Wrestling with Wild Things, Part 2

In “Wrestling with Wild Things, Part 1“, I promised to go through the 2009 movies that made me cry and break down why I broke down. But I first spent some quality time with the most recent of the bunch, Where the Wild Things Are, parsing what it’s about and how it works.

I’m glad we’ve got that out of the way, because it’s time to turn on the floodgates.

Today, we talk about why memories make people sad, the narrativization of loss, advances in clinical psychology, and why everything you think you know about therapeutic art may be wrong. Oh, and there are references to Star Trek V and Wing Commander. You know, to get everybody in the mood.

The Wrestler, Wild Things, Up, and the secret to happiness, after the jump.

The three big moments

Spoilers spoilers spoilers. (Is there a pokemon named spoilers? Because if there is, Overthinking It should catch one to do this part for us. Then we should catch all the others, because we’ve gotta catch ’em all.)

Each of the big 2009 tearjerkers had a main moment that prompted my tears – and from conversations I’ve had and things I’ve read, these moments are pretty well-chosen, even if they’re not exhaustive.

1. The end of The Wrestler, when Randy performs his signature Ram Jam leap from the turnbuckle, which probably kills him (the movie ends before we find out for sure, but we know he has a heart condition and will probably die if he tries this. To an extent, it doesn’t matter whether he actually dies, but he probably does.).

2. The expositionary time-lapse montage from Up, where we watch Carl and Ellie grow up and get married under idyllic circumstances, only to suffer a miscarriage (and subsequent inability to have children) and Ellie’ sudden illness and death just as Carl was about to give her the tickets to Venezuela.

The wage of sin and death they must pay for eating of the forbidden fruit of adventure – for daring to find and love each other.

3. The farewell from the island in Where the Wild Things Are, when Carol realizes that Max loves him and recognizes the consequences of the anger he has, until this point, struggled to understand.

These aren’t groundbreaking moments – in each case, the audience and the characters come to understand something really tragic about their lives. It’s basic Aristotelian catharsis.

Except I saw a LOT of movies with Aristotelian catharsis in them this year. Heck, Terminator Salvation had Aristotelian catharsis (I think it came out of the legs of one of the larger robots) – but these three very specifically made this grown man cry. They have something else in common.

A few things, actually. But before we understand that, we need to talk about why memories make people sad.

I gotta feelin’

Most of us, Care Bear intervention notwithstanding, have the freedom to do what we choose to do with our emotions. Their purposes are open-ended, even mysterious, as are, often, their origins. We don’t have to deal with them in any one way, and they don’t come from any one place. There are three main exceptions:

Children – Children have to learn from their emotions. When you have no previous frame of reference, you have no other choice but to learn.

Therapists – Therapists have to help you deal with your emotions to prevent or treat health problems.

Middle school girls – Middle school girls have to use your emotions to destroy you and take away all your friends.

I’ll refrain from taking on middle school girls for fear of their reprisal and the intervention of law enforcement.

And of course there are others (people who design the Evony ads and the single mom who learned one simple trick to turn yellow teeth white have certain plans), but let’s just consider the first two. Emotions serve an important role in learning, and emotions can be dangerous to your health to the point where you may require medical attention.

Maverick! Amygdala on your tail!

One major reason for both of these phenomena is the function of the amygdala, a part of the brain that is involved in memory and emotion. (I know I’ve written about it before, but it has to do with memory, so I’m going to write about it again – or maybe that was the hippocampus.) The amydala sorts out what it thinks it is important for you to remember based on how strongly you feel about it when you encounter it. The more emotional your response, the more likely to are to store that away, the more likely you are to have that memory or emotional response return unbidden in response to certain stimuli.

If you like to narrativize evolution, as fatuous as that can be (and you know I love narrativizing), think of early humanity as Link from the Legend of Zelda, brute forcing reality by trial and error. Between trips to the fairy for refills, Link wanders around the Overworld until

OH, CRAP,  I touch this statue and it comes to life and hits me!

OH, CRAP, I touch this gravestone and an invincible ghost comes and hits me!

OH, CRAP, I touch this blue lion dude who throws swords at me, and it hits me! (why did I do that, don’t I ever learn?)

