In W (2008), Oliver Stone delivers something truly surprising. A long-time critic of the Bush administration, Stone caused a stir in moviemaking circles by offering, to use his own term, a ‘compassionate’ representation of George W Bush – a President who Stone paradoxically singles out as the worst politician in American history. Like most people in the world, the legendary director is furious about the damage left in George Junior’s wake. ‘Pre-emptive’ military action in foreign policy, unilateral defiance of UN resolutions, lack of leadership in the fight against climate change and world economic disasters are only a few of the reasons to look back with anger on the Bush government. But unlike so many other dissenters, Oliver Stone, in highlighting the psychological mechanisms underpinning the public persona, puts personal anger to one side and addresses his subject with a much kinder but ultimately more revealing technique: bringing humanity to George W Bush. The path that leads to Bush as a hate figure is an all too familiar one but it doesn’t add anything new to our understanding of him as a person. What Oliver Stone has done in his film is to focus on W’s fallibility as a man, the fact that fundamentally W does not know himself and makes life decisions that are rooted in his lack of self-awareness. This approach, however controversial, might prove to be a much more powerful and far more consequential protest song.
Psychoanalysis enables a more enhanced perspective on George W Bush’s unconscious motivations, through a study of the unresolved conflict highlighted in his relationship with his father, George H Bush. According to Jacques Lacan, unconscious experiences predispose a person to relate a certain way to entering the realm of language. Parents play a crucial role, as mothers are intimately connected to nature and the body (pregnancy, breast-feeding, bathing, clothing) and fathers are responsible for introducing children into society (setting rules, discipline, shaping goals for success). Language is a direct result of the paternal influence, as words are structured together in a ‘lawful’ manner and a socially constructed semantic authority (e.g., school) assigns meaning through speech. When a baby learns how to talk, it is essentially forming its identity through the course of language, and the way in which the child grows up to relate to words and to language is a reflection of how they come to view the father/authority/society’s law. On the one hand, if the relationship with words is a seamless and comfortable one in which the speaker masters language and uses it to gain power, success and credibility, then there is a positive identification with the paternal agency. On the other hand, the linguistic experience may be a tumultuous one, in which the speaker feels the perpetual sense that words do not capture the exact idea they want to vocalise or on the contrary that words have the power to expose more than initially intended. This second way of relating to language is a hallmark of the psychological structure referred to by Lacan and Sigmund Freud as ‘neurosis’. The typical neurotic speaks beyond the words he knowingly employs. Moreover, neurotic speakers are incessantly aware of the inadequacy of language for conveying their experiences – they may be clumsy or indeed terrible speakers but they remain painfully preoccupied by their own ineptitude in the realm of language. An inability to conform to the father’s establishment of law and order results in the neurotic person to work feverishly to justify his existence by performing some compulsive rituals to escape the terror of the father’s disapproval.
These psychoanalytic principles allow the viewer to obtain clarity in Oliver Stone’s portrait of George W Bush, especially as this is a story that revolves around a trauma of the father-son dynamic. W was his father’s namesake, but the burden of the name was greater than he could endure – he was a wild child, a drunken frat-boy who couldn’t please his business-like and unfeeling father. Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush, W’s mother, exclaimed, “You’re like me son, you’re hot tempered! Your brother Jeb, he’s like your Daddy, he’s got a cool head.” This was devastating to W, who desperately wanted to be like his father, to have his approval, but doing so meant going against his own nature. When he partied and got into trouble, George Senior admonished him, “You’re not a Kennedy. You’re a Bush – act like one!” These are the mixed messages that set the tone for W’s life. Who was he? What was the purpose of his existence? As he struggled with addiction and various professional failures, the constant presence of his father’s faultfinding tone permeated all aspects of his life. It was a tug of war in many ways, as his rebellious streak wanted to be free to enjoy a career that brought him mostly pleasure (i.e., managing a baseball team) without political influence. But the overwhelming lack of fatherly acceptance and encouragement fanned the flames of W’s neurosis, causing the sacrifice of his personal values in order to comply with the imagined ambition set by his father: Bush in name, Bush in nature.
George W Bush’s reassessment of his life and the single-minded pursuit of a career in politics occurred, probably not due to mere coincidence, when he became a ‘Born Again Christian’. His conversion to religion is a symbol for an altogether more essential ‘rebirth’, a re-emergence into language itself – wiping away past mistakes and reappearing on the scene of a clean linguistic slate. All the arguments with Daddy, the insults, the criticisms, the doubt that was expressed, all of it cleared out to make way for a new speaker, a new W, one who could proudly occupy the territory of his father’s name. W became George Senior’s mini-me; he not only began talking the talk, he also started walking the walk! In 1995 W was elected Governor of Texas, rubbing elbows with the powers that be, becoming a power in his own right. And when the US election was (dubiously) won in 2000, W reached the pinnacle of his father’s professional stature as the most powerful man on the planet. A President and his President son – had W finally realised his greatest ambition?
Unfortunately for George W Bush and for the world, an ascent to power that is based on unresolved unconscious conflict can only lead to dire consequences of its misuse. W was not rid of his neurotic tendencies – his uncomfortable relationship with words and language betrayed the façade of mastery and confidence that he and his administration tried to construct. Two wonderful examples are featured in Oliver Stone’s film. The first when, early on in W’s political life, he declares that he’s “no good with words”, that it is Karl Rove’s job to select the words that capture W’s message. The second event takes place during a press conference in W’s second term in the White House, when a reporter asks W how he will be portrayed in history – thus directly hitting the nerve of W’s existential angst. Feeling the pressure of this loaded question, W panics, stutters very badly and mumbles some sort of incoherence (typical of the ‘Bushisms’ that are now a universal joke), obviously not providing a meaningful answer. Once again, W is confronted with his inadequacy in the realm of language, which is inherently the realm of authority/power/law. The tragedy is that he’s the President, he’s at war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, his name is George Bush – but he’ll never be his father. W’s neurosis rages on, his suffering continues.
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