Gone Girl Part 2

Having returned from a blissful week in Jamaica (Wednesday), survived the tough re-entry into the frozen wasteland that is the D.C. metro area (ongoing), plunged back into the madness that is work these days (Thursday and Friday), and sailed through my academic presentation at the Georgetown University conference on “Passages” (yesterday), I am eager to pick up the thread I left hanging on “Gone Girl.”  As promised, while I was away I thought a lot about why this movie left me so angry.  (Well, I didn’t just think about it.  There was also plenty of reading and crocheting to be done on the patio of our room facing the cliffs overlooking the sea; doing daily yoga overlooking said cliffs and sea; eating healthy Jamaican food (largely prepared by that culinary goddess, Gwen, at Jackie’s on the Reef); connecting with old and new Jamaican and ex-pat friends in Negril; and surrendering completely to an awesome heated bamboo massage administered, in a little hut just a stone’s throw from the waves crashing into the cliffs, by the incredible Karen, at Jackie’s.)  Sigh.  Four days of arctic temperatures and a treacherous snowstorm yesterday make it all seem like a lifetime ago.  Okay, pity party over (not that I expect to garner any from the one or two friends who actually read this!) and down to some Sunday afternoon psychoanalysis. 

The view from our room at the Westender Inn

I admit it.  I, too, giddily rode the crest of one of the key opening scenes of “Gone Girl,” situated at a party in NYC (the Village?  Williamsburg?) where two beautiful, urbane hipsters meet and instantaneously recognize in each other not only the realization of their long-held fantasies of the perfect partner, but also their shared sense of superiority over other potential mates.  (Although I was more than slightly pained by then-future Husband’s sarcastic remark about an intellectual looking dude who he condemned as Proust-spouting.) But we have all been there—the moment or series of moments when we meet the person with whom we will fall in love and believe we will spend the rest of our days.  Whether it’s love at first sight, or love that unfolds over a more extended period of time, we recognize in this other precisely what we want, need, have been searching for.  So, now we have the “Once upon a time” opening for our story.

But even as any child reader of a fairy or folk tale knows, before you can get to the “And they lived happily ever after” ending, the protagonist must endure the daunting, often frightening, middle passage, where he or she must undergo a test and experience genuine suffering.  Having survived the test, the hero achieves redemption and, hopefully but not always, the story comes out right.  In short, fairy tales and folk tales depict allegorically the human condition. 

 

Why then do we, upon falling in love, assume that we can skip the middle passage and go directly from “Once upon a time” to “And they lived happily ever after?”  For those of us who have had any experience in long-term relationships—whether one that has stood the test of time and endured, for better or worse, or one that represents a second or third attempt to get it right—know, the heady, early stages are merely the opening scenes of the real story that has not yet begun to unfold.  Once the first or second flush of love has passed, we get to the “naming of the problem” stage.  I believe that this is the stage where we begin to see that, however many our partner’s virtues might be, he/she is neither the paragon we first envisioned, nor the answer to all of our own problems or shortcomings.  Even in the face of this recognition, however, in many, many relationships participants will go to extreme lengths, often lasting years or decades, not to name the problem. Indeed, some will construct a marriage lasting a lifetime without ever naming the problem, although I can guarantee you that in those cases, there’s a lot of strife and alienation existing in the royal realm.   If we are courageous enough to name the problem, then come the ups and downs of the story—the middle passage—where we try to negotiate the problem and see if we can maintain love, intimacy, and friendship, even as our boundaries have snapped back into place and we are no longer merged as one, amorphous blob of romantic love.  There is usually some climax, or decisive point, in the middle passage, where couples either:  (1) split up; (2) do the difficult, lengthy individuation work necessary to re-engage first with themselves, and then with the relationship, to move it to a higher, more sustaining level; or (3) petrify the relationship into something static and mostly dead that merely serves as a façade to erect before the extended family and community. 

