The Bear (Seasons 1&2); Culture change mirrors and dances with individual change

 The Bear, Jeremy Allen White, HULU, FX Series, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Culture, Culture Change

The Bear is tremendous television.  I highly recommend it.  That said, it can be hard to get started on.  It is filmed in a very rough fashion.  It feels like watching a documentary, or reality TV, but actually, as it moves along, it feels more like a home movie, and, while this leads to a disjointed feel, it eventually draws you in as a viewer.  It is as if you are a member of the family being let in on what goes on inside of and behind the scenes of your favorite local diner.  If you haven’t seen it and you don’t mind spoilers, read on, but I start with the end and work backwards on this one, so spoilers abound because it is hard to think about the content of this film (I can’t help thinking of it as a film, even though it is a series from FX) without interrogating the content.

In the last episode of season two (all that is out at this writing), Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), is locked in the walk-in cooler of his newly renovated and now quite upscale restaurant during its “friends and family” soft opening.  His “cousin” Ritchie Jerimovich (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) has had to take over the role of Chef de Cuisine to run the restaurant in Carmy’s absence and salvage what could have been a disaster.  Ritchie observes Claire (Molly Gordon), Carmy’s girlfriend, leaving the area near the walk-in cooler in tears, and he surmises that Carmy has broken her heart through the cooler’s still locked door.  Ritchie goes to the door and shouts a deeply psychoanalytic interpretation at Carmy.  “You are Dee-Dee.  You are Donna,” he shouts, essentially accusing Carmy of becoming his mother.

Wow!  And isn’t he? And hasn’t he?  Good thing we have a psychoanalyst around (reluctant though he may be) to help us deconstruct this interpretation!

To prepare to think about the interpretation, we need to decode the complicated relationship between Carmy and his mother, Donna – played masterfully by Jamie Lee Curtis, who has been introduced only two episodes before and who makes a brief appearance in this final episode, but who, it is now apparent, has been hovering over Carmy’s life as we have seen it throughout the series as much or more than the ghost of Carmy’s older brother Mikey (Jon Bernthal) who bequeathed the restaurant to Carmy in his suicide note four months before the start of the series.

To be clear, The Bear was a gripping series long before Jamie Lee Curtis showed up, but her showstopping performance cements into place the central dynamic elements of the series.  In Donna/Dee Dee/Jamie Lee’s episode, we see her in flashback, when Mikey is still alive, slaving in the kitchen to produce the meal of the seven fishes for Christmas dinner.  As mentioned before, one of the draws of the series is the filming, which is (intentionally, I am certain) slipshod.  I’m guessing there are a lot of hand-held cameras and the editing is a bit rough.  And Jamie Lee Curtis’s episode is even shot on film in low lighting, and the graininess helps us feel, in a very close and uncomfortable way, like we are there,  not just watching, but feeling the evening unfold.  You know, at a certain point, that there is no way for it to end except badly, but it just keeps getting worse.

Christmas is a complicated holiday.  There is an incredible amount of preparation that goes into creating the “perfect” experience.  The shopping, cooking, decorating and travel create a pressure cooker that, if all goes well, produces a space that is insulated, somehow, from the rest of one’s life – the very toil and trouble that has created this moment.  But the pressure to create that moment can also cause cracks in it, and once those cracks start, the strain of serving the needs of others whom we love enough to want them to experience the magic of Christmas, can explode, as it does here.

A fine dining experience, when it goes well, is a little like the magic of Christmas.  It is an experience that is walled off from the rest of our lives – and it creates an internal experience – a feeling – that is truly sublime.  The first time I ate in a Michelin rated restaurant was in college.  I ate there with a friend.  We couldn’t come close to affording dinner, but we scraped together enough to eat breakfast.  In the moment after a stack of dishes fell and broke, I realized how good I had been feeling as a result of the meal and the company.  The second time that I ate in a Michelin rated restaurant, after I could afford it, it was magic.  The next day, I went to a local eatery with coworkers and the waitress said that she would be serving us today and I thought, “I know you think that, but I now know what true service is, and I don’t think what you have to offer will measure up.”  The fine dining experience, when done well, is as close to seamless as a human experience can be and it is something to be treasured.

This series actually creates a magical experience of its own.  The Berzatto family is one that takes in strays.  Ritchie is such a stray.  He is a cousin by choice, not by birth.  And the restaurant employees are also like family.  In fact, the restaurant is a second, broader family by choice.  I think that we as viewers are invited in, not as viewers, but as family members.  We identity with the crazy and lovely aspects of the family and the business.  The reluctant wife, as an ice breaker, often asks groups that include mucky mucks to talk about their first jobs.  Many of them worked in the restaurant industry or other service jobs that require hard work but not much skill.  Bonding quickly takes place over the hazards and complexities of those early jobs and the mucky mucks and the average Joe’s find that they have a lot in common as they remember what it was like to work in a pressure cooker atmosphere aimed at pleasing the gustatory customer.  I think that we recognize the space that is created here as one that is familiar, but also, thankfully, not our own, and we can vicariously experience it without having to clean up the messes that are created.

But it may also be that I am more susceptible than others to identifying with this family.  I was born in Chicago, but, because of my father’s peripatetic career, I have lived much of my life in exile.  My mother grew up in Chicago and, later, the suburbs.  Two of my cousins on my father’s side ended up opening a bar and restaurant in Chicago.  It was a family business that was a pressure cooker of its own sort – and I was able to vicariously participate from afar (which was much easier than being directly involved) as it got started, flourished, and then crashed and burned.  Though the arc of this story is different, the interaction of family and work dynamics seems very, very familiar, including the tensions between members of the family that have different skill sets, different personal characteristics, and different senses of feeling loved by different members of the family.

Carmy grew up in a sprawling Italian family.  The restaurant that his brother ran (and almost ran into the ground), Chicago Beef, was a sandwich shop that served an urban neighborhood, while the family lived in the suburbs.  When Carmy became old enough, he left Chicago, fleeing from the craziness of his family and searching for a better life.  He found one, sort of, working his way up the ladder of the restaurant business, becoming the Chef de Cuisine at one of the great restaurants in the world.  And there, despite his skills, he was lorded over by a sadistic chef who berated him, encouraging him to work harder and faster.  And, we are left to surmise, he harbored a dream: He wanted to return home and partner with his brother, hoping that his brother could sober up from all the pills and whatnot he was on, so they could transform the sandwich shop into a new restaurant – one that would create a more nuanced experience than the Chicago beef sandwiches that were the mainstay of the business as it was currently run.

When Carmy returns to Chicago, his inheritance is complicated.  The business is failing, and he jumps in with both hands to make sure that it does not go under, but this is complicated by the inertia of the restaurant as it has been, including the people that go with it; Cousin Ritchie, Tina Marrero (Liza Colón-Zayas) the sassy linecook, as well as Carmy’s sister, Natalie "Sugar" Berzatto (Abby Elliott) who also has an interest in the business, and his Uncle, Jimmy "Cicero" Kalinowski (Oliver Platt), who is financially involved.  Carmy is trying to both preserve and change something that all cherish, that all are invested in, and that none but he see the evolutionary potential.  

