Do I expect my life to follow the beats of a conventionally "empowering" story? No, not personally. But I know others expect me to see my life that way, as "empowered" rather than as "victimhood" – as if it were so obvious which is which! And enough of these others are my "moral creditors" for their expectations to matter, no matter what my own are. I end up feeling obligated to frame my life as some conventionally "empowering" story even though I don't believe in that framing myself.
I've been on a somewhat-improbable-but-still-common-enough journey (especially for women) of discovering that my "psychosomatic" symptoms weren't, but corresponded to an easily-measured (once you knew what to look for) and hard-to-fake physical oddity. This journey overlapped with my becoming a mom, and has been made rougher, for the foreseeable future, by childbearing. Nothing has left me feeling as disempowered as my experience of motherhood has, or more on the hook to my "moral creditors" – who now include innocent children! My children are a gift, I know, but I experience them, not as gift, but as crushing, soul-sucking moral *debt*.
"The world owes you neither life, nor cure, nor sympathy; nor flattery that you're irreplaceable; nonetheless, you owe the world," still seems a common-enough sentiment (or at least fear) among the conscientious, one that striking a girlboss pose of "we don't owe you" does nothing to stop. Indebtedness to "moral creditors" can destroy gratitude, since pressure to collect on the world's "debt" (what it seems like the world promised you) so that you can pay off your own debts leaves no space to appreciate anything as a gift. No wonder Christianity pairs forgiveness with gratitude.
Stories of empowerment are stories of overcoming. Overcoming *what*? Few people can honestly tell a story of overcoming benign human limits in order to achieve some exceptional success. Most of us don't have exceptional success, and must resign ourselves to telling stories of overcoming specific obstacles. But, if the obstacles are really obstacles, the story of overcoming them starts out as a story of *suffering* from them – of being "victimized" by them.
What turns pathetic "victimhood" narratives into inspiring "overcoming" narratives is "enough" success at overcoming. But who decides what enough is? An "overcomer" whose story of overcoming fails to impress the audience as adequate has "only" told that audience a "victimhood" narrative.
At risk of being forever the Tolkien girl here, I would say that "Return of the King" takes a different ending than many films in regards to victory and catharsis. Though the Ring is destroyed in the end, Frodo ultimately failed in his quest: when he got to Mount Doom, he claimed the Ring for his own. That Sauron was destroyed was only because Gollum then forcibly took the Ring from Frodo and fell into the fires of Mount Doom with the Ring.
The somber coda of the film, Frodo's failure and the wounds he acquired from his journey, are such that he says "there is no going back" to the life that he knew before. He then departs from his friends forever and takes the ship into the West at the Grey Havens where he will eventually die. Yes, the side of the "good" won in the end, but it came with irreparable consequences for its protagonist and those that loved him.
Lately I've been thinking about the question of whether there are truly modern fables -- ones that are completely new, as opposed to retellings of the same ancient tales as Jungian wisdom would have it -- and one candidate that occurred to me is Rocky. If you're under 50 it seems like that story (underdog gets a shot at a big match, loses but feels like a winner anyway) has been around forever and has been told a million times, but as far as I can tell, it was not told on screen before 1976. It's not really about worldly vs. spiritual victories as you're describing here, but it does play on the tension between the world's love of winners and the world's love of rooting for the underdog. It was a pretty bold move to show the underdog not winning, and indeed Stallone couldn't really sustain it in subsequent films (though personally it amuses me to imagine a sequel where Rocky just gets married, finds a better job, and retells the story of his big fight in bars for the rest of his life).
I recently revisited the Disney movie *Cool Runnings* about the first Jamaican bobsled team, and realized that behind all the funny and inspiring moments, the story is basically a story of defeat. In fact, the defeat itself is framed as a way of demonstrating (and securing) ultimate victory in the things that truly matter -- dignity and self-respect as well as earning the respect of the doubters.
The movie does a masterful job of taking us on that journey. So masterful, in fact, that it’s easy to forget how countercultural its message is, or how difficult it is to recognize those moments in our own lives. That’s probably its superpower :)
Stories where the victory clashes with our expectations of what triumph means - Jane Eyre gets such a victory.
She gets married to a man she loves, but the man she marries has almost been destroyed by his past life and transgressions.
He has been maimed, lost most of his eyesight, his house is in ruins.
I think this raises an interesting point regarding the question the sort of triumph people expect in different historical or cultural settings.
