by Lance Lee
She is distraught when Jan must leave for his next stint on the rig, and flees the scene in a deeply disturbed way well past hysteria. Jan soothes her with difficulty and leaves. Bess copes by, among other things, talking to God in the kirk by herself, a God who is both a split-off part of herself and a harshly condemnatory superego. Intense as all this is, we are only at the start of the maelstrom: Jan is paralyzed from the neck down in an accident, brought to the town’s hospital, and experiences graphic, repeated near-death crises.
All these grievous elements are legitimate story elements and convincingly handled: any wife would be beside herself at the first parting from her husband, if perhaps few as openly and desperately as Bess, whose naked emotionality provokes criticism from others, including her mother. Yet we experience these others as repressed and puritanic members of an isolated community. But now complicating Bess’s life even more deeply, the crippled Jan asks her to make love to other men and tell him about her encounters so that he may live. This is startling, but then the opposite of death is not life, as Blanche knows in A Streetcar Named Desire, but desire.
Bess’s reaction to his request is entirely credible: she is horrified, faints, then tries to fake an experience for Jan. He sees through her and reproaches her. Reluctantly, Bess slides into promiscuity. Others think she is a whore, hardly understanding she gives herself to enable Jan to live vicariously through her. To go on, she imagines her love is being tested by God: if she passes the test, Jan will recover. This is entirely in keeping with her fundamentalist surroundings and her experience of “His” harshness, if given an original turn. The doctor tending Jan falls in love with Bess, though he refuses her sexual advances: when he challenges her behavior, she reproaches him for not knowing what his special talent is: hers is to believe. What’s more, she knows she’s good at what she is doing from love.
The story is trying and uncomfortable for a viewer by this point. If it is hard to say the emotionality of her behavior has become heavy, then it clearly borders that characterization by this point. But we accept with Bess that her descent and emotionality will be justified if it saves Jan even as we recoil from the action, as when she vomits by the roadside after her first sexual encounter. But there’s the rub. Jan has moments of rallying but sinks back as far or further each time, each sinking provoking a more desperate sexual encounter on the part of Bess.
Her sister-in-law and the doctor force Jan to sign papers to have Bess committed, as she once was in the past. She is seized, taken away, and escapes. On her return her mother will not open the door to her, children call her a whore in the street and stone her, the minister leaves her where she falls before the kirk, and Jan is worse. Bess has herself taken to a ship where the men are known sadists, a ship she fled earlier. She believes this extremity of behavior is demanded of her for Jan’s sake. But she is so brutalized the medical staff cannot save her at the hospital, nor can they console her that Jan is better: she dies in despair.
There is no doubt we have moved now into the realm of the heavy.
Compare this to our experience of Zaillian’s Schindler’s List. Schindler begins by wowing the Nazi brass in Krakow, intending to go into business. He is a Nazi himself, able, magnetic, an attractive if heartless personality who happily moves into a luxurious apartment moments after its affluent Jewish owners are forced to leave for the ghetto. He raises money from Jewish businessmen in the ghetto through one of its members, Stern, offering no money in return, only the pots he intends to make for the army that they can barter for goods. They agree to this awful, exploitative offer because they have no other choice.
Stern, however, has his own agenda as Schindler’s accountant. He sees to it intellectual or gifted Jews are hired regardless of their mechanical skills. He saves Jews who would be in immediate danger from the Nazis, like a man with one arm. Schindler turns a blind eye to this as long as he makes money, gets contracts, and can sleep with whom he likes. Life, as far as he is concerned, is sweet. He is profoundly uncomfortable when the one-armed machinist thanks him, however, betraying the first sign of a guilty conscience. Perhaps he is more than a war profiteer and criminal after all. Then his conscience is shocked into full awareness of the moral dimensions of his reality as he watches the ghetto being liquidated at the end of Act 1 by Amon Goeth.
He cuts a deal with Amon who recognizes part of himself in Schindler, with whom we identify, and reclaims “his” Jews from the concentration/work camp. Thereafter Schindler knowingly abets Stern in saving anyone in immediate danger from Amon, steadily bribing camp officials to add these Jews to his workforce. He even tries to modify Amon’s behavior after an orgiastic night, debating the nature of power with him. Power is the ability not to do what is expected, he explains to Amon: to forgive, when death is expected, to forbear, because you can.
