Containing States of Mind in Triangle of Sadness
In his book Containing States of Mind, Duncan Cartwright explores the ideas of the British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1897–1979), and in particular his account of how one mind can stimulate or hinder psychic growth in another, through a relationship Bion characterised using the metaphor of container and contained. Cartwright expands on Bion’s original theory by introducing the notion of a “pseudo-container”, and in one of his more speculative chapters uses the film The Matrix (1999) to describe its characteristics. I have already discussed The Matrix in a previous essay, so I thought it would be an interesting exercise to discuss these ideas in relation to another film, Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness (2022).
While Triangle of Sadness has been critically lauded, some critics have reduced it to a satire of the very rich. I think this sells the film short. I would argue that it deals more profoundly with a universal theme of how minds relate to one another under conditions inhospitable to psychic growth.
(Apologies for the lack of page references below. Apparently it is legal for publishers to sell digital copies of their books at full price without including page numbers.)
Projection as Psychological Defence
In psychoanalysis, an important part of the therapeutic process is thought to lie in how the unconscious phantasies of patient and analyst influence one another. For the patient, painful feelings or thoughts stirred up during the analytical session (and sometimes also positive feelings and thoughts) may be disowned or split-off from the self via distortions in their mental image of the analyst, a psychological defence known as “projection”. An analyst who was sufficiently attuned to the patient would in turn experience “interpersonal nudging,” animating the analyst’s own unconscious phantasies about the patient (a reaction known as “counter-transference”). How the analyst deals with and reflects upon the resulting emotional turmoil may help or hinder the patient’s own capacity to manage the painful affects.
Bion tried to understand this process using the notions of container and contained, where what is contained are the projected feelings and thoughts, and the container is the mind (or a simulated mind) which attempts to think about and emotionally process them. Strictly speaking, the abstract nature of these concepts allow them to be applied to more than just minds (one of Bion’s favourite examples is language as container and emotion as contained). But in what follows the terms will be applied to a consideration of the emotional links between minds. According to Cartwright’s succint summary, what Bion meant by the containing process involves “intuiting, engaging and naming unarticulated experience through complex interpersonal and intrapsychic exchanges.”
Before considering examples of container and contained, let us first look more closely at the phenomenon of projection using a scene from the film.
Early on in the film’s second chapter (“The Yacht”), the protaganists Carl and Yaya, his girlfriend, are sunbathing on a luxury yacht when a deckhand appears nearby and takes his top off to cool down. Yaya and the deckhand exchange a friendly greeting, much to the consternation of Carl, who interrogates Yaya about what she is thinking. Carl then complains to the chief stewardess Paula about the deckhand being half-undressed in front of the passengers. Paula agrees that such behaviour is unacceptable, and later we see that the deckhand is fired and removed from the ship with Carl somewhat guiltily looking on.
It is easy to miss the significance of this episode, because ‘complaining to the manager’ is not necessarily a sign of something deeper. But the film provides plenty of context which allows us to infer Carl’s state of mind. We know from the prologue that Carl is a model who earns one-third of what his female colleagues do. And in the first chapter it is revealed that he also earns less than his model / influencer girlfriend. Despite that, he finds himself picking up the bills for the expensive restaurants they dine out at. It is a lifestyle which is clearly beyond his means and gives rise to feelings of resentment and inadequacy. At one point, in response to Carl’s constant protestations about having to pay the bills and wanting to be treated as an equal, Yaya stuffs cash down his shirt much like one might do with a stripper or prostitute. This leads Carl to explode in rage.
When on the yacht his girlfriend smiles at the deckhand, the mental image Carl forms of the latter is not just coloured by a fleeting pang of jealousy, but also by a deep-seated sense of inadequacy which, because it is an unbearable state of mind, manifests itself as an attribute of the deckhand instead (through projection). The deckhand is perceived by Carl to be something out of place; a member of the crew who should not even be visible to the wealthy passengers on board, let alone the focus of their sexual attention. In something of a panic, Carl tries and fails to raise the issue with Yaya. He then complains to Paula and gets the deckhand removed — in truth, to remove what is a hated, split-off part of himself. After making his complaint, Carl leaves and then immediately returns, asking Paula about an engagement ring on display, and she offers to model it for him. It is as if Carl is under the illusion that by expelling hated parts of himself into others whom he can then control and eliminate, he can maintain a loving relationship with his girlfriend. And the person whose role it is to facilitate this illusion is the chief stewardess, who had earlier instructed her staff that every request from their wealthy passengers, no matter how illicit or absurd, should be affirmed with a “Yes sir! Yes ma’am!”
