At
the Movies with the Law of Attraction
by
Robert Cettl
(Smashwords Edition)
©
2011 Wider Screenings TM | Transgressor; Adelaide, SA; All Rights
Reserved
cover image © Rolffimages | Dreamstime
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Contents
Introduction:
Confessions of a Self-Help / New Age Movie Columnist
When
Harry Divorced Sally! Inter-Personal Relationships in
Cinema
Exploring
the Ambiguities of Childhood Socialization
Faith
in the Benevolence of the Medical Establishment
Self-Actualization
at the Movies: an Introduction
Rising
Above One’s Obstacles
Self
Help Ethics in Contemporary Film
Success,
Disillusion & Happiness
Self-Help,
Political Criticism and Crisis of Faith Melodrama: from Angels to
Demons
Star
Treks, Star Wars & the Triumph of Scientific Humanism in US
Sci-Fi
James
Bond, Partisan: “Nazi Humanism” as a New Genre in US Film
From
Positive Thinking to End-of-the-World Fantasy in Contemporary
Film
World
Cinema & ‘The Secret’ Revolution: A Comparison of Two
Alternative Sociological Analyses
Beyond
the Boomers: Gen-X Revisionism of Baby Boomer Values
From
Borat to Bruno:
Satire in the Age of Sacha Baron Cohen
The
Jesus Irony: Christian/Rationalist
Ontology in Two Screen Depictions of Jesus Christ
Fame:
The Self-Expressive Joy of Achievement
The
Fine Art of Cinematic Con-Artistry
Humanism
in Eastern European Cinema
Johnny
Depp, Public Enemy #1
Stating
Play: the Law of Attraction in Contemporary American Film
Mortality
and Desire Amidst Hollywood’s Funniest People
Hollywood
Medical Ethics & the “Weepie” in the Age of Jodi Picoult
Of
Earth & of Heaven: The
Serpent & the Rainbow
From
Woodstock
to Snuff:
Overshadowing the Peace & Love Generation
The
Possibility and Impossibility of Second Chances in Life
Spiderman
in Hell: Gen-Y Laws of Attraction inform Freudian vs. Jungian
Allegory in Contemporary Horror Cinema
Introduction:
Confessions of a Self-Help / New Age Movie Columnist
After writing three film non-fiction books for a self-help publisher, I was approached by same to write a column for a monthly newsstand magazine, titled No Limits and available nationwide in Australia and through import in the USA. After three issues the magazine was transformed into a weekly e-zine to tie into a then-emerging revolution in digital publishing - the e-book. I had complete control with only one stipulation - the material and writing style had to connect with the market - self-help / self-improvement / New Age - and the target demographic - 65% women, college educated, 25-55.
At the time I accepted the assignment and began to develop a writing persona to suit it there were two important publishing trends. Firstly, the self-help movement was galvanized by the publication of Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (which popularized the abundance and self-actualization possible through positive thinking as epitomized by a natural law termed the Law of Attraction, or LOA) and, secondly, atheism was big news thanks to Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. At first glance the two were incompatible. However, on closer examination I felt that the two could indeed be reconciled in the form of a critical framework with which to assess the movies. This became the column’s hook - movie criticism from an LOA perspective, informed by atheism so as to contest the spirituality usually attending the New Age self-improvement genre and make the LOA theory accessible to non-believers.
It was quite a challenge.
Although the writing was
by necessity far removed from the traditional film scholarship I had
previously written for Academic publishers, I strove to maintain
genuine analytical criticism within the needed referential basis in
the expanded theories surrounding the Law of Attraction. I
endeavoured to ensure that the column writing maintained a balance of
the populist and the scholarly. It worked - the column garnered a
cult following of sorts and I was invited to several press screenings
of the latest releases for review. However, when the e-zine changed
direction, I left to pursue other work and take the complementary
website, Wider Screenings, in a new direction. This e-book collects
the entire run of columns, in sequence, exploring movie criticism
through the LOA: At the Movies with the Law of Attraction is exactly
that.
