our marital relationship, by the way).

So, the Reluctant Wife is a member of the deep state.  She cares, deeply, about the mission of her organization: to serve veterans.  And she works to protect that mission against interlopers – the Presidents and their appointees who, whether well intentioned or not, would move her and the organization away from carrying out that mission.  Fortunately most Presidents, and most of their appointees, also have the health of the organization, and therefore the well-being of the country, in mind.  What they often don’t have is the institutional knowledge about how best to make use of the office to best serve the country. 

It is also the case that a large governmental office is more like an aircraft carrier than a jet ski; it cannot turn on a dime.  While my family, particularly my father’s family, was used to seeing problems be solved on a local level, some of our problems are bigger than that.  When we became a world power, we did this based on our military strength, and maintaining that strength means we need to care for those who have worked to maintain world order, such as it is.  And this is not a small group of people.  In place of the small town, the hospital unit became the place where a community of ex-soldiers came to be known by a caring community of treaters.  And this small group was part of a massive organization – and the members of that organization, over the course of their careers, move from direct treatment to managing the functioning of the organization, and they need to interact with those who come with a mandate from the people to provide better care and help them realize how best to achieve the goals they have given the conditions that exist.

The other piece of institutional knowledge that the Reluctant Wife, as a member of the deep state, carries is a realistic appraisal of the pieces and parts of the institution, but also an appraisal of the institution as a whole.  In this instance she knows that the organization is in much better health than Congress and the press would lead us to believe.  She knows that our veterans are, in fact, being well served by the VA.  Recently she let me know that over 70% of VA medical centers received 4 or 5 Stars in a national patient survey rating versus 42% of Private Hospitals being rated with 4 or 5 starts.  Are there problems? Sure.  There are problems with every health system I have been associated with as a provider and as a patient.  When you have an organization that is employing almost half a million people at hundreds of hospitals, there are problems every day.  And you need a firm hand at the tiller to manage these problems and to keep the ship moving forward.

Happily for me (and for her), the Reluctant Wife’s tour of duty has come to an end after a little more than a year as Acting Chief of Staff.  A permanent Chief of Staff has finally been hired.  She has returned to her regular position as the director of the VA’s Internal Organization Development Office.  This is a position that, like the acting chief of staff, would have been characterized in my family as a bureaucratic one.  It is one that would be characterized in current political speech as being a member of the “deep state”.  Living with a bureaucratic member of the deep state has allowed me to have a new and very different appreciation of what I otherwise would have taken these terms to mean. 

Perhaps not for all, but for my wife, being a bureaucratic member of the deep state meant that she worked very hard to insure that the obligation of a country to its members that have risked life and limb for its protection are cared for in the best manner possible.  It has meant being a servant leader – and in her case it has meant serving the mission of the VA which is, in many ways, the mission of the government and therefore of all of us because ours is a government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Staying in the hinterlands while she commuted to Washington, I did not get to know the other leaders of the organization except through her report, but her experience is that , by and large, the leaders of the organization – the bureaucratic members of the deep state, work incredibly hard and are incredibly talented people doing very difficult work to bring top quality health care to a segment of the population that would otherwise likely be underserved.  They do this not primarily because of the tangible compensation (they would actually be better paid in the private sector) but because of their commitment to the mission.

The VA has come a long way in my life time.  It is a modern health care system, a functional national health care system in a country that is ambivalent about such systems and reports to a body – the US Congress – that is often openly hostile to such systems – while it also lives up to its mission.  One of the subtle, but I think important shifts in the system is that each veteran who arrives for treatment is greeted by a staff member who thanks them for their service.  I think we also owe a debt of gratitude to the health care workers who serve those who have served. 

