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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The Great Gatsby – a tale that continues to be uncomfortably relevant…

 Great Gatsby, psychoanalysis, psychology, Robert Redford, Leonardo DiCaprio, F. Scott Fitzgerald, meaning, narrative, fantasy/phantasy, book, movie versions.

I know that I have read The Great Gatsby before.  I think I may have read it twice, but reading it now – and because I sometimes get obsessed with such things, watching both Robert Redford and Leonardo DiCaprio play the part, I am certain that I did not get it when I read it before – probably as an adolescent – and even as a young adult.  I have been told that Shakespeare is wasted on young people (with Romeo and Juliet as a possible exception).  Well, for this guy, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wasted on me (despite the romance that is central to the plot).

The fragment of memory that I had going into the book was that Jay Gatsby killed Daisy by driving too recklessly – and somehow this was a metaphor for the recklessness of the very wealthy and the indulgences that go along with that.  Well, there was a car crash – Daisy was driving that car, not Gatsby – and someone was killed – Daisy’s husband’s lover, and the wealthy are portrayed as reckless, but Gatsby, reckless as he may be, is not reckless because he is wealthy (Tom, Daisy’s husband, is) but wealthy because he is reckless, including reckless in his love for Daisy.

So, to try to clear things up, Gatsby grows up Jay Gatz, living with parents who don’t appreciate what a genius he is.  His parents are dirt poor farmers out west and he yearns to be something greater.  At this point I get confused.  You see, the two movie versions that, in my geeking out, the reluctant wife and I watched – the Robert Redford version (no one looks better in a pink linen suit) and the Leonardo DiCaprio version – have muddled my sense of what information came from which source.  The DiCaprio version was, in our shared opinion, more true to the essence of the book – even though the wealth and the music was depicted anachronistically (and Leonardo’s failure to fill out a suit like Redford did may actually have suited the role of Gatsby, the guy who appeared to glamorous from a distance but who, as we get to know him, is anxious because he is pretending to belong to a social class that he wasn’t born into).

There are actually five movie versions: 1926, 1949, 1974 (Redford), 2000, and 2013 (DiCaprio).  The 1926 silent film is lost – not as surprising as it might sound.  The book was published in 1925 and it was a dud.  No one bought it.  There are promos for the 1926 film, but no print of the film itself.  The book was reissued as a pulp novel and given to servicemen during the Second World War and they came home raving about it, at which point it started its climb towards being the great American Novel.  The 1949 Alan Ladd version is the favorite of NPR film critic Maureen Corrigan’s because it emphasizes Gatsby as a bootlegger and downplays the romance.  I didn’t want to make my wife any more reluctant, so I didn’t push a third movie on her, and I was fine with the romantic angle in the 2013 film.

I am starting my review with the main character, but the book waits to introduce him as long as possible.  He becomes a more and more mysterious person as we wait for his arrival.  Did he kill a man?  He has enormous wealth, but where does it come from?  How does he know the producers and actors and glitterati that constantly appearing at his home?  He is a man of mystery and so this is part of why it makes sense that I was confused about him and his origins as I tried to reconstruct the novel in my mind. 

The DiCaprio movie provides a backstory that is more cogent than the Redford movie and maybe than the book.  Gatz ran away from home, rescued a wealthy, self-absorbed man who was about to drown in a storm in his yacht; the man took him under his wing and Gatz became Gatsby under his tutelage; learning how to call other people old sport and, certainly in the movies, in part because of his good looks, he began to run with a swifter crowd.

At some point, Gatsby joins the military – as an officer, not an enlisted man (presumably because of the manners he has learned from his mentor) and, before shipping off to the First World War, he is briefly stationed in Lexington where, as a dashing young officer, he woos the most desirable blue book woman in town, Daisy.  He falls for her, and she for him.  After becoming a war hero, he returns stateside to build a fortune that will allow him to join the elite ranks so that he can finally win the love of his life who, in the meantime, has fallen for a very, very old money rich fellow who has swooped in from Chicago, married her, and installed her in his opulent mansion in East Egg, Long Island.  Gatsby, by now having (very swiftly) made his immense fortune, buys an even gaudier mansion across the bay in the nouveau riche town of West Egg.

The story, as I have straightforwardly laid it out, does not unfold that way in either of the movies we watched nor in the book itself.  The story is told through the eyes of Nick Carraway, Daisy’s cousin.  A would-be writer and Yale classmate of Daisy’s husband Tom, he is selling bonds and living a decidedly middle-class life, renting a carriage house in the shadow of Gatsby’s manse.  He ends up being the fifth business in this story that allows the love triangle to emerge and to play out.

I like the device used in the DiCaprio version where Nick is in a Sanatorium and his psychiatrist is urging him to write about his experience as a means of recovering from his madness.  This introduction encourages us to wonder what it is about Gatsby, and being in a relationship with him, that would cause somebody to go mad.  This is, I think, an important question to ponder.  That movie suggests that there is a goodness about Gatsby that is not reflected in Nick’s peers from the upper echelon.  But there is, certainly in Dowd’s favorite (1949) version, a fair amount of fault as well.  Gatsby’s character – his ability to act, even if in shady ways, is a contrast to the constricted life that Nick leads, especially as portrayed in the DiCaprio version.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the mystery surrounding Gatsby creates a space for us to fantasize about who Gatsby is or might be.  Another way of saying this is that Gatsby becomes a transference figure – someone to whom we transfer the experiences (or fantasies) we have had of someone like this from our past.  In other words, just as the people who are going to Gatsby’s imagine who it is that he is, so, too, does the reader/viewer.

