Meeting MoviesNorman N. Holland
In the spring of 1895, Sigmund Freud began to fashion an ambitious theoretical model that would provide not only a quantitative and physiological basis for psychiatry but one that would integrate psychopathology into the general discipline of psychology (Gay, 1988). This “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (Freud 1895/1966; Jones, 1953) emerged after a half-year of extensive correspondence and discussion with his Berlin-based confidant, Wilhelm Fleiss. In the early fall, Freud worked intensively on a manuscript for the project and sent it to Fleiss for his feedback. But almost immediately thereafter, he abandoned these efforts as overly grandiose:
“I no longer understand the state of mind in which I hatched out the ‘Psychology,’ and I can't understand how I came to inflict it on you,” Freud wrote Fleiss in November, “I consider you are always too polite; to me it seems pure balderdash.” (as cited in Jones, 1953, p. 383)
Through more than four subsequent decades of clinical and theoretical work, Freud turned his back on psychology as a quantitative natural science. Rather, he struggled to chart how the mind functions in more qualitative and symbolic fashion by advancing first his topographical (conscious, preconscious, unconscious) and later his structural models (id, ego, superego) of the “I” (as Holland [1985] would have it). The pervasive imprint of psychoanalysis across the 20th century arose, in large part, as a result of Freud's decision in late 1895 to abandon the “Project.”
On the outskirts of Lyons, France, in that same year, two brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, filmed a small group of workers leaving the entrance of their family's film factory (deCordova, 1990). They used a cinématographe, a motion picture film and developing device patented in 1893 by Léon Bouly. The scene they recorded lasted less than a minute but was combined with 9 or 10 other short film clips and shown publicly for the first time to a paying audience in Paris on December 28, 1895 (National Museum of Photography, Film, & Television, 2000). More than a century has now passed since this new mode of communicative art—cinema—first engaged the imagination of both its creators and audiences. But, like its contemporary, psychoanalysis, motion pictures have transformed the way in which human beings understand themselves and their world.
For more than 50 years, the literary critic and scholar Norman N. Holland has pursued the implications of both psychoanalysis and cinema (Holland, 1999). Following a doctoral degree at Harvard in 1956, Holland taught English literature at MIT while completing studies and a training analysis at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He also served as a movie reviewer for WGBH, the Boston educational television station, for two years. In 1966, Holland moved to the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he subsequently founded the Center for the Psychological Study of the Arts (Westlund, 1988). Later, he relocated to the University of Florida (Gainesville), where he has been Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar and professor of English for more than two decades. He currently serves as editor of PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts (http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/index.shtml).
Meeting Movies is Holland's 13th book and offers detailed scholarly and personal commentaries about his encounters with eight crucial films, half American and half foreign, produced since his youth. He begins this survey with Casablanca (Curtiz & Wallis, 1942), which he first watched as an adolescent in New York City. In chronological sequence, the remaining movies include Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise; Borderie, Carné, & Orain, 1945), Det Sjunde Inseglet (The Seventh Seal; Bergman & Ekelund, 1957), Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), Freud (Huston & Reinhardt, 1962), Otto e Mezzo (8 ½; Fellini, Flaiano, & Rizzoli, 1963), Persona (Bergman, 1966), and Shakespeare in Love (Madden, Norman, & Stoppard, 1998). To each of them, Holland brings expertise not only as a scholar deeply familiar with psychoanalytic approaches to literary work (Holland, 1968, 1973), but as an early advocate on behalf of reader-response theory and the creative role of the individual imagination in constructing the meaning of texts (Holland, 1975). Hence, Holland deploys psychoanalytic concepts in approaching the general meaning of each film. But he argues that his own history must serve as a more personal filter by which to interpret his experience of the screen. As a result, the book assumes the form of a quasi-personal memoir in which autobiographical themes weave themselves into more general patterns of psychodynamic origin. Yet, in his afterword, Holland also cautions,
I've not told you everything. I've mostly kept out names and dates. I've protected my own privacy, not writing much about my adult life and the people in it, talking more about childhood. I've not talked much about sex or money, the big secrets. Even so, I've tried to meet these movies fully. (p. 179)
His caution summarizes one of the crucial strengths as well as weaknesses of the book: What lies revealed here seems somewhat older and faded, although doubtless it originally possessed a vitality that energized much of Holland's creative adult life. We learn a lot about the younger Holland, less so about the mature man he became.The issues that the author confronts are broad and fundamental: infantile sexuality and the integrity of the self (Persona; Bergman, 1966), the awakening of sexual drives and guilt in adolescence (Casablanca; Curtiz & Wallis, 1942), the meaning of his own masculinity (Vertigo [Hitchcock, 1958] and Freud [Huston & Reinhardt, 1962]), the loss of early religious belief and the role of rationality versus creativity (The Seventh Seal; Bergman & Ekelund, 1957), ambition and the attraction of the feminine (Children of Paradise; Borderie et al., 1945), creativity and sexual freedom (Shakespeare in Love; Madden et al., 1998), and the limits of significant psychological change across a lifetime (8 ½; Fellini et al., 1963). Although I've indicated specific films as the focus for specific themes, in fact Holland comes back recurrently to these issues as he discusses one film after another. He is particularly insistent on exploring his own father's high expectations that he become a patent lawyer and how he failed to meet those expectations by following (so successfully, I would judge) paths of his own making within the academy. Even more pervasive is the insistent question of his own masculinity and what it meant for a heterosexual adolescent with esthetic sensibilities to grow up during World War II and the postwar period in the United States.
