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Psychology at the Movies

Page 5

by Skip Dine Young


  Marx is usually classified as an economist and social philosopher. However, the line between the social and the psychological is by no means clear. While sociologists are interested in broad social phenomena and patterns, such patterns manifest themselves in the thinking, actions, and experience of individuals. Cultural psychology (sometimes called sociocultural psychology) is a branch of psychology that aims its gaze directly at the overlap between sociology and psychology.47 Most cultural psychologists are interested in the actions of individuals, but assume these actions are constructed by the social conditions that surround them. Cultural studies, including ideological interpretations in film studies, is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that uses textual interpretations of cultural products to gain insight into what is really going on in a society at a particular historical moment (its values, attitudes, anxieties, and so forth).48

  The analysis of products of popular culture as richly symbolic forms of art and entertainment has been a critical part of cultural studies.49 From the perspective of cultural psychology, these textual analyses are one way of revealing the social dimensions of human life. Examples of readings that use film to understand people through their social conditions are common and come from many different directions.

  One classic psychosocial study of film is From Caligari to Hitler (1947), in which Siegfried Kracauer attempts to understand the German psyche prior to the rise of Hitler by analyzing movies of that time period. In the early 1930s, certain German movies emphasized an anti-authoritarian attitude but did not provide a constructive social alternative. In contrast, other movies presented a singular hero exhibiting strength, leadership and determination, all of which appealed to a nation wounded by defeat in World War I. For Kracauer, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was a particularly defining movie in which the plot involving a hypnotist who mesmerizes a young man into committing murder because it is the perfect metaphor for Hitler's spell on his fellow Nazis.

  Wolfenstein and Leites’ Movies: A Psychological Study provides another example of cultural psychological analysis of film. In addition to their psychoanalytic angle, the authors offer a cross-cultural analysis of American, British and French films made shortly after World War II. They consider themes contained in these films as reflections of the national character of their respective countries.

  Compared to American detective films such as The Big Sleep in which the hero is portrayed as an innocent who projects his own aggression onto external threats, British films of the time were more concerned with the danger of aggression arising from within. These heroes struggle with self-doubt even when they were innocent (such as in I Became a Criminal). Postwar French films were characterized as having an ironic attitude toward violence, in which justice is not always done and the universe is random; the authors interpret this attitude as a reflection of the helpless feelings experienced as a result of Nazi Occupation during the war.

  From Reverence to Rape is a psychosocial critique of movies in which Molly Haskell traces the representation of women in mainstream Hollywood film through the early 1970s. She argues that the epistemological assumptions of Western civilization are characterized by “the big lie”—the inferiority of women to men. She believes this lie creeps into all cultural products, including the movies. More often than not, this falsehood is not expressed explicitly but a distorted notion of feminine inferiority manifests itself below the surface. Thus, representations of women as creatures (objects) to be placed on a pedestal are common in Hollywood. Classic Hollywood stars like Ingrid Bergman are presented as goddesses, with lighting techniques that make them literally glow with radiance and beauty. Other actresses are presented reverentially as noble earth mothers, such as Dallas (Claire Trevor), the prostitute with a heart of gold in the archetypal western, Stagecoach.

  Many reverential treatments of women occurred during an epoch when it was widely accepted that women had fewer choices than men. In this mindset, it was assumed that men were needed to raise women onto the pedestal since it wasn't something they could do themselves. According to Haskell, this formula was reversed in the movies of the 1960s and 1970s, as the Women's Movement gained ground. Hollywood shifted from portraying women as innocent, motherly and/or glamorous to graphically flawed—whores, quasi-whores, jilted mistresses, emotional cripples, drunks, daffy ingénues, Lolitas, kooks, sex-starved spinsters, psychotics, icebergs, zombies, and ball-breakers.50 Haskell sees film rape (such as the infamous scene in Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs) as an extreme expression of the impulse to keep women in their place despite changing cultural tides.

  Most of the examples I have presented of ideological interpretations of movies started with representations of certain types of characters and then drew conclusions about national character. Is this perhaps the way Hollywood wants it? Such an approach puts the impetus on individual character, and as Robert Ray has argued, one of the most culturally and psychologically revealing aspects of Hollywood cinema is that it favors the myth of unbounded individualism at all costs: “[Hollywood’s] underlying premise dictated the conversion of all political, sociological and economic dilemmas into personal melodramas.”51 For example, America's anxiety about intervening in World War II is contained in Rick's (Humphrey Bogart) reluctance to help Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid) in Casablanca. Virtually all American movies must be built around a small number of individual stars that determine the action of the entire film.

  While it is difficult for many Americans to imagine any alternative to this formula, early Russian films like Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, which builds its plot around a historical event and not particular characters, provide a counterpoint. When the film was shown in my undergraduate survey class, it was so strikingly different from other films we had seen, there was nearly a revolt among the students. Not because they were offended by the Soviet politics, but because they found the lack of a protagonist almost intolerable.

