Schitt’s Creek: Character Development becomes the Paddle that Propels the Series

 

Psychology of Schitt’s Creek, Psychology, Psychology of Sitcoms, Psychoanalysis, Schitt’s Creek review, binge watching

 

The thinly veiled scatological double entendre of this sitcom turned me off.  So did the characters as I dropped in on the Reluctant Wife watching it.  I found them abrasive, full of themselves, and generally unlovable.  Of course these are the characteristics of the characters at the heart of Seinfeld, perhaps my favorite sitcom of all time, but these were more so – and the small town setting seemed just a bit too campy – not unlike the mockumentaries that the leads in the series, Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, have played in.  But the Reluctant Wife stuck with watching it, and over time I was taken with it enough that I starting watching it more and more in earnest.  And, when she had finished the run, I proposed that we start over from the beginning and she agreed.  Sheltering at home has been difficult, and having an absurd universe to visit was quite pleasant – but, and this may sound strange, there was something happening here that was novel and interesting.  Instead of the characters staying stuck throughout the course of the series, they grew – and on re-watching, it was possible to track this.

The plot of this show is relatively straightforward.  The Rose Family, headed by Johnny Rose (Eugene Levy), who made a fortune with the Rose Video chain, and his wife Moira (O’Hara), a pretentious former Soap Opera actress, lose their fortune when their unscrupulous but trusted business manager absconds with their funds after failing to pay their taxes.  Their only remaining asset is a town that Johnny bought as a gag gift for his son David (Dan Levy).   Stripped of their funds, Father, Mother, Son and Daughter Alexis (Annie Murphy) retreat up Schitt’s Creek.  “Ownership” of the town entitles them, apparently, to two rooms in a rundown Motel from which they have adventures every week.  So, rather than talk about the plot of the 80 shows in the series (good thing we were able to binge watch when we were too brain dead to do anything else), I will talk about the characters and how they developed across our months with them.  Each character had one (or more) foil in the small town.

Roland and Johnny

Johnny Rose is the patriarch of the clan.  Sincere, and, like most of us who have some success, convinced that his success is due to his hard work and integrity of character, he is indefatigably optimistic while battling his sense of bewilderment that his world has crashed.  Further, he has to face the ignominy of living without the adulation of other self-made men and the creature comforts that his success afforded him.  It is also forcing him to spend time with his children who, previously, were simply required ornaments of a successful man’s life – tended to by nannies in a far-off wing of the house while he loved them from afar.  Actually being in touch with them allows him to discover them – and his capacities as a father. 

He is mirrored by Roland Schitt (Chris Elliot), the blow hard mayor of Schitt’s Creek and, obviously, the titular namesake of the town – one his grand or great grandparents founded it and Roland is, then, as attached to the (very local) fame that his name has brought him as Johnny is to the broader recognition of the Rose name.  Roland came up with the idea of selling the town as a kind of con to bring income to a place that has no natural source of revenue.  This is not spelled out in any way, but I think that Roland honors his false promise by providing lodging (though neither he, nor anyone else, seems to pay for it).  Thus he, like Johnny, is sincere and more or less honest, but unlike Johnny, he has never seen his actions lead to anything of consequence and he is incredibly lazy, relying on his wife (to be introduced in a moment) to carry the day for him socially and at home while he mooches off of others in his “professional” life.

In the first season, Roland and Johnny bond over the vagaries of being parents to kids whom they do not understand – when Johnny becomes drunk he acknowledges that having a son who is attracted to people of all genders is confusing – despite his tangible support of that son and his sexual identity.  Despite their moments of bonding, Johnny is disdainful of Roland.  The shift in their relationship, and the beginning of the shift in Johnny’s character occurs at the end of season one when he gets caught in making a lie to avoid having dinner with the Schitts and ends up having to share a meal with them and a couple from his former life that they all end up at the “high class” restaurant in the nearby town.  After watching Roland make gaffe after gaffe at the meal where the guests are making fun of the rural ways and ridiculous local names, including of course, Schitt’s creek, we are surprised to hear Johnny defend the Schitts as true friends, unlike the high class mucky mucks who have never called after his debacle but pretend comradery with him at this chance meeting.

Johnny’s shift into not just accepting, but embracing his fate will, of course, ultimately become his paddle, but it also provides a keel as the rest of the family begins their slow movement from disdain and distancing to discovering their own path (to trample the metaphor) in, through and around the town.  Johnny takes to managing the Motel, and, when he figures out that this is what he is to do, he does it with gusto.  And when Johnny needs support at a critical moment in re-entering the entrepreneurial world, it is Roland who provides it – and we see that Roland is not just cowed by Johnny (which he would never acknowledge openly, though we have known it all along as he has played at being the bigger man and failed), but is both reverently related to him and every bit as deeply attached to Johnny as Johnny is to him.

Jocelyn and Moira

 Moira Rose (O’Hara) is a force of nature.  She is so assured of herself and her abilities – even though it is apparent to us and even to the people of Schitt’s Creek, whom she assumes are stunned by her every move (and her endless string of designer dresses combined with her wacky wigs is a consistent source of fascination – how did she fit so much stuff in the trunks they were allowed to pack up while the feds were stripping their place?) that she is, at best, a B list actress with B list talent, credentials, and a history of way less than impressive roles.  What is impressive is her vocabulary.  Coming from a town very much like Schitt’s creek, she has risen far above her station, even if that involved considerable money through marriage and the pinnacle of her personal achievement is in the very weird world of daytime television.

Moira’s foil is Jocelyn Schitt (Jenn Robertson).  Jocelyn is as plain, simple and grounded as Moira is flighty and self-involved.  Jocelyn is as deluded about some of her husband’s attributes (e.g. his sexiness) as Moira is about herself.  But both women are also able to realistically appraise those same objects – Jocelyn feels the Schitt family traditions are stupid, and Moira, for all of her self-involvement, is tolerable because she is also acutely and accurately self-aware.  She knows that she has been a terrible mother – overinvolved with her son and incredibly disconnected from her daughter – Moira has lived for whatever glory she can get as Johnny Rose’s wife and a B list actress/celebrity.  And as grating as her self-involvement is (mirrored in a reversed image by the sometimes sickly sweet and cloying kindness of Jocelyn), it fuels her efforts to achieve grace when there is very little of it to be had, just as Jocelyn’s emotional connections with those around her cause her to be a loved and respected leader in the community.

