Critical Flicker Fusion

Psychoanalysis at the Movies

William Fried

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429912429
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The premise of this book is that films, like other works of the imagination, may be elucidated by applying methods derived from psychoanalysis, and that doing so will result in a deeper and richer appreciation of the film's meaning. The book explores a number of feature films that lend themselves particularly well to this process. Both in his introduction and throughout the text, the author comments on the method and discusses continuities, similarities and differences among the films. The book is structured according to the central themes of the films, including time and death, love and lust, secrets, and human identity. Some of the films are relevant to more than one of these thematic elements. The introductory essay explores the themes, their representation in the films, and the ways in which they may be elucidated by a psychoanalytically informed critique. Brief paragraphs between the sections of the book facilitate the transitions. In an appendix, there are three essays titled 'Mise-en-scene,' 'Whatever Flames Upon the Night,' and 'Mad Doctors.'

CHAPTER ONE

Secrets

Every work of drama is driven by secrets. They are the source of suspense in all detective stories and of pathos and compassion in high tragedy. The vast domain of narrative that lies between those two genres—detective stories and high tragedy—is also impelled by unknowns that must be discovered. Of the films discussed here, Notes on a Scandal (Eyre, 2007), The Conversation (Coppola, 1974), and the two episodes of The Sopranos (Chase, 2000) are most illustrative of such unknowns.

Barbara and Sheba, the protagonists of Notes on a Scandal share the secret that Sheba is sexually involved with Steven, her student. But Barbara also maintains and lives in a secret world that she entrusts only to her journals. After Barbara has coerced from Sheba a pledge to discontinue the affair with Steven, Sheba keeps her meetings with him secret. Beneath these, however, are unconscious secrets related to anxiety about aging and death that remain inaccessible to the two women even as they incite their aberrant behavior.

Surveillance is the central trope of The Conversation. To “surveil” is to observe someone or something, most often secretly: that is, without the knowledge or consent of the observed. The purpose of the observation is to pry into matters that the observed prefers to keep private. In essence, it is the secretive attempt to penetrate secrets. This is the realm of voyeurism, the wish to see or witness what is taboo or forbidden. Its prototype in early childhood is curiosity about the sexual organs of parents, and the uses to which they are put.

Harry Caul, the protagonist of The Conversation, is a surveillance professional, regarded by his colleagues as “the best in the business.” The film is about the secrets he has been hired to ferret out, but, more pointedly, about the secrets he harbors unconsciously that derive from an especially violent set of childhood oedipal fantasies.

The species of secret that drives The Sopranos is a function of its being a series about a fundamentally secret organization, known popularly as the Mafia. Accordingly, almost all the action is conducted in secrecy. Within the perimeter of this overriding secret, however, there are myriad other secret enclaves and operations. Of special interest among them are Tony’s confidential psychotherapy sessions with Dr. Melfi, and, in turn, hers with her supervisor/therapist, Elliot Kupferberg. From the dramatization of these relationships, we are able to infer a great deal about the unconscious wishes of the principal characters and their reasons and methods for hiding them from themselves.

Notes on a Scandal: Transgression

To begin with, I believe the film is about a transgression that carries personal, psychodynamic, cultural, and mythic significance. I am referring to Sheba’s sexual affair with Steven Connolly. The affair and its surrounding events evoke and draw from a rich literary tradition that includes works by Joseph Conrad, Dostoyevsky, and T. S. Eliot. At the level of myth, it taps Biblical, classical, and folkloric sources. Among the psychodynamic elements that animate the characters are unconscious fantasy, internal object representations, and projective identification. Psychoanalysis, group dynamics, and sociology contribute much to the development and understanding of the powerful central theme—that of boundaries and their violation.

I set great store on the beginning of films and sessions, on what, in the world of opera, is called the overture, because I believe it contains a condensation of what will turn out to be the essence of the work. In Notes on a Scandal, it consists of a shot of Barbara, seated alone, on a bluff overlooking the city. Names, as we shall see, are a key to deciphering the film. Barbara is derived from an ancient Greek origin. It means foreign, or strange. Her solitary position above it all is consistent with her name. In a voice-over, she says, “People have always trusted me with their secrets.”