Gatsby is certainly the creation of Fitzgerald – and in both Gatsby and Nick aspects of Fitzgerald’s own character are, I think, on display here.  But so are aspects of our own character.  We join Nick in observing and wondering about Gatsby, in being enthralled by him, but also disturbed – by his consumption, initially (we don’t yet know that these conspicuous displays of wealth through obscenely expensive parties are primarily there just to attract Daisy’s attention), but then by his connections with unseemly characters.  Though we don't learn much about the details of his shady dealings, we don't doubt that they are shady.

I think that, as a middle class high school student in the Midwest, I imagined Gatsby to be a member of the rich upper class – someone just like Tom, Daisy’s husband.  The idea of being upwardly mobile – of creating wealth – seemed as ridiculous to me as the idea that science would continue to evolve and that there was room among the pantheon of great scientists for me to make new discoveries.  So, my guess is that I missed out on the class distinctions that are at the heart of this book – because all of the characters seemed out of my league, and they always would be.  I had a static view of class and role.

Reading the book now, I am struck by that static conception of class being spelled out in the novel – something that must have been opaque to me then.  Tom cites a eugenicist psychologist, Goddard.  Eugenics is something that I was only vaguely aware of before I started teaching the history of psychology, and I was completely unaware (even though I had taken a class in graduate school that I cribbed some specific readings about eugenics from in my teaching) of the role of British, but especially American scientists in crafting the blueprint that would lead to Hitler’s final solution.  Eugenics is the idea that we should improve the human race by improving the “stock”; by selectively breeding smart people with each other and sterilizing “mental defectives”  (We sterilized over 70,000 Americans in the 1920s through the 1950s with the intent of cleaning up the gene pool).

To hear Goddard referenced, in the book and onscreen, with his blatantly racist ideas – ideas that were not just tolerated but taken (as Tom does) as scientific fact – when the studies that he did were of such poor quality and his own racism pre-determined the outcome of those studies – was amazing to hear leaping out of the novel.  That said, it speaks to still deeply ingrained beliefs that we hold (as I did as a child) that class begets class, and we are not as fluid a society as Horatio Alger and his stories would have us believe.

So, who knows what version of this story led the service men to get excited about it?  Were they dreaming of returning home and being able to become millionaires – to transcend the class barriers that are so securely erected in American society?  Were they aware that this was a story about a society that they were risking their lives to protect that would, according to the central premise of the book, never allow them access to that society?  Or were they, as I might have been, taking this simply as a fairy tale – like Romeo and Juliet – with star crossed lovers who were separated mostly by time and opportunity?  Or were they reading the more malevolent story line that I see as Fitzgerald’s intent – to clarify that we don’t belong in the upper reaches of society unless we are born there, and, that if we try to get there from here, we will fail – or more precisely, the rich will close ranks and keep us out.

I spend so much time on this because I think one reason that this book has become the Great American Novel (or one of them) is that it is a kind of dream.  And, as in all dreams, there is a tremendous amount of condensation, symbolism, and ambiguity.  In interpreting a dream with a patient, or interpreting one of my own dreams, there are generally at least three or four plausible readings of the dream.  And, as in improv, it is not this OR that, it is generally this AND that… and that and that and that.  Because of the device of letting the hero come onto the stage late in the first act, and our being encouraged think about him a lot before he does, this novel, this movie, this dream is not just his – or Nick’s – or Fitzgerald’s, but ours.  We will hold it together with our own understanding of how the world works.

To nerd out for a minute – the thesis that a narrative - a phantasy - underlies our actions in the world comes directly from the work of a British Psychoanalyst named Spillius.  She wrote a paper near the turn of the last century defending Melanie Klein’s position that phantasy (spelled intentionally with a ph) is the basis of our unconscious functioning – not, as Freud would have had it, drives (or as Solms has clarified – our feelings).  Spillius, and, more contemporarily, Thomas Ogden, maintain that we have narrative structures deeply imbedded in our minds, and these structures determine how we see the world and interpret it.  These structures can vary widely and they can be in conflict with each other.

So, for Gatsby, he can have a structure – a phantasy – a narrative, that maintains that his love for Daisy was real – it was meant to be.  He is not the child of his parents – but the golden boy whose shining beauty matches that of Daisy and they, together, are golden children destined to be soul mates.  This phantasy is powerful enough to fuel his engagement with whatever people he needs to build the image that he does of being the powerful, knowledgeable, wealthy man of the world who is externally, as well as internally Daisy’s match (Redford, by the way, seems to fit most easily into this phantasy version).

