Movies and the Mind

by William Indick

  Unlike the classical heroes in Greek mythology, who are blessed with many weapons, gifts, strengths and allies from the gods, the underdog starts out with very little going for him. The underdog hero (Sylvester Stallone) in Rocky (1976) is a two-bit fighter who has to break thumbs for a local numbers-runner in order to get by. Daniel (Ralph Macchio) in The Karate Kid (1984) is a skinny, insecure, fatherless teen used as a punching bag by the local high school toughs. And the hero (Kirk Douglas) in Kubrick’s epic Spartacus (1960), begins his journey as the ultimate underdog,a lowly slave sentenced to die. These heroes have to compensate for their own circumstances and insecurities in order to develop as a hero, but they also have to change their basic concepts about themselves in order to succeed.

  Overcoming Inferiority

  Rather than feeling happy at being given a shot to fight the champion, Rocky feels overwhelmed and inadequate. His tireless training is a tremendous act of overcompensation, but his heart is not truly in the fight until he realizes that winning is not the most important thing. His desire to become the next champion is an unreal goal, so Rocky restructures his self-concept to create a more attainable and personally meaningful objective—to merely “go the distance” with the formidable champion. Though he loses the title fight to Apollo (Carl Weathers), Rocky succeeds as an underdog hero by proving to himself that he could give his all and go the distance with the champion. Rather than stating his goal as the desire to dominate over Apollo, Rocky aspires merely to do the most he can do, achieve his personal best, and not give up.

  Similarly, in Daniel’s moment of critical development in The Karate Kid, Daniel expresses his realization that karate is not about winning a championship, but about finding a sense of “balance” in his life. Daniel learned from his mentor, Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), that individual achievement is not about defeating a rival, but about achieving a personal victory over one’s own demons. Daniel goes on to win the championship, but he does so to achieve a sense of “balance” in his own life, not in order to feel superior or dominant over others.

  Overcoming Superiority

  In Spartacus, the title character leads a slave rebellion against the ruling class. In the end, Spartacus must restructure his self-concept when he realizes that, although his rebellion against the Romans was not successful, what matters the most is that the cause of freedom was a just and honorable cause—regardless of whether it was lost or won. While Spartacus is crucified at the end, he is a victorious hero. He has the integrity of knowing that he led an honorable life, he has the promise of a better life for his son, and he has the pride of knowing that his legacy of freedom will live on after him. His superiority is not the superiority of the dominating patricians, but the superiority of a former slave who broke his chains and lived the life of a free man.

  Sibling Rivalry

  Adler’s concept of sibling rivalry is an extremely common theme in films. In Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Jane (Bette Davis) received most of the attention as a child because she was a big star (“Baby Jane”). It is clear that her original impulse to be successful was driven by desire for her father’s love and approval, and that this primary drive became transformed into a secondary drive for success, motivated by a need for fame, fortune and the love of the masses. Jane’s sister Blanche (Joan Crawford) was the quiet one. She was favored by their meek mother but yelled at by her father, who displaced his anger at the spoiled Jane on Blanche, the quiet “untalented” daughter. But after childhood, Blanche becomes a famous movie star, while Jane grows up to be a forgotten has-been. The sibling rivalry turns into rage when Jane’s jealousy at being the dethroned child star is directed completely onto Blanche.

  For most of the film, Jane and Blanche are stuck together in the steel cage of their house, as Jane tortures her sister for becoming the favored child. They exist completely within the psycho-sadistic realm of early childhood, in which the secret, unmentionable desire to see the sibling rival fail is a primary motivation. In seeing or even causing the failure of the rival, there is a shameful joy. In the light of a sibling’s failure, one’s own failures in comparison seem less lamentable and one’s own successes seem even more triumphant. For Jane, the easiest way to feel good about herself is to degrade her sister by causing her physical, emotional and psychological pain. The original motives behind Jane’s hatred for Blanche—the desire for father’s love—are lost in the distant past. What happened to Baby Jane is that her original desire to be loved transformed itself into a demented and irrational need to hurt and destroy her sister in the cruelest ways possible.

  Crimes and Misdemeanors (revisited)

  The sibling rivalry in Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors is a bit less distinct. Cliff (Woody Allen) and Lester (Alan Alda) are not biological brothers, they are brothers-in-law, linked by Wendy (Joanna Gleason), Cliff’s wife and Lester’s sister. Nevertheless, the brothers-in-law display the basic elements of a classic sibling rivalry. Cliff is depicted as a good, artistic filmmaker with devotion to his craft and social consciousness. Though his work is not as commercially successful as Lester’s, it is quality material rather than pop, mass-medium fluff. Cliff resents Lester’s commercial success, while Lester resents Cliff’s aesthetic posturing. Both characters are also in love with Halley (Mia Farrow), the producer of the documentary about Lester that Cliff is directing. Throughout the film, both Cliff and Lester engage in rivalry over the love of Halley, the approval of Wendy, and a sense of personal integrity in their work. As their characters and the plot develop, we see both of these men express happiness when the other character fails in some way, basking in the knowledge that his brother-in-law is somewhat diminished in the eyes of the ones they love.

