 |
 |
The Conversation, director, Francis Ford Coppola Eye of the Beholder, director, Stephan Elliott sex, lies and videotape, director, Steven Soderbergh The Wizard of Oz, director, Victor Fleming Jean G. Hantman
schizoid defence. In the first plot pattern, the protagonist’s move toward genuine human contact entails authentic personal and moral growth. In the second, his attempts to save the perceived victim fail miserably. In analysis, the former type of patient (one who spies on one person) is amenable to being cured when “the camera is turned on him” in the analytic setting, but the prognosis for the latter (one who spies on a couple) is more ominous. “Schizoid,” in terms of words spoken to another person and words she allows to be spoken back to her, is closest to autistic of any diagnosis. The analyst must hold onto “the hope of words” that is the centre of the psychoanalytic process, to go the distance with any patient genuinely interested in turning dangerous repetitions into language. Introduction A schizoid male patient of Harry Guntrip’s (1969), a professional man in his late forties, “of marked ability and carrying heavy responsibilities, while feeling grave strain and exhaustion,” dreamed as follows:
two periscopes (eyes) which brought me information of what was going on outside, and two slits (ears) through which sounds could come to be recorded on tape for me, and an opening (mouth) through which I could send out messages. (p. 103) Guntrip’s work on schizoid phenomena, published in the late 1960s, foreshadowed the films that began to be made in the 1970s about a type of schizoid personality whose primary relationships are with technological devices rather than with people. But if one researches the history of the “techno-schizoid” in film, one needs to go as far back as 1939 when a highly successful movie was made about a socially inept man: who had no relationships; who lived on the road; who could only put down roots and settle down in a land that allowed him to hide behind smoke, a screen, and curtains, peeping on everyone else while staying concealed himself: The Wizard of Oz. Films about the techno-schizoid have in common the machinery that allows peering at others, and at others’ relationships, from a distance. These machines specifically allow the protagonist to be present without relating, or to be able to relate only when surrounded by or touching machines. Not just any kind of machine, but the kind that provides eyes, ears, moving images and sounds, all at a safe distance; from the tops of buildings with telescopes, through walls in which holes have been drilled to insert “bugs”; cameras, telescopes, tape recorders, computers, surveillance equipment with zoom lenses—all of the technological inventions that have undergone spectacular advances in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In these films, the schizoid protagonist’s fear of relationship is evident in an inability to hold a conversation that doesn’t become in some way unreal, unpleasant, uncomfortable within seconds. We see in him (the character is invariably male) a need to have some type of minimal though significant contact with people, despite his fear and his ingenious talent for working the machinery that allows him to watch and listen without having to participate. In other words, advances in voyeuristic technology have enabled the schizoid personality (and the schizoid element in all of us) to develop ways of getting secretly close to people without ever having to meet or relate to or know another person. The formula is as follows. The film opens with the camera panning over the complicated modern equipment of voyeurism as we hear the sounds these machines make: tape recorders, cameras with telescopic lenses, computers with advanced spying capability. We hear clicking and whirring, we see film footage paused and rewound, volume turned up, turned down, voices distorted, close-ups and zoom-outs. We see people being looked at, but not any real whole person, only their machinefiltered images. The technology has reduced them to part—rather than whole—objects in the Kleinian sense. Technology itself is presented as the main character; we see a machine before we see the person operating it. The second image presented in these films, after the camera, computer, or telescope, is the protagonist, the one who makes use of this technology. His expression is impassive, affectless. He is usually in a dark room (like the dugout in the dream reported by Guntrip) surrounded by his machines with knobs, buttons, lenses, and reels of tape. We notice how important seeing and listening is to him. We are drawn into an identification with his yearning to capture and save and in this way to engage with his objects—not up close and personal, but only from a distance, at one remove, on video, film, or audiotape. In this type of film, in which we see the machines before we see the main character, we can predict that the latter’s passion for the technology of voyeurism is a defence against deeper connection with other people. We can tell that no human being can compete with his equipment. The schizoid’s dread at the prospect of getting too close to anything purely human is ominous. Almost from the