Holland did not choose the films reviewed in this book because he necessarily enjoyed them or found them easy objects for contemplation. Indeed, the chapter on Bergman's (1966) Persona opens with the caution
This is a great film, everyone says, the finest film of perhaps the greatest director of the twentieth century—and I don't enjoy it. Oh, I admire it alright, but I don't like seeing it. I agree that it's a great film, but for me a singularly unpleasant and painful one. (p. 95)
Rather, the author challenges his readers to work through some difficult films that promise to reveal “these movies' psychological possibilities” (p. 13) for their viewers. He offers his own thoughts and reflections, at times in great detail, to demonstrate how important films can prompt their viewers to discover personal meaning and greater levels of self-understanding. To facilitate this process, Holland adopts two alternating voices—one somewhat impersonal and critical and the other more intimate and autobiographical—that are denoted in the text by the use of regular and italic type to identify when each voice is speaking. This strategy is generally effective, although I did find the specific italic typeface used in the book somewhat difficult to read.For the psychologist approaching this volume, Holland is familiar with contemporary research and theory. He witnessed the rise of cognitive psychology in the 1950s and 1960s and acknowledges his debt to its insights at different points of his commentary. His sympathies for the general thrust of cognitive constructivism reach back in the history of film theory to the early insights of the experimental Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, whose contemporaries included the young Vygotsky (see Holland, 1989). Yet, this text remains firmly rooted in psychodynamic theory and presupposes, to a large extent, a familiarity by the reader with Freudian terminology and approaches.
As a reader-response critic, Holland rejects that texts themselves contain predetermined or inherent meanings, whether psychoanalytic or not. Rather, individual persons bring to texts such as movies their own lives and whatever underlying psychological dynamics may find resonance within the materials portrayed on the screen. Holland argues, “In reader-response mode, you don't look for themes, you free associate. You listen to what you say to yourself about your thoughts and feelings as you see the film, and you accept them” (p. 175). For psychologists reading this volume, Holland seems to slide too easily past the problem of method by simply proposing free association as the technique by which to interrogate films. At times, I found myself wondering if Holland ought not to have offered clearer guidelines for how his readers might actually undertake their own explorations of their viewing experiences.
The initial catalogue of the films Holland examines will have cued some readers to what may be the principal difficulty of this otherwise attractive volume: In the four decades after 1966, only a single film, Shakespeare in Love (Madden et al., 1998), warrants the author's attention. Now approaching 80 years of age, Holland ignores with that one exception any film appearing since his 39th birthday (curiously, the same age at which Freud abandoned his “Project for a Scientific Psychology”). Not only does the author fail to include other films from this period for specific analysis, but his comments stand mostly devoid of other references to what has happened in movie theaters for almost four decades. I had expected, for example, that Holland's critique of the lovemaking scene in Shakespeare in Love that has the nurse guarding the bedroom door (pp. 151-152) might have mentioned the parallel scene in Zeffirelli's (1968) Romeo and Juliet. The omission of references to this period of filmmaking may be well justified. The baleful effects of Spielberg's Jaws (Spielberg, Brown, & Zanuck, 1975) in pioneering the rise of the blockbuster movie with its appeal to an adolescent (mostly male) audience could easily be cited in support of Holland's decision. But it lends a certain air of dustiness or distance for readers (and moviegoers) of a later generation.
Today's psychology students, and perhaps younger faculty as well, are mostly unfamiliar with the films Holland has chosen to examine. Anticipating this review, I included all of the titles he evaluates in a questionnaire recently distributed as part of a larger study of media knowledge by traditional-aged undergraduates in psychology courses. Data from 164 students across 10 course sections showed that fewer than 3 percent of them had ever seen The Seventh Seal (2.5 percent; Bergman & Ekelund, 1957), 8 1/2 (1.1 percent; Fellini et al., 1963), Freud (0.6 percent; Huston & Reinhardt, 1962), or Persona (0.6 percent; Bergman, 1966), and none had ever viewed Children of Paradise (Borderie et al., 1945). The most widely viewed movie cited by Holland was Shakespeare in Love (41.1 percent; Madden et al., 1998), followed by Casablanca (20.9 percent; Curtiz & Wallis, 1942) and Vertigo (13.9 percent; Hitchcock, 1958). In contrast, the vast majority of students had seen such recent and decidedly insubstantial works as Titanic (96.3 percent; Cameron, 1997), American Pie (90.2 percent; Weitz & Herz, 1999), Shrek 2 (Adamson et al., 2004), and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (both 89.5 percent; Roach, Myers, & McCullers, 1999).
