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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 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 White Lotus Season 2: Relationships and Lies of Omission

 

White Lotus, HBO, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Lying, Lies of Omission

The Reluctant Wife had watched the first season of White Lotus without me.  I was appreciative of that.  From what I had heard, there were no likeable characters, it was a series about rich people with nothing better to do with their money than to spend it on being pampered, and I, frankly, was not interested in it.  Don’t we live in a world where this is the last thing that we need to be ogling?

Of course, a part of me thought – but wait, what if this series is asking us to take a good look at ourselves and see if we have met the enemy and they are us?  Could it be that rather than a vehicle for envy, which I assumed it would be, it might be a fun house mirror that would expose us to ourselves.  But that part of me was actually pretty quiet.  I mostly thought this was about the 1%, and I have no fascination, at this moment, about knowing more about those who are privileged and know not what to do with themselves.

Then she started watching season 2 and, tired one night, I sat through one of the first episodes.  Apparently the first season is set at a White Lotus resort in Hawaii, and this second season is set in a White Lotus resort in Sicily.  There was something about the vibe of the place that was intriguing – that the 1% inhabit resorts that are cheek by jowl with the world that the rest of us inhabit – and the beach resort did not feel that much different from some of the nicer hotels that we have stayed in…

So, we went back and watched the first episode, and I discovered that each of the seasons have been told in flashback.  The end of the week in paradise (in both seasons) is shown first, and in each, a woman discovers a body of one the hotel guests floating in the water, but we are not told who it is and we rewind to the beginning of the week.  The whodunit is really a who is it that gets killed, and I was hooked.  I wanted to know which of these despicable characters was going to achieve their just reward by the end of the week.

The characters, though played by familiar and sometimes beloved actors, were, indeed, not likeable.  The central four characters are two couples – the classic American Quarterback type, Cameron (Theo James) and his blond and attractive wife, Daphne (Meghann Fahy).  He is a graduate of Yale and married and had kids while becoming a very successful (and rich) money manager, though it also seems that he has come from money and has never wanted for anything.  He is getting together (in the adjoining suite) with his college roommate Ethan (Will Sharpe), who is of indeterminant Asian descent.  Cameron “affectionately” bullied Ethan in college and, now that his roommate has successfully sold his tech startup and is fabulously wealthy, he has arranged for this get together.  Ethan brings his wife Harper (Aubrey Plaza), a straitlaced lawyer who self righteously sues men who violate women’s right to a safe work place.

Meanwhile, in the next set of rooms, we have three generations of men – grandfather, Bert (F. Murray Abraham), father, Dominic (Michael Imperioli), and twenty-something-year-old son Albie (Adam DiMarco)– vacationing in Sicily to find their roots.  The grandfather left Sicily as a very young child and wants to take everyone back now that the family has made good and meet relatives he assumes to be living in the little town his family came from, but who knows?

And just down the hall are the only members of the first-year cohort who have come back to a White Lotus, the incredibly rich and incredibly narcissistic and empty woman Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) who found her husband, Greg (Jon Gries) in that other White Lotus.  He has insisted that they come on vacation together again.  She brings her “assistant” Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) with her, a young, clueless girl who is pretty fed up with assisting generally meaning helping Tanya pull herself back together after a crying jag started because she has been slighted by someone in yet another way.  Portia is also an unwanted interference in Tanya's husband's eyes, so she is supposed to just stay in her room - which she does not do. We discover pretty quickly that Tanya’s husband is as tired of his wife as the assistant is, and he jets off to a “business” meeting that is actually some kind of rendezvous with a lover.

This mess is overseen by Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore) the white gloves manager/ matron/ concierge/ front desk person overseeing the White Lotus, who is constantly fighting with Lucia (Simona Tabasco) the local sex worker providing services to multiple guests and Mia (Beatrice Grannò), Lucia’s friend, a singer who enjoys being party to some of Lucia’s sex work.

