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Masha Tupitsyn
She/Her

Egoism à Deux

by Masha Tupitsyn
^{An excerpt from her next book Time Tells: Acting}

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Many women consider the word actress a condescending diminutive of Actor, a serious male craft. The term tells us there is something different about what actresses do. It speaks to the problem of women’s work in general: Where does it begin and end? What is an actress when she stops being a muse? What is an actress if she’s not also a wife? In what ways is each a character in the same way that a husband has always been a stage director?

By the end of Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, Nicole (Scarlett Johansson) has solved the problem of both wife and actress, first by divorcing her husband Charlie (Adam Driver) and later by becoming a director, like him. “Now I know what you were so obsessed with all the time,” she quips at the end of the film, realizing it wasn’t her or her acting. For Nicole, gender is not only a marriage problem, it is an actress problem. The roles are interchangeable. One performance depends on the other. Charlie enjoys directing Nicole because she is his wife. He can control Nicole as an actress in a way he cannot control her as a wife. Baumbach married his actress Greta Gerwig (the two became lovers while filming Greenberg. Baumbach left his former actress/wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, who starred in the film, for Gerwig). Gerwig has also become a celebrated film director, like her husband. Did this solve the problem of the actress, which is also the problem of the wife? Will it safeguard Baumbach’s own collaborative marriage?

Many of today’s movies and TV shows take acting as a premise—The Americans, Barry, The Kominsky Method, Huge in France, and Glow, to name a few. In Marriage Story, marriage is show, marriage is theater.

The theater, and acting in general, is not just a metaphor for the fiction of marriage, but a testament to our increasing inability to face reality. Twenty- first century relationships rely on artifice yet blame that artifice for the lack of authenticity and fulfillment it creates.

When the psychiatric session began to appear in movies like Spellbound (1945), The Three Faces of Eve (1957), Splendor in the Grass (1961), and An Unmarried Woman (1978), it coincided with the second wave of feminism, Civil Rights, and the gay and lesbian movements, but also the articulation of post-war masculinity. A highly psychological generation, the analysis of relationships became part of the psychiatric and cinematic lexicons. Onscreen therapy lent comic relief and pathos to the post-war, white male melancholic (think Woody Allen), who felt endlessly bothered by the new world and the new woman. Manhattan marks a cultural turning point for white heterocentric masculinity and comedy alike: it makes the male melancholic funny as well as a romantic hero.

“Manhattan is the movie where Allen projected his own self-absorption as universal condition,” J. Hoberman declared in his 2007 retrospective review for The Village Voice. It is a “universal” condition that still pervades the work of male directors like Baumbach. As much as the divorce lawyers “infect” the narrative of Marriage Story, as Baumbach puts it, psychotherapy, both on and off the screen, infects our ideas about what constitutes a good relationship, a good childhood, and a good life. Conversely, it also tells us what a bad marriage is. In the hands of psychiatry and pharmacology, the discourse of love becomes prescriptive and pathologizing. Both fields have invaded the language of modern relationships, endlessly neuroticizing and narcoticizing our relation to other people, ourselves, and our past.

The more we feel victimized and constrained by relation itself, problems— or frustrations, as Adam Phillips puts it in Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (2012)—become antithetical to a good relationship rather than necessarily part of it. There is no reality without frustration, writes Phillips, and no satisfaction either. If we do not know how to bear our frustrations, we cannot bear real pleasure. We are captive to our narcissism, our fantasies, our doubles.

Not surprisingly, Woody Allen’s 50-year filmography has fully capitalized on psychiatry’s 20th century interventions, placing the neurotic melancholic along with the ideals of psychotherapy at the center of our modern-day disenchantment with the power of love. In many ways, Nicole is just as much a Woody Allen invention as Charlie. This has something to do with the nondescript language of American cinema, as well as the simultaneously dulling and indulgent affects of psychoanalysis—cinema’s twin. The neurotic character of psychotherapy is personified by Allen. The irony being that to know one’s self is to be unfit for anyone else.

No longer confined to a private therapy session, or gender, today’s psychological experiences operate primarily in the form of everyday discourse. In Marriage Story, the legal and psychological advice that Nicole and Charlie receive is interchangeable. One sounds like the other. Baumbach’s couple outsource their inner lives not only to the legal and psychiatric infrastructure, but to the fiction of theater. Even though the film is an allegory of therapy, it fails to comprehend the way the above modalities intersect or why Nicole and Charlie are unable to work through or overcome their problems.

