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.

Working Girl: The Early Years and the Christian Delicatessen

As I approach the finish line demarcating close to five decades of an uninterrupted working life—and here (and only here), I define “working” as inextricably entwined with the primary aim of earning something resembling an income—I find myself slowing down a bit to look back at my former working selves, who I left behind on that long-distance race course littered with numerous, sundry jobs along the way.  While the earliest years, say between 12 and 14, found me baby-sitting and even mowing lawns on a regular basis (the latter, my first but not my last foray into the unwelcoming realm of traditionally male jobs), I landed my first “real” job at the age of 14, at a newly opened restaurant in Bristol, Tennessee, named “John’s Deli.” John’s was a decidedly Christian (not to mention Southern) take on that ubiquitous New York eating establishment:  the Jewish delicatessen.  Why a small group of local, Christian investors decided that Bristol, in 1972, needed a restaurant modeled on the Jewish delicatessen was not mine to question.  At that time in my life, my family and I only barely, if at all, acknowledged our own Jewish background, never mind discussed it openly with others in our new home in the Bible Belt region that encompasses southwestern Virginia.  So with a newly minted work permit, as well as what would become my lifelong bureaucratic companion—a social security number—in hand, I officially began my journey as a working girl.

Despite my family’s more or less unintentional suppression of my and my siblings’ half-Jewishness, the dozen years I lived in northern New Jersey, prior to moving to Bristol, had provided me with a few occasions to eat at an authentic Jewish delicatessen.  Specifically, these were the few, very rare, excursions I recall taking in the neighborhood surrounding my Jewish, maternal grandmother’s apartment in Elizabeth, New Jersey.  Even the scarcity of those memories, however, did not prepare me for the dislocation and outright confusion I experienced when I began my first week of work at John’s Deli.  Yes, there were bagels (frozen Lenders, six to a plastic bag) and cream cheese, but where was the lox?  The matzoh ball soup?  The challah (to appear decades later in a major, northern Virginia grocery chain, labeled, much to my very Jewish, then-husband’s horror, “egg bread”)?   The Entenmann’s pastries, if not real cheesecake?  Yes, there was cheesecake, but it was a far cry from its authentic cousin that was readily available at any diner—Jewish or not—in those now halcyon Jersey days.  Inarguably, it was an exile to the culinary desert for any unlikely Jew who might stumble through the doors of John’s Deli.  To add insult to injury, my sense of place was further skewed by the lines of New Testament scripture which were painted like a decorative border on the walls below the ceiling line on all four sides of the dining room. 

I worked hard at that deli, though, hard enough to know that restaurant work, in particular food prep in the kitchen, was back breaking and relentlessly boring.  Moreover, I was not very good at it.  I could not chop fast, or uniformly, enough.  I was squeamish about touching meat (my conversion to vegetarianism was not too many years away).  I was revolted by handling strangers’ dirty dishes and utensils.  Still, I did learn how to bake the perfect baked potato (scrub the potato; prick it in a few places; and then bake it in a very hot oven, unwrapped—no foil (this was key)—for at least an hour).  And while John’s would not be my last restaurant job, it was the first one to direct my thoughts to considering the type of work to which I might be better suited.  So it was that, even at the age of 14, I began to envision a more white-collar profession in my future.  That this was a challenging prospect for a young woman who would be the first in her family to even attend college, not to mention step into a professional career, had not yet occurred to me.  Maybe that scripture, incongruously New Testament as it was, which was writ large on the four walls surrounding me as I worked, had some blessings to confer after all. 

 

Metanoia v. Habit: May the Best (Wo)Man Win

In response to my sharing with friends the news of my upcoming presentation, titled “Metanoia, Meaning, and Migration: Finding the Self through Lifestyle Migration,” at Georgetown University’s academic conference on “Passages” next month, many have asked me to explain the concept of metanoia.  As part of my Folklore post-graduate studies, last spring I conducted ethnographic research into and wrote a final paper on the stories of individuals who made a drastic geographic relocation, motivated by retirement or simply the desire for a lifestyle change, or both.  I chose to examine those stories through the lens of metanoia, a concept first used widely by Carl Jung.  Jung paid special attention to times of acute change in an individual’s life, writing prolifically about the transformation of consciousness that occurs.  He called this type of passage metanoia.  This Greek word has two roots:  meta meaning both “great change” and “beyond,” and noia, a derivative of nous, a word of complex and multiple meanings, including “higher consciousness.”  The experience of metanoia involves a transformation that can range from a minor change of consciousness to a dramatic psychic or spiritual transformation.  My research focused on the metanoia experiences of a sampling of Americans and Canadians who made the decision to migrate to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, from as early as the 1950’s, because they believed San Miguel offered the potential for a more meaningful quality of life.  My final paper related these immigrants’ stories of re-imagination and journeying beyond their previous limitations, not to mention the enormous spirit of adventure and independence which led them to craft an entirely new life and identity in Mexico. 

This subject was not an accidental one.  As my own retirement looms on the horizon, my husband (already retired) and I have engaged in an ongoing discussion—part fantasy and part practical—that asks, to quote The Clash:  should we stay or should we go?  Will we stay put in our cherished and familiar community or will we strike out into the unknown, relocating somewhere totally new and different, perhaps where we know no one?  While not giving short shrift to the pragmatic reality that our retirement income will stretch further elsewhere, we have also, like the San Miguel immigrants, given serious consideration to the possibility of experiencing our own metanoia in making a drastic geographical shift.    