There is, though, another operative fantasy.  Gatsby also believes himself to be the son of dirt farmer’s.  Just as Nick, the writer, never felt himself to be the equal of Tom, the football hero at Yale, even though, as Daisy’s cousin, he should belong in this upper class world that Tom effortlessly inhabits with Daisy – while Tom is also slumming it with his mistress who lives with her husband in his gas station between East Egg and Manhattan – Gatsby doesn’t really feel that he belongs (DiCaprio, to my mind, more clearly articulates this underlying phantasy).  Gatsby worries about whether the flowers he buys for the meeting with Daisy will be adequate – he sweats when, having re-established his relationship with Daisy, he visits with Daisy and Tom in their home.

Deciding to drive into town, Gatsby drives Daisy in Tom’s car, while Tom takes Gatsby’s yellow Duesenberg (perhaps the sexiest car ever built by humans) into town with Nick and the professional golfer girlfriend Daisy has bestowed on Nick.  All five of them, after stopping at the gas station that Tom’s mistress’s husband maintains in the slag heap between East Egg and Manhattan, an outpost overseen by the all-seeing spectacles of an optometrist’s billboard, end up at the Plaza Hotel where they rent a room for the afternoon to hang out and talk.

Gatsby forces Daisy to let Tom know that he is her true love.  She reluctantly acknowledges this to be the case.  Tom, taken aback, reminds her that she loves him, too.  She agrees with this as well.  Gatsby insists that they will leave Tom.  Daisy does not seem convinced but leaves with Gatsby to drive back to East Egg.  What we don’t find out until later – but again I will tell the story in more traditional fashion – is that Daisy is behind the wheel and they are now driving in Gatsby’s bright yellow car.  When they drive through the slag heap past the gas station, Tom’s lover, who had seen Tom at the wheel of the yellow car on the way into town – runs towards the yellow car hoping to convince Tom to take her away from her husband who has decided to leave town with her.  Daisy runs her down, killing her, and then keeps driving.  Gatsby, when they get to her house drops her off, but lingers nearby to make sure that the will be alright when Tom returns – assuming Tom may harm her.

The next day, Tom’s lover’s husband tracks down Tom, assuming it was Tom who Killed his wife.  Tom clarifies that the yellow car belongs to Gatsby and sends the angry husband in Gatsby’s direction.  Gatsby has decided to take the rap for the hit and run to protect Daisy.  He never the gets the chance as the dead woman's husband kills Gatsby and then himself – and Daisy goes off, scot-free, with Tom.  Nick is the sole person at Gatsby’s funeral with the exception of Gatsby’s father who has materialized just as all of Gatsby’s friends and acquaintances, including the “business” partners, have melted away. 

Nick mourns the loss of Gatsby, but perhaps even more so the loss of his innocent sense that justice can or will be served, and that people have genuine ties with each other.  Daisy’s casual dismissal of Gatsby may be the thing that drives him mad.  Daisy cares no more for Gatsby than Nick’s golfer girlfriend cares for him, or he for her.  We live in a world that is simultaneously fluid and rigidly defined.  The things we might think of as being most valuable – relationships – seem the most disposable, while wealth, which philosophers and theologians will maintain are ephemeral, create unbridgeable divisions among us.

The phantasies and narratives that guide our lives need to be constantly revised.  Gatsby’s love for Daisy seems to my romantic phantasy notion, to be the most desirable in this story, but it turns out to be illusory or at least transitory.  Daisy’s attachment to Tom – or perhaps more to the point -Tom’s attachment to Daisy – seems to be solid, despite both partners having philandered, and despite Tom’s despicable views about human beings and their worth being determined by their genes and therefore ultimately by their “race”.  We’d like to think this would be the more transitory belief, but it wins out, in the end.

The great American novel, then, appears to unmask the American dream.  If we are able to listen to the underlying phantasy – if we are able (and this may seem obscure, and therefore I apologize) to give up the curmudgeon Freud’s naïve belief that we are driven by our optimistic wish to meet our own needs, but recognize that we are driven at least as powerfully by a narrative that is based in immutable power differentials – we may be better equipped to understand the paradoxes that lie at the heart of American Exceptionalism – that we are, ultimately, not that exceptional after all.  Trump’s America is, indeed, a crass, uncomfortable phantasy that many of us abhor, but it is also a very real vision – perhaps a more honest vision – than we “enlightened” people would care to admit.  No, I am not saying that the eugenicist vision is biologically or scientifically accurate, but it appears to be an accurate description of a more elusive, but perhaps powerful stratum of the human psyche – that I am superior to you and, if I have the means, I will hold onto that superior position – no matter how much evidence of our equality and profiting from each other you pile up.     

 

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Deliver Me from Nowhere: Oedipal issues can be addressed - but are they ever resolved?

 Deliver Me from Nowhere, Springsteen, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Nebraska, Springsteen on Broadway, Oedipal resolution

Bruce Springsteen was a legendary figure in the middle 1980s.  I did not have the wherewithal at that point to spend much money on records or concerts, but many of my friends who did were avid fans.  He was rumored to be the hardest working rock star ever, and the length and energy of his shows was unparalleled.  I did manage to scrape up enough cash to see John Cougar Mellankamp in concert, rumored to be the second-best show at that point, and even in my nosebleed seats, I found that quite enthralling, so when friends would talk about going to Springsteen concerts, I took vicarious pleasure in their experiences.

