Competing Affections in “The Lion in Winter”

Before Henry VIII changed history for lack of a son, Henry II had too many. His eldest, Richard, a fierce soldier who controls the wealthy Aquitaine, is the favorite of his mother, Eleanor. The youngest, John, is immature and dull, but his father’s favorite. And the middle son, scheming Geoffrey, is, quite dangerously, no one’s favorite. In the end, there are no winners; competing affections and power schemes serve only to cancel each other out. Is it true then, as this story suggests, that being a favorite amounts to nothing more than a target on one’s back, as its benefits are counteracted by the destructive envy of the disfavored? What drives our own propensities for favoritism? And does occupying any position in the pecking order entail, in Eleanor’s words, learning to live with disappointment? Wes & Erin discuss the 1968 film “The Lion in Winter,” starring Peter O’Toole and Katharine Hepburn. Thanks to our sponsors for this episode, Factor and The Inner Loop Radio. Head to factormeals.com/subtext50 and use code subtext50 to get 50 percent off. Subscribe to Inner Loop at https://www.theinnerlooplit.org/radio. Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:11 Erin: Before Henry VIII changed history for lack of a son, Henry II had too many. His eldest, Richard, a fierce soldier who controls the wealthy Aquitaine, is the favorite of his mother, Eleanor. The youngest, John, is immature and dull, but his father's favorite. And the middle son, scheming Geoffrey, is quite dangerously no one's favorite. In the end, there are no winners. Competing affections and power schemes serve only to cancel each other out. Is it true, then, as this story suggests, that being a favorite amounts to nothing more than a target on one's back as its benefits are counteracted by the destructive envy of the disfavored? What drives our own propensities for favoritism? And does occupying any position in the pecking order entail, in Eleanor's words, learning to live with disappointment? Today we're discussing the 1968 film the lion in Winter, starring Peter O' Toole and Katharine Hepburn. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. And this is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. Wes, I have a piece of trivia for you. You probably know that there was a remake of the lion in Winter with Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close in 2003, I think is the year. Did you know about that remake? 1:23 Wes: I did not know that. 1:24 Erin: Oh, okay. Well, that's not even the piece of trivia I have for you. The further piece of trivia I have is that it was also adapted into a TV series in the early 2000s. 1:33 Wes: Wow. 1:34 Erin: Called Arrested Development. 1:38 Wes: Oh, yeah. I didn't think about that. 1:40 Erin: I feel like we're John is Buster. That's perfect. I didn't even think of that. Yeah. Helenor. Helenor, sure. Yeah. Henry and Eleanor are obviously George and Lucille, and Lucille really doesn't care for any of her children, but she especially doesn't care for Gob, I feel like. And Gob is Geoffrey. So I was just thinking about the similarities between this story and so many others that we've covered on the podcast. Like Arrested Development is, of course, a through line throughout the pod, but there are obvious parallels here, too. I was thinking of who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And. 2:13 Wes: Oh, yeah, I thought of that. 2:15 Erin: And especially Lear. Of course. Henry himself says that he's a Lear figure in the film. And at one point, I actually thought of There Will Be Blood, which is hopefully a movie we'll cover on the podcast at some point when he says he has no boys or whatever reminded me of that part when Daniel Day Lewis is in the revival meeting and he's like, I've abandoned my boy. It was very similar. 2:38 Wes: I think Geoffrey, though, would be Michael. Just as far as personalities go. Kind of more reserved, cerebral advisor role. And then you have Richard, who will be Richard the Lionhearted, who is the warrior and. And sometimes the one with the brawn and. Right. Well, that's what Mommy taught him. 2:59 Erin: That's right. 3:00 Wes: It's not the way things worked out ultimately. Yeah, he did not succeed at that. But I guess there's no equivalent of that in Arrested Development. Maybe I'm spending too much time on this. This comparison, though, you know, it's a similar thing in the Brothers Karamazov. Right, with Ivan the brains and Dmitri the warrior, the brawn, the passion. And then Alyosha the religious one. Who does that correspond to? John, incidentally, is the Will turn out to be the. The Magna Carta. Right. And the John who's the villain in Robin Hood. 3:33 Erin: History of England. Yeah. 3:34 Wes: Yeah. And the John who's the villain in Robin Hood and the way he's portrayed in the film is as this extreme moron whose mouth is often just agape no matter what's going on. Very afraid, very stupid, very easily manipulated. And for some reason, the one that Henry apparently loves the most, and I don't know why that is exact. Why does Henry love Jon the most? Is it just because he's the least capable of scheming in a successful way? 4:08 Erin: Perhaps that was a preoccupation for me as I was watching. Because I just thought, you know, in a way, his favorite is Alys. Right? That's his favorite, like, pseudo child. I mean, there's a lot of strange, ancestral kinds of dynamics going on there. Because Alice, you know, she's kind of the Cordelia figure. If you're gonna do the Lear parallel. And if you're gonna do the arrested development parallel, maybe she's like Lindsay or something in that the father loves Lindsay best. Right. And she has that. You know, Lindsay and Lucille have that kind of weird relationship. Familiarly bad relationship. So I was trying to figure that out myself. And I thought that, you know, John is the favorite partially just it seems, because he's the favorite. And I'm wondering about the psychology of favoritism. And if there's really no logic behind it at all. And if there is a logic, perhaps it has to do with the fact that John is the youngest and therefore represents the last hopes of Henry. Or an interest in his own youth and kind of preserving his fertility and his continued success as king. And therefore, to elevate the youngest son might Be appealing to something within himself that he wants to, I don't know, live forever, as he says at the end of the film. But certainly insofar as that actor is the worst actor in the world. 5:33 Wes: Oh, you think the actor is bad? 5:34 Erin: Oh, I think he's so bad. I think it's also ridiculous that he looks like he's 30 playing a 16 year old who. I think there are a lot of things that are wrong. I think it's miscast. I think the actor's. 5:47 Wes: Yeah, he's overplaying the stupidity of the character. I mean, just looking at the script, you don't have to make him such a moron. And so, I mean, the body language, the mouth agape. He's kind of almost hunchbacked a little bit in the way he moves around and scurries around fearfully. 