The scene shifts abruptly to a close-up of Barbara’s pen, journal, and a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray. Her voice-over continues, “But who do I trust with mine? You. Only you.” She is referring to her journal. The camera then pans to a shelf heavy with completed journals, the spine of each marked with a sticker indicating its date. There are scores of them. She has been doing this for a long time. Here, the title of the film is displayed against the background of the journals. “Notes on a Scandal,” it reads, the first three words in white, the fourth in lurid red. The emphasis is on the notes. Barbara is a chronicler: she teaches history and she keeps a record. But the record she keeps is distorted and tendentious, akin to that of an earlier model, Dostoyevsky’s underground man, whose metier is almost a pure culture of spite and who, like Barbara, lives in a basement in what he calls his funk hole, where he pens an acid critique of his fellow humans (Dostoyevsky, 1992).

Another passage that resonates with Barbara’s preoccupation with secrets is the epigraph at the start of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” that T. S. Eliot (1950a) borrowed from Dante. In it, Guido da Montefeltro, an inmate of Hell, says that if he believed he were confessing his crimes to anyone who might return to the world of the living, he would refrain from speaking, but since he is sure that no one ever returns from Hell, he resolves to disclose his secrets without fear of infamy. The irony, of course, is that not only does Dante return, but also he bruits Guido’s story abroad in a poem read by millions, along with intimate accounts of several other inmates of the netherworld.

This irony applies equally to the secrets contained in Barbara’s journals, divulged later in the film, to the “confidential” material of psychoanalytic sessions routinely shared with supervisors, at conferences, and—even less justifiably—in more casual conversations; and, in the end, to much that people may wish to conceal but, for unconscious reasons, are unable to.

It soon becomes apparent that Barbara sees herself as above and superior to her students and colleagues. She stands at the window over the entrance to the school, observing and being critical of those who arrive, referring to them as “Local pubescent proles, the future plumbers and shop assistants, and doubtless the odd terrorist, too.” In this scene, her absorption in the significance of class is introduced, to be elaborated and fleshed out later. Next, we are given a demonstration of Barbara’s unequivocal authority over the seemingly uncontrollable behavior of her adolescent students. She has not ended her lesson when the bell rings signaling the end of the period. The students rise to leave. Turning to them from the board she has been writing on, her Medusa gaze arrests their departure and returns them all to their seats. Then, with a barely perceptible nod, she releases them from her spell and they regain their ability to move.

Barbara’s predilection for matters of class is further illustrated in her observations about Sheba, whose late and, therefore, conspicuous entrance to the staff meeting has drawn her attention. She speculates about Sheba, “Is she a sphinx or simply stupid? Artfully disheveled today. The tweedy tramp coat is an abhorrence. It seems to say, ‘I’m just like you,’ but clearly she’s not.” She adds, “A fey person I suspect. Fey.” In addition to her disapproval of Sheba’s dressing down to gain the acceptance of her working class students, she applies the word “fey” to her with special emphasis. The several definitions of “fey” are acutely instructive. It can mean “Giving the impression of vague unworldliness; having supernatural powers of clairvoyance; fated to die, or on the point of death; and marked by a foreboding of death or calamity” (Oxford Dictionaries Language Matters, 2016)

Barbara’s own powers of clairvoyance are relevant here since she has already displayed an uncanny degree of control over an age group and class notorious for being unruly, and she will, as the film progresses, exhibit a range of other gifts typically ascribed to witches. She seems to be foreseeing that Sheba will bring disaster, that her vague unworldliness contains and conceals this dangerous quality, and wishfully thinking that the feyness she attributes to her constitutes an affinity with her own occult dispositions.

Likewise, the word sphinx that Barbara applies to Sheba is not randomly chosen. The Theban Sphinx, with whom we are familiar from the tale of Oedipus, was a woman who asked people riddles. If they could not solve the riddles, she killed them. Coincidentally, the Queen of Sheba, who came to visit King Solomon, brought precious gifts and several riddles with which to test his wisdom. He passed the test. For Barbara, Sheba is a riddle and a dangerous one, since she answers a deep and enduring longing that is central to Barbara’s existence, one that she does not understand. Like the Biblical queen, Sheba possesses great wealth, which, along with her patrician background, is fascinating to Barbara.

