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A Dangerous Method (2011)
A Dangerous Method. Dir. David Cronenberg, 2011.
It seems that everyone else I know went to see Sherlock Holmes two weeks ago. I went with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
kuwdora and epershand and my roommate C (who read a lot of Freud in her political theory class this semester) to see A Dangerous Method instead. Short verdict: intelligent, sexy, excellent.
This is a very thought-provoking movie. I actually woke up the morning after I saw the movie thinking about it; I can't remember the last time that happened. The movie follows the intertwined relationship of Carl Gustav Jung (Michael Fassbender), Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), whose treatment by Jung using Freud's methods brings the two together. The movie traces the simultaneous progression of the relationships among them, as well as the course of Spielrein's journey from inarticulate psychological patient to practicing, influential psychoanalyst in her own right. The movie actually strongly implies that Freud's theory of the death drive versus the sex drive (thanatos and eros) was derived from Spielrein linking them together first.
The Freud-Jung relationship was famously intimate, famously complicated, and famously final in its ending, and the movie does an excellent job of bringing out the dynamic between these two brilliant, controlling men, though not unexpectedly they didn't really explore Jung's avowedly quasi-incestual, homosexual attraction to Freud (who never appears on screen without a cigar in his mouth, just as Jung clearly has an oral fixation, because he is almost always eating)--though the movie doesn't ignore it entirely, either.
The Jung/Spielrein relationship is the real heart of the film, though, since it's Spielrein and Jung who, after Spielrein enters university, start an illicit and rather kinky sexual relationship based on their avowed reactions to each other's brilliance, a deep affair that lasts until Spielrein finishes her dissertation and goes to Vienna to be analyzed by Freud, against Jung's begging her not to do so. Knightley is great in this movie, particularly in the beginning when she is almost totally inarticulate in the face of her inner demons--everyone in this movie has their own inner demons, and the movie really brings out the courage that it took to bring those demons out into the light. We don't think of it anymore, because the psychological paradigm has swept all before it, even if Freudian analysis is deservedly out of fashion (check out the scene where Freud unashamedly defends the partriarchal status quo and the role of his analysis in maintaining it), but what we see here is the beginning--and considering what the 20thC saw unleashed, it's not hard to understand the opposition to Freud and Jung et al., on some levels.
The movie is also quite good on the differences of class and religion that divided Freud and Jung and that contributed eventually to their break: Freud was of middling income and Jewish, while Jung was Protestant and very wealthy, thanks to marrying his aristocratic wife. Jung cannot understand Freud's insistence on the numbers and passion of psychoanalysis' enemies, just as Freud cannot tolerate Jung's insistence that not all psychological problems can be attributed to sexual issues--and given what the final info-notes reveal, it's hard not to think that Freud's right; it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. Jung was the only one of the three who lived out his natural life and died in peace, in 1961; Freud was hounded to London by the Nazis and died of cancer there in 1939, while the Jewish Spielrein and her two daughters were rounded up and shot in a synagogue in her hometown in Russia during the Nazi invasion in 1941. I actually could see where Freud was coming from in that aforementioned scene, and even sympathize with him a little, which given my feelings on Freudian analysis is quite an accomplishment.
The movie ends in 1916, with a pregnant Spielrein visiting Jung in Geneva at his wife's urging, trying to get him out of the funk he descended into after his break with Freud (in which period he wrote a lot of The Red Book) and telling him that she and her husband plan to return to Russia, as Jung confesses that he's taken a new mistress (Toni Wolff, for those playing along at home) but still loves Spielrein--he actually tells her that the child she's carrying should be his, and she agrees. Some people I know have said that the movie has things to say about being poly, but Jung and his relationships with the women in his life don't seem poly to me. He just seems like a coward--he literally tells Spielrein that he doesn't have the courage to leave his wife (and her money, one suspects), even though he and Spielrein clearly do love each other. Asepershand remarked, the first half of the movie really is rather like The Age of Innocence in that respect. It's striking how, even as the movie deservedly lionizes these people for their desire to know themselves and other people, to rationalize and exorcise the torments within our psyches that previously left people isolated and mute in the face of them, knowing themselves as well as they do by the end doesn't actually make any of them much happier in any but the most philosophical sense. And that too is a very modern dilemma.
So, even as the movie is very modern, and the movie is about how we as a civilization (if I can use that term) became modern in this crucial area, it also runs smack into the wall that runs across Euro-American civilization, which also were, in their terrible ways, nadirs of the modern (particularly World War II). It's unavoidable, and it doesn't have any higher meaning and it distorts everything, but all of this together is also indivisible. And that is our dilemma.
