The screen writer (Apr-Oct 1948)

Boy and Girl Meet Neurosis FOR some time now Hollywood has been doing its best to make us conscious of the unconscious. To get to this point, the motion picture industry had to throw over one of its own long-established inhibitions which decreed that mental ailments were not fit material for treatment on the screen. By now, thanks to this new departure in films, psychoanalysis — couch and all — has become a fixture on Main Street. It is anybody's guess just how far or in what direction the picture makers intend to go with this new type of film. We can, however, take stock of the psychological pictures that the industry has produced thus far. What impelled the movie producers to take the plunge into depth psychology? Have some of the newer psychiatric insights deepened the screenwriter's approach to his material? Has the use of some of these concepts resulted in a more mature and realistic portrayal of social relationships on the screen ? I should like to consider these questions by examining a number of psychological films. What interests me in these pictures is not so much their plot or entertainment value, but rather their underlying psychology. Is this psychology sound or real or valid ? Does it jibe with the thinking of the people who would seem to qualify as our best contemporary psychiatrists and psychoanalysts? I might begin by asking what the psychological film is telling us about the symptoms of neurosis. What are some of the outward signs of the emotional. disabilities we see depicted on the screen? The troubled adult whose inner self Hollywood is busily plumbing is a fairly simple soul. He shows next to no originality in the choice of the symptoms to which his difficulties give rise. This new fictional character is, first and foremost, a killer. He murders people or has homicide on the brain or in his heart. {Shock, Possessed, Dark Mirror, The Locket, Rage In Heaven, Fear in the Night, Spellbound, Secret Beyond the Door, Mourning Becomes Electra.) He goes off the deep end by taking his own life or toying with that idea from time to time. (Possessed, The Locket, Rage in Heaven, Fear in the Night, Mourning Becomes Electra.) As the "psychiatrics" have it, the neurotic also gets himself into trouble because of drinking. ( The Guilt of Janet Ames.) He lies and steals. as well. ( The Locket.) When he doesn't crack up altogether, (Shock and Possessed) , he sometimes loses the use of his limbs (Janet Ames) or the ability to remember things (Possessed, Spellbound, Fear in the Night). What we should look for, then, in the neurotic personality — or what Hollywood is telling us to look for — is murder, suicide, alcoholism, lying, kleptomania, amnesia and functional paralysis or thoroughgoing break down. Now the Hollywood conception of what a neurosis looks like in action checks with reality, up to a point. Even so, I feel that I could get a better picture of the same phenomenon by asking the man on the street to tell me in his own words what he thinks of his mother-in-law or of his adolescent daughter who is currently too much for him. Human beings who are wound up emotionally do indeed develop some or all of the aberrations we have come to expect on the screen. As a rule, however, the psychoneurotics of everyday life are neither killers, nor alcoholics, nor thieves, nor raving maniacs. They are, on the con trary, much more commonplace specimens. The ordinary neurotic of the flesh and blood variety suffers primarily from inner conflicts and from interpersonal relationships. He is a fearful, hostile, isolated soul who gets into trouble with people. As a consequence, he tends to founder in work and sex and marriage, in nearly every relationship he enters. His tensions bring on physical disorders of a functional character. Give him time and he will come up with some psychosomatic symptoms. Only two of the "psychiatric" films I have seen come to grips with this central fact that neuroses and the graver emotional disturbances represent, at bottom, inner conflict and strained interpersonal relationships. These notable exceptions, to my way of thinking, are The Seventh Veil and Mourning Becomes Electra. Both of these pictures get somewhere because they catch the meaning of an emotional disturbance. The behavior patterns they treat in fictional form, all various manifestations of distorted social relationships, make sense. They ring true. They are images of ourselves. These two films dramatize certain feelings and actions that exist within every human being alive. Most of our other "psychiatric" films employ no such concepts for explaining abnormal states of mind. What they settle for, consequently, are portrayals of the obvious, the superficial, or the bizarre. Then, to give us surface tension or the appearance of the real thing, the picture makers are forced to resort to props and background tricks. On this count alone, therefore, or in these first efforts to give us just a surface picture of what a neurosis looks like, the union between Holly The Screen Writer, September, 194S