When Moira discovers the Jazzagals, a local singing group led by Jocelyn, she is shocked to discover that she is required to audition to become a member.  Before her audition, she is able to see a rehearsal – and has to follow an act that a competent musician would have trouble doing.  Not surprisingly she falters.  Though she is accepted into the group, where she continues to put on airs, she is knocked down several thousand pegs.  Rather than let this show, she continues to steam ahead as if she were the prima donna – and when she is offered a part in a terrible Croatian movie with a director who is uninvested in the movie (at best), she rallies him and the movie – and uses this little bit of nothing as leverage to push her daughter’s career along (she begins to actually see her daughter as a person a bit – though she also tries to compete with her) and is ultimately able to use this platform she has been afforded to discover and reassert her actual value in the world of daytime television.

The most damaged characters, who are actually saved by their plunge into Schitt’s Creek, are the children.  Their foils are more complicated.  Rather than just needing one mirror, they both need two, and Alexis, the most damaged of them all, needs three (four, if you count her brother).  The parents have each other.  The kids do not have them and, though they have each other, they need to strike out on their own, and it is very hard to do this when their family isn’t a firm foundation to push against.

David and Stevie

David Rose is a winsome, lovely fellow who wears the most stylish sweaters anyone has ever seen.  Summer or winter he wears them with style and panache.  He has a long history of failed relationships.  His neurotic self-involvement and precarious self-esteem interfere with his ability to really see or connect with others around him.  His former friends and lovers were attracted by his father’s money and ultimately failed him.  He, like his mother, is always the center of attention – and yet he feels transparent when others look at him – as if they can see through his sweaters and his skin and recognize his flaws and failings and know that he is not all that he would present himself as being. 

His first foil is Stevie Budd (Emily Hampshire), the proprietor of the Motel.  She has become as hardened to the world as David is.  They have both been knocked around a lot and have learned to create themselves as arch people who are above (in David’s case) or disinterested (in Stevie’s) in those around them.  And for both of them this archness is a pretense – and a defense against the tremendous yearnings that each feels to be known and loved.  For Stevie, this tension is played out at the end of season five when she is cast, seemingly completely by mistake and against type, as Sally Bowles in Cabaret and we discover her haunting desire to be admired, but more essentially, to be loved.  Despite a brief sexual liaison including a weird sex triangle, David and Stevie learn to appreciate each other and become each other’s first and best friend.  

David finds love in the gaze of Patrick “Pat” Brewer (Noah Reid).  Pat is able to see David for who he is and to love him, not in spite but because of that.  Pat has not previously been aware that he was attracted to men.  He is as grounded as David is at sea.  They first become business partners.  They open a locally sourced general store of consignment products. Patrick minds the books and David attends to the aesthetics.  And they argue over placing products for profit or ambience.  Pat also happens to be a wonderful singer and, in an amazing scene, publicly sings of his love for David, and we see David’s archness melt out of him.

Ted, Mutt, Alexis and Twyla

Where David thinks he is transparent, Alexis Rose knows she is opaque.  Never having been an emotional object for her mother, she realizes that people often don’t see beneath the surface and so she operates without concern about their discovering who she is.  She has a history of having dated every one under the sun, beginning when she was too young to be travelling alone internationally but, since her parents weren’t paying attention, she did what she would. 

In the second season, when David is worried about having to take a driving test, Alexis reassures him that the examiner won’t be paying attention and won’t know that he has made a mistake if David doesn’t call his attention to it.  This pivotal moment immediately precedes an awkward lunch with one of David’s potential clients – a producer of goat’s milk cheese; a woman who is now dating Alexis’ ex – a veterinarian who proposed to her twice, but Alexis was to unsure of herself to recognize the value of his love.  Caught in the embarrassment of being across the table from the woman who replaced her while she still has unacknowledged feelings for her ex, she is able to leverage the relationship with her to secure the contract that David so desperately wants – choosing to use her wiles to help her brother – a much appreciated first.

Alexis’ foil is Twyla Sands (Sarah Levy – yes the last name is familiar, this is Dan Levy’s real life sister), who is the chief waitress at the local coffee shop.  Twyla is the overlooked one – jealous of Alexis’ clothing, her stylishness, and her jet set past.  Twyla, like Jocelyn in her relationship with Moira, is both star struck and accommodating – overlooking Alexis’ faults as Alexis fails to see Twyla, but relies on her.  Twyla, for her part, keeps a secret throughout the series that helps them achieve equal footing in the final season as Twyla finally is able to turn to Alexis for real help – and Alexis is able to recognize Twyla – and refuses to exploit their friendship.

Alexis’ initial love interest is Mutt Schitt (Tim Rozon), Roland Schitt’s son – who is as unlike Roland as one can be.  Competent, confident, and attuned to the world, Mutt is a back-to-the-lander who lives in a barn.  He is also attractive, which is what draws Alexis in, and she drops him when he shaves, losing the beard, which is what she loves about him.  Having established herself as shallow, Alexis next falls for Ted Mullins (Dustin Milligan) the aforementioned veterinarian. 

Ted turns out to be the love of Alexis’ young and lover filled life.  Despite her early and repeated rebuff of him, he continues to hold a torch for her.  He has always been seen as the catchiest of catches in this small town.  Where Mutt was the bad boy, Ted is as good as the day is long.  He realizes that Alexis is self-involved and careless in her affection for him, and yet he believes in her – not just as an attractive object, but as an attractive and potentially capable person.  He supports her in getting not just a High School Diploma (including in the classes she takes with Jocelyn), but a community college degree that gives her the credentials to launch herself as her mother’s publicist.

Alexis is an endearing character.  She is cute.  She trusts her ability to charm her way out of any situation.  And by the end of the series, she is able to express genuine caring and concern for her family, her friends, and to feel both closeness to and pain at the gulf between she and Ted.  All while developing, in parallel with her brother, the skills that are needed to navigate in the real world – skills that they were protected from needing to develop by their wealth.      