Carmy’s first gambit, then, is to hire someone from the outside to help him act as a change agent.  Sydney Adamu (Ayo Edebiri) fits the bill because she has burned every other bridge and, unbeknownst to Carmy, has eaten his food at the high end place he worked for out of town and she is a true believer in him and what he can do with food.  She is also black and she is odd – she is not comfortable in her skin.  It is almost embarrassing to see her on the screen with all the other actors that fit so comfortably into their roles.  It is as if she is the only actor – the only one trying to act a part rather than be someone.  This is, in my estimation, not a sign of her failing to be a good actor, but a sign of her ability to act.  Her self-consciousness is just what the role calls for.  Sydney is, unlike the rest of the characters, uncertain of herself and how she fits in – not just at the restaurant, but in life.  She is, as it were, playing at being human, so she is the one who is most open to the possibility of change.  Carmy has a vision of what the restaurant will be, no matter how muddy, while she is just awkwardly trying to figure out how to have any vision, of a menu item, of a wardrobe choice, of a topic of conversation, that will work.  Her anxiety about not fitting in, about not being centered in herself, leads her to try out and try on all kinds of different new things as she almost spastically tries to become herself.

So the first season can be summarized as a war for the soul of the restaurant.  Carmy and Sydney are trying to bring the old guard up to speed and the old guard are resisting it.  The old and the new (with the exception of Sydney) want the restaurant as the restaurant it has been to work, they want to preserve the legacy of Mikey, the guy who was fun to be with and who could, by dint of his charisma, make everything fun and crazy, but they want to be able to do what he was not able to: keep the bottom from rotting out.  Carmy is trying to instigate culture change – creating a culture where what matters is not the glitter of having a barely functional working space, but the content of producing something of value.  He and Sydney share a vision of the restaurant producing an experience within the people who consume what is offered that is sublime.  In order to affect this, the staff needs to shift in the way that they work together on creating that experience.

The functional changes that Carmy and Sydney institute are, on the surface, simply matters of protocol.  The employees now call each other “chef” and they call out to each other as they move around the kitchen so that they don’t run into each other.  They wash their dishes and keep their spaces clean.  These are the practices of higher end restaurants like the ones where Carmy has been working, but they are foreign to the functioning of a Chicago Beef place that is turning out sandwiches for the lunch crowd.  The culture – the people who have been working in the sandwich shop – resist the changes.  They are used to doing things the way they are used to doing them.  But they are also intrigued by the possibility of thinking about themselves in new ways.  They begin to recognize that what Carmy is offering is something that would not just elevate the experience of the customers, but it would elevate their experience of themselves.  This creates a sense of intrigue, but they don’t know what they are shooting for, or how to get there, and there is considerable anxiety about whether they have what it takes to make the transition. 

The first season ends with a tremendous performance from Jeremy Allen White as he recounts his experience of losing his brother and the impact that has had on him.  It also ends with the surprise discovery of financial resources assumed to have been lost to drug dealing that are in fact stored away on premises and that can be used to fuel Carmy’s vision of what the place could be in the second season.

So the second season unfolds as a series of short stories that allow us to understand the characters that make up the restaurant family.  We learn their back stories and we see how they individually come to make the changes that will allow them to become a functional family – one that will work to remake the restaurant.  All of this is set against a series of catastrophes that threaten to derail the rebuilding of the restaurant, the central of which is Carmy’s failure of heart.  He is distracted from what should be his central and driving concern by his relationship with Claire (Molly Gordon).  This keeps him from attending to the necessary details of getting the door fixed on the walk-in fridge that leads to the ultimate moment of being unable to preside over the soft opening of his restaurant.  Sydney and Sugar are left to be the driving forces as Carmy orchestrates, but with a distracted air.

I said a moment ago that we get the back stories of the characters, but we also get to see them more fully become themselves as they engage in a series of exercises that Carmy comes up with that allow them to explore, outside the confines of the restaurant, who it is that they can become.  Tina Marrero goes to the Culinary Institute of Chicago, the pastry chef studies with a chef in Denmark (where Carmy had a stop on his journey to learn the trade), and, after the episode with Donna/Dee Dee Jamie Lee Curtis, cousin Ritchie spends a week in the kind of restaurant that he defensively disdains – one that he could never afford to eat in, but one that he would secretly kill to be able to claim as a place that he works.  And we see him transform, in the final episode, into the kind of person that he could only have dreamt of being – the person who can confidently fill in the role of chef de cuisine when Carmy gets locked in the walk-in.

So in the Christmas episode, one facet of the manifold complicated interactions that are taking place is the interaction between Carmy and his mother.  She is demanding that others help her and that they leave the kitchen and she is complaining that they never help her all the while managing not just the seven fishes dish (the meaning of which no one seems to quite understand) but a plethora of other complicated dishes all needing time in the oven simultaneously.  Through the chaos of her cooking and her moods, Carmy is tuned in to his mother and her needs.  He knows what it takes to keep her precariously on track, to emotionally resonate with her and to hold her together so that the next step can be taken.  And he knows how to anticipate which dishes need to be attended to while flying under the radar that would lead his mother to think he thought she couldn’t manage what she is doing.  But this is dangerous business, this business of keeping one’s mother on track.  It requires a lot of work, it is highly anxiety producing, and it ends up being something that one might resent as much as Donna clearly resents preparing the elaborate meal that the entire family looks forward to eating.

So this series is presenting something like a paradox.  Carmy is the generative mastermind that is helping his staff, many of whom are his friends as well as employees, make the kind of personal transformations that will allow for a cultural shift that well create a new functional work space.  At the same time, Carmy himself is undergoing a kind of retrograde personal shift.  His single-minded focus, learned while managing his mother’s mercurial moods (and cooking) drove him to get out from under her oppressive oversight, and became his support system as he competed in the realm of high-end cooking.  But now that he has the ability to harness this for his own good, he is wavering.  Not completely in a bad way.  He is entertaining the possibility of allowing someone else into his world – he is not just partnering with Sydney in the business, but falling in love.  And maybe, just maybe, this is helping him realize that he has needs; significant unresolved needs that deserve to be attended to.  Needs for nurturance and support and connection with someone who really understands him, even if that understanding also comes at the cost of interfering with his unwavering attention to serving others.

When Ritchie accuses Carmy of having become Donna, he senses that Carmy has driven away someone who could love and care for him, and that Carmy is pretending that he doesn’t need this, while his behavior cries out that he does.  The complicating factor, of course, is that tending to the relationship with Claire has interfered with his ability to attend to the restaurant, and therefore to his customers, exemplified by his having failed to replace the door handle to the walk-in cooler, including by forgetting to make the call for the repair because he took a call from Claire.

