Good Luck to You, Leo Grande: Are sex and love necessary partners?

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Sex work, transactional relationships, sex and love

 

The Reluctant Wife is working out of town frequently these days, and she flew in very late Thursday night.  On Friday, we had nothing planned for the evening, and she suggested streaming “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” which had been flitting across our feeds for a few days.  It meant we could stay in, which I know she values after being out of town as much as she has been (and I don’t mind given the current rate of COVID, especially among the students in my summer class).  My only preparation for the film were what the headlines on the clickbait were screaming – that Emma Thompson has a full nude scene as a 63-year-old woman…

 Emma Thompson is, of course, the ubiquitous actor whose screen presence is endearing in part because of her ability to simultaneously portray vulnerability and pluck.  Her role as the cuckolded wife in the family Christmas favorite Love Actually is but one example of this.  Pluck and vulnerability are on vivid display in this tightly scripted and acted film – though it feels more like a play.  Her character, Susan Robinson, who adopts the nom de boudoir Nancy Stokes, is a two-year widowed woman who hires a sex worker whose nom de boudoir is Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack). 

 The action takes place mostly in three scenes (or acts) in the comfortable but bland hotel room she has secured for their rendezvous, with one scene in the hotel’s coffee shop.

 Really?  A play about sex work?  And the man is the sex worker?  Hmm….  The uncomfortable part of this film, for me, is that the sex work looks very much like psychotherapy.  This film has much more in common with a series about therapy like In Treatment than with a movie about sex work like Boogie Nights.  It is a play about a very repressed woman who sets about claiming her sexuality, something that she has never done before.  And the vehicle for this is an intense, powerful interaction with a gorgeous, young, virile man and, though there are nude scenes, the intimacy is largely psychological and mostly occurs when both actors are clothed.

The Reluctant Wife and I had differing reactions to this film.  Her position was that this film did a nice job disentangling sex work from moral strictures.  It presented sex work as just that, a business arrangement and, as such, it is making the argument that sex work is honest work and should be treated as such.

I agree with this position in principle.  But I question whether sexual interactions can ever be simply transactional.  It is my assumption that sexual interactions involve something above and beyond the mutually shared pleasure – that something is a more deeply felt emotional attachment that occurs as a necessary side effect of sexual interactions.

My wife agrees that this can be the case, and is for us (which validates my experience of the sexual relationship within our marriage), but she does not see this as a necessary component of any sexual interaction.  She believes that consenting adults can have a mutually satisfying and simultaneously circumscribed sexual interaction that is what it is and nothing more.  Friends with benefits – or, more to the point, individuals with benefits that are bought and paid for.

 I think this film explores this question and provides supportive evidence for both of these positions, even though they are mutually contradictory.

The interaction is on Nancy's turf (she has secured the room) and she is the one paying for the service, thus the symbols of power lie with Nancy, not so subtly underscored by Leo’s being dark skinned.  Nancy is the owner, Leo would appear to be the sex slave (as it were) from the way that the relationship is “objectively” articulated.  But Leo’s apparent comfort with the situation, and Nancy’s apparent nervousness seems to more than balance the apparent power differential.

 Leo is smooth.  And gorgeous.  He is comfortable in his own skin – at least when Nancy is in the room.  We see little cracks in his confidence when she absents herself to freshen up in the lavatory and at other moments when she is distracted by, for instance, a call from her daughter.  When not in relationship, when not in contact, Leo is just a shade less comfortable.

Leo, though paid to be a partner, seduces Nancy by drawing her out.  He needs to know more about her so that he can be of service to her, but this also furthers the power imbalance in his direction – he knows more about her and he knows how it is that she needs him.  In part to balance this situation, and to create – I think – an emotionally as well as physically intimate space, Nancy turns the tables and draws Leo out.  This is OK, up to a point.  But Nancy crosses a line.  She works to discover who Leo “really” is, and he sees through this as an effort on Nancy’s part to put him into his place as a broken whore.  And he re-establishes the boundary, firmly.

 I would like to take a second pass at this. 

 Nancy comes into the relationship wanting to explore aspects of her sexuality that she has never experienced.  Sex in her marriage to her husband was perfunctory, quick and efficient, but it was not pleasurable.  Nancy would like to experience pleasure, but she is not sure that she can do this – I think in part because she is not at all certain that she is an attractive woman.

 Leo, in his seduction of Nancy, reassures her that he finds something attractive in each of his clients.  He notes that she is far from his oldest client.  His sexual interest in her, he assures her, will be genuine.  He does not specify that he is attracted to her, but that he will be.  He is certain of that.  He will discover something in her that is attractive. 

Failing to specify what he will find attractive is actually quite useful.  It allows Nancy to imagine what it is that he will find attractive; to think of herself in novel ways.  It also, I think, allows her to think more freely about what she finds attractive about Leo – she can begin to play with fantasy – to imagine, to dip into and out of what is and what might be.  In the thinking of Tom Ogden, Leo is helping Nancy Dream Undreamt Dreams.

Leo’s backstory, which Nancy draws and then forces out of him, does not quite square, in my mind, with the high-quality therapist that he turns out to be.  Maybe I just want to imagine that my job as a trainer of therapists is not in jeopardy.  I do think that much of therapy is “instinctual” and some people have a better knack for it than others.  And there are parts of the Leo character that are quite believable, including that he would learn to be so good at his trade in part because he is so attractive.

I think that attractive people have power.  The world reflects their attractiveness back at them and they feel confidence from knowing that they are attractive, and this confidence, in turn, makes them even more attractive.  This loop is, I think, a powerful one that helps attractive people manage the feelings of self-doubt that dog all of us. 

 Other things can help us manage our feelings of self-doubt as well, of course.  Whatever competences and skills we have are appreciated by those around us and this affords comfort as we manage the residue of various slights, failures of empathy and traumas that have led us to doubt that we are competent and able to fully inhabit ourselves.

