Inception: A movie about dreams gone awry

Inception is a movie about dreams that tried to accomplish too much.  Unfortunately I think it overreached and was not quite able to deliver on all the threads that it provided.  So why would I ask you to consider this film – why would I write about it?  I think because it is a film that I thought had great promise.  I assume that you are here because you, too, thought that it had great promise – and you may think that it delivered on it.  I will talk a little bit about why I think it failed as a film – about how the narrative focus got lost, and then I will talk about why, despite its being a failed narrative, it is still a compelling movie.  But I will also propose that there is a danger of the allure of the visual promise of film can interfere with our understanding of how dreams – and movies – work.  Dreams and movies involve using images as symbols – but I think the visual richness of this film and the concrete approach to the material drew us into a story that was more concrete than would have been ideal.

Inception is about dreams.  What could be better fodder for a psychoanalyst’s interests?  And, at its heart, it is also about psychotherapy.  But the psychotherapy is a weird, coercive psychotherapy.  The implanting of ideas in a person’s unconscious, through interacting with that person’s dreams, leads them to change their lives.  This is not unlike what takes place in actual psychotherapy.  There, though, the therapist and the patient work together to think about how different concepts might be integrated into the mind, and therefore dreams, in new ways, so that the person can function more healthily.  But the twist is that not only is this idea being implanted without the person’s knowledge, but it is not a health oriented wish, rather it is a diabolical plot to undermine the other person’s functioning.

The movie’s sci-fi premise is that dreams can be directly accessed through a contraption – and maybe with the help of a drug – and that we can join another person’s mind and then substitute our own architecture of a dream for the architecture of the other person’s mind and dreams.  The resulting dreamscapes that are created on the screen are tremendous.  They are rich, complex, intriguing and powerful variants on reality that feel, well, dream like.  We are privy to vivid but also lucid dreams that are being controlled not by the dreamer but by an outside agent.  They are also dreams that are filled with action filled tropes.  This is explained as the host dreamer trying to get rid of the invading dreamer’s ideas.

The action plot of the film feels shopworn.  It is borrowed from Mission Impossible – both the TV series and the films, Ocean’s Eleven, and a thousand other thrillers that feature a good guy – Dom Cobb (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) building a team of specialists to take out the bad guy.  But in this case, the bad guy isn’t so bad at all.  He is the son of an industrialist who has created a virtual monopoly and his father’s rival hires the hero – or coerces him really, to convince the son to destroy his father’s legacy when his father dies so that the competitor can be competitive with the companies.  OK, maybe we can get behind the idea of undoing a monopoly and have an antihero take this down – but we now have too many people’s psyches in play.  Who should we focus on?

The interplay is between the rival industrialist (Saito played by Ken Watanabe) and the industrialist’s son (Robert Michael Fischer played by Cillian Murphy).  We inhabit both of their dreamscapes – or distorted variances of them, following Dom Cobb and his accomplices through them.  Yet neither of them is the person of interest.  We are distracted by them, though.  Their worlds are interesting.  We want to know more – and for a while think we will learn more – about the son – and his struggles and who he is.  We spend the better part of three dreams in his mind – even if the architecture is provided by yet another red herring – Ariadne played by Ellen Page, the architect hired by Dom Cobb to build the spaces.  She is named after the maiden who tended the Minotaur’s labyrinth, she is young and beautiful – and she is the one who gets to know Dom Cobb’s flaw and to help him work to heal it.  One might think this healing would happen through love – and I think it does – but Dom and Ariadne do not become the central love pair in this film.  Ariadne is just another piece of fifth business left on the road side of this complex film.

The central love relationship in this film turns out to be a creepy one.  Dom Cobb had been married to a woman, Mal Cobb (Marion Cotillard), with whom he spent years building a dream scape with endless buildings.  We enter this dreamscape, and there are two qualities of it that are remarkable – the buildings in it are mechanical replications.  It is a massive empty city that is modern and faceless.  It is dead.  At its center is Mal’s home from her childhood.  In it lies the central secret that she is hiding.  Presumably an event – presumably traumatic – from her childhood.  This event, whatever it is, is locked in her inner world, and has kept her from coming to life.  Despite Dom’s love, and despite their having had two children that Dom deeply loves, Mal is drawn inevitably back to the dream world – to the sterile fantasy world and the hidden trauma in it that she has created with Dom. 

When Dom and Mal awakened from their dream world (which is often achieved by dying in the dream) and returned to the “real” world, Mal was not convinced that it was real – and she wanted to return to the dream world they created together.  She did this by committing suicide in the real world – inviting Dom to join her.  When he didn’t, she had constructed things so that it appeared that Dom had killed her.  Dom then had to run from the United States and from his children because he was wanted for Mal’s murder and he could not prove that he hadn’t done it.  Saito is able to convince Dom to work for him by promising to “fix” the legal system so Dom can return home.

Dom ultimately must, with Ariadne’s help, say goodbye to Mal, whom he has been keeping alive in his dream world.  I think that this situation is a difficult psychological problem.  It is hard to say goodbye to any love – but it is especially hard to say goodbye to a love that was never really alive.  I think this is particularly hard to do because the lover (Dom) expects that his love will be able to bring his love (Mal) to life.  When that doesn’t happen, when she dies – especially through suicide – it is harder to give up because the basis of the relationship has always been hope – hope that the other will come around.  And the lover has always been psychologically been dead – so her death – or the ending of the relationship – doesn’t feel that different than the state before – she is still dead – and he still hopes for her life.

This kind of relationship – a relationship in which the lover is in love with someone who is dead – or unable to love him or her back in any meaningful way – is one that feels oddly alive when inside it, but from the outside it is apparent to others that the deadly relationship is one that sucks the life out of the lover.  So I suppose that the failure of the relationship with Ariadne to bloom makes some sense – Dom is dead to anyone – except perhaps to his children, to whom he has no access.

