Bear60's Blog

I recommend seeing the new movie Revolutionary Road, starring Leonardo De Caprio and Kate Winslet. In some ways I’m a sucker for stories rooted in the Fifties, having been born in 1949, and growing up during the Fifties.

Watching this flick reminded me of so many things: people living their lives emotionally “shut down,” the many taboos that folks didn’t speak about openly, in tandem with the surrounding air of family secrets entrenched in so many families of that era.

Looking back at this historical time phase, it’s very easy to observe and label these kinds of cultural road signs. We have our own contemporary ones today. An interesting question to ask yourself is: what are ours? Perhaps one of them is that we are so much more open, that we are now ‘in your face’ about our issues, and we’re more prone to take dramatic risks in our lives. There is much more openness about our resistance to authority. Our time might be called socially regressed aka Murray Bowen, creator of Family Systems Theory.

In this film, the wife and husband (Winslet and De Caprio) are just beginning a family, and have moved to the suburbs to see if they can play out the American Dream. Yet both of them have the sense of uncertainty about what this new kind of life is all about. You can feel the inner boredom, the restlessness, and their pointed questions about the genuine consistency of life, and how to see themselves in it. ‘What is all of this really for,’ they seem to be asking themselves.

The wife in the story is the protagonist who sees the need for herself and her husband, and instigates an idea to move to Paris. Underneath the lines, though, is her growing depression, and the feeling of being trapped within this mapped out life. Both of them may think they know the map, but the territory definitely escapes them.

Her husband is a “company man” who works for a company that his father worked for. He thinks about how meaningless his father’s life had been but buries it underneath his skin by having an affair and abusing alcohol. He doesn’t want the same thing his father got, but he doesn’t really know what he wants. He is a chameleon that appears to change his convictions and ideas with others’ influence and persuasion. He is the man lost on an Atlantic City boardwalk walking alone with no gravity pulling him to the center of the earth.

For this writer the primary emotional component of their relationship is anger and rage. They rage at each other and blame each other for their own entrapment. In one powerful scene, Kate Winslet’s character tells her husband that she had thought they were special and that this life was supposed to be different because of their specialness. She blurts out that all of this emptiness wasn’t supposed to be happening to them.

In this scene we may see the source of so much inner anger, frustration, and blaming others for one’s own problems. The source of anger often is the gap between our own expectations and what is really going on in the world around us. Our expectations are so often simply the idealized, non-realistic, and highly valued norms of what makes us happy, successful or a failure. By “highly valued” I mean that we set such high and perfectionistic values/goals for ourselves by our mutilating self-talk, we tell ourselves that we are failures, we aren’t happy, and that our lives must be nil and useless. Thus, using these standards we are either successful or in a place of failure. This is either/or thinking. This sets the stage for existential depression, discouragement and demoralization.

This incongruence can only cause anger and a sense of being thwarted in one’s life pursuits. The problem is not the other person, but it’s our own thinking that is maladaptive. It’s the illusion of the expectation being reality, not life itself. It’s the rift between our conceptually constructed ideas of ‘what life is supposed to be like’ and what really is. If one can’t see this or accept it, it rattles our emotional cages and we’re in for the fight of our lives—the result of no acceptance is a creeping anger that grows like a troll under the bridge until it bursts out in a hail storm of un-sanity.

Finally, as the film is nearing its end, there is a certain fait accompli. I thought that De Caprio was going to commit his wife to a psychiatric hospital. At point, he calls her “crazy.” Our white, male conditioning has trained us in our sexism well. Male superiority says that women are crazy, sick, over emotional, protected, sheltered, unintelligent, and morally bad. This is the white male system will do everything in its power to maintain control and perpetuate women as being inferior.

In fact, during the Fifties, psychiatry and psychology had been co-opted by the robber baron class. This privileged class of neo-faith-healers didn’t seem to recognize the mental illness of depression. The wife, from what we observe in the film, was going through a clinical depression. Many times anger is hidden within the presenting problem of depression. We might say depression is anger turned inwards on oneself. Women were particularly prone to depression including Post Partum Depression. They were taught by the White Male System to know their place, and that place was at home raising families. Yet as they raised families their role didn’t stop at being mom; they had many other talents, skills and gifts. Because there was a ‘code of silence’ about this, they felt fearful of communicatively expressing their emotions about the faulty expectations spoken of above.

A good example of this is my own mom. In our old home movies, my primary memory is of her fading back out of the picture into the kitchen. But mom worked for the War Department in WW II doing the kind of work that demanded high intelligence. She is a poet, writer, visual and textile artist, and has a very intuitive sense about people and life. She is a thinker, and she can hold her own in an argument or discussion, even now at the age of ninety-one.

Her working ethos when raising her own family was that of ‘the wind beneath my wings.’ These were my father’s wings. He was dad, the leader, the boss, and it was expected that he stood out as the most capable. Her role was to be the wind that would lift her children and husband into the Land of Success, like the role Kate Winslet played in the film. It strikes me that this kind of sexism is pernicious, because it oppresses the authentic thoughts and abilities of both men and women.

In the end, the wife dies just before childbirth. The conclusion of the film is the metaphor for life during the Fifties. She had sacrificed and given everything for her family, but she gave her true self away as well. Stereotypes are the lazy and sloppy thoughts of ignorant people who are so numb to themselves, they would rather die than living to be who they really are.