A Dangerous Method

The method being referred to in A Dangerous Method (2011) is psychoanalysis, as pioneered by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). The danger referred to is that of freeing people from their sexual repressions. The film revolves around the relationship between Freud and his younger colleague, Carl Jung (1875-1961), and the relationship between him and Sabina Spielrein, his former patient and eventual lover and colleague. She also had an affair with Freud, but it was not shown in the film. Keira Knightley plays the Russian woman a bit too strongly in the first few scenes. In terms of the acting, Knightley exaggerates facial contortions as if fishing for an Oscar out of sheer emotionality. In terms of the narrative, Spielrein’s “transformation,” or cure, is hard to take as credible because it is so drastic within a year or two. Before long, she is behaving completely normal and even attending medical school. The film’s merits lie not with the acting, but, rather, with the intellectual content, whose salience and integration into a good narrative is rare in Hollywood. It is due to this feature that the film is apt to stay with a viewer for some time.

For example, the Russian woman had been beaten by her father when she was a girl. She tells Jung that the experience of being beaten used to excite her sexually. When she and Jung began their affair, she told him to punish her, which he dutifully did (though he did seem to enjoy it, as the sex with his wife was always “tender”). Perhaps Jung’s own animus and anima had each found a home. One of the issues explored in the movie is whether freeing up the woman not to repress what excited her constituted progress toward mental health. A rather free-spirited colleague of Freud and Jung provides the affirmative argument, while Jung is more hesitant (even as he moves from spanking to a belt).

I was surprised that none of the psychiatrists in the film voiced the view that the woman’s “excitement” in being beaten might be a misdirected or misinterpreted desire to recover her father or have the father she never had, emotionally speaking. In other words, the feeling of being hit represented that of her father that she had, so she was drawn to it. If I’m right, the underlying desire was not sexual.

How many women are “attracted” to “bad boys” without realizing that the desire is to recover a father by means of the only thing “father” had meant? Ultimately, the alley is a dead-end. The woman does not get her father back, or even the feeling of having one, emotionally-speaking. Is freeing up a woman from repressing a dead-end a good thing? Does it help her get what she really wants? I think the answer is rather obviously no.

Aside from the questions revolving around Jung’s former patient and lover, the film discusses the interesting question of whether a new field can afford to “take risks,” such as in Jung’s interest in parapsychology and religion. His contribution to the psychology of religion is significant—more so than Freud’s Totem and Taboo. However, Freud voices a legitimate point that the emphasis on sexual explanation in psychoanalysis would be than more than enough scandal in the second decade of the twentieth century, so soon after the Victorian era. At about the same time, or a decade or two earlier, Nietzsche’s controversial writings had been very controversial, particularly on religion. Adding a plethora of sexual interpretation to dreams would indeed arouse plenty of resistance. This debate played out as relations between Freud and Jung became increasingly strained before they parted company altogether.

Both with regard to the question of repression and a “cure” and that of how a new firm should develop, the filmmaker did an excellent job in grounding the ideas to characterization. While I would have enjoyed a PBS special on the ideas themselves, integrating theories around narrative and characters is useful both in terms of understanding and as a fruitful avenue for Hollywood, which could be accused of putting out too many mindless action flicks that catch the biggest market segment and allow for merchandizing. Another film from 2011 that effectively integrates theory with narrative and characterization is Hugo.

Carnage

I was drawn to the film Carnage by the actors—specifically, Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet, though Jody Foster and John Riley can certainly hold their own as established actors, and in fact have been in Hollywood far longer than Waltz and Winslet. The primary message of the film seems to be that making up may be more natural than the adults think. This is perhaps why the conflict between the adults doesn’t really get resolved—there being no sense of resolution. This is particularly noticeable because of how dramatically the emotions escalated—particularly in Foster’s character but with Winslet’s coming in a close second. In other words, the acting firepower was perhaps too much, given the actual matter of conflict—the boys’ fight in a city park.

To be sure, things can get out of hand once alcohol enters the social equation, but after viewing the film, I had the sense that “Much Ado About Nothing” would have been a better title than “Carnage.” Given the film’s title, I expected the story to end with someone dying. Such an ending would fit with the emotion Foster brought to bear. From a dramatic standpoint, sometimes less is more, and this seems to apply to the early tension between Foster’s and Waltz’s characters. That was more realistic—more believable.