So Schitt’s Creek grew on me (and many other people).  I even came to feel some affection for the title.  The characters – marooned up Schitt’s Creek without a paddle - are able to figure out how to maneuver within it, and how to paddle back out of it with a semblance of grace and even a bit of charm.  More importantly, they take the sitcom to a new place – an exploration not just of static character, but of character development.

The sitcom has been a staple of American – and my – life for my entire lifetime.  The final episode, however, has usually been an anticlimax.  The final episode of Schitt’s creek famously swept every major category in the Emmy’s, eclipsing the number of awards by the previous record holder, The Marvelous Mrs. Mazel.  Like Mrs. Mazel, this should perhaps be classified as a sitdramcom.  And the final episode seemed like a fitting end and wrap up – it was very satisfying.

M*A*S*H, the longstanding dramatic sitcom that introduced the idea of telling two stories instead of one in each episode, and that was a commentary on our involvement in endless wars, was an endless piece of entertainment.  It introduced ideas and new characters, but the characters were static – they deepened as the writers and actors got to know the characters better, but they did not grow and change as a result of their experiences in the sitcom, so the last episode was sad, as we said good-bye to the characters in a variety of ways, but it was the sadness of a high school graduation, where the members are drifting to the winds.  The Mary Tyler Moore show ended in much the same way – sending its graduates off into spin offs – which became the new way to avoid feeling the loss of a familiar face on our television. 

Seinfeld, which took MASH’s ability to tie two plots together and upped them by two or even three plots, all resolving, in the best episodes, into a single final chord or note, could not end gracefully as its characters were dead set against development and could only be held responsible for their actions – but as they felt no remorse for what they had done, we were left with a distinctly dissatisfying taste.  Perhaps it was Friends that began the march toward sitdramcom with the developmental shifts that were part and parcel of being mid-twenty somethings in New York City.  Did they have a compelling wrap up?  I should know, but I frankly can’t remember it.

This show – this inane piece of froth about a family we should not care about – the Kardashians of this world – living on so much money that, when it is taken away, they don’t have basic survival skills – teaches something about what it means to become a family and, as this is part and parcel of that, something of what it means to become an individual who is no longer dependent on that family but is ready to stand on his or her own two feet and move out into the world with the kind of skills that middle class – or no class people in the broad Midwestern regions of our continent – the fly over zones – know how to do.

And yet these pampered, self-involved, vain, and therefor interesting and unique individuals also have something to teach us Midwesterners about being true to oneself as one develops.  Something to teach us about living with style and grace even when stuck in a world that doesn’t appreciate that.  And a lot to teach us about how to develop – how to grow – while remaining true to oneself.  How to deceive oneself just enough to believe it possible to achieve what should be apparently unattainable.  And most importantly, to do that through reconnecting – or perhaps connecting for the first time – with our family.

Moira’s faith in Johnny – and in herself – is ultimately noble.  So is her faith in David – and the pain she feels for him when others make fun of him – and her pleasure when he comes into his own.  As we reconfigure our own family – welcoming back members who would have only been guests were it not for the pandemic – we have an opportunity as adults living under the same roof – to connect with each other in new and different ways.  Sure, the old ways will out, and we often end up being less than stellar versions of ourselves, but because we are family we stick it out, just as the players in the sitcoms do.  And because we are human, we might just grow from that experience, as the Roses managed to. 

    

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News of the World – Imagination, Literature and Film

 News of the World, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Book, Movie

Paulette Jiles’ book News of the World was recommended by a friend, and a number of others echoed that it was a good book.  When my copy arrived, it had “Soon to be a Major Motion Picture” emblazoned on the front.  I promptly forgot that, read the book, and idly thought about angles that would be worth writing about, but also didn’t feel deeply compelled by it – stirred, but not driven.  Then, last night, I was blindsided by an ad for the film.  It was in the middle of Jeopardy and the Reluctant Son, with whom I was watching it (and against whom I was competing) noted that it looked like a violent film.  Well it did, but I assured him that the book was not essentially violent.  But the trailer was doing an additional, particular kind of violence to my reading of the book.

The trailer for the film led to a collapsing of the images that I had created as I read the book.  These images were still fresh and vivid enough that they could be destroyed – and they were.  The book is told in the third person, but from the perspective of its hero, Captain Kidd.  He is a veteran of three wars, and he is described as having, “a clean shaven face with runic angles, his hair was perfectly white, and he was still six feet tall.”  It is 1870, he is living in Texas, and makes his living moving from town to town and reading, you guessed it, the news of the day.  He puts up signs advertising his readings, rents a hall, collects newspapers from around the world, selects items that will entertain and reads from them to a packed house by lantern light for about an hour.  He is partly informing, but mostly entertaining by bringing news of far-off and imagination saturated spaces that the audience is not familiar with.  This is more in the tradition of bed time stories than the evening news – in fact, he becomes angry when people complain that he is not including more local and politically divisive material – and he tells the audience in no uncertain terms that they are to listen and not to interrupt – which they do, with pleasure.

I’m not sure what kind of picture has begun to emerge in your mind of the captain after the last paragraph.  I had a lot more to go on, but I thought he was lean, to the point of being gaunt.  He had, after all, survived the war of 1812 and the Civil War.  The Civil War soldiers were nearly starving.  He is living on the frontier – in the Hill Country of Texas – and he travels through what was then called Indian Territory and is now called Oklahoma.  Civilization barely existed.  One of the haunting themes of this book is that government is sparse and patchy.  The confederates who governed Texas have been dismissed.  The Captain has to assert order in the towns when he is reading because there is neither order based on external authority – on law – nor on internal authority – the people are focused on survival and this creates a rawness in most of them (the exceptions in the book are women who are probably poorer than the men, but certainly more generous).

Once, after a cross country bicycle tour with a friend of mine in college, he and I got together to review the pictures from the trip.  A few months had passed (this was in the ancient days when pictures were made in cameras with film that needed to be developed).  I had very vivid memories of that trip – made all the more vivid because they were not just visual images, but they were multimedia events – the images were accompanied by memories of the feeling of my palms against the handlebars, my pelvic bones against the seat, and the smell of the area we were riding through, heightened by having given up smoking to make the trip.  There were sounds that rounded out the memories – and the memories of that trip were among the most vivid of my life – until the pictures arrived.  I could feel them melting and recrystallizing around the “objective” images that came out of the camera.  The narrative experience of the trip was being reduced to a travelogue and I was powerless to prevent it.