While Freud believed love was irrational and sexual, the German psychologist and sociologist Erich Fromm saw love as a “capacity” of the “mature character.” In The Art of Loving (1956), Fromm blames the disintegration of love in Western society on the rise of consumer capitalism, arguing that the “concentration and centralization of capital” after World War I profoundly altered our “character structure” and therefore our capacity to love. Real love was replaced by pseudo-love, which is neurotic because it is based on idealization, projection, and fantasy.

To stage a relationship within the literal theater, as Marriage Story does, instills the idea that relationships, like any role, require constant pretense and alienation. With capitalism as the organizing social and emotional principle, modern love, Fromm argues, becomes egoism à deux. For Fromm, love is a discipline, a practice—an art—not a feeling that comes and goes. Not a marriage problem.

Charlie’s prodigious egoism is responsible for what happens to his marriage with Nicole. He is the one who cheats. More importantly, he is the one around whom the marriage has always revolved. He is also the one with the least amount of insight about why his marriage ends. But almost everyone in Marriage Story is self-serving and self-absorbed. Nicole says she has always fed on male attention and direction as her life force (she feels “dead” otherwise), and Nora Fanshaw (Laura Dern), Nicole’s high- powered LA divorce attorney, cynically exploits the language of feminism and emotional capitalism to represent her female clients. What we see between Charlie and Nicole is what Fromm calls the “socially patterned pathology of love.” It’s also the socially patterned pathology of the contemporary egocentric personality.

Early on in Marriage Story, Charlie and Nicole’s mediator instructs them to each memorialize their relationship in the form of a love letter that lists all the things they love about each other. We hear these lists in voiceover during the movie’s opening montage. Instead of a couple, we get a retroactive inventory. Love is idealized and sentimentalized because it is in the past. It is remembered differently than the way it was actually experienced. As an abstraction, Charlie and Nicole’s relationship is another form of pseudo-love. We never see it.

Baumbach’s film doesn’t simply reinvent marriage as divorce, it makes romance a hollow, cynical concept as well as a gimmicky diagnostic exercise. The mediation scene (a form of therapy) is incoherent because its outcome contradicts its sentiment. Like Charlie’s unanticipated piano-bar rendition of Steven Sondheim’s “Being Alive” at the end of the film, the couple’s commencing love letters, which are observant, celebratory, and romantic, are nevertheless consigned to the work of ending a relationship rather than salvaging it.

This begs a series of questions: Why write a long list of all the things you claim to love about someone if you are incapable of loving them—if love doesn’t beget love? And if loving someone produces the same outcome as not loving them, why is the language of loving and not-loving identical? Tellingly, “Being Alive” contains the ambivalent lyric: “Someone to hold me too close/someone to hurt me too deep”—neither are tolerable for the melancholic lover. Both feel bad to him. Like the couple’s love letters, “Being Alive” comes at the end of the relationship, once the divorce is final, instead of at the beginning, as it does in Sondheim’s 1970 musical Company.

In Love in the Western World (1958), Denis de Rougement traces the history of romantic love, focusing on the tragic myth of Tristan and Iseult, a Western archetype that Marriage Story rearranges. In the love-as-tragedy model, argues de Rougement, there is a deliberate effort to renew both obstacle and struggle in order to restore desire. The desire for continual obstruction is actually desire for death. “No problem is ever understood till we have foreseen how to solve it and pass beyond it.” For Baumbach divorce is an epistemology that replaces understanding. The problem of marriage is simply countered by not being married.

Just as director is Charlie’s double for husband, actress is Nicole’s double for wife. Both of these doppelgängers intrude on the melancholic couple’s lives in order to separate them. Indeed, being Charlie’s “favorite” actress is one of the reasons Nicole wants to flee the marriage. Charlie wants to direct Nicole both on stage and off but does not seem to be interested in loving her.

