January 9, 2012 | 1:45 pm

‘Downton Abbey’: A model for male love?

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Even in the Bible, love is never frictionless: Brothers betray brothers, sons betray fathers, fathers their sons, and so on. The message being that above all, faith in God is the only true fidelity. But that too, love between God and Israel, can be as turbulent and unpredictable as high seas in a storm.

Love is no less complicated in the modern world. Though, as Brendan Tapley writes in Slate, it is often the reputed domain of women. It was only after suffering his own heartbreak that Tapley realized this, having sought solace in a popular culture that to his chagrin, caters more to the romantic whims of women. Shattered and withdrawn, Tapley’s best available recourse was to re-read “Jane Eyre.”

After saturating himself in English literature, including several Dickensian offerings, Tapley happened upon a recent phenomenon of Anglo culture: the Emmy-winning BBC series “Downton Abbey.” Penned by “Gosford Park’s” Julian Fellowes, ‘Downtown’ serves as a dramatic study into the relationship between 20th century British aristocrats and their servants. It is a world of love, loyalty and war, where social values are the guiding raison d’etre, and social etiquette, the only true religion. It was in this mix of privilege and penury, duty and honor, that Tapley found the secret to his heartbreak. It was where he discovered, the true measure of masculinity:   

What many have derided as the era’s repression I saw as exacting a major upside: the lovers and beloveds of the time engaged in a scrupulous self-examination whose central quest was to be worthy of love. Furthermore, for the men, avoiding that quest—risking nothing in love out of fear, or apathy, or difficulty—was the true emasculation.

...The masculinity of Downton stood unapologetically opposed to this kind of posturing. What I was witnessing in Crawley, Bates, and Branson was a lived-out insistence that a soulful, ethical heart was the standard of a man’s love. It was curious to me how service to this standard did not render these men subordinate or submissive; on the contrary, it proved them real men. Even Lord Grantham, the patriarch, does not gain his nobility out of status but out of a refusal to shrink from the hard emotion as a factor in leadership, partnership, fatherhood—manhood.

Whether upstairs or downstairs, on this all men were equal. And so falling short of that standard, whether because one had loved wrongly or was wronged in love, was nothing to be ashamed of. Rather, it indicated a lesson our time has perhaps forgotten: that in order to be a man, following one’s heart—no matter perception or love’s undeniable terrors—must become non-negotiable. 

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January 9, 2012 | 11:43 am

Marilyn Monroe: Misery into majesty

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Towards the end of the film, “My Week With Marilyn” about the 1956 production of “The Prince and the Showgirl” starring Sir Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe, Olivier sits alone, in a dark theatre, as a scene of Monroe dancing flashes across the screen.

She is whimsical, self-possessed, incandescent.

Barely averting his eyes when his assistant enters the room, Olivier remarks that the same quality that makes Monroe a revelation to watch is also what makes her “so profoundly sad.” It reminded me what the book critic Dwight Garner said of the recently deceased novelist Wilfrid Sheed: “His pain fed his prose like an underground well.”

If “My Week With Marilyn” is about anything at all, it is a window into a star’s disconsolate emptiness. An emptiness, it suggests, that stems from a loveless childhood.

“Do your parents love you?” Monroe asks the same 23-year-old assistant, Colin Clark, whose personal account of the film’s production and his relationship with its star provides the basis for the film. “I’m sure they do,” he replies.

“You’re lucky,” Monroe says, her face full of sorrow.

History, as well as the film, suggests Monroe tried to reconcile the unrequited needs of youth with adult love affairs. During the period in which this film is concerned, Monroe had just married the playwright Arthur Miller, and although they feigned love for the cameras, there was deep discord between them. In one scene, Monroe weeps over Miller’s journals, in which he supposedly limned terribly hurtful things about her. Later, Olivier confesses to a conversation in which Miller more and less confided that he felt emotionally terrorized by Monroe.

Of course, she is well aware of her effect on men.

One night, after swallowing too many pills, she dolefully tells Clark (who is smitten with her) that the men she loves fall in love with Marilyn Monroe, and soon as they discover who she really is, abandon her. That narrative, played over and over in her head at night, blighted by pills and intensified by alcohol, overcame her rational sense.

