is this joke racist just because he’s black?

“You do what you have to do,” Charles Ramsey said as he described saving the three girls.  We should be more specific: he heard a girl scream… and checked.  And when the girl said, “I’ve been trapped in here, he won’t let me out!” he– you should sit down for this– helped her.

Only in America can you be labeled a hero for doing the most basic human action, helping someone in need.  Only in America can doing what you should be bludgeoned for not doing be considered heroism.  One might wonder if labeling him a hero sets the bar for heroism a little low; or, said a more important way, if it sets the bar for non-heroic, commonplace behavior WAY low, underground low.  “I heard screams, but, you know, The Good Wife was on.”  I’m with you, it’s best not to get involved, that’s what Facebook’s for.  #OWS

Of course— only in America will a hero rush to the nearest TV reporter to proudly explain that the most basic human action that he performed….. shouldn’t be considered heroism.  “You just do what you have to do!” An inspiration to others.

And only in America will no one think this rush to TV humility is at all odd or classless.  (“Did you just say classless on the internet!?”)

But two days later, he was outed as a convicted wife beater.  Which is completely irrelevant to the basic human action that he performed, but of course…. only in America does the media run background checks on our heroes, lest our comparative self-esteem suffer, God forbid hypocrisy should go undetected.  “Turns out he was a wife beater!”  What a relief!  Good thing you never sent him the donation you impulsively told your friends you’d send him.

I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Something is wrong here. Dead giveaway!

“He opened a space for honest dialogue on race.”  Let’s not go crazy here, a pretty white girl will run to into the arms of Freddy Krueger if she just escaped from a decade long shoot of Hostel 3.   No, what no one is willing to say is how great– how weird– how unexpected– is it that when a pretty white girl ran into the arms of a poor black man, he didn’t eat her!  (“Seriously?  Not at all??”  That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you: he’s a hero.)  We have different standards for heroism based on race/class/gender, but then again, we pay them all differently.

The truth is, what he did isn’t nearly as important to us as how he did it: funnily, on TV.  That’s why he’s a true American Hero, not for what he did for the victim, but for what he did for us.   If you don’t believe me, ask Angel Cordero.

@thelastpsych

No related posts.

(King Of Comedy at the Tribeca Film Festival, starts today, so I thought this would be appropriate.)

Chuck Low, in the background behind De Niro’s right ear, imitates Rupert’s movements. But why?  Fans of the movie have long speculated about what it could mean, I think I have a clue: the deleted scene.

In the script, after Rupert and Rita leave the restaurant, Rita meets up with the “young man” (Chuck Low). Rupert secretly follows them, spying on them. Rita and “the young man” go up to his apartment, and Rupert, in a frenzy outside, presses each of the door buzzers in sequence, hoping to get to Rita.

Meanwhile, Rita is having second thoughts about being with the man, so he taunts her and ultimately forces himself on her (“afterwards, you’ll thank me”). At the last moment, the buzzer rings, and Rita takes advantage of the distraction to flee the room. In the final cut of the film, you don’t see this apartment sequence, but you do see Rita emerging from the apartment building.

Relevant section of the script is “14″-”31″, found at sfy.ru/?script=king_of_comedy

—

See also: Hidden Reference In Air Force One http://youtu.be/uE_AMgzjYoo

No related posts.

This season, Don Draper learns what women already know: you can be hot and bitchy up until the time you are only bitchy, and then you better hope you’ve accumulated a lot of money or a loving spouse because people are way less tolerant of you when your hormones downshift. One of the lessons of midlife that everyone talks about is that you realize a lot of doors are forever closed to you, except the last one, and that’s the lesson the show explores; but the real lesson no one ever talks about, not out loud, is that now everyone else can see clearly whether there’s any value in keeping you around.  “And then you go back to your office and take a nap,” says Campbell, giving old man Don an overly aggressive shoulder pat to reinforce his point, would he have dared to do that five years ago?  Answer: no.  Better hope you’re still creative, it’s the only reason no one has stabbed you yet.

So Don comes up with an ad campaign for Sheraton Hawaii:

The clients don’t like it: it reminds them of suicide. (? Am I the only one who see this as  sex?)  And Don doesn’t deny it, “jumping off point for souls” going to the after life, and, he adds as if he is high on quaaludes,  “in order to get to heaven something terrible has to happen.”