Amon tries forbearance for a time, caught by the idea, then tries it on himself in the mirror. Amon has no conscience he can permit himself to feel: he kills the boy he has just “forgiven” for failing to clean his bathtub properly. He cannot be redeemed.
Why isn’t this heavy? The film is certainly full of weighty and difficult experiences, as when the camp inmates are sorted according to “health” so more can replace those sent off to a death camp. It is horrible when the children are seized and shipped off, to say nothing of when the bodies of the murdered are exhumed and burned. Why don’t we rush from the theatre in repugnance or call all this pejoratively heavy and shrug it off as an unpleasantness?
Because it isn’t just the Jews’ story: it is Schindler’s, and as he saves one Jew after another, he saves himself. The point is driven home when Amon’s camp is liquidated and Schindler, instead of leaving with trunks of money, his original goal, spends it to buy “his” Jews from Amon for a new factory in Czechoslovakia. Goodness has to start with what is at hand, not with abstractions, as Billy tells Guy in The Year of Living Dangerously. Schindler has changed 180 degrees from where he was at the start of the story. He even goes to Auschwitz to recover his women and children when they are shipped there by mistake. The dimension of his and his women and children’s risk is driven home as we live through the shower room and the sight of others being led to the ovens as a snow of burning flesh falls. In the new factory Schindler deliberately reproaches Stern for worrying about the quality of the artillery shells they are making: if the factory turns out one that works, he will be disappointed.
Unlike Jan in Breaking the Waves, Schindler gets better: unlike Bess, his feelings deepen as he develops his conscience and sense of responsibility without resorting to a kind of magical thinking in the hope his actions may succeed. This is not to reproach Bess for her dream: Bess acts from love. But it does point out that Schindler, with whom, I repeat, we identify for better and worse, takes us somewhere else. Where? Schindler is on a journey: at the end, the Jews forge a gold ring for him from their gold fillings, voluntarily surrendered, unlike the piles of entire, gold-filled teeth we saw captive Jews earlier in the film having to sort and weigh. Engraved on Schindler’s ring is “Who saves one life, saves the world.”
Schindler reacts in sorrow that he didn’t save more, that he enjoyed himself so much, kept a fancy car and a gold Nazi pin. He breaks down as they collectively embrace him. They dress him in concentration camp clothes, give him a letter signed by all exonerating him, and wave him off. The moment is profoundly stirring, not, in some pejorative sense, heavy.
Schindler moves through hell to enlightenment in a redemptive end that exhilarates: Bess moves ever deeper into pain she experiences, finally, as pointless.
This is a complex issue. Drama and conflict are synonymous, deeply disturbing emotions inescapable in powerful writing. Agave in Euripides’ The Bacchae awakes from a Dionysian transport to discover the head she is holding from the “beast” she had torn apart is her son’s. Tragic? Yes. Heavy? Certainly trying, but the moment is earned, and it has been inflicted by an angry god whose worship the Thebans had spurned: what kind of price did th
ey expect they would have to pay? That head belongs to Pentheus, the primary opponent of the god. Lear dies of a broken heart with Cordelia’s body in his arms, in King Lear, as does Ichimonji with Saburo in his arms in Kurosawa’s take on King Lear in Ran. Lady Kaede in Ran exults over the imminent fall of Ichimonji’s house and her second husband, Jiro, and is beheaded by Kurogane. She dies completed, however: vengeance is at last exacted for the killing of her family by Ichimonji years earlier. Stanley howls in despair for his wife in A Streetcar Named Desire and drives her sister to madness through a brutal rape. We might call some of this appalling as well as tragic, but not heavy: these are all masterpieces, as is Zaillian’s Schindler’s List, and we do not leave the theatre or cinema depressed by them.