Overwhelmed by despair and self-doubt, Monroe’s pain fueled her performance. She could be miserable one day, majestic the next—her career, the most stable force in her life. When Clark proposes she marry him and give it all up, she knows she can’t; the spotlight is her only safe space. Love can not be counted upon.

As Roger Rosenblatt, the journalist-turned-memoirist wrote in a recent book about his daughter’s death, “All I have to keep me afloat, all I ever had, is writing.” Pain sometimes has nowhere to go but to art. Even after suffering humankind’s greatest loss, the loss of a child, Rosenblatt admits, “In every heartbreak, beauty intrudes.”

Monroe, sadly, never completely realized her own beauty—the fullness of her talent, her disarming magnetism, that extraordinary comic charm. All those gifts remained, somehow, external to herself. But with extraordinary sadness swelling inside, a sadness which ultimately led to her death, she was, for many years, a vessel through which her many mesmerizing gifts were shared with the world.

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January 4, 2012 | 7:08 pm

Larry Ellison’s billion-dollar lesson

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Last night I caught a re-run of a 60 Minutes interview in which Charlie Rose interviews the billionaire Oracle founder, Larry Ellison.

Ellison is not exactly the reigning authority on living a meaningful life—he worships money and power, and has been divorced four times—but he is undeniably someone who has lived fully.

His childhood was not easy: He did not learn he was adopted until, as an adolescent, his stepfather blurted it out one night before dinner.

A description of his roots, according to Wikipedia:

Ellison was born in the Bronx to Florence Spellman, an unwed 19-year-old. His biological father was an Italian-American U.S. Air Force pilot, who was stationed abroad before Spellman realized that she had become pregnant by him.[7] After Larry Ellison contracted pneumonia at the age of nine months, his mother determined that she was unable to care for him adequately, and arranged for him to be adopted by her aunt and uncle in Chicago.[7] Lillian Spellman Ellison and Louis Ellison adopted him when he was nine months old. Lillian was the second wife of Louis Ellison, an immigrant who had arrived in the United States in 1905 from Russia.[7] Larry Ellison did not meet his biological mother again until he was 48.[8]

Ellison was raised a Reform Jew. He struggled through college, and then skipped his sophomore year final exams because his adoptive mother had died. He tried again at another school, but eventually dropped out. By age 20, he moved to Northern California where he eventually founded the software development company that would challenge Microsoft.

When Rose recalled that Ellison had spent one month of his life as the richest man in the world, topping his arch-rival Bill Gates, Ellison returned, “That was a grrrreat month.”

Ellison is quite the huckster, eager, ambitious, touting his accomplishments at every turn, but who can blame him after his adoptive father raised him with the threat that he’d never amount to anything?

“I had all the disadvantages required for success,” he said.

Ellison admits it took him awhile to learn the important things, like greatness isn’t a substitute for human closeness.

“One time [when] I was a kid, my sister walked into my room and said, ‘Larry, which is more important to you: to be admired or to be loved?’ And I looked at my very bright young sister and said, ‘Well for me, personally? To be admired.’ She looks at me and smiles—“Wrong.” Walks out. And it took me awhile to realize that all of us, all of us, want to be loved, that being loved is more important than being admired. It’s something we have a hard time accepting.”

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January 4, 2012 | 4:10 pm

Producing partners Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick to receive Writers Guild honor

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Longtime writing-producing-directing partners Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick (“Thirtysomething”, “My So-Called Life”) will receive the Writers Guild of America, West’s 2012 Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television for lifetime achievement in television writing. The ceremony will take place Sun., Feb. 19 at the Hollywood Palladium.

Though this honor counts them “among a small group of writers who revolutionized the television drama,” Herskovitz and Zwick have also produced many notable films together, among them “Defiance” about the WWII resistance fighters, the Bielski brothers, “Love and Other Drugs,” the rom-com starring Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, and “The Last Samurai” starring Tom Cruise. They have also been involved, centrally or peripherally in “Courage Under Fire,” “Legends of the Fall,” “I Am Sam,” “Traffic,” and “Shakespeare in Love,” for which they shared a 1999 Academy Award for Best Picture with several others producers, including Harvey Weinstein.