Umm, first of all that’s backwards but I’m no biblical scholar; second, what kind of a dummy commits suicide in an ocean wearing his shirt and his pants?  (“Virginia Woolf?”   That was a river.)  Which means that this isn’t so much a suicide as…… a baptism.  “In order to get to heaven, something terrible has to happen.”  Spoken like a true, make-it-up-as-you-go-along American agnostic.  Try Buddhism while you’re at it, you’ll like it, there are no rules.  Over at his mom’s funeral super-rich Roger tries to give his grown daughter a jar of water from the river Jordan, she accepts it and conveniently leaves it behind a minute later– what she really came for was his cash. He gives it, what’s he going to do?  Still, she should have taken the water, too, might come in handy when she turns 40 and has to decide what “jumping off point” means for her.  (It’ll be about 1987.)

II.

Did you try and read the text in the ad?  I did, it’s “lorem ipsum” randomly generated: “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, sagittis ac….” You’ve probably seen it in bad websites.  Except lorem ipsum wasn’t randomly generated until there were computers to randomly generate it; the standard version used in the 1960s ran, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit…”   So the text in the ad is wrong.  Let’s call it an anachronism.

But lorem ipsum is derived from Cicero, and it’s worth good bread to know the original:

No one rejects pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure.

… when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted.

Let me translate that last sentence into something a little more hipster:

III.

“Could you hear the ocean?” a drunk Don asks the doorman about his recent near death experience.  Jonesy is evasive, apparently God told him to keep his mouth shut.   Later as Don is staring pensively out of his office window, we hear the ocean.  Either he’s dead, or we are.  Time for a drink.

IV.

Speaking of drinking, “jumping off point” reminded me of something: Chapter 11 of The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous:

He cannot picture life without alcohol. Some day he will be unable to imagine life either with alcohol or without it. Then he will know loneliness such as few do. He will be at the jumping-off place. He will wish for the end.

Sounds like Don!  “That’s a coincidence.”  There are no coincidences.  There is only pure contingency, with meaning applied in retrospect.  Unless you are writing your story towards an ending, then the story of your life is being written in flashback.

V.

See, when we show Don reading The Diving Comedy at the opening of the show, that’s an obvious clue that Dante’s book is the key to understanding the season.  Meaning in retrospect.

But when you hear obvious in psychoanalysis (did you see any psychoanalysts in the show?) you are in the presence of a defense.  The name of the game is identification.

When Roger’s mother dies, it doesn’t seem to affect him.  Then he later admits: “I don’t feel anything.  At all.”  He thinks it’s pathology, he thinks there is something wrong with him, which is why he says this from the analyst’s couch.

Yet when his shoeshine guy George dies, he breaks down into wretched sobs. So he doesn’t have a problem feeling, he contains all the correct amount of emotions, they just come out at the wrong time.  That’s America: massive anxiety when nothing seems amiss; insomnia when you are exhausted; rage at some meaningless news story; lust for the hill troll who smiled at you just the right way; mourning your shoeshine guy.  The question is not why do you feel these things, the question is why don’t they come at the right times?  Why must the energy be displaced?

The answer is that since the emotions are going to come out one way or another, it is way easier to have them come out over your shoeshine guy and say that it’s really about your mother or your own mortality, then it is to let them out when it is clearly about your mother or your own mortality.   Because saying it isn’t the same as feeling it, saying it allows you enough wiggle room to disavow it.  Kind of like when you say I love you.

That’s a fetishistic identification.  More on that alter, and by later I mean the porn book.

Many stupid people were horrified by Betty’s suggestion to her husband that they hold down the (not) sexy teen in the next bedroom and rape her: “you can put a sock in her mouth!”  Guys, that’s not a plan, it’s a hint.  Betty identifies with that girl, which means that what Betty was really suggesting isn’t that the girl get raped, but that she– Betty– get “raped” by her husband: role play.  This is a good time to ask what is the state of the relationship when the best way to get your mate activated is to become someone else?

Meanwhile, Don’s wife is on the fast track to become a superstar– on a soap opera.  How very modern.  Don’s not happy, he prefers reruns of The Donna Reed Show, which he watches before going to Roger’s mom’s funeral.  “I don’t think anyone’s going to show up!” says Donna Reed on TV (the only words you can hear over the noise of the vacuum cleaner.)  Gee, I wonder what that could be a reference to.

