Palm Royale: Today’s Feminism?

 Palm Royale, Kriten Wiig, Carol Burnett, Farce, Political Comedy, Palm Beach, Psychology, Feminism, Margaret Merriweather Post, Mar-a-Lago

Palm Royale: Today’s Feminism?

The reluctant wife had seen most of the first season of this series, enjoyed it (she didn’t remember having seen the last episode of the first season) and thought that I might be interested in seeing it because of its fun, complicated but light comic quality, but also because it is depicting the Palm Beach of my childhood.  She was willing to rewatch the first season to prepare for the second season because it was a complicated depiction of the intersection of multiple lives in Palm Beach in 1970.

In 1970, I was a ten-year-old living in West Palm Beach.  We went to church on Palm Beach, at Bethesda-by-the-Sea, and I was in a gifted child class that met on Palm Beach one day a week, the rest of the time I was at Belvedere Elementary in West Palm Beach. 

The Palm Beach I knew, was not the Palm Beach that is depicted here.  At Bethesda-by-the-Sea, when my buddy and I approached the Chauffeurs who were polishing the Rolls Royce’s lined up to take the wealthier parishioner’s home, I asked one of them how much the car cost.  He looked down his nose at me and said, in what I thought was a proper British accent, but may have been a cockney one, “Thirty thousand books of Green Stamps.”

For those of you who may be too young to know, Green Stamps were given out to customer’s of the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company Grocery Store.  When you saved up enough books, you could buy a toaster with them.  Clearly he had correctly peeped me out as not belonging to the class that drove Rolls – or rather had them driven. 

Palm Royale is about that other class – or about those who wanted to belong to that class and worked their way, one way or the other, into it.  It is also a series about women who live in a world that is ostensibly run by men – and it purports to show that this world’s stars, and the people competent to run businesses, politics, and society are actually the women.

The end of the second season (this will not be the spoiler I have set it up to be, don’t worry) references, not so subtly, a film that also celebrates the women behind the men at a time of turmoil – The Sound of Music.  This is not a series that is as impactful as that film was, or that has a straightforward narrative arc, the way that film did.  Instead, it deals in feints and whodunnit twists and turns, and it is filled with antics and comic folderol, but like the film it references, it is definetly a commentary on the politics of an era. 

The intent of the series, as light and fluffy as it is, is, I think, quite serious.  It intends, through sarcasm and innuendo, to show that a world run by women is every bit as ridiculous and crazy, but therefore every bit as serious as a world run by men.

If feminism has had two waves – one that crested with suffragism – and the second, one that was starting at the time of the Sound of Music, and crested with free love and a sort of faux equality; this movie might be heralding the building of a third wave - one in which women are declaring that they are substantial enough to be ridiculous and important enough to have their ridicule be the centerpiece of our entertainment.  We can laugh at ourselves - and you will watch - the way we used to watch you-all laugh at yourselves and we watched.

Oh, the men in this series…  They are incompetent fools who are insipid, they can’t fight their way out of a paper bag – even with stupid stag antlers on their heads, unless they are gay, in which case they can sing, connive and, even more importantly, love. 

The latest word on the internet is that Apple TV has not yet decided whether to renew the contract for a third season of Palm Royale.  Though the door was left open, I found the ending of the second season satisfying.  Perhaps by the time a third season would drop it will no longer be necessary to continue this tomfoolery because the buffoons in office, who so closely mirror the straight men in it, will no longer be in office after the other men in power join the women who are trying to rein them in by growing a spine and tossing them out.  Of course, the other possibility is that those buffoons will have asserted their flimsy authority and outlawed all sarcastic and laughable representations of themselves.  If they smart enough to be able to recognize themselves here, they will surely outlaw this sort of entertainment when they have the power to do so and then there will be no third season for a very different reason.

Let me be clear, I do not believe that men, as a species, are buffoons.  Nor do I believe that the Republican Party is, at its actual core, problematic.  It is necessary for a healthy Democratic Republic to have different governing philosophies and parties.  In fact, the only historical character that I know of that is being depicted in depth here, Margaret Merriweather Post (Patti LuPone), is being, I believe, misrepresented as a means of depicting the current debauchery of Mar-a-Lago, her home now occupied by Donald Trump.  She was, I presume, a Republican and one who, I presume, supported Richard Nixon, who makes a series of cameo appearances to clarify the connection to Presidents who have unlawfully consolidated executive power, something that doesn’t need to be distorted to make the connection with the current administration.  But depicting Margaret Merriweather Post as debauched goes a bit too far for me.

