Gotham Diary:
On Watching Philomena
13 June 2014
Last night, I got round to watching Philomena, Steven Frears’s film, starring Judi Dench and Steve Coogan. It had languished in a pile of unwatched DVDs for quite some time. I was afraid of it, afraid that it might be mawkish, afraid that a “decent” Steve Coogan character might be embarrassing. I was also afraid that it might be so well made that I would find it unbearable. Of course it wasn’t mawkish (how was that even conceivable, given Judi Dench’s steady gaze); Steve Coogan’s character was slightly less embarrassed than his usual run and not at all embarrassing; and the film was so well made that, in the end, it was thrilling and not at all unbearable.
But there is a scene that is almost unbearable to think about, afterward. An old nun, disinhibited by age, pours forth her toxic scorn for the unmarried mothers whom her abbey exploited, and for their infants as well. Their pain and suffering were penance for their sins! The nun seems horrifically, Satanically proud of having prevented both Philomena and her late son from meeting in later life. Philomena, who walks in on this diatribe, is not surprised to hear it, and with a masterful regard for her mental hygiene, she promptly forgives the nun. This transfiguring moment is quickly blotted out by Martin, the journalist who has helped Philomena solve her riddles. “Well, I wouldn’t forgive you,” he says, with barely-polite disgust.
And there you are. Philomena is right to forgive the nun — it’s the only way to discard a huge block of hateful resentment that will do no one any good. But Martin is right to withhold his forgiveness, as a representative of society at large. Personally, the conduct of the religious order that separated Philomena from her little boy might be forgivable, but socially it is not. Earlier, a much younger, and nicer-seeming nun tells Philomena that there has been a fire, and that records have been lost. Martin promptly discovers that this “fire” was no accident, but a bonfire of potentially unpalatable documents (relating to the sale of babies to affluent Americans) — a conflagration from which all papers advantageous to the abbey were preserved. The institutional dishonesty of the abbey must somehow, we feel, lead to punishments.
Thumbnail summaries of Philomena present the film as the story of a woman who wants to find the little boy who was taken from her, but, if that’s the premise, the point of departure, it’s not the story. The story tells of a woman who at every turn in the approach to closure — a relatively smooth advance, thanks to Martin’s highly-developed skills as a reporter — is overwhelmed by a new and different response to her undertaking. She wants to pursue it; she wants to give it up. She wants to pay Martin not to publish her story; she believes that everyone ought to know what happened to her. She longs to connect with her child; she senses only the futility of such a meeting. He must have been a good boy; but he probably never gave her a thought. That he is dead, having died, with horrible prematurity, like legions of gay men, from AIDS, does not distress or confuse her, but everything else about him, and about her feelings for him, seems to hit her in a new way at every stage of the search. It might seem cynical to say that Dame Judi has a field day with this labile volatility, but it is indeed her sheer liveliness that sees us through the floods of tears.
***
I was also afraid that Philomena might stir things up for me. I’m more than a little familiar with Philomena’s volatility. It has been nearly eight years since I read Ann Fessler’s The Girls Who Went Away, an exhaustive study of what I came to call “the Anglophone adoption racket,” and I didn’t want to experience anything like the turmoil that that book brought about in my life. There was nothing to fear, though, because when all the involuntary reassessments of my childhood were completed, in the wake of reading the book, I stood for the first time in my life upon solid ground, which is to say, my own. I stopped seeing myself as a disappointment, and I ceased to be oppressed by might-have-beens that never meant anything to me and never could have done. I saw what had happened — again, for the first time.
I have no idea how carefully my adoptive parents were vetted by the Foundling Hospital and by the State authorities who oversaw adoptions, but the closest scrutiny would have failed to show them, I am sure, as anything but sterling people. They were ideals in so many ways: financially comfortable, socially engaged, neither too young nor too old, somewhat long-married, and close to their parents, all of whom lived in the same little suburb. There could be no saying what kind of parents they would make, but there would have been no reason to expect anything like failure.
