Louchette

Louchette has had a good week at the cinema.  Having always admired Cary Grant, she was pleased to see Up In the Air, which had a number of old-world Hollywood charms about it, not least of which was George Clooney’s smile flashing about, Grantlike, charming the pants off of Vera Farmiga, and, metaphorically, off of Louchette herself.  Q. was coming down with a cold, and perhaps did not enjoy it so thoroughly as Louchette did.

The next night she saw The Messenger, which was one of the finest films she has seen in a long time. She found it quite exceptional. It is also the second film Louchette has seen this month that showcases not only Woody Harrelson’s very real talent as a serious performer, but also his exposed bottom side. (Louchette saw 2012 over Thanksgiving.)

Having seen these films in close succession, Louchette noticed something curious: the films are telling the same story.  Oh, reader, do not freak out on Louchette—she knows that Up In the Air and The Messenger are distinguished by important differences in genre and theme! But observe this shared premise: a man must perform the important work of giving out bad news, and locates honor and dignity in his ability to absorb the emotions of those who receive this news.

Indeed, Louchette noticed that both films include scenarios in which a wise, practiced gentleman teaches a novice to practice the craft of giving bad news.  In the former, Clooney’s character tutors a young woman in the skill of how to fire people. Clooney knows that his job is to absorb the shock, to soak up the affective emanations of the fired. He knows that to do this, his body must be copresent with the emoter, as if he is a bandage or an acoustical tile. But the young woman aspires to disregard this aspect of his work. She proposes to the big boss the idea of mechanizing this labor and managing it through remote video conference, making Clooney’s immaterial labor even more immaterial.  In all senses of the word, gentle reader, if you will indulge Louchette in a vulgar pun.

Of course, Clooney will not take this insult lying down, and Louchette was surprised and delighted to see a narrative conflict thus located.  Truly, the plot is driven by this conflict—that Clooney believes he must be present in order to manage the emotions that surround the bad news.Thus Clooney must school his young pupil in the kinds of emotional labor that one might have supposed that she, the putatively more feminine, might already know. He teaches her a protocol, and an expectation of what kinds of emotion will blow back across the desk.  Clooney has a million rituals surrounding the delivery of the news, and a strict script that allows him to manage the unexpected responses he receives—a structure that permits an improvisation between firer and fired. The master’s craft involves riffing off of this structure with a real, relational responsiveness, demanding a post-cynical core to Clooney’s otherwise attachment-free, homelessly cynical lifestyle. He and his protege close each conversation by giving each recipient a packet to study, saying there will be a follow-up conversation with their company for counseling about how to move on.

Louchette was enormously impressed by The Messenger. She noticed that, like Up In the Air, it contains a series of scenes of ritualized bad-news bearing, as Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster are charged with notifying the next of kin of the deaths of soldiers killed in war. And, like that other film, a considerable amount of the drama is played out as lessons of Harrelson teaching Foster these protocols. At one point he offers Foster a ridiculous plastic binder of procedures, which can only be said to contain the notification practices in a laughable and literal manner.  Because the ritual around the notification practice must be performed, in person, freshly terrible for each new recipient. Harrelson counsels against introducing himself—“It’s not about you”—and also especially against euphemism and touching.  The officers ritually end each conversation by telling the kin of the dead that there will be a follow-up conversation with different officers who can offer concrete skills in dealing with the news.  Like George Clooney, who defers concrete details to a transition team, Foster and Harrelson are specifically there to do the important work of delivering the blow.

Stephen Holden will observe much the same thing in tomorrow’s Times. Gentle reader, Louchette can hear you shifting in your chair, too kind or polite to say what she knows you are thinking: This matters why?

Louchette is glad you asked.