 

P.S.  This essay, which is overly long, was conceived out of a brief fantasy.  I imagined Joe Biden, in one of his State of the Union addresses pointing to my wife as she sat uncomfortably in the gallery of the House of Representatives.  “There she is,” he would say “an exemplary member of the Deep State.  Educated at our best state institutions, trained by the VA, she has risen through the ranks to become the Acting Chief of Staff.  Along the way, she has helped countless Veterans reclaim their lives, kept the house in order, and, as acting Chief of Staff, has helped my appointees figure out how to continue to improve the great organization that serves our veterans.”  Everyone would have applauded, and she would have been given a medal.  He would have gone on to talk about how dedicated our civil servants are to making our country better.  To really tell the story, I had to add a few words…

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The Bear (Seasons 1&2); Culture change mirrors and dances with individual change

 The Bear, Jeremy Allen White, HULU, FX Series, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Culture, Culture Change

The Bear is tremendous television.  I highly recommend it.  That said, it can be hard to get started on.  It is filmed in a very rough fashion.  It feels like watching a documentary, or reality TV, but actually, as it moves along, it feels more like a home movie, and, while this leads to a disjointed feel, it eventually draws you in as a viewer.  It is as if you are a member of the family being let in on what goes on inside of and behind the scenes of your favorite local diner.  If you haven’t seen it and you don’t mind spoilers, read on, but I start with the end and work backwards on this one, so spoilers abound because it is hard to think about the content of this film (I can’t help thinking of it as a film, even though it is a series from FX) without interrogating the content.

In the last episode of season two (all that is out at this writing), Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), is locked in the walk-in cooler of his newly renovated and now quite upscale restaurant during its “friends and family” soft opening.  His “cousin” Ritchie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) has had to take over the role of Chef de Cuisine to run the restaurant in Carmy’s absence and salvage what could have been a disaster.  Ritchie observes Claire (Molly Gordon), Carmy’s girlfriend, leaving the area near the walk-in cooler in tears, and he surmises that Carmy has broken her heart through the cooler’s still locked door.  Ritchie goes to the door and shouts a deeply psychoanalytic interpretation at Carmy.  “You are Dee-Dee.  You are Donna,” he shouts, essentially accusing Carmy of becoming his mother.

Wow!  And isn’t he? And hasn’t he?  Good thing we have a psychoanalyst around (reluctant though he may be) to help us deconstruct this interpretation!

To prepare to think about the interpretation, we need to decode the complicated relationship between Carmy and his mother, Donna – played masterfully by Jamie Lee Curtis, who has been introduced only two episodes before and who makes a brief appearance in this final episode, but who, it is now apparent, has been hovering over Carmy’s life as we have seen it throughout the series as much or more than the ghost of Carmy’s older brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal) who bequeathed the restaurant to Carmy in his suicide note four months before the start of the series.

To be clear, The Bear was a gripping series long before Jamie Lee Curtis showed up, but her showstopping performance cements into place the central dynamic elements of the series.  In Donna/Dee Dee/Jamie Lee’s episode, we see her in flashback, when Mikey is still alive, slaving in the kitchen to produce the meal of the seven fishes for Christmas dinner.  As mentioned before, one of the draws of the series is the filming, which is (intentionally, I am certain) slipshod.  I’m guessing there are a lot of hand-held cameras and the editing is a bit rough.  And Jamie Lee Curtis’s episode is even shot on film in low lighting, and the graininess helps us feel, in a very close and uncomfortable way, like we are there,  not just watching, but feeling the evening unfold.  You know, at a certain point, that there is no way for it to end except badly, but it just keeps getting worse.

Christmas is a complicated holiday.  There is an incredible amount of preparation that goes into creating the “perfect” experience.  The shopping, cooking, decorating and travel create a pressure cooker that, if all goes well, produces a space that is insulated, somehow, from the rest of one’s life – the very toil and trouble that has created this moment.  But the pressure to create that moment can also cause cracks in it, and once those cracks start, the strain of serving the needs of others whom we love enough to want them to experience the magic of Christmas, can explode, as it does here.

A fine dining experience, when it goes well, is a little like the magic of Christmas.  It is an experience that is walled off from the rest of our lives – and it creates an internal experience – a feeling – that is truly sublime.  The first time I ate in a Michelin rated restaurant was in college.  I ate there with a friend.  We couldn’t come close to affording dinner, but we scraped together enough to eat breakfast.  In the moment after a stack of dishes fell and broke, I realized how good I had been feeling as a result of the meal and the company.  The second time that I ate in a Michelin rated restaurant, after I could afford it, it was magic.  The next day, I went to a local eatery with coworkers and the waitress said that she would be serving us today and I thought, “I know you think that, but I now know what true service is, and I don’t think what you have to offer will measure up.”  The fine dining experience, when done well, is as close to seamless as a human experience can be and it is something to be treasured.

