by Herbert H. Stein
The second time that I watched Silver Linings Playbook—for reasons that I’ll get to in a moment—I noticed something very obvious that had eluded me in the theater the first time around. There is very little traffic in Philadelphia and its suburbs, both vehicular and pedestrian. Where outside of Fire Island can people jog down the street without looking over their shoulders for a passing car? Even in the heart of the city, people can apparently run in an emotional frenzy with no fear of getting clipped by a speeding taxi. Not even a horn sounded! I plan to revisit Rocky with a new understanding of the importance of the city traffic patterns for the development of his boxing career.
Curiously, I have been to Philadelphia only once in my life, and that as a teenager on a school bus trip to a science museum. Nevertheless, I will go out on a limb and speculate that it is not really that quiet, but was made so by the film makers. It is a reminder that we do not always, or even usually go to the movies to see reality. We get that when we leave the theater. Silver Linings Playbook is closer to a daydream, constructed to reflect, or to play upon, inner reality. As with daydreams, we expect them to keep some illusion of reality, but welcome the fantasy they offer; hence my initial willingness to ignore the empty streets.
I came back to this film a second time because my hobby of writing about unconscious fantasy in film keeps me on the lookout for themes. What had caught my attention in this film was a flashback in which the main character, Pat, comes home to find his wife in the shower with another, older man. It was evocative of the “primal scene.”
To recapitulate concisely what I (and others) have written elsewhere, Freud used a recurrent dream of his famous “Wolfman” (1918) to reconstruct an infantile experience of watching parental intercourse. Freud described the event as traumatic for the child and Arlow (1980) elaborated on it, stressing the elements of envy on the part of the helpless child, left out of the parental couple. Arlow further emphasized that the former victim of the primal scene seeks revenge, particularly by fantasizing or contriving to place him or herself in the center of a primal scene-like experience with the parents or a substitute forced to watch.
Silver Linings Playbook gives us not only the primal scene derivative in which Pat is forced to watch his wife naked in a sexual encounter with another, older man, but also a later scene in which he exacts the kind of revenge that Arlow has described, a scene in which Nikki, his wife, looks on while he does an elaborate and sensual dance on stage with another woman. It was enough to bring me back.
When I did examine the film more closely, I found that an important, perhaps the most important, theme of the film has to do with belonging, being an insider or an outsider. This resonates with the primal scene in which the child is excluded from the parental couple.
The film is ostensibly about mental illness, and that too is framed in terms of the plight of the outsider. It begins with Pat’s mother using her parental authority to remove him from a mental institution. When the psychiatrist advises against it, saying that Pat is just beginning to fit in at the hospital, she tells him, “I don’t want him to fit in here.” She does not want him to be a member of a group that is outside normal society. There will be numerous references and allusions to his being outside the norms of society, along with repeated threats, when his mania gets out of control, to remove him from ordinary society in Philadelphia by bringing him back to the hospital in Baltimore. The film appears to want to overcome the prejudice that people with severe mental illness are so different from “normal” people that they are outsiders, but in doing so it first emphasizes that difference.
In the early scenes, we see Pat and his female counterpart and eventual love interest, Tiffany, displaying behavior that frightens or amuses the people around them. Twice Pat wakes up his entire neighborhood in the middle of the night with his manic behavior. His quick temper and socially inappropriate comments separate him from “normal” people. One observer liked the film because it showed the two “out- siders” as being more honest than the other characters who cloak their psychological problems with a dishonest veneer of normality. In fact, the film does come close at times to glorifying the mental illness. Pat and Tiffany seem to wear it as a badge of honor that unites them, as when she tells him “We’re not liars like them,” ostensibly speaking about her sister and brother-in-law with whom they’ve just had dinner, but also meaning all of the hypocrites who don’t say what they think and feel. Eventually the film finds another solution that suggests more of a continuum between mental illness and normality.
On a more personal level, insider and out- sider are defined in terms of family. Both Pat and Tiffany are living with their parents, but are somewhat removed from the family circle. Tiffany has fixed up the garage next to her parents’ house to serve as her private apartment. Pat is living with his parents and is legally under their guardianship because of a court order stemming from his mental illness and violent attack on the man he found with his wife. Nevertheless, there are repeated pleas, particularly coming from his father, encouraging him to spend more family time on Sundays when his father watches the Philadelphia Eagles play football with fanatical interest that is motivated both by loyalty to the team and the city and by his pathological gambling habit. The first words spoken in the film, from Pat, have to do with how much he loves Sunday afternoons.
