Harvey Roy Greenberg, MD

At a dinner party on the eve of the new millennium, I met a recently retired European diplomat. He had served over three decades in often impoverished provincial backwaters, then in major cities throughout the East and West. His geopolitical savvy was immense.

At the evening’s end, I asked for his thoughts about the major perils that might confront the world over the next 20 years. The problems he feared were the rise of religious fundamentalism across all creeds; the resurgence of bellicose, ethnically biased l9th century populist nationalism; environmental degradation; and nuclear proliferation.

He paused, then reflected on another danger. It was recognized by rote, yet for the most part went curiously unaddressed in the halls of power. It was compounded out of a sinister articulation of those already cited: “I worry that the next 10 or 20 years will see an unprecedented number of refugees; displaced within their country’s borders, inevitably flooding into nearby, then distant nations, such as the world has never seen . . .”

I’ve recalled his words many times since then, as one catastrophic migration, frequently spurred by impending genocide, has followed another. I remembered them again after viewing director Christian Pitzold’s haunting 

 (2019). In German and English, it is based on Anna Seghel’s masterful 1942 novel available from New York Review Classics (

https://www.nyrb.com/collections/classics

Seghe’s story is set in the 1940s; in Paris, then Marseille. Thousands fleeing the Nazi invasion descended upon the gritty port city, known as much for its vigorous criminal element as its bouillabaisse. The refugees came from elsewhere in France and other already occupied European countries.

They ranged across the social spectrum in class, race, and economic status. (Many were Jews.) Their common goal was escape, mainly by sea, to any country willing to take them. The alternative was an arduous, dangerous return through occupied territory, then a trek over the mountains to neutral Switzerland, or through Franco’s Spain to neutral Portugal.

Few were able to leave quickly. The majority found themselves hopelessly stranded, embroiled in a dispirited search for visas and permits. The dizzying array of crucial documents escalated daily. Meanwhile, the uprooted multitude became the prey of hostile, frequently corrupt bureaucrats as well as a legion of con artists.

With legal passage increasingly scarce, the displaced were compelled to seek illegal means of getting out, shady captains of “rustbuckets,” many of which never intended to sail. When their cash and jewels were depleted, the destitute turned to begging, petty thievery, prostitution-and suicide.

Pitzold’s cinematic translation preserves Seghel’s essential plot, principal characters, and the debased Marseille mise-en-scene. But he has skillfully fleshed out Seghel’s subtle intimation that the refugee’s specific plight mirrored a generic unmooring of mores and morality as the Nazi menace swept across Europe. Hence, the film is as scarily relevant to our fractured society as Seghel’s, of which more presently.

, Pitzhold has constructed an eerie alternate 21st century fascist reality. Architecture, costumes, and machinery are contemporary. No Nazis exist, only Germans sans swastikas, jackboots, or the Reich’s typical soldiers and weaponry. Instead, brutal street arrests and sadistic interrogations are carried out by thugs who could be collaborating locals rather than iconic Gestapo agents.

The gendarmes backing them sport NATO-type gear and guns. One can’t tell whether they are German or French (shamefully, many police in occupied France-particularly in Paris-arrested refugees and dissenters, whether they acted out of fascist sympathy or a misplaced sense of duty).

The film’s protagonist has escaped from a prison camp in Germany, the reasons for the internment are never explained. He is nameless in the novel; Georg in the film is nearly as anonymous in speech and demeanor. Gone to ground in occupied Paris, he is first encountered sitting in a bar, immured in stolid indifference while violent fighting rages in the streets outside.

Petzold deliberately does not clarify whether Georg’s intense anomie is innate or posttraumatic shaped by his savage prison experiences and the dangers he endured on the way to Paris. Both possibilities obtain.

He has been paid to deliver two letters to Weidel, a famous leftist writer. Georg finds the man has bloodily killed himself after his wife, Marie, declared she no longer loved him and left for Marseille. Ironically, she declares her change of heart in one of the letters he was to deliver; implores him to join her in Marseille and attempt escape. The other envelope contains an offer from Mexico of relocation-the country is a haven for displaced leftists-as well as the necessary travel papers, presumably for intended for husband and wife.

