Birdcage How Do We Learn

¶ … Birdcage How do we learn who we are? This may seem to be an odd question, for our initial response to such a question is likely to be something like we simply know who we are because we can connect our identity to our pasts and presents.

We remember what has come before, from the age of three or four for most of us, and we have a working model of how everything that we have experienced fits with the concept of we have of who we are in the world. And, in very broad outlines, this is true: We are a collection and a commentary on the pasts that we have endured and celebrated. The 1996 movie The birdcage, with its multivalent commentaries about identity and gender, helps us see how the past molds our present.

But who we are is at least as much the product of how other people see us and try to mold and change us as we are the product or result of whom we wish to see ourselves.

Indeed, many models of psychology and psychotherapy would lead us to believe that whom we are see ourselves to be is far more the result of the ways in which we measure ourselves against others (and the ways in which other people react to our self-presentation) than anything that is created purely within the self.

The movie The birdcage (released in 1996 in the United States) provides a comic yet illustrative representation of the ways in which we learn to understand ourselves only through the way in which we attempt to understand ourselves through other people's eyes -- and the ways in which we each spend a great deal of energy trying to get other people to see ourselves in ways that help support a self-image that is as consonant as possible with goals that society itself has instilled.

The movie's storyline is a relatively simple one. It focuses on a gay cabaret owner who in cahoots with a companion of his who is a drag queen together agree to pretend to be straight for a period of time so that their son can introduce the pair to the right-wing, straight-laced, rigidly conventional parents of the son's fiance. In many ways, the movie is played for laughs, and not always (or even often) the subtlest of ones.

But beneath -- or perhaps beside -- the broad brushstrokes of this story of pretence and pretend is a story of how we spend a great deal of our time, energy, and ego trying to fit into the categories that we believe other people want us to adopt. According to Adams in his book The multicultural imagination (1996) our perceptions, beliefs and ideas about individuals of other cultures and groups are based in the relationship of the Self to the other.

This idea of the self owes at least as much to anthropology as it does to psychology, bearing in mind that the historical roots of these two disciplines were close together. (That is, in the nineteenth century, psychology and sociology were much closer to each other than they are now.) Adams (1996) asks us to revisit the idea of the "Self" as an essence that each person (and each culture) created in terms of opposition.

At its most basic, this meant that anthropologists (and the colonial powers from which they came) saw themselves as "civilized." And the idea of "civilized" was one that the anthropologists defined in opposition to those people whom they saw as primitive. Indeed, early anthropologists seemed to go out of their way to find people who were as different from themselves in cultural terms as possible, using the differences that they found to define themselves as the epitome of civilized.

In their world -- for example, in the work of such classical anthropologists as Bronislaw Malinowski -- the greater the degree of difference between "Self" (i.e. white, anthropologist, scholar, citizen of the First World) and the "Other" (non-white, lay person, citizen of the Third World), the more the superiority of the self was demonstrated. Of course, we no longer believe in such dichotomies. Or at least we like to think that this is the case.

But a movie like The birdcage reminds us how short the distance often is from a view of society such as that promulgated by Victorian scholarship and our own twenty-first century daily lives. For the ways in which the different sets of characters define themselves is clearly still marked by this same kind of oppositional process. We understand ourselves in contrast to others.

We can, all too often, only see ourselves as "normal" or good if we can dredge up another person or group of people that we can see as lesser than ourselves -- less morally developed, less socially entitled, less normal.

The humor of the movie is that both the two lead characters, whose sexuality and sense of self is both defined as being defiantly non-conventional, and the two conservative characters (the son's fiancee's parents), whose sexuality and sense of self is very clearly defined by being as "normal" as possible, are equally inflexible and as lacking in insight as each other.

The fact that both conventional and unconventional characters are presented as lacking insight is what allows for the humor of the movie to flourish: Stereotypical characters are entertaining to watch precisely because they insight. We can laugh at all of the characters in the movie because we can feel superior to them, believing that we in the audience are far more insightful about how we define our sense of self than are the characters that we see up on the screen.

But, despite the fact that the movie sometimes plays more for laughs than for social commentary (and, to be fair, there is no reason why this should not be the case: this is, after all, a movie rather than a therapeutic session), The birdcage provides a useful canvas on which to draw conclusions about how Self is constructed, especially around the issues of gender.

Clinicians, like all of us as individuals, must be aware of the fact that some forms of identity are considered in any given society to be normative, or more "normal" than others. For example, if we meet someone in a casual way (say, in the line at the grocery store), we are likely to assume that that person is heterosexual. This is in part because most people are heterosexual, and so is arguably a question of statistical chance.

But it also reflects the fact that we tend to assume that people whom we do not know are likely to members of the socially dominant groups. Therefore in the United States we tend to assume that people are heterosexual, white (unless they are physically clearly unambiguously another race), Christian, etc. There are advantages to such assumptions in the course of everyday life: They are heuristics that allow us to make quick decisions about the complexities of life so that we can get through the complicated mazes of the day.

However, such heuristics are dangerous for clinicians, for one of the most important jobs that a therapist has is to help her or his clients find more subtler, more nuanced, and healthier ways through which to understand the categories to which we belong. We might all wish that we could each live a life in which there were no categories, in which we could each simply be whomever we wished to be. This is on its surface the kind.