Ego integrity and despair

I like listening to Radiotherapy on RRR on Sunday mornings. It’s a bunch of doctors chewing over medical stuff and sometimes they do film reviews. I don’t know if it’s the same reviewer every time but he often comes at things from a psychoanalytic POV – often quite a different take on films. Yesterday he reviewed Gran Torino which he and I both liked. He talked about Erik Erikson’s work on the 8 stages of man – the last one is Ego Integrity vs. Despair - old age. “Some handle death well. Some can be bitter, unhappy, dissatisfied with what they accomplished or failed to accomplish within their life time. They reflect on the past, and conclude at either satisfaction or despair.” (Wikipedia)

This had huge resonance for me because I think this is where my father is at; reflecting on his life and in his case, I think he fluctuates between the two Erikson categories of despair and ego integrity. In the case of Gran Torino, it’s Clint Eastwood who plays an angry, lonely old bastard, a man who has just lost his wife and who has the slightest of relationships with his family. I’m not going to write at length about the film; I liked it despite the fact that most of the plot is a basic redemption plot - dysfunctional person is led to a better, happier life almost in spite of himself. It is also about the Hmong community in the USA, a community I know a little about because of the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. While Gran Torino is not a great film, the baddies (Hmong gangsters) look like total baddies and it is largely though not entirely predictable, it was oddly satisfying seeing this old curmudgeon gradually accept friendship even though he never lost the surface elements of racism. I really enjoyed it. We love seeing bad guys get what they deserve. And Eastwood obviously had a lot of fun with the non-PC aspects of the character he plays - there are some very funny moments. He is great – and brave – he looks his age. Which is old.

I thought of the film gain yesterday after watching The Wrestler which I thought was great. Mickey Rourke was playing a man at the end of his wrestling career, held together by steroids, bandages and headlines from the glory years of his character, “Randy the Ram”. His life is crap: trailer park trash, he’s lonely, broke and damaged. Like Eastwood, he has fucked up relations with the only family he has, his daughter. It’s a stretch applying the Erikson stage to it because Rourke’s character is, I think, meant to be in his fifties but steroid abuse and the damages perpetuated by wrestling have really aged him and one of the events in the film causes him to want to change his life. Rourke is really fabulous. It’s painful watching him try to connect with the lap-dancer character played by Marissa Tomei. He is embarrassingly gauche and shambling with the Tomei character Cassie/Pam, as he also is with his daughter. The Cassie/Pam character has a twofold purpose in the film; she represents new possibilities for Randy and her own life parallels his – they are both struggling with jobs that require a specific and damaging kind of performance that is at odds with the “real” or regular lives that other people live. Both have a performance persona, they frock up (or down in Tomei’s case), they play for the punters and suffer humiliations as a result. (One of the best scenes in the film shows the small cohort of deadbeat wrestlers seated at card tables in a community hall, selling videos (not DVDs) of past glories and signing autographs for the meagre numbers of fans that trawl through this bleak and wintery town)

I can’t do justice to the treatment of wrestling in the film. It is remarkable. The wrestling scenes are violent and theatrical and there were segments in the film which were hard to sit through even though I watched knowing that it was all about performance. Like lap-dancing. The film avoids predictability; I thought it was great. In an interview conducted by James Rocchi, director Aronofsky credited a 1957 Charles Mingus song "The Clown," an instrumental piece with a poem read over the music about a clown who accidentally discovers the bloodlust of the crowds and eventually kills himself in performance, as a major source of inspiration for the movie.

The toy soldiers of our emotional armoury

I liked this description of childhood by novelist Craig Sherbourne. He was writing about Sonya Hartnett's new book. I once upset her at a Writers Forum by suggesting that she should write for adults; that she was in some way limiting what she was capable of by doing the YA thing. I didn't express myself very well and she took umbrage on behalf of all teenagers. I think she has now found her adult voice – I really like her writing. This is what Craig said.

“If we didn’t have childhoods we’d be much better people. We’d start out as grown-ups innocent as lambs. We wouldn’t have behind us all those early years of practising vices: greed, duplicity, cruelty, bullying, indolence, vandalism, bullshitting, cronyism, hypocrisy, selfishness, violence. Childhood is where we hone these skills. If by age 14 we haven’t learned how to manipulate our loved ones, we’re backward and doomed to live at the mercy of others. Parents, siblings, schoolmates, schoolteachers – there’s always one we’ve got a crush on and torture with flirting – are the toy soldiers with which we practise emotional warfare.”

