Copyright © 2012 by James Clark
As with The Artist, in its financially dangerous format of an obsolete mode of cinematic expression, A Dangerous Method (another stunning tour de force from 2011) thinks to make hay along lines of the even more forbidding strike of Socratic Dialogue.
I don’t know about you, but I tend to run the other way when a movie comes at me trotting out the supposed awesomeness of even one historical Titan; but this film packs two of them (two and a half, actually), the celebrated explorers of the modern psyche, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung (not to mention Feminist inspiration, Sabina Spielrein). Naturally enough, the play of ideas centers upon the Socrates of Jung in his (far from Platonically untroubled) bid to do some SWAT upon the esteemed Sophist, Freud. Breaking that possibly ruinous mold from the past, in this case, is Jung’s painful—very non-Platonic, and very cinematic—discovery that the dialogic format is not for him, and never was. Although Cronenberg is no stranger to sensationalizing rational research into the surprises matter brings to humankind, it is the prissy hothouse of an Initial Public Offering as to a new clan of academic hotshots (namely, those earnest, putative benefactors hiving to Freud’s psychoanalytic probe of human sensibility) that constitutes the pervasive (and thus unpromisingly [for film profits] austere) key of this film. Therefore, the question challenging commentary about A Dangerous Method is: How effectively does the work offer its audience the visceralness of its jailbreak from the asylum of classical rationality?
We receive a quite shatteringly earthy introduction to this distaff side of the debate in the first moments, where a girl smashes herself against the windows of a horse drawn carriage within an output of rictus so volcanic as to chill the blood of anyone along the road. Then she’s carried with much difficulty by the crews of both the vehicle and a clinic, to its entryway—a pure white, icily classical institution set in relief by an almost defiantly stark hillside of austerely Swiss lawn. As she is guided to her new catchment, we see with alarm the unsavoury, tense thrust of her prominent lower jaw, which, in conjunction with all four limbs stiffly splayed at incongruous angles, gives her the appearance of a huge, fractious insect. Dovetailing with this affront to civilized order, we see Dr. Jung, immaculately dressed in the finest of pre-Great War apparel, consummately groomed and the picture of measured engagement of life’s rough spots by means of clear-sightedness, and something else—namely, quiet solicitude toward an injured cohort. He’s immediately open for the self-directive features of her initial claim, “I’m not mad, you know.” As such (and his demeanor gives every indication he’s ready to think beyond the box as to “madness,” chronic derangement) he is all about “talk” (dialogue) “to identify what’s hurting you… a talking cure.” She becomes agitated in stepping up to this possibility, trembling and gesticulating as she declares, “I can’t bear to see any kind of humiliation…” Her father, it seems (“He was always angry”), was a relentless deliverer of humiliation to his children (“Whenever he hurt us, we had to kiss his hand”). Such an interactive tumble of Oedipal cues (in both deeds and words—Sabina, the girl’s name, redolent of the rape of the Sabine women, and a word drawn from the actual treatment history depicted; but heaven-sent for Cronenberg’s project) leads forward to the patient’s on one occasion managing to dash from the confines and into a nearby murky pond, and, on a second occasion play with her food as if it were already ca-ca. But, quite remarkably, it pulls back from being totally seduced into the old-science machinery of drives and complexes, which Freud had no problem enlisting into his claim to innovation. Though frustrated by having (the sessions with her just underway) to go off to serve out a term of compulsory military duty (on behalf of a fortuitous insularity), Jung does not fret as would a technician eager to apply a determinate cure, but instead tells her about the delay as if it were part of a much wider input of equilibrium. And, on returning (she having run amok with resentment at being abandoned), he promptly disarms her mutiny by bringing her into play with an offer that she “assist” his researches in view of her wholehearted zeal to get to the bottom of the range of equilibrium.
