The Green Book and BlacKkKlansman – Dreaming about Race

We recently went to see The Green Book at a Saturday matinee at a “sort of” alternate movie house in one of the close in suburbs to our city.  The crowd was mostly older – the place was nearly sold out – and it was almost all white.  The crowd seemed to enjoy the movie – and I certainly did.  It was a feel good film that felt genuinely good.  I was willing to overlook a couple of minor continuity problems to just plain enjoy it.  Which shouldn’t have surprised me.  One of the reasons that we went to see it was that Wesley Morris reviewed it for the New York Times and he, like others, was decrying it for being too “feel good”.   Peter Farrelly’s Direction (he of Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary fame) is up against Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman) for the directorial Oscar.  Morris is convinced that Farrelly with win because he has made a film that makes us feel good about race (the way Driving Miss Daisy did – a film that won four Oscars in 1989 – while Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing that was nominated for two in the same year, won none).  Morris’s thesis is that history will repeat itself with the Oscar’s as Farrelly’s film is a feel good film about race while BlacKkKlansman does not leave you feeling so good.

What leads to the difference between the two films?  This time, Spike Lee has tried to make a feel good film – spoiler alert – the bad guys blow themselves up and the most racist guy on the police force gets set up in the ending to the film and is headed to the pokey with no parole – but the film does not have a feel good vibe.  I think that this is because the films are both dreams – dreams about race – but they are dreamt by very different people.  The dream of BlacKkKlansman is the dream of a black man – the script is adopted from the memoir of the first black police officer on a particular police force – Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington).  The story begins with him and it is largely told through his eyes.  It is also directed by Spike Lee who wants us to know that racism is not dead.  More centrally, he wants to communicate what it feels like to live in a racist country, and he dips into a(nother) period of blatant racism (his final montage is of the Charlottesville Unite the Right march and Trump’s pronouncements about it) in order to help us feel what it feels like to be a black man living in a racist era.

Not so in the Green Book.  We start here with the prejudiced white guy.  While the story is largely centered on  Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), a classically trained and effete jazz pianist, we start by being introduced to Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen) a New York Italian muscle head who works as a bouncer at the Copa Cabana.  Laid off for eight weeks while the club is remodeled, he is hired by Shirley to be his body guard as Shirley and his trio go on a tour of the segregated Deep South.  Tony Lip is a bullshitter (thus his nickname) and he is deeply connected with his family – he is devoted to his wife and two boys and he is connected with his in-laws, talking to them on a daily basis.  His family connections are contrasted with the isolation of Shirley, who is portrayed as living in a strange nether world, estranged from his living brother, cut off from black culture by virtue of having been raised in Russia after he was discovered to be a piano prodigy when he was four, then cut off from classical playing when he returned to the states as he was told that whites would not believe a black could play classical music.  This film, like BlacKkKlansman, dips into a clearly racist time and starkly racist part of the country to help us feel something very different than what Lee would have us feel – to feel hopeful about the possibility of warm and close relationships across racial lines.

Both of these films, ironically then, are buddy films.  BlacKkKlansman jolts along with the two buddies at the center of it – two cops – one black and one Jewish (Ron Stallworth's partner, Philip "Flip" Zimmerman is played by Adam Driver) figuring out how to confront each other but also how to connect with each other.  But their relationship is far from smooth – the black cop is the first black cop on the force and the Jewish guy is conflicted about, surprise surprise, Doing the Right Thing.  It has been some time since I saw BlackKklansman, but my memory of it is that the leader in this pair is Stallworth.  He confronts Zimmerman about his Jewishness in order to help him realize that bringing in the Klan would be a good thing.  Both he and Zimmerman are “passing” – Zimmerman as a goy both at the department and then with the Klan – Stallworth as a non-cop with his girlfriend who is advocating for black overthrow of the power establishment.  In this film about identity, the two main protagonist’s are pretending to be someone they are not.  Then, in the center of the film, they together impersonate Ron Stallworth who interacts on the phone with the voice of the “real” Ron Stallworth and, in person, in the form of Zimmerman.

Green Book is also a buddy film; one of the road trip variety.  Is there any better place to get to know someone than on a long road trip?  There is nothing to do but talk.  That said, the hierarchy in this film, with Shirley as the employer, does contribute a bit of tension at the beginning.  In part because of Tony Lip’s comfort with who he is, which is largely based on his being a member of a close knit and very white, if not a completely assimilated American family (Italian is still spoken among the family members), Tony reaches across the aisle to push Shirley – to get Shirley, whom Tony does not see as being black enough, to try fried chicken – for instance.  But the emphasis in this film is not on the differences – when Tony Lip runs into some mob friends who want to hire him away from Shirley when they are in Atlanta – Shirley who, unbeknownst to Vallelonga is fluent in Italian peeps him out – and when Shirley himself is caught – again spoiler alert – in an anonymous YMCA tryst – Tony Lip finesses what could have been a game changer by referring to his knowledge of the complications he has seen in show business – these men are portrayed as working primarily to understand and help each other.  I think the basis for the difference in the "feel" of the two films is that each of these men is working from a sense of comfort with who it is that he is, while those in BlackKklansman are essentially anxious about their identities.

Both movies are nominally based on actual events.  Both movies take significant liberties with those events.  Lee heightens the drama of the resolution to the KKK case considerably and makes up the bad cop being sent away out of whole cloth.  Stallworth's character has never gone public for fear of KKK retribution, so he is made Jewish by Lee for effect.  Meanwhile, Farrelly embroiders Shirley’s isolation – setting up his being embraced not just by Vallelonga but by Vallelonga’s family.  Both films, then, are visions, dreams, fantasies of what a particular cross racial resolution could look like.  Both include comfort on the part of whites.  The white police force and the white David Duke led KKK are quite comfortable in Klansman, and the Italians – Tony Lip, but the whole clan – are quite comfortable in Green Book (not to mention all the whites that the pair come across in the south – while the blacks are seen hoeing bedraggled soil).  The blacks are uncomfortable in both films.  Stallworth needs to be constantly on his guard – and Shirley is portrayed as isolated and needing support (even as he teaches Tony Lip how to write a proper love letter and is working from a position of cultural superiority).

