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Key points
- Dissociation is a cultural, political, and economic problem that stems from structural inequality.
- Dissociation can freeze a body and mind such that agentive action becomes nearly impossible.
- Netflix's "Maid" offers a portrait of how a poor single mother turns numb in the face of oppression.
I’ll start with her foot. A couch swallows it in the final moments of episode seven of Netflix’s Maid (2021), based on Stephanie Land’s memoir of the same name. The foot belongs to Alex (Margaret Qualley), a poor white woman struggling to free herself from an intricate web of social, institutional, generational, familial, and psychological forces that trap and constrict her capacity to free herself and her daughter from her emotionally abusive partner.
Upon its release, Maid was celebrated for its accurate portrayal of a system that suffocates poor people and prevents them from escaping cycles of abuse and deprivation. Viewers are given insight into the needless bureaucratic hoops, legalese, no-win scenarios, and outright callousness of a system based on securing the needs of white, rich, heteropatriarchal citizens that Alex must navigate if she’s to have any hope of surviving as a poor single mother in the U.S.
What stands out to me in Alex’s descent into the dark recesses of her couch is something more profound, that is, the function of dissociation as a tool the State uses to mark certain populations for “wearing out,” to use Lauren Berlant’s language. In episodes before the couch swallows Alex, viewers are placed within Alex’s perspective as she navigates welfare and legal systems. She imagines, for instance, a social worker calling her a “piece of sh*t” for trying to access welfare, which is no surprise given how shame functions to demonize those seeking financial help in the U.S. In a legal battle for custody of her daughter, she hears the judge and lawyer saying “legal legal legal” over and over again as her bewildered expression confirms: The language of the law is indecipherable to most it governs over.
In the scene preceding her descent into the couch, Alex sits in a hospital waiting room, reeling from a traumatic encounter with her mentally ill mother, Paula (Andi MacDowell). In addition to this interpersonal strife, she is facing homelessness because her ex-partner got drunk at her daughter’s birthday, sabotaging her relationship with her new landlords. As Paula is treated for wounds on her hands, Alex sits in silence next to her ex, Sean (Nick Robinson) in the hospital waiting room.
The use of film techniques in this moment—soft focus, extreme close-ups of Alex’s head at many angles, flashing police lights in the distance, and a soundtrack that mimics the ringing sound of tinnitus—lay the groundwork for what I call a “dissociated diegesis"—that is, a cinematic world where viewers are placed within a dissociated point of view that enables an understanding of how dissociation works to freeze a body and mind such that agentive action becomes near impossible.
As Alex and Sean sit in the waiting room, Sean’s distanced, muddled voice barely reaches Alex (or the audience) as he attempts to connect her to reality. His voice sounds like he’s speaking underwater. His face is blurry to such a degree that we can’t recognize his expression. Alex’s gaze, meanwhile, is cast off, distant, and numb. She doesn’t cry, scream, or express the kind of emotion typical in cinematic depictions of trauma. She’s shut down to her environment, as the extremely soft focus indicates. The hard cuts between different perspectives of Alex’s head—from head on, to the side, and behind her head—indicate a depersonal gaze, one that situates Alex’s perspective outside her body, a feeling common to those experiencing dissociation.
The scene abruptly cuts to Alex standing motionless in the middle of Sean’s trailer, standing in the living room she escaped in episode one. The camera circles her in a slow, shaky movement as she stands stoic, breath heaving, eyes glazed over. The combination of these incongruent rhythms—the shaky camera and her still stance—gives viewers insight into Alex’s internal emotional state despite outward appearances. The camera movements suggest her emotions are discombobulated. After many minutes, Alex cries. Turning to Sean for comfort, the two begin to kiss, leading to their first sexual encounter since Alex escaped from Sean.
The film techniques used to capture their sexual encounter reinforce Alex’s shock and dissociation using extreme close-ups, high-angle shots, and soft focus. In the image above, we see Alex staring at the ceiling as her partner begins to have sex with her. His body is nearly smudged out of existence as Alex’s head takes up almost half the shot, the only object in focus. Daphne Simeon, M.D., and Jeffrey Abugel describe dissociation—specifically depersonalization—as “thinking without feeling,” as a person “devoid of emotional connection to past or present” (Simeon and Abugel 11). What I see in this image of Alex is exactly that: She’s all mind, as evidenced by her enormous head dwarfing the rest of her body.
Many who experience dissociation describe the sensation as akin to an out-of-body experience, where overwhelming stress leads an organism to escape embodiment in favor of getting lost in one’s mind or retreating to the ceiling. The use of a high-angle shot coupled with extreme soft focus works to create just such a sensation. To see Alex framed with such film techniques gives viewers a felt sense of what dissociation feels like on a phenomenological level.
The discomfort of this scene is palpable. Is Alex capable of giving informed consent when these film techniques so clearly indicate she’s not fully present in her environment? Is Sean taking advantage of her altered state, even though he got verbal consent from Alex? Something feels amiss. Something still feels icky.
What’s icky is the incongruence between language and behavior. Sean relies on language at the expense of other cues that Alex may not be ready for sex. He doesn’t perceive—or doesn’t care to perceive—Alex’s facial expressions (shocked, distant), body language (hunched), emotional state (confused, dysregulated, numb), and environmental context (she just watched her mother have a manic break from reality). I’m not suggesting Alex doesn’t want to have sex—she does offer verbal consent—but that the film techniques used to capture the moment suggest profound ambivalence. Perhaps Alex thought sex would provide comfort, intimacy, escape, or pleasure, but because she’s so dissociated, it’s hard to tell how she experiences the encounter. She may not be experiencing it at all.
Scholarly discussions about dissociation are found in psychological, neuroscientific, and psychoanalytic literature and are well-suited for analyzing this pseudo-consensual event. Such literature discusses dissociation as a problem resulting from interpersonal terrorism, like the kind found in domestic violence situations, sexual or physical abuse, and chronic exposure to trauma over a long duration. We can fit this scene within this framework quite easily. As dissociation is largely conceptualized as a relational trauma that occurs when a trusted other betrays someone through repeated abuse and gaslighting, we can see these dynamics play out between Alex and those she loves.
What Maid also reveals is that dissociation has a far larger reach than conceptualized in strictly psychological and neurobiological models proposed by Western medicine and psychology. While nods are made in the DSM-V about some environmental factors that can produce dissociative symptoms—such as growing up in a war zone or experiencing a natural disaster—dissociation is largely framed as an individual’s trauma response that requires individual grit and analysis to resolve. It’s a problem of individuals.
What Maid emphasizes, however, are the ways institutions, laws, and the structure of the U.S. welfare system equally produce conditions that create dissociative states across populations, particularly those that are poor, non-white, non-cis male, and the colonized. Alex is burdened not only by interpersonal and familial strife but grows increasingly numb trying the impossible task of finding housing for her and her daughter, working grueling shifts that leave her zapped, and encountering legal and medical institutions that leave her confused and scared.
It’s time to recognize the impact of cultural dissociation. When whole populations of people are rendered numb, exhausted, isolated, and spent, social change remains out of reach. Maybe that’s the point.
References
Berlant, L. G. (2011). Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press.
Preface. (2023). In D. Simeon & J. Abugel, Feeling Unreal (2nd ed., pp. ix–x). Oxford University Press Toronto.
