Cinema as Therapy

Grief and transformational film

John Izod, Joanna Dovalis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317552413
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Santé mentale en psychologie

Loss is an inescapable reality of life, and individuals need to develop a capacity to grieve in order to mature and live life to the full. Yet most western movie audiences live in cultures that do not value this necessary process and filmgoers finding themselves deeply moved by a particular film are often left wondering why. In Cinema as Therapy, John Izod and Joanna Dovalis set out to fill a gap in work on the conjunction of grief, therapy and cinema.

Looking at films including Million Dollar Baby, The Son's Room, Birth and The Tree of Life, Cinema as Therapy offers an understanding of how deeply emotional life can be stirred at the movies. Izod and Dovalis note that cinema is a medium which engages people in a virtual dialogue with their own and their culture's unconscious, more deeply than is commonly thought. By analysing the meaning of each film and the root cause of the particular losses featured, the authors demonstrate how our experiences in the movie theatre create an opportunity to prepare psychologically for the inevitable losses we must all eventually face. In recognising that the movie theatre shares symbolic features with both the church and the therapy room, the reader sees how it becomes a sacred space where people can encounter the archetypal and ease personal suffering through laughter or tears, without inhibition or fear, to reach a deeper understanding of themselves.

Cinema as Therapy will be essential reading for therapists, students and academics working in film studies and looking to engage with psychological studies in depth as well as filmgoers who want to explore their relationship with the screen. The book includes a glossary of Jungian and Freudian terms which enhances the clarity of the text and the understanding of the reader.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315731582-1

Cinema is pre-eminently the medium that engages people in a virtual dialogue with their own and their culture’s unconscious, more deeply than is commonly taken for granted. The movie theatre shares symbolic features with both the church and the therapy room: all are sacred spaces where people can encounter the archetypal and ease personal suffering, in the case of the cinema whether through laughter or tears, without inhibition or fear. Yet bizarrely, there is a dearth of writing from a psychological perspective on the conjunction of grief, therapy and cinema. The present authors propose to occupy that gap.

We focus on grief for several reasons. Inescapable in life, it frequently comprises the core element of feature films, both popular and artistic. This is not accidental. Individuals need to develop the capacity to grieve in order to mature fully. Yet most Western movie audiences live in cultures that do not teach people how to engage in this necessary process. Personal growth becomes stunted, choices limited by what has been left behind. For that reason, depth therapists find that much of their work becomes devoted to clients’ unresolved grief.

Archetypal symbols penetrate the emotions at a deep level and give the cinema its power to bypass the conscious state and go into the unconscious. Immersion in film viewing distracts the ego so that it disengages from its usual function as the primary filter of awareness. In fact the ego is busy anchoring itself in and assembling the story from the film’s plot (the stream of shocks provided by images, dialogue and sounds). Meanwhile, the unconscious, stimulated by symbols in the film, releases archetypal energies in the spectator’s psyche. Through their involvement in this process, spectators are freed from their usual inhibitions, which allows them to connect to their emotional lives. In identifying certain characters or familiar situations with aspects of their own lives, they project disowned parts of the self onto the screen. That enables them to receive what the screen presents them with as it reflects their own projections back at them. Cinema is thus, as we shall see, an important agent for the stimulation of inward growth and the process of individuation. It has the capacity to provide viewers with a transformative intellectual and psychic experience in which self-discovery can occur.

The large screen functions in this manner as a psychological mirror of images and sounds that simultaneously partake of and invest in the two realities, the inner and outer lives that occupy healthy people. Within the affect-charged psychological realm that cinema sustains, self-reflection may occur and the meaningfulness of the experience evolve. In the darkened auditorium, the threshold of consciousness is lowered, opening the way to an encounter behind the curtain of the phenomenal world. When the boundary between the seen and the unseen is loosened, spectators may, as we have said, be drawn into a realm populated by images that interact with and reflect aspects of their personal psyche. Ultimately it can facilitate growth, transformation, and a maturing of the individual’s total personality.

However, film theatres are designed to foster shared experience and become, as the auditorium lights go down, a temenos or sacred enclosure. They create the social and cultural conditions necessary to shared remembering of forgotten or misplaced memories. As a liminal space or container, the cinema functions as the centring source of such shared images. This helps intensify the emotional experiences that films can provoke and assists their digestion. As a medium of images (both visual and aural), cinema is able to bring us back to our own and the culture’s psychological depths. Thus spectators may also be afforded transpersonal experiences which sometimes allow them to encounter the numinous (Dovalis, 2003: 2–4).

We should mention that we believe it difficult to experience films with intense emotional engagement anywhere other than the cinema. Being in an environment that is not prone to interruption produces a more creative relationship, sinking one into the depths of the film (or the relationship with the therapist) and ultimately the inner life. For our part, we see a resemblance between the inner life experiences of the client going to therapy and those of the cinemagoer.

