Post-traumatic Attachments to the Eerily Moving Image

Something to Watch Over Me

Andrew Asibong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000450859
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book explores how traumatic experiences of impingement and neglect – in childhood and adulthood, and at both the family and the state level – may create a desire in us to be parented by certain kinds of screen media that we unconsciously believe are "watching over" us when nothing else seems to be.

Andrew Asibong explores how viewers make psychical use of eerily moving images, observed in film and television and later taken into an already traumatised mind, in order to facilitate some form of reparation for a stolen experience of caregiving. It explores the possibility of a media-based "working through" of both the general traumas of early environmental failure and the particular traumas of viewers racialised as Black, eventually asking how politicised film groups in the age of Black Lives Matter might heal from a troubled past and prepare for an uncertain future through the spontaneous discussion – in the here and now – of enlivening images of potentially deadly vulnerability.

Post-traumatic Attachments to the Eerily Moving Image: Something to Watch Over Me will be of great interest to academics and students of film, media and television studies, trauma studies and psychoanalysis, culture, race and ethnicity.

Chapter 1

It's a hard world for little things

Post-traumatic attachments to the eerily moving image: a theoretical framework

DOI: 10.4324/9781003185178-2

The devil finds work

In his autobiographical account of a lifetime of ambivalent spectatorship with (white) Hollywood cinema, the writer and activist James Baldwin (1976) describes how, one day in 1931, his little boy self came to be mesmerised, to the point of near captivity, by a moving image of Joan Crawford:

Joan Crawford's straight, narrow, and lonely back. We are following her through the corridors of a moving train. She is looking for someone, or she is trying to escape from someone. She is eventually intercepted by, I think, Clark Gable. I am fascinated by the movement on, and of, the screen, that movement which is something like the heaving and swelling of the sea (though I have not yet been to the sea): and which is also something like the light which moves on, and especially beneath, the water. I am about seven. I am with my mother, or my aunt. The movie is Dance, Fools, Dance. I don't remember the film. A child is far too self-centered to relate to any dilemma which does not, somehow, relate to him – to his own evolving dilemma. The child escapes into what he would like his situation to be, and I certainly did not wish to be a fleeing fugitive on a moving train; and also, with quite another part of my mind, I was aware that Joan Crawford was a white lady. Yet, I remember being sent to the store sometime later, and a colored woman, who, to me, looked exactly like Joan Crawford, was buying something. She was so incredibly beautiful – she seemed to be wearing the sunlight, rearranging it around her from time to time, with a movement of one hand, with a movement of her head, and with her smile – that, when she paid the man and started out of the store, I started out behind her. The storekeeper, who knew me, and others in the store who knew my mother's little boy (and who also knew my Miss Crawford!) laughed and called me back. Miss Crawford also laughed and looked down at me with so beautiful a smile that I was not embarrassed. Which was rare for me.

This remarkable passage from one of Baldwin's lesser-known works, unexpectedly resurrected in Raoul Peck's documentary about Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro (2016), focuses on a child's extraordinary responses to the perceived movements of a woman projected on the cinema screen. The young boy is unexpectedly stirred; and, in his surrender to this strange stirring, he experiences uncanny new attitudes towards the possibility of a new kind of relating. Drawn in by the images of Crawford's “straight, narrow, lonely back”, little James, no longer knowing, or indeed, perhaps, even caring, whether it's his aunt or his mother who has accompanied him to the cinema, is fascinated by something on the screen that mysteriously takes him away. Crawford's haunting mystery seems to possess the child, subsequently migrating from the screen to the store, where it enters the body of a woman who is perhaps more approachable than Joan Crawford – she is a “colored woman”, not a “white lady” – and seems, at least temporarily, so utterly reassuring that she seems capable of overriding little James's attachment to his own family home.

What might it mean for a moving image glimpsed – or created – on screen, during a moment of great receptivity or need, to interact with our subsequent experience of the world in such a way that we are tempted to add it to – or even, eventually, to choose it over – our existing, “real world” family attachments or socio-cultural affiliations, even for an instant? From a number of perspectives, we might say that any child, teenager, or adult who is so irrationally hypnotised by a particular set of images that they risk losing their “real-life” kin is courting disaster. Literature is full of negative examples of characters who seal their fate through their seeming inability to resist the allure of a certain kind of image generated by the cultural field. The romance-obsessed Don Quixote abandons his loyal niece and housekeeper in favour of a seemingly deranged life, in search of the images of medieval chivalry, kept company only by the slavish (we might today call him “co-dependent”), Sancho Panza. As for that voracious nineteenth-century reader of novels, Emma Bovary, she proves willing to forsake both doting husband and neglected daughter in favour of the hopelessly tantalising shadows of Romantic stereotype, hunted out in one extra-marital affair after another. In Madame Bovary and Don Quixote, Flaubert (2003 [1857]) and Cervantes (2003 [1605 and 1615]) offered us iconic and largely dissuasive examples of the fantasy addict. Victims of various kinds of relational trauma these iconic protagonists may be, but this doesn't change the fact that their obsessional turn towards a love-object picked up in a libidinally over-determined and make-believe world is fundamentally pathological. Like the children described in Freud's (1909) canonical essay “Family Romances”, their task – which they spectacularly fail to achieve – is the attainment of enough emotional maturity to accept ordinary human relationships for what they “really” are. Firestone (1987), reflecting on his own clinical practice, makes the point clearly:

