Hit Man: Is it a Good Film or a Bad Film?

 

Hit Man, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Morality, Justice, Personal Growth, Complications, Simple Solutions

One of my graduate school roommates asked me to weigh in on the question of whether Hit Man is a good film or not.  He liked the film.  A lot.  Our other roommate couldn’t stand it.  The one who liked it wants me to tip the scales. 

I think this is – if we leave aside the perils of siding with one friend over the other – a reasonable request.  All three of us were graduate students together, all three of us have become teachers – each in our discipline, and this film is about a teacher and his development into becoming a better teacher.

Shouldn’t this be a film that appeals to us?  Why is our third roommate so recalcitrant?

“Wait”, you say (or I did as I was watching it), “Hit Man is about a college professor?  How can that be?”

The secret to this film (spoiler alert) is that there are no hit men in the real world.  They only exist in Hollywood movies.  So, when, in real life, someone asks around for a hit man, somebody lets the police know that there is a potential murderous impulse out here, and the police set the would-be killer up – they use a sting or catfishing operation and an officer pretends to be the hit man and, when the unsuspecting murderous person clarifies that they really do want the “hit man” to kill someone else, the police arrest the person for intending to murder someone, and there is a trial.

Ah, good, we say.  The police have performed a service.  They have prevented a murder that otherwise might have happened. 

Let me come back to that later.

In the film, our friend the professor – Gary Johnson (Played by Glen Powell who also co-wrote the screenplay with Richard Linklater who, in turn, was the Author of another film that, like this one, was loosely based on the story of an actual human: Bernie), works for the cops part time and listens in while these sting operations are going on.  He is not a police officer, but is doing part time work sitting in a van monitoring the catfishing conversations.

In real life, Gary is dull as dishwater.  He bores his students.  He bored his ex-wife (with whom he is still friends – she didn’t leave him because she hated him, she left him because he was remote and unavailable – and therefore unloving - and she wants him to become more interesting - and interested).  Gary bores all the other members of the “hit man” team.  He is a sad sack. 

Actually, I kind of liked Gary the teacher at the beginning.  He was passionate about his field.  A little clunky in his delivery – but desperately trying to get his students to engage.  And they wouldn’t.  Instead they made fun of him.  The most cold-hearted line was, “This guy drives a Civic.”

And I resemble that remark.  OK, I never drove a Civic, but I do believe that cars are a means to get from here to there.  I think the life of the mind is what matters, and this is very uncool – especially with students who like hot cars and basketball games; these students cringe when they hear me talk about Plato and Freud while I am wondering just what it is that they came to college for…

And I resemble Gary in being more than a little bit dweeby.  His cats are named Ego and Id.  He lives in a nothing little place.  But he cares about ideas.  I would even hazard that all three of us ex-roommates are, at moments, more than a little like Gary. 

The roommate who is enthusiastic about the film is a poet.  He does public readings of his poetry with a Jazz band accompanying him.  He is hip – but some of his students must find him retro hip – and therefore dweeby?

As for the naysayer, the essayist and journalism teacher, is it possible he feels the resemblance too closely?  He is, I think, the coolest of the three of us. He is handsome, easygoing, and good at connecting with people – so he might be the one most vulnerable to a shadow side identification – his coolness just might betray his discomfort with his inner dweeb.

(The moral of the above two paragraphs, btw, is: don’t invite a psychoanalyst to a knife fight – he can cut in ways that leave no visible means of entry).

(Of course, the countervailing concern is that Philip Roth’s analyst wrote a thinly veiled description of him – and then Roth responded in kind.  The writer sliced the analyst to pieces – I may just have created my own soon to be demise).

The low production value of this film is, I think, intentional.  I think it is supposed to feel like a bad 1960s cop show.  Or maybe 70s, 80s or 90s.  Think Dragnet meets Hawaii 5-O or Magnum PI.  It is set in New Orleans – that sea of bad juju -   and the sets are mostly shotgun houses, strip malls, juke joints and a police station that looks like it is in an old house.  This is not the touristy side of New Orleans, but the grittier side.  We are immersed in a desultory sea of humanity.

Meanwhile, Gary’s ex-wife (now pregnant with her new husband) is encouraging him to become someone, anyone; to try on an identity and see if he can live his way into being a new person, and, by doing this, transcend his own desultory, drab existence and become someone who can love and be loved.