It is ironic, then, that in a film about the inner lives of people – a film where we have such vivid pictures of what occurs in their minds – we end up seeing the lives of the dreamers through other people's eyes - in the case of the relationship between Dom and Mal we see it primarily through the eyes of Ariadne.  She ends up being the true therapist in this movie.  She helps Dom realize that his connection with Mal is not one that is sustaining him, but one that is killing him.  By freeing Dom she is able then to help him be able to free Saito, who in turn comes through on his promise to free Dom from his legal entanglements. 

The film ends with a note of ambiguity.  Has Dom awakened from his dream or is he living in a dream world?  Are his children, with whom he is reunited, alive?  Or was his relationship with Mal the real one?  This is not completely resolved – and I think the question that is being asked is ambiguous enough that it allows us to answer it based on our predilections.  Do we think that the internally enlivening relationship with a dead other is real living?  Or, are we in favor of living with real, living, mutually loving others?  This is a weird dichotomy – but the movie suggests that the children can remain in a kind of suspended animation, apparently neither negatively impacted by our absence – even death – and that they wait patiently for us to return.  Of course, this is a dream.  I think that we have to remain engaged in the real ongoing lives of those around us, especially our children, even when we are caught up in the depleting parts of our lives.

I think this movie fails, at least for me, because I think that the dreamers – the writer/producer/director, the actors, and those who were so successfully involved with crafting this film – may have lost track that the film – and the dreams within it – is/are not real, but rather are symbols of something greater.    The movie seems so real – so immediate and so vivid – and so tied to reality.  This movie fails in kind of the opposite way that the first surrealist movies about dreams failed.  Those movies presented dreams in all their craziness – and they were all but nonsensical.  This movie does the opposite.  It explains what is happening in the dreams – and the plan of the dream is so clear – so concrete – that the complexity of the dream does not quite stay open.  I get that the director was afraid of losing his audience, but in the process he may have not allowed them to engage as much as they might have with this very rich material.  He leaves us with a minor mystery - a nagging one - but one that is dichotomous.  Dom is in a real world or a dreamscape.  Real dreams - and movies that mimic them - leave us with many more unanswered questions - and with hints about how to address them.

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Attachment and Psychoanalysis – a new vision out of a research discussion group.

Psychoanalysis is a profession that involves lots of talking.  There is the talking – and listening – that an analyst does with his or her patients.  There is also the talking that takes place in supervision and in classes and in other interactions where psychoanalysts are talking about what it is that they do.  Then twice a year (or, in some cases, more often), they get together to talk some more at conventions.  One form of that talking at conventions is discussion groups, which are just that, discussions of aspects of being a psychoanalyst.

This year there was a discussion group that I co-led that created a minor epiphany that I think is worth sharing.  The discussion group was on psychoanalytic research and I presented a model of what happens based on listening to recorded psychoanalyses.  This model, which emerged out of a factor analysis of the data that we generated while listening to recorded analyses, is pretty straightforward.  The model suggests that psychoanalysts and their patients, when all is going well, engage in a kind of parallel play.  While the psychoanalyst listen as a psychoanalyst – meaning that he or she listens to and comments on what is happening between themselves and the patient – the patient focuses on talking about the things in their lives that are problematic.  And when this is going on, the patients are able to engage more and more deeply in describing and understanding the worlds that they live in.

After I walked through this model with a little, but not a great deal, more detail than I just did in the last paragraph (I have included a picture of the model here), a member of the discussion group noted that this is what happens in a psychoanalysis, even after we have made the “relational turn.”  What he meant by this is that there has been a huge transition in how we think about psychoanalysis since the time of Freud.  Freud, who was the only bona fide psychoanalyst who never went through his own analysis, emphasized drives and defenses as a means of understanding the human psyche – and he did not include the drive to attach to others in his theorizing.

As we have watched infants, and as we have gone through our own analyses, we have discovered that we do, in fact, work hard to attach ourselves to people who are important to us.  We have also learned that it is not just the insights that we receive from psychoanalytic interpretation that lead to improved functioning, but it is the quality of the relationship with the analyst that is related to improved functioning (this is part of the relational turn).  This could lead us to suppose that a psychoanalyst should become “touchy feely”.  They should be focused on helping the patient/analysand feel comfortable and warm and, perhaps, connected to the analyst. 

What the person looking at the data was saying, though, is that the quality of the relationship is highest not when the analyst is focused on making the patient feel connected to the analyst, but that the patient feels most connected to the analyst when the analyst is doing psychoanalytic work.  When we engage in parallel play – being empathically attuned to the patient in the context of trying to understand him or her better – then the patient feels able to engage in the difficult work of thinking about how it is that they are related to the world in which they live - and can explore the connections here more deeply.  It is not that the patient becomes dependent on the actual relationship with the analyst (though that is certainly something that occurs), but that the patient becomes dependent upon having a place in which they can function autonomously because the analyst is attending to the stuff that normally interferes with their being able to think clearly about the stuff in their minds and in their lives and how those things interact.

Even after the relational turn, it is the case that it is the support of the autonomous functioning of the patient that appears to help the patient feel and be more autonomously competent.  Not a bolt of lightning, but a piece of illumination that I found helpful.  When I mentioned it to a research colleague who was not at the meetings he noted that it is interesting that though we know that psychoanalysis works, we still have a great deal to learn how it works.

