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Night Moves: 1975
Director: Arthur Penn
Scriptwriter: Alan Sharp
Video distributor: Warner Home Video
‘So it's really just a series of concentric circles. The outer reality just goes out and out in those circles; the inner reality, and the inner detective story, is there to be examined—if he would examine it.’ Arthur Penn (in Gallagher, 1975, p. 88).
Having been interested in the detective's search as a metaphor for the psychoanalyst's quest, I found myself drawn to Night Moves ever since I first saw it. I offer the following interpretive viewing with the assumption that it represents neither an objective deciphering of the film's ‘true’ meaning, nor solely a projection of my inner world, but rather a new significance that has emerged in the transitional space opened up by my intense personal and transferential encounter with Night Moves (Berman, 1997, 1998).
While my earlier thinking focused on the way I could interpret the film, I recently became more cognisant of interpretation as one of the themes in the film itself (as often in drama; Simon, 1985), and of the film in toto as an attempted interpretation (‘The mystery is inward, and perhaps the solution is inward’; Penn, in Gallagher, 1975, p. 87). Contemporary art has absorbed (sometimes ambivalently) psychoanalytic interpretation, both as a topic and as a tool.
Ellen: ‘Who is winning?’
Harry: ‘Nobody. One side is losing slower than the other.’
The film's plot interweaves and juxtaposes two equally important stories: detective Harry Mosby's attempt to decipher the disappearance, and later the death, of an adolescent girl, Delly Grastner; and his struggle to save his disintegrating marriage to Ellen. At the background of both stories stands a common emotional theme: failed parenthood, and its sequela—the helpless yearning, despair and rage of the abandoned child.