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zelempaI finally saw A Dangerous Method, the Freud and Jung movie, on the last night of its run. Viggo Mortensen, My Friend Michael Fassbender, and Keira Knightley were all on point, selling their characters, being all method and whatnot; and the script started out seeming promisingly fast-paced and melodramatic, sort of a psychoanalysis-flavored pulp romance in the grand and doofy tradition of Spellbound, but it went nowhere fast. Important events happened offscreen. People said surface-profound, actually-meaningless things. Every scene turned into two of the leads talking about the third, absent lead, except those scenes which were not even conversations but letter-writing. Time-jumps of two or more years seemed to happen between each inconsequential scene. It felt like the screenwriter was in the next room, feverishly Wikipediaing, writing, crumpling, red-penning each next scene moments before the actors came in to get it in the can in one perfect take.
Michael Fassbender's Carl Jung, especially toward the beginning of the movie, is wide-eyed and eager, with a tendency to look at whoever he's talking to like he is the only other person in the world, and, during the course of conversation, to wholeheartedly come to the other person's way of thinking. The only reason it takes him so long to succumb to Keira Knightley's persuasively earnest Sabina Spielrein (and another colleague/patient's creepy free-love agenda) is because he has a couple of intervening conversations with his wife or whatever and gets convinced back in the other direction.
I found this characterization pretty entertaining, even endearing: it excused a lot of cowardly/asscovering behavior for me. Of course he doesn't have the strength of his convictions. They're not really his convictions. He's malleable, and that's what makes him such a good conduit for new ideas, but it also means you can't expect him to behave the same to you from one day to the next, even if yesterday he gave you a totally righteous spanking and it felt like love.
But then suddenly Jung starts having the strength of totally weird convictions we never see him develop, like his belief in the supernatural, which Freud mocks. Dudes! If you're going to suddenly give him these unshakeable beliefs that not even Magic Freud can talk him out of, at least show us who seduced him into having them.
Viggo Mortensen's Freud is quiet, thoughtful, and enigmatic, which is probably a pretty accurate portrayal. It's tough to care much about him as a character, though, or about his relationship with Jung, because it always seems like one big question mark. He SORT OF seems to like Jung but also seems to be keeping his distance from the beginning. There is definitely a possible Freud-hearts-Jung reading, particularly in the scenes where Freud refuses to tell Jung his dream (Jung takes this as an affront, believing that Freud is not taking him seriously as a colleague, apparently not entertaining the possibility that jumped immediately to my mind) and also the scenes in which Freud rides in Jung's sex boat. Considering the obviously pervasive themes of EVERYTHING IS ABOUT SEX necessary in a psychoanalysis biopic, I'm surprised they didn't textualize the homoeroticism.
Oh, and there are some themes about privilege, particularly vis. Protestant Jung vs. Jewish Freud (and Spielrein), but they're just sort of there.
The movie seemed to want to capture the heady days at the beginnings of the psychiatric field, when the human psyche was uncharted territory, every bullshit theory seemed equally likely to hold deep explanatory power, and there were no pesky ethical guidelines. When your job is all about stepping outside the taboos and morals of your own society, when the progress of your field (and your own inquisitive disposition) demands that you subject your kneejerk right-and-wrong instincts to cold impersonal scrutiny, on what basis are you to form a moral code for your own behavior? Now, we may find it trivial to say that there's nothing wrong with consensual dom/sub play but sleeping with your patients is deeply ucky, but to a Victorian they might have looked about the same.
I think this is maybe what the movie WANTED to say. It left me wondering however what its thesis actually was. Did it believe that Jung was wrong to sleep with his patient? Things seemed to work out OK for her, and Jung, while he was sort of coming apart by the end of the movie, seemed to be more upset about his professional dispute with Freud than about the guilt of the affair (and he was casually having another one with a woman we never even saw). Did the movie see Jung and Sabina Spielrein as star-crossed soulmates who, in another time and meeting under other circumstances, would have been totally awesome together? If so, does the movie just think it is totally okay to sleep with your patient if you like really really like her? I don't know.
Although "I love you... as your physician" was a pretty awesome line.
Michael Fassbender's Carl Jung, especially toward the beginning of the movie, is wide-eyed and eager, with a tendency to look at whoever he's talking to like he is the only other person in the world, and, during the course of conversation, to wholeheartedly come to the other person's way of thinking. The only reason it takes him so long to succumb to Keira Knightley's persuasively earnest Sabina Spielrein (and another colleague/patient's creepy free-love agenda) is because he has a couple of intervening conversations with his wife or whatever and gets convinced back in the other direction.
I found this characterization pretty entertaining, even endearing: it excused a lot of cowardly/asscovering behavior for me. Of course he doesn't have the strength of his convictions. They're not really his convictions. He's malleable, and that's what makes him such a good conduit for new ideas, but it also means you can't expect him to behave the same to you from one day to the next, even if yesterday he gave you a totally righteous spanking and it felt like love.
But then suddenly Jung starts having the strength of totally weird convictions we never see him develop, like his belief in the supernatural, which Freud mocks. Dudes! If you're going to suddenly give him these unshakeable beliefs that not even Magic Freud can talk him out of, at least show us who seduced him into having them.
Viggo Mortensen's Freud is quiet, thoughtful, and enigmatic, which is probably a pretty accurate portrayal. It's tough to care much about him as a character, though, or about his relationship with Jung, because it always seems like one big question mark. He SORT OF seems to like Jung but also seems to be keeping his distance from the beginning. There is definitely a possible Freud-hearts-Jung reading, particularly in the scenes where Freud refuses to tell Jung his dream (Jung takes this as an affront, believing that Freud is not taking him seriously as a colleague, apparently not entertaining the possibility that jumped immediately to my mind) and also the scenes in which Freud rides in Jung's sex boat. Considering the obviously pervasive themes of EVERYTHING IS ABOUT SEX necessary in a psychoanalysis biopic, I'm surprised they didn't textualize the homoeroticism.
Oh, and there are some themes about privilege, particularly vis. Protestant Jung vs. Jewish Freud (and Spielrein), but they're just sort of there.
The movie seemed to want to capture the heady days at the beginnings of the psychiatric field, when the human psyche was uncharted territory, every bullshit theory seemed equally likely to hold deep explanatory power, and there were no pesky ethical guidelines. When your job is all about stepping outside the taboos and morals of your own society, when the progress of your field (and your own inquisitive disposition) demands that you subject your kneejerk right-and-wrong instincts to cold impersonal scrutiny, on what basis are you to form a moral code for your own behavior? Now, we may find it trivial to say that there's nothing wrong with consensual dom/sub play but sleeping with your patients is deeply ucky, but to a Victorian they might have looked about the same.
I think this is maybe what the movie WANTED to say. It left me wondering however what its thesis actually was. Did it believe that Jung was wrong to sleep with his patient? Things seemed to work out OK for her, and Jung, while he was sort of coming apart by the end of the movie, seemed to be more upset about his professional dispute with Freud than about the guilt of the affair (and he was casually having another one with a woman we never even saw). Did the movie see Jung and Sabina Spielrein as star-crossed soulmates who, in another time and meeting under other circumstances, would have been totally awesome together? If so, does the movie just think it is totally okay to sleep with your patient if you like really really like her? I don't know.
Although "I love you... as your physician" was a pretty awesome line.