You sure do learn not to go around touching random crap, right? Diamonds may be “forever,” but nothing says “I’ll remember this tomorrow” quite like a swift kick in the nuts.

These strong emotional reactions are good, and they have saved a lot of lives. The stronger your emotional reaction, the more thoroughly you learn about something and the more it will shape your future behavior. I once stuck my finger in the light bulb socket of my family’s living room lamp when the bulb was out. ONCE.

And then Link gets a blue candle and attempts to set fire to every tree in the forest, walking back and forth into each screen between shots, looking for a subterranean moblins with a secret to everybody. When he gets to the second quest, he gets to push against every wall in every dungeon to find out which ones you can pass through.

Remembering every tree in the forest is unreasonable (although I could probably draw some screens from memory). So, the amygdala uses emotion to screen what to remember. When the candle doesn’t reveal a hidden staircase, there is no emotional response. But when it does work, there’s a big intenal “Yipee!” and you’ve learned a little something about the world.

When you come across the tree again, you feel the “Yipee!” again, and you remember what happened.

When you come across the lion dude again, you feel the “OH CRAP!” again, and you remember what happened.

When you come across the statues again, well, you probably touch them anyway and run around like a crazy person – but hey, Power Bracelets don’t find themselves.

The problem with this kind of learning arises when you have a really strong emotional reaction to something that is problematic or thoroughly overwhelming – like, say, a multiple fatality car crash, an up-close-and-personal assault or the Freddie Prinze Jr. / Matthew Lillard Wing Commander movie (too soon). The emotional “OH CRAP!” that goes along with it gets processed by your amygdala, and the memory of it can be burned in your memory for keeps, real serious-like.

This is a big part of what trauma is.

People complained that I made page breaks too frequently, so here you go

At that point, anything that even suggests an emotionally charged memory can set off alarm bells – you see a seat belt and you freak out. You walk into a crowded room and you start hyperventilating. You vomit uncontrollably whenever you hear the word “Pilgrim” (Wing Commander movie reference. Apologies.).

So, on one hand, emotional memories help us learn and remember the world. They are essential to our survival, and especially important to children, who have to learn all the many bounties in God’s creation that are not for eating – like dust kittens or 9 volt batteries.

But on the other, emotional memories can eff us up and make us sick. They can stick in our craw and hurt us – prevent us from doing things we like or need to do, damage our ability to do things that we or somebody else have deemed are important for reasons unrelated to our own emotional states (such as, say, care for children or hold down a job).

Carl from Up is clearly damaged by his painful memories of Ellie. He talks to her picture. He rarely leaves his house. His personality changes; he becomes antisocial and violent. As romantic as this is, it is probably not the way for Carl to live his life (which is what Up is about).

Emotion helps create the world around us, but it can also put it in a stranglehold. We can be empowered by emotionally-turbocharged learning and experience in the world, but we can also be so damaged by the things we find that we require professional help to move on with our lives.

This space around these two purposes, these two powers emotion has, is where a lot of art and philosophy lives. Sometimes they intersect – as in childhood traumas related to learning disabilities – but usually they float on either side of experience; emotion the instructor and emotion the punisher. Lessons Learned and Love’s Labours Lost. In negotiating this difficult place (which all three of our featured 2009 movies do, in very similar ways, ‘natch), I’d encourage you to remember two fundamental things:

1. The dual goals of learning and being healthy neither totally explain emotions nor give a strong imperative about what an average person ought to do with them.

2.Whatever a therapist does for you, it is not strictly the same as art, philosophy or truth.

A corollary to that – it is not the goal of art to make you feel better.

Psychological controversy and Star Trek V

Since today is all about narrativizing things (and reducing them by narrativization from incomprehensible complexity to something we understand, hint hint), allow me to narrativize the history of psychology for you.

Psychology as an intellectual discipline emerged from art and literature’s attempts to understand the mind, motivate and character. It is often said that Shakespeare was one of the early muses of the science. The great early psychologists, not coincidentally, were also great writers. The psychological systems of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung work like fiction – phenomena have causes, real or mysterious, and the peering eye or listening ear seeks for what it can find to unravel the truth of what is going on.