Having endured the requisite trials and tribulations that come with many years in the entertainment biz, they also deserve kudos for loyalty and partnership. It’s a real gift to be steadfast in challenging circumstances but these two have been as devoted as if in a marriage. In fact, at least for one of them, their partnership outlasted marriage.

Read the full press release here.

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January 4, 2012 | 3:23 pm

Aaron Sorkin heads to the stage with the ultimate Jewish escape artist: Houdini

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Aaron Sorkin, who is somewhat of a Houdini himself, will pen a Broadway play set to star Hugh Jackman about the Jewish disappearing act, magician Harry Houdini.

Houdini was born Erik Weisz in the late 19th century in Budapest, Hungary. His father, Mayer Samuel Weisz, was a rabbi, and after the family emigrated to America in 1878 became head of the Zion Reform Jewish Congregation in Appleton, Wisconsin. When his father lost his position with the shul, Mayer and son moved to New York City, where Houdini began performing tricks.

According to Wikipedia, “Ehrich Weiss took several jobs, making his public debut as a 9-year-old trapeze artist, calling himself ‘Ehrich, the Prince of the Air.’ He was also a champion cross country runner in his youth. [When] Weiss became a professional magician [he] began calling himself ‘Harry Houdini’ because he was heavily influenced by the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin.”

Houdini started off performing card tricks at the circus, then performed at Coney Island, but he soon gravitated toward something Jews do best—escape acts:

From 1907 and throughout the 1910s, Houdini performed with great success in the United States. He would free himself from jails, handcuffs, chains, ropes, and straitjackets, often while hanging from a rope in plain sight of street audiences. Because of imitators, on January 25, 1908, Houdini put his “handcuff act” behind him and began escaping from a locked, water-filled milk can. The possibility of failure and death thrilled his audiences.

Centuries of persecution have made many Jews expert escape artists. As my editor Rob Eshman once wrote, Jews created Israel to escape the world; they created Hollywood so the world could escape reality. Houdini’s life and work became a literal vehicle for escape, not only for himself, but for his fans. But although he enjoyed the illusions of magic, he despised dishonesty. As he matured, he took to debunking the so-called Spiritualists who claimed to commune with the dead. For awhile, he devoted himself almost entirely to exposing fraudulent Spiritualism, some say, an interest sparked by the death of his mother, by attending seances with a police officer and a reporter in order to reveal the victimization mediums inflicted upon the bereaved.

The difference between illusion and untruth is the part that most interests Sorkin. He told Deadline Hollywood’s Mike Fleming that the play will focus on the conflict between Houdini, an entertaining magician, and the Spiritualists, who claimed to have supernatural powers: “Rather than being a biography, Houdini, told in a contemporary tone, tells the story of an epic battle that took place between the world’s greatest illusionist and a trio of women, known as ‘Spiritualists,’ who convinced millions of people, including the editors of Scientific American and The New York Times, that they could communicate with the dead,” Sorkin said.

 

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December 26, 2011 | 4:08 pm

Sue Mengers’ epitaph: ‘Dirty, flirty’

Posted by Danielle Berrin

In Julian Barnes’ Booker Prize-winning novel, “The Sense of an Ending” he speaks often of memory and nostalgia. Implicit in his tale is how much perspective on history shifts when recollected over time.

Of an aging, good-looking woman, he writes: “The best way I can put it is this: she sees only what’s gone, I see only what’s stayed the same.”

I thought of that line reading Maureen Dowd’s postmortem homage to Sue Mengers, the renowned talent agent who died some months ago and was remembered in The New York Times Magazine’s annual ‘Lives They Lived’ segment. The issue purports to honor “ordinary people” but there was nothing much ordinary about Mengers. Accounts from those who knew her describe her personality as explosive, edgy, and my favorite, “full of exhilarating vulgarity,” as Dowd puts it. She was a groundbreaking female in a male-dominated industry and her private world was the stuff of Hollywood legend. And by that strange, specific code, you knew you were somebody if Mengers had you to her home.