When a man’s wife get’s bigger then the man, you got to make yourself feel manly somehow, so after a New Year’s get together, when Dr. Rosen has to rush off to a patient, Don takes the opportunity to bed Dr. Rosen’s wife.  We are all supposed to be shocked.  Back to his old ways?

No.

We are told over and over that Dr. Rosen is Jewish, but what we are never told is that his wife isn’t.  Not only is she Catholic, but she’s a practicing Catholic, as evidenced by her crossing herself, wearing a cross, and fornicating underneath the cross.

It’s an odd backstory to give a minor character… unless you plan to make it a frontstory.

“What’s your New Year’s Resolution?” Rosen’s wife asks Don during pillow talk.

“To stop doing this,” he says.  Oooh.  Harsh.  Don’s guilt has finally caught up with him…

No. Here’s the Hail Mary prediction: Yes, Don meant” stop cheating”– but not stop seeing her.  He’s falling for her.

Maybe if Don offers her husband a Leica, he’ll let her have his wife?  I mean, the guy married outside of his religion in 1949, how badly could he want her?

Related posts:

1. Mad Dolls

My point here is not the movie, but the fact that those are the two publicly agreed upon things to talk about.  They are inextricably linked.  Only a movie made by a woman could get away with asking (neutrally, of course) if torture is necessary; only a strong female character can get away with supervising it, because the assumption is she doesn’t enjoy it, she’s doing what she has to do, her lack of privileged status in the world is precisely what gives her the privilege to use torture when needed.  Put a man in that role, and either it becomes an action movie, or too obviously approving of it.

In the real world, the government’s official position that torture was not used comes with a parallel, covalently bonded story: while we don’t know the identity of the real “Maya”, the one thing that is publicized about her is that she sent a mass email to the CIA complaining that… she didn’t want to share any of the credit.  It was all her.

That’s the point: the only way to get people to accept torture in real life is through the backdoor of showing a woman did it first.

Related posts:

1. Black Women are Less Attractive (If Your Idea of Black Women Comes from TV)
2. So-Called Feminism in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo
3. Katy Perry is silly, Naomi Wolf Is Completely Insane

After reading your piece, I thought you may be interested in this article [from Dissent]. I doubt you’ll agree with everything, but certainly an interesting / similar take to yours on Lean In:

Where other feminists focus on articulating the amount of free or underpaid labor that women do, Sandberg places a priceless value on labor itself and encourages more of it, whether paid, unpaid, or poorly paid.
[...]
The loser in the Lean In vision of work isn’t one version of feminism or another [...] but uncapitalized, unmonetized life itself. Just as Facebook relies on users to faithfully upload their data to drive site growth, Facebook relies on its employees to devote ever greater time to growing Facebook’s empire.
[...]
Sandberg is betting that for some women, as for herself, the pursuit of corporate power is desirable, and that many women will ramp up their labor ever further in hopes that one day they, too, will be “in.” And whether or not those women make it, the companies they work for will profit by their unceasing labor.

The quote seems right, but there’s an important difference between my article and Dissent’s, I am not splitting hairs, it’s fundamental.

The problem is that Dissent is just as fooled as everyone else is in thinking that Sandberg’s book is interesting/relevant in itself, “the fact that she is COO of Facebook is a sufficient resume to speak on women’s issues,” and so they think they need to address what Sandberg says…. because Sandberg said it. But that’s the trick. We don’t parse out what the (female) CEO of General Dynamics says, no one writes articles about her, because what she says can’t be used to promote the system, what Phebe Novakovic believes won’t motivate a future 9-5er to work overtime: she’s not pretty enough, she works in explosions, she’s not aspirational. That’s why there is no Time Magazine spread on her, even though she rules the world. To paraphrase the great Marshall McLuhan, the messenger isn’t the message, and the message isn’t the message. The medium is the message, properly massaged.

