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William Fried's book offers a valuable psychoanalytic perspective on thirteen films, grouped in the categories of Secrets; Time and Death; Love and Lust; and Human Identity. He underlines his analytic approach by treating films as though they were sessions, and making connections between films and dreams (“the methods to interpret any tend to be relevant to all” [p. xxiii]). He admits his bias is to write about films he likes, and “to conceive the task of criticism as the enhancement of understanding, appreciation, and pleasure” (p. 119), rather than fault-finding. He explains that he originally wrote his essays, over a span of twenty years, as presentations at conferences where the films in question were first shown to the audience, so the subsequent discussion benefited from that collectively shared experience. He adds three brief but wide-ranging appendices, written for this book.
Fried may be influenced by his previous profession as a teacher of literature when he cautions against treating the film's characters as though they are real people with an unconscious; or treating the film's narrative as saying something about its screenwriter or director. I suspect he suffers from the faddish but flawed (and anti-psychoanalytic) literary theory that would promote this skewed “death of the author” view as dogma we all must follow (fortunately, Freud did not, in his brilliant works in applied analysis). Researching films usually uncovers meaningful links with the lives and conflicts of the screenwriter or director, or of the writer whose novel inspired the film. One of the most powerful applications of our psychoanalytic understanding is in elucidating such links. Fried ignores this dimension of the films he discusses (except with regard to the biographical film Gods and Monsters).
By contrast, Fried's exploration of films is greatly enriched by the close reading approach to literature, which parallels close listening in psychoanalysis. Fried plausibly observes that close