As I commented on one of Maiello’s blogs: “Annie Hall is still one of my favorite movies, in part because it treats relationships in a sentimental but unsentimental way that is rare in the movies. But it also has some of the best off beat humor.” One scene that I didn’t mention in the comment was a conversation between Singer and Hall when they first started to get to know each other:

Annie Hall: Oh, you see an analyst?
Alvy Singer: Yeah, just fifteen years.
Annie Hall: Fifteen years?
Alvy Singer: Yeah, I’m going to give him one more year, and then I’m going to Lourdes.

I’ll be honest that until I began working on another blog using this quote (which about a year ago), I had no idea as to what “Lourdes” was a reference to. I assumed it was probably some kind of place like the Vienna Circle, except it was place with the current top-notch psychologists or neuroscientists of the day.  In other words, that particular part of the joke went over my head.  It turns out that Lourdes is

...in the Hautes-Pyrénées department in the Midi-Pyrénées region in south-western France,…[where] The Blessed Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to Bernadette Soubirous on a total of eighteen occasions [said to have occurred between 11 February and 16 July 1858]….To date, 69 miracles cures have been recognized, to have occurred and certified by the Lourdes International Medical Committee which has been in  existence since 1947.

So what Singer was saying was that if after sixteen years of psychoanalysis wasn‘t going to do the trick, he was going to not only take the religious miracle route to cure what ailed him, but turn to Catholic’s Blessed Virgin Mary.  Given that Singer is not only Jewish, but also just a little paranoid about anti-Semitism around him, makes this little bit of dialogue an prime example of Woody Allen at his subtle best.

But whether Allen intended to or not, the scene also points to the common effort evident throughout the history of civilization of individuals, groups, and cultures who seek some kind of immediate intervention, whether divine or not, to cure what ails them. Today, of course, we turn as much to institutions of science as we do to the institutions of religion. And by institutions of science, I include, of course the pharmaceutical companies and the doctors who write the prescriptions to solve what ails us with the latest in pills.

The desire for quick fix has always been with us.  It is only natural to desire what is making us suffer to go away, and to go away now (if not sooner).  So on one hand, the microwave and the instantaneous stimuli from our smart phones have nothing to do with this impulse. They don’t help, of course, but rather affirm the impulse and generate an greater expectation that somewhere out there is that quick fix for what is ailing us.  

But what ails us in many cases cannot be fixed quickly.  This is true for issues facing our education system or transportation infrastructure as it does with the psychological issues a particular individual may be enduring.

One of the comments I have been fond of saying here and amongst friends is that I believe just about everybody could use a number of years of psychoanalysis, always with the caveat that it is with a qualified and competent therapist.  I usually say this in half-joking manner, in the vein of ‘we’re all crazy,’ but I do believe it is true.

Culturally, we are, as a people, adverse to taking such a route. There is the ever present stigma attached to seeing a therapist or counselor.  This is driven by a number of different sources, some of the more common ones are “I ain’t crazy” and the belief that one should just be able to handle one’s issues on one’s own, a subset of the belief in the autonomy and superiority of individual.  That individualism that leads to the response of “just pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps,” and scoff at such things as the adage “It Takes a Village.” Sometimes it takes a good therapist and willing participant.

Woody Allen once joked:

My films are therapy for my debilitating depression.  In institutions people weave baskets.  I make films.

I believe it is a joke based on some responses he has given in interviews, in which he claims not to  have suffered from depression that was debilitating.  In an interview with New York Magazine, he had this to say:

NY: As the world’s most famous analysand, can you say whether you think analysis works?

WA: People always tease me. They say, look at you, you went for so much psychoanalysis and you’re so neurotic, you wind up marrying a girl so much younger than you. You don’t like to go through tunnels, you don’t like to stand near the drain in the shower. But I could also say to them, I’ve had a very productive life. I’ve worked very hard, I’ve never fallen prey to depression. I’m not sure I could have done all of that without being in psychoanalysis. People would say to me, oh, it’s just a crutch. And I would say, yes. It’s a crutch, and exactly what I need in this point in my life is a crutch.