The Containing Function as Mentalizing
Bion thought that a condition of psychic growth was the ability to hold painful thoughts in mind long enough for them to be emotionally processed. This is an elaboration of an idea found in Freud, who argued that being able to tolerate frustration was a necessary step in the mind’s making contact with reality (as opposed to simply hallucinating). For Bion, the point of holding thoughts and feelings in mind is to infuse them with meaning as subjective states of mind, rather than reacting to them as if they were material things or forces. He postulated the notion of a “containing function” as an abstract way of representing this capacity. Cartwright notes the similarities between Bion’s notion of a containing function and that of “mentalizing” developed subsequently by Peter Fonagy and Anthony Bateman:
Mentalizing involves the capacity to intuit and track emotional and mental states in the self and others… The ability to mentalize remains largely unconscious or preconscious and involves attempts to perceive and interpret the intentional mental states that lie behind behavior or conscious thought. Similar to the containing function, mentalizing is an imaginative activity that respects the opaque nature of minds. It necessarily involves imprecise attempts at making meaning that focuses on mental states rather than on the physical world directly.
It is clear that Carl lacks this capacity to mentalize, at least with respect to certain painful affects. The way in which he dealt with the emotions stirred up by the deckhand can be compared with how frustration over the bill was ultimately handled in the first chapter. There Carl and Yaya together, as a couple, were able to fashion something like a containing function to deal with Carl’s sense of inadequacy, albeit in a messy and temporary manner. It was in order to analyse how multiple minds can collectively give rise to the containing function that Bion introduced the notion of a container-contained configuration.
Container-Contained Configurations
Bion distinguished three types of container-contained configurations or modes of interaction: the symbiotic, commensal and parasitic. The symbiotic refers to the container and contained roles being divided between two minds which are mutually dependent on one another. The commensal refers to a container role being shared between two minds, such that the pair is capable of containing (or being contained by) a third object or person. And the parasitic mode is when the container-contained configuration gives rise to a third object which is destructive of all three. We can find examples in the film of all three configurations.
As already noted, a successful example of container-contained interaction giving rise to the containing function is seen in the first chapter, “Carl and Yaya”. After a sometimes painful back and forth that involves evasion, anger, rejection, introspection and confession on both sides, Yaya is able to act as the container for Carl’s projections and formulates the thought that one day he might be able to provide for the both of them; effectively making sense of Carl’s unconscious phantasy involving envy. This is an example of the symbiotic mode.
Bion thought the paradigmatic example of the symbiotic mode was the mother soothing her infant’s distress by allowing the infant’s unconscious projections to emotionally impact her inner world, and through an exercise of the imagination (or what he called “reverie”) modify these emotions and communicate the transformed state to the infant. But while this kind of processing plays an important protective and developmental role, it can also be limiting with respect to psychological growth. Cartwright notes that in the symbiotic mode:
[C]uriosity about the other’s mind is limited to attention paid to projected contents and their preverbal nature. Other internal objects or thoughts that allow two minds to connect through imaginative exploration and mature verbal communication are not available in the symbiotic mode. This creates ‘blind spots’… which the symbiotic couple work together to avoid.
Particularly destabalizing for this configuration is the presence of a third object. That is because the “core organizing phantasy behind the symbiotic mode is perhaps best represented by the phrase ‘I complete you.’” The pair becomes dependent on one another in a way that does not easily accommodate outside emotional links.