Daniel Stern, in his book on infants relating to others, clarifies what Carmy demonstrates so clearly in this series.  We are built to relate to others.  As infants, we thrive when others closely attend to us and communicate to us that they get what our needs, but perhaps more importantly, our desires are.  When we have internalized a sense of ourselves and are able to articulate our needs to others while also meeting their needs, we achieve a state of equilibrium.  But this state is rare and difficult to achieve.  Carmy has long been laboring in the desert.  He has been trying to build himself on his own foundation, rather than a foundation that is connected to others.  He hasn’t connected to others, apparently, because it is too painful to do that.  His older brother made fun of him.  His mother demanded too much from him, so he headed out on his own, and he got a considerable distance, but it didn’t create a foundation within himself that is like the one he has been preparing for others.

Many people come into my profession from similar backgrounds.  We work to provide a foundation for others in part because we are seeking such a foundation for ourselves.  Perhaps this is a contributing factor to the high rate of suicide in those professions.  I don’t think that Carmy has such a dark future ahead of him, though it might have something to with the suicide of his brother.  I think that the community that Carmy is building will help sustain him and support his seeking out the kind of support that he needs, that is, after all, the arc of the other characters, but I think both he and Sydney are in need of support, and it can be particularly hard to acquire genuine support as leaders in an organization where you are expected to support others and the others don’t always see the need for the leader to be supported.

What I intended to point out here, though, is that culture change does not occur in the culture – culture is amorphous and dependent on the functioning of the individual members, and ultimately for a culture to change, the individuals have to change.  As I write this, I am in Florida, where I visited an art museum that included the works of Seminole Indians.  In a video by one of the artists, he noted that the elders taught him the basic skills that he needed, then sent him out to explore his craft (in his case it was building dug out canoes).  As he worked, he came up with questions, which he took back to the elders, who would suggest that they had solved the problem he was presenting in a particular way, and he could use that, or he could find a novel way to solve the problem.  It occurred to me in that moment that culture and cultures are not static, and that they are, as depicted in The Bear, fluid entities powered by the interactions between people with complex individual histories that are shaped by the flow of the previous culture through those they have interacted with.

 The Bear asks us to think about who it is that we are as individuals and in relation to others.  It clarifies that neither the individual nor the culture has unlimited degrees of freedom to change.  We are embedded in the culture that has supported and sustained us, but we can also contribute to changing that culture - often by changing ourselves and the ways that we interact with others.  We can, through effort and hard work, move closer to being the person that we would imagine ourselves to be.

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The Fabelmans: What’s in a name?

 Fabelmans, Spielberg, Art, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, A tale 

I am not a big Spielberg fan.  His films have often felt contrived.  I leave the theater feeling manipulated rather than moved, even though feelings have, indeed, been wrenched out of me.  In The Fabelmans, a film that is also a memoir, perhaps it is no coincidence that Spielberg’s muse is a particular kind of artist – a circus performer.  Perhaps Spielberg is equating his films with The Greatest Spectacle on Earth – something not to be missed, but also something that is primarily entertaining and only incidentally edifying, even if there is great potential for that when you martial the resources needed to put together a human and animal extravaganza like a circus or a blockbuster movie.

I read somewhere that Spielberg, like Hitchcock before him, was interested in communicating a feeling state that he experienced as a child.  Hitchcock’s father had him locked up in jail by the local constable, a family friend, for a minor infraction at home to teach young Alfred a lesson.  What Alfred experienced was dread tinged with terror, and he mastered this by inducing that feeling in his audiences.  For Spielberg the Ur experience was the dissolution of his parent’s marriage.  And the feeling associated with this might best be understood as a yearning – a wish to repair something that is broken and over which you have little control – the wish to help ET phone home so that he can be reunited comes to mind.  So, I was interested to see how this film would interrogate that emotional territory not in a displaced form but when confronted directly.

Of course, when The Fabelmans was released we were still under COVID restrictions, and we weren’t in the habit of going out.  I knew that it would be streaming shortly and with the summer movie slate promising to be even more tepid than usual, the Reluctant Wife and I decided to wait to watch it at home because we were both curious about whether this very successful director can adequately capture what drew him to the medium that he has so profitably exploited.

The answer to our question is entrusted to young Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle), who, as the ersatz Steven Spielberg, ends the film spending a few moments with the person he believes to be the greatest film director of all time, John Ford, where he learns to put the horizon high on the screen or low on the screen, because those are interesting, but not in the middle of the screen, because that is not.  And in many ways this scene captures how Sammy has used film – it is a way to capture the interest of the audience – to pull them into an experience – to dazzle them even.  Film is a bright shiny object that captures an audience in ways that a geeky kid would never otherwise be able to.

That is not, however, how he uses film initially.  He is taken to his first movie – The Greatest Show on Earth (in fact- the circus theme runs through this movie) – and he is traumatized by it.  There is a scene in which a convertible full of people drives up the tracks to warn a second train that the first train has been derailed and the car is hit full on by the train and the people are thrown from the vehicle.  Spielberg asks for a toy train set for Chanukah and replays the scene to try to master it, but his father Burt Fabelman (Paul Dano), a brilliant but emotionally constricted electrical engineer, is concerned about the damage to the train set during the re-creation.  Sammy’s more sensitive mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams) suggests that he recreate the wreck once more and film it so that he can relive it endlessly by showing the film over and over.

There is a lot packed into that set of interactions and the development that film is both the inducer of trauma, but also the means of working it through.  In PTSD, one of the things that fascinated Freud and that did not fit in nicely with his theory of the mind is that traumatic events are replayed, for instance in repetitive dreams.  We keep returning to the scene of the crime, as it were, and he sees this as not fitting in with his theory that dreams are about fulfilling wishes.  I think that the PTSD dreamer is wishing that the dream would provide a different ending than the one that occurred in real life, but the reality of the loss, of the trauma, intrudes, and we wake up not having figured out how to make this thing that has happened unhappen.

But I think Sammy’s mother intuits something else.  I think she intuits that being able to create the accident will give Sammy the sense of mastery over it.  It will be he that is causing the train to strike the car, not something that is being done to him in a movie theater by another person’s film.  It is he that will be taking something that was uncontainable – his terror at the fate of these men – and containing it, making it into something that he is in control of, something that he has produced.  In the trade, we call this turning passive into active.

