A History of My Analysis

Sigmund Freud's (Viggo Mortensen's) head appears to swell in A Dangerous Method.

* * * A Dangerous Method. Written by Christopher Hampton, based on a play by Christopher Hampton and book by John Kerr. Directed by David Cronenberg.

Q: So, anything new this week?

A: In our last session, I said movies about great Dead White Males still get made, but only if they steer clear of much intellectual content.  It took just one week for an exception to arrive to this confident generalization. David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method is indeed about a couple of post-Victorian eminences—Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. And notwithstanding the way it is sold as a love triangle, the script by Christopher Hampton (Dangerous Liaisons, Atonement) is very much about the intellectual conflict that animated and eventually destroyed the relationship between these two giants. Now what would Freud have made a critic who is compelled to highlight an exception to his own rule?

Q: Hmm, what do you think?

A: I guess I’d say I’m conflicted—perhaps on some level deeply, deeply angry—that Cronenberg’s has chosen to abandon the overt horrors he used to make (e.g. Scanners, The Fly, Dead Ringers) for mainstream dramas like Eastern Promises and A History of Violence. True, the latter are well-wrought, undeniably more edgy products than most multiplex fare. But compared to the ambitious contemplations of mortality in the best of his horror films, the new Cronenberg seems content to settle for far, far less. He’s like a slugger in baseball who used to hit booming home runs but also strike out a lot, who decides to turn himself into a specialist in slap singles.

            Being a fairly sumptuous period drama, A Dangerous Method would seem to fit this pattern of diminished expectations. It is, after all, about the genesis of psychoanalysis, otherwise known as “the talking cure”, which was in essence the antidote to the neglect, confinements and beatings—in short, the Cronenbergian horrors—inflicted on mentally ill people until well into the 20^th century. 

            And indeed, being based on a play based on a book, much of the film is comprises people in tweed and linen, talking in paneled rooms. Jung (Michael Fassbender) is an independent Swiss psychologist who decides to apply Freud’s newfangled ideas to the treatment of the beautiful, tormented Sabina (Keira Knightley). As imagined here, Jung’s relationship with Freud himself began only after he had begun to delve into the wellsprings of Sabina’s sadomasochism. In the continuous 13-hour long conversation that touches off their friendship, Freud (Viggo Mortensen) insists the root of her illness as sexual, as he more or less did for every problem. Jung, though flattered to be seen as the old man’s heir apparent, suspects that there are more monsters in the subconscious bestiary than just psychosexual ones…

Q: Yes, go on.

A: A Dangerous Game isn’t In Therapy or some similar confessional drama. Hampton’s script seems largely disinterested in the particulars of Sabina’s case. Instead, it dwells on how her influence—much like Geneviève Bujold’s in Dead Ringers—widened the seams that were already dividing the men. Freud was a Jew of relatively modest means who perceived his theories, and of course himself, as dangerously exposed to ridicule in pre-fascist Austria. Jung, as an “Aryan” married to a rich woman (Sarah Gadon), quite literally had the luxury to take risks as he adapted and deepened what Freud had begun. Class tensions between them, and the inevitable jockeying for supremacy between master and apprentice, counted more than poor Sabina, who seems even more crazy once Jung nominally “cures” her of her hysteria.

Q: Shall we do some free association about the cast?

A: OK.

Q: Keira Knightley.

A: Teeth.

Q: Viggo Mortensen.

A: Pipeweed.

Q: Michael Fassbender.

A: Shame.

Q: Keira Knightley.

A: Eyebrows.

Q: So how does all that make you feel?

A: In the end, this movie is more tragedy than horror—the tragedy of a conflict where the rivals are doomed to play their parts, no matter how self-conscious and insightful they might begin. How does this make me feel? Insofar as the best of Cronenberg’s old horror films verged on tragedy, this is something of his old promise redeemed. As outcomes go, that’s not bad.

Q: I see we’re out of time. Pick up again next week?

A: OK. Take a check this time?

Q: Sorry, I still prefer cash.

© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro