Kay Pollak, the successful Swedish director, returned to filmmaking after an absence of 20 years in 2002 when he directed As It Is in Heaven. In the interim he published a little book of spiritual wisdom titled No Chance Encounter. He writes, “Everyone I meet is my teacher…in every encounter with another person I have something to learn…just imagine if everyone I meet is sent for a purpose…” Could Pollak's vision be right in a very deep sense also? Are there any chance encounters? Is life on earth…As It Is in Heaven?
Daniel Dareus, a play on words from the Bible story, (played by Michael Nyqvist) is transformed and transfigured on his journey from world-class conductor to a disguised boy/man in a dangerous return to the dark and cold place of his childhood in northern Sweden. His heart attack triggers past heartbreaks. Daniel's doctor says, “Your heart is completely worn out.”
We see that Daniel was beaten by the boys of his town while practicing his violin in an open wheat field. Immediately after, he says, “I want to marry you, Mommy,” as the face and voice of his mother comfort him and she promises to take him away to another school. When she comes to hear him play later as a young teen, she is cruelly struck down by a car that he sees impassively from a tower window above the street. In this film, he becomes a generative “Man of Achievement” (Wilfred Bion) through his love for Lena (played by Frida Hallgren), a local, young, unsophisticated and vivacious beauty in the frozen northern Swedish town. We watch as his and the town's frozen hearts melt and meld together. How does this happen? This film tells us much about trauma and healing.
The prolonged and repeated trauma of being sadistically beaten, rejected, humiliated and terrorized many times by the boys, joins the cruelty of fate that strikes down Daniel's mother (and where is the father whom we never see?). Daniel's development freezes on the spot with lightning speed. The boy escapes into music.
Pierre Janet described trauma in the mind as a large zone of inflammation, walled off by surrounding layers of scar tissue, around which an outer rind might mature, rerouting all connections around the frozen center into a rigid or chaotic personality. This cuts off important internal and external experiences that a child would need to develop into a full loving adult. A career in music is a wonderful displacement and compromise, but not a substitute for the buried emotions and energies inside Daniel's real self. His potential for a full life is encased behind a castle of repression and a garrison of defensive guards.
Allan Gold, M.D., practices psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in Baltimore. He has been a discussant for many years of films in the Baltimore Washington Institute's “Close-Ups: Psychoanalysts Look at Film” series.
Bruce H. Sklarew, M.D., an associate editor and co-founder of the award-winning Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, organizes the film programs at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association and has co-edited two books on psychoanalysis and film.
After his heart attack, Daniel returns to the town, for reasons he was not conscious of, to a frozen landscape on a snow buried road. The unconscious seeks wholeness. His life had reached a pinnacle, yet he feels numb. His return to the frozen town of his youth, in the dark of winter, symbolizes the journey that a traumatized person in therapy makes into the dark areas of the mind.
Daniel encounters Connie, now a man, who was the abusive persecutor of his childhood, and Stig, the repressed, tyrannical churchman of the town, who mirror the cruelty of fate, Daniel's own murderous rage, his identification with the aggressors, external persecutors who embody the internal persecutors that cut him off from human warmth. He is easily overwhelmed by anxiety, unable to face the intense anger and longings inside or to connect emotionally with people outside. The film articulates a “myth of the hero,” a journey back to connection with Daniel's deeper self and others.
Lena, her face illuminated in the warm light of the town convenience store, first appears as the angel of Christmas. Her smiles and face recall Daniel's mother when she comforts Daniel on the night of his beating. Lena shyly and playfully awakens notes of a buried chord in Daniel that vibrates with her sexuality and tenderness. He cannot take his eyes off her beautiful smile, which begins the melting of his heart. Lena's tender and sexual feelings will combine to reawaken and harmonize Daniel's connections back to the mother of his childhood and forward in time to his becoming an adult sexual partner. Lena helps him recover from both the traumas of violent bullying and the violent loss of his mother by providing the mirroring Daniel needs for early reattachment, as we do with our patients. Daniel practices new skills and develops tolerance for emotions and anxiety. Lena smiles as he explores leadership and learns friendship with the choir, using his acquired skills and talent in music to create community in the choir and a community of interconnecting aggressive and loving emotions within.