This series actually creates a magical experience of its own.  The Berzatto family is one that takes in strays.  Ritchie is such a stray.  He is a cousin by choice, not by birth.  And the restaurant employees are also like family.  In fact, the restaurant is a second, broader family by choice.  I think that we as viewers are invited in, not as viewers, but as family members.  We identity with the crazy and lovely aspects of the family and the business.  The reluctant wife, as an ice breaker, often asks groups that include mucky mucks to talk about their first jobs.  Many of them worked in the restaurant industry or other service jobs that require hard work but not much skill.  Bonding quickly takes place over the hazards and complexities of those early jobs and the mucky mucks and the average Joe’s find that they have a lot in common as they remember what it was like to work in a pressure cooker atmosphere aimed at pleasing the gustatory customer.  I think that we recognize the space that is created here as one that is familiar, but also, thankfully, not our own, and we can vicariously experience it without having to clean up the messes that are created.

But it may also be that I am more susceptible than others to identifying with this family.  I was born in Chicago, but, because of my father’s peripatetic career, I have lived much of my life in exile.  My mother grew up in Chicago and, later, the suburbs.  Two of my cousins on my father’s side ended up opening a bar and restaurant in Chicago.  It was a family business that was a pressure cooker of its own sort – and I was able to vicariously participate from afar (which was much easier than being directly involved) as it got started, flourished, and then crashed and burned.  Though the arc of this story is different, the interaction of family and work dynamics seems very, very familiar, including the tensions between members of the family that have different skill sets, different personal characteristics, and different senses of feeling loved by different members of the family.

Carmy grew up in a sprawling Italian family.  The restaurant that his brother ran (and almost ran into the ground), Chicago Beef, was a sandwich shop that served an urban neighborhood, while the family lived in the suburbs.  When Carmy became old enough, he left Chicago, fleeing from the craziness of his family and searching for a better life.  He found one, sort of, working his way up the ladder of the restaurant business, becoming the Chef de Cuisine at one of the great restaurants in the world.  And there, despite his skills, he was lorded over by a sadistic chef who berated him, encouraging him to work harder and faster.  And, we are left to surmise, he harbored a dream: He wanted to return home and partner with his brother, hoping that his brother could sober up from all the pills and whatnot he was on, so they could transform the sandwich shop into a new restaurant – one that would create a more nuanced experience than the Chicago beef sandwiches that were the mainstay of the business as it was currently run.

When Carmy returns to Chicago, his inheritance is complicated.  The business is failing, and he jumps in with both hands to make sure that it does not go under, but this is complicated by the inertia of the restaurant as it has been, including the people that go with it; Cousin Ritchie, Tina Marrero (Liza Colón-Zayas) the sassy linecook, as well as Carmy’s sister, Natalie "Sugar" Berzatto (Abby Elliott) who also has an interest in the business, and his Uncle, Jimmy "Cicero" Kalinowski (Oliver Platt), who is financially involved.  Carmy is trying to both preserve and change something that all cherish, that all are invested in, and that none but he see the evolutionary potential.  

Carmy’s first gambit, then, is to hire someone from the outside to help him act as a change agent.  Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) fits the bill because she has burned every other bridge and, unbeknownst to Carmy, has eaten his food at the high end place he worked for out of town and she is a true believer in him and what he can do with food.  She is also black and she is odd – she is not comfortable in her skin.  It is almost embarrassing to see her on the screen with all the other actors that fit so comfortably into their roles.  It is as if she is the only actor – the only one trying to act a part rather than be someone.  This is, in my estimation, not a sign of her failing to be a good actor, but a sign of her ability to act.  Her self-consciousness is just what the role calls for.  Sydney is, unlike the rest of the characters, uncertain of herself and how she fits in – not just at the restaurant, but in life.  She is, as it were, playing at being human, so she is the one who is most open to the possibility of change.  Carmy has a vision of what the restaurant will be, no matter how muddy, while she is just awkwardly trying to figure out how to have any vision, of a menu item, of a wardrobe choice, of a topic of conversation, that will work.  Her anxiety about not fitting in, about not being centered in herself, leads her to try out and try on all kinds of different new things as she almost spastically tries to become herself.