The crucial point is a meta one: Sandberg herself is being used in exactly the way Dissent says she is getting other women to be used. Whatever Sandberg believes she is doing, the system is using her as a battery (to get women to work harder, for less money, in exchange for the trappings of power– fame, titles, prestige.) If we believe Sandberg is earnestly trying to advance women in the workplace, then the system is using her (comparatively) cheap labor for the purpose of enhancing that very system, not changing it.

To illustrate why Dissent has missed the point, let’s take Dissent’s thesis and summarize it in one sentence: “Sandberg is a lunatic because she is asking women to work harder for the system, in exchange for titles/prestige/the trappings of power.” Not only is this thesis wrong, it is a defense against change, because if you don’t agree with Sandberg’s message, you find fault only with Sandberg. Meanwhile, the system proceeds unmolested.

I realize that “the system” is a nebulous term relying on an even more nebulous “unconscious”, lacking clear definition, so I’m going to try and define it. First, start with a single individual, and eliminate value words like “purpose” and “unintended consequences.” If a guy cheats on his girlfriend in a way that likely could get him caught, one might say, “he wants to get caught.”

Now  add a few more individuals. I want an ipad, but I can’t afford the $10000 it would cost to make it in America AND generate to Apple the same nominal profit of $300/ipad, so then the ipad has to be made in China with cheaper labor. So while one can say, “the consumer wants an ipad,” and “Apple wants $300 in profit per ipad”  the sum of those wants is “the system”:  “The system wants cheap Chinese labor.”  The system doesn’t want it because it’s awesome, it wants it because it added up the wants.

To be clear, the fact that ipad consumers don’t “want” cheap Chinese labor is irrelevant. All of their choices want cheap Chinese labor. You can say the same about renewable energies, something that everyone says they “want,” yet all of their choices sum up to the system’s want: the system wants to protect the oil industry. The CEO of ExxonMobil isn’t to blame, you are.

To go back to Sandberg, if the system wants cheap female labor, how would we change the system? Only by wanting different things. Simply, if the majority of women wanted to work less, that would be the game. But the majority of women do want to work less, but they also want to buy X, Y, Z aspirational products, and they want X,Y,Z way more then they want to work less. If you sum up those “wants,” and add in the wants of Nordstrom’s, Nine West, Whole Foods, Visa and Mastercard, etc, and throw in what the media wants, then it is technically correct to say: the system wants women to become batteries.

The final twist to this otherwise simple addition is that what you want is often taught to you by that very system.  For example, in running through the above, what you didn’t say was, “maybe I don’t want an ipad.”  That thought cannot occur to you…. because the system wants it.  Try saying this to your friends and see what happens: “I’m not interested in a career, I just want to get married and have kids.”

No related posts.

is this is what he always wanted?

“People are fed up!” I’m told. “People don’t feel safe!” Uh oh, I’ve heard that before, are we going to vote to invade all the states that start with Co? Everyone hates living in a police state until the moment they suddenly want a police state, and then they wonder why they live in a police state. Understandably, in such existential moments, people want someone to protect them, to take over; but if that’s impossible they will settle for the appearance of a larger power differential– they will willingly weaken themselves to create the illusion– in their own head– that their protector is that much more powerful. Yes, just like the gimmick in BDSM.

“I’m outraged!” someone will have written on Facebook. “This can’t go on!”

The louder people yell for change, the more things will stay the same. You’ve all argued vociferously for or against gun control, I’m sure, but how many of you did something about it– called your Congressman, which is your only (albeit miniscule) avenue of power? Or do you think they read your twitter?

But anyone can say that yelling won’t help, things won’t change, but my point is very different: you are yelling so that things don’t change.

Frantic hyperactivity to mask impotence, frantic hyperactivity to signal to some omnipotent entity that you are trying to make things right– it’s the description for what’s happening now and the definition of obsessional neurosis. That could be coincidence, I guess.

II.

Well here’s what both sides of the debate can agree on: “The media should stop publicizing the killer’s name! It makes killers think they can be famous, getting their fifteen minutes of fame.” Tip: If you find yourself in total agreement with people you wanted to murder in the last election, you’re wrong.

It’s interesting that we think spree killers are motivated by fame, an idea so entrenched it is immune to critical examination, we assume that that must be what drives people, crazy people doubly so. That would be an example of projection. Or perception. Whatever. This guy left no manifesto and obliterated his computer on his way out. Fame? Sounds like his problem was he felt overscrutinized, but I’m no shrink. Unless he thought he was playing Candyland he did it out of rage. You know what’s even more interesting? That you don’t think “rage” is a satisfying explanation, but “fame” is.

