Repetition or Working-Through? Notes on A Dangerous Method
On paper, A Dangerous Method seems very bad. It’s the story of psychoanalysis as brought to you by E. M. Forster and Merchant/Ivory, with “Only Connect” as its moral: if only Jung would have left his wife for Keira Knightley and Freud would not have carried on like Ariel Sharon, we might have been spared the whole twentieth century!
I exaggerate only slightly; there’s just enough author-approved S&M to make the screenplay’s wistful liberalism palatable to the jaded arthouse filmgoer. The film as written appears to be a condemnation of Jung, but it really vindicates him at the thematic level. Jung’s problem, as the story presents it, is his inability to integrate the shadow side of his personality, represented by women, Jews, and non-vanilla sex. In other words, Jung’s problem was precisely that he was not Jungian enough! Whereas Freud’s problem in this story is that he’s too pessimistic, too ethnic, too dirty–too sure that the personality, either of the individual or of the collective, cannot be integrated once and for all, that goods will always be in conflict. I feel like a bore making this explicit, but: Freud is too Jewish.
Mind you, I am not claiming that the story is anti-Semitic; it’s too intelligently universalist for that. It argues instead that particularisms can wed on some idealistic common ground and thus avoid rivalry. A little Jewishness, like a little adultery, is okay, but the final destination is another marriage, another baby, another patria. Of course, this is already Protestantism, as every good American knows (and Jung, in the film, is very impressed with America, whereas Freud’s cigar, in a brilliant visual confusion of foreground and background, appears to penetrate Lady Liberty). To the extent that the film presents this utopian conclusion as having failed to come to pass, the fault is with Jung for not heeding his own advice. Jung is wrong in practice but right in theory–Freud is just wrong.
So much for the screenplay. The question is, won’t a director of David Cronenberg’s eminence, along with such a talented cast, do something to spice up this NPR-ish pablum? I believe the answer is yes, and I further believe that the filmmakers do three things to make this a worthwhile and interesting movie:
1. Through lighting, set design, and even–if I’m not mistaken–make-up, Cronenberg so heavily plays up the visual contrast between the worlds of urban/petite-bourgeois/Viennese-Jewish Freud and pastoral/haute bourgeois/Teutonic-Protestant Jung that the script’s subtext comes fully to the surface in a specular abreaction that reveals the unconscious fantasy for what it is. The film at the visual level is so insistent about its ethno-ideological theme that the screenplay’s own emphasis on the sectarianism of Freud takes on an unexpected political resonance, one not really linked to the biography of the founding psychoanalyst. For a minute, I thought the film was less about Keira Knightley’s vagina than it was about Zionism…
2. But, yes, Keira Knightley’s vagina. And her breasts and her mouth and her nervous tics and her screaming and–far more than any of this, and in defiance of the simplistic French-feminism of the New Inquiry piece I linked above–her mind, her intellectual passion. In the sections of the film wherein she presents her own psychoanalytic theories, Knightley’s Sabina Spielrein displays more energy, more radical engagement than either Jung (with his buttoned-up [literally: they really stuffed Fassbender into some tight vests] Protestant restraint) or Freud (with his materialist’s cynicism about pretty much everything). The portrayal of Spielrein suggests that there is something beyond Jung, Freud, or the screenplay’s suggestion that they merge into some kind of intellectual liberal universalism. That something is a pursuit of thought beyond the mind/body split. Not their reconciliation, but rather their productive tension.
3. Not unrelatedly, the film somewhat relieves its commitment to the idealism vs. materialism binary politically coded as German-Protestant vs. Viennese-Jewish by introducing other allegorical nations as possible lifeworlds. An extended sequence features Otto Gross, historically a Nietzsche-influenced Austrian anarchist, but played in the film as a dirtily debonair Frenchman by Vincent Cassel, who essentially reprises his Black Swan role as an erotic philosopher of performed freedom. Thus, a lapsed-Catholic-inflected Existentialism–Gross’s key line in the film is, “Freedom is freedom,” which means that it comes without a guaranteed outcome–adumbrates the portrayal of Spielrein’s eroticized intellectualism to suggest a way out of the idealism vs. materialism argument. If an allegorized “France” plays this role, so too does “Russia,” which is where Spielrein is from and to where she returns. What does Old Russia suggest to the elite filmgoer but the fully embodied spirituality of a Dostoevsky? And what does (early) Soviet Russia signify but the union of theory and practice? Of course, there is a sense in which choosing imperfect reasonable embodiment as the solution to hysterical outbreaks is already to choose between Jung and Freud in favor of one version of the latter. On the other hand, such longterm readers of this blog as may exist will recognize that I believe the right answer to the modernist question Jung or Freud? is Joyce.
So Cronenberg, encountering the scriptwriter’s compulsion to repeat the wars of the twentieth century, brings to light the fantasy’s underlying trauma, displays the falsity of its hysterical solution, and suggests several non-perfect but also livable alternatives, with the important caveats that analysis will necessarily remain interminable and that we will probably never be happy. What more can we expect from cinematic therapy?
