Crise de panique
I’ve gotten really over-invested in Le Bureau, a tv show that it’s fair to call French Homeland. It’s a spy show with a lot of feints toward psychological realism and scenes where someone at a whiteboard explains which faction currently controls the different regions of Syria to the characters in the room (but really to the audience.) I don’t know why I’m insulting it! It’s a good show! I guess because it’s 2020 (for another few hours) and if you find anything pleasurable you’re supposed to immediately investigate why you shouldn’t enjoy it. Anyway: Le Bureau. It’s the main thing I have going on right now, and I still have two seasons left, so I hope it continues to be a bright spot in the days for me. Recently though there was a subplot in it that threw me for a loop.
(I’m not going to try to do this without spoilers, because I doubt you’ll immediately embark on a 6 season spy show that’s in French and even if you do, by the time you get to this subplot you’ll have forgotten about having read this newsletter.)
So there’s this spy, Marina, who’s come back from a mission in Iran, having been jailed and interrogated and tortured. We saw her survive and escape. Now she’s returning to active duty, but it quickly becomes apparent that she’s broken. At a coffee-date job interview — her cover identity is that she’s a seismologist, so it’s normal for her to get jobs in eg Iran — she thinks a guy a few tables away is listening to her conversation, and she hyperventilates and sprints out of the café. Despite this failure, her bosses let her try again, this time on a mission to Moscow. But at the airport she thinks she sees someone eyeing her suspiciously, makes excuses, and misses her flight as she hides in a bathroom stall, trembling and weeping.
I’m sure I’ve seen PTSD depicted in film and TV before, but if I’ve seen anyone have a panic attack onscreen with this level of specificity, I can’t remember it. Certainly, I felt I had more in common with Marina than with Tony Soprano passing out at the bbq. I hadn’t actively admired the actress who plays Marina before season 3 of the show, but maybe she’s a great actress because her performance is kind of flat and one-note, and you can project anything onto her, which means she’s a good spy? The scenes where she’s freaking out are so vivid because suddenly this blank person’s exterior is cracking. I guess the thing the actress nails is the tension of trying to seem okay when you feel like you’re dying.
I hadn’t had a panic attack for a while and then I started to have one when we were driving into Manhattan to go to the Natural History Museum. It was a beautiful sunny winter day, with cold white light shining on the East River, and we were zooming up the F.D.R. when I started to realize that I was sweaty, dizzy, and actively fantasizing about the moment I would be allowed to get out of the car. I didn’t tell Keith anything was wrong because it’s never my first impulse to tell anyone I’m freaking out. I took half an Ativan and continued to chat about whatever (global warming, which didn’t help.) In the car with the kids I’m always a little bit worried (in a normal way) that Ilya will barf because the times he’s barfed have come out of nowhere and have been truly horrific. In this context though I started to worry about it in a not-normal way, and that sort of dovetailed into thinking about the other bad things that could happen to us trapped on the shoulder-less F.D.R.
I felt fine by the time we were looking for parking, like, 75% fine. The whole time we were in the museum I was not thrilled to be inside with so many other people, but again, in a not-pathological way. I felt like I had control over my body and reactions.
Marina is obviously starting to seem doomed. The show has been telegraphing her doomed-ness for a while. The spy IT-guy character who’s always eating sandwiches at his desk compares her to a line of broken code that will eventually corrupt the whole system. She’s only on her current mission because she was recruited by a Mossad agent pretending to be a French agent for a mission in Azerbaijan — she was going to retire, but got pulled back in! Sorry, I’m trying to only give you as much context as is relevant but you can see the kind of show we’re dealing with (awesome to watch, doesn’t withstand a ton of scrutiny). Anyway, to get her Azerbaijan seismology job, she has to pass a polygraph test, and the Mossad-pretending-to-be-DGSE-agent handler coaches her through it in a way that seems like it might fix her brain, at least temporarily. He teaches her to purposely overreact to the benign questions like “have you ever lied to a boss,” deliberately holding her breath to get her heart rate up, so that any involuntary reaction to questions like “are you a spy” will seem minor by comparison. As we watch her ace the test, it seems like she might be back in control of her reactions, which she’ll need to be in order to have any chance at survival.
It occurs to me now that the one thing that’s off-limits to Marina is to tell whoever she’s with that she’s freaking out, but that is not off-limits to me. It’s only this weird prideful need for control that makes me imagine that it is.
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Happy (?!) 2021 to everyone who has read this far. I’m excited to read more newsletters this coming year from the newsletteristes/ Patreoners who have gotten me through 2020. It is not a coincidence that these people all have little kids.
If you like my letter and don’t subscribe to these you really should, just my 2 cents.
See you in 2021!