There are, then, two parallel incidents that describe Sammy’s adolescent trauma, the trauma that involves a greater loss of control than the death of actors on the screen.  Both of these traumas are the result of his family’s move from Arizona to California.  In this move, Sammy’s mother needs to leave behind the family friend, Benny Loewy (Seth Rogen).  Benny has been like Sammy’s father’s kid brother – another engineer that has followed the family from place to place.  As Burt Fabelman’s career has expanded, as he has been in demand, he has been able to negotiate a place for Benny to come with him each time, but the move to LA is a move to the big time and Benny doesn’t have the chops to make it there.  It is also the case that Benny and Mitzi have become lovers – and whether Burt knew that or not, Mitzi’s depression at leaving Benny makes it clear.  Unfortunately, Sammy has known about Benny and Mitzi’s trysts and he is furious with is mother about them.  His incessant filming has caught them secretly being indiscreetly affectionate with each other.  He edits a highlight reel of them so that when he mother asks what is wrong, he can show her the evidence that he has collected.

The other trauma is that Sammy moves from being firmly ensconced in a peer group in Arizona, where he had a cadre of friends to act in the movies that he created, to being the weird kid at the High School in California.  Paralleling his knowledge of his mother’s infidelity, he becomes aware of the prom king’s dalliance with someone other than his girlfriend.  When Sammy tells the girlfriend, and the prom king finds out, the prom king attacks Sammy and demands that he take back the information – to lie to the girlfriend.  Dutifully (and to avoid more bodily harm), Sammy does this, though the girlfriend sees through his meager attempt to undo his interference.

These parallels allow Sammy to use his camera to work out the complex experience of feelings of loss that his parents impending divorce visits upon him.  He does this by filming the senior class’s day at the beach and splicing the film together to portray the philandering classmate as the golden boy who is everybody’s hero.  The golden boy, knowing that Sammy knows that he is not a hero – both because he is a philanderer and because he has bullied Sammy, is ashamed of the film.  He cries that it does not represent who he truly is and demands to know why Sammy has portrayed him in this manner.  Sammy genuinely seems perplexed.  He does not know why he has done this.

I think Sammy’s perplexity is mirrors Spielberg’s.  This film, written by Spielberg about the formative moments in Spielberg’s development, is inarticulate at the central moment of explanation.  This could be a device on the writer/director’s part, but I don’t think it is.  I think he is left wondering about this and he presents this movie as art – raising the question of what occurred in his own and the viewers mind and invited the viewer to wonder.  He is, like his mother, aspires to be not just an entertainer (she is an accomplished pianist), but, as his uncle points out, an artist. 

The maternal uncle (played by Judd Hirsch in a wonderful turn as the impish and crazy family member who should not be let into the house after the death of his and Mitzi’s mother) has predicted that Spielberg’s curse is that he loves film more than he loves his family.  This is the explanation that the writer/director is offering for his tragic hero – that his love of film – his love of, and the scenes of the film emphasize this, creating scenes, filming them, splicing them together and figuring out how to have special effects – his interest (largely depicted as being in the mechanical and logistical aspects of film making) leads him to be isolated from those around him.

But this explanation does not hold water in explaining his decision to glorify the two-timing bully.  I think a more concise explanation is that he wants to restore a complicated world – one filled with philanderers – to one that is simpler; one that is filled with admirable heroes – people that he can believe in and be comforted by.  His isolation from his family is not caused by workaholism, but by the denial of the flaws that he sees in the world and the wish to portray and inhabit a world that lives up to the ideals that he expected of his parents and his workaholism is the mechanism for maintaining the denial.

Some of the irony here is that Burt, Sammy’s father, is depicted as a real mensch.  He recognizes that Mitzi, in spite of her love for him, and his love for her, is better suited to Benny.  Of course, Sammy’s father is being created now by an unreliable narrator – Spielberg has let us know that he doesn’t show things as they are (the prom king), but as he would like them to be.  Is this movie trying to repair his image not just of his mother – to idealize her desire to keep the family together despite the pain that being separated from Benny caused her, but also of his father, to see him not as the person who was not enough for his mother, but as the man who was too smart, too wonderful for any woman to be able to live with?

I have two weird and somewhat random connections with Steven Spielberg.  The first is really random.  I own the home that his cousins grew up in.  They visited the home and gave me a home video of little Steven running around in what is now my house with his camera, taking film of everything in sight.  I also have a less random connection.  A high school friend majored in film and became an editor and worked for Spielberg for years, cutting the films that we have all seen.  Perhaps my friend’s discomfort with working on those films – he did not see them as art but as popular films – is another factor leading to my wondering about denial and wishes for something better as being at the core of the ways that film has led Spielberg to produce the movies that he has.

What this film has helped me see is that the difference between art and entertainment may be that art invites us to wrestle with the unpleasant truths that are difficult aspects of life.  It encourages us to let go of what we hold dear in order to consider a world that is organized along lines that we find uncomfortable, but the artist believes that if we acknowledge them, we will be empowered to better navigate the complicated aspects of that world.  Entertainment, on the other hand, let’s us leave the spectacle essentially unchanged – or,  perhaps, changed back from our complicated selves to a simpler version of who we are and were – children who are fascinated but also bewildered by the world, and soothed by knowing that there is always a happy ending.  The moral of the Fabelmans is that our heroes are real and we can rely on them - the factures that lie beneath the service do not detract from their virtues - even though this leaves us a little mystified because we never quite come to grips with them.

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 Gad, Series, Huge in France, Comedy, Tragedy, Psychoanalysis, Psychology

Huge in France: Is He Gad, or Is He a Latter Day de Tocqueville?

 

Having just finished watching the first season of Huge in France, Gad Elmaleh’s comic take on living life in America as a French Comedy Star whose celebrity status counts for naught here, I was not surprised to hear that Netflix is not renewing it for a second season.  It, like Hacks, another current series about comedians, has not a likeable character in it.  Even The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, starring a likeable comedian, is turning her into someone we don’t like in it’s fifth and final season.  Is there something about being funny that makes people unlikeable?  Certainly the characters on Seinfeld, while likeable, had few other redeeming qualities, as they themselves were quick to point out.

Gad, however, may only be a comedy by accident.  Sure, Gad is the Seinfeld of France.  His decision to leave fame behind; fame which has turned bitter in his mouth, and move to America, propels the series towards its black humor where Gad plays straight man to the antics of a series of shallow, self-obsessed Americans like his son, Luke (Jordan Ver Hoeve), his ex and his son’s mother Vivian (Erinn Hayes), and her current lover, Jason Alan Ross (Matthew Del Negro).  He is guided through this tour of vapidness in the capitol of vapidity, Los Angeles, by a Korean American, Brian Kurihara (Scott Keiji Takeda).  Brian, in his role as Sancho Panza, sits firmly astride an early 1970s vintage Toyota(?) station wagon.  

But this series does not primarily evoke Don Quixote for me, even though Gad is on a Quixotic quest to win back the love of his Dulcinea – in the form of the son he has neglected for the 14 years of the kid’s life – but instead it appears to be the commentary of a Frenchmen on the culture, as it were, that he finds in America.  And this, in turn, is reminiscent of the observations of another Frenchman, who published, in 1835, his two-volume book Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville .  Many consider this work to be a near prescient assessment of our country not as it was conceived, but as it was realized.