Nietzsche, meditating on the choice of myths in Greek tragedy, points out a selection was made from a small number of the myths actually available. Why these? Because they provide stories extreme enough for a dramatist to use to break human nature down so we can see what we are capable of doing and being.1 The stories at issue here—King Lear, Ran, Hamlet, A Streetcar Named Desire, Schindler’s List, Breaking the Waves, even Witness—do just that too. Yet a paradox attached to tragedy, spoken of as early as Aristotle, who speaks of tragic wonder, is that it ends in exhilaration—not as a downer, not as heavy.2 The heavy lacks exhilaration, lacks the tragic solace: it lacks any solace.
Bess dies in despair in Breaking the Waves, as we saw: but at her funeral Jan is standing. Her body is secreted from the elders so they cannot curse it as they lower her coffin into the ground as her sister-in-law breaks into their patriarchal enclave and denounces their right to condemn Bess. At the inquest the doctor raises eyebrows with the implication that Bess died of “goodness”: when challenged to make that official, he retracts. At sea, after Bess is interred in the depths, Jan is awakened by his friends to come on deck: bells are ringing overhead, the bells no longer in the kirk steeple. We have slipped into the realm of fable.
It is true that Bess acts for a higher reason, and her post mortem success goes a long way to averting a disastrously heavy ending. But Breaking the Waves goes far enough down that path for us to sense the heavy arises from a conflict when emotion is handled in a way where we begin to feel pain is indulged in for its own sake. Bess never knows what she has achieved, and dies debased in her own eyes, while we have seen nothing to justify an expectation of sympathetic magic working earlier in the film, nor have we seen any sign Jan is getting better. His appearance standing at the funeral comes as an uncaused surprise. It simply doesn’t convince.
Schindler, on the other hand, transforms his character and becomes a world redeemer, as evidenced by the ring’s inscription: he is married to destiny and made whole. All is experienced from his and “his” Jews’ perspective: the Holocaust is seen through the prism of a positive story, which may be the only way we can bear it.
Yet there is more to the sense of a film being heavy than just pain being indulged for its own sake, unpleasant and repellent as that may be. Fortunately, we have a excellent guide into this dark realm.
Freud, Civilization, and the Heavy
Freud published Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930, examining at length the nature of love (libido) and death (the death instinct), or, famously, Eros vs. Thanatos.3 It presents his late thinking on the subjects of guilt, ambivalence, and aggression/destruction, as well as on the libido/love, and bears on the question of what in our experience makes experience feel heavy. Near the end of his life he published two other crucial papers, Analysis Terminable and Interminable, in which he questioned the ability of an individual psychoanalysis to reach a final resting point in treatment, and Constructions in Analysis, an even more thoughtful piece.4 There he concedes the truthfulness of what is remembered in treatment is not a decisive feature of a cure achieved by patient and analyst, even after years of the meticulous reconstruction of past events through dream, memory, and regression in the transference to the source of a patient’s neurosis, all to free the patient by thus bringing what was unconscious into consciousness. Instead, if analyst and patient have jointly created a version of reality that is not wholly true yet has the effect of curing the patient’s neurosis, then the construction will do. In a sense it is true because it works.
Constructions in Analysis is a very brave paper, pushing against the limit of what we can know, and how, at that limit, things are not what they seem. Even more remarkably, with this insight Freud ends his career by positing how an act of the imagination can cure, just as in the years between 1896 and 1900 he abandoned the theory that actual incestuous seductions lay at the root of his patients’ hysterias, wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, and showed how acts of the imagination, including imagined acts of incest, could cause ill health, specifically neurosis.
What is dramatized in Breaking the Waves is an attempt on Bess’s part through an act of the imagination to cure Jan: her belief is that her sexual escapades will be creatively curative as they are relived by Jan. She dies feeling she has failed, while we are not convinced by her postmortem success. Yet the power of imagination, whether in Bess’s beliefs that God speaks to her or love can cure, is everywhere in Breaking the Waves and resonates deeply with our own sense of human nature, as Freud underscores. But in Bess’s case hers is a creativity that doesn’t create, an exercise in Eros that instead carries her into death.
