Total Pageviews

Monday, March 4, 2024

Succession: Why am I obsessed with a show that has no likeable characters?

 Succession, Logan, Kendall, Shiv, Roman Roy, Family Psychology, Psychoanalysis


Succession has been an obsession for the past few weeks.  Four seasons of intense drama – 38 or so episodes in all – each episode an hour or more filled with, as everyone I have talked with about it says; a cast of characters not one of whom is likeable, and yet, like the proverbial car wreck, we can’t turn away from looking at it.  What is the draw?



We watched the penultimate episode last night and I awoke a tad early this morning, as I often do after watching an episode, from a dream about the episode.
  I cannot capture the dream itself, but could capture the feeling of it and I was finally able to articulate, as I lay waiting for it to be time to get out of bed, some of the draw to a show that has been this toxic for me.

The penultimate episode centers around the long delayed funeral for Logan Roy (Brian Cox), the media mogul, king maker, billionaire toxic patriarch of the clan of misfits that would fill his shoes.  In this episode, we finally get the backstory on this man at the center of the drama, and various rage storms, that have filled our screen for many weeks.  The four eulogies, one from his brother, Ewan Roy (James Cromwell), an aborted one from his youngest son, Roman Roy (Kieran Culkin), a stolid one from the oldest son of his second marriage, Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong), and childhood memories from Siobhan “Shiv” Roy (Sarah Snook), the middle child of this group and his only daughter, paint an interesting picture against the background that we have come to know.  (Logan also has an only child - his eldest son from his first marriage, Connor Roy (Alan Ruck), a kind of laughable, delusional son whose wholly apparent ineptitude allows the other children, whose ineptitude is more subtle, to shine in comparison, especially in their own minds.)  It also allows the family members to parade across the screen one final time before the series ending showdown where the successor will be named…

Logan Roy built his empire from scratch (or close to it – Ewan clarifies that after they made the terrifying crossing of the Atlantic in the 2nd World War, in the hold of a ship that lost its power and where the 5 year old Ewan and the 2 and ½ year old Logan, alone on the ship without parents, were told not to make a sound lest the UBoats would blast a hole in the hull; they arrived in the States to stay with an unspecified relative who had some unspecified amount of money), and Logan’s fondest wish (and seemingly greatest fear) was to leave the empire that he had created to his children – while he simultaneously did everything in his power to undermine them, seemingly to ensure that they were unable to take the reins when his rule came to an end, or, perhaps in his conscious mind, to avoid their stealing the kingdom from him before his time was up.

In this reversal of King Lear, Logan hangs onto power too long, and he sees everyone, especially those who most love and care for him, as threats – and because he treats them as competitors who would take away what he has, they become every bit as threatening as he fears they might be, but because he is prepared for that, he can thwart them at every turn and no one is able to trust anyone.  Unfortunately for them, his suspicions and criticisms and brutal attacks have crippled them so that they are not effective threats to him – nor, then, can they be legitimate candidates to run the company in his absence, but none of them can see that, except, ironically, Roman – the initially most unaware character who, across the course of the series, actually grows into an admirable human being. 

In one scene in the second or third season, Logan, who supposedly does not know how to swim, is swimming in Connor’s pool – ironically in New Mexico, one of the driest states in the nation – and we see his back – and it is covered in the scars from what must have been brutal beatings – probably when he was a child.  This hint at childhood trauma, and the ways that he is enacting that trauma on his children including, at one point, hitting Roman hard enough to dislodge a tooth, we can imagine that he is justifying his treatment of them by saying something to himself like, “beatings made me stronger – they need to regularly be beaten in order to have the strength to head this company.”

Logan Roy is, then, like Stalin, or any other despotic ruler of an empire, someone who is paranoid that those around him are as ruthless as he.  And his paranoia, his projection of his own internal world onto those around him, poisons them; turning them into crippled, angry broken versions of himself.  But where he was focused on proving to the world that he is a powerful person who needs to be recognized and dealt with, his children become focused on getting him to recognize that they are a force to be dealt with by him; but since he has all the power, they fail, time after time.

The humane thing to do would be to leave them by the road.  To let them know that they are inadequate, to provide for them, but to leave them, but he is not able to do that.  He is forever stirring them up, appointing a new favorite, drawing attention to what this new one has to offer, apparently because, if he doesn’t keep them interested, who will be interested in him?  Who or what does he legitimately have to offer the world that will result in the world loving him?  Logan Roy is a deeply cynical man who sees through everyone's efforts to curry favor with him - what is it that he is looking for?

And why am I drawn to watch this super slow-motion series of car wrecks?  Why can’t I look away when looking at it makes my own dreams toxic, disturbing my sleep at a time when I am too busy to devote one or even two hours a day to something that is not just disruptive, but unpleasant?  What must this be mirroring in my own life that makes this so enthralling?

I think I am drawn in by a nearly universal thread about fathers and their children that I didn’t get until the Eulogies.  Logan Roy is a despicable man.  He doesn’t like to receive gifts.  He is not motivated by acquiring the tremendous wealth that he has generated, though his children are addicted to the trappings of wealth and he despises them for that.  "You don't know the price of milk," berates them during one of the really crazy and dehumanizing episodes where every member of the family and the executive board is demeaned.  Logan wants power, and no amount of power is enough for him.  He is the personification of the toxic, narcissistic psychopath who is so vilified in our society.  He is the toxic patriarchy writ large, with the ex-wives and mistresses to prove it.

This extended portrayal of the family and the business allows us to see – often in broad daylight – the malicious cruelty that emerges out of his personal cauldron of hate and bile.  Because of the harm and the damage this causes to the psyches of those around him, the psychopath is rightly feared and avoided.  And yet, the psychopaths in our society do not just fill our prisons, but they often turn up, as Logan does, as leaders of our corporations and other entities.  I would also propose that though we have called them a class of people, segregating them, as it were, from ourselves, they are also, to some degree, perhaps, present in each of us.  Haven't we had a moment where we have taken pleasure in causing another pain?  

Those who fit the category of psychopath of become leaders in part due to their single-minded pursuit of goals and objectives.  Famously unhindered by guilt, their path is not impeded by the social concerns that would prevent others from rising.  But this does not explain their charismatic pull – their ability to suck us into caring about them despite ample evidence of their lack of caring for us.  What they care about is the attention that we focus on them – and it is important that we be clear that we are talking, then, about the narcissistic psychopath.

As one such psychopath clarified, it is not that the psychopath does not know the rules, it is that they are not bound by them except as it serves them to observe them.  Rather than simply doing things because they are the right thing to do, as most of us do – we have internalized the rules and the threat of punishment is essentially unnecessary to sustain our inhibitions (though getting a speeding ticket now and then does curb my speeding for a while) - they are consciously choosing to follow the rules or the laws because it is strategic to do so – not because they have to.  If it is advantageous to them not to follow the law and when the risk of doing that is calculated to be low, they will do what is expedient.

So why are we drawn to such people?  First, and most importantly, because they are alive.  Their drives – their desires – their feelings – are present to them.  They don’t defend against them, they manage them, or fail to manage them (Logan’s rages are volcanic), and they are real.  When we are confronted by them, we don’t just deal with them.  We need to think about them, plot against them, and weigh whether confronting them is worth it to us.  Do we really want to invest that much in this interaction?  Are we up for going toe to toe at the drop of a hat?

