Movies and Psychotherapy = Cinematherapy - Part 2
Well, I'm back from romping around Boston and the harbor area and roaming the new, fantastic, bird-like, convention center located adjacent to the harbor. I was attending and giving some presentations at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association. Always a blast and never quite so dull as rumors and chambermaids would have you believe. There were even passionate protests and speeches criticizing APA for not coming out with a strong, definitive enough stand against psychologists, whatever their rationale working on sites for government agencies involved in torture.
On a lighter note, if you're in Boston and are down by the harbor area, visit the Seashore Hotel's Aura Restaurant. Words (almost) fail me. Nouvelle cuisine that leaves you feeling magnificently sated. I thought the words nouvelle cuisine and sated constituted an oxymoron. Who knew? Everything, literally everything at Aura, wine, bread, courses, tasted as good as they looked. The best food I had in Boston, bar none. The chef's name is Rachel.
Okay, back to Cinematherapy (CT).
While on a panel talking about CT as one of a clutch of therapeutic tools that use the media to "move things along," I was reminded of a patient who told me about her experience the night before, as she was leaving a movie theater. She had gone to see the film Trip To Bountiful and noticed that, while she was unmoved by the story of an elderly woman trying to get back to the home of her childhood before she died, virtually the entire audience left the theater wiping their eyes. She winked and said "I knew there was something there what with my tears and emotions not being there."
Ever the clever therapist, I asked her to elaborate. She started but then, suddenly, words stuck in her throat while her eyes welled up with tears and she stared at me, speechless, helpless, stuck. A silent struggle to speak filled the room. Just as suddenly, the damn broke. What came pouring out was the brutal truth that she did not want to go back to her childhood home; NEVER wanted to go back to it; it harbored no good memories for her. Her adult life was where she wanted to remain. The therapy "work" part of that session began, primed, defenses softened up by a movie she went to see only because of her admiration of the work of Horton Foote.
Now for the BBC tale.
Doing Cinematherapy for the BBC: A Hollywood Tale
Peter and Alexandra flew all the way from chilly, rain-swept London Town to the sun-drenched, glamour capitol of the world, Hollywood. Non-stop. Coach class. To save the BBC money. They arrive at my house late, hurried, but happy, having enjoyed their cab ride through the Hollywood hills, as a heavy afternoon rain accompanied the descending fog. Neither was prepared for the rain. Rain! This is Southern California. Hollywood, after all. Reigning movie stars, yes. Raining rain, no.
They came to do interviews. One of the interviews was to be with me, and concerned cinematherapy. This is a surprisingly popular topic in England nowadays. Peter hosts the BBC science-oriented radio show, Frontiers. Alexandra is his Segment Producer and "sound person."
Peter is wearing a trench coat, but it isn't because he was expecting rain. He was a print journalist in a previous life. Trench coats. Journalists. It's a prop. Alexandra the Wet, alas, is propless.
Initial chit-chat revolves around the traffic snarl in Hollywood. They arrived in Southern California just in time to be bedeviled by Academy Awards traffic which includes closed or barricaded streets forming a gauntlet to my house, all in servitude to the following evening's Oscar gala at the new Kodak Theater, a scant two miles from my home. Ironic, I thought, that Peter had trouble getting to an interview with me about cinematherapy because of the chaos surrounding a celebration of the cinema.
Alexandra sniffles as she runs through tech-sound checks on her digital tape recorder as we sit across from each other. She coughs several times and apologizes for bringing her cold germs all the way from London.
The plan is to first talk about the media's impact on people and culture, but Peter gives this arena short shrift because. He really wants to get to the highlight of the show, for him at least, a brief, on-the-spot demonstration of cinematherapy. I will play the doctor, he, the patient. That was the pre-arranged plan, hatched in London, weeks ago.
Oddly though (or not), Peter throws this schedule a curve and begins to play psychological hide and seek with me. When that fails to accomplish his goal, he appeals to Alexandra to take his place as the cinematherapy guinea pig.
Surprise? Not really. Guys really hate to be vulnerable in public.
But Alexandra has spunk (the thing Lou Grant hated so much in Mary Richards). Deftly she turns the focus back on him, first cajoling, then goading, appealing to Peter's talent and intelligence (both considerable), and to his status as show host, and finally as celebrity-in-residence. Very eventually and very reluctantly, Peter relents. After all, if not him, then who? Not Miss Sniffles.
So, Peter positions himself on the celluloid couch. We try to mount a CT dialogue on some vague movie scenarios Peter tosses out, really as sops. This gets us nowhere because the films are a micron deep in emotional importance for him. I scowl a bit and Alexandra laughs at the sheer flimsiness of his stalling. Grudgingly, Peter abandons his evasiveness, switches gears, and starts to talk about a film he saw recently on television, Carol Reed's 1949 shadowy masterpiece thriller, The Third Man.
At my urging, Peter recalls a pivotal, cinematic scene from the film: A drug dealer, Harry Lime (played by Orson Wells) and his old friend and pulp fiction writer, Holly Martins (played by Joseph Cotton), are on top of stationary carousel in East Berlin. From that height the people below look like specks to them. Lime disdainfully points out to Martins how meaningless, how tiny, how thoroughly ineffectual are the people below. Dealing them addictive drugs or diluted penicillin is no worse than squashing an ant, Harry Lime coldly opines .
Peter throws out a few word scraps about how much the scene upset him, but then turns silent.
"Why is this scene important?" I prod Peter? He shrugs. I probe further. He holds back. I verbally recreate the troubling scene and plumb again: "With whom do you identify? What feelings are uncoiled in this scene for you? This resonates with you. Why?"
At first Peter mumbles something about the scene making him feel like one of the ants. His speech is halting, then without warning, the dam breaks and words of bitterness spill out. As he talks, this Niagara of feeling seems to surprise Peter as much as it surprises Alexandra and me.
If this is an act, Peter's an Oscar contender. He bitterly decries his impotence in confronting the economic system that is gutting his pension plan. He resents his powerlessness to fight the powers that be, the "Harry Limes" who played with the stock market and bankrupted so many small investors, including him, and, more to the point, the portfolio managers who carelessly, impunitively "downsized" the value of his pension plan all the while lining their pockets with transaction fees. He feels the weight of future anxiety. His early retirement plan -- history!
In this brief cinematherapy demonstration, a movie, The Third Man, became a road into Peter's barely hidden catacomb of angst. The movie became a TAT or Rorschach, and more. The process had worked its projective voodoo on Peter and he ultimately gave himself over to its brief voyage of discovery. It was a start. He could, if he wanted, continue the journey elsewhere, back in London.
Peter had his CT demonstration for the radio audience. But that's only the show biz part. What Peter was truly surprised at was how, with rather modest prodding from his producer and me, he was so ready to risk vulnerability.
