Spellbound

It all goes back to childhood.  And certainly we have all repressed events or people or feelings from our childhood.  It might be something small that affected how we feel about certain people or places.  It might be something larger like abuse or neglect.  Perhaps an Oedipal or Ophelia complex or issue with the opposite gender?  Or it just might be that we killed out little brother by accidently pushing him off a ledge and impaling him on an iron fence….  But these repressed memories change us, and in the case of Dr. Edwards/John Ballantyne, they make us loose a bit of who we are, our past, in order to protect us from our guilt.  Baudry talks about the persuasive power of the cinema and its ideological influence.  He states that the cinema is an artificial location which shows hidden phases of our mental life. "It is the desire, unrecognized as such by the subject, to return to this phase, an early stage of development with its own forms of satisfaction which may play a determining role in his desire for cinema and the pleasure he finds in it." (184)  He further highlights the power of cinema to be like a dream.  A perceived reality and images that accompany, so much like the dream state, that allow the audience to explore the repressed emotions of other characters, and perhaps, even of themselves. 

The opening credits allude to the overarching theme of this plot.  Quoting Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar; the title credits read: “The fault...is not in our stars, but in ourselves....Our story deals with psychoanalysis, the method by which modern science treats the emotional problems of the sane. The analyst seeks only to induce the patient to talk about his hidden problems, to open the locked doors of his mind.”  This 1945 film deals with that very subject, plowing through the realms of the mind and repressed fears and memories.  The analyst’s job is to examine the mind and help the patient discover the truth that has been clouded with fear or contempt.  And perhaps our job, as the audience, is to examine the film and our response to it. 

From the very beginning of Spellbound, we encounter a variety of very clear statements about relationships with the opposite gender, the repression of feelings, and a psychoanalytic approach to dealing with the subconscious.  One female patient comments on how much she hates men and that she once “bit the mustache right off” of one man who tried to kiss her.  Yet she is an overly sexualized character who is being treated for her urges and aggression.  She equally seems to despise women, stating that Dr. Petersen tries to make herself superior.  Another male patient professes that his subconscious doesn’t want him cured.  As Freud notes, psychoanalysis is concerned with laying bare the hidden forces, those which specifically control our world our or perception of reality and our space within that world.  The distinct gender roles are certainly on the forefront of this piece.  Dr. Constance Petersen is taunted by a male co-worker for whom she won’t accept advances.  He calls her cold and emotionless, a “human glacier,” and states that she will “never be involved with any man, sane or insane.”  Once the jilted co-worker sees her attachment to Dr. Edwards, he pulls the Oedipal Complex out and shines it up for all the other doctors to see, suggesting that she has “outcroppings of a mother instinct toward Dr. Edwards.”  And indeed, she seems confused about her role in his life.  Is she the doctor to his patient, the lover, the friend, the object of his aggression?  She claims to be his wife (though that’s only to deceive others and protect John), though at times she seems to be afraid of him and what he might do.  She coos over him as a mother might a sick child and holds him like he is her longtime love as opposed to a man she met mere days before.  He frightens her and at the same time, seems to feel like home to her.  And in this way, he comes to represent the uncanny for her character.  Adding to this confusion is the role of the father.  Dr. Petersen’s mentor, Dr. Brulov, suggests to John that he is “going to be [his] father image”  And tells him to: “Trust me, lean on me.”  (This is, of course, after John attempts to murder this father figure.)  He is worried that John is making himself sicker by trying to forget and losing his grip on reality.  And working together, they can unlock the “secrets buried in your brain.”

Using the film noir genre, Hitchcock’s use of shadow, darkness and light adds to the discontent with the piece, particularly within the dream state.  The dream sequence, designed by Dali, creates quite the reaction in the audience.  It’s familiar and unsettling at the same time.  The eyes, lightening strikes, the cliff, the imagery of the door after door opening, all create the sense of disconnect with the real; a hallucination or a dream.  Further, Dr, Brulov suggests that: “Dreams tell you what you are trying to hide.  But [they] are mixed up like a puzzle.  Psychoanalysts have to put it back together.”  (An implicit nod to both Freud and Baudry there.)  Spellbound’s music furthers the effect of the uncanny.  The electric music, played on the Theremin, reaches a dissonant chord, especially in the dream or hallucination scenes, that make it sound off or strange.  And as an audience, as we encounter the text, we indeed have an emotional response to John’s episodes of mania.  Thus, the cinema proves a great psychoanalytic tool. As Baudry suggests, “The storyteller has a peculiarly directive power over us; by means of the mood he can put us into, he is able to guided the current of our emotions, too dam it up in one direction and make it flow in another, and he often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material.” (840)

Johns suffers from severe repression – due to his guilt complex from his infancy and triggered by the death of the real Dr. Edwards.  He has blocked out what happened to his brother so severely, that he has blocked out his own identity.  Objects are, at once, both strange and familiar.  With the cigarette case, he finds that it is an object “that frightens me, though I don’t know why it should.”  He has repressed how he burned his hand, represses words that are “in the corner of my head.”  This displacement helps him to squash down emotion.  Trying to help him cope with this disillusionment from reality, Constance reassures him that he can “remain sane by forgetting something too horrible to remember.” He seems to re-trigger the uncanny, arousing his own dread and horror, as he encounters a number of things that frighten him that shouldn’t.  As Freud would say: “What is uncanny is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.” (826)  Something as simple and seemingly non-threatening as repeating fork lines in white fabric, a pattern on a robe, or tracks in snow throughout the film become an object of terror wherein our protagonist loses his grip n reality.  And in this case, the dream becomes the reality.  It is, as Baudry would say, more real than real.  It goes as far as to even convince John of his own guilt without an evidence or memory of having done something wrong.   He seems to be, as one character comments, “bumping head against reality and saying that it wasn’t there.”  It’s a “desire to desire” to find the truth.

But it is in this very quest that reality blurs once again.  Freud surmises that uncertainty emerges in the not knowing if we are in the real world or a made up one inside the story.  As John experiences this phenomenon, so can we, as the audience.  When writing about the uncanny, Freud says that man can become somewhat of a doll when he is worked upon; the very thing that John is experiencing.  He further clarifies: “If psycho-analytic theory is correct in maintaining that every effect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs.” (833)  Freud states that in a well designed story of the uncanny, many things are not clear. And we as the audience, often together with the character, are not sure of what is real.

If film is really a shadow of something, the question must then pose: what level of reality are we experiencing when we encounter a film?  We can, as Baudry suggests, get up and walk away from a film.  We are not tied down as were the prisoners in Plato’s essay.  Though we experience omniscience in seeing everything from the camera’s point of view, including holding the gun and firing it, we are still removed from it, becoming prey to our illusions.  Yet, we get into a darkened theatre, or room around a conference table, eating a bowl of delicious chili, and loose ourselves in the story, in the dream.  It becomes our reality for a time.  And in this strange environment, we can experience the uncanny.