So the first season can be summarized as a war for the soul of the restaurant.  Carmy and Sydney are trying to bring the old guard up to speed and the old guard are resisting it.  The old and the new (with the exception of Sydney) want the restaurant as the restaurant it has been to work, they want to preserve the legacy of Mikey, the guy who was fun to be with and who could, by dint of his charisma, make everything fun and crazy, but they want to be able to do what he was not able to: keep the bottom from rotting out.  Carmy is trying to instigate culture change – creating a culture where what matters is not the glitter of having a barely functional working space, but the content of producing something of value.  He and Sydney share a vision of the restaurant producing an experience within the people who consume what is offered that is sublime.  In order to affect this, the staff needs to shift in the way that they work together on creating that experience.

The functional changes that Carmy and Sydney institute are, on the surface, simply matters of protocol.  The employees now call each other “chef” and they call out to each other as they move around the kitchen so that they don’t run into each other.  They wash their dishes and keep their spaces clean.  These are the practices of higher end restaurants like the ones where Carmy has been working, but they are foreign to the functioning of a Chicago Beef place that is turning out sandwiches for the lunch crowd.  The culture – the people who have been working in the sandwich shop – resist the changes.  They are used to doing things the way they are used to doing them.  But they are also intrigued by the possibility of thinking about themselves in new ways.  They begin to recognize that what Carmy is offering is something that would not just elevate the experience of the customers, but it would elevate their experience of themselves.  This creates a sense of intrigue, but they don’t know what they are shooting for, or how to get there, and there is considerable anxiety about whether they have what it takes to make the transition. 

The first season ends with a tremendous performance from Jeremy Allen White as he recounts his experience of losing his brother and the impact that has had on him.  It also ends with the surprise discovery of financial resources assumed to have been lost to drug dealing that are in fact stored away on premises and that can be used to fuel Carmy’s vision of what the place could be in the second season.

So the second season unfolds as a series of short stories that allow us to understand the characters that make up the restaurant family.  We learn their back stories and we see how they individually come to make the changes that will allow them to become a functional family – one that will work to remake the restaurant.  All of this is set against a series of catastrophes that threaten to derail the rebuilding of the restaurant, the central of which is Carmy’s failure of heart.  He is distracted from what should be his central and driving concern by his relationship with Claire (Molly Gordon).  This keeps him from attending to the necessary details of getting the door fixed on the walk-in fridge that leads to the ultimate moment of being unable to preside over the soft opening of his restaurant.  Sydney and Sugar are left to be the driving forces as Carmy orchestrates, but with a distracted air.

I said a moment ago that we get the back stories of the characters, but we also get to see them more fully become themselves as they engage in a series of exercises that Carmy comes up with that allow them to explore, outside the confines of the restaurant, who it is that they can become.  Tina Marrero goes to the Culinary Institute of Chicago, the pastry chef studies with a chef in Denmark (where Carmy had a stop on his journey to learn the trade), and, after the episode with Donna/Dee Dee Jamie Lee Curtis, cousin Ritchie spends a week in the kind of restaurant that he defensively disdains – one that he could never afford to eat in, but one that he would secretly kill to be able to claim as a place that he works.  And we see him transform, in the final episode, into the kind of person that he could only have dreamt of being – the person who can confidently fill in the role of chef de cuisine when Carmy gets locked in the walk-in.

So in the Christmas episode, one facet of the manifold complicated interactions that are taking place is the interaction between Carmy and his mother.  She is demanding that others help her and that they leave the kitchen and she is complaining that they never help her all the while managing not just the seven fishes dish (the meaning of which no one seems to quite understand) but a plethora of other complicated dishes all needing time in the oven simultaneously.  Through the chaos of her cooking and her moods, Carmy is tuned in to his mother and her needs.  He knows what it takes to keep her precariously on track, to emotionally resonate with her and to hold her together so that the next step can be taken.  And he knows how to anticipate which dishes need to be attended to while flying under the radar that would lead his mother to think he thought she couldn’t manage what she is doing.  But this is dangerous business, this business of keeping one’s mother on track.  It requires a lot of work, it is highly anxiety producing, and it ends up being something that one might resent as much as Donna clearly resents preparing the elaborate meal that the entire family looks forward to eating.

