My childhood, that is.
I am halfway through watching Team Foxcatcher, the real story behind the events depicted in the movie Foxcatcher, and let me tell you, I really feel bad for John DuPont.
For one thing, I identify with him. I know what it is like to grow up socially isolated like he did. And he had it far worse than I ever did. I mean, this poor guy had never had a meal with another human being until he was 13 years old. All his meals were brought to him by the maid. Everyone he knew worked for his family. He had siblings but they were all older and had little to do with him.
And I identify with that a million percent.
I know what it’s like to be forgotten. To be too timid to ever ask for attention or advocate for your own needs, and therefore to have to learn to be self-sufficient in a really terrible way. You don’t learn how to live, let alone thrive, but you do learn how to… get by. How to not quite starve. How to cling to the tiniest shreds of human warmth you get.
How to be pathetically grateful that a cashier was kind of nice to you.
Luckily for me, I didn’t have the option of buying friends. I figure I am better off for that, on the whole. I would rather have sincere loneliness than insincere closeness any day of the week. At least when you are alone, you know where you stand.
But John didn’t have that. Like a lot of people who grow up rich, he learned to be paranoid about whether people really liked him or just saw him as a big bag of money. But not too paranoid… he always had a rather pathetic credulity, willing to do anything for people who made him feel like he had a friend.
That’s so pathetic it makes my whole soul sad. And like I said… I can very much relate.
A lot of times in my life, I met someone who made me feel less alone and then clung to that person despite the fact that the person obviously didn’t really want me around. But when you are that lonely, you will ignore all but the firmest and clearest of signals to go away.
Like the dog who comes back, tail wagging, no matter how many times he gets kicked. Because sometimes he does not get kicked, and gets to hang around and feel like he belongs for a while.
John was so much like me, but worse. We see him in the documentary at age 55, but he clearly still has the emotional patterns of a child. Like fixating on someone and wanting to be around them all the time. And a strong need to be liked. And, sadly, a certain instability in his sense of reality.
According to the doc, he had his good days and his bad days, and on his bad days, things got pretty weird.
Like, they tell one story of a time when John called to say he needed to be rescued because his brand new Lincoln was floating in the estate’s pond. Everyone thought, well, okay, he was going too fast around the pond, could happen to anyone. So the auto shop gives him a loaner to use while the Lincoln dried out.
The very next day, John has a very important Russian wrestling official in the back seat of the loaner, and does the exact same thing again. Drives the loaner right into the pond. What a weirdo, right?
Well as a similar breed of weirdo, I can tell you exactly why he did it, both times. Because by driving into the pond, he made people express concern over him and display care by coming to rescue him. That’s exactly the sort of thing I can imagine myself doing if I were a little less stable. There have been times when I seriously contemplated inflicting harm on myself just to get the caring attention I craved.
Luckily, I am too sane to actually do that kind of thing. Nope, not me. I would never do something that would be so obviously a cry for help.
In fact, I never cry for help at all.
If you are wondering about the title, Foxcatcher was the name of the athletic compound John built for the various athletes he more or less adopted, particularly wrestlers. Another poignant detail from the doc is that all the wrestlers worked together to let John pretend to be a wrestler like them. To be “part of the team”. He trained with them, wrestled with them, even entered wrestling competitions with them, all to feel like one of the boys.
But he was in his fifties and frail and slow and so he just plain could not wrestle. The wrestlers would wrestle him and let him win. They’d encourage him to compete. They would put together fake wrestling meets where there would be an audience shouting his name. It’s exactly what you would do for a Make-a-Wish kid… and for a lot of the same reasons.
For most of them, it was out of genuine affection for this clearly very delicate man. He wasn’t just a meal ticket to them. I can imagine someone like that having a profound effect on you. He’s the sort of person who could rouse the nurturing instinct in Ebenezer Scrooge himself.
I am only halfway through the doc, so I don’t know what leads to the tragic end to the story. But I have gotten far enough that he is showing all the classic signs of paranoid schizophrenia spiraling out of control, so it is pretty clear that he’s on the wrong path.
And when you are rich and powerful, who is there to save you from yourself? Paranoid schizophrenia is incredibly hard to treat even under the best of conditions.
But with someone like him?
It’s no wonder it all ends in tragedy.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.