Leo’s trauma is significant.  He was disowned by his mother for acting out his sexuality as a teenager and his mother now does not acknowledge that he exists.  I imagine that his sex work is a revolt against her and her disapproval, an affirmation of his value as a sexual creature, and a make shift defense against her critical voice.  Nancy’s crossing of Leo’s boundaries dismantles his makeshift defense and he collapses, momentarily, into a state of brokenness, from which he quickly claws his way back out.  And to make sure that he does not return to it, he imposes a rigid boundary in the relationship.

 So, many are things are at play in this relationship in addition to the apparently simple desire of Nancy to get in touch with herself as a sexual creature.  There are significant power dynamics and there are deeply felt esteem issues, and these are tangled together.  Leo and Nancy deftly untangle them, leading to the conclusion that sex work is both noble and ennobling.  Or it could be…

I wonder whether this movie is a fantasy – or, if you prefer – a think piece.  An examination of what could be and how sex work could be reparative rather than dirty and shameful, not to mention illegal.  Perhaps Leo has learned through the school of hard knocks various tricks of the trade.  He has learned that maintaining good boundaries is essential to doing this work.  He has learned that self-respect and respect of his clients and their integrity is essential to the work.  He has also learned how to manage a relationship with someone else while being authentic, present, and spontaneous in his interactions.

What I am describing in the last paragraph sounds suspiciously like what we teach our graduate students as they prepare for a career in serving the needs of people who have experienced and internalized slights, failures of empathy and traumas.  It helps for our students to explore through their own psychotherapy how they have dealt with their own histories and their own endowments and deficits – and psychoanalysts are required to undergo a personal analysis to engage in this exploration first hand.

I am not saying that the school of hard knocks could not have taught Leo Grande the skills he needs to do the work he does, but I think it would be terribly difficult (and inefficient) to learn these skills through trial and error, and I think it would be helpful to have a community of like-minded workers to support him through difficult periods/ relationships/ episodes.

I also think that this task is easier for Leo Grande than it would be for most sex workers because he is a man.  The social judgement of sexually active men is, of course, positive in a way that it isn’t, to this point in our history, for women.  Even without the Supreme Court’s decision to clarify that women’s bodies are something that men or the state or religion – anyone but women -own, sexual behavior on the part of women is condemned.  So, for the women who are doing this work, the opportunities for training and support (traditionally, at least in movies, provided through brothels and fellow sex workers) are even more essential to the well-being of the workers.

It is also the case, somewhat paradoxically, that we have ample evidence that having sex with a therapist does tremendous damage to our patients. Indeed, this is the third rail of psychological interactions.  Among other things, this movie is asking an inverse question, “Is psychotherapy possible in the context of a transactional sexual relationship?”

But I would like to go back to the opening question: is it possible for us to have transactional sexual relationships?  The somewhat paradoxical answer from this movie appears to be: yes, conditionally.  The paradoxical condition is – we can have transactional sex in the context of a carefully tended and mutually respectful relationship.

When leading man Hugh Grant was caught with a prostitute, he was asked (if memory serves) by Johnny Carson why he made use of prostitutes when so many women would gladly sleep with him.  His reply was interesting.  I think he said, “If I pay them, they will leave in the morning.”  He was clearly indicating that his sexual needs could be bifurcated from his relational needs.  This movie might add a small caveat; that his relational needs might also be met, at least in part, in a transactional sexual relationship – but his position would be that, just because he has sexual needs (and perhaps relational needs), he does not need to enter a long term/committed relationship to meet those needs.

 Nancy gets her needs met in the relationship with Leo in a deeply satisfying way.  She learns that her sexuality really is her own, and she is free to take that with her from this relationship.  We also learn that she has not only repressed herself, but she has oppressed others in her role as a teacher.  She revisits that, and also helps Leo re-own himself as a competent and useful worker.  Would that our therapeutic interactions could more frequently have similar outcomes!      

 

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Homeland Elegies: Grief is the difficult pathway to healing...

 Homeland Elegies, Ayad Akhtar, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, Loss, Foreign Life, Trumpism

Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar

If you are looking for a page turner, keep looking, this book is not it.  But if you are willing to put up with bad writing by a good author in order to understand something essential about American culture and where it is heading and why, and, as a bonus, to understand something essential about the complications of having a Moslem heritage in the U.S., this book, told from the perspective of a very self-revealing (without necessarily being insightful) first generation Pakistani- American, might be just the ticket for you.

This book, not quite a memoir – perhaps a Roman a Clef?  - shares some characteristics with other books told by outsiders from clans that don’t allow for divulging anything to outsiders – Hillbilly Elegy comes immediately to mind, but so does Bill Clinton’s autobiography (I did not write about this – I was not posting when I read this book).  All three books have very intelligent authors; good raconteurs each, who fail to deliver. 

All three figures fail to deliver in a similar way for similar reasons.  Akhtar, J.D. Vance, and Clinton overshare.  They focus on the details of what happened and they tell the story as if they could get it absolutely accurately.  It is as if they don’t want the reader to be thinking and imagining along with them.  When an author is on his game, he doesn’t worry about whether the story is accurate – he or she is more concerned with the experience of the audience and getting the story to make sense in their minds – as they construct it - than caring about getting the facts absolutely straight.  The author is confident that what they are relating is what happened because this is the story that will make sense to the actively involved reader.

These three authors do not have the confidence of knowing that their readers will believe them.  Or perhaps they fear that they readers will believe them – or both.  When you come from a place of discomfort with who it is that you are – for Vance, the Hillbilly ethic strongly supports him as long as he keeps what he has to say inside the family – similarly for Clinton – a Southern child of divorced parents playing at belonging with the rich and powerful – and Akhtar cites the example of Salmon Rushdie and his Satanic Verses as a means helping us empathize with his discomfort in articulating the secrets that he is telling.   

