MOVIES | David Cronenberg's "A Dangerous Method": Proseminar as filmed entertainment
Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender in A Dangerous Method
Earlier this year I faced off in an online debate about whether or not the discipline of cultural studies is necessary. I said no—arguing that the ideas covered in that discipline would be more constructively addressed in more scientifically rigorous fields—but my coblogger Becky Lang said yes. "I wanted to study psychoanalysis and read Freud and Jung, but many psychology teachers laugh at the mention of their names. [...] Someone has to teach kids that Freud did more than smoke cigars and make dirty jokes."
That someone turns out to be director David Cronenberg, whose new movie A Dangerous Method translates John Kerr's 1993 nonfiction book A Most Dangerous Method into screen entertainment via screenwriter Christopher Hampton, adapting his 2002 stage play The Talking Cure.
The film traces the relationship between Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender). The trick Hampton tries to pull off is to link the pair's academic debate to their personal relationship. Freud remains steadfast in his materialism and his focus on sex as the key driver of the human psyche, while Jung wants to broaden the discussion to include supernatural phenomena and other non-sexual motives. Jung's view that there are higher—or at least other—motives than sex is put to the test when he finds himself being tempted into an affair with his patient Sabin Spielrein (Keira Knightley, chewing heartily on a Russian accent).
Turning the birth of psychoanalysis into a movie would seem to make perfect sense: while Freud's ideas about human motivation have been eclipsed as psychologists have opened the black box of the brain with increasingly sophisticated (and, indeed, less dangerous) methods, Freudian thought still provides the master blueprint for characters' motivations in most movies, plays, and stories. Guilt, lust, symbolism, dreams: we attribute more power to these things than they actually have in our lives, which is why it makes sense when characters behave as though they're textbook studies from Freud's notebook. Show me any but the most avant-garde movie, and I'll show you the tell-me-about-your-mother moment.
Cronenberg starts strong, with Knightley being ushered kicking and screaming into the custody of Fassbender, who's a partisan of Freud's then-revolutionary idea that many psychological disorders can be effectively treated by a hands-off "talking cure." As Knightley settles down, though, so does the film, which ultimately becomes little more than an extended pissing match between the two Significant Analysts in her life.
Having earned a Master's in psychology via classes like "A Radical Geography of the Psyche," I enjoyed the stroll (with much literal strolling) through intellectual history, but fundamentally, A Dangerous Method falters because it doesn't seem to know what it really thinks about these peculiar characters and their once radical, now outdated ideas about human nature.
Freud is accurately depicted as a genius whose rhetorical skill worked against his own legacy when he talked himself and others into accepting dubious ideas about the workings of the mind, while the forward-thinking Jung points the way past Freud intellectually even while his cock seems to be vindicating his mentor's resolute focus on the idea that a cigar is rarely just a cigar. What are we to believe? The film doesn't tell us, which is perhaps meant as an acknowledgment of psychological subtlety but ends up feeling more like a cop-out.
For a film full of turgid dialogue and heaving bosoms (well, one modest bosom that heaves repeatedly), A Dangerous Method is strangely static when it comes to character development. When all is said and done, Freud is repentent, Jung is still torn between his ego and his libido, and Spielrein—having been efficiently and completely cured, by Jung's suggestion that it's okay to like it a little rough, of the long-term psychological effects of incestual molestation—gets on with her own successful career in psychoanalysis.
That doesn't make for a very good story—but then, this isn't a work of Freud-flavored fiction. This is real life.
Uptown Theatre
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Comments
Dangerous Method
I often Google a movie before risking the $9.50 to see them. Dangerous Method was panned by the several reviewers who complained that it lacked the usual “Mythical Journey of Calling (a loss), Quest (the search for righting a wrong with its sub crisis and major crisis), Illumination or happy or at least meaningful ending) and Integration ( or character growth of the protagonists), Others complained that there was too little detail of Freud’s and Jung’s backgrounds that would explain their eventual parting of the ways.. All this I have to agree with,. The movie is not for the psychologically uninformed who do not want to learn more about psychology but are looking for an exciting story.