Cases in which the third object is not destructive, but able to be contained by the original pair through their sharing of the containing function, is an example of what Bion called the commensal mode. In the film’s final chapter, “The Island”, Carl and Yaya are finally able to achieve a commensal relationship despite their less than ideal circumstances, and by doing so Carl becomes the main provider for the two of them — as anticipated earlier by Yaya.
Finally, an example of where the container-contained configuration gives rise to a third object destructive of all three is the interaction between the billionare’s wife Vera and the stewardess Alicia. In confiding to Alicia, Vera mentions that studies have shown most people who work for a living find they later regret having wasted so much of their life, i.e. that their lives are meaningless. The third object here is Vera’s phantasy of the division of labour under capitalism, which denies to Alicia the meaning-making capacity required by a containing mind. This is such an important moment in the film that I’ll return to discuss it later.
The Autistic and Pseudo-Containing Modes
Cartwright expands on Bion’s initial taxonomy of three contained-container configurations by adding two more: the autistic mode and pseudo-containing.
Cartwright explains the autistic mode as a way of avoiding being held in the mind of another by instead treating sensations, thoughts and emotions as if they were physical surfaces capable of holding the self together. There is no projecting into an object because in this mode conceptions of internal space exarcebate anxiety. This has “a deadening effect on psychic experience as objects are treated like inanimate surfaces to wall of experiencing.” This mode is represented in a number of ways in the film, such as by the time on the yacht when interaction between people consists of taking instagrammable photos. Significantly, it also frames the film, which opens at a fashion show where the interior life of people is systematically devalued in favour of physical surfaces. Indeed, the phrase “triangle of sadness” is used in one of the opening scenes to refer to an area of the forehead in which the emotional interior of the model is thought to interfere with the photogenic qualities of their face.
Pseudo-containing occurs when being held in the mind of another is simulated rather than actually undertaken. We see it when Carl is unable to find a container for his anxious thoughts in the presence of the deckhand (Yaya tells him to “drop it”), and so he seeks out another container, one represented by the chief stewardess but which in fact extends to the entire context, a deliberate ordering of sensory experience and normative expectations which serves as a “pseudo-container” for uncontained projections.
According to Cartwright, pseudo-containing modes of interaction “circumvent the emotional turmoil inherent in container-contained relations”:
They do this by mimicking the configuration’s existence and perverting its role. In this mode uncontained, unmetabolized experience that has not been integrated into the self appears with an assured and righteous sense of clarity…. In the pseudo-containing mode ‘the contained’ is not derived from raw experience that seeks transformation, but is generated by mimicking the unconsciously perceived intentions, needs or functions of the other object.
In the case of Carl, his projections (which his mind has failed to contain and “metabolize”) are given “an assured and righteous sense of clarity” by being ‘officially’ interpreted as a complaint about the deckhand’s behaviour in front of the passengers. Although this complaint has little to do with the true psychological source of Carl’s anxiety, in the pseudo-containing mode it is given the status of a moral truth. Thus his actual experience remains “uncontained” and “unmetabolized”. The chief stewardess’s role is not to express curiosity about Carl’s psychological reality, but simply to play along, in effect acting out Carl’s unconscious phantasy by expelling the ‘bad object’ persecuting him and then modelling the engagement ring as if she were his girlfriend. Nothing has been emotionally transformed in this process because nothing real (psychologically speaking) has been acknowledged.
Beta-Mentality
One of the key concepts in Bion’s theory of the mind is that of beta-elements, by which he means external or internal (emotional) stimuli before they have been processed by the mind into something meaningful. These are the unconscious ‘thoughts’ or feelings which are projected by the mind and distort one’s perception of reality. Bion argued that in order for these sense-impressions to be used as components of dreams, memories or thoughts, they first have to be transformed via a mysterious mental process called “alpha-function” (which Bion described as a kind of dreaming while awake), the products of which are called “alpha-elements” that then form the meaningful components of thoughts, dreams, etc.