Her next comment about Sheba’s effect on the school—”She has certainly rippled the waters of our stagnant pond. They flock to her. Even limp little Brian had a go. Oh the horror”—ends with a famous quotation from Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness (2008, p. 147): the dying words of its central character, Kurtz. Barbara seems to detect a parallel between Kurtz, a successful and wealthy ivory trader who captivated and exploited the Africans among whom he lived, and Sheba, who is in the process of captivating the students and faculty of the school. Kurtz’s transgression was to violate boundaries of race, class, and sexuality. Marlow, who tells Kurtz’s story, inherits the role of the “Secret Sharer” (2012), the eponymous Conrad work that is invariably published as a companion piece to The Heart of Darkness. As we have already observed, Barbara is a quintessential sharer of secrets and she later becomes privy to the one in which Sheba reveals her own transgressions of class, age, and law.

Presently, Barbara again displays an ability to control the students’ behavior and set limits, which borders on the uncanny. With the single word “Enough!” she stops the mêlée that Sheba has been caught in. When she then says, “Outside!”, all the students leave. She follows this with a remarkable demonstration of occult powers when she forces Steven Connolly to break the adolescent version of the Code of Omerta by using an incantation. She says, “Yes. Brain. Mouth. Speak,” and magically, Steven, who a moment before told her he did not know why he was fighting with another boy, blurts out the lewd reason with no hesitation.

Suddenly, however, this intelligent, sophisticated, cynical, worldly-wise enchantress becomes a naïve, star-struck acolyte of the very person on whom she has been privately passing such severe judgment. The change is abrupt and, therefore, requires that we account for it within the context of the story. In hindsight, we might say that it was occasioned by Barbara’s developing hope that she would be able to engage Sheba in the kind of relationship that satisfies the requirements of her inner script. This would certainly be accurate, but I believe there is something else, and the film provides a clue to its nature by showing Barbara’s elaborate preparations for her luncheon visit to Sheba’s home. As a conscientious member of the middle class, Barbara fulfills a set of time-honored conventions for a social encounter with the rich: she shops for a new outfit, has her hair done, stops at the florist for a bouquet, and in general, to quote Polly, gets “All poshed up.” She is very anxious at the door and, profoundly humiliated when Polly asks whether she is going somewhere, she replies lamely that she has an appointment. “Later. In town.” Unrelieved of her bouquet, she holds it awkwardly on her lap.

The entire scene seems designed to underscore Barbara’s subjugation to the protocols of class. When Sheba later confides much about her personal life and history, Barbara says, “It’s a peculiar trait of the privileged: immediate, incautious intimacy,” and sharpens this to, “But Sheba went well beyond the tendencies of her class. She was utterly candid. A novice confessing to the Mother Superior.” Her emphasis here is on the class-specific carelessness of Sheba’s almost cavalier self-disclosure, on her own capability to elicit the secrets of others, and on her role as a guardian of societal values.

The close of that day finds Barbara at her writing, pasting a gold star to the end of her account of it and declaring, “I always knew we’d be friends. Our mutual reserve inhibited us, but now it is manifest, a spiritual recognition.” She feels the special elation that always results when an external event or person seems to confirm and validate a crucial unconscious scenario. As her voice-over speaks these thoughts, the camera angle shifts abruptly from a close-up of her very pleased expression, to a long shot from behind her, the middle distance occupied by Portia, her cat, who, in the mores of witchcraft, is her familiar spirit, or simply familiar, a personal demon in the form of an animal that assists the witch in her sorcery. The name Portia immediately recalls the character in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice; it is less familiar as a genus of hunting spiders that prey on other spiders, especially those that build and live in nests. Barbara’s familiar, then, epitomizes her unconscious fantasy of appropriating the desirable qualities of someone she admires. Towards the end of the film, after the rupture in her relationship with Sheba, she writes, “They always let you down in the end. Jennifer said I’m too intense, meaning what, exactly? That I am loyal in my friendships? That I will go to the ends of the earth for someone I admire?”

