The latter, again, seems dependant on fate, luck and inexplicable inner demons: not some fatal flaw, not the gods (since there don't seem to be any, despite shrines, portents and pictures on the wall), but something more intractable.
It is true that there is something more intractable in devotion to otherworldly ideologies rather than to materialistic creeds that at least have their headquarters on earth, even if these are in foreign capital cities.
The director could be moving away from the more lenient position of the earlier two films and toward something more intractable and disquieting – closer to an imagined focal point of evil and despair that provides a context for that blasted heath of defeat across which the tiny figures have been moving.
Moreover, in explaining the advent of lawful existence, Freud identifies something recalcitrant, intractable in social arrangements a kind of self-assault (the super-ego) that links pleasure with aggression, and thus that carries a potentially destabilizing force.
When you're facing something as intractable and incomprehensible as infertility, and you're feeling helpless and hopeless, denial can be your best friend.
Nor are state authorities keen to take on responsibility for something as murkily intractable as urban government.Because it became notorious, East St Louis in the end demanded the state's attention.
Derbyshire also detected "a whiff of Updike" about the novel, "but, unlike Updike, for whom the world is mostly a welcoming plenitude, Markovits's characters experience it as something hard and intractable".
But such treasure islands, with attendant trove studies, seem only symptoms of something far more intractable: basically, a way of doing business that no one – from WikiLeaks to the Oval Office – can reform or replace because no one has the resolve or the means, because there is (literally) no alternative.
If Mockingbird was about the rule of law and justice, about community and equality, Watchman tackles something even more intractable: the prejudice we find in those we love.