Mar-a-Lago was visible from the end of the block that I lived on in West Palm, across the intracoastal waterway – also known as Lake Worth.  Mar-a-Lago was like Brigadoon, a kind of fairy tale place with a tower and various outbuildings.  It occupies land at the southern end of Palm Beach nestled inside the crook of the road that connects the bridge from the mainland across the Lake to Palm Beach proper, and Mar a Lago has a tunnel under the road to connect the home, that sits on the Lake Worth side, with the ocean (and various pool houses) on the Ocean side of the Island, perhaps the only estate that straddles the island.

I was enamored enough of Mrs. Post to tour her home in Washington D.C. that has been turned into a private museum.  Yes, as depicted in Palm Royale, she has a collection of Faberge Eggs, perhaps the most extensive collection in the world.  Of course, her story is idealized there, but they note that her father let her know that she would be fabulously wealthy and that she should spend two dollars on others for every dollar that she spent on herself.  They also don’t emphasize that while she inherited a great deal, she also built Post into General Foods, acquiring many other major lines in the process. 

She built Mar-a-Lago in the early 1920s as the premier property on the island.  Palm Beach itself was first exploited and created as a winter escape by Henry Flagler, whose museum sits next to the next bridge north from Mar-a-Lago.  Flagler started Standard Oil with Rockefeller, and he built a railroad to Florida and a very impressive, Gilded Age Mansion that he built in 1900, in part to attract other wealthy people down, is now a museum.  

The most impressive thing about the Flagler museum to me as a child was the secret staircase that ran from the back of Flagler’s study to the second-floor bedrooms (that were not open to the public).  Apparently, Flagler, who threw lavish parties, did not particularly enjoy them and would often retreat to his study – and from there, through the panel in the wall to his bedroom, without offending his guests by walking up the front stairs to bed while they were still dancing the night away.

Mar-a-Lago, of course, now has a resident who believes himself too important for the beliefs of those who elected him to matter, and he flaunts himself in ways that Mr. Flagler would have found contemptable.  And, when Ms. Post was in residence at Mar-a-Lago, I am told by my best friend from when I was ten, that hsi mother would see her at the local women's community meetings, something she surely could have sent a proxy to do.

The secrecy and deceptive practices of the very wealthy (I rode my bike past the Kennedy mansion, surrounded with a wall that was capped with broken bottles to prevent trespassers) seems to have attracted the interest of Kristen Wiig (who plays the Tennessee born, orphanage raised, interloper Maxine Delacorte – the star of this show) and the rest of the producers, writers, directors and players, as just the kind of place that would interest middle Americans like me - and I think they are right.  We are curious about the very rich - are they like us?

The assistant priest at Bethesda-by-the-Sea who ran the teenage outreach programs there came to that parish after having served teenagers in one of the poorest parishes in the country in East St. Louis.  My mother tells me that he reported to her that the issues in the two places were the same.  There was little to no oversight of kids among both the very rich and the very poor and this led to very similar issues when the kids became teenagers (we moved north right before I became a teenager, so I did not get to see the parallels).

The adults in Palm Royale are, at best, teenagers, but actually less mature than that.  Maxine Delacorte has been following them in the Shiny Sheet – as the Palm Beach Daily News is called (one of our field trips in the gifted child program was to see how the Shiny Sheet was printed – and the printer gave us each a bit of type that had been used that day).  The Shiny Sheet, though really a local society based paper with perhaps a few stories of national interest to keep up appearances, apparently included distribution in Tennessee, and Maxine grew up wanting to be part of the socialite set – so she snagged a disenfranchised member of the Delacorte’s, a faily of Palm Beach Royalty, when he judged one of her beauty contests and married him while he was a pilot and earning a nice living.  She decided that he wanted to give up their middle class lifestyle and go back to Palm Beach, certainly her own desire, and when they landed there, she worked to break into Palm Beach Society.