Central to de Tocqueville’s assessment of America was the idea that we, instead of inheriting our wealth, worked for it.  He admired this, as it created an industriousness that he did not see in his own country where men either inherited wealth and looked down on those who needed to labor – or they were laborers with no hope of becoming wealthy, so were consigned to the drudgery of life.  Hence the current concerns in France with quality of life, including being unshackled from labor to retire at a relatively young age.

Gad’s wealth has been supporting the lifestyles of his ex, her boyfriend and their son.  But they have not been living the life of Ryan, luxuriating in that wealth (though they live in a fine home and drive nice cars).  Instead they are each working towards wealth and fame in their own ways.  Luke is working to become a model, Vivian has an Instagram based company, Exhale, to which she is uploading episodes filmed by her assistant on their iPhone and for which she is entertaining groups and instructing them how to be calm by, you guessed it, exhaling, and Jason Alan Ross is trying out for TV parts while mentoring Luke based on his earlier experience as a model.

Gad observes their antics with an air of mild disdain.  Why are they engaged in such silly pursuits?  He is most concerned with Luke, who is trying to find the money to buy surgically supplied pecs to enhance his chest without causing his arms to become bloated.  Why would he want to distort himself in this way?  Why are these people obsessed with appearance? 

Luke, for his part, does not understand why his biological father is so clueless about what is important to him and sticks like glue to his preferred father figure, Jason Alan Ross, who keeps promising to come up with money for his half of the cost of the surgery.

I think Gad’s feelings towards Luke (and Vivian and Jason Alan Ross) are intended as commentary on our country in part because of his reaction to American humor.  Gad repeatedly engages with a comic who tells dick jokes, as in, “I have a California dick so it looks blond and curly and like it is ready to go surfing.”  After commenting on what the dicks of various members of the audience must look like based on where they are from, he calls out Gad and asks where he is from.  When Gad acknowledges that he is French, the comedian calls out rhetorically, “What does a French dick look like?  If looks like you!”  (With drum roll and inane laughter to follow). 

Crestfallen, Gad, who has been questioning himself while being bewildered by those around him, turns to his sidekick, the loser Brian, who defends the comic, saying that his jokes are not just dick jokes, but meta-dick jokes: they offer commentary on the weakness of the genre.  Perplexed and angry, Gad enlists his friend Jerry Seinfeld to put the upstart comic in his place, twisting Jerry’s arm to tell the punk that the joke is not funny, but Jerry, in the moment when he should support Gad, pulls the rug out from under him, acknowledging that the joke is, in fact, funny.  And humor, in Jerry’s world, trumps the dignity of his friend.

Facing the ignominy of  having lost his son, his ex, and playing second fiddle to a man who is inept in so many ways that it is hard to imagine a less worthy opponent, Gad excuses himself from a bowling match in which he is supposed to be his son’s wing man to try his hand at an open mic night in the bowling alley’s lounge – perhaps the lowest place a comic can sink to.

Now de Tocqueville did not face similar personal challenges (as far as I know) on his trip to America.  Quite the contrary, he was greeted as an esteemed visitor from a country, in the midst of its second try at a Republic, that was imagined by both countries to be comrades in arms – working, on two sides of the ocean, to figure out how to engage in this complicated mess called self-government.  De Tocqueville had a whiggish view of history – that the Republic was built on the accomplishments of Louis the IV – the Sun King, who had brought France out of the middle ages and into an enlightened era that would lead, inexorably toward the ennoblement of the common man. 

The reality of America, for de Tocqueville, was that the white man in America was so focused on his own promotion that he was largely unaware of others, except in so far as they could help him towards a goal – whether in working together towards something that would benefit all working on that project or working alone.  In the process of being so focused on themselves, they were blind to, among other things, the terrors they were wreaking on African Slaves and Native Americans.  He predicted that we would assimilate the Native Americans and isolate the African Americans, and that this would be a dilemma that would prevent us from achieving the lofty goals of equality that we set for ourselves.

De Tocqueville, though, saw that the industry of the Americans would outstrip the French in productivity. He saw the French collectivism as breeding a certain kind of apathy.  The French may have a greater sense of country and of belonging and they may enjoy a certain kind of freedom that comes from not being afraid of being left by the side of the road by a citizenry that doesn’t care (OK, I may be presentizing de Tocqueville here), but their material accomplishments were likely to be eclipsed by the exploits of the Americans.

Gad, the character, is the most popular comic in France (I don’t know whether the actor – a French/Morocan comic – is actually that popular).  As the most popular comic, he is known in France as the French Jerry Seinfeld.  Even in France, where he speaks the language and where he is huge, he is eclipsed by the exploits of the self-centered and aggrandizing Americans.

Curious about what we do across the pond, and also wanting to connect with his son, Gad travels here.  As a comic, he observes.  This is what comics do.  They observe – and they comment.  They notice what is going on around them, and they (at least according to Hannah Gadsby) bring the most egregious and anxiety provoking aspects of our experience to our attention, but then, rather than energizing us to do something to change those things, they release the tension that they have brought into the room by making light of the situation.

Aristotle wrote the book on tragedy.  Nietzsche used that work to write a modern version of the tragic.  What was lost in antiquity were Aristotle’s thoughts on comedy.  Could it be that Gad, now in the guise of Aristotle, would point out that comedy is based on horror?

Freud maintained that dreams are, at their base, means of granting wishes to our unconscious drives.  What he didn’t say, but maybe left implicit, is that the source of the wish is a lack and behind that lack is a fear that the lack will not be addressed.  Freud's first example of a dream is of the child who is hungry and dreams of eating so that he or she doesn’t wake up.  What he doesn’t point out here is that the child is lacking something – food – and feeling something – hunger – that would motivate him to address the lack except that, at the moment, the need for sleep is going to trump the need for food, so we are going to produce some imaginary food - and the purpose of the dream is to keep us asleep. 

Of course, when we are hungry enough, we are desperate for food because we are horrified that we will die if we don’t eat.  Similarly, while we may want to cavort naked, to meet our desire to exhibit ourselves, we are also horrified when we dream that we have gone to school or to work without wearing any clothes.  Gad points out to us, in this film, the he is horrified of the state of affairs in America.  We are bloated narcissists who focus on the surface of our lives – and put that out on the internet for others to emulate, parading nude, as it were, on the internet.

From a classical perspective, this is, indeed a comedy.  It has a happy ending, of sorts.  Our hero – whether as Quixote, de Tocqueville, or Aristotle, managed to accomplish the relational goals that he set for himself.  His Sancho Panza helped him to these goals.  There was some ambiguity about how well the other characters made out – and without another season, we will not know how the story might have continued.

I think that the essential unlikeability of most of the cast was necessary to clarify to the reader that what Gad was seeing was really there – he wanted to hold up a mirror to them and to us that would highlight the flaws that his de Tocquevillian self was observing.  Perhaps, though, the horror that is at the heart of the series – and one that the happy ending could not quite mask – is that, for all his disdain, Gad still wants to be an American – and he despises himself for doing that.

