A Dangerous Method: The historical hysterical
Viggo Mortensen as Freud and Michael Fassbender as Jung in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method
Something Sigmund Freud says in A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg’s stupendous film on the birth of psychoanalysis, caused us to sit up straight in the slouch chair. He tells Sabina Spielrein, the patient, then lover, then student of his estranged disciple Carl Jung: “We’re Jews, and Jews we will always be.” Jung, whom she was still fascinated with, is an Aryan who is interested in mysticism and talks about helping people “become what they were born to be.” Jews, Freud reminds Spielrein, have seen what people really are.
The fates of the protagonists, summarized dispassionately at the film’s end, attest to the truth of Freud’s statement.
(In our own heads Freud is telling us, “We are nerds. They tolerate us now because we are clever, but someday the Sardaukar will come after us.”)
Cronenberg’s deceptively pretty movie based on the play by Christopher Hampton is itself a form of psychoanalysis: it dredges up the dark impulses under the bright surfaces. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung consults his intellectual father figure, the Austrian Sigmund Freud, who sees their relationship in Oedipal terms naturally: the son attempting to kill the father.
Jung has a beautiful house paid for by his rich wife; he sails in the tranquil blue lake in a boat paid for by his rich wife. But his great love and intellectual match may be Spielrein, who enters the movie kicking and screaming literally. He cures her of her symptoms, and then gets her off by spanking her.
Keira Knightley as the hysteric Sabina Spielrein
The alien in Alien. Hmmm. Michael Fassbender is starring in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, which is “set in the universe of Alien.” Freud believed there are no accidents…
As the hysteric Keira Knightley contorts her face and extends her already prodigious jaw so far she looks like the alien mother getting ready to bite off someone’s head. Her acting is almost risible because her costars don’t seem to be acting at all (Vincent Cassel expresses volumes by raising one corner of his mouth very slightly). However, the director has stated in interviews that this is exactly how the historical Sabina behaved. However one regards Knightley’s performance it is certainly brave.
Fassbender caps his amazing year by playing Jung as a very proper man consumed by terrible agonies. (His visions will result in the theory of the collective unconscious.) Mortensen’s Freud is playful, paranoid, magisterial, a man who sees complexes everywhere. His expression on the ocean liner as his disciple goes off to first class says everything we need to know about the outsider who is suddenly reminded of his true status. Don’t get too comfortable.
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February 7th, 2012 at 15:09
that couch is scaring the sh*t outta me.