True causes are cloaked in guile and deception, surprise transformations and transmutation of psychological cause and effects are commonplace. Once the truth is unraveled, the psychologist declares a certain success over the problem. People are like books – the first step to fulfilling their purpose is to read them. Relative to the climax of diagnosis, treatment is denouement. The rest is trivial by comparison.

Think of Randy from The Wrestler atop the turnbuckle, about to leap to his doom. In that moment, Randy has a revelation, and at once understands his life and everything that leads up to this point. This is a psychological breakthrough!

At some point along the line, the scientific method began to creep more thoroughly into this poetry. Psychology became increasingly focused on not just causes, but results. “It is all well and good, Mr. Freud, that you have determined my wife wishes she had a penis, but hooking her on cocaine seems to have been, dare I say, a net negative.”

Think of Randy from The Wrestler after his epiphany. He leaps from the turnbuckle and is probably dead. How can we say this revelation was a uniformly good thing?

From an artistic standpoint, we can admire it. From the standpoint of the pursuit of the truth of the human condition, we can pity it and fear it. But from a psychological standpoint, mentally unbalanced people killing themselves is straight-up bad news.

As psychology got its legs under itself as a professional practice and medicine also improved and evolved, it became more important to demonstrate that what you were doing actually helped somebody. This is where we find the most elusive and difficult to grasp fact about psychology:

Psychology rarely determines whether something is good or bad, true or untrue, desirable or undesirable. Psychology is primarily tasked with determining what is healthy. You can have the craziest whacked out motivations or memories or complex oedipal fantasies in the world, but if it doesn’t impact you in a way that can be defined as health, psychology offers you little help in determining what you ought to do about it.

And it is an entirely possible outcome that the truth is not healthy for you.

The narrative seems neat, except that this process is not a one-way arrow – both the old way of looking at therapy as discovery and the new way of looking at empirical evidence of improvement are still practiced. One of the major practical controversies in contemporary psychological treatment, even if it is not the most popular to talk about – to what extent is talking about the problem solving the problem, and to what extent is it not?

When Captain Kirk yells that he “needs his pain!” is he right?

Bonanno-rama

George Bonanno is one interesting current figure in the pursuit of this question. A professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University, Bonanno explored the trajectories of grief through extensive empirical data-gathering and rigorous scientific methodology. One thing he found? The whole “six stages of grief” thing is nice, but it doesn’t show up in practice. Another thing he found? Sometimes, talking about things that bother you only makes things worse. Crazy, huh?

Bonanno attributed most successful response to grief or loss – and in fact most response to grief and loss in general, to resilience. How do people move on after big losses? The move on. They do what is necessary. They endure. Most people don’t tend to suffer major psychological damage from grief.

It’s the old matchup between the cliché WWII veteran, wearing his gray flannel suit home from the city to the suburbs, and the cliché Vietnam veteran, a homeless drifter cursed by flashbacks and mentally shattered by brutality. Obviously, these are both charicatures, but when you think about it, it’s hard to believe that maybe there isn’t some selection bias at work in judging an entire group by its loudest, craziest members.

Bonanno did say that people tended to “cope ugly.” They did strange stuff. Things that seemed pathological actually helped people make it through the tough times.

So, if you just drank a quart of whisky and ate a bloody steak in a hot bath after an awful heartbreak, congratulations, you’re probably not crazy. But you are probably going to vomit – just fair warning.

The missing Link

So, let’s bring back Link from the Legend of Zelda, and let’s try to help him get over his fear of statues coming to life and stabbing him.

Show him a picture of a statue – HOLY CRAP!!

Show him a picture of a statue – HOLY CRAP!!

Make him describe, in detail, what it’s like to be stabbed by a statue – HOLY HOLY CRAP!!

Bonanno’s research (and of course the research of others as well – I mostly point him out because he is so rich in potassium) would suggest that maybe this isn’t what Link needs. Maybe this is actually just upsetting Link. Maybe what Link needs is some quality alone time with his warp whistle, or some afternoons huntin’ enough Tektikes to get a blue ring the hard way.

