Room
At a certain point in Room, the protagonist, having escaped with the help of her son from their captor, a pseudo-father, is overwhelmed with guilt and berates herself for not being a good enough mother. At this point the suspicions of the audience are confirmed: this is a movie about the ideas of the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott.
Before we even know the ostensible premise of the movie, about a kidnapped girl kept in a small space for years, a scenario reminiscent of several crimes uncovered during the past few years, what the viewer sees is a small boy whose relationship to his surroundings seems somewhat peculiar: specifically, he does not apply definite or indefinite articles to the things he has about him, such as rug, wardrobe, chair, skylight, or room itself. This absence of articles in speaking about inanimate objects has the effect, in a way, of animating them, almost personifying them, or, in other words, of enchanting them.
What this amounts to is precisely the creation of transitional objects, and, through them, of transitional space: the boy’s mother has, in an attempt to ease his way into an encounter with the world, created a transitional world, between the originally omnipotent relationship of infant to breast, and the soon-to-be-encountered reality of a world in which failure and disappointment are assured. We understand in the film that the mother has done this as a form of protection from the awful circumstances in which the two of them find themselves, but in fact this is, according to Winnicott, nothing more than a description of the process of parenting itself, and specifically of mothering: rather than allowing the child to be overwhelmed by the too-sudden discovery that omnipotence was an illusion, the transitional object allows the child to invest in an object that symbolizes the mother while at the same time opening up the space of the world beyond the mother-child relation. In this way, she encourages the creation of what Winnicott calls a false self, but through which the mature self of adulthood becomes possible. The world is thus filled by the mother with things that are not real, that do not really exist, yet for the child they do indeed manage to consist, they hang together, they have magical power that extends them infinitely (room goes on forever, right to the end, as the son says).
Winnicott’s point is the same as the movie’s: that good motherhood is not a question of being everything for the child, but of managing this transition. The good enough mother is the mother who knows how to introduce the illusory transitional object in a way that opens up the transitional space that the child will eventually have to decide to leave. The false self is necessary, because it is only by departing from the omnipotence of infancy that the child learns all the forms of politeness and manners that define social life.
But it is precisely because the mother, as a good enough mother, takes responsibility for fostering transitional space, and the false self, that she is so often the target of rebukes. In Room we see this in an interesting way, for not only does the son rebuke her mother when she tries to prepare him to leave transitional space and enter the real world beyond room, but we also see the mother herself, after she has escaped, rebuke her own mother. Referring to the fact that her capture was made possible by being tricked into thinking she was helping, she yells at her mother:
Maybe if your voice saying "be nice" hadn’t been in my head, then maybe I wouldn’t have helped the guy with the fucking sick dog!
In addition to the fact that this injunction to “be nice” is the very definition of creating the false self, what is noticeable here is also the fact that she invokes the voice of conscience: the mother’s voice, the voice of the superego in other words, is an internalized authority with which the child has learned to identify and by which to police their own behaviour. The rebellion against this is a rebellion against the good enough mother, on the grounds her preparation for the real world was insufficient, that it was still too transitional, so to speak, too enchanted for the disenchanted reality of the true world. It is the rebellion that thinks it is ready for the bare facts of reality, where enchantment is no longer necessary, to simply dwell within what exists without resorting to that which does not exist, yet consists. How much of the discourse of resistance amounts to this kind of rebuke of the supposed falseness of the position of the good enough mother?
But the movie does not endorse this position, and nor should it, because it is really the expression of the disenchantment which the mother has experienced as a result of the trauma of her own unsatisfactory entry into the adult world: having just entered into adulthood, she found herself snatched away into a prison world totally alien to the world of social life where “being nice” would be a positive, useful virtue. She has, in a way, lost her own individuality, almost forgotten the fact that her name is Joy, lost in the overwhelming reality of seeming to be nothing more than a pseudo-wife and mother. That the voice in her head should be held responsible for this situation is an understandable reaction, but in fact the fault lies not with the mother but with the world: to get to this realisation, however, requires a process.
All this, too, is founded in a Winnicottian understanding of the difficulties of being a good enough mother, of striving to maintain an enchanted transitional space within an adult world where the mother herself may perceive all too well the non-existence of what merely, maybe, consists. As Winnicott well understood, it is the mother (or, by extension, the parental generation) who is mostly blamed for the faults of the world, and it is for this very reason that he formulated the phrase “good enough mother” as a form of defence: the good enough mother is not the mother who enables her child to resist the world, but the one who, through her own inventiveness in concocting transitional space, invests the child with the possibility of inventing its own relation to the world, or, in other words, of potentially reinventing the world as such.
And so the films ends, rather nicely, with the boy hopefully ready to leave the enchanted world of room once and for all, and begin a new life in the real world, and his mechanism for doing so, by saying goodbye to all the animated, personified, magical things of room, proves also to be the means by which he enables the hopeful re-enchantment of his mother’s disenchanted world.
What the film, then, can be construed as saying, is the following: not only must we remember how to be good enough mothers and fathers, capable of introducing transitional objects and thereby fostering transitional space around our children, and thereby to allow to grow within them the false self of social life, of savoir vivre, and of all those things that do not exist but consist; in addition to all of that, we must recognise that we ourselves are, today, constantly in the process of being disenchanted, in a systemic and systematic way that goes beyond the process of disenchantment and rationalization discussed by Max Weber, and that what we therefore need to cultivate are new processes of re-enchantment. For, after all, what do we do, when we go to see a good movie, other than engage in a ritual that opens us up to a kind of transitional object that in turn opens up a transitional space, which in so doing opens us to the possibility of being enchanted by the experience of that which does not exist, yet consists?