So, when the policeman who portrays the hitman is unexpectedly suspended from the force right before a sting, Gary is forced to impersonate a hit man because no one else is available, and it turns out he has a knack for it.  In the conversation with the sap, Gary adds in gruesome details about disposing of bodies and transitions from dweeb to ghoul convincingly enough to get the sap to say the words that get him arrested and, ultimately, thrown in the pokey.  And Gary is drafted into the position as a regular replacement while the regular is forced to take time off for having perpetrated acts of violence.

Not surprisingly, this subplot plays out like Wally Pipp taking the day off and having Lou Gehrig upstage him.  The cop being replaced, though, isn’t as gracious as Wally; he holds a grudge and shows up later to exact revenge.

Gary takes to this new opportunity with gusto.  He begins researching the potential saps and becomes the type of hit man he imagines the saps are looking for.  He impersonates a Russian Thug, a woman, but most centrally he not just impersonates but becomes “Ron” – the kind of cool, devil may care, aggressive man that would be the hero that a wounded bird would be looking for.

When “Ron” meets the wounded bird, she is named Madison (Adria Arjona) and she is being held hostage by a mean and vindictive husband.  Hiring a hit man is, as Glen Powell notes in an interview, a simple solution to a complex problem. 

Getting a woman out of a relationship with an abusive man is complicated and difficult.  Cities have built safe houses to protect these women.  I have worked in cities where I am not allowed, as a mental health professional, to know where these safe houses are because I am a man.  Sometimes when a woman leaves an abusive relationship, the man seeks her out and tries to win her back through intimidation and/or force.  Also, once out, the women, who are frequently deeply attached to the men in addition to wanting out, act on their ambivalence by returning. 

When “Ron” meets Madison, instead of closing the deal, he takes pity on her.  There is a sense that justice will not be served by sending the wounded bird to prison, and he talks her out of hiring him.  And, it just so happens that, as “Ron”, he is just the kind of badass that a wounded bird would be attracted to. 

The strength of this film is that it, like Bernie, tells the story of an average man - someone who is struggling to move ahead in a mediocre world without much heft, but someone who is essentially decent and quiet and weighs weighty problems as if they are theoretical, not the actual problems of living a life - who gets caught up in a web outside his control, and it is the story how he responds to reality intruding into his safe and protected version of life.

One of the holes in this story is that Madison evokes a different reaction from Gary than any of the others.  We see him in court, testifying about the murderous intent of the people he has entrapped.   He is judgmental about and contemptuous of the people who opt for the simple solutions to difficult problems; including the woman who wants to off her husband and offers to take a subtly different version of "Ron" – a kind of sleazy countrified hit man – on as a boy toy.  Of course, this woman is not as attractive as Madison…

The holes here are multiple.  Gary is a guy who is philosophical and, I think, interested in Justice.  He wants to do what is right.  And yet he doesn’t consider that (all of) the other folks might be overwhelmed by the circumstances they are facing and want an easy way out, one that will lead to huge complications (including their own jail time - a simple solution that introduces multiple complications into people's lives...). 

Hmm…  Am I proposing that the police should be a social service agency, helping those who are down and out rather than hustling them off to the pokey?  I think Gary should be contemplating this question, regardless of whether I believe it or not.  Or rather, he should be contemplating it in cases beyond the one involving the drop-dead gorgeous woman.

If I were to contemplate it for a moment, I would propose that the legal system is proposing a simple solution to a complex problem when they arrest the person who is mad enough to try to hire a person to solve the problem with murder.  The solution the legal system proposes is to jail the person who can’t figure out another way to solve the problem.

At the risk of overgeneralizing, isn’t this what the legal system does in general?  Isn’t this what dichotomous solutions do in general?  In the legal system, one person is at fault, the other is a victim.  Isn’t that solution usually (though not always) problematic?  Isn’t it more complicated than that that?

In the field of psychology, the hardline psychologists, in attempting to make psychology a “hard” science, demand that we only accept certain kinds of evidence of, for instance, the effectiveness of psychotherapy treatments.  The intent here is to eliminate the kind of bias that can creep in when we evaluate treatments using other means.  Guilty as charged.  But if we restrict ourselves to only one kind of evidence, or one way of “proving” something, another kind of bias creeps in – a bias that prevents us from using our whole selves to engage with each other and our functioning becomes mechanical – hardly a useful way to treat another human being.