A friend of mine who was bipolar talked about his experience when he was manic.  He felt so alive, so aware, so awake.  And he particularly felt sexually alive and awake.  And women would respond to this.  They would frequently have sex with him after spending very little time with him.  It was a combination of his losing his inhibitions, feeling more powerfully sexual, and of being able to concentrate all of the energy he was feeling on a single person at this moment that, at least as he reported it, led to a very different sex life than he experienced when not under the influence of mania.  I am suggesting that narcissistic psychopaths have access to similar life juices on a pretty regular basis.

But, while this accounts for our attraction in the flesh – and perhaps to our enthrallment with them as objects of interest, Succession got under my skin for more personal reasons – reasons that I wasn’t aware of until this episode.  In this episode, where the loss of the father was expressed and felt by each of these damaged and largely unaware children, I think it came to me that all fathers have a kind of low level narcissistic psychopathy on a relatively normal basis.  Freud focused his interest in the Oedipal situation on the child’s experience and acted as if it were the child's attraction to the father and the mother that is driver of the whole drama.  I don’t buy that.  So I will tell a slightly different fable:

Fathers, in our industrial society, traditionally left the home to do work “on the children’s behalf”.  They were expected to be selfless providers.  But, of course, they resented this.  Instead of respect at work, they had to compete with others on a consistent basis.  And then, when they got home, they frequently found that their spouse was more interested in the children and what was going on domestically than they were with what was going on in the world of the father.  Now they had to compete with the children for what should have been coming to them.

Heinz Kohut clarified for us that our narcissistic needs are not somehow met and then they disappear was we become capable of working from our full tank of self-esteem and self-confidence.  In fact, he said, we continue to need validation to maintain a sense of competence and worth.  Some of this, under the best of circumstances, gets accorded to us at work – sometimes more than at home, so we often spend more and more time at work, justifying it as somehow being for the good of the family while using it as the replenishment of our tank.

Of course, in a post-industrial world, the need to be validated by the world is compounded as two spouses are returning home to a place that should be a refuge, but is frequently chaotic and where, instead of a caring presence, additional demands are placed on each of them.  We are in the middle of figuring out this shift and, to this point, we have blamed the patriarchy for the ills that are so manifest in Logan, but we will see if, as things evolve, our challenges continue to be gendered or if we find new ways to manage them as the workplace becomes feminized and men influence the domestic sphere.

In any case, I think that the plaintive cries of Logan’s children – Roman’s inability to deliver the speech that he had been practicing with ease all morning when he was confronted with the actuality of his father’s death; Kendall’s putting together what needed to be said – pretending to be the grown-up in the room in the face of the loss of the true adult; and Shiv’s vulnerability as she recalled being a child playing outside their father’s office and his rage at being interrupted by the sounds of their play, somehow brought home to me that part of what drew me to the show is that this is a version – a distorted, larger than life, twisted version – of the family that I grew up in.

We did not have multiple marriages in my family.  We did not have inestimable wealth – quite the contrary.  But we did have a complicated inter-generational family where, I think, there was a tremendous desire to be loved on the part of each of the members – and, at moments, a tragic inability for any of us to see the needs of the others for validation and loving because of the momentary strength of our own needs.  And then, when this is a more or less constant state, it is only in the moment of loss – only when the contact that is so desperately sought is no longer possible - that a new kind of reckoning has the possibility of occurring.

Would that it had been possible for each of these characters to see themselves as a result of the “gift” of the loss of the mirror through which each was seeing a distorted vision of him or herself.  As I have mentioned before, Roman, once freed from this mirror, is able to observe himself and to know that he is incapable of performing the functions of the leader, something that has been painfully obvious to us from the very start of the series.  Roman is a glib, endearing fellow who appeared to be tremendously shallow and petty and his failure to be able to have a mature sexual relationship with a woman predicted his likely business impotence as well.  As the series progressed and it became apparent that he was the most emotionally available of the three children – that his shallowness may have been a cover for evolving emotional depth – it was also clear that sensitivity is not an asset in this family – quite the contrary, it leaves you open to ridicule and, indeed, destruction. 

Shiv is finally able to see, as painful as it is, that Kendall is also not able to fill that role.  It is less clear whether she can see that she is not fit for the role – she has, at moments, seemed so capable to us – and the illusion has been that it is only her gender that has blinded her father to her abilities.  If it is the case that she has been able to protect herself from the toxic burn of the family, performing this role will destroy the parts of her that she has tried to maintain by staying outside the family business to this point, but even a little reflection on the quality of her relationship with her husband Tom reveals that she has been, at least in my mind, deeply polluted by the stench of the family.

Which leaves us with Kendall.  The early money was on him.  But he has always seemed small while his father was large.  And with his father’s disappearance, one might imagine that he would grow into the role, but instead he continues to desperately aspire to it.  His failure to see himself in the absence of the distorting mirror – his inability to recognize that he is not the person that wanted his father to imagine him to be is not a tragic moment.  It is a sad and small moment.  Instead of realizing who and what he could have been – whatever that might be – he will likely always harbor resentment that his legacy was stolen from him.

When I was in college, after a summer working for my father, I wrote him a note explaining that though I understood his wish that I would take over his business at some point in my life, I did not believe that this would be a good fit for me and it would not be good for us if I were to set my sights on that goal.  This was deeply hurtful to him.  I did not know how deeply for years.  He only referenced it once.  And figuring out how to see each other outside of the narrow parameters that we had used proved to be a difficult, indeed a lifelong task.  I believe that, on some level, I regretted not having followed in his footsteps – it would have been a simpler life.  I could have been the mirror he wanted and needed me to be.  But, ironically, if we had worked together for thirty years, we never would have gotten to know each other in the ways that we did by my choosing not to follow his path.  Though I fear Kendell will never know that freedom, I think I was drawn to possibility that there would be some reconciliation - some way out of the mess that only got deeper and deeper the deeper we got into 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), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.

          .

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Appropriate: The disturbance lies not in the players but in our selves...

 Appropriate, Broadway Play, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Race, Racism, Denial




Appropriate, with Sarah Paulson and Elle Fanning, is the hot show in New York this season.  I am in New York for the American Psychoanalytic Convention with the Reluctant Wife.  The Eldest Reluctant Daughter decided to join us for the weekend, so we went to see the show that has people talking – or should.  As we were headed back afterwards, I commented that I thought the Reluctant Wife had done a good job of choosing the show.  This was based on my experience of it having been poignant, well-acted, and, while some of the lines were wooden, the staging was great; it was dramatic, I was pulled in, and it was a good performance.  Also, it was in the Helen Hays Theater – a small house, so though we were ten rows back in the balcony, it felt like we could reach out and touch the actors.

The Reluctant Wife looked skeptical and said that it had left her feeling nauseous.  The Reluctant Daughter chimed in that she was tired of people being entertained by the oppression of African Americans.  Not having had a chance to process the play, still floating on the cloud of the aesthetics of it, I was brought up short.  As we reached our destination and were able to discuss it, and to do a little online sleuthing about the backstory, things came together for us in a way that led me to have a very different take on the evening, and to join them in being deeply disturbed, not just by the play, but perhaps more to the point, by the audience’s reaction to it; the audience’s reaction which mirrored mine, not theirs.

