"Because you're good and everyone else in the world is bad. You're so hurt. So brave. With your little white nose in the air and all the time you've been building a life raft."
"Alicia, here's the thing, you like to think you're a good person, and maybe at one time you were, but we both know, you'll do whatever it takes*."The first of those quotes is Don Draper to Betty in the last show of the third season of Mad Men. She has been saying she wants to leave him because she is unhappy with him. And she is. But she has also been preparing her exit for a long time. It's not entirely clear to us or to Betty Draper which is the real motivator. The second quote is from the second-last episode of the first season of The Good Wife. Cary is angry at Alicia because she has used her contacts in the spectacularly corrupt Chicago political machine to win a competition between the two of them for a job. Cary is bitter and speaks as a bitter man might but Alicia is also more than a little uncertain that what she did is right.
In both situations the man is in a morally ambiguous position. Don Draper's actions are far from defensible. Cary is letting his bitterness get a hold of him. Both men have also incorrectly assumed that the woman they are accusing has been using sex to get what she wants**. And yet, they both have a point. Both Betty and Alicia have a lot invested in being able to think of themselves as good and neither really is as good as the image she desperately needs to hold of herself. There is a very deep truth about female moral psychology at work here.
I've written elsewhere about film noir and how a lot of the noir classics turn on a particular twist of male moral psychology. We men tend to allow ourselves to get bewitched such that our desires become entitlements. This applies to everything we desire but the place where it is most evident is in sexual desire and neo noir films have exploited this to maximum dramatic effect. The typical male noir hero has made, a Robert Glover puts it, a covert contract with the world that if he follows the rules he should get a trouble free life and that he should get "sex". I put the scare quotes up here because sex symbolizes much else: it symbolizes a certain level of financial success and social status. Even in the unlikely event that he gets a trouble-free life he seeks, it won't be enough. He needs the recognition of being a person of status in the larger world and good lover in the privacy of his own bedroom. He can't supply those, so he needs the world to give it to him. And this desire becomes an entitlement. And that becomes his justification for now breaking the rules. He sees the denial of his entitled status as proof that the system is crooked and concludes that he is no longer morally bound by the rules.
At some point in our lives (and maybe at several points) every man does that trick to himself. And not just to himself, he causes pain to others. I think a majority of affairs are justified by the man on the grounds that, "Okay, this is wrong and I made a commitment but I'm entitled to this once in my life." Take that basic scenario and complicate it with some serious crime and you've got any one of a dozen classic film noir.
But what about women? The same scenario doesn't work. The male who does what I have described above is wrong but can remain a sympathetic character. You could not do the same thing with a female character. There are women who occasionally decide, "Okay, this is wrong and I made a commitment but I'm entitled to this once in my life." But they don't garner sympathy. It's unfair, I know, but we judge women by a different standard.
But there is a different sense of entitlement that I think women are prone to and that we tend to understand and thus sympathize with the woman who has it and that is the sense of being entitled to think of herself as a good person no matter what happens. Part of the motivation for this is fear of shame.
I'll return to the male case first to show how shame works there. The man who gets cheated on or cheated out of something worries that this makes him a loser. He knows that life isn't fair and that success in this world depends to a large degree on lucky and that some people succeed by cheating. In reality, he hasn't done anything to earn the things he wants and then the insult-added-to-injury when someone else hurts him helps him believe that he is somehow entitled to, Robert Glover's phrase, "a happy, trouble-free life". When he doesn't get that, he feels personally shamed. People are sneering at me and I've always been a good guy who follows the rules. (Think of the opening scenes of Breaking Bad in which Walter White has been working hard at two jobs to support his wife and son, who hs a disability, and no one respects him.)
With women, the problem is a bit more complex because there is an unfair double standard to begin with: women are held to a ridiculously high but not actually impossible standard of sexual purity that no one expects from men. If it were actually impossible, the problem would disappear but every woman knows that there is a very small number of women who actually achieve what is nearly impossible and a much larger number who fake it successfully. She too knows that life is unfair and that being perceived as good according to the unfair standards that women are judged by is mostly a matter of luck and that lots of people cheat. In reality, she hasn't done anything to earn the good-woman status she wants and then the insult-added-to-injury when someone else hurts her helps her believe that she is somehow entitled to think of herself as a good person no matter how ruthlessly she pursues her selfish needs. And, just as we start off on Walter White's side, we also start off on Alicia Florrick's side. We don't necessarily think that what she subsequently does is right but we understand (tricky word that) her desires and her having been wronged by her husband, whuch she clearly was, seems to give her the moral high ground as the "good wife".
I think that the solution to both is the same: to develop a conscience. That is a much bigger challenge than it might seem forever for there is deadly trap and that is that we might simply internalize shame. If our conscience is just the nagging little voice inside that tells us that we've done wrong then we don't actually have a conscience. All we have is our mothers inside our head tearing us down. We will resent that such that, no matter how hard we try, we will quietly sabotage our attempts to "be good".
Again, both positions are about being rather than doing. The man wants to feel like a winner and the woman wants to feel like a good person. Yes, the goal is ultimately to be a better human being but we become better people by doing good things. Doing good things focuses me on something outside myself, something that can be evaluated in a cool, objective way. It also makes progress possible for each bad thing is a bump in the road instead of a terrifying shame that I meet be no good after all.
*In my all-time favourite movie, Body Heat, Ned Racine makes a similar judgment on Matty Walker; that she could, "Do what is necessary, whatever is necessary." Before we join in condemning this, however, we should remember that Jesus tells us to do what ie necessary, whatever is necessary. This appears to make it look like any means will justify the end but if our character is our destiny, and it is, then actions will make us what we are. We might gain something we want by stealing it but what we will become is a thief. Do do whatever is necessary but do it for the right end. Meanwhile, as the Book of Ruth tells us, sometimes using sex to get what she wants is exactly what a woman should do.
**The only reason that these fictional women haven't been using sex to get what they want is because the audience would lose all sympathy for them if they did. Because women are held to an unfair standard, we never see fictional women having affairs. In real life, women in these situations would have most likely had affairs. Even at that, the prime motivation for not dong so in fiction is the desire to continue thinking of herself as a good person. It's not that they don't want the or that they give even a moment's though to the issue of betrayal—they don't have the affair so they can maintain a sense that they have the moral high ground.
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