Madness - Part 2/4 The film Silver Linings Playbook illustrates how the way we see madness is always transduced into romantic comedy. We cannot stand to look at madness as it is lived in bodies without hope. Bradley Cooper's character comes home from a mental hospital and tries to settle in with his parents. One night he throws Hemingway's "Farewell to Arms" through a window, outraged that two such deserving people should suffer a tragic ending.
During the first half of the movie the family falls apart. Cooper stays up late scheming to win back his estranged wife. He becomes increasing unstable as his plans fail. In the process we see his father Robert De Niro suffering from OCD. Convinced of his power to influence random events through ritual, he has lost his business and is risking a future of poverty for himself and his wife on a string of football bets. Cooper meets a woman as close to the edge as he is and they form a tenuous bond. She advises him on winning back his wife. At the pivot point of the movie, Cooper begins ranting about not being able to find his wedding video. He becomes increasingly agitated, storming around the house, screaming at his parent, disturbing the neighbors. There is violence and police and in the aftermath we see a family ripped apart by mental disease and disorder. At that moment we glimpse a world where obsessions compel, anxieties rob us of focus. We see the cutting edge of a reality that is hopelessly dynamic. And then Bradley goes on his meds. His relations improve. There is music and ballroom dancing. Daddy De Niro wins his final bet. Everyone lives happily ever after. We go home with a song and a smile. Finding smiley face DQ quotes is for people who either didn't see, or have forgotten, the first half of the movie. Claiming the happy ending was the theme all along is an understandable repression of the darkness that is background to that happy talk. Some see in both of Pirsig's tales Kierkegaard's knight of faith, Abraham , the Father of Faith, coming down from Mount Moriah, with his son Isaac, the sire of the 12 tribes, at his side. But I can help but wonder if these aren't all silver lining playbooks. I wonder about that other Abraham, abandoned in his faith with his son's corpse in the wagon and Isaac's blood on his knife. I wonder about Phaedrus who "begins to discard things, encumbrances that he has carried with him all his life. He tells his wife to leave with the children, to consider themselves separated. Fear of loathsomeness and shame disappear when his urine flows not deliberately but naturally on the floor of the room. Fear of pain, the pain of the martyrs is overcome when cigarettes burn not deliberately but naturally down into his fingers until they are extinguished by blisters formed by their own heat. His wife sees his injured hands and the urine on the floor and calls for help." I wonder about Lila walking the streets of New York swearing at her dead husband, rocking a plastic incarnation of her baby and talking to her dead dog Lucky. Without their silver linings Abraham, Phaedrus and Lila are lost. They are street preachers, plasma donors, adrift on Foucault's Ship of Fools. A medieval vessel for the mad, across whose bow might well have been writ "Dynamic Quality." Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
