Female infidelity as Hollywood sees it

One of the many things I am grateful for is that my occasional commenter Gaius put me onto The Last Psychiatrist. Like me, TLP is inconsistent: sometimes you moan, sometimes he hits something really good. Unlike me, sometimes he has insights that really shake us out. Case in point, his polemic against The Descendants.

I'm not knocking these movies for existing or for casting these hairless nymphomaniacs, I'm simply posing the general question: since the audience has learned nothing from their own parents, and they don't read 19th century Russian literature, what is their model for love in the 2nd decade of marriage?  They don't have one.  Which is why when this demo finds themselves in the 2nd decade of marriage they feel unfulfilled, anxious, depressed, is this all there is? They have nothing to guide them except The Discovery Channel and mommy blogs, and they lack the courage to analyze their ennui, so these movies serve the important function of pretending that it's normal.  "Oh, yeah, that's exactly what I'm feeling."  Fine, but don't you also want to know why you feel that way?

And, of the two, the mommy blogs are the bigger problem. Read the whole thing, it's well worth your time. That said, there is a weakness here that you need to grasp to really get it. TLP handles men and women unevenly and that is a flaw he shares with the movie he is discussing.

The set up paragraph from TLP  is below. I'm going to chop it into two. Here is part one:

Here's a bit of human nature for you and you are most certainly not going to like it.  Fat George Clooney discovers his wife has been cheating on him-- and he never suspected.  That's a profound insult, a narcissistic injury, and no, people who complain I talk about it too much but haven't actually learned the lessons, you don't have to be a narcissist to experience a narcissistic injury, it's built into the way we relate to other people.  It's jealousy AND an existential beat down: look at the limits of your power, look at the limits of your reach, she is able to have a whole other existence that had so little to do with you you didn't even notice, nor did she feel any need to tell you.  

Clooney's character discovers all this, by the way, while his wife is dying and in a coma. That's important because it completely closes any possible response from her and, therefore, any moral assessment we might make of her. So how is a guy to respond?

Before we get to that, let me emphasize the formula here: jealousy + an existential beat down = narcissistic injury. Jealousy by itself is a perfectly natural and, more importantly, an absolutely unavoidable emotion. No love is ever so secure that you won't feel twinges of jealousy sometimes. Jealousy can tear your love down or it can build it up depending on how you respond. But there is one sort of situation where you always lose and that is when jealousy is combined with a threat to your sense of who you are. Finding out you have been cheated on will almost always be an existential beat down.

Okay, now for part two:

At least if she had done it to hurt you you'd still suffer the jealousy but your place as main character in your own movie would be secure.  Maybe you're only supporting cast in hers?   "Screw that. I'm changing the script."

This is one of my own favourite points: she didn't cheat to hurt you because she planned to get away with it. Her guilt here is analogous to the person who decides to drive themselves home anyway after a  few drinks. She never thought about the pain she might cause by running you down because she focused on getting away with it. You weren't even on the radar screen when she did this. That hurts much more than even than the thought that another guy got to ... .

So what do you do? Well, assuming you don't go on a destructive rampage or kill yourself, the irresistible temptation is to make it about yourself.

Increase your pain to save your ego.  That's the path the movie chooses: she cheated not because she fell in love, or lust, but because he neglected her, he was a bad husband, he didn't take her on shopping sprees.    "As long as you don't ask me to change, I'm accepting some blame for her cheating on me."  You'll feel right as rain. 

But here TLP, in my opinion, goes astray because he isn't willing to confront the crucial question directly enough. Notice how he seems to contradict himself in the very next paragraph for he immediately turns around and tells us that the audience don't understand Clooney's character's motives:

They are (thanks, VO)  starting from a false premise: that he actually really loved his wife in the first place.  He didn't.  That's why she was cheating.

Uhhhh whattt??? But isn't that the narcissistic defense mechanism? You know, making it about myself by saying that she cheated because I didn't love her well enough? Well, it actually all makes a sort of sense because the movie itself embraces the narcissistic impulse along with its lead character and that is what TLP wants to highlight: if this movie really speaks to you, then there is something wrong with you. But even if we allow that, I think TLP is missing a key detail here.

To understand what is really wrong here you have to turn this scenario around and imagine it the other way. Imagine the husband is in the bed in a coma about to die and the wife dutifully sitting at the bedside holding his hand discovers that he has been having an affair and had planned to divorce her before he got sick. Okay, got that picture? Okay, it's easy to picture part of this playing out the same. You can imagine the wife suffering the narcissistic injury and coping by blaming herself for being a poor wife, boring lover, letting herself go or whatever but any Hollywood movie would ultimately assure us that she was mistakenly blaming herself. It wouldn't be her fault.

When a man is the cheater, our culture blames him.

It would be easy, perhaps too easy, to show us that the husband was, in fact, a selfish jerk in such a movie. That is the real hollow moral core in our culture: it is unwilling to acknowledge that women are just as capable of being selfish jerks as men are. That is the missing step that George Clooney's character needs to make here. He needs to see that his wife behaved like a selfish jerk and now that evil will outlive her.

And that is what women need to see if they are going to be really liberated. Moral freedom comes from confronting the truth that you yourself are a sinner. And that will never happen so long as our culture keeps honouring movies like this. For in this movie, as TLP nicely draws out, the narcissistic response is made to look like moral maturity and love. What he misses is that the reason it does this is because it cannot bring itself to treat women as moral adults.

Note: I used to write about women and womanly virtues on Friday but I'm moving that to Wednesday with this post.