Schindler, on the other hand, grows in his imaginative powers steadily in Schindler’s List. In the Beginning he cannot imagine the Jews as people at all: they are just objects to manipulate and exploit. He betrays a profound lack of empathy. Which is first, empathy or imagination, cannot be resolved: it’s a bit like a chicken and egg argument. It may be empathy is just one facet of our imagination. But a profound ability to imagine himself in the shoes of others brings Schindler to redemption at the End as he sobs in guilty remorse.
We are in Freud’s realm here, because writing structure is rooted in mental structure, because our minds work in some ways and not in others, because any writing in depth about a character’s motivation inevitably plumbs human nature. I could say Freud is in our realm here, for the same reason. Harold Bloom credits Shakespeare with having invented modern consciousness.5 Deep insight into human nature has always been one of the facets of writing that makes us call some dramatists great, and that leads to their often being credited with anticipating modern psychoanalytic insights, like Sophocles for the Oedipus complex, or Shakespeare generally. Our great writers have the ability to intimate realities we are unable to put into scientific language, however controversial. But the constellation of guilt, remorse, aggression, love, and destructiveness so omnipresent in Breaking the Waves and Schindler’s List is Freud’s subject in Civilization and Its Discontents.
He begins by wondering how to explain the oceanic feeling associated with religion. As a scientist, he wants to find a scientific (read: psychoanalytic) explanation grounded in our real experience. He points out infants are governed by a sense of omniscience typically abetted by mothers, who try to meet their infant’s every wish while the infantile ego structure is incapable of distinguishing between “me” and “not me.” That early feeling he regards as the prototype for the oceanic religious sense. Does, however, the adult mind retain all the intermediate stages back to the beginning? If not, our early sense of omniscience cannot be the root of that religious feeling. Yes, Freud answers: all is preserved in the mind. But if that oceanic feeling proves to have a mental root, oceanic feeling is not the source of religion, which must arise from a need, not a feeling. That need is the yearning for the father, explored in 1927 in The Future of an Illusion.
Worse, this adult oceanic feeling of connectedness with all is not a sufficient consolation for our lives, anyway, because we cannot avoid suffering. Try and imagine a screenplay without suffering. We may try and deflect suffering, find substitute satisfactions, or bury ourselves in intoxication, but hedonism, isolation, joining a communal effort as in subduing nature, or dimini
shing our organic sensibility by drugs or stoicism cannot free us from suffering. Even more galling is the fact that the uninhibited satisfaction of any instinct gives us our greatest pleasure, yet civilization constantly and necessarily inhibits such satisfaction. We are reduced to coping by sublimating the libido, Freud’s term for our underlying sexual instinct, speaking very broadly, by feeding it into creativity, the scientific pursuit of truth, or just into “work” for those capable of nothing more.
Love alone engages the world with passion, either sexually or in the worship of beauty. Yet “we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”6 If it were not so, the trials and tribulations of love would not be such a staple of our writing. But passion doesn’t last and varies in intensity: happiness is fleeting and subjective. While we seek pleasure through the pleasure principle, the reality principle intervenes to deny our attempts at unalloyed happiness. We must try to be happy, nonetheless, and we must suffer. Some men become “erotic” in their relation to reality, some “narcissistic,” some “men of action.” The inadequate fly to neurosis, which religion spares us, but at the cost of infantilism and intimidating the intellect.
So nature, our own limitations, and society bar happiness. We resent social barriers to happiness the most because we think them most arbitrary. Often we wish to get rid of civilization out of a long dissatisfaction with the limits it places on our instincts, or from the Christian denigration of the world, the overestimation of the primitive, neurotic disappointment at the frustration of unrealistic ideals, and the failure of material progress to make us happy. But civilization is everything we do to protect ourselves from nature and adjust our relations with each other; we cannot live without it, any more than we can avoid suffering.
What, then, is the nature of civilization? It is characterized by science and technology, which are practical; the demand for beauty, which is not practical but essential, with its associated demands for order and cleanliness; and by the exercise of the higher faculties as shown in science, art, philosophy, and religion. Crucially, civilization brings order into our social relationships by subjecting the individual will to the communal, brute force to justice, which demands a renunciation of uninhibited instinctual satisfaction. We are in a continual balancing act of liberty and freedom vs. necessary constraint. Civilization very definitely is not about perfecting but restraining human nature.