In a recent interview, the anthropologist Arthur Kleinman argued that
something has happened in my life. I'm 65 years of age. When I was twenty years of age, many educated Americans were reading much more broadly than you would think and much more deeply than you would think, into things like literary theory or social history or philosophy. It's not being done now, and we're losing something very, very important. (Geddes, 2006, p. 87)
The data I offer above suggest that Kleinman's lament may extend to a parallel loss of familiarity with foreign and domestic films of either classic status or provocative intellectual challenge. As a viewer only a generation younger than Holland, I became familiar with most of the films in this book many years ago. The period that stretched from the late 1950s into the early 1970s seemed a time when movies served as much to provoke as to entertain, to wrestle with as well as to be distracted by. Hence, reviewing the earnest and penetrating analyses in this volume produced in me an almost elegiac mood. The potential for movies to penetrate deeply into the psyche and elicit powerful personal responses is undeniable. Holland's confrontation with the harrowing world of Bergman's 1966 masterpiece Persona attests vividly to such potential. But movies of that kind and the willingness of audiences to expose themselves to the rigors of personal reflection as Holland demonstrates here seem increasingly rare. In such a context, Page 7 of 9 then, the author's willingness to share the results of his own meeting with these movies is an offering for which the readers of this book can only be grateful.References
Adamson, A., Asbury, K., Vernon, C. (Directors), Steig, W., Adamson, A., Stillman, J., Stem, J., & Weiss, D. N. (Writers). (2004). Shrek 2 [Motion picture]. United States: DreamWorks Distribution.Bergman, I. (Director/Producer/Writer). (1966). Persona [Motion picture]. Sweden: Svensk Filmindustgri (SF) AB.
Bergman, I. (Director), & Ekelund, A. (Producer). (1957). Det Sjunde inseglet [The seventh seal] [Motion picture]. Sweden: Svensk Filmindustgri (SF) AB. Borderie, R. (Producer), Carné, M. (Director), & Orain, F. (Producer). (1945). Les enfants du paradis [The children of paradise] [Motion picture]. France: Pathé Cinéma.
Cameron, J. (Director & Writer). (1997). Titanic [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures.
Curtiz, M. (Director), & Wallis, H. B. (Producer). (1942). Casablanca [Motion picture]. United States: Warner Brothers Pictures.
deCordova, R. (1990). From Lumière to Pathé: The break-up of perspectival space. In T. Elsaesser (Ed.), Early cinema: Space, frame, narrative (pp. 76-85). London: BFI.
Fellini, F. (Director/Writer), Flaiano, E. (Writer), & Rizzoli, A. (Producer). (1963). Otto e mezzo (8 ½) . [Motion picture]. Italy: Cineriz.
Freud, S. (1966). Project for a scientific psychology. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 1, pp. 295-387). London: Hogarth Press. (Original work written 1895)
Gay, P. (1988). Freud: A life for our time . New York: Norton.
Geddes, J. L. (2006). A conversation with Arthur Kleinman. Hedgehog Review, 8 (3), 82-91.
Hitchcock, A. (Director & Producer). (1958). Vertigo [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures.
Holland, N. N. (1968). The dynamics of literary response. New York: Oxford University Press.
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Holland, N. N. (1985). The I. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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Holland, N. N. (1999, September 21). The story of a psychoanalytic critic: An intellectual autobiography. Retrieved November 11, 2006, from the University of Florida (Gainesville), College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Web site: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nnh/autobiol.htm
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Madden, J. (Director), Norman, M. (Writer), & Stoppard, T. (Writer). (1998). Shakespeare in love [Motion picture]. United States: Miramax Films.
National Museum of Photography, Film, & Television. (2000). Pioneers of early cinema 7: Auguste Lumière (1862-1954) & Louis Lumière (1864-1948). Retrieved November 4, 2006, from http://www.nmpft.org.uk/insight/info/5.3.45.pdf
Roach, J. (Director), Myers, M., & McCullers, M. (Writers). (1999). Austin Powers: The spy who shagged me [Motion picture]. United States: New Line Cinema.
Spielberg, S. (Director), Brown, D. (Producer), & Zanuck, R. D. (Producer). (1975). Jaws [Motion picture]. United States: Universal Pictures.
Weitz, P. (Director), & Herz, A. (Writer). (1999). American pie [Motion picture]. United States: Universal Pictures.
Westlund, J. (1988). Norman N. Holland. In G. S. Jay (Ed.),Dictionary of literary biography. Vol. 67: Modern American critics since 1955 (pp. 162-166). Detroit, MI: Gale Group.
Zeffirelli, A. (Director). (1968). Romeo and Juliet [Motion picture]. Italy: Dino de Laurentiis Cinematografica.
Review by Vincent W. Hevern, PsycCritiques, April 4, 2007
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