OK, to return to the film, Hollywood demands that beauty allows for empathic connection and ugliness does not.  “Ron” falls for the pretty girl.  And he recognizes that her situation is more complicated, in part because she presents it as being so simple.  I get that.  Without dropping too many more spoilers, suffice it to say that some pretty predictable complications arise when Madison looks up “Ron”.  And also a pretty thin happy ending is eked out (I don’t think that is a spoiler – this movie has the kind of Magnum PI vibe that promises that we will feel good at the end of it).

The irony here is that Madison’s entry into “Ron’s” life significantly complicates Gary’s life as well.  The complications are, I believe, what end up making Gary a more interesting person – not his impersonations of others.  It is that he, as Gary, has to acknowledge his commitment to Madison and act on that commitment in ways that are, well, complicated.  They go against the basic principles that would protect dweeby Gary from ever causing anyone any harm – but would also keep him from causing others to be interested in him. 

Not so much because he engages in heinous actions (which he does), but because he become active.  The things that he is talking about in class are no longer esoteric academic exercises that he drily describes, they are lived and applied principles that he helps his students wrestle with using real life scenarios, and his female students wonder when he became hot.

Simple Gary was aesthetically admirable, but he was also a hermetically sealed character leading a nothing life.  Complicated Gary is reprehensible, but daring – and, more than that, passionate and passionately engaged in living. 

One of the complexities of the film (I am being generous here) is that Gary develops unevenly.  He is, in fact, attractive as well as dweebish in the beginning.  He is also compassionately engaged – with his students, and with animals as well as humans before his conversion.  Generously, then, Gary is portrayed as discovering his true self as he explores the character of “Ron” – his alter ego (or, to use the black board example he offers the class, his Jungian shadow self).

Frankly, though, the charismatic edges that shine through Gary’s pre-transition character seem more like the actors natural charisma bleeding through – and we could judge this as a failure on the director and actor’s part to help the actor fully channel a dweeb.  The dweebs that I see transition in therapy do that much more subtly, but every bit as tectonically as the film portrays.  The introduction of the heinous action on Gary’s part – something that was not part of the life of the person the film is based on – seems, then, gratuitous and part of the over inflation that the film engages in to make a point.

So, where do I land?  This is decent entertainment.  It helped me pass the time.  It was thought provoking.  How does a person become someone else?  Does imitation lead to internalization?  Can Gary become “Ron” by playing him?  Or is it in the action of truly becoming “Ron”, not playing him, that Gary is transformed?

Ultimately I have been asked a dichotomous question about a film that appears to be more complicated than it was at first glance.  Is this a good or a bad film?  YES!

  

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Inside Out 2: A Sequel that Makes Developmental Sense

 Inside Out 2, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Emotions, Character, Inner World, Art and Science

Inside out was a surprisingly psychologically sophisticated film.  I saw it with the younger Reluctant Daughter - we both loved it - and I loved having an evening with her.  She is now grown and on her own, living far away, and, after asking permission from her, I decided to go to the theater with the Reluctant Wife and our older Reluctant daughter to see Inside Out 2.  After watching it, I commented to the Reluctant Wife and Daughter that Inside Out 2 was a disruptive film.  Both of them had enjoyed it, as did I, but unlike our last venture to the theater together (we went to see Appropriate on stage in New York which generated intrafamilial controversy), this seemed to be just a lighthearted excursion into the world of adolescence.  What could be disruptive?  I responded that I was disappointed that Pixar seems to be more on top of some aspects of development than I am, and this is concerning to me.

I will forego framing the plot of Inside Out 2, though I anticipate that my descriptions of the psychology of the film will necessarily contain spoilers.  Briefly, the film articulates the experiences of a week in the life of Riley, the preteen in Inside Out, as she navigates a week in her life between eighth grade and high school, culminating in a weekend at hockey camp where she is attempting to make the high school team as a freshman.  I am not intending this post for people who are thinking about going to the film, but, as is often the case, for people who have seen it. 