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Carol Gilligan becomes a member of the American Psychoanalytic Association

Carol Gilligan, who wrote an essay titled In a Different Voice in 1968, would go on to publish a book with the same name using the title essay as a central element.  In that book, she spoke not with the faux objective passive voice of the social scientist, but with a personal, deeply felt subjective voice that rang in the ears of women and men for decades, leading many people to rethink what it means to be a woman – what it means to be a man, and what it means to be human.  In honor of this and the other work that she has done, the American Psychoanalytic Association made her an honorary member and she, in turn, agreed to deliver the plenary address at the meeting of the association this year.

Gilligan spoke to an enthusiastic roomful of psychoanalysts with, as a female friend of mine sitting next to me noticed with some pride, not a hint of make-up on.  She was, most definitely, herself, including on the high-def screens that allowed us all to have a front row seat in her talk.  And she talked about another person who is very much herself – Greta Thunberg – who has taken the world by storm by being herself – and talking with passion about the world that she cares so deeply about.  Gilligan helped us see that our attraction to Thunberg comes from Thunberg's ability to hold onto the truths that an 8 year old experiences – Thunberg was first exposed to a film about global warming when she was in second grade and this experience precipitated a depressive experience for her.

Unlike her peers who learned to get along to go along as she entered puberty, Thunberg held onto her passionate little girl voice.  Gilligan talked about how Thunberg’s parents started altering their behaviors related to their carbon footprint because they saw that she was not consoled by their empty promises that "everything will work out".  Perhaps in part because of her parents responsiveness, though maybe also because she is on the autistic spectrum, Thunberg’s tenaciously intense ability to speak truth to power, has led her to rally people like no one else has been able to do to the cause of saving the planet.

This latter day version of Gilligan’s own assertion of her voice is one that Gilligan found evidence for in the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden.  But she had to dig for it.  There are two creation stories in Genesis.  One of them is about God creating the heavens and earth and creating humans in his own image – male and female he created them.  Then a second story gets crammed onto the first.  In this story, God creates Adam, but Adam is lonely.  He needs someone who will be an Ezer Kenegdov in the (transliterated) Hebrew.  This term – which is really straightforward – it means someone who will push back against – someone who will assertively question – has been translated by the King James’ version as a “helpmate”.  Well, the tenor of Ezer Kenegdov, according to Gilligan, is a bit more than someone who holds the ladder while the man fixes something – it is a person who asserts her position with her own voice.

Gilligan traced her own ability to articulate her voice back to her childhood.  Her mother took her to a class on how to raise children based on psychoanalytic principles, and the teacher proposed that her mother support Gilligan being able to call attention to things that need attention – that she should support rather than suppress Gilligan’s voice.

Of course, when Gilligan discovered psychoanalysis as an adult, she discovered that it contained all kinds of crazy things about women that were the result of men talking about the minds of women.  Her work became a clarion call for other women to take up the psychoanalytic mantle and shake it – to begin to assert – in a woman’s voice – what a woman’s subjectivity was actually all about.  The standing ovation that her address brought was a testament to her having served as an Ezer Kenegdov to an entire discipline without ever having been a member of it.  What a potent voice. 

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We the People - A Response to the Decision of the Senate to Forego Evidence

The Senate's decision to forego seeking witnesses or evidence in the trial of President Trump appalled The Reluctant Son and me.  We have sent the following letter to the editor of our local newspaper.  I don't expect them to publish it, but I am pleased that we were able to articulate our thoughts - and that we still live in a country where, for now, we can continue to do that.

We The People

Alan Dershowitz

In arguably the most significant moment of his distinguished career, trial law expert Alan Dershowitz stated that “If a President thinks his re-election is in the public interest, anything he does in pursuit of his re-election is legal.” This misreading of the constitution was dangerous not only because it elevated the president above the law, but because it offered an invitation to the Senate to lift itself above the law as well.

The Republican Party, headed by Donald Trump, is threatening those Senators who do not vote against additional testimony, documents and ultimately Trump's removal with withholding support of their re-election efforts (in an eerie echo of Trump’s threat to withhold funds from the Ukraine).  Senators, whose constitutional duty is to act as impartial Jurors in a trial, have chosen to knuckle under to this threat.  They are voting for their own self-interest as if it were the interest of the country.   Despite his admission that the President’s conduct was both illegal and impeachable, Marco Rubio voted against further evidence and will presumably vote against removal, arguing that removal would not be in the best interest of the country.  

We fought a Revolutionary War to get out from under a tyranny that was not answerable to the electorate.  The Senators have urged us to express our beliefs at the ballot box.  We should do that not just with the President, but with the Senators who have skirted their duty and held themselves above the law. 

Rob Portman, who was either duped or actively colluded to cover up the withholding scheme, did not recuse himself, as David Pepper urged him to do in our local paper, from a trial in which his behavior was implicated. Realizing that the calling of witnesses would submit the president’s (as well as their own) actions to further investigation, Portman and the other Senate Republicans decided to admit that wrongdoing had already been proven but that it didn’t merit removal.

Though an adept political move, this action ultimately gives free rein to the office of the presidency, in turn violating the system of checks and balances Portman and his colleagues swore to uphold. 

Mitch McConnell has orchestrated a jury fixing with the president.  

Neither Portman nor McConnell deserve to serve in the body whose job is to “Advise and Dissent” and both should be defeated when they run for re-election.   We must return the government of the country to the people of the country.  

No individual or institution is above the law in the United States of America.  

We The People must become the final jury.




