Our Promise Parlor part one: Revolutionary Road
There are two parts to our Discourse this time round.
Below’s the first centered on the film Revolutionary Road. The second with Blue Valentine at its center will post in the near.
What is it to abandon the promise one’s made to oneself?
Deep in the code of our inherited male narrative, woman as the portal for life, the mother, is idolized into deepfreeze or reframed as burden; either way a method for crippling and containing. This tends to turn women’s great gift for birthing life into nightmare by way of elaborate, mostly repressed mechanisms that block and bind us, setting our biology in opposition to any discovery of what womanhood might be, might be becoming once separated from reproduction. Which is underway. There is no turning back. This is an untenable equation no matter how much is sacrificed, by both men and women, trying to prove this ancient, no longer relevant foundation to be solid and true. As a consequence the emotional evolution of us all is crippled and contained because our continuing, essential emergence can not find birth without both women and men as fearlessly as possible encouraging growth in one another.
The stories in these two films, Revolutionary Road and Blue Valentine, approach the untangling of this mess.
”Having babies is a blessing, not a duty.”
Our once First Lady Mrs. Betty Ford. May she rest in peace.
But first, a meanwhile…
A woman rises from the seats of the cavernous Egyptian Theater during the question answer session after the showing of The Whistleblower, a Women In Film Seattle sponsored film at SIFF - a story about a UN peacekeeper in Bosnia who uncovers a sex trafficking ring. The woman stands to question the film’s director, Larysa Kondracki about forcing the audience to watch a brutal torture scene of a young woman by her captors. Very upsetting.
Ms. Kondracki responds by acknowledging the woman’s emotional shock and states that it was very difficult, too, for everyone involved in the filming. And in the edit again, she had to carefully weigh how much was enough. Then she explains that as a storyteller she absolutely needed the scene in order to show that this “breaking” (a term of the darkworld depicted) of the young woman was a tactical decision on the part of the sex traffickers. She had shown too much, well, will to live by trying to escape. Ms. Kondracki felt her story had to show the violence it takes to enforce what is, from the trafficker’s point of view, a practical matter. An independent minded woman is expensive, you see; a young woman’s human will is a detriment to profit in this economic system that demands the female body be put under the absolute control of the males who trade in them. Money’s more easily made from a broken girl. Less fuss. And besides, broken’s much more marketable to other men.
It’s an accepted principle of predatory economics to “contain” the cost of labor, right? That’s the game, no matter what the damage. Because it keeps in place the underpinning rationale, a presumption, that it’s the given order of human interaction to take the life force, the raw resource of the energy of lower others, by violent means if necessary, for the benefit, the enrichment of one’s own. The rights of the privileged. Top of the heap.
What has all this to do with the film Revolutionary Road?
Well, this “breaking” is the same and belongs all of a spectrum, albeit at some far other end, with Frank Wheeler’s use of his world of work and his top dog marriage rights to fortify himself as he “breaks” his wife April. His desperation and rage by the time this scene of breakage comes in the last third of the story makes his go for her throat resemble a cage match with his self justification set to rebalance things between them for what he needs; he, the man, by default the privileged one in the marriage equation by measure of the old, rutted inequality of energy flow found there.
Each of us senses we are capable of being something in this life. This is our human Promise. We create symbols and imagery for this Promise in the dreams and stories we tell ourselves sourced from our time and place. These are pathways along which we hope to fulfill our Promise of living lives that realize as completely as possible what we each might have to offer, to ourselves and to those we love. If we could all together practice allowing this realizing, in ourselves and others, we would perhaps find ourselves in communities based on a model of interconnectivity, the increasingly pressing and apparent reality of life on this one earth, rather than indulging in the current practice of opposition as our means for self definition. So the question now presents itself, how to disengage ourselves from these inherited predatory and oppositional models of being and how best to manifest social relationships big and small that enable us to encourage in one another conscious emotional evolution? How best to play to our strengths, and resist capitalizing on weakness, to make a way for this human so long promised?
April’s dream in Revolutionary Road is her vision of a life lived with Frank in Paris. Seems kinda hokey today, a clichéd notion of what constitutes a creative life. But April’s story is set in the American 1950’s when Parisian dreaming was more in the air. And, as to our interest in her womanhood of that time and place, she does not hold this dream for herself alone. A woman firmly of her era, she gestates the dream for her husband Frank and herself together. This is not the least because she has transferred and mutated her dream of artistic specialness onto him. Again, typical of her times. She can’t go it alone (as demonstrated in her failed ambitions as an actress.)
In April’s dreaming she would financially support her husband in Paris (“doing what?” the covetous neighbor asks, and incredulously) while Frank “finds himself,” finds his latent writerly talents. This living out of his creative self is Frank’s Promise as well as his spoken promise to her of what their life together would be since the first hours of their courtship. It confirms them both as being special (fulfilling their dreams) and allows April to tolerate the meanwhile waste of her anxious brilliance spilling all over that suburban living room she so unsettlingly finds herself roaming as she waits for her dream to come true.
There is one scene of April complete and whole. She walks fully centered in her very womanbeing down a Manhattan sidewalk after manifesting her dream concretely by purchasing airline tickets to Paris. While Frank is seen repeatedly on these same streets and always as one of a packed crowd of hats, no one could fail to pick out April from the masses. Very special indeed. She glides, a force of life exploding in others the desire to have and capture whatever it is she embodies. In this scene it is all hers and there’s no containing it.
