Tampa Bay Institute for
Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc.
(T-BIPS)

Co-sponsored by Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, Inc

TRAUMA SERIES WORKSHOP:
Healing Haunted Lives
Part IV. Adult Onset Trauma
Presenter: Gislaine Boulanger, Ph.D., author of Wounded by Reality
with Carrie-Ann Gibson, MD on Combat PTSD
and Nancy Brehm, PhD on EMDR

DATE: Saturday, March 7, 2009
TIME: 9:00 a.m.-12:15 pm and 1:15-4:30 p.m. (Coffee and bagels: 8:45-9:00 a.m.)
LUNCH: 12:15 Boxed lunch available by reservation: additional $10 (bring own bag lunch, optional).
If boxed lunch is required, please RSVP with $10 check (to TBIPS) no later than March 1st.
LOCATION: Tampa Bay Crisis Center, One Crisis Center Plaza (on Bearss Ave, just west of I-275 and west of Florida Ave),Tampa, Florida 33613
PROGRAM FEE: $75 [$25-students/candidates] (includes 6 CE credit hours).
Registration deadline March 1, 2009. Lunch Add $10. (Add additional $10 if register after Mar 1st).

Objectives:
1. Define the circumstances under which adult onset trauma can arise.
2. Distinguish adult onset trauma from childhood trauma.
3. Identify common therapeutic resistances to working with adult onset trauma.
Continuing Education Credits: This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the Essentials Areas and Policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint sponsorship of The American Psychoanalytic Association and the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians and takes responsibility for the content, quality and scientific integrity of this CME activity.
The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this educational activity for a maximum of 6 hours in category 1 credit towards the AMA Physicians' Recognition Award. Each physician should only claim those hours of credit that he/she actually spent in the educational activity. Disclosure information is on record indicating that participating faculty members have no significant financial relationships to disclose.
The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society has been approved by the Florida Dept. of Health to provide Continuing Education Accreditation to Psychologists (Provider # PCE-46, Exp. 5/10) and Clinical Social Workers, Marriage & Family Therapists, Mental Health Counselors (Provider # BAP 423, Exp. 3/09). The Society certifies that these courses meet the requirements of the Board on an hour-per-hour basis for continuing education credits.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRAUMA SERIES WORKSHOP: HEALING HAUNTED LIVES PART IV. REGISTRATION FORM
Saturday, March 7, 2009 Presentation by Gislaine Boulanger,PhD
First Name: LastName: Degree: License#:
Address: City: State: Zip:
Telephone:( ) **E-mail Address**

Are you requesting continuing education credit? Yes ____No____ (ALL SHOULD REGISTER!) Are you purchasing lunch? Yes ___ No ____ (if yes, add $10)

Please return Registration by SATURDAY, March 1, 2009: Mail check (made out to T.B.I.P.S.) and form to:
300 S. Hyde Park Ave, #220, Tampa,FL 33606;

Call Heather Pyle (813) 857-9044 or Lycia Alexander-Guerra (813) 908-5080 for further information.

Pre-registration for attendance is optional (bring own bag lunch) - all welcome at the door!
If boxed lunch is required please RSVP no later than March 1, 2009.

University Beat 3-2-2009: Women in Crisis Series

The University Beat radio report on the “Women in Crisis” Film Series will run next week on WUSF 89.7 FM, starting Monday (3/2) and Thursday at 3:57 p.m. and Tuesday and Friday at 9:05 a.m.

Promos for the report will run throughout Morning Edition (5 to 9 am) on Tuesday and Friday and during the late morning/early afternoon hours on Monday and Thursday.

The University Beat television report will run on WUSF TV/DT, Monday through Friday, March 2-6, between 11:55 a.m. and noon, between 11:25 and 11:30 p.m., and at two other various times each day. It will also run on Saturday and Sunday, March 7 & 8 at four various times each day.

The reports, along with a number of web-only pieces are to be found at https://frontend.cas.usf.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.wusf.org/university_beat.

"Women in Crisis: Scholarly and Clinical Perspectives" at USF -- Helping the community understand the effects of trauma--Free and open to the public

Women in Crisis Scholarly and Clinical Perspectives

The Film Series “Women in Crisis" is a collaboration
between The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society
(TBPS), The Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic
Studies (T-BIPS) and the Department of Women's
Studies at the University of South Florida.