That the “dramatic” secondary conflict was not resolved only adds to the film’s problems, though as I mention above, this could be part of the larger message. Though even so (and I don’t think an intellectual connection trumps leaving a major conflict unresolved), the resolution was choppy (to say the least) and abrupt. It was as if one of the boys in the park had been hired to edit the end of the film.

At any rate, an audience should not leave the theatre feeling like things were left hanging at the climax. Nor should the audience wonder why the guests stayed around for so long, or question whether the intensity of emotion is believable or merely acted. Were the characters "held together" simply by the motive to get to the bottom of the tension—or to have it out in real carnage? Considering Waltz’s character’s calls, it is difficult to believe that anything but the 18-year-old scotch could have kept him in the apartment for so long. Was he even there at all? The absence of his presence was itself stirring some of the tension, but it is not clear that it could be sufficient to get Foster's character so upset. If Polanski viewed the characters' dominant motive as being to fight or resolve unresolved angst, and furthermore as sufficient to hold the four adults in the apartment for so long, it can be asked whether he was (perhaps inadvertently) also setting the viewers up to want something that would not come in the course of the film—namely, enough resolution at the end to be emotionally satisfying. What astonishes me is that giving the characters sufficient motivation to sustain the story and providing the third act with enough resolution are basic tenets of screenwriting—something Polanski and Reza no doubt knew as they were working on the screenplay.

Perhaps carnage done at the expense of the basics in screenwriting doesn’t work after all, in spite of the earlier attempts by sleepers of the New Wave and Neo-Realism in the twentieth century (no wonder deconstruction followed these two movements). As much as detest predictable narrative, presumption in bypassing a basic ingredient of storytelling is perhaps worse.

The Descendants

In the 2011 film, The Descendants, George Clooney plays a character who must wrestle with several trade-offs bearing on character itself. Both the acting and the screenwriting handle the task very well. It is a pity that the actor gets a near monopoly of the credit/attention, for the way the trade-offs are navigated by the screenwriter is vitally important—perhaps even more so than the acting.

For example, the decision is made in the writing whether the character will cash in on instant gratification or protect the interests of people who do not deserve any such protection. Moreover, the screenwriter weighs how many of the character’s decisions will side with principles over expediency and how many will reflect instant gratification.

Clooney’s character decides not to harm an antagonist in one way and then decides to take something away from that same antagonist. The taking away is consistent with a societal principle, but is nonetheless part of the motivation. Interestingly, the decision not to harm the antagonist even though such harm would be totally justified contributes to the antagonist effectively undoing that protection.

Generally speaking, deciding not to pounce when one would be justified in doing so can eventuate in the protagonist “having his cake while eating it too.” Acting on principle rather than satisfying immediate gratification can involve or trigger a “multiplier effect” wherein “what goes around comes around” for the offending antagonist. The protagonist acts on the basis of character—which is beyond ethical obligation—and eventually can realize satisfaction, only here due to the antagonist’s flaw unraveling rather than to any complicity by the protagonist.

Deciding to be merciful at the expense of instant justification may trigger something in nature that eventuates in one eventually receiving an even greater benefit “with interest.” In illustrating this dynamic, the screenwriter teaches a modern society of instant gratification an important lesson and provides a role model for us all.

Computer Technology Revolutionizing Industries: Books and Films

Crude oil was first drilled in 1859 in northwestern Pennsylvania (not in the desert of the Middle East). It was not long before oil lamps became ubiquitous, lengthening the productive day for millions beyond daylight hours. Just fifty or sixty years later, as electricity was beginning to replace the lamps, Ford’s mass-produced automobile was taking off, providing an alternative use of crude oil. For those of us alive in the early decades of the twenty-first century, electric lighting indoors and cars on paved roads have been around as long as we can remember. As a result, we tend to assume that things will go on pretty much as they “always” have. Other than for computer technology, the end of the first decade of the 21st century looks nearly indistinguishable from the last thirty or forty years of the last century. As the second decade of the 21st century began, applications based on computer technology were reaching a critical mass in terms of triggering shifts in some industries that had seemingly “always” been there.  Books, music and movies were certainly among the fastest moving, perhaps like the dramatic change in lighting and cars beginning a century and a half before with the discovery of crude oil.

