Happy-Go-Lucky (2009), a film by Mike Leigh

Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky is an unusual film that I have grown increasingly fond of in these several days after watching it. 

You might call it a character study of a woman who may appear to some a "silly airhead" (I'm quoting a family member's critical reaction 20 minutes into the film), but who proves over the course of the story, I believe, to be a portrait of psychological health: a person with strong boundaries, who is non-judgmental, non-reactive, compassionate, courageous, appropriately assertive, modest, unpretentious and just happy being herself. She keeps balanced and cheerful in the face of all the dysfunctional cultural dynamics around her. Her good cheer is not merely passive and adaptive: even if in modest ways, at critical moments, she takes a stand and proactively confronts others around her. Childlike and playful whenever she can, but a mature and forceful adult when circumstances require.

Need I say what an important achievement this is in our world today? One of the actors, giving his commentary on the film, calls the main character a living example of the laughing Buddha. I think that captures it well. 

A special something about the film quite intrigues me, and I'm not sure that I can articulate what it is. What's coming up for me is an analogy to the curious fact that our mainstream news media today is so rarely able to report "good news." If it bleeds, it leads, goes the saying about our contemporary journalism. 

This characteristic of our news media reflects, I think, something deeply characteristic about our culture's almost addicted focus on problems, on "what's wrong," on everything unhealthy and pathological. 

Why do we seem to find health so boring? 

Why does happiness in our world seem like something always out of reach -- most likely something that we haven't saved up enough money to buy yet, or something enjoyed by other people who unjustly have more wealth, privilege and power than we.  But happiness as something already present, free, available to all? Boring, or perhaps not believable. 

Are we an eternally-disgruntled, blaming, protesting people, perversely finding some self-validation, perhaps even some joy, in the calamity that happens to others?  Why do stories of murder, war and bad behavior by celebrities sell so many newspapers? 

To our negatively-oriented spirits, the central character in Happy-Go-Lucky may seem to have nothing of interest to offer. No spiky textures to chafe our excitement. 

Nothing spiky, that is, unless we find her continual laughter and good humor something quite annoying. The first thing out of many a viewer's mouth after watching this film may be something like this: "The main character laughed too much. She was really annoying. She got on my nerves. She acts like a child, not an adult." The attitude behind such a statements, I think, will bring relief to such viewers -- because they have found a way to insert the character back into the mainstream negative framework, thus making her unthreatening and easily dismissed.

Yet that annoying tapping on our nerves may represent a suppressed, inner, more happy self that's trying to emerge, if only we weren't so fearful of the consequences of letting ourselves be happy, of breaking from social norms, of being okay and compassionate with ourselves and with others -- much like the character in question. Have you considered this: Why does the word "childish" have such negative connotations in our language? Perhaps we disgruntled adults would do well to bring more of the spirit of children back into our lives.

The main character in Happy-Go-Lucky might be perceived as a sort of "nothing" from one perspective (I say, intending to invoke the ideal state of "nothingness" as preached by the Zen Buddhists). She is nothing but resilient and adaptive poise, a model of composure and unfailingly generous good humor relative to all that life brings her way.  

The world as it is currently structured and oriented, I grant, is deeply unjust. How do we respond to that? Can justice grow out of a negative and bitter reaction to injustice? (At least one character in the film models such a response.)  Yet flowers need healthy soil to grow. How can we become happy and spread health in an unjust world, among dysfunctional social relations, exploitative economics and corrupt politics, where assaults are coming at us constantly from all directions? 

For I believe that we can. All the shadows we see in our lives are only visible because of a surplus of illuminating light. The given abundance supersedes all human-generated scarcity. 

A few lines of poetry come into my mind: 

"The light for all time shall outspeed the thunder crack."   

              - William Carlos Williams

"when you consider 

the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

 bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped

 guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no

 way winces from its storms of generosity ... " 

             - A. A. Ammons

Perhaps the emergence of such a film indicates that our culture is finding new models of psychic and spiritual health in the face of social dysfunction, new exemplars of the kind of individual poise we must learn to join together in building a new world.  

The Celebration (1998), directed by Thomas Vinterberg

After seeing "Melancholia," the subject of my prior post, I decided to watch "The Celebration" (Festen, 1998) the first of the "Dogme 95" films.  It didn't have as strong an impact on me as Melancholia, though I thought it quite good and it gave rise in me to much reflection.