So this series is presenting something like a paradox.  Carmy is the generative mastermind that is helping his staff, many of whom are his friends as well as employees, make the kind of personal transformations that will allow for a cultural shift that well create a new functional work space.  At the same time, Carmy himself is undergoing a kind of retrograde personal shift.  His single-minded focus, learned while managing his mother’s mercurial moods (and cooking) drove him to get out from under her oppressive oversight, and became his support system as he competed in the realm of high-end cooking.  But now that he has the ability to harness this for his own good, he is wavering.  Not completely in a bad way.  He is entertaining the possibility of allowing someone else into his world – he is not just partnering with Sydney in the business, but falling in love.  And maybe, just maybe, this is helping him realize that he has needs; significant unresolved needs that deserve to be attended to.  Needs for nurturance and support and connection with someone who really understands him, even if that understanding also comes at the cost of interfering with his unwavering attention to serving others.

When Ritchie accuses Carmy of having become Donna, he senses that Carmy has driven away someone who could love and care for him, and that Carmy is pretending that he doesn’t need this, while his behavior cries out that he does.  The complicating factor, of course, is that tending to the relationship with Claire has interfered with his ability to attend to the restaurant, and therefore to his customers, exemplified by his having failed to replace the door handle to the walk-in cooler, including by forgetting to make the call for the repair because he took a call from Claire.

Daniel Stern, in his book on infants relating to others, clarifies what Carmy demonstrates so clearly in this series.  We are built to relate to others.  As infants, we thrive when others closely attend to us and communicate to us that they get what our needs, but perhaps more importantly, our desires are.  When we have internalized a sense of ourselves and are able to articulate our needs to others while also meeting their needs, we achieve a state of equilibrium.  But this state is rare and difficult to achieve.  Carmy has long been laboring in the desert.  He has been trying to build himself on his own foundation, rather than a foundation that is connected to others.  He hasn’t connected to others, apparently, because it is too painful to do that.  His older brother made fun of him.  His mother demanded too much from him, so he headed out on his own, and he got a considerable distance, but it didn’t create a foundation within himself that is like the one he has been preparing for others.

Many people come into my profession from similar backgrounds.  We work to provide a foundation for others in part because we are seeking such a foundation for ourselves.  Perhaps this is a contributing factor to the high rate of suicide in those professions.  I don’t think that Carmy has such a dark future ahead of him, though it might have something to with the suicide of his brother.  I think that the community that Carmy is building will help sustain him and support his seeking out the kind of support that he needs, that is, after all, the arc of the other characters, but I think both he and Sydney are in need of support, and it can be particularly hard to acquire genuine support as leaders in an organization where you are expected to support others and the others don’t always see the need for the leader to be supported.

What I intended to point out here, though, is that culture change does not occur in the culture – culture is amorphous and dependent on the functioning of the individual members, and ultimately for a culture to change, the individuals have to change.  As I write this, I am in Florida, where I visited an art museum that included the works of Seminole Indians.  In a video by one of the artists, he noted that the elders taught him the basic skills that he needed, then sent him out to explore his craft (in his case it was building dug out canoes).  As he worked, he came up with questions, which he took back to the elders, who would suggest that they had solved the problem he was presenting in a particular way, and he could use that, or he could find a novel way to solve the problem.  It occurred to me in that moment that culture and cultures are not static, and that they are, as depicted in The Bear, fluid entities powered by the interactions between people with complex individual histories that are shaped by the flow of the previous culture through those they have interacted with.

 The Bear asks us to think about who it is that we are as individuals and in relation to others.  It clarifies that neither the individual nor the culture has unlimited degrees of freedom to change.  We are embedded in the culture that has supported and sustained us, but we can also contribute to changing that culture - often by changing ourselves and the ways that we interact with others.  We can, through effort and hard work, move closer to being the person that we would imagine ourselves to be.

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The Fabelmans: What’s in a name?

 Fabelmans, Spielberg, Art, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, A tale 

I am not a big Spielberg fan.  His films have often felt contrived.  I leave the theater feeling manipulated rather than moved, even though feelings have, indeed, been wrenched out of me.  In The Fabelmans, a film that is also a memoir, perhaps it is no coincidence that Spielberg’s muse is a particular kind of artist – a circus performer.  Perhaps Spielberg is equating his films with The Greatest Spectacle on Earth – something not to be missed, but also something that is primarily entertaining and only incidentally edifying, even if there is great potential for that when you martial the resources needed to put together a human and animal extravaganza like a circus or a blockbuster movie.