When
Harry Divorced Sally! Inter-personal Relationships in Cinema
One of the most rewarding attributes of humanism is the joy possible in inter-personal bonding. Society has its lone wolves to be sure, but it is no surprise that the telling sentiment once behind Barbra Streisand’s hit song “people who need people are the luckiest of people” should still strike a note of recognition with so many. From Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus to the latest tome on how to improve your relationship, the thrill of communication and the ideals of intimacy between lovers has been an inspirational subject for much popular culture. And of course, cinema has embraced the study of inter-personal intimacy, from high drama to so-called women’s “weepies”.
The one constancy through films that explore the inter-dynamics of human relations is the emphasis on the nature of inter-personal bonding. In contemporary times, it is perhaps that timeless question posed by Nora Ephron in When Harry Met Sally that endures, recently re-worked in the Self-Help Bestseller adaptation of He’s Just Not That Into You (and, of all things, Zack & Miri Make a Porno): the sly wondering as to whether men and women can be friends or if the prospect of sex will always get in the way. Intimacy. It’s an intriguing theme and an enthralling ideal to aspire towards. Indeed, in film the theme has its own legacy and examinations of human intimacy resulted in key works that defined the held moral priorities of their time. Now, with the wondrous advantage that DVD offers by putting the wealth of film history at the disposal of the home viewer, it is possible to either look back and reflect over this legacy or discover it afresh.
Take what one might consider an inter-personal dilemma as presented in the 1940s classic Brief Encounter. The film concerns a married woman (Celia Johnson) who by chance meets a man (Trevor Howard) at a train station. Each time they meet, as they wait for their trains, they chat, increasingly fond of each other to the point where they fall in love. Naturally, in the invigorating mix of passion and yearning that is found in the prospect of surrendering to a lover’s embrace, the two of them make arrangements for an intimate encounter. However, rather than go through with it, Johnson puts aside her passion and returns to a presumably chaste and staid marriage to a very prim and proper husband. When the film was released in the 1940s, this self-sacrifice in the name of marital duty was seen as a positive virtue, but today’s films can’t help but wonder if setting aside innate passion for the societal ideal of monogamous traditional marriage is indeed as virtuous and fulfilling as people make it out to be.
The contemporary riposte to Brief Encounter can be found cumulatively in the films of British director Adrian Lyne (profiled as the first director in the Wider Screenings Guide ebook series, Contemporary Film Directors – Kindle release details via No Limits / Inkstone Digital), whose tantalizing looks at marital relationships and the prospect of the fulfillment of infidelity in Fatal Attraction, Indecent Proposal and Unfaithful make his works modern morality tales, exploring contemporary notions of inter-personal needs and the turmoil inherent in fulfilling need in the face of moral convention. In these popular films there still remains a deferment to the ideal of marriage as a kind of moral standard, but unlike the honourable self-sacrifice of Johnson in Brief Encounter, Lyne (and modernity) cannot help but ponder the dangerous invigoration of the alternative – the inter-personal fulfillment of a lover’s communication as emotional, sexual and intellectual self-actualization. The legacy of Brief Encounter is that it sets up what many subsequent films measure such inter-personal bonding against – the ideal of intimate love.
So, whilst a classic like Brief Encounter can find solace in an ideal, it is the nature of the ideal as illusory and self-deceptive that consumes subsequent examinations of the theme. By contrast thus there is, for instance, the seldom seen Maria’s Lovers. Here, John Savage has idolized Nastassja Kinski from afar for a long time, put her so high on a pedestal that having her is to him all that sustains him as a man. However, now married to her, he finds that sexually consummating his relationship with an “ideal” ironically diminishes that ideal. He paradoxically needs the sense of unattainability in order to sustain his “ideal” of love and the perfect partner. In the fallout of Savage’s resulting psychological impotence, Kinski is drawn to seek other men for the sexual and inter-personal contact she requires: the “ideal” destroys the inter-personal, an idea based on the writings of psychologist Jacques Lacan.
What is one to make
therefore of cinema’s continued investigation into the inner
workings of humanity’s need to relate and bond with another? Is
there a direction away from tradition? What are they searching for
if not an ideal? Certainly films can create tales of romantic
intensity, indulging in fantasies of the perfect, ideal love but they
can also call into question the moral expectations underlying such
ideals. But, to re-state the earlier point, what remains constant is
a search for the intimacy of communication – verbal, sexual,
emotional – as an innate human need and an important factor in
achieving personal fulfilment. People need people for many different
reasons; intimacy being paramount amongst them.
