One Battle After Another, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Reaction Formation, Defensive functioning, review
The Reluctant Wife and I have just finished a marathon
viewing of the 10 films nominated for best picture and I have already reviewed two of
the others (Bugonia
and The
Secret Agent). I found all nine of
the films I watched riveting, and my wife assures me that the 10th,
Train Dreams, was perhaps the most visually glorious of them all. I have decided to write about one final movie
from this group, One Battle After Another, not because it won best picture, but
because it illustrates a psychoanalytic defense that I don’t think I have
written about to this point, one that I rarely see in treatment, but one that
is more prevalent than I think we give it credit for (do I overlook it in my
treatment of my patients?), and, when it is present, a virulent problem. The defense is Reaction Formation.
This post contains all kinds of spoilers. It is intended for folks who have already
seen the film and want to think about it.
If you haven’t seen it yet, the Academy (Oscars people) and I recommend
it – it is suspensful and contains lots of chase scenes and a fair amount of
violence. The Reluctant Wife, who can
tolerate violence when it is not unnecessarily cruel and when it is plot based,
not gratuitous, survived viewing this film.
One Battle After Another is a film in the thriller
tradition. It grabs you in the opening
scene and keeps you in breathless thrall from that moment until the
resolution. There are little eddies to
the side of the rushing stream, but you need to be wary when you are in them
because you sense that the lulls are there to give you a slight respite before
the roller coaster drops you over the next cliff (indeed, the central chase
scene is, quite literally, a roller coaster ride through the pitched roads of
the California mountains).
We begin with an attack on a refugee camp near the American
border in what feels like contemporary America, but necessarily must have been
twenty years ago if the rest of the film is contemporary. The attack is both chaotic and extremely well-orchestrated. The eddy in the midst of this rushing torrent
is an encounter between Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor), a very attractive
African-American who gets sexually aroused during her revolutionary acts and Col.
Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn),
the person responsible for securing the Detention Center she is liberating. She breaks into his tractor-trailer command
center and lords her power over him – commanding him to have an erection, which
he dutifully does before she clarifies to him that she is the person in charge
of him ties him up (I think) and runs off with the rest of the commandoes and
the people who had been incarcerated.
This Sado-Masochistic interaction between Perfidia and Steven unleashes
the central relational tension that drives the rest of the film.
The aspect of this interaction that I would like to
highlight is less the sado-masochistic component, though that is very worthy of
analysis and description, but more the way in which that ongoing interaction
ignited by this first brush is an obsession that Col. Steven Lockjaw is both
deeply invested in and, I think, intermittently unconscious of. That is, Lockjaw may be hiding (in plain
sight) an extremely high level of disavowal about the nature of his feelings
towards Perfidia Beverly Hills and perhaps even the actions that we see him
engage in.
We learn, much later in the film, that the pinnacle of career
success for Col. Lockjaw would be membership in the elite secret cadre of the Christmas
Adventurers Club. This club is a White
Christian Nationalist group that has, as a central tenet, the separation of the
races. Miscegenation is a cardinal sin of
this group – and, just as “interbreeding” was forbidden and a common practice
when white masters raped their slaves in antebellum days, Col. Lockjaw is
entranced by that which, by transitive logic, is morally repugnant to him. He also goes to great lengths to cover up his
actions which are, I believe, in tension with not only his stated, but also his
avowed beliefs.
Now this raises the issue of a Christian organization
engaging in Unchristian activities, something that has been going on since before
the Crusades. Why would a spiritual
leader who preached love for others – others of all kinds – even tax
collectors, be used as the vehicle for war, hatred and persecution? This is a very big and important question
that any fifth grader should be able to pose, and yet we have not been able to find
an answer that allows us to deconstruct the seemingly airtight rationales for
things like miscegenation prohibition, attacking of Muslim countries, and the
prevention of immigration of those with different religious beliefs into a
country founded on, among other things, the principle of religious
freedom. So, Col. Lockjaw’s psychology
is, I think, worth our interest.