I must admit that seeing the film in the theater was not pleasant.  After sitting through a half hour onslaught of commercials for Disney Parks and films, seeing the Disney castle appear to announce the beginning of this film released both relief and a wish to defile the Castle in some permanent way – to clarify that it is not, in fact, a place of conviviality and connection, but a series of isolated towers that seem designed to imprison rather than free those who have been captivated by it…

Which is an interesting introduction to the film.  This is a coming of age film – or, more focally, a surviving early adolescence film.  But the twist is that the emancipation that this film envisions is not from an external oppressor (Disney, in this case, or perhaps her parents locking Riley in an isolated tower), but rather she is being freed from the clutches of being controlled by her own emotions.  I may be a slow learner, but I did not achieve what is portrayed in this film until long after adolescence (OK, truth be told, I am still trying to negotiate the transition being portrayed, and maybe that has something to do with my not being up to the same developmental speed as Pixar).

The genius of the Inside Out (now apparent) franchise is that inner world is run by basic emotions that compete for access to the control system.  In the original film, five emotions are in competition: Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, and Fear.  Emotions are depicted as being in competition for access to the consciousness not just of Riley, but of all of the other characters in the movie.  In other words, this is the basic state of being human.  This mechanistic depiction of human functioning is actually quite consistent with current psychoneuroanalytic concepts of the functioning of the mind.  In this second film, the original five emotions have been joined by Anxiety, Envy, Embarrassment and Ennui.

Having new emotions appear – especially with the onset of puberty – is brilliant.  It is not just that the world feels MORE intrusive, abrasive and difficult to manage – it is not just a matter of degree – the world has a different quality.  It feels different.  We are attuned to aspects of the world that didn’t matter much before because we have new antennae – new feelers that are capable of picking up new vibrations in the world.

Of course, within the Inside Out world it would have been nice to have been aware of these additional feelings that come on board later, as the parents and other adults could have been equipped with them in the first movie as they are in this current edition, but we will give some artistic license to realize that it is not just Riley that is developing, but the Pixar people.

That said, it makes sense to compare the Pixar feeling states with the feeling networks that are the current scientifically accepted core neurological states.  Jaak Panksepp’s research has led us to think of seven feeling states:

1.          Fear.  This feeling does not come into play when we feel safe.  When it gets activated, we freeze or flee from an external threat.

2.          Rage.  Frustration occurs when things get in the way of accomplishing a goal.  If the person who is getting the way of accomplishing a goal is someone that we love, things get complicated (see panic below).

3.          Lust.  Freud thought that all pleasure was sexual.  We have learned that there are many pleasures and we can think of this as an acquisitive drive.  I want x.

4.          Seeking. We might think of this as curiosity.  I am longing to come in contact with what is unknown to me.

5.          Panic/Grief.  This emotional state is based on our need to cared for.  When we are in danger of losing loved ones, we freak out.

6.          Care/Concern.  Not only do we need to be cared for, we need to care for others.  Our hearts ache when those we care for are in danger. 

7.          Playfulness.  This emotion is an important part of our being pack animals and learning how to interact with other members of the pack.

8.          Disgust.  (I said there would be seven, but disgust is sometimes included as an eighth – and since Pixar has this as a character, let’s just add it in).

The Pixar feeling state that is most glaringly missing from this group is Joy.  Playfulness, in my mind, may be the closest feeling state to the character Joy in the Inside Out movies.  But in the model of the mind that Mark Solms proposes – one that is based both in current neuropsychological thinking and in Freudian theory – joy is, weirdly, the absence of feeling.  A state we could call the nirvana state, when all systems are go and there is no feeling that is tugging at conscious saying, “you need to take care of this!”

The interesting thing about both the Pixar list and the Panksepp/Solms list is that they are both woefully incomplete.  One of the fun internet games is, “What additional emotion would you have included that Pixar did not in Inside Out 2?”  After we watched the movie, the Reluctant Daughter posed this to us – I answered guilt and The Reluctant Wife answered shame.  Thinking about it now, I am surprised that Pixar didn’t include love.  Where would Disney, or any other studio, be without love?  Isn’t love what makes the world go round?

Panksepp and Solms propose that the manifold feeling states that we experience are essentially complex combinations of the basic emotions.  Sternberg’s triangular theory of love is an example of this kind of thinking.  Sternberg proposes that we can describe different kinds of love (erotic love, parental love, companionate love) based on the relative strengths of three components – two of them emotional and one cognitive.  He suggests that the levels of passionate attraction (lust), levels of  intimacy (Panic/Grief and/or Care/Concern) and levels of commitment (the cognitive component) can distinguish between different types of what we call love.