Though a citizen of Russia, Sabina has inherited a German surname, “Spielrein” (denoting clear, tidy play). Such a fascinating coincidence thrusts the scenario toward the much more consequential irony that the patient being the recipient of such radical (untidy) researches heads toward establishing for herself a comfort zone within confines gratifying by reason of not only their antiquated predictability but for their facilitating a realm of (tempered) wall-to-wall sexual violence. That is to say, her voyage toward normal functionality, by way of a thinker in major conflict with the enterprise of Freud, displays a soft spot for the lamb in wolf’s clothing that was Freudian psychoanalysis. One of her first actions as Jung’s clinical assistant and psychoanalyst-in-the-making, is to monitor the verbal and electronic responses of a subject to the self-consciously contrarian Herr Doktor Professor’s stream of suggestive terms—“Sex”/ “Male”… “Divorce”/ “No.” The pregnant and composed subject, whom Sabina cannily surmises to be his wife (to his surprise), leads the novice to suppose that the patient has “doubts” about her marriage. In another episode from this early stage featuring his wife, Emma, Jung’s far-ranging and self-challenging investigations come to be revealed as adopting the dialogue form of “talking cure” devised by Freud but perplexingly (to Jung) never explicitly elaborated. She suggests he confront the imposing colleague on the substance of that excavation, but Jung rather woodenly and self-doubtingly protests, “I don’t know him.” Her look at that juncture says, “So what? What is there to be afraid of?” The way the narrative is constructed consigns that generally placid relationship between Carl and Emma to a sidetrack, while the spectacular Orient Express that is the agitation of Freud and his militant clique (as ineptly but dramatically interrupted by Jung) and the equally blazing long freight and its burden of pig iron that is the torchy manoeuvres of Sabina and Carl devour the viewer’s time and energy. That would establish a perspective in accordance with the normality under multiple sieges here; but its implication in stunning change would include the exigency of not being suckered by flashy mediocrities. Speaking of which, let’s not overlook Sabina’s starting point of being readied by Jung for socioeconomic life both productive and problematic. It is that latter adjective that the intense but over-assertive starlet thinks to obviate by overestimation of what seems describable by the word “libido.” There is an early interview generously taking the measure of this plunge to derailment. Jung asks, “Can you explain why your nights have been so bad?” She complains, almost suffocating from tension, about a sense of a great snail or mollusc or snake invading her bed, writhing and slimy across her back. His next question, whether she had been masturbating just before the frisson that clearly carried an ultimacy to her that he could not subscribe to, leads her to not only confirm that generator, but to sketch a landscape of troubling precipitation. Her father would frequently lock her in a room, tear off her clothes and beat her. “I liked it! It was exciting! Just entering that room made me wet! It happened everywhere… in school! There’s no help for me! I’m vile and filthy!” In selling this universe of gloomy conclusiveness, actress Keira Knightley is not only riveting but very touching. Cronenberg has pointedly installed ingénue, Sara Gadon, in the role of Emma, in order to put into this bloodshot mix large, limpid eyes and the carriage of an heiress to a fortune so vast as to sustain surroundings of remarkably restrained luxe. And, as a final touch, though she’s usually apologetic (to him) about looking so unattractive in her frequent pregnancies, her body language is unfailingly youthful, exuding an easy forward momentum of energies, striking in a context of crushing disappointment and exhaustion.
The kindness and disciplines Jung extends to Sabina play a large part in her acquiring accreditation as a medical doctor. But his inducements to that wider range of strivings get nowhere with her. Whereas, on finally visiting Freud at his inner sanctum in Vienna, Jung sadly marvels at the steadfast program of disclosing consciousness from a strictly sexual perspective—recognizing the master’s rhetorical agility and energy, but also looking askance at his acolytes as “bohemians and degenerates”—such a restriction is right up Sabina’s alley, and she goes on to practice psychoanalysis on the basis of her own presumably rich and comprehensive experience. Freud’s skirmish with the (“unscientific”) renegade (whom he, at the outset of their interaction recognized for incisiveness so keen that he would single out Jung as his heir apparent) now become a complete rupture, the power broker would remark to Sabina, “Put not your faith in Aryans (like Jung). We’re Jews, and Jews we will always be.” (On the occasion of their first meeting, Freud implores Jung to cease straying, in his studies, from strict rational, empirical, scientific procedures, especially because his crusade on behalf of the new empire of elemental lucidity cannot bear attacks on the grounds of prizing phenomena not readily introducible to the general population. He goes on to sweat about his little army being vulnerable inasmuch as all its members are Jews.) While still toying with the offer to one day take over Freud’s vehicle (a hesitation that speaks volumes about his difficulty with jacking up his skepticism, about the causal ultimacy of orthodox rationalism, to the level of a thoroughgoing skepticism), Jung joins Freud and some of his minions on an ocean voyage to gain converts in America. In a minute but strangely disconcerting moment of drama, on boarding the boat, Freud and the faithful heading for economy class, Jung informs them with an easygoing smile that his wife has booked him along with her into a First Class cabin. Therewith, the tenuousness of his links to the Realpolitik of cultural clout is vividly and fluidly underlined. On beholding New York harbour and the Statue of Liberty, Jung allows himself to be buoyed by the newness of the New World and his involvement in it; Freud, standing next to him with a scowl on his face, can only foresee some tough slogging on the rubber chicken circuit.
