[A meditation on the 2011 movie, written and directed by Jeff Nichols
and starring Michael Shannon as the mentally-assailed protagonist, and
Jessica Chastain as his initially horrified, but later supportive
wife... ]
Reposted because significantly updated.]
“What I fear in you is something you don’t know is in you.”
What, I asked.
“It’s lurking somewhere about this
house … In a way we’re on the same
side against it.”
-- John Fowles, The Collector
(1963)
[Update 17 July 2013]
To work you up into a suitable state of terror, prior to reading the
review, consult this factual article:
~ ~ ~
The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to
happen. … Gust after gust of
disorder … the whole northern
religion of things coming to an
end.
-- Jonathan Franzen, The
Corrections (2001), opening paragraph
Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut;
in allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei.
Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei,
Und an den Küsten -- liest man --
steigt die Flut.
-- Jakob Davidsohn, Weltende.
 |
| Hard rain's gonna fall |
We are so
accustomed to the Nature-has-gone-crazy variety of disaster flick, that
we expect this one to fall into the familiar mold. It
begins thus, with rogue storms dropping something like motor-oil
rather than pure water, and with swirls of birds like sandstorms or the
flights of jinn.
[For a spooky actual video of such birds, along with a physics commentary, try this:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/swirling-bacteria-linked-to-the-physics-of-phase-transitions/ ]
Such movies often have a frame-tale of a family drama, and this one does too; only,
it takes its own more seriously, and dwells there, without
(frustrating to some audience) any reversion to mere special effects.
Also, this drama proceeds in a direction different from what is expected. The run of the genre is: someone heroic protects the family from surrounding peril -- a peril that had been predicted, but not believed (the Cassandra motif). And so it seems to be here: the
husband becomes obsessed with building a storm-shelter that he can ill
afford, yet seems justified when, of a night, the family is wakened by
hurricane warning-horns. Into the shelter they all go.
Yet there is no genuine shelter to be had -- not from what is really menacing them. In the words of the old spiritual, quoted by psychiatrist Theodor Reik in Listening with the Third Ear (1948):
I went to the rock
to hide my face;
the rock cried out,
“No hiding place --
no hiding place down there."
For
down there, down below, it becomes clear, is what this
shelter symbolizes.
It
represents the defenses of the mentally ill, who, to guard a kind of
self-cohesion or inward sanity, spin castles of imagination that protect
them from worse ills.
 |
Nun ist die Luft
von solchen Spuk so voll,
Daß niemand weiß, wie er ihn meiden soll.
|
The movie has been -- to its credit -- quite up-front about this angle; it's not trying to fool you, like "The Sixth Sense". The husband is seen visiting his aging mother, long ago committed to an asylum for paranoia: her son, it seems, has inherited the tare. He himself voluntarily consults a psychiatrist. But the movie keeps us hanging on with a trope that itself is becoming old hat: that even a paranoid may be right about the threat.
Upon learning that this film will feature a Little Deaf Girl, the seasoned movie-goer groans inwardly: Glurge alert! Yet -- not a bit of it: she is not sentimentalized, and she turns out to play a key structural role.
Firstly: She seems to share her father’s perceptions of paranormal meteorology, not shared with her mother or anyone else. For some time the import of this is ambiguous:
Either
(a) What he -- and
she, as corroborating witness -- perceive
is real; as for the others,
the more fools they.
Or:
(b) Just as he inherited his
delusional make-up from his mother, so the blight has continued down the family line.
Second: Her deafness, so far from being a mere tear-jerker irrelevant to the thrust of the plot, serves to echo her father’s condition. They are both cleidoic within their respective disabilities.
And finally (this unsuspected until the last, and even then, subtle of interpretation): She turns out to play a pivotal role between the sanity of the wife and the madness of the husband, until (as I shall argue) her own mite of a weight upon the psychical balance-pan at last causes the bar to kick the beam, as a folie à deux becomes a folie à trois, by infection.
*
The detective versus
an unnamed evil thing:
A tale of madness,
and of the uncanny --
uncannily available
for only ninety-nine cents:
*
So! Back to the shelter.
As the family takes refuge, a real storm seems to be on. We have heard the sirens, and the soundtrack is awhoosh with wind. So is this his vindication -- he was right all along, like Cassandra? Not crazy, but merely disbelieved by the complacent townsfolk?
At this point, any normal movie would offer an intense enclosed-space Das-Boot-style mini-drama underground: yet, again, not a bit of it. The family exchange barely a word, and simply go to sleep on their barren plank beds.