I posted this as a political comment to the paper.  In the context of psychoanalysis, I think we can learn that Alan Dershowitz, like Trump himself, says what he really means - and then, when he is caught at it, he retracts it.  But his audience hears and understands that his retractions are not his true message.  It is like the buly who sucker punches the other kid and then says he didn't mean to and asks for forgiveness.  Well, he did mean to.  I think Dershowitz is telling the Senators, "You, like the President, can do anything you want to do."  And I think they have heard him.  The question is whether we agree with that.  Are we going to be the kids who vicariously glory in the strength of the bully - or are we going to be what one of my colleagues calls the "Moral Rebel", who takes the uncomfortable position that the bully is NOT repentant, he is wrong and needs to be contained.  He is not made of the same stuff as the other kids and shouldn't be allowed to play with them.  At this point, the question of whether we have the ability to function as the Moral Rebel is too close to call. 

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Alias Grace: Did She or Didn’t She? Atwood Keeps Us Guessing.

Alias Grace is a novelized version of a completely fictional attempt to unravel what actually occurred during a factual and later sensationalized murder that took place not far from Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1843.  Margaret Atwood, the author, is better known for another novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, about the future.  What unites these two books is an implicit feminist viewpoint on gendered issues. That is, neither of these books contains polemics, or rants, or arguments about why the way that gender has been used is a problem, instead they argue through showing – and this is a particularly persuasive argument because the reader finds him or herself making the argument him or herself – not being preached to by an author.

In the process of writing about this book, I will likely do some of that preaching, so this will be significantly less convincing of the feminist perspective than the novel.  Also, as a man, I will inevitably note the places where the argument fell flat.  More precisely the spell of having the reader take on the feminist perspective was broken.  For instance, at one point the character who interviews Grace, whom I will introduce in a moment, is staying at a boarding house where the hired help has fled for non-payment, the man who owns the house has fled to drinking and carousing, and the woman who is married to the man who fled is indisposed, so he is left on his own to attend to the basics of living for a brief moment.  The narrator, who at this moment is a woman, notes that he is essentially incapable because he has never had to do various tasks for himself.

This would have been a stronger argument if she were talking about cooking, but she was talking about sweeping floors and carrying a chamber pot out to the outhouse and then washing it out.  I think the larger point is an important one that ties the book together – those who are cared for, as the upper crust and professional class were until modern labor saving devices made that no longer necessary, were much more dependent on their help than they knew.  Heck, that is true today.  I was talking with another faculty member about how clueless we were about the administrative structure necessary to run a University as students and even as junior faculty members.  But my point is that in this moment Atwood’s attempt to get us to see this wears thin – she points out mechanical aspects that the caregivers engage in that we could figure out – professors have been doing their own typing since the advent of quality word processors.  On the other hand, we still haven’t figured out how to recruit, admit, orient, and house the students who so regularly show up in our classrooms at the beginning of every semester like clockwork.

At the moment when she points out that character could not do tasks that were within his means, Atwood is, in my mind, an unreliable narrator.  When we run into an unreliable narrator, the narrative they are weaving cracks – we begin to question it.  We wonder about her motives.  At the moment illustrated above, I become aware of Atwood’s wanting to preach, or, more precisely, to use me as the instrument of her preaching – to use me, the reader, to do her dirty work.  The central protagonist in this novel – Grace – is, like Atwood at that moment, a highly unreliable narrator.

Grace Marks – a domestic employed by Thomas Kinnear – was found guilty of murdering Kinnear.  Another domestic in Kinnear's employ, James McDermott, was also found guilty.  McDermott, however, was hung and Marks was not.  She was imprisoned and also spent some time in an asylum, but was ultimately pardoned, released from prison, and mysteriously ended up in Upstate New York.  Neither McDermott nor Marks were tried for the murder of Nancy Montgomery, who was also employed by Kinnear and was murdered at the same time he was.  She was, in addition to being Kinnear's chief housekeeper, his mistress and she was pregnant with his child.  McDermott and Marks were not tried for Montgomery’s murder once they received the death penalty for Kinnear’s murder as it wasn’t deemed necessary to have multiple death sentences.

With these facts, and the sensationalized and contradictory accounts from the newspapers, Atwood weaves a tale that asks the question of whether Marks was guilty of the murders or not.  The foil for determining this is an invented series of conversations between Marks, who is imprisoned and working for the prison governor as a maid, and a somewhat lost physician who is the son of an industrialist; Simon Jordan.  This is the man I referenced above who was clueless about how to sweep a floor.  His father’s Massachusetts company has failed and he is having to live on less and less money.  He has decided to come up with a means of supporting himself by making a name for himself as a psychiatrist so that he can open a humane asylum and actually cure those who come to him.  Grace is the case that will make him famous if he can get to the heart of the question about her guilt. 

Charcot demonstrates hypnosis.

This long novel, then, is dominated by the pre-psychoanalytic conversation between a naïve, but knowledgeable physician who, like Freud, is aware of the work of Mesmer and, more importantly, the work of Martin Charcot – the physician in Paris that Freud studied under and whose work Freud translated.  Charcot was the first successful treater of hysteria – that vague disorder of women.  Charcot used hypnosis – and Freud started with that, but found it not as helpful as something else he discovered – the talking cure.  A treatment that was invented by another mentor of his, Joseph Breuer and Breuer’s patient, Bertha Pappenheim.  Freud would take this “talking cure” and refine it into psychoanalysis.

Now at this point, you may think that my psychoanalytic interests have completely derailed me and that I am making all of this up.  Well, that may be.  But there is another clue here that might be helpful.  One of the minor but key characters in this novel, the only person who knows both Grace and Simon Jordan in their respective homes, is named Dora.  Now this is not a common name, but it is the pseudonym of one of Freud’s five case studies.  It was a case that Freud was proud of because he used his ability to interpret dreams to “solve” the case, but it was also a case that it took him five years to publish because it was a failed case.  Dora fired Freud.  She gave him two weeks’ notice, the same way that a domestic would give an employer two weeks’ notice.   The Dora in this book is, in fact, a domestic.  She was the domestic who quit working at the house where Simon Jordan was staying, and she also worked as a domestic at the prison governor’s mansion alongside Grace and gave her the inside scoop on what this man Jordan, who was so interested in her, was really like at home.