Appropriate announces, by projecting on the curtain ahead of time, the ways in which the title of the play is a pun.  As an adjective, the screen notes, appropriate is describing proper, reasonable behavior.  As a verb, there are a variety of meanings that are related to hostilely taking what doesn’t belong to the person.  I assumed, knowing nothing more than this, that we would see the ways in which whites have appropriated African American culture by, for instance, stealing Rock and Roll and making it into our own very commercial art form.

The play unfolded, though, as a drama about a dysfunctional family.  The three adult children and three grandchildren of various ages are gathering at the Arkansas ancestral plantation of the family patriarch who died six months ago and whose estate will be settled this weekend.  The prodigal son, Franz Lafayette (Michael Esper), who has been out of contact with the family for a decade, sneaks in through an unlocked window with his hippie-dippie girlfriend River (Fanning) and wakes up his sister Antoinette “Tony” (Paulson) and her teenage son, who weren’t supposed to be there yet, and the fun begins.

This play revolves centrally around denial.  Denial is a psychological defense (not just a river in Egypt – bah dum).  In denial we simply refuse to acknowledge something that is unacceptable to us, for whatever reason, despite ample evidence that the thing we don’t want to acknowledge is, in fact, the case.

The children’s denial takes place on two levels.  The first is the denial of the complexities of the past relationships between the siblings.  Each, in their own mind, has done right and the others have wronged them.  The youngest sibling, Franz, with the help of his hippie-dippie girlfriend, has gone into AA and NA and perhaps some shamanic interactions, and has come to the “reunion” with the intention of making amends.  He wants to apologize, but also have his siblings acknowledge their role in the difficulties he has caused with both his substance abuse and also some statutory rape/pedophilia when he was a young adult.

Franz’s apology is batted down by his sister Tony who sees it as an empty ploy to avoid taking responsibility for his actions (again).  Though his older brother Bo (Corey Stoll) seems more reasonable, Bo is also in denial about how much strain Tony has been under both caring for – in her distant and authoritarian way – Franz when Franz (who was then called Frank) was younger and, more recently, caring for their father, again from considerable distance and with little apparent warmth, as the father declined.  All three seem to be in denial about the impact of their mother’s death on them when they were much younger and their father’s subsequent relocation from Washington D.C., where he may have been in line to be a Supreme Court Justice and where they were raised, back to this small town in Arkansas.

The family drama is adequate – indeed takes up much of our bandwidth as we watch – especially Tony’s strident squelching of anything remotely resembling assertion on the part of either of her brothers.  This is mirrored by the Hippie-Dippie girlfriend of Franz that keeps pushing him out into the family arena and by Bo’s wife’s cowing of Bo whenever she is in the room.  So, we are mesmerized by the current – post death of the mother – family drama, so much so that we might well miss the unfolding historical drama that is roiling underneath.

The task that the family is setting about is to get the plantation house and land in order for an estate sale and auction.  The house is in disrepair and is filled with stuff – Franz accuses his father of having been a hoarder as well as manic depressive in the wake of his wife’s death when Franz, as a young adolescent, moved with him to this dreary backwater. 

We see the clutter that litters the stage in the first act.   As the children pitch in to help, the youngest grandchild, all of five or so years old, discovers what appears to be a scrapbook of photographs of lynchings.  Though Franz is accused of having been the owner of the pictures, he believably denies that he was.  But where did they come from, then?  Even more disturbing are jars of what appear to be body parts – ears and fingers etc. – that are soon discovered after that.

The body parts are quickly disposed of (presumably thrown away – there is no sense that these are a human being’s remains and should be treated with anything resembling reverence), but the book circulates though every family member’s fingers – no one can quite seem to bring themselves to throw it away – there is something fascinating about it.  At one point, the adolescent grandson is masturbating and Franz, who walks in on him, mistakenly believes that he is using the lynching pictures as pornography.  The audience knows that he is using homoerotic porn, but Franz does not.

As more and more evidence accretes that their grandfather was not just run of the mill racist and anti-Semitic (both of which are completely denied by Tony but grudgingly acknowledged as possible by Bo and Franz), the fighting continues on the level of the presence or absence of bigotry, and the father’s apparent perverse interest in or participation in violence against African Americans, is ignored.  Even when their google searching clarifies that, post lynching, body parts were often cut off as souvenirs, they can’t seem to put two and two together.

The family’s denial of the depth of their father’s depravity becomes more and more pronounced – but so does the audience’s.  We are laughing along with the family and horrified (not in an “I’ve been there” kind of way) at their infighting, when we might be horrified at what is unfolding.  The mood is jocular.  We are laughing at this over the top, balls to the wall dysfunctional family, not cringely laughing with an uncomfortable sense of recognition of a version of ourselves.   

When Franz, attempting to cleanse the family of its demons, takes the pictures into the algae covered water in the pond out back, his brother and sister are up in arms because they now know that the pictures have great monetary value; selling them was the going to clear the debts that have been incurred by the patriarch and it is apparent that they are interested in the windfall because none of the three of them is fiscally solvent.  We should recoil at their lack of emotional solvency, but somehow we seem to get sucked into the wake of their financial concerns.

Into this fever pitch, the youngest grandchild emerges bearing undeniable evidence of the patriarch’s complicity in heinous fascination and/or violence, and this precipitates violence on stage as the children begin to brawl with each other dragging everyone into a physical version of the chaotic sparring that has been going on throughout the play.

In the aftermath of the fight, it might well have been possible for some kind of reckoning to occur.  But the children agree to part and to pretend that they are dead to each other.  The resolution of the play, such as it is, involves our watching the house be ravaged by vandals, squatters, weather and time and it decays until we welcome the cast back onstage with a standing ovation.

As we were leaving the theater, the Reluctant Wife and Daughter overheard a woman next to them exclaiming, “That play was so funny!”.  And the mood in the almost all white crowd was jubilant – they seemed to feel satisfied (as I had been) by having had the opportunity to see a play that lived up to its hype.

After our discussion, and after learning that the author is an African American playwright (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins) and the director is a woman (Lila Neugebauer), it became clear to me that, in so far as the play worked, it worked on the allegorical level.  We white people, especially those from the south, are so focused on denying our participation in racist positions – or perhaps even more damning, we believe that the racial wrongs are in the past, weren’t that bad, and are best forgotten – that we fail to recognize the roots of our current difficulties and, on some level, I guess, that is laughable.

The quality of this laughter is interesting though.  It is not the laughter of recognition – of there I go again doing stupid things, but the laughter at others – stupid, ignorant, narcissistic others who are too self-involved to recognize what I do – and so I don’t have to be touched by this drama.  It isn’t a drama, it is a comedy – a funny play, not a deeply disturbing and difficult play.  Perhaps, as the President & Artistic Director of the Hayes Theater notes in the Playbill, it will provoke conversation – it did in our family.

But this was in part a critical conversation – critical of the failure of the play to work on the more concrete, even prosaic level of helping to instruct us in how to think about what we had seen.  Instead, we were encouraged to look away.  Or to look at the Plantation as we drive by and to think, “Man, that family wasn’t able to sustain that property without slaves, were they?  What a shame. Serves them right.”  We were not encouraged to look at ourselves (unless my shame at being brought up short by my family is what we were to experience).