And here’s where the movie comes back in.  Not having read the book, I could be either totally wrong about this or, alternatively, stating the obvious, but in my opinion the couple in “Gone Girl” pretty much parodied a marriage that had hit the “naming of the problem” stage and was too immature and underdeveloped to face that fact.  Not only are Husband and Wife unwilling and incapable of naming the problem, and thereby entering into the stage where the real work of a relationship begins (and the real treasures unearthed, I might add), but to avoid this step, Wife goes to psychotic ends in acting out her resistance.  Husband, on the other hand, enacts his resistance through the tedious affair-with-younger-woman syndrome and alcohol abuse approach.  My anger at this point in the movie stemmed, I think, from the collective’s more prevalent, misogynistic portrayal of the woman as the partner who will likely go homicidally berserk in a foundering relationship (think “Fatal Attraction”), whereas the man is more often portrayed as the sad-sack dunderhead who will just sleep with a much younger woman to avoid acknowledging the problem. 

But what really enraged me was the ending.  Prior to that, neither Husband nor Wife would name the problem.  Nonetheless, Wife’s psychosis more or less named it for them, and thrust them unconsciously into the middle passage.  In the middle passage, BOTH of them had opportunity after opportunity to consciously dive in and actually undertake the work on themselves, to submit to the test that the situation forcibly presented, but neither chose to do so.  Instead, at the culmination of a cascading series of more and more incredible events, Husband and Wife reunited and chose to return to the “Once upon a time” stage of the process.  WTF!!!   Not only did this hit me in the gut as just wrong, it left me with a story, to which I had just devoted two hours of my time, without a moral as a take-away.  I felt cheated.  But, more significantly, I was horrified.  And still more horrified, once I had time to cook it in my psychic cauldron and conclude that this parody of a marriage was just that:  a grotesque exaggeration of a tragic situation that many relationships and marriages return to over and over again and which, in the end, amounts to a life together. 

So people, start withdrawing those projections you’ve foisted onto your unwitting partner and start your journey into the middle passage.  Maybe that’s the moral of the story after all. 

 

"Gone Girl" (Spoiler Alert)

Last night my husband and I finally got around to watching the much vaunted new film by David Fincher, “Gone Girl.”  I had a vague idea that the film, based on the 2012 novel by Gillian Flynn, was about a wife who has mysteriously gone missing.  With that tiniest of kernels, I was somehow expecting a more updated version of Ann Tyler’s 1997 novel, “Ladder of Years,” about a wife and mother who, in the midst of a family beach vacation, leaves the rental cottage one day, disappears, and starts a new, anonymous life in a small town.  Boy was I disabused of that feminist fantasy in short order.  I clearly had not read the fine print and noted that this was a Fincher film.  I won’t go into the similarities in psychology and tone with “Fight Club,” but trust me, they’re there. 

For the first part of the movie, I was lulled into that place where I was mentally raising a feminist fist (several times I’m ashamed to admit) at the specter of a dissatisfied wife, married to a somewhat loutish (albeit hot) guy, who finally takes matters into her own hands and, without warning, leaves her husband to embark on an independent, more meaningful life.  Yes, I was thinking, you go girl!  Shortly thereafter, as it appeared this might be a case of murder at the hands of said loutish husband, I dredged from the murky shoals of my memory the Scott and Laci Peterson case from 10 or 12 years ago.  You remember that particular non-stop media circus:  hunky, sociopath husband murders beautiful, sweet, 9-month pregnant wife in cold blood.  I even turned to John and smugly stated that I knew exactly where this was going, based as it clearly was on that case.   

The next turn of the screw, once I had a handle on what was going down, left me infuriated.  What I thought was the ultimate feminist fantasy, had turned into a misogynist screed.  We women all know this script well.  Yes, she may have had good, or even compelling or life-threatening, reasons to abandon husband and hearth, but she will be punished for doing so.  I prematurely concluded, at this point in the film, that the patriarchal collective social, economic, and moral systems had stepped in and begun to dole out the comeuppance the wayward female was owed for her subversive actions.  I was pissed, to put it mildly.    

The next turn of the screw (knife, to be more apt), definitely required a suspension of disbelief, but I did not get too hung up on that problem because of the creepiness and gore that now took over.  Still clinging to the notion that there might be some type of redemption for the wife, who I was desperately hoping was still a victim of the patriarchy, I had to surrender that much too easy panacea and begin to wrap my head around the reality that what we were dealing with, in the character of the wife, was an outright psychopath. 

