July 1996
The Nautre of Film and Reality
by Mark Levy, M.D.
Film as an art form is unmatchable. The cinema, at its best, is poetry expressed in a visual, kinetic medium. The nature of film is unique in that it has the ability to condense events from real time into just a few hours in a believable way, allowing the audience to gain a perspective and understanding of aspects of reality that are not normally evident. In addition to helping us learn about others - and ourselves - film offers us a means of escape, a way to leave the stresses of modem life and experience the visceral thrill of an action blockbuster, where men can see themselves as heroes and where women can idealize a powerful protector.
Cinema is both a passive and an active process. Paraphrasing the great director Bernardo Bertolucci, when people watch a film, they come together in a darkened room and have a collective dream. Even though the stimulus is the same, we all bring our own perceptions, beliefs and history to the images that are presented on the screen - every one of us experiences the same film in a different way.
Akiro Kurasawa's Rashoman is still the best example of the way our personal history can color our experiences. In the film, four narratives reflect each character's perception of a traumatic event - the rape of a women. This film is so powerful that it is used to describe a psychological concept: the "Rashoman Effect" is a multiperspective take on subjective reality.
We often use film to better understand our own lives. Documentaries illuminate history, and films that delve deeply into character enable us to explore our inner selves with greater perspective. The two films described in this issue News Room aptly demonstrate how film can reveal so much about private interiors.
To interview Dr. Levy about the nature of film and reality, please call Media Consultant, Mary Tressel at 1-800-260-2663.
The Appeal of Blue Velvet: Perverse and Erotic Excitement
in a Love Story
by Stephen Purcell, M.D.
Calling Blue Velvet a love story might on first glance be considered rather strange; after all, Blue Velvet is the story of some very perverse relationships.
Once, when asked about the association of love and violence in his work, Tennessee Williams responded, "It's the other side of the coin. The dark side of the moon if you want to call it that. But the dark side of the moon is in the sky." In some ways it's safe to be told that the dark side of lovers is as far away as the moon in the sky and quite another to be told it's as close as our own hearts and minds. Director David Lynch shows us this truth about ourselves in a way that is undeniable and inescapable in his creation of a modern classic, a film that enables us to see beyond stereotypes and into fundamental truths.
Lynch's love story is a complicated mixture of perverse and erotic elements of desire, highlighting the excitement, horror and sadomasochism of unbounded, unlawful, undifferentiated eroticism as it exists in the unconscious minds of lovers and in the conscious minds of perverts. But the film also makes clear the banality, sterility, incompleteness and superficiality of conventional love confined by morality and compulsive idealization as it exists in the socially sanctioned, conscious experience of many people.
The "two sides of the coin" are dramatized by the parallel stories of two of Lumberton's finest young people - Jeffrey and Sandy - and two of the Deep River Apartments' most pitiful and frightening residents - Frank and Dorothy. The two separate stories intersect, intertwine and become a single story in an allegorical depiction of the relationship between perverse and conventional love as well as unconscious and conscious experience.
The film Blue Velvet can be cited to demonstrate a psychoanalytic perspective on perversion. The compelling attraction of Jeffrey to Frank's underworld and his sadomasochistic erotic relationship with Dorothy suggest that perverse aspects of eroticism are present in everyone, just beneath the veneer of our social personas or, perhaps, our conscious minds. The fact that these elements are present in everyone partially explains both the distaste and also the appeal of the to different viewers.
In Blue Velvet, Lynch portrays Jeffrey and Sandy falling in conventional love while their alter-egos Frank and Dorothy are linked in a regressed and primitive sadomasochistic horror show. But viewed allegorically as one love affair upon which Lynch focuses his special genius to look beyond appearances - deep into well-manicured lawns and behind blue velvet curtains - the story depicts essential truths about erotic love.
To interview Dr. Purcell about a psychoanalytical perspective on any film, present or past, please call Mary Tressel at 1-800-260-2663.
Piano Lessons
by Woodrow Donovan, M.D.
A number of interpretations can be given to the award-winning film, The Piano. Focusing upon the terrible punishment inflicted upon Ada, the heroine of the film, one might view it as a cautionary tale, maintaining and preserving the dominant patriarchal values of our society. Ada may be seen as an eccentric woman who, in choosing not to speak, refuses the usual expectations of society. Instead she insists on a voice expressed through her pain.
To Holly Hunter, the Oscar-winning actress who portrays Ada, The Piano is a story of personal discovery. She sees it as "...the story of one woman's discovery of love and eroticism, what she has to sacrifice to become part of the world. She unabashedly follows her needs...women of that time often could not recognize that they had any separate needs from what their families and their men had of them." From this perspective, Ada represents a modern feminine hero, courageously pursuing her needs and unwilling to compliantly adapt to her assigned submissive help-mate position.
From another vantage point, The Piano is a tale in the gothic romance tradition, replete with a frail heroine, exotic locale and men both sinister and noble. Yet this movie reinterprets its sources by addressing a host of contemporary issues: the domination of one culture by another (the clash between European colonialism and the indigenous Maori), the domination of one sex by another (the traditional domination of women by men), the increasing hostility and incomprehension between the sexes, as well as the extent to which childhood heritage determines one's ultimate destiny.
Jane Campion, the film's director, said she was interested in portraying sexual experience from a unique view - that of the woman. For Campion, the "outrageous morality" of the film is depicted in Ada's shift of erotic focus from her lover, Baines, to her husband, Stewart, because "Ada actually uses her husband Stewart as a sexual object. It is somewhat shocking to see a woman actually doing it, especially a Victorian woman ...to see a man so vulnerable. It becomes a relationship of power, the power of those that care and those that don't care."
This film demonstrates cinema's capacity to render deep psychological themes on the screen. Cainpion's work immerses its audience in the realm of the masochistic aesthetic. This aesthetic depicts fantasies of mutual enthrallment, dominance and submission in relations (especially erotic relations and a kind of polymorphous sensuality that blurs the boundaries of sexual differences.) Themes of mutual enthrallment, ecstatic merging and both reunion and rebirth in death dominate the portrayal of Ada's subjective state.
In the film, the piano embodies both mother and lover, comforting and nurturing, yet ultimately seducing the heroine. Ada refuses to be separated from the piano, reunites with it on the beach, caresses its keys, seeking its reassurance and comfort. The smooth lacquered wood, the melodious music seem to transform Ada, to revivify her, to provide delight as well as reassurance. Throughout the film, she languorously strokes the instrument in a highly sensual manner, creating pangs of jealousy in her lover when he desperately desires her love, and, later, attacks of vengeful rage from her spurned husband. The intensity of Ada's engagement with the piano threatens to preclude relationships with others.
In the end Ada briefly succumbs one more time to the terrible attraction of symbiotic merger, throwing herself into the sea with her jettisoned piano. The scene symbolizes a reunion in the rebirth in death with her unknown mother, represented by a transitional object, the piano. At the last moment she struggles to the surface, gasping life's air. "What a surprise. My will has chosen life," her six-year-old voice exclaims. She chooses to be with a man who can bring her to life - the promise of which was symbolized by the seahorse on the beach at their first true meeting, for the male seahorse gestates and gives birth to its offspring.
To interview Dr. Donovan about a psychoanalytical perspective on any film present or past, please call Mary Tressel at 1-800-260-2663.