Transcription

• Wendy Winograd

  People that have delusions, you can't talk them out of it. They're there for a reason. That's what they believe. It's their reality. The struggle for me would be, how do you live in this world?

• Sean Bart

  As someone who experienced a lot of trauma and a lot of grief and had trouble working through it, I felt very seen by this movie. It takes a very sober look at the way the mind works and how grief affects us.

• Nancy Oliver

  I set out to make a small Swedish movie. in that style. And I think it kind of got most of the way there. In the end, you got to write what you got to write. You just have to put it out there.

• Tim Kirkman (Host)

  Welcome to Real Lives, a podcast about movies and the people who love them. Each episode, we focus on one film and hear stories from people about how it made an impact on their lives. My name is Tim Kirkman, and today we're talking about Lars and the Real Girl.

• Film Clip

  You're a good-looking fellow, Lars. Where's your girlfriend? I don't have one. Are you gay? My grandson's gay. I know all about the gays. I'm not gay. Well, don't leave it too long. It's not good for you.

• Tim Kirkman (Host)

  What if something so traumatic happened to you that one day it triggered a response that no one seemed to be able to understand? That's the premise. of the 2007 film Lars and the Real Girl. Lars is a shy, intensely introverted young man in a small Wisconsin town who lives in the garage of the house he grew up in, now occupied by his older brother Gus and his sister-in-law Karen. Lars leads a quiet life. He has an office job, goes to church, the people in town like him, but lately he seemed even more socially withdrawn than usual. Until one day, when Lars tells Gus and Karen that he's met someone, someone special. Her name is Bianca. He explains they met online, she's a missionary from Brazil, and she's in a wheelchair. All of that seems fine, until they meet Bianca in person and discover what Lars hasn't said. Bianca is a life-sized, anatomically correct sex doll. Gus and Karen are understandably confused and alarmed and immediately take him to see a doctor, who tells them that Lars is having some kind of break from reality.

• Film Clip

  You know, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. What we call mental illness isn't always just an illness. It can be a communication. It can be a way to work something out. Fantastic. When will it be over? When he doesn't need it anymore. How can we help? Go along with it. Oh, no. No, that's... Oh, my. No, No, I mean, pretend that she's real. I'm not going to do it. I mean, I can't. I'm just not going to do it. She is real. Well. She's right out there.

• Tim Kirkman (Host)

  Over the course of the story, Lars' family, friends, co-workers, the whole town, in fact, come together to help Lars get through whatever this is. And in the process... start to discover some things about themselves as well. Lars and the Real Girl received critical acclaim and good reviews, but audiences largely stayed away. Maybe it was the premise that involved a sex doll, which certainly created marketing challenges for a film that was rated PG-13. But the film takes that shocking premise and transforms it into a tender exploration of loneliness, grief, and the profound impact of empathy. The film was directed by Craig Gillespie and stars Ryan Gosling as Lars, Paul Schneider as Gus, Emily Mortimer as Karen, and Patricia Clarkson as Dr. Dagmar Berman. The film was nominated for one Academy Award. Best Original Screenplay for Nancy Oliver.

• Nancy Oliver

  It's always radical to write something sincere about love and compassion. So I knew there would be heat and people wouldn't get it. And you get that. that dreaded word quirky attached to it and then there'd be bad reviews and stuff like that but you know you got to tell your truth so but i'm very pleased that it was made at all i mean i never had any hopes of it getting made so i feel fortunate and don't worry about the other stuff my name is nancy oliver i am a writer and sometime director and i wrote lars and the real girls it was an experiment because i wanted to write something uh in less than a year, to write a major piece in less than a year. Because I had to speed up. I was late to Hollywood. And working in television stuff, I had to speed up. So that was probably why I wrote Lars. And the other part was that I wanted to deal with the human capacity for love. Because it seemed like it's so enormous, but nobody ever talks about it. So I was going after that as well. And it did connect with a job that I had, which involved emails with lonely guys. And it turned out to be, as I realized, basically a twist. on the Pygmalion myth. But sometimes you don't find that stuff out until later on in the process.