“But constant exposure on CNN does spur copycats!” Oh, yeah, because what every twenty-something homicidal maniac uses as an identity touchstone is the news programs targeted to a demo twice his age and three times his estrogen level. You think they are motivated by what they see on CNN? What year do you think this is? You think they want to get on the local news? They don’t even watch TV! I know your heart is in the right place, but are you seriously arguing for a world where someone decides what information is suitable for you to know? And even if some killers motivated by fame, for this to work, you can’t cause a media blackout of a killer’s name on the TV news only, you’d have to black it out on the entire internet. Does anyone have a killswitch for the internet? Keep yelling like that, someone will.

III.

“But now’s the time for action!” Note the date, February 13, 2013, it is the day you will stop talking about this tragedy, it is the day you will simply say, “that’s the system, I guess, we yelled for two straight months, but nothing ever changes.”

I arrived at that date in a semi-scientific way: that’s how long it took Occupy Wall Street to die of ennui, and it’s worth pointing out that those people had youthful energy and infinite free time. You know who they put in charge of changing gun policy? Joe Biden.

Google Trends supports me:

N is Virginia Tech, H is Giffords, B is Aurora, and etc, note they all run about a month, and the dotted lines in the graph is Google’s guess– they give it a month. This is just a horrific massacre, so you’ll be in for two. Then it’s Superbowl, Oscars and Season 16 of Dancing With The Stars.

IV.

“Will nothing ever change?” Oh, one thing will, can’t stop the steady march of authoritarianism.

Since you don’t have the courage to look to the inevitable conclusion of your opinions, I’ll do it for you: there’s absolutely no chance that guns will be illegal, so “gun control” means tighter control of who gets guns.

In America, if the word “control” is anywhere near a social policy issue, then to your left will be its unwitting executor: psychiatry. “They already decide financial benefits, criminal responsibility and who gets more time on tests, so why not mandate a psychiatric clearance for gun owners!” Because it’s madness. Of course I’m not opposed to this in theory, because in theory is the only place where it would be conceivably valid or reliable. In practice you will have a guy judge you based on his own prejudices, or his fear of lawsuits, or on the negotiated fee. Why not have a gypsy run some tarot cards? At least when it all goes bad you can blame the cards.
 

Which is the whole point: the system is designed to fail in specific and predictable ways, because a tragedy that is the result of a failure of the system is much easier to live with than a tragedy that happens for no reason, even though they are equally common and equally dead. Which is the whole point of the frantic hyperactivity. It’s not to prevent it, but to feel like it is going to be prevented. I realize this doesn’t sound very satisfying, but on February 13, you will realize it was.

No related posts.

“I have a vagina and a voice.” Great. Anything else?

An interesting article in the LA Times about how the wives portrayed in cable dramas are…. hated.

Lori’s bloody end capped off a particularly rough year for AMC’s first wives club. When the once-svelte Betty showed up at the beginning of “Mad Men’s” fifth season carrying 50 or so pounds of extra weight, “Fat Betty” became an instant meme. Similarly, when Skyler plunged into her pool in a desperate cry for help this summer on “Breaking Bad,” her detractors wondered aloud why she didn’t just drown herself already.

I’d change the word “hated” to hatable.  If suicide is a selfish act, then it was perfectly in character for Skyler.  Why is it so easy to hate her?

The simple reason why men don’t like the wives in TV shows is that it is impossible to like a character who doesn’t act, do.  Surprise, men don’t like passive women (characters.) Even if the doing is preposterous (superheroes).  Do something. Men, generally, hate the women in stories who are simply supporting cast.  The examples are myriad: porn is beloved, and women are the stars.  Rom-coms, by contrast, and Twilight, and The Hunger Games, all have female leads but they’re not doing, they are reacting or emoting or waiting.  The first move is the man’s.

The women never act as independent individuals.  Their thoughts and actions are always in response or in reaction (or even in support) of their husbands; there’s never a sense of them as women.  No TV show could be made about Lori.