Exploring
the Ambiguities of Childhood Socialization
The dynamics of human inter-personal relationships may have made for some of the most memorable and enduring of cinema’s treasures but there is one aspect of human social interaction which has provoked filmmakers into some of their most emotionally affecting and personally revealing work: sexual socialization. As environmental factors impacting sexual maturation have a conditioning affect in addition to biological drives, the cinema of inter-personal development seeks to dramatize the dualism in what Romantic poet William Blake expressed so eloquently as the transition from innocence to experience.
In Sergio Leone’s violent, epic gangster saga Once Upon a Time in America, for instance, a teenage boy has bought a small dessert treat not for himself but to give to a girl in exchange for his first sexual experience. However, this boy is left alone for some time waiting and his eyes are torn between the door the girl is behind and the dessert treat he holds in his hands: divided between the temptations of a boy and a man. There is an innocence in his dilemma, but it is the incipient yearning for experience that gives it added poignancy. Yet, in that lure of sexual curiosity can be a perversity that makes innocence sinister: hence the boy in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea who has drilled a hole in the wall in order to spy on his mother’s bedroom activities.
But, just as the Oedipal affect of familial circumstances on sexual development is stressed in film so is the sense of deterministic socialization. Hence, Pretty Baby examined the life of a teenage girl (Brooke Shields) whose childhood is spent in a New Orleans brothel where she lives with her whore mother (Susan Sarandon). Inevitably, her sense of adult womanhood is heavily socialized in terms of this home environment: her rite of passage into adulthood being her first client and the loss of her virginity for money an act she accepts as a natural given of the world she inhabits: social determinism denying her an individualized self-actualization. Often it is similarly ambiguous and qualified conceptions of childhood socialization into experience rather than celebrations of innocence which are the dominant concerns in adult-oriented films about the maturation process, from the boy shouting for his idolized hero to return at the end of Shane to the conscious deliberation of the child to remain forever innocent in The Tin Drum.
For contrast, it is interesting to note the distinction between depictions of childhood in films made for adults and films made for children / families. In the latter, typified by what has come to be known as the Disney ethic, childhood innocence is idealized. Although the main message behind these films may be positive, similar portrayals in adult-oriented films are cautious and even negative regarding innocence – here, childhood innocence is an illusion held in contrast to the sheer monstrousness of the adult world which must inevitably consume it to the point where in, say, River’s Edge, teenagers have been so amorally warped by their socialization that they think nothing when one of them kills a friend: the complex and morally ambiguous state of “experience” consumes whatever pure “innocence” may have existed to begin with – “experience” is the inescapable reality to which all are socialized.
No consideration of themes of childhood innocence in modern populist cinema would be complete without mention of Steven Spielberg. The hit family film E.T the Extra-Terrestrial idealizes innocence to the point where children have the last vestige of humanism, protecting a benevolent alien from the adult inhumanity that would see it dissected. Yet, as an adult, Spielberg is aware of the escapism inherent in his conception of innocence, so much so that, some twenty years later, the robot child in A.I Artificial Intelligence is programmed with an unconditional love for his mother, indicative of what the film considers innocence, but which is revealed finally to be a perfect but virtually delusional state. The progression in Spielberg is striking for the director’s reluctance to fully relinquish the conception of an absolute innocence even in the face of cynical despair. However, A.I as a project was initiated by the cynical Stanley (Eyes Wide Shut) Kubrick and only inhered by Spielberg at a later date.
The vast discrepancy
evident between so-called safe family fare and more adult
considerations reveals that what is commonly considered “innocence”
is actually a multi-faceted deliberate construct rather than a true
state of being: an interpretation of childhood. However, the
alternative “experience” with its fatalistic inevitability is
often so unrelentingly despairing as to make a return to a fabricated
innocence a desired state, hence both the consistently popular nature
of innocuous family entertainment and its ultimate thematic
insignificance to an adult audience: insignificant because it negates
the qualities which distinguish the dramatization of the maturation
process and its symbolic transition from innocence to experience in
true adult-oriented cinema – ambiguity and irony.