  Spectators in the Movies

  While film has interested scholars from the beginning of the technology, the first 50 years of film scholarship were produced by individuals trained in other disciplines (e.g., literature, psychology, aesthetic philosophy, etc.) who decided to focus their attention on movies as a particular topic of study. This tendency of scholars to “moonlight” with movies continues today; many of the examples of interpretations presented above come from psychologists, psychoanalysts, or cultural critics outside academia. In contrast, the scholarly field of film studies has arisen in which film comes first.52 Many critics use Andre Bazin's founding of the influential journal Cahiers du Cinema in the 1950s as a marker for the birth of a separate film studies discipline. As can be seen in the title of Bazin's most famous work, What is Cinema? film scholars initially found it critical to distinguish the nature of film from other art forms. The significance of movies is not just found in what they are about (their content); instead, the ways in which movies are filmed (framing, camera movement, editing, etc.), produced, and distributed are just as important.

  When I started taking film studies courses as an undergraduate, I struggled to understand the filmcentric orientation. As an aspiring psychologist, I wanted to talk about the characters and what they did. If I paid attention to stylistic aspects of a film, it was usually how character behavior was colored by elements of the mis-en-scene (the things in front of the camera such as actors, costumes, make-up, sets, and lighting). My professors, however, were interested in other things—the way a camera panned from one side of a room to another, or a quick edit between day and night. Curiously, when aspects of mis-en-scene were emphasized, they tended to be items like a mirror, a window frame, or a pair of binoculars. I frequently had the experience of watching a movie filled with scenes of human passion, and the only thing the professor seemed excited about was a two-second shot of a character glancing into a hand mirror. I eventually realized that for them, objects like mirrors, frames and binoculars captured the fundamental formal qualities of film—“Movies mirror reality,” “Film frames ou
r world,” “Cinema is a tool for seeing.”

  My naïve approach was a type of objectivity—I was treating movies as objects that I could analyze. My professors, on the other hand, following decades of scholarly precedent, were using a more subjective approach in which they were trying to “get inside” the movie to identify the reflexive process by which the film was functioning. I eventually realized these kinds of analyses were attempts to connect the stylistic components of film with the viewing experience itself, thereby bringing film studies closer to psychology, but in a way I didn't recognize at first. I finally asked my film studies advisor about the connection between psychology and film. The first word out of his mouth was “Lacan.”

  Jacques Lacan is a French psychoanalyst whose postmodern spin on Freudian theory has had an enormous impact on film studies since the 1970s. Led by Christian Metz, many film scholars have integrated Lacanian psychoanalysis, along with ideological approaches, feminism, and semiotics (the study of signs), into the theories of film interpretation that have dominated film studies for decades.53 While there is much variation among these theories, they all use careful textual interpretation to gain a better understanding of the experience of viewers. Such approaches clearly have a psychological dimension and are collectively labeled “theories of spectatorship.”

  The work on spectatorship in film studies has a curious relationship to the interpretive approaches presented in this chapter. Film studies’ reliance on Lacan for its psychological theorizing creates a chasm compared with the traditional psychoanalytic approaches to analyzing film. Most American psychotherapists have never even heard of him.54 As a result, they have a tendency to find modern film theory difficult to grasp.55 On the other side, film studies appears to have little awareness of what is going on in modern American psychotherapy. I recall a film studies professor's surprise when I told him that the Freudian concepts of penis envy and castration anxiety were not a central part of modern psychology (or even psychodynamic therapy), given how often they appear in psychoanalytic film interpretations.

  Perhaps the defining aspect of spectatorship theories derived from Lacan is its focus on uncertainty. The theories of Freud and Marx can be seen as questioning obvious reality, but these theorists offer their psychoanalytic and ideological analyses as replacements for the naive view of reality. Lacan and other postmodern theories take this skepticism a step further by essentially giving up on a reliable ground for reality.56 Interpretations in this tradition can thus be either delightfully playful or maddeningly noncommittal, depending on the reader's mood.

  Despite the complexities of spectatorship studies, many of its key psychological components can be found in four proposed processes that constitute the ways in which viewers relate to a film:

  Identification: Film viewers identify with certain elements (usually a character) of a film and experience the film world as though they were inside it; on another level, they know they are not a part of the film, and that the film is unaware of them.

  Voyeurism: Because viewers are simultaneously participating in a film at the same time they are separate from it, a distance is created between viewers and film that is both frustrating (because it is incomplete) and pleasurable (because it is contained and safe).

