The New York Review of Books - USA - 16.12.2021

(EriveltonMoraes) #1
50 The New York Review

devaluation?” Guralnik asks him. “I
think I don’t care how quickly I move
to devaluation,” says Mau.
There are apparently things Annie
believes are off-limits for discussion,
which keeps Guralnik feeling out of
the loop. They are the only couple that
cause her to glare. The word- parsing
Mau, who resembles the actor Clive
Owen, has come from a childhood of
poverty, violence, and neglect (though
he does not view it as abuse), and now
wants merely to be seen in his entirety
without having to indicate who he is.
This is an exaggerated form of a con-
dition common among the couples—
the desire to be known and accurately
acknowledged without having to spell
things out for their partner.
As an example, Mau sees himself, he
says, as a person who would like a “glass
of water and [to] have it there
before he asks.” This hunger
for magic is how he has got-
ten through life, he claims.
“I don’t have complicated
needs. I’m utterly transpar-
ent,” he insists. But he sees
his birthday as a test of how
well his wife knows him. And
she usually fails. Guralnik
finds the two of them both
mystifying and codependent.
“This marriage will keep
its peace if she gives up on a
certain piece of her subjectiv-
ity,” she says to Goldner. But
Annie is counting the years
until their fourteen-year-old
son is old enough for her to
leave the marriage. Children
are often the off-screen fac-
tor keeping Guralnik’s cou-
ples together.
The other three couples in
the show’s first season exude
touching vulnerability in the
sessions and, despite some
flashing anger and water-
ing eyes, bring determined
self-awareness and emotional intelli-
gence to their troubled situations. They
are strong people with wounded pride,
and the therapy sometimes involves
isolating the wound from the pride.
The tasks Guralnik sends them home
with—take two hours to yourself;
make him cook dinner; express affec-
tion; listen, listen, listen—are mostly
accomplished as the months roll along.
The balance between togetherness and
solitude, attention and boundaries,
trusting but verifying, needs to be fig-
ured out for everyone.
All but Annie and the stubborn,
self-educated Mau appear willing to
“do the work” that psychotherapy re-
quires (most of it a conscious breaking
of one’s own unhelpful habits). As for
his own “incredibly warm, sweet, vain,
and thoughtless” mother, Mau says in-
sightfully, “If you ask my siblings they’d
all agree that we’re all waiting for her
to take us to the pool thirty-five years
ago.” In marriage the past lands in the
present as a time capsule; in his mar-
riage, Mau is still waiting for his mom.
The second couple we meet in this
first season are Lauren and Sarah
(Lauren is trans and recovering sto-
ically from difficult surgery). They
are the most impulsive of the couples,
having moved in quickly, married
quickly, then sexually opened up their
marriage, and then tried for children.
Guralnik’s task is to slow them down.
Money and the division of labor, is-
sues common to many households,

also make appearances in Lauren and
Sarah’s conversation. Lauren doesn’t
like dishes in the sink but admits that,
because she makes more money than
Sarah, she believes that maybe Sarah
should do them. Plus ça change.
The couples on the show are selected
to demonstrate a range and diversity
of racial, sexual, ethnic, religious, and
social class suffering. Those who laugh
with each other give the viewer the most
hope. The ones who can eventually see
that immersive professional work is
not the enemy of a happy family—as
so many commercial Hollywood films
have repeatedly told us through the
decades—also seem to be on the right
track. As the credits roll at the end of
every half-hour episode, the music sug-
gests a theme for each of their stories.
One episode ends with the Soul Scratch

song “The Road Looks Long,” and in
it are flung and sung all the unreason-
able hopes and dangers of the marital
project. One feels precisely what the
singer means when he says, “Just give
me a little faith... Ain’t got much going
my way.” But everyone on Guralnik’s
couch manages at least one smile.
Who wouldn’t root for these cou-
ples? Though why we do touches on
our own fear of aloneness as well as our
belief, expressed in everything from
Shakespeare to Mamma Mia!, that the
preferred human narrative is one that
ends in an enduring marriage—that is,
one that can be endured.

The therapist is, of course, at the
center of this collection of unplot-
ted domestic tales: she is the constant
and the guide in the ramble, there to
help the couples deepen their under-
standing of their dilemmas—“noth-
ing more,” advises Goldner. A deeper
understanding of the trouble always
sounds like a good idea, but is it? The
therapist is not to offer an opinion as
to whether the couple should break up,
even if she has one. She is not to side
with any desire to end things. (They
can, if they choose, end things without
her help.) “I feel like I was siding with
the giving-up,” Guralnik says to Gold-
ner, about Evelyn and Alan, a gentle,
teary Latinx couple who exude almost
unbearable unhappiness. But Gural-
nik does not give up, and Evelyn and

