Lars and the Real Community

We watched Lars and the Real Girl last night. I completely loved it.

I'm reading In Defense of Lost Causes. The second chapter has some wonderful readings of movies and Kafka letters. The basic idea involves the core Oedipal drama, a narrative that persists underneath all sorts of other stories. One of the strongest and most detailed discussions is of Frankenstein and the French Revolution. It's straightforward, so I won't summarize it here. It interests me, though, because of the way Lars and the Real Girl can't be reduced to an obvious familial drama but instead only works as an account of a supportive community, or more specifically, of the supports that community provides, the community on which people's identities depend.

The familial drama: Lars enters into a delusional psychosis. The triggering factors include the death of his father, the return of his brother after years of being away, Lars' consequent feeling like a stranger in his own home and his moving to the garage, the pregnancy of his sister-in-law (Lars' mother died giving birth to Lars), and the arrival of a new woman at work who stirs up suppressed feelings of desire. Lars orders a sex doll, Bianca, and treats her as his girlfriend. But he doesn't have sex with her. Because both he and Bianca are religious, Bianca sleeps in the room that was his mother's in the house now occupied by his brother and sister-in-law.

The charm of the movie consists in the willingness of the entire town to take Lars' delusion absolutely seriously. He takes Bianca to church, to a party. Bianca gets a job modeling for a local store. She volunteers at the hospital reading to children. She's elected to the school board. She is more than an object for Lars. She is an object for the entire community. So it's not simply that Lars displaces all sorts of feelings and desires onto Bianca. Rather, the community gives her a place. It lets her take a place and in this taking place to enable Lars to see that there is a place for him. More than a domestic drama about guilt and reconciliation, psychosis and recovery, the film is an allegory for the Symbolic as a providing place and meaning.

Of course, Bianca has to die. As Lars gets better, becomes more integrated, acquires a sense of place, learns more about what it is to be man (a lesson which has to do with accepting responsibility and which he demonstrates having learned in a wonderful scene where he performs CPR on a strangled teddy bear), Bianca becomes ill and eventually dies (she might even drown, but this wasn't clear to me). There is a funeral for her and priest remarks, without irony, that she has been loved, that she has contributed, and that she was truly helpful and unique.

Bianca was Real. A Real object for everyone. The gap or space she opened, occupied, and left as an object enacts subject as lack in the structure, the Real of the subject. The drama of the film, then, concerns the Symbolic order of the community providing a place when one of its members feels itself displaced (in one scene, as Lars' brother and sister-in-law go to the church to ask that its members help out and make Bianca feel welcome--the psychologist has advised them to go along with Lars' delusion--as one member voices aversion to treating a sex doll like a person and to socializing with a psychotic, another reminds them that they all are close to people with idiosyncracies and disorders; it's as if she reminds them all that even as deviance and transgression are the underside of the community, they are nonetheless part of the community; perhaps once could say that she is not so naive as to disavow the 'nightly law' but instead recognizes its inseparability from the bonds of sociality; or maybe it's better to say that all nights or all nightly laws are not the same; they can be differentiated, acknowledged, or disavowed in different ways).

Some theory friends (I'm thinking about Jane Bennett here) draw from Latour to extend and develop the agenic properties of objects. At times, that theoretical orientation seems at odds with a Lacanian one. I've wondered, though, if the Lacanian object might suggest more possibilities for convergence or intersection than often seems to be the case. Here, the material object Bianca animated relationships, friendships, opportunities to help, support, be together, speak, and eat that had otherwise seemed less alive. And she did this not simply as an object onto which fantasies or delusions were projected but as a material object and as a Real object. Her materiality incited various physical events (she weighed 125 pounds so dressing and bathing and moving her wasn't easy). And her insistence as a gap/lack and as an excess inscribed or reminded everyone of the prior inscription of a place in the community for Lars.

Comments

[Joe Clement]

"The drama of the film, then, concerns the Symbolic order of the community providing a place when one of its members feels itself displaced..."

Wouldn't a feeling of displacement give a nod to the Symbolic that was never present for this (apparently) psychotic person in the first place? We have rented the movie, but never got around to watching it. If Lars is psychotic in the sense relevant to Lacanian psychoanalysis, I'd expect there to be more trouble rather than less from the accommodations made for Lars delusion.

Is a delusion really a delusion for someone in particular if everyone plays along? To that end, isn't it the lack of this agreement between the delusion and what the community "really" knows or thinks less demonstrative of the Symbolic opening a space for the psychotic as much as maintaining itself for us in the gap we as viewers recognize?

[Joe Clement]

In other words, I agree with you that this could all be read as an example of the Symbolic making space for deviance, but should we say this is for the deviant's sake?

[Jodi]

The community in the film (Symbolic) doesn't make a space for deviance; it provides a space for an excessive object. The excessive object makes a place in the community.

So, in a way, no, the person isn't delusional if everyone plays along. The 'playing along' is acceptance. And, crucially, I think, this is what the Symbolic does for everyone. This is how it gives place to everyone, by playing along.

[Richard]

So many people seem to have responded with disdain to this movie (I've seen numerous references to "Hallmark sentimentality"), but I loved it, too. I think you captured well what I responded to.

"the community gives her a place. It lets her take a place and in this taking place to enable Lars to see that there is a place for him"

I tend to be moved when movies depict moments of community involvement, of a reaching out and welcoming in. In this movie, the community response felt very genuine. I love how you describe the movie as "an allegory for the Symbolic as a providing place and meaning".

[giorgio]

. . . without having seen the movie, I'm just going to guess the following:

The writer/director trades on the shock-value of placing such an improbable object (the "sex" doll) at the center of community life.

Yes, the movie-goer may gradually come to accept that the characters in the film accept the legitimacy of this strange object, but surely the movie-goers are meant to leave the theater shaking their heads: how weird those characters are, to have accepted the normalcy of a "sex" doll in public!

