Rigoletto: Trump and Leadership 2, How to Get away with Murder.

 Rigolletto, Opera, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Trump, Morality Play, Tragedy, Comedy, Sadism

We ran into a friend at the intermission of the local production of Rigoletto.  He is a big sports fan from Boston who has season tickets to the local baseball and college basketball teams and often travels to see championship games.  I have seen him intermittently at the opera over the years and wondered about his affinity for sports AND opera.  His explanation was as follows:

He was wandering around Europe on a Eurail pass, staying in hostels and generally taking a gap year sometime in the 1970s.  When he came to Vienna, a friend suggested that he had a couple of tickets to the Vienna Opera performance of Rigoletto.  Willing to take a suggestion, he went along, sporting jeans and a leather jacket, with shoulder length hair.  The Opera goers, of course, were dressed very differently.  At intermission, he went to the lobby where the denizens formally paraded in two circles – one clockwise and one counterclockwise – nodding stiffly to their friends and acquaintances as they passed by in their tuxes and evening gowns. 

At the end of the opera – when Rigoletto experiences his tragic loss – my friend looked around.  All of the men that he could see were in tears.  They were sharing the grief of the lead character.  He, himself, if he wasn’t crying before, was after seeing the others.  At the conclusion of the final aria, as Rigoletto bent over his now dead daughter, there was sustained applause for 3 minutes before the tenor acknowledged it with a slight bow, after which there were 5 more minutes of applause before the curtain call.  My friend was hooked, and has been ever since.

The story of Rigoletto is relatively straightforward compared to that of many operas.  Rigoletto is a hunchback whom people have always made fun of, so he knows how to make fun of others and has connected himself to the Duke – the most powerful man in town.  Rigoletto’s job is to be the Duke’s jester.

The Duke is a despicable man who makes sport of seducing, deflowering and casting aside women – despite being married himself and the most powerful man in the town (originally modelled after the King of France, the tale had to be retold for the censors to allow it to be produced).  The Duke is, in a word, a charming bully.  The opera opens with the Duke engaged in casting aside his latest conquest, and Rigoletto, in his role as jester, but seemingly also without remorse or conflict, making fun both of the spoiled woman and of her father.  The Duke and Rigoletto are reveling in their power and thoroughly enjoying the roles of bully and piler-on.  The father, driven to distraction by their bullying, curses Rigoletto, something that Rigoletto laughs off in public, but is more concerned with in private.  Originally called The Curse, the action of the second and third acts of this opera detail Rigoletto’s downfall as he is skewered by the father's curse.

In the second act, we discover that Rigoletto has a secret life.  He lives in a very private place at the end of an alley that no one uses.  He lives there with his daughter, Gilda, whom he tries to protect from the outside world, a world that he knows all too well can be cruel and callous.  He allows Gilda to leave the home only to go to church and back for services.  While at church, she has fallen for an apparently pious and very poor person who is actually the Duke in disguise.  The duke follows her home and, after bribing her lady in waiting confesses his love to her and she, quite taken by him, feels transported into a state of bliss (In the staging that we saw, she was clearly masturbating on stage while talking about the intensity of her adoration for the Duke – and the aria clearly lent itself to the sounds of a woman experiencing carnal as well as ethereal pleasure).

Meanwhile, the Duke’s henchmen get wind that Rigoletto, who has cruelly made fun of each and every one of them, is hiding a woman in his home.  They think that he has a secret lover – and they break into his house and steal his daughter to deliver her to the Duke (they even blindfold Rigoletto and get him to hold the ladder for them, claiming they are stealing someone else for the Duke’s delight).  The Duke is all too happy to take Gilda into an inner chamber in his home and to deflower her.  Rigoletto has, by this point, figured out what is going on and, while the Duke is charming and defiling his daughter, the Duke’s henchmen cruelly taunt and humiliate Rigoletto, preventing him from protecting his daughter, even after he reveals that the woman is not his wife or lover but his daughter.  They seemingly have no shame or remorse, just as Rigoletto had no shame in deriding the poor man whose only recourse became the curse. 

