It is my misfortune that my life means nothing to me
without the joy of love, of tempestuous, eternally changing love… Return to me,
in this moment of my need, some of the love and guilt and altruism which I was
able to give to you at the time of your illness. Now it is I who am ill.
Uncompleted letter from C.G. Jung to Sabina
Spielrein, 4 December 1908
I keep thinking
about hysteria, how we depict it. When I first saw David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method last September I noted
a fair bit of eye-rolling and presumptuous dismissal regarding Keira Knightley’s
embodiment of Sabina Spielrein. Spielrein’s admittance to the Burghölzli
psychiatric hospital, quite literally kicking and screaming all the way,
jumpstarts the film and, it would seem, instantly made certain viewers uneasy.
I guess some felt that Knightley was exaggerating Spielrein’s behavior, but I
can’t help but think she got it just right. The early years of
psychoanalysis coincided with a period in which hysteria remained a blanket
diagnosis bestowed almost exclusively to women—it was considered a feminine
condition. With this in the air, I can only imagine that being labeled
hysterical was, in a way, a prompt to act out some collective idea of what
hysterics are supposed to do. I don’t mean that Knightley’s Spielrein is
anything less than genuinely traumatized; I simply suggest that the parameters
of her behaviour are subject to context.
A Dangerous Method is out on DVD and
blu-ray now, so I watched the film a third time. Those initial scenes with
Spielrein were only more compelling, rich with details, each containing some
aspect of the character’s psychic malaise. That moment when she’s asked her
very first question by Michel Fassbender’s Jung, the brilliant young doctor who
will cure her with Freud’s method, identify her sexual trauma, and become her
secret lover somewhere along the way: jaw jutting, elbows arched in the roasted-chicken
pose, the word “humiliation” yanked up from the depths of her viscera as though
snagged on a fishhook. Even in relatively calmer moments, she seems trapped inside
a state of ceaseless panic, caught, gasping for air, in the dragnet of some
trawler that never sleeps. In terms of finding a balance, Knightley punctuates
the early scenes with a great deal of mischievous humour, and later in the film
she will develop her Spielrein into an articulate and innovative young doctor
in her own right, successfully negotiating precarious relationships personal
and professional and coming to terms with her knotty desires, while never quite
losing traces of the wild neurotic we first met.
Another thing I began to appreciate only more on a
third viewing: Cronenberg and his editor Ronald Sanders’ knack for knowing when
to exit one scene and enter the next, cutting from the image of a hand to one
of handwriting, from one coat to another, from Jung commenting on the
limitations of certain doctors to an arresting outdoor portrait of Vincent
Cassel’s Otto Gross, the other brilliant young Freudian analyst whose radical
notions about polygamy and freedom-at-all-costs threaten to compromise the new
science he might otherwise help to legitimize. The Jung-Gross friendship, built
on a sort of tag-team analysis (Jung would analyze Gross and then Gross would
turn around and analyze Jung), is one of the film’s jewels. It’s sort of sad
yet perfect when Gross, not even wearing a shirt, climbs a ladder and goes over
the high stone wall surrounding the Burghölzli and disappears from the
narrative. Once he’s gone it’s as though, to use a very Cronenbergian metaphor,
Jung becomes infected by Gross’ provocative assertions. And never quite
recovers. The belief in mysticism seems to surge in Jung as he slips deeper and
deeper into anxieties founded in insatiable ambition, sexual-romantic
dissatisfaction, and the feeling of being unmoored from his great but now frustrated father figure—the film implies that it’s this mysticism above all that divides the
pragmatic Freud from his protégé. (And Cronenberg the materialist seems to
relate more to Freud here than Jung.
I’m grateful for Entertainment One’s handsomely
transferred home video release of A
Dangerous Method, which will hopefully draw more viewers. But the extras,
or rather the lack thereof, is disappointing. There are brief, choppy, annoying
edited interviews with cast and crew that never let the subjects get very far
into anything. And there’s no Cronenberg audio commentary track, which strikes
me as a misreading of the sort of things that make people buy DVDs—even those
who didn’t particularly care for A
Dangerous Method might be persuaded to pick up the disc if it had been
endowed with a commentary track, given that Cronenberg’s one of the most
articulate filmmakers out there and has a way of making even dubious choices
seem thoughtful. Those in Canada who want the disc with commentary will have to buy the US Sony Pictures Classics edition.