start we sense that some awful choice will have to be made between his machines and his hidden yearning for human connection. The consequence will be ruinous. His unconscious (emotional) message is, “I want it, but I don’t deserve it, because of some crime I committed in the past. I’m not sure how much of that was my responsibility . . . I was trying to help. In fact, I thought I was doing a good job of helping. So why did those people die (or leave me)?” In keeping with the nature of his repetition compulsion, such a character, unconsciously guilty and tormented, will at some point need to intrude in some way into the lives of the objects of his secret voyeurism, to step in front of his camera so that he can unconsciously arrange for the catastrophe from his past to be repeated with the strangers in the present who occupy, through transference phantasy, the roles of the characters composing his life history. He unconsciously believes that this time he’ll be able to make things right, provide a better ending. But we sense that as soon as he lays down his cameras, starting to participate rather than merely watch, helping, saving, or rescuing is the last thing that will happen. In fact, the opposite must occur: his uncharacteristic compassion will lead to blunder, danger, and catastrophe. Technology films place us at the beginning of the breakdown of the character’s schizoid defence. He has unwittingly begun to feel, to care. Two patterns are observed (Versions A and B). In some circumstances (Version B), the protagonist’s move toward genuine human contact entails authentic personal and moral growth. In Version A the opposite occurs: both the audience and the subject watch helplessly as—instead of transcending his unconscious need for danger, crime, and catastrophe—his attempts to save the (real or imagined) victim fail miserably and lead only to yet another destructive repetition. The conclusion of the film finds the protagonist returned to emotional deadness, to “unfeeling callousness” (Guntrip, 1969, p. 38). Significantly, the catastrophe always befalls another, never the protagonist himself. He causes it by his meddling, watches in horror as his rescue attempts fail, then retreats, alive. Whereas he is returned to his safe isolated life, everyone he tried to touch, help, heal, rescue, or engage with is ruined. According to Fairbairn (1952), whereas the depressive fears his hatred, the schizoid fears his love: it is the fear that his love will prove destructive to both his objects and himself that causes the schizoid to be wary indeed about establishing intimate connections. In the films in which technology is presented as an obstacle to connection, and catastrophe as the consequence of feelings breaking through in the schizoid protagonist, nothing is worked through emotionally; no defences are understood or resolved. The second type of techno-schizoid film invites us to see technology as a bridge to connection and, later on, to intimacy. Rigid defences break down, working through is portrayed, and resolution is the outcome. In the films in which catastrophe rather than intimacy occurs, it is not one person who is being spied upon, not a group of people, not three or a hundred in a row one at a time, but two, a man and a woman, i.e., the primal scene. The Oedipal phantasy, according to Melanie Klein, begins much earlier than Freud conceptualized: Oedipal horrors (albeit infiltrated with oral envy, greed, and rage) and schizoid phenomena coexist in the techno-schizoid. These films reveal that (in Version A) the subject spying on a couple encounters only danger, frustration, disappointment, and destruction (The Conversation, Blow Out, The Eye of the Beholder). But (in Version B) the subject spying on one or many (any combination except two) leads to love and life (sex, lies, and videotape, The Wizard of Oz, American Beauty). It is possible to imagine that in the sinister world of schizoid phantasy, the punishment for intruding on the Oedipal couple, then failing to break them apart, harming one or all in the process, is to be thrown back forever into a life lived alone without feeling, with technological instruments and activities standing in for friends, lovers, family. The feeling state common to all of these characters is not conscious, “depressive guilt” (Grinberg, 1964) reflecting a mature “capacity for concern” (Winnicott, 1965), but rather what Grinberg calls “persecutory guilt” (which Carveth [2001] prefers to view as persecutory anxiety, to distinguish it clearly from the conscious and mature guilt of the depressive position that it frequently helps to evade). The techno-schizoid is unconsciously convinced that he has committed a crime or crimes in the past; in his distorted phantasy he is always poised to make reparation when stimulated by just the right situation in the present. Typically, such characters feel responsible for actions, thoughts, or wishes other than those that constitute their real “crimes.” There is confusion over the matter of right and wrong. Within the psyche of the Version B protagonist, the desire to make reparation conflicts with his fear of human connection. His unconscious conflict is “solitude versus connection.” He is not mired in orally