And from an article for The Australian, after his film “Whatever It Takes” came out:
 

"Like Boris I have a grim view of the world," Allen says. "I fight it all the time. I've always been lucky: I've never experienced depression. I get sad and blue, but within a certain limit. I've always been able to work freely, to play my clarinet and enjoy women and sport; although I am always aware of the fact that I am operating within a nightmarish context that life itself is a cruel, meaningless, terrible kind of thing.

"God forbid the people who have bad luck, or even neutral luck, because even the luckiest, the most beautiful and brilliant, what have they got? A minuscule, meaningless life span in the grand scheme of things."

Wow, so the years of therapy were helpful, then. "People think I've spent my life on the couch because I've played that part so relentlessly in my nightclub act, on TV and in the movies. I've had therapy, but not an ungodly amount. I exaggerate it for laughs. One could even point to me as a decent advertisement for it.

"I've been productive all my life, I've never taken sleeping pills or an antidepressant. I've been married now for 13 years. I have two nice children and good relationships with practically all the past women I've been involved with. I have long-term friendships, business partners, I've been a fairly solid citizen. I'm not a crazy."

He pauses in this stout character reference. "Well, I'm claustrophobic; who wants to be stuck in a lift for three hours? But I don't brood on existential or personal terrors."

In both cases, he makes the case for at least some psychoanalysis, even if it is a crutch, we all need some help.  The individual trying to make it through alone in this world doesn’t generally fare very well.     

I would note here that I have had my frustrations with some of my sessions of therapy which seemed after numerous fifty minute hours to not only be just where I was when I first started the session, but also in some ways worse than when first walked through the door.  This could very well be, in part, due to the incompetence of the particular therapist I was seeing at the time, as well as my own resistance to doing what was necessary to make things “better,”  preferring instead to wrap myself in whatever misery I was experiencing.  

Also for transparency sake, I am currently taking a couple of those “pills” from the pharmaceutical complex, although I do not see them as a quick fix, and one or both of them may be a part of my life for the long haul.  

It is more difficult than some would make it to be able to be honest with one’s self, to not only reflect upon one‘s internal environment, but be willing to really look at what was there below the surface, to accept it, to work with it, to take responsibility for it, regardless of what injustices fate or destiny has thrown at one.  It can be a frustrating ordeal, one that takes more than ten sessions, or goes away with the right pill, and definitely if one is hoping to find the complete answer and end to the process.

Yet, even if we tear ourselves away from the multitude of distractions we with which surround ourselves,  most of us can’t help but seek out some way to bring about serenity now.  

In a weird coincidence while I was working on the title for this blog,  I had initially went with “Looking for a Cure.”  This title made be think of a title of another movie and so I changed the working title to “Looking for Mr. Goodcure," thinking it was a little more catachy.

I have not seen the movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar (and likely I nor anyone else will in the near future at least*), nor have I read the novel from which it was based. Somewhere over time, I have picked up references to it, probably other movie reviews. All of I knew was that it was considered more than a little risqué for its time, but I was otherwise basically clueless about it. 

So like Lourdes, I did a little a research to see if it was somehow related to what I wanted to explore in this blog and discovered, to my surprise, that not only was the movie’s central character Theresa Dunn played by Diane Keaton, but that it was also released in the same year (1977) as Annie Hall.

But this coincidence is not why I bring up the movie and the novel it was based on, which itself was based on the events surrounding the brutal murder of Roseann Quinn, a 28-year-old New York City schoolteacher..

The reason I bring it up first starts with Roger Ebert's review of the movie. Although he gave the movie 3 out of 4 stars, his criticism adaptation from the novel is what I wanted to focus on:

The heroine of Judith Rossner's bestseller…Theresa was turned on to a particular flavor of self-destructive sexual experience, one involving possible danger to herself, and she played a role in bringing about her own death.

