In John Huston’s last and best film noir movie, The Asphalt Jungle (1950), the fog of mistrust is so thick that it pervades every scene. Every character is a criminal. Everyone is wicked in his own way. Nobody is worthy of trust. Even policemen and judges have dark secrets and dirty hands. The Asphalt Jungle is a “city underneath the city,” a dark substratum of society in which there is no honesty, no trust and no honor among thieves. The classic film noir movies were black-and-white and filmed in urban settings. The black and white film provided a dark, shadowy backdrop for its stories about dark, shadowy people. The urban settings provided a cast of city people who stole, lied, cheated and killed in order to satisfy their desires. The tone of mistrust and dreadful sense of not knowing which nefarious character may be lurking in the shadows are the defining qualities of film noir.
Oral Pessimism and Oral Sadism
Ironically, Huston’s greatest movie on the theme of mistrust was The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), which was not film noir. However, the vital film noir element that Huston did employ was the casting of Humphrey Bogart as Dobbs in the lead role. Bogart, who played Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, was the archetypal film noir hero. In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Dobbs is a poor American expatriate living in Mexico. He’s out of work and down on his luck. His lowly state in the beginning of the film is characteristic of what Erikson called “oral pessimism,” a central syndrome of secondary mistrust. Deriving its name from Freud’s oral stage, the oral pessimist has been deprived of his basic needs for so long that his dominant view of the world is that of an empty wasteland. He views himself as an empty person, with nothing good to offer to himself or to others. Dobbs is stuck in the depressive mire of oral pessimism. He wanders the streets begging for handouts. He doesn’t even notice that he’s panhandled the same man three times in a row. He feels so empty that he cannot even look his mark in the eye—he just looks down at the money in his hand.
Dobbs’s pessimism is bolstered after he is conned out of his day laborer’s wages by a shady contractor. But things look up after Dobbs and a fellow laborer hunt down the contractor who hustled them. They beat him up and take his money. Dobbs and his new pal Curtin (Tim Holt) become partners. The viewer gains hope for Dobbs. If Dobbs can trust Curtin, maybe he can overcome his character flaws of mistrust and pessimism, and learn to believe in himself and others. Dobbs’s character progresses even further as he and Curtin team up with an old prospector, Howard (Walter Huston), and the band of three go up into the mountains in search of gold. The gold quest is symbolic of Dobbs’s spiritual search for something pure in the world and in himself. His hope that they will find gold and strike it rich shows that he still has hope for a good life. And Dobbs’s faith in his partners shows that he still has the ability to trust people.
Unfortunately, the hope and faith in Dobbs’s character is not strong enough to overcome his basic sense of mistrust. Dobbs catches “gold fever” on the mountain. He mistrusts his partners and suspects them of plotting to steal his gold. Dobbs’s heightened sense of oral pessimism leads him to the endpoint of mistrust, “oral sadism”—“a cruel need to get and to take in ways harmful to others or to oneself.” The inability to trust and the absence of a need to be trusted invariably leads to deception and villainy. The oral sadist satisfies his own needs by taking from others, and he derives visceral pleasure while harming them. Dobbs regresses to a state of complete psychotic paranoia. He deludes himself into believing that everyone is against him. His delusions become so strong that he cannot even trust himself. Led by his paranoia, Dobbs betrays his partners and attempts to murder Curtin. In the end, isolated by mistrust and left alone with his gold, Dobbs’s paranoia ultimately proves to be self-destructive. Dobbs is killed by bandits. His lowly end is fitting. He is destroyed by forces of mistrust and greed, the same forces that drove his ego into a murderous, paranoid psychosis.
The Balanced Resolution
Each of Erikson’s stages presents a normative conflict, in which the developing ego is torn between two emotional poles. In the first stage, the infant struggles to form a sense of trust with his primary caregiver. Once a basis of trust is formed, the ego confronts other people, the world and himself with a trusting disposition. Hope that things will work out, and faith in the inherent goodness of others and one’s self are the rewards of a trusting nature. If trust is not formed, mistrust will dominate the developing ego’s disposition, leading to skepticism, pessimism, deception and self-doubt. In all of Erikson’s stages, the proper resolution is a healthy balance between the two emotional poles in conflict.