Baumbach dooms marriage by bypassing it altogether without showing us the problems that led to its unraveling. In Marriage Story, the very concept of love is gaslit, a growing trend in movies as wide-ranging as Up in the Air (2009), Annihilation (2018), and Widows (2018). Even Sofia Coppola’s reassuring marriage story, On the Rocks (2020), presents an inconclusive allegory about modern love. Coppola’s “good” husband, who we suspect is bad until the very end, is as indeterminate as all the bad husbands leading double lives on and off the screen today. On the Rocks’ good guy is not only utterly unconvincing and inconsequential as a good husband, but once again, it may be that the actual good guy is the good old-fashioned misogynist (Laura’s father, played by Bill Murray), who is at least authentic about his failures as a man. While betrayal and suspicion once belonged almost exclusively to the structure of noirs and thrillers, subterfuge now permeates all film genres, deceiving characters and audience alike. Baumbach said it himself when describing his film in a Netflix interview: “You see it in thrillers all the time, all the stuff that seemed innocent in the beginning—you know he touched the wine glass, we have the finger print—all those things suddenly become part of the police investigation.”

Betrayal, suspicion, and pain are presented as the inevitable outcomes of intimacy. In Baumbach’s case, it is the blueprint. In each of these films, love is revealed to be a lie without any indication that it was a lie. Baumbach claims there are clues for the dissolution of Charlie and Nicole’s marriage, but how can that be if we never actually saw the marriage and are only given a montage of a once-happy couple? Why should we believe this happiness was real, and, by the same token, that it wasn’t? Why should we believe this marriage is doomed if we don’t actually know what doomed it?¹

“I know too much about love,” Vivian Gornick declares in her 1995 essay “The End of the Novel of Love.” “We all know too much... I remember the first time—it wasn’t so long ago—I turned the last page of a novel and it came over me that love as a metaphor was over... Today, I think, love as a metaphor is an act of nostalgia, not of discovery... Love is the problem here. It’s the wrong catalyst. It doesn’t complicate the issue, it reduces it.” Gornick doesn’t outline what the trajectory of this knowledge entails. Nor what catalyst could or should replace love. Though she doesn’t explicitly say so, for Gornick, a politicized heterosexual woman, to know “too much about love” is too know too much about men. To know too much about men is to be an experienced woman of a certain age. To be an experienced woman of a certain age is to no longer believe in the possibility of true love. Too much experience descends from too much grief. Grief becomes an ongoing, baffling, and melancholic experience, devoid of the work of mourning and change. Misogyny necessitates the betrayal of all women. To betray women, is, in one sense, to betray love; to always be loyal to misogyny above all. To be nostalgic, as Gornick puts it, is to remember and long for a (pre-feminist) time before you too knew too much about the inevitability of heartbreak—what Gornick compounds as men-and-women-together in “Tender Hearted Men.” “An idea of ‘men’ and an idea of ‘women.” Too much experience is to ask oneself: is love without betrayal possible with a man?

What crimes is the husband guilty of? To declare that “it’s always the husband,” as HBO’s The Undoing (2020) does, is to ask what the husband’s crimes are when he is not officially a criminal. While the show’s husband-on-trial may or may not be guilty of murder (this is the show’s question), he will never be innocent if he suffers from “a truth problem.” The Undoing’s repeated claim that it is “always the husband” confirms that the husband construct is both phenomenologically specious and morally unsound. While a select few husbands may admit to being liars, most even lie about being liars.² While The Undoing posits that being a liar— even a pathological one—does not automatically make a husband irredeemable, choosing to explore the full spectrum of what it means to lie, it does prove that a man’s claim of innocence is inextricably bound to his denial of guilt. 

The Undoing’s most significant revelation and gender critique is made behind the scenes by 15-year old actor Noah Jupe, who plays Henry, the son. In 2020, Jupe told HBO, “At the end, Henry discovered something about how much the truth matters.” To embrace the truth, and to become an honest man, Henry must forsake his lying father, whom he identifies with and tries to protect by covering up his sexual crimes. To identify with the father is to follow in his duplicitous footsteps. The son must choose between the Father and ethics.³ The Undoing places much of its narrative tension on the full range of lying masculinity, asking what lying leads to rather than what leads to murder. While the show plays with the idea that being a liar does not automatically make a man a killer, nor an irredeemable husband, it does make his claim of innocence inextricably bound to his denial of guilt. Today a man is innocent simply until he is found out.