The reason:
This shelter is the world of the husband’s pathology;
and as such, is a
sterile world.
 |
| A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief |
*
Again, a tale of
madness --
yet now, ’tis not the
man,
but the planet that
has gone mad :
Murphy Makes a Mitzvah
(the tale of the
magic pawnshop)
for less than the
price
of a side of fries
*
The next day, the wife -- who has regained her empathy for her sick husband -- says: It’s over. Meaning not (as in so many a cruel movie), It's all over between us; but, literally: The storm is over; figuratively: Your illness can begin to be over, if you will be brave. -- He shakes his head: the storm still rages, he says. But we the viewers notice that the soundtrack is now silent, and begin to take her part.
-- “Open the door,” she says, not once but several times. This works on several levels:
(i) Cinematic family drama (the
lowest level, recalling schlock movies):
We are trapped with a madman.
(ii) Psychoanalytic metaphor: Seek ye to be healed.
(iii) (something that goes beyond
this particular movie, really, but:
The Doors of Perception.)
And then, something quite unexpected happens
-- something which, if you are by now interpreting the whole thing as
allegory, for the first time turns you against the brave and suffering
man. The wife is adamant that the storm has passed; the husband, that it has not. The logical thing is to peek and see; but that would be too flatly empirical. Instead, the husband reaches out to the daughter, who like him may
be a Sensitive: bidding her, like him, to put her hand against the
door, and feel the madness outside raging, as he can and as his wife
cannot: in short, recruiting the child into his illness. Yet -- coup de théâtre ! -- she shakes her head: she declines.
And so, he holds forth to his wife, the key to the door: a pat solution to the dilemma in (i). But, in line with (ii), she declines it: You must open it, I cannot open it for you (else the illness will continue). She then says (standing some distance back, and with her arm around her daughter -- their daughter -- her daughter): “This is what you need to do, to stay with us.” The simplest interpretation of this statement is in line with the usual miserable cinematic divorce-drama,
i): Do this or I walk out on you
and take the kid (and maybe the toaster too).
But the subtext
is
(ii): You must do this, to remain among the sane, represented right now by your wife and child.
She adds: Yes, I could open the door for you, and you would emerge and indeed see that the storm has passed: but
that would not remove your underlying problem. -- Such an observation
is explicitly psychanalytic, quite familiar within those circles. The
psychiatrist could blurt out the literal origin of the patient’s
neurosis ("You thought your mom was hot!" or whatever), yet this bare
statement, though given lip-service or intellectual assent, by itself
breaks no bonds. Neither is
the neurosis thereby cured, nor are the symptoms abolished (although,
caught in the act as it were, they might transmogrify).
*
For a mini-movie
of madness and
salvation,
click here:
*
(During
all this, the director plays with the lighting -- now this, now that
face is lit, or in shadow, a question of cathexis and of shifting will.)
Then at last he faces up to the challenge: He pushes open the storm-door, and totters out blinking into the sunlight. And sees -- really a quite funny scene, given the right context: A yellow-helmeted workman on a cherry-picker, competently restoring the power-lines; an elderly couple picking up downed branches. So, yes, there was a storm, but not an apocalyptic or metaphorical storm, nor even a gully-washer.
(For an example of the humor of an oversold storm, click here:
By implication, the husband now accepts that he is mentally ill. He
and his wife then consult a more qualified and high-priced
psychiatrist, who firmly recommends that the husband be
institutionalized for a time. This, of course, will entail separation from his (sane) family; so as a last respite before this happens, the family is permitted its traditional vacation at the beach.
And now we see them in a typical bland ahistorical unpsychological American setting: the wife busying herself in the kitchen, the husband and daughter making sand-castles (and not imaginative scary ones: they use a mould to imprint cute turtles). -- Perplexed, I
glanced at the DVD time-bar, only a minute or two to go, no time for some
huge plot-twist, apparently all is to end on this hopeful note.
Yet
then -- something I really had not bargained for (and when you’ve
reached my age, many movies under your belt, you have to hand it to a
director who surprises you).
It is a small gesture, easily missed: in the midst of their play, the young daughter looks up, viewing the horizon with mute concern. Instantly, the blood chilled in my veins.
Nor does her father immediately perceive the gist of it: He gives her a querying look -- himself (nota bene) evidently not yet noticing anything in the objective world that she might be referring to -- and she makes (in readily interpretable sign-language) a swirling motion with her hands. The obvious and literal reference is to tornadoes; but
perhaps with an echo of that gesture signifying madness, which
Americans make against their temple, and which Egyptians (as I just the
other day learn) make against their forehead.
The husband looks up, and espies, on the horizon, a skyful of clouds, and waterspouts. Yet still the soundtrack offers no roar, nor do we see sand blowing about.