However, I found it it an amazing film, historically well researched and accurate. It expounded Freudian theory. and Jung’s extensions of it accurately while fleshing out what they might have said to one another with wonderfully creative scriptwriting imagination, There ware observations about life that are meanlngful to us 120 years later. For Insance. Jung says to Freud,.
“What difference does it make that all your Vienese disciples are Jewish? One’s religion isn’t of consequence.”
Freud replies that Jung’s is a typically Protestant remark, suggesting that Christians in their kindly loving ways have no understanding of what it means to be Jewish and of the pride Jews have in their past history and in their unique direct relationship witht God not mediatiated yet by a Saviour and also of the contempt Jews endure in anti-Semitism.
Freud on the other hand refuses to share his own dreams with Jung explaining that doing so would diminish his authority in their relationship. Jung saw that as a pompous put down. (In psychoanalyst Ernest Jones two volume biography of Freud, Jones points out that Freud always attributed his own dreams to be those of his patients.)
Freud was right to maintain his authority as a “Teacher” with his students and to protect his unpopular theories by not exposing the typical irrationality and lacking of logic of his dreams . Additionally Freud is portrayed with typical German traits of orderliness in science and life activities generally without expression of emotions even within his marital relationship.
The movie starts at Burgholzli, the large Swiss insane asylum famous for research and innovation at the time (and now). Treatments are cold baths, restraints. and lectures on correct behaviors but innovations are occupational therapyand the word association test carefully measured for response time and physiological responses. Art therapy and figure drawings were also noted, Jung experiments with the “talking treatment" he assumes is Freud’s method without yet having details of it or having even met Freud, He asks a lot of questions ( though relevant ones) for a modern psychoanalyst. I thought him amazingly respectful of his female patient even though the actress was outstanding in portraying the bizarre behaviour and emotions of hysteria and anxiety typical of the era and before tranquilizers. Her very gradual maturation during the course of the movie satisfies the Integration of character maturity part of the Mythical Journey one epexts in all novels, films, fables etc.
But the major character study is of Jung who learns as much from his patients as he teaches. What he learns is by his trial and error of many possible understandings and resolutions of conflict and ambivalence that eventually precipitates his psychosis. One assumes that his living in the illogical dream world of psychosis he apparently formulated his dream theories and in his recovery put those dream theories into use as the major authority and teacher of modern dream interpretation.
His adding the Eastern Bhudist, Confucius and primitive society spirituality to dreams led him beyond Freud in not just finding the relief from neurosis that Freud aimed at but in encouraging patients to grow spiritually beyond what they would have achieved as Freud’s patients and to aspire find a feeling of self and of oneness with the universe.
His problem along the way was that he did avoid solving internal conflict of opposite impulses with the logic of the 19th Century that you settle the ambivalence in behaving either one way or another. Hence his affairs with patients and sadistic behavior with them and his troubled marriage.
What neither he nor Freud understood was that the conflicts were only superficial manifestations (sexual/repressive, masochistic/ sadistic, grandiosity/shame) and symbolic of one’s efforts to become who we really are as capable of validating and empathizing with our true selves so that we can also validate and empathize with others. And thereby share those qualities with significant others, achieving intimacy without losing ourselves in doing so.
Mark Shulkin
in and out in 20 minutes
my husband and i went to see this movie and we left after only 20 minutes after i was subject to watching the creepiest previews of time. the movie was absolutly terrible, kiera knightlys acting along with bizzare jaw movements made it even more unbearable. We are shocked and disgusted with this film. it was boring as excrement, we were the youngest people in the theatre. i highly doubt that the other people in the theatre (70+) were psycologically informed. i was actually excited about seeing this movie at first, since i had learnt about freud in school....never again.
I din't like the movie at
I din't like the movie at first, but I stayed in the theatre, and end up liking it. I think Keira Knightley did an amazing job. It was a very nice movie, since I learned about Freud an Jung at school a few months ago. :) And anyways, you can't judge a movie by the first 20 minutes.
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