Tag: culture

“First, you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, I’m a human being!” (Howard Beale [Peter Finch], Network)

My previous post focuses on how our thinking gets in the way of our being: we are more than our minds. If you have read this blog, you know this is a struggle of mine, and I don’t think I’m all that unusual. It is, however, an unending tension: where does that line appear to cross over into mental illness or whatever other term you want to use. Peggy in Fargo (previous post) may have some issues. Maybe Lester Burnham in American Beauty (earlier post). Likewise, the 1976 film Network relies on and dances around this question in two ways: macro and micro. The micro is Peter Finch’s character, Howard Beale. The macro is all of us, who Beale rails against with increasing rancor as the film progresses. Audiences and critics saw truth here; the film was a success along different measures (and Finch won the Oscar for his role).

Obviously I titled this post with this clip in mind, though I didn’t use the more familiar line (the “I’m as mad as Hell and I’m not going to take this anymo!” rant/refrain).

This notion that our thinking, or our zombie-like lack of it as Beale frets, as something distinct from who we are isn’t new. Moreover, outside of therapy and psychoanalysis, we celebrate the brain, perhaps more than ever these days. We revel in its possibilities. We marvel at what it does and what it can do.

My children love that “Brain Games” show. And yeah, it’s cool. But when I watch it (either really watch it—sitting in the room absorbing what’s on the screen with one or both of my kids—or sort of watch it—sitting in a different room hearing what’s going on and either responding vocally without moving or popping my head in to see what’s on the screen), I always notice the show’s punchy positivity (the narrator’s voice, the colorful visuals, etc.). Makes sense: the show celebrates that amazing entity, the brain!

But the brain also plays us. And when it does, we react in different ways. I feel like I can recognize this more easily now as I transition off of  antidepressants. I’m not blocked like I was before. Howard Beale would be satisfied: I’m able to get mad again. Beale says that first, you have to get mad. My feelings and emotions are no longer six feet under. And so what if they’re not always happy or even? Better to feel some madness than nothing at all, right?

Our popular culture has turned against this since the late ’70’s of Howard Beale and Fargo‘s Peggy. For example, I love this exchange from one of my all-time favorite films, Adaptation (2002):

Screen Shot 2016-01-16 at 6.01.17 PM

Or more recently: the way that Joy continually tries to contain Sadness in last year’s animated film, Inside Out.

Our most popular songs have gone from “Let It Be” to “Let It Go” and “Shake It Off.” Maybe “it” does “get better” for some, but maybe that doesn’t happen for a long long time. Or maybe it only happens when we radically accept (DBT reference there–see previous post) and finally figure out how to expand what it means for something to “get better.” What if it isn’t getting better? What if you have tried? In so many ways? Does it leave you with false hope? “It” may require some really blind faith, perhaps. No, change that. Not faith—faith is too embedded with other meanings. Hope. Blind hope.

What does a typically glass-half-full person do with all this? If, as one of my therapists has said, I hold so true to my values, my natural inclination and need for hope and rightness and justice, that the world will sort itself out and that there will be a correction to the blatant injustice applied toward my professional career, then what am I supposed to do when it doesn’t? Well, there my friend, that is when therapy doubles your dosage of antidepressants. And it’s also when you, dear reader, go back to the beginning of this post and read through it again and again to invoke this stupid, vicious cycle of futility.

“All these small things they gather round, gather round me” (Ben Howard)

lines of shadow
(My own picture here, not from Fargo.)

If you’ve been in therapy, then you’ve presumably been told how (and how often) the mind/brain/thinking screws around with us. That our mind is not our identity; that we are not our thinking. So my racing thoughts, my obsession with all the overwhelming small things (and whether or not they’re “small” or not in the first place…), and my overanalysis about the things that are beyond my control: all of it is that dastardly mind.

As a longtime yogi, this idea wasn’t exactly new to me when it was raised, but I had thought it was confined to the feelgood ‘be in the present’ attitude often pursued in yoga talks. In therapy, this idea rises to a higher level of importance. In group, we’d learn about DBT and CBT (dialectical and cognitive behavioral techniques…or maybe the “t” stands for thinking? I can’t remember…small thing, perhaps…), which included stuff like radical acceptance and managing boundaries and letting “it” go. Many of the DBT and CBT lessons work to reduce or mitigate the role of our mind as merely one part of who we are.