With a death squad hammering at Weidel’s door, Georg flees, scooping up the writer’s Mexican entry papers, passport, and his last short story. He plans to travel to Marseille, assume Weidel’s identity, and somehow jury-rig an exit.

 powerfully depicts the refugees’ frenetic round of official and embassy visits, punctuated by weeks of excruciating boredom, and hope for securing precious documents dashed hopelessly by indifferent or openly hostile scornful bureaucrats. Absurdly, Marseille’s authorities will tolerate and mercilessly exploit the stateless but only if they can prove their commitment to leave the city.

The film’s opening sequences deftly establish the refugees’ devastating dislocation. The film is filled with vivid, evanescent encounters. Georg’s are notably intense and ephemeral. He drags a wounded partisan into a boxcar, then finds him dead upon arriving in the city next morning. He grows close to a fetching North African boy and his deaf-mute mother. The pair then vanishes into the mountains after the youngster angrily rejects Georg when he learns about the intended escape. To paraphrase Goethe’s Faust: all is transitory.

 knowingly evokes the classic 1940s and 1950s film noir tropes. Many of these were written and directed by European refugees like Fritz Land and Billy Wilder, who were strongly influenced by post-World War I German expressionist art, which often contained unsettling urban themes. EmigrÃ© filmmakers translated the angst ridden, dispossessed milieu of the doomed European city to Hollywood (eg, 

The noir genre was typified by labyrinthian plots involving a criminal venture, set in the seamy underbelly of big city nights. Characters often came from working class, low class, or otherwise compromised social backgrounds.

In a common noir subgenre, a pair of star-crossed lovers, one or both seduced into crime, pursue redemption down dark, mean urban streets. A capricious, ultimately imponderable destiny dictate the destruction of their dreams-and usually their lives (eg, 

Transit insinuates that most of the refugees’ fate will be as fatally sealed, but in the actinic sunlight of Marseille rather than the tarnished nocturnes of Los Angeles or Manhattan. A femme fatale, who caught lovers in a a spiderweb of betrayal, often lurked at the core of noirs like 

 (1941). One interprets her as destiny’s lethal handmaid. Weidel’s wife is her avatar and the film’s femme fatale. She is the narrative lynchpin, however unwitting she appears about the sinister consequences of her compulsive ambivalence towards men.

Her abandonment compels Weidel’s suicide; her backpedaling letter precipitates Georg’s usurping the writer’s identity and journey to Marseille. When they finally meet, she is living with an American doctor, who gave up his own hard-won departure to be with her. She then offers herself to Georg. Instantly smitten, he cannot reveal his imposture. Her narcissistic perspective admits no incongruity in sailing away with all her lovers, including the dead husband she thinks will be on board with the crucial Mexican entry papers. Instead of a tidy 

 is unutterably tragic with no convenient rescue. I will only reveal that one last sees Georg, again alone in a bar, more immured in his sarcophagus of perennial anomie.

Backed by an exemplary cast, Franz Rogowski’s Georg personifies the director’s dramatic and ideological purposes. At times his faintly dysmorphic features appear set as in Gargoyle stone; at others, they are idiosyncratically attractive. Rogowski makes Georg’s default silent isolation achingly palpable. Being so unexpected, his observations about Marseille’s traumatized, unanchored mileu are rendered more incisive-and his rare breakthrough of endearing tenderness even more poignant.

In the film’s most heartbreaking scene he wipes away a single tear, while crooning a sweet lullaby to the North African boy about the twilight return of beasts and parents alike to the solace of home.

 between the totalitarianism engulfing Seghal’s era and our troubled time. Pitzhold’s enigmatic project demands strenuous work from the viewer to grasp this searing equivalence, and it brilliantly succeeds. One comes away enlightened and discomfited.

 implicitly references the social critics who illuminated the disrepair and absurdity of the human condition during and after World War II. One chiefly thinks of the great existentialists: notably Camus of 

. But, it is the ghost of Franz Kafka, paragon of agonized alienation, who hovers over the concluding appraisal of our suffering unmoored world in 

. Kafka’s presence is unmistakable in the parable of Weidel’s last story, which Georg relates with quiet irony to a cynical American embassy official who would rather see thousands die in Marseille’s squalor than grant them liberty.

