Today’s post is a further exploration of the themes we surfaced in our previous Film Night. The movie in question is Shame, and you can catch up on our recorded round-table talk here.

Top of the fears that keep men out of the land of women—that keep men like us pushing good women away and in a Brandon-like, isolated experience—is the fear of losing freedom.

That if you let a woman too close to your space, you will lose your freedom.

We see this happen to Brandon. Not with any of the women he sleeps with or seduces—he’s masterful at maintaining distance. It happens with his own sister.

Brandon is proud that he has created what he has: a stable job, he owns his own pad. Through his self-direction, his responsibility, he has something: an apartment: a centre from which he can live out his great modern fetish—his undisturbed sense of ‘freedom’.

But what does he do with all that freedom? Think of times you experienced radical freedom: say you lived alone, you completed a work project and had a comfortable couple of months living off savings, the beginning of a long overseas trip. What did you do with all that freedom?

I have seasons of freedom and (relative) unfreedom, too. When I’m building up to a course launch, something inside me feels compressed. I think each day about these emails—I speak with too-many people over the phone. Then, two or three days after opening night, the push is over, and I simply respond to my students in a sweet hour per day.

In moments like the one I’m in now, I yearn for the freedom I project onto the other side. Right now I’m focused, on mission, carrying a positive level of stress. Yet post-launch, in all that dreamy freedom, I risk failing into the worst of my habits.

I’ll say this: after some twenty-or-so years on the road, in which I’ve met a number of men experiencing ‘freedom’ in ways unprecedented in all of history, I’d say less than 20% of them actually know how to use it. The rest of men live in an un-nameable existential soup—a calamitous absence of knowing how to confront the wild responsibility of a free life—and they look out at the world through scared eyes when they’re not collapsing back into their phones. Most are relieved to re-take their job and return home.

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When Sissy barges into Brandon’s ‘free’ domain, using the girlishness she can to bag herself a few nights’ stay, it triggers Brandon on a number of levels. Sissy is everything Brandon hates: she doesn’t have her own place because she is irresponsible, doesn’t work in something that gives her enough money, seems to travel all over the country without settling. She’s clingy, chaotic, dependent, a parasite: unable to get her life on the tracks.

On top of that, she’s needy, hysterical, something of a love-addict, over-emotional. She drinks the last of your orange juice and pesters you—do I look fat? What man wants that?! But in many ways, it doesn’t even matter that Sissy exists as a character: she represents the feminine half of Brandon’s psyche that he has cut off from himself. Yet Sissy is fun, she’s music and dance—with her are the only times we see Brandon playful—she has, as we saw, beauty, the sublime. She’s irritating, yes. She takes away Brandon’s bachelor freedom, and humiliates him by sleeping with his boss in his own bed. Though we cannot deny it: the closer Brandon gets to Sissy, the calmer, more integrated he is. The times he pushes Sissy away are the times his addiction swells to dangerous highs.

Whether we take Sissy as a metaphor for the feminine side of Brandon’s psyche, or whether we take her as a full character in herself, the psychology of these siblings is outstanding. There was a family trauma, and both brother and sister cut half of themselves off in order to deal with it. Their split is perfectly down the centre: Brandon embodies all the cultural ‘masculine traits’: the non-feeling, responsible cowboy, I guess entitled, after work, to a little vice. Sissy is everything ‘old school feminine’: needy, chaotic, emotional, yearning. So when Brandon and Sissy re-integrate with each other, their puzzle pieces fit together perfectly for wholeness.

So why does he push her away?

Well, while we’re here, I’ll invite you to bring the spotlight onto yourself:

— Can you relate to Brandon/Sissy’s sibling split?

— Who in your life is a puzzle piece that represents a missing part of you… but that you don’t want to connect with?

— Is there anyone (who claims to love you) that you typically push away?

— What are you trying to protect by keeping this person away? Can you touch into the feelings or memories you don’t want them to trigger?

— But what good, what beauty, is that person actually trying to bring you?

— If you’re partly estranged from a sibling (even parent), you might consider your split in this light: what happened that polarised your personalities against each other? How did you end up with different character traits, and how do you try to avoid the underlying pain?

Like most men out there that value ‘freedom’, Brandon’s freedom is a sham. He thinks himself psychologically independent, but the truth is that he’s counter-dependent. He’s so afraid of any dependence, the risk of exchanging any real need with another person, that instead of finding freedom through healing his aversions, he can only maintain ‘freedom’ by kicking any threat of dependence (including positive dependence) away.

You trap me!

If Brandon were truly free, he wouldn’t have to indulge in all these sexual acts to keep his inner pain away. Yet he does nothing with his freedom except spiral, unquestioned, into the compulsive cycle of his lowest habits. He identifies as responsible, but has built nothing in his life except the minimum requirements for fuel his addiction. Brandon’s freedom is 100% a coping mechanism, a shell of self-protection. Sissy’s existential threat to him is that, through her closeness, through closing off his seduction release valve, Brandon will have to now face all the aspects of relationship—all the aspects of himself—that he worked his whole life to cut off.

In this sense, ‘freedom’ is simply a euphemism for getting away from the feelings that really fuel your life’s choices. And it is not freedom at all.

I make you angry al the time, and I don’t know why.

Brandon explodes at Sissy on the bed, on the sofa, a number of times. Anger, in my experience, is usually our last-ditch response to protect us from shame: it’s the last ditch defence that keeps our identity, our face, together.

There are a number of catalysts that crack open Brandon’s shell, and put him in touch with his primordial shame. The final straw is his abject terror of Sissy’s death—his fear that she self-harmed by leaping onto the subway tracks—and only by fearing a grief larger than his own does he finally reach out to call her. The next few scenes cement his transformation. None of Brandon’s identity shift could have happened without Sissy: her yearning, her need for his protection, gave Brandon prolonged, forced contact with his forgotten half.

From the clutches of over an hour of dark despair, Shame, almost miraculously, ends up not being a tragedy.

And if the catharsis of the film is Brandon, finally, breaking open into grief in the rain, the climax of the film, the moment on which all healing always hinges, is that moment in the hospital where he touches—for the first time, with tenderness—Sissy’s (his) numerous self-made scars.

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Perhaps the aspect of this movie I most relate to is that I, too, thought I lived years of freedom. But really, much of these adventuring years was simply self-exile.

And it’s precisely self-exile that leads most men to seduction teachings. And as we saw on the Film Night with Marianne, the land of women offers only a slim window… through which we might climb out.

T-11 days: We did this movie night as a taster to the new Masterclass, Hidden Sides. Season #2 starts this Sunday. Sign up here.

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