Cartwright characterises beta-elements as “the stem-cells of experience.” If beta-elements are not contained or not able to be transformed via the alpha-function, then their presence in the mind can have disturbing and pathological effects. In their book on Bion, Joan and Neville Symington describe this aspect of beta-elements as follows:
They are sense impressions devoid of meaning or nameless sensations which cause frustration. For example, they may be persecutory or depressive in nature but they are incoherent. They are undigested and feel like things-in-themselves, as foreign bodies in the mind. They are suitable only for evacuation because they cannot be thought about. If persecuting, they feel like debris of which the mind wants to rid itself…
Cartwright broadly agrees with the idea that uncontained or unprocessed beta-elements are mostly fit only for evacuation, such as through projection. But he also picks up on remarks by Bion that beta-elements may cohere to form a kind of impersonal substrate of experience. They can generate “sensory contours and shapes” which form the background upon which movement and interaction takes place; pre-cognitively registering the edges of experience in the form of repetition, mimicry, rhythm and so on. Cartwright’s discussion of this idea, drawing on research from cognitive science and the like, is quite fascinating. But the details are beyond the scope of this essay. What matters here is Cartwright’s thesis that beta-elements can play a “proto-containing” role in interaction; agglomerating to create “a near physical sense of boundary or contour” out of which a more sophisticated intuition of the containing mind is formed.
When the containing function breaks down, Cartwright hypothesises that this proto-containing potential allows beta-elements to self-organise and mimic container-contained configurations. These are effectively pseudo-containers, in which the container lacks an alpha-function. Cartwright characterizes the use of such pseudo-containers by the mind as a beta-mentality. It typically involves the weaving together of both beta-elements and pre-existing alpha-elements; in effect confusing sense-impressions with thoughts, and thoughts with objects and sense-impressions. For example, Carl’s persecuting feelings regarding his inadequacy (beta-elements) are “contained” through a combination of the chief stewardess Paula’s affirmation, the normative expectations of how the crew should behave, the presence of the ring and the feelings it evokes, the sadistic anticipation of the deckhand being disciplined, and so on.
Much of Cartwright’s discussion of beta-mentality is concerned with how it manifests itself in a therapeutic setting. In his chapter on The Matrix, however, he seeks to apply the concept more broadly. In particular, he is interested in examples of beta-mentality in culture, and how technology seems to facilitate its use as a substitute for genuine thought. Whether it is the “thoughtless and contrived (although seemingly reasoned) decisions about life-changing events” one observes on reality television, or the “faceless, disembodied fragments of communication that often typify communication over the internet,” Cartwright’s examples highlight how uncontained mental states and experience can be linked to the mimicking of rationally motivated thought and behaviour. Regarding “fragments of communication”, an amusing example of this is the political debate at the captain’s dinner, between the captain Thomas and the Russian billionaire Dimitry, which consists entirely of exchanging quotes looked up on the internet.
The Parasitic Mode and the Division of Labour
On the day of the captain’s dinner, there is a particularly consequential interaction between the Russian billionaire’s wife, Vera, and one of the stewards, Alicia. We encounter it already in progress, with Vera in a hot tub on deck while Alicia waits on her patiently with a bottle of champagne. One can imagine Vera engaging in “free association” (saying whatever comes into her mind) while Alicia, like an analyst, tries to make sense of what she is saying; or given her expression in the film, simply struggles not to be overcome by boredom.
At the point where we start listening in, Vera is opining on the division of labour in society, the implication being that people who have to work for a living tend to find their lives empty and without meaning. If we think of this topic as the emergence of a “third object” between the pair, then the relation between Vera and Alicia at this moment resembles what Bion called the “parasitic” mode, one in which the container-contained gives rise to a third object which is destructive of all three. Whatever emotional link might be established between Alicia in the role of container and Vera’s mental states as contained is attacked by this idea of the division of labour, which in Vera’s phantasy of it, denies Alicia any independence as a containing mind, a mind capable of generating meaning.
One could even argue that this idea of the division of labour is the core organising phantasy of the film. Consider that under capitalism, the value of a person’s labour cannot be known in advance of the market’s determination. The “Yes sir! Yes ma’am!” speech of the chief stewardess alludes to precisely this: that it is only by giving the passengers whatever they desire (satisfying the market) that they might get a big tip (their work will be valued). In a very real sense, this social imperative strips the workers of their capacity for independent thought. We see this in the film whenever a member of the crew attempts to push back against a passenger’s nonsensical assertion or demand. We also see this in real life, as people engage in behaviour and practices they know to be destructive or wrong but which are determined by the market to be the only viable option (the continual reliance on fossil fuels being only the most urgent and potentially catastrophic example).
