VITAL TOPICS: SOCIAL WORK & FILM
Ozark Dropout Anatomy of a Scandal
by SaraKay Smullens, MSW, LCSW, DCSW, CGP, CFLE, BCD
(Editor’s Note: SaraKay Smullens has written film and TV commentary and reviews for The New Social Worker since 2018. As of this writing, these will be published under the column title of Vital Topics: Social Work & Film, continuing to address key issues of relevance to social work, social workers, and those in related professions depicted in film.)
In 2015, after the first edition of my book Burnout and Self-Care in Social Work was published, I began to receive requests for workshops and presentations from administrators of college student mental health centers staffed by newly minted social workers. To quote one, reflective of all, “Our young staff is fully informed about the lethal impact of injustice, inequality, and the evil ‘isms’ on individuals, families, work settings, and our society. But to help with conflicts our students present about their backgrounds, present personal lives, directions, choices, a better understanding of their emotional ‘inner world’ development is required.” Meeting with students in myriad settings confirmed a strong need for richer awareness of psychological development, which led to the inclusion of this important emphasis in the second edition (2021) of Burnout and Self-Care.
For the past year, student and general mental health centers have requested workshops and presentations with a different emphasis on what several term as “the present epidemic”—a growing citizenry devoid of conscience, who manipulate and lie with neither concern for those harmed nor any apparent guilt. They ask not for theory, but for focus on “real life examples” of “what has gone so terribly wrong in the personal, psychological world of liars and cheaters.”
With the urgency for this examination in mind, I turn to a discussion of three highly popular series currently streaming on Netflix and Hulu. Each of these series offers hints, glimmers, and full explanations of what can and does go so terribly wrong. Following a discussion of each series, I will briefly address social work/therapeutic directions that can prove beneficial.
These insights are meant to be meaningful for all social workers, for all of us hear the hopes, dreams, and frustrations and pain of our clients and can guide them toward claiming their “emotional sense of direction,” leading to resilience and fulfillment. Of course, in evaluating suggested therapeutic direction and defining additional ones, the use of supervision and consultation is enormously important.
Ozark offers profound insights and will receive the most incisive framing. Creators of this award-winning series illuminate how generations of uninterrupted familial pathology lead to what is publicly labeled “evil.” This terrifying progression is also seen in The Dropout and touched upon in Anatomy of a Scandal.
Further, a spoiler warning: To lift clues from myriad detail and shed light necessitates the use of spoilers. However, spoilers are offered in concentrated broad stroke analysis. Most of each script’s intriguing details—the twists and turns leading to culmination—will not be revealed.
Ozark
Netflix, released July 21, 2017-April 29, 2022
It takes time, in this grim, brilliantly acted 4-season series (shot through a lens the sun will not pierce) to confirm and finally accept who the protagonists Wendy (Laura Linney) and Marty (Jason Bateman) Byrde actually are. Initially, they are introduced as a couple facing marital problems who get caught up in something unimaginable, the kind of conundrum no one is immune to—one that for the sake of family survival calls for desperate measures (ala Breaking Bad).
In time, the truth about the Wendy-Marty union becomes undeniable. Theirs is a lethal dance, their connection and attraction pathological. In retrospect, the seeds of this truth are evident upon first meeting. Wendy, dissatisfied with her life, her work, her husband, harbors secret, seemingly impossible dreams. Yearning for excitement and turned on by danger, she seeks adventure and new direction through an affair.
Marty has a loving, trusting heart; superb accounting skills; and is by nature a follower. He and his partner Bruce Liddell are financial advisors who launder money for the Navarro Mexican drug cartel. When Bruce skims $8 million and is murdered, along with others in the Byrde circle, including Wendy’s lover, Wendy and Marty are forced to unite or die. They leave Chicago for the Ozarks with their two children, Charlotte (Sofia Hublitz) and Jonah (Skylar Gaertner), to launder money and save their lives.
The move to the Ozarks provides the opportunity for Wendy to transform her deepest yearnings into a dream come true. Brilliantly skilled at playing the martyred wife, she is motivated only by the survival and well-being of her family when the opposite is true. Wendy will do whatever she deems necessary to achieve the power, control, and wealth she craves, and will go to any and all lengths in her determination to manipulate and strong-arm whomever necessary, including her children.
