Bugonia: Queen Bees and Wannabees at the Oscars

Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos, Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Politics and the Movies, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Oscar Nominated Films for best picture 2025

This week, at our local movie house, we are watching 10 films that have been nominated for best picture.  Actually, I missed one that was only being shown during the day, and we’ll see if we make it to the other nine.  Movies pack a lot into two hours (plus or minus).  The binge watching we have become more accustomed to pushes us along a known track, creating a craving at the end of each episode.  A movie introduces us to a whole world, the way a novel does, walks us through it, and then wraps it up with a bow and delivers us back to our own world.  It is a more intense ride.

Bugonia was a particularly intense ride.  With no background or expectation – other than having seen Emma Stone in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things a couple of years ago – we were introduced to her not as the suicide survivor who was struggling to come of age in an era when women were thwarted, as she was in that film, but as Michelle Fuller the powerful CEO of a company who has little empathy with the poor things who work for her and bring her and the corporation fantastic wealth as a result of their unending labor.

Simultaneously, we are introduced to Jesse Plemons’ character, Ted Gatz, a struggling, loner who keeps bees with his mentally challenged cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) and is concerned about the welfare of those bees as they face Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD as he calls it in his dialogues with Michelle Fuller).  The corporation he works for as a shipping clerk, loading boxes, we learn is also the corporation that Michelle Fuller heads, and it is a pharmaceutical company that also manufactures the pesticides that he blames for CCD.

At this point, after having set up the dynamic, I want to try to step out of describing the plot.  I want to avoid describing the plot for two reasons: partly because it is wacky – a little like Donny Darko, Everything, Everywhere All At Once, or a host of other seemingly low budget, science fictionesque films that use science fictiony ideas as a device to expose something uncanny about our experience of life.  I was not surprised to learn that this is a remake of a 2020 Korean film.

The second reason that I want to avoid describing the plot is because this is a well-crafted movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat.  I was uncertain about just what was really happening as it pivoted from moment to moment and I was constantly reassessing my own reading of the basic plot – so if you haven’t seen it, I don’t want to steal that from you.  That said, I should warn you that there is a great deal of violence, and, though it is not gratuitous in that it is, I think, necessary to the plot, the violence is graphic and while even, at moments, over the top and blackly comical; it is considerable in both its quantity and graphic depiction.

So I will, in effect, try to interpret the latent content of this movie/dream without referring too much to its manifest, observed content.  In doing this, I have a sense that I may be anticipating the “collection” of Oscar nominees for best picture.  This film (and we also saw the Brazilian nominee last night, The Secret Agent) seems to be struggling with the craziness that the world is currently experiencing, even though it has been being planned for over the course of the past five years.  It feels as if Hollywood knew that we would be perched on this precipice.

One theme that is right below the surface in this film is that of toxic masculinity.  Not the type of toxic masculinity that is being modelled by people like Trump, but the toxic masculinity of some of those who voted for him.  There is the sense that competitive women – the women who are no longer taking their place in the kitchen where they belong – are destroying our world.  They are Queen Bees that the men now work for – but in Colony Collapse Disorder, they are the Queen Bees that the workers abandon in droves.  Ted Gatz personifies the disaffected worker who is tired of working for the Wo-man, seemingly forgetting that this trope was defined by masculine mores about what it takes to get ahead, and he has not seen, as we have, that Michelle Fuller is working at full tilt to get ahead and stay there, both mentally and physically, just as, or perhaps, more aggressively than a man would have done.

He also doesn’t quite see the stark emptiness in her life, living in a modern, stripped down, sterile home, surrounded, not by a family, but by well-manicured but lifeless lawns both at home and at work.  Her worker bees are not supportive and warm, but efficient, awed, and a bit scared by her and her power.  She deigns to know them by name, and to grant that, as a new policy, they can choose to leave work at 5:30 if they really have nothing additional to work on – and this will not be held against them, perhaps.