infiltrated Oedipal concerns. In contrast, within the Version A protagonist the desire for reparation conflicts with unconscious envy and Oedipal jealousy. His phantasies of the danger the couple is in represent a projection unto their supposed attackers of his own destructiveness toward their union. For him there are two unconscious conflicts, not one: in addition to his struggles with conflicting drives toward solitude on the one hand and connection on the other, he is caught between reparative wishes to help the couple and more deeply repressed and projected wishes to harm them. In Version A, he must resolve both schizoid and (pregenitally overladen) Oedipal conflict, and in this he inevitably fails. In Version B, the protagonist must resolve the schizoid conflict. In Version A, the protagonist must resolve the schizoid conflict. In Version B, he must resolve both schizoid and (pregenitally overladen) Oedipal conflict, and in this he inevitably fails. Version A: Catastrophe, Retreat—One Spying on Two The film The Conversation, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, concerns surveillance expert Harry Caul, who is hired by a wealthy executive to spy on his wife and her lover. Harry has not been told who these people are in relationship to the man who hired him; he is given no information and only the instruction to get their conversations on audio and their actions on video. The title refers to the conversation between (we soon find out) his employer’s wife and her lover whom Harry was hired to tape. The Conversation is the purest of the techno-schizoid films. The plot, the character, the editing are all brilliantly constructed by Francis Ford Coppola to reflect the schizoid style: person back to machine, person back to machine, in, out, in, out. Throughout the movie, from beginning to the penultimate scene we are shown the machine, the man, anxiety, machine. The character Harry Caul is as obsessed with his own privacy as he is with secretly (professionally) intruding on others’. He has become a genius at both keeping the world out of his private life and developing machinery to spy on the private lives of his clients. Three themes occupy his mind as he struggles to avoid feeling and human connection: Catholicism (he is devout but helpless to feel absolved); the spying he was hired to do years ago that resulted in the death of a family; and his tools and equipment. The crime that has Harry guilt-ridden and anxious is the murder of a husband and wife who had been assassinated as a result of his surveillance work. Now years later he is living on the opposite coast having tried to erase his past, both to himself and to others. The significant other possible crime is recalled through Caul’s dreams, in which he tracks the young woman who walks ahead of him while he divulges his deepest thoughts and feelings to her—and she doesn’t listen. In this dream Caul speaks emotionally of his own childhood illness, during which he was forced to spend time at home hoping to receive the special care of his mother. The young boy sick at home with his mother is an opportunity for the unconscious to mesh phantasies of dangerous illness with dangerous love that Caul’s adult psyche reflects in his fear of getting too close. As the story unfolds he finds himself unwillingly drawn into a fascination with the possible plight of the couple he has been hired to spy on. Though he had made a pledge to himself to remain strictly business, he becomes gripped by the “conversation” he tapes from a distance, of the couple, lovers, as they walk around a park in San Francisco. The more he tries to avoid what he imagines is behind the job he was hired to do, the more he is possessed by emotion towards the two, especially the young woman whom he imagines is in grave danger. It becomes evident that Caul’s professional mission, to avoid involvement, is a fragile defence when confronted with the force of a man and a woman, the Oedipal couple. The more Caul listens to the conversation he has taped, the more he imagines that the woman is saying to the man, “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” This stimulates his anxiety and desire to rescue (for the schizoid in Oedipal suffering, just who is being rescued is always a question, as well as who it is actually who is committing the crime). The more Harry’s defences begin to unravel, the more hours he spends with his recording equipment and snapshots of the woman in danger. Though his wish, like that of all people in the grip of techno-schizoid states, is that his machines give him answers, provide control, control the actions of others, administer solace, save lives, the real world proceeds as it wants to. A surveillance convention comes to town, bringing his professional rival, the east coast expert on spy equipment. His girlfriend ditches him, he fires his assistant (his only consistent human contacts). He gets arrogant and drunk with people from the spy convention and brings them back to his workplace. In his unravelling he becomes careless. The tape of the conversation, which he had concluded would bring disaster to the couple, is stolen from his desk while he is sleeping off his wild night. He goes to the hotel where he had deduced the