Ultimately, Gilda is returned to Rigoletto, and, though ruined in Rigoletto’s eyes, she herself is convinced that she is in love.  Rigoletto realizes that the curse is upon him, and decides to hire an assassin to kill the Duke.  After all, it is the Duke who is the true bad guy who has put all of these terrible consequences into action, and the death penalty feels like an appropriate penalty for this crime.

Rigoletto met the Assassin earlier, but when they meet now, the assassin explains that he works by using his beautiful sister as bait.  She lures men into her home where they are vulnerable to attack by the assassin and she turns them over to her brother there to kill them.  The assassin’s sister finds the Duke and brings him, as planned, to her home.  Rigoletto hears the sister's advances towards the Duke and takes his daughter to hear the Duke seducing another woman, which he does with a very bouncy, bubbly tune, all the while unaware that he is being seduced and ultimately will be killed. 

Despite hearing the Duke’s joy in seducing another, Gilda remains resolute in her love for the Duke.  When Rigoletto tells her to go home and prepare to flee the town with him, she doubles back, hears the plan of the assassin, and runs into his sword to protect the Duke.  The Assassin packs her in a bag, delivers her to Rigoletto as the corpse of the Duke.  Rigoletto, thinking she is the Duke, prepares to pitch the body into the river, but just then he hears the Duke singing that bouncy tune as seduces yet another woman.  Rigoletto opens the bag to discover his dying daughter who professes her love for the Duke but also her father as she dies, and Rigoletto cries out, “The Curse”, and we all cry with him…

This is obviously a morality play, but the moral is a bit cloudy.  The real villain here – the Duke – gets off scot-free.  He can seduce women with importunity and deride their parents – including Rigoletto, one of his underlings, but the curse does not affect him.  As the production notes at our opera noted, he is also never cognizant of the danger he is – he seems to have succeeded in seducing the Assassin's daughter, is unaware that Gilda has sacrificed herself for him, and he is off to his next conquest later that night. 

In a recent lecture that I heard about Greek and Tragedy and Comedy, the Tragic hero tries to imitate the Gods, and his inability to do that leads to his downfall.  Expecting ourselves to transcend who it is that we are is a set up for failure.  Rigoletto (and most opera heroes) seems to fit this bill.  The Duke, however, seems more like a comic hero.  Someone who lives as a mortal, never pretending to be something he is not, and, almost in spite of this, he succeeds in achieving happiness.

The problem with accepting the Duke as a comic hero is twofold.  First, even though the opera is chided for its light and hummable tunes, it does not end with the Duke, as comic hero, joyfully prancing off the stage into the sunset.  We identify with Rigoletto.  We, too, want to shield our children from all that is bad in the world, including ourselves.  We want to create a space for them that is sacred – not filled with the toxic agents we have been exposed to and exude.  So our identification is with the scarred but trying to do better by his child Rigoletto, and our shared grief at our failure to be able to do that is what leads to the communal catharsis at the end of this opera.

The other reason this is not a comedy is that though the Duke is a flawed human – he is not someone who bumbles and stumbles, but can laugh at himself; he is an essentially evil person.  We are seduced by him when he professes his love for Gilda.  This is different, he assures her and us, from all his other conquests.  Her virtue, her beauty is transcendent and has made him a changed man.  And we (or at least I) believe him – until we hear him wooing the executioner’s daughter – then all bets are off.  He does not in fact care about the other – he has forgotten Gilda and is not parading other women in front of her to show that he is not taken with her – defending against the deep attachment that she feels for him; he has forgotten her.  He is not mature enough to be sadistic.  The women in his life are simply confections – there to be consumed and discarded.

Rigoletto is a sadist.  He takes pleasure in the Duke’s conquests.  They allow Rigoletto to vicariously seek revenge on those who have injured him – to help them get their comeuppance.  He wants to hurt them - or others like them – and this betrays his attachment to them.  This is further borne out in his attachment to his daughter, which is genuine.  He does not want her to know that he is mean and petty because he wants a different kind of connection between him and her.