• Film Clip

  Look! Solid. Like, if she weighed 125 pounds, then she weighs 125 pounds. Is that right? You can customize everything. They got all these different heads and parts. You can design your own woman. And Lars. Lars. Yeah. Correct.

• Sean Bart

  Do I understand how it is that someone has a delusion like this? No, but I know that it happens. Is it completely realistic? I don't know. Does it matter? My name is Sean Alexander-Bart, and I'm a musician, music director, vocal coach, and writer living in Los Angeles. I was working at a college as a vocal coach, and one of the students recommended the movie to me. And immediately, upon the first scene, it resonated with me. I've never quite been as reclusive or as painfully awkward. However, I understood where it was coming from, and I could see that part of myself. I didn't go to the point of. having serious delusions as the main character in Lars. However, I understand the power of the mind.

• Wendy Winograd

  I just love this movie. Why? It is a different way of looking at what we might call mental illness. You know, somebody might have given him a diagnosis of schizophrenia, but Dagmar says he's not schizophrenic. He's not psychotic. He's working out something. My name is Wendy Winograd. I'm a clinical social worker and psychoanalyst in Chatham, New Jersey. It's hard to live in the world if you have a delusion. What would happen if somebody like Lars went to the hospital is they'd medicate him up the wazoo. They'd give him all kinds of antipsychotics and try to talk him out of the delusion. I think if he presented at the emergency room at any hospital, that's what would happen. You can't talk them out of it. They're there for a reason, and that's what they believe. It's their reality.

• Sean Bart

  I grew up in San Francisco, at Daly City, mostly, to be specific. And I was raised mostly by my dad. It was a rocky situation where my mom had left when I was three. I remember standing at the doorway or the hallway, watching her pack clothes. Her back was to me. From an adult point of view, it seems like she was in a crisis of her own. Of course, when I was three, I didn't understand all that. The time from three to eight was basically just me and my dad, and he was taking care of his mom while dealing with feeling abandoned by my mom. And then when I was a little older, about eight or nine years old, she came back into my life. She lived in San Francisco. She would pick me up Saturday morning after music class, and then I would take the bus with her, spend Saturday and most of Sunday with her, and then take the bus back to my dad's. And that would happen twice a month. The time with my dad was very challenging. A lot of my childhood, I didn't want to upset my dad because he was doing so much for me. Through his own pain, he had a terrible temper and could be triggered very easily. On the one hand, I would lie to him a lot because I didn't want to admit the crappy things I was doing as a kid, not doing my homework or whatever it was. I mean, probably the most consistent thing from when I was a kid is that I was kind of a pathological liar. I mean, I remember so many of the lies, and I remember almost convincing myself of some of the lies that I came up with. Rather than just face up to, oh, yep, nope, I don't have any girlfriends, I would make up a girlfriend. I would make up a neighbor that I was dating or something. And I remember this very clearly in eighth grade. And then finally, one of our other friend group just called me out in front of everyone and said, Come on, Sean. You don't have a girlfriend. This is all made up.

• Film Clip

  You know what I could use is a more complete history on her, like parents. Well, they died when she was a baby. Hmm. Well, that's not fair. Yeah, but she doesn't feel sorry for herself or anything. She just wants to be normal, have everyone treat her normal.

• Nancy Oliver

  I wrote the first 30 pages and... I just got stuck. I had a doctor and I had a psychologist. I had the two there, but I got stuck. I got stuck for three months. And the fix was combining those two characters into one who became Dagmar. Once I did that, for some reason, I could see her, I knew her, I'd met her. He was a figure that I would believe he could become friends with and confide in.