In his stand-up routine – taped and available to stream – he talks about being at the beach in Morocco when he was a child and his father pointing across the ocean and saying that America lies on the other side of that and, if he is lucky, he will be able to go there some day.  He ends the show by telling of going out to Long Island and pointing across the Atlantic to tell his child that Morocco lies there, and, if he is lucky, some day he will be able to go there – but it is a joke.  America is the shining destination.  As horrible as it is, it is desirable in a way that Morocco simply is not.

What if, then, what is most monstrous and horrifying about us is that we desire to be Americans – to be striving to make our dreams come true not just at night, but when we are awake.  That we are in love with the idea of being able to “live the dream” and blind to the fact that the effort to achieve it will spoil us.

It is a truism in psychotherapeutic work that we don’t want to strip away all of the defenses.  Some delusion is an important element of living a happy life.  As observer, Gad (and his fellow comedians) relentlessly desire to show us who we are ultimately has a tragic quality – he strips away his and our delusions and connects us to our ugly, unhidden selves, and we find him, and ourselves, unlikeable.   

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The Lotus Eaters: Tatjana Soli's profound debut novel

 The Lotus Eaters, Tatjana Soli, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Lessons learned, vietnam war, meaning of

The Lotus Eaters

The Lotus Eaters is a woman’s coming of age story set in Vietnam during the American war there.  The civil war, and the war between Vietnamese culture and American culture becomes the intrapsychic battle that the hero, a person who thinks of herself as nondescript in her California home environment, explores as she becomes a war photographer.  She becomes a was photographer, on the one hand, in an overdetermined way: her father was a soldier, as was her beloved older brother and, when her older brother is killed in Vietnam, she is drawn like a moth to flame to the site of his death.  But she also becomes a war photographer in an almost whimsical way – "Oh, there is a war on, I’ll just go over and take some pictures as if I were a tourist going to Europe and, like that tourist, I might only last a week, but maybe I’ll like it there and decide to stay."  Like Odysseus men in the land of the Lotus Eaters, I may decide to stay because I like the flavor of the lotuses.

Frankly, as I started into this book I was much more reluctant to read it even than I am about my psychoanalytic identity.  This is a war, I thought, that is better forgotten.  I was creeped out by the descriptions of the jungle and leeches and the uncertainty of who might attack from which vantage point.  I felt on edge, uncomfortable, and, on another level, manipulated.  Why is the author choosing this space, I wondered.  Is there a point to the discomfort evoke by her writing, decades after the war is over, her first novel about a war she didn’t experience herself?  Why is she returning to this most embarrassing and misguided moment of ours?  Does she want to rub our noses in just how out of touch we were?  

Fortunately I managed to manage my concerns long enough to get over the hump and be pulled into the central dilemmas that are played out very intentionally against a backdrop that suits them and helps highlight how they are played out, in a hidden way, in our contemporary world.

In describing how a good photographer works, the author lets us know her intent.  The good photographer, she maintains, does not instruct us.  She tells the story, and, when we hear the story, we construct the intended meaning ourselves rather than having it given to us.  

The author of this story starts near the end of her story, telling us about the photographer’s experience on the day that the US pulls out of Vietnam.  In the process of doing this, we learn the outline of what will be told, in effect, as a flashback through the rest of the novel – the story of a love triangle between the hero and two others – an American and a Vietnamese.  The American we know will die in the war and the Vietnamese man will be the person the photographer manhandles onto a helicopter out of the country on that last weird day as she chooses, to her apparent surprise and our own, not to join him on that last helicopter ride out.

We spend the novel, then, with a question.  How do we get to that day that we think of as final? How do things work out so that the particular configuration the author has set up can be resolved and make sense?  Not to spoil things, when we get back to that moment, there is enough still unresolved that we realize that the story does not end where we imagined that it would, but just a bit more needs to be played out, and we are hungry for it.  We have been setting the stage, through this long and complicated novel, for an ending that will be both a resolution and an opening to new questions about how what we now know about this woman will play out in her life and, vicariously, in our own.

So, I will now violate the author’s rule and talk directly about what the book means rather than tell the story.  She has already told that story, and what follows is a reaction and my own interpretation and experience of the impact of the story.  I do not mean it to definitive.  I, like the author, was not in the Vietnam war.  I, unlike the author, am not a woman.  So, like the author, I will have to imagine myself into places that I cannot inhabit.

One reason that a woman might want to locate a woman’s coming of age story in the Vietnam war is that the patriarchal attitudes of men are perhaps never more clearly on display than in war – and this war is a particularly good canvas on which to paint those attitudes – neither the photographic core nor the military was meaningfully inhabited by both sexes.  Further, the cultural divide between the American and the Vietnamese cultures is starker during a time when we are occupying and, at least in theory, fighting on behalf of people we, on some other level, despise and devalue.

The point here is that in our current cultural space, where our political correctness would force us to whitewash the differences, she might be accused of imposing a latent sexism and racism rather than being able to describe them in their natural and naked shape before we knew enough to better hide and disguise them.  To put on my psychoanalytic hat, in so far as this woman is writing about contemporary issues, this woman chooses to do that where the defensive structure of the culture is not so well developed.  Because we, as Americans and as men, are able to unselfconsciouslessly assume that ours is the best way to operate, we can express that in undisguised fashion.  Discovering there are flaws in the assumptions underlying both of these aspects of ourselves, we don’t necessarily quit believing in this truth, but we hide our belief in it better than before.

So, the question for a woman coming of age in a man’s world – and especially in a Western man’s world, is how does she remain/become true to herself?  What is a feminine self?  What is required of a woman – or of this woman in particular?  How can she make use of the psychological and social landscape, one that is determined largely by American males, to become a woman?  And isn’t this a contemporary problem, one that is complicated by men who disown their beliefs and values – who hide behind being woke while still practicing a variant of a very old and deeply culturally engrained pattern of behaving?  So, let’s strip the curtain off and deal with what’s lying underneath.

There are a number of teachers in this novel – many of them are men.  The two main teachers include the first lover – the photographer who is driven to get the best picture and is the quintessential American male.  Comfortable in his bravado, married to a woman who represents a world that he disavows, and comfortable being sexual with women he does not care about.  While he is all of these things, he is also troubled enough by this construction of himself to desire the hero – to feel that she is a worthy compliment to him and someone he can both admire and connect with, something that he has not done before.

The second teacher is also the second lover, a Vietnamese man who embodies a very different culture and a very different form of masculinity.  Rather than wearing who he is on his sleeve, he is reserved.  His world is, if anything, richer and more emotionally alive than the first lover – a person he serves but with whom he also becomes friends – but access to this man's emotional world is not offered or even imposed in the ways that Americans engage with other people – it is earned.  His tight rein on himself is necessary – he needs to serve many masters while letting each know that he is caring for them in the best possible way – while he needs to remain true to himself, far from an easy task.