Then the wife comes out from their bungalow, looking perturbed. There could be many reasons for this, but -- now, see, how her hair is blowing! She feels it too! And
lo -- she stretcheth forth her hand, her frail pale hand, and upon it
drop glops of that same sinister-amber motor-oil, or anti-manna, or
id-juice, or whatever it may be.
Abruptly, the film ends. The titles slowly scroll, against a sombre unrevealing background of black.
It would be interesting to know what most audiences make of this.
The standard big-budget Hollywood line would be: Omigosh
the guy was right all along!!!! followed by a delicious hour of scenes
of escalating destruction, townsfolk reaction-shots, perky pets
(sensing looming disaster before their owners do), doomed heroics by
jut-jawed heroes and jut-busted heroines, so pleasing to the folk.
Yet the movie shows none of that, nothing like that: it just ends, leaving you to your own thoughts.
Mine being: These
paranormal events, while fittingly symbolical of the realities of our
troubled times, are intended ultimately to be understood, in a coolly realist framework, as imaginary. This is not a horror flick, nor even a family drama in the usual sense: it is a psychological thriller, and quite sui generis. The
fact that no-one else on the beach stands up to notice this
Walpurgisnacht of a storm -- that no physical evidence is offered but
her blowing hair -- proves it: this is but an inner wind. The storm is shown far off on the horizon, so the oil drops from what must be a clear sky.
What has happened is an ending out of Ibsen’s chilling “Ghosts”: from the mother to the son, from the son to his daughter, the family curse, the inherited tare, has been passed down. For at the end, it is not he who pulls his daughter in -- he tried, in the shelter, and failed -- but she, him. (Or rather -- It, them.)
All that said, I must confess, I didn’t so much
enjoy this movie, as
appreciate it.
Intellectually, analytically, I respect the heck out of it;
but it is nowhere near so engrossing as, say, “North by Northwest”, “
Memento”, or (dare I add) “
March of the Penguins”.
When push comes to popcorn, I still do enjoy a really good car-chase.
(The effect, no doubt, of archaic urethral eroticism.)
~
By
mere happenstance, a week earlier I saw another movie with
psychological aspirations, though unlike “Take Shelter”, this one wears
psychoanalysis on its sleeve:
I refer to “
A Dangerous Method.”
Yet though its pretentions are greater, its depth is less.
The movie turns upon the Godzilla-meets-Frankinstein or Batman-cum-Robin premise
of the personal relations between Freud and Jung.
These
did indeed historically take place -- it’s not like that movie ("The
Seven Percent Solution") with the interesting premise of a partnership
between
Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes.
Yet
between them comes the equally historical figure of Sabina Spielrein
(sometimes transliterated “Shpielrein”, after the Cyrillic original).
And she manages to quite spoil the show.
We
meet her in a fit of florid overacting, as she is brought screaming
and writhing (in a sort of copulatory parody) to an asylum.
Yet
the next thing you know she is helping nice Dr Jung with his clever
experiments, and becoming a full-fledged analyst herself.
Now, these things she in fact did, nobody doubts it;
but give me leave to doubt the conditions of her arrival.
As is well known, raving maniacs and florid narcissists do not make good candidates for analysis;
and as we meet Ms. Spielrein, she is both.
The cloyingly self-indulgent antics of that actress stand in the starkest contrast to the laconic stoicism of the protagonist of “Take Shelter”. He realizes that he seems to be getting sucked down the rabbit-hole; yet
such is the force of his hallucinations, and such the rock-like
instinct of protection for his family, that he must in any case act upon
them, carefully building a highly workmanlike shelter (to build which he has to take out a loan, both from the bank and against his account with Lady Luck -- she forecloses on this one and he loses his job). He is making the best of a bad bargain, by his lights. And buttressing our sympathy for him is our knowledge, as old hands on the popcorn circuits, that he may (in magical movieland) turn out to have been right all along, when The Big One hits at last.
Still, essential to this sympathy
is the fact that, neither as an actor nor as a character
does he indulge himself.
The integrity of the role requires that he
underact :
for the character, a strong and decent man with a slipping grip on reality, is constantly thinking, “
Get a grip on yourself.”
Such understated acting does not typically garner Oscars;
but, gratifyingly, the critics were not misled, and praised Shannon’s performance to the skies.
[For a more recent example of magnificent underacting, gratifyingly appreciated by both critics and audience, click here:
Discretion and Ben Affleck.
~
The
specifics of mental illness (as Otto Fenichel remarks) do not take
place in a vacuum of untethered human nature, but are socially situated. So -- What is the Sitz im Leben of this particular neurosis, in this particular film?
Critics, to their credit, picked up on two things:
(1) The utterly justified, but nonetheless existential-dread-inducing, fear, in this age of the Bush Recession, of being
downromneyed -- of losing your job.