While I thought this series was going to be a whodunit or perhaps primarily about sex (and it is both of those), I think it is mostly about lies and lying.  We are introduced to the couples at the center when they have breakfast together and are getting reacquainted/acquainted with each other.  Cameron and Daphne are pretending to be deeply and comfortably in love with each other, but it is apparent very quickly they are not particularly committed to or knowledgeable about much of anything and it is hard to take them seriously as people.  Ethan, who is a bit remote, and Harper, by contrast, are dialed into various causes and concerns, they seem genuinely invested in a better and more just world and – here is the tell – they never lie to each other.

Even though Ethan and especially Harper are no fun and they are altogether too earnest and judgmental, I am immediately in their camp.  They are, it seems - and certainly by contrast with Cameron and Daphne, real.  And they are struggling with how to manage the changes that are occurring in their world when they, unlike Cameron and Daphne who have always been obscenely rich, are suddenly discovering themselves to be one percenters.  Hmm…  might they have what it takes to make the transition without selling out?  Could this be a hiding place for good solid American middle-class values in a false and insipid world?  For just a moment, we hope so.

There are no such hopes for our three gentlemen of Sicilian descent.  Bert’s wife has died, Dominic’s wife and daughter have refused to come on this vacation because Dominic is such a cad, and Albie, the innocent son, could help his mother and father reconcile, but knows too much about his father’s infidelities to help them do that because he would be deceiving his Mom if he touted his father.  And this is before we discover that Dominic has hired Lucia to service him on this vacation.  Bert tries to warn Dominic that he is playing with fire to be playing with Lucia right under Albie's nose, but Dominic counters that he learned from Bert to be a two timer – he grew up with it and the pain it caused his mother, while Bert refuses to imagine that his wife knew anything about his affairs and insists that she loved him.

In this group, we are introduced to the lies of omission.  The form of the lie is: I will not tell this information because it would only hurt you.  It is in your best interest for me to lie to you.  Being honest with you would only bring you pain, so why do that?  Of course, this lie is also tremendously self-serving, and contains within it a lie.  If I told you what would hurt you, I would be found out not to be wonderful, and you would insist that I change my behavior, and I don’t want to do that.  So this is a lie both to the other person, but also to and on behalf of the person telling the lie - and the wonderful irony is that the liar is NOT lying - he is not saying anything at all. 

This kind of lie has been showing up in my clinical practice all of a sudden.  I won’t tell him or her this or that because it would hurt them.  Sometimes the person is struggling to tell the truth – they are being forced to do that so that they can move on with their life – and sometimes when they do that the feared outcome does not happen.  The other person does not fall apart.  Not infrequently, the other person realizes there is a problem and pledges to work with the former liar to work on that shared difficulty.  They say, in effect, thank you for broaching that subject.  I, too, have been afraid to do that because it would be disruptive to face and address this central difficulty in our relationship, but if you are going to put the cards on the table, so will I, and we can now play a productive game.

While I wanted this kind of “healthy” outcome to occur, I was not convinced it would.  Where is the drama in that?

Lies of omission are not the only kind of lie.  There are many different kinds of lies – and we lie all the time – first and foremost to ourselves (this is the center of Freud’s discovery of the unconscious – we keep things from ourselves – we defend against thoughts all the time), but we also lie to those around us, and especially those who are closest to us. 

Tanya is consistently lied to by those around her.  They don’t just omit things, they make things up.  Partly they do this because she is so fragile that they have to in order to keep her from falling apart, but partly they do this because she is so needy and clueless that she is drawn into the lies that others tell her, pretending that she has protected herself against her gullibility, but actually being used by others more and more egregiously.

The pleasure in Tanya's subplot comes from the ways in which Tanya, with Portia’s help, finally begins to see what is being done to her and, in a kind of dimwitted but bullheaded self-protective set of acts, outwits those who would take advantage of her.