Ten years ago, I took my son and one of his friends to baseball camp in Florida.  His friend was into Springsteen, so we listened to the Springsteen station on Sirius FM on the way down and back.  I was familiar with most of the songs – and they seemed mostly to be played from recorded concerts – so they were his big hits.  I saw and wrote about his Netflix special Springsteen on Broadway, but that left me with more questions than answers.  So, when the buzz started about this film, I purposely avoided learning much about it – I knew that it starred Jeremy Allen White (whom I enjoyed in The Bear), and that Springsteen himself had had a hand in it. 

I expected that it would be a bio pic in the style of Elvis, A Complete Unknown (about Dylan), Walk the Line (a film about Johnny Cash), Ray (about Ray Charles) or even Maestro (the biopic about Leonard Bernstein), all films I have seen and enjoyed, and each of which follows a familiar arc with a smattering of material about the family of origin, the grind to get from there to the top of the heap and then some material about their fall from grace – interspersed with a good impersonations of the singing and the singer (or conductor) nicely fleshing out the story.  There are variations, but they follow a general outline.

I was unprepared, then, for a film that looked closely at a critical moment in a career – Oh, it included a couple of impersonation moments of the star as a star, but mostly it looked at a crisis – a crisis that occurs after the beginnings of stardom – and one that, instead of derailing the star, propels the second half of his career.  More importantly, I was completely unprepared for my emotional reaction to the film.  I cried like a baby throughout this film (and because it was so emotionally moving), I may not be able to veridically describe it.

To be fair, my family jokes that I cry at Coke commercials.  And I do.  But the quality of this crying was different – I was not just moved by the performance or the story, but both together created a cathartic level experience in me – much like Aristotle’s description of the impact of Greek tragedy on the viewer.  The tragic element here was not; however, in the Greek tradition of something that causes the hero to fail, but this element drives the hero to appear to succeed, when, in fact, he is never quite going to achieve what it is that he is looking for.  The goal for Springsteen, at least as told in Springsteen on Broadway, will always lie just out of reach, so he will keep reaching for it, and this will account for his continuing success.

This movie, then, is about the creation of a weird and off brand album – Nebraska.  I was beginning graduate school when it was released and there was a certain mystique about the album.  It was dark and folksy, and, frankly, to my ear, monotonous.  It was seen by my friends as a break from his more commercial work and a sign that he was a true artist.  Watching the film, I realized that I must have listened to the album at some point because I was familiar with so many of the songs, but I do not remember spending much, if any time, with it.  It was, in a very important sense, forgettable.

This movie presents that album, instead, as pivotal.  On a very surface layer, it was.  Springsteen held hostage the record executives who wanted him to keep playing with the E Street Band and churn out hit after hit.  He insisted that they release this bleak recording made on a cassette tape of his playing an acoustic guitar and singing mournful tunes as a commercial record.  Thanks, in part, to the support of his agent, he was able to make them cave so that he could establish himself as an artist.  Not just by throwing a tantrum and having thus gotten his way, but by having this dreary bit of singing hitting enough of a cord with enough people that even without it being hyped, it became an underground hit.  Point made: I know what I am doing as an “artist”; a concept that seems to be in tension with the persona of the rock and roller from Freehold, New Jersey who plays good, danceable music.

But the pivot it portrays runs much deeper than that.  In Springsteen on Broadway, Springsteen portrays himself as a huckster – someone who is telling other people’s stories that are not really his own.  The title track (the album was recorded in a rental house in New Jersey, not, as I was led to believe, in a motel in Nebraska) is a first person account of the psychopath Charles Starkweather, the heartless murderer played by a young Charlie Sheen in the film Badlands.  This haunting song is about a man who feels no guilt, but it seems to me that that is a wished-for state.  The feel of the song evokes a deep, dark kind of despair – a despair that springs, according to this film, from two sources.

The first and most obvious source of Springsteen’s despair is his relationship with his alcohol sodden and cruelly abusive father.  If only he could not feel.  But he does.  He feels, I think, I deeply sorry for his father – deeply sorry that he can’t change the way that his father feels.  I think this is a particular kind of guilt.  Most of the guilt that I feel is a very selfish sort of guilt.  I generally am a very guilty person, but the guilt I feel is for not living up to the version of myself that I should be.  I should have done better, but I didn’t and so you have to suffer.  But your suffering is the side show.  The center of my guilt is perhaps better understood as shame.  I failed to be the person that I expected myself to be.

Now there is a fair amount of shame that I am imagining Springsteen feels about his failure to make his father feel better.  If he were a better son, as it were, his father wouldn’t drink.  But there is another layer to it.  His father’s drinking – his father’s attacks on his mother and on himself – enrage him.  And he wants to kill his father – both to protect his mother, but also to put his father out of his misery – because his father, he suspects – even knows – is miserable.  He feels guilty for his murderous impulse – and wishes that he could have that impulse without the guilt – that he could carry it out as effortlessly as Charles Starkweather kills his victims.

The other part of his guilt, I believe, has to do with his own inability to be better than his father.  He is no more capable of committing to the relationship with Faye, the younger sister of a friend from High School, who is a fan and the mother of a young child from a previous relationship, than his father was able to commit to caring for the young Springsteen and his mother.  In my imagination, like his father, Springsteen desperately wants to do this – or at least to be untroubled by his need to have more than fun with Faye – so he writes with envy about being Starkweather – about being able to not feel anything but fun in his relationships with the important people in his life, and to be unaware that he is ruining their lives by not being able to commit to them.