(2) The
background anxious dread connected with Global Climate Change -- our
generation’s counterpart of the nuclear spectre that haunted humanity
during the Cold War.
Now, (1) is not much used in this movie; it
serves simply as a historically realistic and familiar background, so
that we know that, when the protagonist loses his job, it is a really
big deal, since jobs are scarce these days; and,
when he must take out a loan to build the shelter, that no-one is
tugging illegitimately on your heartstrings, credit these days is
stretched tight.
(2) is potentially meatier; yet in fact is never explicitly exploited in this remarkably self-restrained film. A
lesser director would have regaled us with pictures of offshore
oilspills (indeed, see the Comments below), or of Mister Polar Bear atop his melting ice-floe, gloomily contemplating his end. Such things we never see.
And
so -- in the spirit of Freud and Jung and their associates, who
offered up their own most intimate fantasies, in the interest of
science, I shall now reveal my own innermost feelings about Global
Climate Change.
[Hm! This is a good place to leave the reader in suspense. Tweet out the link, folks, and maybe more will follow. -- Really, I ought to sell tickets …]
* * *
~ Intermission ~
Relief for
beleaguered Nook lovers!
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
[Update 2 Sept 2012]
[Meta-hmm…. Let us, instead, continue the analytic foreplay, resorting later to the Big Reveal.]
Few reviewers will admit to having merely skimmed a book; and in the past there was physically no way to ‘skim’ a movie. But now there is: the blessed gift of Fast-Forward (gratias agimus tibi, domine). And in any case, I am not reviewing “A Dangerous Method”, but simply pissing on it. (Vide "urethral eroticism", supra.)
I
thus FF’d over most of the movie -- noting, in passing, in bafflement,
some Hot Bondage Action between Carl Jung and his illustrious rump-up
hussy.
Where did
that come from?
It
is as though the direction of the movie had become intermediately
outsourced to Monty Python (that excruciating "Spank me!" -- "Spank
me!" scene in "M.P. & the Holy Grail".).
The scene is mere pandering -- and indeed, less to male fantasies, than to female (of the sort now familiar from
Fifty Shades of Gray).
 |
| Countertransference can be dangerous |
As for Miss Spielrein, she doesn’t even rate a note in Jung’s memoirs (
Memories, Dreams, and Reflections/
Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken);
her prominence in this movie
is mere narcissism.
Note: I
have no idea how prominent a role Miss Spielrein actually played in
history, as opposed to the histrionic one in this movie, as depicted by
a particularly hapless and annoying actress. The
Wikipedia entry for Jung (the fuller, German version) makes no mention
of her -- yet tellingly, describes a countertransferential role quite like that depicted in the film, -- yet filled by a different woman, Toni Wolff:
Antonia Wolff war ab 1912 Mitarbeiterin von Jung und wurde ab 1913 seine engste Vertraute, und ab 1924 für viele Jahre seine wichstigste Mitarbeiterin und Geliebte. Jung blieb mit Emma Jung verheiratet, und oft traten sie zu dritt auf.
Likewise Jung’s sympathetic depicter Anthony Stevens (
Jung:
A Very Short Introduction (1994), p. 27) describes her role as
femme inspiratrice as “brief”, and decidedly
inferior to that of Wolff; she does not otherwise come in for mention in the
book.
*
Falls Sie im
Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium
weiterblättern
möchten,
Bitte hier
klicken:
*
A hint of the phoniness of this flick comes already in the title, “A
Dangerous Method” (echoing such better movies as "A Beautiful Mind"
and "A Simple Plan").
That is intended to titillate the audience, as is almost everything else
in the film. But surely the
analytic “talking-cure” (as one of Freud’s anglophone patients herself dubbed it), with the patient
recumbent on a comfortable couch in a quiet room, and facing away from the
analyst (who is thus denied the influence of his Svengali eyes), is the least
dangerous method ever invented.
After all, the basic insight of psychoanalysis is that awareness of
certain conflicts is deeply suppressed, and difficult if not impossible to
bring to the surface. It’s not
like pressing the Red Button -- like saying “Niagara Falls” in the classic
Abbott & Costello skit, upon hearing which Abbott’s cellmate instantly becomes homicidal. (“Ni-AGGGG-ra Fallllls…. !!! Sloooooowly I turned …”) A patient who, innocently, recounts a
dream which, upon extended analysis, might point towards incest-leanings, is
not, by the mere fact of having recounted it, going to light upon that analytic
insight, unassisted and with traumatic results. (“Omigosh, the woodchuck really
means Mom! -- Mom was so hot!! --
Think I’ll go kill myself.”)