Valentina, the front desk matron, who is trying to both cater to these various entitled people and ride herd on them, is ultimately a victim of the kind of lying that Freud warned us about – self-deception.  She is uncomfortable with her sexuality – something that stands out as a kind of naivete that is possible in a repressive, Catholic community, even in someone who is servicing individuals whose sexual more’s could not be more liberal and loose.  It is Mia, Lucia’s friend, who sees through Valentina’s horrible conflict and helps her feel safe enough to grow into herself.  Mia is not without cunning in doing this.  It is good for Valentina, yes, but it also helps her cement employment at the White Lotus.  This kind of open lie – Valentina is personally naïve but aware of what people want from her – seems to be the least concerning of the lies that are told.

It is the lies in the two couples that are most alarming.   It does not take long for Harper to suss out that Cameron and Daphne’s loving relationship is a sham, especially when Daphne kidnaps Harper, taking her to another city without telling her that she intends for them both to spend the night there.  This leaves the boys, Cameron and Ethan, on their own.  Daphne is punishing Cameron for former misdeeds by withdrawing from him – and she knows he is too immature to manage himself without her.  True to form, he enlists Ethan in escapades to manage his insecurities that sicken Ethan, but these escapades take place in Ethan and Harper’s room and when Harper returns, she thinks that Ethan is lying to her when he maintains that he did not engage in adulterous behavior.

And here is the turning point for the lies.  Harper knows that Ethan does not lie.  He is rigid about that – it is written into his character that he will not.  So how could he lie about this?  Well, the problem is that Ethan, who would never deliberately deceive Harper by telling a lie of commission, engages in lies of omission all the time.  Centrally, he has not directly told Harper that he is no longer attracted to her.  He has not acknowledged that there is an important deadness at the center of their marriage. 

As I alluded to earlier, this would be a moment that could go in very positive directions.  Ethan could confess, and they could work on this together and they could ride out of Dodge (or the White Lotus) on the moral high road, having the marriage that they want to have and that Cameron and Daphne could never dream of having.  Without spoiling more than I already have, this doesn’t happen.  Instead, Ethan’s lying is used by Harper as an excuse to engage in lies of her own, and this is what reignites the passion in their relationship.

I think that the lie that is being told by the writer here is that not knowing the other – being lied to by your partner – is what will maintain the relationship.  I get this.  Some mystery is required to keep a relationship going.  But it is my solidly middle-class belief that we are so vastly different from every other human, even those that we choose to spend the rest of our lives with, that there are always mysterious elements to be plumbed.  We don’t need to manufacture them, they exist, and our efforts to acknowledge them and work them out lead to moments of connection, but also moments of disconnection, and these bring us back to the table to understand the mysterious gulf between us again and again and again. 

I am beginning to think that the writer and I both agree that love is, at heart, driven by anxiety.  It is mysterious that someone else could love us.  We fear that, if they truly knew us, they would not love us.  For the writer, this is an invitation to deceive the other, so that they will find us desirable.  We are something that our lover cannot own, or we are desirable to someone else and therefore we are desirable to our lover.

Ironically, the writer includes a much more hopeful – or pedestrian version – of love in the resolution of the family men drama.  Albie, the naïve son, falls for Tanya’s assistant Portia, but Portia is drawn away, in a parallel fashion to Harper, to a bright and shiny object.  Albie finds solace in Lucia, who, as he says, plays him.  His father indulges Albie in a lesson about being played, Albie thanks his father by working to patch things up with his mother, and Albie and Portia are able to have a rom-com moment.

OK, I said I wasn’t going to spoil things further, but I did.  I wanted to make the point that if the writer wants to hang onto us, the audience, he has to throw us some slop.  There has to be the hope that, even amidst all this wealth and our own attraction to bright and shiny objects, we also can discover that having a direct and honest relationship contains within it ample rewards. 