The evidence that surfaces of the Patriarch’s misdeeds would, my family thought, have a sobering effect on the people we know – even those who are deeply unsympathetic or blind to the impact of racism – which these characters did not seem to be.  There was no point at which, in the words of the Reluctant Wife, the characters or the audience were “brought up short.”  We were just along for the ride, as the children of the patriarch seemed to be, and we were encouraged to keep our safe distance and to imagine these characters as different from us (including by their being Southern in this play being put on in New York) rather than reflecting the conflicts that we feel about race and racism that has been practiced throughout our country (there are plenty of lynching trees in California).

I have written before about the virtues of white writers, as in The Help, avoiding writing about Black subjectivity.  I have also written about the perils of white writers speaking black thoughts, as in Horse.  A play is an interesting vehicle because we have behavioral windows into the functioning of the characters – we see them moving about the stage – but we also have indirect access to their thoughts – we hear their words, including the words that they speak in private. 

The Patriarch in this play was, based on the evidence, able to have a public persona (if we believe that he was, in fact, being considered to be a Supreme Court level legal mind) that belied deep convictions about race and a fascination with the illegal taking of black lives – and perhaps participating in that.  There is evidence that he had a psychic structure that allowed him to dehumanize African Americans – in whatever way it was that he accomplished this.  And the fascination with and likely participation in the violent suppression of Blacks likely allowed an outlet for expression of deeply felt but likely projected beliefs about Blacks.

There was no evidence, other than in one of the grandchildren (the grandchild who was, ironically, using homoerotic porn – something that likely would have been conflictual within parts of this family system), about casual prejudice on the part of the main characters.  They likely had varying degrees of prejudice, and this likely involved varying means of managing that prejudice using defense mechanisms.  But, unlike the patriarch as I am imagining him, there is no evidence that they would be unambivalent about these feelings.  In other words, these feelings would be deeply conflictual for them.

If the denial would have broken down, which I believe it would have in a family with this composition given all of the evidence, I think there would have been a reckoning: a realization that their father was not who they had assumed him to be.  There would have been an effort to reconcile who they had thought he was with all of this newfound information.  This would not have been pretty – the drama would have been considerable, and different for each of them, but I believe it would have been present.

Depicting their conflicts around the information would have given us models for dealing with our own version of coming to grips with our own inheritances – and our own ambivalence about them.  Denying the characters the ability to wrestle with their conflict – denying that they have conflict about their legacy, about their family tree, the tree(s) on which men were lynched and then their body parts robbed – denies the characters – and the audience, humanity.  Of course, my supposition that the denial of the family would have been punctured by the amount of evidence presented may reflect my own denial of our ability to acknowledge our actions.

The New Yorker’s review of this play suggested that the windows in the house, which are at the back of the set, may have been looking as much at us, judging our reaction to what we saw, as giving us a view of the family graveyard and slave graveyard beyond that.  The play may have been observing us as much as being on view for us to see.  I hope that others who were as entertained as I was had families who helped them see the tragedy that lies behind, but somehow was not depicted.


  

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

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

          .

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

The Big Sleep: Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade embody reluctance

 The Big Sleep, Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, film noir, psychoanalysis, psychology, heroics




We were driving to yoga last week, listening to NPR, and Scott Simon was interviewing Clive Owen, the British Actor who is playing Sam Spade in a new series, Monsieur Spade, now streaming on AMC.  In the series, Sam, now in his sixties, and in the 1960s, has retired to the South of France, but gets called on to do the business of being a private detective, because that’s what happens when you are Sam Spade.

As we listened to Clive describing how he wanted to play Bogart playing Sam Spade; not to reconstruct the character and as he described and we heard clips of both Bogart and he playing Spade, I said to the reluctant wife that Spade’s character is very similar to mine.  She agreed.  Rare for her to do that so readily…

You see, my being a psychoanalyst is one of the things I am most enthusiastic about.  Truth be told, I’m reluctant to do just about anything.  Given the option, I would probably be inert.  But I’m not given that option, and neither is Sam – we both feel a sense of obligation.  Someone needs help, so a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do when someone needs help, and I know how to help people – or I can figure out how to.

Now I don’t think I’m quite as jaded as Sam, though I can be pretty judgmental, and I’m certainly not as brave as he, but I became interested in exploring his character further.  The reluctant wife, because she is, in Sam’s parlance, a good dame, indulged me.  She suggested we watch The Big Sleep – because it was not one of the film noir detective films we had seen before.  Philip Marlowe is the main detective character, and, unlike Sam Spade who was created by Dashiell Hammett, he was created by Raymond Chandler. Both, however, are played by Bogart and our sense was that the differences between the characters would be outweighed by the similarities.

A little Wiki sleuthing led me to understand that the book on which the film is based is a mash-up of two short stories, and one of the mysteries of The Big Sleep (and of The Big Lebowski, which is loosely modelled after it as an homage of sorts), is that the plot does not hang together particularly well.  Chandler and I are apparently alike in not editing the material we write as closely as we might.  So, for instance, when the screenwriters, who included none other than William Faulkner, were confused about whether a chauffeur whose car was fished out of the bay had committed suicide or been murdered, they asked Chandler which was the case, he replied that he did not know, and that seems to be a reasonable response because the death is not tied in any way that I can figure out to the rest of the story in the movie.

So, what is the story?  It is a complicated piece.  There is a retired general, whose protégé, who was having an affair with his younger daughter, ran off.  The general hires Marlowe to “take care of” some gambling debts that the younger daughter has accrued.  It seems like the general is flirting with Marlowe, to see if he will become the new protégé, and perhaps take up with the younger daughter, who throws herself at him, but on the way out, it is the older daughter who stops him and interrogates him about whether he is looking for the protégé.  Marlowe doesn’t say.  He investigates the debts which emanate from a “bookstore” that turns out to be a front for a small-time blackmailing operation.  He goes to the home of the hood who ran the bookstore to discover that he is dead and the younger daughter is there, out of her mind on drugs.  A picture has been taken and someone has run off with the negative.  I assumed the picture would pin the murder on her.  In fact, it was more blackmail bait.  It was a pornographic picture, but the censors interfered with depicting that in anything like a straightforward way.

Marlowe goes back to stake out the “book store” and trails the person who is looting it – and discovers that the trail leads to the apartment of the person who was the last person to blackmail the general.  Marlowe goes in to talk to him, is held at gunpoint, talks his way out of that and discovers that the older sister is already there.  By the way, if you haven’t seen the film, I expect that you are lost about now.  If you have seen the film you may be just as lost, and we haven’t even started into the serious body count.  I have not given the names of these characters because it seems like no sooner do they show up on film than they die and we go up the chain to the next hood, more serious than the last, until we end up at the most serious of all. 

So, let me skip some of the intermediate steps and get to the payoff (I think I will leave missing three murders or maybe four if the fourth is murder and not a suicide).  Marlowe becomes convinced that the biggest racketeer – the guy who runs a casino, whorehouse and drug parlor out of his palatial home with a huge parking lot in front – has the goods on the older sister but she’s not saying.  He goes out to save her and gets knocked on the head and tied up.  He is at her mercy (Btw, the sister is a 22-year-old Lauren Bacall who had been married to Bogart for two years already).  Much to my surprise, and I think Marlowe’s, the older sister decides to play ball with him.  You see, it turns out that her younger sister could take the rap for murder unless she helps the gangster, but she wants to get out.  She decides that Marlowe might just be the hero to save her and her sister.