It seems that everyone else I know went to see Sherlock Holmes two weeks ago. I went with
kuwdora and epershand and my roommate C (who read a lot of Freud in her political theory class this semester) to see A Dangerous Method instead. Short verdict: intelligent, sexy, excellent. This is a very thought-provoking movie. I actually woke up the morning after I saw the movie thinking about it; I can't remember the last time that happened. The movie follows the intertwined relationship of Carl Gustav Jung (Michael Fassbender), Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), whose treatment by Jung using Freud's methods brings the two together. The movie traces the simultaneous progression of the relationships among them, as well as the course of Spielrein's journey from inarticulate psychological patient to practicing, influential psychoanalyst in her own right. The movie actually strongly implies that Freud's theory of the death drive versus the sex drive (thanatos and eros) was derived from Spielrein linking them together first.
The Freud-Jung relationship was famously intimate, famously complicated, and famously final in its ending, and the movie does an excellent job of bringing out the dynamic between these two brilliant, controlling men, though not unexpectedly they didn't really explore Jung's avowedly quasi-incestual, homosexual attraction to Freud (who never appears on screen without a cigar in his mouth, just as Jung clearly has an oral fixation, because he is almost always eating)--though the movie doesn't ignore it entirely, either.
The Jung/Spielrein relationship is the real heart of the film, though, since it's Spielrein and Jung who, after Spielrein enters university, start an illicit and rather kinky sexual relationship based on their avowed reactions to each other's brilliance, a deep affair that lasts until Spielrein finishes her dissertation and goes to Vienna to be analyzed by Freud, against Jung's begging her not to do so. Knightley is great in this movie, particularly in the beginning when she is almost totally inarticulate in the face of her inner demons--everyone in this movie has their own inner demons, and the movie really brings out the courage that it took to bring those demons out into the light. We don't think of it anymore, because the psychological paradigm has swept all before it, even if Freudian analysis is deservedly out of fashion (check out the scene where Freud unashamedly defends the partriarchal status quo and the role of his analysis in maintaining it), but what we see here is the beginning--and considering what the 20thC saw unleashed, it's not hard to understand the opposition to Freud and Jung et al., on some levels.
The movie is also quite good on the differences of class and religion that divided Freud and Jung and that contributed eventually to their break: Freud was of middling income and Jewish, while Jung was Protestant and very wealthy, thanks to marrying his aristocratic wife. Jung cannot understand Freud's insistence on the numbers and passion of psychoanalysis' enemies, just as Freud cannot tolerate Jung's insistence that not all psychological problems can be attributed to sexual issues--and given what the final info-notes reveal, it's hard not to think that Freud's right; it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. Jung was the only one of the three who lived out his natural life and died in peace, in 1961; Freud was hounded to London by the Nazis and died of cancer there in 1939, while the Jewish Spielrein and her two daughters were rounded up and shot in a synagogue in her hometown in Russia during the Nazi invasion in 1941. I actually could see where Freud was coming from in that aforementioned scene, and even sympathize with him a little, which given my feelings on Freudian analysis is quite an accomplishment.
The movie ends in 1916, with a pregnant Spielrein visiting Jung in Geneva at his wife's urging, trying to get him out of the funk he descended into after his break with Freud (in which period he wrote a lot of The Red Book) and telling him that she and her husband plan to return to Russia, as Jung confesses that he's taken a new mistress (Toni Wolff, for those playing along at home) but still loves Spielrein--he actually tells her that the child she's carrying should be his, and she agrees. Some people I know have said that the movie has things to say about being poly, but Jung and his relationships with the women in his life don't seem poly to me. He just seems like a coward--he literally tells Spielrein that he doesn't have the courage to leave his wife (and her money, one suspects), even though he and Spielrein clearly do love each other. As
epershand remarked, the first half of the movie really is rather like The Age of Innocence in that respect. It's striking how, even as the movie deservedly lionizes these people for their desire to know themselves and other people, to rationalize and exorcise the torments within our psyches that previously left people isolated and mute in the face of them, knowing themselves as well as they do by the end doesn't actually make any of them much happier in any but the most philosophical sense. And that too is a very modern dilemma. So, even as the movie is very modern, and the movie is about how we as a civilization (if I can use that term) became modern in this crucial area, it also runs smack into the wall that runs across Euro-American civilization, which also were, in their terrible ways, nadirs of the modern (particularly World War II). It's unavoidable, and it doesn't have any higher meaning and it distorts everything, but all of this together is also indivisible. And that is our dilemma.