The Duke, on the other hand, is not parading his conquests in front of his wife to harm her – to prove to her that she doesn’t love her when, in fact, he does and these conquests are a vain attempt to prove to himself that he is not attached to his wife when he actually is.  The Duke wants to hide his conquests from his wife.  If he feels any attachment to her, she is functioning as a parental figure who would keep him from pleasure.  And he wants pleasure and more pleasure and doesn’t want any consequences – and he doesn’t get any. 

If Dante had a ring of hell that was an Island for each inhabitant so that they are cut off from any contact with others (like Philoctetes), the Duke would surely be consigned to it.  He takes the availability of others for his pleasure for granted and doesn’t need to provide anything in return.  If there is a price to be paid for his lack of connection, it will be paid by his henchmen, not he himself.  In part because his henchmen are beholden to him, they understand the importance of relationships – even if those relationships are corrupt.  Because the Duke believes himself beholden to no one, he is “freed” of the sense of obligation – but also freed from becoming the best version of himself, one that can be content with what he has accomplished rather than momentarily sated by the false promise of cotton candy conquests; a pale imitation of the joys (and trials) of true intimacy.

 

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 Mission Impossible Final Reckoning, MI, psychology, psychoanalysis, leadership, trust, dreams, ambitions

Mission Impossible Final Reckoning: Leadership Notes to Trump 1

Mission Impossible Final Reckoning is a pretty straightforward action movie.  It is one that culminates a series of such movies, but you really don’t need to have seen any of the previous ones to enjoy this one – nor even to have seen the original TV series – though a bit of background won’t hurt either.  I will try to make this post brief because the movie is straightforward, but as my kids say, “Ask him what time it is and he will tell you how to make a watch.”

The New Yorker’s review of this film highlights the ways in which it appears to be pointed at Trump’s agenda, but I think it is a bit wide of the mark.  They suggest, for instance, that filming in various countries underscores the havoc that Trump imposed tariffs on foreign filming could cause.  I find it hard to believe that the choice to film in various locations was made after the tariffs were announced just three or four months ago.

I think this engrossing film is effectively critical of Trump for two reasons: first, the Tom Cruise character demonstrates leadership – meaning that he is thoughtful and constructs a plan and then takes on the parts that suit his character while delegating aspects to people well suited to handling them; second, then, he constructs a team that works both together and autonomously to accomplish a shared goal.  Building an effective and well-functioning team with clearly defined objectives is characteristic of good leadership.  I suppose there is a third aspect – the film suggests that a charismatic leader – one who understands the gravity and import of a moment – can make a difference – can effect a positive change against all odds.  This may be something that Trump aspires to – I think, in fact, he imagines that this is what he is doing.  If this is the message to Trump though, I think it is bait.  Something to draw him in.  Not an action plan.

This movie stretches credibility at every possible moment.  The task that the Mission Impossible team is set is an eponymously impossible one, and the obstacles that they must surmount, and the things that must coalesce for the team to be successful, are beyond unreal.  The chances of each part of the plan succeeding are slender – and the feats of derring-do that must be accomplished are formidable.  Throughout the film the odds of each aspect of the plan are stated with mathematical exactitude, and each probability is miniscule.  When they are multiplied together, they make an electron look large.

The movie, then, is built like a dream.  A dream we might have every night, a dream of something that is unlikely to actually occur, but one that we are deeply invested in.  In an ordinary night dream, when the odds are against something actually happening, we work hard to create the conditions that will allow our crazy wish to come true.  As we stretch what is plausible, the dream begins to crack – and if our wish is entirely unrealistic based on what we "know" to be the case, it breaks. 

In the movie, two things work against the implausibility of what is occurring leading us to turn away in disbelief.  The first is the intensity of the action.  We move back and forth between two fight scenes seamlessly integrated with each other so that we can keep track of what is happening in both, but only if we fully commit our attention to the action – there is no room for us to entertain doubts about the plausibility of what we have just observed actually happening.  Similarly, when we are keeping track of the rolling of the submarine at the same time that we are tracking both the internal geography, what needs to be accomplished, and the threat that the falling torpedoes pose, we don’t have room to ponder how the swimmer can be this active in water this cold at this depth when his skin becomes exposed to it.