The
imputation is the more absurd when one considers the practices that
commonly went before, which consisted less in treating the madness
than in punishing the madmen. (Fashionable citizens used to visit the asylums to
witness the tortures, as one might a bear-garden.) Nor even with later
treatments of the liberal age, involving swallowing hallucinogens at
the edge of a cliff, or evoking -- nay, creating
the very pathologies they pretended to cure, as with the American
feminist excesses of recent decades, conjuring up multiple
personalities, and fantasies of Satanic rituals -- dangerous not
only for the patients, but for the bystanders who wound up getting
prosecuted, their lives destroyed, in places like Florida, by zealots
like Janet Reno.
(For a survival of drastic pre-analytic therapeutics, click here:)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/at-afghan-shrine-ancient-treatment-for-a-new-epidemic/2012/10/23/570ce338-187f-11e2-a346-f24efc680b8d_story.html?hpid=z1
Certainly Freud himself did not consider that his talking-cure was dangerous to the patient (to the analyst, possibly; see below):
Schwere, dauernde Verschlimmerungen des Krankheitszustandes sind nach meinem Urteil auch bei ungeschickter Anwendung der Analyse nicht zu befürchten. Die unerfreulichen Reaktionen klingen nach einer Weile wieder ab. Neben den Traumen des Lebens [“Traumen”, note, not “Träume”] welche die Krankheit hervorgerufen haben, kommt das bißchen Mißhandlung durch den Arzt nicht in Betracht.
-- Sigmund Freud, “Die Frage der Laienanalyse” (1926)
*
Für psychologisch
tiefgreifende Krimis,
in pikanter
amerikanischer Mundart,
und christlich
gesinnt,
klicken Sie bitte hier:
*
The only times I
pressed Play, resuming the soundtrack, was when it was Freud speaking (or even just frowning),
played by an eminently watchable Viggo Mortensen. Mostly he just chomps his cigar, though even that was fun to
watch, such is his charisma; but
one quite interesting scene did arise, where Jung is visiting Freud in his
study. This incident is
quite accurate historically -- or at least, it is in accordance with Jung’s own
account (Chapter V of the memoir mentioned). A loud report
is heard from the bookshelves;
Jung calmly reports that this is no more than a “catalytic
exteriorization” of the tension between them -- an explanation that upsets
Freud no end. So far so who-cares;
but then Jung predicts a second éclat -- which duly comes. -- Highly
interesting is Freud’s reply. He
does not deny the incident, nor attempt to sweep it under the rug as a
coincidence (do we? do you?), but rather holds up a metaphorical bunch of
garlic in the face (the grinning face) of the paranormal, and (in the movie)
says (and this is true) that many out there are looking for any handle with
which to beat down psychoanalysis, and embracing the paranormal would give them
a big one. In Jung’s memoir, Freud
instead says, more enigmatically, that, in staving off the paranormal, he is
defending against the “black tide of mud”, a phrase that Jung finds highly
interesting, given the sort of subnoëtic muck Freud notoriously wades through.
Note: I have not seen Freud describe this
specific incident, but he implicitly denies that it, or anything like it, ever
happened to him, in this somewhat suspiciously droll or disingenous denial that
he has ever come within spitting distance of the paranormal:
Ich muß leider bekennen, daß ich zu jenen unwürdigen Individuen gehöre, vor denen die Geister ihre Tätigkeit einstellen und das Übersinnliche entweicht, so daß ich niemals in die Lage gekommen bin, selbst etwas zum Wunderglauben Anregendes zu erleben.
 |
| Checkmate! |
 |
| Checkmate! |
The
movie also depicts (following Jung’s account) Freud’s fainting, as an
apparent effect of Oedipal fears -- Jung being the imagined parricide.
This incident occurred at a conference in Munich, in 1912;
but there was an earlier such incident in 1909, in Bremen.
And there too, Freud’s fantasy (or insight) was that Jung harbored “death-wishes towards him”.
~
The thing about psychoanalysts -- these guys play for keeps. Again, Jung:
I tried to fall asleep again, but a voice within me said, “You must understand the dream, and must do so at once!” The inner urgency mounted until the terrible moment came when the voice said:
“If you do not understand the dream,
you must shoot yourself!”
In the drawer of my night-table lay a loaded revolver, and I became afraid.
Now, I must confess: in my own desk drawer lies no revolver, loaded or otherwise. Nor a stiletto, nor a dagger of rare Oriental design; nor a slingshot; not so much as a peashooter. (Though, were I to rummage, I might manage to come up with a rubber band or two -- the weapon of choice among 8-year-olds.)
Linguists live a comparatively lead-free life.
[To be continued, inshallah.
Meanwhile, a couple of other movie reviews, that likewise probe beneath the surface:
]
~
[The comparatively few pageviews do not warrant taking the time, to build the rest into an extended essay. But I shall post some notes, either to be worked up later… or as Nachlass.]