USF Tampa Campus, BEH 104, 6-9pm

4202 E. Fowler Ave., Tampa, FL 33620

Free and Open to the Public

The theme of the film series, “Women in Crisis” complements and enhances T-BIPS Institute's clinical Workshop on Trauma (Oct 08-Mar 09) entitled "Healing Haunted Lives.” The film series will feature academic and clinical perspectives of trauma explored through women in film. The goal is to provide an accessible way for the public to discuss the topic of struggle and transformation in women’s lives. These are key themes that are studied and researched in the academic discipline of Women’s Studies. We have invited one USF scholar and one local clinician to speak (about 10 minutes each) after each of the films, and then to facilitate a discussion with the audience.

Thursday, February 12 Eve’s Bayou
Kim Vaz, Ph.D., USF Associate Professor and Chair of Women’s Studies & Lycia Alexander-Guerra, M.D., Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst

Thursday, March 5 Maria Full of Grace
Madeline Camara, Ph.D., USF Associate Professor of World Languages & Loren Buckner, LCSW, Clinical Social Worker/Board Member of TBPS

Thursday, March 26 Notes on a Scandal
Susan Mooney, Ph.D., USF Associate Professor of English & John Hartman, Ph.D. Psychologist/Psychoanalyst

Thursday, April 2 Volver
Adriana Novoa, Ph.D., USF Assistant Professor of Humanities and Cultural Studies & Horacio Arias, M.D., Psychiatrist/Psychoanalyst

Thursday, April 9 The Reader (if not on DVD, than The Piano Teacher)
Margit Grieb, Ph.D., USF Assistant Professor of World Languages & Kim Vaz, Ph.D.

Thursday, April 16 Wide Sargasso Sea
Kersuze Simeon-Jones, Ph.D., USF Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and World Languages & Michael Poff, MSW, Social Worker/Psychoanalyst

The Unconscious at Work in Organizations by Kenneth Eisold

The Carter Jenkins’ Center presented Kenneth Eisold’s lecture on "The Unconscious at Work in Organizations". The objectives were to understand how the unconscious extends beyond individual minds; appreciate the ubiquitous and importance of unconsciousness processes in organizations; and to think about effective interventions.

Drawing on findings from neurobiology, most of the informational processing we do happens in the unconscious. Our brains and muscles begin to act even before the thought of why we are moving in a certain direction occurs to us. This places our motivations out of conscious awareness, while consciousness allows us to plan and make decisions about what we want to do. This view of the differing roles of conscious and unconcious processing explains why therapists take time to help patients see the programs that are all set to get activated.

Conscious Processing

Conscious processing is oriented to survival needs rather than everyday reality including the social vicissitudes of organizations. Eisold noted two flaws in privileging consciousness above the unconscious in understanding interactions in organizations. The first was “user illusion” in which we filter incoming information to put together a story that fits our understanding of the world. We tend to discard anything that challenges us. The second is that a belief is developed and reinforced that we are agents in our own behavior.

Unconsciousness Processes in Organizations and Interventions:

Eisold shared stories about organizational crises that he and his colleagues had encountered in their consulting practices with a focus on problems that arise from a preoccupation with group cohesiveness; giving up authority to a single leader; lack of understanding what makes employees anxious; lack of clarity of purpose. His premise was that organizations have tasks to perform whether it is treating patients, educating students, servicing bank customers or flying passengers to varying destinations. Organizations have a lot of anxieties that are stirred up in the performance of those tasks. Those anxieties stimulate people’s behaviors that are outside of their awareness.

Ordinarily, organizations hire consultants to provide a report on the problem, but rarely do they engage the consultant in helping to bring about a resolution to the problem. Eisold noted that it is management’s resistance to change that often causes the greatest obstacles to creating organizational viability. Eisold suggests that getting the client engaged requires helping them see the problem themselves by engaging them in conversation about the problem over a period of time. While the organization’s management will continue to push the consultant back into the expert role, encouraging a co-consultant relationship will require that management give more of themselves then their conventional reactions. Suggesting a book may help them get interested in the problem and complicate their understanding. Offering a surprising empathic comment can help to build insight such as “if you were to do X, it might make others feel Y. and way the consultani resonating with what management is feeling. These intervention suggestions were characterized by an audience member as a kind of “public therapy.”
---------------------------------

Visit Kenneth Eisold's Bog: What You Don't Know You Know

You can't know what is unconscious. At the same time, you do know it because it drives your perceptions and your thoughts, your reactions to events and your emotions. The New Unconscious - unlike the old unconscious of traditional psychoanalysis - is multifaceted, pervasive, encompassing. Inside our minds and outside, in our relations with others, in our personal and our professional lives, it shapes all social and economic relations. It is relevant to government, business, politics, culture.