The second thing that is working to keep our reality testing at bay is that we know that Tom Cruise is performing his own stunts.  There is a real component to this.  Especially as we approach the final action sequence, we are riveted by the empathic connection with the individual who is holding on for dear life while the wind is whipping him and he is being twisted and turned by powerful g forces.  This guy has skin in the game, so we, even those of us who, like me, are of two minds about what kind of person the actor actually is, suspend our disbelief because we are there, hanging on for dear life with him.

The movie, in general, asks us to be empathic both with the fears of the other leaders – what would it be like to be the president and to consider using nuclear power, knowing personally what damage it would cause, and knowing that it would, at best, keep terrible forces at bay while wreaking unimaginable broader destruction; and with leaders of the team who find helpful aids along the way – a native who doesn’t speak English but is able to communicate and lend the resources necessary to complete the mission.  We need to trust that our leaders have integrity – and that those we meet along the way will help us because they recognize the value of what we are doing.

So this movie is constructed to help us believe in the possibility of impossible missions being accomplished.  And what is the central impossible mission?  It is to create a team that can rely on each other – to build relationships and trust including with those who might at first seem hostile to you (while also recognizing those whose ideology is inconsistent with ours - pointedly, the Russians)– because, at heart, we all want the best possible outcome.

I have written elsewhere about the problems with American exceptionalism.  It can blind us to the manifold ways that we are actually causing damage when we believe that we are being helpful, but, especially at a historical moment like this one, when everything that we thought we knew about ourselves is being questioned, we need to be reminded that the central concepts of trust, leadership with integrity, and caring for others as a central value are virtues that we aspire to – even though those are much more complicated than they are being portrayed to be on the screen.  Just as this movie is a team effort – multiple people working on multiple continents to achieve a common goal, we are a people that are united in believing that this grand experiment of governing ourselves can work.

This past weekend, I participated in one of many local “No Kings” marches.  The people on the march were neighbors, friends and strangers and the largest group I have been in for some time.  There was a sense of trust in each other, of shared purpose, but also of respect and comradery.  It was moving to see the real world reflect the values that a movie – that a dream – would have us aspire to.

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Covid Chronicles XXXI: Much of what we thought was true was not…

 

 Covid, Science, Psychology, psychoanalysis, failed shelter in place orders

Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee have written a book, “In Covid’s Wake”(Princeton) that was reviewed this week in the New Yorker by Daniel Immerwahr.  The book uses epidemiological data to evaluate some of the measures that we took to manage the COVID crisis.  Immerwahr uses this to muse about our willingness to accept the word of experts – and the perils of doing that.  He also points out that, in the long run, science will out.  Indeed, the results of the study that Macedo and Lee publish are scientific results, but he cautions that when science does not have enough time to fully test hypotheses, we can come to erroneous conclusions…

OK, so, the erroneous conclusions.  First and most importantly, the data clarifies that the stay at home orders did not lead to lower rates of death.  The first of the two primary sources of these data are from Europe – where there were no greater levels of death among the Swedes, who opened back up soon after the imposition of the stay at home orders, while the rest of Europe remained on lock down.  The second is the US, where red states (like Florida) that moved away from the lockdown did not differ from blue states (like California) where the lockdown was closely enforced in mortality rates (indeed, there were higher, though not statistically higher, rates of mortality – pre-inoculation – in blue states versus red states). 

Secondly, masks did not work outside of the laboratory.  Fitted N95 masks that were new worked in the lab, but the longer we wore the masks, the more the pores got filled with moisture and we ended up breathing around the fibers, allowing whatever germs we might expel in our breath to get out.

The good news is that the inoculations did, in fact work.  After those were introduced, death rates in blue states, where the shots had a higher usage rate, had lower death rates than in the red states.

Let me take a beat here.  The implications of these data are, of course, huge.  We engaged in a multinational one to two year moratorium on most of our trade and much of our social interaction based on bad and limited data.  There were early indications from the Chinese that sealed apartment buildings slowed the spread of the infection in some areas.  We extrapolated this to the planet, and shut everything down.