Back to "Take Shelter".
The daughter does not Play Well with other children; as her mother reports, “she can’t connect”. At
first the viewer assumes that she is shunned for her deafness -- but
it soon turns out that she attends a friendly, well-run school for deaf
children. No, deafness is not her problem, not in this respect.
Socially, the wife is much more connected to the daughter than the husband is. As: He comes to the breakfast table, whence the daughter is feeding the dog; says
-- in English, sans ASL -- “don’t feed the dog”, and, not even glancing
to see if she has read his lips, sits down and addresses his meal; the little girl continues (unnoticed) to feed the dog.
Later the mother notices this, and tells the girl in sign language to stop; she stops.
And yet the
subterranean connections between father and daughter
run deep, through the genes -- underground rivulets, not to be stanched from the surface.
This is not a tale for a novelist or dramatist.
What happens to the protagonist
is not a matter of character.
He has no tragic flaw;
hubris does not bring him down;
you cannot predict his end from his beginnings.
He has a
frigging genetic defect, just like his deaf daughter.
You can’t make a novel out of that;
but you can make elegy, and allegory.
My reference to madness being “catching” was no speculative invention, but is in line with long experience. Freud on “psychische Infektion”:
Der Mechanismus ist der der Identifizierung auf Grund des sich in dieselbe Lage Versetzenkönnens … Die anderen möchten auch ein geheimes Liebesverhältnis haben, und akzeptieren unter dem Einfluß des Schuldbewußtseins auch das damit verbundene Leid.
Es wäre unrichtig zu behaupten, sie eignen sich das Symptom aus Mitgefühl an. Im Gegenteil, das Mitgefühl entsteht erst aus der Identifizierung.
-- Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse (1921)
This
possibility is applicable here even though the wife is not simply the
consort, but in a sense (towards the end) the therapist of the
protagonist; for many an
analyst has remarked upon the danger of extended exposure to the madness
of one’s patients, comparing the latter to Roentgen rays.
A
particularly gripping account of such a scenario occurs in the essay
-- or analytic memoir, or perhaps more of a short-story or sotie -- “The Jet-Propelled Couch”, by the psychiatrist Robert Lindner, in his best-seller from 1954, The Fifty-Minute Hour. (A great title, that, referring
to the standard duration of a session with your shrink --- at least,
back in those days, the American heyday of psychoanalysis. Nowadays all that has gone by the board, for better or worse. You see your physician for more like fifty seconds, so that he -- or these days, almost certainly she -- can refill your prescription for Zombistatin or whatever, kthxbai.) In
that narrative, the doctor gets drawn in to the elaborate
science-fiction fantasies of his narratively gifted patient, much as the
wife in "Take Shelter" in the end gives in to the libidinal tug of her consort.
As: the patient is stymied in space-travel calculations involving various imaginary planets.
“I don’t understand it,” he said. “I could swear I copied those maps exactly from the originals at the Institute.
“Maybe” I suggested “you made your mistake in translating from Olmayan measurements to miles.”
“That’s not it,” he said, “there’s something fundamentally wrong.”
“Well,” I comforted, "it’s not very serious, after all…”
“Not serious!” he exploded. “Why, man, these maps are used by my pilots. No wonder I’ve lost so many ships!”
That
is quite funny to read, and must have been much more entertaining to
listen to (plus getting paid for it) than the usual droning kvetching of
the narcissists, nerds and neurotics that typically wind up on the
couch.
But not without its dangers, the more deadly for their attractive sheen. Lindner confesses:
In the beginning it was a game. My
wholesale acceptance of the fantasy was no more than a pretense …But
eventually it ceased to be a game. … The materials of Kirk’s psychosis and the Achilles heel of my personality met and meshed like the gears of a clock.
As we have remarked in another context: If you sup with the Devil, use a long spoon.
~ ~ ~
A critic writes:
http://spectator.org/archives/2011/10/21/take-shelter/print
The
strength of the movie is that Curtis himself sees the problem. When he
was ten years old, he watched as his mother (Kathy Baker) drifted away
into the dreamland of paranoid schizophrenia and had to be
institutionalized. Now he is afraid that the terrible dreams he is
having portend a similar fate for himself, which would be scarcely less
horrific than the alternative peril, namely that he is getting some kind
of supernatural warning of impending doom to his family. Methodically,
manfully, he pursues both explanations simultaneously, consulting his
doctor, reading books from the library (Understanding Mental Illness),
and visiting a counselor at a mental health clinic at the same time he
is taking out a risky home improvement loan to build an elaborate storm
shelter in his backyard.