To put this another way, the film seems to reimagine the asymmetrical economic relation between buyers and sellers of labour, as a symmetrical relation between minds where contact with reality is abandoned in favour of sharing in another’s phantasy. The notion of symmetry and symmetrical logic is used by the psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco to account for the mental activity of the unconscious (what Freud called the “primary process”), which is characterised by a lack of negation and contradiction, displacement and condensation of meaning, a failure to differentiate between internal and external reality, etc. For Cartwright, the container-contained relation interrupts the symmetry of unconscious thought in this sense, introducing a “forced asymmetry” between container and contained which requires tolerating a degree of difference and a limit to one’s phantasy.
In the prologue, we are informed that “Everyone’s Equal,” albeit in a context and manner which makes us question what, if anything, is really being communicated. Some variation on this theme is repeated throughout the film, including by Vera in her interaction with Alicia; and of course it can be unpacked in various ways. In the context of containing relationships, it suggests a phantasy of symmetry between individual minds in which a shared phantasy is substituted for reality. This is quite seductive but ultimately fatal for psychic growth. The asymmetry between container and contained should not be interpreted as some kind of hierarchy between minds. But it does require the acknowledgment of a difference between minds, especially the opacity and unpredictability of another’s mind, rather than imagining another mind as an extension of oneself. Symmetry between minds is the impairment of mentalization, and if anything it becomes more pronounced under social conditions of inequality.
The interaction between Vera and Alicia quickly shifts from a parasitic mode to a pseudo-containing mode when Vera feigns concern for Alicia’s well-being. Cartwright notes that in a therapeutic situation, pseudo-containing can involve the patient taking over the container role as a way of avoiding being held in the mind of the therapist. In the same way Vera acts as if she were a concerned mother, preoccupied with Alicia’s needs and wants. Of course, Vera’s assumption that Alicia wants to go for a swim is completely detached from reality, an example of what Fonagy and Bateman call “pseudo-mentalizing”. At the same time, because Vera is dominated by a beta-mentality, she needs to confirm her assumption about Alicia’s state of mind through the senses, by physically swapping places with her in the hot tub. Cartwright argues that another characteristic of beta-mentality is the assumption that more of something is always better; and so it is that Vera demands not just Alicia but the entire crew go for a swim. In effect, she imagines herself the container for the entire yacht, the crew becoming an extension of herself.
Undigested facts
A consequence of Vera’s intervention is that the seafood being prepared for the captain’s dinner is left to spoil. Food plays an important symbolic role in the film, and on the yacht seems to align with the notion of beta-elements. For example, Yaya is seen taking a photo with a bowl of pasta for her Instagram account, but will not eat (or digest) the pasta, which is metaphorically suggestive of the autistic mode in which beta-elements are used to as sensory surfaces to block entering another’s mind. The kitchen, meanwhile, is where food gets cooked so that it can be digested, akin to the alpha-function’s transformation of beta-elements into alpha-elements usable by the mind. When the kitchen doesn’t do its job, or when the alpha-function is impaired, the passengers are served up spoilt food symbolizing the toxic accumulation of beta-elements; exactly what one would expect from their over-reliance on beta-mentalizing. As noted above, beta-elements are either transformed, utilised as proto-containing substrates of experience, or are evacuated as debris from the mind, or “undigested facts” as Bion calls them. The climax to the dinner is a visceral metaphor for psychic evacuation. Indeed, the scene suggests an aggressive takeover by a psychotic part of the mind which inverts the alpha-function: feelings and thoughts are ejected from the mind in the form of sense impressions. (Clinically this would take the form of hallucinations, which one of the passengers clearly suffers from.) In Fernando Riolo’s memorable description of the inversion of alpha-function: “the apparatus for thinking thoughts… is partly overturned and expelled, and the mind operates like a mouth–anus canal or muscle without a digestive apparatus.” (From his essay “Psychoanalytic transformations”.)
