The Resistance of Friendship: Sigmund Freud, Laurence Rickels, and Sean Baker

In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines three kinds of friendship: utility, pleasure, and virtue. The characters in the films of Sean Baker fit into none of these categories. Friendship is central to all of Baker’s films, but it takes the non-Aristotelian form of “friends, no matter what,” which I interpret as a description of the aporia of friendship, of an impossible friend, or a friend in the realm of fantasy. In other words, friends are only friends when they resist everything friends are supposed to do. Betrayal, lies, and complications sit at the heart of this new definition. One mechanism for this kind of friendship is mourning. Friends are only friends when friendship is mourned, or when it is part of a crypt, or a vault for losses that are too traumatic to confront fully, as set out in the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Derrida, Nicolas Abraham and Mária Török, and developed by Laurence Rickels. This reading of mourning puts a particular spin on fantasy, for if fantasy is generally assumed to be about wish-fulfillment, then when fantasy reaches into the crypt for inspiration, it is retooled into a vehicle for confronting what is too hard to face. This is the function of friendship in Baker’s films: his friends are Judas figures going against their friends in order to keep their friendship alive. In Tangerine (2015), two transgender sex workers in West Hollywood develop their friendship around a fight over a man. In Starlet (2012), a young woman hides a secret from her elderly female friend, and this friendship is only saved when another actress betrays this secret. In these films, friendship is paradoxically formed by attempting to ruin friendship. Thought on fantasy and mourning will help in defining this type of non-Aristotelian friendship, as well as Freud’s work on the “ambivalence of feeling” from his writing on the First World War.