Recent trends in super-ego movies

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djross
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Recent trends in super-ego movies

Post by djross »

The premise underlying this post is that it may be useful to divide movies according to the components of Freud's "structural model" of the psyche: id, ego, and super-ego. Obviously this raises several theoretical questions, first among which is whether this tripartite division remains useful or valid in psychology today, and second among which is on what basis psychoanalytic categories can be extended to collective or aesthetic objects such as films.

These are not questions I can deal with here. Nevertheless, in my view, the medium of film is one that invites artistic constructions with a significant psychological aspect, and this more or less justifies the idea of applying psychoanalytic concepts (hence for instance the popular notion that every monster movie is really about a hero who projects his repressed feelings outward with such force that they assume material, monstrous form). But I also tend to think that so-called "film theory" tends to do this applying in a rather cavalier way, without paying sufficient attention to the fundamental questions of what kind of thing a movie is and what it means to interpret a film in any way whatsoever, let alone psychoanalytically. But that's just my hobby horse.

Leaving that to one side, however – which obviously means I'm guilty of doing the very thing of which I am accusing film theory, but where I am telling myself this is OK because it is within the confines of a Criticker post rather than an academic treatise – it does seem to me to be possible, in a very/too simple way, to divide films according to Freud's second topography.

So, then, this is to suggest, for example, that there are "id" films, such as, for instance, horror movies whose aim is to tap into individual and collective fears, but where fear and desire are inextricably linked, so that our "primal" fears cannot be divorced from our primal drives. Such films try to expose us to contents found in the dark depths of our soul, for better or worse.

Ego films would be all those that try to negotiate with the id and find a "healthy" pathway through our relationship to our fears, desires and guilt. Every conventional movie that presents a character's "conflict" and then resolves that conflict through the narrative would have some relationship to this kind of "ego" film. By the end of the movie, the audience is supposed to have travelled along the same journey with the main characters, emerging with a better understanding, renewed faith, a sense of hope, to have grown just a little, become just a little bit better person, or whatever. You know, the usual junk (but this is not really to say there can't be good ego movies).

A super-ego film would be a third kind of movie, not just one that thematises questions of guilt, but movies that are intended as a kind of super-ego for the audience. This would include "worthy" movies designed to teach us important lessons about the crimes and prejudices of the past, movies whose goal is to make us realise just how wrong we have been all this time, movies that show us that we are the problem, and so on: you know, the kind of movies favoured by the Oscars and all that (but not limited to those kind of movies).

Of course, it goes without saying that the boundaries here are neither hard nor fast. In so far as such categorisations are possible at all, most movies probably contain elements that can be considered to belong to all three components (The Sixth Sense is a film in which it would be possible to locate all three of these topical areas as rather equally distributed, I think, in a way that perhaps accounts both for its success and for its unresolved contradictions). And, in any case, if we understand Freud as a thinker of tendencies rather than oppositions, it is probably best to understand his account of psychic structure in a non-rigid way. The other argument being put here is that such categories also evolve historically, in the first place because Hollywood needs ways of telling the same stories differently, or telling different stories in the same way, or however the hell they work out what movies to finance. The law of genre is one that develops over time, however slowly.

There isn't space here to conduct some kind of full analysis of the way Hollywood goes about creating products that more or less conform to these categories, or how this has changed over time, and I haven't conducted that kind of analysis anyway. I'll simply make two observations about recent movies that have a large "super-ego" content.

First, in 2010 we had two big movies, featuring the same star, whose theme was slowly revealed to be the inability of a husband to admit to himself that he is responsible for the death of his wife, and who therefore engages in an extremely elaborate psychic construction simply to avoid having to confront the crime for which he is guiltily, criminally responsible. Both Inception and Shutter Island can be construed as remakes of another Nolan film, Memento, but there is something remarkable about two big movies coming out in the same year possessing this identical premise and structure. In both cases, these movies can be understood as arguing that cinema is itself the mechanism by which men evade the reality of the everyday crimes they commit against women, and the super-egoic "drama" of both films lies in the insistence on gradually forcing the audience to confront this guilty reality (and so potentially redeem cinema itself, absolve Hollywood of its own guilt: this is the very meaning of the super-ego film). Looper could be cited as another, slightly different, variation on this theme of guilty husbands and fathers, but this last case is perhaps more of an ego movie in that it proposes an escape route, even if this is through the absolute disappearance of the husband and father from the scene: that escape means disappearance would then be what places it between ego and super-ego.