I think that the complications must be soothing to those who don’t believe it is possible to come clean.  There is an alternate way to stay attached.  It is a dangerous and volatile way, but attachment through deception is possible.  On some level – thank God for the ability to have a stable relationship based on deception, for we can never be truly honest with ourselves, much less with others.  At the same time, though, I think we are likely to have a better relationship when we are striving to minimize deception even if we can't eliminate it.  

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Hacks: Aren't We All?

  Hacks, HBO, Deborah Vance, Psychoanalysis. Psychology, 

Hacks is a series with two season on HBO Max that stars Jean Smart as the successful but now running-on-autopilot comedienne Deborah Vance, whose long Vegas run has made her wealthy but also irrelevant to all but her aging midwestern fans, and Hannah Einbinder as the young, sassy writer Ava Daniels who gets assigned by their mutual agent to work with Vance, though Vance has no interest in creating new material or having a writer - has always written her own material. 

The thing that sets this series apart is that the two principals are both totally and entirely unlikable.  Vance is vain and magisterial, and Ava is self-indulgent and childish.  What they have in common – and what Deborah appears to admire in Ava – is that they are both intensely focused on getting ahead at any cost and therefore are total jerks to the people around them.  This series is a tough watch through the first few episodes.  We hung in there, partly because the reluctant daughter recommended it, but also partly because we sensed that the characters would become more likable, but it wasn't easy...

What seems to distinguish Deborah and Ava is that Vance is successful and Ava hasn’t, apparently, done much of anything and is at the end of her rope, can’t get work anywhere else, and is therefore desperate, though still proud enough to quit when Vance demeans her.  Very quickly, in the first season, they both become aligned when Vance’s primo gig gets pulled out from under her because she is no longer the draw she once was and, though she could retire on her wealth and her continued ability to sell her line of products on QVC, she will have lost her audience and we discover that Deborah desperately desires to the connection she feels with a devoted audience as much as Ava desperately desires to so something, anything.  Vance is a performer and feels like she is herself when she if performing.  Ava is trying to find herself.

I am a big fan of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, but it has always felt too clean and simple.  Hacks does not feel clean.  It feels gritty and, in a Vegas sort of way, real.  That is, as real as the lives of entertainers who both mock and define what our culture is and should be while doing that from within ersatz replicas of great architectural wonders of the world for people who are in town for conventions and/or to figure out how to get rid of excess wealth through the promise of gaining more wealth can be.

It sounds like I must have hated this show – and a part of me did.  But it was the part of me that I would rather disown.  The part of me that identifies with these characters – and particularly with Vance.  Oh, I have been nowhere near as successful as she has been.  But I, like her, am much closer to the end of my career than I am to the beginning of it.  And I, like her, am beginning to feel less and less relevant.  And I, like her (it turns out) despite having had a reasonable successful career, did not – at least in my own mind, achieve my full potential.

We discover Deborah’s potential when she assigns Ava to review and digitize her collection of jokes, sketches, videotapes, and records of her career.  This scut work has a purpose, of course.  It is not articulated clearly in the series, but if Ava is going to write for Vance she needs to know what works and what does not – she needs to know who this woman is.  But the apparent reason is that Deborah needs this stuff catalogued and it appears that she is treating her employee like clerical staff rather than as a junior colleague.  It feels like she is trying to demean Ava.  

I have been given scut work to educate - and demean  - me, too.  My former, younger self identifies with Ava - the one who wants to belong (and I think Vance both identifies and feels some affection for the part of her younger self that she sees in Ava, though it takes a while for Ava, and the audience, to see and appreciate this.  The scut work feels like part of a hazing process).

In my own life, Ava's and Vance's going through old clips parallels my reviewing my career to make a case for promotion at work.  This is a review I should have done years ago.  But the first time I was up for a promotion was such an embarrassing experience that I haven’t wanted to put myself in the sights of those who would judge me again.  So, I have been, like Ava, reviewing records from years ago and dredging up what I did when.

