"Is this all?’”

The Escape REVIEW

Someone has actually made a movie out of Betty Friedan’s 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique. The Escape is focused on (and believe me when I say that throughout 90% of this movie, the camera actually is focused on) Tara, a young housewife and mother of two small children who is experiencing all the terrors of arrested development that Friedan spoke of in her transformative book. “I make myself care” Tara says of her life as a domestic care provider. “It’s a phase,” her mother tells her. “I just need you to tell me what to do,” her caring but clueless husband says to her depression, as though the problem is something that *he* can solve by doing something instead of something *she* must solve by doing something. “Protection is lovely but too much security is also very boring,” a woman who councils her observes.

I think it is probably impossible to truly understand this film without referencing the argument of Friedan’s manifesto. “The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person,” Friedan said in an interview with Janann Sherman in 2002, “is by creative work of her own. There is no other way.” In the introduction to her best-selling book, Friedan spoke of the “problem with no name” and this movie simply illustrates it in a hundred facial expressions over the course of one mundane day after another.  “The problem,” Friedan says,

“lay buried, unspoken for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban housewife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night, she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — ‘Is this all?’”

The irony, I suppose, was that many men were suffering the same problem in the 1960’s. And still do. They have work that does not provide a context for actualizing their potentials. The problem, in my opinion, was not that women were working with children so much. It was simply that so much of that work was being turned over to professionals while the more mundane tasks of childcare were relegated to mothers. One sees this in the film as Tara drops her children off at school. What she winds up doing is pouring orange juice and pushing strollers and picking up legos and shopping for groceries. There is no mystery in it. No growth. No challenge. No intelligence demanded. She is not needed for anything that a well paid maid and a prostitute could do. “American housewives have not had their brains shot away,” Friedan said.

“nor are they schizophrenic in the clinical sense. But if … the fundamental human drive is not the urge for pleasure or the satisfaction of biological needs, but the need to grow and to realize one’s full potential, their comfortable, empty, purposeless days are indeed cause for a nameless terror. . . . The problem that has no name (which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities) is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.”

It is the “nameless terror” that the director of The Escape is trying to capture. We literally see Tara falling into panic attacks that she cannot explain or understand. The director neither excuses her nor blames her husband though he appears to me to be a fundamental cause. He expresses a desire to “fix this” or to “fix her” but he has no bloody clue that his lack of any interest in art, in literature, in music, in travel, in philosophy, in education, or anything that Robert Frost would refer to as “lovely, dark, and deep” is making his wife’s life a desert that she is shriveling up and dying in. He has no sense of the romantic in the true sense of that word. She cannot connect with him because there is so little of him to connect with. He works. He makes money. He grows facial hair. He “needs” her. He has parts. That is about it.

This movie is one more brick fortifying my belief in the need for better and more humanities courses. For accessible, affordable education that does more than train people for careers but gives them the tools they need to creatively actualize their human potentials. The fear that our lives are not meaningful enough is not some “freakish personal fault” this movie wants us to understand. It is a basic human drive. And the pursuit of happiness will never succeed when it becomes the pursuit of stuff.

Question for Comment: Have you ever panicked about the possibility that your life will never have a sufficient amount of meaning?

Comments

[Skyler Crossman]

There was an essay I once read (long lost to the internet and I have not been able to find it again) about Ender's Game specifically, and fiction novels in general, that cut very close to home.

In Ender's Game, near the end of the story the main character overcomes the great threat that the story has been building up to. Like many adventure novels, at the end Grendel is defeated, Voldemort is overcome, and Brian Robeson returns home. There's so much focus placed throughout the story, and in Ender's Game throughout the entire life of the main character, on this climax of purpose. If one grows up on this kind of narrative (and it's not a surprise that many people do- we call many of these stories "coming of age novels" after all) then it's natural to push upward towards the great challenge or obstacle in our lives.

And then the story goes on, and we don't know what to do with ourselves. Ender wins his war, then lies around on a barren asteroid with no idea what he wants to do next. Like Frodo, eventually he "sails west" out off the map we've made. What would a book written about Frodo's life after The Return of the King be like? What does a life lived after graduation or getting that big promotion or getting married look like?

Meaning in life might be better thought of as food. We need it, but we there is no great feast so large that we won't need to eat again next week. Perhaps better to take our meaning in small drips and drabs, like one more brick laid in a foundation of a building you believe will be great someday.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LrEKevEKPQ

[Philip Crossman]

Brick by Brick the pyramids rose. 
[they should have documented who built them, eh?] 
Do you ever embedd philosophical thoughts into the comments in your programs?
Thanks for reading my blog sky. 
Always enjoy hearing your thoughts. 
Phil 

[Skyler Crossman]

I embed the odd apology, does that count?

"But I’ll teach the student
Who’ll manage the factory
That tempers the steel that makes colonies strong.
And I’ll write the program that runs the computer
That charts out the stars where our rockets belong."

I hear having dinner and conversation with one's son is the best source of meaning in life. I've got thoughts aplenty if you ever start running low.