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*Kenneth Eisold is a practicing psychoanalyst as well as organizational consultant. He has written extensively on the psychodynamics of large systems as well as on the organizational dimension of psychanalysis. He is a Past President of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organizations as well as former Director of the Organizational Program at The William Alanson White Institute in New York.

What Popular Education Performances such as Cemetery Tours can Teach Us about Mourning

The 15th Annual Halloween Tour of the Cedar Rest Cemetery in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi,” an annual event of the Hancock County Historical Society.

The origins of cemetery tours are steeped in the community’s response to the need to prevent vandalism and raise money to maintain the headstones of gravesites and this is especially so for small towns with historic cemeteries.

Sixteen years, ago Hancock County Historical Society’s Executive Director, Charles Gray, noticed that some of the graves had been defaced with spray paint the previous Halloween. Mr. Gray took it upon himself to stand guard during the next Halloween night. A few society members joined him and they passed the time playing card games.

From this activity evolved the idea of the Halloween tour. According to Eddie Coleman, the editor of the society’s newsletter, The Historian of Hancock County, the tour has three objectives; to “preserve and teach the history of the area, to serve as the October function of the society, and to accept donations to finance the restoration of graves and headstones in the Cedar Rest Cemetery.”

The tour begins at the main entrance of the Cedar Rest Cemetery. Each visitor passes by the seat of the “Keeper of the Gate,” a society member that collects donations.

Once a group of 10 forms, they are led along dimly-lit paths of sand-filled bags with candles to see portrayals of the citizens who are buried there.

Each year, the Society features Kate Lobrano, whose tomb is at the entrance of the Cemetery and whose house the Society officially calls home, and about nine other citizens.

Wherever possible, the Society asks a family-member to portray their relative; if none is available, a society member will play the part. In either case, the actor has wide-latitude on how to portray the citizen as long as the information is factually correct.

Audience members are invited to ask questions and to add their own information to the growing body of knowledge about that local personality.

The Role of Cemetery Tours in Coping with Loss

Psychoanalyst George Pollock writes that creative acts are often associated with adapting to loss. Music, literature, and visual art are ways of expressing grief and memorializing those we love. Pollock explored how many musicians consoled themselves and immortalized their mentors, parents, spouses, children, and friends through the creation of exceptionally complex musical compositions. For example, he notes that the Latin Requiem Mass “had its origins in the prayers found in the catacombs, the underground cemeteries of the early Christians in Rome.” In addition, many musicians composed mourning music as their last acts of creative productions. Mozart for example wrote a Requiem as he was dying. Pollock suggests that creative practices at the end of life could be a way that the dying persons begins to come to terms with their own mortality. In a sense, the person begins to mourn the loss of the ‘self’ before death takes place. At the same time, the creative product ensures that something of the self will remain with its own ‘vitality.’

Creative products then are the sublimated elements of the course of mourning in which a loved one may be honored, one’s feelings about the life and death of a friend can be expressed, and a wish to reunite with one’s mentor can be imagined, and so on.

Mourning is an intrapsychic event, because it puts us in an emotional place of having to come to terms with changes in who we were and with what might have been. Mourning becomes an explicitly interpersonal event during public memorials. Today, Pollock concludes that elegiac works of art are not as common as they once were. Now in our fast-paced world, mourning is a rushed process where attempts are made by external forces (e.g., work and friends) to accelerate our processing of ‘loss, change, and transition’. Thus, the cemetery tour offers an important, yet neglected space and opportunity for helping people adjust to loss.

A cemetery is a particularly evocative setting stimulating a range of reactions from fear, to revulsion, to entrapment, depression, despair, excitement, intrigue and adventure.