She was more successful than she had any right to have been, and she climbs to the top of the Palm Beach pyramid with chutzpah, subterfuge, but also with genuine care and conern for those around her.  At the peak of that society is a woman who has been the queen of Palm Beach forever, Norma Delacorte, played delightfully by the 92 year old Carol Burnett, who gets to play, most of the time, the straight woman (though her stunt double does hilariously do a series of somersaults down the stairs).  Norma, like Maxine – and, indeed, all of the other characters, is hiding who she is behind a series of masks.  This is not a series where we learn about human nature’s depths, but about its surfaces and it is a farce, a spoof, and a whodunit.  Keeping track of the antics from beginning to end is a daunting task, but this may become a cult classic that people enjoy binging for the pleasure of seeing women in all the lead roles of a dramatic-comedy that heralds the abilities of women to take the reins from the men and bring some common sense back to the running of this country.

They may also enjoy the warmth of the ending's message - that the characters who have a happy ending, and who have acted with integrity (more or less throughout) are the outsiders - the ones who had to ask how much that car cost, demonstrating both their naivete, but also their grit and resolve to figure out how to be able to afford it without losing touch with the principles that they learned in simpler, more closely watched world.

 

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Nuremberg: Will Justice be Served?

 Nuremberg, Movie, Narcissism, Psychopathy, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Goring, Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, Evil, Good, Ambivalence

If you haven’t seen this movie – go see it, or, by the time you read this, stream it.  And tell your friends to see it.  This film is not a great movie, but it is a pretty good one and it is an important one.  It describes a particular kind of toxic narcissism, but one that is, at least to my mind, more noble than the current narcissism that we are seeing in the White House.  Yes, I am maintaining that Trump’s narcissism is more toxic than Hermann Göring’s (Russell Crowe) and, for that matter, than Hitler’s.

That said, if you are reading this review and you have or intend to view the movie, you are unlikely to change your mind about the current political situation.  Like Conclave last year, I think those who are opposed to the current regime will see the value in art that warns us about it, but those who are in favor of the regime will likely see neither the review nor the movie.  When Casablanca had an impact on our engagement in the Second World War, movies were the dominant form of national entertainment.  Movies’ role in determining our national identity has been declining since the advent of television, then the internet, and I don’t think they have recovered from the little sway they had left after COVID and our fear of being in public spaces with others emerged.  And if you show this at a family gathering, be prepared for those who disagree to leave long before the credits.

As depicted in this film, Goring was a self-involved, grandiose individual who had essentially no regard for the negative impact of his actions on others and whose fealty to Hitler was central to his official functioning.  (By the way, Russell Crowe’s depiction of Goring is masterful – the movie could have been great, but Malik’s depiction of Kelley is not at that level).  That said, Goring’s grandiosity was tied to recreating the grandness of his country (OK, because it is available, Make Germany Great Again) – and he saw Hitler as the best vehicle for making this happen.  He would appear to be the political equivalent of Russell Vought or Stephen Miller.  Each of them appears to be loyal to Trump and each suggests that their vision will Make America Great Again.

I have no idea what the family life of the Voughts and Millers are like, but the Goring’s family life, as depicted in this film and apparently, at least to some extent, in reality – is positive.  Goring was a loving, perhaps even doting husband and father.  If we are going to see him as a psychopath, which I think we will, he is what was once known as a type II psychopath.  That is, he treats those not in his family or his tribe as objects towards whom he has no feelings, but is empathically connected to those he cares about.  The type I psychopath cares about no one, including his family members, except in so far as they can help him achieve his own ends. 

My concern is that Trump, unlike Hitler, is so focused on enriching himself and his family (though not, I don’t think, loving them – he is disdainful towards them and thus falls more into the Type I category of psychopath) and enjoying the perks of the office, including attacking those he believes have wrongly attacked him, that he is a pawn being manipulated by the likes of Vought and Miller, whose ends are murkier.  Pete Hegseth’s ends are clearly in line with the Christian Nationalists.  Vought and Miller’s vision of a better America is, at least to me, unknown.  Hitler, for all his faults (and Nuremberg clarifies, as if we need it, that they are unforgivable), at least genuinely shared his personal narcissism with his love of country, as did Goring.  And, according to the film, Goring was genuinely attached to Hitler – something that I wonder about in terms of Vought and Miller.