Being an Eagles fan is another identity that binds people together. It is a bond that supercedes the doctor patient relationship, uniting Pat and his psychiatrist, Cliff Patel. One of the secondary characters, Randy, is an outsider both because he is an outsider to the family who takes money from Pat’s father on bets and an outsider from the loyal fans of Philadelphia and the Eagles because he roots for the Dallas Cowboys, “America’s Team.”
But at the heart of the film is the issue of out- sider as defined by the primal scene. The film implicitly sets up an ideal of being part of a loving couple. Both Pat and Tiffany have been part of a couple and suffered psychiatric problems when that was taken away. We’ve seen that Pat’s marriage was broken up by his wife’s affair. He is trying desperately to get back together with her despite a court order of protection and nothing from her end to indicate that she is interested in getting together with him again. Tiffany’s husband, Tommy, has died. We eventually learn that after his death she became promiscuous at work, eventually losing her job.
There is a moment very early in the film that subliminally sets the tone for this ideal. Pat has just gotten home. Hearing that Pat is planning to get in shape and get back to Nikki, his father tells him that Nikki has moved, that she doesn’t want to see him. Pat responds vehemently, “You don’t know anything about my marriage, our marriage. We’re very, very much in love. Just like you two.” As Pat says this, his father moves closer to his wife and puts his arm around her as the two of them face their son. It is artfully done, one of those small gestures that we may barely notice, but which sets a tone, emphasizing an ideal from which Pat, like the small child in the primal scene, is excluded.
The next scene gets us closer to the imagery of the primal scene as Pat barges into his parents’ bedroom at four in the morning to complain about the ending of the Hemingway book he was reading. We see him at the foot of their bed as they lie side by side. His complaint about the book (A Farewell to Arms) is that just when the couple are happy together, the heroine dies.
We next see him on his first visit with his psychiatrist in which he describes the incident that caused his arrest and hospitalization, completing the progression of primal scene imagery. It is the first explanation we get of the hospitalization and the restraining order. Pat becomes agitated when he hears “My Cherie Amour” playing in the waiting room, creating a scene as he knocks over magazines looking for the wire to the speakers. He accuses the psychiatrist of playing it deliberately and I, for one, was very surprised to hear that it was true, the psychiatrist telling him that he wanted to see if he could control his reaction on hearing the song. The interchange brings Pat to the memory of the scene that led to his plea bargain and hospitalization. In his own words:
“I come home from work after I left early, which I never do, by the way, but I got in a fight with Nancy, the high school principal. I come home and what’s playing but the song from my wedding. The song that you so charmingly played out here today for us. That’s playing and I don’t think anything of it. Which is odd, ’cause I should’ve. I come home, what do I see? I walk in the door and I see underwear and pieces of clothing, (we see this from his vantage point as he is telling it) and a guy’s pants with his belt in it, and I walk up the stairs, and all of a sudden I see the DVD player, and on the DVD player is the CD and it’s playing the wedding song. And then I look down and I see my wife’s panties on the ground. And then I look up and I see her naked in the shower, (we look up with him and see her facing away behind the shower curtain) and I think, ‘Oh, that’s kinda sweet, she’s in the shower. What a perfect thing. I’m gonna find her and maybe I’ll go in there. We never fuck in the shower anymore. Maybe today we will.’ I pull the curtain back and there’s the fucking history teacher with tenure. (We see an older man rising up and embracing her around the shoulders, much as Pat’s father had done with his mother in the earlier scene.) And you know what he says to me? ‘You should probably go.’ That’s what he says to me. So yeah, I snapped. I almost beat him to death.”
This remembered scene gives coherence to all that has happened and to all that will follow in the film. We are quickly reminded that he suffers from bipolar disease and that he was delusional a week before the incident, having called the police with a paranoid story about his wife and the history teacher plotting against him by embezzling money from the school. Nevertheless, his actions and symptoms are clearly motivated by jealousy and rage. The film in offering an etiology also suggests a potential cure. In Arlow’s terms, if the precipitant is envy at being an outsider looking on to the primal scene, the solution is to turn the tables by becoming a member of an envied couple.
Pat is invited to dinner by his friend Ronnie and Ronnie’s wife, Veronica. Soon after he arrives, the doorbell rings, interrupting Ronnie’s private confession that he is overwhelmed by the pressure of his marriage, his job and his expenses. He explains that they have invited Veronica’s sister, Tiffany. We later can piece together that there has been a conspiracy to bring the troubled Pat and Tiffany together.
Pat knows her as part of a couple, Tiffany and Tommy, and on being told that Tommy died, is asking how he died when Tiffany enters, asking “How did who die?” Ronnie tries to smooth it over, introducing them.