In both films the discomfort – the thing that the dream needs to address and to process – is experienced by the black protagonist.  In both films the transformative move needs to be made by the black man.  They need to move into the white world in order to be right.  When that move is portrayed from the perspective of the black man, it is an uncomfortable dream – I have to alter the world or the way that I see it in order to live successfully in it.  This is an unpleasant experience – whether I have to incite a riot – as Lee did in Do the Right Thing – or whether Stallworth has to make the white establishment uncomfortable by bringing down the KKK and making his black girlfriend uncomfortable by being an agent of the establishment.  This dream (Lee's/Stallworth's/the viewer's) is a transformative dreams.  These are the kind of dreams we look for in psychoanalysis.  They lay the ground work for our becoming different people.  In analysis, we are looking for someone to give up an immature attachment and become more mature.  But these are not comfortable dreams to have - they involve turmoil and loss as well as promise of something new.  When the dream is the dream of the white man, the discomfort is minor – the black will make the changes in the world or in themselves that will allow them to come into my world.  This will shake me up a bit – I will have to manage my prejudice in new ways – but the vast majority of my world will be unchanged.  That dream feels much better.  It is a dream of reassurance – including that this person whom I thought was my enemy can be my friend – and whether in the guise of Driving Miss Daisy or the Green Book it is a much more comfortable perspective – a wish fulfilling perspective rather than a paradigm threatening one.  We don’t have to wake – as we do with a Lee film – we can stay comfortably asleep.

I was at a panel yesterday at the American Psychoanalytic Association where three black women and a black man were presenting on the subjectivity of being black.  They talked about many things and, at the end of the talk, the first response was from a white man.  I frankly did not understand all that took place, but in his attempt to welcome the panel into his world, the panelists took offense.  When he asked to clarify what he intended, the moderator would not let him do that until after all of the other questions were addressed.  The issue as they described it – I think – was something like who gets to stand where as what.  And they were asserting their ability to stand as black men and women at the podium and to determine what and how the world would be understood.  This was an uncomfortable moment for all – and one that the moderator – a psychoanalyst – was encouraging us to sit with.  It brought into the moment – in the way that happens in the best psychoanalytic moments – an alive moment of affect – of emotion.  And it was therefore pregnant with the discomfort that might lead to changing not just a thought - but something deeper - something in the gut.

Ultimately I think that the question of whom the Academy graces the Oscar to hinges largely on the willingness of the largely white academy to sit with the discomfort of a dream that is asking us to wake up – to realize what it means to live in discomfort and to realize the cost of change – to realize how difficult it will be to live in a multicultural world – versus supporting a dream that allows us to stay asleep - comfortable in the knowledge that this will always be a white man's world and those who want to enter it will have to do the changing. 

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

For other posts looking at Race in America see: James Cone's The Cross and the Lynching Tree, and applied to a Rock Musical, Dorothy Holmes presents to the 2016 Psychoanalytic Convention, 2017 Convention Aktar, Powell and Trump, hearing Ta-Nehisi Coates talk, Black Lives Matter,  John Lewis' March, Get Out, Green Book and Blackkklansman, Americanah, The Help, Selma, August Wilson's Fences, Hamilton! on screen, Da 5 Bloods, The Black Panther, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me.

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The Favorite - A Period Piece for Our Time

The Favorite, Queen Anne, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone, Olivia Colman, Politics

We think we have it bad these days.  Politics creates anxiety and divisiveness and we here in the United States seem, at times, to be the dominant power in the world and it doesn’t seem at all clear who is at the tiller or, when someone is, what their intentions are.  It could be worse.  We could be ruled by a Queen who is in poor health and getting worse, a Queen who faints while addressing parliament, a Queen who is afraid to articulate what she believes and perhaps weirdest of all – a Queen who is more interested in playing with her 17 rabbits than governing.  Now the rabbits.  She has one for each of her now deceased, stillborn or miscarried children.  It is unimaginable to me that someone could have been pregnant 17 times and not have one single living child.  How could she not be obsessed with rabbits?  Her grief must have been huge.  But it does interfere with her governing.  It focuses her on what she has lost and, I think, on how she has failed, and keeps her occupied with trying to fix through fantasy what can’t be undone.  And the country that depends on her is at war and needs her to be making important decisions about how to manage that war and this Queen who is focused not on her capacities and abilities, but on her inabilities and insecurities, is the one that her people must depend on.  And the Queen, in turn, because she is so inconstant, relies on someone with whom we can quickly see she has a very strange relationship indeed – someone who manipulates and shames her and who plays on her manifold insecurities mercilessly.  Ouch.  I guess it could be worse…  (or is this a commentary on our current situation?)

But we know none of this at the beginning of the film.  All we know is that we are travelling with a pretty woman in a coach.  When she catches the eye of an attractive young man, he starts masturbating – she gets thrown out of the coach - she ends up in mud and, well, I’ll just say it, shit, and then walks to the palace (the palace first inhabited by Henry the VIII and a very dingy and dark palace it is – more like a castle -  where she is hoping to be employed by her cousin – the woman with the manipulative relationship with the queen).  Instead of being hired as some kind of lady in waiting, she is sent down to the bowels of the palace to work as a scullery maid because she shows up smelling like shit (quite literally)!  So we are introduced to this madhouse that is the governing place for one of the world powers and we see the top most layers – and the corrupt relationships there – and the bottom most – where our apparently innocent coach travelling woman is tricked into dunking her hand into straight lye by the other scullery maids and has to sleep on a tiny mat surrounded by scores of men and women snoring away on their own mats when they go to bed at night.

Well, it turns out that the pretty girl is named Abigail Hill (played by Emma Stone).  She was born into a royal family and was educated well when she was a child.  She speaks multiple languages and has knowledge of herbal remedies.  Her father, who drank and gambled away the family fortune, lost her in a game of cards to a German man who, she reports, not only had a skinny penis but was stupid enough to believe that women bleed twenty eight days a month.  She may be pretty and look innocent, but she is knowledgeable of both book learning and the ways of the world.  We don’t see it at first, but she is as manipulative as her cousin Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz) who has the ear – and the ability to dominate - Queen Anne (Olivia Colman). 

The reluctant wife, who saw this film with me, was struck (as was I, though I think not as viscerally as it didn’t hit quite so close to home for me on the gender front) by how vulnerable women were in this era of history – the time just before the King Georges start appearing – not too long before our own little revolutionary war (actually, it could have been pretty much any time in our history).  There is some irony in her response in that these three women turn out to be incredibly powerful – they are being portrayed as the most powerful people in their era and this is in many ways a film that celebrates the power of these women.  But I think it is also right on target.  The ways that they are the pawns of men, the ways that they don’t feel themselves to be solidly standing on their own two feet, the ways that they feel precarious in their positions of power end up leading them to rely on each other and to undercut each other in ways that drive the central drama of the film.