What Ava discovers is that Vance was in line to the be the first woman to have a late-night talk show (something that still hasn’t actually happened out here in real life), but her life melted down when her husband, who had been her business manager and biggest supporter, had an affair with her sister.  We suddenly have an explanation for Vance’s bitterness and mistrust of anyone who is close to her - anyone that she doesn’t have on her payroll and therefore imagine having complete control over.  And we begin to feel something like empathy for this very prickly character (or at least I do – I, after all, haven’t wanted to put my vulnerabilities out there again for many years).

It is hardest, though, to feel empathy for Deborah Vance in terms of her relationship with her grown daughter, Deborah “DJ” Vance (Kaitlin Olson).  DJ is a loser.  She just isn’t good at anything.  And this appears to be, at least in part, because Deborah (her mother) keeps running her life, so she has very little true autonomy and instead she engages in faux moments of running her life – making truly terrible jewelry that is way too clunky and big – as a failed means of supporting herself, for instance.  Over time, we come to see that this has much deeper roots – Deborah took DJ on the road with her after the divorce from DJ’s father and, though this was intended to be an expression of her maternal caring, Deborah was too wrapped up in her own career and achieving success to be tuned into her daughter.

Of course, I hope that my devotion to my career has not interfered too much with my parenting, but it certainly played a role in marital distress and a failed marriage, as well as a great deal of personal angst and many sleepless nights that left me feeling less than at my best.  So, given a chance to review my career, was it worth it?  Would I do it all over again?

Deborah is proud of her career and married to continuing to do what she does indefinitely.  That said, we can see that in Vegas she is just mailing it in.  We also see, through Ava’s eyes, that she is not relevant to a younger, hipper crowd.  And then the hammer comes down – she is booted by the owner of the casino that has hosted her for many years in an arrangement that has been mutually very enriching.  Angry and embittered, Vance sets out to reinvent herself – with Ava as her devalued muse and co-author.  In spite of ourselves, we come to admire the pluck and verve of these two women who are very hard to like, but somehow easy to identify with.

Just as in Seinfeld, part of what is attractive about this pair, and the rest of the planets in the solar system that revolves around Vance, is that they are part of a community despite their apparent lack of redeeming value.  Perhaps as in Seinfeld, part of the attraction is that, despite Woody Allen’s protestations to the contrary, we actually are looking for a club that could tolerate having us as a member.  And that we could belong not because of the ways that we have made ourselves look good – not because of our shiny resume, as it were – but that we could belong warts and all.  Even though we have a face that only a mother could love, we wish that the world would turn out to be a supportive maternal figure.

So I think that we enjoy this pair and their entourage not because we like them, but because we are like them.  Their flaws are our flaws and, through identifying with them, they become likable (and perhaps teach us something about being able to like ourselves as we learn to like them).  

In the second season, as they are on the road and Vance is trying out her new material on audiences that want to be sympathetic, she keeps falling flat and, while she gets a few laughs, she doesn’t connect with the audience.  Ava has convinced her to be more straightforward and real about the facts of her life.  Vance didn’t actually burn down her house when she found out about her husband’s infidelity – her husband did that and framed her so that he not only torched the house but also her career.  But putting this into her act makes her come across as self-pitying, self-mocking or, worse, she turns, in a few performances, to mocking her audience.

The magic happens when she is able to turn her keen judgement back on herself.  She doesn’t just tell what happened, but recognizes the humor in the ways that her efforts were self-destructive.  She amuses herself – and her audience – by being amused with herself.  She learns to simultaneously take herself very seriously – honestly articulating her experience instead of pretending that things were not so bad – and also to take herself way less seriously – to recognize that, despite the cards being stacked against her, she made her situation even worse by being headstrong and self- important.  And that becomes funny.  She unites with her audience in good-humoredly poking fun at herself, and she and the audience laugh together at the result (not all that differently than what Mrs. Maisel does from the get go).