Pat: You look nice. Tiffany: Thank you. Pat: I’m not flirting with you. Tiffany: Oh, I didn’t think you were. Pat: I just see that you made an effort, and
I’m gonna be better with my wife, I’m working on that. I wanna acknowledge her beauty. I never used to do that. I’m gonna do that now. ‘Cause we’re gonna be better than ever, Nikki. Just practicing. How’d Tommy die? … (We see a slight grimace on her face and Ronnie squirming in the background.) What about your job?
Tiffany: I just got fired, actually.
Pat: Oh, really? How? I mean I’m sorry. How’d that happen?
Tiffany: Does it really matter?
The dialogue is superficial and inane, particularly on his part, but the body language suggests something else. They are standing close and face to face. Their eyes never leave one another. Ronnie is in the background looking on. When the conversation is interrupted by Veronica, who enters, we momentarily see them in profile staring at one another with Veronica in the background looking on. After Veronica enters, Pat’s eyes move down to Tiffany’s chest and through them we inspect the cleavage of her breasts, her polished nails and the cross around her neck before looking back at her face. Once again, the surface presented focuses us on Pat’s inappropriateness, but the visual cues quietly push us towards the romantic coupling with hints of the reverse primal scene in which Pat and Tiffany are the couple being observed.
If we look closely, we may also see hints in the dialogue that Pat is conflicted, diverting his attraction to Tiffany by first saying he’s not flirting, then claiming to be practicing for Nikki. We’ll soon see further evidence of that conflict. In fact, Pat and Tiffany are soon identified as having a common bond of mental illness, a common bond of being outsiders. At dinner, they both ignore social convention and flaunt their differentness, at one point comparing notes on psychiatric medications. When she senses her sister’s disapproval, she abruptly cuts dinner short by saying she wants to leave, precipitating an argument.
She asks Pat to walk her home and on that walk says to him,
“I saw the way to were looking at me, Pat. You felt it, I felt it, don’t lie. We’re not liars like they are. I live in the addition around back, which is completely separate from my parents’ house, so there’s no chance of them walking in on us. I hate the fact that you wore a football jersey to dinner because I hate football, but you can fuck me if you turn the lights off, OK?”
In the face of her excessive directness, Pat suddenly shows signs of being appropriate, asking, “How old are you?”
“Old enough to have a marriage end and not wind up in a mental hospital.”
He looks thoughtful. “Look, I had a really good time tonight, and I think you’re really pretty, but I’m married, OK?” (He displays his wedding ring.)
“You’re married. So am I.” She shows him her ring.
“No, that’s confusing. He’s dead.”
She looks hurt, breaks into tears leaning on his shoulder. After a moment, in which he is bewildered, she breaks away, slaps him on the cheek and walks to her apartment, leaving Pat looking confused.
What follows is another manic episode. Pat goes home, appears agitated and again wakes his mother in the middle of the night, this time looking for his wedding video. He escalates, waking the entire neighborhood, knocking his mother down while picturing the scene with his wife and the history teacher, ends up being held down by his father with the policeman who is in charge of his case (and apparently has no other responsibilities) coming up to ask if he has to go back to the hospital.
Although we may be distracted by the severity of his symptoms, his psychiatrist, hearing about it the next day, is not taken in. He suggests, “You think Nikki’s not around and Tiffany’s an attractive girl, and if you get drawn towards Tiffany, you will spoil your chances of getting Nikki back to you?”
Pat is still caught up in the dynamics of the primal scene, jealous and enraged at being the outsider in the love triangle. But from the time he meets Tiffany, the triad changes. From that point on, the tension develops around a second triad, Pat, Tiffany and Nikki, with Nikki off- stage throughout. Since our focus is on Pat, we do not at first notice that Tiffany is attempting to crash her way into this new triad. She literally crashes into Pat when he is doing his daily jog, shooting out suddenly and brushing by him as she begins her run. We much later learn that Pat’s mother has been telling her when he goes out for a run.
The tension builds as Tiffany offers to get a letter to Nikki. Using that as the bait, she engages Pat in a project of her own, a dance contest she has entered, lacking a partner. Pat is reluctant1, but is lured in. We, the audience, are drawn to the love interest, aided by typical movie conventions that we implicitly recognize. Pat claims to be drawn in by the chance to get a message to Nikki, but we are uncertain if he is also drawn into the relationship. That is kept beneath the surface, but there is another scene, lightly touching on the primal scene dynamics, that gives us a clue.
