The Mystic River is seven miles long, traversing eastern Massachusetts, just outside Boston. In an Algonquian language, “Missi-Tuk” means, “a great river whose waters are driven by waves”; this refers to the tidal nature of the Mystic. And that captures the relentless cyclical force of destiny in this film, its tragic inevitability, which in turn has led many critics to think about Sophocles and Shakespeare when they discuss it. Considering destiny and tragedy, we would like to believe we have the capacity to choose between alternatives, and one moral of this film is, more than we realize, we do not.
How do things go wrong? Aristotle, who defined tragedy in his Poetics, thought the key development in tragedy is that a great person experiences a peripeteia, a reversal of fortune. And this reversal is caused by the tragic hero's hamartia, which is a mistake of some kind, based on not knowing. (It derives from hamartanein, missing the mark, a spear missing its target.) Unable to help himself, because he does not understand, the hero moves to his doom. Oedipus's hamartia was his lack of knowledge about his own identity, which resulted in his feeling free to slay the man at the crossroads who was his father, and to bed the woman who was his mother. In the face of hamartia, the situation is hopeless. Ignorance unscrews choosing. In Oedipus at Colonus, the chorus repeats, “Not to be born is best.”
Shakespeare's tragic heroes could only move to their destruction. It was not ignorance now, but character flaws that sealed their fate—Macbeth's ambition, Othello's impetuousness, Hamlet's indecisiveness, Lear's vanity. Tragic figures in Shakespeare's work are doomed by the difficult aspects of their natures. We have no sense that their fabrics could unravel otherwise, they are done in from the start. It is not only Hamlet who is incapable of choice, the rest may think they are choosing, but we know better. Richard III says, “And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover, / To entertain these fair well-spoken days, / I am determined to prove a villain.” He could not do otherwise.
The film opens with Sean's and Jimmy's dads talking about tonight's Red Sox game, they have Luis Tiant pitching, and those of us who know baseball realize we are watching the team that is trying to go a full century between World Series wins. Our team of destiny.
We move to the road, where young Sean, Jimmy and Dave are playing street hockey. A car pulls up and the driver gets out, claiming to be a cop. The boys buy it, although Jimmy is street smart enough to claim he lives right here, so the guy worries maybe mother is watching. Dave is a naïf, he is scared of authority, and so he tells the truth, I live on Rester Street. No dilemma, not even a choice there. Makes it easy for the driver to grab him, stuff him in the car, and peel away.
Thirty years later, grown up, Jimmy runs a corner store. A former con man, he is now the head of the neighborhood family. While he was in jail, his wife died, and once out he devoted himself to raising their daughter. Katie is 19 now, and planning to elope; instead she is murdered. Jimmy screams when he finds her. “Love and rage in equal quantities,” the screenwriter Brian Helgeland writes, “it shreds the birds from the trees.” Suspicion will fall on Dave. He has come home bloodied that night, and he was in the
Robert Winer, M.D., is the co-creator and co-chair of New Directions: Writing with a Psychoanalytic Edge and of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program of the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. He authored Close Encounters: A Relational View of the Therapeutic Process.
Bruce H. Sklarew, M.D., an associate editor and co-founder of the award-winning Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, organizes the film programs at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association and has co-edited two books on psychoanalysis and film.
bar where she was dancing on the counter, the last place she was seen alive on the night she was murdered.
Dave's abuse has cut both ways, inside and outside. Inside it becomes the narrative of his life—he is the prey and he is the wolf. PTSD moments. “GET IN!” The novel tells us that he has to fight his urge to molest children. Managing himself takes every bit of his energy and resolve. He lies at will, as though the truth of his life could actually be plastic, whatever he decides it is, not a fracture that has been cast in stone. Stooped, he folds in on himself. The way the abuse cuts from the outside is that he lives in a community where, as critic Stephanie Zacharek wrote, “When a sexual crime is committed against you, it counts against you.” Dave is damaged goods.
Sean has become a cop. He seems like a decent, capable, colorless guy, the sort of a guy a wife might leave for someone more exciting, which is what has happened. He seems pretty emptied out.
Throughout the film I get the sense at various points that it is not impossible things could work out, it does not have to go badly, but some combination of accident, coincidence, fate, misunderstanding, and the inevitability of character just will not let it play out that way. In another Clint Eastwood movie, Unforgiven, Strawberry Alice says, “You just kicked the sh*t out of an innocent man.” Little Bull replies, “Innocent? Innocent of what?”
Although they have not stayed friends, Dave, Jimmy and Sean have stayed entangled with each other in their minds. It's been almost 30 years, but Jimmy and Sean are still tortured by the same thought, what if I had been the one to get in the car? Seeing Dave underlines it for them. They cannot escape feeling guilty they got away and Dave did not.