I have to stop at this point and note that the reluctant son is in his first year as an associate at a high-powered law firm.  He likes the law, he has worked hard in undergraduate and in law school and enjoys the work, including at the law firm, but even he is brought up short by the lifestyles of the partners at the firm – many of them rise very early so they can work out and be at work early – they leave to spend “quality time” with their families in the early evening, before getting back to work before lights out.  Even for my hard working son, this feels like a daunting life path to be treading.

Michelle Fuller’s life is contrasted with the home of Ted Gatz and Don.  Not only is it the place where unspeakable things were done to Ted when he was being babysat by a boy who became one of the local sheriffs, it is a rural home that is in obvious disrepair.  Ted’s obsessions with various ideas have led him to invest in tinkering, but not in a way that makes the house a home.  It is, instead, a particular kind of ramshackle man cave, and the bee hives out back are the least toxic components of the environment that Ted has created and the Don inhabits with him.

We are not surprised when Ted wants Don to join him in chemical emasculation so that his sexual thoughts don’t derail them from their mission of fixing the earth.  Ted’s feelings of paternal affection for the earth seem divorced from the kind of care that we would associate with generative paternal functioning.  From a toxic masculine perspective, women have taken over our space, we have defined ourselves not in positive qualities, but as the things that women – our mothers – are not.  We need to develop into a different space.  We do that, only to find that women have already occupied that space and we now have nowhere to live – so we abandon the community.  We don’t have a vision for how it should be, only dissatisfaction with how it is, so we want to destroy the changes that have led us to feel disaffected, isolated and lonely – but we recoil from acknowledging the soft feminine core of that desire for something that feels a lot like dependency and being a little baby - attachment.

For Ted, his retreat is into a very cerebral world.  He becomes obsessed with a variety of conspiracy theories and finally lands on one that he beilieves to be true, and he comes up with inventive ways to test the theory.  His abduction of Michelle is the final piece that he needs to prove it.  He may not have the resources of the corporation, or indeed much of a community at all, outside of the obeisance of Don, but he does have considerable smarts.  These smarts are read by Michelle (and us) as madness, and she works from within that framework to connect with him, but Ted, as crazy as he may be, recognizes her pandering ploy and will have none of it.  Her offers to connect are clearly a trap – whether she is offering sex or comfort and dependency he knows that this is just more of what he is trying to overcome and he and Michelle are stuck in a standoff.

Michelle’s effective strategy is to offer a solution – one that fits within Ted’s sense of her as both all powerful and withholding – and she offers what we realize is a fatal solution to the thing that he seems most to desire.  She dangles it in front of him, like bait, and he bites.  But even after he knows that it is bait, she still holds him in her thrall because she has the answer to his overwrought, paranoid fantasies about what has led to the upending of the world as we (used to) know it.  He hangs in there even after delivering the most horrendous betrayal any person could lavish on another because his curiosity is so powerful and has such a hold on him.

This view of human nature – that we are driven both by primal nearly unmanageable urges but that reason, the very faculty that we use to curb those urges, can be corrupted.  In current neuropsychoanalytic speak, the seeking urge, the one that leads to and is supported by higher cognitive functions, is also, for lack of a better word, primitive and can override those other urges that would save us, like attachment, to our detriment.  That is, the very thing that Ted is relying on to lead him out of the morass is what proves his undoing.  I suppose I have just described this as a classical tragedy, and the ending would suggest that we, as a species, have internal programming that cannot be overcome.  That which would lead us out will, in the end, be our undoing.  This is not black "comedy" at all.

Just to follow up on one more thread here, women, leaving hearth and home and inhabiting male roles, end up leaving their redeeming qualities at home – so their inhabiting the masculine space is not a solution.  That thread leads me to believe that this film really is, underneath it all, supporting a weird version of the toxic masculine discourse.  I’m not sure whether it is doing that ironically or unconsciously, and whether it is offering a reduction ad absurdum argument (you guys are crazy - women would not be ruthless as you imagine men would be in that position - and men need to be ruthless to protect our sanctuary) – or whether this really is a dim view of what we are capable of becoming as a species.