6:05 Erin: Yeah. But I wonder if his cartoonish unlikability is actually serving for me to call attention to just the strangeness of our own predilections for things. You know, like in a way, taking Jon at face value, maybe the most interesting thing about Henry as a character is the fact that Jon is his favorite in the way that we would think it would be really strange if he loved, I don't know, some really disgusting flavor of ice cream or something. It reveals something kind of strange about him. Obviously of more import than the ice cream thing, but something strange and unexpected about his character, which I think still kind of is somehow fitting. He's not a guy with a lot of smooth edges himself. 6:46 Wes: So Jon is grotesque and maybe that's part of it. There's something about the grotesque. And since incest is such a strong theme or the, you know, the way the family members are embroiled with each other and in a way too close and using the power dynamics, the fighting over land and things like that to establish some separation. You see the incestuousness broadly in that, but then also, you know, specific scenes, one that I think we'll discuss between Richard and Eleanor, in which she cuts herself and which you get a very strong sense of the over closeness of the mother and the son. So the grotesqueness, you know, you might think of that in terms of a product of incest. So that John is the closest, the fully representing and concreteness and concretely embodied the incestuous dynamics of the family. I didn't think of that watching the film. I just thought of that. Now, from what you were saying, I do want to put a little caveat on there. There is a historical reason, I think at this Point. He's the only one who hasn't tried to overthrow his father, to rebel against him. And probably just because he was too young, later he will. But it's odd when you look at the history and you realize. Yeah, well, it does come out in the film, of course, that I think looking at the history of this, the full extent of it is actually quite startling. You know, they were fielding armies against each other, and now they're together as a family for their Christmas vacation. So it's quite something. There is also historical, a boring historical reason for this, which is that John is the only one who hasn't yet rebelled against the father. And it's really interesting when you look at the history. It's quite startling, even though it does come out in the movie, that, right, Eleanor has rebelled against him and he's keeping her prisoner and the sons have been involved. I think the history makes it more hammers home the extremeness of it. Just because the family members have been fielding armies against each other, right? Lots of people getting killed, castles being razed to the ground, treaty negotiations, all that stuff going on between father and wife and sons, and now they're all together for their Christmas vacation. I guess Christmas is the time where you. Well, no, it's not the time where you put away the knives. It's a time where you really dig in deep at an emotional level instead of going at it with the armies. 9:16 Erin: You hold the knife menacingly in your hand as you stare at the family members. Yeah, well, what I love about the film is just how the historical import, however implausible some of this may be, the sort of real facts behind it and the real insanity behind this family actually warring against itself, I think heightens the campiness of the film. I see this as a very campy film, a film that's not at all taking itself seriously and that's kind of fundamentally a comedy. I mean, I think it's like Virginia Woolf in that way, where the genre is a bit unstable, but I think it's very arch. And when it's funny, it's really funny. And even when it's kind of being serious, even serious moments have really campy undertones. Each member of the family emerging from one tapestry after another over the course of a scene, which has many painful moments, right, but which is also set up like a bedroom farce and is, in a sense, a bedroom farce. But to go back to this question of incest, one of the things I was thinking about, too, is the fact that much is made. I think Eleanor Says at one point that if she had stayed married to Louis, if she had produced sons for Louis, then none of us would have known each other. Something like that. And what I'm really interested in the film as well is not just the incestual relationship in the actual nuclear family, but in the sort of shadow family that emerges in the might have beens. And even at the end, this shadow family that Henry wants to build with Alice and this idea of getting an annulment and starting over again. But there are all these possibilities that might have been Philip, might have been Eleanor's son in a way. Right. Alys, who's Philip's sister and now Henry's mistress and was kind of raised by Eleanor. She is also a kind of shadow daughter of Eleanor. And so there's a sense in which these are people who, like Eleanor and Henry especially, they're older, they're at the end of their long careers, and you could see the shadows of possibilities back behind them on the road behind them that have been closed off. And so in a way, it makes the film feel a little bit more claustrophobic, maybe that at the end of this marriage, like, these are the only people that they're left with. They're the only people that they have to contend with or to deal with or to play with, as the case may be. And so it makes it seem a little bit more. 11:45 Wes: When you say at the end of the marriage, they are the. Who are the only people at the 11:49 Erin: end of the day. Henry and I almost said, Lucille, Henry and Eleanor are just left with each other. And these three surviving children, all of the other possibilities for their lives have been eliminated through their own choice or through unforeseen circumstances, like the fact that young Henry has died and everything. And so it makes the film feel extremely claustrophobic to me that this family is, as you say, overly close, even if they're far away from each other. 