Spellbound was released in 1945, only 6 years after the
death of Sigmund Freud. At the outset,
it portends to offer some type of earnest exploration of psychoanalysis, as it
opens with the statement, “Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science
treats the emotional problems of the sane. The analyst seeks only to induce the
patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his
mind. Once the complexes that have been disturbing the patient are uncovered
and interpreted, the illness and confusion disappear ... and the evils of
unreason are driven from the human soul.“
However, the film proceeds to treat psychoanalysis somewhat flippantly,
and there are no remotely realistic representations of the practice within the
film. As Hitchcock insisted when these
incongruities were objected by the advising psychoanalysts, “My dear, it's only a movie.” If the film does not, in fact, explore
psychoanalysis with any depth, it does at length plumb the depths of the
Oedipal fantasy and Oedipal guilt complex.
But with rather clumsily constructed characters, how does this Oedipal
exploration work? It would appear that
this narrative relies heavily upon the division between reality and perception,
as much in the viewer’s phenomenological experience as in the experiences of
characters within the plot. The idea of division is rife in the film, with
overt binaries between old and new practices, between youth and old age,
parents and children, conflicting identities, conflicting female roles, agency
and fate, material reality and psychical reality, and the conscious and the
subconscious. Ultimately all of
this division points to the division between the desire within the text, and
the desire of the text, and how the film ultimately becomes about the latter
rather than the former.
Spellbound came to be made largely out of producer DavidSelznick’s own experience with psychoanalysis and his desire to make a movie
about it. Psychoanalysis went on to
become a popular plot device in suspense films later in the 1940s, but in this
case its use was innovative. He
purchased rights to the novel, The Houseof Dr. Edwardes, and hired his own psychoanalyst, May Romm, to advise
Hitchcock. Hitchcock and Selznick appear
to have had fairly incompatible visions for the film though, and their
dissonance over this film irreparably damaged their working relationship. Selznick (and film censors) appears to have
insisted on the removal of the bulk of the dream sequence designed by
surrealist Salvador Dali, leaving only what was necessarily for plot
propulsion. The images of multiple eyes,
and of the pair of scissors cutting through an eye are the only strong surrealist
images that remained, and they are appreciably symbolic of the duality inherent
in the film. The film, or rather it’s score by MiklósRózsa also pioneered the use of the Theremin in the score. (See: Spellbound Concerto, approx 4:22-7:55) The instrument is played without actually
touching the device, and the pitch alters based on the proximity of the instrumentalist’s
hands to it. By adding this unfamiliar instrument to scenes involving dreams or repressed memories, an uncanny effect
is evoked, as what had seemed familiar in the score (always repeating motifs
previously introduced) becomes unfamiliar when played on the theremin.
The film plays with Baudry’s idea of double space of the
subject. Both the conscious and
unconscious are explored in the character first introduced as Dr. Edwardes, but
who later turns out to be an amnesiac John Ballantine. The film is also, more subversively, playing
with the conscious and unconscious of the viewer, providing them with the
“desire of desire” by fulfilling Ballantine’s Oedipal fantasy.
The film opens with the pretense that Dr. Edwardes is arriving
to take the helm at Green Manors, a psychiatric inpatient hospital. The current director, Dr. Murchison, is being
forced into retirement by his own mental breakdown, from which he appears to
have recovered. Dr. Constance Peterson,
the only female psychoanalysis on staff, is firmly platonic and professional
(even cold) in her interactions until the supposed Dr. Edwardes (John
Ballantine) rather abruptly sweeps her off of her feet. She immediately abandons any semblance of
professionalism and spends the rest of the film trying to cure his amnesia
through psychotherapy and prove his innocence in the death of the real Dr.
Edwardes.
In keeping with Freud’s criteria for “the uncanny” the
viewer is left in uncertainty about whether Ballantine is guilty of the
murder. (Freud referred to uncertainty
whether an object or character is familiar or “other”, such as dead/alive,
animate/inanimate) Freud said this should be “done in such a way that attention
is not focused directly upon this uncertainty, so the matter is not cleared up
directly.”
This was the first of Hitchcock’s films to question visual
perspective, displacement, and guilt. He
went on to explore these devices (arguably with more finesse) in Rear Window and Vertigo, both as cinematic devices and as subject matter within the
films. Seeing him toy with it here is
revealing.
The plot sets up John Ballantine with an overt,
unmistakeable Oedipal conflict. Constance is a blatant mother figure, and the
role of a father figure is divided amongst male characters in the film. There
is guilt for the death of one father figure, Dr. Edwardes, who was Ballantine’s
psychoanalysis prior to his death. Fear
of a punishing father (both in Dr. Murcheson and in the law), and ultimate
identification with a good father (Dr. Brulov, Constance’s mentor who says “any
husband of Constance is a husband of mine.”)
Constance’s maternal nature is referred to repeatedly. One other doctor says that he can “detect the
outcroppings of a mother instinct” in her relations with Balantine/impostor Dr.
Edwardes. Brulov reprimands her “You are
not his mama.” Yet Brulov and Constance
both hover over Ballantine like concerned parents, despite his alarming
behavior, and Brulov even says to him “I am going to be your father figure.”
Despite the uncanny themes of Ballantines involuntary
repetition of psychotic episodes whenever confronted with parallel lines or the
color white, the film seems overwhelmingly designed to accommodate pleasure,
rather than fear in the viewer.
Baudry claimed that by it’s very nature cinema puts viewer
into regressive, passive, oral, narcissistic state and that films are dream
screens, like a mother’s breast for an infant after nursing. That cinema is inherently Oedipal, leaning
toward a state of complete satisfaction parallel to the oral phase in infant
development. By its repeated, overt
oedipal references, this film seems rather self-aware of its function as a
fantasy for its audience.
Ultimately,
it is not Ballantine, but rather the fantasy constructed for him that becomes
the motivating force behind the action in the film. Ballantine himself is a
rather passive character. He is more
acted upon than active. This allows a viewer
to split the vision of the film (as perhaps alluded to by Dali’s scissors?) and
appropriate himself in the fantasy created for Ballantine. In this context, the bizarre behavior of
Constance makes more sense. For a film
that claims to be about psychoanalysis to portray a psychoanalysis behaving so
contrary to her profession only makes sense if her character exists not to
illustrate psychoanalysis accurately, but to satisfy the viewer’s oedipal
fantasy completely. Her transition from
a mother/caretaker to a romantic trope is inevitable in this context.
Ultimately, and none-too-subtly, the film changes from being
about the Oedipal issues of John Ballantine to being about the Oedipal fantasy
of the viewer. There is a shift from
desire as represented in the film to the desire of the film by the viewer. This is most clearly evidenced by
Ballantine’s absence for nearly all of the sequences involving exposition or
conflict resolution. After his arrest,
Ballantine disappears from the film entirely, but the fantasy constructed for him
remains and continues of its own volition for the viewer’s pleasure.
This seems like an easy example of Baudry’s “Desire of Desire.” The viewer’s desire to see Ballantine’s
fantasy completed becomes more important to the film than Ballantine’s own
presence. “Symbol becomes merged with what it represents,”
and Ballantine seems to represent the viewer’s fantasies. The film invites “transference of
identification” from Ballantine’s experience within his cinematic world to the
viewer’s own interaction with the entire fantasy.
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