  Ben-Hur

  Prince Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) is a rich and powerful Jew in the Roman colony of Judea. Ben-Hur (1959) begins with the return of his childhood friend, Tribune Messala (Stephen Boyd), from Rome. Judah and Messala were “like brothers” when they were growing up. Judah’s sister was even in love with Messala, but now there is conflict between them. As Deputy Governor of Judea, Messala needs Judah’s help in curbing the growing anti–Roman sentiment among the Jews. But Judah refuses to betray his people by becoming Messala’s stooge. The connection between these “brother-like” characters is so strong that if they cannot be allies, then they must be enemies. Messala punishes Judah by unjustly condemning the Ben-Hur family and exiling Judah to sea as a galley slave. Judah spends three grueling years as a galley slave, the only thing keeping him alive being his hate for Messala and his desperate desire for revenge.

  The Race. The intense sibling rivalry between Judah Ben-Hur and Messala is represented literally and figuratively in the famous chariot race sequence. Messala (Stephen Boyd), left, and Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston). Ben-Hur (1959), Warner Bros.

  THE RACE

  Judah’s lot turns upward when he saves the life of a Roman consul who then takes a liking to Judah, eventually frees him and adopts him as a son. After some years, Judah returns to Judea, now as the son of a Roman consul to Emperor Tiberius. Like a moth to a flame, Judah is drawn back to Messala and their ongoing antagonism. The sibling rivalry between these two main characters is depicted with extreme drama in one of the most memorable action sequences in film history, the famous chariot race. The visual symbolism of the good brother, Judah, racing white horses and the bad brother, Messala, racing black horses is not lost in this massive sequence, in which Messala is ultimately defeated and trampled to pieces. The race-as-rivalry motif is made clear in Messala’s dying words to Judah. In a final act of malice, Messala tells Judah that his mother and sister are not dead, as he thinks; rather, they are alive, but suffering a fate worse than death as miserable lepers. He tells Judah, “The race is not over! It goes on! It goes on!” The rivalry between the siblings continues, though the original motivation is lost. Though Messala dies, he revels in the fact that he can hurt Judah one last time before his death. But in the end, Judah is ultimately the triump
hant brother in the sibling rivalry. Judah lives, and his hatred for Messala inspires him even after Messala’s death to defy the Romans and support the cause of the freedom-yearning Jews of Judea.

  9

  The Personal Myth

  Rollo May was born in 1909 in Ada, Ohio. He attended Michigan State University but was expelled due to his involvement with a radical student magazine. May completed his undergraduate degree at Oberlin College in Ohio. His post-college years were spent in Europe, where he traveled, taught English and was a starving artist. At one point, he studied psychoanalysis for a brief time with Alfred Adler in Vienna. Eventually, he returned to the United States and entered the Union Theological Seminary, where he met his friend and mentor, Paul Tillich, whose existential approach to theology had a profound effect on May’s later theories. Shortly after earning his B.D. in 1938, May was stricken with a severe case of tuberculosis. During his years of convalescence at Saranac Sanatorium in upstate New York, he contemplated the concept of his own death and read voraciously the existential works of philosophers and novelists such as Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky.

  Upon regaining his health, May entered the White Institute to study psychoanalysis. He completed his studies at Columbia University in 1949, where he earned the first Ph.D. in clinical psychology that the university ever awarded. Influenced by teachers and mentors such as Erich Fromm, Alfred Adler and Paul Tillich, May’s theories and perspectives were decidedly existential. His first book, The Meaning of Anxiety (1950), was based on his doctoral dissertation, and offered an existential perspective on the traditionally psychosexual problem of neurotic anxiety. May would go on to become the most famous and influential theorist among the existential psychoanalysts. His professional years were spent writing, teaching, practicing psychoanalysis and counseling at City College of New York. Rollo May died in Tiburon, California, in 1994.

  The Age of Anxiety

  Rollo May’s earlier works focused on the problem of anxiety, which he defined as a psychological and physiological response to existential danger. In May’s (1977) words:

  Anxiety is … the apprehension cued off by a threat to some value which the individual holds essential to his existence as a self.

  May believed that the anxiety faced by average people in modern society is related to alienation—a sense of loneliness and isolation that arises when a culture has abandoned the values, religions and myths that offer a sense of meaning to life. As Nietzsche noted, simply asserting that “God is dead!” is not necessarily an act of liberation. In fact, if we abandon God along with the values and meaning to life that God provided without replacing them with new values, then rather than feeling free, we will feel lost and alone in a world without meaning.

  Hollowness

  The principal aspect of alienation is what May called “hollowness”—feelings of personal emptiness and meaninglessness that arise as a result of the loss of traditional values. The decline of religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries along with the decline of other collectivist values such as patriotism and nationalism have created a modern age in which existential anxiety is endemic. May referred to this modern age as “The Age of Anxiety.”

  In addition to the loss of traditional values through the decline of religion and nationalism, the decline of the traditional family structure and the decline of agrarian-based societies have resulted in physical as well as psychological isolation, as families broke apart to move from the country to the city. The emergence of industrialism has resulted in the depersonalization of labor and a consequent decline of pride in one’s work, as assembly-line factories and malls replace small shops and craftsman. Recorded music and radio have replaced personal musicianship. Television and movies have replaced storytelling and community theater. And professional and mass-produced art have replaced the personal art of the average individual.

