The following originally appeared on Zap Oracle.
"He
made on me personally the impression of a man obsessed with fixed ideas. I can
make nothing in my own case with his dream theories, and obviously 'symbolism'
is a most dangerous method." –William
James, referring to Sigmund Freud, in a letter to Geneva
psychologist Theodor Flournoy
David
Cronenberg, who in the 80s was making movies like Scanners about mutants whose telepathic boundary dissolution made
them so painfully aware of the chaotic mundanity in people's minds that they
lived at the margins of society and, if sufficiently enraged, employed psionic
powers that could make someone's head explode into a flying shrapnel of skull
shards and brain tissue, has made a subtly restrained film about the tense
relationship between Jung and Freud.
Sorry,
but the urge to work the plot of Scanners
into a surrealistically run-on sentence related to the history of
psychoanalysis was a disruptive urge I found impossible to repress. A Dangerous Method is still (late January,
2012) playing on some independent screens including The Mayan in Denver,
where I just saw it.
A Dangerous
Method is a highly disciplined film that very accurately portrays
many of the fracture planes in the relationship between these two great
pioneers of psychoanalysis. The story centers on Jung's affair with one of his
early patients, a beautiful, 19-year-old Russian-Jewish hysteric, Sabina Spielrein.
Transference, counter-transference (Spielrein/Jung, Jung/Spielrein, Freud/Jung,
Jung/Freud, Spielrein/Freud, Freud/Spielrein), proto-psychoanalytic method,
Victorian propriety and explicit Victorian S&M, and a number of other
dense layers of charged signifiers, all get very concisely mixed together in a
way that never seems like what it could so easily devolve into — the cheap movie
device of centering a complex history on a steamy romance.
The
film reveals much about the dark side of both Freud and Jung. The iron fist of
Freud's patriarchal authoritarianism and monomaniacal
dogmatism is visible beneath the velvet glove of his charisma, old
world decorum and courtly charm. Jung's adulteries, violations of professional
ethics and descent into near madness and other liminal zones is shown to be
inextricable from his visionary realizations. As Jung once said, "The larger
the man, the larger the shadow," a statement that 6'5? Jung no doubt meant to refer to
himself. Jung's brutality and bullying tactics, however, are left out of the
film.
At
first, the casting seems surreal — Viggo Mortensen as Freud? Yet Viggo pulls it
off brilliantly with a performance that, like the film, is restrained, subtle
and sympathetic.
Many
critics and moviegoers have criticized the acting of Keira Knightley as
Spierline, especially the extreme facial contortions, etc. she makes early in
her treatment. Most of us haven't met Edwardian era hysterics facing
incestuous sexual material, but according to Cronenberg, Jung described the
facial tics, etc., in his notes. Keira was obviously doing exactly what Herr
Director Cronenberg wanted, so if you feel her performance is over-the-top it
would be his fault, not hers. Here is what Cronenberg (as quoted in the Daily Beast) has to
say on the subject:
"Jung
wrote down what they were — her tics, spasms, laughing spells, body deformations,
and distortions. Of course it makes people uncomfortable, and they have to
account for that by saying it's bad acting or overacting, but it's totally
accurate acting. For a young girl of that era to talk about masturbation and
her father beating her as being sexually arousing, these are unspeakable
things, so part of her is trying to speak, and part of her is trying to deform
the speech so the words don't come out."
Since
going to the movies so often involves the extreme hazard of seeing trailers for
god-awful romantic comedies where overly-caffeinated yuppies do a series of
manic, supposedly funny things with other, overly-caffeinated yuppies, I was
delighted to find a movie love triangle so charged with dense, ambiguous layers of psychoanalytical tension that M.C. Escher and Salvador Dali could
wander its labyrinthine, ever-receding corridors for a bewildered eternity. The
impartiality of the multiple perspective is such that all the principals seem
entirely justified in their irreconcilable perceptions and actions.
The
film has an admirable efficiency in conveying a depth of information. For
example, in just a couple of moments, each lasting only a few seconds,
Cronenberg conveys the economic disparity between the two men, an aspect
of their relationship rarely commented on. Freud needed to see patients to pay
the rent on his claustrophobic apartment in Vienna, while Jung, who grew up in
genteel poverty as a rural minister's son, married the second richest woman in
Switzerland, heiress to the IWC (a great Swiss watch company) fortune. Jung
could have a years-long fallow period to go off the rails and into the
unconscious, but Freud could not. The divergence of their economic fortunes had
strange parallels to other divergences between them — Jung's more expansive view
of libido for example, and Jung's expectation of transcendence through
psychoanalysis, while Freud, like a weary, working man, hoped only to replace
neurotic suffering with ordinary suffering.
I
was delighted to see that Cronenberg, faithful to his Scanners past, chose to include the telekinetic episode that
happened between Freud and Jung. I also fell in love with many of the period
details, especially the beautifully realized steampunk apparatus Jung used to
measure galvanic skin response in his early word-association experiments — a
device that has both a turn-of-the-century Swiss precision and a Rube Goldberg-like
extravagance. Cronenberg understands the mythic dimensions of crucial gadgets,
like the increasingly organic Clark Nova typewriter he created for Naked Lunch.
All
of Cronenberg's films employ some sort of dangerous method, but this one does
so with masterful restraint.
See
other movie reviews by Jonathan Zap: Zap Reviews
Interested
in Jung? See: Thoughts on Jung
Text copyright 2012, Jonathan Zap. Edited by Austin Iredale