12:18 Wes: Yeah. I mean, he essentially. He has to keep her in a prison on the surface level, just because she is dangerous and has rebelled. And. But you get the sense also on an emotional level, because the. They are too close in a way, and they don't know how to regulate that boundary. These are people with a combination of boundary issues and power. Right. So the dynamic that might play out in a typical family that does can't fight over a whole kingdom. There'd be subtler power dynamics. And you might do things that are aimed at, like figuratively kill a sibling or a parent. Right. But you. It doesn't play out as Literally here. Just because there are. There's so much power at stake. All of the family dynamics, including envy and you didn't love me. And all that stuff can play out at the level of, give me a castle, give me. What is it that they're fighting over? The Aquitaine itself. There's other. Anyway, give me this tract of land, the Vexin. Give me this tract of land or I'm going to take it because it's mine. That's really. The film makes all of this out ultimately to be about love and the way in which love has been completely distorted by power and can only be experience through the lens of power and the lens of these big power struggles at the level of nations and duchies and things like that. So you get this weird sense in the film that there's all this love and profound attachment, and yet everyone also overtly hates and resents each other and is willing to talk about it. At least they're doing, like, family therapy throughout the film. They're willing to talk about it and they're willing to. It does look like a bit of a game through the whole thing, because the film starts with when Eleanor arrives on her boat. She and Henry seem to be very happy, like authentically happy, to see each other. And they have that same affect when she leaves. They say goodbye, and it's almost as if everything that has gone on in between is just the game that they like to play. And it's the game. It's the only game that they can use to signify whatever affectionate bonds they have, even if that game involves a lot of hate. So that's the sense. That's the way. The reason it reminded me of who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Right. All this aggressive gameplay. My overall point was the way this dynamic between love and power and how love can be completely swallowed by power dynamics, but find a way to manifest itself in those, even when they are murderous and involve war. 15:13 Erin: I can't even recall in this moment the ending of Virginia Woolf. I know we discussed this in the podcast, but did we come to a sort of understanding of whether or not the pieces on the board had moved at all over the course of the night? I think we did. 15:27 Wes: Whereas here the ending is actually quite dramatic change because their imaginary child is killed off. 15:35 Erin: That's right. So there is a kind of resolution for that. Yeah. 15:37 Wes: And the whole game has actually been designed to, in a way, is designed as that catharsis or basically psychological abortion. 15:46 Erin: Right. 15:47 Wes: So you're right, it's different here. 15:49 Erin: I think yeah, it's not really the end of the game. It's just. I mean, maybe there was. Maybe they were playing a little game, but then they're just going to set up the pieces again for next time, for Easter. 15:59 Wes: Let me out for Easter. And he's like, maybe you can strike me down again. And I hope we never die. Right. So it's not just a game. It's like Eternal Return. They're going to do this forever. And maybe there's something even primal about it, some sort of mythology that's being enacted and supposed to lie deep, deep in the ontology of the world or something like that. 16:21 Erin: Is there a first cause here? I mean, I think the. The explanation that the film seems to set up, insofar as I will believe anything that Katharine Hepburn tells me is just that it was really Henry's fault. I'm always looking to figure out who I can blame here. You know, she says, at some point, I could peel you like a pear. And God himself would call it justice. Right. It seems that the original sin that has sparked all of this insecurity on Eleanor's part and then set off this chain reaction is Henry's notorious infidelities. The affair with Rosamund, maybe. But also, it seems, his willingness to kind of bed down with anybody over the course of their marriage. Though we also get the suggestion that Eleanor teases him with the fact that she slept with his father, who's named significantly, Geoffrey. You know, that she violated the marriage with Louis while she was, you know, while she was still married to Louis. She had this passion with Henry that then sparked that annulment. It's a bit futile and maybe a bit silly of me to be looking for a cause, but there does seem to be an element with this. It's like crying out for just an attribution of how all of this started, what set it in motion. 17:37 Wes: He's a philanderer, and he himself even says, I've slept with. I don't know. How does he put it? Alice, in my time, I've known Contessas, milkmaids, courtesans and novices, whores, gypsies, jades, and little boys. But nowhere in God's Western world have I found anyone to love but you. How romantic. 17:57 Erin: That is so beautiful. He is just a walking. 18:01 Wes: Not even the little bag of STDs can live up. And then later on, Eleanor will accuse him of bestiality, which I wouldn't put that. So, yeah, he's a. He's a bad guy. Like many of these People were. But the film kind of raises us to the level of everyone seems a bit psychotic. They are quite caught up in this power struggle, and some of it seems really absurd. So, for instance, there's the wedding scene where Henry is. And this is a game, this is a ploy. But basically, Eleanor at this point has. The way the game has gone is that he has made Eleanor a promise that's too good to an offer that's too good to refuse, which is her freedom if she will sign away something or other. I forget the Aquitaine for John. And there are other elements to the deal, and she's. She has this great line, you offer me the only thing I want if I give up, the only thing I treasure. So in a way that seems like a defeat. And she initially says, yes, but then she says, but only if you marry off Alice to Richard. And you do it. Right now, it's got. The wedding has happened. Gotta happen right now. And then he calls her bluff, or seemingly does. But, you know, what he knows is that he's going to. That the. That the conditions of the deal are not going to be acceptable to Richard anyway once he reveals him, so that a wedding is never going to happen anyway. But he goes through with the whole thing, and Alice thinks it's gonna happen. It's a very cruel. You know, one of many very cruel moments in which people are just being people and their emotions are being toyed with. But the wedding kind of reveals the absurdity of what it is they're competing over, right? Just the complete meaninglessness of it. So I think Richard says something like, I'll have the crown. And Henry says, you'll have what Daddy gives you. And then Richard says, I'm next in line, you know, and he. And he does it with. And this is Anthony Hopkins doing, you know, being Anthony Hopkins and doing a great job, but throwing a tantrum, basically, it looks like a child throwing a tantrum. And they're talking about how they might go to war over this. I don't know that I've done a great job of describing it. I think the film does a very good job of bringing it out. But the sense in which these very high stakes about land and property and titles and who's going to be king are really. They're valueless, except insofar as they represent what it is the family really ultimately wants, what they want from each other at a different level. 