In Richard Brooks's film version, that masochistic impulse isn't considered as openly. He gives us a Theresa who drinks too much, sleeps around too much, and takes too many drugs -- but she seems more of a hedonist than a masochist. She's looking for a combination of good times, good sex, and a father figure, for psychological reasons the movie makes all too abundantly clear. But she isn't looking for danger, mistreatment, or death. Maybe Brooks thought audiences would find Rossner's masochistic heroine too hard to understand. He has rewritten the story, in any event, into a cautionary lesson: Promiscuous young women who frequent pick-up bars and go home with strangers are likely to get into trouble.
….
Then there's that ending that bothers me. On a New Year's Eve, she makes a fatal decision in choosing the next guy she's going to take home. We know she's made the wrong decision because Brooks abandons her point of view to show us a scene in which the guy is established as unbalanced and hostile. But she doesn't know that and gets killed because she doesn't. Her lack of knowledge is exactly the issue here: In the book, Theresa might have picked up the guy because she knew he'd be trouble.

This led me to the NY Times review of the novel by Carol Eisen Rinzler at the time of its release [the emphasis is mine]:

Having looked passively to a man and entirely past herself to make herself whole, the message Theresa takes away from the affair is that she's not good enough to hold a man. Her life becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy; she involves herself with a series of men--married, newly divorced--whose rejection is almost guaranteed. Finally, she is left looking for a life in which no rejection is possible; all she asks of men is that they want to use her body. Her life-style--going to bars, picking up men and bringing them home to sleep with--has the appearance of aggressiveness and the illusion of control. After all, she is the one who decides whom she'll sleep with, isn't she? She is in charge of her emotions, isn't she? But the author makes it clear that Theresa's life is one of consummate passivity and emotional impotence.

Theresa's illusory control is threatened when a decent and sensitive man falls in love with her. James's love terrifies her; she sees returning it and committing herself to him as an abdication of her control, when what it really is, the author implies, is a chance for her to achieve control. But any action is beyond Theresa.

Passivity is a theme that has been dealt with much of late.  Sumner Locke Elliot's brilliant novel, "Going," describes a Nixon-like United States where nobody acts until it's too late, and they're all dead. Erica Jong explored that emotional disease in women whose pathology is not only similar to cancer's but whose morbidity is greater. Passivity may kill more slowly, but it is more efficient; it kills a whole lot more people in the end. Judith Rossner gives passivity an added dimension of horror. She anatomizes its growth, step by chilling step, showing how it can be as effective a means of suicide as poison or a gun.

And, Rossner's heroine, Theresa Dunn, in this tough and powerfully controlled novel, takes her place beside Henry James's Isabel Archer and Scott Fitzgerald's Nicole Diver as another victim of the American Dream, a woman who never roused herself enough to wake up from the nightmare.

There is much to be said positively about the efforts to break the various forms of repression during the latter half of 20th century in this county, including those focused on sexuality.  It would be nice if all one had to do was throw off the particular chains of oppressive and repression, but not only do the wounds of that history remain, there are plenty of pitfalls one finds in the new 'freedom.'  

It would be nice if all that was required for a happy and healthy relationship was finding Mr. or Ms. Right. But that delusion is just another impulse for, if not the quick fix, the easy fix.  Such an attitude usually, if not always, leads to disaster. If not divorce or separation, then a kind of passive depressive co-mingling.

These days, with our negative views about government, we look for the outsider who will turn things upside down and restore our faith in our elected leaders.  In our education system we look for some new approach (e.g. charter schools) to solve the problems.  I could go on and on.

We remain, as a culture, as a nation, as passive as the character Theresa Dunn, believing we have taken control, through whatever particular quick fix we have chosen to deal with whatever particular issue it is that we confronts us. Chances are it going to take more than fifteen years or a miracle to cure what ails us.