To declare that “love is the problem,” as Gornick does in “The End of the Novel of Love,” a pronouncement that extends beyond the literary novel, when in fact the problem is men, is to wrongly invest in a preference and tolerance for betrayal and falsehood. It is also to equate the bad husbands (and boyfriends) we keep encountering—both in life and on TV—with love rather than the horrors of male dualism.⁴ Blind sighted by her own melancholia and disillusionment, Gornick mistakenly blames love. To believe that our so-called “knowledge” (what have we learned? What truths have we fabricated?) and findings about “love” are the fault of love or relationships in general rather than the result of our continued failings as bad lovers. In an interview about The Undoing, Hugh Grant, who plays the bad husband, echoes Baumbach’s romantic paranoia: “Why is it a thrill to be made to doubt the foundations of our lives?”⁵

As many have pointed out, The Undoing is neither an original crime thriller nor a convincing whodunnit, for how can we truly expose something we already know but keep failing to understand? The question is not whether the shows’ particular version of a bad husband (how bad?) did or did not brutally kill Elena Alves—his stereotypical femme fatale mistress. The true horror is watching women from all walks of life admit (in Grace Fraser’s case, the killer’s wife, this happens on the stand. As a clinical psychiatrist, it is Grace Fraser’s job and expertise to recognize and diagnose in others what she herself has been “undone” by) that they don’t know who or what they are married to.⁶ To identify with both the idea and lie of the husband, as Grace Fraser does, is to forsake love and uphold falsehood.⁷

Given that historically most men, regardless of who and what they are, are nearly always also husbands (however peripherally), one could easily make the claim that the present media discourse, along with the past few years of corporate television—true crime, mystery, documentary, and comedy included—has been about coming to terms with our unbreakable attachment to bad masculinity and to the fact that women, regardless of experience, expertise, and background, still don’t know who or what they marry. In fact, they don’t know or may not want to know anything about who men are or what they are truly capable of. And all of us may only be continually devouring the fullness of this truth now. But to what end? Does the truth matter? Do we care? Or are we simply content with being “thrilled” and enraptured by the trauma loop of our entertainment economy? Have we gotten used to being seduced, destroyed, and betrayed? Is it easier to live with the assault of patriarchy than it is to live with love?

When love is no longer something we can trust or believe in, love, ambivalence, desire, and paranoia become so entangled we don’t know what structure or person will betray us and what or who will set us free. We don’t know the difference between love and pain. We don’t know whether we are the cause of unhappiness or the recipient of it. We don’t know whether we want love to succeed or fail. As On the Rocks demonstrates, we have not only stopped believing in the novel of love (which is to say, love as a convincing premise), we have stopped believing in good husbands. This loss of faith does not mean women have stopped marrying—far from it— nor does it necessarily correlate with feminism. The serial killers we have become obsessed with dissecting, are after all, also husbands (fathers). If good husbands do exist, they don’t seem to thrill us nearly as much as the bad husbands do. The serial killer pageant showcases a new social investment in negative attachment. In Coppola’s undecided hands, it is almost disappointing to discover that Dean, On the Rock’s husband-under-suspicion, is not cheating on his wife after all. He, it turns out, is a good husband. Yet the verdict does not support the diegetic story. The movie lies to us by depicting the behavior of a cheater only to flip the narrative at the last minute in order to assure us that what we’ve seen and heard is false—a gaslighting assault on reality. Betrayal, rather than love, is wielded as an ontological tool. We can no longer trust what we see or hear.

“Put Romantic love at the center of a novel today,” writes Gornick, “and who could be persuaded that in its pursuit the characters are going to get to something large? That love is going to throw them up against themselves in such a way that we will all learn something important about how we got to be as we are,or how the time in which we live got to be as it is.” In Gornick’s essay, the seasoned novel reader (Gornick in this case) has become a seasoned disbeliever (us in this case)—unmoved and unconvinced. In Coppola’s romance, it is the viewer who is unaffected. In the end, On the Rocks tells us nothing about love. The happy ending is hollow and anti-climatic. Laura is not thrilled with either outcome. We almost wish Dean was a liar.⁸ Laura’s loveable-chauvinist father cares more about the fate of her marriage than she does. What we discover at the end of Coppola’s bland saga is as uneventful as what we did not know at the start. The ending certainly does not make us believers in love or in happy marriages. Love, as Gornick concludes after finishing Jane Smiley’s The Age of Grief, “failed to grow large.” (“Then come the great things—Love, Life,” writes E.M. Forster in Maurice. But also: “What hope for Maurice who was nothing but falsities?”). If Dean had cheated, Laura may or may not have left him.⁹ Since he didn’t cheat, she stays. Yet Love is not the reason.