Since 2010, however, there has, perhaps, been a shift in focus, from the guilt of husbands and fathers to the guilty feelings of mothers. I refer to "guilty feelings" rather than "guilt", here, because whereas this first of group of movies is concerned with the unresolvability of this guilt, the second group is more concerned with the possibility or otherwise of coming to terms with guilt, if not of resolving it completely. Such a shift perhaps moves these movies more towards the "ego" rather than the "super-ego" end of the spectrum, but I would argue for the relevance of the latter in the choice of a theme whose bottomless depths of mourning and guilt go beyond ordinary ego conflicts (and where it should not be forgotten that the super-ego is not just censoring and authoritarian, but also productive and authorising, so to speak).

The films I am talking about here are two big-time Hollywood science fiction movies, one from 2013 and one from 2016, both the work of male directors perhaps eager to gain the respectability that comes from tackling something "serious" within the commercial limitations of genre. What these films, Gravity (the title telling you just how weighty it intends to be) and Arrival, have in common is, of course, the notion of a woman having to confront the traumatic, unresolvable fact of having lost one of her children. This is what the films are really about (hence the complete lack of interest in Arrival in actually pursuing the ostensible theme concerning the nature of alien communication, which is simply "solved" by a cut from one scene to another, conveying a short passage of time in which somehow or other the answer has been discovered). The temporal trickery utilised in the narrative of Arrival is unimportant here (and seems, if anything, just a way of differentiating itself from the former film, while at the same time the movie essentially repeats the main thematic elements of yet another Nolan film, Interstellar, with its "power of love" nonsense and all that), for in both cases what the film asks is if, whether, how and in what way it is possible for a mother to "move on" from the inevitable profound feelings of mournful guilt aroused by such tragedy. This contrasts with the earlier films focused on wife-killers-in-denial, movies in which the concept of "moving on" would be literally anathema. In this more recent sequence, identification with the protagonist is ultimately meant entirely positively, even if we "can't possibly imagine" what it's like to be in their shoes, whereas in the earlier movies our identification with DiCaprio's character is ultimately meant to generate internal conflict for the audience (another recent film thematising maternal guilt is the 2015 movie Room, which, like The Sixth Sense, can be understood as possessing strong elements of id, ego and super-ego, but in a less contradictory way, or so it seems to this viewer).

As in 2010, there is something remarkable about this thematic duplication within a short space of time, and in this occurring in two films belonging to the same genre, into which this theme of "mothers whose babies have died (or will die)" has been injected in rather an "artificial" manner, it would seem.

So what does all this mean, you ask, and where will Hollywood head next, since it surely can't just keep telling these two same stories about guilty husbands and guilt-ridden mothers? No idea. That's it, I'm out. Sorry.

Stewball
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Re: Recent trends in super-ego movies

Post by Stewball »

I think the super-ego can be thought of as our self-aware consciousness in the pursuit of Truth, where Truth can be found in knowledge, justice, love and beauty--objective Truth to subjective Truth. It's the part of ourselves that sits back and looks at our passions and asks which are worthy, which are destructive, and what's possible?

I never thought of movies in terms of the super-ego before, but it turns out that all of my 10/10 masterpieces are super-ego movies.

(500) Days of Summer
2001: A Space Odyssey
The Accountant
Black Snake Moan
The Counselor
Detachment
Fiddler on the Roof
Gladiator
Her
Inception
Inherit the Wind
Jesus Christ Superstar
Life of Pi
Like Sunday, Like Rain
O Brother, Where Art Thou?
Undisputed
Zero Dark Thirty


O Brother is probably an exception, it being more oriented more towards egoistic humor than any sort of moral or epiphany. They all share another quality, an expression of bittersweet hope--with the exception of The Counselor, which can better be thought of as a warning.

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