What women in TV do a lot of, to the exclusion of everything else, is talk.  Three dimensional characters come into conflict, but these cardboard cutouts criticize.  Endlessly.  At least if they were moral criticisms we could say the women are personifications of superego, but their criticisms aren’t about right and wrong, they’re essentially selfish: what’s this going to mean for me?  This isn’t just the wives.  On Homeland, the 16 year old daughter is portrayed as a selfish brat, but she is merely a more unfiltered version of her mother.  Every line of dialogue for both of them is some version of “what now?”  Note that the daughter and her boyfriend have killed someone, and while the boy tries to cover it up, all she does is talk about it.  “What now?  This isn’t right…”

To mask this inertia, this awful lack of agency, dialogue for women is often (forgive me) “chirping”: staccato zips that substitute for meaningful content, snappy dialogue with barely a pause in between responses, emphasized with popping piano notes as soundtrack, and if you need examples watch anything on network TV.

Ultimately the biggest problem for the wives of AMC may also be the most intractable: “Women are socialized to identify with both male and female protagonists, but I don’t think men are socialized to identify with female protagonists. When they are asked to do so, they rebel,” argues Holmes.

This is wrong.  Men accepted Homeland no problem, and a decade ago they loved Alias,  and there are plenty of female superheroes men love.

If you start from the perspective of “men don’t like strong women” or “there’s an undercurrent of misogyny”,  like many silly people do, you’ll miss the point.  When Jezebel or other “feminist” outlets try to tell you that these characters are “strong women” or female role models, they are, of course, doing a terrible disservice to women; but what’s fascinating to me is how they think they are advancing the cause.  I want my daughter to watch Lori and Betty and Skyler and think, “Jesus, these people are idiots.”

A separate question is why actually strong female characters  rarely exist, especially on network TV which is watched mostly by middle aged women.  And that would be your answer, unfortunately: the audience can’t relate.

Interestingly, the one show that does depict a female with thought, action, agency, is Homeland– and she is explicitly depicted as mentally ill, and it’s hard not to read this as, “only a woman who was broken already would be this fiercely independent, able to do all these things.”  But instead of feminists posing this interpretation, they praise her for being able to do so  much in spite of her mental illness.  Ladies, this is a story, this isn’t real life– there is no “in spite of.”  It’s all “as a consequence of.”

—–

1. Interestingly, strong females on network TV almost always carry a gun, which is evidence of a “phallic signifier”– simply, a symbol of power that changes both the viewer’s understanding of the person and the person’s own behavior and desires.

2. But there’s an essential realism to the TV wives and their men: the kind of man who would go from chemistry teacher to cold murderer/drug dealer is the kind of person who would have married the kind of woman who is deeply selfish, angry, bitter.  The kind of narcissist who is Don Draper would have married the kind of woman what was a  soulless plastic model of her own mother.  Etc.

Related posts:

1. 5+1 Sentences On The Walking Dead “Beside The Dying Fire” s2e13

portrait of a chastised daughter

A retired naval officer sends an email to his three grown kids about “being forced to live through the never-ending bad dream of our children’s under-achievement and ineptitude.”

The obvious first step is that the Guardian and Telegraph are papers for people who still write emails to their kids. So of course, anything where that generation gets to criticize the younger generation for being lazy is going to be front page news. NB: retired Naval officer=beyond reproach.

However, he’s not actually lamenting their underemployment, he’s more upset that there are four divorces and five marriages amongst the three; that six grandkids are being raised by clueless parents.

The second thing to observe is that you can read the email, which means someone released it, and that someone is the daughter.  Why would she want this out?  Doesn’t she realize this makes her look like a fool?

Crowdsourcing the superego means that as long as a few people say, “it’s not easy nowadays, I’d like to see that bitter old codger try to succeed in today’s world!” she gets off scot free. I’ve counted 11 such comments, and I’m not even trying. Guilt and shame evaporate.  She says this is a wake up call, but she believes she was awake before the call came:

She said her father’s email did not upset her because she had already begun to turn her life around when she received it in February. She had set up a business and had started translating a French self-help book into English.

But the interesting question is why the father would be disappointed in her.  She is married to a surgeon, lives in France with her three kids– why would her father consider that a failure?  I’m going to assume to on old Brit being safely married is as good as safely employed.  So my first thought was she was getting divorced for a second time.