The debate thus shaped comes to be laced through with protracted and anguished sexual manoeuvres between Jung and Sabina, as bringing to a head the unspoken but burning issue of love in a context of pretenders to mastery of same. Most viewers, from out of considerable expertise on that subject, would find in this channel the factor compelling them to hang around. As such, A Dangerous Method (secretly referring to its playing fast and loose with the laws of movie smarts) quite brilliantly ushers a wide spectrum of the population into a range of problematics wild horses could never drag them into directly. Freud, here looking almost embalmed (a pharaoh, perhaps), perpetually drawing like an ancient banker upon a durable cigar, does a diversionary chess move in terms of, “All I know is I’ve simply opened a door” (leaving out the point that that door directly feeds into a cell that would only be gratifying to a timorous dogmatist, a figure who would in fact faint, on one occasion, on being confronted with a non-syncophant). Jung’s wife also seems to suffer from a very tight range of motion, but she has the grace to understand herself as a work essentially in progress and a work, furthermore, never to be about vicious self-aggrandizement. Jung—stuck with a Trojan Horse (a Knight chess-piece) by Freud, on the pretext of relieving his caseload, namely, a young medic, Otto (another Crown Prince in Freud’s eyes), who is all about “freedom” and “natural pleasure” in galloping libido—is further shaken by what to him is the cogency of Otto’s case and his ridicule of the host/therapist’s monogamous tendencies. Otto sneers at the unsteady clinician’s sense of professional and personal outrage in the proposal he fuck the ever-hot Sabina. (“You should beat her within an inch of her life.”) Whereas Jung tries to maintain, “Pleasure is never simple,” Otto objects, “It is, until we decide to complicate it… Freedom is freedom.” As a measure of the faltering grasp he has upon a wider range of passion than the sizzle of sex, he no longer hesitates accepting Sabina’s invitation (punctuated by an impulsive kiss) to visit her at her flat with the bay windows. The ensuant blood gives us to understand this was Sabina’s inaugural moment—a nice touch for a relationship skirting upon something more than the mechanics of “pleasure.” Though she corners him into admitting that with Emma “habit” is the order of the day, he cannot subscribe to Sabina’s schema that he sustain both the bright Swiss watch and her own dark sensuality. “With me it’s another thing in another country… I want you to punish me.” Although his own intensities anger and frighten Freud—in their threat to his movement’s intellectual respectability—as a form of non-Semitic irrationality (“mysticism”), there is rich irony in Sabina (when the chips are down, a lead-pipe rationalist-atavist), during her days of med student free-wheeling reflection, being the means to Jung’s refinement of that invitation about a country where the “more” takes root. Though a scandal to Freud—who successfully has her back down from which, before enlisting her as his assistant—Sabina primes her academic dissertation with some form of the Wagnerian sense of purity by way of impurity, a dialectical process by means of which the ego is subsumed within a confluence of sexual and death instincts. Though Jung continues upon lines of binding her and whipping her, only when he pulls back from such an abyss does Sabina ask in shock—breathing for the first time a word hitherto out of bounds and something of a shock to our own ears—“Don’t you love me anymore?” She goes on to stab him in the face and menace him with, “I could have done much worse.” Now pregnant and married to someone she makes a point of characterizing as a “Russian Jew,” Sabina visits Jung and Emma at their villa and—after ominously gushing to Emma, “Your children are glorious!” (Later she would repeat the overreaching with her former lover, “Your children are beautiful!”)—she hears that Jung is immobilized by depression in the aftermath of his clash and total break with Freud, a disablement which we know (and she knows) includes the real danger of equilibrium harbored within the (facile) Freudian method of engaging the elements of consciousness. Sabina then goes to the lakeshore where Carl sits staring ahead, and hears his resentment that Freud has refused to offer treatment to him. On the other hand he reaffirms the crux of the termination: “We have to go into uncharted territory to help the patient reinvent himself, to send him off on a journey.” In addition to that bewildering division of loyalties, he acknowledges that he has another mistress to try to assimilate with his wife. (Doing a bit of quick analysis, Sabina self-approvingly comes up with the correct hypothesis that the new girl is a Russian Jew.) “Emma is the foundation of my house. Toni is the perfume…” Then he assures Sabina, “My love for you is the most important thing in my life.” He regards her belly, and adds, “This should be mine.” His last words to her—and perhaps as far as he would ever run with this task—are, “Sometimes you have to do something unforgivable just to go on living.” We see Sabina in the taxi leaving the estate, distraught but more resignedly so than she was when coming into his life. We see Jung frozen with a sense of hopeless impasse quite absent from his exploratory procedures that induced her to grow up somewhat.