Anne, the one with the most powerful hold on legitimate political power, knows that she is the power of the land and asserts that with terrifying certainty – sometimes at the moments when she is most precariously concerned about just what the right thing to do is.  But her insecurities – that are played on like a Stradivarius by Sarah – range from her looks to her health to her capacity to think clearly – and these insecurities undermine the sense of power that she should feel over her own mind.  Without this essentially feeling of security in herself, she is vulnerable to manipulation – and afraid to assert the very real political power that she has.

Abigail, the one with absolutely no real power at the beginning of the film, the woman who is used and abused by everyone from her father to the fellow traveler on the coach, relies on her wits, her knowledge of herbal remedies (to soothe the open lesions on the legs of the Queen) and her ability to appear innocent and wholly taken by another – to love another without reserve and with absolute loyalty – to not just ingratiate herself with the Queen, but to become essential to the Queen’s well-being and stability.  This allows her to rise well above her status as a scullery maid – indeed to become a lady again – and it allows the queen to find her keel – to gain a certainty – especially in her relationship with Sarah – that she has never had before – though at the cost of losing Sarah’s love – a not insubstantial cost.

Sarah appears to have the most solid command of herself – and she uses that to exercise her control over the Queen – but it is a sadistic control – one in which she is publicly subservient – but privately very much in charge of her.  Sarah is married to the person heading the army that is fighting the French – and is ensuring that the Queen provides the material (by doubling the taxes) and political (by keeping the war going rather than settling a peace) support that her husband needs to win the war and bring honor to himself – and by extension to her.  Sarah is also – and Abigail discovers this in a very perilous way – not just the Queen’s manipulative ruler, but her lover.  And the sexual love between Anne and Sarah is yet another venue where their manipulative engagement with each other gets played out.

Abigail’s insertion of herself into Sarah’s relationship with Anne, including by turning her ministrations of Anne’s pained legs into sexual ministrations that turn into a love affair that has a very different feel to it – the feel of Abigail’s veneration of Anne as opposed to Sarah’s mastery over her, supports Anne becoming more certain of herself – more centered in who she is – much less perilously perched atop her own misgivings and uncertainties.  Anne becomes a more decisive (though a much less well informed) ruler.  She feels better about herself and her ruling capacities, though it appears that she is steering the ship of state on the advice of a somewhat childish and certainly ill-informed supportive partner – Abigail.

It is at this point that we see Abigail coming into her own – making the most of the power that she is consolidating.  She takes revenge on some of those who have abused her, forms strange alliances with others, but sets about destroying her one true competitor – Sarah.  Abigail defeats her so soundly and so profoundly that it is, frankly, stunning – both to the audience, but also, I think, to Abigail.  She takes the tail of the tiger – and not only survives but somehow throws it off the boat.  And so Sarah, the most powerful one at the beginning of the movie, is banished.

The resolution of this state of affairs - the installation of a new power behind the throne, is less than satisfying.  Abigail proves to be a much less useful container to Anne’s insecurities when it becomes more apparent that her love is largely a ploy – and Anne must work to maintain the illusion long after Abigail has abandoned trying to maintain it with any rigor.  Anne is now not just beset by physical ills, but it is clear – in a marvelous bit of make-up and acting – that she has suffered a stroke.  The dissolution and bloat that were characteristic of the court before the appearance of Abigail thoroughly infect Abigail – or perhaps she contributes to any even greater dissolution – and when Anne finally realizes the extent of Abigail’s liberties, Anne reasserts herself as Queen, putting Abigail clearly in the role of servant – and the film dissolves into a montage of rabbits – thousands of rabbits.

The director, then, is inviting us to wonder what those rabbits symbolize.  We know that they are symbolic of Anne’s aborted, stillborn and dead children.  They are more broadly symbolic, I think we can safely say, of the ways in which Anne’s intentions to govern – herself and her kingdom, and her last two lovers – are aborted and stillborn.  Despite her immense wealth and power, Anne is (I am aware of thinking at the moment – like the men around her) unable to bring forth legitimate new life.  She does not produce an heir – she is the last of her line and a new royal line must start – but she also is powerless to bring her life and her reign to a close in anything even loosely approximating grace.  She ends up being an isolated, petulant child, ordering around other children, while is she also desperately trying to govern – using a magnifying glass to read documents of state while Abigail lies nearby distracting her.

Sarah had served as a kind of severe and controlling maternal figure who kept Anne in line and allowed her to timidly feel that she was in charge.  But this was a charade.  Both Sarah and Anne knew that Anne was not up for the job of governing herself much less the country, which gave Sarah the illusion of holding the true power so that she experienced herself as governing Anne and therefore the country.  But Anne, I believe, resented that.  She knew that Sarah’s control – Sarah was her oldest friend, confidant and protector – was indeed control – and while it passed for love, it played on her insecurities – deepening and reifying them.  Sarah’s position with Anne was that her love was real because it was honest – she let Anne know both the truth of her loveliness, but also asserted when that was not the case so that Anne could know the cold hard truth about herself and the world.  Sarah believed that her love - the love of limits and truth telling - was the love that Anne truly needed.

Abigail’s love – though largely feigned – was more deeply desired by Anne.  And, whether real or feigned, it had a real, if temporary, effect on Anne.  She became a more effective ruler of herself and, oddly and by coincidence, of the country.  Using Abigail’s metaphor of a party to understand warfare proved prescient while being far from a standard military tactic.  The success of Abigail’s supporting Anne’s confidence was that it allowed Anne to throw off the yoke of Sarah’s rule and assume her own.  Even without the stroke (which I think can be understood as a symbol of the impact of losing Sarah on Anne) she was paralyzed in the wake of losing real if self-serving counsel.  Abigail’s promise of greater certainty – of more balanced self and country rule – turned out to be illusory.  A false promise.