 

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Rupture and Repair: Research, Clinical Practice, and the Erotic Elements of Life

 

Rupture and Repair, Safran, Muran, Clinical Practice, Applied Psychoanalysis, Applied Psychological Research, Original Sin

At our local meeting of the Association for Psychoanalytic Thought (Apt), we recently had a panel on Rupture and Repair – a concept that emerges out of the research literature to describe an important psychotherapy phenomenon – one that predicts a good therapeutic outcome.  Apt is not, however, primarily a group of people interested in clinical phenomenon.  We get together to talk about the ways that psychoanalytic thought can help us more fully appreciate works of art, but also politics, religion, and just plain living.  We call this applied psychoanalysis, which is a little confusing because psychotherapy itself is usually thought of as applied psychology, but psychoanalysis plays a bit by its own rules and imagines itself to be a particular kind of psychology - a branch unto itself, as it were.

We had a panel on rupture and repair because these concepts had come up when we were discussing the film Good Luck to You, Leo Grande.  One of the board members was taken with the idea of Rupture and Repair and wanted us to articulate what is meant by that and to help us have a better sense of what the concepts were and how we might apply them to the works of art that we address in the programs that we present.  Dutifully we set off to make sense of these ideas and to present them to a group that is analytically curious but not necessarily steeped in or interested in being steeped in clinical and research lore.

Jeremy Safran and Christopher Muran first proposed Rupture and Repair as an important set of variables in an article in 1996.  Sadly, Jeremy was killed in his basement by an intruder in a robbery gone awry.  I had an opportunity to interview him before then and reported on that here.  To prepare for the panel, we read a more recent introduction to a book on Rupture and Repair, by Muran, Eubanks, and Samstag (2022). 

As I was mulling over the concepts they described in the chapter, focused mainly on how repairing ruptures helps maintain the therapeutic alliance which, in turn, predicts a positive outcome of a psychotherapy, I happened to listen to a podcast of a lecture about classical ideas of erotic love.  In the podcast, the author of the lecture talked about two models of erotic love.  The first is in Plato’s symposium (which recently caused an uproar in Texas about its appropriateness for a college audience because it deals with LBTQ+ issues) and the second is in the book of Genesis.

In Plato’s Symposium, a series of people speak about love.  The most memorable speech is a fable that is made up by Aristophanes, the Greek Comic Playwright.  Aristophanes proposed that humans were once four legged, four armed two headed creatures who were tremendously strong.  Zeus was concerned that they were plotting his overthrow, so he cut them (us) all in half – so that we would only have 2 legs, 2 arms, and 1 head (the first great rupture).  Even after this, Zeus was afraid we would band together to overthrow him, so he distracted us from that task by creating sexual organs and desire.  We could now repair our lost connection with our other half (Some men yearned for the men they had been separated from, some women from the women they had been separated from, and some men who had been separated from women – and those women, would desire the person of the opposite sex).  So sex became the repair of a rupture.

In the second Genesis creation story, the author argued that the nuclear family (including Adam and Eve’s family with God, but every nuclear family after that) has a centripetal force (or perhaps a gravitational pull) maintaining that family as the center of the lives of all of its members.  It is erotic desire – the wish to connect with someone outside the family – being drawn to them – that is the centrifugal force that allows the family member to pull away – to have a life of his or her own.

Graphically, I represented it like this:

The blue circle on the left represents the family which has been the center of the person’s life and blue circle on the right is the erotic (love) interest, that pulls the person out of the orbit around the family and into a new orbit – now around a love object.  If a friend of yours has ever fallen in love with someone, you will understand this experience (or, of course, if your child has).

Rupture, in this model, is a desired goal.  It is how the child grows up and then leaves home to start their own family.