A Dangerous Method superbly brings us up close to the fallout of daring to undertake the loving intensities of consciousness. Though he would assure Sabina, “You were the jewel at great price,” Jung could only sail the vehicle she entailed toward a distant, garbled vision of lucidity and grace (she herself having entirely scuttled her own purchase upon integrity). Unable to let go of supposed intellectual obligations to the person and empire of Freud; unable to effectively see through the empty, destructive megalomania of Otto; unable to let go of real obligations to Emma who, despite facing his verdict that she is worthy but a bore, can wholeheartedly tell him, “You’re a good man. You deserve what’s good;” unable to let go of sophomoric Sabina; unable to let go of Toni, the perfume—Jung hovers before sensual steps (well spotlighted but, for him, impossible) apropos of the weave of carnal violence and carnal gentleness, sexuality along lines of a death-announcing frisson. The sadomasochism sent screaming his way by Sabina, coming to absorb and distort his endeavors, is given a delicious rendition on the ship’s deck overlooking the New York skyline. Jung declares, “Take it from me. What we’re looking at here is the future.” Freud, proving astonishingly impervious to any innovation but his patented treadmill (he would have Sabina take vows in accordance with the tepid asceticism informing his program of recreational reflexes, to wit—“The world is as it is. Psychic health is about accepting it”), intones, like some effete Attila, “Do you think they know we’re on our way… bringing them the Plague?”
There would be ways—as Jung could postulate but not discern—of circumventing the grinding savagery and banality of hidebound psychological disclosures about consciousness. To begin with the paternalistic, domesticated, egotistical and Plague-like superabundance of sexuality which Jung was hard-pressed to illuminate at non-pathological proportions, a researcher more acute (and less driven by an orthodox agenda) than Freud would notice about sexual intercourse not simply clashing flesh and its causal zoo but affection for the beauties of the whole sensibility as consumed by abysses that show their own affective embrace of the finite presences, thus loving presences. In this light, Emma, the only amateur in a circle of high-powered discoverers, would ask Jung—ill at ease with being a Swiss reservist—(at the moment of bearing him a son), “Will you come back to us now?” Her disadvantageous positioning would be tantamount to a camp-follower urging desertion to a warrior consumed with mavens of blood lust and doctrinal proselytization. (Sabina goes through a rough patch with the doleful Viennese Commander, apropos of her explicit enthusiasm for Jesus-the-battered, in her dissertation readily recanted for the sake of a career both socioeconomically commanding and culturally obsequious [beaten-down].) At the first appointment with her at that white-washed, spare facility resembling a military stronghold, perched as it is on the vantage point of a hill, he could still—while enacting the interview method devised by Freud (but, tellingly, not followed up by the latter regarding subjects in their full consciousness, as distinct from their dreams as readily slotted into the Oedipal slot-machine)—focus upon “thoughts” coming to Sabina when she stopped talking. Although what Sabina could report was simply her father’s abusive hand (i.e., a family-political entanglement), the point was overt in its looking for clues about consciousness in less musty, more unpredictable territory. (On hearing of Sabina and her being so suited to “the talking cure,” and on learning that her mother had tried to hook her up with Freud, Emma remarks with pleasure—in recognition of a playfulness within experience—“What a coincidence!” And true-pro scientist Jung snaps back, “I don’t believe in coincidence.” Then he rattles on about the excitement he feels in going along that path, and she, perhaps trying to get him out of what she senses to be an abstruse rut, draws his attention to the fetus kicking in her guts.) Face-to-face with Freud, he presses the case for cutting the libido-to-the-fore, off-putting sensationalism. “Use another term.” But he readily capitulates to Freud’s maintaining that any other term would quickly devolve to the sexual juggernaut, the precedence of libidinal energy—thus showing how little real conviction is behind his hunch that the sexual schema has been wildly overplayed. His loading his plate (at a dinner with Freud, his large family and Emma) and proceeding to wolf it down before the others had been served, amusingly casts light on his woeful self-possession and unsuitedness for the circumspective pressures of cultural fire-fights. On the other hand, another amusing incongruity, about Freud’s correcting Jung’s pronunciation, “psych analysis” in deference to the “better sounding,” “more correct”—“psychoanalysis”—finds our protagonist intent upon probing a psyche without taking for granted the classical rational tradition. Freud’s modest rejoinder to his colleague, “I’ve set foot on the shore… The country exists,” does not, however, come close to mooting the possibility that that range of consciousness include a major setback to the hegemony of orthodox securement—a possibility implicit in Jung’s mustering, “There must be more than one hinge into the universe.” At the breaking point between them—Jung dipping into some speculative reflections along lines of a universe that feeds back in startling ways to individual initiatives—the still young man asserts, “There are so many mysteries… So far to go…,” and the voice of the past counters with, “It won’t do!”