If I were, for a moment, to do violence to what I think is a piece of art and use it to my own ends – I might do that in two ways.  In the first, I would think of Sarah and Abigail as two therapists/advisors of Anne.  They both, unfortunately, have their own interests in mind and so both “treatments” are doomed from the get-go.  None the less, Sarah’s “treatment” of Anne is a treatment that is based on giving her the insight that she needs to govern.  We could think of this as a authoritative model of psychotherapy where the patient is not capable of managing her life, so we do it for her.  When it is our interest rather than the patient’s that is at the fore, the treatment is not a treatment, but an imposition. It is the relationship of Sarah to Anne that the vehicle for the real “treatment” – and that treatment is to undermine the well-being of the Queen, for it is only when the Queen is uncertain that Sarah can feel powerful – and that is Sarah’s true goal.  So the treatment is really a gas lighting. 

If we think of Abigail’s “treatment” as a more modern, relational treatment, it too fails, not because it does not offer insight and support but because it, too, is corrupt and aimed at helping Abigail achieve power – not helping the Queen do so.  Abigail does not offer genuine love of Anne – and she does not believe in Anne’s power to function autonomously – she just believes that her own life will be better if Anne believes herself to be more competent than she actually is.

In a world that is short on resources – and even the richest courts in the world can be remarkably short on the resources that really matter – the putting of others and the putting of the country before the needs of oneself – the ability to support the autonomous functioning of the other – can become the most needed resource that is in the shortest supply (and this can be true of psychotherapy when a patient cries out for direction, but really needs to learn how to assert self-control).  When women are not empowered – when any of us are disempowered - it is difficult to truly think of what is in the best interests of all – we tend to look out for ourselves.  I think this may be the implication of what the reluctant wife was seeing as the consequence of the uncertain fate for women.

So I promised to do violence to this art in two ways – and the second is to think of it as an intentionally anachronistic piece – something that I think is advertised to the viewer not with the sexual shenanigans (We watched a piece called A Very English Scandal the other night about male homosexual hijinx among the ruling elite of Britain in the 1970s – the more things change the more they might be the same); the anachronistic quality of the film is advertised with a dance number where the highly scripted and tightly choreographed dancing all but becomes a modern street dance – we can think of this movie as a commentary on those currently in power in various places in the world, but the replacing our current rulers with others just like them has the potential to be every bit as toxic.  Just choosing women whom we would herald as saviors doesn't solve the problem.  Should those women prove to be as short on psychological resources – as limited in their sense of comfort and certainty about their personal power – we would be in the same mess.  We would have rulers who are incapable of being confident enough to assert their power usefully, including being confident enough to wonder about how the world might be rather without really knowing rather than to assert how it will and must needs be in order to manage their own insecurity. 

What this underscores, then, is the importance of assessing, in a republic, the character of those that we elect to office.  Ultimately we need people who have enough self-confidence to be able to govern effectively.  But distinguishing between earned, solid self confidence that is based on realizing that the world is a complicated place and one where, as Abraham Lincoln pointed out, we should be praying that God is on our side – rather than being certain (or telling him) that he is, from the self confidence that comes from an absolute certainty that one’s own position, based on one’s own idiosyncratic views of the world, is always right, can be a difficult call. Anne was always able, because she was an absolute ruler, to assert her rule.  And she knew that once she said, “I have spoken”, that was the law of the land.  In a democracy, such a position is not possible.  We are always at the mercy of shifting views and changing opinions.  That has become a much more complex reality with the changing and increasing numbers of information sources, and our recognition of character as an electorate is going to be sorely tried as we are confronted with the wider range of the humanity of those who would lead us.  We will have to elect imperfect, but therefore more flexible and helpful leaders.

To access a post looking at similar issues in the last season of the House of Cards link here.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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House of Cards Final Season – Are you still there?

HOUSE OF CARDS, POLITICS, ROBIN WRIGHT, CLAIRE UNDERWOOD, DOUG STAMPER, SEASON SIX, PSYCHOANALYSIS, PSYCHOLOGY, BINGEWORTHY, STREAMING, WOMEN IN POLITICS, GENDER PERCEPTIONS

It is a wintry long weekend here in the Midwest and the reluctant wife and I had planned to settle in to watch Kenneth Branagh’s four hour Hamlet, which had been streaming free on Netflix, only to discover that it was no longer running there and we couldn’t even purchase it on Amazon.  We were ready to watch before dinner and after dinner – so we had a chunk of time available (a rarity) and we considered various options, then remembered that the last season of House of Cards had dropped in October.  We had watched a few favorite series installments in the interim, including the Marvelous Mrs. Mazel’s second season as soon as it dropped in November, but we had been putting House of Cards off. 

House of Cards lost much of its luster as a bizarre tale of intrigue in Washington when reality began to compete with fiction and we had a real estate magnate running for president – and then to become far stranger as that man’s Presidency unfolded – and the penultimate season seemed to be stretching itself just a bit too far in trying to keep up with and perhaps top the very real crazy doings in Washington by having President Frances (Frank) Underwood (Kevin Spacey) appointing his wife Claire (Robin Wright – who is also a producer of the show) to become Vice President with the understanding that she, when she succeeded him as President, would pardon him for all his crimes (including multiple murders) and misdemeanors on her ascension.  On becoming President, she let Frank twist in the wind while she decided whether to pardon him or not.  The season ended with Claire as President and Frank on the outside after she had declared, through the fourth wall, “My turn.”

Meanwhile, out in the real world,  the me too movement happened.  Kevin Spacey was accused of sexual improprieties with a young man, and then other young men followed, and then Spacey was no longer going to be a part of the final season.  This final season was shortened from the previous usual number of thirteen episodes to a tighter eight.  And so we watched all eight shows of the final season last night in marathon viewing that kept us up past our bedtime.  One of many cliffhanger questions that kept us in binge watching mode was the overarching question: Who killed Frank Underwood? 

When, in the first episode, Claire broke the fourth wall to ask, “Are you still there?” I realized that I had avoided watching the show not just because of how crazy it had become, but because Spacey was no longer the star.  And an implicit question – will men watch “male” themed show with a female lead became explicit.  And the show depicts a presidency with a woman at the helm where that woman does not at first appear to be functioning on her own – she has borrowed or stolen or inherited the presidency from her male predecessor and we watch her grow into it to see her put her own stamp on it.  As the President does this, Claire also grows into Spacey's role by continuing to use his trademark asides to bring us into her world through that fourth wall. And the auxiliary question that is being asked within the show itself, "Will men allow a woman who has become president, whether because she was elected or assumed the presidency, allow her to govern?” So the question becomes: does a woman - to succeed in Hollywood or in DC - have to emulate the men who have preceded her in order to succeed at their business?

