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.

Conspiracy Theory (1997)

Conspiracy Theory (1997) Dir: Richard Donner


Laurence Olivier as The White Angel,
hovering over hapless Dustin Hoffman,
in Marathon Man (1976).

Why would I mention a nearly forgotten 1997 film now? One would think that I would be disinclined to mention movies that star Mel Gilson. For Mel Gibson has since been reviled for his racist and anti-Semitic rants in real life, even though he was applauded for his similarly psychotic, off-the-cuff incantations when he plays an incoherent cab driver who was duped by the CIA and doped with LSD by “The Company” doctor.

The film shifts between an action-adventure motif to a romantic comedy subplot. We learn that Gibson’s paranoid character was used as a test subject in  earlier CIA’s secret experiments. This time around, Dr. Jonas, a CIA psychiatrist, captures him and binds him to a wheelchair, and tapes his eyes open. Patrick Stewart, better known for Star Trek and later Professor X roles, plays Dr. Jonas.

Gibson’s misfortunes clearly began before meeting Julia Roberts, who plays an attractive young attorney who is on a quest to learn the who’s and why’s of her father’s mysterious death. Infatuated with Julia Roberts, Mel Gibson stalks her in a laughable rather than predatory way. He eventually wins her heart after his Conspiracy Theory proves true. 

Again, let me ask (myself) why I would mention this film now? The answer is obvious, for those of you who read the last post on The Bourne Legacy (2012), where I discuss genetic experiments conducted on another covert operative, played by Jeremy Renner.  In that case, an indifferent doctor (Rachel Weisz) administers experimental injections that enhance performance. Weisz is not malevolent; she is simply detached and does not know the name of her patient, even after four years have passed.  In addition, Weisz is a virologist and is not a psychiatrist, although her treatments change Renner’s behavior, enhance his cognition (and maybe make him addicted).

Some readers may know of the CIA’s MK-ULTRA project, where tests subjects were dosed with LSD and subjected to behavioral conditioning studies, not by fringe elements of the profession, but by a psychiatrist who once headed both the American Psychiatric Association and the Canadian Psychiatric Association. Other academic centers participated in these occasionally lethal tests, sometimes unwittingly. Andrea Tone wrote an award-winning book on the topic.

In Conspiracy Theory, Patrick Stewart’s hairless and smile-less psychiatrist is as sinister as could be. He is so sinister that he reminds us of Laurence Olivier’s rendition of the Nazi dentist known as White Angel. In that classic under-the-Brooklyn Bridge scene in Marathon Man (1976), Laurence Oliver drills into Dustin Hoffman’s teeth to force him to reveal his brother’s secrets.

Like Patrick Stewart’s Dr. Jonas, Marathon Man’s evil DDS consorts with American agents. Dr. Jonas is so sinister that he could span an entire chapter in my recent book on Cinema’s Sinister Psychiatrists (McFarland, 2012). He might have done just that, except for the fact that there are many more intriguing examples of conspiracy theories and sinister psychiatrists in the chapter.

To read more about Marathan Man's references to the McCarthy Era, and learn how those troubled times translated into paranoid themes in film, pl see Movies and the Modern Psyche (2007).

 

 

McFarland Catalogue

The Bourne Legacy (2012)

To the naked eye--or to the unabashed action-adventure enthusiast--The Bourne Legacy (2012) looks like exactly that--an action-adventure film. It strings together exciting motorcycle chases, spy versus spy scenes, explosives, combustion, state-of-the-art weapons, and, of course, hand-to-hand combat. Jeremy Renner does justice to the Bourne Legacy, even if he never romances “the girl.” “The girl,” in this case, is the doctor (Rachel Weisz) who manipulated his genes and transformed him into a super-smart spy who can literally jump over mountains and perform feats that are ordinarily reserved for superheroes from outer space.  This secret genetic experiment opens a window into the future, even if the film is science fiction and pure fantasy at present.

Gene therapy may be in its infancy at present, and the failures still seem more common than the successes. Yet advances in neuroscience are progressing at a fast pace, even though relatively few of those advances have current clinical applications. One wonders how soon medicine will offer gene transplants that increase intelligence, or at least slow down the loss of intelligence, as happens in dementia. This seemingly superficial film forces us to ask questions about the distinction between pure cosmetic neuropsychiatry and the treatment of genuine disease states. As we watch Renner’s character inject himself with drugs, to prevent loss of his artificially acquired abilities, we can’t help but compare this act with controversial trends in stimulant use and abuse on highly competitive Ivy League campuses, as chronicled by the NY Times and elsewhere. The future is now, as they say.