When I went back to read the current article on rupture and repair, I discovered that Safran and Muran had based their understanding of rupture on a number of concepts in the clinical literature.  They stated that “rupture is intended to be a synonym for: breaches, breakdowns, challenges, derailments, deteriorations, dissociations, disturbances, disruptions, dysfluencies, failures, impasses, misalliances, mis-attunements, miscoordination, misunderstandings, negations, pulls, resistances, splits, strains, threats, and weakenings (Muran, Eubanks, and Samstag, 2022).”

That is a whole lot of condensation that is going on there.  They went on to say that “Rupture is intended to be associated with: enactments, negative processes, projective identification, transference-countertransference, vicious circles or cycles (Muran, Eubanks, and Samstag, 2022).”  Again, that’s a lot of stuff to say that it is related to.

I think that the way that rupture and repair has been applied to this point is that the focus has been on the ruptures and repairs that take place between a therapist and their client or patient.  But that is only part of the picture.  Part of what the therapist is trying to help the client or patient do is to engage in a huge rupture – with their usual way of doing things.  This might be understood as helping them, for instance, break away from their family or origin, much as a romantic interest helps a young person do that.  But it might also be breaking away from a pattern of behavior, or an idea, we might think of it as helping them give up an addiction, or whatever it is that the patient is trying to change.  An author, teaching students of writing about how to write a novel, has proposed that we should be writing about how the person deals with a lie.  In our culture, perhaps the first rupture in the family is when we discover that the Christmas presents don't really come from Santa Claus...

I think this way of thinking about the bigger picture may help us better understand how complicated it is to maintain the therapeutic relationship.  We are trying to help the patient feel heard and understood – which is difficult when something like 70% of the time when we are speaking we are not understood by the person listening to us.  But we are also trying to keep them in orbit around the new way of doing things – to keep them engaged with a whole new way of functioning while an old way of functioning is still exerting tremendous centripetal or gravitational pull.  If we lose our grip – or they lose their grip on us – they risk being pulled back into a pathological (but familiar and therefore comfortable) way of doing things.  But repair is not our central task.  Rupture is.  We are trying, in part through the relationship that we offer, to help them break with something that has been life giving, or order producing, or comfort providing.

So, part of the repair work that we need to do has to do with the relationship we have with our clients/patients, but part of it has to do with helping our patients mourn the way of life that they have left behind.  Often, too, we are inviting them into a world that is tremendously uncomfortable.  It is more difficult in the short run, for instance, for people to tell others what the problem is than to simply ignore those who are discomforting or to figure out how to get back at them in some indirect way. 

So, not only do we help repair the ruptures that occur in the hour with the treater, but also more broadly, we help repair the client/patient’s experience of a larger scale rupture with the world as they knew it, without, however, having them fall back into those old patterns and ways of doing things.  So, when we marry someone, we have to figure out how we, as a family, are going to function.  It would be easiest to just have our family do it the way my family did.  But our spouse's family did things differently.  Not only that, but both of us found some aspects of the life in our family of origin onerous.  So we need to construct a whole new way of doing things, while also borrowing from what worked and what we are both accustomed to and is functional.  

Psychoanalysis comes into this picture by pointing out that we are talking about an operating system (if you will) in each member of the new pair that is largely unconscious.  We don't actually think about whether to have the toilet roll come over the top or out the back, we do it the way we learned how to do it - it only becomes a point of conscious point of attention (and possible contention) when our families did things differently - or we had planned on changing that when we got out on our own.   

 The rupture repair model then can be used fruitfully as a means to understand the coming of age stories that are at the center of so many of the movies and books by which we are entertained, but also enlightened.  The protagonist or hero often learns to connect with the world in a novel way (or to give up the lie, or to point out to others that they are living according to a lie).  Most recently, I have written about Lamia, the hero in The President’s Cake, who must search through embargo isolated and war torn Iraq to find the eggs, flour, sugar and baking soda needed to bake a cake for her class on Saddam Hussein’s birthday.  As she goes about this, she learns that she is capable of navigating in an adult world - that she is less dependent on the adult world than she knew – a lesson that comes far too early for this nine-year-old girl.