• Wendy Winograd

  Donna Winnicott was a pediatrician. And became a psychoanalyst in the UK. And he came up with this concept of good enough mothering, which really refers to being present and available and almost in a psychotic state for the first six or eight weeks. But then you can't sustain that forever. And if you did, the infant would never have to grow some independence. And so when I think about Lars, he lost that and he lost his father too. because his father couldn't, was heartbroken. And Winnicott was like, yeah, there's something that happens between a mother and an infant that's really important in our development of an ego or development of a self. And at one point, he says in one of his books, that he believes that analysts interpret too much. And most times when he interprets, it's for his own ego, rather than really for aiding the patient. And that's what Dagmar does. Dagmar is such a great therapist A lot of people would think you have to talk him out of the delusion. And she's like, no, he'll do that on his own time. He needs that. And that is what Freud said. It's a symptom is a solution to something. It's a way of working out something. So, okay, we'll all pretend she's real. We'll play with him. And that's how he learns how to play.

• Nancy Oliver

  In my head, in the writing of it, that's what the community realizes as well. This child has grown up so damaged. We've been around him in church. We've been around him in life. And we did nothing. And now it's in our face what that break has meant. He's brought a sex doll to church. And what are we going to do about it?

• Film Clip

  I don't even know why we're here. For heaven's sake, what's the big deal? Sally, your cousin puts dresses on his cats. And Hazel, your new nephew, gave all his money to a UFO club. And Arnie, everybody knows your first wife was a klepto. She wasn't. Then why is she buried in a pair of my earrings? Yeah. Now that's enough. These things happen. Lars is a good boy.You can depend on me.

• Sean Bart

  They love him. So everyone figures out, all right. Let's pull up our britches and figure out how to support this guy and hope that he comes back and hope that he works through this. And there's so much care put into how each person comes to their own decision about how they're going to handle this. Just the fact that everyone was willing to challenge themselves and willing to be there for him. is a tremendous inspiration. Every person should have the support network that Lars had.

• Wendy Winograd

  You know, the other concept that comes from Winnicott that is very present in this film is the transitional object. So the transitional object is that thing that most of us have, that special stuffed animal or blanket. And Winnicott theorized that this was a connection between the... infant and the mother. It was like a substitute mother to help the infant manage separations from the mother and that everybody in the infant's life went along to kind of believe that this was true. It's real and not real at the same time. It exists in this transitional space between the infant's self and the mother's self at a time when the infant doesn't quite have a sense of self. They still maybe don't know that they're separate from the rest of the world or separate from the mother. But that has to happen. And it happens with the assistance of a transitional object. And transitional objects, we all utilize them throughout our lives in different ways. We have somebody that we loved who died, we keep something of theirs with us. And for Lars, it's that blanket in the beginning. He has the blanket. He's very worried about Karen. You know, Karen's pregnancy, I think, was the crisis that happened that brought all of this about and actually helped him to resolve, work through the trauma and resolve it.

• Film Clip

  It's a beautiful blanket. Gus says your mother made it for you when she was pregnant. Well, she must have loved you very much. I believe you.

• Wendy Winograd

  That blanket. He can't give that up. Sometimes parents feel more sentimental about the transitional object than the child does once it's done, because once it's done, it's work. You don't need it anymore. Now I have a sense of myself. That's just a stuffed animal now, even though it used to be so much more. I couldn't go to sleep without it. I couldn't be without my mother, without that symbolic representation. I think for the co-worker, the superhero figures that he has are a kind of transitional object for Certainly for Margo, the bear is. And that scene that I love so much where he gives CPR to the bear is like an example of what parents would do with a transitional object that got hurt. You would, you know, you would get a Band-Aid or what and pretend that it's actually real, right? That's what parents do. Good parents who support their child in that rather than saying to them, well, that's not real. We don't have to give a Band-Aid to a stuffed animal. That would be unfortunate parenting.

• Nancy Oliver

  What I wanted to do. was layer all these tensions so that his psychological break was believable. So you had Karen's pregnancy, and his fear about that, and Margot at work, his feelings about her, so that you can see how, as the story unfolds, how this break happened, and that it's believable, because there was so many different tensions, conflicts. whatever, closing in on him at that moment. And plus the way that humans learn through play, through this inanimate object, they all became attached to her in a certain way. And that in the end, the lie tells the truth, a profound truth about them, about Lars, about everybody in the town. It makes perfect sense that he would... try to grow out through a doll. He's playing at being a man.