Marlowe and his new – what? Best friend? Love interest? OK, its got to be the latter, even though he really didn’t want to get dragged into all this (the guy must be reluctant if he can’t get excited about Lauren Bacall), anyways, Marlowe and his new doll drive back into town to the scene of the first murder, the one with the photograph, and lure the big bad guy there, tricking him into thinking that they are out in the country, giving that bad guy time to set up a trap.  He shows up to set the trap, but they trap him instead and trick his goons into shooting him.  So Bogey and Bacall are alone in the house uncertain whether the goons will come to get them, but sure that whatever happens next, they will do it together.  Curtain.

Throughout, Marlowe keeps getting dragged deeper and deeper into a viper’s nest of stuff that is more and more problematic.  He was just hired to do a simple task by an old man who was sitting in an overheated greenhouse with a bunch of orchids, unable to leave that room because he no longer has the internal fire to keep himself warm – he has to be heated from the outside – like the two other hothouse flowers who live in that house – the daughters who seem to thrive on excitement – though the older daughter appears to, much to our surprise, have more substance than we gave her credit for initially.

Marlowe was just trying to earn a buck, but it turns out he has to bring down not just one, but maybe two or three increasingly shady and dangerous rings of bad guys to protect the younger daughter, fall in love with the older one (and we know what a burden that can be) and solve the riddle of what happened to the protégé. 

If the trick to making a successful movie is having a hero the audience can identify with, Warner Brothers has my number with this one.  A nice guy, someone who can’t deal with authority, someone who is a bit of a loner but hopeful that some dame with a heart of gold will recognize his virtues, keeps on doing what needs to be done, because that’s what the good guys do, and in the end, he gets rewarded, though that reward, we sense, will be complicated.

I think I can identify with this as a psychoanalyst, a guy who just puts his shingle out and hopes he can help a person or two with difficulties and then finds himself pulled into unimaginably complicated internal and relational lives of the people who seek him out (and in the political worlds of academia and psychoanalytic institute politics).  But I could also identify if I was a plumber, a guy who took a job with someone who taught him the ropes and is now up to his neck in equipment and billing and paying his taxes and has a wife and kids, but he’s going to do right by them, and if I was a..., well, you get the idea, fill in the blank.

We all believe – or want to imagine – that we are one of the good guys.  We are fighting for God and Country and to take care of the kids.  It is a nasty and cruel world out there – we don’t want to go out there and set it right, but by golly, we’re gonna.  I don’t mean to be making fun of this – I really do believe this about myself.  With my organizational hat on, as department chair, when the upper administration would decide to do something that I was not in favor of, my Dean would counsel me to just take it as a loss and think about my won loss record.  I couldn’t do that.  I wasn’t playing some sort of game.  My way of doing it was the right way and if they couldn’t see that, well, it was a travesty.  To recognize that there are multiple ways of accomplishing goals – well, that is a big ask.

In order to maintain the belief that I am the good guy, the world has to be populated with bad guys, and I have to be prepared, despite my being essentially a nice guy, to figure out how to get the bad guys killed.  With all of the bodies stacked up in this movie, I think that Bogey might have directly killed only one of them – and that one was a really bad guy.  At one point, a farmer Joe goon was sent after him, and Bogey immediately sensed that the poor guy was in over his head and fired his gone off to the side knowing the scaredy cat would run off, which is, of course, exactly what he did.  We good guys only kill the really bad ones, and we know the difference between the good and the bad, and mostly we trap the bad guys in their own snares and they get what’s coming to them.

This is a very primitive way of functioning in the world – when we split the world into good guys and bad ones.  In fact, a researcher who studies such things puts this defense, splitting, near the bottom of our defenses – it is an immature way of dealing with the world.  That same researcher, when he analyzes the ordinary conversations of healthy people, finds that about twenty percent of our conversation can be coded at that primitive level. 

My hope is that my character, like that of many people who enjoy Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe, is just spending some time in that more primitive space – taking a vacation from my more typical mature functioning (when I am not in a position of being a middle manager – as I was as chair).  I hope that I am more balanced, most of the time, when I am functioning as an analyst.  That said, the analytic relationship, like a marital relationship, a work relationship, or a friendship pulls both the best and the worst out of me – hopefully, by recognizing that and figuring out how to repair the damage that my human functioning does in all of those relationships, we can limp home, enjoy each other’s company, and the body count will stay at a more reasonable level.



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

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

     

     

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Maestro: I run into Lenny again...

 Maestro, Leonard Bernstein, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Homosexuality, Intimacy, Marriage




This seems to be the year of the bio pic.  Not that there aren’t bio pics every year, but there just seem to be more this year, and many of the award contenders seem to among them.  Oppenheimer on the big screen stole the summer, the end of The Crown on the small screen involves many bios being pic-ed.  The Fabelmans qualifies as a Roman a Clef bio pic.  In the fall, we had Napoleon.  I was thinking that Killers of the Flower Moon was also a bio pic, but I suppose it is somewhere between Oppenheimer and The Crown as a history pic.  In any case, other than Barbie, what passes for a blockbuster these days seems more rooted in history than in, for instance, fiction.  So, wouldn’t you think that we would get a veridical representation of a life?

Perhaps it has always been the case, but the bio pic about Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) seems rushed.  We zip from his introduction to his future wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan) where they recite their bios, through various highlights in their lives, and seem to arrive at their deaths without quite having had enough time to really get to know them.  I think, perhaps, I have been spoiled by series like The Crown that have the leisure to develop individual characters across multiple episodes and then to set up a finale with characters that you care about and really have a sense of who they are.  Even though a bio-pic focuses on only one character – or, in the case of Maestro, two – having just two or three hours to narrate a life suddenly seems like not quite enough.

Leonard Bernstein has, inadvertently, been a part of my life for a long time, and I was looking forward to seeing certain themes that I had picked up on in other areas.  That said, I have recently written about unreliable narrators in the novel Trust, and I should have been prepared for a new and different perspective…

Like many kids my age, my first experience of Leonhard Bernstein was with the New York Philharmonic’s children’s programming.  At least I think I watched those programs.  What I remember most is listening over and over again to his recording and description of Peter and the Wolf.  I remember the quality of his voice, and the way that each of the instruments played a part – Peter, the Wolf, Peter’s Grandfather, the duck, etc.  But the story, as fascinating as it was, did not hold together for me.  I never quite got the plot – don’t have it to this day.  My fascination with his voice, the details of the instruments, didn’t allow me to integrate them into a coherent narrative.  Oh, at some point, as an adult, I listened again and got the story, but it is gone now – and what I remember is the experiential and unintegrated bits.

As an adolescent, I became enamored of West Side Story.  I don’t think I ever saw the film, but again, listened to the soundtrack over and over again.  This time I felt like I got the story – and when I later saw the film in bits and pieces, I didn’t need to see the whole to understand it, I already had it in hand.  Of course I had Romeo and Juliet as a guide.  But I was brought up short by a performance of Bernstein’s music by a psychiatrist who is also a concert pianist, Richard Kogan.  Dr. Kogan studies the lives of various composers and plays their music while tying it to the composer’s life. 