George Barnes, a cemetery administrator in Canada, told a local reporter that parents can be skeptical about allowing their school children to take a field trip to tour a cemetery; but as the parents listen to the recitations of the local history, they become very supportive (Battye).

At another Canadian cemetery, named Woodlawn, actors dress in period costume and recount the lives of the departed. According to the same local reporter, a young black man, sits by one of the graves and tells the story of how Isaac Spencer, an enslaved African, escaped to Canada through the Underground Railroad. The local reporter wrote “Portrayals are so realistic and moving that some audience members weep.”

I took Hancock County’s Halloween tour for the first time in October 2008. My own learning during the tour began with heightened enthusiasm because I took it as an opportunity to travel to the town were my parents, grandparents and a host of other relatives are buried. Having recently lost my mother some few months before, the tour offered for me a perfect reason to visit the town of her family, where their roots extend to the mid-1800s.

I so looked forward to this trip. It was as if I would be reuniting with my ancestors even only if in theory. I arrived at the gates of the cemetery with a family friend, Yolande Bradley, who is knowledgeable about the town’s history and happenings. It took a few minutes to get oriented to the dimly-lit setting and small groups of people going from grave to grave. Yolande rounded out and added to the stories conveyed and facilitated a discussion with performers who had known my mother.

The experiential activity not only helped me as mourner connect salient pieces of the town’s history with bits of lore that had been in my family, I gained solace from the repetition of the linear narratives provided by each actor: “I was born;” “These things happened for or to me;” “I died in such and such a manner;” These are other family members who have joined me here in subsequent years; and finally, “This is what my life meant to me.”

The narrative sequencing of each life story, coupled with the actor’s obvious joy in portraying these local notables; the lighted path through the broken ground, with sticks and poles and broken pieces of granite jutting out from unexpected places; to graves and mausoleums all jarringly side by side, coupled with the steady leadership of our guide whose flashlight navigated the tight and uneven lanes, was soothing to my sense of loss and my hopes for reconnection.

I am not alone in this response. One Canadian cemetery counselor, Ceska Brennan, schedules a tour each Mother’s Day and plants a shrub in the “Mother’s Day Grove,” in what she calls a “gentle service of remembrance.” Guests may write letters to their deceased mothers and drop them in the hole along with the new plant. At Christmas time, she hosts “Blue Christmas” in which a tree is decorated with blue and white lights, guests sing Christmas Carols, and fill the tree with white hearts inscribed with messages to their deceased loved ones. Brennan sees this ritual as a way to allow bereaved guests to celebrate Christmas and address any sense of guilt they may feel in enjoying the holiday (Battye).

Witnessing powerful performances offer the transfer of knowledge in which townspeople learn of the legacy, contribution and heritage of their ancestors--instilling pride, pity, disgust, or compassion. Performances provide a pathway by which we can enter an experiential world vastly different from our own to see life’s choices and forces responded to in ways we could never imagine.

In addition, witnessing performances can be a healing balm for the grieving and the distressed by normalizing the ups and downs and inevitable ending of a human life.

Dale Miller who leads cemetery tours as a business enterprise notes that “all the stones we see” at gravesites “were erected not because somebody died, but because somebody lived” (Battye).

From a psychoanalytic perspective, cemetery tours that include historical performances can be seen as communal rituals that help us come to terms with what we have lost and what we are going to lose. Thinking about our own mortality can be threatening. The communal experience of the tour eases anxieties associated with thoughts of our physical temporality in a fun and even inspiring way. The collective participation in the question and answer periods can provide a sense of relief that death is a shared reality and not one meant for us alone. In addition, learning about people we do not know helps us connect with people in the past, stirs up our fantasies of who they were, and provides opportunities to refine our ego ideals (i.e., to make shifts in people we identify with and try to emulate because of their admired qualities). Taking the tour can also allow us to imagine the future. Attending the tour offers a forward way of dealing with our ultimate ending, but in a particularly salubrious way. While we may be “gone,” we certainly will not be “forgotten.”

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Battye, B. 1/21/2002, The lives that were, Report/Newsmagazine (Alberta Edition) Vol 29., p. 45.

Pollock, G.H. (1975). Mourning and Memorialization Through Music. The Annual of Psychoanalysis, 3:423-436.