The energy buzzing off April from her confirmation by Frank’s Promise catalyzes joy in their shared belief that they will in fact together realize a dream of Paris by actually going. This joyful moment of belief, in that kitchen, leads to the re-ignition of passion between these two searching pilgrims that, it is absolutely no coincidence, leads to pregnancy. And with pregnancy, April’s story splits open in the stark fusion of her literal and essential embodiment of the force of life. The woman’s dilemma. For this breathtaking moment of insemination occurs precisely at the pinnacle of her belief that the Paris dream will be realized and at the pinnacle of her sway over her family’s way and path toward Promise. It is as if her own body, vibrating with the life force of her belief calls forth life in fact. And this, in the world here depicted, precipitates April’s entrapment.
From this point on Frank, once he becomes aware of her pregnancy, seizes on this third child to come, as April feared he would, as an excuse to begin his turn away from her challenge to him, and it is a challenge, to follow his Promise. Their dream of Paris is reframed as an unrealistic fantasy under the man’s burden of how to support and provide. His story of work and the men and women there and the neighbors and the house-selling woman and her crazy son all together in that way of the herd conspire to turn April’s gift of life, both as Promise and literally in her pregnancy, to nightmare.
Frank’s been bruised some too, his wings clipped by his workmates who react with great anxiety at the prospect of Frank following April’s dreaming to Paris, taking his specialness from them. Just as April bestows lifeforce on Frank, so he bestows it on his working world which responds with a counter offer to Frank of increased prestige and salary. That way he’s got plenty of excuses, and eventually self hate, and eventually hate for her for making him hate himself for turning his back on her dreaming.
But it is April’s refusal to let go her human Promise, her refusal to let go her will to live by trying to escape, symbolized in this story as her refusal to let go the dream of Paris, even and especially in light of her pregnancy, that is so disruptive as to threaten the efficiency of a smoothly running economy of work and marriage. This refusal is so dangerous it must be contained. And it is what sets her up for breaking. It’s not that Frank consciously wants this. He tells himself it’s her fierce will and her exotic dreaming that he fell in love with. He’s not practical in the way of the sex traffickers. He doesn’t let himself realize that breakage is what he’s doing. He’s just fighting. Cause that’s just what men do when push comes to shove.
The depth of men’s resources in this way, the men we love, their trained willingness to do anything to win in an emotional battle always comes as a shock to us. Really? You’d do that, really? But awareness of this is the consciousness towards which we work, not the reality we livingly create, yet.
And so, in that kitchen, in the morning after the fight of breakage with Frank, April’s dreaming, her vital energy is finally and completely extinguished. And with it, what it was in her everyone wanted and her gift to give, her life force, is also gone. In its place is the flat emptiness of Frank’s substitute dream of his men’s workworld from which April gets no identity, no nourishment. And no escape. So she stands contained by those picture windows looking out as the blood runs in deadly hemorrhage from her body.
And how does all this breakage, and dreaming and pregnancy play out in Blue Valentine, a story set half a century later?
Woman idolized into deep freeze or re-framed as burden? Ya, perhaps, but what I see in Sam Mendes “Revolutionary Road’ is a potent portrayal of two strong, emotional people, potential risk takers who both wanted out of the ‘Leave It To Beaver’ world of ‘Pleasantville’ and needed to pay far greater attention to the prophylactic aspects of their sex life. But, speaking of sex, the kitchen scene between April and Frank was rivaled in apish dullness only by the car intercourse scene between April and Shep. I didn’t time it, but I doubt the combined number of seconds it took Frank and Shep to come to orgasmic self- gratification, using April as the instrument of their own individual dialogues with nature, was no more than twenty. Of course April had her own dialogue with nature going (what a hot dancer!), and she wasn’t any angel either. A heroic figure, in a way, but one with quite a sharp edge. Neither she nor Frank were really bad people at all, their cruel streaks notwithstanding. But, in the absence of radical therapeutic intervention, something explosive almost had to happen with this unstable couple and its thermonuclear family, and of course it did. Paris wasn’t what April and Frank really needed, except as a means to a glittering end of postponing tragedy. Maybe what they needed was marriage and a subsequent divorce, but not Paris.
The mother may indeed be idolized into deep freeze (John Lennon and Sigmund Freud certainly addressed this), but , shifting gears, it can be argued that ice is by no means innocent and can without much difficulty reframe itself as a lethal weapon. ..Burden? Sure. The truth is, men and women are definitely each others’ burdens, even as they are each others’ joy. We’ll work through it as best we can. The sex better the hell be better and the couple more mature in the sequel to ‘Revolutionary Road’.
I do appreciate the somewhat hopeful note at the end of your comment Paul, that we do work through it as best we can. Yes, RR is “a potent portrayal of two strong, emotional people, potential risk takers who both wanted out” of their suburban cage. The Paris dream simply stands in as a symbol for this want. I feel for them both, Frank and April, so trapped especially, as you point out, in the out of balance sex. And April’s no angel. Again as you point out, being ice is by no means being innocent.
But April’s need is greater than Frank’s because the promised alternative fulfillment as a woman of her era leaves her being less and causes her to become the flaming, if ultimately impotent, carrier of the symbol of promise in this story. Like Lady Liberty. And just as frozen with her dreaming turned to, well, ice, as Paris ends up mattering/meaning more to her than to Frank. When she realizes he’s been bought off, she understands it for what it is, his betrayal of their promise to each other for which she’s been carrying the torch, now a flame in image only. Nothing left to live for, then – not wanting to be a burden.