 

The Possession (2012)

The Possession (2012) 

It was a long hot summer, and there was not a horror film in sight—until The Possession appeared just before August ended. There was a drought on horror films all June, July, and nearly all of August of 2012. Many say that The Possession satisfied this unmet demand, to the point that this otherwise unremarkable film led box office sales for a few weeks.  

 The Possession revolves around a young girl who finds a “dybbuk box” at a yard sale. At her insistence, the girl’s divorced father buys the box, unaware of its contents. The daughter opens the box and becomes possessed by the disembodied spirit (“dybbuk”) that is housed inside. She begins to behave bizarrely, stabbing herself and others and wandering off, for no reason at all. Her parents’ divorce is implicated in this sudden shift.  

The parallel between the dybbuk box and Pandora’s box is obvious, but this association is secondary to the dybbuk’s deep roots in Jewish folkore, film, theatre, and mysticism. The theme is a throw back S. Ansky’s play from 1914. The dybbuk story became a favorite of Yiddish stage and cinema, eventually making its way into opera and puppetry. The last “official” Yiddish dybbuk film was made in Poland in 1937, shortly before Nazis invaded Poland and eventually exterminated most of Poland’s large Jewish population. 

The Dybbuk (1937)

Even though this film revolves around the Jewish mystical concept of the dybbuk, it’s impossible not to view the film as a rip-off of The Exorcist (1973), which shook spectators out of their seats in the mid-seventies, and made little Linda Blair (and green vomit) famous. Even those of us who relish the folkloric legacy of the Yiddish dybbuk can spot the commercialism at bay. So be it—movie makers “go with what they know,” and have to be more practical than mystical when it comes to investing money in movies. The Dybbuk may hold sentimental significance among certain circles, but the legacy of The Exorcist (and its many sequels and remakes) remains intact in Middle America.  

Matisyahu stars as the young Chasidic man who rises to the occasion to save the day—but loses his own life in the end (just as the psychiatrist-priest dies as The Exorcist ends).  Matisyahu is a neo-Chasidic rapper who holds heart throb status for many young traditional Jews. He wins kudos for his heroic role in exorcising the dybbuk from the daughter—after an MRI scan reveals shadows of a spirit inside her and after her father drives frantically to a Chasidic enclave in Brooklyn to consult with rabbinical experts.

It’s easy to understand why traditional Jews would buy tickets to see The Possession. But it took a much wider audience to make this film a commercial success, in spite of its cinematic shortcoming. I’m not convinced that the perseverance of hard-core horror film fans fully explains its impressive sales, either. Producer Sam Rami has his followers, for sure, but not enough to blast the box office.

Perhaps the plot also reflects current controversy about psychiatric treatments for young children. ADHD diagnoses among children are no longer news—but the increasing use of strong, and often unapproved, antipsychotic meds in pediatric patients has made the front pages in the last few years. I’m theorizing that this film about the bizarre behavior of a little girl—and the equally bizarre explanation for its sudden onset—may represent a hidden critique of child psychiatry, and the willingness to assign serious diagnoses to young children, and to prescribe multiple medications, before conducting a full explanation for other sources of distress.

In this film, the parents’ acrimonious divorce, and its spillover on their children, could explain their daughter’s odd behavior. Instead, a dybbuk is discovered, and an exorcism is performed, and serious side effects (the loss of Matisyahu’s life) ensue.  



The Possession poster recollects the moths & mouth
seen in the famed Silence of the Lambs poster.

Perhaps, on some level, viewers took this message to heart, and bought tickets for a second-rate horror that has first-class parallels with contemporary controversies. It would not be surprising if some parents are  as perplexed as the parents in The Possession, when their children behave strangely, and then receive even stranger diagnoses and more mysterious treatments. Updates to the APA's DSM-V (Diagnostic & Statistical Manual) will address these important issues.

To read more about the literary, filmic, and folkoric origins of The Dybbuk (1937), please refer to  Dr. Packer's Movies and the Modern Psyche (Praeger, 2007).

To read about recent debates about psychiatry, 
please see Cinema’s Sinister Psychiatrists (2012),
which references the summer 2011 issue of
NY Review of Books reviews and rebuttals.