345. "Bang Gang" Insouciance

What Stephen Holden finds remarkable about this movie showing teenagers doing group sex is its "shrugging attitude."  I notice that "Bang Gang" is French and I can see the shrug.  How many times in Paris, witnessing another incomprehensible street scene, have I seen the shoulders go up.  C'est la mani. Here, I suppose, C'est la jeunesse.

Our world leaders in insouciance they are, and I turn to them gratefully, especially when in doubt about my cool.  Should I show curiosity about that man in high heels?  Ah, there at the corner table, les épaules going up.  I'm as grateful as I was in Milan, seeing a gentiluomo cutting his spaghetti.

The opposite of "insouciance" would be "souciance" I suppose, but we don't have the word.  I could have used it when I tried to think of people opposite to the gang-bang shruggers.  Certainly my father would qualify.  I remember his being asked once to serve as a chaperone for a high-school weenie-roast.  My mother said he spent the whole evening chasing kids out of the woods and back to the campfire.  He was souciant.

It's a coinage to be pleased with.  You know it fills a gap in your vocabulary when you keep finding new fits for it.  I think of the boyfriend of the babysitter who thought my dad could be a chaperone.  He failed to use a condom (on some other weenie-roast, I suppose) and got her pregnant.  He was under-souciant.  Then he got souciant in their search for the baby after she, in her period of disgrace and despair, had given it up for birth-adoption, and they were finally married.  Then the long period you'd have to call "post-insouciance."  Not a shrug anywhere, even among observers.

The more you observe the world the more sockets you find the word fitting into.  WCTU people standing watch at saloon doors were super-souciant.  LGBT people detecting micro-aggressions are hyper-souciant.  Those fearing the uncool of super- or hyper-  become crypto-.  Contemporary professors with a weakness for Victorian values — or Platonic love, or Doric discipline — have to be crypto-souciant.

There was nothing crypto about my father, chasing couples out of the woods, and there is nothing crypto about my other opposite to the French shruggers, NYT columnist David Brooks, telling his readers to start talking as if people had souls.

That's a cry in another ballpark.  Maybe in another age.  Yet what's on the field is the same.  Say you're at a post-movie table in Cannes and the person next to you, Brooks, says, "You know, if public life were truly infused with the sense that people have souls, we would comfortably tell [young people] that sex is a fusion of loving souls and not just a physical act" (NYT 6-7-16).  What are your shoulders doing?  Where are the épaules of those around you?  What about Holden, whose cool in front of the sex scenes was itself pretty Gallic?  Can you even form a picture?

One thing our sense of incongruity shows is that Holden must be right in calling the insouciance of the movie's group-sex treatment "distinctively contemporary."  A few years ago in France the souciance of existentialists kept shoulders down.  "You are what you choose, and every choice counts."  So choose carefully.  You're constructing your essence. 

In the contemporary world, then, Sartre becomes one of the voices from the conservative past, where relations with Christians become more congenial.  If Sartre and Brooks, silenced at the table, meet in the washroom they'll make perfect sense to each other.   "The soul can be elevated and degraded at every second, even when you’re alone not hurting anybody," says Brooks.  "I hear existence constructing essence," says Sartre. "I'm with you."

Treating life as a series of choices, and seeing a choice in every moment, with nothing lost, is about as deeply souciant as you can get.  You're down there with St. Augustine ("Take care of your body as if you were going to live forever; take care of your soul as if you were going to die tomorrow") and the saints who saw the crisis in every moment.  Not to mention the followers of Socrates, whose entire business was care of the soul.

Those are pretty heavy hitters, and if we can stay in the same ballpark I think they will win.  The thought momentarily cheers me, a longtime souciance fan, but then I think of what victory here might mean.  The end of insouciance?  Will I like that?

"Well," comes the voice of Socrates, "do you like the New York Times?  Would you like to remove the Arts section from it?  It's full of insouciance.  Hardly any in the Editorial section.  Will you be a one-section man?  Is that the good life?"

Oi, he's got me.  The very pieces that inspired this blog post, Holden's and Brooks's, appeared in the same issue!  Giving me pleasure, keeping me alive.  Giving me as good a life as I'm capable of.