There are other teachers, but it is important that there is a female teacher – a French woman who is left over from the former occupation of the country – a woman who is in the fashion business and who is wise to the ways of men.  The hero and this woman form a friendship that helps sustain her as she navigates numerous treacherous waters.

I would like to focus on two central learnings this woman engages in.  The first thing that this woman learns about herself, much to her surprise, is that she is brave.  Much braver than she imagined herself to be.  This courage is not about standing up for herself, though.  In fact, it comes about in the process of losing herself – of becoming so focused on what she is doing that she is unaware of herself.  At this moment, she both does extraordinary work and she is supported by and accepted by men – for a variety of reasons.  Some of the men profit from her courage, some of them are moved by it, and some of them recognize that she needs to be protected because her courage leads her to not think of herself.  She is also, and this is implicit, protected by the mantel of being an American.  She has a particular kind of freedom to be brave and to survive that those around her do not.

The second thing this woman learns (I am writing as if this were linear when in fact both learnings are more parallel and intersecting and they are both learned and forgotten and learned again) is that she is not a tourist or a dilettante.  She is here with a purpose.  This is a complicated piece of learning – and one that has to be learned in different ways in a veritable kaleidoscope of situations.  On one level, the American occupation is the occupation of tourists.  They do not move in and join with the natives – they hold them at arm distance. 

Our hero learns the Vietnamese language and eats their pho.  She connects with them individually – sometimes as a tourist – she spends a day weeding a rice patty, but goes back to being a tourist the next day - but who these people are begins to seep into her bones.  Some of the military guys have “gone native”, but this seems like an extreme version – one that is not authentic.  She goes to tourist sites, she photographs the Ho Chi Minh trail, but his is hardly a guided day trip.  And she doesn't go native in some faux macho way, nor faux femme way, but as herself, as an American female in a foreign and intriguing land.

More centrally, though, she wrestles with the urge to be a tourist – to see the best sight and go home and show the slides to her friends as a kind of trophy of her visit – and she wrestles with the urge to be not just any tourist, but the best tourist – to have the most compelling slide show not just to show the horror of war (while she is simultaneously drawn to it), but to beat out the other tourists at being the best tourist and, in the process, she intermittently loses sight of the fact that this is a war in which human beings are dying in gruesome, awful ways.

How can she – how can we – live lives of authenticity when we are surrounded by sights and experiences that we need to protect ourselves from?  I suppose this second learning is a subset of the first – how can we learn to have the courage to face the things that are terrifying and to engage with them rather than turn away?  How can we develop the wish to be connected, deeply and powerfully, to a transient and deeply flawed world without losing our capacity to be awestruck by it?

As I’ve written about these two things that she learns as she grows up, I realize that these are not static teachings, but ones that come and go.  They are “known” to a different extent at different moments.  I am struck that this book reflects an organic principle of a good psychoanalytic therapeutic encounter, it is periodical and self-contradictory.  The integrity of this story, one of the reasons that it works for me, is that the hero does not move from not-knowing to knowing, but rather moves in and out of knowing, forgetting and learning anew and in new ways as she moves forward.  She is both cannier and more naïve as she develops, and this feels true to me – or at least true to my own development.  She is, at no place in this novel, and certainly not at the end, done.

And perhaps that would be the third thing, then, that she learns – and the author teaches us in the well-crafted ending – that she is able to live in a world that is complex and internally inconsistent.  Things are not as they seem – the story that we thought we were being told at the beginning is not the story that we end up hearing at the end, and yet it is.  As we become savvier, we might not have to become more cynical – we might become capable of withstanding the intensely contradictory nature of life without having to resort so frequently to blotting that life out.  We might be able to live – to return to contemporary life – with men, including myself, who deny patriarchal values while simultaneously practicing them.  We might be able to extract from flawed models useful means of moving forward.

As I was reading the novel, it felt like the Vietnamese lover was set up as the desired and more virtuous model, and I think he was.  This is, after all, called the Lotus Eaters.  The hero will want to stay in the land of the lotuses.  But the Vietnamese lover was not a perfect model.  I found myself uncomfortably aware of how hiding the richness of his inner life, especially from the hero, left her cruelly isolated from him – or reliant on a kind of knowing that invites, I think, a kind of fantasy that can lead to delusional distance from connection.  If the writer intended a less complicated version of the world than I think she delivered to us, I would encourage us not to be satisfied by that version – not to be satisfied by the idea that there is a solution, but instead to join our hero in what I believe to be the position she attains, that we can, indeed must, live in a world that is deeply flawed and yet deeply, achingly beautiful – and we can trust ourselves to navigate and improve it as we work towards a better version of it, while simultaneously careening perilous close to destroying it and ourselves.

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Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; The Game is Rigged

 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow; Gabrielle Zevin; Psychology; Psychoanalysis; fantasy; Sadie Sam characters; Play; Gaming's limits

How weird to be reading a book about gaming (something that I do very little of) while learning about playing games at the American Psychoanalytic Association’s annual meeting from a neuroscientist, Mark Solms.  Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow takes its title from Banquo’s cry of lament after losing his wife in MacBeth.  The speech – and therefore the book – is a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life – its brevity, but also our unwillingness to admit that.  Indeed, the criticisms of online games at the conference were two; one that the interactions are not real (more on that in a moment) and two that gamers never die truly die, they just restart the game – there is always another tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

In the magical land of Harry Potter, where seemingly anything can happen, Rowling put in one absolute boundary; death.  Once someone has died, they are dead and no magic can revive them.  This parameter would, from Mark Solms’ perspective, make the books “real” rather than a game.  In a game everything is imaginary – and it is when the real intrudes – when a player in a football game actually dies – that the game quits being a game and becomes reality. 

So, computer games – including first person shooter games, but also games in which virtual worlds are made or a script is followed – are not real because you never die – unless, perhaps, you reach the highest level and solve the problem.  But even then, apparently, you can play the game again to try to do it more efficiently or effectively.  I once had a friend who didn’t like the character that he had constructed in Dungeons and Dragons (a game I have never played), so he set about to kill himself so that he could be assigned a new avatar.  It took him forever to die.

Games, according to Solms, are fun to play precisely because we don’t die.  We play them again and again, but only if we can “win” somewhere between 40 and 60 per cent of the time – or maybe, if we stretch it, between 30 and 70 per cent of the time.  We find it “fun” when there is a chance that we will win, but also a chance that we will lose.  Computer games capitalize on that by having us do better than we did before – winning, if you will, often.