Charlotte Bronte wasn't fluffy at all in her thinking, she'd lost a mother, lost a sister, and saw her brother go down the slopes of alcoholism. She knew very well what women's expectations were: husbands with little regard to their personal needs, a lot of pregnancies, poverty, sickness. Wasn't it Harriet Beecher Stowe who once wrote that all her female friends and family weren't entirely healthy? Charlotte Bronte must have been able to make similar observations. For her, a real-life Rochester would have been quite the catch.
My grandmother, who was born seven decades after Charlotte Bronte's death, told me a lot about her youth as the seventh child of small farmers. She didn't spell it out, but it was very clear that in her world, triumph meant finding a husband that wouldn't beat you and owning a farm large enough for all your children to remain there until they were adults. A great career would be getting more then eight years of schooling and being allowed to become a seamstress instead of unskilled farm or industrial labour.
For her, too, Rochester would have been quite the catch, arm or no arm.
"Have you sometimes expected your own life to follow the beats of a conventionally “empowering” story? What effect did those expectations have?"
The birth of my daughter. This was during COVID lockdown. The holistic, hippie, crunchy moms I knew meant well but did not prepare me.... at all... for what happened to me. It was all about maximizing your birth experience, feeling your womanhood, cherishing the moment.
The (carefully selected, holistic, female) OB moved across the country on my due date and didn't tell me; I found out I was going to be dropped as a patient from Facebook mommy groups. The replacement OB, a man (I specifically was hoping for a woman) then told me if I didn't have an immediate C-section my baby would be too big to come out naturally and I'd regret it. She was 8lb 3oz at birth and I am 5'7". Needless to say, she was not too big. I requested my medical records and that's literally the indication. "Big baby."
Then a lactation consultant in the hospital told me women with wide set breasts often fail to breastfeed, but if I couldn't do it now, my mammary glands would "turn off like lightbulbs." She told me to pump and supplement with formula. I got mastitis from it. I was afraid of starving my baby with my broken breasts, the pediatrician intimidated me even more, and breastfeeding was really, really hard since I could not even hold her without assistance after the completely unnecessary surgery. I was loopy from pain meds for 3 days. I finally found a mom-lead pumping group on Facebook after 6 weeks of low production and pumping/formula; tried their tips; more than TRIPLED my production to the point. where formula was not needed; and realized the consultant had lied to my face. 6 weeks I could have been learning to breastfeed my baby - gone.
I had been so deeply naive and credulous. I believed medical professionals would follow evidence based practice guidelines (they didn't). I believed they cared about me as a patient and saw me as a human being (they didn't). I thought talking to mom-friends and my own aunts would prepare me (it didn't; they just told me I was overthinking things and to "get over" what happened). I thought choosing a nontraditional OB would protect me (it didn't.) I thought birth would be a powerful and self-actualizing process (it wasn't). Now, I've learned to be less credulous. I've learned not to trust those in power. I am a pretty liberal Christian who has always "trusted science/authorities". Not anymore.
I've been watching Fleishman is in Trouble on Hulu and my goodness, the definition of a story with a different approach to catharsis. The powerful mom girl boss is that way because of her birth trauma. It's a compensatory mechanism. She's not just a feminist heroine; she's suffering deeply. I related so much to her story and I really appreciated the show's subtle approach to womanhood. There are no heroes in the show.
Rom coms! 'Set it Up' from 2018 is a quintessential example. Love wins, corporate success driven dude winds up finding happiness in love and being a temp. A bit of the opposite of the trope of successful city woman moves to small town and falls for the handyman (which is also great).
Also, The Hobbit. As the last sentences go, "'You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all! 'Thank goodness! ' said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco jar.” Ah, to be oneself in the big wide world :)
Leah, your parenthetical about Six cracked me up :-D When I was trying to explain Six to a friend I described it as "Renaissance Hamilton but with Spice Girls." No disrespect to Hamilton or Six! I love them both, but they both require the willing suspension of disbelief, as do all musicals I suppose.
The first story that came to mind for your first question is Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, though I'm not sure the princess's choice at the end of the movie is supposed to be either victory or catharsis. I do remember being surprised at the ending when I saw it for the first time nearly 20 years ago, and I think it would ring even more discordantly now.
I absolutely LOVED Tár, but I was also once a teenage cellist obsessed with Leonard Bernstein, Galadriel, and Mahler, so. Probably not the most “objective” of viewers, lol.
I've for a long time claimed that Les Miserables (the novel, at least - I've never watched either musical nor movie) has a happy ending despite the main character death.