This series, in my mind, is intended as a kind of yin to the West Wing's yang.  Where the West Wing was too warm, too positive, too idealizing of the way the White House could and should be, this is too cold, too calculating, and too incisive about the kinds of people who rise to the top of the political heap.  If there is a political spectrum from ideal to feared, these two complimentary shows span that arc.  And if the task of a President is to run a marathon – with his staffers performing sprints that keep him or her afloat while burning themselves out (as was depicted in the West Wing), the House of Cards demonstrates what it would be like to be President without a team – to be one against the world  constantly sprinting and having very little room to appreciate that this is a marathon – which feels increasingly like the situation of the current White House.

When it is one against the world, it is important to have an aide who is indispensable – someone who would live and die for you and who will do your dirty work.  The constant through all six seasons – the person who has been there since the beginning for Frank and, to a lesser extent, for Claire, is Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly).  This character, who plays the role of fixer and then of fall guy – is deeply connected with Frank.  He is the son that Frank never had – indeed, in this season, it is revealed that Frank writes an 11^th hour will leaving his entire estate to Doug.  This is largely, like so much else in this series, a plot device – and its presence allows Claire to override it both by stealing it from Doug before he can know about it – though like so many secrets in this season it gets exposed in due time – but also by allowing her to trump it by carrying Frank’s child to term – which will override Doug’s claim while also allowing her to masquerade as caring mother-to-be to the country.  This particular plot twist feels forced - and I think it is an effort to make something happen that can't quite work - the way that dreams - right before they fail - try to insert something that will somehow keep the dream going no matter how preposterous the dream.

The irony, of course, is that Doug is, in fact, the rightful and sole heir to Frank’s estate.  He is the one who is concerned with preserving the memory of Frank as the President who accomplished all that he did which is the only estate that really matters - the material things will rust.  He is the one who would protect Frank’s legacy, not only by taking the fall, but also by keeping all of the skeletons hidden.  When he negotiates to do dirty work, he is negotiating nor for himself, but for Frank - making sure that the Shepherds will fund Frank's presidential library.  And he is the one who would seek revenge on the person who led, in his mind, to Frank’s downfall – Claire.  From this perspective, Claire is seen by Frank as Macbeth’s wife, urging Frank (as Macbeth) on to do things that lead to his ascension, but that also involve both of them being drenched in the blood that gets them to the top.  And she deserves Doug’s wrath and intended retribution for having besmirched and failing to protect her husband’s legacy.

The issue of Presidential pardons is central to this thread of a very complicated tale.  Doug insists not only on his being given a pardon, but on Claire bestowing a posthumous pardon on Frank.  We are also, of course, living in a real world where Presidential pardons could loom large in the question of whether every citizen must abide by the rule of law.  Trump could wield pardons as a mean of springing those whose misdeeds are being used by Mueller as leverage to learn about Trump’s possible misdeeds.  From that perspective, pardons are, like so much else in this series, simply means to an end.  But this series, for all of its starkness and for all of the meanness of its characters, turns out to be about much more than just achieving a means to an end – and the issues of loyalty and redemption lie very close to the heart of what it is about – and what, in the end, redeems it as a series and, indeed, as a work of art.  And how much the redemptive process that is spelled out is about the President, how much about the world of Hollywood, and how much about the reaction of the show to the behavior of its star all overlap in the delicious ways that creative works - our own dreams and works of art - seem to.

Claire is presented as the first female president – and she is presented as needing to be ruthless in order to function in that role.  There is great irony here.  When, in an incredibly staged counter coups, she fires her entire cabinet and replaces them all with women – it is very important (this is a small but not emphasized point) that they are all functionaries - they are career bureaucrats; long term employees and leaders within the agencies that they head, and while she is pushing forward a woman’s agenda that follows the gender stereotype of working cooperatively with others rather than going it alone she is also supporting a culture of rewarding hard work and dedication to an organization with opportunities to lead that organization rather than plopping in political cronies who have not earned, by virtue of their work in the organization, the position that is bestowed on them.  She is embodying (as she does with her pregnancy) the anti-Claire.  This Claire sees the opportunity for a new world – one that is not run by the vile and despicable predator types that include Frank and her current nemeses – Bill (Greg Kinnear) and Annette (DianeLane) Shepherd.

Bill Shepherd is a billionaire scion of a chemical and oil and gas family who is dying of cancer and riddled with the fear that his high handed disregard for the environment and safety that has lined his pockets has also ruined his health.  Annette is his sister and a college intimate of Claire's.  Her meanness and moral depravity is captured by her attempt, despite her right-to-life stance, to kill Claire’s unborn child.  From this perspective, this series becomes a morality play, with Claire’s lack of apparent conscience seeming to be a foil to protect her from truly evil others – whom she immorally disposes of so that she can achieve a greater good.  Though this is present, it is a thin read.  There is much deeper and therefore more complex and difficult to read stuff going on here than a simple good vs. evil with good having to compromise to defeat evil moral.

We revisited Robin Wright in her early days when the Reluctant Stepdaughter’s latest enthusiastic partner joined us over the holidays and mistakenly stated that he had never seen The Princess Bride.  We were so enthusiastic to show him this shared family treasure that, by the time we had it cued up, it had progressed too far for us to undo it once the boyfriend revealed he had seen it before.  So we once again watched Robin as Princess Buttercup be protected by the dread Pirate Robert – who was a better swordsman than the great Inigo Montoya, outfought Andre the Giant, and outsmarted the brainy Vizziny to ultimately be able to wrest her from the odious Prince Humperdink and ride off into the sunset with her. 

For Robin to move from the dependent and helpless – if likeable and spunky Buttercup to the President of the United States, and for her to move – as Claire - from the pretty prep girl who must choose to forego an excellent sex life to marry the ambitious but self-infatuated and conniving Frank rather than charting her own path to power – she must come to grips with a world that is not filled with good hearted farmhands like The Princess Bride's Westley who only seems to be evil as he inhabits the role of the dread pirate Robert, but instead with the boys in the House of Cards flashback who cut her dress off when she is a tween in order to ogle and perhaps do more to her, and with women like her House of Cards mother who berates her for seeking revenge against her brother who led his friends to do this deed.  She must, one supposes, also come to grips with Kevin Spacey's behavior - and who knows what behavior she herself has more directly faced in the Hollywood culture that Spacey and other's behavior has recently uncovered.