This speaks both to the state of our research capabilities in the midst of an unfolding threatening and novel situation (more on that in a moment), but also on our need to do something, anything, in the face of the tremendous anxiety that we were all feeling. 

When I bought my first house, I included a clause in the contract that included “parental approval” necessary.  There was a time limit on this approval clause – 48 hours.  During that time, I did, indeed, ask my parents to look at the house we were thinking about buying.  Mostly this was an effort to show it off.  The 48 hours also gave us time to scope out the neighborhood and make sure that we hadn’t overlooked anything egregious.  We had, to that point, only seen the house at night, and wanted to evaluate our decision, literally, in the light of day, but we also wanted to get our bid in before others did.

Well, on the Tuesday after my parents had seen the house, long after the 48 hours had elapsed, my father called to say that the cracks he had seen in the walls clearly indicated that the house, which was situated on the crest of a hill, was in the process of breaking in half and half of it would slide down one side of the hill while half of it would slide down the other.

 Needless to say, this assessment was unnerving.  We went ahead with the purchase of the house, had it inspected, and were reassured that it was structurally sound – though my sense that it was falling apart never completely left me.  When my father came to spend time at the holidays, he inspected the cracks that he had remembered and his comment was that “anxiety makes cracks grow larger.”  Never were truer words spoken.

Our anxiety about our mortality led us to take measures that imperiled us in ways from which we are still discovering.  What is the impact on those who were 5 and 6 and learning how to read being out of school for more than a year?  How is this different from the impact on Junior High Schoolers who missed critical and often painful social developmental periods?  How did the Seniors (in High School and College) who didn’t get to say good bye to their peers and participate in ceremonies that marked their transition fare in a world where those endings could not be acknowledged in traditional ways?

Of course, the article points to the economic impact of the decision to shelter in place, which was huge.  In my department, I chronicled here and here the Great Resignation and how it impacted us at the time – but the impact of those resignations is still lingering in a department where we are missing a whole tier of faculty that should be assuming much needed leadership roles at this point.

I decided to chronicle the real time reaction to the pandemic, though, in part to describe the state of affairs as it was happening.  When I was angry at administrators for forcing us back into the classroom – and angry at Catholics who were praying for this administrators who would feel so badly when the faculty and students died (and not praying for those same faculty and students), I think that was justified anger – outrage, even – though it now appears to have been wasted as we were, in fact, not increasing our risk by going back to the classroom – and to the dormitories and the cafeteria.

The issue that will haunt us now, though, is that people will use this new science to point out that the old science let us down and that, in turn, will be used to suggest that we don’t need science.  People will not see the irony in the need for science to understand the ways that science has failed us being used in this way in this argument.

That said, this should give us pause.  Especially those of us who are practitioners of science – or, as we call it in my program – local scientists.  Applying general principles to a particular case – and doing that under time pressure – which I do during many individual hours each and every day that I work as a clinician – will necessary lead to mistakes.  I will misdiagnose – in small and big ways – both in determining a course of treatment and in offering an interpretation at this particular moment that is poorly timed, insensitive, or just plain wrong. 

As a social scientist, I can predict trends.  As a practitioner, I am proposing ways of understanding that need to be plausible, need to be tested over time, and many of which will not bear up over time.  But many of them will and do.  And I can demonstrate that, for a general group, there will be a generally positive impact.  But that doesn’t mean that this or that particular outcome will be good. 

We just learned this lesson on a massive scale.  Ouch.  Will we more continuously monitor the next time something like this head’s in our direction?  Will we engage in real time studies – will we have the stomach for treating ourselves as guinea pigs when our lives are at stake? 

On the micro level, will we continue to question what authorities tell us – what our individual treaters maintain is the best treatment?  Peter Jamison, of the Washington Post, wrote that “Doubt is a cardinal virtue in the sciences, which advance through skeptics willingness to question the experts, but it can be disastrous in public health, which depends on people’s willingness to trust those same experts.”

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