Perhaps if I can just learn to take myself a little less seriously – while also recognizing just how powerfully attached to the important things in my life I really am – I, too, can connect more genuinely with those around me.  Maybe I, like Deborah and Ava, can become more likeable, while remaining deeply (but hopefully more adorably) flawed.

 

Post script:  In the discussion among the writers after the last show of the second season they hint at doing a third season.  I hope this doesn’t happen.  The second season wraps things up.  Let’s leave it at that.  

 

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Severance - Work and Life Bisected

 Apple TV+ Series Severance Psychology Psychoanalysis Meaning of Work and Work Life Balance

What if you could not remember the color of your mother’s eyes?  Or any other details about her?  What if you could not remember your own name, or anything about your life outside of work? 

The creators of Severance, a gripping new series streaming on Apple TV+ asks us to grapple with the impact of this experience – and in so doing, they expose multiple fault lines in our actual work/life balance, while simultaneously making a powerful political statement.

Interestingly, in a series that severs its players from the rest of their lives, it evokes many, many other series and films – as if it were offering homages to them or perhaps appropriating them while having a look and feel that is also very much its very own. 

It feels like a David Lynch film, but the eeriness in this is not that like what David Lynch provides - images an unprocessed dream – a dream where the symbols are left without any referents (except maybe the baby goats); instead the vision is that there is a sense that there is an underlying order that the writers and directors want to help us understand.  Furthermore there is a sense that, in so far as chaos lies very near to what is being described, that chaos is the chaos that we all are in contact with and trying (perhaps desperately) to keep at bay, and the writers and directors are as afraid of it as we are, not in league with it, the way that David Lynch sometimes appears to be. 

Using the Bell Labs office building designed by Eero Saarinan as the setting for Lumon Industries puts us in an interesting space/time dimension.  Futuristic when it opened in 1962, the building still feels futuristic and therefore vaguely impersonal, like the sets of the film 2001 A Space Odyssey.  Like Bell Labs, which was tremendously successful, breeding Nobel prizes and products like cell phones that would be tremendously successful and profitable, the venture was doomed – as we hope that Lumon industries will be, too.  We strongly suspect that the attractiveness of the above ground facility hides a cancerous underground menace.

The actual office layout that the severed workers descend to under the modern edifice feels even more blatantly anachronistically futuristic, with its lavish use of space, outdated and slightly mod but off colors, fluorescent lighting, 1980s computer consoles and graphics, and rat maze hallways that create a sense of claustrophobia - a sense that we are trapped in a space that is essentially hostile to our existence as organic creatures – not something that is supportive to human life.

The people who inhabit this space that seems akin to the space in the movie Office Space, people who have been severed from the rest of their lives, including memories of their mothers and fathers and siblings and children, live lives that are centered on their work experience.  Even though they have no memory of who they are on the outside (their outies), the innies are not children playing together in a play space, but fully formed adults – adults who “remember” how to have a personality, even if they don’t have the memory of how that personality was formed.

The relationships between these “innies” is reminiscent of our work relationships.  They are half-formed.  There are work parties that feel forced and odd and are fun, kind of.  Kind of the way my work parties feel.  People don’t expose themselves at work parties the way they exposed themselves at birthday parties when they were two or four or six, nor in the ways they exposed themselves at peer parties when they were 16 or 18 or 20.  These are fully formed adults who know how to protect their secrets, even though they themselves don’t have access to them even when they want to.

The mechanism behind this is a chip that is inserted in the brain and we watch the outies transition to innies in the morning, after they change into their work clothes at their lockers and after they are checked to make sure they are not taking contraband down to their work station.  They close their eyes and we can see their outie persona melt away as they return to their work environment in what seems to their innie to have been only a moment. 