So, I think we might have an alternate version of the Freud tale.  OK, maybe I’m going over the top, but Freud’s father was a wool merchant – and Simon Jordan’s father’s failed industrial venture was a Massachusetts textile mill owner.  OK, maybe I’m grasping at straws – or threads – but this is either an alternate, failed version of Freud’s method that is on display – or it is a very pointed but very deeply veiled criticism of Freud and how badly he misunderstood women.  And Dora would be the perfect case to use to point out Freud’s ineptitude when it comes to women.

Actually, I think this book is taking on something much bigger than Freud – it is taking on the culture of Canada in the mid to late 1800s – and the deeply misogynistic and highly class based system that repressed not just the Grace’s of this world, but also her partner in crime – or the real criminal – McDermott.  But I think it may well be referencing Freud as an instrument of that culture – something that he certainly was in the Dora case – at the same time that he was in the process of upending that culture by listening to women and reporting what they said.  Jordan Simon listened, but he never had the courage to report what he heard for fear that he would be laughed out of the profession - something Freud had to face head on.

So, let’s get back to the story.  Grace is being interviewed by Simon in the Governor’s mansion.  She is an unreliable narrator because she remembers too much detail – more than anyone could.  She is like Scheherazade, stringing along her listener and staving off her death by doing that.  But she is also unreliable because we can’t always tell what she is telling her listener and what she is simply thinking.  We don’t know what Simon knows versus what we know.  We know a story that is too detailed and too clear and too linear to be an organic narrative.  We also know things – including dreams about Simon – but also memories of “dreams” that took place at Kinnear’s home before the murders – that Grace deliberately withholds from Simon.  We also know that Simon thinks that Grace is withholding things from him, but what he thinks she is withholding is different than what we have access to – and it isn’t clear to us what he thinks she is withholding.  It seems to me that he feels she is withholding the key to understanding what goes on in the minds of women – and that connects up with the idea that Simon may be a stand in for Freud.  As far as we can tell, what we have access to is largely of a piece with what she is telling- except that it hints that she may not be quite as prim as she appears in the tale told to Jordan.

The story of her life that Grace tells is an abysmal one.  She is born in Ireland – but she is a protestant and her grandfather was a minister.  Her mother married a man who drank everything he earned – and her aunt shipped them off to Canada.  Her mother died on the trip over and Mary was left to look after the brood of kids and to try to keep a rein on her father.  They were soon ensconced in a boarding house that might as well have been a chicken coop and she escaped (feeling somewhat guilty about leaving the younger children behind) to work, at the age of 13, as a live- in maid.  Her father agreed to this arrangement because he thought that he would get her wages.  He did collect a part for a while, but she soon became independent of him and lost track of him - she was truly on her own in a new world.

At the house where she landed, she was befriended by Mary Whitney, who also worked there, but Mary was more worldly wise, and Grace learned from her how the world worked for girls/women like her from Mary.  Mary , thought, got herself pregnant by one of the young masters of the house, but then died when her abortion went horribly wrong.  Grace feared that she wasn’t able to let Mary’s spirit escape from the room she died by opening a window in time, just as she had failed to let her mother’s spirit escape from the hold of the ship they were on when her mother died.  Grace moved from this house to other houses, working for one owner after another who tried to seduce and/or rape her, but she kept her virtue intact and she ended up working for Kinnear because she felt befriended by Nancy Montgomery – the housekeeper and, unbeknownst to her at first, lover of Kinnear. 

As we creep more and more slowly towards the murder, we have been treated to a wealth of details about the social lives of the households of the professional class in Canada in the 1840s.  And we have been given a sneaky prism through which to view this.  Grace is a protestant and the granddaughter of a minister.  She is one of us – the class of people who read books.  But she is also, by virtue of her father being a n'er do well, a member of the class that does not read books – the Irish Catholics who were coming from Ireland because of the potato famine and who were seen as not just being members of a different class, but essentially a different race.  We learn just a bit about the recent Canadian troubles – the revolt of the working class against the landed gentry.  McDermott, Grace’s partner in crime – or the bully who did all the killing and then took her as hostage – was a revolutionary.  Grace is branded a revolutionary by association at the trial, but that is not the person through whose eyes we see.  We see the inequalities of this land through the eyes of someone who by all rights could very well be in the gentry class.

We have been seduced by a Scheherazade who looks and feels like one of us.  And so, when she says that she didn’t do it – which her story leads us to in the parts that she tells to an absent Simon Jordan who is off finding objective evidence about what happened – we believe her.  Then when he returns, and she is interviewed in a hypnotic trance by a peddler that she previously knew who is now posing as a physician and hypnotist and she reveals to an audience that includes Simon Jordan that Mary Whitney’s soul traveled into her and performed heinous acts – we believe her.

Grace is guilty – and not guilty – but of what?  In both versions of the story, her own and “Mary Whitney’s”, she did not kill Kinnear; McDermott did that.  In her version of the story, McDermott also killed Nancy, but in Mary’s version, Mary helped McDermott with the final murder.  To be legally minded for a moment, Mary is not guilty of the only crime that she has been tried for.  She may or may not be guilty of the murder of Nancy Montgomery, whose statute of limitations has likely run out – but no matter – she is innocent.  But Simon Jordan does not have a legal mind.  He wants to know if she is guilty – and so do we – but of what?