Barnes’s line resonated because Dowd’s piece makes clear that she is remembering a woman whose best gifts endured despite aging and ill health. Naturally some of her professional powers diminished (an agent who doesn’t leave the house can hardly remain at the heights of a socially-driven industry). But Dowd focuses not on what Mengers lost, or how she declined, but on the essential qualities that remained the same—her charm, her sense of humor, her passion for fun.

And at least from this telling, we can know that a woman who narrowly escaped Nazi Germany at age 6, remained, until her dying day, so very Jewish:

When she started a sentence “Tip from Sue” or “Notes,” you wanted to run for the Hollywood Hills.

But she had a soft, warm side; she was a yenta who loved fixing people up, in work and in love. If a match struck, she would urge the woman, “We have to close the deal.” After Brad Pitt left Jennifer Aniston for Angelina Jolie, Mengers told me that she advised her beloved Jen to ask Brad for some of his sperm.
...
She borrowed some bon mots from her late husband, the director Jean-Claude Tramont. When a party was dull, she would murmur, “Schindler’s B-list,” and when a Tinseltown suit made a dumb move, she’d sigh, “God didn’t send his best Jews to Hollywood.”

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December 23, 2011 | 5:06 pm

‘Melancholia’ even when God exists

Posted by Danielle Berrin

“The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out… You’ve left me in the dark.”

Those are the lyrics to the Florence + The Machine song “Cosmic Love” but they almost perfectly capture the narrative knot of Lars Von Trier’s seductive meditation on sadness, “Melancholia.”

It took me some time to see the film, because, let’s face it—life is melancholia enough. Who wants to spend two rare, spare hours subjecting themselves to gloom and sorrow?

But then I read an interview with a director who talked about the value of being uncomfortable at the movies—we like to think we go to the theatre to escape the quotidian tragedies of our lives, but there is something to be said for escaping the distractions that prevent us from more deeply entering the complexity of our own emotions. So I guess you could say I was feeling melancholia enough to visit Von Trier’s “Melancholia” which juxtaposes a wedding and a cosmic collision, and which was one of the more memorable cinematic experiences I’ve had all year. Even though I watched it from my couch, a shame in itself since its images deserve the big screen. (And anyone who’s thinking ‘How could she see that anti-Semite’s film?!’ should read this.)

There is much to say about this movie. It is gorgeously shot, each frame photographic – a long take of Kirsten Dunst’s character floating down a river in all her bridal beauty evokes the painterly loveliness of Millais’s Ophelia as much as it captures the disconsolate emptiness of Shakespeare’s character. And the opening sequence, which plays supremely slow but breathtaking images against the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, is a captivating and ominous meditation, introducing the film’s leitmotifs as planets and people do a “dance of death” with each other.

Von Trier has said the film was inspired by his own experience with depression. A therapist reportedly told him that depressives fare better when facing catastrophes because they already expect bad things to happen. And indeed, the crazy person at the beginning of the film is the calmest at its end – which is, incidentally, the end of the world.

Contrasting forces serve Von Trier throughout: The entire film takes place on a magnificent estate, the Tjolöholm Castle in Sweden whose enchanting grounds and stunning indoor spaces are supposed to distract from the ugliness of what’s about to happen but of course, can’t. But it is the central irony of a wedding, the locus of possibility, promise and the future, hopelessly resisting the impending apocalypse. Love, it turns out, does not conquers all—in Von Trier’s world even parents are powerless to protect their children.

Broken into parts, “Melancholia’s” opening is followed by two almost entirely distinct movies that focus on its two central characters, a pair of sisters called Justine (Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who at first unwittingly live out their final days as if nothing’s going to happen, careening through the gauntlet of emotion: anger, denial, acquiescence—and eventually, terror and despair.

How do you behave on the quiet, overcast afternoon before the world ends? What conversations do you have? What happened the night before? How do you prepare your child for an event from which you cannot save him? 