And I also claim, similarly, that Buzzati's Desert of Tatars ends in a technical happy ending despite the external circumstances of the main character looking particularly sad and pathetic (he dies alone in an hotel room after having dedicated all his life to prepare for a war he ended up too old to fight).
As for stories that take a different approach to catharsis or victory than we’re accustomed to seeing, I recommend Christopher Beha’s “What Happened to Sophie Wilder.” Beha uses two different narrative styles, in alternating chapters, to depict a character who, on the brink of worldly, grrrl power success, experiences an authentic religious conversion that upends her (and our?) notions of success and failure. I can’t talk about the ending without spoiling a powerful experience for those who haven’t read it, but I will say that Beha manages to take a different approach to catharsis/victory and to comment on the tension between worldly and otherworldly expectations.
Scorsese's version of Endo's "Silence" comes to mind. The ending is extremely ambiguous, and refuses to tell us what to think about Rodrigues' choices.
Also "The Peanut Butter Falcon." In the context of the film, Eleanor's decision to go with Zak and Tyler to Florida is a victory for her, but in the eyes of a watching world, I can imagine her actions to be a step down, a "bad career move."
Im thinking of the movie "leona." It definitely did not cram in the girl power ending we were hoping for and, instead forced the watcher to consider the protagonist embedded in community. She makes moves fir her autonomy, but not at the expense of her religious community. It was hard to watch at times, but felt truer than a "true love takes all" arch
You ask: Have you sometimes expected your own life to follow the beats of a conventionally “empowering” story? What effect did those expectations have?
My thoughts: It all depends on whether we met those expectations or not. If we met them, congratulations are in order. But the question remains, are we happy with the results? If we didn't meet them, how do we feel about not measuring up? Can we be happy, nonetheless?
It's interesting to think about The VVitch this way because of how it was interpreted as a girl power story by some people. The Vox review, for instance, claims that Eggers is "careful to leave us with the thought that the witches might be seen as evil mostly because they stand for feminine power" (to fill in some context for anyone who hasn't seen the movie, this is referring to a witch who unambiguously murders a baby in the first ten minutes or so). So I'd be curious to know if The Northman also got that kind of reading from critics, and if not what made the difference.
Do I expect my life to follow the beats of a conventionally "empowering" story? No, not personally. But I know others expect me to see my life that way, as "empowered" rather than as "victimhood" – as if it were so obvious which is which! And enough of these others are my "moral creditors" for their expectations to matter, no matter what my own are. I end up feeling obligated to frame my life as some conventionally "empowering" story even though I don't believe in that framing myself.
I've been on a somewhat-improbable-but-still-common-enough journey (especially for women) of discovering that my "psychosomatic" symptoms weren't, but corresponded to an easily-measured (once you knew what to look for) and hard-to-fake physical oddity. This journey overlapped with my becoming a mom, and has been made rougher, for the foreseeable future, by childbearing. Nothing has left me feeling as disempowered as my experience of motherhood has, or more on the hook to my "moral creditors" – who now include innocent children! My children are a gift, I know, but I experience them, not as gift, but as crushing, soul-sucking moral *debt*.
"The world owes you neither life, nor cure, nor sympathy; nor flattery that you're irreplaceable; nonetheless, you owe the world," still seems a common-enough sentiment (or at least fear) among the conscientious, one that striking a girlboss pose of "we don't owe you" does nothing to stop. Indebtedness to "moral creditors" can destroy gratitude, since pressure to collect on the world's "debt" (what it seems like the world promised you) so that you can pay off your own debts leaves no space to appreciate anything as a gift. No wonder Christianity pairs forgiveness with gratitude.
Stories of empowerment are stories of overcoming. Overcoming *what*? Few people can honestly tell a story of overcoming benign human limits in order to achieve some exceptional success. Most of us don't have exceptional success, and must resign ourselves to telling stories of overcoming specific obstacles. But, if the obstacles are really obstacles, the story of overcoming them starts out as a story of *suffering* from them – of being "victimized" by them.
What turns pathetic "victimhood" narratives into inspiring "overcoming" narratives is "enough" success at overcoming. But who decides what enough is? An "overcomer" whose story of overcoming fails to impress the audience as adequate has "only" told that audience a "victimhood" narrative.
At risk of being forever the Tolkien girl here, I would say that "Return of the King" takes a different ending than many films in regards to victory and catharsis. Though the Ring is destroyed in the end, Frodo ultimately failed in his quest: when he got to Mount Doom, he claimed the Ring for his own. That Sauron was destroyed was only because Gollum then forcibly took the Ring from Frodo and fell into the fires of Mount Doom with the Ring.
