Psychology at the Movies

by Skip Dine Young

  According to Spoto, Hitchcock's insecurity about his physical unattractiveness led to obsessive relationships with his lead actresses. The Hitchcock “type” (blonde, sophisticated, cool, and unattainable) appeared in his films from the 1940s through the 1960s (e.g., Ingrid Bergman, Tippi Hedren, Grace Kelly, Kim Novak). Hitchcock had notoriously intense relationships with these actresses. He could be attentive and adoring; Kelly affectionately described how Hitchcock sought her opinions about her wardrobe in Dial “M” for Murder.17 He could also be perversely controlling and maintained extraordinarily unrealistic standards. He was outraged when Vera Miles had to drop out of Vertigo when she became pregnant with her third child. He told her that “one child was expected, two was sufficient, but that three was obscene.”18

  Spoto sees Vertigo as the quintessential example of Hitchcock's psychic obsessions. During the first half of the film, Scotty trails mysterious, ghostly Madeleine (Novak), the wife of a rich college chum, through an equally mysterious and ghostly San Francisco. At first, she is idealized and out of reach. But as soon as Scotty initiates an affair, she falls to a death from which he, crippled by a fear of heights, was incapable of saving her. In the second half, Scotty tries to make over Judy (also Novak), a dark-haired, vulgar Madeleine look-alike. He is relentless, meticulous and thoughtless as he transforms Judy into his memory of Madeleine. Eventually he discovers that Madeleine and Judy are the same person, hired to take part in a murder conspiracy.

  As he drags Judy up the stairs of a mission bell tower, Scotty chokes out the following dialogue:

  He [the murderer] made you over, didn't he? He made you over just like I made you over—only better. Not only the clothes and the hair, but the looks and the manner and the words . . . And then what did he do? Did he train you? Did he rehearse you? Did he tell you exactly what to do and say?

  Spoto believes this speech is not simply a description of the characters’ actions in Vertigo, but also describes Hitchcock's own attitude and treatment of his leading ladies.

  Martin Scorsese

  For an industry that is often accused of being secular and agnostic, it is interesting how many great directors are preoccupied with religious and spiritual themes. When Martin Scorsese made The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, he brought his religious preoccupations to the foreground, but these themes were evident in all of his previous movies—including Travis's (Robert De Niro) pseudo-Biblical speeches in Taxi Driver about the coming rain that will cleanse the filthy city streets, and the religious preoccupations of Charlie (Harvey Keitel) in Mean Streets.

  Biographer Vincent LoBrutto argues that much of Scorsese's visual flare and aesthetic sensibility come from the rituals and sacraments of the Catholic Church—the focus on blood and the body, intense myths, a rich color palette reminiscent of stained glass. These images overlap the cinematic themes found in the gladiator movies, historical epics, and religious spectacles that were popular when Scorsese was growing up in the 1950s.19

  Of course, these images and themes are not unique to the Catholic Church but are also related to pagan influences that go even further back in Scorsese's Sicilian heritage.20 While Catholicism was important to Scorsese's family while he was growing up, there was always suspicion of the Church and nobody else in his family was especially devout. LoBrutto concludes that ultimately cinema was Scorsese's true religion and that Catholicism was important mostly for its visuals.21 However, Scorsese apparently internalized the morals and dogma of the church more than his family; he was briefly in seminary and intended to enter the priesthood. The movies won out, but the religious themes of guilt and redemption form the backbone of his work. While LoBrutto emphasizes the sexual guilt in Scorsese's early preoccupations, a broader sense of being inadequate as a human being still haunts Scorsese: “I took the Gospel very seriously. I wondered then and I still wonder whether I should quit everything and help the poor. But I wasn’t, and I'm still not, strong enough.”22 Consistent with this lack of resolution, many of his characters struggle for redemption, but rarely find it. In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle's redemption in the eyes of the press and the law is demonstrated to be ironic and false. It is only the character of Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ who is strong enough to unequivocally make the right choice.