In the case of Bernstein, Kogan used West Side Story to highlight Bernstein’s use of the tritone, which he also called the Devil’s chord.  This chord is inherently discordant – unlike a major chord, which feels settled and comfortable, the tritone screams tension.  It feels unresolved.  Technically, it is two notes three whole tones apart.  Kogan explained that it is rampant in West Side Story.  Think of the song Maria.  The first two notes in Maria – Mah and Ree – are a tritone apart, and the tension between them is resolved on the Ah. 

Kogan pointed out myriad examples of the tritone in West Side Story and he connected them to the tension that Bernstein was feeling about his sexuality during the time that he was writing West Side Story.  According to Kogan (as I recall, this was some years ago), Bernstein had sequestered his family in Puerto Rico while he wrote the musical as a means of shielding them from the conflict that he was feeling – the tension between the Sharks and the Jets could be understood as the tension between the straights and the gays – or between Bernstein’s loyalty to his family and his loyalty to his sexuality.

The next intersection occurred at a National Meeting of Psychoanalysts.  There a group of us who are interested in the relationship between Music and the Mind were treated to a presentation by Leonard’s daughter, Jaimie.  She is a performer, author, storyteller and composer.  She was at the meeting to talk about her Dad and his career.  When she was explaining about the tritone, one of the analysts raised the issue of her father’s sexuality and wondered about the tritone as an expression of the tension that he felt about that.  There was a long, awkward pause and, in my memory, Jaimie went on to talk about other aspects of the tritone without addressing the question.  At the time, I was proud of the restraint of my analytic peers who did not press the issue.  I somewhat naively wondered, “Did she not know?”.

So this bio pic becomes yet another way of observing Bernstein.  The screenplay, as hurried and rushed as it is, depends heavily on Jaimie’s memoir, “Famous Father Girl”.  That said, the very first scene involves Bernstein lying naked in bed with his male lover when he gets the call to conduct the New York Philharmonic later in the day – a performance that would catapult him into becoming the Bernstein that I (and so many others) would have a relationship with.

The vantage point of the author of a biography/biopic is very important.  I wrote about Ray Kroc in a post about a movie, The Founder, that portrays him (and my thesis was consistent with the picture) in a negative light.  A friend who read it and was a big fan of the Krocs, in part because of their generosity to causes like NPR, was dismayed that I did not have a more balanced view of him.  And I didn’t.  The view that I took was the one presented in the movie, and it was not balanced.  Neither, though, is the view of a child of her parent balanced. 

Marriages are complicated.  They are public – and, especially in the upper classes and the royalty from which those classes are descended, they are political arrangements.  Bernstein, according to Wikipedia, arranged a marriage for the man we met in the first scene with a woman who would serve as the man’s beard.  Being married, for a gay man in the post war years, was an important means of public display around his sexuality.

Marriages are also private affairs.  And they are messy.  And the mess gets observed by the children.  The children see the mess at various points in the lives of their parents and through the various lenses they become capable of using as they grow up.  Divorces are much less messy when they happen early in a child’s life.  When they happen when the child is an adolescent or even a young adult, the children in the marriage tend to take sides and to idealize one parent and denigrate the other.  Partly, though, this tension is a means of addressing an underlying wish, in many cases - the wish that the parents would reconcile and the family could be restored.

Bernstein was, as he states to the Thursday Philharmonic practice audience in the film, an artist.  And as the Sixties dawned, Bernstein declared that the artist, perhaps more than anyone, is aware of his impending death.  And the artist, he goes on to say, must be afforded the freedom to live an unfettered life.  Heck, he said, everybody is doing that now – and I must do it as an artist even if it were not the current fashion, but since it is, I can be truly free.

Freedom, though, comes at a cost.  Felicia (his wife – sorry to have wondered so far afield that I feel I must remind you of her), is, perhaps through the eyes of Jaimie, and certainly through the eyes of the film, much more than just a muse.  She is an anchor – a rock.  A point of stability in a world that, without her, becomes immediately chaotic and unstable.  But his cruelty to her has been met by her cruelty and, I suppose – though this is a supposition on my part – he cannot admit that he needs her when he is in the space of justifying the advantages of his freedom.

So, it is Felicia that makes the move to repair the rupture between them.  She attends his legendary performance conducting Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony at Ely Cathedral with the London Philharmonic.  This rapturous performance – one where Bradley Cooper throws himself as fully into the role as Bernstein himself did – maybe more so – is prelude to his rapturous reconnection with Felicia.

This is pretty heady stuff, through the eyes of a child – and through our eyes as the audience.  We recognize the true love that he has for Felicia, and she takes back her taunts about the falsity of his love.  And then we see Bernstein demonstrate his love for her, tending to her when she is ill and acknowledging her value after she is gone.  There is a fairy tale component to the reunion that feels more authentic than I think I am painting it here.

We see that Bernstein is not a cad.  I don't think we see him as torn so much as unintegrated.  He cannot experience the tension of the tritone.  If it is there in West Side Story, it is perhaps because he wishes that he could feel it.  Instead, he is brought to life by his love for whomever is in the room at the moment, and he loves them deeply, powerfully, but also indiscriminately - and leave it up to them to hold him in check against his passions, but resents them when they do exactly that.

When Felicia dies, Bernstein, not surprisingly reverts to his chaotic life, but in a way that is unbecoming an old man.  He seems to sort of crumble without her and plays on his position of power as a star and as a teacher to pursue younger men and there is something tawdry – but primarily sad - about his descent. 

When Felicia is taunting him, one of the things that she throws his way is a criticism that others have made but one that she has shielded him from to that point.  Others have claimed that he has wasted his talent.  She takes a subtly different tack, stating that he has used his talent to exert power and influence rather than to connect with others.  She accuses him, I think, of confusing being enamored with himself to overcome the ways he feels marginalized.  She would have him sit squarely within his genius and using that as a means to transform the world.

I think she may be entreating him to integrate his narrative, and he may demonstrate that he needs help doing that – that without her (admittedly likely perhaps through the eyes of Jaimie), he cannot keep Peter, and the Wolf, and the other characters straight enough to have the story make sense.  He is distracted by the notes of the oboe and the French Horn – caught up in them, swept away by them, so that he doesn’t get how they all fit together.

One other fact about children of divorce is that, when their parents remarry, the children are twice as likely to divorce as children of divorced parents who do not remarry.  Perhaps we need to believe that it is possible for adults to go on loving each other – even if circumstances keep them apart – for us to accomplish the difficult task of sustaining a marriage.  Perhaps we need to be sheltered from the chaos that our parents must manage – or it helps to see them survive it – for us to internalize a sense of the possibility of something like true love in all its gritty and chaotic splendor.  We have to be strong enough to withstand the gaze of someone who sees us both as they would like us to be and as we actually are.


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

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

     

     

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Sherlock: What is the nature of healing?

 Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Series, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Mystery, Psychopathy, Psychopathology


 


Usually I find a movie made from a book to be disappointing.  The book seems so much richer – it is filled with inner thoughts, but perhaps most importantly, I have seen – envisioned – the environs so clearly and accurately that the representation that is on the screen is disappointing, sometimes jarringly so.  One exception to this was the Harry Potter series of movies.  Somehow, they seem to have gotten the visuals right enough – they weren’t the same as mine, but they were somehow proper.

I liked reading Sherlock Holmes books when I was a kid.  I didn’t love them – I liked them.  Detective novels, mysteries, have never been my genre.  But Sherlock I admired.  He could observe things and make deductions from his observations.  I think I saw him as very smart and, growing up in a family that admired smarts, I admired him and wanted to emulate him, but feared that I could not.  He was too reserved to be the kind of person that a wild thinker – an impulsive individual – like me - could ever grow into being.  I also found the stories somewhat formulaic and lost interest in his ability to deduce things from simple observation.  It felt like a nice party trick, and I think I was frankly too young to understand the backstory that was also being told that knit together the individual elements of the manifold cases that were presented, so I did not become a fan.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered the series Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock and  Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson.  Admittedly, the visuals from my 10-year-old brain have faded quite a bit in the ensuing decades, but I still vividly recall the sea of red headed men waiting to apply for a job in one story.  What is refreshing about this series is that it creates a novel palette – not only does it update the London Environs, its characters are contemporary with contemporary concerns, and this, I think, humanizes the story.  This is an instance of a movie making characters more, not less, robust – more three dimensional, at least for me.  Even though I had not been a fan, I recognized something of the characters in their contemporary versions.  I vaguely recalled that Dr. Watson had been a military doctor, and, while it never occurred to my ten-year-old self that two gentlemen roommates might be considered gay – that might have been a private thought of an older reader; here it is a theme the series publicly repeatedly plays with.

But what was most gratifying is that these two men are not stodgy at all in the ways that I had imagined them from the book – yes, they are middle aged, living in London and solving crimes with no apparent compensation (which could have been a sign to an older reader that this is partly a fantasy), but the two of them are more like impulsive little boys recklessly careening about town, Sherlock showing off his brilliance and, in the process, alienating everyone within earshot, and John being well intentioned and smart, but very much put off balance by this creative ball of energy – Sherlock – that only he and their landlady seem to be able to tolerate much less embrace, and he finds himself consistently apologizing for Sherlock and trying, as best he is able, to manage him.

The series is four seasons long with three or so episodes per season.  The reason to blog about it has less to do with the visceral pleasure of the series, which is considerable (this is good television), and more to do with what I think the central question that the series asks.  I think this series wrestles with the question of what evil is.  And I think it is wrestling with a particular type of evil – cruelty.  “What is the basis of cruelty?” ultimately becomes the question that is addressed in the final season – and I have to say that the final episode contains so much cruelty that the reluctant wife, who enjoyed the series as a whole – wished she had not seen it, even though we were both enthralled and couldn’t wait for it.  She said, “There is no redeeming artistic value for being that cruel,” by which she meant being that cruel to the viewer.

I will try to avoid spoilers while talking about the underlying dynamics.  I don’t know that I will be successful.  I will also acknowledge that the elder reluctant stepdaughter let me in on some of the back and forth between the writers and the public – the fanbase – and some of the concerns about whether the writers respected their audience.  I think this question is relevant.  Less relevant is the information that this was Cumberbatch’s break out role and Freeman, who was forever endearing in Love Actually, is still physically endearing and uses the same physical humor but adapts it to playing a very different role.

There are three other central characters in the series: Mycroft Holmes (played by Mark Gatiss who is also a co-creator), Sherlock’s older brother; Jim Moriarty (Andrew Scott), Sherlock’s arch enemy; and a mystery character, another Holmes sibling, in the final season.  Each of these characters are critical to fleshing out the concept of cruelty.   Each of the characters is also a member of a very exclusive stratum: they are members of the upper classes (or live as if they belong to that class – without having to earn a living) and are each much more intelligent – and manipulative – than the people around them.

One implicit question that the show then asks is whether the brand of cruelty that is depicted and explored here is garden variety evil or whether it is a special class of evil; for instance, a type of cruelty that is only available to those with the high class intellect, cold hearts, and substantial means to play out this type of cruelty.  Indeed, is this a type of cruelty that only the Brits, the most brutal of all colonial societies, could mete out?  And, indeed, is it the type of cruelty that only high class Brits – those who are raised by nannies, or wish they had been – could mete out?

Sherlock describes himself as a “high functioning psychopath”.  Technically, psychopathy is characterized by a lack of empathy – an emotional connection with a victim would interfere with the desire to harm the victim – though in fact there is, I think, in lived psychopathy of the cruel sort a great deal of empathy – the psychopath, especially the sadistic psychopath, enjoys the feeling of mastery over the terror that he evokes in the other.  There is a sense of not being at the mercy of forces that are outside of one’s control but instead being the master of the experience of terror that others are having.

While we are diagnosing the characters, Sherlock could also be considered to be Aspergerish – or, using more contemporary language – being on the spectrum.  He has the cold logical quality of Spock, but also Spock’s emotional transparency – his feelings are every bit as on display as his brilliance, even though he himself – perhaps through denial or simple thick headedness – does not seem to be nearly as aware of this as those around him, including the audience.  This is, I think, part of what makes watching him feel so compelling instead of repulsive – we want to reach out; as Mrs. Wilson, the landlady/housekeeper who has a history of being married to a drug lord, does and as Watson constantly has to.  We want to take Sherlock under our wing and soothe the disturbance which he radiates but seems oblivious to.

His older brother is cut of the same cloth, but instead of careening without regard to the ways in which his actions affect others, as Sherlock does, Mycroft is cautious.  Arguably brighter than his brother, he is not the lone wolf his brother is.  Quite the contrary, he is a company man.  He serves the Queen and uses the resources of the government to keep an eye on his brother – to keep him out of trouble.  Mycroft sees in Sherlock the potential for great evil, apparently because of Sherlock’s obsessive interest in solving cases.  What Mycroft doesn’t see is that keeping Sherlock’s past from him confuses him rather than protects him and makes him more vulnerable rather than less so.

Moriarity, in this mix, is utterly unhinged.  He is truly a psychopath without a connection to others of any sort other than the power that he exercises over them.  Insanely self-obsessed, his toxic narcissism leads him to demonstrate how uniquely evil he is.  He engages Sherlock in play, promising to harm people if Sherlock cannot solve his puzzles fast enough.  And Sherlock takes the bait.  Indeed, play is a consistent theme in the series – not just between Sherlock and Moriarity, but also between Sherlock and John and Sherlock and Mycroft – but it does have the feeling of English boarding school play – where cruelty is woven into something that should be an analogue for harming others – not the thing itself.

I am reminded of a friend who went to Harvard.  He said there was a consistent experience that he observed there among the students; it was a sense of here I am, one of the best and the brightest, I am among the best and brightest – is this all there is?  There is a kind of disappointment that, despite our tremendous gifts, we are still human, and still vulnerable to ordinary human experience.  By being outrageously cruel, perhaps we gain control over our surroundings and experience ourselves as being god like – and therefore a bit immortal.