After Barbara discovers Sheba’s affair with Steven, she becomes the custodian of boundaries, insisting that even Sheba’s individual tutorial with him constituted a breach of structure and a prospective threat to the stratified order of society. In an earlier conversation, one of the veteran teachers admonishes Sheba, “If we pull strings for one child, the entire system will unravel.” The affair, then, is no mere impropriety of one misguided person, with restricted local consequences; rather, it ramifies to the prevailing taboos on class relations within British society and—both historically and in our globalized contemporary situation—on relations between English people, those whom they colonized in the past, and those with whom they trade, influence, and exploit in the present. That Steven Connolly is Irish is not accidental in this connection. Less than two centuries ago, Jonathan Swift wrote a scathing satire titled “A Modest Proposal” (2009, pp. 230–239) in reproof of England’s brutality to the Irish. In it, he suggests that poverty in Ireland would be alleviated if parents were to sell their children to be slaughtered and eaten for food. He goes on to provide recipes for the preparation and cooking of the children’s tender flesh. There is a comparable, if less grisly, sense in which Sheba consumes Steven.

Consider the following quotation from Freud’s (1912–1913) Totem and Taboo in relation to the significance of Sheba’s trespass and Barbara’s response:

It is equally clear why it is that the violation of certain taboo prohibitions constitutes a social danger which must be punished or atoned for by all the members of the community if they are not all to suffer injury. If we replace the unconscious desires by conscious impulses we shall see that the danger is a real one. It lies in the risk of imitation, which would quickly lead to the dissolution of the community. If the violation were not avenged by the other members, they would become aware that they wanted to act in the same way as the transgressor. (1912–1913, p. 33)

A passage more apposite to the theme of Notes on a Scandal would be difficult to find.

Only when Sheba succumbs to her desire for Steven do we grasp that boundary violations are only a part of the conflict that motivates the action. The violations of legal, class, and generational boundaries are, themselves, driven by a compulsive hunger for the vitality, beauty, passion, carelessness, and sheer prodigality of youth. Almost every character in the film lusts for someone younger: Richard for Sheba, Barbara for Sheba, Sheba for Steven, Pete for Polly, Barbara for Jennifer Dodd and Annabel, the woman she picks up at the end of the film.

The quest for youth, then, is the overarching theme of the film, and the dynamics of the individual characters are both secondary to, and supportive of, it. That Barbara envies and wishes to consume Sheba is clear, just as it is clear that Sheba strives, symbolically, to consummate an incestuous relationship with her father by seducing Richard away from his wife.

Let us recall that Sheba’s full name is Bathsheba. In the Bible, she was the wife of Uriah the Hittite and she had an adulterous relationship with King David. To facilitate their affair, David contrived to have Uriah killed in battle. The name Bathsheba means the daughter of wealth. Sheba Hart, like her Biblical namesake, becomes the lover and then the wife of an older, accomplished man. Hart, incidentally, was the medieval name given to a mature deer, worthy of being hunted by nobles, a so-called beast of venery, the latter from a Latin root meaning both “hunt,” and “Venus.” Richard’s nickname for Sheba is “Bash,” signifying, alternatively, a party and a destructive act. I need hardly comment on the aptness of Barbara’s surname, Covett.

If the foregoing paragraphs justify my assumption that the striving for youth is the key to this film, it must follow that the people in it experience the passage of time as intolerable. Perhaps this is why most of the sex scenes between Sheba and Steven take place on the ground between two railroad cars, with a ubiquitous sound of passing trains as background. Thus, their union is juxtaposed with a vivid symbol of elapsing duration that recalls the famous poem “To His Coy Mistress” that Andrew Marvell (1989, pp. 478–479) wrote in the seventeenth century:

Had we but world enough and time,

This coyness, Lady, were no crime …

But at my back, I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found;

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song; then worms shall try

That long-preserved virginity,

And your quaint honor turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust;

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction The films, the method, the themes
• Dedication
• Chapter One Secrets
• Chapter Two Time and death
• Chapter Three Love and lust
• Chapter Four Human identity
• Chapter Five Conclusion: critical flicker fusion
• Appendices: Introduction
• References
• Index