Springsteen’s confrontation with the ghost of his father and with his own inabilities in the relationship with Faye lead him into a very dark place.  His agent recognizes the soundtrack as a symptom of that darkness, and he realizes that he is in over his head in terms of his ability to help him, so he refers him for psychoanalytic help. 

The film fast forwards from his first meeting with his analyst to ten months later.  Springsteen has just completed a successful set on tour and is meeting with his parents backstage after the show.  There is a tender interchange with his father – and the implication, at least to this viewer, is that the effort that he pours into each performance – the care that he puts into the creation of the impersonations of others – is driven by both a desire to make his Daddy happy and also by a desire to create in the minds of the audience the experience of being with the person he would like to be rather than the person that he fears himself to be; he wants them to imagine him as someone who is reliably there for them.

In Springsteen on Broadway, Bruce acknowledges that the moment portrayed in this film when he enters into treatment with an analyst has extended into a relationship that has continued for at least the next 25 years.  I can’t pretend to know what went on in those conversations.  I can only report on the experience I had watching the film – part of which I have related above.  So, if you want to call this projection, I will not be able to contradict you.  Whether it is accurate is, as it were, up to the boss (I know he hates that nickname, but it seemed to work in the sentence).  But it is also up to you – whether you felt something similar as the events of this moment in his life paraded across the screen.

I think that Springsteen imagined himself to have the power to fix his father.  More centrally, I think he felt guilty for not having been enough – for his presence not being a joy – that it was, instead, a burden.  In addition to feeling guilty – and fearful that this was the case, I imagine that he was furious at not being recognized as the brilliant child – the gift – that he was.  The gift that all children should experience themselves as being.  In the novel The Great Gatsby, which I am currently reading, Gatsby imagines himself, when he is a child, to be a God.  For Gatsby, he is ashamed of his very limited parents.

Certainly, Springsteen would have been ashamed as well – so he hides the aspects of himself that he is ashamed of.  This film is about the beginning of the process of coming to grips with his shame, his anger, his guilt, and his anxiety about the ways in which his relationship with his father pointed out all the ways in which he was not a gift – he was not a God.  To become a rock star is to be treated like a God.  To remain balanced and humble in the midst of the adulations of thousands or even millions demands a reckoning with the parts of oneself that are mortal and fallible. 

Nebraska was, then, not the ego piece of a Diva, but, instead, the acknowledgement of a genuinely troubled soul.  To cut and perform Born in the USA, which he had already written, an upbeat anthem intended to both stir stadium sized crowds, but also to give voice to people who were not him, Springsteen chose to explore who he actually is and who he would like to be, including being ashamed of wanting to be the people that he is and cannot be. 

I think that the lesson that comes out of this movie is that, if we are to surpass our fathers, we need to know that when we do, we are not better than they are – we are made of the same stuff.  And what we need from them is what they needed from their fathers; validation and attunement.  In the dressing room, Springsteen asks to sit on his Daddy’s lap – and his father suggests that he do that just as he did as a little boy.  Springsteen clarifies that he has never befoe had a seat on his father’s lap. 

As angry as we are with our fathers for having wounded us, as guilty as we are for not having healed their wounds, and as anxious as we are about exposing ourselves to being wounded again, we still need that adulation.  Springsteen asks for it from his Daddy, but also from his audience.  He deeply needs to be validated.  Fortunately for us, he recognizes that this validation will come when he performs optimally.  He has come to some sort of peace with his need to surpass and still be connected with the man who bore and disappointed him.

 

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Fredrik Backman’s My Friends

 Fredrik Backman; My Friends; Novel; Psychoanalysis; Psychology; Love; Friendship; Escapism

 

Especially in these dark and perilous times, a little bit of escapism may serve us well.  I have been thinking about starting a series of posts about normal life as the end of the United States as we know it approaches, similar to the posts about COVID that I published during (and after) the lockdown.  I published the COVID chronicles because historians were noting, as the pandemic spread, that we didn’t have good records of the experiences of everyday people during the 1919 flu epidemic.  They hypothesized that this was because people felt terribly about how badly they felt about not helping their neighbors who had been stricken and then quarantined.  I have not seen anything about not having records from ordinary Germans who were opposed to the Nazis, but I also haven’t seen reports of that – outside of the exploits of one Gestalt psychologist, Wolfgan Kohler, which I discovered teaching the history of psychology.

So, let it be noted that, in the Midwest, where the day to day stuff doesn’t seem to have changed all that much, despite the fact that this has been the most disruptive period in the history of the country, that a little escapist literature (as well as a No Kings March) has come in handy.  Reading this book transports me to a place and a time that is familiar and very far away, and to a crazy geographical space where the suspension of disbelief is helped by the dislocation that you may feel as you try to locate yourself in this fantastic but very familiar place and time.

Please don’t dismiss this book because it reads like it is written for young adult readers.  If they like it, more power to them.  But I found myself being transported by this book to my own adolescence and the weirdest thing happened – it caused me to fantasize about meeting my wife as an adolescent and that fantasy helped me fall in love with her all over again and in entirely new ways.  More on that later, but, for now, your results may vary and I can’t guarantee this will happen to you, but I do want you to know, up front, that this is a potentially powerful book.

It is a tale of discovery – two coming of age stories – well actually five – but the coming of age of a group that banded together before the age of cell phones and then the power of that coming of age story – and the art (both the story itself, but also the work of art that the story produced) to support the coming of age of the next generation – a girl who would have been one of us – both one of the four, but also one of those who have the gift to use art to connect us to each other – because she can see, both in the work of art, but also in humanity, what is there to be seen – as crazy and discomforting as that necessarily is.

I hesitate to articulate the plot because part of the delight of this story are the minor and major twists that the author so nicely keeps hidden from one moment to the next.  Suffice it to say (spoilers inevitably coming, but I will try to keep them minimal): this novel centers around the unfolding of the story of the group of adolescents who are now in their forties to an eighteen year old who comes from a similarly impoverished and simultaneously enriching background, one that includes a close friend and the kind of crushing losses that sear themselves into a person and, if they don’t turn them ugly, become an integral part of their beauty.

The old group were youngsters in a port city – one where life was grim for the parents – and even grimmer in school – especially if you were “different”.  People were not just ridiculed for the ways they stood out, they were assaulted for them – and the futures that lay over the horizon were actually all around them.  They would end up as cogs in the machinery of the port and old men and women like their mothers and fathers.  But these four kids fell in love with each other and knew that one of them, the most different, the most “special”, needed to get out.

So, one of the stories in this book is that story, the way that these kids conspired to get one of their own out of the mess they all found themselves in (and into an even bigger mess in the wide world - but isn't that the way of all things?).  This story unfolds as a member of that group recounts it to the girl who has grown up in foster homes and now finds herself without a home but with an artistic vision of the world that doesn’t have much room in it for the wealthy collectors of art who collect it not to appreciate its beauty but because it will appreciate in value.  She finds it heartbreaking that her favorite piece of art, a piece of art that truly moves her, is likely to be hermetically sealed.

This book borrows something from Donna Tartt’s book The Goldfinch.  I had a sense of that, and then the author quoted Tartt!  Both books are meditations on the relationship between art and trauma, and both are wary of the collectors of art – and want us to appreciate the art that we are holding in our hands.  And that piece of art is the story – and here we get two stories for the price of one…

The story of the kids in the book unfolds as one of the friends, one who loved the artist – perhaps the most – travels with the girl back to the harbor town where the kids all grew up together.  They are travelling there to bring the story of the four kids full circle, but the story of how they get there is the second story.  Two things are important about that second story.  The first is that the girl is as irritating to the story teller – who has always suffered the other members of the club – as any member of that club was, and the land they are travelling across – they travel by train – is not quite Europe and not quite America – but it is clearly one or the other while simultaneously being neither – helps us be disoriented as we read.  We are never quite sure where we are in either space or time – and meanwhile we are jumping back and forth between the past and the present.

Just one of the remarkable observations of Louisa, the girl who makes the cross-country trip with Ted, the friend of the artist and the rest of the members of the group, is that, in a story, when it is heard for the first time, things are not happening in the past, but now.  Backman’s use of hyperbolic language continually calls our attention to this story as it is unfolding - it is happening NOW.  We are as irritated at Backman as we are at Louisa for the outlandish importance he and she attach to every little thing – and then we (or at least I) remember how ridiculously connected to the world we used to be as adolescents – when everything meant something and we wanted to know it all.

So it was from that frame of mind that I rediscovered my Reluctant Wife.  We met as pretty well formed professionals -  and we agreed that had we met as adolescents we would not have hit it off (my Reluctant Wife was Queen of the Nerds while I, a closet nerd, was a wannabe hippie who was acting the part of the rebel without a cause).  But this book is, at heart, about the love of a group of kids – very much like the group(s) that we both belonged to – in High School and in College – that cared deeply about each other.  The group(s) that had each other’s backs while also having it out with each other in a variety of ways – I could work my way into imagining us – she and I – as members of just such a group.  And aren’t we?  Isn’t our family a reflection of those groups as well as our families of origin?  Aren’t our friend groups halfway spaces on the way to a place that we will someday call home?

Perhaps the disorientation in the reading of this book is the necessary experience of being neither fully a member of my nuclear family any more (though the kids in both generation in this book had varying degrees of nominal families – though those families did play significant and essential parts in the book.  And Louisa had both a family and friends that predated her travels with Ted), nor of yet having a family of my own yet.  That in between space where we float a bit – trying this and that on for size.  It is helpful to the plot that Ted never quite managed to get to having a family of his own – and it is interesting that Louisa is pushing him to go there.  Of course, Ted is Backman’s alter ego – there are biographical hints – but more importantly, Louisa pushes Ted to tell this tale and he intends to do it, while it is, of course, Backman who is actually telling this story.

Since Ted is gay and Backman is a family man we might assume that Backman read Freud and agreed with his position that we are all born both hetero and homo sexual, but I think he would actually say that we are all capable of being in love with the world.  This book articulates that love beautifully – and it is the perfect antidote to the hate and destruction that seems to be threatening to obliterate our world.  Fortunately, we cannot forget that life is best lived in loving connection with others.   

