Guilt — in the psychoanalytic tradition — is both a form of
self-punishment and a key obstacle to therapeutic improvement. In The Ego and the Id, Freud wrote that the
patient finds “satisfaction in the illness and refuses to give up the
punishment of suffering.” In a paradoxical way, obsessive guilt becomes a
masochistic attempt at an unreliable cure.
The Company You Keep, starring
and directed by Robert Redford, is a film awash in guilt. Redford’s character,
Jim Grant, an ex radical still “hiding” in plain sight, feels guilt about his
past and about the secrets he has to withhold from his daughter. A reporter,
played by Shia Labeouf, eventually feels guilty about the impact his bulldog
reporting might have on the people he’s writing about. A tenured radical
professor feels guilty about not keeping up “the struggle,” unable to inspire
his students beyond a round of applause at the end of his stories. Another ex-member
of the movement (played by Susan Sarandon) tells a reporter that it’s the “kids
that change you,” the guilt of abandoning her family audible in her voice. Then there is Mimi, the hard-core hold
out, who wants her former revolutionary comrades to feel guilty for easing into
adulthood while U.S. Imperialism still runs rampant.
In recent years there has been a kind of nostalgia for the
supposedly tough, adventurous, radical critique the Weather Underground
supplied a wishy-washy “white left” during the crucible of the struggle.
Memoirs have been written, documentaries have been made, and a presidential
candidate attended a fund-raiser at the home of ex-Weathermen. Redford insists,
of course, that The Company You Keep
is not about the Weathermen, but simply about people who are trapped by their
past, by small offenses they committed that they have to pay for — for the rest
of their lives. The director made this assertion (twice) in an on-line
discussion with New York Times
reporter David Carr, during which the director was joined by Labeouf, who
pointed out that Redford had given him some books to read in preparation for
the role. Labeouf also said that he had talked to his parents who were familiar
with the Weathermen, concluding, “These were the Billy the Kids of the time and
my dad was rooting for them.” (Proof that you can be a successful actor while
still thinking from hand to mouth about politics and history.)
To read the full article go to The Los Angeles Review of Books at the link below:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1599
Book References for the article include:
Todd Gitlin - The
Sixties – Years of Hope, Days of Rage
Sigmund Freud – The
Ego and the Id and New Lectures In
Psychoanalysis
Peter Gay – Freud, A
Life In Our Times
Irving Howe – Leon
Trotsky
Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin - America
Divided – The Civil War of the 1960s
Baruch
Knei-Paz - The Social and Political
Thought of Leon Trotsky
James Miller - Democracy
Is In The Streets – From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago
Adam Phillips – On
Flirtation – Psychoanalytic Essays on the Un-Committed Life
Leon Trotsky – Their
Morals and Ours
Robert B. Westbrook – John
Dewey and American Democracy