Although Marty often questions his wife’s insisted upon direction, Wendy’s hold on him leads to perpetual acquiescence. The love they claim is based on Wendy’s determination to call all shots and the control Marty surrenders to appease and satisfy her. Wendy’s schemes include relegating Marty to savage Navarro cartel territory, brimming with treacherous Oedipal plot and rivalry. They also include murder.
The darling of Ozark is sassy, irresistable Ruth Langmore (Julia Garner), part of a family “cursed” by a life of petty (and worse) crime. Ruth’s seemingly tough exterior is for protection only. Her capacity for goodness, love, and loyalty is birthed because, surrounded by lawlessness and corruption, she becomes the nurturer and mainstay of cousins who need her and whom she loves deeply, most notably and achingly, Wyatt Langmore (Charlie Tahan).
Marty hires Ruth, opening her door to a far different future than she could ever have imagined. You will never forget Ruth in the closing segment of Ozark, with a sparkling barrette-broach in her hair, looking bride-like, free, and rich with optimism about the future.
Ruth’s “inner world”—her capacity to care for others—is one Wendy works tirelessly to project. However, the ruthless, devious killer Darlene Snell (Lisa Emery), whose first husband Jacob (Peter Mullan) is the local heroin producer and feared crime boss of the area, is the true portrait of Wendy’s inner self, her Dorian Grey.
We see the origin of the Byrde family pathology as Darlene cares devotedly for a foster baby she is determined to make her own and will rarely be separated from. Darlene offers a helpless child all she has longed for, but never received.
When we meet Wendy’s duplicitous, abusive father (Richard Thomas, in a role that can free him from John-Boy Walton), with his saccharine pipeline to God cover, the aching loss and longing for unavailable parental love reveals a shattering truth—Wendy’s father, a destroyer of souls, lives on in his daughter.
Social Work/Therapeutic Direction: The essential question for Marty to explore is why he allows Wendy to dominate him. Of course, if this topic is broached too quickly, defensiveness will set in. In my experience, one with Marty’s dependency and ability to tolerate dangerous circumstance has experienced enormous loss and hazard in formative years. It is rare for one with Wendy’s psychological makeup to seek help, unless it is to manipulate one consulted. Also, in my experience, marital therapy insisted upon will not work unless disaster strikes Wendy’s psychic world, such as Marty telling her that unless there is change, he is leaving her (and meaning it!), or one of her children doing the same. To change, Wendy must face that she has become the person she hates most in this world. Either family or group therapy would offer Marty a safe place to face his loss in early years and awaken to the need to protect his children. Charlotte and Jonah are of an age when family therapy could be beneficial. Also, with this choice, it is possible to isolate a dangerous force in a family and strengthen others, and there are times when this dramatic shift can lead to change in one like Wendy. Family life education in Charlotte and Jonah’s school could lead to greater awareness of their need to separate from their mother.
The Dropout
Hulu, released March 3, 2022
(Please note: In my discussion of The Dropout, analysis for the purposes described is based only on depiction offered in the television series, which may have taken liberties with the actual life experiences of Elizabeth Holmes.)
In the 8-episode series The Dropout, we see the depiction of a real-life scandal familiar to many—the development and fall of the disgraced, fraudulent company Theranos. The multi-billion dollar start-up was founded by Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried), who for years duped the world into believing she had revolutionized blood testing.
The script’s focus is narrow—the unfolding of Holmes’ lack of any semblance of ethical boundaries or empathy for those she manipulates and harms, including patients. Toward this end, the following is telling. Just before Holmes begins her freshman year at Stanford, her father, Chris Holmes (Michel Gill), loses his position as an Enron executive when the company is bankrupted through well-reported accounting fraud. Both her father and her mother, Noel (Elizabeth Marvel), are deeply invested in their daughter’s determined goal to achieve such enormous success that she will become a billionaire. This blind parental investment marks the couple’s unveiled resolution that their daughter compensate for their inability to attain fame and fortune.
When Holmes is raped at Stanford and no one, including those in college administration, believes the violation she endures, her mother will neither discuss what happened with her grieving daughter nor acknowledge her pain. Soon, shamed and isolated, compensating with a shield of grandiosity, Holmes decides to drop out of college. Without necessary academic background, she convinces her parents to put tuition funding toward her research.