Of course, when I return to work, it is as if I never left, but that is because I have been worrying about it all night – sometimes quite literally.  What have I forgotten to do?  How can I understand this thing that is at a tight spot in this therapy?  How can I work out how best to teach this concept?  Or deal with this administrator?  It is as if I never leave…

The work that the innies do is odd.  The work of those we follow most closely, in the “Macrodata Refinement” department, sort numbers into bins based on an intuitive feel for those numbers.  What they are really doing is anyone’s guess.  It seems quite odd, but there are quotas and rewards for work well done.  There are also promotions – we join Mark S. (Adam Scott) on his first day as the leader of the four person department on the day after his best innie friend Petey (Yul Vazquez) leaves the work for reasons unknown.  He inducts a new innie, Helly R. (Britt Lower) in the first episode into the organization to replace Petey and join Dylan (Zach Cherry) and Irving (John Turturro) to complete the department.  The department is overseen by the menacing Harmony (Patricia Arquette) and her henchman, Seth Milchick (Tramell Tillman). 

While the work they are doing is mysterious – and there may be meaning to it that will be revealed in later seasons – their primary role, in the first season, seems to be being severed workers.  Their true job is to prove to a skeptical world that the amnestic work world is productive and acceptable – perhaps even useful.  As an aid in this endeavor – since it is we, the audience, who need the most convincing, we follow Mark S. as he transforms into his outie Mark Scout and discover that he is a grieving history professor who lost his job when he could no longer concentrate in the wake of his wife’s death.  He chose to sever his work life in part because he couldn’t find other work, but mostly as a means of making a third of his life – if not unbearable, at least off limits. 

We empathize with Mark Scout.  Not only is he grieving, his sister is married to a complete idiot who is so narcissistically involved that he doesn’t realize that his self-published self-help book is a complete waste of time, as are his pompous and clueless friends.  Mark is so depleted, though, that he relies on his sister, her social life, and alcohol to simply survive one day after another.  He seems genuinely relieved that he has no access to his work life, for it would surely complicate the rest of his life, and he is already failing to manage the minimal complications that this life presents.

Our complacency does not last long; however.  We see how shallow and lifeless the work of the innies is and we detest Lumon, the corporation that would pit them against each other – in this case, using the myth that the “Optics and Design” department attacked the Macrodata Refinement department in a failed coup years ago.  Irving, the most loyal of to the organization of the Macordata Refinement deparment – the person who can cite chapter and verse from the Lumos Bible – is attracted to Burt (Christopher Walken) in O&D.  This leads the group to bond over fighting to connect with the other severed workers against Harmony and Milchick and ultimately the entire weight of the Lumos Corporation.

So, this series, like Office Space and The Truman Show, becomes a story of man against corporate America.  The Macrodata Refinement department begin swashbuckling like superheroes, and the chinks in the corporate armor emerge, as does the stench from the lies and moral compromises that support it.  All of this is ripe for interpretation: Why would we become subservient to a corporate master?  Perhaps more chillingly current, why would be become subservient to a dictatorial government?  But I would like to focus on a different aspect – how is it that we relate to our work selves?

The metaphoric space allows for the depiction of two parts of ourself – the “real” self and the work self.  Helly R. (as her work self), during her first day of work, appeals to her outie (her real self) to free her from the dismal and abusive workplace.  Her outie, through a recorded message, refuses her request and encourages her to continue on doing the work.  And don’t we do this to ourselves – we fail to empathize with just how difficult the work is for us to do – as we drag ourselves out of bed to return to the work – and linger in the evenings (perhaps binge-watching Severance) to extend the time of our freedom – even if that will make it harder to get up in the morning?  Isn’t the hope of releasing ourselves from this miserable cycle part of what lies behind the Great Resignation?