Faith
in the Benevolence of the Medical Establishment
There is a saying: “at least you have your health”. Behind this is the belief that fitness is paramount. In accordance with this sentiment, the medical profession is culturally elevated to something approaching omniscience. The status of a beneficent medical professional, however, carries with it complex ambiguities and absurdities in those feature films that have dealt with such as a whole and the type of people who seek to practice it rather than merely receive the benefits of its wisdom and technology.
The unquestioned nobility of the medical establishment, and the figure of the surgeon, was invoked in the Douglas Sirk melodrama, Magnificent Obsession. Here, an arrogant man (Rock Hudson) is responsible for an accident in which a woman (Jane Wyman) is blinded. Feeling responsible, he falls in love with her and goes to medical school in the hope that one day he can operate on his love and cure her. The film being a “weepie” of the kind so popular in the 1950s, he manages to do just that – the surgeon here becomes a romantic hero. Although that sense of passionate conviction was appealing to audiences and made the film a smash hit of the day, even if the critics felt it a trivial so-called “women’s picture”, subsequent films have been infected by an almost viral cynicism regarding this selfless benevolence.
This is evident in two films directed by former doctors turned filmmakers. First, there is Australia’s own George (Mad Max) Miller, who used his Hollywood connections to set up Lorenzo’s Oil. This film, based on a true story, concerned a couple (Nick Nolte and Susan Sarandon) whose very young son is infected by an incurable disease. The medical establishment is powerless to help the boy and urges his parents to accept the inevitably short and limited life the doctors consider is the boy’s lot. The parents reject this hopeless medical “realism” and do their own research, soon uncovering a breakthrough which results in a treatment for their son’s condition. Second, is best-selling author Michael (Jurassic Park) Crichton, who used his science-fiction thriller Coma to turn against his own profession and depict a callous world of high-powered surgeons who deliberately make patients comatose in order to harvest their organs for high-paying buyers: the medical profession was controlled by market forces.
Market forces indeed exert tremendous pressure on the medical establishment. In addition to truly questionable ethics is the simple business of running a hospital. Satirist Lindsay Anderson tackled this in the biting Britannia Hospital, in which a British hospital is beset by union strikes amongst its kitchen staff during a planned Royal visit, much to the annoyance of the hospital’s private patients; even though the Frankenstein-like chief surgeon is pre-occupied with his own experiments to create life. In contrast to the power-obsessed doctor above, the everyday operations of a hospital was the domain of doctor George C. Scott in The Hospital, so besotted by the blunders of the hospital over which he presides (including the surgeons under him operating on the wrong patients due to stuff-ups at the processing level) that he is now impotent, not helped by the male menopause which propels his sense of inadequacy nor by the young woman (Diana Rigg) advocating he take LSD (then a popular drug in the early 1970s and immortalized by The Beatles in the song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds).
A characterization thus emerging was that of the doctor as victim or monster, the latter segueing into horror movies about killer doctors (such as Dr. Giggles), whilst in the case of the former, the allegorical overtones remained highly suited to a variety of dramatic and comedic interpretations. One of the most harrowing was that in Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris, a success of the renaissance in Australian film in the 1970s. In this black comedy, a small town purposely causes traffic accidents and plunders the booty resulting from such. The inevitable human casualties are taken in by the local doctor, who experiments on them, effectively creating an entire underclass (whom the locals call “veggies”) of diseased and disabled people who depend on his benevolence in order to live what is left of their lives. On a more solemn level, the real political power of the medical establishment to keep patients dependent in order to validate their funded existence was explored in another Aussie drama, Annie’s Coming Out – about the institutionalization of people with cerebral palsy.
Yet not all doctors were
monsters and a number of films explored the realistic issues
affecting hospital staff. Hence William Hurt in The
Doctor
becomes more empathetic towards patients when he faces a throat
cancer scare, and medical student Mathew Modine in Gross
Anatomy
realizes that no matter how good he may be, it is natural human
empathy alone that will transform him into a truly good doctor rather
than his impersonal, proficient training. Thus, although the public
hold generally to a view of the importance of the medical profession,
films have been both supportive and sceptical about the ways in which
our society elevates such to paramount importance and in the process
almost deifies it.
Self-Actualization
at the Movies: an Introduction