When deprived of love-food, an infant experiences considerable anxiety and pain and attempts to compensate by sucking its thumb and by providing self-nourishment in various ways. At this point in its development, a baby is able to create the illusion of the breast. An infant who feels empty and starved emotionally relies increasingly on this fantasy for gratification. And, indeed, this process provides partial relief. In working with regressed schizophrenic patients, my colleagues and I observed that some had visions and dreams of white hazes, snow, and the like, sometimes representing the wish for milk and nourishment. One patient described to me a white breast that he saw, and when I asked what came out of it, he said: “Pictures”.

(pp. 37–8)

Kidnapped?

Children's literature often specifies the danger of the child's turning to an eerily white, spectrally glittering object in the wake of a gnawing resentment about the deficiencies – real or imagined – of their own family or caregivers. Little Edmund in C. S. Lewis's (2009 [1950]) novel, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, falls furiously into the clutches of the Turkish Delight bearing White Witch because he cannot find acceptance with his siblings; before him, little Kay, in Hans Christian Andersen's (2009 [1844]) fairy tale, “The Snow Queen”, faced a similarly beguiling situation. Perhaps most hapless of all are the little girl protagonists of Lucy Clifford's (1882) terrifying story, “The New Mother”, condemned to a homeless childhood, foraging for berries in the woods, and living in daily fear of the glass-eyed, tail-swishing “new mother”, all because they wanted something more exciting – or merely less depressed – than their long-suffering mother of origin.

These cautionary tales of alternately sad and horrifying parent-replacement aren't confined to generations past. In Neil Gaiman's (2002), Coraline, the eponymous child heroine finds herself trapped in an uncannily inverted household on the other side of a wall in her own home, where an “other-mother” and an “other father”, both with buttons where their eyes should be, encourage her to relinquish her original family relationships in favour of alternative kinship with them, kinship that promises, like a peculiarly parent-obsessed pornography, to be both superficially containing and soul-crushingly dead. It would seem that culture is widely in agreement regarding the fundamental inadvisability – we might even say madness – of a disturbed or neglected individual's going off in search of image-based substitutes for a sense of love and relationality, no matter how dismal the real-life alternatives might be. While the superhero genre allows for a temporary indulgence of our infantile desire to model our relationships on a set of idealised images of potency, a contemporary – and now thoroughly disgraced – cinematic comedian such as Woody Allen pokes repeated, self-deprecatory fun at Walter Mitty like characters who remain obsessed, long into adulthood, with idealised icons imagined to watch over them. Allen's most fully realised exploration of this psycho-cultural tendency is probably the pathetic cinephile schlemiel Allan in Play It Again, Sam (1972), whose constant hallucinations of a ghostly Humphrey Bogart advising him on matters of love and sex is played strictly for laughs. Meanwhile, in Allen's movie, Manhattan (1979), the neurotic and self-obsessed protagonist, Ike, protesting at an accusation levelled at him by his best friend, Yale (Michael Murphy) that he thinks he is God, indignantly splutters: “Well, I gotta model myself after someone!”

Shengold (1993) takes Allen's apparently humorous self-aggrandisement very seriously in his book-length study of Freud's concept of the “ego ideal”, in which he explores the various ways in which Freud himself made persistent, passionate, psychical use of figures other than his biological parents in his construction of a set of internal imagoes through whom he could forge his own adult identity. Shengold shows how, for Freud, not only Biblical figures such as Abraham, Moses, and Joseph, but also fictional characters such as Oedipus and Hamlet became the source of a quasi-parental energy that he would utilise (in some ways counter to his own argument in “Family Romances”) to facilitate his own emotional maturation. Shengold suggests that Freud was far from alone in this repeated deployment of figures – frequently fictional – from outside his own family for the purposes of personality development and growth:

In this book I want to focus on the universal need for parents that gets partially transformed as we lose the sense of parental omnipresence – an inevitable loss which can make us feel orphaned even when still fully parented. The need soon begins to shift to include figures from the past, from literature, and, most important for healthy development, others beside the parents from the present. This partial displacement functions to shore up our sense of identity, to provide continuity with our past, to become part of our psychic picture of our selves. These substitute figures usually consist of great people from history, mythology, fiction, and contemporary life as well as more ordinary others whom we ephemerally endow with a kind of narcissistic greatness because their emotional propinquity fulfils our need for central importance

(pp. 3–4).

