middle cyclones and other references

Procrastination Theatre: January 19, 2012

This was honestly a bizarre movie-watching experience, especially if you’ve seen any other Cronenberg movie ever. It was just - really inconsequential. And I am fully willing to appreciate intellectual conversation, it’s just that it didn’t actually seem to capture the complexity of the issues as much as it could have, and as much as normally Cronenberg is capable of. I mean - Freud is a lot more than talking about sex incessantly, which you sort of see but not really. So much of the film felt goofy - like Jung’s “I”m back” and Freud’s constant phallic cigar and the way they talked about dreams. There just wasn’t that much at stake - you caught glimmers of it, like when Sabine and Freud discussed the climate of anti-Semitism, and in Michael Fassbender’s whole general performance - but it was vague and loosely formed. Like, my friend fell asleep next to me during it. The only thing that has any life to it is actually Keira Knightley’s performance, which I thought was absolute perfection. Honestly, haters can just shut it, because that was a fearless, seamless performance. She became something completely different to me. That performance to me indescribably defines the difference between true acting, which sometimes has to be intense, and painful overacting, which is what Natalie Portman did in Black Swan. 

And I mean, Michael Fassbender also does a fine acting job, but precisely because Jung has to be an absence in the film. It’s weird to see him so restrained and hollow - he does it perfectly, but it leaves the movie empty too. I have a theory, which is basically that because Cronenberg made a movie about something he was interested in and might even be passionate about, he had no chance. The hardest things to talk about are those you care about. And the way he characterized Jung and Freud felt so intimately goofy, like how the Boyfriend and I joke about theorists and authors.