But the drama in this film involves two additional characters.  One is the United States Supreme Court Justice,  Robert H. Jackson (Michael Shannon), who believes that American style Justice – where no man is above the law (could the message be heavier handed in today’s world?) – should be implemented on a global stage.  The Nazi leadership should be executed, not because they had been vanquished by a superior power, but as the result of being found guilty of crimes against humanity by an impartial court with a fair defense; something never before attempted in the history of the world.  This was not to be a show trial of enemies, but a genuine objective evaluation of the motivations and punishable guilt of members of a political regime (this, too, seems to be a warning – that if the Supreme Court is not going to hold a president accountable, some other body may, at some point…).

One point of drama in the film, then, is whether Jackson, having convinced the world that a fair trial is needed and who then becomes the lead prosecutor, can win the case.  It would seem to be a straightforward prosecution, but Goring turns out to be a worthy adversary.  He did not become the number two man in the Reich by being a dummy.  He is a very smart man who knows a thing or two about the law and about justice.  Serving as his own defense attorney he proves to be a match for one of the best legal minds the United States can produce.

Jackson makes the case that crimes against humanity have been committed.  We see the films that were shown in the Nuremberg trials – the brutality that was committed against Jews and others considered undesirable, and, when we recover from being sickened, we are convinced that those who are responsible for this genocide should be held accountable.  Jackson clarifies that a crime has been committed and everyone in the courtroom, and everyone in the theater is convinced of this.

The other character?  A psychiatrist named Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) tasked with keeping Goring and the other Nazi high command members on trial alive.  In his first interview with Goring, Goring peeps Kelley out as an ambitious guy, one who is going to make his name by writing about being the psychiatrist who worked with Goring.  This leads Goring to suggest that he and Kelley are not that different – in fact they are same: ambitious men who will do what it takes to promote themselves into positions of power.

The second point of drama, then, is whether Kelley is, indeed, simply a reflection of Goring – and then whether we – the audience, the United States, people in general, are vulnerable to the influence of a strong man like Hitler because of our wish to narcissistically share in his vision of unlimited power – and our desire to ride his coattails – worse than that, to be part of the apparatus that propels him to power through any means possible – and maintaining him in power despite our knowledge that he is orchestrating evil actions, because we, on some level are both on his side and also enamored of him.

The fatal flaw of Jackson is that he is scrupulous.  He believes in the law.  He believes that the Second World War itself and the Holocaust are crimes and the perpetrators of these atrocities should be brought to justice.  He is blind sided by Goring’s legalistic reading of the orders that Goring has signed – they are written euphemistically and never, for instance, refer to a final solution, but instead to exploration – which turns into the final solution, but is not traceable directly to orders from Goring.  The trial teeters for a moment as Jackson realizes his error and is dumbfounded about how to hold this monster accountable.  It is Jackson’s British co-counsel who supports him and gets Goring to implicate himself on the stand using information that is provided by Kelley.

That Kelley has informed Jackson and his co-counsel of the material that Goring has told him as his patient is an ethical violation – a violation of the Hippocratic oath.  As a psychologist, I wonder about the ways in which Kelley’s training as a physician mirrors the kinds of training that Goring had as an administrator, but I want to be clear that psychologist’s, too, make ethical – and legal – violations – see my notes on psychology’s role in committing torture, something that the United States and Psychology as a science and a humanistic service profession are opposed to here, here and here.  But I think that the training of physicians – they are taught to be in charge in life and death situations, and they are selected as the best students in the most difficult science classes to become members of a highly compensated profession – leads to a certain kind of selection and training that mirrors that of a Government official of Goring’s stature – and that can lead to resonating with Goring – and recoiling at the similarities – having chosen to go into a profession aimed at saving lives, not ending them – leading him to choose to compromise himself and his professional credentials in order to save a sense of his personal integrity.

