Gotham Diary:
Watching Jasmine
21 May 2014
Exhausted after my library labors, I threw myself into an armchair and watched Blue Jasmine. What a mistake! To watch such a deeply disturbing movie alone — alone and tired. I felt as isolated as Cate Blanchett’s “heroine,” and, however fleeting this sense of isolation might have been, it made me share her culpability as well. I felt that I was just as bad as Jasmine, just as delusional and narcissistic. Surely I was about to carted off to jail! When the film reached the point where Peter Sarsgaard’s character discovers his about-to-be-fiancée’s deceptions, I had to leave the room.
Why the guilty conscience? To some extent, of course, it was just a natural human response to Blanchett’s formidable performance. But there was more to it than that. When I look back on my adult life, I remember the good things, just like everybody else, and have to be reminded of the bad; but I associate childhood with being in trouble. I was always in trouble. I certainly did some bad things. I learned, the hard way, that stealing dollar bills from my mother’s wallet was not worth the trouble. I almost started a forest fire once, and then had the unconvincing effrontery to deny that I had had anything to do with it. I pulled the chair from behind a sixth-grade classmate who was about to sit down — to see what would happen. (She fell, and burst into tears, and I knew instantly that I had done something terrible.) There were lots of bad things that I never did, such as cheating in school or getting into fights, but that didn’t count.
At a certain point, probably in the third or fourth grade, I gave up on being the son my mother wanted, and resigned myself to being a disappointment. (My mother was also not worth the trouble.) In my twenties, I saw a psychotherapist whose favorite mantra was, “Do you intend to be a monument to your parents’ failure?” Even then, I believed that the failure was mine, not my parents’, but I did see that I had become a monument to their disappointment, and I decided to do something about that. I went to law school at last, which pleased them (although my mother died of cancer days before the first acceptance letter came in), but I didn’t go to law school to please them. I did it for myself. I figured that it would lead to a better job with more pay, and put an end to my seven-year exile in Houston, Texas. While I did manage to get back to New York, the other objectives proved to be difficult to attain, but as time went by, the only disappointment that I had to deal with was my own.
Blue Jasmine took me back to before all that, to the time when, in the secret recesses of my heart, and despite the fact that I had an interesting job and a lovely little daughter, I had no self-respect, and saw myself as a hopeless failure with a weak character. The journals that I kept from college to law school are (I now see) the functional equivalents of Jasmine’s curbside monologues, endlessly probing attempts to understand myself while taking pains to understand nothing. Aside from being overly attached to creature comforts, I wasn’t very much like Jasmine in any way, but my life was governed by misgivings and dread.
At the end of the movie, Jasmine sits on a bench and resumes her monologue. It is fragmentary in nature; she boasts about her grand life, she accuses her husband of infidelity, she remembers the song that was playing when they met. These fragments will never be worked into a whole. Jasmine cannot bear to face the facts of her life, and she is too detached from other people to know what honesty is good for. Her chatter is all that she can do to spin a protective cocoon.
When I got serious about understanding myself, I stopped writing to myself.
***
Tante Hannah
I’m about to finish Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography, which I’ve been calling For Love of the World, although that is its subtitle. I’ve grown to dislike the book over its great length; yesterday, in the section about Karl Jaspers’s death, I realized that I had no interest in Jaspers at all, because Young-Bruehl couldn’t be bothered to make him interesting. She is so piously reverent about Jaspers, a beacon in Arendt’s life, that he becomes dangerously incapable of saying anything that isn’t luminous and all-wise. Young-Bruehl is a little more candid about her subject, but I doubt that I’d think much of Arendt, either, if this book were all I had to go on. Compare the biographer’s take on the toll that Arendt’s myriad commitments to speak here and there took on the writing of The Life of the Mind —
At just the moment that she wanted to find peace and quiet for The Life of the Mind, Arendt was besieged. She accepted the price of her reputation dutifully, but impatiently. (447)
— with one of Arendt’s last letters to Mary McCarthy, about an upcoming conference outside Paris:
Finally: I got the invitation to the “International Symposium” in Paris about the Year 2000. The trouble is that it is not in Paris but in Jouy-en-Josas, about 30 km away from Paris. That means I am much less tempted and not sure that I shall not cancel. to go there would mean to be imprisoned for 4 days in something which, after all, interests me only because of language. When do you come back? Let me know. (22 August 1975)
The correspondence’s editor, Carol Brightman, tells us that Arendt did go to Jouy-en-Josas. But “dutifully”? Arendt herself gives the impression that she paid no more for her reputation than for what she enjoyed about it.
I’ve already begun The Life of the Mind. I’ve read the first section, about appearances. It’s very dense and referential, and I probably ought to read it again. There’s a lot of good stuff about science and common sense, plus how badly Descartes screwed things up.