Why Does Everyone Love “A Dangerous Method”

 

 

I don’t write much on this blog these days, but I had to take twenty minutes of my day to write down why “A Dangerous Method” is *not* a dazzlingly brilliant film. The plot circles and winds through turn-of-the-20th-century Switzerland and Austria, recounting Carl Jung’s early treatment of Sabina Spielrein, his repressed and unhappy wife Emma, and the arch of his relationship with Sigmund Freud. The film has been touted by many critics and viewers as a subtle masterpiece engaged with historical giants of the earth. But Cronenberg’s film, to me, falls flat at all points meaningful.

I get it, I get it: Jung is the metaphoric representation of the ego in both sexual and intellectual registers in the film. He engages in a lusty masochistic id-affair with Sabina (Knightley) with all of her dramatic conclusions that wreak of acting rather than mania. Yet, Jung is unable to abandon his wife Emma, the “foundation of his home” and superficially idealistic woman. Professionally, he is the awe-struck, contemptuous, and blatantly reverent-while-blind chosen one of Frued’s. He attempts to find some more attainable and spiritual version of psychoanalysis than the high-highfalutin rigidity with which Freud attempts to cauterize the field. But, his professional and psychiatric relationship with another prominent analyst, Otto Gross, sends him into a tailspin: to fuck the patient or not?

Throughout the unfolding of this movie, subtle and delicate as it may be, I think that my issues with this movie are more with the lack of follow through in “historical representation.” Throughout the movie we are practically beaten to death with the Jewish question in Jung’s biographical life. Viggo’s Freud tells Sabina to trust the Aryan Jung, 20 minutes to the credits, because we are both Jews, and Jews we will always be.

Again, at the end of the film, when Sabina meets Jung for the last time at the eve of the war in 1913, she asks him about his new mistress. She asks if she is similar to Sabina: “is she your patient? is she Jewish? is she studying to be a doctor?” Jung smiles and saying something about perfume in the air, tells Sabina about his dreams that Europe will be bathed in the blood of bodies and death.
AND THEN THE MOVIE ENDS! What a let-down. I think that the dynamics between Sabina and Jung and Freud could have been so well dramatized and problematized for us

if THE WARS weren’t supposed to be the silent and already-understood breaking-off point of society or meaning. So look, if Freud and Sabina are both Jews, and Jung has this inexplicable attraction to “The Jewish” perhaps the metaphor grows more complex: perhaps the ego drive is at war with two “others” who can cope and exist with each other without destruction. Only when the “human” ego comes into contact with these forces is there conflict, violence, and death. The motor of life and death is a uniquely human struggle.

Then again, in an epilogue, the film explains that Sabina and her children were murdered by Nazis, that Freud was forced out of Vienna by the Nazis in his old age, dying of cancer, while Jung lived until 1961, dying peacefully and alone. BAH but the film completely disregards Jung’s fascist fan boys, those brown shirts. His “human” theory is left hanging clear of his historical liaisons with the Nazis and the Aryan unconscious. What would this mean, carried out in film, if we were to see how the rational, the human, the middle roading ego lapses, quite easily, into fascism and exploitation. All of a sudden, the viewers would have been implicated in the sea of blood that they dreamed about, the war and the culture that died with it that somehow contemporary culture still valorizes.

What would that have meant? But instead, we are left in the shadows of history, of the personal dilemma. We are left to identify with with historical pre-programming.

short titles, waking up in darkness

Reading Hegel again is difficult for me. Just as is writing in this blog. Perhaps Hamlet’s phraseology is dangerous for me. I spent so much time at the end of college wanting to appear or be what I could not have been. And now, I feel as though I am treading against a current of thoughts and convictions that are so obviously false and maligned. I strive to make a better day that will do some justice to the first feelings of commitment that I had. I should say that I do still have them. I should say that all my writing on the university and of student life was just the beginning.

But it is such a sad beginning, for all its would-be powerful rhetoric. I think it is most sad in speaking of “the university” because it is still a marker of identities. There has certainly never been a willfully united consciousness and it would be insufficient to say that looking back through recent history provides the blanket-walls of any universal movement. There is a cruel joke played on all of us, on every reader in time and on the imagination who would lose his own. The failures of the past were manifest in the fragmentation that was embedded in a historically-forced unification. The working class in England during Marx’s time, contained, I think, the same potentiality for striation as the globally disenfranchised do today. Only the highest rate dialectition might have articulated this narrow band that connects man to another in untold slavery.