There is a sucker born every minute. The infant sucking at Mother’s breast has no reason to mistrust anyone, but eventually the breast is taken away and replaced with a plastic nipple. A gradual weaning from the breast teaches the infant that all good things must come to an end. A similar lesson comes later in life—a trusting disposition must be limited by a sense of caution. Cautious mistrust in others is taught to children from their parents, who warn them: “Don’t talk to strangers!” We want our children to be trusting, but we also want them to be cautious and wary of the depraved people who would exploit their trust. So, even though trust is generally a good thing and mistrust is generally bad, we must also admit that a certain amount of healthy mistrust should be instilled into the developing ego. A trusting, gullible, Pollyanna type who believes everything he is told is extremely vulnerable to liars and cheats.
Bubble Boy
In Bubble Boy (2001), an interesting symbol for trust and mistrust is represented by a plastic bubble, in which a mother (Swoosie Kurtz) encapsulates her son (Jake Gyllenhaal) for his entire life. Bubble Boy’s mother suffers from severe mistrust, resulting in psychotic levels of paranoia. She believes that everything and everyone in the world is diseased, corrupt and wicked, so she protects her son by keeping him in a bubble. Eventually, Bubble Boy grows up and falls in love with the girl next door (Marley Shelton). He must travel to Niagara Falls to stop the girl from marrying another man. His journey is encumbered by the fact that he must travel in a bubble, and he is also handicapped by a lack of healthy mistrust. Since he’s never left home before, he doesn’t understand that there are bad people in the world who shouldn’t be trusted.
Though some shady characters take advantage of the gullible Bubble Boy, it is his overwhelming sense of trust in others that gets him help from unexpected strangers, who take him to Niagara Falls. At the wedding, Bubble Boy discovers that it is his mother, the infantile object of trust, who ironically betrayed his trust by lying to him for his entire life. Bubble Boy never actually had the severe immunity deficiency that his mother told him he had. He never needed to live in a bubble. In the end, Bubble Boy sheds the symbol of his mother’s deplorable breach of trust. He steps out of the bubble and acquires a new primary love object. By transfiguring his maternal love for his mother into a romantic love for the girl next door, Bubble Boy successfully resolves his Oedipal complex while also learning a valuable lesson—complete and unlimited trust in others must also be tempered by some cautious mistrust.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The second psychosocial stage, autonomy versus doubt and shame, corresponds to Freud’s anal stage of psychosexual development. In Erikson’s view, the small child is seeking to “individuate” from the mother and become “autonomous.” Parents who have experience with toddlers know about the “terrible twos”—a time when the child’s favorite word is “no!” For the toddler, “no” is more than just a word, it is a statement of autonomy and individuality. Meanwhile, parents are in the undesirable position of having to teach rules for behavior to their growing toddlers. If parents are overly punitive, they run the risk of quashing the child’s blossoming autonomy, resulting in a child crippled by shame and doubt. But if parents do not impose enough authority, they run the risk of raising a child who has no respect for rules and regulations. Autonomous individuals understand rules, laws and the
authorities that enforce them. They know when it is appropriate to follow the law, but they also know when it is more appropriate to follow one’s own autonomous sense of morality.
The psychiatric hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) recapitulates the arena of early struggles between parents and children. The men in the hospital ward have been stripped of their individuality and autonomy and placed under the parental care of the hospital administrators. The father figure, Dr. Spivey (Dean R. Brooks), is an elderly, benign and kindly psychiatrist whose scarce presence belies his enormous power. Though Dr. Spivey isn’t around much, he’s the one who makes all the big decisions concerning evaluations, medication, treatments and punishments. Dr. Spivey is a menacing figure who hides behind a smile and soft-spoken persona.
Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) is the all-powerful mother figure. Her presence dominates the entire ward, and she is the force in control of the daily lives of the patients. Ratched demands complete obedience from her patients. She is aided by daily doses of mind-numbing medication that she gives to every patient. The medication “calms” the patients, artificially exorcising them of any inner sense of autonomy or rebelliousness. However, we get the sense that the complete lack of autonomy in the ward is enforced by something stronger than the pharmaceutical straitjacket. Nurse Ratched herself has the power to control every emotion in her patients. In her group therapy sessions, she wields her tremendous psychological power like a sledgehammer over her weak-minded patients. She can manipulate each one of them into a complete emotional breakdown, just by pushing their buttons in the exact ways that she knows so well.
Autonomy
McMurphy, nicknamed “Mac” (Jack Nicholson), enters the ward like a breath of fresh air. In Mac’s autonomy, we see the freedom and rebelliousness of a man who simply cannot obey the rules. When asked why he keeps on winding up in prison, Mac tells Dr. Spivey, “Because I fight and fuck too much.” Mac is simply unable to control his behavior. His basic drives—sex and aggression—are expressed without regard for law, authority or society. Dr. Spivey is correct in suspecting that Mac is not a psychotic, but merely an incorrigible rule-breaker who wants to avoid work detail in the prison farm during his 90-day prison sentence. But Dr. Spivey isn’t necessarily convinced that Mac is not crazy. Mac represents the absolute anarchy of the drives. Dr. Spivey is faced with the question: Is a person who has no control over his impulses sane?
Shame and Doubt
Mac’s new world is a strange inversion for him, in which dozens of grown men are completely dominated by one pretty matron in a white cap. His eyes are opened to the situation when he sees Nurse Ratched run her group therapy sessions like a public inquisition. Ratched sits coolly as she pries into her weak-willed patients’ neuroses, forcing them to disclose personal information that she can load into her armory. The key to Ratched’s absolute control of the ward is her knowledge of each patient’s most secret issues, and her willingness to raise these issues in order to shame her patients into line. Ratched demonstrates her shame tactics in her manipulation of Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif). Billy is an extremely weak, shy and anxious young man. His intense anxiety and lack of confidence is displayed in his chronic stuttering. He is by far the youngest member of the ward, and he acts and is treated like a young boy. The name Bibbit may be a reference to “Babbit,” the title character in the Sinclair Lewis novel who was the ultimate conformist. Like Babbit, Billy is plagued by self-doubt. He doubts his own sense of worth, he doubts his ability to live independently, and most of all, he doubts his own power to stand up to controlling, domineering mother figures like Nurse Ratched. For Billy, Ratched represents a double threat. Ratched is a menacing and omnipotent mother in her own right, and she is also good friends with Billy’s real mother, whom she often confers with—as she frequently reminds Billy.
Mac is disgusted to see Nurse Ratched forcing Billy to talk about an episode in his life in which he failed to approach a girl that he loved. This episode is linked to Billy’s central issue of self-doubt. Ratched’s manipulative process of forcing Billy to talk exemplifies the problem—he lacks the confidence to stand up for himself and defend his own ego. Ratched publicly shames Billy by exposing his most vulnerable secrets to the group. True to her name, Ratched manipulates her patients like a tool—a ratchet—that can tighten or loosen the nuts in the minds of her patients with alarming ease.
Power Struggle
It doesn’t take long for Mac and Ratched to butt heads. The power struggle between Mac and Ratched escalates into an all-out war over control of the ward. Ratched represents bondage, obedience, conformity and compliance. Mac represents freedom, rebelliousness, individuality and autonomy. In the process of the power struggle, Mac becomes a replacement father figure for the patients in the ward. He takes them to an imaginary baseball game, he breaks them out of the hospital and takes them on a road trip, and he takes them fishing on a stolen boat. The patients identify with their new father figure and begin to act like him. They rebel against Ratched and verbalize their newfound sense of autonomy in a group session, which culminates in an eruption of violence. Mac and two of his disciples are punished for their transgressions with electric shock treatments. While the famous shock treatment scene is not a realistic depiction of electroconvulsive therapy, it depicts a compelling parallel between the shocking of rebellious adults and the spanking of rebellious children.