20:45 Erin: The strange thing about that scene and the meaninglessness of that enterprise is the fact that, you know, marriage seems to mean maybe as Little as it does now, or like maybe it never meant very much. I don't know. I mean, it's strange to look at what marriage meant in the Middle Ages, you know, with our kind of postmodern eyes. But when it's all about power anyway, and it's all about just like one upsmanship or something, you know, you have the legal problem or the ecclesiastical problem of having to divest yourself of someone that you no longer like. But you know, there's not a tremendous sense of marriage for love or anything like that. So it' swhat do I mean by all that? Just that everything seems to have been evacuated of meaning. Like all of the traditional ways in which maybe a modern day viewer might say, well, you know, they're married, so they care about each other because they're married. But it's sort of like the last reason why anyone in this film would care about each other is if they were actually married to each other. So the formalities of these arrangements or these schemes, whether they go through or whether they don't, seems ultimately to matter very little. Like it matters to Henry, obviously, if Alys marries one of the other sons because he actually has some kind of genuine affection for her. But yeah, I think maybe that scene, that wedding scene kind of contributes to this sense of camp that I'm getting through the whole film. Because ultimately, even these life or death battles or even, or the prospect of having to haul in a bishop to suddenly marry you in the middle of a sentence, it's deadly serious, but also just so ridiculous at the same time and obviously true to life in terms of how things actually went in the Middle Ages that you're left only with how these people actually do feel about each other underneath everything, like the game playing. Ultimately it is for me not so much about power as it is about getting out these feelings that they have towards each other. And it's not really for me very much about power at all. Is that what power is all about anyway? It's just about divesting yourself of unwanted feelings or trying to secure someone's affection? Or is it about these sort of relatively, in terms of import, low stakes feelings? Or is it about high stakes, actual history changing kinds of moves? Do you know what I'm saying? 23:09 Wes: I think power and status go together. And status and the seeking of recognition and honor and titles and all of these things is a kind of alternative to love. And there's a narcissistic element to it, right? It's often one way you admire me, but I don't you know, you're my subject. I don't have any obligation to you. So it's a more bounded way to have a relationship with someone. And to make the love less intimate and less potent, you protect yourself against intimacy, which is especially important in a family with these incestuous dynamics. So the power serves the purpose of keeping them sane, really, keeping them from going completely crazy, because the incestuous dynamics are so strong. It was a cool little exchange between Geoffrey and Eleanor early on where they're scheming. And I think she's talking something about delaying Richard's wedding or something. I think the dynamics and the scheming in the movie is so complicated, it's hard to keep track of it. But anyway, at some point, Geoffrey says, I know you know. I know. I know you know. I know. We know Henry knows, and Henry knows we know it. We're knowledgeable family. We're knowledgeable family is a great line because it sums up the incestuous part, right? The knowing. And that's the way Henry puts it when he gives that speech to Alice, you know, who is he known in the sense of. Laid with. We're a knowledgeable family, which is to say, they're too much in each other's heads, but they're in that kind of hall of mirrors in which the way they know each other, the other side of that knowledge is the knowledge that keeps people away, keeps people from being too intimate, and that's the scheming. So there's knowing in the sense of really like an intimate knowledge of the other. And then there's knowing in the sense of you're reading their intentions to. In order to figure out your next step in a power struggle. And it becomes. Is there a Princess Bride scene that's. That's like this. 25:14 Erin: The Wallace Shawn scene is like outwitting the poison. The poison cup is similar to this principle. 25:22 Wes: I think the guy who wrote the play and the. The screenplay. I think his brother wrote the Princess Bride, the Goldman. 25:29 Erin: So talk about a knowledgeable family. 25:34 Wes: Yeah. So this question of being, you know, being aware of what other people know, but also being aware that they know, you know, and then how far does that nesting or that loop. Where can you settle at a point where you think you've outsmarted them or looked farther ahead than them. Any case, all of that hall of mirrors effect provides some insulation against closeness. And then you move on to. I was gonna contrast that to. We don't have to do it exactly right now, but to the Eleanor scene with Richard. That very intense scene between them. 26:09 Erin: Yes, I was gonna suggest we go to that scene and look closely at it. 26:14 Wes: Let's pause to talk about our sponsors for this episode, starting with Factor. Factor is a service I've actually used extensively in the past during a time when I didn't want to cook for myself, didn't want to go to the store, didn't want to do all the prep cooking Cleanup Factor is America's number one ready to eat meal kit. They're not frozen. You get them delivered, refrigerated and vacuum sealed and they heat up in 2 minutes. Every week you get to choose from more than 34 restaurant quality options like Bruschetta, Shrimp Risotto, Green Goddess Chicken and Grilled Steakhouse Filet Mignon. The menu has an option for a variety of lifestyles from keto to calorie, smart, vegan and veggie and protein. Plus, it's prepared by chefs and approved by dietitians. Get Factor and enjoy eating well without the hassle. 