Repress Yourself

Emotional expression, meanwhile, has not always been as tiresome as it has become in our full-disclosure culture. When the Romantics proclaimed that “Feeling is all!” it meant something, and their exploration of the individual psyche and its most powerful emotions — sorrow, awe, ecstasy, longing — was fired by great-souled ambition. This revolutionary fervour seems to have dwindled. Rather than expanding the self to meet the world, latter-day romantics have been shrinking the world to fit the self. Leftover Romanticism has been topped up with misreadings of Freud, who has been brought in to champion emotional anarchy in ways the good bourgeois Viennese gentleman could never have anticipated. Andr_ Breton and the Surrealists hoped that Freud’s theory of dreams and the unconscious would waken humankind to complete social, sexual, and emotional liberation, something Freud found vaguely embarrassing. He himself was content with the rather more modest project of converting “neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness.”

“Ordinary unhappiness” would never cut it in the American self-help movement, of course. Postwar pop psychology’s tendency to zero in on instant personal fulfillment reinforced the idea that any thwarting of emotion could be instantly converted into unhealthy neurosis or even physical disease. Amid this emotional free-for-all, our culture began to jettison the idea of decorum, the notion that displays of feeling should occasionally be circumscribed by time, place, or audience — that not everything needs to be expressed, for instance, “in front of the children,” on a cell phone in a crowded elevator, at the wedding of one’s former lover, or during a teary appearance on daytime TV. We increasingly used self-expression as a justification for all sorts of bad behaviour on the grounds that to do anything other than what our natural feeling dictates is hypocritical.

But, really, what’s wrong with a little hypocrisy, wonders Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners, North America’s best-known arbiter of etiquette. Though occasionally expected to pronounce on matters of fish-knife placement, Martin spends much more time dealing with the moral foundations of civilized society. Within this framework, she finds social hypocrisy vastly preferable to expressions of unkindness, no matter how existentially authentic they may be. As she writes in the modestly titled Miss Manners Rescues Civilization: “People seem to have an inordinate amount of interest nowadays in their own feelings. This does not strike Miss Manners as quite decent. First they put an enormous effort into examining themselves, in the hope of discovering what their feelings actually are . . . .Then they act on those feelings. This requires no thought at all.

“All of this puzzles Miss Manners, who always knows exactly how she feels, and considers the question of how and when to express or to act upon one’s feelings to be a highly complex subject — namely, etiquette. Martin wishes to remind her “gentle readers” of the difference between feelings, to which we are all entitled, and the notion that all feelings must be yanked, half-formed and gasping, into the open air.

We should make clear that those of us who find reticence sexy — let’s call ourselves the New Repressives — are not advocating cold-fishiness of any sort. We seek not to extinguish emotions but to focus them by using reflection, self-knowledge, and the judicious ability to occasionally shut the hell up. We’re for feeling passionately but expressing selectively, because it’s in this gap that interesting things happen.

The last decade has established the tedium of hyper-emotionalism with a queasy display of over-sharing celebrities and tell-all autobiographies, chair-throwing talk shows and invasive reality TV, and the cyber-exhibitionism of blogging. We may have reached a tipping point, though, if the recent fascination with buttoned-up TV characters is any indication. It’s doubtful that this development marks a pop-culture paradigm shift. It’s probably not even a trend. Emotional subtlety and stringent self-analysis will likely remain the territory of Booker Prize winners and Joan Didion memoirs. But the mass media’s puppy-like attention span has seized on the prickly pleasures of uptightness — at least for a moment.

Consider the contrasting celebrity trajectories of Tom Cruise and Madonna. Though he’s known for his portrayals of callow, cocky operators, Cruise once maintained a sense of mysterious depth through the ruthless gatekeeping of his public image. And then suddenly there he was, getting all schmoopy with Katie Holmes and scaring Oprah by going down on his knees, pounding the floor, leaping on the furniture, and screaming his love on national television. (According to urbandictionary.com, the phrase “jumping the couch” is now used to describe “a defining moment when you know someone has gone off the deep end.”) Meanwhile, we have Madonna, the “Express Yourself” girl once known for nude hitch-hiking. With her cool eye for zeitgeist zigzags, she sensed that total exposure had temporarily exhausted itself and embarked on a calculated dalliance with British propriety and reserve. In last August’s Vogue the reinvented Madge was pictured on the English estate she shares with husband Guy Ritchie, feeding the chickens in a ladylike dress and cardie.

Public reaction to these PR reversals suggests a new mood. Cruise nearly scuttled the War of the Worlds publicity push when his fans discovered that, um, actually, they didn’t want to see “the real Tom” and his icky, inappropriate public displays of affection after all. The newly demure Mrs. R., on the other hand, piqued our interest — even if it was only to marvel at her unabashed media manipulation.

Madonna’s passing passion for primness — she’s already reworked herself as a disco diva — may have been a shrewd show of self-marketing. And csi producer Jerry Bruckheimer, known for loud, bombastic movies such as Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, is probably backing his uncommunicative investigators for strategic reasons. As shrewd pop-culture prognosticators, they have both seized on emotional repression as a novelty, a cool contrast to the emotionally overheated effects of most mass media, including the web.

Cyber-theorist Rebecca Blood’s early optimism that the blogosphere could be a community dedicated to self-awareness, self-reliance, and critical thinking was a wonderful leap of Rousseauian idealism, and the blogs that live up to that standard are models of democratic social engagement, with writing fresh enough to merit Blood’s definition of blogging as “a coffeehouse conversation in text.” Unfortunately, most of blog-world material doesn’t warrant this kind of optimism. Instead, it offers sullen and adolescent evidence that personal expression does not necessarily lead to a greater understanding of the self and others. Blood believes that “each of us [bloggers] speaks in an individual voice of an individual vision,” but just try googling the phrase “I hate my mom” or “Nobody understands me” or “My love life sucks” and see how many hits you get — and how drearily alike the entries are. Many bloggers seem to be caught in circular thinking and world-obliterating self-absorption. They can’t be doing anything for their audience, and it’s not even clear what they’re doing for themselves.