All
this is rather touching on Curtis's part, though not so much on that of
Mr. Nichols who, it seems to me, really does have to make up his mind
between the two alternative explanations. Trying to have it both ways,
as he does, is a cop-out, a lapse of verisimilitude, which may be no big
deal to those who live comfortably in our age of cinematic fantasy but
which to me devalues and cheapens all the hard work he has done up to
this point to make the movie look real. The
movie's ending, which is bound to provoke a great deal of unprofitable
discussion, seems to me to serve no other purpose than to indulge that
tiresome adolescent profundity about the ultimate uncertainty of the
boundary between reality and illusion. Thus he avoids breaking with
Hollywood magic and comfort the audience with the reflection that we are
still in movieland after all.
Beneath the surface of Take Shelter, I'm afraid, there lurks a trace, or maybe more than a trace of the '60s belief in the truth underlying madness -- that old sophistry associated, perhaps unjustly, with the names of Norman Mailer or R.D. Laing that the insane are not delusional but merely in touch with different realities from the rest of us.
There is a half-hearted attempt to relate Curtis's fears to those that
we all have of natural and environmental perils, but anyone with any
experience of madness knows that there is a huge and unbridgeable chasm
between the fears of mental health and those of mental illness. The
movie is much better when it focuses on what almost emerges as the
central matter of trust between husband and wife, but even this loses
much of its impact in the face of the author's ill-considered agnosticism about what's real and what isn't. He only succeeds in reminding us that the movies, nowadays, are what isn't.
I
share this critic’s distaste for “the '60s belief in the truth
underlying madness”; but contend that, in this film, no such illusion or
agnosticism exists; and that madness, so far from romanticized, is seen as a grim and gruesome thing. As
a thinker, I believe, Nichols is aware that birds don’t act like that
outside of Hitchcock, and that the sky does not rain oobleck,
particularly the sort of oobleck that only this one spooky guy can see. But as a director, he must maintain a light and polysemous touch -- leicht schwebend, in Freud’s phrase. For
he refuses to shallow-out at the end and rise above the characters in
whom he has invested all, gazing down at them from some smug cloud-shelf
and snickering, “See? They’re bonkers!” Instead,
he shows us the hellmouth, leading through the downswirl into the merging
unconscious of these three intimately interlinked souls.
So, what to make of that ending? The chilling and perplexing moment comes when the wife looks down and sees the oily drops on her hand. Now, her husband has not told her the details of his fantasies. But she does not now just suddenly start worrying about global warming, or peak oil, or something: she has his visions in detail. So, these self-same drops do signify an extra-individual reality of some sort. But it is not a meteorological reality, shared by any competent observer on the planet. It smacks rather of archetypes and the collective unconscious: and thus, is more Jung than Freud.
(The distinction may, however, be one more of style than of substance: cf. Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959) p. 200: “Jung, Freud warned, solved nothing by introducing the idea of the collective unconscious. ‘The content of the unconscious is collective anyhow.’”)
~
An afternote
about cinematic craft:
There is no
objective correlative to the protagonist’s visions, apart from ambiguous signs from
the enigmatic deaf daughter, and the dream-dog, until the very end, when the wife (seemingly) sees them too.
Otherwise the director scrupulously refrains from giving you any ratification.
At
the same time, for purposes of suspense (he is, after all, making a
movie, not writing up a case-file) he must not make it obvious that the
protagonist is hallucinating.
Thus, the latter hears a thunderclap from a cloudless sky, and asks his work-buddy if he heard it too;
but the buddy is operating loud machinery, and thus heard nothing.
When
he is beholding strange events in the sky, no neighbors come running
out of their houses to watch, but neither does the postman come blithely
down the sidewalk, whistling.
In
the same way, “The Sixth Sense” plays fair: after the surprise ending,
you replay the movie scene by scene in your mind, and notice, Ye-es,
that was somewhat strange but it didn’t strike me at the time; now all
is explained. Likewise “Calvin
and Hobbes” -- notice that, whenever adults are present, the towering
tiger Hobbes resumes his mute form as a small stuffed toy.
~
In the course of the past generation or so, the very idea of
“shelter”
has undergone a
significant and darkling shift.
In its origins, the word shelter
had a casual, even rustic flavor.
The earliest citations in the OED are as follows:
[1585] thatch sheds or shelters
[1590] a hat of straw like a swain/
shelter from the sun and rain
[1610 -- Shakespeare’s Tempest] alas, the storm is come again. The best
way is to creep under his gaberdine;
there is no other shelter hereabout
[1611 -- Cotgrave’s dictionary] a
cote, cottage, thatched shed, or shelter; a covert, shroud, shelter or shadie place.
Originally, the
ideal shelter or refuge consisted 0f a fortress on the high ground.
