Thoroughly enjoyed Sophie Barthes’ Cold Souls. I bought the whole package, Appreciating the concept and the execution, the Russian literature overlay, the wintry objective correlative, the Brighton/Beach and Gogol/Allen connections, the symbolism, the conflation of Dead Souls and Sleeper, the angst that eventually goes down the drain of one person’s life. Even the un-movielike connections of three women and their linkages across time and space and the final theme of empathy and solitude on the Brighton Beach as we rearrive at Gogol.
If you couldn’t tell, I liked it. A lot.
I wake up this morning to find that NYT writers provide two glosses on the movie. A.O. Scott uses the Coen’s A Serious Man and its Gopnik (as opposed to the New Yorker writer Adam) to write about Jews; though Giammatti isn’t MOT, he’s a fellow-traveler; his tweed jackets and shoulder-forward walk harkens back beyond the Coens and Happy Gilmore to the primordial schlump who was old when Bellow resuscitated him from the Yiddish (probably with a piece flanken).
Then there’s Understanding the Anxious Mind, Robin Henig’s summary of Jerome Kagan’s forty years of research into people like the character played by Paul Giamatti, whose character in Cold Souls is yclept Paul Giamatti. There are lovely moments in the movie that describe that moment when anesthesia kicks in and the amygdala loosens its stranglehold, that moment of curiosity, empathy, openness that belies the character beneath. It’s at the heart of the movie’s deeper understanding, and at the heart of the struggles of productivity — and creativity. From Henig:
In the modern world, the anxious temperament does offer certain benefits: caution, introspection, the capacity to work alone. These can be adaptive qualities…
People with a high-reactive temperament — as long as it doesn’t show itself as a clinical disorder — are generally conscientious and almost obsessively well-prepared. Worriers are likely to be the most thorough workers and the most attentive friends. Someone who worries about being late will plan to get to places early. Someone anxious about giving a public lecture will work harder to prepare for it. Test-taking anxiety can lead to better studying; fear of traveling can lead to careful mapping of transit routes.
Kagan told me that in the 40 years he worked at Harvard, he hired at least 200 research assistants, “and I always looked for high-reactives. They’re compulsive, they don’t make errors, they’re careful when they’re coding data.”
An anxious temperament might serve a more exalted function too. “Our culture has this illusion that anxiety is toxic,” Kagan said. But without inner-directed people who prefer solitude, where would we get the writers and artists and scientists and computer programmers who make society hum? Kagan likes to point out that T. S. Eliot suffered from anxiety, and that biographies indicate that he was a typical high-reactive baby. “That line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ — he couldn’t have written that without feeling the tension and dysphoria he did,” Kagan said.
It all talks to the same issues, why we (at post-20th century lit/crit types) feel so familiar with the New York anxious Paul — and so moved by his links to not only to the Russian poet, but to Dina (Nina Korzun), the responsible ‘mule,’ and it raises questions about the pursuit of art, why it’s easy (and, perhaps, wrong) to reject the glittery Sveta (Katheryn Winnick), who desires the soul of De Niro. She wants to be a great actor, as does Paul, but we somehow rationalize Paul’s decision (and the Jewish stereotype) because of the legitimacy conferred by its familiarity, and the pain that Paul claims as the decision’s source, as opposed to the superficial, illegitimate nouveau-Russian stereotype and Sveta’s ambition.
The schlump has become part of the cultural mainstream? Now we’re clucking about the recent arrivals? Now we’re answering questions with questions? Hmmmm.
Talk amongst yourselves.
