The Path of Least Resistance
Mary W. Matthews
My husband and I are fans of “Six Feet Under,” the HBO dramedy about the loves and angsts of a family of funeral directors, each of whom is more neurotically repressed than the next.
The character I like best, Nate, is as I write engaged to Brenda, the daughter of two sociopathic psychiatrists (is there any other kind on TV?) and the sister of a psychotic who’s functional when he’s on his meds. Brenda is supposed to be so scarily brilliant that when she was a child, yet another psychiatrist wrote a best-seller about her precocious genius.
In the middle of April, “Six Feet Under” ran an episode during which Brenda tells her mother that she and Nate are engaged. Her mother at first dismisses the news as a joke, and then incredulously asks her daughter whether Nate is smart enough for her. Brenda utters an impassioned diatribe about what agony it is to be so much smarter than everyone else, ending with, “No, Mom, he’s normal.”
At the time, I turned to Jerry and said, “That screenwriter doesn’t have a clue what it’s like to be a Mensan.” But I’ve been thinking about that scene ever since. The taken-for-granted presumption that high intelligence and mental abnormality go hand in hand. The taken-for-granted presumption that that it’s impossible to be both highly intelligent and happy.
In the real world, Brenda would be no prize. She sleeps with strangers, both imagined and real. Her relationship with her wacko brother is quasi-incestuous. She has no discernible life ambitions or spiritual insight. Early in the series, Nate’s mother walked into her own living room right before a dinner party to discover Nate performing oral sex on Brenda. Ever since, Brenda has been convinced that Ruth doesn’t like her. How irrational, Brenda seems to believe, for Ruth to have expected two adults, a guest in her home and her own son, to have the slightest sense of propriety!
But we’re still expected to believe that Brenda is so intelligent she’d make the average Mensan look like a Densan! I think of it as the path of least resistance — a “normal” screenwriter with a deadline to meet going for the easy answer rather than the potentially more interesting one.
Historically, entertainment has divided the intellectually superior into two categories. Occasionally we are portrayed as cute and cuddly — Walter Matthau playing Einstein.
But on the path of least resistance, the scientist has to be mad, the professor has to be absentminded, the psychiatrist has to be crazy, the evil genius has to be a megalomaniac, and the diamond has to be in the rough. The brilliant detective has to be fat, in a wheelchair (or both), a spinster or widow, a misogynist, eccentric, friendship-impaired (like Philip Marlowe), or have some other detriment to balance off the genius. Conversely, the beautiful woman and the muscular jock are expected to be stupid, and the saint is required to have no common sense. The hero or heroine who is brilliant, gorgeous, happy, and successful will be dead by the end of the drama.
On the path of least resistance, twenty-something Barbies and Kens, groomed to bandbox perfection, are supposed to be Nobel-quality scientists, $500-per-hour attorneys, or battle-hardened military commanders with years of experience on the front lines — a Baywatch babe as Hannah Arendt or Henry Kissinger. When actual Mensan actors are cast, we have to put up with insults like William Windom as a bumbling fool, Geena Davis as a beautiful airhead, and Alan Rachins as a burned-out druggie.
But the scene would have been so much better if Brenda had said to her mother, “No, Nate is not as smart as I am. So what? He’s more compassionate than I am and he has a much better moral compass.” Verbal and logico-mathematical are not the only forms of intelligence there are. Mozart would have tanked on his SATs. Pablo Picasso, Babe Didrikson, Mohammed, and Lola Montez, to offer just a few examples, were other geniuses who would never have scored high enough on any standardized test to get into Mensa.
Being more intelligent than most people doesn’t automatically make us more tortured by demons that mere mortals can’t even perceive. Being in the top two percent might make us more eccentric than “normal” people, but that’s the only major difference I can think of — and eccentricity is as much in the eye of the beholder as genius is.
Genius has been defined as any number of things — a greater aptitude for patience, the willingness to take infinite pains (or as Einstein said, “99 percent perspiration”), a mind of large general powers, the enmity of dunces, the ability to re-enter childhood at will. We are no more (or less) mentally disturbed than the general run of the population, no more (or less) criminal, anguished, good, evil, coordinated, klutzy, etc. Sometimes we can even be joyous.
So let’s hear it for all those who try to avoid the path of least resistance. Long may they wave!