And they did not fail. That I am sitting here, writing, in the middle of a life that, for all its banal vicissitudes, seems to me (the only person who matters here) to be rich, satisfying, and endlessly interesting, is proof that they did not fail.
But it did turn out that they had one little problem — one that, again, would never have come up in the closest investigation. My father, who was disciplined but easygoing, had perhaps foreseen it; I’m sure that it occurred to him that the child who came into their home might not make a perfect fit. I am equally certain that this never occurred to my mother. When she saw that it had indeed happened, that there were ways in which I was not only an imperfect fit but a seemingly perverse one, our mother-and-child relationship was dealt a blow from which she could never quite recover it. She couldn’t trust me, because she couldn’t understand me. I think that my father did understand me, and that, level-head practical fellow that he was, he responded with the mildest of dismissals: I was someone for whom he could have no real use. He remained loving and generous, much moreso than I understood at the time. But my mother, although she continued to do all the proper things, stopped being a mother.
Quite a few times, in the ugliest years of early adolescence, before boarding school was discovered to be the perfect solution to our problems, she said things like, “You have killed my love for you.” I felt terrible about doing this, and I didn’t quite understand how I’d done it, but I knew that the love was dead. She had, perhaps as a measure of self-protection, reverted to being the foster parent that she officially was for the first year and a few months that I lived with her.
It was a terrible time to be in this situation. Everything was unraveling; everyone was tired of the old ways. People put their hopes in bigger fins and newer appliances. I was more fundamentally conservative than anyone I knew — not reactionary, but already on the lookout for things to gather up and protect from the impending upheaval. Everywhere I turned, however, people were trying out new ways of doing things. Take, for example, learning French, an ordeal that took place, at the college level, in “language labs.” (Oh, how the term betrays the inhumanity of it! Language in a laboratory!) The other day, re-reading a book, I came upon a passage that shed light on the futility of this sort of pedagogy:
The close connection between these two things — the substitution of doing for learning and of playing for working — is directly illustrated by the teaching of languages: the child is to learn by speaking, that is by doing, not by studying grammar and syntax; in other words he is to learn a foreign language in the same way that as an infant he learned his own language: as though at play and in the uninterrupted continuity of simple existence. Quite apart from the question of whether this is possible or not — it is possible, to a limited degree, only when one can keep the child all day in the foreign-speaking environment — it is perfectly clear that this procedure consciously attempts to keep the old child as far as possible at the infant level. The very thing that should prepare the child for the world of adults, the gradually acquired habit of work and of not-playing, is done away with in favor of the autonomy of the world of childhood.
(That’s Hannah Arendt, of course; “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Future, p. 180)
I studied Great Books, but was distracted by endless arguments about “relevance.” I was horrified by Course Evaluations — and I still am. Everyone seemed to be rushing in a direction that struck me as the Wrong Way. Educated people knew their Mozart and their Henry James, but had they learned anything from them? Was culture merely ornamental?
For my mother, culture was definitively ornamental — that was what was so admirable about it, beauty that asked nothing in return. Looking back today, with lenses distorted by what has in fact become of me, it seems that fully half, if not more, of our acrimonious disagreements sprang from my contemptuous insistence that culture was the only thing that mattered, that it had to be preserved from ornamental status. In the context of the times, I must have looked like a bohemian in reverse — just as alienated by materialism as any beatnik, but dressing as sharply as my frame allowed, and drinking tea, from a cup on a saucer, every afternoon.
My mother was always inclined to be a Romantic. My allergy to all things Romantic (I still can’t bear Byron and Shelley) emerged very early, but it was my worldliness (masked by an apparent other-worldliness as, even then, I spent a great deal of time reading and writing) that alienated my mother: to her, I was heartless.
I thought I was, too. Not absolutely heartless, perhaps, but damaged in the “heart” department. Then I read The Girls Who Went Away, and that changed. Watching Philomena, I saw how completely that had changed.
Bon weekend à tous!
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