Von Trier does not bring religion into the mix at all. There are no crosses or symbols suggesting redemption is possible. No last minute confessions, prayers, or kind words exchanged. There is only cowardice and suffering. And there is absolutely no mention of God.

I think it’d be easy to argue that Von Trier is positing an atheistic worldview. His is a Godless, meaningless, existential world where pain is the only truth. But there’s another way to read the film.

There is something spiritually magical about the final scene, when the two sisters and Claire’s young son gather in their “magic cave”. The teepee-like construction of tall, thin branches serves mainly as metaphor, designed not to protect them, but to focus them in a place where they can receive the elements. And there they sit when the blast occurs and the ocean explodes, holding hands, closing their eyes and accepting their fates.

Von Trier is sophisticated enough to know that God cannot save man from the inevitability of the cosmos, any more than God can erase desolation in the human heart, shield from bodily harm or inoculate against human hopelessness.

But as flesh and blood sit on the grass together, tears pouring, hands clenched, waiting for the collision that will reset the course of human history, God is right there with them.

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December 21, 2011 | 12:36 pm

Steven Spielberg: Still in the throes of movie passion

Posted by Danielle Berrin

“I just know what it feels like to be overwhelmed with a desire to make a movie,” the director Steven Spielberg told the New York Times, giving a clue as to why he has two movies in theaters this holiday season.

Spielberg directed both the animated adventure “Tintin”, based on the bestselling European comic books by Herge, as well as the film adaptation of the play “War Horse,” which his producer, Kathleen Kennedy first saw on Broadway.

Two things struck me about this interview. First, when the reporter asked him the question about why he wanted to make “Tintin”, he basically said that he saw himself in the character.

I became enthralled with the way Hergé told his stories. Grand, epic, global adventures about a young reporter who goes all around the world looking for stories to tell and then gets himself deeply involved, and dangerously involved sometimes, in the stories he’s telling. And then eventually becomes the story itself. And I always related to that because I do the same thing. I go out and look for a good story to tell and if I like it enough and I decide to direct it, I become dangerously involved in becoming a part of that story. 

The first thing that came to mind, of course, was “Schindler’s List,” which for Spielberg, became something of a permanent project. He invested heavily—both financially and otherwise—in creating The Shoah Foundation, a non-profit Holocaust memorial effort that cataloged visual histories of survivors. Holocaust preservation, subsequently, owes much to Spielberg’s personal connection.

Though his family-friendly fare is not every cinema-goer’s delight, that Spielberg himself is still ensorcelled by his vocation is kind of astonishing. Even at age 65 (which he became on Sunday), he still possesses the childlike wonder that attracted him to movies in the first place. And he isn’t afraid to try new things as “Tintin’s” experiment in form proves. “It made me more like a painter than ever before,” he told the L.A. Times last February.

The other bit I found both nostalgic and sweet was his admission that he runs a “mini-industry”—though he couches it in terms of community. It’s as if he works in an entirely different Hollywood than the one we’ve come to know, a cold-competitive corporate world that values profit above all. The way he puts it, Spielberg’s industry is a vestige of the way Hollywood used to be, preserved through the commitment of a devoted community.

[A]s an adult, filmmaking is all about appreciating the talents of the people you surround yourself with and knowing you could never have made any of these films by yourself.

My job was constantly to keep a movie family going. I’m blessed with the same thing that John Ford and Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock were blessed with, a mini-industry very similar to the one from the golden era of Hollywood, where it was the same people making movies with you each and every time. And it makes life so much more enjoyable when you get to go home to your family and go to work with your other family.

It’s redundant to say, but how Jewish is that?

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December 20, 2011 | 12:03 pm

Christopher Hitchens and deathbed poetry

Posted by Danielle Berrin

I once had this fantasy that I would read a dying man poetry by his bedside. There would be low lights and rain trickling past the windowsill and it’s only now I realize how much I had glamorized a hospital scene. Death is not romantic so I thought I’d make it so. Poetry seemed, to me, the only way to get close to someone leaving, the consummate end to a doomed relation. It’s only now I realize our relations go on even after someone is gone. We all live with ghosts. The wilting flowers in the wooden box, mosaic hearts like shards of glass, the apparitions that haunt the doors at night.

