Psychoanalysis and the Cinema

PSYCHOANALYSISAND THE CINEMA Rick Altman. The American Film Musical. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. x + 386 pp. Illus. Mary Ann Doane. The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, I987. 211 pp. Illus. Krin Gabbard and Glen 0. Gabbard. Psvchiatry and the Cinema. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. xx + 304 pp. Illus. Wes D. Gehring. The Marx Brothers: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987. xv+ 262 pp. Illus. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. New York: The Free Press, 1987. x + 374 pp. Illus. Stephen Snyder At a time when cinema scholarship is penneated by a virtually incomprehensible vocabulary derived from psychoanalysis and structuralism, a reader may be forgiven a less than enthusiastic response to a new cluster of works spilling from the structuralisUpsychoanalytic horn-of-plenty. However, contrary to expectation , each of the five books reviewed here is a great deal less facile than most of the unintelligible and unintelligently done applications of French Structuralism which have dominated film scholarship, ad nauseam, in recent years. Each of these books (excluding Gehring's which does not really touch upon psychoanalytic themes) has managed in varying degrees to digest and use facets of structuralist thought without becoming too enmeshed in the very obfuscating •'patriarchal'' discourse which most structuralists claim to abhor yet repeat anyway. In fact, the myth of the film scholar as detached scientist would be an appropriate study for film scholarship; structuralists in particular might benefit from analyzing their own assumptions of scientism, as Joel Kovel has done for psychoanalysis in a recent critique which identifies the scientific pose as an extension of bourgeoisie ideology. 1 I mention this issue because it keeps appearing in some way in each of the books reviewed here. The Gabbard book, Psychiatry and the Cinema, deals very much with the mythology of science in America in its exploration of the mythology of the psychiatrist in American film. The studydelineates Hollywood's fear and idolatry of the scientist as embodied in the psychotherapist. Predictably, as the Gabbards point out, the image of the therapist on filmis one of extremes, neither of which is 90 Stephen Snyder particularly accurate. The films present, on the one hand, the therapist as the benevolent healer-pioneer-of-enlightenment type (Montgomery Clift, Freud, 1962) or, on the other hand, as the utterly depraved power manipulator (Alexis Smith, Nightmare Alley, 1949) or, alternately, as factotum of bourgeoisie ideology. While this discussion of therapists in film is not without interest, neither does it have any startling revelations. Anyone with enough interest in the subject of film psychiatrists to read this book is likely to be quite aware of the prevailing stereotypes. Thus, I find that far too much of the discussion in this book amounts to little more than a cataloguing of cinematic misrepresentations of therapists with far too little attention given to what sort of anxieties are embodied in these distortions. For almost a hundred pages, these authors evince almost no comprehension of metaphor or formal structure, either of a film as a hermetic unit or of the film as a cultural symbol. Thus the authors explore only casually what seems to me rather obvious social facets of the screen therapist, such as the manner in which these figures reveal the paranoiac delusions most people have about psychiatry: people fear therapists because of the supposed power of the therapist to violate the privacy of the mind and possess it in some way (the people in my home town perceived psychoanalysis as part of the communist conspiracy). A greater failing of the book's discussion, it seems to me, is the curiously casual dismissal of the psychological issues in a number of films. Let us consider, for example, the authors' comments on the Jimmy Piersall figure in Fear Strikes Out (1957): The film argues that Piersall's domineering father (Karl Malden) caused his son's eventual breakdown by withholding love from the boy in order to drive him to higher levels of athletic achievement. After his psychotic depression is relieved through ECT [electro-shock therapy] we...