The impact of troubling memories has always been a staple of movie melodrama, including a spate of contemporary films about adult survivors of child abuse who recover their mental health by retrieving past traumas i therapy. On a broader scale, genres diverse as the epic, western, comedy, war and weird movie have een pervaded by […]
‘Rounders Revisited: Vaireeeeee Agkgresseeeve! There are movie lines that stick in your head like Crazy glue: “I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.” “I coulda been a contender…” “You can”t HANDLE the truth!” I’ve found that many poker players love movies as much as I do, and are exceptionally well informed about films present […]
After enduring a child’s cruel death, the composer/hero of Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus is moved to write a piece which will subvert the ebullient optimism of the “Ode to Joy” and “take back” Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony Mann’s oddly potent phrase springs to mind after viewing Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, the sixteenth film of an uneven but […]
In the seminal contribution, Silverberg (1949) delineated the role of the quest for omnipotence in neurosogensis and normal personality development. drawing upon the formulations of Freud (1911, 1909) and Ferenczi (1913), he traced the infant’s passage from a theoretical state of ‘unconditional omnipotence’–marked by the sense of total gratification at a time of actual maximum helplessness–to […]
The present volume emerges out of an ongoing, sometimes acrimonious, debate over the viability of psychoanalytic theory to explicate horror and speculative cinema. The doubtfulness of influential critics like Noel Carroll on this score is indicative of a general skepticism about the worthiness of “applied analysis’ in cinema and other critical studies, which has escalated […]
If Hair proclaimed the Age of Aquarius, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) surely celebrated its last gasp According to Steven Spielberg’s vision, our troubles would be resolved by Aquarian consciousness-raising sessions conducted by relentlessly benevolent extraterrestrials. But then a stretto of disasters put paid to the aspirations of Woodstock Nation. Three Mile Island, […]
Be-Tipul, the basis for HBO’s In Treatment series, debuted on Israeli television in 2005. Conceived by producer/director Hagai Lei and writer Ori Sivan, its format was novel: On four successive days, Tel Aviv psychologist Dr. Reuven Dagan met with four private patients; same patient same weekday; and on the fifth with Gita, his mentor, supervisor […]
Sex is the ultimate metaphor, shifting signer par excellence, imbricated and resonating with a vast spectrum of human activity. It gives us the best and worst of moments, provokes experiences, sublime, disastrous or merely trivial. One has to be impressed by the sheer duration, let alone the intensity, of our species’ preoccupation with the carnival […]
Read my latest The Media on My Mind column: Dr. Johnson famously proclaimed to his biographer, Samuel Boswell: “Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.” In the early 1970s, I visited London for the first time. After a week […]
My latest installment of The Media on My Mind: In the early 1970s, a couple who had been together 20 years consulted with me after the husband insisted his wife read Nena and George O’Neill’s “Open Marriage: A New Life Style for Couples” (New York: M. Evans & Co., 1972)… Click here to read the […]