The series Fight (in the original, Beef ), released this month by Netflix, is already considered the biggest recent success of the respective streaming . On the internet, in a first search, you will find the following synopsis "A traffic incident awakens the fury and darkest impulses of two strangers: a bankrupt contractor and a frustrated businesswoman". Those who watched it know that "bankrupt" and "frustrated" are far from being able to handle the protagonists. On the other hand, "fury and the darkest impulses" may come closer to what unfolds from the traffic incident.
Amy, the "frustrated businesswoman", works hard and is successful in her job. He is about to close a deal that will allow him to be more at home with his family, something he dreams of. As the plot unfolds, we discover that she has deeper issues and wounds, carried since childhood.
Right after the traffic incident, in one of the first scenes, Amy tries to tell her husband what happened in traffic (in reality, in the parking lot of a store). Soon he interrupts her and reminds her to think positively, says that maybe they need to go back to the "book of gratitude". In another scene, also with her husband, Amy tries to talk about the emptiness she feels inside herself. He soon states that he understands what she is talking about, interrupting her speech.
Repeatedly, Amy has her voice and her conflicts muffled, silenced. There is something very large and important about his subjectivity that simply does not find space to appear, in any relationship. Silence takes a toll. And it is precisely in the "beef" he has with Danny, the "bankrupt contractor", that something of this can emerge.
On the other hand, Danny tries to improve his life, always helpful and well-intentioned, but ending up making very questionable choices when he feels he can't succeed. He always tries to get back on his feet, but the truth is that he feels extremely frustrated, without getting results from his efforts. It is also in the relationship with Amy that his darker face is revealed.
Both Amy and Danny oscillate between destructive impulses and so-called "good" ones. Danny constantly fights against his dark side, avoiding at times – sometimes at the last minute – causing a tragedy. Some would say: "deep down he is a good person". Amy, on the other hand, sometimes says that she is a bad person, as if she is beyond repair, she is broken forever.
Throughout the series, other characters also show their "good side and their bad side", their weaknesses, their desires. But specifically with regard to the protagonists, to whom we have greater access, why can't they curb their violent impulses? How do they get to the frightening escalation we have witnessed?
In the article "The other and the violence of culture" , Tania Rivera reminds us:
Culture is a place of malaise because it is always conflictual, in it we are always foreigners. And it manages conflict and well-being against a background, almost always repressed, of extreme cruelty (Rivera, 2008, p. 76) .
Does our culture allow anger and aggression to come through? Or does it reproduce a speech similar to that of Amy's husband, of a certain "toxic positivity"? Rivera observes that we are currently led to propagate a moral discourse about violence, as if it were not also an undeniable and constituent part of our nature:
Man is sometimes a "wild beast", there is no place for any defense of a human nature safe from violence. There is no way to treat violence as a behavioral deviation. It is not enough to repudiate it, it is necessary to make room for it in our thought, with all its challenge, all its pain (p. 75).
In his drive theory, Freud states that the death drive and the life drive are present in living beings in a mixed way. "Life would consist in the manifestations of conflict or in the interaction between the two classes of instincts (...) (Freud, 1923, Two encyclopedia entries. The libido theory , Standard Edition, p. 274, ). But how can we make room for what is in us and what is of the order of death without installing barbarism?
In Remember, repeat, and work , Freud brings the idea of a "compulsion for repetition" – which will be dealt with in Beyond the pleasure principle , where he develops the concept of the death drive – from which the analysand would repeat instead of remembering. The psychoanalyst states:
(...) it repeats everything that has already imposed itself from the sources of its repressed in its evident essence, its inhibitions and unfeasible positions, its pathological character traits. Because he also repeats all his symptoms during treatment. (p. 156, Authentic edition) .
The analyst then has the objective of making the analysand "remember in the old way", that is, to reproduce something of the impulses in the psychic and not motor spheres. Thus, in an analysis, it is about seeking that the analysand remembers speaking, to prevent him from acting. It is a "(...) triumph of the treatment, the resolution of something through the work of remembering, which the patient wants to unload through an action (p. 158).".
So we have pointed out here a way to deal with aggressive and violent impulses, to deal with anger. It is necessary to make room to place such affection in the field of the word and, in this sense, the analysis is placed as a privileged space for listening to the trauma, to the violence of which the subject was also the object. Psychoanalysis does not shy away from looking at and listening to what is of the order of horror and destruction, in a kind of asepsis and denial of what is human; backwards:
The psychoanalyst is precisely the one who is summoned by this sign [of the disaster], and the one who takes as his mission the transmission of the disaster. Even knowing that one cannot speak of it fully – in fact, this resists speech, it is almost impossible to get to its core – speech, in the best of cases, manages to circumvent it, to give it a margin (Rivera, 2008) .
That which cannot be said, said, can end up being "acted upon", put into action, with all the consequences that this can bring. This is much of what we see unfold in the plot of Fight .
[Below, there are spoilers about the series].
No wonder, after many twists and turns, isolated and under the effect of a hallucinogenic plant, Amy and Danny end up sharing their deepest issues, their greatest pains and fears, that which had not found a place in any relationship. In the final scene - probably the most beautiful of all the episodes - it is precisely Danny, for so long her enemy, that Amy ends up hugging. Perhaps there is no greater intimacy than sharing with someone your darkest and most disastrous side.