After a visit from the still credible celebrity, Emma has no qualms about writing him off with, “I’m not sorry to see the end of him.” And, with pronounced disintegration in the air—coming out of Jung’s tortuous vacillation, including derailment of the freight (“I’m married. Is it right for us to perpetuate this deceit?”) and, first lying to Freud (being pestered by a vengeance-prone Sabina) in denying that he had blundered into an affair, and then, his jewel in blackmail mode, admitting he had succumbed to an “occupational hazard” (a narrative tremor coming eerily close to the deadly fluctuations informing the series, Mad Men)—we are left with a remarkable taste of the painful enormity of bringing consciousness into a creative timbre. On hearing of Toni the Perfume, Sabina fixes Jung with an amazed look and asks him, “How do you do it?” Marvelling, as she does, at a colleague’s powers of multi-tasking on behalf of independent exploration, she would not consider that Emma’s forbearance (not to mention her millions) might have something to do with keeping things afloat. (She had bought him a fine sailboat.) Perhaps the love buoying that patience constitutes an unsung parallel endeavor, a dangerous enough method in itself, with noteworthy traction. The brilliant screenplay, by Christopher Hampton, based on his stage play, The Talking Cure, leaves Emma and her powers by and large eclipsed by the cultural heroics of those surrounding her. It being almost obligatory to assume that an heiress to a fabulous fortune, a habitué of breathtaking elegance of house, home and person, would be a spiritual underachiever, especially in a context of painstaking and very public aspirations on the part of acquaintances, we would be lulled into confirming Sabina and Jung’s declaring Emma to be a purveyor of “habitual” love-making, in absolute contradistinction to their “other country” of deeply informed eroticism. That would seem to overlook the possibility that workaholic Jung might have something to do with any lack of sparkle. The gentle affection of his body language toward her affectionately solicitous constancy far outstrips the perfunctory, clichéd quality of declarations like, “What we have is sacred, sublime.” But, as with everything else he does, such mustering of class is infrequent and unsteady. For all his studied repertoire of patrician composure, the supernaturalist tilt of his oeuvre is far less than aristocratic (far closer, in fact, to that of Freud, endlessly fussing about his legacy [his “immortality”] and being patently more driven by fame than lucidity), less than the unspectacular (and alarmingly “uncinematic”) energies Emma emits in the course of maintaining a domesticity that (in its primal dimensions) could (and almost imperceptibly does) rise above the banal. (Her unexpected interruption of his ragged improvisation—“You didn’t expect me to give up without a fight?”—carries a remarkable authority within a scenario seemingly sold on “Anything goes.”) Amidst a grandiloquent formal park in Vienna, with its impressively frozen sculptures of wild animals that never were wild, Freud boasts to Jung, “Here is where many of my greatest ideas came to me.” Emma’s take on inspiring landscape tends toward gliding in that sailboat (in which, on one occasion, Freud was clearly ill at ease)—which she had presented to her husband in terms full of hope and promise (“…the boat you always wanted… with red sails…”)—with the man whose love she tries, with tempered joy, to make the best of, an event which left shore-bound Sabina, on one occasion, glowering their way.