After the murder, Sean had asked a friend, “What the f*ck am I going to tell him? Hey Jim, God said you owed another marker. He came to collect.” We come back to Sophocles: “Not to be born is best.” So one idea is, for the living, sin is inevitable, whether through ignorance or perversity, so we all owe markers, having to pay makes sense. There would be the consolation of meaningfulness in that, a “because.” We also realize we are shaped by circumstances, some random and some not at all random, by our upbringings, by earlier choices we have made, by our culture, by our biology. This can lead us to feel we are just passengers on a train, or even passengers under the wheels. We look for meaning.
Jimmy looks for meaning in revenge. It is the only way he can imagine getting any relief. And in his culture it would be a mark of shame to fail to avenge such a killing. But revenge has not provided relief in the past. He got revenge on Just Ray who ratted him out, put him in jail 30 years ago, by killing him and dumping him in the Mystic, which did not solve much. Now, as one way of dealing with his guilt about having done that, Jimmy hates Just Ray's kids.
Continuing the story of tragedy into modern theater, the tragic hero never has agency over his life. With a few notable exceptions—the likes of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, August Wilson, Sam Shepard—American playwrights do not write tragedy. And that has been explained as the consequence of its interfering with a particularly American sensibility, the idea that man is captain of his fate. Check out Broadway. But the British playwright, Howard Barker, writes, “You emerge from tragedy equipped against lies. After the musical, you're anybody's fool.”
The story's other cop, Whitey, who is black, is setting in motion the sequence of events that will seal Dave's fate. He's decided Dave Boyle fits this killer's profile to a T. He is the right age, he is marginally employed, he was abused, now he is the abuser. Sean says the obvious: Katie was not sexually abused. I think Whitey has stopped thinking clearly because he is so convinced Sean is trying to cover up for a childhood friend. This is the consequence of Sean's deciding to stay on the case even though he was Jimmy's friend, the cops' form of a boundary violation, which made Whitey an angry outsider.
In fact, Katie has been killed by Just Ray's son, using the gun Just Ray had hidden while he was still alive. Maybe he was panicked about his brother's leaving him to elope with Katie, stranding him with their crazy mother. Full circle. This universe is not benevolent.
Dave's wife, freaked out by her husband's erratic, menacing behavior, and with the lasting memory of seeing him bloody that night (he had actually killed a child molester), naively tells Jimmy her suspicions. If she tells Jimmy, she thinks, then he and his thug friends can create a moat around her that Dave would never dare cross. There is no space anywhere in her mind for thinking about loyalty to her husband.
Dave again gets in the back seat of a car he should not be getting into, and the die is cast. Out behind a waterfront bar on the Mystic, Dave is intimidated by Jimmy and his thug pals into making up a false confession that he killed Katie. For Jimmy, the waterfront scene is his capitulation. He thought he was finished with all this. Going straight had been his private pledge to Katie, and how could violating that pledge honor her memory? He is abandoning the honorable person he had worked to become. When Dave says, “I did it,” Jimmy quickly shakes his head, like something in him actually did not want to hear this. Then Jimmy stabs him, saying, “We bury our sins here, Dave. We wash them clean.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
Jay Greenberg was invited to give the Plenary Address at the 2007 spring meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association, and he wrote a paper called “Choice.” He writes that we understand the necessity for “working through” in our treatments, for revisiting the same conflicted solutions time and again in various guises. But he also sees a deeper truth: Reasons do not explain choices. He quotes Leo Rangell saying the idea that “expanded choice” follows easily from analytic work is “perhaps one of the most prevalent fallacies in psychoanalytic practice.” Greenberg's argument is that our patients' significant choices are often manic acts, actions they think can be taken without emotional cost. Like Jimmy's saying, “We bury our sins here, Dave. We wash them clean.” Meaningful choice, in contrast to flight, requires bearing the various dimensions of the situation, the conflict of motives, the gains and the losses, the harms done, the uncertainty of consequences. Using the Kleinian metaphor, choice can exist only in the depressive position.
You can search long and hard in Mystic River to find meaningful choice, action taken with awareness, action that affects who we are. Jimmy is unable to reflect on what Dave is about as a person, and so he cannot help Dave's wife think about him or understand her anxiety; and he cannot imagine what it would mean to Katie to revenge her death; and he cannot contemplate what committing a murder will do to his own sense of himself; or what failing to seek revenge would do to his family, and whether he could survive that. In spite of ourselves, we repeat, because that is home.
A footnote: Baseball frames the film, now we see the huge ball in the float moving away from us as the movie ends. Ironically, the year after the film was released the Red Sox won the World Series for the first time in 86 years. A mixed blessing for us long-time sufferers. What can you count on?