Mary Whitney’s story fills in blanks in Grace’s story – particularly those moments when Grace doesn’t remember – or dreams of being outside and being touched sexually but chastely by McDermott or maybe Kinnear.  In Mary’s version, when Mary is in control of Grace’s body, she gets Grace to seduce both Kinnear and McDermott – and puts McDermott up to the crime.  Nancy has decided to fire them both, and Mary eggs McDermott on to murder them and take the valuables and they can escape to the States together.  In this version, McDermott must have been confused by the contrast between the lustful and conniving Mary and the chaste Grace who primly objected to whatever advances he would make. 

So, we are asked to choose between two versions of Grace (who takes the alias Mary Whitney when she runs away from the murder with McDermott), and to judge her.  I think that if we judge her guilty, it might be as an accessory in the murder of Nancy - which she can't remember, but not of Kinnear.  If we were to judge her innocent, we could do that by blaming her alter ego or the ghost inside her of instigating the murders and of having a hand in them - or we could determine that the ghost was a ruse and that her version to Simon and then to us is real, and she was innocent. 

But I think that if we do either, we have not gotten something essential about Grace.  Grace – and the name is no accident – moves through her life – at least as she reports it – without being buffeted by the currents around her.  All the sexism, classism, neglect, and abuse that she experiences doesn’t alter her essential goodness.  But it also leaves her as a character who is essentially passive.  Freud – unlike Simon Jordan – does not see the women that he meets with as blameless.  Dora is, according to Freud, passionately desirous of all the men in her life – each of whom, including Freud, uses her to their own ends.  Grace, left to her own devices, and in her own mind, I think like Freud's Dora's view of herself, is innocent – and not, as Freud would have her be, lusting after the men who are forcing themselves on her.

Grace – her essence – is blameless in so far as she really has no interest in the ways of men.  She would, thank you very much, like to lead her own life.  She would like to be free to make a quilt –a quilt pattern adorns each chapter, which is named after that quilt pattern.  She would like to stitch a life of her own making, but she is not free to do that.  I think that Atwood is encouraging us to create a world where Grace could become who it is that she is.  I think.  Perhaps the greatest feat of this book is that Grace – and Atwood – can be guessed at, but not known.  I think that Atwood would have us not be able to assign guilt – or Grace, but instead to be stumped by this mystery.

And that, I think, may help understand the power of this book.  The essence of it is that Grace remains unknown, despite the best efforts of others.  The tragedy, too, is that she remains unknown.  If knowing another is to love them – and loving requires a reciprocal engagement with the other – a process of getting to know each other, perhaps Grace’s strength is to resist being known by those who would force themselves upon her.  In a world where love is, perversely, seen as taking knowledge of another from them – either through raping them or through interviewing them to get at their secret – she avoids the degradation that both would subject her to. 

Simon Jordan is not so lucky.  He is seduced, essentially against his will, by the woman who is boarding him.  He is known by her and gets to know her – but the knowing is false and shopworn.  He desires to know and be known by Grace.  But he does not have the tools, nor do they have the platform, from which to get to know each other.  He ends up feeling isolated and alienated within the context of a non-loving erotic relationship – and this ends up being his fate in the afterward of the book.

The cost for Grace is that she remains unknown.  When she is finally pardoned, she is shipped to Upstate New York to become the mail order bride of the boy from the next farm over from Kinnear’s who had a crush on her, but then betrayed her at her trial.  She forgives him and they marry.  But what gets her husband horny are tales of her mistreatment in prison.  He is in love with having saved her – but still not with her.  She is a morally superior being – consistent with her tale of innocence, but an unknown one – the cost of being the virgin (vs. the whore, in the age old dichotomy).

Women are, in this book, the stronger sex.  They endure more, they survive – Grace is the only one left standing, along with the boy next door – from the Kinnear household, which she notes (including the boy next door) early in the text.  She also remains intact, which Simon Jordan does not.  Guilty or not, she survives – and, in the bleak world depicted in this text, that is an accomplishment.     

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Two Popes - Fictional Movie Narratives can be Useful

The Francis Effect.  It has been huge.  One small piece of it is an uptick in applicants for the priesthood.  The most recent applicant whose psychological testing I completed tied his interest in reaffirming his faith to seeing Pope Francis when he last came to the United States.  Francis is, as they say, a rock star – but a weird kind of rock star.  His fame is based on being self-effacing rather than self-aggrandizing.  He espouses a church for and by the people rather than one that serves the priesthood.  He emulates the Christ that he, as the head of the church, represents.

The film The Two Popes centers on a fictional account of a series of conversations between Pope Benedict XVI (Played by Anthony Hopkins) and the future Pope Francis, Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce).  The conversations did not take place, but the dramatization allows us to take a peak at the shifts that occurred in the church as the result of the resignation of Benedict and the election of Francis.  This view is a personal perspective, abeit an informed personal perspective, from the screenwriter, Anthony McCarten and the director Fernando Meirelles.

This post is also a personal appraisal of that enactment, so you should know a little bit about me and the perspective that I bring to it.  I was raised an Episcopalian and I teach at a Jesuit University.  Before working at a Jesuit University, I started to learn about the Catholic Church from a liberal psychologist friend who is a Benedictine Hermit.  This was before the time of Francis.  My friend, who was no fan of the Jesuits, was concerned about the direction of the church.  He felt that it was in the hands of men who were out of touch with what Catholics were truly concerned about.  A priest in Nicaragua echoed these concerns when Benedict was Pope, saying that the Pope was surrounded by “Crows” who were cackling to him and distracting him from the true needs and mission of the church.