  The commercial aspects of the modern age have lead to a sense of alienation from these inherently meaningful activities, inventing the false belief that only exceptionally talented individuals can be good musicians, actors, storytellers or artists. Pre-prepared and fast foods have replaced personal cooking. Cities, cars, factories and offices have replaced animals, farms and open spaces to create a sense of alienation from our own bodies and Nature itself. Computers, phones, faxes, e-mail, ATM’s and other machines are all designed to eliminate one-to-one contact with other people, also increasing the modern sense of alienation. And finally, the idealization of the characteristics of independence, individualism and “Americanism” has created a society of disconnected people—a nation of wanderers who are cut off from their traditional homes and detached from the extended families and cultures that offered them existential roots and historical values.

  MODERN TIMES

  The problems of hollowness and alienation were addressed most poignantly in silent films, because these movies were made while the societal transition from a rural agrarian culture to an urban industrial culture was in mid-swing. Silent films such as The Crowd (1928), Metropolis (1927) and Modern Times (1936) (Chaplin’s last silent film) depict the frustration and alienation faced by traditional men struggling to adapt themselves to their new world of assembly-line factory production and the automaton quality of big city office work. World War I films such as The Big Parade (1925) expose the dehumanization and dismemberment of men by the killing machines in modern mechanized warfare. And Lon Chaney became a superstar in the 1920s by making films such as The Penalty (1920) and Tod Browning’s The Unknown (1927), in which Chaney invariably played characters with missing limbs. The popularity of these macabre movies represented that generation’s penchant for identifying with amputated heroes—victims of the inhuman dismembering machines of modern war and industry.

  Negative Identities

  The loss of traditional values is particularly devastating for young people, who face the danger of having no one and nothing to identify with at the time of life when they most desperately need direction for their developing identities. May believed that young people who lack a strong and positive role model run the risk of developing “negative identities.” For example, the meteoric rise of Hitler and the Nazi party in the 1930s was fueled by a German youth that grew up without fathers—children of a generation of men who died in World War I. The Hitler Generation, many of whom were members of the Hitler Youth, grew up in a time when Germany was crippled by a postwar depression, disgraced by defeat, humiliated by the emasculating terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and dispossessed of its military and political leaders. The allure of Hitler was that of a strong, charismatic, powerful role model who could lead Germany out of its pit of shame and despair, and restore a proud sense of German identity in the youth of the nation. Hitler provided a courageous and commanding father figure to a fatherless generation. In May’s view, the greatest tragedy of post–Weimar Germany was the fact that an entire generation of young Germans were lured into a desperate and ultimately self-destructive identification with an extremely negative father figure, who carried the darkest of messages.

  In American History X (1998), the Vinyard brothers are fatherless, frustrated boys. Dennis Vinyard was shot by a black man. His elder son, Derek (Edward Norton), finds a sense of identity and an outlet for his hostility in a local white-supremacy youth movement. But the biggest attraction for Derek is the attention and guidance of Cameron Alexander (Stacy Keach), the charismatic founder and leader of the movement. As a middle-aged man among a throng of worshipful adolescents, Alexander is clearly a strong and powerful father figure to the scores of fatherless, angry young men seeking identity. Derek is especially vulnerable to Alexander’s racist propaganda because it offers him a suitable target for his intense hostility, born of the pain and alienation of losing his father.

  Poisoned by Alexander’s twisted philosophy of Nazism and violence, Derek commits a barbarous hate crime that lands him in jail. By that time, Derek’s younger brother Danny (Edward Furlong) had already identified with h
is older brother as a father figure. With Derek in jail, Danny begins to identify with his older brother’s mentor, Alexander. Trouble begins to brew for Danny at school when he hands in a book report on Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Like the lost generation of the Hitler Youth, Danny Vinyard lost his father figures to violence. An insecure, impressionable and confused boy, he finds identity and purpose through his identification with a strong father figure, Alexander. And like the Hitler Youth, Danny’s blind belief in his adopted father figure’s message of hate and violence leads to his own destruction

  Puberty Rituals

  Throughout most of history, the transition period between childhood and adulthood was marked by a puberty ritual, which represented an initiation into adult society. This ritual was extremely important because after the completion of the ritual, the young person had a new identity as a full member of adult society. The new members were allowed and expected to marry, reproduce, live separately from their parents and engage in adult labor. Puberty was both a physical and social transfigurement that came to a symbolic fruition upon the successful completion of the puberty ritual. In contemporary society, the absence of psychologically significant puberty rituals may be seen in the self-inflicted physical changes that modern adolescents tend to be fond of. Tattoos and piercings are physical tokens of the transition from childhood into adolescence. They are also declarations of independence, informing the adolescents’ parents that their bodies are their own, and are no longer under parental control. Puberty rituals represent the young person’s attempt to achieve a sense of identity and personal meaning in an “Age of Anxiety,” a time in which identity and meaning are hard to find.