Bleak hey? You can read more in The Monthly. My friend Jane and I spent part of yesterday talking about how lucky we were to have the childhoods we have. We both reckon we have less baggage than lots of others because we were much loved and quite well parented… Better tell Dad before I kill him – he is tormenting me at present…

Craig said some other interesting things about Sonya - he reckons she is a hedgehog style writer "Many books, same story", every novel is the "unpeeling of every layer of that vision". I think he's right - wonder how Sonya will respond...

All class

If I landed on Mars in a version of a Martian secondary school I would be able to teach. This is comforting. I’ve kind of known this anyway, since I had to entertain 200 Years 11 and 12 Chinese students for an hour in a hall in Yunnan province but nice to have the confirmation. I went to see the film The Class on the weekend. The French title is better: “Between the walls”. This title references the small, intense, claustrophobic world which is the essence of the teaching experience. As an adult, it can be lonely and frustrating but also intimate. Director Cantet creates the sense of frustration really well, especially in the first half of the film. The teacher, played by the guy who wrote the book which underpins the film, a man who IS a teacher, is trying to teach some grammar. It’s boring, not pitched at where the kids are at and, as the kids point out, seemingly irrelevant. It’s high culture, formal speech. All English teachers have been there at some time; “Why do we need to know this?” As a viewer, it’s incredibly hard to endure. It’s like being in the classroom. All the teachers in the audience (and there were lots – all my age, daggy shorts, ill-fitting T shirts, little white middle aged stick legs and a paunch or three) were aching to shout “Stop! There are better ways of doing this!”

I was thrown back into the tussle that teaching can be; the tussle for control, order, engagement, forward progress. The way momentum can shift so fast to knock you off balance. The callousness of teenagers. The smell of blood. It can be pretty primal. Francois, the teacher, doesn’t have much fun. This film is about as real a narrative about the job as any I’ve seen.

The second half of the film focuses on a student in trouble. It’s more dramatic but no less real. I have seen teachers escalate trouble, intentionally and by accident, about a thousand times in the 19 years I was a teacher. And I’ve done it myself. Probably more than I want to remember. Easy to critique from the back of the room but you try being the one up the front with 25 lounging adolescents ripe for a bit of a struggle. Francois fucks up. He means well but he fucks up. And then it kind of goes pear-shaped for everyone because the school is bound to support the institutional power relationships. Bound in a kind of unstated and complex arrangement of power, authority and support. Bound because there is a tacit agreement with the people who are in the front line doing the intimate and personal thing that is teaching that you will support them in the process. So what the viewer gains is a small taste of the struggle for a school when a student pushes the last boundary. The film conveys a sense of the investment made in the child, the relationship, the sense of loss at the waste of the efforts of all. And a despair at what might happen to the kid. And anger of course and sometimes relief. The common good argument. It’s all there in this classy film – pun intended.

Lots of critics have written about the way the film has been constructed – student volunteers, loose plot. The success of the film is down to its essential truthfulness; the people making it wanted to show what the work of a teacher is – tedium and all. I’ve been talking about the job with people I work with; we were talking about lesson plans and I admitted that I probably hadn’t done one since about my second year of teaching. I wasn’t much of a teacher then but they didn’t suit me as a way of organising myself. What I ended up saying in that conversation is that your success as a teacher partly depends on pretty quickly having a good sense of how you wanted to be in Role, capital “R” role, and the closer that the Capital R role is to your own sense of self, the better. Then your persona is consistent and predictable and genuinely grounded. It‘s not a stretch – you’d be able to feel, as Francois perhaps didn’t – that where he was heading with kids was down a whole lot of alleyways that were dead-ends. Maybe.

The Monthly critic Luke Davis ends his review of this film by saying “Francois is like the character Glory Boughton in the Marilynn Robinson novel Home who comes to understand, of the children she taught for many years, that her role as a teacher had essentially been that of “helping them assume their humanity.” On first reading, this resonated but it’s not the kind of language which Australians could use about themselves. I see it as trying to have kids get a sharper sense of themselves and the wider world; of what makes it all tick and what they think about it. And why. And to be curious about what other people think. That’s about it. And some skills to communicate. That’s it. That’s enough. (and BTW - I think Luke's pushing it a bit with this description of Francois - calling a couple of teenage girls "skanks" might be a natural human reaction to an incident in the film, but this and the ensuing events hardly amount to helping those particular kids "assume their humanity".)