The film opens with the election of Benedict.  This serves the function of immersing us in church protocol.  For Catholics, and those who follow the church, my guess is that this feels comfortable or even comforting as Pope John Paul II, who has died, is mourned and a new Pope is chosen by election of the Cardinals from among their own ranks.  The ritual of the black and white smoke – black if no new pope has been chosen, white when one finally is – is explained by newscasters so that, for those in the audience who are new to the ritual, they can understand it.  Benedict is the “conservative” candidate choice, while Bergoglio is pitted against him, something that some sources see as an invented controversy, but it is one that foreshadows the action.  The action is also foreshadowed by the location of the vote – it takes place, as it always does, in the Sistine Chapel.

Benedict and Bergoglio are both Cardinals at the beginning of the film.  Much has been made of Francis being the first Jesuit Pope, and there is a very good reason a Pope has never been a Jesuit before.  To become a Pope, you have to be a Cardinal, to become a Cardinal, you have to become a Bishop.  To become a bishop, well, you have to nominated.  When Ignatius Loyola started the Jesuits, he recruited very smart and capable men to serve in his order, an order that he dedicated to education.  The Church, badly in need of the reformation that Loyola and others were putting in place – in part in response to the protestant movement started by Luther - had many priests who were marginally competent.  The Pope saw that Loyola had many good priests in his order and asked Loyola to nominate a few to become Bishops so that the church could get healthier.  Loyola told the Pope he would get back to him about that.

When Loyola did get back to him, he told the Pope that giving him priests to become Bishops would not be in the best interests of the order, and therefore would not be good for the “Greater Glory of God,” or “Magus”, and he refused.  They were Loyola's priests, so the Pope couldn’t override him, but he was furious, and the Jesuits are the only order that have to swear their fealty to the Pope as part of their ordination.  And they are the only order that almost never lets one of their priests become a Bishop.  It is considered bad form within the order to promote oneself – one would only get “promoted” to being a Bishop if the head of the order tapped you – and that tap almost never comes.

After Benedict is installed, we fast forward seven years and Bergoglio is more and more disaffected with the Church and with his role as a Cardinal in it.  He wants to step down and sends letters to the Pope requesting the opportunity to talk about this, but they are never answered.  Frustrated, he books a flight to see Benedict, even though he hasn’t been invited, and then finds out that Benedict does now want to see him.  (The plot, including this bit, from here forward is apparently all constructed, though most of the historical material about their lives referred to in the dialogue between the two turns out to be reasonably factual).

When Bergoglio arrives in Rome, he makes his way to the Pope’s summer castle and makes his case to retire and return to being a parish priest.  As he does this he talks about why being an Archbishop feels more and more out of step with his own experience of what he has been called to do by God.  Benedict refuses to accept his resignation.  Benedict explains that his resignation would be seen as a rebuke of Benedict and all that he stands for.  And we have heard that this is the case.  Bergoglio has a rebuttal, frequently with a scripture quote attached, to every statement that Benedict makes about what the Church is becoming.  We get it that Bergoglio is a malcontent and his leaving would be experienced by many as a moral condemnation of the Pope and of the church as a whole.  But we also resonate with his plain speaking style and the scripture passages that he quotes.

After an afternoon spent in the garden arguing, Benedict retires to eat alone, as he always does.  Bergoglio “joins” him by eating alone as well.  They then get together for social time.  They look for interests they might have in common.  Bergoglio loves soccer, but Benedict has no taste for it.  Finally Benedict entertains Bergoglio by playing the piano.  Benedict catches Bergoglio out by pretending not to know the cultural significance of the Abbey Road studio where he once made a recording.  There is a sense of play and a sense of two men getting to know each other.  Bergoglio brings the letter with him, but Benedict ignores it and refuses to talk about it.  He does encourage Bergoglio, though, to tell him about how he came to the Church, and Bergoglio talks about his love for a woman, Maria, and the fated calling that he heard, and how he joined the Jesuits and warmly describes his relationship with his formation director.

Meanwhile, Benedict is embroiled in a scandal having to do with leaked papers about the papal finances.  His chief minister in charge of finances is arrested.  Benedict is called back to Rome and Bergoglio joins him in his helicopter.  There is more playful play between them and some disapproving glances from Bergoglio about the trappings of wealth and power that go along with being Pope.

On arrival, Benedict asks to meet with Bergoglio in the Sistine Chapel.   This is an incredible place for them to meet.  It is, as we know from the beginning of the film, the place where Popes are elected.  It is also one of the great artworks in history – Michelangelo’s ceiling is a masterpiece.  So much so that it overshadows the great frescoes on the walls by other giants of the renaissance.  And there is a tension between the walls and the ceiling that mirror the tension between Benedict and Bergoglio.

The frescoes on the walls connect the stories of the Old Testament to Jesus, clearly making the case for Jesus as God’s chosen one, the Messiah.  They then go on to show Jesus handing the keys of the kingdom to Peter and from him, the first Pope, to all the Popes that follow.  This is the pictorial proof that the Pope speaks as the leader of the one “Catholic and apostolic church” that was referred to in the Nicene creed that I recited as a child in the Episcopal church.

 The ceiling, though, is a celebration of Human Beings in all of his and her glory as an incarnation of God.  And the first man is made, front and center, in God's image.  The ceiling speaks to the humanity of every one of us – and points out our failings, our weaknesses – the things for which we will be damned – and our triumphs – including the very earthy bodies that are on display.  The ceiling is a celebration of the glory of the diverse individuals we are, each in a powerful reflection of some aspect of the creator.  The ceiling is about the actions of humans, what they have made of themselves – not what they have inherited.

Benedict calls Bergoglio here to this sacred space to tell him a secret.  A secret that Bergoglio must keep.   The secret is that the Pope will step down – not unprecedented – it happened 900 years ago – and he would like Bergoglio to take over for him.  Now this is a grand and, I think, fantasy laden moment.  First of all, Benedict can’t appoint his successor.  We started the movie with the process.  But more importantly, Benedict, before he was Pope, was a man, Ratzinger; a lifelong scholar from Germany, who is so deeply embedded in an authoritarian mindset that this would be a true reformation for him as a person.