And then, the movie goers are supposed to make a simple transference: "how weird I am, and we are, that some of what sits at the center of our community's meaning-structures is so weird, e.g., a dead man on a cross, or a college mascot, or a colored, striped flag.

In other words, is this movie simply engaged in ideology critique? Does it do more than illustrate a certain theory?

(Is this B. Anderson's "Imagined Communities" on a different stage?)

Jane Bennett has pointed out that "the disenchantment thesis" should be understood as a narrative of the self-understanding of certain modernists, rather than an actual (correct) diagnosis of modernity.

Again, not having seen the film, I can only speculate, but it seems that the film enstages and emplots a certain self-understanding about how meaning is structured symbolically --- but is it also a (correct) diagnosis?

[patrick j. mullins]

Of course, Bianca has to die.

No, she didn't, and it would have been more powerful if she had been phased out and forgotten as Beloved was in 'Beloved'--or been like Lolita Davidovich in that shitty TV movie about the Amish with Patty Duke, in which Lolita acts like a whore with the heart of gold, as she convinces the Amish to Quit Shunning and Love the City Girl. Why do you say 'of course she has to die?'

Alison Lurie wrote a story about some live dolls, this reminds me I should look those up

[Jodi]

Patrick--I disagree. For her symbolic place to be there, she has to vacate it and then become a powerful memory. She remains a loved person, like anyone who passes (there is tombstone and she is buried in the community graveyard). Also, her passing lets Lars start a relationship with the woman from his workplace whose teddy bear he brings back after it was lynched by a coworker who took an office game too far.

Giorgio--this doesn't have anything to do with disenchantment but rather enchantment. I can't say what the director intended or what movie goers are meant to come away with.

[patrick j. mullins]

Okay--she has to keep her symbolic place and cannot be forgotten, but given the fairy tale aspect of this anyway, is is necessary that she be dead? You have not explained, as well as I can tell, why death is the only option for her. The problem with her death is that it still ends up making her a conventional scapegoat, in only looking from the exterior as the story-conference people are at work. Yes, Irving Thalberg as Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon would have killed her off, because he knew who Louis B. Mayer was and everything that was required to get America to spend. But given that there is no actual sex doll who becomes a part of the community, why can she not be a part of the community by going back to dollhood, say? Everything's a stretch to believe, but this way she is not killed by the characters (who 'love her' as you say), but she is killed by the creators of the story. So that, as far as I see it, she was therefore killed after all because I cannot see that death is necessary. Or rather, even if one insists that before she 'died', she was nevertheless 'still a doll', then going back to being a more conventional doll--a still life, as it were, which is not too far-fetched given that it is all far-fetched. If she had really been able to be a part of the community, she could still have 'died' much later and lived happily with Lars for a good long while. After all, Jezebel lived some 30 years after Elijah cursed her, and she probably didn't spend a lot of time worrying about it, even when the eunuchs started listening to the macho Jehu.

Not trying to be a pain in the ass, but seriously doesn't death somehow render her dignity reduced since she then comes across as merely an 'imaginary friend', and not really a sex doll at all. But an imaginary friend cannot be buried, has no body. She apparently has a body, and they decided to kill her--the writers, producers, director and Completion Bond (lol)--and in doing so, the community can enshrine her only by killing her. It is because she was a form of prostitute, isn't it?

[Jodi]

Patrick--I'm glad you are pushing this. It's interesting. Here's a defense: she could not go back to being a 'doll;' that would be the ultimate loss of dignity. In fact, we could say that this sort of loss is what happens in real life when people become just things to us, we take them for granted, they are just part of the furniture, the old ball and chain, etc. So, 'just a doll' isn't an option (or, it's the worse case scenario). Living on as a doll also makes her just a toy. Not only does this make it impossible for Lars to grow up (he has toys his whole life) but she also loses that extra quality that makes her more than a thing, or that makes the Real of the community/subject shine through her. In the film, Lars saves the woman from his office's teddy bear. The teddy bear, although hung and strangled, lives on--Lars does CPR and brings it back to life. But it's clear that all this is because the teddy bear isn't Real. The teddy bear is a toy. The bringing back to life stuff is an act of imagination and Lars has to acknowledge and perform all this imagining in front of the woman (a kind of flirtation). Bianca is different. And she is not a toy because she can die.

I should add that Lars makes sure that they can't think of Bianca as a prostitute--he says she was a missionary and they don't have sex because they are both religious.

[old]

I had been interested in the movie when it was here at the Toronto Intl. Film Fest, but not quite enough to go see it I guess. I'd kind of decided against seeing it eventually. But then a co-worker of mine went to see it and it brought him to tears as he identified with the townspeople given our work. Two women we work with, one on a several times a week basis have hysterical pregnancies. The one we work with most frequently, i've seen go through the triggering factors (surrounded by abusive men, then a baby in a room) in just hours - that night she went from not necessarily pregnant, to labour pains. One of the Ojibway and Cree men we work with desperately wants to have children, but has known for year that he's shooting blanks. A couple months ago he came in and announced to our nurses that something had changed, he was definitely going to be a dad. One particular nurse, who'd known him for years, rejoiced with him enthusiastically. Then she heard who he'd been dating - the woman we see less frequently, a woman she'd seen swell up, taken to the hospital at 9 months when labour pain started, not realizing it was a hysterical pregnancy until all the monitors were hooked up and everything, no heartbeat, nothing.

In general we are constantly assessing where it's appropriate or necessary to play along with the delusion until a birth or death or a new day will mean a change, though not always so dramatically better as in the movie. On the other hand, there are times where we're generally convinced that playing along at all is a bad idea. In short, am now definitely wanting to see the movie.