young couple would be murdered and checks into the adjoining room. In a distorted, freakish Oedipal re-creation Harry hooks up his spy equipment, drills holes into the wall to fit cameras and microphones and descends into a psychotic state trying to see, to listen in to the room where the crime is taking place. He is helpless again to prevent the crime from happening. But what he finds out later from the newspapers is that the man who had hired him was murdered, not the young couple he had been worrying about. Only then is Caul hit with the reality: the woman on tape had not been saying, “He’d kill us if he had the chance,” she had been saying, “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” And he realizes that the conversation had been the couple plotting to murder his employer (her husband), not the other way around. The last scene of the movie shows the ultimate devastation as Harry: his discovery that his apartment is being tapped (“the bugger gets bugged,” said his rival at the convention), and he slips even more into psychosis. He strips his apartment bare of all objects, machines, phones, even the wallpaper, even the drywall, looking for bugs (wiretaps). He shatters into pieces his precious statue of Mary looking for bugs (did the church ever help him anyway?). The last shot is on Caul, machine-less (did machines ever help him anyway?), sitting in his underwear (revealed) playing his saxophone, crazy, alone, and ruined. The first shot of The Conversation follows the formula: machinery first, audiotaped music and voices distorted by wiretaps and hidden microphones, and by getting close to the couple, then pulling back so they won’t notice they are being spied on. The distortion is almost hallucinatory and induces in the viewer a feeling of derealization. The second shot is on Harry, listening in and filming the couple as they walk through a crowded park in San Francisco. When we realize the bizarre sounds and sights are being created by surveillance machines employed by an expert, we are relieved to find that we aren’t psychotic after all. This shift, from wondering if the initial distortions in sound and sight are hallucinations to realizing they are purposeful elements of someone’s profession, cinematically depicts a typical schizoid defence against anxiety. The techno-schizoid with his machinery can bend reality, magnify it, increase and decrease volume, bring people close and send them away again without ever becoming aware that his fear of losing control of the object underlies his need to control via buttons, knobs, lenses. It’s his profession; he gets paid to do this by the sane and orderly, the integrated. The fact that they perceive him as an expert and hire him implies (mistakenly) that he is sane and integrated too. In Blow Out, directed by Brian DePalma, the first thing we see is sound-effects equipment. Jack, a former Philadelphia police detective, is now reduced to working as a sound-effects specialist for cheesy, lowbudget slasher films, trying to dub a realistic-sounding scream by a woman who is being murdered in a movie he’s working on. The second shot is of Jack himself. He is being told by his employer, a film director, to find a more realistic-sounding scream. His crime in the past, the cause of his superego’s torment, occurred when he worked in surveillance for the city police department. A cleverly constructed wiretap Jack had attached to an undercover policeman was discovered by the criminals, who proceeded to kill the cop. Jack quit the police department after the murder for which he feels responsible, and quit the world of human connection. He is drawn (again, the protagonist is drawn unwillingly) back to people after he accidentally tapes a political candidate’s limo tire being shot (the blowout of the title). Someone assassinated the politician, who was riding in the limo with his girlfriend (not his wife) but made it look like a car accident. Jack, having caught the crime on tape, realizes that the girlfriend is in danger. The news reports express surprise that the dead man had had a passenger, and we find that the people behind the murder were also surprised to learn of the extra passenger, now on the run because she is the only witness to the blowout. Jack’s defence begins to unravel as he (following the formula) helplessly (unconsciously) fights the technoschizoid’s repetition compulsion: attempting rescue and participating in death instead. He becomes friends with the hooker and sets the scene for the inevitable mistake: instead of dropping the machines and rescuing her, presenting himself to the world as whole object, he again phantasizes that he will fail unless he uses his plastic audiotaping equipment (prosthesis? Viagra?). The assassin chases the girl, and though she is wired with Jack’s tracking apparatus (instead of having Jack there in person), they lose contact with each other and she is killed, and Jack returns to his life’s inevitable conclusion: alone in the trenches, surrounded by equipment, numb. In the film Eye of the Beholder we first see the surveillance equipment devised by the expert, known only as “The Eye,” who is capturing on video a co-worker having sex (a couple). In the next shot, we see “The Eye” himself, a