Pat’s friend from the hospital, Danny, has come to visit him and finds him practicing with Tiffany. He watches and begins to come up with advice about the dance routine. In a series of mini-scenes, we see Danny dancing with Tiffany as he shows her a new routine. Pat watches, looking restless, and in each case breaks in to practice it with her. Without a blaring statement, it is just suggestive enough of the Pat’s envy as he watches the more natural (African-American) dancer, Danny, dancing with Tiffany.
As the film moves along, there is a shift in focus and tension. In the early part of the film, much of the tension has to do with mental illness and impulsive outbursts. Much of the tension has to do with whether Pat’s explosiveness will spill into violence and whether he will be returned to inpatient care. As he gets involved with Tiffany and particularly with preparing their dance routine for the contest, he starts taking his medication and the violent out- bursts diminish, the last one occurring at the football game, and even that happening only in response to his brother and his psychiatrist getting involved in a fight with another group of Eagles fans.
In all the tumult over the events at the football game, Tiffany comes to Pat’s parents’ home crowded with all the other characters and takes over center stage. She convinces Pat’s father that she has been good luck for the Eagles and that whenever Pat was with her, the Eagles (or other Philadelphia teams) won their games. She convinces him. In the ensuing excitement, Pat’s father, who has just lost most of his money on the football game, makes a double or nothing bet with his nemesis, Randy, on a “parlay,” a combination bet in which he wins if Philadelphia beats Dallas and Pat and Tiffany score a 5.0 at the dance contest.
From that point forward, the film’s focus has shifted away from mental illness and manic episodes to the tension of the love story between Pat and Tiffany and the triadic tension between Pat, Tiffany and Nikki. Since Pat appears to be improved, and is indeed showing much better judgment and less impulsivity, we are left with the impression that love and a relationship effects a cure.
It all comes to a head on the night of the dance contest. With the Eagles beating Dallas handily, we can direct our focus on the dance contest and the elements of the primal scene. Tiffany had “tricked” Pat into participating by telling him that Nikki would be there, but she is as surprised as he is when Nikki does, indeed, show up with Veronica and Ronny.
This climactic event is made up of a series of three way rivalries and mini-primal scenes. Now, it is Tiffany who cannot cope with the rivalry. She leaves Pat and heads to the bar to start drinking. A young attorney starts to pick her up. Seeing her, Pat barges in again, as he had with Nikki and the history teacher, but this time with more confidence and less violence, easily separating her from her new suitor and bringing her to the dance floor for their performance. Now, they perform with all the film’s central characters watching. Even the police officer can be seen there dressed up for the occasion.
But the principal viewer from the point of view of the two dancers is Nikki. This is, of course, the reversal of the primal scene in which Pat gets his “revenge” in Arlow’s terms, dancing well and erotically with Tiffany while Nikki watches. Despite one misstep, they finish with a triumphant flourish and, of course, earn an average score of 5.0, winning the bet and achieving a personal triumph.
But there is one final pull of triadic tension. Pat leaves Tiffany to go to Nikki. (It is here that the police officer can be seen nearby, presumably giving him a pass on the violation of the restraining order.) He leans towards her and begins to whisper in her ear. Seeing this, Tiffany is crushed. She runs out of the hall, down the stairs and out into the street. Now, we identify with Tiffany as the overmatched victim of the primal scene and its inherent oedipal dynamics. After what feels like an interminable amount of time, Pat leaves Nikki to look for Tiffany. His father tells him she has run out and exhorts him to go after her, even that seeming to extend the time that she has to get lost in the night crowds of the city.
But this is Philadelphia, the Philadelphia of the movies, in which she is the only figure walking down the street. He catches up to her and they face each other on a deserted street. At last the primal scene is behind us and the two lovers are alone with one another. Pat gives Tiffany the letter he had written for this occasion and asks her to read it. He recites it aloud and we see that it is addressed not to Nikki, but to Tiffany, letting her know that he knew she had manufactured her contact with Nikki and that he no longer cares about Nikki, but wants to be with her, fulfilling all our private oedipal and primal scene wishes as we bask in the film’s happy ending. Pat’s family prepares for a happy Sunday of football while Pat and Tiffany kiss in a quiet corner of the house, just the two of them. We are left with the comfortable feeling that all you need is love and a little lithium.
1. This was foreshadowed earlier when Pat talked about the Hemingway book, saying that the couple had fun dancing, a part that bored him, “but that’s ok.”
Arlow, J.A. (1980) The revenge motive in the primal scene. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 28: 519-541.
Freud, S. (1918) From the history of an infan- tile neurosis. S.E. 17: 1-124/
Published in the PANY Bulletin Summer, 2013 51:2.