• Sean Bart

  Lars isn't crazy. He's dealing with his own sense of what makes a man, right? We know from the movie that his relationship to Bianca is emotional, romantic. He didn't order this doll for sexual needs as far as we can tell. The scene with Gus And Lars, so it starts out in the kitchen and Lars is asking Gus some, I mean, they're perfectly reasonable questions, right?

• Film Clip

  How'd you know? How'd I know what? That you were a man. Nah, I couldn't tell you. Was it? Okay, was it sex?

• Wendy Winograd

  How do you know when you're a man? That's such a question that a son would ask a father or that a father and a son could talk about. But the whole thing around Gus, how stricken he was by this whole tragedy, how guilty he felt. He had to grow up too fast because he also lost two parents. I mean, he was traumatized too. And then how he becomes the father.

• Film Clip

  Okay, you know, I can only give you my opinion. That's all I want. It's not like you're all one thing or the other, okay? There's still a kid inside, but you grow up when you decide to do right, okay? And not what's right for you, what's right for everybody, even when it hurts. Okay, like what? Like, you know, like, you don't jerk people around, you know? And you don't cheat on your woman. And you take care of your family. You know, you admit when you're wrong. Or you try to anyways. That's all I can think of, you know. It sounds like it's easy and for some reason it's not. I know because nothing is easy.

• Nancy Oliver

  The fault lines that run through our culture is, you know, without these passage points where you... you know, a celebration where you become, where you're not a child anymore, and you have direction and growth and specific responsibilities. Well, we don't have any of that. And if you didn't have a communicative father or anything that understood that, where do you get the answers to your questions? Who do you emulate? How do you find that out? It's one of the questions in the film that has to get answered because Lars very much wants to become a man. He wants to take that on.

• Wendy Winograd

  When I think about Lars, he lost his mother. and everything that she was supposed to provide in those first months of his life. But no one else could step in and fix that because his father was heartbroken. He was too sad to be able to be there and be present for Lars. So that was the, to me, that was the trauma, that he didn't get something that he essentially needed, that we all need and deserve in the first months of life. I don't know how, what Nancy Oliver knows or doesn't know. about psychoanalysis, but this movie is so psychoanalytic.

• Nancy Oliver

  My oldest brother died when he was 30 years old in 1980. And it wasn't a small town. It was a city outside of Boston. And it was, of course, a terrible shock that changed me forever. But another thing that changed me forever was people's response to it, which was the cards and the food. kept coming and coming and coming and coming from people that we didn't know, from people I'd never met. And I was surprised because New England can be socially and emotionally kind of a cold place, especially for an incomer, you know, somebody who moves in if you weren't born there. And that was kind of my impression of the place. But I was really shocked and amazed by how much love and compassion that there was underneath. So. So that stayed with me for over 15 years, and I got to express some of that feeling in Lars.

• Film Clip

  There's something I should be doing. No, dear. You eat. We came over to sit. That's what people do in tragedy strikes. They come over and sit.

• Nancy Oliver

  You know, it's about the vigil that you keep around people who are dying. It's like sitting Shiva. It's what we do as humanity in most cultures, is you bring food and you sit there. And in the sitting, in the quiet sitting, you're together. It's a way to join at a very primitive level. At the most primitive level, you show up.

• Wendy Winograd

  In some way, Karen is like his mother. In some way, those three women that sit with him when she's dying and bring the casseroles, they're his mother. You know, and Bianca is his mother. All the substitute for the mother that he so tragically lost and couldn't even remember. And she was a vehicle through which he could work through those phases of development, through loving her, through feeling separate from her. for being angry and then losing her ultimately she the second time he lost her it was okay it wasn't happy it was sad as it should be when you lose somebody that you love but it was manageable because he had developed enough ego to

• Sean Bart

  manage the loss my my mom and dad never reconciled it wasn't until she was very very very sick that I guess that they allowed the friction to lower enough to focus on what was so important going on at the time. I think I was 15. My mom was, let's see, she suddenly went to the emergency room one night, and my dad and I drove to the hospital, and her best friend Rita was there. and the doctors were saying she has three days to live. It was cancer, but she said, it's not going to be three days. No way. I'm sticking around. and she did stick around. She was very sick for about a year. Then she went into remission and then it came back after about a year. And I didn't see her very often during that time because she didn't want anyone to see her. And then as it got to the very end, I saw her a couple of times at the very end. And I was there right before she let go. And I was 18 at the time.