man tormented by the guilt and grief he feels because his wife left him several years before and took their daughter after accusing him of being a terrible father. We see him surrounded by his surveillance equipment, gazing without expression at a school photograph, a class of young girls. On the back of the picture his ex-wife had written, “Guess which one is your daughter, asshole.” Having retreated from the world of relationships, he now works for a agency like the cia whose special password phrase for entering the top-secret facility is “guilty in the eye of the beholder.” In a scene strikingly reminiscent of Guntrip’s patient’s dream of the dugout, when he is given his new assignment he leaves the headquarters saying, “I’ll call you from the trenches.” Notably, in all three of these films, the opening scene depicts a machine, the second depicts the person. Guntrip (1969) wrote of the schizoid, “Fear of loss of contact with the external world constantly motivates efforts to regain contact with it, but this cannot be done by loving relationships” (p. 156). All three protagonists in Version A have pseudo-relationships (pseudo-colleague, pseudo-girlfriend), that is, none are fully realized. Their associations with others are marked by superficial, fragmented interaction with no sense of permanence—sad cinematic depictions of Guntrip’s “in-andout programme” (p. 278). In fact—and this comes as no surprise—for all three characters these superficial relationships quickly disintegrate as each begins to descend further into dark, obsessive alternating preoccupations with primal scene emotions (stimulated by the desperate need for insertion into the dyad) and cold, steel pieces of technology (telescopes, guns, cameras, “bugs”). In each of these films the protagonists’ latest surveillance assignment introduces them to someone (in a couple) who disturbs their brilliantly affectless, monastic rigidity, provoking them to feel again: feel concern, feel curious, feel dizzy with interest, feel love and desire—all of which represent psychic death to the schizoid. This in turn stimulates the repetition to step back into the real world, seemingly to rescue but unconsciously to destroy. The predominant feeling driving the Version A protagonists’ unconscious attempts to destroy the couple is envy. In the techno-schizoid’s case, envy is unconscious and denied. Consciously he imagines he is being helpful. When envy is unconscious, it is acted on destructively. The techno-schizoid’s desperate hidden envy is stimulated by stumbling upon a primal scene that is already tinged with danger. That leads to the unfolding of the plot, beginning with his own imagined altruism. This is followed by an increasingly obsessive tinkering with machines that takes on the appearance of frantic, manic masturbation (tools and knobs constituting the phallus from which he can’t remove his hands), resulting finally in the blunders that lead to ruin. These characters remind us of Guntrip’s patient who said, “I’m very afraid I’ll ruin this treatment in the end” (Guntrip, 1964, p. 289). The schizoid’s simple lack of practice in relating, the consequence of his withdrawal from the mainstream of intimate interactional activity, has led him to be as inept and weak at human connection as he has become skilled with technology. This is an aspect of each of these characters (inept at simple human interaction) that makes it impossible for him to discern the true danger of the situation or who is really threatened. Although he thinks he is seeing everything (a delusion resulting from his idolization of sophisticated seeing machinery), in reality all he continues to see is his own unconscious life history being played out, with new characters enacting the primal scene. This is no ordinary primal scene, something that is unsettling enough for most of us. For the schizoid, a bonded couple represents the deadly essence of desire. For Harry in The Conversation the stimulation for repetition is the woman in the couple whom he thinks he hears saying to her lover, “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” He rewinds this tape a thousand times, foregoing food, sleep, and other duties (signalling a breakdown of his former neatly ordered life), as he continues to listen to her saying to her lover, “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” Not until it’s too late (“too late” is an overdetermined motif in these films) does he understand that she’d really been saying, “He’d kill us if he had the chance.” Only after his employer is brutally murdered by the woman and man, the deadly couple he’d childishly imagined were innocent victims, does he realize that, for all his fabulous machinery, he had blundered again in his attempt to insert himself into the world of people. As noted before, typical of these films, Harry is alive at the end while someone else is dead. In Blow Out Jack’s emergence from schizoid solitude is triggered by a young woman who took part in a scheme that led to the death of a presidential candidate (with whom she’d been having an affair). She is now in danger herself of being killed. Following the techno-schizoid formula, Jack first encounters Sally when she and her lover are together in the |