Rectum Claustrum
In his discussion of the film The Matrix, Cartwright interprets the virtual world generated by the machines to be a pseudo-container dominated by beta-mentality, and distinguishes it from life in Zion, the “real world” in which human resistance to the machines is located. In his account of Zion, Cartwright draws on the work of Donald Meltzer, who theorised that psychological regression could take the form of a retreat into what he called the “claustrum”, an internal object modelled on the mother’s body, the subject of the earliest unconscious phantasies of the infantile mind. Retreat into the claustrum is a form of psychological defence which involves closing oneself off to meaningful relationships and psychic growth. Doing so brings with it a sense of security, but one accompanied by both a sense of imprisonment and paranoia that one might be discovered as an interloper and cast out.
In his work on the claustrum, Meltzer mapped out three regions which designate degrees of psychic fragmentation and paranoia. The first is the head/breast, which Meltzer likened to the house in which Goldilocks found herself, where everything is “just right” but there is the lingering thought that one might be forced out of at any moment. (This probably corresponds to a pervasive anxiety that might accompany a comfortable middle-class existence.) The second is the genital region, which Meltzer thought is characterised by a highly excitable but enjoyable state, like a brothel or a South Sea Island of the 19th C. imagination, where anxiety arose from being ranked according to a hierarchy based on sexual attractiveness. (Anyone who has attended a book club while being single knows what this is like.) And finally there is the rectum, a state of mind which he thought was perfectly captured in Kafka’s writings, one of waiting and keeping one’s head down to avoid being targeted, or else of betraying others in an effort to ascend a hierarchy of tyranny. Meltzer’s examples include an English public school and a concentration camp.
Cartwright associates Zion with a psychic retreat undertaken in the face of annihilatory anxiety. The virtual world of the machines does not just represent the absence of alpha-function, but according to Cartwright is “an active hate-filled attempt to render human life meaningless,” an attack he associates with the inversion of alpha-function. Survival means taking refuge in the rectum claustrum, which is dominated by paranoia and sadism, represented in the film by a resistance movement riven with internal division and betrayal. But apart from its abject nature, Cartwright argues there is another side to Zion, one consisting of “hope and faith in the prophecy.” It is a place to retreat while awaiting the prospect of psychological rebirth:
It is a refuge, a rectal-womb, away from persecutory splitting and the separation of body and mind. In this way it suggests a different pathological constellation, a healthier one, where non-psychotic aspects of the personality can make use of psychotic mechanisms — splitting and intrusive identification — for the sake of a last-ditch attempt at preservation of the good object. The conflict thus becomes one of trying to preserve goodness in the face of encapsulating sadism, paranoia and cynicism. Retreat into encapsulation is a lesser evil than having to face the threat of annihilation in the external world.
In Triangle of Sadness, the yacht chapter can be similarly divided into the world of the pseudo-container and the rectum claustrum, only it is a division in time rather than a virtual one. Indeed, the vessel after the captain’s dinner more literally resembles the rectum claustrum than Zion does in The Matrix. The self-declared “king of shit,” Dimitry, proclaims that he is the new owner of the yacht, taunting his fellow passengers over the intercom, while shit literally inundates the ship. Believing the yacht to be sinking, the passengers put on their life jackets and are seen falling over themselves in a panic. The lights go out, and a flashlight reveals some of them to be sitting in the dark, anxiously waiting and isolated, seemingly at their lowest point.
The clear implication is that the social environment represented by the yacht, in which beta-mentalizing substitutes for the work of the container proper, is a direct attack on human existence which threatens to render it meaningless. As with Cartwright’s interpretation of Zion, however, we also see signs of hope which counteract this desperate scenario. The captain’s attitude evolves from that of joining Dimitry in his sadistic persecution of the passengers, to acknowledging his own failure as a supposedly good object (a socialist), to engaging in a more personal and less political form of introspection, at which point Dimitry hands him back the microphone. In the terminology of Melanie Klein, these changes can be interpreted as a move from a paranoid-schizoid position (which employs aggressive projection and splitting into part objects embodying either the good or the bad) to a depressive position (which involves integration and a mournful concern for the whole object as both good and bad). Moreover, the chapter which soon follows this scene is “The Island”, which according to Meltzer’s internal geography suggests an ascent into the less hellish genital compartment of the claustrum.