The full essay is at "Computer Technology Revolutionizing Industries."

Organizational Bureaucracy at Odds with Creativity in Film

Art through corporate bureaucracy can be likened to oil and water. The rise of the studio system to produce film as an art form thus evinces a necessary evil. To be sure, organization is necessary to literally organize the various facets involved in the production of a film. However, needless managerial levels have gone beyond what is needed for coordination, particularly in television, and have stifled good narrative in the process.

Ken Loach, a feature and television film director, declared, “Television kills creativity; work is produced beneath a pyramid of producers, executive producers, commissioning editors, heads of department, assistant heads of department, and so on, that sit on top of the group of people doing the work, and stifle the life out of them.”[1] These suits are told to control the creativity even though the latter cannot be controlled without dying out in the process. According to Loach, “if you’ve got ten people sitting on your shoulder you can’t be good, you can’t be creative.”[2] For example, directors say they are told that they are not allowed to work with the writers. Instead, the directors work with managers, who somehow view themselves as qualified to write narrative because they are oriented to business factors. The result has been artificially-constructed television programing akin to politicians running solely off polls. Although financial concerns have a legitimate place, they are of such import to the layers of managers that cheap reality shows have trumped serious drama with a coherent, thought-out plot.

According to Loach, television, which “began with such high hopes,” has become “a grotesque reality show.”[3] To be sure, Loach admits that “some good work gets through.”[4] Even so, it is much too hard for it to survive the inevitable onslaught of the bureaucratic knives unscathed. The editing done by managers is fundamentally different than that which writers would do—and not for the better.

Perhaps rather than tearing up scripts that have been accepted, managers could have confidence in their own decisions in accepting the scripts by letting the writers themselves work out any changes with the directors. In other words, in putting an accepted script through the meat-grinder, are not executives and their staff undercutting their own decision to accept the script?  Of course, a particular acceptance could be to say that a script is only “good enough to get through the door.”  In other words, it would be understood that the script is to be considered as only partially done when it arrives. I would caution against such an “acceptance” because managers oriented to business matters are not likely to function as surrogate writers in finishing the job. A writer is a writer whereas a manager is a manager. Business expertise does not proffer the ability to tell a story.

Therefore, I contend that scripts ought to be accepted that can stand on their own as scripts. That is to say, the accepting executive ought to believe that the scripts he or she pays for are good already, and thus that the respective writers can be trusted to accommodate changes that the director believes are necessary.  

A producer ought to be on the look-out for the following: “What writers need to write are original stories, original characters, plot, conflict, things that dig into our current experience. Things that really show us how we’re living, give us a perspective on what is happening”[5] (p. 41). Sometimes in watching a movie, I can sense what will come next because the formula has already become hackneyed.  I have even thought that nearly a century of films has perhaps exhausted good narrative.

The screenplay’s structure is so “scripted” that the exactitude of the uniform structure may itself willow away originality and creativity. It is perhaps like trying to fit lots of different shapes through a very small hole.  The defining structure, such as there being three acts—the first running twelve to fifteen pages and ending in a triggering event that in turn leads in act two to a critical event that is seen to be resolved in the last act—seems needlessly confining. Are there not other possible structures compossible with film narrative? 

On the other hand, I suspect that creativity can still be applied through the existing structure if there are original stories and characters out there in someone’s imagination. However, the standard structure ought not be allowed to exclude any stories that are original yet not conducive to that particular structure. Perhaps a new structure could naturally come out of such an original story. I suspect that the specificity of the formatting and length is primarily a means of standardizing incoming scripts so they can be more easily compared. While convenient, the guidelines may be contributing to movie-goers viewing the films as too formulaic.  For example, boy meets girl, girl pushes boy away, boy wins back girl, and the two embrace. Girl goes with other boy is scarcely off the formula.

In any case, creativity is urgently needed among screenwriters, and the protection (and respect) of creativity is urgently needed among managers having control over the art. Just because a person can control something doesn’t mean they should hold it so tightly—squeezing the air out of it.

1. Ken Loach, “Between Commodity and Communication: Has Film Fulfilled Its Potential?” International Socialist Review, 76 (March-April 2011), 28-44, p. 40.

2. Ibid., p. 41.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.