I read somewhere that Spielberg, like Hitchcock before him, was interested in communicating a feeling state that he experienced as a child.  Hitchcock’s father had him locked up in jail by the local constable, a family friend, for a minor infraction at home to teach young Alfred a lesson.  What Alfred experienced was dread tinged with terror, and he mastered this by inducing that feeling in his audiences.  For Spielberg the Ur experience was the dissolution of his parent’s marriage.  And the feeling associated with this might best be understood as a yearning – a wish to repair something that is broken and over which you have little control – the wish to help ET phone home so that he can be reunited comes to mind.  So, I was interested to see how this film would interrogate that emotional territory not in a displaced form but when confronted directly.

Of course, when The Fabelmans was released we were still under COVID restrictions, and we weren’t in the habit of going out.  I knew that it would be streaming shortly and with the summer movie slate promising to be even more tepid than usual, the Reluctant Wife and I decided to wait to watch it at home because we were both curious about whether this very successful director can adequately capture what drew him to the medium that he has so profitably exploited.

The answer to our question is entrusted to young Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), who, as the ersatz Steven Spielberg, ends the film spending a few moments with the person he believes to be the greatest film director of all time, John Ford, where he learns to put the horizon high on the screen or low on the screen, because those are interesting, but not in the middle of the screen, because that is not.  And in many ways this scene captures how Sammy has used film – it is a way to capture the interest of the audience – to pull them into an experience – to dazzle them even.  Film is a bright shiny object that captures an audience in ways that a geeky kid would never otherwise be able to.

That is not, however, how he uses film initially.  He is taken to his first movie – The Greatest Show on Earth (in fact- the circus theme runs through this movie) – and he is traumatized by it.  There is a scene in which a convertible full of people drives up the tracks to warn a second train that the first train has been derailed and the car is hit full on by the train and the people are thrown from the vehicle.  Spielberg asks for a toy train set for Chanukah and replays the scene to try to master it, but his father Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano), a brilliant but emotionally constricted electrical engineer, is concerned about the damage to the train set during the re-creation.  Sammy’s more sensitive mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) suggests that he recreate the wreck once more and film it so that he can relive it endlessly by showing the film over and over.

There is a lot packed into that set of interactions and the development that film is both the inducer of trauma, but also the means of working it through.  In PTSD, one of the things that fascinated Freud and that did not fit in nicely with his theory of the mind is that traumatic events are replayed, for instance in repetitive dreams.  We keep returning to the scene of the crime, as it were, and he sees this as not fitting in with his theory that dreams are about fulfilling wishes.  I think that the PTSD dreamer is wishing that the dream would provide a different ending than the one that occurred in real life, but the reality of the loss, of the trauma, intrudes, and we wake up not having figured out how to make this thing that has happened unhappen.

But I think Sammy’s mother intuits something else.  I think she intuits that being able to create the accident will give Sammy the sense of mastery over it.  It will be he that is causing the train to strike the car, not something that is being done to him in a movie theater by another person’s film.  It is he that will be taking something that was uncontainable – his terror at the fate of these men – and containing it, making it into something that he is in control of, something that he has produced.  In the trade, we call this turning passive into active.

There are, then, two parallel incidents that describe Sammy’s adolescent trauma, the trauma that involves a greater loss of control than the death of actors on the screen.  Both of these traumas are the result of his family’s move from Arizona to California.  In this move, Sammy’s mother needs to leave behind the family friend, Benny Loewy (Seth Rogen).  Benny has been like Sammy’s father’s kid brother – another engineer that has followed the family from place to place.  As Burt Fabelman’s career has expanded, as he has been in demand, he has been able to negotiate a place for Benny to come with him each time, but the move to LA is a move to the big time and Benny doesn’t have the chops to make it there.  It is also the case that Benny and Mitzi have become lovers – and whether Burt knew that or not, Mitzi’s depression at leaving Benny makes it clear.  Unfortunately, Sammy has known about Benny and Mitzi’s trysts and he is furious with is mother about them.  His incessant filming has caught them secretly being indiscreetly affectionate with each other.  He edits a highlight reel of them so that when he mother asks what is wrong, he can show her the evidence that he has collected.