Unfortunately, the best lived example that I have to
understand his behavior was seemingly intractable. There was a family in Topeka, Kansas that was
incredibly homophobic. They received national
attention when they would travel to funerals of prominent gay men during the AIDS
epidemic and throw red paint on the mourners.
On a more local level, they would do disruptive things like texting the
same black sheet of paper to the local courthouse over and over so that the
printer there would run out of ink. They
also set up signs at prominent corners in town deriding gays. The family owned all of the houses on a city
block and, instead of having fences that demarcated different yards, the fences
went from house to house creating a common backyard, or compound.
When I was in training in Topeka, I played on a recreational
basketball team in town. There were no other
mental health professionals on the team.
The players were all “Townies” who had grown up in Topeka. They had gone to school with the children of
this family and, in their gossip about the family, it was clear that were
concerned about what took place in the family – in the compound. One of the family members was, according to
my friends, routinely masturbating in class.
They assumed, as did I, that this elementary aged girl was in an
oversexed environment. And the efforts
of the family were to point a finger at others that they claimed were oversexual
appeared to us – professional and nonprofessional alike - as likely a result of
projection and, as I will explain in a minute, a particular form of projection,
reaction formation.
In the film, Perfidia Beverly Hills exerts power over Col. Lockjaw. She holds the gun and stands above him,
confident, cocky, and full of confidence.
Col. Lockjaw’s evident arousal betrays his desire for her – for what she
has. He imagines her, I believe, to
mirror him. To be, like him, self-assured, organized, angry (but seemingly in
control of that anger, as evidenced by the control of the people and forces
around each of them). As Col. Lockjaw obsessively
watches Perfidia, he becomes aware of her white lover, Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio).
Lockjaw imagines himself as a superior person, in part to manage his envy of
Pat. Lockjaw demonstrates he is a
superior person when he captures Perfidia and trades sexual pleasure for her
freedom. He is now in the position of
power and she in the position of the needy and therefore, at least in Lockjaw’s
mind, desiring one.
The issues of power, control, and sexual desire in the movie
are all now in play and interacting with each other. We can think of these as interpersonal forces,
but, as a psychoanalyst, I am aware of them as intrapsychic forces as
well. Lockjaw (and the family in Topeka)
publicly present themselves as being in control of these forces – indeed, they publicly
deny that they are operative within them.
And yet they are drawn to and focused on the behavior of others –
behaviors that they want to stamp out. This
is a classic example – in both cases – of the reaction formation defense. In this defense, the person denies interest
in the forbidden area, and their consistent efforts to eliminate the forbidden
thought or action in others allows them to think about the forbidden material
and thus satisfy their own forbidden desires.
At least in theory the defense should help prevent action on the part of
both Lockjaw and the family in Topeka.
Certainly in the movie, the defense fails to ward off action, and, in
the case of the family in Topeka, both the townies and me worried that it may
not have been adequate there either.
Lockjaw lives an austere life. He is not married, he does not have a
family. He is the consummate soldier,
focused on getting rid of those who are undesirable. He is also clearly drawn to and fascinated by
those he despises, betraying his desire.
Perhaps the closest we come to seeing folks like this in the clinic on a
regular basis is when we
treat incest offenders. These individuals
invariably know that what they are doing is wrong. They feel ashamed about what they are doing
and try to hide it, including telling their victims not to talk with anyone
about what they are doing. But they are
also powerfully drawn to act on desires that they feel uncomfortable with. From this perspective, reaction formation
might seem less damaging.
The problem with reaction formation is that it is a defense
that keeps the defendant from realizing the perversion that is at the base of
it. Rather than exploring the
fascination with the otherness of people who are different from (but also in
important ways similar to) oneself, we deny the connection to them and their
actions and stand firmly on the side of the right rather than the wrong that
others engage in. This means that we do
not seek help for our position – our position is, after all, the healthy one,
the right one. Why would we ask for help
dealing with being in the position of the right?