But they don’t have the same kind of interactional capacities that real life games – the rough and tumble games of wrestling or the interactive games of skill that are played between real people rather than with avatars include figuring out, for instance, how to make the teams fair enough that either can win.  So, the psychoanalytic concern is that children growing up with avatar driven games don’t learn how to interact with people in the real world – they don’t learn how to read when the other has had enough and won’t play anymore unless you let them take the lead role for a while.  They won’t learn the subtleties of relational dynamics (and intrapsychic defenses) that are essential to becoming equipped to play in the very real and rough and tumble world of adulting.

I think this book is also written as a game rather than a novel.  One example of how it imports game architecture into its structure it the way it uses time.  We are constantly going back in time to discover the backstory of the characters. The way this works in gaming is illustrated by the protagonist, Sadie playing a game that she played as a child where she learned that she has to pick up a screwdriver rather than the more satisfying cudgel to bash in the brains of zombies because, she knows, the screwdriver will later be necessary later to fix the elevator.  It is only possible, then, to know in retrospect what we should have done in the game, and it is only in retrospect that we discover in this book what some of the most important elements of the story are.  Psychoanalysts use the term “apres coup” to articulate this sense of wishing to know then what I know now, or only being able to figure out “after the fact” that something is important. 

We, then, are playing a game when Zevin gives us those necessary details in retrospect.  We know that the other central player, Sam, has a broken foot which is a central dynamic in the plot, but we don’t know for a very long time how it was broken nor do we know the full impact on his character of the broken foot until that point and we find ourselves rethinking the role of the foot in Sam's life.  We need to pick up the pieces, carry them along on the journey, but also to assemble them once we have the tools to do that. 

This is both a book about gaming, then, and it is centrally a game about three people that are brought together by games and who end up making games together.  The book is highly structured – it is written as if it were a multi-level game that we, the readers, are playing.  If it were truly a game, the object of the game would be to help the two characters (Sadie and Sam) who are destined to come together accomplish that.  This premise (and the consummate story telling) make it hard to put down - will they get together?  How will they get together? - so I was confused that I was finding it vaguely unsatisfying until I figured out why. 

The author brings us into the book in the same way that a designer brings us into a game, she has us identify with the characters in the story.  To do this, she spells them out in broad strokes – they feel like fantasy figures, rather than real humans.  I want more detail from her, more grit, more character, but I think she is expecting that we, the readers, will bring that to the characters, just as I have noted in other posts that actors bring their lived experience (and their imagination filtered through that lived experience) to the characters that they play and this helps flesh those characters out.  Banquo comes to life because of the felt grief of the actor who plays him, not because the lines, by themselves, lead us to feel sorrow. 

A play or a movie is a collaboration between the writer, the director and the actor (as well as the set designer, the make up artist, the cameraperson, and certainly the other actors) to bring a relatively flat script to life.  This book, despite its length, reads more like a script than like a novel.  The ending feels inevitable from early on and we are invited to figure out how it will be accomplished.  Ultimately, though, the collaboration has to be with the reader, and this reader, while he admired the architecture of the game, and he kept turning the pages with joy, was ultimately not satisfied because the characters were not given the kind of detail that allowed not just the scripted, plot driven ending to occur, but that allowed the psychological ending to hold true.

I went back and looked at my critique of Zevin’s previous book, The storied Life of A.J. Fikry, and the complaint was the same.  The characters weren’t complex there either.  This woman is very good at creating worlds, at building a suspenseful plot, and at putting the players in position.  Weirdly, these characters were interesting.  I cared about them.  But they didn’t end up feeling real.  In particular, Sam, the character who is matched with Sadie and it seems that they are destined to come together is not, I don’t think, ultimately believable.  He is a fantasy character.  Someone whose desire to connect with others, so apparent throughout his life and his pursuit of Sadie, is imagined by this author to be satisfied by becoming her play partner rather than her lover.  And Sadie's remoteness - her comfort with this compromise solution - is not, to me, adequately communicated as a lived component of her character rather than simply being a fact about her.  I don't feel the pain or the conflict or the even just the mistrust that makes her remote.

On some level, I get that a play partner is a better connection than a lover.  As grandparents say about their grandkids, we can play together and then they go home.  The domestic, and all its squabbles, gets separated from the messiness of the real.  Sadie saves Sam early in the book, then Sam saves Sadie. They also deeply disappoint each other.  This is the stuff of real play.  Then, towards the end of the book, Sam saves Sadie again, and he does this by creating a space where they can be together virtually and she can both know and not know that she is interacting with Sam.  He works to rebuild her trust.

In psychoanalytic psychotherapy we call this progression rupture and repair.  In the virtual space, they marry, something Sadie in a real space is deathly opposed to.  I wrote that last sentence and then deleted it.  Deathly seemed too strong.  But maybe it isn’t.  Maybe for Sadie (And perhaps for Zevin) marriage feels like a death sentence.  Mark Twain wrote that it made no sense to write about the life of a married man because he had no life.  And for women in our culture, many have commented that this has been even more the case.  I can get that on a sociological level, but I read novels to get the particulars of how that plays out for this person.

Sadie remains unknown to me.  This is frustrating.  She is remote - from her early lover who is a cad, from the man at the other end of the triangle and from Sam.  All of that is fine.  But her being remote from the reader - and leaving it to the reader to connect with her remoteness out of her own is, apparently successful - the book is selling very well - but it leaves this reader at a loss.

I’m tempted to take the easy path and say that Zevin’s a grown up a gamer and has learned about life from video games, not from playing games on the playground.  That would, I’m sure, be incredibly reductive.  But I do wonder if she spent more time gaming than reading and playing with friends.  I was also surprised to learn that she has been in a relationship for the last twenty years and that she is has been writing for that long as well.  I had thought that her writing would get more complicated as she matures, but I’m now thinking that she is letting us know that this is her version of a well lived life. It does not surprise me that she is also a very successful writer for a young reader audience. 

I think this book may best be understood as fantasy and a version of an online game and enjoyed as such.  The danger, of course, is that if this book is imitating life, the fears that the analyst's have about gaming feeding the need to play without providing the nourishment that play does may be realized when we turn to entertainment in our books that is as thin as that provided in our consoles.

Postscript:  I have been thinking about this since I posted and I don't think that I articulated the concern about the lack of character.  When Zevin goes back to fill in the backstory on one of the characters, it is frequently to relate an event - often a traumatic event.  This event is supposed, I think, to explain something about the "current" functioning of the character.  It does "explain", in the sense of filling in a back story, but she fails to explain how the incident impacted the character.  

As an example: the character in the first game that Sam and Sadie create is Ichigo.  Ichigo, the lead character, loses his parents when he is preverbal and has to figure out how to fend for himself.  This terrible thing happens - it impacts him - and his development is going to be completely different from every other human, but his avatar is nondescript.  I am referring to him in the masculine, but the avatar has a indiscriminate form.  The characters in the novel are not as nondescript, but they are on that continuum.  We are not just the sum of what happens to us, we are what we have done with what has happened to us, and I want to the author to more clearly articulate how that has occurred in her characters. 

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