The movie proposes that Benedict has, indeed, changed.  Benedict lets Bergoglio know that he is planning to step down and, in a reversal of roles, Bergoglio tells him that he can’t do this.  The Papacy is, he says, bigger than a person.  He says it is Benedict’s job to stay in the Church.  He is mimicking back some of the objections that Benedict was offering him 24 hours earlier.  But Benedict is insistent – and insistent that Bergoglio take on the Papacy himself.

Bergoglio begs off.  He can’t do it.  He was the head of the Jesuits in Argentina during the “Dirty War”, which was a rule by a ruthless military junta in which many people were “disappeared” – they were killed and dropped from airplanes flying high enough over the seas that their remains were destroyed on impact.  One of Bergoglio’s chemistry professors was disappeared, despite his efforts.  More personally damning, he renounced two priests, including his formation director, when they refused to follow his and the junta’s orders to shut down a collective for the poor.  Without the protection of the church, the now ex-priests were tortured.  Bergoglio, meanwhile, to protect the rest of the Jesuits, was seen as colluding with the junta.

When Benedict asks about the outcome of all of this, Bergoglio acknowledges that he has done penance by serving as a parish priest for ten years, and that his formation director has forgiven him and performed mass with him, but acknowledges that the other priest has not and he feels deeply guilty about his actions.  Benedict offers him absolution.

About this time, the tourists come into the chapel.  Benedict and Bergoglio beat a hasty retreat into the sacristy.  There they continue their discussion.  Benedict states that he no longer hears God.  He also notes that he reassigned a known pedophilic priest to new parishes after it was discovered that he was molesting children in one place – inflicting him, in the process, on other children and Bergoglio is horrified. Benedict formally asks Bergoglio to hear his confession.  He starts, but then we don’t hear all of it as his voice fades.  There are, I guess, some things we just shouldn’t hear…

The high point in the film, for me, then occurs.  Bergoglio and Benedict emerge from the sacristy and the gruff and retiring Pope Benedict is immersed in a sea of people, people who adore him and want to take selfies with him.  He embraces this, under the watchful eye of Bergoglio who protects Benedict from his underlings who would whisk him off to his next duties.  We then see the coronation of Bergoglio as Francis, who refuses the Red Papal cape and Shoes as he makes his way to greet the world, saying the carnival is over.  A year later, the two Popes are seen together sharing the joy and agony of watching Germany defeat Argentina in the world cup.

As much as I think this film does not portray the truth of what happened between Benedict and Bergoglio, it does portray what should have happened.  And it portrays a shift in an institution that has seemed hopelessly mired in institutional muck and completely divorced from the congregation it was created to serve.  It portrays a sea change – but I think that institutional inertia is likely to turn that into a bit of a shift rather than an about face.  We will see how long one man’s vision can inform the formation of an institution.

I think the film offers a tremendously charitable view of Benedict.  It portrays him as someone who is aware of his shortcomings – and is able to not only acknowledge them but to embrace someone with a seemingly opposite view – but one that he can see is based on a devout and true vision of the church – one that he, an isolated and very smart boy – was never able to achieve within himself or the church he shepherded, but one that he, too, would like to participate in.  But Benedict did not believe he would change his own spots to be the leader – someone else would have to lead with a vision that he acknowledged to be superior but could not live.

If this is anything like what happened, then Benedict belongs in that rare and small class of people – a class that Dora Maria Tellez in Nicaragua pointed out includes George Washington and Nelson Mandela – people who worked hard to acquire power and then worked equally hard to walk away from it. A very small class of people who are able to see the office as greater than themselves.  Based on this film, Benedict is every bit the leader that Francis is.  Of course, it is also the case that Benedict was embroiled in scandal and needed to get himself and the Church out from under it.  There may have been no other way to do that than to resign.  But in so far as even a part of him realized the opportunity to have a leader like Bergoglio take the reins of the institution is true, that is a testament to a very impressive legacy – one that also includes all of those things that he confessed to and that we couldn’t hear – and those that we could.

This film, then, is a story not just of two Popes, but of two remarkable men.  Men who have worked to achieve power, but also recognize that the purpose of the power is for a greater good – and that the path towards that good is one that can best be trod by following in the footsteps of Christ, the person from whom they have inherited the keys.  Together they are portrayed as uniting the seemingly disparate depictions of the Sistine chapel.  They respect the legacy that they together share enough to have it reflect what it is that they and the congregations they lead can aspire to becoming.  Even given that the path towards this action is certainly less clear than the movie portrays it to be, this vision should give us pause – and hope – that we can, at least for moments, transcend those forces that would prevent us becoming who we might be.

The film is also based, from a psychoanalytic perspective then, on the ability of an ego ideal - a beacon of truth - to keep us oriented.  Though Benedict and Bergoglio have very different visions of the Church, they share a love of God - and of the idealized Son of God.  It is this idealized vision - one that is depicted perhaps most movingly on the front wall of the Sistine Chapel, in the form of Christ separating the sinners from the saints in the Last Judgement, that perhaps brings these men together.  They are, like all of us, fallen.  They have committed not just small sins, but big ones in the process of navigating their lives.  These sins have been shaped by who they are and have shaped who they have become.  And yet, this movie maintains, it is possible for them - and by inference us - to rise above our ourselves - above who it is that we have been - and to radically revision ourselves.  Though the analyst in me thinks that process is more complex and difficult than the one depicted here, there is something miraculous about the power of the ideal to move us.

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