  Akira Kurosawa

  Psychobiographers, like many developmental psychologists since Freud, tend to pay special attention to events in childhood—including the relationship to parents, socioeconomic hardships, and traumatic experiences. While childhood is important, its influence may be overstated. The developmental aspects of adulthood have not been given equal attention.

  A lifespan approach to the career of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa provides one alternative.23 Kurosawa's most famous and critically hailed films such The Seven Samurai and Rashomon were made in the 1950s when Kurosawa was already in his forties; he lived to be 88 and made films into the 1990s, though for the most part, these are not as celebrated as his earlier work. It may be that the evaluation of Kurosawa's later films is based on a developmental misunderstanding—critics considering the older style of an experienced artist from a middle-aged analytical perspective.

  Like many artists, Kurosawa turned more inward as he aged. After a great deal of personal turmoil and a suicide attempt, starting in the mid-70s he consciously decided to make films that were more autobiographical yet also less realistic. Some critics see this shift as a loss of artistic focus and control. Yet, by loosening the story and abandoning a youthful cinematic propensity for action, Kurosawa's later films capture the reflective stillness of a contemplative life. Dreams (eight vignettes that embody Kurosawa's own dreams) is an attempt to create “biographical space” for the resolution of previously competing life forces.24 This artistic accomplishment was only possible by an accumulation of life experiences both in and outside the cinema.

  Star-Gazing: Profiles of Actors

  Most movie stars have an instantly recognizable public persona—qualities that are attractive and intriguing. This public perception is often exaggerated as stars tend to play variations of the same character over and over. Even at public venues like the Academy Awards, they present a stylized version of themselves. Such appearances effectively become yet another role that contributes to their star quality. In the end, it is this stardom that outshines both their acting roles and the reality of their daily lives. Their fans come to feel that they know these stars. In some ways, they seem to have normal human qualities and are relatable. Yet, in other ways, movie stars are not like other people at all. They are in fact “bigger than life” and somehow purer.25

  Star power is so potent that, for many Hollywood movies, an argument can be made that the stars are the real auteurs. A John Wayne movie or a Will Smith movie defines what the characteristics of the movie should be and how it needs to look. It is the job of the other filmmakers, including the directors and screenwriters, to construct such a movie around its star.

  The psychobiography of movie stars explores how an actor's roles, public persona, and private life intermingle. Movies are unlikely to be transparent replicas of an actor's underlying personality, but they may act as distorted prisms for his or her psychological reality.

  Jack Nicholson

  Nicholson's body of work is impressive, particularly the films he made in the 1970s, from Five Easy Pieces to The Shining. While these films were directed by renowned filmmakers, critics believe it is Nicholson's performance that defines them. As an actor Nicholson projects the intensity and psychological complexity of post-Brando movie acting, yet he is also a throwback to an older Hollywood in the sense that no one would ever say he “disappears” into his roles. Whatever the character, part of his appeal is that he is always “Jack being Jack,” a characteristic that invites psychobiographical analysis.

  Patrick McGilligan's Jack's Life (1994) explores a variety of psychobiographical themes, but it is Nicholson's parentage that stands out as most unusual. His mother June gave birth to Jack when she
was 18. The father of the baby is unclear. In order to allow her daughter to pursue a show business career, Jack's grandmother Ethel May took over the role of raising Jack, telling him that she was his mother and that June was his sister. Jack's grandfather and nominal father, John J., moved out when Jack was a baby, though they continued to have sporadic contact as Jack grew up.26 Nicholson did not find out the true circumstances of his birth until he was contacted by a reporter from Time just as Chinatown was being released in 1974. This revelation reportedly had a strong emotional impact on Nicholson and he tearfully told the story to various confidantes.27

  Starting with Bobby Dupee's infamous “chicken salad” tirade in Five Easy Pieces, Nicholson's acting has become associated with intense emotional outbursts. Often these eruptions have a strong air of righteousness about them. In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, McMurphy is the noble truth teller in the oppressive environment of a mental ward. In early interviews, Nicholson emphasized the importance his family always placed on honesty.28 Biographer McGilligan claims that Nicholson's cinematic tantrums were perfected when the young Jack wanted attention from the women in his grandmother's beauty parlor.29 This behavior, combined with the fact that major secrets were being kept from him, might lead one to reinterpret the grown-up tantrums of Bobby, McMurtry, and other Nicholson characters. Seen in this light, such outbursts take on a frantic, searching quality, where truth is not something that has been found, but something for which the characters, like Nicholson, are desperately striving.