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Learn how to tell a great ghost story from a literary horror writer or how to construct the perfect sonnet from a poet laureate. Episodes include interviews, inspiration, takeovers and casual check ins with their favorite writers. Subscribe now to the Inner Loop Radio on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube or any other podcasting site. Get inspired, get focused and get lit on the Inner Loop Radio. He's her favorite and yeah, he seems pretty upset with her. 28:41 Erin: Well, they've had a recent falling out for reasons that are never 100% explained. Like for the past couple of years they've been on the outs with each other as he's been off conquering things. So he's gotten the Aquitaine from her. Right. And he's just been out warring down there, perhaps. And so I wonder if the fact that he's gotten this from her has contributed to the cooling of relationships between them a little bit. But what I find most disturbing about this Richard and Eleanor scene is the fact that Eleanor loves to tell people about her sexual attraction to her husband. It's very. It contributes to this ickiness where they're in the middle of a family scene and they just start like making eyes at each other. And there would have to be a little bit more alcohol. I think, if you were to stage this in a modern day interpretation in order to convince people that she would just suddenly start talking about how her husband's body was. That he had a form like mortal sin. But why does she do that? 29:40 Wes: Yeah, that happens in this scene. So they're scheming and at a certain point she tries to get sentimental with him. So she says, she says, I loved you more than Henry and it's cost me everything. And he says, what do you want? She says, I want us back the way we were. No, that's not it. All right then. I want the Aquitaine. And then he says, that's the mother I remember. We can win. She says, I can get you Alice. So I've got to have the Aquitaine. I must have it back. It's mine. I'll never give it up. She says, shall I write my will to Richard? Everything. Would you believe me then? And then he says, paper. She says, where's paper? As if she's going to write her will. And he says, paper burns. She says, I love you. He says, you love nothing. You're incomplete. The human parts of you are missing. You're as dead as you are deadly. Don't leave me. You were lovely once. I've seen the pictures. So you have all this back and forth and she tries. She acts as if she's going to write the will on her body and cuts herself. And then he becomes upset and they. I think at that point they have an embrace, right. And. Or she says, remember how I taught you numbers and the lute and poetry? This is something, by the way, Henry will later guess he even almost gets the line right about how she's been manipulating him. What kind of words. She would say, I taught you dancing, too, and languages. And all the music I knew and how to love what's beautiful. The sun was warmer then, and we were every day together. So you get this kind of weird descent from Bitterness and scheming into a loving moment. But a moment that has some incestuous overtones. And then at a certain point in that scene, she's talking about. I think she does talk about sex with the father at some point. I didn't find that. But she compares, right? She compares him and the father. And having given up the father for him, he's her favorite over Henry. And she lost everything because of it. Right. She helped him with the rebellion. She ended up in prison because of it. That's how much she loved him. Oh, she says we shatter the commandments on the spot. 31:52 Erin: Yeah. 31:52 Wes: That's the line where she's talking about the relationship with Henry. 31:56 Erin: Right. 31:57 Wes: So it's kind of not the thing you should be saying to your son. Right. 32:01 Erin: Yeah. That was my big takeaway from that scene. Also, just the fact that when Richard says, you know, you're incomplete, the human parts of you are missing. You're as dead as you are deadly. Are we supposed to take that seriously? Are we supposed to take anything anyone says seriously? As you say, this is a really tender scene. And then in the next scene, Henry is making fun of them and doing his little Katharine Hepburn impression. I taught you. Prancing lamb and lute and flute, you know, and she's like, that's marvelous. That's absolutely me. So then we're led to believe that she's circumspect enough to make fun of that tender scene that she just played with her son. It seems to me, of all the. Like, there are a lot of passions in the film that everyone is, like, overly human. They're not incomplete. Like, I think that part of the problem, you know, as Henry suggests, or actually as Eleanor suggests, is that there are too many sons, not that they have too few. You know, Henry wants to have more sons. She's like, I thought that was the one thing of which you had had enough. So the problem doesn't seem to me to be incompletion or a lack of something. It seems to me to be an overabundance problem. So there are too many passions. And these scenes in which various people are accused of not feeling enough or not being human enough, you know, it seems a pretense to me, or like a script that these people have for each other, which ultimately doesn't seem to matter because he says these things and she just kind of ignores it and is able to get him on her side anyway. That's the other thing, is that they're really good at sparring. But most of the zingers just bounce off each other. So there's a kind of futility both to the passionate scenes like this one and to the ones in which they're really trying to. 33:43 Wes: There's a scene where she tries to get Alice and Henry to kiss. Says she has only an intellectual interest in it to see if it's how she imagines it. And then he says a lot of very tender things to Alice and then kisses Alice and she. And Eleanor gets very upset and says, I've lost again. I'm done for this time. At this point, she's in her bedroom in front of a mirror and looking at jewelry. And she has a great line where she's holding a necklace of some sort and says, I'd hang you from the nipples, but you shock the children. You're shocking the audience. Katharine Hepburn, to hear you say that. 34:22 Erin: I will admit that I love doing a Katharine Hepburn impression. And this is a gold mine for great lines to do an accent. 34:28 Wes: I want to hear it. I was going to ask you earlier if you were going to do a Katharine Hepburn impression. 34:33 Erin: That line is the most frequent line that I say in the Katharine Hepburn voice of all time. Like I used to go around saying, I'll save it for the post. I'll save it for the postscript. How about that? All right. Yeah, sorry, yeah. 34:46 Wes: I've seen you do your Katharine Hepburn impression. It's very spot on, very impressive. 34:51 Erin: I'm kind of always doing a Katharine Hepburn impression, but some moments are more robust than others. 