 In contrast, Lisa Halliday, in Asymmetry, also a book, like each of these three, about power differential, is able to comment on the dominant culture without losing her ability to write smoothly, elegantly and powerfully.  But it is a book by a woman writer exposing another writer – a powerful man – to the world.  She is not violating the rules of her feminist/protestant dominant culture community when she uses the power of her writing to empower herself by describing her part in the complicated dance of the relationship with the other author.  Perhaps more to the point, Tara Westover, in Educated, eloquently exposes men and her own highly valued Church of Latter Day Saints  community to scrutiny.  These two women’s membership in the Oprah Openness club, or perhaps just their status as women in a male dominated culture, seems to protect their writing from the clunky flaw of needing to control it.

All five authors, though, share the vantage point of being the outsider to the dominant culture.  And the outsider has a privileged position from which to view the foreign culture.  Like de Tocqueville in his take on America, or Freud’s (or any of a host of other male authors) on the minds of women, these five author’s positions as outsiders provide a unique view of our culture.  Unlike de Tocqueville and Freud, though, each of them is also a member of the culture that they are critiquing.

American exceptionalism has necessarily afforded us significant blind spots.  Any narcissistic position, indeed perhaps any position that allows us to take pride in our accomplishments, has the potential to induce in us the wish to occlude our failings.  All five of these authors bend over backwards to expose their own foibles – and the foibles of their own cultures in pointing out the foibles of those who are the primary focus, and it is interesting that, in this small sample, it is the men who seem most clumsy about doing this.

This book begins with the dislocation of the protagonist.  We are lead through the election of 2016.  It returns, to me at least, like a bad dream.  The absurdity of the idea of Trump as president.  That simply couldn’t happen, could it?  And yet the protagonist’s father imagines that it will – indeed he hopes for it.  And this makes no sense to the protagonist.  How could a foreigner like his father, from a Moslem country, be in favor of a man who directs hate towards men like them?  We begin this book, like the protagonist, and presumably the author, off balance.

Akhtar is perhaps most clumsy in his description of enjoying pleasures that are valued in our culture and forbidden in his own.  He is better at describing his experiences with alcohol, mostly offered by fellow Moslems, than he is at talking about sex.  Here his openness is clumsy in part because it seems that he is feigning comfort with it.  In our culture, I imagine we are embarrassingly straightforward about sex to the Moslem sensibility.  So when he talks about his sexual experiences, as he identifies with the dominant culture, having rejected his birth culture, the experiences are related as if he doesn’t feel any shame – I think because he doesn’t resonate with our own discomfort about it; he doesn’t realize that the public openness about sexuality is at odds with our private, and still strongly held Puritan, Catholic, but also just plain personal feelings about how private and uncomfortable sexuality is.  He doesn’t realize how rare and powerful for us, in our culture, his experience of pure lust and its consummation is for us – his writing suggests, instead, that he is bringing coals to Newcastle - we feels, as he would like to - comfortable with our sexuality.

He is not bringing coals to Newcastle: he has genuine insights to offer.  His analysis of our economic system – he portrays capitalism and its essential corporate configuration of capital – as inconceivable in a Moslem system based on the ethical need to divide assets among a man’s wives and children at his death.  He might be surprised to find Benjamin Franklin was an ally, believing that assets should revert to the state to prevent the kinds of accumulations that led to the ruling classes in Europe.  What Akhtar appreciates, that Franklin did not, is that the capitalistic system, with all of its inherent ills, has also been instrumental in the ascendancy of the Christian wealth and technology over Moslem, and this is both a source of pride (in his identification with the U.S.) and shame (to his Moslem shape).

Perhaps it is the protagonist’s ambivalence about his adoptive homeland – embodied in the conflict between his mother, who is openly disdainful of it, and his father who is not only enamored of it in general – but particularly of Trump and the Trumpian version of it.  Through his mother, he is able to get in touch with his pride in the fall of the towers on 9/11.  It took me at least a year to appreciate the elegance of the attack; before then, the closeness, shock, and terror of it was too visceral to be able to get the distance to appreciate it.  For Akhtar, too.  His description of the discovery of the cross that he wore in the days following 9/11 to avoid New Yorker's racist response to him is poignant, as is the bravery it took to give voice to his mother’s pride in his play, but all of that is portrayed as clumsily as I am portraying it here…

Part of the difficulty of integrating his mother’s and father’s positions is Akhtar’s ambivalence towards his father.  I would call the following a spoiler alert, but because there is not a consistent narrative here, it feels more like putting a random pair of jigsaw puzzle pieces together than spoiling a narrative arc.  His father has a secret affair, and Akhtar has an unknown half-sister, with whom he himself almost has an affair before seeing the picture of his father in her home.  Somehow it doesn’t seem shocking that Akhtar’s deeply moral father would have an affair with a woman who is native to the country he loves – nor that he would become enamored of Trump based on a brief professional encounter in which he experiences Trump as someone who is not the terrible person others accuse him of being.

I am realizing that as I write this, the narrative that is based on the life of the protagonist in the novel does not organize the novel’s material in a way that we might have hope for.  The character at the center of it is torn in ways that are metabolized neither by him nor by his alter ego, the author.  This effect is not necessarily problematic; in the same way that September 11^th viscerally communicated something about the feelings of many members of the Islamic world towards the U.S., Akhtar’s unintegrated understandings of his clashing cultural identifications sits undigested in the reader’s gut, poking at us, not yet organized enough to direct us, but uncomfortable enough for us to wonder if it is possible to reconcile these competing aspects of what becomes our shared concern.  We can no more discard aspects of our increasingly shared competing identities than we can voluntarily lop off a limb.  Despite failing to bring us smoothly into his world, he has deposited it, and all the messy aspects that are part of it, in our laps.  He says to us, in effect, “Here, this is what I’ve got.  You deal with it.”