It is no accident that the second creation story in Genesis - the one that follows the origin story of light and dark, heaven and earth - the one about Adam and Eve, is about rupture.  Original sin - in this language, original rupture, becomes the foundation for so many stories that come after it.  We feel guilty, but also feel compelled to break with what came before in order to create what will be.  And just as Eve needed a collaborator in Adam to get out of paradise, we need helpers to do that in our lives.  Psychoanalysts, but other therapists, teachers, friends, and family members end us serving this role in novels, movies, and in the lives we lead.

 

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The President's Cake: An Iraqi film made for an audience like us, even if we don't want to see it.

 The President's Cake, Iraqui Film, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Dictatorships, Coming of Age

We watched this Iraqi film on the day that the United States started bombing Iran.  It is a film set in 1990 that purports to document the hardships endured by the poorest people in Iraq, the peasants, as a direct result of the sanctions that the US and other countries had applied to Iraq.  The people were caught between a leader who was, at best, indifferent to them, and foreign powers who flew overhead in multimillion-dollar planes that seated on or two people while they scrounged for basic necessities.

The film centers on a day when a nine-year-old girl is tasked with finding more than necessities.  This girl, Lamia, who is cute as a button, is an orphan.  She lives with her grandmother, her Bibi, in the marsh country in Iraq.  She travels to school in a beautiful but very simple canoe-like-boat with a high prow and aft that is like those of everyone else, that she pushes, paddles and steers with a single long oar.  Her Bibi has instructed her on various ways to avoid the raffle that will take place in school, one where the “winner” will be required to bake a cake on Saddam Hussein’s birthday – an annual ritual. 

Despite her arriving late to school, but not, unfortunately, before the raffle, and despite her telling the teacher that she has to go to the bathroom at the beginning of the raffle, she is forced to write out her name like all the others and put it into the pot.  Her friend, Saeed, the son of a cripple – almost as humiliating as being an orphan like she is – suggests she should have said that she had diarrhea.  In any case, as we expect, she wins the lottery, meaning that she must find flour, sugar, eggs and baking soda; all nearly impossible to come by.

Bibi & Lamia Hitchiking

Bibi takes her by the hand and leads her to the city.  The only way to get there is by hitch hiking and they are picked up by a taxi/mail/wedding/funeral driver who introduces himself as a saint and a devil, depending on how you see him, but in the movie he plays the role of the family’s patron saint, helping them out of various jams across the course of the day, and ultimately helping them return home that night.

I was reminded, in the film, of interviewing for my first job as a paraprofessional.  When I decided to apply to graduate schools in psychology, I thought it would be a good idea to do some clinical work to see if it suited me and if I was good at it – could I help people?  I applied to work at a halfway house for runaway teenagers and the head of the agency, when interviewing me for the position, informed me that if teenagers would not phone their parents to get permission for us to house them or, if the parents didn’t give permission, they would have to return to the streets and he wanted to make sure that I was OK with that.  I assured him I was. 

“What if they are twelve and it is late at night,” he asked.  I felt terrible.  I had been picturing a 17 year old high school senior stopping by in the middle of the day.  I must have looked crestfallen, because that was, in fact, what he was looking for.  He trusted that I would follow the rules, but he wanted to know that I got it that we were dealing with a vulnerable population and that sometimes we would not be able to protect them from the vagaries of the world and that this would (of necessity if we were suited to work there) be distressing to us.

This is, in many ways, a coming of age story.  We have been exposed to these ever since we read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.  It is a different thing to see a nine year old navigating a world that is much more complex and frightening than she is prepared for, but also one that is, I trust, generally more supportive than we might fear.

This film has been criticized by an Iraqi critic as one that “rehearses known stereotypes and corresponds to little that is real. Instead, it fulfills misconceptions of morbid Oriental cities reduced by despotic regimes to decadent theaters for the corrupt.”  It is certainly, in his telling, a mishmash made for the foreign audience.  He particularly objects to both the careless connections across time and space (Baghad, where Bibi, the girl and the boy face all kinds of difficulties, is far removed from the marshes and the kind of corruption depicted did not occur until later), but I do think that the film speaks to a larger truth, if only found in our country when children confront ICE members: those on the margins are not able to protect their children from sociopolitical harm that corrupts cultures and individuals that would once have sustained those selfsame children.