34:58 Wes: A line like that, what is that doing? What is that about? She's in a state of despair. She's associating to putting on some sort of weird sexual display. And apparently that's in some sense meant for Henry. But the only reason she wouldn't do it is because of the children. She has to preserve them from that dynamic. But of course, in large part, the children are not preserved from it. And there are elements in the film where you get the idea that it's the fighting between Henry and Eleanor that has actually damaged them. Right. They're willing to consciously attribute the fact that they're psychologically damaged to the relationship between the mother and the father, which is not far fetched. So it is, of course, about how the parents have treated the children, but it's also about the sick game, the sick relationship between the parents. So even witnessing that, even beholding that is damaging. 35:49 Erin: That's my favorite scene in the film, is her scene in front of the mirror. And it's also the scene in which I have the Most sympathy for her. I mean, I do throughout. But it's interesting that to me, all of Eleanor's hurt comes down to the fact that she's been sexually rejected by her husband or that she's insecure about her appearance and has been put aside. And like, the fact that she's kind of an also ran in her own marriage. And I think that her feelings of rejection of not being her own husband's favorite companion, that this is kind of repeated in each one of the children, that they all feel hurt for being rejected or they all have these resentments towards not being a favorite or are trying to hurt the one who is perceived to be the favorite in any given moment. And I'm interested in this dynamic. Like, I think that not to speak too much from personal experience, like, I've experienced being both the favorite and the least favorite in different relationships in my life. And I've perceived both, as being, in a sense, equal punishments. I'm interested in this film in how you're screwed either way. Basically, how either way seems like a huge punishment. Except for in this scene in which you see the cost of Eleanor's not being the one that Henry wants to be with. This is the one scene in which all of that scheming and shuffling kind of falls away. I don't know really what I want to say about that and about favoritism in general. It seems like everybody, in other words, is getting a raw deal in this film. 37:25 Wes: What do you mean by everyone's getting a raw deal? So in a way, no one is the favorite or. 37:30 Erin: Well, it seems like the way that favoritism works is that if you are the favorite, then you become the target of the people who are not the favorite, and you're cut down by other people's envy. And so it's a bad thing to be the favorite because you become the target of other people's desire to destroy you. And if you're not the favorite, that sucks too. Obviously, it's terrible to know that someone prefers someone else to you or flaunts things in front of you or ignores you and treats you like a total non entity. So it seems like if there is a dynamic in which there are favored ones and unfavored ones, everyone is the unfavored one. But it also seems to me that there is no perfect dynamic in which, like, everyone can be equal all the time. Right? So I'm interested in the line that Eleanor says at some point in the movie where she says, you know, you can't all three be King. Two of you are going to have to learn to live with disappointment. I see the message of the capital M message. But the demonstration that this film carries out is that whether you're the favorite or not the favorite, you still have to learn to live with disappointment. You're still getting a bad deal. And I'm wondering if that's symptomatic of this particular situation or if I can reasonably draw these generalities that I'm trying to draw about the condition of any kind of tiered system or pecking order, whether it be within a family dynamic, within. I don't know, whatever else. It could be within a job, a friend group, whatever the case may be, where affections will inevitably be unequal and 39:06 Wes: where envy is often aroused. But in this case, again, that dynamic gets writ large be just because they happen to be royals. So there's much more for them to fight about. 39:19 Erin: Is this an interesting question for you, or is it something that you're not this idea of favoritism or of unequal distribution of affection. Is this something that is an interesting psychological issue, or am I just being so obtuse and overly generalizing that there isn't much to say? Just people have preferences and that's it. 39:38 Wes: At the deepest level, this kind of dynamic is supposed to be psychologically fundamental. If you're of a psychoanalytic orientation. Because the whole premise of the Oedipus complex is that we have an attachment to the mother or early caretaker to maternal principle, however abstract you want to get. And in a way, we have to be extracted from that relationship. And the way we are extracted is to become painfully aware of the mother's subjectivity, which is to say, aware of the fact that her desire is not simply like the psychological version of a womb in which we can incubate forever, but that it is a vector. And it's a vector that is pointed away from us towards the father or the other lover, however you want to put it, and that that's necessary. So we develop an aggression towards whatever it is. And it could be. It doesn't have to literally be the father. It could just be the mother's work, right? Eleanor uses this phrase in the film. Her life's work is ruined, or what a life's work. We should discuss that at some point. And anything else towards which the mother's desire is directed can become an object of envy and aggression. And at the most primal level, envy doesn't even need a third, right? A father or something like that, or a sibling. You can just envy the Thing that is the source of love or nutrition. All right, so the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein talks about envy of the breast. And what you envy, you want to destroy it because. Because how dare it be outside of me? How dare I have to depend on something outside of me? Everything should be inside of me. I shouldn't be in that precarious situation. So envy. Envy doesn't have to simply manifest itself in these triangles. But on the other hand, when it does, you know, if it is manifesting itself in that Oedipal triangle, it serves the purpose of detaching you, right? So that you can. There's a psychological birth. You leave that little Garden of Eden, but then now you have identifications with the paternal principle, which is to say work and culture and aspiration. You turn your psychological energies towards work and other love objects, right? Towards romantic relationships and things like that. And