Part of the riddle of this author’s clumsiness may reside in his method.  He is, first and foremost, a playwright.  His method is to live his life, and then to record it.  He spends two hours or more each day reconstructing what occurred during the day by writing about it.  He is trying to get it right.  And his ear is tuned to the things that a playwright’s ear should be tuned to.  He is listening to the rhythms of the dialogue.  He is trying to get how we present ourselves to each other.  He works primarily from the outside - the novel is a form that is intended to allow the writer to work from the inside.

At the same time, he has a muse – a writing teacher he refers to at the beginning and end of the book.  She is a lesbian – and I think her sexuality is an important part of the meaning of her identity for him.  She tells him to record and work to understand his dreams.  And she has a description of the unconscious, based on the OED, which feels liberating and real.  She points out that the OED catalogues over 290,000 words, but most of us have a working knowledge of only 20,000 words.  “The unconscious, she suggested, was like the mass of words you didn’t [know].  Those unknown words and meanings – rhizomes of sound, radicles of signification - were like a body of forgotten roots still drawing sustenance from the dead matter of the lost languages buried in the living one we heard and spoke and wrote (p. 104).”  I think, when he is working from within, he hears the overtones, but doesn't quite know what to do with them - he passes them on to us, hoping we will be able to make sense of them.

This work is an elegy – a poem of grief.  It is also presented as a piece of music, with a finishing coda.  Like a symphony, it evokes powerful feelings, and like a play or a poem, it also evokes thoughts.  If I play with the masculine voice of the author and contrast it with the feminine voices that are able to articulate loss seamlessly, perhaps men often realize later in their development that the world they are confronted with is not the one they had imagined it would be.  They are unprepared to integrate the foreignness into their experience because it is new.  Our dislocation is unexpected rather than part and parcel of our identity as foreigners in our own land.

The grief in this novel is real.  The losses are real.  The protagonist loses his mother.  His father is now trapped back in his homeland, Pakistan, and the protagonist can no longer safely travel there as he is labeled an enemy of the state.  But this is an elegy of a greater loss, one that we can, if we are strong enough, uncomfortably resonate with, especially if we are men.  It is the elegy of living in a homeland that is not our own, a place that has become unfamiliar.  Perhaps whether we are fans of Trump, and see him as a path to recovering what we had, or we are opposed to that vision, we can recognize that we are all feeling broken.  Could an opera that would express our shared grief unite us in a common purpose?  Can we, especially we, as men, withstand the knowledge that we, too, are destined to live in a foreign world?

Similar themes are evident in the current film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.

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Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

 

Movie Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, psychoanalysis, psychology, family therapy.

On a recent road trip, I heard a New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Stephanie Hsu, one of the stars of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.  She commented that she watched the premiere with her mother and, at the end of the film, she turned to her mother to see if she was OK with it.  She was afraid that her mother might not get it, for reasons I will try to make clear soon, but her Mother's experience was one of gratitude.  "You got it," she said, indicating that the film captures something essential about the experience of raising adolescent kids in this country as an Asian immigrant.

Based on the heartfelt endorsement of Hsu's mother, I recommended it to one of my patients struggling with similar issues without my having seen it first.  My patient dutifully watched it and thought it would be something good to talk about with her family, but, she said, she didn’t understand the multiverse aspect of the film and wondered if I would watch it so that we could talk about that part.  I was happy to do that, and the reluctant wife was happy to go along to make it into a date instead of an assignment.  Since it is not streaming this is the first movie we have seen in a theater in almost three years!

Wow.  I should preview movies before recommending them to patients.  This film has some rough edges and rough spots. The construction of the film appears to suggest that the filmmakers are trying to appeal to a young audience – so I might cringe at recommending a movie with graphic butt plug humor to an older, immigrant patient.  On the other hand, the central message of the film – essentially that love conquers all – might cause me to cringe at the idea of recommending it to a younger/adolescent audience.  The fact that it is such a good film in part because of the cheesy special effects, not in spite of them, and because of the somewhat cloying and heavy handed message, not in spite of it, will lead me to continue to recommend it, but there will be appropriate warnings depending on the client.  Appropriate warnings that I wasn't able to offer this client.  My guess is that she wants to talk about more than the multiverse aspect, but that is an important component of the film...

So, the multiverse…  This film has, as a central element the idea that there are infinite universes and a new universe is created each time that we make a decision.  If we turn left, there are a set of consequences that follow and if we turn right, same thing, and we live in each of these multiverses. 

The multiverse is pretty standard science fiction fare, I think, and it is an intriguing psychological model.  All those close calls we’ve had in our lives?  Somewhere there is a universe where the bad alternative happens and we are maimed or dead in that universe, but in this universe, of course, we are still living.  How else to explain the incredible luck and fortune that lands us in the particular place where we are now?  And if we aren’t so lucky?  Well, in some alternate place we are.  Either way there is solace, but also a way of making meaning of this particular life and how we have lived it.

The way that this idea gets applied in this film is that the fulcrum of history – or the future – is being determined by the lives of Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a woman who left her family in China when her lover Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan) asks her to marry him and move to the United States.  They did this and they opened a laundry and had a child, Joy (Stephanie Hsu - the woman in the interview) who is now in her early twenties and a lesbian.  The action revolves around a special day in the life of Wangs, the day when they throw a party to celebrate their business and marriage to impress Evelyn’s estranged father, Gong Gong (James Hong).

Evelyn is a tiger Mom, berating her husband, running her business, cooking for her father, keeping track of which of her customers is putting shoes in the washing machines (which is, of course, against the rules), and tracking her daughter – giving no one the time of day because she is too busy and too stressed to manage all that is going on around her – and what is going on around her is that everything is falling apart.  Her daughter is not living up to her standards and her daughter’s homosexuality is something that she is struggling with and hides from her father.  Oh, and her husband is filing for divorce, the papers are written up but she hasn't seen them yet and doesn't know they are coming.

