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“We become what we agree to suffer” (Wilfred Bion in Grotstein, 2018).
Much like poetry, the art of cinema can distil some of the universal truths of our psychic life in two short hours, greatly adding to our psychoanalytic understanding of the unconscious. In our eyes, the film Incendies, directed by Denis Villeneuve (2010), is one that does so in a particularly interesting manner, as it embodies a fundamental psychoanalytic construct — the Oedipus complex — while situating it in a real, present-day, sociopolitical setting.
The film depicts the journey of two twins, Jeanne and Simon Marwan, to an unnamed Middle Eastern country torn by a civil war between Christian and Muslim fanatics. The twins set out after their mother's will leaves them a pair of envelopes: one addressed to the father they thought was dead, the other to a brother they did not know existed. This enigmatic inheritance sheds light upon their mother's unexplained silence during the final weeks of her life. The twins gradually piece together the story of the woman who gave them life, discovering the tragic fate and the extraordinary courage of this exceptional individual.
Throughout the film, a deeply moving story is fleshed out, portraying the extremism and violence of today's world as well as the uncanny power of the will to survive. As we see it, the film offers its own version of the Oedipal myth,1 and deeply resonates the intricate quest for knowledge and truth, alternately driven by love or hate, or in Bion's words, by the life or death instincts: ‘In the personality where life instincts predominate, pride becomes self-respect, where death instincts predominate, pride becomes arrogance’ (1958: 144). This interpretation of the Oedipal myth emphasises various themes which converge around the relation to truth: the quest for truth versus the denial of truth, blindness, and enigmatic messages; arrogance as a fundamental impediment to the discovery of truth; and the search for truth in the