  Fetishism: The technical qualities of film (a beautifully photographed sunset, or a sweeping pan shot) become cherished objects even though ultimately we cannot possess that which is only being re-presented (the sunset itself).57

  Suture: Films present a series of physical spaces that are incomplete in one way or another (the edges to the screen suggest a larger reality to which the viewer is not privy). In order to identify with a film, viewers have to accept its incomplete narrative reality as their reality by “suturing” over the elements that are missing in order to create a unified experience when there is none (e.g., remaining engaged in a film after an edit that abruptly moves the action from California to New York). Some films try to make suturing easier while others, like Psycho, challenge the audience by frequently changing character perspective and refusing to answer questions the film appears to be asking.58

  The concepts of voyeurism, identification, fetishism, and suture are all components of a favorite trope of academic film analysis, “the gaze” or “look.” The gaze refers to the fact that when a film camera captures an image, it does so from a particular perspective or vantage point. This perspective is necessarily that of the audience members as they watch the screen. Therefore, viewers must adopt the gaze which becomes a stand in for the totality of their visual experience. The importance of the gaze is highlighted in films that use camera shots representing the point-of-view of a particular character (jiggling the camera when a character is running; cross-cuts between a close-up on an object and an exaggerated facial reaction). In this way, the audience's identification with those characters who control the gaze is heightened.

  This process happens in a twilight zone of consciousness in which viewers feel they understand the experience of the hero, at the same time that they “know” they are not in the exotic land in which the movie occurs. The viewer's experience is further heightened by the voyeuristic pleasure of being able to look into the private lives of others. This pleasure can only be achieved through suspending disbelief by suturing together the various gaps in the narrative. When the fleeting experience of a time-limited movie isn't enough, the viewer can attempt to freeze the look by claiming the object through fetishistic adoration (movie posters) or ritualistic reviewing (a task made easier by modern digital technology).

  The complicated, sometimes confused relationship between viewer and film is captured in the song Brownsville Girl, cowritten by Bob Dylan (who has starred, written and/or directed a number of films) and playwright, screenwriter and actor Sam Shepard:

  Something about that movie though, well I just can't get it out of my head

  But I can't remember why I was in it or what part I was supposed to play

  All I remember about it was Gregory Peck and the way people moved

  And a lot of them seemed to be lookin’ my way.

  Brownsville Girl, Written by Bob Dylan, Copyright © 1986 by

  Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International

  copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.

  The gaze has proven to be a powerful analytical tool, and one of its primary applications has been in feminist criticism. An influential essay by Laura Mulvey argues that Hollywood has typically used the gaze in a gender-biased manner—it is male characters who control the gaze and subsequently control the narrative of the film59 while female characters are primarily there to be looked at by the male characters. Therefore, viewer identification is located in a masculine perspective. Mulvey uses Freud's notion of castration anxiety to argue that staring at a woman is anxiety-provoking; for a woman viewer, the female star is a reminder of what she has lost, and to a man, what he could lose (literally, the penis; figuratively, power). Mainstream cinema copes with this voyeuristic anxiety by either punishing the woman (“bad girls” and “bitches”) or fetishizing her, making her into an untouchable superstar.60

  Mulvey exemplifies her argument by considering several Hitchcock films that express both sadism toward women and fetishism. In Vertigo, the first half of the film is dedicated to Scotty's (Jimmy Stewart) trailing of the graceful and sophisticated Madeleine (Kim Novak). Hitchcock uses long tracking shots that lovingly capture the beauty of both the perfect blonde and the city of San Francisco. The second half of the film explores Scotty's sadistic attempts to transform the unsophisticated lookalike Judy (also played by Novak) into Madeleine. Given the pleasure that the audience receives from Hitchcock's manipulation of the gaze, Mulvey argues that the purpose of her essay is to “destroy pleasure” by revealing the underlying sexist ideology behind the movie.61

  Closing Shots: The Boons and Banes of Interpretation

  This chapter has focused on interpreting movies as texts, symbolic containers that can be unpacked and f
ound to contain meaning. Some critics have argued it is a mistake to focus on anything other than the text—that focusing on filmmakers risks limiting interpretation to what they might have intended, which is largely inaccessible and sometimes inane and inarticulate (the intentional fallacy). On the other hand, focusing on viewers risks getting caught up in momentary emotional experience that takes the analyst away from the real truth contained in the text (the emotional fallacy).62

  Very few, if any, of the interpretations presented in this chapter succeed in completely excluding filmmakers and viewers. Some refer to the motives (particularly the unconscious sort) of filmmakers. And many interpretations, especially in the spectatorship section, discuss the experience of the viewer. Even when there are no explicit references to viewers, the use of language associated with psychology suggests an implied viewer.63 If critics refers to a film as “disturbing” it is reasonable to assume that they were disturbed or that they believe that the film is likely to disturb at least some members of the audience. Everything on the screen can potentially be taken as a reflection of the movie-makers and/or the audience.

  Despite the potential for psychological interpretations, the whole process of psychological interpretation is considered suspect by some psychologists, because it is not an empirical method—textual interpretations do not study human behavior because they do not involve gathering data about physical reality. This is a narrow and indefensible notion of empiricism however. Films are physical products of social activity; the interpretation of film involves closely observing and analyzing a human product.

 

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