It's like Melancholia in some ways: e.g., a large extended family (about 40 people or so) gathers at a wealthy estate for a celebration, this time not for a wedding, but in honor of a father's 60th birthday. The father is a successful, wealthy businessman.
Like Melancholia, this film that is nominally about a family event, in my opinion, actually makes a challenging analysis and critique of modern civilization. 

The major event that the "The Celebration" turns on is the eldest son's shocking, open accusation of the father: When this eldest son stands in front of the entire gathering to make a toast to the patriarch, he surprisingly, yet also quite flatly and matter-of-factly, tells the story of how the father repeatedly molested him and his twin sister when the two were young children (the twin sister has recently committed suicide).

The whole family at first responds to this accusal -- or, rather, statement of fact -- with utter denial. First, the party behaves almost as if nothing had been said at all. Eventually, the son's claims are explicitly dismissed. The son is ridiculed and, finally, attacked and expelled from the house (only to return later). Even the mother, who had once witnessed the abuse with her own eyes, claims the son has mistaken imagination for reality. When a black man (the guest of another, rebellious sister) starts to defend the son, the entire party ridicules him by joining together, with a gusto quite painful to behold, in a racist song about black sambos. (With this, the film undeniably connects the family dynamic with the wider world.)

A main insight I had while watching the film was this: In the son's accusing the father of  having fucked his children, the film intends to expose the authoritarianism - patriarchal, racist, coercive -  that is at the core of our civilization and is its central sin, and to expose as well the patterns of denial by which this sin is both reenacted and kept in force. Moreover, and importantly, I think, the filmmakers intend molestation, despite its being an extreme form of abuse, to represent something that our culture typically does to its children -- that is, to virtually all of us -- ordinarily and every day, albeit in more and less subtle ways.

Molestation, I believe the film is saying, is only an extreme instance of an abusive relation between parents and children, between ruling authorities and oppressed or dependent subjects of all kinds, that epitomizes what is occurring in our families, our workplaces and in our civilization at large, and that has been at the center of our world story for a very long time. Molestation, the film says -- and as the son says at the family anniversay -- is our hidden truth.

Yet molestation seems so appalling and distant from our common experience: Why would a father molest his children? How ever could parents fuck their own sons and daughters? How can we possibly relate something so heinous to our everyday life? What is the emotional logic of molestation? As I posed these questions, I found myself at turns grasping and then losing my conceptual grasp of what I was asking. But eventually I became clearer that the answers may not be so far to seek.

The molester strangely entangles love, or a simulacrum of love, with an exertion of control. In molestation there occurs a strange and abusive mix of intimacy with an exercise of power over those who are vulnerable. Something of this strange mix is captured in the word "instruction," when we hear the sadistic parent, teacher or other authority figure speak of the "instruction" he or she "must" perform upon a child. A stereotype of the old-school Catholic nun, supposedly representing a God who loves us, strikes a ruler across the wayward pupil's knuckles.

Familiar experiences from my childhood arise: e.g. of my parents or teachers "disciplining" me, my siblings and my schoolmates -- blatantly or subtly shaming, coercing or rewarding us so that we would satisfy some perceived social or cultural imperative, achieve some perceived measure of success, and ranking us in relation to each other relative to its measure. They did these things, we were told (and we both wanted to believe them and did not believe them), "for our own good," "because they loved us," "because they cared about us," so we would "learn our lessons," "so we would be happy," so we would be "successful" and "steer the right course." "Sometimes you have to do things that you do not want to do," was a refrain often repeated to me when I was a child. I remember instances, too, of my re-performing such behavior on my younger siblings.

Molestation and its denial seem to happen at a crux of vulnerability, intimacy and power. The molester's assertion of control and intimacy are mixed up with a denial of his own vulnerability, a fantasy of certainty, a fundamental betrayal of some inner self, a wish to emulate the father. In seeking to vindicate the choices he or she has made in life, clinging to illusions of a higher authority -- the "good fathers" who say what we should and must be -- here in this most intimate and vulnerable relation to the self and to those close to him, the molester performs a victimizing ritual. A "truth," one that does not arise from nature, must be enacted, manufactured and imposed through a mix of coercive power and a claim of love (and the threat of its withdrawal). The performance, in the language of social constructivists, is how our hierarchical world and its social dynamic gets constituted in an assertion of power.