The copyright of the article What Popular Education Performances such as Cemetery Tours can Teach Us about Mourning in “City of Spirits:” Psychoanalysis and South Culture on the T-BIPS blog is owned by Kim Vaz. Permission to republish What Popular Education Performances such as Cemetery Tours can Teach Us about Mourning in print or online must be granted by the author in writing. Contact Kim Vaz at kimmvaz@gmail.com.

Trauma Workshop: Healing Haunted Lives: Adult Onset Trauma, featuring Gislaine Boulanger

Tampa Bay Institute for Psychoanalytic Studies, Inc. (T-BIPS)
Co-sponsored by Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society, Inc
TRAUMA SERIES WORKSHOP:
Healing Haunted Lives
Part IV. Adult Onset Trauma
Presenter: Gislaine Boulanger, Ph.D., author of Wounded by Reality
with Carrie-Ann Gibson, MD on Combat PTSD and Nancy Brehm, PhD on EMDR

DATE: Saturday, March 7, 2009
TIME: 9:00 a.m.-12:15 pm and 1:15-4:30 p.m. (Coffee and bagels: 8:45-9:00 a.m.)
LUNCH: 12:15 Boxed lunch available by reservation: additional $10 (bring own bag lunch, optional).
If boxed lunch is required, please RSVP with $10 check (to TBIPS) no later than March 1st.
LOCATION: Tampa Bay Crisis Center, One Crisis Center Plaza (on Bearss Ave, just west of I-275 and west of Florida Ave),Tampa, Florida 33613
PROGRAM FEE: $75 [$25-students/candidates] (includes 6 CE credit hours).
Registration deadline March 1, 2009. Lunch Add $10. (Add additional $10 if register after Mar 1st).

Objectives:
1. Define the circumstances under which adult onset trauma can arise.
2. Distinguish adult onset trauma from childhood trauma.
3. Identify common therapeutic resistances to working with adult onset trauma.
Continuing Education Credits: This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the Essentials Areas and Policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint sponsorship of The American Psychoanalytic Association and the Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians and takes responsibility for the content, quality and scientific integrity of this CME activity.
The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this educational activity for a maximum of 6 hours in category 1 credit towards the AMA Physicians' Recognition Award. Each physician should only claim those hours of credit that he/she actually spent in the educational activity. Disclosure information is on record indicating that participating faculty members have no significant financial relationships to disclose.
The Tampa Bay Psychoanalytic Society has been approved by the Florida Dept. of Health to provide Continuing Education Accreditation to Psychologists (Provider # PCE-46, Exp. 5/10) and Clinical Social Workers, Marriage & Family Therapists, Mental Health Counselors (Provider # BAP 423, Exp. 3/09). The Society certifies that these courses meet the requirements of the Board on an hour-per-hour basis for continuing education credits.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
TRAUMA SERIES WORKSHOP: HEALING HAUNTED LIVES PART IV. REGISTRATION FORM
Saturday, March 7, 2009 Presentation by Gislaine Boulanger,PhD
First Name: LastName: Degree: License#:
Address: City: State: Zip:
Telephone:( ) **E-mail Address**

Are you requesting continuing education credit? Yes ____No____ (ALL SHOULD REGISTER!) Are you purchasing lunch? Yes ___ No ____ (if yes, add $10)

Please return Registration by SATURDAY, March 1, 2009: Mail check (made out to T.B.I.P.S.) and form to:
300 S. Hyde Park Ave, #220, Tampa,FL 33606;

Call Heather Pyle (813) 857-9044 or Lycia Alexander-Guerra (813) 908-5080 for further information.

Pre-registration for attendance is optional (bring own bag lunch) - all welcome at the door!
If boxed lunch is required please RSVP no later than March 1, 2009.

Film "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"

This was not a movie I would have seen were it not nominated for Best Picture (and a dozen more awards). Reading Roger Ebert’s review made it more unlikely that I would see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Ebert practically says the idea of a man born in an old body, which gets progressively younger while his mind ages, is too fantastical to consider. So what could I make of such a movie? Seeing as how Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt)and Daisy (Cate Blanchette)were approaching their relationship from such unusual vantage points, I wondered if ‘perspectival realism’ (ala Stolorow, that each approaches ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ from one’s own unique, teeny tiny sliver of experience, an infinitesimal part of the whole picture, thereby encouraging respect for the ‘reality’ and ‘truth’ of others) would apply. I thought about how time and aging and mortality in an (expectable trajectory serve as ‘organizing principles’ for each of us, and how their use in Benjamin Button may have served to discombobulate Ebert and undermine his/the audience’s capacity for emotional connection with this film. And Ebert made it seem so creepy when he wondered what Benjamin and Daisy were thinking the first time they made love: was Benjamin remembering Daisy as a little girl? Was she remembering him as a wizened boy?