Now, many years later, the more visceral memories have returned.  Not with the same vividness they once had.  The memories of the photographs, ironically, are more faded – patchy.  I can remember just one or two.  As I was reading this book, I was thinking that the author, when she wrote it, may have had its being made into a movie in mind.  It is written in such a way that the visual is given prominence, despite it being a very internally focused book – a book that explores such things as loneliness, loss, and grief, and also how culture creates us a creatures – but that even below that there is a primal self – one that cries out for attachment – both early in development – when there aren’t words for it – and much later, when we have a beautifully descriptive language available and therefore can explain much of that away – even though it keeps knocking away at us as we ride across the country, as the captain does in this book - and looks and sees the land around him - which is beautifully, vividly - and visually described by the author.

A friend of mine, an English literature professor, a person who was one of the best readers of fiction that I have known, confessed that the written word did not conjure up for her a single visual image.  I still do not know how she managed to keep a story in her mind – or more accurately, to follow the story as it unfolded.  And, for what it is worth, she was terribly jealous of those who were able to experience images from reading.  I do not read a novel so much as let the words prompt my visual imagination so that I, like the listeners of the captain, am swept away to a place that I create – as I created the High Plains and the Hill Country of Texas as the captain rode through it.  Oh, there are parts of this territory that I have traversed, but not in a wagon, not on a bicycle, but in a car, zipping past the bluebells of spring and enjoying, with airless comfort, the visual pleasure of fields and hills – but never testing myself against them in ways that this text allows me to feel, to appreciate not just what they look like, but what it feels to gallop towards a swollen stream in the hope that the momentum will carry us towards the other side when the horse's hooves lose contact with the streambed and we are floating or to feel what it means to scale a hill – a word that makes it sound so tame – but when the horses are straining and the wagon threatens to pitch backward you realize it is not just a bump, not just a hill, but a fortress.

And yet the words matter.  The narrative that holds the images together is important.  When listening to a patient’s dream, I write down what they say, as best I can, word for word.  What I remember months and years later are visual images – and, when they come to me, it is in reference to what the patient and I are now talking about at this moment.  And those images are important – but they important in part because the words that are used to describe the dreams has allowed us to communicate about what the dream means to the patient.  My image of the dream, conjured up as I write down what is said, is my production – not the production of the dreamer.  Could she or he see my image, they might not recognize it as their dream.  So the common starting place for us to understand are the words they have spoken.  Though they may be pale representations of the visual experience of the dream, they allow us to know, together, what the dream means (at least in certain respects – the dream will always contain private aspects that we are never going to be able to share).

And when we discuss a book, it is the words that we can agree are our common text, as it were.  This is where we take off in our particular way to experience this work – whether we “see” it or simply know it as a story.  A film, on the other hand, starts with the image as the shared text.  It is the image, and secondarily the sound – the dialogue and/or narration that we share.  But, in so far as it is the image, in the film it is the non-verbal that we have in common.  And this image creates something concrete in our minds – something that is not pliable – the way that images in dreams and the images that emerge when we read are.

So, spoiler alert, when I saw that Tom Hanks will play the captain, my image of the captain, but the images of the whole book were threatened.  Tom Hanks is a fine actor, but he is a round person – not gaunt.  Yes, he is eager to be loved, but he wears that eagerness on his sleeve – he does not hide it under layers of protection the way the captain does.  Tom Hanks does not, in my mind at least, have the gravitas – the grit (True Grit was an association as I read to this book) that the captain has.  And the entire enterprise is threatened. 

The film is not out yet, and it may prove to be a lovely experience, but I fear it will not be the vehicle the book is.  We will not get to know the flintiness of the captain in quite the same way.  We will see that he is an upstanding man in a world that is chaotic and filled with people who are uncivilized.  We will see smatterings of civilization, but we will not see those through the eyes of the child he “rescues”, a white girl who was adopted by the Kiowa and who became thoroughly Kiowa in the few years she lived with them so that she finds “civilization”, which we experience as approximate at best, as a dangerous and oppressive force that we, because of having seen the Dallas Cowboys play football, know will obliterate this wild world that can only be scaled by force of will and turn it into something that is non-threatening to those who have no appreciation for their own essential wildness. 

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My Octopus Teacher- A nice family evening

 

My Octopus Teacher, Movie, Netflix, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Love, Psychology of My Octopus Teacher

 

The Reluctant Stepdaughter has been home from school since Thanksgiving and will be through January.  Last night she told her friends she was going to have an evening doing what Hot Girls do and stay in.  One part of being a Hot Girl apparently included watching a movie.  Now family movie nights have been a boondoggle since our first movie night as a blended family 14 years ago when I recommended Harvey.  Oops.  I have never lived that down – though when Harvey shows up as a cultural reference now, the girls are sure to mention that they are well prepared to remember it.  Back then it was a horrifyingly creepy film about a creepy guy with an imaginary friend.

So my first offering – watching Paper Chase, the 1970s film depicting Harvard Law School life anxiety - starring John Houseman – who worked on the script of Citizen Kane in the film Mank that we saw recently – was met with the usual less than enthusiastic response.  The Reluctant Stepdaughter thinks that movies about Harvard Law School begin and end with Legally Blonde.  So my next suggestion came via the Reluctant Sister – someone the Reluctant Stepdaughter likes and feels a certain kinship with – and it was a documentary to boot, which is the R.S.’s go to movie genre: My Octopus Teacher. 

Jackpot!  Not only does she like documentaries, she likes octopi.  So, when we asked whether the Hot Girl was going to join us at the movies, we were told that we could watch what we want to – but if we watched something else on the family TV, she would be watching My Octopus Teacher.  We let her know that we had been intending to watch it and would love to watch it with her.