  

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Eyes by Hand: Dan Roche’s deep dive into the world of oculastry

 Ocularists; Glass Eyes; Healing from disfigurement; Eyes by Hand; Dan Roche, Psychology, Psychoanalysis

Dan Roche and I have been friends since graduate school when a mutual friend in the English Department, a poet named Phil Terman, suggested we all rent a house together.  Dan, a good looking, athletically built essayist, shared not just the house with us, but Saturday morning Basketball games with the English Department, some of the best (and worst) parties thrown at Ohio State, and, with me, a history of having been an army brat, that pretty closely mirrored my history of having been a corporate brat, both of us moving from place to place as children.

Dan differed from Phil and me in that he was married.  Or at least purported to be married.  I am told that I met his first wife, Julie, at some point.  She would later be the teacher of my younger reluctant daughter, but I kidded Dan that she was imaginary, especially after having made a trip with him to her home in West Virginia, only to find her not there.  His relationship with her resulted in his first book, Love’s Labor: A Story of Marriage and Divorce.  I still think it would have been better titled A Marriage Apart.  In any case, it was written during the first year of his marriage to his second wife, Maura, who is a saint…

His newest book is, according to the blurb on the back cover, autoethnographic academic writing.  That’s a mouthful.  And this book chews off a lot in its slim 176 pages.  It is about the process of preparing for, creating, and wearing a prosthetic eye – what I grew up calling a glass eye.  These prosthetic eyes, I learned, are still made from glass in Germany, but here, in the United States, they are more likely to be made from resin – which is a fancy name for plastic (Fountain pens, for which Dan and I share a passion with his saintly wife; especially when they are expensive, are also described as being made from resin – never plastic).

Dan begins the book talking about repulsion: the pushing away that someone experiences when they look at someone with a deformity.  He uses as his source writers from the 1800s, ocularists advertising their services who promised a diminishment in the repulsion people would feel looking at the person with a missing or deformed eye.  My reluctant son enthusiastically stole away this book before I could read my copy having read Dan’s other books and he commented that this is an interesting advertising strategy – to tell your prospective customers that they are repulsive.  Of course, it is often how we sell products – mouthwash, weight loss programs, but even cars and clothes – the fear of missing out (FOMO) is just a version of this: being the one who doesn’t know, who is out of the loop, and who is therefore less than, and we are highly motivated to diminish our feeling of being an outcast, in whatever form.

Even though I love Dan, I almost didn’t make it through chapter two.  Here, in the chapter titled removal, Dan was writing in his academic voice, and describing the processes of extirpation through enucleation (complete removal of the injured or diseased eye) or evisceration (emptying out the contents of the eyeball).  Even writing out that sentence made me squeamish, much less reading the details, but Dan is now a journalism teacher and he has long been observing the treatment of his own diseased and ultimately extirpated eye from among other perspectives, at a journalistic, “objective”, remove.  He also needed to get some technical aspects of the physiology on the table so that we could understand something about the craft, as well as the art of creating objects that, he would clarify, are integral components in what can be life changing experiences.

(I feel comfortable telling you that, if you haven’t read the book, and become interested in the latter chapters and, like me, you fear this chapter would be too gross to read closely, you can skip it.  I feel comfortable telling you that because Dan has told me that when he reads my blog posts, he routinely skips the paragraphs in which I describe the psychoanalytic insights I have derived from whatever object I have been interrogating.  Also, because the information in this challenging chapter, while useful to the technical components (Dan was trained as an engineer before being trained as a writer) of the rest of the book, are not necessary to what I see as the most psychoanalytically meaningful parts of the book…)

All but one of the eight chapters are followed by transcripts of interviews with ocularists or their patients about the transformative process of creating an object and doing that in the context of relating to the person who would receive that object.  The object, the glass/resin eye, is fascinating in itself – and the process of creating it, and seating it, and the technical challenges in creating a working illusion of the presence of something that is not there are detailed.  We learn about the challenges of creating something that moves – the decisions about how large to make the pupil – the technical details of painting a realistic three-dimensional object, but we also learn about what it means to be seen by a person who is looking at you – when, for much of your life, you have avoided wanting to be seen.  And we learn about the care that the oculist provides – the care for their craft, but also the care for their patient – and the intense, powerful, and healing relationships that can be not just auxiliary to, but feel to Dan to be, at least in some cases, essential to the reparative process of being fitted for a prosthesis.

I am embarrassed to realize that, as Dan’s friend, I never realized the impact his disfiguring diseased eye had on self-concept.  Frankly, I was jealous of Dan’s good looks.  I travelled with him to Las Vegas when my first wife and I won an all expense paid trip for two at a fund raiser and, because she was planning to leave the marriage, she didn’t want to go with me.  I called up Dan and figured out how to get the plane tickets (first class, no less, for the first time in my life) to include him and me.  He was excited to go, in part because he wanted to look up old friends from when he had lived there in High School.  A picture of him with washboard abs at 16 was consistent with my experience of his comfort putting on a pair of jeans and t shirt to go out for a night on the strip looking like a million bucks with no effort – while I was feeling that no amount of preparation would lead me to look presentable.