Then I saw the film. And now I can see its appeal. Not only is its digital technology proficient, but it is a love story about love that endures the ravages of time. Who doesn’t understand the wish for such a love? But an Academy nomination? And who doesn’t understand how nearly impossible is such a love? Who doesn’t wish they knew then (at 16) what they know now (at 60)? So this is a fairy tale in more ways than its quirky time.

Still, Benjamin and Daisy are a couple with their problems. They are like two ships passing in the night, again and again. I sometimes wonder if couples aren’t all a lot like this: we turn around and the other is different, changed, sometimes, in a disconcerting way. Don’t all couples struggle to retain a common purpose, to meet and to have needs met? Despite that the screenplay is by Eric Roth (Forrest Gump), this film is not the farce of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, but captures more the sadness of goodbyes. Director David Fincher (Fight Club) gets the best he could from the often limited Pitt.

While I was happy that Benjamin, having been raised in an ‘old folks home,’ learned to love, listen to, learn from, and respect those who were aged, the sprinkling of philosophizing he did might have been better left to Robert Downey, Jr in Tropic Thunder. What I liked best about this film was Benjamin’s openness to learning from characters from all walks of life, particularly his staying up night after night with Elizabeth Abbott (Tilda Swinton) propelled by an open and indefatigable curiosity, which also turned to love, about her life. While we as analysts do not physically consummate our relationships with patients, I think we, too, are propelled by an open curiosity, a wish to learn, and by love.

Film: "Frost/Nixon"

Director Ron Howard (A Beautiful Mind) has outdone himself with Frost/Nixon, screenplay by Peter Morgan (The Queen) based on his play, creating (despite that the historically-informed audience already knows the outcome and precursors!) a surprisingly suspenseful and completely gripping docudrama on a particular event in history: the Frost-Nixon interviews of 1977. Frank Langella as former President Nixon, like Jamie Fox (Ray, 2004) before him, adeptly channels a real-life figure. While Frost/Nixon does not fully capture, and was not meant to, the outrage of anti-war, anti-Nixon sentiment of the times, [I recall The Politics of Lying by David Wise,1973] -- despite the presence of journalists James Reston, Jr (Sam Rockwell), a rabid anti-Nixon, and Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt), both hired to help David Frost (Michael Sheen-The Queen) prepare for the interviews, -- I was still surprised to find myself feeling any compassion at all for Langella’s Nixon. Langella, like Winslet in The Reader, so humanizes the villain that I found myself feeling bad for feeling bad for the bad guy.

Perhaps like a doomed couple, Frost and Nixon are drawn together, each attracted to the other for what the one is not, and beneath the other is the discomforting familiarity of the underdog, 'kicked around' by 'the snobs.' I thought of the couple of biopics nominated this year: Frost/Nixon and Milk, both nominated for Best Picture, Male Actor, Director. But the two films seemed to be emotional inverts: ever present beneath the humor of Milk’s quips was the gravitas of civil and human rights violations; whereas in Frost/Nixon, the gravity of the dishonor Nixon brought to the presidency (and the memory of Viet Nam and, especially, Cambodia) skated clearly on the surface, and beneath these were the smiles, nay, smirks and incredulity, recalling the Nixon of my youth as the dangerous buffoon, devoid of pathos. And then here comes Langella, stirring unwilling compassion for the man Nixon. On that alone he might deserve Best Male Actor. I recommend this movie to all, no matter what your politics.