Consider that, as psychologists, we would be primarily concerned with what is healthy for Link. We bring into our discipline from outside determination that it is important that Link adventure through Hyrule and save Princess Zelda. His statue trauma is preventing him from doing that. So, what is better to do, slog through further years of weekly upsetment over the statue, or help Link find a way to cope and find his resilience?

Because after all, Link is hella resilient. Even after his hearts start beepin’, he’s still got a whole lotta more dungeoncrawling left in his elvin long johns.

Being mean to meaning making

If Bonanno’s interpretation wins the day, one of the bridges between “learning” aspect of emotion and the “punishing” side of emotion – the dredging of trauma for contextualization and “meaning making” takes a serious hit in its clinical applications and overall cogency.

Which – and this is why I went to all the trouble and the Zelda examples – adds quite a bit of texture and insight into our critique of the crying prompted by the movies of 2009.

We can look at Where the Wild Things Are and say, “We are sad because we are plumbing the essential truth of this character’s sadness; we identify with it and with our own troubles, and we weep in catharsis at the discovery and mapping of meaning onto a chaotic emotional state. This is essentially a Good Thing that is Good for all of us.”

But let us take off our old-school psychologist hat and put on either a new-school psychologist hat (where we try to help our patients as much as gratify our own curiosity) or any number of other hats (like a British Bobby’s hat we have left over from a Benny Hill chase scene). Is this true? Is this what the art says?

We could say the same thing about Up. We could say the same thing about The Wrestler. That we each have our own basin of unhealed hurts, and the act of connecting with and grieving on behalf of these characters helps us heal ourselves.

Well, regardless of what I have written before on the subject, let us today call this the easy way out and look for something better.

It just seems too simple – this art imitating life imitating art – this narrativized psychology giving us a pat explanation for what feels like a jarring and complex – and rare – artistic experience.

Plus, I am suspicious of any interpretation of art that ascribes artistic value to nonartistic virtues – such as instructive quality, decency or healthfulness. These are not the reasons we make art. It is the same objection I always have to George Orwell’s 1984 being taught in schools; or to many literature currula that focus on the context in which a work was written or published while glossing over the quality and specifics of the work itself – if I want to know about the horrible abuses of Communism, I can read real history. I don’t have to read fake history. Stalin did a lot of bad things. Granted. We don’t have fiction just so we can make inaccurate history more entertaining.

Besides, I can always watch this instead anyway, which I will never tire of embedding in articles:

Narrativizing

So, having hopefully wedged apart the literary clamshell of catharsis and brushed off that we are paradoxically healing alongside characters who are suffering, let us consider what it is to narrativize a loss.

Narrativization is one of the most important concepts in overthinking – the urgent human need to make chaotic and multideterministic existence or stimuli comfortable or comprehendible by forging it into a story is one of the basic hungers that drives the constant production of pop culture – and certainly informs its ephemeral quality. New songs, new shows, new movies are like the fabric of the fates, constantly being spun out to keep up with the progression of the living world.

And not just grief for deaths or big tragedies, but really all losses drive an impetus for narrativization – take the pain you have encountered and make it into a story. Link did not hit box overlay with zone 345×1414 prompting a sprite redraw, further hit box interaction and a status change – he touched a statue that became a soldier and it hit him.

I hope I have somewhat desanctified this impulse – made a case that it is neither normative nor explicative – that making a loss into a story for its own sake does not necessarily fix it, or make you feel better, or find the core truth of it.

What remains is an open-ended impulse that emerges from the basic concepts of emotional learning – something critical for children that becomes more optional, but still important, as we grow up, remapping and re-explaining the world to ourselves to cope with the shifts our amygdalas force on our perceptions as powerful emotional experiences affect the way we perceive and react to what is around us.

Consider Where the Wild Things Are again. One of the unifying motifs of the movie is the destruction of the igloo. Max’s loss of his igloo is a very painful loss that prompts an immediate and drastic emotional reaction out of line with what a rational narrativization might recall, but in line with what tends to actually happen. This new emotion is so terrible, so difficult, that Max explores ways to narrativize it – and also to engage in dramatic play – act out this idea, explore it from different directions, until he can assimilate it.

This doesn’t make his pain go away, necessarily. It doesn’t stop him from acting out in the presence of his mom. But it does help him understand that he loves her, even when he is mad, and that she loves him, even when he is alone or being denied what he wants. What he does with that, then, is anybody’s guess.

