Matchstick Men: Psychological Thriller and Therapeutic Paradox by Arlene Kramer Richards

Reprinted with the permission of The PANY Bulletin

Psychoanalytic Association of New York
Volume 42, #2 Summer 2004

Film Essay
Matchstick Men
Psychological Thriller and Therapeutic Paradox
by Arlene Kramer Richards, Ed.D.

A little noticed movie about the psychotherapy of obsessive-compulsive disorder and tics slipped by in 2003 despite a dramatic plot and a great performance in the lead role. The ironic title describes the layered plot and its various characters. Matchstick men are con artists, specialists in creating illusions and getting others to believe in them for the purpose of fleecing them of their money. The irony comes in the plot from the beginning. We see a tense man enter his immaculate house with an immaculate swimming pool outside and clean the windows. He checks his dog: a standard size bulldog which sits next to the couch in his immaculate living room. It is made of hard clean ceramic. He opens and closes doors to a count of three. His house is a con. It looks like a plush setting for a leisured life, but it is actually a hard, cold setting for a life bound by so many rigid rules that it might as well be a concrete cell. If this is a prison, what is his crime?
Called by his slick younger assistant who sounds and looks like a harried ambitious business person, our hero Roy rushes over to close the deal. In a sly pun, Roy’s name echoes the french word for king. Aristotle has it that a tragedy requires that the hero start from a high place in order to have room to fall. Roy’s Hollywood style house with its white furniture and window wall looking out onto a large pool fits that bill and his name confirms it. Roy leaves his elegant home and drives over to the scam. He enters an ordinary suburban house and sits at the ordinary dining room table with the middle aged husband and wife. Only his briefly flashed badge and his claim to be an FBI investigator differentiate the scene from any sales talk. Roy convinces the husband that what his wife bought was worthless. He offers the services of the FBI in catching the con men who sold her something worth far less than what she paid for it. Roy plays on the husband’s eagerness to believe that he is smarter than his wife. In order to prove this, he willingly gives Roy his bank account number, his signature on a paper that allows the any transactions the supposed FBI man chooses and thus gives him the means to defraud him of his entire fortune.

One important premiss of the con is the idea that a woman is a gullible victim. Another is that the man is in charge of decision making. In order to feel like the smart one, the husband willingly accepts the idea that Roy plants: the wife has been conned. He is so willing to accept the idea that he does not bother to get any proof. Roy has conned him by playing on his masculine narcissism. Just as the con is completed, the woman opens a door to let in their dog. Roy becomes completely panicked. He twitches, shakes, and breathes hard. His assistant has to get him out of the house and back to his own place. Another premiss: the young take care of the old. And dogs represent animal nature, something the hero is terrified to confront. The stage is set.

In a supermarket Roy buys a carton of cigarettes and several cans of tuna fish. He notes that it is “the usual”. He barely checks out the checkout lady even though she clearly indicates her interest in him. He reenters his house with all his rituals including carefully leaving his immaculate shoes at the door, checking his immaculate ceramic dog to see that his gun and money are in place inside it, and prepares an immaculate dinner: a well washed can of tuna fish, neatly opened and slid onto an immaculate plate. He uses his sink and garbage disposal to clean away all evidence of his austere dinner. He places the emptied can in a plastic bag and slides that into another plastic bag.

Interestingly, the con man hero takes medication for his mental disorder. He is shown to be completely dependent on it: when he accidentally upsets his bottle of pills into his garbage disposal, panic ensues. A desperate call to the “doctor” from whom he gets them yields worse news. Not only is he out of pills, his “doctor” has skipped town with no forwarding address. What can he do? He hides out. He tries to deal with his anxiety by cleaning the house with a toothbrush. He smokes by holding his cigarette with rubber gloves. He cleans and cleans, but nothing helps. He cannot live without these pills. His assistant rescues him by supplying the name of a psychiatrist who can prescribe for him. There is only one hitch. The psychiatrist, Dr. Harris Klein, (a pun on harried and small) insists that he talk if he is to get medication. This doctor seems substantial, real, legitimate. By insisting that Roy talk about his troubles, he is following the best psychiatric practice. But our hero does not want to talk. Yet he has no choice-he needs his medication, so he agrees. He tells the psychiatrist that he developed the symptoms ten years ago. He does not like being outdoors, cannot stand dirt and has had no personal relationships for ten years. The symptoms began when he left his then pregnant wife after beating her because he thought she was two-timing him. The idea that she was conning him was unbearable. Yet Roy falsifies one part of his story. He tells Dr. Klein that he is an antiques dealer. Once again we are back to the theme of the woman as the faithful and real person, the natural person. Like the middle aged wife in the couple he conned, his wife was part of nature, pregnant she was procreating, natural, real. Losing faith in his woman caused his disaster. The con man was created when his earlier self was destroyed by the suspicion that he was being conned.