This lovely film is quite short, but the pacing is so languid that it feels like a feature film.  It stars Craig Foster.  He is the main and almost only character except for the octopus, a few sharks, and a bit role by Craig’s son.  The film documents a year in his life – a year that followed two years of living hell, the details of which we don’t get, that came in the wake of filming and editing a film about the Kalahari bush people.  Foster returns to the home he grew up in – a bungalow in South Africa that faces, and at high water, is partly covered by, the Atlantic Ocean.  

Craig is returning to a world that is much more in touch with nature than the world of film editing – a world that he experienced as being devoid of nature - cut off from it.  As he narrated his return and we saw him swimming, without a wetsuit or tanks, in the frigid waters (48 degrees Fahrenheit) of a Kelp forest, the Reluctant Stepdaughter observed that this was going to be a film about him – and not about Octopi.  Fortunately, she hung in there despite this.

Craig presumably was recovering from a two year depression.  He talked about the cold water reorganizing his brain circuitry.  I don’t doubt that getting into that water and swimming for an hour or two would be shocking – and, though ECT is a proven treatment for severe depression – he wasn’t inducing seizures with the cold.

Craig would be understood by Sydney Blatt – a brilliant Yale based researcher – to have an introjective style of depression, which he distinguished from an anaclitic style.  The introjective style – really more of a personality style than a type of depression, but a personality style that can lead to depression – is caused by internalizing very high standards for one’s self and then becoming depressed when one doesn’t live up to those standards.  The introjective style includes not just high standards, but valuing thought and thinking over emotion.  It is not that these individuals are not deeply emotional; they are (in fact we all are), but that they approach problems imagining a cognitive solution.

The problem Craig encounters is an octopus – don’t ask me how he knows it is a female octopus – whom he discovers in a ball at the bottom of the ocean with shells stuck to herself on all sides so that she looks like a weird piece of beach art.  Even the fish near her seem as puzzled as Craig about what she has done and who or what she is – and when she sheds the shells and speeds off, we are introduced to Craig’s Octopus teacher.

The movie now shifts to being more about the octopus or, more precisely, about the developing relationship between Craig and the Octopus.  When Craig, after befriending her, scares her off, he has to learn to think like an octopus to find her again.  He lets us in, a bit, to the world of the octopus.  She is a mollusk without a shell – a predator who protects herself with her wits – based on figuring things out (octopi are solitary creatures whose life cycle prevents their being taught by parents) and she is incredibly creative.

Craig’s focus on the octopus led us to worry about the state of his marriage.  He is able to connect with his son about the sea and all things in it.  Is he connected to his wife?  She is a shadowy figure in the background.  If the octopus is not just his teacher but his therapist, his wife is giving him room – as a spouse does when a patient goes into treatment, but especially into analysis - room to become very intimately connected with another.  And the Octopus becomes all consuming.

And this turns out to be a good thing.  We learn early about the life cycle of an octopus.  And we learn about the ways in which this brief life – octopi only live for about a year – allows Craig to see the cycle of his own life – to live out in the relationship with the octopus coming in contact, growing, having advances and setbacks, recovering from the problems along the way, and regenerating a will to live. 

Again, this seems like a metaphor or analogue for treatment.  We live out, in a relationship with a therapist, a relationship with a beginning, a middle and an end, and that relationship, which is initially based on the paradigms of relationships that we have lived before, becomes a new template – a new way of living in relationship with others.

There is another way in which this metaphor works.  Craig goes back, each day, to the same clearing in the forest.  He gets to know not just the octopus, but the other denizens of her space.  When friends ask why he doesn’t sample different places with his daily dive, Craig rejoins that plumbing the same place allows him to truly get to know it and, by implication, to better know himself.

Especially in psychoanalysis, we frequently cover what seems to be the same ground again and again, and yet, each time we traverse it, it has the potential to reveal something new.  And when this happens, we get to know that piece of ground just a little bit better.

There is an odd distance that Craig feels from the Octopus.  He greatly values his relationship with her, but he does not intervene on her behalf – even though they are friends – when she is in dire circumstances.  Craig does not, to me, clearly explain this.  It is a scientific distance that he is keeping – but is he a scientist?  Is he gathering basic data? Or is his distance part and parcel of the introjective personality style?  Is he walking with, and next to, and touching the Octopus, but is he also keenly aware that she has her own life to live – and that that life is not his – only his to observe?

In this stance that Craig takes, I think that this is less about “science” and being a “scientist”, and more about coming to grips with a much more essential existential fact – that we are, essentially, alone.  Even though others are there and can comfort us, we fend for ourselves, feel for ourselves, and live and die largely by ourselves.

You might think this is a COVID fueled conjecture (and in part it certainly is), but I think it is a realization that occurs, in one form or another, in most effective treatments.  We go to someone else for help and discover that what they can help us do is to make better use of ourselves – they cannot make it easy for us.  In this case, Craig is taught this not by what the Octopus does or doesn’t do for him – but the other way around, by what he does or doesn’t do for her.  He learns through an empathic experience of what it means to be a creative, brilliant creature on one’s own in a very scary world.

This, then, is both a very comforting and an oddly disquieting film.  We are drawn to Craig, and to the Octopus, and to their relationship.  We admire their bond.  And we wonder at what separates them – but also what bonds and separates Craig and his son – Craig and his wife – and we, ourselves – what bonds us to the world and the creatures around us? 

The film reaches a nice dramatic conclusion – we were all satisfied.  The Hot Girl had a very satisfying Hot Girl night with her parents – who knew that was possible?  We enjoyed connecting in a space that worked for all of us – knowing that this space – extended by COVID – is still limited.  We will carry away from it, as Craig does from the clearing, a better sense of who we are – individually and collectively, just as we do from any other meaningful relationship, including a psychotherapeutic one.

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

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First Complete COVID semester done – COVID Chronicles XV

 

This last month at the University where I teach has seemed like a race to the finish.  When we decided to meet in person for the fall, we set the schedule to minimize students’ travel away from school and attempted to shorten the time spent on campus.  This meant that we started school a week or two early, dropped Fall break and various other holidays (Labor Day) and introduced two midweek skip days, and the students headed for home at Thanksgiving.   They then did remote final exams and grades were due earlier today.  Whew!