Reaction formation is, then, a partial answer to that fifth grade question of how can Christian organizations profess Christian beliefs while acting in what would appear, from the outside, to be decidedly unchristian ways. When we define others as sinners, we can protect ourselves from their heathen ways so that we can lead Christian lives. We are pure, and they are misled, and we can send missionaries to fix them while we stay safe within our Christian nation.
Lockjaw’s defense against his interest cracks when Perfidia
Beverly Hills lords herself over him. He
then, I would posit, uses what we call vertical splits to try to keep his
interest in her at bay. He generally is
able to rationalize his surveillance of her as part of his job. Apprehending her is also clearly part of what
he needs to do. Once she is apprehended,
he acknowledges to her and, apparently, to himself, his interest in her, but,
in the long run she successfully wards him off.
He can then, for a very long time, deny that he had the interest. The concern, though, is that there may be
evidence of his interest and, when he is called up to be in the Christmas
Adventurers Club, he has to discover if that evidence exists and, if it does,
to erase it. As is often the case, it is
the effort to cover up his misdeeds that proves his undoing.
At this point, you may be a little confused about defenses
and how they work. The idea here is that
Lockjaw has an impulse – a very human impulse.
He is curious about people who are different from him. Jaak Panksepp, via Mark
Solms would suggest that this is a result of the seeking drive. Conveniently, the sex drive is a subsystem of
the seeking drive, so all of this stuff is nicely nestled together deep in the
human, but we might as well call it the animal, part of the brain. Wanting to know more is a way that we and
other animals learn about the environment around us, and this enhances our ability
to survive. Civilization mandates that
we not be too nosy – we need to curb our enthusiasm, as it were, so we learn to
limit our curiosity.
A big part of limiting our curiosity is discovering that
there are dangers out there lurking in the unknown. So, we are simultaneously drawn to and afraid
of the unknown. In part to get rid of
bad feelings that we are told not to have, we can begin to attribute those
feelings to those who are unknown. We
can project our unwanted or socially unacceptable feelings onto an entire class
of people that we don’t know. We are
told not to be aggressive – “don’t hit your brother!”. Obediently, we deny that feeling, but still
sense it, but we sense it as arising in someone else. It is then a simple step to try to help this
unknown other with this terrible feeling that they have. “Stop hitting,” we might say to these others –
or “Stop watching pornography, it’s bad for you”; “Stop having sex with other
men, that is a sin”; or “Stop being attracted to white people, that is a bad
thing for you to be doing.” And the
sneaky thing is that as we do this, we observe and/or imagine the forbidden
activity and we are able to deny that the activity is something that we are
interested in, except to stop it.
In so far as Lockjaw does use reaction formation, it doesn’t
work very well. He decides that, if he
has control over the other person, he will be able to keep his interest contained
as well. Unfortunately, when he puts
Beverly Hills in the witness protection home that he believes she won’t leave in
order to avoid being killed by her own people that she has ratted out, she has
other ideas and flies the coop. Of
course, the child she had after the sexual interaction when he first picked her
up might be his, so when he is tapped to be in the organization, he has to find
out if that is the case, and, if it is, he has to get rid of the evidence.
When he is asked about the match between his DNA and
Perfidia’s, Steven makes up a lame story about having had his sperm stolen
against his will. This is not reaction
formation, it is just bad rationalization. The Christmas Adventurers Club and
they quickly see through his ruse with terminal consequences. His reaction formation – the projection of
his desire onto Perfidia – is not successful any more than the reaction
formation of the family in Topeka, blaming everyone else for being sex obsessed
when they themselves may very well have been sex obsessed.
I hope that this tricky defense is a little clearer after
having had these two examples of it, but I also hope it is clear that defenses
in general are just that, defenses. And
like walls in a castle, they are not always successful in keeping things out
(or, in the case of drives, in). Our defenses
leak all the time. This leads us to
engage in symptomatic behavior – and also to be able to create gripping works
of art such as One Battle After Another.
To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.
No comments:
Post a Comment