that diversion depends upon the intervention of the paternal principle and the resentment of that and the aggression towards that. And in this dynamic, that hasn't sufficiently worked for some reason, and you would think it would, because he's a king. And he's a very Peter o' Toole type of king. He's loud and being very assertive. It's not like he's the passive, unassertive father who can't step in and be the barrier between the infant and the mother. But in this particular case, the mother and the father are also rivals. They're political rivals. And their children are pawns in that rivalry. And the children are also rivals with the father in a way, right? Not just in some abstract psychological way where I'm gonna become a film producer, too, and I'm gonna surpass my father, and not just that type of stuff, but literally may need to defeat the father to get what they want as far as their life's work is concerned. But anyway, I think if the dynamic between the mother and the father involves their own type of rivalry and then the use of the sons as allies, then the father is no longer simply a successful intervening principle. Something to take people into the quote, unquote, symbolic order, as Lacan would put it. There's the opportunity to stay with the mother, which every son, I think, in some sense, has done. Even John, in a weird way. Right? So how does that speak to this problem of favoritism? And I was thinking out loud, and I'm not sure am I going to be able to get back to your question about favoritism. And we learned that we're not our mother's favorite, you know, maybe knitting is her favorite. Maybe it's father, maybe it's knitting, maybe it's being the CEO. We might be high on her list. Right. But we can't be everything. I think favorite can have multiple meanings, but I think the meaning we want it to have is to be everything to that person. Nothing is more important. But also there's really nothing else that's significant that can compete, that all competitors are eliminated. And to know that that's not the case, that there's always things that compete for the mother's attention, is a problem. And then that plays out in all of our relationships at some level, because we know that everyone has multiple relationships on a friendship level. We're polygamists. So I think you see those dynamics played out. I don't know if I've answered your question. I've gone on for a very long time now because I am just thinking about out loud. So I do think it's a very interesting question. It's just hard for me to fully wrap my head around it. I haven't thought fully about that. Does that help you elaborate your own thoughts on this? 44:48 Erin: I think so. I'm never quite sure what I think about these psychoanalytical readings of these dynamics because it always feels so foreign to me to think of things in those terms. 45:01 Wes: It still feels foreign to me, in a sense. I don't think it ever stops feeling foreign because. Yeah. 45:05 Erin: Yeah. Nor does it even seem right to me, that to be a favorite means to be everything to that person. For me, maybe. And again, I haven't. Though I'm the one bringing the subject up. I don't have really any set ideas about this either. I just think it's an interesting topic of conversation. But I think for me, or what my intuition might suggest about this, is that it's a matter of insecurity. So it's not that one has to be everything to one's mother, but that one has to feel secure that one is sufficiently valued by one's mother. And I think that the odd thing, maybe, about the Eleanor and Richards scene for me, is the fact that she's trying to win Richard over. She's trying to make him, in that moment, secure in her love for him, secure in the fact that he is her favorite, and she's bringing up the very relationship that I identify as being the root of whatever insecurities he has about that relationship. In other words, the competing affection of Eleanor for Henry. You may be right that this desire for favoritism is to be everything to the parent. But I think that favoritism, if you're someone's favorite, it implies that you occupy a secure position within that person's affections, that you're at the top of a kind of a hierarchy. And that can be a perilous place to be. Because you could be knocked out of that position by someone or something else, especially knitting. But the idea is a kind of search for security, which I think tells me that insecurity is at the root of maybe the desire to be recognized as the favorite. Or insecurity is, of course, a position of not being the favorite. And so the extent to which Henry and Eleanor have been occupied with either, alternately, like, having a passionate kind of love affair with each other and fighting with each other, I think has created the symptoms of this insecure environment in which there was no stable, secure sense of affection. And then they chose favorites to use as weapons against each other. But that position is really perilous when you're talking about an environment in which secure attachments have not been formed. And so even when you are the favorite in this particular family dynamic, that's a perilous position to be in, both because you become the target of the other children and because you may just as easily fall off the top of that pyramid if it behooves the parent. 47:30 Wes: But in this case, he may also be right upon. In a game between the father and the mother, she's trying to win his affection in a way. What is the rebellion right in the play? Not historically, but what is it? But, you know, as you pointed out, there's the infidelity. And then, in a way, her project is to win him back, win his love. And the sons become subordinate to that project. They get used for that. Right. She turns them into her allies. 48:01 Erin: I think that's right. 48:02 Wes: So they can be favorites in a sense, but favorites in the sense that they're useful to. The favorite is Richard, because he's the most effective at, you know, she's gonna help him conquer Henry. 