Alan do as they are told. Guralnik is
able to crack the case by getting Alan
to reexamine his habits of checking out
and living solo in the world. Soon Ev-
elyn and Alan are meditating together
at home and the marriage looks as if
it’s been pulled from the ditch. “I feel I
have such power over them,” Guralnik
says, but she uses it well.
Although she feels “the limits of
how much [any] relationship can de-
liver,” Guralnik is there with all of her
patients, to rejoice calmly and with af-
firming declarations when any couple
reaches a sense of unbreakability while
also abandoning destructive patterns.
At that point, they curtail therapy with
her—perhaps because they feel they’ve
achieved all they can; perhaps only be-
cause their medical insurance has run
out, though the series does list a med-

ical insurance provider in the cred-
its—and she is left with the intensity
of their situations (addiction, abuse,
fatal inertia, insufficient love, job is-
sues). Her occasional worries that her
work with them might be both meager
and futile seem to reveal themselves in
anxious expressions on her face, but
her successes also leave her bereft. She
has become involved. “Suddenly the
enormity of their stories is just sitting
with me,” she tells Goldner. She is not
as detached as she might wish. “What
a bizarre profession,” she confides to
Goldner in the season 1 finale. In the
end, she is alone on the set, the clien-
tele having gone home. A new cast will
arrive shortly.
Season 2 introduces three new cou-
ples: two gay white men (Gianni and
Matthew) and two straight couples,
one interracial (Dru and Tashira),
and one Orthodox Jewish (Michael
and Michal). The gay men must deal
with Gianni’s homesickness for his old
dance troupe and for his native Italy, as
well as with Matthew’s alcoholism; the
devoted Dru and the reluctant Tashira
must deal with unequal affection; Mi-
chael and Michal must deal with un-
equal ambition. The season begins
just before the pandemic, and so, as it
proceeds, it includes all the domestic
suffering of the quarantine: unemploy-
ment, exhausting childcare, social iso-
lation, Zoom. Sheltering in place often
forces each member of a couple to give
up whatever exit fantasy they may har-

bor, or, on the other hand, to nurture it
in silence and deferment.
The counseling for a while is forced
to go online, which makes everyone’s
home life seem funkier and blurrier.
Guralnik sits in front of a jammed
bookcase with Bleak House promi-
nent on one of the spines above her
head—a witticism. We imagine that we
get a glimpse of what time-tested love
resembles from the inside—the pets,
the kids, the chores. Goldner, however,
appears to have a calming country re-
treat, the series’s quick nod to class
disparity in the pandemic. No toddlers
burst in squealing. Pastoral springtime
dapples her windows.
Luckily for the clients, the virtual is
only temporary, and soon the couples
are returning to Guralnik’s office and
her new pink print in the waiting room.
Summer both heralds their
return and closes out the ses-
sions of season 2. Lessons
have been learned: a couple
must share anxiety, passing it
back and forth between them
until it is understood; a part-
ner must smile fully or it may
resemble a smirk. Guralnik
has been patient and seem-
ingly effective; the couples
give her affectionate good-
byes as well as gifts to say
thank you and farewell.
“It’s hard to let them go,”
she says to Goldner. “Are
they going to mess up the
work we’ve done? ‘Don’t
mess it up!’” Though she
may feel abandoned (“I’m
left with this void,” she con-
fesses), this is her territory—
starting over with a new set of
problems—and she is good at
it: unknotting the discourse,
excavating the past, nam-
ing emotions (most of them
forms of sorrow). “That’s
sabotage,” she will say, or, “If
that’s the dynamic, why go there?” (The
one time I was in couples therapy, the
therapist turned to me and said, “And
now I have a question for Lorrie: Where
did you get your boots?”) Since the se-
ries began, it has been almost impossible
for new couples to get an appointment
with Guralnik: she is completely booked.

This glimpse of successful couples
counseling is interesting to compare
with the recent HBO drama Scenes
from a Marriage, which, despite the
dissolving relationship at its center,
has mostly disparaging comments in
its script regarding the “psychobabble”
of professional therapy. Psychother-
apy here is offstage, referred to but
not participated in jointly. Hagai Levi,
who created the original Israeli televi-
sion series BeTipul (In Treatment), has
put together an honoring reassembly
of a modern classic, the famous 1973
Ingmar Bergman television series, a
program that is said to have prompted
a spike in divorce in Sweden in the
mid-1970s.
Levi’s Scenes from a Marriage is
slightly more alert than Bergman’s to
the theater of couples talking, even if
not in therapy, and the performances
by Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac
are harrowing in their concentration
and intensity. Their scenes are like a
postgrad theater workshop (and indeed
the two actors attended Juilliard to-
gether). Perhaps Levi’s script (written

Liv Ullmann as Marianne and Erland Josephson as Johan in Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, 1973

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