White House Down (Emmerich, 2013) SPOILER ALERT

White House Down is one of a string of action-adventure films that revolve about an imperiled US. It is a post-911 ode to anxiety. It is also a family drama, where a clever but pouty teen-aged girl comes to the rescue. She saves the show and reconciles with her errant father, who saves the other side of the show. The recently divorced father has a chance to show his best side, after a number of bungles at the beginning.

Channing Tatum saves face. He even saves the President (Jamie Foxx) and a White House full of hostages, including his daughter--after he being rejected by the Secret Service and after failing to meet his fatherly responsibilities.

There are plenty of shoot-‘em-up scenes, with fighter planes and military helicopters looming overhead and rocket launches from the White House roof. Hand-to-hand combat occurs often. All this should have been enough to satisfy the action-adventure audience. Yet the film flopped at the box office, possibly because it tried to be all things to all people (family fun plus political intrigue plus action-adventure). This “jack of all trades” wound up being “a master of none.”

Still, the film was fun, even if the story line has grown familiar by now.  Central to the film is the paramilitary group that plans to take over the White House, and almost succeeds. The sell-out insider (James Woods) who leaks secrets is also a recurring stereotype, even though we never suspect silver-haired Secret Service Agent Walker as he cuts the cake at his retirement party.

Interestingly, James Woods starred in Videodrome (Renn, 1983), a bizarre film about a man with a brain tumor who hears his TV talk. In the film, the protagonist insists that the hallucinations caused the tumor, rather than the other way around.

When we learn that James Woods’ character in White House Down also suffers from a brain tumor—a frontal lobe tumor, specifically—we are not too shocked. No, I correct myself: those of us who know something about neuropsychiatry or behavioral neurology are shocked that the film’s medical advisors let this one pass. Frontal lobe syndromes cause apathy and amotivation and strip the sufferer of the ability to strategize. James Woods plans, plots and strategizes, even though his efforts are misdirected. Had the film claimed that he had a temporal lobe tumor that changed his behavior and made him moody and impulsive, I might have been more impressed. If it located the tumor in the amygdala, or in the rage center of the brain, it would be even better.

Temporal lobe disease can also induce “déjà vu”—a sense of familiarity or a feeling that a current event previously occurred in the past. For I had a sense of déjà vu while watching the denouement. The movie reminded me of the Iran Contra scandal from the 1980s, when then-CIA director William Casey helped to secure arms for Nicaraguan rebels (after Congress forbade such acts). Casey himself developed a brain tumor (definitively diagnosed as a lymphoma after his death). He suffered two seizures the day before he was to testify to a Senate panel about the Central Intelligence Agency's role in the sale of American arms to Iran.

The moral of the story?
This improbable paranoid plot is based on a kernel of truth. For that, I can forgive the filmmaker for an anatomical error about the location of a fictional brain tumor.

The Great Gatsby (Luhrmann, 2013)

What do Iron Man 3 and The Great Gatsby have in common?

No, this isn't one of those kindergarten jokes--this is for real. Even though their plotlines and the cinematography couldn't be farther apart, these two films share their psychoanalytic framing device. In Iron Man 3, the psychoanalytic session/framing device is the reveal. It appears in the epilogue.

In The Great Gatsby, we meet Nick Carraway in a sanitarium, before the action starts. Carroway narrates the novel and speaks in Fitzgerald's voice. F. Scott Fitzgerald does not include a sanitarium scene in his original Gatsby, although sanitariums are prominent in other stories, and surely figure into the sad tale of his wife, Zelda, who herself went in and out of mental hospitals.

Iron Man 3 (2013)

By Memorial Day 2013, Iron Man 3 (Black, 2013) was poised to break box office records. In little more than three weeks’ time, receipts reached the billion dollar mark. Impressive, even for superhero cinema. Why did this film perform so well? Let’s toss around some theories.   

The draw of the Sir Ben Kingsley as the drug-addled “Mandarin” double needs no extra explanation. Kingsley was knighted for his acting abilities long before accepting this role as a behind-the-scenes surrogate for the real powerbroker played by Guy Pearce.   Stark seeks retribution--before he rebuilds his cliffside home. He forgot that he rebuffed the once down-and-out scientist (Guy Pearce) who has resurfaced and is now is planning to overtake America and reshape the world as we know it.

 

The terrorist theme, the superhero story, even Stark’s back story as a tech genius turned philanthropist, and a successfully recovering alcoholic to boot, speak to the times. 

Add state-of-the-art special effect, class-A cinematography, and a fast-paced script with action, adventure, romance, and redemption to the mix, and a blockbuster is born.  Star power adds allure, but Sir Ben Kingsley is not the star, even though he is a shining light.