The somber coda of the film, Frodo's failure and the wounds he acquired from his journey, are such that he says "there is no going back" to the life that he knew before. He then departs from his friends forever and takes the ship into the West at the Grey Havens where he will eventually die. Yes, the side of the "good" won in the end, but it came with irreparable consequences for its protagonist and those that loved him.
Lately I've been thinking about the question of whether there are truly modern fables -- ones that are completely new, as opposed to retellings of the same ancient tales as Jungian wisdom would have it -- and one candidate that occurred to me is Rocky. If you're under 50 it seems like that story (underdog gets a shot at a big match, loses but feels like a winner anyway) has been around forever and has been told a million times, but as far as I can tell, it was not told on screen before 1976. It's not really about worldly vs. spiritual victories as you're describing here, but it does play on the tension between the world's love of winners and the world's love of rooting for the underdog. It was a pretty bold move to show the underdog not winning, and indeed Stallone couldn't really sustain it in subsequent films (though personally it amuses me to imagine a sequel where Rocky just gets married, finds a better job, and retells the story of his big fight in bars for the rest of his life).
I recently revisited the Disney movie *Cool Runnings* about the first Jamaican bobsled team, and realized that behind all the funny and inspiring moments, the story is basically a story of defeat. In fact, the defeat itself is framed as a way of demonstrating (and securing) ultimate victory in the things that truly matter -- dignity and self-respect as well as earning the respect of the doubters.
The movie does a masterful job of taking us on that journey. So masterful, in fact, that it’s easy to forget how countercultural its message is, or how difficult it is to recognize those moments in our own lives. That’s probably its superpower :)
Stories where the victory clashes with our expectations of what triumph means - Jane Eyre gets such a victory.
She gets married to a man she loves, but the man she marries has almost been destroyed by his past life and transgressions.
He has been maimed, lost most of his eyesight, his house is in ruins.
I think this raises an interesting point regarding the question the sort of triumph people expect in different historical or cultural settings.
Charlotte Bronte wasn't fluffy at all in her thinking, she'd lost a mother, lost a sister, and saw her brother go down the slopes of alcoholism. She knew very well what women's expectations were: husbands with little regard to their personal needs, a lot of pregnancies, poverty, sickness. Wasn't it Harriet Beecher Stowe who once wrote that all her female friends and family weren't entirely healthy? Charlotte Bronte must have been able to make similar observations. For her, a real-life Rochester would have been quite the catch.
My grandmother, who was born seven decades after Charlotte Bronte's death, told me a lot about her youth as the seventh child of small farmers. She didn't spell it out, but it was very clear that in her world, triumph meant finding a husband that wouldn't beat you and owning a farm large enough for all your children to remain there until they were adults. A great career would be getting more then eight years of schooling and being allowed to become a seamstress instead of unskilled farm or industrial labour.
For her, too, Rochester would have been quite the catch, arm or no arm.
"Have you sometimes expected your own life to follow the beats of a conventionally “empowering” story? What effect did those expectations have?"
The birth of my daughter. This was during COVID lockdown. The holistic, hippie, crunchy moms I knew meant well but did not prepare me.... at all... for what happened to me. It was all about maximizing your birth experience, feeling your womanhood, cherishing the moment.
The (carefully selected, holistic, female) OB moved across the country on my due date and didn't tell me; I found out I was going to be dropped as a patient from Facebook mommy groups. The replacement OB, a man (I specifically was hoping for a woman) then told me if I didn't have an immediate C-section my baby would be too big to come out naturally and I'd regret it. She was 8lb 3oz at birth and I am 5'7". Needless to say, she was not too big. I requested my medical records and that's literally the indication. "Big baby."
Then a lactation consultant in the hospital told me women with wide set breasts often fail to breastfeed, but if I couldn't do it now, my mammary glands would "turn off like lightbulbs." She told me to pump and supplement with formula. I got mastitis from it. I was afraid of starving my baby with my broken breasts, the pediatrician intimidated me even more, and breastfeeding was really, really hard since I could not even hold her without assistance after the completely unnecessary surgery. I was loopy from pain meds for 3 days. I finally found a mom-lead pumping group on Facebook after 6 weeks of low production and pumping/formula; tried their tips; more than TRIPLED my production to the point. where formula was not needed; and realized the consultant had lied to my face. 6 weeks I could have been learning to breastfeed my baby - gone.
