Editor's note: This article is the second in a series stemming from a film discussion group led by Mary Brady and Diane Borden in San Francisco over the last six years. Articles by group members will consider films as works of art that illustrate psychoanalytic themes, dynamics, and concepts through cinematic technique, image, and narrative.
Some years ago, I was browsing in the Karnac bookstore in London near the Freud Museum when my eyes spotted a book with large letters on a shiny white cover: the title, Siblings, the author, Juliet Mitchell, a name I didn't recognize. Yet I was drawn to the topic, particularly after reading the recommending blurbs, and I purchased the book.
For whatever reason, I put the volume on a shelf and never took the time to read it. Earlier this year, I was having a conversation with a colleague who stated that Siblings was instrumental in the development of her career as a psychotherapist. That was enough to motivate me to pick up the text.
I recognized that the topic of siblings was under-theorized in psychoanalytic literature. I was further intrigued because Juliet Mitchell—an academic trained in literature and a practicing psychoanalyst—came from an interdisciplinary background. Her main idea involved the way the vertical Oedipal line intersects with horizontal relations between or among siblings in development. (That Oedipus is an only child is a provocative thought, but one beyond the scope of this article.)
As soon as my colleague Mary Brady and I agreed upon the topic of siblings for our continuing series on psychoanalysis in film, I developed a list of appropriate films: two films on sister-brother relationships, two presenting sisters, then four on brothers, two of which would be documentaries. The class for ten students followed our usual protocol: I sent a list of viewing notes before the discussion of the film the following week; Mary selected relevant psychoanalytic papers.
Gradually our students began to do research on such aspects of the films as directors, musical score, color, lighting, and acting, and they reflected and how the films affected them individually. In other words, we considered the films as an art form and a way of understanding human emotion, storytelling, and psychoanalytic practice. We soon functioned as a congenial, insightful, well-prepared group, with a high level of discourse, sharing ongoing perceptions and revelations.
In Steve McQueen's 2011 film Shame, the opening overhead shot shows a man lying in bed, eyes closed, corpse-like. The shot holds, thus establishing the character in a state of deadness. Brandon, the main character, suffers from a sexual addiction. He has a troubled, perverse relationship with his younger sister, Cissy, who is dependent on him and desperate for his attention. At one point Cissy says to Brandon, “We're not bad people, we just come from a bad place.” While viewers are not given the backstory, they can conjecture a history of trauma and abuse, with the sequelae of self-destructiveness and perverse relatedness.
McQueen is a master at linking expressive imagery and composition with psychological states of being. Because he seems to understand pacing and narrative rhythms, he is able to portray such psychoanalytic concepts as death drive, part object, sadism/masochism, primal scene, beta elements, repetition compulsion, defense mechanisms, and suicidality. Key sequences in the film powerfully illustrate these concepts. In one scene, for example, Brandon watches his sister sing in a cocktail lounge, his face registering both compassion and disgust with her limited vocal range. In a following sequence, Brandon, along with his boss and sister, returns to his apartment. When Cissy and his boss head to Brandon's bedroom, Brandon explodes in anguish, as if witnessing a primal scene, hands over his eyes, falling to the floor. In another scene, Cissy desperately tries to call her brother, but he doesn't answer. During this time Brandon experiences a frantic kind of Harrowing of Hell (the period between crucifixion and resurrection when Jesus was thought to battle the devil in medieval Christianity), getting beaten up in a bar and then submitting to gay sex in a bathhouse. When he finally calls Cissy back, he gets no answer; he
rushes home to discover that she has attempted suicide.
In contrast to Shame's sordid New York underworld of marginal sexualities, director André Téchiné locates his 1993 film My Favorite Season among the bourgeoisie in Toulouse in southern France. Antoine and Emilie are twins; he's a doctor, she's a lawyer in her husband's law firm. The siblings have frequent conversations about how different they are in character and personality. Often they seem irritated and angry at each other, yet an erotic tension draws them together, a frisson that Antoine consciously realizes but Emilie suppresses. At one point Antoine says, “We're two babies in the same belly.” This could be considered in terms of Juliet Mitchell's vertical-horizontal relationship, that is, the point of intersection where babies intersect with the mother's belly. The film's title sequence pictures the relationship with drawings of Siamese twins.
Téchiné eschews conventional cinematic markers that distinguish realistic perception from delusions, fantasy seductions, screen memories, regressions, and other defense mechanisms. Flashbacks, reveries, and memories are smoothly integrated into the narrative. In a significant sequence, for example, Emilie sits in a hospital dining room. When a young doctor sits down next to her, she is flustered and annoyed by his apparent sexual advances, so she moves outdoors. But the man follows and attempts to kiss her. Finally, she passionately succumbs. The viewer asks, is this a fantasy or an actual event? A possible interpretation comes to mind: the seductive doctor looks like her dark-haired brother. When we realize that he too is a doctor, we understand that Emilie's repressed sexuality is enlivened by the presence of a lover who could be both brother and doctor, unleashing the desire masked by the complexities of time and memory.
In another powerful sequence, the adult Emilie walks toward her father who is fishing and her mother who is beside him. Her mother asks Emilie, “Are you looking forward to having a little brother?” This scene does not recreate a typical flashback to an actual, historical time, where Emilie would be portrayed by a child actor, but rather constructs a temporality more dream- or reverie-like. Emilie always sensed that her mother preferred Antoine. The scene expresses envy, a sense that she was unwanted and outside the family orbit. But at the film's conclusion, after the mother's death, Téchiné composes an exquisite close-up shot of Emilie who moves her head in a 45-degree angle. The brother and sister smile together in one shot, as Emilie recognizes her long-suppressed deep love for her brother. She now embraces him.