• Film Clip

  We need never ask, Lord, what should I do? Because the Lord has told us what to do. Love one another. That, my friends, is the one true Lord. Love is God in action.

• Nancy Oliver

  Well, it was a deliberate choice to start off the movie in the spiritual center of the town, the symbol. I mean, it could have been a temple, it could have been a church, it could have been anything. You know, I wrote what I was most familiar with, which was like a benign, vague. northern protestant thing you know i went to church every week to sing in the choir i never heard a sermon never listened to one but what was important about that for me was the music and that people were kind there that there was compassion there and and they lived it at least on on sundays so i wrote what i was most familiar with but really it's a spiritual just as it's a spiritual symbol.

• Sean Bart

  There was a few months right after my mom passed where I was kind of okay. I had a friend who I talked to every day. And then after a few months, all hell broke loose. I had a lot of acting out. There's drugs, naturally. There was a dabbling in some hard drugs. It got a little dangerous there for a few months. As a job, I started playing for a church. I even did drugs in the church. I did meth. I did meth in the church once. That was absolutely acting out. And at the same time, it was survival.

• Wendy Winograd

  I remember when I first got my job in this high school, and people, teachers and other people, thought I was, you know, oh, she's a therapist. She's going to want to make it easy for everybody. And I would have parents call me up and say, well, I don't want my child to struggle. And I'm like, oh, how are they going to grow? Life is not easy. Sometimes life is traumatic. And if we looked at it that way, instead of, oh, this person has an illness and I have to give them medication or, I don't know, do something to cure it, I think we'd have better luck helping people if we could just sit with their suffering, acknowledge it, and know that the things that we do, all of us, we do to manage that somehow. And that's what I think that's what that film shows us, and that you can get better with help from people that care.

• Film Clip

  People do whatever they want. They don't care. No, we all care. Lars, we do care. We don't. That is just not true. God, we're a person in this town. bends over backwards to make Bianca feel at home. Why do you think she has so many places to go and so much to do? Because of you Because all these people love you

• Nancy Oliver

  It brought together certain themes of a lifetime, and people are always saying his love for this inanimate object is so weird. But is that weird at all? We humans, we love anything. I love my first car. I dream about my first car. It's about what things mean. And yeah, that we love rocks, we love trees, we love everything. That's what we're capable of as human beings. And that was also something that I wanted to express.

• Wendy Winograd

  What a world we would have if we could treat each other the way that town treated Lars and the way Lars treats Margo. And maybe I'm, you know, overly sentimental, but I wish we could have. that kind of a world.

• Sean Bart

  My sense of my own experience was validated by that movie. It's been very rare in my life that people could really understand the depths and the nuances and the dimensions of everything I experienced in my life. It's impossible. I mean, how can any of us understand each other that comprehensively? It's... Been a long road, a long, gradual road of healing. And there's been therapy here and there along the lines, a lot of introspection, meditation, things like that. Doing my best to be kind with myself and forgive other people, be kind to them. And my biggest classroom is the car driving on the streets of L.A. The forgiveness opportunities are abundant. Driving in L.A.

• Tim Kirkman (Host)

  This episode of Real Lives was written, produced, and edited by me, Tim Kirkman. The executive producer is Mary Beth Greeley. Original music was composed by John Crook for Space Factory. Special thanks to my guests, Nancy Oliver, Sean Alexander-Bart, and Wendy Winograd. Real Lives is produced in collaboration with Transylvania University. You can support the podcast by subscribing to the Real Lives sub stack, where I write about films each week. And if you like what you heard, tell your friends, post a review, give us some stars and follow us on all the usual social media platforms. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email. Let us know what movie you'd like to hear more about. Maybe even talk about our website is real lives podcast dot com. That's R.E.L. lives podcast dot com. Until next time. See you at the movies.