One of the most striking statements that I heard over and over again from the San Miguel immigrants was that the decision to relocate inaugurated the arrival of a “new self,” or that finally, in Mexico, they were able to bring forth their “authentic selves.”  What is it about the confines and demands of the quotidian and the familiar, with their endless cycle of responsibilities and expectations, which suppresses the emergence of our “authentic selves”?  Is it merely habit?  Recalling how my beloved Proust frequently took Habit to task, I did some research and came up with this, from my much underlined and dog-eared copy of Remembrance of Things Past: “As a rule, most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services.” Yes indeed.  Habit, that hobgoblin of creativity, has no need to draw from my more authentic, richer self to enter into my daily routine. It is well equipped to carry the day on its own. 

This is not to say that I cannot experience my own metanoia, here in my familiar realm, by initiating dramatic lifestyle changes once I have finally broken free from the shackles of a 40-hour work week, where the dragon’s breath of Habit is especially fiery.  But then again, the tantalizing specter of new horizons, my own San Miguel de Allende or Shangri-La you might say, seems to beckon me more urgently than ever before.  Will I heed the call?

Stepping on the Head of the Dragon

Well into the second week of 2015, I remain steeped in Virginia Woolf.  Having just read a tiny gem of a short story, “Lappin and Lapinova,” I find myself considering the following:  Upon what illusions do we depend to maintain the smooth operation of our daily lives?  The story first.  Woolf’s little tale is about a newly married couple temperamentally unsuited to each other.  For the first two years of the marriage, the couple is able to sustain the fiction of a happy alliance by spinning a fantasy story around the reality of their relationship.  Woolf, drawing the story to a close with a trivial incident that nonetheless bursts the fantasy bubble, brilliantly and abruptly concludes:  “So that was the end of the marriage.”

The illusions I depend upon to maintain the smooth operation of my daily life do not, fortunately, concern my marriage, but rather my profession.  In this regard, the precise question that has been pressing itself upon me more and more urgently with each passing month is whether I will continue to work as an attorney for the three years remaining until I am eligible for full retirement?  As I consider that question, I am simultaneously examining the illusions I rely upon to imbue continued meaning into a profession that no longer inspires me.  Consider those illusions:  that my professional stature, based on 27 years of hard work, dedication, and well-respected accomplishments, are a reflection of my true self rather than merely a persona; that my co-workers are dependent upon my prodigious output and the fact that I am, as the only attorney on staff, singularly indispensable; and that it would be foolhardy and irresponsible to retire prematurely and forego the full recognition of and reward for 30 years of service, to embark on the life of an artist.  These illusions, I recognize, are neither absolute and rigid nor easily dispelled. The reality, I know, is somewhere in between.  So, I will continue to wrestle with them and suspect that 2015—and perhaps beyond—will require my stepping on the head of a dragon or two (my “women of the well” friends will surely understand this allusion!) before I come to any resolution. 

Quan Yin Stepping on the Head of the Dragon

Truncated Virgins

Between Christmas and New Year’s, I headed into D.C. to meet a friend, visiting from Papua, New Guinea, to see the new exhibit at the National Museum for Women in the Arts:  Picturing Mary:  Woman, Mother, Idea.  Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea | National Museum of Women in the Arts  According to the NMWA website, the exhibit “examines the concept of womanhood represented by the Virgin Mary and the power her image has exerted through time.”  To be honest, I was disappointed by the relatively one-dimensional representations of Mary depicted throughout. In all fairness to the exhibit curators, I should have read the website description more carefully beforehand, so that I understood the exhibit was presenting exclusively Renaissance- and Baroque-era masterworks (6^th to 18^th century) from museum, church, and private collections in Europe and America.  Had I done so, I would have known not to expect more unorthodox and, dare I say it, irreverent depictions of Mary.  Even while this impressive array of works revealed Mary in her myriad roles as daughter, cousin, and wife; the mother of an infant; and a bereaved parent, I could not help feeling impatient with these, to my mind, truncated representations of a mostly submissive and chaste Mary. 

                                          Elisabetta Sirani, Virgin and Child (detail), 1663.

Before going further here, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I feel obliged to confess myself a lapsed (read, recovering) Catholic.  But despite having left Catholicism behind as early as 1976 if not before then, I continue to nurture a fierce admiration for a Mary who I see as something other than a patristical icon of femininity, love, suffering, and chastity.  The Mary who I hold in my psyche is not such a unilateral figure.  Rather, she is a courageous feminine spirit who more closely aligns, in the way I’ve internalized her, with her Virgen de Guadalupe and Black Madonna manifestations.  That is, as Guadalupe, she is an intercessor, closely connected to the major events in a woman’s life—sexuality, childbirth, the loss of a child.  As the Black Madonna, she is the Queen of Nature, the agent of all fertile transformation in the outside world and in the psyche. These more cthonic Marys, with their potent feminine energy, speak to me much more strongly about what it means to construct a powerful and resilient female identity than the admittedly gorgeous images of passive maternal compliance depicted in the NMWA exhibit.

 "Coyolxauhqui Returns as Our Lady disguised as La Virgen de Guadalupe to defend the rights of Las Chicanas" by Alma Lopez. 

I think I speak for most D.C. area feminists when I say that I have always viewed Frida Kahlo as the NMWA’s poster woman.  The museum’s permanent collection proudly showcases Kahlo’s 1937 “Self Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky,” and NMWA’s gift shop prominently displays numerous items sporting Kahlo motifs.  Part of Kahlo’s genius was her willingness to take on taboo subjects which challenged cultural norms not to mention feminine beauty ideals.  I can only imagine how Kahlo, with her penetrating, unwavering gaze and a heavily arched eyebrow, is viewing the truncated Virgins who have taken up temporary residence in her D.C. home. 

                                       Frida Kahlo, Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky, 1937