The final scenes of the movie returned all the characters to what passes for normalcy in a Fincher film.  However, to enter into those scenes fully, the viewer had to accept that, for all of them, insanity was the new normal.  Or maybe insanity was the old, persistent normal, and it was merely a case of events that temporarily pierced the veil of normalcy.  This, I think, might be the crux of the film. 

My reaction as the movie ended was:  “I hate this movie.”  I went to bed hating it and I woke up hating it.  It’s not unusual that I dislike a lot of films I see.  In fact, I am one of those grouchy viewers who thinks nothing of walking away from a movie mid-way through if it’s poorly done, uninteresting, banal, or overly formulaic.  But this movie, I HATED.  Which led me to think about Jung’s statement that “[t]he events which do not awaken any strong emotions have little influence on our thoughts or actions, whereas those which provoke strong emotional reactions are of great importance for our subsequent psychological development.”  So what, exactly, has this film stirred up in me that my reaction is so strong?  In the spirit of keeping each blog entry a readable length, I am going to postpone this particular cogitation for a later posting.  Hopefully, a week in Jamaica will shed some light into that dark cauldron of my psyche where all this stuff is brewing, if not boiling over. 

 

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Howard

In reality, the work of art grows out of the artist as a child from his mother.  The creative process has a feminine quality, and the creative work arises from unconscious depths.

(Jung)

This semester and next I am enrolled in a course, “Patterns of the Creative Unconscious,” which examines creativity from an inter-disciplinary perspective.  As I seek to engage in my own creative process as part of the coursework, I have found myself musing on persistent memories of a very old friend who, tragically, passed away in 2001 at the age of 43.  When we became friends at 17, Howard was the first artist I knew.  Although I had, as yet, no preconceived idea of what it meant to be an artist, it was clear to me that Howard was the real thing.  Part of my certainty came from Howard himself, who recognized early in life that he was an artist and casually yet firmly propounded that fact to the world at large.  Those of us who knew Howard then will recognize the courage, not to mention the profound self-knowledge, it must have taken for this gentle, sensitive man, who embodied the feminine in his dress and manner, to publicly define himself—in the Bristol, Virginia of the early 1970’s—as an artist.  But Howard’s self-assertions were not without a basis; his portfolio, which was growing steadily, had already begun to speak for itself.  

After graduation, Howard and I went our separate ways to college.  While we visited each other occasionally over the next few years, one particular incident has emblazoned itself in my memory.  I was visiting Richmond, where Howard attended Virginia Commonwealth University.  We met on campus, and Howard invited me to accompany him to the metalworking studio where he was taking a class in jewelry design.  What I saw in that dark, cavernous studio was nothing short of mythic.  Howard, donning his leather apron and visor, transformed before my eyes into Vulcan, the Greek god of fire and metalworking, as he literally bent metal over a flame.  Paradoxically, the jewelry Howard was then designing was heavy, emphatic, and sumptuous, so unlike Howard’s own physical presence (both sartorially and in terms of his long, rangy, musculature) and personality, which were flowing, ethereal, and airy.  As I consider that incongruity, I cannot help but extend Jung’s theory of dreams to the field of art.  That is, art, like dreaming, is both purposive and compensatory in that it serves to promote the balance and individuation of the personality. So it was that, in contrast to his own delicate beauty, the rings and bracelets Howard forged and then styled had a weight and a complexity that belied his own seemingly “unbearable lightness of being,” to quote Kundera. 

The Greek god Vulcan (Roman god Hephaestus)

While I was not fortunate enough to see the more mature work Howard would produce in the years prior to his premature death, I  knew from our attenuated contacts and third party accounts that he continued to study, work, and present as an artist until the very end of his life.  I recently reached out to Howard’s sister, Terry, and she shared with me that as Howard’s work evolved, he worked in many different mediums, including making his own paper from which he sculpted and then painted faces; creating a work of art and then adding  to it “items,” such as sand and styrofoam; and drawing in charcoal. 

Paper sculpture:  Howard Quarles

 
As I enter into my own creative journey, Howard returns to me as a powerful muse, one who incarnates Henri Matisse’s anthem:  “Creativity takes courage.”  Rest easy my friend and may your memory be for a blessing.