The articulation of many identities and forces that were perhaps supposed to bolster the unity of the universal have in fact shown the utter fragmentation and nihilism of such articulations. I have to say that I do not believe in bastions of the past. I must renounce the university. I must renounce enfranchising women and blacks and poor men. I would sooner spit on some federation of groups and wishes and promises for a troupe of identities. I must say that I hate the bodies that we resurrect to march in the form of long-dead souls. All for image’s sake! All for the ease of extending that great myth we cannot even whisper without gasping under the burdening debt we owe to names.

For why are any students in the American university, actually (not just in flowery potential), other than for a job? What are the strictures of state-funding and parental support? Is it not for the economy? Are these hopes and dreams enough? Is black potential so radically free from the perdition of the working day?

Why have we who used to have to call ourselves among the names of: women, men, slave, worker, believer, student, still tumbling on crumbling foundations that oppressed us?

I must say that the fixtures of identity are powerful myths only when we make use of them as myths, as retelling the ancient rhymes of eternal will. Eternal will is realized without a face, its spirit condemns all strongholds and waits with hands unarmed but reaching for the barrels–prepared to fight.

And in a fragmentary moment all of history is waiting to be smashed open from the confines of our names, assigned as they were, even before our births.

a man of one’s own time.

It is hard to imagine that it is possible to be a man that is fully himself and of his time. To be “of time” is to exist and persist in spite of the climates and attitudes that shape the course of politics and thus of daily life and action. Most men are of time as a matter of happenstance; some show a great effort in spite of the inimical Current of Events, though most have up to now submitted themselves to it before they were ever aware of it.

It is difficult to speak of these men, even the valorous example, without falling into the despair of loosing count, of the overwhelming forgetfulness of history, and without searching and compacting all being in time into a vacuum-pack story of comfort, of violence, of apathy. There is, I think, a possibility of transcendence. There is a manner of emerging from the back-breaking agony and constraint of effort against time to the divested fullness of experience.

There have been many men of their own time and we think of them often, perhaps without recognizing how it is or why we do it. These figures are emblematic–living fully in their epoch and engaging firmly with the politics and problems that bear down upon them. These figures grapple and shift the mire of their own circumstance and build (not only direct) their masts into the ocean-scape of history. The man of his own time, in effect, replaces conceptions of time and we in turn remember him as the marker, rather than periodizing him from the opposite direction.

How often we think of the great revolutionaries of the American and French variety, the writers and policy makers in collusion with the grander tides of Enlightenment thinking. There are men who also articulate, confront, and govern the vicissitudes of their own era without succumbing to its blustering trends; there are eternal men of politics and of thought and of action. The men of politics speak against the tyranny of context with the fury of their lives; the men of thought think eternally of ought in plain defiance of is; men of action die in an instant with the power of forgotten yesterdays and never-promised tomorrows as if to prove that time existed. And for every founding man, or Great Man of Philosophy, there are men whose names are unknown to us, as if barred to us as we would be sinners against them. The revolutionaries without faces, without organs, these men whose affirmation of history and living might slip through the comprehension of our minds if we did not find a flag for them, or placard  the rubble of a blockade wall, or a read a mythic novel that reinvigorates a wilting legend.

The men with names, the authors and thinkers and political men, these are men for whom the searching man would exchange with history. Perhaps the searching man finds himself transported out of himself believing instead that his place is among the appellations of 18th century fraternity, of republican severity. There are those of us in search of history and in search of ourselves who delve freely into the great myths of time and perhaps do not ever truly reclaim ourselves from fables. Myths of history are often seductive: they isolate space from space, and color the clouds and grass and cities with a more austere pallet than we grant the present weather capable.

The man of his own moment is a lover of myths and of eras, but does not attempt to paint the world around him, but for the essential and eternal (if not persistent valuations) of humanity. The man of his own time is he who is he who might see the fullness of what could be instead of the dismal and disparate collisions of time. What possibility remains for him is all that might be written, done, dreamed of, without bending to circumstance. Circumstance is the illusion of continuity. In a word, the man of his own time is an author who is for what ought in search to marry the possibilities of the future to the dross and destitution of is; this man is an author of the present.