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The Three Faces of Eve ((1957) starred Joanne Woodward playing a woman suffering from multiple personality disorder. In David and Lisa (1962) Keir Dullea played the part of an institutionalized teenager. In Snake Pit (1948)Olivia De Havilland famously portrayed another patient suffering back in the days when mental institutions and penal colonies were indistinguishable. David Cronenberg goes back to Cosmo Topper (Leo G. Carroll) in portraying the founder of psychoanalysis in A Dangerous Method. Carroll as you may remember played the venal Dr. Murchison in Spellbound, but people associate him more with the 50’s television series, in which he really was a sweet old fellow, rather than the l945 Hitchcock movie. Actually the character of Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Freud (Viggo Mortensen) both seem to owe a debt to Leo G. Carroll with the once swashbuckling but eventually doddering Jung (Topper) having to deal with a manipulative psychopathic Freud (Murchison) who gets the upper hand in discussions by treating his one-time follower and in fact anyone who disagrees with him as a patient. Keira Knightley as Sabina Spielrein, the patient, who is treated by Jung both psychiatrically and sybaritically (as in treated to a good time which means giving her thrashing she likes) falls off the charts in her depiction of what we can suppose to be hysteria. Hysteria, an affliction that Freud recorded in many of his famous cases (Anna O is one of the most famous) is reduced by Cronenberg’s to a rendering of something that might have afflicted one of the characters who drank too much and was about to vomit in say Animal House. It’s really a triumph of filmmaking when you can take a significant piece of the past and make it look like the Pleistocene era. But A Dangerous Method is not just a period piece, its success comes from taking major themes and discussions like that of libido, the death instinct and the ego and reducing them to the level of comic book balloons. Rather than hiring a whole cast of expensive actors, Cronenberg would have done better to deal with a seminal moment in psychoanalytic history by creating an animation with perhaps Batman as the dashing Aryan, Jung and say The Joker as Freud.
The devil lies in the details, but also in two long sequences in Steve McQueen’s Shame. The details are the facts of the film’s central character’s existence. Brandon (Michael Fassbender) lives in nameless high rise, one of those glass boxes that populate the tonier parts of Manhattan. It could be Chelsea or Noho or Soho; in this case the address is 9 West 31St. Brandon gets off at the 28th Street stop of the R. He also listens to vinyl, has a volume of collected excerpts from Henry James on his otherwise spare bookshelves and comes home to find his sister Sissy (Carey Mulligan) naked in the shower. Brandon works in a modern office and has problems with his computer which is infected with all kinds of porn. He also likes fleeting encounters, has problems with relationships and has to push his sister out of bed, though she doesn’t exhibit any conscious desire to consummate their relationship. The two long sequences take place on a train where he exchanges meaningful glances with a young woman and in a bar where the camera focuses on Sissy singing “New York, New York”. Back in l969 Rip Torn starred in a film called Coming Apart that was remarkably similar to Shame, taking place in a l969 version of the high rise apartment Brandon occupies (in the later case the locale was Kips Bay) which was also the site of compulsive and often hostile couplings. Fassbender is reminiscent of the young Rip Torn in the seductiveness of his sullenness and violence. Shame has been trumpeted as a film about compulsive sex, but it's really about solitude. It’s a 21st century version of Strindberg in which relationships are absent and violence is simply unleashed on the self. Brandon steps into his existence like an alien, a creature from outer space landing on earth or an earthling landing on a strange planet. There's a temptation to look at the source of Brandon’s problem as incest or sex sites, but these are really just symptoms. Ironically though the film is full of sex and has an NC-17 rating, you would be better off employing an existentialist than a Freudian in looking for answers to what makes this Sammy run. Drive is unleashed to quench uncomfortable affects and yet the character seems to be suffering from a sense of what Heidegger defined as Unheimlichkeit The word literally means not-being-at-home, what common folk call alienation. Freud actually used Unheimlichkeit to refer to a sense of the uncanny which he associated with anxiety, but it’s an anxiety at being that Shame portrays rather than the kind of anxiety that has its root in some permutation of the Oedipus Complex.