I looked forward to this arrangement – not only would it minimize students heading home in the middle of the semester – the semester would be over early which would allow for a longer Christmas break and that would allow me to work on some projects that have needed my attention.  I have also always thought of things like Fall Break (a random Thursday and Friday in the fall with no classes) as kind of silly – Spring Break, too, for that matter.  My clinical work continues during these “breaks” and I experience them more as a bit of a lull rather than a true break.

Well, I don’t know whether it was sprinting through the semester, or the strain of COVID, or the weirdness of this political season, but by the end of the semester, I was all but wrung out.  I have not slept so consistently soundly in years.  By the end of day I was tired, and by the time bed time rolled around, I was deeply exhausted, as if I had been hard at work all day out of doors.  I have not posted on this site in over a month, which is unusual for me – and a sign of not feeling like I have had time to do anything but work on what needed to be done.

Another feature of this time is that I have been completely at home except for the six clock hours each week that I was on campus to teach two face to face classes (these were simulcast on zoom – and the last two weeks I was the only person in the classroom – my other class was online throughout and I “broadcast” from our home office).  I have been spending less time on campus in recent years – but even recently, I have been on campus for 30-40 hours each week – seeing patients at home – and working at home on the weekends.  It made a huge difference to be working at home all day every day.  There was no shift in place to work.  Before there was a sense on the weekends that the work I was doing was “not work” because it was at home.  Now home feels like the work place and it feels like I am always at work…

Of course, this is a first world problem, and in the first world, especially now, there could be way worse problems!  The bad news, of course, is that this won’t be over soon.  The novel vaccines are being pushed through the pipeline, but it will be a logistical nightmare to get them to us and we don’t yet know how quickly they will be produced.  To most effectively prevent the continued transmission of the disease, they should go to front line and essential workers.  We’ll see how they are actually distributed.  And we don’t yet know what it will mean to be inoculated.  For instance, one question that has not yet been experimentally addressed is whether a vaccinated person can be a transmitter of the illness.  A corollary question of mine is can a person who has had the illness still carry it?  But of course, we don’t yet know how long having had the illness will provide immunity or whether it will provide immunity from other strains.  And getting to the point Nationally, much less internationally, where enough people are inoculated that this thing will die out will take months or perhaps another year.  

If you detect an increasing line of hysteria underlying the questions above, your radar is working well.  As a dear friend and analyst once told me, living in the world of the unconscious means that we are more, not less prone to the fears, follies and foibles of being human.  The Reluctant Wife just calls me Captain Calamity.

I started this line of posts with the intent of tracking, in real time, my experience of the pandemic.  Especially in the wake of revelations that we really don’t know much about the public’s reaction to the 1918 influenza outbreak, I thought it might serve a useful purpose.  A recent NPR spot on a book about the Spanish flu clarified that part of that had to do with a national media blackout orchestrated by President Wilson who, not wanting the backlash that Lincoln received by allowing reporters to travel with the troops in the Civil War, kept a lid on the news about both the world war and about the ensuing flu.

On our own smaller home front, my fear at the beginning of the semester had to do with being in front of a classroom full of students some of whom likely would be sick.  Very quickly, my classroom was largely empty, as I reported earlier, because the students chose to participate by zoom.  But when one of our reluctant children came home from school to spend a week with their paramour, the paramour’s boss and co-worker became sick, so the paramour was tested and found positive – so the adult child was tested and fortunately turned out to be negative, both on testing and symptomatically, as were the reluctant spouse and I.  Why did we duck that bullet?  Was the reluctant child's spring illness really COVID though she tested negative at the time?  

Based on a near miss, we were more cautious at Thanksgiving – having only nuclear family at our celebration.  This meant that there were about half as many people at the table as usual – and we could hear each other talking!  We also spent the rest of the weekend masked in the house after kids starting connecting with others to celebrate the holidays.

Our world is smaller – and will stay that way over Christmas and the New Year – but more intimate.  Were it not for the sameness of the days, sheltering in place hasn’t been a bad way to live.  The Reluctant Wife is not travelling, so that is a real bonus.  But the uncertainty, the compressed schedules, and living in fear for family members are all things I could live without.

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

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text. 

For other posts on COVID:

I:       Apocalypse Now  my first posting on COVID-19.

II:      Midnight in Paris  is a jumping off point for more thinking about COVID.  (Also in Movies).

III:    Hans Selye and the Stress Response Syndrome.  COVID becomes more normal... for now.

IV:    Letter on the occasion of a Town Hall Meeting

V:      COVID craziness at the University continues with no end in sight.

VI:    Get back in that classroom  Paranoid ruminations.

VII:   Why Shutting Classes Makes Fiscal Sense A weak argument

VIII: Catholic Social Teaching Marshaled to support Rationalization...

IX:    What will school look like?

X:     Denial is not just a river in Egypt...

XI:    Back in the Classroom

XII:  Labor Day is for WORK!

XIII: Ennui

XIV. Where, Oh Where have my in-person students gone?  Split zoom classes in the age of COVID.

XV.  The First Complete COVID Semester is Done.

XVI.      More of the Same: The Second COVID Semester begins.

XVII.     Surviving the First Year of COVID: Will education be the same?

XVIII.    I miss my mask?

IXX.      Bo Burnham's Inside Commentary on the commenter.

XX.       The Olympics Mark the Oddness of the Time In Between.

XXI.      It's baaaack...  Joy and Horror and Maybe a Little Bit of Hope

XXII.     The Great Resignation Hits Home

XXIII.    The Great Resignation (cont.): A Family Reunion

XXIV.    COVID in the Classroom: The Great Dis-integrator

XXV.     First COVID, Now No Snow Days?

XXVI.   Not with a Bang but a Whimper: COVID is over... or is it?

XXVII.  Post COVID (we can hope) reflections on morale and morals...

XXVIII. How will we move on from our Empire of Pain? (Also in books)

XXIX.    A New Year's reminiscence.

The Trial of the Chicago 7 – Aaron Sorkin and dramatizing dissent.

