Abstract
William Fried’s book offers a valuable psychoanalytic perspective on thirteen films, grouped in the categories of Secrets; Time and Death; Love and Lust; and Human Identity. He underlines his analytic approach by treating films as though they were sessions, and making connections between films and dreams (“the methods to interpret any tend to be relevant to all” [p. xxiii]). He admits his bias is to write about films he likes, and “to conceive the task of criticism as the enhancement of understanding, appreciation, and pleasure” (p. 119), rather than fault-finding. He explains that he originally wrote his essays, over a span of twenty years, as presentations at conferences where the films in question were first shown to the audience, so the subsequent discussion benefited from that collectively shared experience. He adds three brief but wide-ranging appendices, written for this book.
Fried may be influenced by his previous profession as a teacher of literature when he cautions against treating the film’s characters as though they are real people with an unconscious; or treating the film’s narrative as saying something about its screenwriter or director. I suspect he suffers from the faddish but flawed (and anti-psychoanalytic) literary theory that would promote this skewed “death of the author” view as dogma we all must follow (fortunately, Freud did not, in his brilliant works in applied analysis). Researching films usually uncovers meaningful links with the lives and conflicts of the screenwriter or director, or of the writer whose novel inspired the film. One of the most powerful applications of our psychoanalytic understanding is in elucidating such links. Fried ignores this dimension of the films he discusses (except with regard to the biographical film Gods and Monsters).
By contrast, Fried’s exploration of films is greatly enriched by the close reading approach to literature, which parallels close listening in psychoanalysis. Fried plausibly observes that close reading was probably invented by ancient Talmudic scholars, who in turn influenced Freud (Fried cites more works by Freud than by any other author). Fried is frequently fresh and original, as when he teases in an arresting aside that analysts pay closer attention to their patient’s associations because of the “fiction” (p. 127) offered by the theory of transference that the patient is always talking about the analyst, in displacement.
In his excellent preface, series editor Frederic Perlman usefully links the genre of film with the closely related (and much older) genre of drama. Fried himself begins his first chapter, “Every work of drama is driven by secrets” (p. 1; emphasis added). It’s curious that psychoanalysts seem more interested in film than in drama. Is this partly due to our neophilia? For all that film offers us, it inherited a great deal from the thousands of years of live theater that preceded its invention. Theatrical performance offers us the sort of collective experience of literature that was the norm before the invention of written language, when epics such as Homer were recited to an audience from memory, not read. Perlman tells us that an 1858 book anticipated Freud in saying that the “most astute students of psychology” (p. xiii) were Homer, Shakespeare, and other great creative writers. Perlman quotes Freud’s crucial observation that “creative writers are valuable allies and their evidence is to be prized highly. . . . In their knowledge of the mind they are far in advance of us ordinary people . . .” (p. xiii). He also quotes Kurt Eissler to the effect that “with regard to some essentials, Freud may well have learned more from Shakespeare than he did from his patients” (p. xiv).
What about Fried’s claims for the uniqueness of film, among the arts? Ricardo Ainslie in his foreword makes convincing comments about the power of a soundtrack to influence the audience’s emotional response to a film, subliminally. True enough. The same can be done with a good play. And was done, as early as the Elizabethan era (see Smith 2018). Ancient Greek plays were sung, not recited. The role of music does indeed deserve more attention, in both film and drama. Ainslie also writes, “The quality that most distinguishes film from other art forms, however, the element that most accounts for film’s magical quality, is that films, and the characters within them, literally move in time” (p. xix). Ainslie then contrasts this aspect of film with painting, sculpture, and literature. True enough. But, oddly, he doesn’t mention the parallel with drama.
Midway through Fried’s discussion of Notes on a Scandal, I watched the film. As I then continued to read Fried’s discussion of it, I was blown away by his perceptiveness (or perhaps by my obtuseness). My only disagreement with Fried is that I found the Judi Dench character (Barbara) more deranged than he seems to find her. He treats the film as a gold mine of subtle allusions, stemming from the core theme of “the striving for youth” (p. 8) and intolerance of aging (which I did notice). Fried plausibly links the sex scenes in a train yard with Andrew Marvell’s seventeenth-century poem “To His Coy Mistress” (“But at my back, I always hear / Time’s wingéd chariot hurrying near”). Fried is especially eloquent in his riff on our intolerance of aging and death: Humans deal with endings by creating eschatology, monuments (including estates and progeny), procrastination, and sequels. Endings are intolerable. They must be eradicated from experience by the next big thing—the hereafter, the children, the foundation, and the work of art or science. Another antidote that all psychoanalysts are familiar with is the serial repetition of stereotyped scripts that render the lives of patients spuriously cyclical [p. 11].