  Angelina Jolie

  Angelina Jolie is perhaps the preeminent young female star of the modern age. Since winning Best Supporting Actress in 2000 for Girl, Interrupted, Jolie has been a regular media presence, either because of her movie roles, her personal life, or her humanitarian efforts. One constant feature of her public persona is her sexuality. Even in a movie that has minimal explicit sexual content such as Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, her hyper-toned body is nearly fetishized. What makes Jolie particularly modern is her openness about her sexuality, particularly practices like bondage, bisexuality, and tattooing that are generally associated with alternative lifestyles. Freud's observations about the motivating power of sexuality are clear in terms of Jolie's celebrity but you could hardly say it is treated as a buried secret.

  Jolie's only major biography this far, Angelina: An Unauthorized Biography by Andrew Morton, devotes substantial attention to her racy image. Its index includes bisexuality, S&M fetish, and romantic relationships with various famous people, as well as such pathologized topics as cutting, drug use, eating disorders and “knife fascination.” Childhood and humanitarian work are also included, but curiously, there are no entries for acting and other professional topics typically prominent in the biographies of filmmakers. Passages like the following are sprinkled liberally throughout the book: “While there was sexual hesitancy on film, among the actors and crew [of Foxfire] there was no such inhibition, the eight-week shoot turning into one long and decadent sorority trip.”30

  Morton attempts to explain Jolie's sexuality as the results of her childhood and parenting. A lesbian relationship in her early twenties is interpreted as an attempt to seek revenge on her father, actor Jon Voight, because she knew he would not approve. Morton bolsters his analysis of Jolie's bisexuality by soliciting the perspectives of a psychoanalyst—“Bisexuality is part of being lost. . . If you don't understand yourself and what you need, you are going to experiment”—and a psychologist (in reference to Jolie allegedly being left unattended in her crib)—“If you are [a woman] starved for intimacy, if you have been abandoned, you feel like nothing. If you have an attraction to a woman, it is going to end up sexual.”31

  Such opinions, particularly the causal connection between newborn attachment and bisexuality, are not accepted by most mental health professionals, and their truth is dubious. They do, however, succeed in providing explanations that are more lurid and provocative than the behaviors they are attempting to explain. Instead of her simply being involved in a lesbian relationship, readers form a picture of Angelina Jolie as a wild, lost little girl running around Los Angeles, desperately searching for her mother by doing a lot of “experimenting.” It's the kind of thing that gives psychobiographies a bad name.

  Cast Psychology

  Despite the inordinate attention given to movie stars and star directors, movies are not made by individuals. No matter how charismatic an actor or how visionary a director, filmmakers don't work alone. Movies are the reflection of many people working together on a shared purpose over a lengthy period of time. More than the sum of these individual experiences, the pieces fit together in unique ways. The famous aphorism, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,”32 can be readily applied to psychobiography.

  Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci had a revelation about the interdependence of cast and crew on the set of his vast historical epic 1900:

  For a long time, I thought that a movie was the expression of one person. That's why I started making movies when I was very young. I was coming right from the experience of being a poet. [Eventually] I had to accept that the film was also the expression of and the result of a collective creation. Everybody in the crew, everybody on the set, participates in my movies.33

  The collective psychology of every participant also rubs off on the movie. Bertolucci points out how the use of non-professional shepherds added an air of authenticity to a film about the history of Italy. And actress Fiona Shaw likens the film crew to a family (albeit a peculiar kind, where everyone on the set is avoiding their real families34). A darker version of how group psychology can affect the final product is captured in Francis Ford Coppola's comments about Apocalypse Now: “It was a little like the Vietnam War, a group of people went into the jungle and went mad.”35 For better or worse, the interactions of many people coming together are what's responsible for the ultimate meanings and feelings contained in a film.