First of all, the film stars Robert Downey, Jr. Robert Downey, Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark is perennially appealing. Downey’s personal drug history, and his well-publicized and repeated struggles with rehab, animate his acting and makes Stark’s ex-alcoholic character scintillate. Guy Pearce, the villain, and Gwyneth Paltrow, as Pepper Potts, have more than their fair share of fans. Iron Man 3  reassures Americans of success that awaits them, yet it also reflects mounting fears about foes that lie in wait. It implies that deadly enemies may masquerade as unemployed actors (Ben Kingsley), suicidal scientists (Guy Pearce), or other superficially benign beings, such as the beautiful botanist (Rebecca Hall) who changes alliances after creating the Extremis virus that drives the plot. Those themes alone should be sufficient to attract audiences, as it simultaneously stokes and allays anxieties about contemporary world events. The movie’s motifs replay recurring conflicts between science and creationism, and humans against the machine. On a psychological level, it showcases the challenges of changing fate and facing fear versus accepting the status quo. 

The film includes a subscript to that is not readily apparent to the average spectator, but is highly relevant to my forthcoming book about neuroscience in science fiction film, which addresses and the place of neuroscience in post-psychoanalytic society. Better than any other film that I have seen to date, Iron Man 3 captures the spirit behind this book,  because it alludes to the “two minds” of psychiatry that stand at loggerheads, today as much as ever. It references both biological psychiatry, now known as “neuropsychiatry,” and the “couch cure” of psychoanalytic lore.  

If we listen to the dialogue between Stark and Banner (Mark Ruffalo), with our ordinary hearing and with our third ears, we can hear commentaries about the theoretical and practical rift in psychiatry. As the epilogue in Iron Man 3 opens, the camera moves in, showing a close-up of Tony Stark. Tony is thanking “Bruce” for listening and for letting him “get it off his chest.”

 

Read More in my forthcoming book about Neuroscience in Science Fiction Film (McFarland)

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Side Effects (2012)

Director Steven Sonderbergh has more than his fair share of fans .  Those fans will see similarities in subject matter between his first feature film sex, lies & videotape (1989) and this film. Many  fans will hope to find more similarities between his more recent film Contagion (2011) and this film, especially since both concern corrupt medical systems or officials and frightening public health hazards.

Sadly, Side Effects does not grip the spectator as Contagion does, even though its script struggles to make dramatic twists and turns and adds an interesting website. www.sideeffectsmayvary.com

Some details are realistic: drug company logos on pens, clandestine offers to pay Jude Law’s psychiatrist character $50,000 to test new meds on his patients, psychiatrist Catherine Zeta-Jones’ not-so-subtle push about new products, pharma-sponsored educational conferences, Jude Law asking for Adderall.  They all smack of the truth, sad to say. However, those who know Hitchcock immediately recognize near-mirror image repeats of the movie master’s framing shots, plot-driving devices, even damning character flaws. For them, there will be no suspense. Yet this movie is intended to be suspenseful.

Side Effects succeeds in opening questions about contemporary psychiatric practices. Yet so much of the plot is so far-fetched that even though salient details may be lost on those who dismiss everything about Side Effects as pure fantasy. Still, Side Effects captures contemporary  2012 Manhattan psychiatrist stereotypes well—or at least as well as De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) captured skyscraper psychiatry did over thirty years ago.

Like Sonderbergh’s Side Effects, De Palma’s Dressed to Kill also replicated Hitchcock’s tour de force in Psycho (1960). Like De Palma, Sonderbergh exploits unexpected sexual preferences to the max, but 2012 is not 1980. Shock value has simmered.

For many more examples of sinister psychiatrists in cinema, please  see Cinema’s Sinister Psychiatrists (McFarland, 2012).
www.drsharonpacker.com 
 

It's a Wonderful Life (1945)

The holiday season has passed. Now we can gleefully look back at the “myth of the holiday blues,” to  see where that myth started. In an article that I wrote for the December 2012 issue of SoHo Life magazine (“Beating the Holiday Blues”), I speculate that a specific movie inspired that myth. That movie led us to believe that the December holiday season brings sadness and even suicide, when, in fact, suicides drop to their lowest levels in December, and are lower in this month than any other. Unfortunately, news articles have perpetuated that myth, as documented by the CDC website.

Which movie prompted such misinformation? It was Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1945), starring Jimmy Stewart. This wonderful movie shows a hapless man, drunk and depressed, teetering on the brink, ready to end it all on Christmas Eve. Then an angel appears, and shows him how the world was a different, better place--because of the lives he touched.

Stewart’s acrophobic character in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) becomes all the more credible because of his unforgettable performance as a deeply disturbed man in the Capra classic.

Jimmy Stewart (1958) 

Just because the film exercises dramatic license, and includes misinformation, doesn’t mean that it isn’t a most wonderful film.

After all, there’s a reason this film replays each Xmas season.