Trial of the Chicago 7, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Aaron Sorkin, Jerry Rubin, Abby Hoffman

I turned 8 years old in the summer of 1968.  I saw images in Time magazine of hippies putting flowers into National Guard rifles.  I also saw a picture of a clearly angry hippie shooting the bird at the camera and, presumably, whoever was standing with the camera person.  These pictures – with rich colors – are stored somewhere deep in my mind.  They were arresting images, but I did not understand them. 

Five or six years later, I read the book “Steal This Book” by Abby Hoffman.  I don’t know how I got hold of a copy…  I might have borrowed it from a friend…  In it, Hoffman was encouraging acts of civil disobedience including, for instance, having everyone in a dorm threaten to flush their toilets at the same time if the administration of the University didn’t accede to their demands.  This would, supposedly, burst the pipes.  I didn’t buy it then, and I don’t buy it now.

By the time of the Bicentennial, I was almost sixteen and I hitchhiked to Washington D.C. with my enthusiastic friend Tim to join a protest movement that involved signing a document called the Declaration of Economic Independence.  We spent the eve of the fourth in Annapolis and heard the Star Spangled banner at midnight at Francis Scott Key’s alma mater (where I later went to college).

I had somehow romanticized demonstrating and was actually looking forward to getting tear gassed.  Fortunately the Vietnam War was over, and the demonstration was a bust – there weren’t enough people there to join with, much less for the police to get excited about.  Fortunately I did not learn firsthand just how terrible and unromantic it is to be tear-gassed.  Tim and I watched the fireworks, spent the night on the mall, and hitchhiked home.

In eight years the mood of America had changed and the gritty reality of 1968 had disappeared.  Fortunately, 50 years later, just in time for the 2020 election, Aaron Sorkin (who was only six years old that summer of 1968 and had no knowledge of the events he described in this movie when Spielberg pitched it to him) has brought it back to life in the movie The Trial of the Chicago 7. 

The Chicago 7 (plus one) were a loosely affiliated group of protesters who “led” a convergence of kids – probably mostly a little older than I was when I went to Washington – in an attempt to protest the goings on at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.  Five of the members (Two groups of two and one other person) applied for permits to demonstrate (something that is protected by our constitution).  Mayor Daley’s machine (the same one that denied my registered Republican grandmother the right to vote in 1960) denied them permits.

They came anyway and camped in Grant Park which, for those of you who don’t know Chicago, is one of the truly great city parks in America.  Right up there with the Mall in Washington and Central Park – it is a big strip of land that connects downtown Chicago with Lake Michigan – and is a front porch for the city.  It houses Buckingham fountain and is where Taste of Chicago and other big crowd events are held.  It now even has the Bean.  In short, it is now and was then a gathering place.

Mayor Daley was convinced that the best way to show off Chicago at the convention was to keep the hippies and yippies and war protesters away from the convention – to contain them with police and National Guard in a corner of the park that was a long way from both the Convention’s headquarters at the Hilton Hotel and from the convention center. 

Well, this turned into a bloody mess.  And it had the exact opposite effect of showing off the city and placing the Democratic Party in a positive light.  Instead, the nation was appalled at images – including the ones I saw in the magazine, but others that I don’t remember, of police tear gassing and beating protesters.  One of the complaints about the film is that it insinuates that the protesters – backed into a corner – aggressed against the police – when, in fact, it was the other way around.

The Chicago 7 (plus one) were charged in Federal Court with having caused the whole ruckus by Richard Nixon’s Attorney General, John Mitchell – yes the John Mitchell who would later figure prominently in the Saturday Massacre that would lead Nixon to resign.  Sorkin’s movie is a portrayal of the events that occurred outside the convention as remembered by the witnesses and the Chicago 7 themselves as the trial unfolds. 

The enacted testimony and memories with the actors portraying the events are interspersed with occasional videos of the events to paint a picture of the power of the state to suppress those who would question it.  There is lots of blame to pass around, but LBJ’s Attorney General Ramsay Clark (delightfully played by Michael Keaton) chose NOT to prosecute the Chicago 7 because his department blamed the Chicago politicians and police for creating the violence.  But the real criminals that Sorkin wants to blame are the unhinged Judge, Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) who ran a court that was, as Abby Hoffman pointed out, a political court, not a criminal one, and the Federal Prosecutors under John Mitchell’s direction who brought the full weight of the government to bear on oppressing those who would have the temerity to object to the goals and objectives of that government.

It is easy to offer a psychoanalytic interpretation of this film – the members of the “Group” called the Chicago 7 serve as the self-preservative id.  They and the young people who are in danger of being drafted and sent to a war against people they have no reason to want to kill object to the super ego’s demands that they do this, and the ego, trying to preserve peace, sides with the super ego to silence the id, but the ever creative id figures out how to get around the ego’s effort to suppress it and ends up asserting itself – not with the ego, but with the more empathic public who recognizes its distress and get it help.

OK, done.  But this does not begin to touch on how truly terrifying this movie and its depiction of the state’s power is.

The Chicago seven were made up of four groups, plus one.  Abby Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) were the head of the Youth International Party – the Yippies.  And, just as he had in Steal This Book, Hoffman was interested in getting kids to prank the adults – he won them over with humor about a not so humorous subject – the war.  He was interested in using youth and energy to take on the establishment.

The second group were the Students for a Democratic Society headed by Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and included Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp).  This group was interested not in making a mockery of the institutions of the government, but of electing individuals who would tilt the levers of power towards justice and equity.  They were interested in empowering the poor and using the government to serve the needs of the populace.

There was also a veteran pacifist and non-violent organizer who was focused on the anti-war effort (and was a Boy Scout leader and father of a Boy Scout aged kid).  Finally there were two protesters who were included by the prosecution because they would allow the jury to let them off, relieving any guilt they might feel about finding the rest to the group guilty.

Oh, and the eighth was Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), co-founder of the Black Panthers, who was in Chicago for four hours to deliver a speech in a different part of town as part of a completely different reaction to the convention.  He objected to being included with the others, was unable to be represented by his council, who was recovering from surgery, and he objected that he was not a member of the group and was not being represented by counsel.  The Judge – the dishonorable Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) had Seale beaten, bound and gagged when he would not stop insisting on his need to be represented and ultimately declared a mistrial for Seale, imprisoning him for contempt.

