Overt Freudianism in Film: The George W. Bush Years

Because we do not understand ourselves, our attempts to repair our lives are apt to make them increasingly worse.

The only experience we humans have in common is our desperate loneliness.

The most honest an artist is willing to be, the more artificial his/her art will become.

--themes observed in the 2008 film Synecdoche, New York


Insecure men with daddy issues, who attempt to mask their insecurity by swaggering around and refusing to see life's inherent complexity, deserve our sympathy. That does not mean, however, that we have to elect them president.

--theme observed in the 2008 film W.


Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York and Oliver Stone's W. are both exercises in Freudian psychology; both, that is, attempt to understand human motives with reference to Freud's mapping of the psyche. Neither filmmaker is particularly coy about this fact; for example, Synecdoche is full of Freudian slips (which are referred to by that term at least once), and just about every review of W. remarked on its interpretation of George W. Bush as someone still dealing, in his 60s, with a deep Oedipus complex.

Both are pretty good movies, in my opinion. But here's a difference: Stone's movie is straightforward in a way that would seem implausible from a Freudian standpoint. As David Denby said in a review in The New Yorker, "Even if the real Bush is as simple as that (which I doubt), he’s still a lousy movie character—an inadequate protagonist in his own life story." The success of Kaufman's movie, on the other hand, depends on its more-than-a-little bewildering plotline: if, in other words, someone claims to understand Synecdoche, New York completely, either that person is lying or else the movie failed (for him or her).

The first third or so of Synecdoche is fairly unadorned realism, a portrait of a family that looks like many families, and that (like many families) is in the midst of a crisis composed of many small problems with the potential to become large ones. The middle third is less realistic, and "reads" like a Coen brothers movie, with increasingly quirky characters and lapses from the plausible that seem to serve a realist end (such as the house one character contemplates buying despite its being on fire--homage to Barton Fink?--which seems a metaphor for her forced optimism despite a sense of impending doom). The last third of the movie, however, is full-out David Lynch territory, in which the lines between the real and the surreal (conscious and unconscious) are so blurry that they can't really be sorted out; the only option is to watch the interesting, blurry patterns. At some point, Synecdoche, New York becomes an account of its protagonist's dream, but it's not easy to say at exactly what point this occurs.

The protagonist of W., on the other hand, like that of Synecdoche, New York, doesn't really understand what is happening to or around him, or why, and (like his counterpart in Synecdoche) makes a mess of things in trying to wrestle his life into a plot he can make sense of. But his issues, as Stone interprets them, are half an inch below the surface. I enjoyed the movie, and I have a feeling it will help future viewers make some sense out of this moment in history, but it's less persuasive (and also less interesting) as a psychological portrait.

So it may be that Synecdoche, New York will end up being the more definitive account of the cultural moment known as the George W. Bush years. In fact, I couldn't help wondering what kind of movie would result from Stone and Kaufman collaborating somehow to blend the two, incorporating Stone's research and insistence on speaking plainly with Kaufman's disturbing analytical weirdness. What if, instead of a play-by-play enactment of what journalists and historians have concluded really happened behind the scenes, Stone and Kaufman concocted a version of the 43rd president who (like Synecdoche's Caden Cotard) hires actors to play himself and his cabinet members, each day acting out their most recent experiences while W. directs? Would that have more aptly captured the weird mixture of manipulation and sycophancy that Cheney et al. directed at their boss? What if, instead of Caden's attempt to construct an exact replica of part of New York City inside a warehouse, Stone/Kaufman's W. character built a scale model of Baghdad on the White House lawn, then slowly and unintentionally wrecked it? That would at least offer the possibility that, as an artwork rather than an actual nation, it can be torn down and forgotten about once its maker moves on--which, I guess, would serve as wish fulfillment for the audience.

Fear of a Black President

This topic (the last in my three-part series of golden oldies) is both timely and obsolete now that Barack Obama is maintaining a tidy lead in the presidential election with just over two weeks to go. When I wrote this paper, Obama was a state senator with no national name recognition, and if there was going to be an African American president anytime soon, most people assumed it would be a Republican, Colin Powell. (Also, the paper was written before the TV show 24, which initially featured the African American actor Dennis Haysbert as the president, or the Chris Rock movie Head of State, had debuted.)

