Word: freudian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...deadpan colloquialisms by the teen-age Linda-is right out of Ring Lardner's sardonic stories. In the tradition of these other native ironists, Malick keeps his distance from his material. Though built around a heartbreaking love triangle, Days of Heaven has no introspective dialogue and no Freudian fireworks. Accordingly, actors have been cast more on the basis of how they look than how they emote. Except for Gere, who is too manicured to pass for a migrant, the cast serves the movie well. In a more conventional film, perhaps, Gere might have caused severe damage; here...
Most people are unlikely to find such observations very convincing or useful. Worse, Psychoanalyst Gould applies a heavy dose of Freudian pessimism: every child is born with an "insatiable biological drive" to have what it cannot have, the total attention and love of its mother. The failure to satisfy this drive, he believes, produces anger and protective devices that dominate every stage of adult development. Says Gould: "Mental life seems to have an unconscious goal-the elimination of the distortions of childhood consciousness and its demons and protective devices that restrict our life...
Unfortunately, Sarah's path to an Olympics gold medal is strewn with Freudian booby traps. Aunt Velvet, it seems, has still not recovered from a miscarriage she suffered after being thrown by Pie years earlier. John has not only problems at the typewriter but a patho logical fear of marriage. Both these characters discuss their neuroses at great length, often in voice-over narration that accompanies Forbes' extensive travelogue footage of British scenic vistas. Young Sarah, meanwhile, finds herself unable to make friends among her peers. In one gratuitously jarring incident, a cruel class mate presents her with...
...technical device symolizing both inner and outer vision. "La Fronde" harks back to the theories of Sigmund Freud, one of the great heroes of the founder of the Surrealist movement. A person with a tiny head and huge, bloated body curls around in an endless, crazy, frightened somersault--a Freudian might see it as a picture of someone's terror when they are about to be born...
...plot of Caligula is unspectacular: young, idealistic prince turns into ruthless emperor; ruthless emperor regrets past sins and kills himself--a Freudian explanation for the motives behind the suicide (the death of the emperor's sister-mistress) is available for those non-believers in the true power of spiritual anguish. But the philosophical and moral message of the play is much closer to post-Marxian France than to Rome during the Pax Romana. The young, callow Caligula recognizes the hypocrisy of the dominant values and mores. Devoted to exposing the irrationality of society, he sets out to accomplish the impossible...