The absurd but essential plot idea is that the fate of the universe rests in the hands of this woman who means nothing to no one – except perhaps to her daughter, who experiences her as a repressive and unhelpful mother.  It turns out that alpha Waymond – the Waymond from the alphaverse, the place where people first learned to move between the multiverses, has been searching for the right Evelyn among all of the Evelyns that exist – he has been searching for the Evelyn that has the power to prevent the most terrible thing from happening – that the entire universe of multiverses will be pulled into the equivalent of a black hole, but much worse because, in addition to a gravitational pull, this black hole, shaped like a bagel, has a toxic emotional pull.  Who would create such a thing? 

Joy from the alphaverse – where her tiger mom, alphaverse Evelyn, directed her to do so much jumping between multiverses so that they could accumulate power – got so tired of being used by her mother and so fractured by the multiverse jumping that she became the evil Jobu Topaki and built the Black Hole Bagel.  None of the other Evelyns that Waymond has found had the power to stop Jobu Topaki because, Waymond surmises, all of them were more successful that this most pathetic of all Evelyns.  Because this Evelyn is the product of the worst possible decision at every turn, she is the one who is most closely connected to all of the Evelyns in all of the Mulitverses.  This, in turn, is critical because when we jump between multiverses, we jump into other versions of our selves – and all that we can bring back are the skills that our selves have gained in the alternate universe.

God, I hope I haven’t lost you.  If you are still hanging in there, this Evelyn, the one we get to know so well in the first “act” of this movie, “Everywhere”, is perfect for the job because she is the least competent and gifted of all the Evelyns in the multiverse.  What a great premise for a movie!  I am a superhero – I have the most superpowers of any superhero – because I am the weakest of all possible version of – myself.  My superpower is that I can tap into what I woulda shoulda coulda been…  Oh, if only.  Imagine what I could have been!  And Evelyn gets to do that right before our eyes… 

The cute part of this movie is that this doesn’t mean that we move into a multiverse that is filled with fantastic and fabulous alternative versions of Evelyn and her family, but recognizable ones.  Some are absurd (the universe where everyone’s fingers are hot dogs is farcically funny), but the ultimate fight scene in the film that takes place in the alphaverse in a generic suburban mall!  Even the most talented and successful versions of Evelyn end up in gorgeous, but still dingy places.  Even the best versions of ourselves live in places very much like the one we actually live in.  And even the best versions of Evelyn have the same central problems in everyday living – and the most important one, of course, is the problem of how to deal with an unruly teenager who is marching to beat of a very different cultural drum.

The brilliance of this campy, ridiculous film is that it presents alternate universes that are believable neighbors of the one we live in.  And, the other brilliant part of it is that those versions of ourselves, which are very different, are also recognizable, at core, as versions of who we are.  Drab Evelyn is still visible in glamorous Evelyn.  Waymond’s essentially good character is consistent in the more competent versions of himself, and Joy’s befuddled objections to the old ways of her ancestors are an apparent factor in the evilness that is Jobu Topaki.

Parenthetically, this becomes a really fun acting opportunity for these very gifted thespians.  Further, it is an opportunity to express the range of characters possible for a marginalized group that has been stereotyped as monocharacterological.  We discover the character ranges within each of the actors, but also within the frequently sequestered cultural niches that are inhabited by first generation Asian immigrants who can be dismissed, like all minorities, as being essentially alike, not because they are, but because our disinterest in them makes them so.

Ultimately I think this film, in its absurdity, paints a potentially spot on picture of the generational conflicts that I am seeing in my consulting room.  Harried, anxious, hard working parents are terrified when the children that they have chosen to raise in this country because of the opportunities that it will afford those children freak out when the children take advantage of those opportunities.  The children, misperceiving this as an attempt to control them, turn away from the parents, creating the unfathomable pain within the parents.  When the parents are able to weather this tremendously difficult period; when they are able to remain steadfastly committed to their children while being bewildered by them but respecting the boundaries the children erect, can frequently greet them as those children emerge from the process of individuating themselves in mutually beneficial ways.  The depth of the divide can, I have seen, ultimately forge tremendously powerful bonds.

Of course this is true not just of immigrant parents but of all parents who are navigating the complex waters of the individuation of their children.  Our youth oriented culture supports the branching out of children – it supports their expressing in various ways their uniqueness.  This is part of what makes our culture attractive across the world.  But it also creates a difficult position for the older generation.   We have to trust that the essential values that we have inculcated will withstand the powerful cultural currents that will sweep our children in unexpected directions.  As we watch them tumble and turn through that maelstrom, staying connected to, interested in, and loving of the people who can seem to be, at times, alien creatures, is a challenge.

It occurs to me that recommending this film – a film that relies so garishly on the worst of our American movie tropes (think Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure meets Walt Disney’s sappiest happy ending with just a dash of R-rated Beavis and Butthead) – to immigrant parents may, inadvertently, be a good test of whether immigrant parents – or just plain parents of teenagers – have what it takes to weather the storms of children who individuate.  Can they enjoy the humor in it?  Can they recognize how their superpower is their lack of power?

On the other side, can adolescent children stomach the saccharine desires of their parents to connect with them while recognizing the essential need to also have those parents recognize their independence?  Can they learn from this film (and their lived experience) to respectfully stand up for what they believe in and trust that their parents, when given enough information, can join them in celebrating who it is that they are and who it is that they coming to be?

Of course, watching it myself (and living through my own version of it) will, I hope, improve my ability to be a vicarious passenger in my patients’ voyages towards not just survival, but the expression of our most basic desire – to love those we care about most.  Perhaps this is the absurd element at the heart of this movie – that of all the gin joints in all the world, the only one that matters is the one that we are living in – and if that gin joint disintegrates, the universe disintegrates with it, so we’d best invest all that we have in maintaining it.

 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), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment. 