In the closing scene of the 1987 movie Someone to Love, actor/director Harry Jaglom frames Gornick’s argument another way. While rehearsing with his cast, Jaglom, who plays a director in the film, bemoans the fate of modern love with Orson Welles, his real-life mentor: “I was trying to find out why we’re all alone,” he tells him. “Why my whole generation is alone.” Jaglom, a Baby Boomer, stands on the edge of the stage, breaking the fourth wall. Like the late 20th century novel, cinema has failed as a stand-in for love and psychoanalysis has replaced faith, conquering love in the process. Welles, cigar in hand, listens unconvinced from the back of the old theater, about to be torn down. “Is there something special about your generation?” Welles asks Jaglom. “Yes,” Jaglom insists. “I think that my generation is the first one that has not managed to create the illusion for themselves, in their own lifetime, that they are not alone.” Jaglom’s soliloquy stresses the importance of love, regardless of experience. Love has not changed, but we have.¹⁰

In “Beyond Tragedy,” de Rougement declares that love in the western world “appears to be the account of a gradual decay. It has insisted on the degradation of the myth, on the breakdown of marriage, on the disparagement of convention and of formal modes.” The sequel to post- tragedy that de Rougement offers at the end of his book, is faith based, but not religious. When Kierkegaard, writes de Rougement, famously broke off his engagement with the young Regine, his faith in God and in love arose from despair. From nothing—ex nihilo. Kierkegaard became a “knight of faith.” Love—a mystic marriage—begins after the engagement is broken off. After love has been lost. After experience.¹¹ Are we post-experience because we are post-hope? (E.M. Forster: “and he knew from experience what was coming.”). How can we want—much less find—something we no longer believe in? How can we believe in something we no longer know how to want?

Being faithful to love itself, even post-love, even with “too much direct experience,” allows us to treat love “with a kind of semi-divine indifference.” You the lover are not the point, nor is your love. Love is the point. You are not driving love—love is driving you. “It wishes for nothing that its love does not wish for; it is at one with this love in duality, and the duality is now simply a dialogue of grace and obedience. And the desire for the highest passion is thereupon being gratified in the very act of obeying, so that the soul is no longer being cauterized and branded; there is not even any awareness of love, only the happy moderation of love.” Love begets love. Love is something you are faithful to without question, without, which is, as James Baldwin writes, a true passion. In Beloved, Toni Morrison concludes that “love is never better than the lover.” What if we were not simply passionate for the One we love, but passionate for and devoted to the work love requires? And for the love love requires? If betrayal is “inevitable” it is because we want it to be. Because we have chosen it as both the premise and the outcome.

At first glance, de Rougement’s sequel to tragic love seems lifeless and antithetical to desire, the driving engine of digital consumer capitalism. Desire, a One-scene, can change course; waning at any moment without notice; making the beloved subject to our whims. When love is a feeling rather than a discipline—an art—as Fromm argues in The Art of Loving, love becomes errant, unfaithful, self-serving. In the internet dating economy, there is always someone else out there for us to consume.

Baumbach’s melancholic opus posits that relationships end the moment they start; wants become burdens the moment they are fulfilled; to truly know someone is to eventually hate them, and love will never get our full faith or respect. By making divorce the focus of his film, Baumbach teaches us to care more about what it takes to separate—to “consciously uncouple,” as Gwenyth Paltrow famously described her own divorce from Chris Martin in 2014—than what it takes to be together.

When a man becomes a director, what does he really want? In The Girl (2012), a drunk and love-sick Alfred Hitchcock, also a bad husband, tells his handsome young script supervisor, Evan Hunter, “I’d give it all up. I’d give up the films, money, everything I’ve ever done to be like you. To look like you.” In the biopic, Hitchcock, a renowned director, is dying to sleep with his leading actress, Tippi Hedren, and has attempted to do so many times, against her will. He sees himself as a romantic who would do anything for love. Hitchcock insists he would give up directing to be more than just Hedren’s director. But what he actually wants is to look the way Hunter looks because men like Hunter and Jonathan can use their appearance to deceive with consent. In a 1961 BBC interview with Greek actor/director Alexis Minotis, Minotis is asked if his actress wife, Katina Paxinou, had ever directed? “No, no, no, she never did,” Minotis proudly assures on Panixou’s behalf. Baumbach’s Charlie Barber comes to mind here. So does Gerwig. What happens when your wife stops being your/an actress and decides to be a director instead? “Don’t you forget that she’s a woman, of course,” Minotis continues. “And an actress rather prefers to be directed than directing. Like, in life—they much preferred to be directed than be directing.”