I would’ve liked to have read poetry with Christopher Hitchens. But since I never knew him, well, at least not in the conventional sense (we all feel we know the writers we read) I’m grateful Ian McEwan was there, bedside, with Hitchens, piloting him through poetry into the world from which there’s no return. Least not according to Hitchens.

McEwan writes in The Globe and Mail:

In the afternoon I was helping him out of bed, the idea being that he was to take a shuffle round the nurses’ station to exercise his legs. As he leaned his trembling, diminished weight on me, I said, only because I knew he was thinking it, “Take my arm old toad …” He gave me that shifty sideways grin I remembered so well from healthy days. It was the smile of recognition, or one that anticipates in late afternoon an “evening of shame” – that is to say, pleasure, or, one of his favourite terms, “sodality.”

That must be how I came to be reading The Whitsun Weddings aloud to him two hours later…

I set the poem up and read it, and when I reached that celebrated end, “A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain,’ Christopher murmured from his bed, “That’s so dark, so horribly dark.” I disagreed, and not out of any wish to lighten his mood. Surely, the train journey comes to an end, the recently married couples are dispatched toward their separate fates. He wouldn’t have it, and a week later, when I was back in London, we were still exchanging e-mails on the subject. One of his began, “Dearest Ian, Well, indeed – no rain, no gain – but it still depends on how much anthropomorphizing Larkin is doing with his unconscious … I’d provisionally surmise that “somewhere becoming rain” is unpromising.’ 

And this was a man in constant pain. Denied drinking or eating, he sucked on tiny ice chips. Where others might have beguiled themselves with thoughts of divine purpose (why me?) and dreams of an afterlife, Christopher had all of literature. Over the three days of my final visit I took a note of his subjects. Not long after he stole my Ackroyd, he was talking to me of a Slovakian novelist; whether Dreiser in his novels about finance was a guide to the current crisis; Chesterton’s Catholicism; Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, which I had brought for him on a previous visit; Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain – he’d reread it for reflections on German imperial ambitions toward Turkey; and because we had started to talk about old times in Manhattan, he wanted to quote and celebrate James Fenton’s A German Requiem: “How comforting it is, once or twice a year,/To get together and forget the old times.”

In Walter Pater’s famous phrase, he burned “with this hard gem-like flame.” Right to the end.

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December 19, 2011 | 4:23 pm

Against transformation: ‘Young Adult’, ‘A Dangerous Method’ and resistance to change

Posted by Danielle Berrin

In Khalil Gibran’s opus “The Prophet”, the story begins with a sage awaiting his ship—long has he been away from home. But when his ship arrives, the occasion is bittersweet; he knows he must journey forward and “return”—in Judaism, teshuvah, the ultimate spiritual act—and yet, he is deeply pained at what he is leaving behind.

Though he is divided in his heart, torn between two different places and two different selves, he knows that to stay is to die. It would be a spiritual death, a fatal malaise sprung from an inability to evolve. Hard as it may be, he has no choice but to take on the struggle:

“It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands,” The Prophet says. “Yet I cannot tarry longer. The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark. For to stay, though the hours burn in the night, is to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mould.”

The central spiritual urge in Judaism is the possibility for transformation. We need not be whom we have been; the soul is meant to grow. The theme is universal, and the conflict between who we are and who we might be is sharply reflected in character tropes at the movies. The very formula for narrative arc, for instance, practically demands that a character changes. Isn’t it usually some kind of revelation that brings on the happy end?

But sometimes, art chooses the real over the ideal. And this year, two movies in particular—“Young Adult” and “A Dangerous Method” – undermine traditional character tropes by resisting the religious impulse towards change. The reasons vary: it’s too hard, there’s too much baggage, someone is too old. Sometimes, the revelatory moment comes – the ship sails into the harbor – but we are frozen in a mould and let it pass us by.