This is paradoxically a social act. For this assertion of power originates not simply with any one individual; rather, the individual participates in a socially-legitimated performance and its socially-supported denial. This shared performance creates our social artifice, sustains our culture of domination, and is at some deep level an act of belonging. It joins us as perpetrators and victims to the fathers and to the wider participant social world, all those who gather at our anniversaries to sustain this peculiar tradition of togetherness.

The film suggests that our present-day culture is molesting all of its children -- all of us are the children of our age -- just as it has molested and continues to molest, on the most visible level, people of color and other marginalized groups and nations. The educational system that drills and rams information into us as passive recipients, ranking all from top to bottom. The managers and officials who boss the ordinary laborers. The racist practices that grant some the top position and relegate others below. The financial and property systems that direct money and socially-created value to the ruling class through various means. The politicians who allow big business to have its way with us. The media and corporations who propagandize and market to us.
The film says we are getting fucked all around by those who control us and yet who need and depend upon us, who ever orient themselves toward us, and who dominate us. The molestation from the top is repeated all the way down, and passed on through the generations. And the victims repeat the cycle of perpetration.

At the bottom, there are always the suicides. How does the logic of suicide appear in this context? As a special case of self-victimization? A heroic if tragic ending to the cycle?  In "The Celebration," thanks to a suicide note that surfaces, the sister who killed herself speaks to the gathering from a strange and paradoxical place of tragic liberation.

In the current historical epoch of our dominant human culture, an epoch dating back thousands of years, we have accepted this imposed discipline over the experienced truth of our own inner, fundamentally loving, childlike, open and curious natures, and we have repeated the performance ritualistically as we have passed it on to others -- as we must once we have accepted it ourselves.

It is still rare and dangerous to publicly expose the hidden crime. Most are not ready to open themselves even to entertaining the possibility in thought. Our psychological safety, our belonging to a social world, has depended on our personal and public identification with the molesting fathers. To separate from this tradition is still to risk a terrifying isolation, expulsion and physical harm. Like the most domineering and abusive of the siblings in "The Celebration," there are many around who are poised almost desperately to defend the tradition against all imputation.

In general we hold to the tradition, I think, as we hold to our fathers and families, as we value loyalty and trust, familial and communal belonging, our cultural membership. The coercion is strangely entangled with love. We cannot easily sever ourselves from what we love and what shelters us, without risking shame over what we hold most sacred. Partly for this reason, most everyone complies with the drama, playing his or her supportive role in the birthday fête.

"The Celebration" tells the story of the favorite son who publicly reveals the truth. He does not take this risk entirely alone. Already around him the more wayward siblings in the film, including the now suicided sister, have begun tentatively and awkwardly to come together with one another, in league with the household servants, under a new set of norms and relationships, and around a new truth. To make such public risks worthwhile and meaningful, we need first to build and test a new platform of togetherness, we need to solidify new alliances, allegiances and support networks, new skills and practices, that are capable of delivering a new world into being.

Although the film puts forth a devastating analysis of our culture, such a critique is possible only from a position qualitatively different from than the one that is being exposed. Molestation and perverted love become visible as such only from a stance that knows and appreciates genuine respect and love. As the exposure of what is perverted intensifies, awareness of what is wholesome and healing also grows.

"The Celebration" is a story that means to evolve our human story, to take a step forward into a new historical epoch.

And so the "celebration" to which the title refers is finally not the father's 60th birthday celebration that brings the extended family together at the start of the film. No, the real celebration is the dancing in which the siblings spontaneously engage after the truth of the brother's accusation has finally broken through and has been heard by the gathering.

The real celebration happens with the dawning of the new era that emerges when the most racist and violent of the brothers -- the father's staunchest defender, who at first violently denies his elder brother's claim -- himself now rejects the father's story.

The real celebration begins when the father, who now admits his heinous crimes, is told to leave the breakfast table, so that the children-siblings now find themselves seated at a new table, in a new world where the central sin of the past has been brought into the light, and a new generation breathes a new atmosphere on a new morning.

The film chronicles the rite of passage that our new generations, born into a patriarchal culture,  must pass through to start the earth anew.