But the violation of the Hippocratic Oath is but one indication of Kelley’s putting himself above the law.  He also secretly takes notes to Goring’s wife and daughter and offers them comfort.  Again, I think this is partly an attempt to reassure himself that he is a healer – a concerned and caring physician, not an unscrupulous, power hungry and needy individual who will exploit his relationship with Goring for personal gain.  He is reaching out to Goring and demonstrating his concern.  But he is also earning Goring’s trust.  He recognizes something that won’t enter the research literature for another fifty years – to get a good outcome in a treatment – which in this case means keeping Goring alive so that he can be executed by the state – it is important to build an alliance with the patient.  But, in order to do this, he must disobey orders and the law and act as a go between with Goring’s family.

Kelley becomes enmeshed here in an existential quagmire.  He uses his alliance with Goring not to help him, but to harm him (The first and greatest rule of the Hippocratic Oath is: First, do no harm.).  This is his charge.  When he fails to prevent the suicide of one of the other prisoners, an officious psychologist is brought in to “assist” him – but he recognizes that he has been displaced for failing to do his duty.  His “friendship” with Goring is both real, but also not – it is a professional relationship and, like all such relationships, it inhabits an ambiguous space based firmly in the human connections and bonds of family and friendship and yet is something other – a generalized concern for the patient borne out of professional, not personal, concern.  And he is engaged in a political reality – Goring has been responsible for a government that has committed atrocities.

It is unclear how historically accurate the violation of the Hippocratic oath is.  I think the courtroom scenes are pretty consistent with the actual trial – there are both transcripts of the testimonies and there are films of the proceedings, but Kelley’s role is not part of those transcripts.  The film is based on a book that seems to be more focused on Kelley’s experiences after the war.  Kelley became increasingly dissolute as he used his experience of interacting with Goring to try to warn the American people that we are (as he assumed that we are a narcissistic extension of himself) vulnerable to the kind of madness that had gripped the German people.

Kelley’s failed attempt to convince us that American Exceptionalism would not save us from the German fate was an extension of the existential quagmire.  He was trading on his relationship with Goring, just as Goring promised that he would.  He was trying to do that selflessly – to sound an unpopular reverse siren call – to keep people from going aground on the rocks of totalitarianism and fascism – but his selflessness, he knew, was, at best, partial.  He was acting as a leader – an unpopular leader trying to convince the world of something that it didn’t want to hear.  He, like Goring, needed a Hitler – someone with the ability to communicate clearly and get people enthused about his ideas – someone who was not ambivalent.

If we are to get anything accomplished in this world – at least in the western hemisphere – we need to create a structure – whether it is a hospital, a corporation, or a University – that will carry out a mission – and we need to get people on board to do that.  If we create a hospital, we need to triage – to figure out who gets treated most quickly, who gets to use which resources and who does not – ultimately, who gets to live and who must die.  We need an administration or a profession – defined by principles that we ascribe to – both as employees and also as consumers – and we need to trust that those principles are being applied by people we trust.  And yet those people, whether they are administrators, managers, or employees, are human and will inevitably be biased in their application of the principles, however well conceived those are. 

Part of Kelley’s dilemma is that he cannot trust others because he cannot trust himself.  He does not experience himself as a reliable leader.  In his failure to trust, he may be more honest than those of us who do trust ourselves – and our peers. He may also be less able to manage ambivalence and ambiguity.  We are both loving and hating of those we are close to and those whom we experience as others.  Figuring out how to manage this ambivalence is important as we enter into ambiguous situations.  If we don't trust ourselves to embrace others while holding in reserve the tools we will need to protect ourselves and/or attack them if that proves necessary, we can reductionistically simplify our evaluation of situations.  Psychopaths simplify all social situations by classifying all others as enemies who need to be defeated lest they defeat me.  Of course, Goring and Kelley mirror each other – they are both human – and they both have a narcissistic streak – a self-protective streak – that they use to navigate the world.

There is not a little irony that fascists use the tool of blaming others to motivate a populace to take responsibility for themselves.  The alternative, I suppose, would be to acknowledge our humility but to recognize that, by forging relationships with others, we become stronger.  At our best, we use this latter strategy.  That strategy is part of the traditional version of American Exceptionalism.  Perhaps we will be able to find leaders who can help us imagine ourselves, once again, as being able to operate with strength from a position of humility.  If we can actually do this, even if only partially, we could begin, once again, to move towards living in an exceptional world.

 

 

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