Later, although her relationship with tech entrepreneur Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews), nearly 20 years her senior, is decidedly unsettling, her parents focus only on Sunny’s wealth. As Holmes grows overwhelmed by the demands of duplicity, a state intensified by the confines of her relationship with Sunny, she considers giving all up and confronting the truth. Once again, she turns to her mother, aching for exploration and support. Yet, her mother ignores Elizabeth’s pain and instead relishes in her fame.
The result: Elizabeth Holmes is a young woman clueless about who she is. The pride her parents need/demand is the driving force in her entire life. She cannot show caring, compassion, or empathy for others because it has never been shown to her.
Social Work/Therapeutic Direction: When hearing a life story like Elizabeth’s, the question, “How did you feel when…,” or the request, “Can you tell me more about this?” may open up essential avenues for thought and reflection. However, the script depicts Elizabeth and her mother locked in a lethal, concrete symbiosis, one that will prove extremely difficult to address. If available in prison, individual and group options for reflection and expression can be beneficial. A woman like Elizabeth Holmes can in time find satisfaction mentoring others in positive ways, offering them what she has yearned for but never received. Ideally, since the parental patterns dominating her life are apparent in her youth, a school social worker could have provided an essential role model, one poles apart from her mother, representing a very different path to follow.
Anatomy of a Scandal
Netflix, released April 15, 2022
The six episodes in Anatomy of a Scandal tell a tale that is highly familiar. James Whitehouse (Rupert Friend), an entitled, charismatic, married British politician with young children, has an affair with Olivia Lytton (Naomi Scott), a much younger office aide. James’ beautiful wife Sophie (Sienna Miller) stands by him when she first learns of the accusation, which he brands a lie.
The plot intensely thickens, however, when Olivia accuses James of rape, a case that comes before British prosecutor Kate Woodcroft (Michelle Dockery—you would never think of Downton Abbey’s Lady Mary if it weren’t for Dockery’s voice).
Sophie takes her two children to visit her privileged, wealthy in-laws. (We are not told whether Sophie’s parents are living and her past or present relationship with them.) During this visit, the realities of her husband’s grandiosity and lack of character begin to ferment within Sophie.
Through crisis, Sophie’s progressive realization that her husband uses her for his own purposes and that her marriage is a sham recalls the adage about young women in search of their prince, who find him, and are then relegated to a lifetime cleaning up after his horse. Motivated by a desire to claim her own life—and the importance of ethics, responsible behavior, and care for others in the future fulfillment of her children—Sophie ditches both prince and horse in surprising climatic scenes.
Social Work/Therapeutic Direction: The ideal time for social work involvement with a client like Sophie is earlier in her life, when a school social worker is available to explore family issues stated earlier and support her in taking herself seriously as a young, highly intelligent emerging woman.
Wrap-Up
Reflection on Ozark and The Dropout offers numerous “if onlys”—wishes for the type of intervention Sophie recognizes as imperative. If only Marty had told Wendy, “Enough is enough!”—especially when Charlotte and Jonah begged for his help, rather than cementing a union with their lethal mother. If only Noel or Chris Holmes had responded to their daughter’s pain and cries for help, rather than pushing her relentlessly and basking in the sun of her seeming fortune.
Ozark, The Dropout, and Anatomy of a Scandal offer a unified warning. Ambition not tempered by conscience and the capacity to love and care for and about others destroys one’s soul—in family, in work, in politics. This process begins in youth, creates demons, and brings a curse to all in their path. This reality begs a final “if only.” If only America’s schools had a social worker in each, countless abusive cycles endured would be broken before their malignancy takes root.
SaraKay Smullens, MSW, LCSW, DCSW, CGP, CFLE, BCD, whose private and pro bono clinical social work practice is in Philadelphia, is a certified group psychotherapist and family life educator. She is a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award (2004) and the Social Worker of the Year (2018) from the Pennsylvania chapter of NASW, and the 2013 NASW Media Award for Best Article. In 2018, she was one of five graduates of the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice selected for the school’s inaugural Hall of Fame. SaraKay is the author of Burnout and Self-Care in Social Work (2nd Edition).