A Dangerous Method

A Dangerous Method – It has been years since the Canadian director, David Cronenberg, indulged himself, and audiences, in that most disreputable of genres, the horror film. Cronenberg made his name with sexually transgressive, spectacularly loathsome horror films, most famously The Fly with Jeff Goldblum’s nose and ears falling in a gentle, fleshy drizzly to the tiles of his toilet, the exploding head in Scanners, the lunatic gynecologist-twins in Dead Ringers, and the flesh equipped with a slot to read and play sado-masochistic DVDs in Videodrome (not to speak of Marilyn Chambers writhings in Rabid and the pre-natal monsters in The Brood). In his last several films, Cronenberg has favored cerebral and, rather, stately dramas driven by literate dialogue as opposed to blood-letting and splattering gore. A Dangerous Method, which details the relationship between Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, threatens to revert to Cronenberg’s horror-show roots in its first twenty minutes – Keira Knightley plays a wealthy Russian girl afflicted with all sorts of spectacular tics and convulsions; in several shots, which surely must be CGI-generated, she seems to dislocate her jaw to thrust it prognathously (and as a sort of phallus) a half foot in advance of her face. Not the least of the horrors suffered by Knightley’s character, Sabina Spielrein, is a dense Russian accent, as thick as cabbage and beet borscht, rather unconvincing to my ear, but pleasingly similar to the sound of Bela Lugosi’s Transylvanian-inflected English. After Knightley’s spectacular spasms are largely cured, in good old fashioned psychoanalytic fashion by liberal application of Jung’s virile member, the film reverts to a rather studious, if gripping, narrative of the clash between the Swiss analyst and his mentor, Dr. Freud. So far as I can ascertain, most of the story is true and Cronenberg stages several exciting and famous quarrels between Freud and Jung, including the celebrated debate over Akhnaten that resulted in the Freud’s infamous fainting spell: “how sweet it must be to die” the supine Freud whispers to Jung who embraces him like a lover. The movie is gravely beautiful, splendidly acted, and, oddly enough, seems too short – this film is so interesting that it could easily sustain another twenty to thirty minutes. True to his genre film background, Cronenberg is economical with his means, makes excellent use of Viennese settings, and brings the whole enterprise to a rather hasty conclusion in less than two hours. It’s like a primer on the developing schism in European psychoanalysis punctuated with lurid episodes of overtly sado-masochistic sex – the comely Sabina Spielrein adores pre-coital thrashings administered by her Aryan “Siegfried”, Dr. Jung. Wagnerian music, particularly the beautiful “Siegfried idyll” provides the soundtrack. If you’re interested in the subject matter, the film is very good and, indeed, expands in your memory – the controversy between Jung and Freud which involves religious, economic (Jung was very wealthy and Freud merely upper middle class), as well as theoretical questions in the theory of psychoanalysis is dramatic and fascinating. Spielrein seems to have been a classically histrionic patient, one of the grand old hysterics of the kind in which Charcot specialized in his own theater of cruelty; today, we would call her a Borderline personality patient, a mistress of manipulation of the most cunning and malign sort who intrudes herself between Freud and Jung for the purpose of strewing discord and chaos among them. (She became a famous Soviet analyst in her own right before being murdered, with her children, by the Gestapo in 1941). My chief criticism of the film is that it is almost too modest – Cronenberg eschews drawing any larger significance from the antics of Spielrein and the warring shrinks – and it seems to end too abruptly. Evidently, A Dangerous Method is better than I grasped. If a film stays with you, and poses questions, two or three days after you have seen it, if the movie reveals curiosities in its odd corners and angles when you turn the thing over in your mind after half a week, then, the picture must be very good. In some respects, A Dangerous Method explores the contrast between optimistic and tragic views of life. Freud’s perspective is pessimistic: we are told that he has posted a motto over his desk: Don’t ever think that you can cure them! Sabina Spielrein accuses him acquiescence in his patient’s neuroses – “you just open the closet on their sickness and show it to them, squatting there like a toad. No one is cured.” By contrast, Jung seems to have cured Spielrein, albeit by a “dangerous method”, and stands for the proposition that human beings can overcome obstacles to their self-actualization and become, so to speak, the heroes in the narrative of their own life. But Jung, who is a very sympathetic character in the movie, behaves dishonorably, and Freud, who is portrayed as an unctuous Machiavellian manipulator, acts with punctilious honor. Jung is said by Freud to be “exquisitely Protestant” and, of course, he is obscenely wealthy. As far as Freud is concerned, Jung’s optimism is an artifact of his status as a rich member of the master race. Freud reminds Spielrein that she is Jewish and therefore his natural ally against the persecuting Aryans – in this case, her lover, Jung. In the end, the tragic sense of life seems to have prevailed. Although Jung perceives his children with ambivalence, as barriers to his success, his lily-white wife is always pregnant. Jung, the optimist, overcome with love kneels masochistically against Spielrein’s lap, desperately pleading with her to remain his lover – this is after we have seen him beating her into an orgasm a few minutes earlier. Who is the stronger here? Jung claims that people can be healed and can change their fundamental constitution. But, near the end of the film, Sabina Spielrein points out to the astounded Dr. Jung that his current mistress, Toni Wolff, is Jewish, studying to become a psychoanalyst, and, indeed, very similar to her. In the final scene, Jung tells Spielrein that he has imagined seas of blood swamping Europe. But he feels powerless to do anything to avert the coming catastrophe and sits almost comatose at the edge of the great lake in its placid mountain basin perplexed with visions of disaster. At the film’s outset, we have seen Spielrein arriving at Jung’s clinic, feral and screaming in a locked coach; we see her depart, the cool mistress of her destiny, in another elegant carriage.