There is, then, a deep fracture in the character of Claire (even if she had never, in real life, been Princess Buttercup).  Whatever maternal feelings she may have towards others feel like they will betray her and keep her from achieving the ends that she has in mind - ends that might right some of the wrongs in this world, because the softer feelings would allow her to be used and discarded by those whose ends are nefarious.  So she must lose that which is most precious to protect it.  And it is in the final scene of the series that this becomes evident (and yes, if I haven’t already spoiled enough, I am about to spoil the whole thing, so be warned…).

Pain is described by Frank as being divided into two types – that which makes you stronger and that which is useless.  Claire amends this to say that pain is of only one type – the useless variety.  When Claire confronts Doug in the final scene, Doug is in pain.  Doug’s pain is the pain of having lost a father – and he lost Frank as a father when Robin froze Frank out of the White House driving Frank to become frenzied and irrational.  Frank was returning to the White House – perhaps to kill Claire.  Doug desperately wanted to head this off.  In order to protect Frank's legacy, Doug chose to kill the person who was threatening it – Frank himself – and Claire divines in the instant that Doug tries to kill her that it was Doug who killed Frank.  Doug confesses that he messed with Frank's meds so that Frank had what appeared to be a heart attack and Claire could claim that he was sleeping beside her when it occurred.  But Claire can see that the pain of killing Frank is something that Doug believes he can only erase by killing her.  To see her as responsible would absolve him of guilt.  But she sees beyond that and realizes that this is a false solution.  Doug, unlike Frank, is attached to Claire - and he can't kill her.  Also, unlike Frank, Doug is connected with all people, especially Frank, and feels, in fact, guilt.  And this is a pain that he can't get rid of himself.

This scene is a powerful one that is hard to reconstruct as I write about it (and I have liberally interpreted what passes between the two of them).  Doug has returned to the White House with the intent to assassinate the President.  She knows this and she has ordered the secret service members out of the room to confront her assassin directly.  She has lied to Doug repeatedly and Doug has brought Frank’s recorded memoir for her to listen to.  These are recordings in which Frank recounts his crimes and misdemeanors and implicates Claire in them.  Claire points out that Doug’s name does not appear anywhere in Frank’s rantings – even though it was Doug who carried out many of the deeds.  Frank has erased Doug and overlooked him.  Doug – whose life revolves around Frank – does not exist as an entity in Frank’s life.  Doug’s deep and powerful love is not reciprocated by a man who cannot love in the way that Frank so desperately desires.

Doug wants to kill Claire – because he blames her for having ruined Frank - and to relieve his own guilt.  But it was Frank’s failure to be the person that Doug wanted and needed him to be that is causing Doug pain.  Hardened Doug – Alcoholic, AA surviving Doug – fixer Doug – unattached Doug – this Doug feels deeply, longingly connected to the slick and competent star that is Frank – a person who was able to trick and deceive people – and one who let Doug see who it was that he really was – and this opening to Doug felt like an act of love – but it ended fueling Doug's desire for intimacy and love - not addressing it.  And killing Claire is not the solution – so when she brutally and lovingly kills him – when she puts Doug out of his misery with the murder weapon that Doug inherited from Frank and attempted to use against her – the letter opener that Doug used to carve his initials in the Roosevelt desk – the instrument that he used to say, “I was here, I mattered,” she was able to end the pain that involved his feeling that he never really had been here – that he didn’t in fact matter.

So Claire’s statement, “No more pain,” with which this series concludes, suggests that she has walled herself off from pain – but that she has also been able to be open to her own pain enough that she can engage in a tremendous act of empathic generosity and put someone who is in unresolvable pain out of his misery.  This kind of twisted, powerful, perverse maternal figure – one who would create space for a new, more feminine based means of engagement – can only, it seems, in the universe of the House of Cards, which seems to oddly parallel our own universe, assert that new femininity from a decidedly warped version of masculine power and control.  To end the reign of masculine depravity, one must be not only depraved, but also care for others - one must not just have more strength, but address the true needs of others - to end their hopes for a fairy tale - for a clean and simple world of white hats and black hats, to help them quit desiring something that does not exist.  What she does not go on to do is to articulate how to train a new generation to recognize that we are all compromised, but that we do the best that we can out of that compromise.  I think maybe her all female cabinet will do something she can't do - advise her on how to be a compassionate woman.

If we are still here – can it be we who remain?  Do we want to see women take on masculine roles and carry them out, as it were, with a vengeance?  What does it take for a woman to stand up to a man like Putin?  Or the Koch brothers?  Or to Trump?  Or to Spacey?  Or Harvey Weinstein?  What will we lose in the process of gaining a new, better, more powerful and authentic voice that will lead our organizations and this country?  How will we be able to stay in touch with our deeply based Democratic ideals as we become more powerful and more transparently vulnerable to corrupting influence than we may be able to stomach?  Are we still here is a question to be asked indeed.


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Lucky Boy – A Tale of Attachment

LUCKY BOY, NOVEL, SHANTHI SEKARAN, PSYCHOLOGY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, ATTACHMENT, IMMIGRATION, IMMIGRANTS, NOVEL, MATERNAL BOND, PATERNAL BOND

Shanthi Sekaran’s novel Lucky Boy is an easy read, even if it is long and too artfully and self-consciously constructed to be engrossing.  It tells the tale of two women – Soli, a woman from absolutely nowhere Mexico running to the United States for a better life – and Kavya – a first generation Indian American woman married to Rishi – also a first generation Indian American.  The novel alternates between chapters describing Soli’s trek from Mexico towards the United States and, inevitably, Berkeley, where her cousin lives with her cousin’s two children, and chapters describing Kavya’s life, which includes working as a cook for a sorority at UC Berkeley and trying, without luck, to become pregnant with Rishi.

The Lucky Boy of the title is Soli’s child – who is conceived on the road to the US – perhaps through love and perhaps through rape – both befall Soli on the way.  It is inevitable, for almost three hundred pages, that the lives of these two women will intersect through Ignacio, the lucky boy that is born to Soli.  While reading these pages I both considered giving up on the book – it was pleasant enough but focused largely on telling about the lives of these two women from an objective vantage point – I didn’t feel like I was really getting much access to them – and I was convinced I would not write about it.  There was little here of merit.  That changed at the moment Ignacio was born.