Defiance
Just as physical punishment rarely works with children, Mac’s shock punishment only recharges his batteries. Upon his return, Mac leads the ward into outright defiance of Ratched’s authority. Like the small child who yells “no!” at his mother, defiance is a personal statement of autonomy. Mac leads the ward into public defiance by administering his own medication, alcohol. Instead of controlling behavior, like the drugs administered by Ratched, alcohol frees the patients. They become temporarily uninhibited and free from Ratched’s strict control. Billy even overcomes his incredible shyness and self-doubt. Spurred on by Mac and the other patients, Billy makes love with Candy (Mews Small), a young girl that Mac smuggled into the hospital along with the booze.
The name “Candy” is particularly significant. Power struggles between parents and children are often centered around candy. The child’s desire for sweets is as primal as an adolescent male’s desire for sex. In the film, both desires are given the name “Candy.” When Ratched finds Billy in bed with Candy, he is literally caught with his pants down. Billy’s personal act of autonomy is also a clear act of group defiance against Ratched’s authority. Ratched’s anger is really directed at Mac, but she knows that she can hurt Mac more by torturing weak and defenseless Billy, the baby-faced boy that Mac has taken under his wing. Ratched asks Billy: “Aren’t you ashamed?” Billy replies: “No, I’m not.” For once, Billy is not stuttering and stammering. He is standing up for himself, and standing up to Ratched. The other patients applaud him. Ratched coolly continues: “What worries me is how your mother is going to take it.” The mere mention of his mother casts Billy down into a spiral of shame. He immediately loses all of his confidence. Billy blames the other patients and Mac for his infraction, he begs for forgiveness and he beats himself to show penance. Billy’s sense of shame is so deep that he kills himself—the ultimate act of self-punishment—as a pathetic gesture of atonement to his mother figure.
Punishment
In the end, Mac is done in by his characteristic lack of control. After Billy commits suicide, Mac explodes in a fit of rage and attempts to strangle Nurse Ratched to death. The destructive side of Mac’s personality is revealed as he indulges the darkest impulse a child could have, the impulse to kill a controlling mother figure. Mac’s punishment is swift and absolute. He is given a full frontal lobotomy. Like the medieval practice of trepanation, in which barbers bore holes into people’s heads to release their evil demons, the lobotomy exorcises Mac’s desire to rebel against authority. The procedure also turns him into a vegetable. Every trace of Mac’s autono
my, individuality and personality are gone with one slice of a scalpel. Mac lost his battle with authority, but his rebellious spirit lives on in the psyche of Chief (Will Sampson), the patient that Mac inspired, who escapes the mental hospital in the final scene.
Crimes and Misdemeanors (re-revisited)
At the third stage of psychosocial development, the child is “deeply and exclusively identified with his parents, who most of the time appear to him to be powerful and beautiful, although often quite unreasonable, disagreeable, and even dangerous.” The stage of initiative versus guilt corresponds with Freud’s phallic stage of psychosexual development. The internal moral conscience—guilt—is the counterbalance to “initiative,” the “will” of the child. Initiative is the force that motivates a curious child to ask, “Why?” It is the force that motivates a child to build a castle in the sand, and it is also the force that flattens the castle, breaks the toys that made the castle, and throws sand at the child who built it.
Once again, it is the parents who control the resolution of this stage through “mutual regulation” of the child’s behavior. If parents are too strict and punitive, guilt may become the dominating force in the child’s unconscious, resulting in an overdeveloped conscience and a life of crippling neurosis and anxiety. Parenting that is too lenient may result in an underdeveloped conscience, which is not strong enough to restrict the destructive side of the initiative drive. Erikson believed that the proper balance between initiative and guilt must be based on a sense of responsibility. A healthy sense of guilt keeps us from doing things to hurt others, while a healthy sense of initiative allows us to do things to help ourselves.
Movies and the Mind Page 23