Film: "Milk"

Milk directed by Gus Van Sant (Good will Hunting , My Own Private Idaho), original screenplay by Dustin Lance Black, and starring macho actor Sean Penn (Mystic River, Dead Man Walking) is nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Male Actor, and Best Supporting Actor (Josh Brolin-No Country for Old Men, W). Penn luminously portrays gay activist Harvey Milk, the first ‘openly’ gay man in the USA elected to major public office (San Francisco Board of Supervisors) who, in the years prior to his murder, tirelessly fought for civil rights for gays, taking on Anita Bryant, and campaigning against California Proposition 6, anti-gay legislation in 1978 sponsored by John Briggs (Denis O’Hare) to keep gays and their supporters out of public schools. This movie was especially timely given the concurrent defeat of Proposition 8, which proposed marriage equality for gays.

It is with disbelief that I watched the beatings and murders of gays in this film, much like one would watch the hoses and police dogs unleashed on Freedom Fighters in the South. Brokeback Mountain and now Milk show how far the Academy has come, nominating films about gay men, (though I remember Dog Day Afternoon, 1975, received 17? nominations, winning for writing), at a time when many actors feel they must still remain in the closet. Gay bashing continues. Milk debuted in the same month that USA elects, for the first time, an African American president, giving hope to our social consciousness. Still, California’s Prop 8 was defeated on Election Day. When a friend’s two young adult sons, not having memory of Jim Crow laws, could not fathom the enormity of Obama’s victory, my friend asked her sons if they thought they would see a gay man and his partner one day in the White House. They chortled incredulously, to her horror, but then better understood the racist climate of her youth.[As an aside, while Bryant may have and Briggs certainly did confuse homosexuality with pedophilia (the former between two consenting adults, the latter, abuse of one recognized as unable to legally and emotionally consent) Hollywood remained confused, or provincially squeamish, when it snubbed The Woodsman, 2004, and Kevin Bacon’s performance in it.]

Throughout Milk I sat a little teary-eyed, not simply because I knew Milk’s real-life fate, but because there is a profound sadness in the horror of watching our sons and brothers brutally beaten, both literally by police and legally by a prejudicial system, a sadness made deeper by how far we have come and still have to go. Activists for human rights were, and are, heroes. Milk, then, is moving, uplifting, and inspiring, as it shows the last eight years of Milk’s real-life transformation from closeted-gay conservative to a gay activist, a man “fighting for our lives,” for civil, for human, rights. Milk was murdered, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone (Vincent Garber), November 26, 1978, by former supervisor colleague Dan White (Josh Brolin). Many say assassinated as if it were strictly the gay activism of Milk which incited White.

I surmise that White was more complex than that explanation allows. Whether a repressed homosexual or not, his motive to murder may have been narcissistic injury from which he could not recover. White may have seen himself as a golden boy, a handsome former fire fighter and police officer, All-American boy, who did everything right, and received insufficient recognition. Milk, was invited, possibly only out of politeness, along with all the supervisors, to White’s son’s christening, and is the only supervisor to show up. (I don’t think Milk, as other reviewers noted, was the only one invited.) Later, White feels betrayed that Milk did not support White’s effort to keep a psychiatric hospital out of his district. And White misread the Board when he was the only one to vote against Milk’s cosponsored city-wide gay rights ordinance. White’s district is the only one in the city to vote for the unexpectedly defeated Prop 6. ‘How,’ he must have wondered, missing the bigger picture of human rights, ‘could a gay man be preferred to me?’ Then he was further humiliated by not being able to rescind his resignation. (Why else kill Moscone first?)

Another tragedy following that of the murders of Milk and Moscone, was the death in California of the diminished capacity defense, undermined and made unfairly notorious by the hype of the “Twinkie Defense.” Mental illness mitigates even if it does not exculpate. White, who killed himself two years after serving five years of his sentence for manslaughter, suffered with a mental illness, depression, a not uncommon result of irreparable and devastating narcissistic injury. While it may be true, as Milk intimates in Milk, that gays killed themselves because they were coercively closeted (in his case, by him as their lover), being gay, repressed or otherwise, is not the cause of depression. Milk is described in Christianity Today as an “inspiring tale of one man’s quest to legitimize his identity.” It is lack of the Self’s recognition by others, the Self’s de-legitimization, by coercion, victimization, shunning, deprivation of civil liberties, or police brutality, that leads to alienation from the self and, possibly, consequently, to depression. Whether a repressed homosexual or not, White had lost himself.