There is something very strange about having a child.  It alters you (or at least it altered me) in the most fundamental ways imaginable.  I was now connected to another human being in a way that I had never been connected to anyone in my life before.  As I have mentioned before, talking with other parents, they get it – but it is like a secret club – you have to have had a child to belong.  Sekaran takes the reader through three very different processes to achieve this result.  Soli’s experience of giving birth to the child she calls Nacho, Kavya’s experience of choosing Ignacio to foster parent and hopefully to adopt, and Rishi’s coming around to connecting with Iggy as his father, long after Kavya has given herself over to him.  The description of each of these three very different but parallel processes of attachment rung very true to me and each of them were emotionally evocative in ways that I had not anticipated they would be based on the writing to that point.

I cannot know if the powerful emotions evoked in me would be evoked in someone who has not gone through the attachment process with a child.  That attachment process, as exemplified by Kavya and Rishi, does not have to be a birth process.  I think that my sister went through a similar experience as she became the aunt to my son, and I know that my friends who have adopted describe a similar fundamental shift – a seeming movement in the cosmos.  Everything feels different as a result of this attachment.

Sekaran uses the attachment of each of these people to this boy to play out the plot in the second half of the book.  The attachment is the glue that holds the last half of the book together.  What that plot is does not, on some level, matter.  What matters is the glue and Sekaran's ability to describe it in such a way that I remember such silly things about my own attachment process as hearing every love song on the radio as the song expressing the love of a parent for a child – and avoiding watching television for a year because the violent deaths of every person on every show depicting it were the deaths of someone’s child – and that I remembered much more solemn things – the sense that my life was no longer my own – that I was living, at least in part, very much for someone else and that I could no longer treat my life with the same casual disregard I once had done.  And it is this solemn attachment  that drives the drama of the last half.

I am dismissive of the particulars of the drama, but appreciate that they exist at this moment on another level.  Despite my observations about my own sense of attachment to my son in the immediate aftermath of his birth (and vestiges of that still bind us together twenty years later), I found myself disconnected from the immigration crisis and the forced separation of children from their parents.  I’m not sure what kicked in for me during that process – how it was that I did suddenly become aware of the cruel implications of what we were doing – how it was that I somehow hadn’t known before at all either professionally (see my post about Daniel Stern’s work) or personally (see the paragraph above) just how devastating the impact of that separation would be on the infant and on the parent. 

This book, at times with too much detail, works hard to humanize its protagonists.  We cannot dismiss Soli as an other - as someone essentially foreign to us, nor Kavya, nor Rishi.  I think we identify with them through something much more powerful than the laboriously drawn descriptions that Sekaran provides – though the background may be important.  I think that we connect with them through the descriptions of their reactions – the felt experiences that they have in the context of having a child enter their lives in the way this child enters into each of their lives.  I think we would have had that experience based on Sekaran’s ability to create within us the feelings that she is attributing to her protagonists.

That said, I think that the long read is not wasted.  We learn a lot about these three people, imaginary though they may be.  We also learn about the experience of being both a documented child of immigrants and an undocumented immigrant and we learn about the justice system, including the various injustices that it metes out.  But all of this is ultimately in service of learning, once again, that it is the bonds of attachment that connect us and that this boy – whom some might pity based on all that befalls him – deserves to be considered lucky because of the attachment that he has experienced with these three adults.  

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Springsteen on Broadway - Appearances Are Deceiving

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, BROADWAY, PSYCHOANALYSIS, PSYCHOLOGY, AUTHENTICITY, SELF PRESENTATION, ROCK AND ROLL, FOLK, PERFORMANCE ART

First a disclaimer.  I am not now nor have I ever been a true Bruce Springsteen fan.  That said, while Springsteen’s music has not hung in the place of honor, it has been the wallpaper in more than one room of my musical life’s home.  His reputation as putting on the best live show of any rock and roller of his generation has also made me feel guilty about never having scored a ticket.  The friend from whom I cribbed the disclaimer at the opening of this post is a fan, and he is convinced that in one of the shows Springsteen picked him out as one of the people that he was singing the show to – and – whether that was true or not – I think it speaks to a particular connection that audiences have felt to Springsteen in his performances – they have felt a particularly close bond to him as a performer and as a person.

The recording of the Broadway show, recently released on Netflix, which follows on the heels of and apparently plays with themes from Springsteen’s autobiography, itself starts with a disclaimer.  Springsteen claims that he is a fraud.  He has written lyrics about things – like being a factory worker – that he has never been.  He presents himself as a Carney – telling the people what they want to hear - and says that this is a magic trick, but then he proceeds to put the songs that he has written into the context of the life that he has lived in a way that allows us to glimpse their integrity, honesty and genuineness – or he is one hell of a liar.  And it is hard to imagine that he is not also that – he notes that in coming to the theater every day for this show is the first time in his life that he has worked a steady job and he acknowledges that he doesn’t like it.  And being as bare and raw and intimately connected as he is with the audience in this performance night after night, working from a script, is he talking to us?  Is he performing for us?  Or is he playing a part?  Of course, he is doing a bit of all three – and he is convincing in each role as he plays the parts.

The songs that he performs are acoustic versions mostly of his standards that are sometimes hard to recognize because of the arrangements.  He uses an acoustic guitar or a piano to accompany himself and, on two songs, he and his wife Pattie Scialfa.   There is no band and no screaming from the audience – they don’t even sing along.  His music struck my ear, in this setting, as folk or maybe blues based, and the reluctant wife heard the tunes as sounding more like spirituals.  The music though, is largely secondary.  What is primary is the talking – the storytelling.  In his autobiography, Springsteen reveals that he has been working with a psychoanalyst for the past twenty five years.  This performance does not feel like psychoanalytic free association – but it does feel free – the words trip off his tongue effortlessly and you would think that he would take more pleasure in the poetic turns of phrase that he includes, but his mood is somber.  Indeed, his bearing is very much like what I would expect from his father – a hardworking and hard-drinking Irish Catholic man from small town southern New Jersey – at the end of his life. 

It felt like a completely different guy that we found on a Youtube rendition of his “Dancing in the Dark” video where as a young cute guy with a cute curl over his forehead, he pulls a starry eyed  Courtney Cox (before she was on Friends) out of the crowd to dance with him.  He is now old, tired and somber.  He still takes great joy in life, but it is circumspect joy.  He weighs the joys of life against the difficulties that come with it.  He acknowledges how hard it was to be his father – and to be raised by him.  But he is also able to share something of his mother’s joy – her pride in her work as a legal secretary and walking buoyantly home with her – head held high – after a day at work.  And he remembers her dancing - something she does even now that she is 93 and stricken with Alzheimer’s.  Her presence is an energizing counterpoint to his father’s gloom.