But there, in the article, was a sentence I had skipped:

Yes, I lived in a beautiful house, but, under French law, I had no rights over it and felt very unsettled and worried about the future.

That struck me as a particularly odd thing to bring up, so I went hunting and found an old blog post of hers:

However, [a job agency's] parting advice was more of a question: why would a doctor’s wife with a young baby be looking for a job anyway?

Why, indeed? I’ll tell you: Over here, marriage contracts, for those who have children from a previous marriage, are, so my husband tells me, “always” on a “separation des biens” basis. This means that I have no claim, in theory or in practice, to the house or to any of his wealth. This would be OK with me as I never intend to get divorced – but it carries with it extra pressure to make my own money, or I’ll never have anything of my own. It makes me feel kind of naked, exposed and alone. And very, very poor, despite living in a good house and having no direct money worries…

What does my husband have to say about this? Well he’s been ramming a career in translation down my throat since I was heavily pregnant with the first of my children with him. While I should’ve been adjusting to motherhood he was lecturing me at 2am about how I’d be forever invisible in France without a french qualification of some sort. I finally realised where all this negative energy was coming from when I realised how stressed he is, like all french people, about retirement. He thinks I should pay into my retirement now as, even though I would be entitled to some pension from his even if he should die, I wouldn’t get this until I’m 65.

First, she’s wrong, under French law she may not be entitled to his previous wealth (I have no idea) but she is certainly entitled to wealth made during the course of the marriage.

It’s not hard to imagine what that father must feel when he hears hysterical things like this.  She should know better, he must think.  Even if she is happy in her marriage, all he hears  is her complain; and she moved her kids to France, where she has an unmarketable British skill set and… what happens if she got divorced again?

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it’s not possible, so the rest of it is plausible

Never answer a ringing rotary phone because there’s madness on both ends, but Rick does anyway and has a heart to heart with his dead wife, and the interpretation is that this is a kind of working through of the grief and forgiving himself, which would be right except that this is a show about zombies, so it’s wrong.

His zombicidal rage in the prison was working through his grief; the phone call, however, came after that was all over, and so the starting point of interpretation is that this is the single instance of mourning in the show that is not mediated through the experience of zombification– i.e. denial of death– but through a connection to something else that carries on after death, the essence of a person, the exact part lacking in zombies.

In the show when you die you don’t die, you continue as a zombie, and then you must be finally put down, terminally terminated; so if he believes he talked to her– as if in a dream– then the point isn’t that she forgave him but that she still exists, just as the body survived, the soul survived as well.

The key is the telephone, it is the single mediating device that he knows just enough and not enough about that it would plausibly still be operational, it has copper wires and gears, after all, (remember the old timey computer in Lost?) not like a cell phone which he knows couldn’t work, or a material letter which is similarly unimaginably impossible.  So while he knows perfectly well he could not have talked to his dead wife’s spirit on the telephone, he’s created a split which he can forever avoid confronting head on:  that what’s impossible isn’t her spirit but that he talked to her spirit on the telephone– rather than the phone mediating an impossible communication, it becomes the “sink” for the doubt,  leaving all else floating uncritically, possibly….

And yet still they do not call them zombies.

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the poncho means a return to the earth

If it’s about zombies, it’s about mourning, and we’re presented with two kinds of  pathological mourning.  First, the negation of the negation: we see the Governor in denial and not letting go– of his daughter’s hair as he brushes it, by sheer will alone he has ended her death and kept her undead, but this kind of grief results in obsessive control of the present, a stand against change, and his society building and experiments searching for a “cure” are the neurotic’s busy activity which guard against inevitability.

In the other extreme, Rick has fully accepted his wife’s death (which is why you never see her as a zombie) but is consumed by vengeful rage, so he abandons life to spend time amongst the dead– after all, that’s where his wife is.

The interesting thing to note is that in these contrasting and dramatic depictions of pathological mourning, the story simply doesn’t care about the boy’s mourning at all.  Not only did he lose his mother, it was left to him to put his mother to rest, and the most he gets is “he’s been through a lot,” and in this we see yet another poignant depiction of American narcissism: it only pretends to care for its children, through overinvestment and overparenting, but leaves it up to them to redeem the narcissistic generation that preceded them.

And yet still they do not call them zombies.

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