48:14 Erin: Yes. I also think that Richard must have been the most affectionate towards her when he was a child, Obviously the most willing to receive her influence and attention. And I think that her whole thing, right, is that she feels rejected by her husband and therefore is extremely insecure in her. Like, ultimately, I think a lot of it has to do with she's insecure about whether or not she's sexually desirable and attractive. And Richard offered her that attention, it seems, when Henry was out gallivanting. So her affection kind of transferred to him because he makes her feel more secure in her desirability, which is maybe another, like, thread to which I think we've already touched on to this incestuous element where she didn't get attention and affection from her husband, she gets it from her son. 49:02 Wes: In this dynamic, who's the favorite, right, Comes down to who has the land or who's going to be king. And only one person can be king, and only one person can have the. What's the name of it? The Vexin. So if there's a love language for this family, it's. It's land or dirt, as Eleanor later puts it. There's a scene towards the end where Eleanor says to Henry, my losses are my work. And he says, what losses? And she says, I'm the one with nothing. Okay? So nothing is nothing equivocates between she doesn't have him and his love, but also she doesn't have her freedom from prison and she doesn't have the land that belongs to her. So he says, lost your life's work, have you? And she says, provinces are nothing, land is dirt. I could take defeats like yours and laugh. I've done it. So at that point where she says, provinces are nothing, land is dirt, I had the impression she was making fun of his pretension to not caring about that at this point, because he's made several gestures throughout the film that he's willing to give up all that stuff and he doesn't care about it. He just wants to marry Alice and that she's reacting to his idea that it's silly for you to care about the land. So provinces are nothing, land is dirt. But no, in the context of the film, provinces are everything. And land is not just dirt, it's love. And they have fully bought in. I think at some level they know it's crazy, right? But the political battles, the battles over who's going to be king and who's going to have the land, they are signifiers of maybe who's gonna be the favorite, who's gonna get the love? And they really aren't of any value. They're just purely associated, right? Cause they're not gonna get the love if they get the land or the titles. And they know that. They know it, and yet they can't help acting as if that's the case. They seem to be aware of it, and yet they just can't help themselves. To me, that's one of the most interesting things psychologically about the film. They are just caught up in this enactment and this kind of crazy belief that there's a pathway to love through political struggle and battle and scheming and all that stuff. And through hate, right? Because there's so much hate and hateful stuff, cruel stuff that goes on in the film, and resentful stuff. And it's as if there's a deeply held belief that hate can be used to win love in the same way that war might be able to win peace and all that. 51:32 Erin: I like that. Because I think that what you're saying essentially is that this is all, like, the land is kind of a proxy for the affections, but it's actually working in the opposite direction. Is that right? So when a really interesting moment that I love in the film, all three of the sons are together and Richard says to Henry, you know, what are you giving to Philip? What of mine? And John says, whatever you've got goes to me. And then Geoffrey says, and what's the. Nothing Geoffrey gets, You know, so each of the three of them are sort of like demanding. They're like baby birds with their mouths open, you know, squawking. And so Henry tells them the terms that, you know, at this point in the. In the scheme, relatively early on, that Richard will succeed him, he'll get Alice and the crown. And Jon is told, like, you know, he can't get the lands because he couldn't keep whatever Henry gave him, that he would lose it on the battlefield. And John says something like, oh, well, you know, you can help me. You know, if you fight with me, I'll keep it. And Henry says, of course, like, he won't always be there to win back these lands for John, and he has to know that whoever has these lands is going to keep them. And John says this really interesting line. You've led me on, right? Like, Henry has led him to believe that he's going to take over when Henry had really had no intention of giving up the crown to him. Of course, Henry really does have the intention of giving up the crown to him, but he's making this really interesting, you know, devil's advocate case that he can't give anything to John. And actually, it really doesn't make sense to give anything to John, because he's exactly right that John won't be able to hold any of these lands against his brother. But what's interesting to me is the line you've led me on, because it's like Henry is like teasing everyone, and there's a suggestion of being a romantic tease or some kind of sexual tease even to his own sons, using this Land or these titles or the Vexin or the Aquitaine or whatever, as a kind of proxy, so that it's a kind of wooing or keeping everyone in play or keeping everyone happy to a certain extent. That involves lying. That's kind like if you were somewhat like a guy who's trying to keep three women who are prospective romantic partners, each one of them happy at different points, and making sure that none of them kind of leaves you, you know, but lying to all of them to keep them in play, or vice versa, if you're a woman who's trying to keep three guys or whatever the case may be. Right. So whatever the arrangement that he's juggling. He's juggling them. That's the word. And it involves leading them on so that he has to placate the other two at various points, even though he wants only Jon to get it. It's an interesting. It's like he needs the others to feed off of this. He can't just give everything to Jon and then say that's the end of it, even though he could. Is it because. I mean, partially it's because he has to placate the other two, because they're going to rise up against him and have risen up against him. But it also seems to me to be a kind of a psychological need that parents maybe have in general, that Henry certainly has in particular, to like, keep the other two on the hook for. For these sort of more. More mysterious parental reasons where you actually want to have the affection of all three of your children at various points. Or, you know, you want to have the security that, like, if John betrays you, you'll have someone else. And this is ultimately what motivates him. I think in the end, to want to have more sons is to finally find the one that he can bethat will be loyal to him without having to juggle the others. That he could finally get it right and not have these variables of these three people who might turn on him and have turned on him at any moment. 55:03 Wes: Yeah, I think that's a very good point. We should talk about that in postscript. Yes, because there's a point where he talks about having lot that point of despair where he talks about having lost his sons and you think because of your way, did you ever have them? When are you talking about. About. So we should. I think we should talk about that. 55:20 Erin: Great. 55:21 Wes: Thank you. 55:22 Erin: Thank you. 55:30 Wes: [email protected] subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com Com.