Yes, Dan’s eye was a prominent feature, but I had long before learned to have what my friend Bede, the Wired Hermit, calls “custody of the eyes”.  I looked at Dan’s good eye when I looked at him and didn’t notice his other eye.  Of course, I can see now, this meant that I was also not noticing what Dan was feeling about that eye.  When he would talk about feeling self-conscious about it, which he did, I would minimize that – pointing out my experience of him as I have articulated it in the paragraph above.  When, during a basketball game when I was guarding him, my fingernail lifted the contact off his good eye (a very strange experience of feeling small motor feedback while performing large motor movements), Dan was seemingly unworried about how close I had come to injuring his good eye.  I imagined him to be as impervious to concern about his appearance as he appeared to be about his physical vulnerability.  Or, perhaps, I hoped that my comments, intended to be supportive, about his presentation when he would mention his self-consciousness about his eye, had made him impervious - rather than unheard.

My empathic failure is mirrored by a therapist Dan describes having consulted in the book.  Dan listed a litany of concerns to the therapist and then opined that they might be related to and waved at his head.  Confused, the therapist asked him what he meant, and Dan responded, “My [deformed] eye.”  The therapist stated that he hadn’t noticed.  Dan curtly characterized the therapeutic relationship as short lived.

Would I, as Dan’s therapist, have taken his concerns to heart?  Would I have offered the kind of care that he received from the husband and wife team who created the prosthesis for him when he finally received the ophthalmic care that he wishes he had received earlier in his life?  Does caring for a friend differ from caring for a patient?  Should we join our friends in their infirmities and vulnerabilities?  What keeps us from talking about the things that are most important in our lives?

Here is the paragraph Dan might skip in his reading of this post:  Peter Fonagy, in talking about the sexuality of men, talks about our sexual selves as being ignored by our parents and peers – when infants have erections, he says, care givers frequently look away.  This preserves our sexual selves in a child like state, he opines.  Thus, when we become sexual, there is the potential for a delightful, child-like connection with our sexual partners.  We can explore sexuality with the joy of discovery that children have – we don’t turn from it with the jaded sense of having been there and done that; something that can spoil other new and challenging endeavors.

Perhaps the deep connections that Dan articulates between the ocularists and their patients – and this would mirror the connection between therapists and their patients – and all healers and those they heal – is access to hidden aspects of the patient; the parts they have kept hidden or, perhaps even when they have invited others to see them, as Dan did me, they have been repelled – as if to minimize those parts would protect the person from feeling shame – or perhaps would protect the “friend” who might care from having to explore his or her own feelings of being vulnerable, disfigured, or whatever the friend is hiding.  What we might miss, at these moments, is the opportunity to connect with the childlike, undeveloped, and therefore perfectly lovely and accessible parts of the person that we care about.

Dan describes the moment when a person who has long had a visible deformity see themselves in a mirror for the first time with the prosthesis in place as an experience of seeing themselves as they have always hoped they would be seen as profoundly validating.  I have a friend, Virginia, who does research on plastic surgery, and she reports that often the opposite occurs – especially on reality TV shows where patients are given a big reveal.  They often see themselves, and still see flaws, and this leads them to… more plastic surgery.

I imagine that, for some of the patients that Dan describes, especially those for whom a prosthetic eye is just part of recovering from a traumatic disfiguring accident, there may be disappointment that, for instance, the prosthetic eye doesn’t solve the entire problem.  But I think that Virginia would wonder if the patient who is simply having plastic facial surgery to repair being unsightly – is disappointed because they were looking forward less to a physical change than to a psychological change.  They want to feel desired or connected, or to feel that they won’t continue to be overlooked.  The physical change does not assure them of the result they want.

For the individual with a prosthetic eye, the defect is more focal, and thus the remedy is more clear – and it may inspire hope that the desired social effects can now be pursued.  Especially, and this is the central point that Dan makes, in the context of a relationship with an ocularist who has heard and understood the impact that their disfigurement has had on them, seeing the eye in place gives them hope that they can achieve both the personal integration they desire, but also the social acceptance of them as a whole person.

If you are curious about Dan and his eyes, you can see a quick video of him talking about the book here.

Addendum:  After writing this post, I realized that I was being less than candid in my "objective" experience of Dan.  When his eye was withered, I purposely avoided looking at it.  I practiced what my friend the monk called custody of the eyes.  When I did look, I felt, Okay, I hate to say it, revulsion.  I imagine that Dan read that on my face - I don't have a good poker face.  Or if not on my face, on other's faces when they experienced something similar.  This might be a momentary reaction, but that moment surely packs a huge punch.  I put that squeamish feeling (perhaps that is a better term than revulsion) aside, in part by retaining custody of my own eyes and making eye contact only with the good eye, and my overall impression of Dan is what I report above.  I overlooked, as it were, the blemish - something that we do in relationships with others - but when others have seen that we have seen that blemish (whether it is visceral or psychical) I think they don't forget that we have seen it, and neither do we, even if we have successfully directed ourselves away from it and believe we have constructed them without it...  So I applaud Dan for acknowledging what he and I would rather not acknowledge.

 

  

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