  Recently, there has been a trend toward filming epic stories in a multi-movie series (The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter) that requires the cast and crew to work intensely over a period of years, sometimes filming in physically challenging locations. Like all modern blockbusters, these films have plenty of visual effects, but their phenomenal success has just as much to do with the bonds between the characters. The actors involved in these marathon shoots speak movingly about the intense camaraderie that develops among the cast and crew. The friendships formed behind the camera manifest themselves in the movies. Harry Potter director David Yates expressed this sentiment regarding one of the final scenes with Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint): “It wasn't just the actors playing the scene, it was the kids reflecting on growing up in this moviemaking world, and I believe a bit of that has ended up on [film].”36

  Psychology for Filmmakers: The Case of Woody Allen

  Psychology is not just for psychologists. The ideas of Freud and Jung have spread beyond academia and the therapist's office to be adopted by laypeople, including biographers. Some filmmakers have been influenced by psychological concepts in their own lives and art, providing many “how to” hints for the film industry.

  One of the most significant developments in twentieth-century theater and film acting was the so-called Method. Based on the work of Stanislavski, it was developed by Lee Strasberg for his Actors Studio and popularized by actors of the 1940s and 1950s including Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Paul Newman. Method acting encourages artists to find the emotions and motivations for their characters inside themselves. This inward turn was part of a post-Freudian zeitgeist that emphasized subjective experience and multiple levels of consciousness.37

  Some psychologists have packaged psychological insights specifically to help actors, directors, and screenwriters develop characters which are psychologically complex and realistic. Writers are encouraged to align their characters with ancient archetypes such as the hero, the wise man, and the fool to forge a more profound connection to the audience
.38 The goal is not just to access parts of an individual's unique self but to connect with those parts of the self that everyone has.

  A number of stars, directors, and movie moguls have experienced clinical psychology themselves. In Hollywood on the Couch, Stephen Farber and Marc Green (1993) explore the long, intense, and sometimes inappropriate history of moviemakers who fell under the spell of psychology, particularly psychoanalysis. In 1924 Samuel Goldwyn offered Sigmund Freud $100 000 to help fashion a love story with psychoanalytic insights.39 Freud declined without comment, but many other psychoanalysts were on hand to offer their assistance. Most of their methods did not correspond to modern standards of care. A psychiatrist employed to be Judy Garland's crisis counselor on The Pirate assisted the producer and director, Arthur Freed and Vincente Minnelli, with the editing of the film.40 This type of influence by psychologists continued in Hollywood for decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, pop psychologist John Bradshaw developed a professional relationship with a number of celebrities including Barbra Streisand. He influenced the making of The Prince of Tides, both in the characterization of Steisand's Dr Lowenstein and in the plot device based on a cathartic revelation of abuse.41

  But it is Woody Allen who holds the closest association with psychology in the public imagination. Certainly therapy plays a prominent role in many of his films. In Husbands and Wives, a shelf of Freud's books is visible behind Gabe as he conducts self-revealing interviews with an unseen documentarian/quasi-therapist. In Another Woman Marion (Gena Rowlands) finds her life altered when she overhears a suicidal patient talking to her analyst. In Allen's films, therapy is presented as part of the New York intellectual lifestyle. In Annie Hall, Alvy (Allen) even pays for the analysis of his therapeutically naïve girlfriend, Annie (Diane Keaton). Occasionally, Allen's therapists are harshly satirized, such as when Helen (Demi Moore) in Deconstructing Harry repeatedly ends therapy in order to start love affairs with clients, or Mary's (Keaton) therapist in Manhattan who Isaac (Allen) ridicules by saying “You don't get suspicious when your analyst calls you at home at three in the morning and weeps into the telephone?”42