Before the mistrial, during one of the intense interactions between Seale and Hayden, Seale, the only African American among the Chicago 8/7, points out that the motivations of the rest of the group largely revolve around Oedipal conflicts with father figures (he didn’t use that term, but that was what he was saying), while the African Americans were fighting the people who had lynched their parents.  This grim and (at least on some level) accurate assessment put a chill on the image of the rebellious group that was left to take on the prosecutor and the Judge after Seale’s departure.  It also has the unfortunate side effect of underscoring the performance aspects of the trial as just play – when, in fact, there was very serious work underway. 

The trial drags on for six months.  During this time, Rennie is keeping a daily list of those who are killed in the war.  In the final triumphal scene, these names are read aloud by the presumably responsible Hayden who chooses to break with decorum by one-upping the judge when he has been promised leniency if Hayden will just play along, and pandemonium breaks loose.  This is not when the names were read into the record in the actual trial – and the attempt to do that in the trial was thwarted by Judge Hoffman, who would not permit it.  So this is artistic license – to good dramatic effect – and it is a means of reminding us that these antics – and the very serious business of civil disobedience – is not being done solely because of oedipally based motives, but to protect American and Vietnamese lives from the warmongering of Super Powers.

More centrally, though, the movie reminds us that when those Super Powers get angry about being questioned, they can and will use their full might against those who would question them.  The Justice Department apparently engaged in jury tampering; the Judge would not allow evidence from LBJ’s administration that contradicted the current Justice Department’s view of the matter to read into the record; and it was clear that an unhinged judge (in a not so subtle mirroring of our current unhinged President) can wield tremendous power without immediate remedy (the decision of the court was ultimately overturned – the gross negligence of the judge would have been apparent to anyone reading the record – but there was no way to prevent the ongoing injustices during the trial itself – and the bully in chief seems to have silenced the senate’s ability to rein him in).

There were, as noted, a number of changes in the historical record to make this a better dramatic work.  I think the most inspired may have been the writing of the part for the prosecuting attorney – and casting Joseph Gordon-Levitt, one of the most likeable actors working today, as Richard Schulz.  And Gordon-Levitt plays a version of the prosecutor that is much more insightful, humane, and aware than the real Richard Schulz apparently was.

This is a critical change in the texture of the drama, then.  When Schultz objects that the motives of the prosecution are not on trial in this case, it is clear that they are.  This Schultz did not want to try this case.  He saw no collusion between the members of the group – some had nominal contact before the trial, but each of the subgroups had very different agendas – and they were not working towards the same ends.  They were also, in important ways, inarticulate.  Hayden’s statement that set off some of the worst violence was a statement about letting blood run in the streets.  He neglected to clarify that he meant our blood.  He neglected to let the people he was exhorting know that they were to be martyrs, not murderers, so he was tried – not for what he intended, but for what he said.  Meanwhile Hoffman was defending not what he did, but what he intended.  The prosecution wanted to know what he was thinking as he planned the demonstrations – not what actually occurred.

More importantly, Sorkin's Schultz recognized that he would be giving the demonstrators just what they wanted by trying them – a platform to broadcast their views.  In this, he was anticipating the networks coverage of Trump as a side show when he was running for President – providing him free campaign air time, but also throughout his presidency.  Amplifying his tweets so that the dog whistle qualities of them could be heard by all of us.

Sorkin's Schultz was smart enough to know that he didn’t have a winnable case and that prosecuting it would realize goals exactly opposite to those that the administration wanted to achieve.  But he was ambitious.  This was also a platform for him.  And Mitchell called his manhood into question – he wondered if he was up for the task.  Hubris – pride – is the vehicle that pulls a smart, capable man into a vortex from which he, and his vision of an orderly nation, cannot emerge.  His wish to ingratiate himself with those in power, but also the challenge of being able to out duel the Abby Hoffman’s of the world, pulled him into a place that his better judgement would have saved him from.

In that final, imaginary scene – the one where everyone in the courtroom stood and cheered as the names of US servicemen who had died in Vietnam during the trial were read – was punctuated by Schulz rising to stand with the rest of the courtroom.  When his co-counsel tried to keep him from doing this – Schulz stated that he had to honor the war dead. 

Sorkin’s Schultz is a man of honor and integrity.  A good Dad.  Someone who has sympathy for the causes of the men on trial.  He is here – perhaps ironically – putting into play Trump’s statement that “there are good people on both sides”, but proving that to be the case.  There is honor among those that serve the government.  This is not just a movie about the Hippies and the Yippies and the pacifists and the next generation against the man.  It is a movie about the complicated process of being a self-governing nation.  It is about the importance of each of us keeping track of the values that determine who we, individually and collectively, are.  It is about looking away from the leaders – as if they embody us – and looking at ourselves to determine how best to move forward.

I am writing these words on the day of Donald Trump’s attempt to keep the office of the Presidency.  I am anxious about the fate of the country.  If Trump is elected, there will continue to be many fine people in government service.  He will attempt to root them out.  We need to count on “the deep state” – the men and women of the bureaucracy that is the Federal Government – as well as our elected officials – to preserve our standing, as best we are able.  We will need to know that there are, indeed, good people on both sides. 

Similarly, if Biden is elected, we will need to bear in mind that there are good people on both sides – and not to veer too sharply away from those who have heard good in reasonable policies Trump has been supporting – but also to recognize the dog whistles for what they are and to continue the process of educating ourselves about how to become better versions of ourselves.  We need to listen to the reasonable principles that would guide us – that would allow us to treat each other as family – to be good Samaritans – and overcome our fears, our pride, and whatever else has led us to become ugly versions of ourselves. 

Aaron Sorkin and I belong to the generation of baby boomers who came very late in the curve.  We idealized what the Chicago 7 were doing and how they did it.  They were peace, love, flower people and we believed we could change the world so that everything would be lovey dovey.  This attitude is, I think, reflected in Sorkin's West Wing, where all of the people in the White House care about the people they are governing.  While there is a part of me that is very deeply committed to this ideal, there is also a part of me that realizes that we act on much more petty and short sighted impulses without thinking through the far reaching impact of those actions.  This world is grittier than we would imagine it to be - grittier even than the world depicted in this movie.     

 

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