Solms also suggests that some emotional states are the result not of concordant but of conflicting feelings.  So guilt is the result of a conflict between rage and attachment. 

Because the emotions in the Pixar world are not pure, but characters being voiced by complex people, we see the feeling states develop across the course of the movie.  Joy moves in the first movie to acknowledge the need for sadness, and in the second movie to acknowledge the importance of anxiety.  But it is not just joy that develops, anger also does, becoming more thoughtful – more strategic.  All of this is occurring in the context of the development of Riley’s character.

The central plot in the internal world of Inside Out 2 revolves around the development of the character structure.  The original emotions have helped Riley develop a seemingly solid, desirable character in her childhood – the sense that she is a good person.  This has helped her in the outside world.  Anxiety demonstrates that this is too brittle a character to carry her through adolescence – where relationships demand much more cunning and ennui.  The original emotions are banished from the control room and set off on a quest to recover the “good girl” character and are in a race to return that character to the determining position in the control room before the new, complex character that is constructed of various “not so good” strands becomes solidified.

Ultimately, the solution to traversing the vast distances in Riley’s mind in the short time afforded to the banished feeling states necessitates their unleashing the suppressed memories that they have so carefully hidden from Riley’s consciousness.  This tidal wave of undesirable memories and experiences floods the area that connects to the character structure and the replacement of the twisted character with the original pristine character fails and a new hybrid character structure, one that is kaleidoscopic rather than static, emerges. 

This highpoint in the movie made me wonder how many of the writers are engaged in Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy.  This therapy is based on an assumption that the mind is not unitary, but made up of dissociated elements – the treatment has appropriated the language of Multiple Personality Disorder (now call Dissociative Identity Disorder in an effort to hide it from the public) to refer to aspects of the self as “alters” – short for alternative personalities. 

And don’t we all have alters?  Aren’t we a different person when we talk on the phone with our Dad than when we talk with our Mom?  Or our children? Or our sibling? Or our boss?  And yet, aren't we the same person from one day to the next?  Isn’t it sort of a miracle that we have relatively constant sense of ourselves at all?

Inside Out 2 nicely takes this potentially disorienting and shattering characterization of our character as kaleidoscopic and turns it into a lovely visual representation of a talisman of ourselves that can shine different colors and forms depending on the needs of a given situation.  At a sleepover, we can be less mature, while with cunning friends we can feign indifference to material that we care deeply about, all in the interests of maintaining the integrity of the whole self.

Perhaps the central miracle illustrated in this film, then, is the relationship between Riley and her emotions.  In a weird moment, Joy is called back to the control panel.  If I overlay Solms' concept of Joy as the absence of feeling - or perhaps the drive of the core self to achieve a state of homeostasis where we are using our self to maximum capacity - Riley bypasses the wily anxiety and turns to Joy as the character who should be in control of her actions.  Isn't this something that we all aspire to?  Isn't this something like the depiction of a peak experience - of self actualization?  I both enjoyed and was just a little bit envious of Riley's ability to call forth Joy.  Oh, that I may be able to do that more often in my own life!

To return to the brilliance of this work, the development of a complex self involves not just the integration of various memories into a complex whole, but the development of new means of sensing the world and reacting to it.  The research of Panksepp – and Solms – has largely focused on the adult emotional system and, at least as I have studied it, I have not been asking the question of how does this system developed.  Inside Out 2 nicely corrects that oversight.

A complete theory of mind, as Freud pointed out 100 years ago, requires an understanding of how that mind develops.  What are the critical elements of that development?  How does it come online?  And so, when we focus on various components of that mind – cognition, emotion, character structure – how do those components develop both as individual components, and in relationship with each other.

I am not ready quite yet to cite Peter Docter and the rest of the Pixar team as my go to neurological consultants, but I appreciate their guidance as I work to create a working model of the minds that I work with both in the abstract and in the concrete world of the consulting room and engaging in the relationships with others that, in their best moments, bring me joy and allow me to connect the appropriate color of my character with the color that they are able to radiate at that particular moment.  I am also appreciative of the development of my children that allows me to enjoy favorite and share favorite experiences and current versions of those experiences with each of them.

 

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