Shengold's discussion is fascinating for the way it makes possible a respectful and non-pathologising exploration of how we may actually need to internalise certain fictional forms and figures in order to be “parented” in ways that facilitate our psyche's capacity to reach its full potential. The necessity of a novel, non-biological source for a new experience of being parented becomes greater, I would argue, the more deficient our “original” experience of being parented is. But these are precisely the circumstances in which our desperation for nurturing by fantasy figures may propel us into the arms of flimsy, insubstantial, or downright dangerous pseudo-caregivers. We may find ourselves in something of a Catch-22 situation, in which our starvation of actual parenting creates the conditions for an addiction to spectral stepparents, who can never feed us in the way we need to be fed. We may find ourselves in a circular complex of never-compensated nurturing, a complex in which we are doubly orphaned. What if, robbed of the chance to feed from a real breast in infancy, we end up getting deluded in later childhood, adolescence, and adulthood by a series of phony, phantom “breasts”, thenceforth doomed to wander the earth in search of “milk” we expect, psychotically, to pour from the pages of books, or the screens of our televisions?

Contemporary psychotherapist Pete Walker (2014), writing about the development of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD) in the children of dysfunctional families, empathically imagines a little girl, Maude, left to her own devices by neglectful and narcissistic parents who had already expended all their malignant energies moulding Maude's two older siblings into archetypal “golden child” and “scapegoat” roles:

Maude became the classic lost child and was left on her own to raise herself […] Over time, Maude numbed out into a low-grade dissociative depression, and felt extremely anxious and avoidant whenever she was in a social situation. At four, an eccentric aunt gave Maude a television for her room, and she was soon entranced. She was forced to develop an attachment disorder in which she bonded with TV rather than with a human being. Sadly, she is still lost in that relationship, living on disability in an apartment cluttered with an enormous amount of useless hoarded material.

(p. 17)

For Walker, as for a persistent and persuasive critic of technology-inflected alienation such as Turkle (2013), the attachment path Maude is forced down is not in any way a helpful one. The aunt's gift of a television is simply not an acceptable alternative caregiver in the absence of real, living, flesh-and-blood humans. Rather than being a salve for the already existing relational wound that has opened up in the little girl, the television, a ghoulish kind of wire-monkey babysitter, seems to finish her off, snuffing out whatever aliveness might have emerged beyond the wreckage of her family tragedy. Like the glass-eyed “new mother” of Clifford's (1882) terrifying story, Maude's television stares at her with eyes even more deadened than those of her original caregivers. Not even glamorous enough to lead her into the white, snowy wastes of Narnia, Maude's television instead condemns her to a lonely adulthood of decidedly less “cool” addiction: the cardboard box compulsion of the self-entombing hoarder. But is Maude's the only story we can tell about the shifting attachments of a neglected child in relation to the moving image? Is there no chance for a child as underfed as Maude to make use of fictional forms of caregiving in the way an apparently more exceptional child such as the little Sigmund Freud, as described by Shengold, could make use of Moses?

The key word to probe with regard to little Maude's relationship to her television and the moving images she watches on its screen is, I think, “moving”. It doesn't sound, reading Walker, as if there's anything remotely moving about the images consumed by the deprived and neglected child Maude: on the contrary, all movement in her world appears to have stopped. She is, as it happens, the sibling Walker chooses to illustrate the trauma-related concept of “freeze”, that third strand of the “four Fs” (the others being “fight”, “flight” and “fawn”) that he suggests are the key characteristics of survivors of CPTSD. And if we cast our minds back to the little children protagonists created by Andersen, Clifford, Lewis, and Gaiman, it would appear that their experiences in the uncanny new worlds they so willingly wander into are also characterised by a recurrent sense of loneliness, freezing, and solidification. But Hills (2013), recruiting the child psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott to offer greater complexity to the situation, argues that

[m]edia users are not drug users […] Winnicottian theory enables a way of sensitively moving past commonsensical (and “passive audience”) judgments which denigrate media users, whilst holding onto the tension between creativity and dependence, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Series preface
• About the book
• About the author
• Introduction: Something to watch over me
• 1 It's a hard world for little things: Post-traumatic attachments to the eerily moving image: a theoretical framework
• 2 I just wanted to tell you that everything's going to be all right: My life in the bush of film-ghosts: an autoeth-nographic analysis
• 3 May I be alive when I die!: Psycho-televisual regeneration six feet under: an audience study
• 4 In this here place, we flesh: Racialised vulnerability and collective dreaming: film groups in the time of #BlackLivesMatter
• References
• Index