Entry into the subtle imaginal realm that cinema can illuminate presupposes a willingness to explore the unknown in a way at once creative and new. Working in this realm distinguishes depth psychology from other psychologies. The work is shaped by the belief that transformation is virtually impossible unless urged by strong affect. Knowledge alone does not suffice to promote change: real understanding is acquired through the synthesis and digestion of the feelings that accompany cognition. Psychological shifts seldom occur other than when affect meets the assimilation of new insights (Dovalis, 2003: 5). Furthermore, as Marie-Louise von Franz wrote, ‘this psychic growth cannot be brought about by a conscious effort of will power, but happens involuntarily and naturally…’ (1964: 161).

In the cinema spectators are more open to being moved emotionally than in their daily lives. In the movie theatre they do not need to defend themselves against other unwanted emotions such as the shameful feeling of exposure that they might have to contend with when revealing themselves in a real relationship. Thus, film allows viewers more freely to surrender themselves to their present feelings (Dovalis, 2003: 5). Indeed, it seems that audiences have an appetite for the kinds of stimulus that may put them in the way of psychic change. John Beebe has observed that cinema and psychoanalysis have grown up concurrently, close siblings nurtured on a common zeitgeist, and sharing a common drive to explore and realise the psyche (1996: 579).

As Jung was radically optimistic about the healing possibilities of the self, so audiences seem to approach films, like Dorothy and her friends off to see the Wizard, with the expectation of a miracle, an extraordinary effect upon one’s state of mind. Often enough this hope is disappointed, and yet there are films which induce an unexpected new consciousness in many who view them… [This] may be why film viewing and criticism have become such important activities within our culture: in addition to wanting to be entertained, the mass audience is in constant pursuit, as if on a religious quest, of the transformative film.

(Beebe, 1996: 582)

The goal of transformation is individuation, the process of psychic growth that occurs independently of the ego’s will. Phyllis Kenevan has discerned three ways in which, when it happens, a person’s individuation may proceed. It may occur unconsciously, or it may progress through self-motivated, conscious reflection; alternatively guidance from a trained analyst may lead the growth of self-awareness (1999: 14). For our part, we endorse Beebe’s opinion that another way should be identified since films can function as an active mirroring guide with potential therapeutic value for spectators. That appears to be the case, whether or not those spectators who experience one or a number of films as such a stimulus, consciously realise the therapeutic effect they have had. Our intention is to augment their consciousness of that effect.

For their part, depth psychotherapists recognise the unavoidable condition of human suffering as potentially serving transformation. Suffering that has been metabolised and integrated holds the possibility of consciously expediting a person’s individuation if he or she is psychologically and spiritually prepared. The process of grieving, no less than other forms of anguish, can spur individuation. Greg Mogenson says, ‘the more precisely we imagine our losses, the more psychological we become’ (1992: xi–xii).

From the imaginal point of view, the end of life is not the end of soul. The images continue. Deep inside the grief of the bereaved, the dead are at work, making themselves into religion and culture, imagining themselves into soul.

(Mogenson, 1992: xi)

The imaginal, then, can dislodge the suffering in grief from its intolerable state frozen in the personality and the body, into a psychological space that is deeply connected to the Self (in the sense of the unified psyche). As we shall discover in our analysis of Three Colours: Blue, grieving, when actively dealt with so that it works a transformation in the mourner’s personality, is intensely creative (Mogenson, 1992: xii). Like any other creative process it is by no means exclusively rational and in order to engage the psyche must conjure up curiosity and openness. That, as we have mentioned, is something that films can sponsor most effectively. We wrote our book to facilitate this self-reflective process – both for our readers and ourselves.

We first put together a list of feature films designed to illustrate aspects of grieving, and did this in the initial stages of considering what the themes of the book should be. At that point we reckoned that what might result from analysing these films could be a wry treatise on how to prepare for death. However, feature films are not first and foremost educational tracts but stories and mythmaking. They rarely seek to propagate a thesis although some may offer ‘what if’ speculations. So we decided, rather than look in feature films for some form of allegorical guide to psychoanalysis, it better suited our purpose to think of grief in the context of fictional characters’ responses to the suffering it brings – whether they resist or embrace what chance or fate delivers.

The fate of fictional characters was not our only consideration. Our choice of films is also in part explained by Terrence Malick’s observation that certain films

can enable small changes of heart, changes that mean the same thing: to live better and to love more. And even an old movie in poor and beaten condition … can give us that. What else is there to ask for?

(Malick, 1979)

From the psychoanalytic perspective, as we have seen, Beebe developed the complementary observations that ‘there are films which induce an unexpected new consciousness in many who view them’ and that ‘in addition to wanting to be entertained, the mass audience is in constant pursuit, as if on a religious quest, of the transformative film’ (1996: 582). The phrase ‘transformative film’ is worth re-emphasising because, although much of our attention will be given to characters undergoing emotional conflicts encountered in the narrative arc, we soon realised that we needed to widen our focus. In most of the films we have selected, therefore, their aesthetic beauty, not only storylines but images, the play of colour and light, the subtleties of sound effects and music, all combine to create associations in viewers’ minds of the transformative kind that Beebe writes about. We were not concerned only, therefore, with emotions felt by characters, but also with those communicated to the audience at large, and to ourselves in particular. We chose only films that excited and stayed with us long after the screening, both of us aware that subjective, emotional engagement is a prerequisite for making Jungian readings.