In sum, I looked at the various representations of an African American president in the news media, film, and literature, and concluded that there have been two main strains:

1. the "liberal version," which focuses on the attainment of the presidency by an African American man (always a man, as far as I've seen), and scrupulously avoids talking about policy or any overty "racial" issues: once an African American assumes the office of the presidency, this myth assumes, the American history of racial conflict will immediately become a closed book.


2. the "Afrocentric version," which assumes that blackness is "an ideological rather than a purely visual or symbolic entity," and that the race of the president is a separate (although clearly related) issue from that of race relations in America.

Lots of examples to look at (again, remember that this is pre-Barack Obama, pre-24 and Head of State):

• Toni Morrison famously wrote, during the Clinton impeachment scandal of 1998, that Clinton was "our first black president." However seriously she meant her remarks to be taken, Morrison clearly saw blackness as something other than a matter of skin color--as a cultural rather than a biological phenomenon. In the animosity Clinton faced from the right, she saw a glimpse of what African Americans in positions of power consistently face in our culture; thus, her view can roughly be categorized as part of the "Afrocentric" perspective.


• The 1972 novel Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed touches on the rumor that President Warren Harding had black ancestry. Wrote Reed, "When Republicans approached Harding with these rumors and asked him to deny them he said, 'How should I know. One of my ancestors might have jumped the fence.' What kind of answer was that?" Clearly, Reed was not charmed by Harding's unwillingness to acknowledge (or, for that matter, even to bother to repudiate) a possible black heritage.
• The 1964 novel The Man by Irving Wallace tells the story of Douglass Dillman, a black senator who (through a series of coincidences) ends up as president. Although Wallace is taking a stand against racism, he also betrays his implicitly racist attitude in a couple of key passages. His character, President Dillman, thinks to himself, "an original piece of paper is white, but the carbon is black, and often the carbon copy, no matter how weak, is almost as useful." Almost as useful? A racist Secret Service officer resents Dillman's ascension to office; however, (anticipating the motif of the "noble racist" later seen in Matt Dillon's character in Crash) he nobly risks his life to save Dillman's and is rewarded by a promotion that allows him to move into a segregated neighborhood. (I'd feel better if I felt that Wallace was conscious of the irony here, but I'm not convinced he was.)
  

  Inevitably, Dillman is impeached (one of the points I suspect Morrison was trying to make was that the first African American president will surely, like Clinton, be impeached--we'll see). He is charged on four counts, but he knows very well that the real reason he's being impeached, what he thinks of as the "fifth article," is being black. Eventually, he's acquitted and his lawyer informs him that he was acquited of "all five" charges--that is, he's acquitted of being black!

• Although I have not seen it, I read a very interesting article about the film version of The Man (starting James Earl Jones), written by Samuel B. Garren and published in CLA Journal. It explains that the original screenwriter, an African American novelist named William Attaway, attempted to push the story in the direction of a more distinctly anti-racist message (for example, showing that racism was present throughout the nation, not exclusively in the Deep South, and--in contrast to the novel--including scenes in which African Americans speak out against racism without being regarded as whiners or schemers). Garren, who read the various rejected drafts of the screenplay by Attaway, shows that he was flouted at every turn by Wallace and the film's producers. (The film was eventually made using a screenplay by Rod Serling.)
  
• Then there's Deep Impact, the 1998 movie in which Morgan Freeman plays a president who must contend with an asteroid that threatens to destroy the world. The movie follows the "liberal" model of African-American-president mythology. The producers cast a black actor to play the president, true, but only in the absence of the slightest whiff of political topicality in the movie. We're all anti-life-destroying-astroids, and so it must have seemed safe to cast the president as a black man (knowing, presumably, that this was unusual, and maybe even benefitting from the appeal of newness). Movies about actual issues upon which Americans can disagree, in contrast, cast white actors as the president.

I'd be interested in how people think recent developments alter the thinking outline above. Clearly, Obama's candidacy has (to the minimal extent it has touched directly on race at all) traded exclusively in the "liberal" version of the myth in its rhetorical and symbolic gestures. On the other hand, assuming Obama is elected (as polls suggest he will), it will be interesting to see how his racial identity--Obama is, of course, the son of a black man and a white woman--influences the discourses that surround him.

Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: The first black president is neither black nor a president. Discuss.