COVID Chronicles XXVII. Post-Covid (We can only hope) Moral and Morale Fallout.

 

COVID, Moral violence, Great Resignation, After Effects

I started writing these chronicles because of an NPR segment that noted that there was very little written about the 1916-1917 Flu epidemic that killed more people than the First World War.  The authors speculated that people were morally ashamed of their behavior during the epidemic.  They might have been ashamed of failing to help their neighbors who had fallen ill for fear that they would contract the disease.  I wanted to write about the experience of COVID to chronicle what occurred from one vantage point during a pandemic and to record that as the pandemic unfolded.

Despite having intentionally documented my experience of the pandemic, my memory of these times is spotty.  Time has taken on a fluid quality.  I have been called for jury duty this week – but don’t have to accept it if I have sat on a jury within the past two years.  It feels very recent that I was called for duty, so I thought I might not have to serve this week, but then I realized it couldn’t have been in the past two years because COVID protocols were not in place when I served.  While time has always been a little slippery for me, in this case it is as if the intervening two years didn’t happen, and what happened before is almost continuous with what is going on now.

As I speculated about the way time has become fluid, I began to wonder about whether COVID and the attendant isolation and uncertainty has led to massive regression among both the students and the faculty at my University.  This regression is similar to that of a psychoanalysis (or, in some cases, a marriage).  In a psychoanalysis, there is an intentional regression.  The analyst is both present – meeting four times a week – but also not present in certain ways, creating space for the analysand to immerse him or herself in their own thoughts and following them to wherever they might lead.  This, in turn, allows the analysand to feel more and more like earlier versions of themselves and as aspects of themselves re-emerge that can be examined (analyzed), the analysand can reconsider how to integrate those aspects of themselves into their current functioning.

During the pandemic, in an oddly similar kind of interpersonal isolation, regression occurred.  Our students came to class – at least they turned on their computers and, especially on the undergraduate level, they then frequently turned off their microphones and their cameras and listened and watched – or wandered off – frequently when I called on a student they simply wouldn’t respond.  The students also didn’t interact with each other before and during class the ways that they usually did when we were in person.  One of the characteristics that facilitates and is fueled by a regression is that our defenses become more and more relaxed.  Stuff bubbles up out of us – and we are more vulnerable to things around us, e.g. the influence of the analyst.  So it is important for analysts to be cautious as they work with patients in this vulnerable state.

In a Zoom meeting with faculty members from across campus to discuss the current bad morale on campus, we agree that the proximal cause is COVID.  But the distal seem to be related to a longstanding malaise that was simply brought to a headd by COVID.  In the meeting, an article was referenced that talks about moral violence as a lynch pin of morale issues.  This article was recommended by a faculty member and it suggests that when we feel complicit in morally compromising actions, we experience trauma – though I would add that this creates internal conflict and turmoil.

Often we think of things that are traumatic as things that happen to us, but we are also traumatized by what we do.  An extreme example is the experience of killing another human – something our veterans have often experience as traumatic and that is often as much or more the focus of treating PTSD as the experience of being powerless in battle.  Sometimes we fear what is done to us, but often we fear what we are capable of doing.

During the pandemic, when we were in this imagined state of regression and our defenses were relaxed, we were confronted by our institutional and cultural complicity in subjugation of other humans (George Floyd) and our complicity in the degradation of the planet (Climate Change).  Just as things are returning to “normal” we were reminded that we are warlike creatures who are capable of more immediate destruction (Ukraine).

At the University, I was first confronted with my moral complicity in institutional subjugation when I was hired and realized that scholarships are referred to internally as discounts.  They are then awarded to students who will improve our standing as an institution and other, less well prepared students pay more for a similar education but profit from the institutional prestige afforded by being in the classroom with the better prepared “discount” students when they graduate.  This initial complicity has been followed by being privy and complicit– both by virtue of serving in quasi administrative roles (e.g. Department Chair), also as a psychological consultant called in to various messes on campus over the years- and in various other actions on campus.

To be clear – being a faculty member is the best gig imaginable.  The admissions office lines up a cadre of students who arrive eager to engage with me about the things that I am most passionate about.  Could you ask for a better job?  Well, OK, if I didn’t have to do grading – if I didn’t have to teach the classes about which my passion is less intense – if I didn’t have to run the tenure and promotion gauntlets, but come on – I have academic freedom!  I have been able to research what interests me, to pursue analytic training, to teach others how to do psychoanalytic therapy and administer the Rorschach, and I have engaged with undergraduates about how the mind works – this is great stuff.

But I have also been witness to and infected by institutional pathologies.  Anxieties about survival.  Decisions that are expedient but morally questionable.  The Great Resignation is a sign of discontent on the part of the populace.  We have experienced our own version of that not just in my department, but I have experienced it in my soul, including by choosing to go back into the classroom to teach before it was safe to do that and by teaching in a split zoom room even though I knew that teaching was going to be largely ineffective.  And I think the morally questionable decisions are a significant aspect of that sense of resignation.

I remember the Dean telling me after a particular battle I lost as chair not to take it personally and that you win some and you lose some.  I understand this metaphor as it applies to sports.  There is a better team – or better player – on any given day.  He did not understand that I was seeing the battle not as something that was good for me if I won and bad if I lost, but something that involved right versus wrong.  The faculty in my department, and the students in their classes were going to suffer as a result of the decision.  I had failed to make this clear – otherwise why would the administration have made the decision that they did?  Objectively I don’t know that this was the case, but subjectively it certainly felt that it was.

How do we live in a complex, interdependent society where our membership makes us complicit in activities that we find morally repugnant?  What obligation does that put us under?  And what strain?  How can we manage to not know what we need to not know so that we can avoid paralysis that would prevent us from working on that which we can contribute to?  How can we, collectively and individually, work on restructuring the social order so that it works to our collective benefit?  We need to manage our individual anxiety in order to do that – we need to rely on a belief that we are working collectively towards the greater good.  We need, in a word, to have faith.  But we also, and here I hate to quote Ronald Reagan of all people, but we need to trust but verify that things are being attended to.