Moriarity’s compulsion to cruelty is presented as a kind of fun house version of Sherlock’s drive to solve crimes.  Sherlock is drawn to the game – to figuring out what is going on – by a sense of boredom.  He turns down cases that are too easy.  We get the sense that he is both tortured by his brilliance, but also only happy when exercising it.  His intelligence is an itch that constantly needs to be scratched.  Moriarity, on the other hand, seems to be entirely interested in setting up the game.  In doing this, he is untethered and enjoys exercising his power to terrorize as a means of keeping his boredom and disdain at the human condition (and perhaps his own mortality) at bay.

Sherlock is exposed, when John marries, as deeply connected not just to Watson, but to Watson’s wife.  This gives the lie – perhaps – to the psychopath label.  Isn’t one a psychopath not because he cannot empathize – we are all born with the potential to care for others (though that would be a question - if Sherlock were born on the autistic spectrum might his genetics inhibit his ability to empathize?).  Might we all be generally equipped to empathize at the get go, but learn to override that ability – to not attend to that information rather than not having that information at least theoretically accessible? Is Sherlock deeply defended against how deeply he cares about others?  If so, this, on some level, he must realize, is his kryptonite, so he works to build walls against experiencing his concern for others, all the time expressing that concern by taking on interesting cases – ones that require that he think about the motives that drive people to be cruel and help him to provide those who have been wronged some measure of justice – some sense that the cruel person has paid for their cruelty.  

Holmes’ interest in mysteries is, it turns out, rooted deeply in the central mystery in his life, a mystery that has haunted him since he was quite young.  I am not going to reveal it – it is too delicious (and cruel) to spoil it if you haven’t seen the series all the way through, yet.  I will let you know that Mycroft plays a hand in keeping this mystery from him, but most telling, it is Sherlock’s own mind that has deceived him across the course of his life.  He is not just emotional disconnected from others, he is deeply disconnected from himself.

So, it makes sense that Sherlock is forever searching for clues – making sense of every everyday mystery that surrounds him, as if he is reassuring himself that he will not be deceived again.  He blames his deception on his senses and his reason, and he tunes them to a fever pitch in order that they (he blames his senses, I think) will never disappoint him again.  His ability to piece together clues reassures him not just that his senses can’t deceive him, but that he can’t deceive himself (and, in this, it turns out he is gravely mistaken).

In this internal battle, Sherlock is a lot like Freud.  Freud imagined that we have veridical memories of all that has taken place in our lives.  It probably didn’t hurt that Freud had a prodigious memory – he spoke English so fluently that he enjoyed Shakespeare without translation (Shakespeare is an author that I, as a native speaker, struggle with).  But there were many mysteries in Freud’s early life – indeed in all of our lives – that he, and we, using his techniques and ideas, tried and try to ferret out.

But back to Sherlock.  The essential problem is that memory is, as Elizabeth Loftus has famously (and sometimes infamously) reported to us, transformable.  We do not recollect so much as reconstruct. Freud, according to Mark Solms, suggests that memory’s primary task is to predict.  We gather information not so much to know what has happened as to figure out what will happen.  So, Sherlock stuffs his mind with facts which he uses to solve crimes – and famously avoids those facts that aren’t relevant to crime solving (in an example from the original, which shows up in the series, Holmes does not know that the earth revolves around the sun because it couldn't help him solve a crime).  Sherlock therefore imagines the mind as being limited.  It has only so much RAM and he doesn’t want to clog it up with useless information.  This, by the way, also suggests that memories can be jettisoned forever, Sherlock believes he can not know (while Freud believes we cannot not know). 

Apparently Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a physician himself, modelled Sherlock on one of his medical school professors who would diagnose his patients not from an interview, but from a careful physical exam as they walked into the examining room, making all kinds of uncanny deductions about their habits, aptitudes and failings based on their physical presentation.  I remember once that someone at the Menninger Hospital commented that David Rapaport, a psychologist and psychoanalyst who studied psychological testing there, hoped that we would one day be able to diagnose someone “by the part in their hair.”

Sherlock’s ability to take others as objects, and to divine their intentions – to dive deeply into their souls in search of motivation – is, it turns out, the result of having been deceived.  His affections for another was the catalyst for the one who felt spurned to do horrible things.  I am being somewhat coy here, and this is where the backstory re-emerges.  The authors of the miniseries publicized that the elements of the backstory were present in the earlier seasons and the fourth season should have be soluble by the fans.  The fans dutifully concocted theories about what had happened but, as in all good mysteries, they were apparently and generally wrong.  Unfortunately, the authors expressed disdain for their fans, and the fans cried foul – stating that they had been had.

But isn’t that the nature of mystery?  Do we ever quite nail who the perpetrator was until things get narrowed down significantly and couldn’t it often have been someone else and we are right more by chance than by really figuring out the motives of the killer?  Perhaps that is because we are all capable of murder.  We do all have the motivation to kill everyone else in the room at any given moment, but we are held back by a variety of forces.  On the most primitive level, we fear retribution or censure for doing something bad or wrong.  On a more advanced level, we are ambivalent about most anyone who is important enough for us to want to kill them – we also love them and would miss them if they are gone.  But perhaps most importantly we have learned to manage our ambivalence – in a whole variety of ways.  We bury ourselves in our work or convince ourselves that we are all working towards common goals and that we need everybody on board to reach them.

I think that Sherlock is the more interesting of the characters because he is closest to losing the ties that bind us to each other.  His interest in crime seems to be a thinly veiled attempt to sublimate his interest in murder – he seems to over rely on the defense of reaction formation; working in the area that is his biggest interest and the thing that he most needs to defend against.  Try as he might, he ultimately can’t jettison the memory of what happened.  He transforms it – he reconstructs it into something different – but, in his heart, he retains the essence of the primal betrayal.

Holmes, then, becomes a very Freudian character.  He has deeply buried his long-lost memory, but it will out, showing up in ways that shape his very character and his choice of profession.  He keeps picking away at the thing that he would pretend is gone.  He does this incessantly, constantly and, apparently unconsciously.  The need for maintaining this unconscious schism is revealed in the final episode.

There was talk of an additional season after what proved to be the final season, but there would, in my mind, be no need for it.  Holmes has been cured.  He no longer needs to keep his secret and to fondle it at the same time.  If he were to continue to use his gift to solve crimes, it would be an empty exercise, not the one driven by the compulsive need to know.  The tragedy has been resolved, the tension is gone, and, as Freud famously said of the result of psychoanalytic treatment when the neurosis has been cured, Holmes has been freed to lead a life of ordinary misery.

What we might have witnessed would have been the processing of his grief.  In solving the central mystery in his life, Holmes would have come to realize that it involved losing not just one, but two of the most important people in his life.  These losses would be caused by something out of his control – the envy of one for the other.  To connect with more than one person presents a particular kind of danger – the danger of the Oedipal triangle – and part of what this series shows is that the Oedipal triangle does not just play out with our parents but with every significant set of relationships in our lives.  By virtue of being in contact with others we imperil ourselves, but we cannot live without those important others, so we lead lives of restraint, hoping that the intensity of our affections does not end up causing us unintended consequences.


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

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

     

Succession: Why am I obsessed with a show that has no likeable characters?

 Succession, Logan, Kendall, Shiv, Roman Roy, Family Psychology, Psychoanalysis Succession has been an obsession for the past few weeks.  Fo...