From the view of this metaphoric space, though, we not only fail to empathize, we disown and despise – indeed we might even feel disdain for – our working selves.  They do stuff that is not worth doing and they do it in a hermetically sealed environment that is severed from our “real” lives.  Even though our “real” lives may be bleak, or shallow, or filled with pain, they are real and this allows us to value them more highly than our work selves.  Certainly, our partners or our children can do this – I despised my father’s work – I devalued it – and did not want to emulate his life – one of apparent drudgery where he went off to provide for us.  He also seemed to resent it – complaining that we constantly demanded more stuff so that he was forced to work harder – but I think I questioned whether he was actually working for us or whether he was more drawn to the work than to being with us.  Perhaps our shared disdain was directed towards his love of working (and my wish to avoid emulating him was a way of acknowledging that I, too, could be drawn into that seemingly hateful but apparently very attractive vortex).

All of this gets encapsulated in the ways that work becomes a sort of religion for us.  It is what gives our lives meaning.  We are accomplishing something at work that helps us matter.  When Helly R. finishes an assignment, the 1870s founder of Lumos, Kier Egan (voiced by director Ben Stiller), visits Helly, in one of those cheesy 1980s video representations, as a bird who lets her know that she is loved by him before he flies off to give good wishes to other Lumos workers.  Helly and the other three members of the department stare at him with rapt attention.  They have been visited by the founder!

This, of course, would allow us to enter the series as a commentary on religion, which I think it is, but if we stay in the work/life vein, we can see that it is commenting that work has taken on the role of religion in our lives.  It provides a sense of purpose, of being part of something greater, and of contributing to something that will live on after us – the corporate – the embodied – being that is representative of us collectively and individually.

Of course there are problems with this formulation, but the central problem is that we are going to die no matter what we do.  Being angry at ourselves for having wasted the better parts of our lives is a way of managing the anger that we feel about having been given this tremendous gift of life, but with the caveat that we only get to enjoy it for a limited and indeterminant amount of time. 

Poignantly, when a Lumon employee is fired, quits, or retires, they disappear.  When they go up that elevator for the last time, their work lives and all that life contained (in the case of Burt, his love for Irving) disappears.  As I approach my retirement(s) (one from teaching at the University, the other from clinical practice) the question of how to bring a career (I never wanted to have a career) to a close is a complicated one.  What will happen to the work relationships – the relationships with other faculty and staff, with students, and with patients?  I have friendships with fellow faculty and staff that I trust will survive.  I expect that we will, ironically, largely talk about our families.  Will we continue to care about the issues that have fueled our professional lives?  How can we not?  How can we continue to?  Will the work of our lives die with our retirement?

My mother has recently put all of the old family movies, slides and photos into electronic form.  This is a tremendous gift.  I can remember – or remember for the first time – moments of intimacy with my grandfather, who died when I was youngster but whom I have carried with me through my entire life.  I can see interactions with and between my family members with new eyes.  I have memories, but they are from my perspective – not through the objective lens of the camera.  What will be the record of my work life?  My resume – or, as we call it in academia – my curriculum vita?  What kind of record is that?

The grim view presented in this gripping series is that we will have no relevant memories of our working lives.  We will struggle to integrate our work life with our personal life – and perhaps in coming seasons we will see whether this is a triumphant vision or a more tragic one.  I think it should be clear by now that I believe the tragic vision is not written into the bylaws of the corporation, but into the very joints of the natural world.  It is our task to knit together an existence that, what?  Allows us to traverse the span our existence with some sense of style and grace – to join with others in a revolution against something that is inevitable, but also cruel, and to try to wring some sense of joy and genuine purpose out of a life that is replete with the eerie specters that would pass as providing real meaning.

I fear that I am leaving those of you who haven't seen it with a bad impression of this series.  It is gripping theater.  The striving against the oppressive corporate forces leads to a tremendous denouement that I don't want to spoil for you - and one that is open enough for us to sit on our seats for a season and wait for it's resolution when the next season drops.  In the meantime we will continue to toil, in our own disparate ways, to fight off the oppressors!  Good luck to us all as we do.

 

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