I had been so deeply naive and credulous. I believed medical professionals would follow evidence based practice guidelines (they didn't). I believed they cared about me as a patient and saw me as a human being (they didn't). I thought talking to mom-friends and my own aunts would prepare me (it didn't; they just told me I was overthinking things and to "get over" what happened). I thought choosing a nontraditional OB would protect me (it didn't.) I thought birth would be a powerful and self-actualizing process (it wasn't). Now, I've learned to be less credulous. I've learned not to trust those in power. I am a pretty liberal Christian who has always "trusted science/authorities". Not anymore.
I've been watching Fleishman is in Trouble on Hulu and my goodness, the definition of a story with a different approach to catharsis. The powerful mom girl boss is that way because of her birth trauma. It's a compensatory mechanism. She's not just a feminist heroine; she's suffering deeply. I related so much to her story and I really appreciated the show's subtle approach to womanhood. There are no heroes in the show.
Rom coms! 'Set it Up' from 2018 is a quintessential example. Love wins, corporate success driven dude winds up finding happiness in love and being a temp. A bit of the opposite of the trope of successful city woman moves to small town and falls for the handyman (which is also great).
Also, The Hobbit. As the last sentences go, "'You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all! 'Thank goodness! ' said Bilbo laughing, and handed him the tobacco jar.” Ah, to be oneself in the big wide world :)
Leah, your parenthetical about Six cracked me up :-D When I was trying to explain Six to a friend I described it as "Renaissance Hamilton but with Spice Girls." No disrespect to Hamilton or Six! I love them both, but they both require the willing suspension of disbelief, as do all musicals I suppose.
The first story that came to mind for your first question is Roman Holiday with Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, though I'm not sure the princess's choice at the end of the movie is supposed to be either victory or catharsis. I do remember being surprised at the ending when I saw it for the first time nearly 20 years ago, and I think it would ring even more discordantly now.
I absolutely LOVED Tár, but I was also once a teenage cellist obsessed with Leonard Bernstein, Galadriel, and Mahler, so. Probably not the most “objective” of viewers, lol.
I've for a long time claimed that Les Miserables (the novel, at least - I've never watched either musical nor movie) has a happy ending despite the main character death.
And I also claim, similarly, that Buzzati's Desert of Tatars ends in a technical happy ending despite the external circumstances of the main character looking particularly sad and pathetic (he dies alone in an hotel room after having dedicated all his life to prepare for a war he ended up too old to fight).
As for stories that take a different approach to catharsis or victory than we’re accustomed to seeing, I recommend Christopher Beha’s “What Happened to Sophie Wilder.” Beha uses two different narrative styles, in alternating chapters, to depict a character who, on the brink of worldly, grrrl power success, experiences an authentic religious conversion that upends her (and our?) notions of success and failure. I can’t talk about the ending without spoiling a powerful experience for those who haven’t read it, but I will say that Beha manages to take a different approach to catharsis/victory and to comment on the tension between worldly and otherworldly expectations.
Scorsese's version of Endo's "Silence" comes to mind. The ending is extremely ambiguous, and refuses to tell us what to think about Rodrigues' choices.
Also "The Peanut Butter Falcon." In the context of the film, Eleanor's decision to go with Zak and Tyler to Florida is a victory for her, but in the eyes of a watching world, I can imagine her actions to be a step down, a "bad career move."
Im thinking of the movie "leona." It definitely did not cram in the girl power ending we were hoping for and, instead forced the watcher to consider the protagonist embedded in community. She makes moves fir her autonomy, but not at the expense of her religious community. It was hard to watch at times, but felt truer than a "true love takes all" arch
You ask: Have you sometimes expected your own life to follow the beats of a conventionally “empowering” story? What effect did those expectations have?
My thoughts: It all depends on whether we met those expectations or not. If we met them, congratulations are in order. But the question remains, are we happy with the results? If we didn't meet them, how do we feel about not measuring up? Can we be happy, nonetheless?
These are the questions each of us must ponder.
It's interesting to think about The VVitch this way because of how it was interpreted as a girl power story by some people. The Vox review, for instance, claims that Eggers is "careful to leave us with the thought that the witches might be seen as evil mostly because they stand for feminine power" (to fill in some context for anyone who hasn't seen the movie, this is referring to a witch who unambiguously murders a baby in the first ten minutes or so). So I'd be curious to know if The Northman also got that kind of reading from critics, and if not what made the difference.
Have you watched HBO's *The Last of Us*?