I don't object to the use of geographically distant places to be mushed together.  This happens in dreams, but also in movie making.  My home city (where Mark Twain claimed he wanted to be when the world ends, because everything here happens 15 years after it happens everywhere else) is frequently used a set for New York in the early 1900s, as in the movie Carol, because our skyline is so dated.  His point is a little more subtle than that, but still, I think some license is warranted.  But I am more curious about the salutes to Saddam - both in the classrooms and on the street.  Is this a warning to us about the cult of Trump and what we might be in for in a dictatorship or is this a realistic representation of daily life in that particular dictatorship at that time?

Of course, as I was watching the film, I was unaware of the very broad license that was being taken to pull at my heart strings – I just felt them being pulled, as I did in the interview at the agency where I personally never had to turn away a 12-year-old runaway during the year that I worked there, though I’m certain that it happened.  Instead, I experienced anger at a President who cared more for his own well-being than that of his country and the people in it (and in that sense I do think the film is intended to speak to both an Iraqui audience and an international one).  

Btw, the Iraqi reviewer was using the empty theater where he saw the film in Iraq as evidence that it wasn't a realistic representation of Iraqi life, but there were only two other people in the theater with the reluctant wife and me here - I think this level of despair is hard to muster a large audience to be enthusiastic about on any continent and in any city.  

But there was a lot more to it than that being a depressing movie about a dictatorship and its consequences.  This is a tragi-comedy.  This girl is plucky and I won’t spoil all the ways that she sees through the shenanigans and plots of the adults around here, though I will say that she has seen the cruelty of children – including her friend, the crippled man’s son.  His inconstancy and meanness to her is countered by their loving connection and pleasure in each other’s company.  Their game, of staring into each other’s eyes until the one blinks – a game the boy always wins – is the image we are left with at the end of the film when, rather than staring into the fate that awaits them, they stare into each other’s eyes and the boy doesn’t call the game when she blinks, but they keep staring.

Last night, at a local French restaurant, they were playing a French farce in the background without sound.  It was clear that the ineptitude of the police was central to the humor.  This film relies on this and similar tropes, but in a much grimmer and more unsettling background.  This is not farce, even though it borrows from it.  It portrays a world that still has remnants of the threads that bound a great civilization. 

Yes, as Freud pointed out, these threads restrain us, but they are also what allow us to travel unmolested – and to raise children who are trusting but wary.  These threads allow us to offset the base drives that Freud encountered beneath the civilized veneer – pure aggression and sexual desire – with other, powerful but more subtle drives, like attachment.   Just as in My Friends, a book by Fredrik Backman, it is the children who step in with the attachment when the adults fail.  Coming of age involves transitioning from a defensive position of harming others to protect oneself – pointing out anything that others do that sets them apart so that they can be ridiculed – to recognizing one’s vulnerability as similar to those around us and banding together with others who realize this to protect the group – and sometimes that is just the dyad – through mutual support, rather than through attacking others.

This developmental process is enacted over and over in films, books, and plays because, I think, adults wish to pass this knowledge along – to get the developmental process started early, to teach and prevent the continuity of the cruelty that is a seemingly earlier and more powerful force – the force that comes from fear and isolation and that ends up powering some of us to rise through the corporate and political ranks to the pinnacles of power.

It has been said that Buckminster Fuller wondered if our technology’s useful products could stay ahead of and prevent or remediate its destructive aspects.  He thought that, if we were to survive, this would be a neck and neck race to the end.  I think similarly the race between our goodness, affection and attachment to each other is in a similar race with our more dangerous aspects.  Films like this, though they may collapse complicated components of that balance into familiar tropes and generalizations, portray our vulnerability and the importance of banding together in ways that are, I think, on balance useful to us as a global community.  

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