The other trauma is that Sammy moves from being firmly ensconced in a peer group in Arizona, where he had a cadre of friends to act in the movies that he created, to being the weird kid at the High School in California.  Paralleling his knowledge of his mother’s infidelity, he becomes aware of the prom king’s dalliance with someone other than his girlfriend.  When Sammy tells the girlfriend, and the prom king finds out, the prom king attacks Sammy and demands that he take back the information – to lie to the girlfriend.  Dutifully (and to avoid more bodily harm), Sammy does this, though the girlfriend sees through his meager attempt to undo his interference.

These parallels allow Sammy to use his camera to work out the complex experience of feelings of loss that his parents impending divorce visits upon him.  He does this by filming the senior class’s day at the beach and splicing the film together to portray the philandering classmate as the golden boy who is everybody’s hero.  The golden boy, knowing that Sammy knows that he is not a hero – both because he is a philanderer and because he has bullied Sammy, is ashamed of the film.  He cries that it does not represent who he truly is and demands to know why Sammy has portrayed him in this manner.  Sammy genuinely seems perplexed.  He does not know why he has done this.

I think Sammy’s perplexity is mirrors Spielberg’s.  This film, written by Spielberg about the formative moments in Spielberg’s development, is inarticulate at the central moment of explanation.  This could be a device on the writer/director’s part, but I don’t think it is.  I think he is left wondering about this and he presents this movie as art – raising the question of what occurred in his own and the viewers mind and invited the viewer to wonder.  He is, like his mother, aspires to be not just an entertainer (she is an accomplished pianist), but, as his uncle points out, an artist. 

The maternal uncle (played by Judd Hirsch in a wonderful turn as the impish and crazy family member who should not be let into the house after the death of his and Mitzi’s mother) has predicted that Spielberg’s curse is that he loves film more than he loves his family.  This is the explanation that the writer/director is offering for his tragic hero – that his love of film – his love of, and the scenes of the film emphasize this, creating scenes, filming them, splicing them together and figuring out how to have special effects – his interest (largely depicted as being in the mechanical and logistical aspects of film making) leads him to be isolated from those around him.

But this explanation does not hold water in explaining his decision to glorify the two-timing bully.  I think a more concise explanation is that he wants to restore a complicated world – one filled with philanderers – to one that is simpler; one that is filled with admirable heroes – people that he can believe in and be comforted by.  His isolation from his family is not caused by workaholism, but by the denial of the flaws that he sees in the world and the wish to portray and inhabit a world that lives up to the ideals that he expected of his parents and his workaholism is the mechanism for maintaining the denial.

Some of the irony here is that Burt, Sammy’s father, is depicted as a real mensch.  He recognizes that Mitzi, in spite of her love for him, and his love for her, is better suited to Benny.  Of course, Sammy’s father is being created now by an unreliable narrator – Spielberg has let us know that he doesn’t show things as they are (the prom king), but as he would like them to be.  Is this movie trying to repair his image not just of his mother – to idealize her desire to keep the family together despite the pain that being separated from Benny caused her, but also of his father, to see him not as the person who was not enough for his mother, but as the man who was too smart, too wonderful for any woman to be able to live with?

I have two weird and somewhat random connections with Steven Spielberg.  The first is really random.  I own the home that his cousins grew up in.  They visited the home and gave me a home video of little Steven running around in what is now my house with his camera, taking film of everything in sight.  I also have a less random connection.  A high school friend majored in film and became an editor and worked for Spielberg for years, cutting the films that we have all seen.  Perhaps my friend’s discomfort with working on those films – he did not see them as art but as popular films – is another factor leading to my wondering about denial and wishes for something better as being at the core of the ways that film has led Spielberg to produce the movies that he has.

What this film has helped me see is that the difference between art and entertainment may be that art invites us to wrestle with the unpleasant truths that are difficult aspects of life.  It encourages us to let go of what we hold dear in order to consider a world that is organized along lines that we find uncomfortable, but the artist believes that if we acknowledge them, we will be empowered to better navigate the complicated aspects of that world.  Entertainment, on the other hand, let’s us leave the spectacle essentially unchanged – or,  perhaps, changed back from our complicated selves to a simpler version of who we are and were – children who are fascinated but also bewildered by the world, and soothed by knowing that there is always a happy ending.  The moral of the Fabelmans is that our heroes are real and we can rely on them - the factures that lie beneath the service do not detract from their virtues - even though this leaves us a little mystified because we never quite come to grips with them.

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