Consider The Wrestler again – all the times in the movie the Ram Jam comes up as a motif. The celebratory letters on the Nintendo game that Randy briefly and joyfully plays with the neighborhood kid in the trailer park. The chant of the crowd and its promise of adoration in exchange for it. The Ram Jam is Randy’s death sentence, but it is connected with the few things in his life that encourage him and give him what he thinks is love.

This is also a narrativization, but it is not therapeutic at all. It is a learning experience that teaches Randy little of use – it only teaches him self-destruction. Throughout his history, Randy had plenty of opportunities to give up wrestling and be with his family, which would have no doubt led to him ending up happier and more successful (except for his fleeing moments of joy, his life does get to a point where it is pretty miserable).

And yet I insisted to the friend I saw the movie with that The Wrestler isn’t a cautionary tale. It isn’t about what is right or wrong about with Randy’s choice to be a professional wrestler.

Because what is healthy for you, what makes you happy, and what is true are sometimes not the same thing – and seldom so at the same time.

I think this emotional insight is at the heart of Where the Wild Things Are, in the character of the child exploring new and scary emotions, in The Wrestler, which tells the story of a man whose emotional life is warped around his drive to make what many would consider a peculiar sort of art, and, in a briefer, more introductory way, is a starting place from which Up proceeds when it ceases to be sad and starts being a mundane kids movie (in which those three things are almost always the same – ah, mundane kids entertainment, where brushing one’s teeth, recycling or walking a dog are at once great for you, great for the world, and thoroughly fulfilling).

What, then unifies all these specific moments of sadness?

I’ve I think it’s the act of narrativization itself – because each scene is structured to present you with the stimulus and demand that you to narrativize it. It is definitely notable about all three scenes that inspired tears that:

• None of them include meaningful dialogue
• They are all presented as montages of disconnected shots with at least a few jump cuts
• They all have include patterns or shapes with established meanings (Randy’s glance at what might be his daughter’s outfit, the heart with the C in it from Carol’s ruined diorama, the measured pace and comfortable iconography of the “happy couple” Pixar sequence)
• They are all packed with stimuli – sound, visuals, movement – they all move quickly, and they all challenge the mind

Each moment includes some difficult, paradoxical ideas – the death of a baby in a children’s movie, the victorious special move that leads to death, the happy monster friend you are abandoning to never see again – and is presented in a way to force the audience’s mind to put the pieces together. And each is permeated by a powerful sense of loss.

It’s much like the phenomenon of closure as described in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics – in one panel, you show an axe blade falling. In the next, the deed is done, or it is shown from outside. In the urge to form a story out of it, the mind fills in the blanks, and does so more horribly than the author ever could.

Psychologically, this would point to the modular act of the narrativization of a loss as in itself an act of grieving, even if it is not a loss of your own, even if it serves no normative purpose related to health or the negotiation of the events and state of one’s own life. Even if it just for a movie.

It’s hearing the gunshot that killed Old Yeller, but not being permitted to see it easily yourself – having to fill in the details from limited information.

The value behind the crying is artistic, not psychological, but it is produced from an understanding of the psychological that emerges from craft and technique – like most synthesis of disparate elements drawn together in powerful moments, pieces with limited intrinsic meaning become far more meaningful in juxtaposition or collage.

I am reminded of the last time, prior to 2009, when I cried this profusely in a movie – it was a similar scene in Big Fish, the (where’s the Pokemon again?) presentational rush to the river where the son carries his father toward death surrounded by the gathering characters of all his father’s stories. The movie does not do the work of narrativizing the loss for you. It gives you enough to figure out a loss is being suffered, and it depends on the lack of cogency or essential unity in the psychological experience of grief for you to put the pieces of it together.

It asks you to cope ugly.

And cope ugly I did.

Though I take some consolation in the fact that Rowdy Roddy Piper did too.

Though I don’t know if he cried during Wild Things.

And no, not the Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, Kevin Bacon movie.

Sheesh.

Oh, and the secret to happiness? Be resilient. Make the most of the good times. And try not to let things fall apart when things go badly.