I haven’t written enough here about fun. Those kids looked like they’d be fun. I taught in schools like this for most of my teaching life and there is lots of fun to be had, lots of interest to make you hang around amidst the tedium of perrenial staffroom stuff, government directives, union meetings, students wearing caps in class and the rest. The film triggered one of my ongoing desires – to teach again. It comes and goes and is tempered by the memory of the boot-full of correction that dogged my life. Maybe I’ll go back one day.

How you look at life?

Been mulling this over in terms of my life - Justice Michael Kirby is reported as saying "You have to look at life as if it's a grand nineteenth century novel. A Joseph Conrad tale. This highway robbery, that love affair, now this time of servitude. And so on." Been wondering if my life is like a 19th century novel or some other form. It's easier to describe others - the guy I work with - his life is like a military handbook; marked by strategy and defensive play. Mine - I'm not so sure...

Life is short and then you die

The length of a film is not the best grounds for choosing which one to watch but the over 40’s Melbourne temperatures of last week made the decision easy. Find the longest film on offer at the closest cinema. And so I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I liked it more than I expected even though I have an automatic resistance to these kinds of films. By this I mean extremely polished, expensive, emotionally manipulative films from the Hollywood stable. I don’t like crying over crap or having sentiment front and centre as a device. I don’t much like Brad Pitt as an actor either. Less pretty is good. And this film is all about pretty – in lots of ways. (And on the Brad topic, I loved this critique of him from film critic A O Scott in the New York Times; “Mr. Pitt seems more interested in the nuances of reticence than in the dynamics of expression”. Originally John Travolta was to have had the role; he would have been a better choice.)

So, what‘s to like? Almost every scene looks like a scene from a picture-story book, with the exception of the “modern” scenes which contrast nicely. The historical scenes are filmed in a luminous sort of candlelight which makes then look both rich and mysterious. I’m sure that part of the reason for this would have been the need to cleverly manage the process of ageing Brad backwards; he is born in the guise of a very old man and becomes younger as the film develops. So soft lighting is important; as the Brad character, Benjamin becomes younger, his co-star, Cate Blanchett, playing Daisy, has to age. The scenes are visually striking; lush and dramatic. It's a lovely film to look at.

The picture story book effect provides the film with licence to be melodramatic. A baby is close to being thrown in the river by his father, a tugboat is blown to bits at war, a woman is knocked down by a car, Hurricane Katrina is whirling round the edges of the modern story. It’s a fable. And provided you accept that it’s a fable, it’s quite satisfying.

A lot of critics have rightly criticised the lack of characterisation in the film. Usually this matters to me but I think this is a film about a larger topic; the passage of time and how humans manage it. It’s about the brief ephemeral intersections of contact and about loss. Loss caused by death and loss caused when people move on or move out of your life.

The most poignant scene for me was late in the film. Benjamin and Daisy intersect many times as she ages and he goes in the opposite direction. After a gap of several years, Benjamin walks through the door of her dance studio and stands, looking at her. She doesn’t initially recognise him. Her face is lined, she is a middle-aged woman. He is a young man, glowing with all the gorgeousness of youth. My mind went immediately to my recent meeting with Geoff, a man I lived with a long time ago. We hadn’t seen each other for many years and so meeting again, were confronted by physical change, by memories of the relationship we had shared and by what was left - nothing really. I felt a sense of loss – not that we no longer had a relationship but that there was nothing left now. No yearning, no nothing. I had the “So what’s it all for?” feeling. It made me feel terribly, terribly sad.

The focus on aging also made me think about my father and his own aging process, the pain of it. It’s painful watching my father go through this. Painful, sad and frustrating. The world becomes smaller and more circumscribed. But not necessarily. Geoff is not in my current life and making that decision decades ago was a good decision. What I have now is rich, lively and full of opportunities. Some options have closed down but I don’t feel like my world is getting smaller; if anything it seems more open-ended and full of promise.

The film comes from a short story written by F Scott Fitzgerald, who had an ongoing preoccupation with the ephemerality of things. I haven’t read it yet but you can download it. The screenplay was written by Eric Roth, who also wrote Forrest Gump. I was pleased when I read this – not because I liked Forrest Gump much but I was reminded of that film while I was watching the Benjamin Button film and I couldn’t work out why – something to do with the over-orchestration of effects and emotions, I think. It’s made me want to go and re-read Scott Fitzgerald which is no bad thing…