This approach got some attention recently in the second season of Fargo on the cable channel FX. Unlike the first season, the second is set back in 1979, but like the first season, there’s a lot of beautiful violence (akin to my previous post’s observation of beautiful violence in the film American Beauty). For example, a drawn out march through a winter forest (very thicket-like, actually) on a gorgeous sunny day ultimately ends in an uncle killing his niece. More time is spent on the beautiful trek and tramp into the thicket. The camera not only wades through the brush but also hovers above it. The aerial shots in particular remind we viewers of our ability to luxuriate in succinct, chaotic patterns formed by precise lines of shadow cast by naked trees across the snowy earth. It creates a quiet, peaceful tone even though we have a pretty good sense of how the scene will play out.

But back to our struggles with our minds…and so, back to Fargo. The beginning of the eighth episode (S2E8) is likewise beautiful and surreal, and though it takes a mocking approach to people’s preoccupation with attaining self-actualization (remember? set in the late ’70’s?), I found it meaningful. Ultimately, Peggy’s conversation with herself comes down to her ability to recognize the difference between thinking and being. “To be is simply to exist,” says Peggy’s imagined male alter ego. “Try it,” he says calmly in almost a seductive whisper, “try simply being.” But Peggy is too dim to understand this, so her life-coach alter ego derisively observes that she is “aroused by an insistence for meaning. Seeks and finds nothing but contradiction and nonsense.” Peggy looks beyond this thicket of words and says that, as a woman, she is worried she is not living up to her full potential. But all her male alter ego offers in response is: “Think or be. You can’t do both.”

At the risk of obsessing about this short exchange, I think it is interesting how the episodes immediately before and after this one are incredibly physical and visceral–less talk, more bullets. But this entire episode stays on the same tone as Peggy’s imagined conversation: it’s a delicious mindfuck of various thickets; the claustrophobic cabin in the woods that offers temporary retreat for Peggy and her husband is only one of several mental thickets–if you’ve seen the show, you know I’m also referring to Hanzee (“the Indian”) and what we see as a turn in his response to the brutal history applied to his people. One aspect that might help explain this is the episode’s title, Loplop, which refers back to German surrealist Max Ernst and his birdlike creature, the Loplop.

Ernst_Loplop_introduces_Loplop
Loplop introduces Loplop, by Max Ernst (1930)

(I wonder whether or not it’s merely coincidence that the male alter ego talking to Peggy in her basement looks a lot like Ernst.)

I want to elaborate more about this, how the mind/brain/thinking screws with us, but will save it for a future post. Too many small things, you see, to sort, and I’m only getting started.

 

“I don’t wanna die, but I ain’t keen on living either” (Robbie Williams)

Among other subjects, I teach film criticism. American Beauty is a film that we study in class. As the semesters go by though, I’ve grown less comfortable featuring Lester Burnham on the syllabus. Don’t get me wrong–we talk (and the students read) about so much of the film’s twisted shit (e.g. patriarchal politics, the centrality of heteronormative white masculinity, incest metaphors, all-around general misogyny). In other words, we fully vet the film’s problematic representations.

I think the reason I get less and less comfortable as the course curator who reifies the film is (gulp) that I hold more affinity for Lester Burnham. I’ve told my friends that my mid-life crisis has been foisted upon me (I suppose I’ll get to it in later posts), and I’m angry and lost and hurt by it. So by result, it is easier and easier for me to relate to the ‘ordinary guy with nothing to lose’ posture. As I proclaimed in my first post, hello, hostility!

But yes, I know, I get it: this is a time when we (societally, culturally) revel in antiheroes. Nothing too unique about this. But I think I could argue the point that the antiheroes we typically applaud, while relatable in some ways (e.g. Walter White, who began as a good teacher with bad healthcare), also are plausibly different from ourselves in fundamental ways (e.g. Heisenberg, drug kingpin extraordinaire!). Not so for me when it comes to Lester. And *spoiler alert* if you haven’t seen the film, Lester’s fate at the end is not only bleak but also one of the most beautiful parts of the film. I sometimes think, moreover, that it is the quintessential Beauty of its title.

Now that, as Brad would say (in the clip above), seems pretty twisted as fuck.