Such was true, not only for the militarily, but for the
psychologically besieged: witness
that of the troubled young Carl Jung, as described in Anthony Stevens, Jung:
A Very Short Introduction (1994), p. 7:
On a rock rising out of a lake sat a well-fortified castle with a tall
keep, a watchtower, surrounded by a small medieval city … The need to create a
citadel in which to hide … is characteristic of people with schizoid
disposition.
All that basically changed with the London blitz, when air-raid shelters became the iconic
symbols of dread. Here, you didn’t
take the high ground; you sought
refuge beneath the earth.
Still, these subterranean shelters were still at least communal.
Another sea-change occurred with the boom in personal fallout shelters during the early
‘sixties.
Prior to these, protection had been collective,
institutional: the city walls, or
asylum in a church. Only with the
craze for personal fallout shelters in your own back-yard did it become individual -- indeed,
anti-social. (Along with the
soup-cans, you stocked your shelter with a shotgun, so that you could shoot
your neighbors when they tried to break in.)
~
(Analogy between analyst, and analysand; in "Take Shelter")
As we see him out on his laborer’s job, he is not building
anything, -- let alone selling
anything, or pushing paper around -- but Drilling Down -- like a patient in analysis.
Compare, indeed, the analyst, as well as the analysand:
Freud’s greatness seldom
elevates. This was not his
purpose. He was a digger, not a
builder.
-- Philip Rieff, Freud: The Mind
of the Moralist (1959), p. 322
(Die Traumdeutung)
Dog is Sensitive to storm; bites Curtis, in what turns out to be a dream. A dream so plain, so pat, so patent, no
comment is necessary.
Tales like these
lead us to think of depth psychology. And yet, unlike
phobias or neuroses or hysterias,
it does not readily lend itself to analytic exfoliation.
The tare-taint here -- It runs in the family -- runs down
the bloodlines -- and there is little that talk-therapy can do. I have seen it myself -- God help us.
~
There is a depth to all this, that you do not intuit.
At
this very moment, my own mother (now deep into her nineties), has
issued a plea, that she might be allowed to die: the impetus being ... Global Warming.
[Clinical
note: The patient in question lives in a notably temperate town, in
an air-conditioned room in a well-run assisted-living center, not far
from the cooling breezes of a large park...]
~
[Update 24 Jan 2013]
A new movie, "The Impossible", is based entirely on the terror
of the elements, in this case a tsunami.
The special effects are said to be excellent; it otherwise "tells a rather banal story",
according to David Denby in this week's New Yorker.
* * *
~ Commercial break ~
Relief for
beleaguered Nook lovers!
We now return you to
your regularly scheduled essay.
* * *
[Update 25 Jan 2013]
You might think that extreme weather, being objectively dramatic, is no
subject for psychological investigation
if people are emotionally deeply affected. That such at
attitude is blinkered becomes clear if we contrast the differing national
attitudes to exceptional meteorological events. Thus, from today’s edition of the Swiss newspaper, the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, putting into perspective the current cold snap
there:
Es ist zwar derzeit recht kalt und
winterlich in der Schweiz. Doch so kalt, dass die grossen Seen zufrieren
würden, ist es bei weitem nicht. Vor genau 50 Jahren war das anders. Damals waren die
meteorologischen Voraussetzungen für die kumulierten 350 Minusgrade - also zum
Beispiel 35 Tage mit einer Durchschnittstemperatur von minus 10 Grad - gegeben,
die es braucht, damit ein Gewässer von der Tiefe des Zürichsees zufrieren kann.
Die Seegfrörni geriet zu einem
gesellschaftlichen Grossereignis. Es
begann ein langes, fröhliches Volksfest.
--
http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/zuerich/zuercher-seegfroerni-1963/seegfroerni-1.17957482?extcid=Newsletter_25012013_Top-News_am_Morgen
This is a common enough attitude among those who
deliberately moved to live in a cold climate: They almost revel in it. The real anxiety and kvetching occurs rather among
those who fled to Florida and cannot understand why everything does not just
absolutely go their way.
*
Falls Sie im
Doktor-Justiz-Sammelsurium
weiterblättern
möchten,
Bitte hier
klicken:
*
[Update] The dreary post-apocalyptic movie "The Road" has some of the atmosphere of "Take Shelter", but none of the depth or interpersonal interest.
[Update 28 March 2014] And now this new movie, about the archetypal
meteorological apocalypse:
Russell
Crowe in ‘Noah’
[Update 10 May 2014]
Adventures in fluid
dynamics
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posttv/national/timelape-shows-wyoming-supercell-thunderstorm/2014/05/19/517a2258-df90-11e3-9442-54189bf1a809_video.html?tid=hp_mm
You do *not* want to be located near a singularity of one of
these suckers.
