The times, dreams and cinema

Freud called dreams “wish-fulfilments”, inviting the obvious objection, that this would fail to account for nightmares.

Except … if we think of nightmares as negative wish-fulfilments — whatever it is that haunts you in your dreams, is precisely what we wish to avoid.

The father of psychoanalysis also pointed out that dreams unfold in the form of image-sequences, which are the “hallucinatory” means to arrive at the point where the pleasure principle’s demands are met, namely to restore equilibrium or homeostasis to the psyche. The only problem, of course, is that dreams only provide “hallucinatory”, instead of the relatively “lasting” fulfilment attained at the level of the ego negotiating reality via thinking, language and movement — dreaming of a juicy steak is in the end less satisfying than going to a restaurant to order and eat one there. It is also well-known that Freud referred to dreams as “the royal road to the unconscious” — hence the place enjoyed in his oeuvre by dream-analysis.

Had Freud lived long enough to witness the way in which psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic theorists have used his theory (and those deriving from it) to understand, not only the patients who consult them, but the artefacts in what has become an important sphere of creative cultural activity, namely cinema, he would probably have been astonished.

But in the end, I believe, he would have agreed that, metaphorically speaking, one might think of films as the dreams of society at large, with all the attendant characteristics of being wish-fulfilments in hallucinatory terms and the rest.

Against this background one should take note of the fact that, at the recent Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood, several films were honoured that have been described as the “dark Oscars” — including No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood, and Michael Clayton, all of which embody, in one way or another, a vision of social reality that is decidedly bleak or dark: visions of a society where human lives are worth nothing, or where grand ambitions of self-promotion or enrichment are thwarted, with disastrous consequences.

It may be objected that this is not the first time that such films have been honoured. Sure, but given Freud’s theoretical arsenal, the very fact that these films are produced, let alone honoured in this way, is already significant in a nightmarish sort of way — they are nightmare-visions of society which are symptomatic of what humanity would rather avoid.

In Freud’s terms, they are negative wish-fulfilments, and they tell us something about the current state of society at the level of symptomatic manifestations of collective anxieties.

Cinema has always been a barometer of societal fears, anxieties and collective wishes. One of the most interesting genres in this respect is that of film noir which, as the name indicates, invariably portrays a dark, sombre world of pervasive, indelible institutional corruption and fallible, morally compromised individuals. It is no accident that the archetypal film noir, The Maltese Falcon, as well as a spate of noir successors, appeared in the historical context of the Second World War — they are manifestations of a deep pessimism about humanity’s morally compromised state and its inability to rise above irresistible attempts at self-destruction.

From this perspective, the fact that, in the years since its first appearance (not forgetting its significant predecessors in, for example, German expressionist cinema), certain eras have been more densely populated by noir films than others. It seems to me to be no accident that recently we have witnessed a spate of neo-noirs, not all of them authentic, to be sure, but still recognisably noirish as far as the formal structure of institutional corruption, alienated detective figure and femme fatale, together with the perceptual formal properties of chiaroscuro settings, Venetian blinds, wet tarmac surfaces, whirring fans, fedora hats, dense cigarette smoke, and so on, are concerned — all of them tell-tale signs of a psychically subterranean awareness of the unmitigatedly corrupt state of humankind.

One of the best recent examples is The Constant Gardener where, in true noir fashion, both the femme fatale and the alienated detective figure expire in the end, with no hope in sight of ridding society of the corrupt activities, here, of the multinational pharmaceutical companies’ cynical abuse of Third World countries need of medicines in order to use these populations surreptitiously as lab rats, without the exorbitant costs accompanying genuine lab testing.

The fact that some noir films — including Minority Report and The Bourne Ultimatum -– are given incongruous happy endings (that do not sit well with the drift of the rest of the film, and which are probably explicable in light of audiences’ endemic need for escapist fantasies of the it will all work out in the end-variety), does not detract from the symptomatic significance, á la Freud, of this type of film. They signify, in no uncertain terms, a deep-seated unrest, and not a wholesome one at that, of a collective awareness that all is not well with the world, in particular with the human species, and perhaps express, negatively, the wish that this situation might change for the better.