I think that people may have “forgotten” what occurred during the flu pandemic for many reasons.  I think just being isolated and taken out of the normal routine creates a kind of separate reality – and this reality is easily lost as the new normal moves back in.  We say, in effect, "It was just a blip – it wasn’t real".  But I also think that we may have been confronted, in both pandemics, with aspects of ourselves and decisions that we made that we would just as soon forget – to let the lost years be, from one end to the other, a forgotten couple of years.  Freud talked about amnesia for our earliest years that was based on our being uncomfortable with remembering that we are mammals with what are currently repugnant strivings.  In fact, infantile amnesia is more complicated than that, but we might apply his logic to our experience of the pandemic – and to our experience of other morally repugnant parts of our lives (our fear of how fragile we are), as things that are better forgotten.

 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), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment. 

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.

Elvis, Graceland, and Whiteness

 For spring vacation this year, I convinced the reluctant wife to go on a trip.  One of the weird effects of COVID is that we have not been taking vacation time.  Ever since I was a kid, vacation has meant going on a trip.  My dad only ever had two weeks of vacation a year and we spent most of that time driving to some new part of the country to explore either the cultural opportunities or the sites.  I have continued this tradition with my family, but when COVID made travel suddenly dangerous, we quit vacationing – a staycation just didn’t occur to us.  So when I realized how long it had been since taking a break, and how COVID and otherwise exhausted we were feeling, and still being leery of plane travel, we looked at destinations we could drive to that we hadn’t recently visited.  We decided on Memphis – a place where I once spent a day visiting Graceland, but a place the reluctant wife had never been.  So we booked a hotel and took off.

No first trip to Memphis would be complete without going to Graceland.  The reluctant wife was skeptical, but I convinced her that it was a slice of Americana that is not to be missed.  It is an internationally known destination and millions have visited the King’s home.  I convinced her to put it on the itinerary and we booked tickets for first thing in the morning on our second day there, hoping to beat the crowds that had teemed the last time I was here some 25 years ago.  Would Graceland be different the second time around?

It turned out, in building the whole itinerary that Memphis has more to offer than just Graceland.  Who knew?  The first day we visited the National Civil Right Museum at the Loraine Motel.  We had walked across the river to Arkansas and back in the brisk morning air to begin exploring the city and to stretch our legs.  When we came upon the Loraine hotel I was unprepared for the experience of seeing the balcony on which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot.  The iconic photograph of the men pointing to the place where the shot came from was etched in mind and seeing it in living color was profoundly moving.

The museum carved into the Loraine Motel was created in a partnership with the Smithsonian, and it is a recounting of the African American experience, beginning with the middle passage – the brutal trip from Africa to the Americas for slaves - proceeded through the Civil War, reconstruction, the Jim Crow era and the long (and continuing) battle – first for human rights and then for civil rights.  We have all been continuing to become aware of this long arc, especially in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.  I teach about the doll study that was critical in the Brown vs. Board of Education School desegregation case, but it was useful to realize that this case was the culmination of 20 years of legal work to get a case before the Supreme Court.  It turns out that, before the current court, reversing a decision was a big deal.  Similarly, there were details of the Freedom Riders’ work that was news to me – despite having read John Lewis’ graphic novel March – and ending the tour in the last room that Martin Luther King occupied brought home the efforts that untold numbers of African Americans have made to achieve some measure of his dream.

When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot, he was in Memphis to help the sanitation workers.  Two of them had recently been killed when the trucks they were loading had crushed them to death along with the garbage.  They were on strike for safer working conditions, better wages, and to be included in the pension system.  They printed picket signs that said, in bold letters, I AM A MAN.  They were largely, or perhaps exclusively African Americans; doing the dirtiest of jobs and getting paid little to do it. 

After King’s death, Memphis, unlike many other cities with large black populations, did not have race riots. Federal mediators were brought in to help bring an end to the strike, and the sanitation workers got a union and better wages and working conditions, but the sign said they are still waiting for a pension system.  While things on the surface went well, Stax records, a recording studio and record label that had promoted Soul music and is now a museum, took a hit.  An apparently seamlessly integrated work place before King’s death, racial issues started to surface there after it and became one of the factors that led to its eventual demise.

So when we arrived at Graceland the next day, and to a vast and largely empty parking lot, we had race on our minds.  I was concerned that Graceland’s target audience had aged out, but the reluctant wife reassured me that he would be of interest generationally in the families that were fans.  The greeter who took our tickets explained that this is always their slow time of year – it begins to pick up with spring break and then summers (when I was here before) are crazy busy.  And that’s not figuring in the COVID slowdown in travel.  Still, we did not need to have made reservations!

Graceland is, of course, the house and grounds that Elvis bought and reshaped to his needs.  To tour Graceland, you enter a museum/theme park that is across Elvis Presley Boulevard from the mansion, watch an introductory film, take the bus over and go through the house, and then come back to wander through various halls filled with memorabilia, cars, planes, and walls of gold and platinum records along with kitschy interactive things to do.

Yes, Elvis is still King and still a person of fascination.  Or is he?  The most striking thing about the tour of the mansion and the surrounding buildings and then the museums associated with Elvis’ career is that they aren’t really about Elvis, the person, but about Elvis the entertainer and about his home – or more precisely, the public areas of his home.  The second floor of the house, where Elvis died, is off limits. 

The first time I was here, I thought they didn’t want us to go upstairs because they didn’t want us staring with macabre fascination at the bathroom where he died.  It was kind of spooky.  But this time, the audio guide informed us that the parts of the house we were seeing were the public parts, and that when Elvis came down the stairs, he was, in effect, onstage, functioning as Elvis the entertainer.  He was always careful to come downstairs dressed for whatever public might be there to see him.

