Diving Beneath the Surface

By Leonard Quart

Sitting in a chain coffee shop waiting for a friend to arrive, I do some people-watching. A family enters--two well-dressed, bland professionals about 45 and their daughter of 8. They are there to meet their younger cousins, and engage in strained, cheery talk about other relatives, jobs, and travel plans. Listening I begin to construct a scenario about the untroubled relationship and family life I assume this upper-middle-class couple possess. I tend to weave these stories as I look out at the world, even when all I know is the most superficial aspects of people’s lives. It’s a harmless pursuit, and in this case I’m working from some sociological stereotype or other to make wrongheaded guesses about the pair’s supposedly conventional existence: lives that may be utterly volatile or dysfunctional beneath the pleasant, calm exteriors they present to the world. We know next to nothing about strangers like these; and even about the lives of people we casually socialize with, or those we see every day at work, we probably perceive little more than the bare outlines--just a bit more than what a thorough vita would reveal.

So when dealing with a colleague who we shared an office with for many years or a friend we see infrequently, we will know something about his relationship to the job, and his political opinions and cultural tastes, and we may glean from our conversations some understanding about his childhood and parents. But we never really know what lies beneath his persona. We learn next to nothing about his anxieties, depressions, vulnerabilities, fantasies, and feelings about people closest to him. We just never penetrate the secret recesses of his self.     

Yet somehow we feel we know these people. But given the shallowness and highly structured quality of these connections, we’re often emotionally thrown when a marriage suddenly terminates, a painful life change occurs, or, in the worst case, when somebody commits suicide. We struggle for some sign that was given and missed, some snatch of conversation that in retrospect might illuminate their situation. But we are usually left grasping at something ephemeral with no real understanding of why the traumatic event occurred, and a vague sense of guilt that we never truly spoke to the person and failed to be of any help.

One rhetorically asks why we should have knowledge of the deepest aspects of the self of people we have never made a profound emotional investment in. It would be unseemly and difficult to bear, if every casual friend or colleague began to use one as a confessional. The intimacies would feel as if they were coming out of nowhere. In these relationships we desire to maintain the surfaces, and to have relatively predictable encounters that don’t disrupt us. We usually expect the other person to talk about the more external aspects of themselves--opinions, anecdotes, and gossip-- feeling that anything that went beyond that level of communication was unearned. 

Intimate relationships are another order of being, but even the most self-aware and introspective among us doesn’t fully understand the nature of our own behavior, let alone the behavior of the person we’re intimate with. I think of the time about seven or eight years ago that I suffered from a full-scale depression. I was conscious of the symptoms, but had no real comprehension of what I was dealing with. It was not the kind of severe depression that would have prevented me from teaching and writing. I didn’t withdraw from people or the world into some private reverie. I didn’t spend a great deal of my time in bed or hidden away at home like a close friend who suffered from depression recently did. Still, for somebody who has a passionate involvement in many things--from politics and films, to friends and city wandering-- my capacity for being emotionally stirred had diminished. I had become a mere shadow of myself.

What was interesting was that my depression wasn’t readily recognizable to anybody but my wife, since I maintained all my life’s normal routines. And I myself couldn’t at first distinguish it from my normal periodic angst. It was only when I felt I couldn’t shake both the depression and the insomnia that accompanied it, that I understood I was in a more difficult and painful place on the emotional continuum. 

The depression lingered for months, but then suddenly disappeared as strangely as it came on. I never really got a handle on what its source was: bio-chemical? an unconscious trauma? my consciousness of growing older and the imminence of death? burning out professionally? Whatever its roots, it struck me how difficult it is to explain one’s behavior. We are all ultimately mysteries to other people, and in some ways even to ourselves.

Still, however imperfect and limited our capacity to communicate our feelings is, the need to go beyond formal and casual chat with other people are basic. I don’t mean for us to become emotionally promiscuous, but opening up to my wife and a few other people about my depression clearly made me feel better. Some form of intimacy is a necessity, and being trapped in solitude or being dependent on a series of superficial human connections can be a recipe for emotional desolation.

Leonard Quart: Professor Emeritus of Cinema Studies at the College of Staten Island and at the CUNY Graduate Center.  He is a Contributing Editor of Cineaste, and has written essays and reviews for Dissent, Film Quarterly, The Forward, London Magazine, and New York Newsday. His major publications include the co-authored with Albert Auster third edition of American Film and Society Since 1945(Praeger, published in December 2001), the co-authored with Albert Auster, How the War was Remembered: Hollywood and Vietnam (Praeger, 1988), and the co-authored The Films of Mike Leigh for Cambridge University Press (2000).