Sean Penn may well deserve Best Male Actor. And it may well be the toughest choice this year for the Academy, when we consider Richard Jenkins’ performance, playing a man also transformed, in The Visitor, or Frank Langella, who, equally well, channeled a real-life figure in Frost/Nixon. But my personal favorite was Mickey Rourke, in The Wrestler. Though I thoroughly loved this film, Milk (as you know from my post 2/18 about The Reader) is not my pick for best picture.

Film "The Reader"

Most of us dream of changing the world, or winning a million dollars, or of having a love so true that it endures the ravages of time. These longings come to life in the Academy nominations for Best Picture of 2008, except in The Reader, where there is neither heroism nor triumph nor that kind of love. Directed by Stephen Daldry (The Hours )and based on the novel of the same name by German author, Bernhard Schlink, adapted to the screen by David Hare (The Hours), The Reader is nominated for five Oscars, including Best Female Actor (Kate Winslet) and Best Cinematography (Roger Deakens- No Country for Old Men and Chris Menges- North Country) and is my pick of the five for Best Picture [The Wrestler, having not been nominated, -- though I hold out high hopes for Rourke and Tomei]. I do not, however, expect The Reader to win, for it stirs up moral questions too uncomfortable to consider and does so at a time when we worry that Holocaust minimizers and deniers (Bishop Williamson and Iran’s Ahmadinejad, e.g.) might prevail.

Hanna Schmitz (Winslet), is a woman so un-self-reflective and so dis-embedded from humanity that she considers illiteracy more humiliating than dutiful murder. Hanna is so matter of fact (with the exception of her illiteracy) in her honesty about her crimes, she appears not only worse than callous, but uncognizant of their context and meaning. “It doesn’t matter what I think. It doesn’t matter what I feel. The dead are still dead.” As I viewed The Reader, I found myself morally confused because I felt unwelcome sympathy for Hanna, I marveled [though she has already garnered BAFTA’s Best Actress Award, and SAG’s and Golden Globe’s Best Supporting Actress for this role] at Winslet’s (and Hanna’s) capacity to elicit such a response in me. There is something more than a little sickening about seeing a Nazi guard as human or sympathetic. [It is a moral question completely devoid of humor, unlike, e.g. the question posed in Woody Allen’s Bullets over Broadway: would you save from a burning building a bum or the last known copy of Shakespeare’s works? which is answered by the untalented playwright (John Cusack) who goes on to opt for the person, and by the artistic gangster (Chazz Palminteri) who chooses the play.]

But there is no dilemma about condemning Hanna’s actions as an SS guard. Lena Olin as the older Ilana Mather had it right: there is nothing that exculpates Hanna’s actions. The dilemma comes because, prior to learning of her former war crimes, we felt her immense constriction of relatedness, how painful and limiting, and only later learned how pervasive was her lack of embeddedness in humanity. Moreover, even after learning of her heinous crimes, I could not help feeling compassion for her deep humiliation, misguided as it was, for her illiteracy.

Michael Berg (David Kross, Ralph Fiennes) too, is disenfranchised: from himself, and from others: his lovers and his daughter Julia (Karoline Herfurth). But he is not so truthful. He hides his affair from school friends and from family; He denies to his law school peer knowing Hanna; Mather, a concentration camp survivor, implores him to “Start by being honest…” It is only after Hanna’s death, and after meeting Mather, that Michael is able to share his inner world with his estranged daughter.

Some have written that it was Michael as a law student who had the moral dilemma (to reveal, or not, mitigating evidence at Hanna’s trial) and that his failure to do so was meant to punish her for her crimes in the deaths of so many Jews. I think, if he intended to punish Hanna, it was for her crime against him, abandoning him eight years earlier. Simultaneously, it was an act of love: he protected her secret, respected her choice, and shielded her from the humiliation she found most profound. Humiliation, in part, led to her suicide, triggered, in part, perhaps, by the face to face encounter of his visit to her in prison. The older Michael had, out of loyalty to his past love for her, discerned the best way to sustain and nurture her while she served her life sentence.

I saw Michael‘s moral dilemma decidedly less impactful than that of the audience. It is not simply the stellar performance of Winslet or the cinematography that made this film my pick. It is because I grappled with what to make of The Reader. Unlike any of the other nominated films, it haunted me for days, and caused me to think about things in a way that left me a different person unto myself.