The Return of the Oppressed
Bion’s approach to psychoanalysis represents a shift of focus from the contents of thought to the apparatus for thinking. The psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas in Meaning and Melancholia alludes to this change when he draws a distinction between “the return of the repressed” and “the return of the oppressed”:
The return of the repressed — a necessary focus for early twentieth-century psychoanalysis — refers to the reappearance of unwanted mental contents through disguised articulation. We are now considering a related idea, which I am calling the return of the oppressed. This refers, not to mental contents, but to new forms of thinking that are the result of oppression…. The drive to return the repressed to consciousness can lead to intriguing symptoms, dreams, linguistic formulations and even artistic creations, but a self who is suffering from profound oppression will reveal impoverishments of thinking and affect. This can be understood as a form of mental suicide, or subjecticide, which offers the self an ego position in the new social order through the elimination of sophisticated forms of perceptions and thoughtfulness. (pp. 68f.)
He finds evidence for this notion of oppressed thinking in historical accounts of slaves engaging in acts of “deliberate bungling” and sabotage, examples of “pseudo-stupidity” or deficient forms of thinking prompted by their circumstances. We see examples of this on the yacht, when for example Abigail the cleaner intrudes on Carl and Yaya in bed, and repeatedly asks when she should return to clean the cabin. Another example is the stewards confusing food poisoning with sea-sickness. And of course there are the cooks who serve up spoilt seafood.
The history of colonial oppression is perhaps alluded to in the film by the middle class elderly couple who turn out to be arms manufacturers (how much of the Western world’s wealth is bound up with violent appropriation?), who get their comeuppance when pirates attack the yacht. The notion of oppression Bollas is interested in, however, is much broader than just this colonial history; it also encompasses poverty, patriarchy, the cumulative trauma of wars and globalization (p. 34). In this sense, Bollas believes we are all more or less oppressed in modernity. The consequences of this oppression for the individual mind are also wide ranging, and in many cases resemble what Cartwright calls beta-mentality. Bollas highlights in this respect a preference for sight over insight, and action over reflection. He describes the “normapathic self,” which prefers the material world to subjective life, seeking “to become an object in the object world — alongside motorbikes or boats or nifty shoes” (p. 43); and the related “compound syndrome” in which the wealthy retreat into gated communities, eventually resulting in a sensory and intellectual “undernourishment of the self.” (p.46)
In Triangle of Sadness, this “return of the oppressed” takes the form of a beta-mentality which is shown to mainly affect the wealthy passengers on board; although for the most part there is little to outwardly distinguish these passengers from the middle class. It seems to me that the point of focusing on the wealthy, apart from its satirical value, is that it can bring to the forefront the role of the division of labour under capitalism as a condition for the widespread adoption of beta-mentalizing. That the division of labour can be experienced as a form of oppression for many is vividly illustrated by the character Abigail, who goes from being a “toilet cleaner” on the yacht to a “captain” or group leader on the island, only to face the prospect of “subjecticide” as the price for returning to the capitalist order of things.
After the hellish scenes aboard the doomed yacht, the island represents a psychic retreat or convalescence. While not without its own tyrannies and sadism, most of the people on the island do seem to relate to one another in a healthier, more human, manner. But with the time of convalescence coming to an end, and the potential for violence raised, we are left with an ambiguous image: Carl running through the undergrowth, his face scratched and scarred by the branches. We do not know whether he is running to or away from something; and I don’t think the point of the ending rests on how we answer that question. Instead, I read the marks on his face as a clear rejection of the beta-mentality that dominates the film from its opening scenes. It suggests that the only path forward to psychological growth, no matter how painful, depends on negotiating the emotional turmoil that comes from containing states of mind.
