Word: psychiatrists
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Burning a person with a cigarette is a fair example of the first option. Torn, who plays a psychiatrist and thus knows how to hurt people most profoundly, chooses the second...
...Torn is a psychiatrist who decides to act out his sexual fantasies and record the results with a concealed movie camera which films all the escapades which occur in his living room. He leaves his wife, drops his patients, and sets himself up as a photographer to lure women. The movie the viewer sees is the one which the shrink makes. It documents his disintegration...
...Coming Apart's interest slim as it is, consists in having two avant-garde elements at its center. The protagonist is that archetypal figure of the West in this country: the psychiatrist. In theory this could have been one of the movie's strong points: how the man's highly developed self-consciousness affected the way he lived, etc. In practice, however, Torn is unable to convince you that he is a shrink at all, let alone that any psychiatrist would be motivated to scale the heights of promiscuity in such...
...severely restricted point of view causes this incompleteness of knowledge about the protagonist's motivation. If filmed in a more typical way, the story of the psychiatrist's disintegration might have been augmented by scenes describing what he does when the movie camera is off and the nature of his relationships with his mistress and wife. The fixed-camera experiment is a radical application of the modern assumption that the teller's point of view is all-important in the interpretation of a story. The viewer never knows the "whole" situation, but only the portion that...
...Coming Apart , the camera offers no help in interpreting the happenings on screen, abandoning the viewer to puzzle over the ambiguities. The viewer sees only the abysmal way the psychiatrist treats everyone, and his breakdown. There are no explanations beyond the acts themselves. The question "Why?" is as irrelevant as it is unanswerable, Coming Apart is ironically, post-psychological...