Comments on: The Adversary

By: beluga

beluga — Tue, 27 Jul 2004 22:43:35 +0000

note to cherylb: it’s life (perhaps) imitates life not fiction. the hacking case is still ongoing, of course, but the parallels are frightening. at least, the couple’s parents are unharmed, physically, but romand, the subject of the adversary, may have inadvertently done his parents a favor by murdering them & sparing them the pain of learning what their son/son-in-law’s been up to.

By: mc

mc — Sun, 25 Jul 2004 15:26:48 +0000

I didn’t read the book, but just watched the film, The Adversary – the one with Daniel Auteil. What a story. And aren’t the French so good at telling this kind of unsettling stuff in very ordinary ways, it makes it even more haunting. I don’t know how faithful the film is to the actual events, but while it leaves you with uneasy questions, it does a very good job of giving you glimpses of how the protagonist viewed his own actions as inevitable. His choices were insane and destructive but you do get to see hints of how he justified them to himself. You get to see his own self-serving logic. I really think the missed exam was only a pretext. It could have been anything else. He chose to miss it, chose to never take it again, chose to start this massive deception… but he never fully admits he made those choices. The main impression I got is exactly what Ophelia said above – the solipsism, how other people were there for him as puppets in his play. Even as he seemed to care for their reaction and feelings, all he cared for in the end was that they didn’t interfere and that he could use them to prop up his act. Also, he constantly played tricks with them to somehow shift (in his own mind) the responsibility for the hardest decisions on them. Like when he starts telling the truth to his best friend, then somehow lets him derail the conversation – that was masterful, the way he did it. You could imagine him thinking, “there, I tried, I tried, but he just wouldn’t let me”. And when he tries and convince his mistress that he can’t “invest” her money… he is not trying at all, even here, but he is pleading, “please don’t me make do it!”, as if it was her call. As if he was somehow condemned by others, or by fate, to do what he did. It’s very fascinating, how he manipulated these situations to serve his self-justifications. The other unsettling thing is indeed the role of other people. The question you don’t want to ask but feel compelled to is how on earth could those who were so close to him not pay due attention to his weirdness. When the police is nearly hassling his doctor friend with that question, you feel sorry for the guy, you see he is truly shocked and of course he has nothing to be blamed for. But while you feel annoyed by the policeman’s questions, you do see he has a point, you want to ask those questions too, not to blame anyone else, but just to try and understand, and imagine “what if they could have stopped him earlier”… That’s very tricky, also because you basically end up thinking like the protagonist there, you nearly fall in his trap on that very question. In the film, it’s a good trick because it does make you see things from his angle. You can see how his deception mechanism was something that he viewed as inevitable, even if it was of his own making. He avoided acknowledging any responsibilities so he built something that would allow him to think of himself as trapped, and justify anything he’d do, and avoid responsibilities, and keep up the deception – all in a perfect loop. He liked to think he couldn’t stop lying, because what else was there apart from lies? nothing. It was easier to kill people than kill his own lies. If he didn’t kill them, and they exposed him, that would have made his whole construction pointless, to his own eyes. He couldn’t bear that. He couldn’t kill himself, either, as long as his family was alive, because that too would have exposed the lies, and made his deception pointless… so he felt trapped. By killing them, he did something so evil that it somehow justified in his mind all he had done up til then. That was the most inevitable outcome, in his mechanism. He “had to” take decisions that were increasingly worse so that they could somehow vindicate the pointlessness of the initial one. Totally insane, but with is own relentless inverse logic. It’s like he was addicted to that feeling of inevitability, even as he took the worst possible decisions, they had to appear inevitable to him, not his own choosing. Maybe that’s why he says even prison is more tolerable – the quote in that CNN review shai linked to. His own lies were not a perfectly self-enclosed mechanism, they were still open to that intolerable choice of the alternative, telling the truth. Prison is total inevitability with no alternatives, and no future choices to make. So paradoxically in prison he’s “free” and happy… It’s the ultimate in self-serving lies. Oh well, maybe this is flattering the character too much with all this pseudo-existentialist reading, and the real killer was likely a lot less complex or interesting than the film (or novel) makes him look like. Auteil is just so good. But as a story, as a narration, it does haunt you with those questions, even at much more trivial and less tragic levels.