Because of course, when Louchette sees George Clooney in his fabulous suit, she does not for a moment imagine that he will be performing a more manual kind of labor—not dressed like that! The shift to service jobs in the dominant sectors of the economy has been taking place for some time. Louchette, like you, already knew that this kind of work of “problem-solving, problem-identifying, and strategic brokering” is the most highly valued work we have at present. But what did surprise her was to see these most strapping of gentlemen present intense, intimate forms of affective labor, all organized within their film narratives to permit them to do so while remaining masculine. Their jobs, essentially, are to care, to witness, to listen, to absorb shock with their bodies.  In short, their jobs are, traditionally, “women’s work.”

Within The Messenger, this question is rather brilliantly made complex by Ben Foster.  His character has three months left of active duty, and so he must learn this emotional labor of caretaking from Woody Harrelson.  Foster’s experience is set against his previous MOS in combat, where the labor is profoundly material.  Indeed, his work is grotesquely parallel: if, on the homefront, he is asked to absorb people’s emotional expulsions with the physical act of in-person witnessing,  in combat he is literally in the position of absorbing the physical explosion of his combat partner, taking hits of “flesh shrapnel” to his own body. This seems to Louchette more than a metaphor—the film draws a concrete analogy between two kinds of purposeful and important work— one hypermasculine and the other arguably hyperfeminine. It is no wonder, then, that it is extremely demanding for such a figure to negotiate the blows that he is obliged to take for others, both at home and over there. This gendered vascillation is, of course, possible, and perhaps not even uncommon, except for within the army.

Louchette speculates that this is part of why Ben Foster forges such an intense empathy with Samantha Morton. When he gives her the notice that her husband has been killed, she responds not by asking him to witness her grief, but by acknowledging his work. “This must be so hard for you,” she says.  She witnesses his witnessing. Louchette has seen this actress before, and notices that she has always been especially good at this kind of work. Sometimes Louchette thinks that Morton’s face is a special kind of membrane, invented to vibrate to emotions both inside her and outside of her.

In one way, Louchettte regards the gestures that these films make as the height of brilliance, protagonizing intimate work and asking men to work with and against their own masculinity to perform it.  Perhaps she especially so regards The Messenger, which is, as its director acknowledges, something of a heterosexual love story between men. (Louchette knows that this may be the rather brilliant open secret of the military itself—creating bonds among brothers who then are prepared to die for their platonic but real love of one another, a logic that is fairly tested by the presence of ladies and queers).

And indeed, as far as George Clooney goes, well, Louchette has always been partial to Cary Grant in a dress.

At the same time, Louchette also experiences some concern that the work of intimate feeling gains value—economic value within the story, and cultural value as the movie circulates in the world— precisely by being removed from its traditionally feminine practitioners.  This week, both within and without the pages of the Grey Lady, Manohla Dargis found herself ranting about the exclusion of ladies from cinema.  She remarks upon the male appropriation of the romantic comedy. Louchette would add that there may also be cause for concern around the melodrama.  She finds each of these male dramas to be beautifully pitched, and the emotions within them to be wonderfully managed.  And yet, might there also be a story to be told about the work of feeling in which a feminine worker might be paid to perform these traditionally feminine roles? Louchette did not mean to become such a traditionalist—she simply hopes that now that affective labor is considered valuable, she will still from time to time be hired to perform it.

She is reminded, first, of a treatment she read of the film Paper Dolls, about Filipino care workers, a conversation that reminds us of the complex ways that value is created and also denied to care work across global economic sectors, as well as the complex ways that people occupy traditions of femininity. Not to mention the jobs that involve the work of intimate feeling that appear to pay less than George Clooney’s.

And finally, Louchette is reminded of all this talk she has been hearing about trying to roll the clock back on immaterial labor in the first place.  She is intrigued by, and generally supportive of, the government’s idea of responding to this so-called “mancession” by creating material labor jobs by building infrastructure like bridges and roads. (She has no doubt that men have lost more than women in this recession, but also this term takes little account of who began with more to lose!) Louchette hopes that many new bridges will be built, by many kinds of workers. But perhaps these intimate, affective jobs of caring could also be stimulated. She fears for the support of the exact kinds of affective work that are valued when George Clooney does them, but less so when teachers, nurses, ladies, and feminine people perform them.