The intellectual core of this study derives from a Jungian base because of its vast conceptual frame which, in relation to our work here, encompasses symbolism, the archetypes, myth, the religious function of the psyche, synchronicity, Self, spirit, and soul. Jung’s work is thus teleological. Freud’s more reductive psychoanalytic theory gives us a deep understanding of the characters’ psychological organisation. In seeking authorities on coping with loss, we found Greg Mogenson’s concept of the imaginal realm in the mourning process grounded the way we think about grieving. We also examine grief through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s work, which describes a series of stages that many clinicians have observed: denial, anger, bargaining and negotiation, depression and finally acceptance. A further source is John Bowlby’s focus on the internal processes of grieving, which include a three-phase progress that, citing him, ‘begins with anger and anxiety, proceeds through pain and despair and if fortune smiles, ends with hope’ (1961: 330). Murray Stein writes authoritatively about liminality and, because so many of our characters move through transitional phases, our debt to him is evident throughout, reaching its culmination in The Tree of Life.

We found that some films, because of their specific content, called for the application of particular theories to assist in their psychological interpretation. For example, in Trois Couleurs: Blanc, D. W. Winnicott’s writing on transitional objects illuminated the analysis of the lead characters and their cultures. Two analysts Aldo Carotenuto (a Jungian) and Stephen Mitchell (Freudian) help us understand the themes of love and suffering in Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter … and Spring. Paradoxically, for a film that features a leading character who will never have heard of therapy, Morvern Callar required the attention of three authorities. Edward Edinger provided an allegory for the evolution of soul from chaos to wholeness in his work on alchemy. Rose-Emily Rothenberg led us to find and understand the orphan, while Michael Meade elaborates the themes of fate and destiny that we employed in identifying the ways they play out in Morvern’s life. Because of its extraordinary impact, The Tree of Life incited us to develop our methodology significantly: Jennifer Barker’s work on embodiment in the cinema was fundamental. Murray Stein furnished understanding of the mid-life journey and the interplay between feminine and masculine consciousness. Finally, Paul Bishop’s scholarly insights into Jung’s Answer to Job were invaluable, enabling us to close out our reading of that film.

We have organised our working relationship to draw on our respective areas of expertise. Dovalis, a psychotherapist, uses Freudian and Jungian theory in her writing and private practice. Izod, who teaches film studies at the University of Stirling, brings to the project his interest in living myth. They have been writing together for some years, mutually celebrating that what they produce together neither could achieve without the other.

We conceived this book with both a general and a professional readership in mind. We said at the start that grieving is an inescapable reality of life. From that point of reference, it follows that many filmgoers (like ourselves) will find themselves deeply moved by a particular film and be left wondering why. Our book has an informal educational goal in offering such people an understanding of how deeply the emotional life can be stirred at the movies. Thus, the book’s potential value extends beyond the ten films studied here.

For film studies departments our work encourages students to engage with the psychological reading of films in depth. It is intended to function as an interdisciplinary bridge – not only to link the two areas of study, but, as we shall claim, for its worth in personal development as well. Meanwhile for psychotherapists and clients, the book may provide a guide that may further explain and augment their experiences of grieving in the cinema. Most importantly, for filmgoers, students, therapists and their clients alike, it creates an opportunity to prepare psychologically for the inevitable losses we must all eventually face. For the deeply engaged reader, our analyses of the films are intended to generate a container for past grief and a template that might help hold future suffering.

Beyond our personal engagement with them, we selected films that enabled us to explore certain kinds of responses to grief by the main characters. The different forms of anguish that grip them call forth (just as when clients present in the therapy room) different theoretical positions. We have divided the book into three parts. In the first, through Birth, Tsotsi, and Million Dollar Baby we examine characters coming from very different societies with radically different lives and personal histories. They share nevertheless a common trait in being locked into particular patterns of grieving caused by devastating and undigested loss. All of them remain stuck, unable to move forward with their lives no matter what social or personal conventions govern their attitudes and rule their day-to-day behaviour.

Anna, the rich and beautiful woman at the centre of Birth, is the epitome of this condition. Partly because equally self-absorbed family members and friends surround her, she has not succeeded in accepting the loss of her husband after ten years of widowhood. A decade after her husband’s sudden death, still in denial, Anna has not learnt that loss is an event that ‘requires that some part of the individual be left behind and grieved before the process of transition and rebuilding can occur’ (Humphrey and Zimpfer, 1996: 1).

As we have said, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross describes five stages of mourning. Anna locks herself in the first stage, denial. In the South African film Tsotsi, a gang leader uses a potent mix of poverty and rage to repress unacknowledged grief. The slum environment of desperate unemployment is his spur to plunder the nouveau riche elite as if their possessions were his by right. This violent thief – not long out of adolescence – exhibits the early symptoms of Kübler-Ross’s grieving process, namely denial (which happened so long ago he has forgotten it) and the anger in which he has got stuck. In fact, he behaves like an infant suffering developmental arrest who believes himself entitled to whatever he wants. Only when he discovers th...