Dr. Klein tells him that he must contact his ex-wife and find out whether the pregnancy was successful. He must know whether he has a child. Meanwhile the doctor gives him pills that are even better than his old prescription. These pills are so new that the only way to get them is directly from the doctor. Calmed by the pills, Roy tries to comply with the behavioral injunction. He calls, but cannot leave a message when he reaches a recording that indicates that she is not answering her telephone. The contrast between the smooth talking con man who talked another man out of his life savings and the pathetic ex-husband unable to speak to his ex-wife even on the answering machine is a dramatic reprise. Faced with talking to the woman, he is as helpless as he was when the dog came in to the scene in which he was conning the couple to whom he represented himself as the FBI man. Since our hero is unable to make contact with his ex-wife, the doctor agrees to call for him.

In their next session, Dr. Klein tells him that he has a teenage daughter who wants to meet him even though his wife does not want anything to do with him. The idea of meeting his daughter clearly frightens him. He goes to the meeting place, but sits in his car with the windows rolled up watching high school students out on a campus. A cute, roller skating, child-woman identifies herself as his daughter, Angela. Angela appears to be his guardian angel. She inspires him to want to conceal his scamming. Much of the movie shows him gradually softening as he allows his daughter to sleep on his living room couch, order in pizza for dinner and eventually even identify with him by taking part in one of his scams.

As the film progresses, we see the hero learning to trust his daughter, gradually letting her see the money hidden in his china dog, letting her learn where he has a safe deposit box and how to use it. He is now behaving just like the husband in the first scam scene. When our hero shows his daughter where he keeps his cache of money, ironically, the money is in a china dog he keeps in his living room. The cold imitation of a dog is a container for his most cherished possession. Real live dogs frighten him. Does a china dog represent another form of the same animal, or is the china dog a denatured dog as he is a denatured man? Does the man also serve as a container stuffed with money?
His daughter prevails on him to let her run a scam-which she does in a do it yourself laundromat. The vision of money and cleaning or “cleaning someone out” of money recurs like a musical theme. By tempting a woman in a laundromat to share in a supposed winning lottery ticket, she plays on the gullibility of a poor person and on the large amount of money that she could supposedly get with no work. She succeeds in getting money from her even though the woman is reluctant to do anything that might be dishonest, like cashing in on someone else’s lottery ticket. In a clever reversal of tactics, the daughter convinces the woman that she will be doing the daughter a favor by taking the ticket, only she can put up a little cash up front to get the ticket. Again and again the victim of the scam is someone who wants more for his money or more money than he is entitled to have.

Meanwhile Roy’s apprentice convinces him to participate in a money-laundering scam similar to the one his daughter pulls. When Roy goes out on this serious scam, the meeting is in a strip joint. The sleazy sex for money makes the perfect background for the scamming set-up. The dupe is a man who is willing to exchange British and United States money at far better than the exchange rate. Supposedly the scammers get the currency from a bank.

When he runs out of pills again, the doctor is out of town. He brings a wrapper to a pharmacy and tries to talk the pharmacist into giving him a few pills to tide him over until his doctor returns. Much to his chagrin, the pharmacist tells him that he has been taking vitamins for menopause. Yet the pills had helped him. Was this a con? He is enraged, but confronts his doctor who explains that psycho-tropic medications like the one he was originally taking are only marginally more effective than placebos. This statement, by the way, has not been challenged by any drug companies or their representatives since the movie came out. That scam is still being perpetrated in the real world. Yet we have seen changes in Roy. How is this possible? He has been talking to the doctor. He has been getting cured. He is participating in a talking cure. He has not been running scams. The real changes he has been making in his life are responsible for the moderation of his symptom. The doctor knows that he is not really an antiques dealer because he did not recognize the valuable antique stool in his office. Even though Roy has not told the doctor the truth as he knows it, the therapy works anyway. Can it be that it is not what is said, but the quality of the relationship that effects the cure?

In a complex scheme Roy’s daughter, his doctor and his assistant scam him out of his life savings, he finds out that the “doctor” was not a real doctor and he has lost everything. The picture fast forwards to one year later. He now lives in a small apartment, is married to the clerk at the super-market who is now pregnant. He works in a carpet store where his erstwhile daughter comes in to buy a carpet that will be suitable for a family with a dog. She is clearly not afraid of the natural. She tells him that she was in on the scam but was also scammed out of her share of his savings. She is older than she appeared to be and is now living with a poor musician, but she is happy with her life.
Roy’s love for his therapist, his love for his supposed daughter and eventually his love for his wife and baby-to-be are the signs and the guarantors of his recovery. The raw aggression of beating his first wife has been overcome by the loving induced by his therapist and Angela.