At this moment in the tour, I began to feel for the guy.  He died when I was a senior in High School and he was, by then, a bloated caricature of himself, playing in Vegas and hooked on pills.  He was also only 42 and already an elder statesman in the world of Rock and Roll, a world that was very focused on youth and the “now”.  The tour, in so far as it let us into the world of Elvis the person, emphasized that he came from humble beginnings and had a meteoric rise to stardom.  Mostly, however, the tour focused on the place and on Elvis’ success.

Graceland is a marvel of Americana.  It was originally built on “Grace’s land”, the part of a rich Memphis family’s plot that belonged to Grace.  It is an estate, but it is not palatial.  It probably was, and still appears from the outside, stately.  Inside, it is kitschy.  Stained glass windows featuring roses, Elvis’ favorite flower, surround the front door.  The formal living room, to the right, is extended onto a sunporch with has a grand white grand piano to match the rug and furniture in the living room.  To the left is a formal dining room and, since Elvis died in the 70s, the dining room table and chairs, the sideboard, indeed the furniture throughout the house are from that period -  a low point in the history of both fashion and interior design.  After a detour to the basement to see his entertainment center – with three TVs to catch all three local stations simultaneously – and the pool room with an amazing canopy over the table, the tour of the house ends with the jungle room, a family room with green shag carpeting on the floors, walls and ceilings!

Out back is the business office where Elvis’ father kept track of the checks, bills and correspondence, a racquetball and gym building, swimming pool, a trophy building, filled with memorabilia about the house (last time this was where the gold records were displayed) and Elvis and his parents’ grave, including his mother’s original headstone that included both a cross and a Star of David in honor of her maternal grandmother being Jewish.  But you have to Google Judaism to find this out.  The audio guide is long on telling about the building and short on describing those who lived here.

Closer to home, in Louisville, the Ali museum is about the person, Muhammed Ali, born Cassius Clay.  It describes his life and his character, and it doesn’t, as it were, pull any punches.  It describes both his character strengths, but also his weaknesses.

Graceland, on the other hand, is a shrine.  In so far as Elvis is portrayed, he is portrayed as a fun loving, somewhat impulsive entertainer.  A high school graduate who had a few hit singles before being drafted into the army, he turned out hit after hit, and then B movie after B movie, and we are told little about his ambitions, about his relationship with his agent, or about his relationship with his wife.  (We did skip the area that told the story of growing up as Elvis’ daughter, so maybe there was more biographical material there).

What we were told is that Elvis wondered why he had been singled out to have the talent that he did.  Apparently he read books on spirituality, partly in an attempt to understand how or why God had singled him out.  I remember seeing an interview of Elvis where he described his talent as the ability to communicate feeling in singing.  He felt his true competition in the field was not any of a number of other good looking guys, but Roy Orbison, whose ability to bring out the emotion in a song rivalled his own and whose looks most certainly did not.

I have promised in the title to articulate how Elvis and Graceland epitomize whiteness – this esoteric and difficult concept that is used to describe the dominant culture in America (and globally).  It is a term that is slippery and hard to pin down, in part because it is formed, at least in America, from high and low, north and south, and from a confluence of many national and ethnic rivers.  And yet it is referred to and experienced as if it were a monolithic concept.

The aspects of whiteness that Graceland and Elvis’ portrayal there seem to me to capture are: First and foremost, an emphasis on accomplishment rather than character – on the achievement rather than on how the achievement is attained.  Elvis is portrayed as having a God given talent that he used to become the king of Rock and Roll.  He is rewarded for utilizing this mysterious talent, so he is on stage, performing, acting, making a living – in Elvis’ terms, taking care of business, all the time.  His credo is, “I am what I have done or accomplished, not what I have felt and not how I have achieved what it is that I have achieved”.  This means that there is a certain hollowness to the experience of being a white man. So there is no small irony that Elvis achieves what he does because he is able to communicate what it feels like, I think, to be alive – to be vital, while simultaneously not quite feeling that his own feelings are authentic.  No small feat.

Second, the stuff that makes those feelings legitimate needs to be hidden.  The back story is somehow shameful.  In Elvis’ case, this has to do with – well, what?  We don’t know because we aren’t told what it is, at least not at Graceland.  He is not portrayed as some kind of tragic hero, kept under the thumb of Colonel Tom Parker, his business manager, for instance.  Nor is the relationship with his Mother described in detail – though there are enough hints at it to suggest that there would be a lot of grist for the mill there.  And his marriage (and affairs) – those are off limits except for a very white washed version.  So there is a denial – as if there were something to hide instead of something to understand.  When we project this onto whiteness in general, there is a ton under that surface.  It is as if Graceland is taking its cues from those who would whitewash history and portray our country as having always been color blind.

Third, there is just a whiff of arrogance and disobedience – enough to code signal that the stuff that is not being talked about makes him one of us, but not enough to make him culpable in any way.  I don’t know whether this is characteristic of Whiteness in general, but it certainly is of American Whiteness.  What I mean by this – Elvis the Pelvis – a nickname he is stated to have disliked – clarifies that Elvis is a sex symbol – and a symbol of the US moving out from under the repressive post WWII model of the good and obedient populace wanting to become diligent.  Elvis clarified that we – men and women – want to have fun.  One the many B movie posters included one about a movie where Elvis seduces a nun played by Mary Tyler Moore into a different life.  We are revolutionaries.  We do things that others have not done.  We are ashamed of our southern brothers, but we also admire them for being rebels.  But we are rebels – and Elvis certainly embodied this – in a sneaky way.  We are rebels who carefully protect our public image and pretend to the world and ourselves that we don’t really mean it – while our code signal warns people not to test our resolve. 

   

 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), please try using the service at the top of the page.  I have had difficulty with these and am looking for something better, but these are what I have at this moment.