Daniel regulates his aggression with love as he stands up for the abused and repressed wives of Connie and Stig, both of whom try to murder him in the film for threatening their tyrannical control of their wives. Rescued by the town, he reveals his identity and his childhood trauma as the town rallies around him. He achieves mature sexuality and love culminating in what is likely his first sexual experience, followed by tender sleep, just a few hours before he will die a complete and Authentic Man.
The film reflects multiple Oedipal triangles. However, as Freud also taught, our patients' lives take place in larger contexts of meaning, history, human culture, art and literature, and myth. The film in story and imagery portrays Daniel as Christ-like and as Daniel in the lion's den in the Old Testament. Even more central, as in the myth of the hero elaborated by Jung and Joseph Campbell, a broken Daniel leaves the familiar, undergoes a series of trials and perils, and brings wisdom, skill and healing back to his home. Daniel is like Odysseus in his journey back to Penelope or Percival in search of the Holy Grail.
The film also resonates with more recent understandings in psychoanalysis from infant research and neuroscience. Like Lars, in the American/Canadian film Lars and the Real Girl, Daniel is hypervigilant and hypersensitive (emotionally and tactilely). His schizoid and avoidant personality struggles against a hyperaroused nervous system resulting in his avoidant and, at times, odd behavior. Daniel learns through Lena and his encounters at multiple levels with the town to find centers of calm in his personality, his music and his nervous system and to allow increasing amounts of contact.
Terror of contact is desensitized with progressively safe contact experiences.
As with our patients, frozen developmental capacities can then unfold, activating calming influences of the parasympathetic nervous system, balancing the fight/flight/freeze feelings of the sympathetic nervous system. This results in a deconditioning of the terror of these sensations while curiosity, interest and a sense of mastery rise, just as our patients in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy talk about and renegotiate the stories of their lives.
Anxiety changes from a dreaded harbinger of overwhelmedness to a signal for more attention to feelings of excitement as body and mind encounter new opportunities for challenge or fulfillment. Daniel in his exuberance in learning about love, riding a bicycle, the joy of childlike play in his work with the choir, emerging sexual and tender love for Lena, spontaneously explores new capacities for sensation and emotional activation in relationships. He learns to manage conflict and sexuality with others through discussion and negotiation.
The film, like our dreams, like music, resonates with our biologically more primitive affect systems. Our nervous systems, like superbly crafted violins whose woods resound with the harmonics of the strings, have evolved to respond cognitively and emotionally to sound, story, facial expressions, color, patterns and word connotations consciously and unconsciously. Pollak is a sophisticated director who uses these elements to evoke deeper emotional experiences in the viewer. For example, the landscape itself mirrors the theme of transformation. As the snow melts, the river flows, the sun shines longer; as the iceberg melts inside Daniel's mind and heart, we melt with sympathetic sorrow and joy.
Rivers flow. We actually can feel in our bodies the warmth in Lena's smile, excitement in her sexuality, liveliness in her childlike expressions of anger and longing. We belly laugh at the antics in the little choir room where the singers romp, play and pile on each other, dancing, drinking and feasting as in an overtly sexualized Dionysian bacchanal. We constrict with terror and hold our breath, as Daniel is facing Connie in the icy river once again having his chest beaten, or Stig with a shotgun plans to kill both Daniel and himself. In the film, the skillful deliberate focus on facial close-ups and musical accompaniments draws us as viewers into empathy and energetic activation patterns.
Bion suggests our minds, awake or asleep, are always working with linkages and analogues in sensation and symbolization, which he calls the alpha process that is the same as in dreaming. He further suggests that our waking lives, psychoanalyses, and dreams are all constructed by processes that bring the ultimate unknowable cosmos into the individual who is open and achieves mature inner development in a relationship with another human being. Daniel's lifelong goal of unlocking the music in the human heart is linked with his view that it already exists in heaven. Pollak in his emphasis on “no chance encounter” parallels the findings of the attachment researchers, neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, and infant researchers that there are, inside the core of us, systems, evolved over millennia of astronomical and biological evolution, that suggest we are more transpersonal and intersubjective beings than intrapsychic beings. As Pollak and other mystics would say, there are no chance encounters. We are here to learn to be human… to love each other… on earth as it is in heaven.