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In Critical Flicker Fusion, William Fried applies his considerable psychoanalytic skills to a deeper understanding of films. The book includes thirteen essays, twelve on films and one on two episodes of the popular TV series The Sopranos. He explains in his brief introduction that these were written as presentations to an audience that had just viewed the film, opening the path to a deeper discussion. Now, he opens it to a wider audience of readers.
Fried makes it clear that in approaching these films, he is applying the same skills that he uses in his psychoanalytic work approaching “dreams and other clinical materials.” Each essay goes into detail concerning the elements of the film and the motivations and internal conflicts of its characters.
Fried also points out that he is using “the discipline known among literary critics as close reading.” In fact, Fried was a professor of literature before becoming a psychologist and psychoanalyst, and clearly sees a continuity from one to the other that gives this book an added perspective that is not present in many other psychoanalytic studies of film. His interpretations, if I may call them that, are not merely described in analytic terms, but in literary terms bringing in frequent associations to lines from Shakespeare, Dante, Coleridge, and others. These are not simply added on. They come across as having an organic coherence, the natural associations of a man who has lived his life in both the world of psychoanalytic understanding and the world of literature.
In the first essay in the book, on the film Notes on a Scandal, Fried examines the significance of one character's personal diary—her private recordings—and quickly compares them with the writings of Dostoyevsky's underground man in Notes from the Underground, then references Dante on the subject of revelations and secrets, comparing Barbara, the character, with her secret diary with a character in The Inferno who can tell Dante his secrets because he believes th