Hilary and Jackie, a 1998 biopic about renowned cellist Jacqueline du Pre, who died of multiple sclerosis at the age of 42, tells the story of two gifted sisters. Parallel accounts unfold of their courtships, marriage ceremonies, and future careers. In long camera shots that bookend the film, we see the sisters as young children play on a beach, and they appear to share an unconscious fantasy of fusion. Yet as the film reveals, Jackie's cruelty toward her older sister, Hilary, says something otherwise about their attachment.
Interiors opens with panning shots inside an empty house in the Hamptons. The house was decorated by Eve, a professional designer. The title shots evoke a visual pun, considering the house's interiors as indicia of the psychic interiors of the family that lives there.
At one point, Jackie shows up at her sister's country house where she lives happily with her husband Christopher “Kiffer” Finzi. Inexplicably, Jackie's husband, the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim, is not with her. Shockingly, at least according to conventional moral standards, Jackie tells Hilary that she wants to sleep with her husband. Hilary complies, offers up Kiffer, and the family carries on as if nothing happened. A very painful home movie (a film within the film) contains scenes that illustrate Jackie assuming possession of Hilary's family.
Perverse behavior typifies Jackie's way of being in the world. She kicks and tries to destroy her cello, tells her sister that she is nothing special, mails her family her dirty laundry from Moscow and Madrid. Sororal dynamics teeter between rivalrous envy and emotional containment, with Jackie demanding and Hilary compliant. At one point Hilary answers why she takes care of Jackie when she has fallen ill: “I do it because I love her. She is my sister.”
The director, Anand Tucker, uses rapid camera movements to dominate the aesthetics of the film: track-pans, 360-degree pans, tilt shots, swirling motion, and slow motion. This camera rhetoric serves to characterize Jackie's histrionic, flamboyant, and idiosyncratic movements when she plays the cello. Once Jackie is diagnosed with MS, her energetic body declines, and we, along with the audience in the concert halls, witness her horrifying and profoundly sad deterioration toward death. And it is Hilary who takes care of her.
The characters in Woody Allen's Interiors constitute one of the most miserable group of people I have seen in a film. The movie focuses on two sisters, Renata and Joey, who share responsibility for their mother's care. Eve, the mother, is a cold, invasive, heartless woman, pretentious and narcissistic—a version of Andre Green's dead mother.
Not coincidently, she also suffers from clinical depression and suicidality. As a result, her daughters grow up suffering from their mother's toxicity. In a medium shot, Renata describes to her unseen psychoanalyst what appear to be dissociated states. Joey constantly complains about trying to find herself and denigrates her sister for thinking ill of her. Renata has a young daughter, seen only in a quick cut, which suggests that the daughter, too, has an absent mother. Joey wants no children. Fearing that she might be pregnant, she seeks an abortion. Renata's husband Frederick is an alcoholic who attempts to rape the youngest sister, Flynn.
Yet this dysfunctional family appears in one of the most exquisitely crafted and elegant of American films, with its superb set design, shot composition, and most especially, Gordon Willis's cinematography. Woody Allen's four-act tragedy pays homage to Chekhov's play Three Sisters and Ingmar Bergman's gothic film Cries and Whispers.
Interiors opens with panning shots inside an empty house in the Hamptons. The house was decorated by Eve, a professional designer. The title shots evoke a visual pun, considering the house's interiors as indicia of the psychic interiors of the family that lives there. We then see an extreme long shot of the three sisters playing on the beach outside of the house. At the close of the film, three people are on the beach when Pearl resuscitates Joey while Michael, Joey's husband, stands by.
Allen's script follows the dramatic conventions of theater, within cinematic moments of heightened tension, locating significant sequences at the end of each “act.” For example, Eve approaches her suicide as if staging a theatrical performance. In a close-up point-of-view shot, she cuts strips of black tape to seal up the windows of her New York apartment. In another set of close-up shots, she turns on the knobs of the gas stove without lighting it. The pièce de résistance occurs when she positions herself in a long black dress on a black couch to “perform” her suicide. The scene cuts to a speeding ambulance on Park Avenue.
The second act closes with Eve and Arthur, her husband, in church, when Eve realizes that Arthur has left their marriage. In a violent gesture, Eve sweeps all the lit candles on to the floor and runs out. In Act III of the film, Pearl, Arthur's fiancée, an enlivening mother, appears. In her bright red dress, she bursts out of the frame, energetic and vital, with Joey disgusted by her vulgarity, and Renata indifferent but resigned to her presence. The father Arthur is, of course, delighted by Eve, so in contrast with his pale gray-suited wife.
The final act includes both a wedding and a funeral, events that typically characterize a comedy or a tragedy, respectively. Pearl delights in dancing with her new husband and attempting to dance with the morose members of the wedding party. In the concluding sequences of the film, Eve throws herself into the ocean, her successful suicide. But it is the vital mother who rescues Joey, perhaps rescuing the family as well. Allen, in the last shot, lines up, first the two main sisters, as they gaze out a window at the ocean; then the youngest sister moves close behind them and quietly comments, “It is so peaceful.” Quick cut to black and we know the film is over.
Diane M. Borden, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Film and Psychoanalysis at the University of the Pacific, and faculty at SFCP. Her publications include papers on Vertigo, The Clouds of Sils Maria, and The Last Black Man in San Francisco.