In discussing a film (The Conversation) whose symbolism he finds too obvious, Fried comments that he prefers works “in which the author’s intention is to create a simulacrum of her experiences in as truthful a way as she can and allow the symbols (if there are any) to emerge of their own accord” (p. 16). And he believes that we analysts should be challenged to find symbolic meanings, rather than have them served up too overtly—by compliant patients, or by overly transparent films. The more we have to work to achieve understanding, the more meaningful are the insights we gain.
Fried believes that the television series The Sopranos “ushered in a new era for television” (p. 27), with a much higher quality of programming. His remarks on two episodes of this series reminded me of the ApsaA meeting at which Glen Gabbard interviewed Lorraine Bracco, who played the psychiatrist Dr. Melfi in that popular show. When the audience was allowed to ask questions, Bracco became nonplussed by the many analysts who asked her advice about various clinical dilemmas. She finally had to remind us that she is an actor who recites lines written by others; she told us we are the ones trained as psychoanalysts, after all! Apparently, even analysts are ready to suspend disbelief when they encounter a famous actor. (Surprisingly, Fried does not cite Gabbard’s book on The Sopranos (2002), or Gabbard’s other writings on film.)
As I mentioned earlier, Fried orginally wrote these essays as film discussions that he presented just after audiences had seen the films in question. He recommends that his readers do the same. Not having seen them detracts from our full appreciation of his exegeses. In any case, Fried still offers many fascinating observations. While exploring Up in the Air, he refers to “Hollywood’s compulsion to preempt meaning by means of sentimentality” (p. 47). Later, the same film leads him to say, “In my work with couples, much of the dyadic discord is caused by the incompleteness of individuation in one or both partners, and the impediment that presents as a wish for a different type of partner is often a disguised longing for absent or failed experiences of individuation” (p. 48).
Tunes of Glory leads Fried to an important insight about our military: “Part of what was learned most dramatically after Vietnam . . . was that soldiers who cannot mourn [their lost comrades] cannot return to civilian life . . .” (p. 55). Perhaps the military needs to create meaningful discharge rituals, the converse of the basic training rituals that turn civilians into soldiers.
While discussing An Affair of Love, Fried writes perceptively about perversions. Referring to the couple in this film, as well as to perversions more generally, he says that “the specter of death [is] the ultimate reality that perversions are designed to deny. . . . perversion is, first and foremost, a moratorium on the claims of reality, especially those deriving from separation and loss” (p. 63). While others can play with illusions without denying reality, perverse individuals want to insist that their illusion is reality. One cannot avoid thinking of President Trump as an example, since his subjective reality seems pervaded by the “fake news” he projects onto the far more reliable mainstream media.
Before turning to Certified Copy, Fried explains that he will use an approach that reminds me of my approach in this review. He chooses not to address the “particularities” of this film, but instead to make connections between the film and relevant psychoanalytic concepts, such as transference. He then makes a helpful distinction between two types of transference, each found in people whose original objects were “radically unsatisfactory” (p. 67). In the first type, the person attempts to change the new object so that it resembles the original object as much as possible. In the second, the person does the opposite, seeking relationships with people who are unlike the original object, though their unconscious repetition compulsion may subvert this goal.
Fried views Blade Runner as a bathetic recasting of Milton’s Paradise Lost. He makes the questionable assertion that this “demonstrates the devolution of our conception of the heroic as a consequence of the serial disillusionment wrought by historical events . . .” (p. 98). Not to minimize the horrendous violence that began with World War I, I nevertheless wonder if our darker worldview also reflects our relative ignorance of earlier historical epochs—the fourteenth-century plague, for example, that killed up to half the population of some European countries. Or the repeated wars of religion, which reflect so poorly on monotheism (warring polytheistic groups do not fight over religion, at least). Up to 90 percent of Native Americans died after the European invasion, not only because of their lack of immunity to smallpox and other European diseases, but sometimes due to biological warfare, as when Europeans gave them smallpox-contaminated blankets as “gifts.” Homo homini lupus, from way back (though that proverb is unfair to wolves, who don’t engage in religious wars, and whose descendants include man’s best friends).
Fried agrees with other analysts who find films to be comparable to dreams, with their altered states of consciousness, and willing suspension of disbelief. I would add that our various self states are active in our dreams, and they are also activated by watching films, as we identify with their various characters.
One minor error—Fried misdefines scopophilia (he uses the scoptophilia spelling) as “the child’s impulse to perceive and understand what is forbidden to him” (p. 138). The OED, by contrast, defines it more accurately as “sexual stimulation or satisfaction derived principally from looking; voyeurism,” from the Greek for “love of observation.” The English word was coined to translate Freud’s term Schaulust—e.g., when in Three Essays on Sexuality he wrote of “this pleasure in looking [scopophilia]” (1905, p. 156).
All readers will find this book pleasurable and informative.