Maria, a new Netflix movie starring Angelina Jolie as opera superstar Maria Callas, is generating large viewership as well as awards buzz.
Wellesley professor Paul Wink watched the film through a distinctive lens. As a psychologist, lifelong opera fan, and biographer of Callas, Wink says Maria is visually spectacular and raises important issues related to gender and aging. At the same time, he notes, the film misses an opportunity to illuminate some key aspects of Callas’s life.
Wink is the Nellie Zuckerman Cohen and Anne Cohen Heller Professor in Health Sciences and professor of psychology at Wellesley. Here, Wink shares some of his thoughts about Maria—and about Callas herself.
Tell us about Maria Callas’s life.
Her life was very complicated. Some children grow up knowing they want to be a singer. But Maria did not want that. She enacted her mother’s ambition to become a star.
Maria’s mother saw her two daughters as a way to get out of a bad marriage and have some notoriety or fame. She initially fixated on her beautiful older daughter, Jackie, who had some talent. But then one day, her mother was walking back to her apartment and saw a group of people standing outside and looking up at the balcony, watching and listening while Maria was singing. And then her mother realizes, “This is it!”
In addition to her voice, Callas had a powerful presence.
But Maria didn’t fully believe this. Maria’s mother was good-looking, and Maria’s older sister was extremely good-looking. And they consciously or unconsciously conspired to ensure that Maria would feel that she wasn’t at all good-looking. That helped the mother, who did not want Maria to marry because that would mean the end of her opera career.
At some level Maria, who was a perfectionist, agreed with her mother and her sister. She put on a huge amount of weight, and then lost the weight, but throughout her life she was worried about her “fat thighs.” And so there was this split between the imperial Callas, the magisterial diva, and Maria, who did not fully believe she was attractive.
Is that uniquely a woman’s story?
It is true that women who become prominent are more likely to have that split [between public persona and private self], because there are more demands that are put on women. If you compare tenors to sopranos, some tenors are handsome, some are not. Many are obese. And that was fine; tenors didn’t have to care about their bodies. Women have to care much more. They are much more vulnerable to this pressure.
Why is Callas so important to opera?
Maria Callas is celebrated for her artistry. She had a genuinely magnetic persona onstage. Maria’s voice was not as beautiful as some of her peers’, but her voice was extremely expressive. And she convinced the world that this is what matters. It’s the totality of the experience that matters.
What makes her life and her death so tragic?
You would think that Callas would have ended her life by basking in her accomplishments. But she just couldn’t do that. She had a mixed and uncomfortable relationship with her persona as an operatic diva. Psychoanalyst Erik Erikson said, “In old age, you either integrate or you despair.” Maria could not integrate—she could not accept her life, with its ups and downs—and so she despaired.
This is also what makes her very similar to people like Judy Garland, Michael Jackson, and others. They were all real geniuses of the stage, and they all ended up, tragically, addicted to drugs. And the drugs are there to kill the pain associated with a fractured self.
What can we learn from Callas’s life?
Maria Callas demonstrates the power of the individual to forge a career. Unlike many famous singers, she had no previous connections in opera. What she did, she did on her own: Her willpower, her perfectionism, her talent allowed her to change the operatic world! That’s the positive side.
The negative side, of course, is we learn that all of these successes don’t necessarily lead to a successful life. But it’s important to remember that not everyone famous ends up [like Callas or Garland]. That’s why you have to look at psychology, at the structure of the self. It’s here that you see that there’s a price to be paid for a disjunction between your outer self and your inner self. That sort of fracture allowed Maria to become a great artist. But that split, her incompleteness—that helped her, but it also destroyed her.