Mavis Gary, played flawlessly by Charlize Theron in “Young Adult” is a miserable grown up. She earns a living as a ghostwriter for a once-popular young adult series and lives a cozy urban lifestyle in a Minneapolis high-rise. The interior of her apartment is as messy and confused as her psyche. And night after night, she falls asleep in a drunken stupor, a cashed bottle by her bedside, as the pathetic plots on “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” play out in the background.

The two things she has going for herself are that she is beautiful and sad. She’s unhappy enough to be daring – she decides to return to her hometown to reclaim her happily-married high-school boyfriend, and vain enough to believe in her delusions – he will want her back, because she is rescuing him from his simple, small-town life.

It is worth seeing the movie to witness the stinging and snide tactics Mavis deploys – often distinctively feminine and boorishly funny—to achieve her goal. Her sabotage, of course, is a direct result of her self-pity, and so, the more desperately she tries to wrest her former flame away from his contented life, the closer she nears to utter breakdown. After all, it isn’t really him she’s after, but some younger, brighter version of herself.

Then comes the moment of truth. After wreaking havoc on everyone else, Mavis looks inward. “I have to change,” she says to the only person around who will listen. But because that person is so taken in by Mavis’s demonstrable gifts – her beauty, her brains, her exciting urban life – she reinforces all of Mavis’s basest beliefs about herself. Mavis is restored. Why do all that work when it’s simpler to be who she already is?

Obviously, change can only occur with will. But even if the motives are there, to what degree can a person alter their fundamental makeup?

That is the central question in “A Dangerous Method” in which Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, the fathers of psychoanalysis (then, “the talking cure”) duke it out over just how much people can change. Is total transformation possible? Or is small, incremental change the best we can hope for? At the center of their dispute over the efficacy of psychoanalysis is a fundamental difference in worldview.

Jung is a man deeply tormented by his own sexual repression. He has chosen a profitable but loveless marriage and uses his work to work through his demons. He begins an affair with his patient, Sabina Spielrein, who fulfills his sexual and intellectual fantasies but is a blight on his family life—not to mention, a madwoman herself, whose sanity and stability teeters on the edge of safety.

Jung is a divided self. Near the end of the film, he tells Spielrein that his wife is the foundation of his home, his mistress is the perfume in the air, and that she is the love of his life. He is not seeking a workable solution to his complex problem; he is seeking redemption for his soul.

Freud, on the other hand, is foremost an academic, who avoids his own psychology by focusing on the psychology of his patients. He seeks to unmask the causes of repression, believing that a keener awareness might beget more self-control. His methodology relies on illuminating the grand psychoses so that their everyday manifestations (neuroses) become more manageable. 

Freud is a Jew. He’s seen too much. He knows the rhythms of history and how often, throughout, human beings resort to repeating patterns.

Jung, on the other hand, is not Jewish, but possesses the more religiously motivated belief system. He wants to know that transcendence is possible. That human beings can overcome the traumas that shape them and reinvent the contours of their lives. Spielrein, ironically, becomes his emblem: She overcomes mental illness, survives their affair, marries and has children, and establishes herself as a prominent voice in the psychoanalytic community. Then, the cruelties of fate intervene and she is murdered by the Nazis.

So much for transformation.

The precipice of change is a narrow bridge. And in the movies, as in life, it is difficult to cross without fear. Though the great sage, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav tells us to do precisely that: “The important thing is not to fear at all.” Judaism tells us that to live statically is to live slightly. Our souls should always be striving, journeying towards the place of promise, no matter how bewildering, exhausting or frightening the desert years.

There will always be arriving ships for souls adrift. Hearts will always be torn between differing desires. “[W]ho can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?” The Prophet asks. Leaving behind who you are in order to become who you’re meant to be is a task for the brave. It cannot be faked – even in the fictional world of movies.

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December 15, 2011 | 9:38 pm

Wisdom from ‘The Wizard of Oz’

Posted by Danielle Berrin

The Wizard to Tin Man: “As for you my galvanized friend, you want a heart? You don’t know how lucky you are not to have one. Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.”

Tin Man: “But I still want one.”

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