Before we even know the ostensible premise of the movie, about a kidnapped girl kept in a small space for years, a scenario reminiscent of several crimes uncovered during the past few years, what the viewer sees is a small boy whose relationship to his surroundings seems somewhat peculiar: specifically, he does not apply definite or indefinite articles to the things he has about him, such as rug, wardrobe, chair, skylight, or room itself. This absence of articles in speaking about inanimate objects has the effect, in a way, of animating them, almost personifying them, or, in other words, of enchanting them.
What this amounts to is precisely the creation of transitional objects, and, through them, of transitional space: the boy’s mother has, in an attempt to ease his way into an encounter with the world, created a transitional world, between the originally omnipotent relationship of infant to breast, and the soon-to-be-encountered reality of a world in which failure and disappointment are assured. We understand in the film that the mother has done this as a form of protection from the awful circumstances in which the two of them find themselves, but in fact this is, according to Winnicott, nothing more than a description of the process of parenting itself, and specifically of mothering: rather than allowing the child to be overwhelmed by the too-sudden discovery that omnipotence was an illusion, the transitional object allows the child to invest in an object that symbolizes the mother while at the same time opening up the space of the world beyond the mother-child relation. In this way, she encourages the creation of what Winnicott calls a false self, but through which the mature self of adulthood becomes possible. The world is thus filled by the mother with things that are not real, that do not really exist, yet for the child they do indeed manage to consist, they hang together, they have magical power that extends them infinitely (room goes on forever, right to the end, as the son says).
Winnicott’s point is the same as the movie’s: that good motherhood is not a question of being everything for the child, but of managing this transition. The good enough mother is the mother who knows how to introduce the illusory transitional object in a way that opens up the transitional space that the child will eventually have to decide to leave. The false self is necessary, because it is only by departing from the omnipotence of infancy that the child learns all the forms of politeness and manners that define social life.
But it is precisely because the mother, as a good enough mother, takes responsibility for fostering transitional space, and the false self, that she is so often the target of rebukes. In Room we see this in an interesting way, for not only does the son rebuke her mother when she tries to prepare him to leave transitional space and enter the real world beyond room, but we also see the mother herself, after she has escaped, rebuke her own mother. Referring to the fact that her capture was made possible by being tricked into thinking she was helping, she yells at her mother:
Maybe if your voice saying "be nice" hadn’t been in my head, then maybe I wouldn’t have helped the guy with the fucking sick dog!
In addition to the fact that this injunction to “be nice” is the very definition of creating the false self, what is noticeable here is also the fact that she invokes the voice of conscience: the mother’s voice, the voice of the superego in other words, is an internalized authority with which the child has learned to identify and by which to police their own behaviour. The rebellion against this is a rebellion against the good enough mother, on the grounds her preparation for the real world was insufficient, that it was still too transitional, so to speak, too enchanted for the disenchanted reality of the true world. It is the rebellion that thinks it is ready for the bare facts of reality, where enchantment is no longer necessary, to simply dwell within what exists without resorting to that which does not exist, yet consists. How much of the discourse of resistance amounts to this kind of rebuke of the supposed falseness of the position of the good enough mother?
But the movie does not endorse this position, and nor should it, because it is really the expression of the disenchantment which the mother has experienced as a result of the trauma of her own unsatisfactory entry into the adult world: having just entered into adulthood, she found herself snatched away into a prison world totally alien to the world of social life where “being nice” would be a positive, useful virtue. She has, in a way, lost her own individuality, almost forgotten the fact that her name is Joy, lost in the overwhelming reality of seeming to be nothing more than a pseudo-wife and mother. That the voice in her head should be held responsible for this situation is an understandable reaction, but in fact the fault lies not with the mother but with the world: to get to this realisation, however, requires a process.
All this, too, is founded in a Winnicottian understanding of the difficulties of being a good enough mother, of striving to maintain an enchanted transitional space within an adult world where the mother herself may perceive all too well the non-existence of what merely, maybe, consists. As Winnicott well understood, it is the mother (or, by extension, the parental generation) who is mostly blamed for the faults of the world, and it is for this very reason that he formulated the phrase “good enough mother” as a form of defence: the good enough mother is not the mother who enables her child to resist the world, but the one who, through her own inventiveness in concocting transitional space, invests the child with the possibility of inventing its own relation to the world, or, in other words, of potentially reinventing the world as such.
And so the films ends, rather nicely, with the boy hopefully ready to leave the enchanted world of room once and for all, and begin a new life in the real world, and his mechanism for doing so, by saying goodbye to all the animated, personified, magical things of room, proves also to be the means by which he enables the hopeful re-enchantment of his mother’s disenchanted world.
What the film, then, can be construed as saying, is the following: not only must we remember how to be good enough mothers and fathers, capable of introducing transitional objects and thereby fostering transitional space around our children, and thereby to allow to grow within them the false self of social life, of savoir vivre, and of all those things that do not exist but consist; in addition to all of that, we must recognise that we ourselves are, today, constantly in the process of being disenchanted, in a systemic and systematic way that goes beyond the process of disenchantment and rationalization discussed by Max Weber, and that what we therefore need to cultivate are new processes of re-enchantment. For, after all, what do we do, when we go to see a good movie, other than engage in a ritual that opens us up to a kind of transitional object that in turn opens up a transitional space, which in so doing opens us to the possibility of being enchanted by the experience of that which does not exist, yet consists?
Mini Review: A "good enough mother" helps her child negotiate Winnicottian transitional space, filled with transitional objects: introducing him to the enchantment of things that do not exist, then enabling detachment from this enchantment as the path to becoming adult. And he in turn makes possible her re-enchantment with a world that had become thoroughly disenchanted. Attention seems to have been paid to some of the details of filmmaking to which filmmakers seem increasingly incapable of paying attention.
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