By: cheryl b

cheryl b — Fri, 23 Jul 2004 05:36:56 +0000

This thread ties to the current search for Lori Hacking, the missing pregnant jogger whose husband was allegedly going to North Carolina to attend medical school. The police have found out that he had never applied. Life mimics fiction….

By: cheryl b

cheryl b — Fri, 23 Jul 2004 05:36:25 +0000

By: cheryl b

cheryl b — Fri, 23 Jul 2004 05:35:55 +0000

By: Robin Green

Robin Green — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 15:11:12 +0000

Ophelia – that degree of solipsism has a name. It is called “being a psychopath“. The only thing that doesn’t fit is that psychopaths tend to be utterly shameless. Still, I expect they still try to avoid being found out.

By: Ray Davis

Ray Davis — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 19:53:44 +0000

The “true story” is indeed worthy of contemplation. Unfortunately, Carrere’s treatment of it is painfully trite and obtrusively self-involved. For me, it chiefly served as a reminder that Patricia Highsmith’s prose deserves more credit than it gets.

By: glory

glory — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 16:12:00 +0000

it was utterly irrational well, maybe not quite utterly; there could be a reason :D btw, there was a nice guardian interview with carrère a few years back! also, the onion liked the movie! (i thought it was okay :) oh, and it's romand...

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 13:11:22 +0000

I’m suspicious of the single incident that turns someone to a life of crime… Reminds me, in an admittedly weird way (I’ve taught and tutored mathematics), of people who claim they can’t understand math because they missed a critical lesson on fractions in the third grade and never caught up.

By: Shai

Shai — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 03:53:19 +0000

Ran into this cnn review/summary back in 2001 when I was reading several books on the topic of self-deception. It's fascinating, not because the story is incredible, but a lot of us can identify with a lie, often to bolster our image, that turns into an elaborate web just to remain consistent, simultaneously wildly inconsistent with less tall tales your other friends know about you. And by chance you all happen to collide one day...

By: vivian

vivian — Wed, 21 Jul 2004 01:40:22 +0000

Ophelia, Keith: Surely if he were a solipsist then he wouldn’t care what other people thought, believing that he could simply re-imagine them as more admiring. Roland sounds less philosophical than tv-confessional (antisocial personality disorder), doesn’t he? No impulse control, no ability to delay gratification or accept disappointment (or shame), not enough regard for others to, as Ted says, kill himself and spare the others. Ross, help your friend to get some help, he’s not alone, though he probably feels like he is. I doubt he’s like the guy in the book though.

By: PG

PG — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 23:45:11 +0000

I see the existentialist element here, though: if we are left to make our own (im)moral way, what is to block us from being motivated by something as pathetic and universal as the fear of embarrassment? Ophelia wonders at how other people could exist for this man only insofar as they thought well or poorly of him. This reminds me of an argument I made to a friend last night, that most people surely would behave the same regardless of whether they believed in a deity or not. Most of us don’t refrain from murdering each other just because we’re afraid of an old bearded man’s throwing us in hell, or even just because we fear the police; we realize that other people exist for purposes beyond our own convenience, so even if it would be simpler to have them dead, we don’t do it. For Roland, however, there apparently was fear of neither God nor Government to restrain him, and no sense of other people as more than his audience. So he killed them when it became too difficult to avoid embarrassment through obfuscation and deceit.

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 23:04:31 +0000

Ophelia: that’s astonishingly solipsist, isn’t it? It’s hard to imagine that many people could be that truly solipsistic. Hmm. But it’s not truly solipsistic, when you think about it. It’s just necessarily very selfish. It’s isn’t necessary that he think of those people as only extensions of his person, but that he recognizes their autonomy but values it less than his being in a shame-free emotional state.

By: Matt Weiner

Matt Weiner — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 23:02:42 +0000

Ophelia, I think it may be even more common than you think—not just as a force for Evil, but for Good. I think a lot of moral behavior may come from a desire not to embarrass yourself—not to be called out in front of others.
But then, I’m much more likely to put off something I ought to be doing once I think I’m already embarrassingly late doing it. And the Millgram experiments sound kind of similar to me; the subjects may have (so they thought) tortured someone to death because they didn’t want to make a scene in front of the scientist who seemed to know what was going on. Cf. also the reaction to Joseph Darby.

By: DC

DC — Tue, 20 Jul 2004 22:31:37 +0000

“Highly recommended.” The book or the life-path? “He could have gotten a job, rather than spending his adult life reading newspapers all day.” He could have done both. That’s me done.