In another special we watched recently, Ellen DeGeneres’ Relatable, DeGeneres begins by noting the concern that viewers will not relate to her stand-up routine because her net worth is so much different than ours.  Well, both she and Bruce are estimated to be in the 450 million dollar range – and Bruce does not talk about raising kids with all of that wealth – and all of the complications of being a father with whom many millions of people feel like they have a personal relationship.  Instead he relates to us as if we do, indeed have a personal relationship with him – and talks about something that we can relate to – the years when he was growing up and then, once he was grown, how hard it is to love and be loved.

Like seemingly all modern pop singers, love is at the heart of Springsteen’s songs and his rendition of his life, but Springsteen’s love is not the light and seemingly effortless love of someone like DeGeneres – and perhaps his mother.  Springsteen’s position in the show and in his music is that letting someone else have access to the parts of oneself that one doesn’t even like about one’s self is, to say the least, difficult.  So instead, we present brilliant disguises to each other and hope that the other sees through them but simultaneously fear that they will.  In order to love each other – as he and Scialfa have done – we need to be tougher than the rest.  And the love that they portray, as they sing the duets together – is one that has some rough edges.  There is affection – and wariness – and even a little awkwardness.  I found myself thinking of the relationship between Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash as portrayed in the biopic I walked the Line.

There is a level on which this performance feels very real and a level on which it also is very much a play – a construction that we are witnessing.  It is both an intimate view of the most private parts of the artist – and there is a ton of who we know that he must be that is not included.  We don’t hear about the glitzy parties and hanging with other celebrities – we hear about growing up one hour from New York, but it might as well be on the other side of the moon from it – no one would think of going there.  We learn about all the uncles and aunts that lived within a two block radius – but we don’t hear – as we do with Ellen – what it is like to skooch across a thirty foot bathroom on the bathmat because the marble floors are too cold to walk on…  We also see someone acting and being (in some odd combination of both) sincere.

And there are also moments where we don’t have access to important – even critical - pieces of the narrative – moments when Springsteen hides in plain sight with a brilliant disguise.  He is clear, for instance, in his description of writing “Born in the USA” that this is not his song – he puts to music the experience of others – in ways that are, I think, deeply satisfying to them – to him – and to us.  But as he is talking about Vietnam – and losing friends who died there – he is also talking about being drafted and going with two of his friends to the draft board and they all did what they had to do to avoid being inducted.  He shifts from this quickly into a description honoring our veterans so that we almost don’t see the sleight of hand where we don’t know what he did to avoid serving.  Now, to be clear, I am not trying to judge him, but I do think he is avoiding the potential judgement of his audience through a finesse.  He keeps parts of himself hidden – parts that he might not like – and that he fears we might not like as well.

And yet this show is deeply satisfying.  The person that is revealed to us – certainly not the whole person – is a person that has a certain kind of integrity.  It is a version of the person that we know this man to be and a credible one.  He tells a narrative that hangs together.  In a text that I am teaching psychoanalysis from, Morris Eagle is talking about “narrative creation” as one of the ways that some have come to characterize the goal of psychoanalysis.  And creating a narrative description of our lives that holds together is, indeed, useful – but also, I think, a useful fiction.  A grander, more romantic integrity – one in which this man who looks like an aging steel worker but who is also an aging rock star and is also a caring and devoted (or intermittently so) husband and father and is also a ne’er do well (I am making this up) and a poet who is proud of his poetry – and is whatever else he might be – is a kind of integrity that analysis – in Freud’s mind before he invented it – might have afforded.  But in the modern and post-modern world, such an integrity is harder – perhaps impossible to achieve.  Indeed, Freud himself came to think of himself in a much less romantic – much less grandiose way – after writing what, ironically, he thought of as his greatest work – The Interpretation of Dreams.  There he proposed that we are inevitably and inexorably internally inconsistent.  We are neither simply heroes nor villains but both and so much more – and while Springsteen tells us that he lies to us – that he portrays people he is not – we also see that he has lent himself – or part of himself – to the portrayal of these people – including the person that he is portraying onstage – and that this is part of what makes his songs, his concerts, and this stage performance compelling.  He lets us in on the joke, but tells it none the less – and can’t not tell it.  No matter how he portrays himself it will not be who he is.  And we walk away humming the tunes of our life, enjoying a well told tale – with just a few whiffs of Sulphur to interrupt the pleasure that we feel in having gotten to know someone so intimately – and so partially.

As I reflect on this piece, which emerged in a way that is different than I expected it to, I think that what kept me from thinking about the piece in the way that I have written it while watching it is Springsteen’s sincerity.  He really wants to be who he is portraying himself to be – and he really wants you to connect with that person and there is actually a deeply winsome quality to the way that he performs.  He wants us to take him at face value despite his warning that we should not do that.  The lyrics to his songs – and the closed captioning helps me hear them – sometimes for the first time – tell a story of duplicity and complexity – while his talking, singing and, in his concerts, dancing and performing, tell a much simpler story – of a person who values connection – and values being loved by you and will do just about anything to get that love from you and to connect with you so that you will give it freely.  And I think we really want to give it to him, even though we all know that on some level it isn’t quite what it appears to be because he is not, and we are not, quite what we appear to be – despite our best efforts.

Addendum:  So, a friend read this post and let me know that the memoir addresses many of the aspects that I have noted are left out of the performance - including the details of draft dodging and the raising of kids - including hiding their parents fame from the kids for as long as they could!  Tough job, that.  While I may get to the memoir at some point (my friend highly recommended it), I think the points that he makes about what is included there that is not included here actually underscores the challenges of a performance piece - including the need to connect with an audience on a different level - one that requires certain sleights of hand that aren't necessary in a written piece.  There is room, in a written piece, to operate inside the mind of the reader - within limits - to create psychological and emotional space.  When performing, the performer (same person, in theory, as the memoirist) is experienced as an other - as a separate person - not as the narrator within the mind of the reader.  And the savvy performer - which Mr. Springsteen certainly is - takes this into account in the way that he crafts the presentation - there is a need to be winsome in a different way - not through appealing to rational/cognitive empathy, as one can do in writing - something that is analogous to the way we engage with our own thoughts, but by appealing to the desire to connect with another, the way that we do with our children when we know that they have done something bad but we continue to love them in spite of that. 

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