Because he can love, he no longer needs to court punishment; he is able to make a real living rather than living off scams. What is notable and similar to the analytic situation is the therapeutic love that enables real love.

This movie shows a version of a therapeutic relationship cure in which the guilt and fear of his own aggression motivate a man to commit crimes which mirror the initial traumatic fear of being humiliated. Roy’s initial crime was beating his pregnant wife. He beat her because he believed that she had been unfaithful to him. His rage was fueled by his imagined loss of masculine pride in inseminating a woman. Losing control of himself and enacting the rage against the unborn baby led to shame and guilt that were excruciatingly acted out in the compulsive cleaning and the phobias that kept him isolated from nature and anything natural.

For most of the movie Roy is unable to tolerate nature, yet he is able to interact successfully in the world of people. Able to inspire trust in the people he meets for the first time, he is unable to sustain deeper relationships even when he appears to be doing that with his apprentice. His apprentice ultimately betrays him as does the putative daughter he feels for and the therapist in whom he confides his shameful and guilty secret. Why does intimacy breed contempt? It appears that when he confides in others they see his self-contempt and treat him accordingly. It is the opposite of the situation in which the successful narcissist is able to inspire love in others because she loves herself. Roy inspires contempt because he holds himself in contempt. This prevents intimacy as effectively as does the narcissist’s self-absorption. The paradox that opposite character traits have the same outcome is best understood, I believe, in terms of Bach’s theory of fixity of point of view versus flexibility. For Bach, human interaction depends on being able to simultaneously keep in mind one’s own point of view and that of the other with whom one interacts. Inter-action, in fact, is the rapid alternation of these points of view so that both participants are taken care of by the interaction. Another way of saying this is in the commentary of Rabbi Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

For Bach, the therapuetic action of psychoanalytic treatment for such people depends on the capacity of the analyst to avoid interfering with the patient’s insistence on his own point of view for as long as it takes for the patient to feel sufficiently satisfied that he is being heard so that he is interested in hearing the other’s point of view. Is this what happens to Roy? In some ways, it is. The therapist avoids confronting Roy with his lie about being an antiques dealer until the treatment has taken effect sufficiently for Roy to have begun to want to give up scamming. If we see the scamming as a part of a complex enactment of crime and punishment with the tics and phobias as the punishment, we can take the failure to confront as a disruption of the enactment scenario. Roy commits his crime; he lies and he does not get punished. This disruption itself is thought by some analysts to be enough to change the patient’s expectations and world view and allow him to give up the pathologic pattern that has routinized and destroyed the spontaneity of his world.

Whatever has happened to cause the cure, Roy has experienced it. He no longer needs the big money, big house and trophy pool that shored up his fragile sense of self worth before the therapy. What is most interesting to me about this movie is the depiction of a complicated syndrome with a narcissistic core, a set of related symptoms and a frank exposition of a theory of cure that involves being fooled. Roy’s cure comes about because he was scammed.

Martin Bergmann has posited psychoanalysis as a cure by love. He asserted that the analyst presents a situation in which the patient feels loved because he is understood rather than shamed or condemned for what he believes to be shameful or bad acts. Bergmann posits love as the belief that the other is necessary and sufficient for the lover’s happiness. The lover believes that being loved by the beloved is all you really need. The love recalls that of the ideal mother who loves the baby unconditionally. The analyst does not really love the patient in the sense that Bergmann understands love. The analyst does not believe that the patient is necessary for the analyst’s well being. But the patient loves the analyst in that way and both sustain the illusion that the feelings are mutual. It is this illusion that is destroyed bit by bit in the course of the analytic work; the patient understands that the analyst is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. She gradually comes to believe that she can live without the relationship she has learned to trust and depend on and then learned to live without. She thus loses the illusion that the analyst is necessary to her well being. She also loses the illusion that she is necessary to the analyst-an illusion that the analyst has never encouraged. She finds her own love outside the analytic relationship when she realizes that the analyst is really not going to leave his wife for her.
The reason that analysts are so shocked and outraged when one of us fails to keep the boundaries we accept as necessary between analyst and patient is that the analyst who falls in love with the patient binds her to him in a way that negates the whole analytic process of gradual de-idealization and gradual acceptance of the inevitable loss of contact with the analyst and need to turn to others in the world for the comforts and ecstasy of loving and being loved.

Could this way of understanding the analytic process contribute to a combined classical drive-relational model of analytic work? Perhaps it reflects a logical outcome of the classical analytic model as transposed to modern American reality.