A scene occurs at the end of the film: a man who has just died must register himself into hell. What he has done to deserve his fate is as inexplicable as the bureaucratic registration process-he finds himself standing before a large door and waits years without being admitted. (It is all pure Kafka.) Finally, he asks a passerby how to gain entry. The Kafkaesque reply:

Dr. Greenberg practices psychiatry in Manhattan, New York. He continues to publish frequently on film, media, and popular culture. For many years, his cinema column appeared in Psychiatric Times. He has appeared frequently on national and international network and cable television programs including Good Morning America, Today, CBS Evening and Sunday News. Please address communications to Dr. Greenberg at HRGSMES@AOL.COM

Articles

Christian Pitzold’s haunting 2019 film, based on Anna Seghel’s masterful 1942 novel.

Transit: Already in Hell

Dr Greenberg practices psychiatry in Manhattan, New York. He continues to publish frequently on film, media, and popular culture. For many years, his cinema column appeared in Psychiatric Times. He has appeared frequently on national and international network and cable television programs including Good Morning America, Today, CBS Evening and Sunday News, PBS, CNN, Showtime, and BBC-TV. Please address communications to Dr Greenberg at HRGSMES@AOL.COM.

The pleasures of a story unfolded serially are ancient and ubiquitous. Cliffhangers enhance their power. Imagine a Cromagnon tribe’s ace yarn spinner suddenly breaking off his tale before a circle of enraptured listeners. He announces the hour is late, the fire burnt down, all the Neolithic hooch drained.

So-they’ll have to wait a moon or two for the conclusion. That primal “to be continued” must have been sorely frustrating. But one conceives that it also conjured up a bevy of exciting fantasies about mighty Og’s slaying the monstrous mammoth, rescuing future Mrs Og to share his man cave.

The serial format has ranged across every genre in every time and place-embracing epic, saga, Dickens’s masterpieces (published in monthly installments), banana-peel comedy, and banal soap operas. For decades, prime time network TV thrived on the serial format-pitching series at every brow (mostly low- and mid-).

In the wake of popular BBC/Masterpiece Theater series-from 

 (2016)-major cable networks like HBO and Showtime, followed by new kids on the block like Netflix and Amazon, have increasingly turned to serial programming. As always, industry financial considerations figured prominently in the move.

Compared with big network series, cable fare generally has lower production costs and is more easily cancelled. Producers’ fervent hope is for that Big Box Office Kahuna, when avid fans cry out for more, and multiple seasons generate staggering profit: 

 (2011, et seq), an obvious case in point.

We are lucky to be living through a time of unprecedented cable excellence. A cornucopia of American and international series are hallmarked by riveting plots, magnificent casts, and exquisitely realized milieus-whether Victorian stately homes or prohibition-era Atlantic City. Sadly, the field is already becoming crowded with flimsier stuff. So, enjoy the good times while they last!

The following short takes on three favorite series cover widely different subjects, are notable for accomplished technical craft, depth of characterization, and psychological resonances.

, a nuanced depiction of a fiercely patriarchal Jerusalem Hasidic community. Its traditions mandated to be unchanged until the Messiah’s advent. Marriages, commonly arranged after two dates, yield a throng of children to continue their parents’ pious practice. Meanwhile the community has to deal with the lure of the secular world as well as the recurrent doctrinal disputes with other ultra-orthodox groups.

The protagonist is Rabbi Shiloh Shtisl, teacher and later principal of a children’s Talmud Torah school. His avuncular presence reminds one of Sholom Aleichem’s tender hearted Tevyah-until he opens mouth, and out pops anti-Tevyah.

In Dov Glickman’s magisterially truculent performance, Shtisl’s dismissive jeremiads are provoked by the least opposition to his iron will. The characters rarely speak about their inner lives. Potentially troublesome motives are repressed or consciously disavowed. Shtisl is even more alixithymic on this score than others.

He is infuriated when a matchmaker’s report deems him merely an “eater and smoker”-he’s both, big time-because he conceives himself a major educator. He never cops to shamelessly manipulating his children if they threaten to stray from obedience to the Divine Will-as he construes It.

He wheedled one son, a promising singer, to sacrifice his gift for the Talmudic study house. Another daughter fled his domination to marry a Lubavitcher Hasid. Shtisl views the Lubavitch as Satan’s spawn.

In the second season one discovers this petty tyrant possesses a Tevyah soft side after all. It’s evident in his abiding affection for his students, the ancient mother who knows him like a book, and his deceased wife Dvora. She strove to nurture the better angels of his nature behind the scenes-a familiar strategy in similar rigorous patriarchies. He finally confronts his desolating grief in the series’ unsettling conclusion.

Shtisl’s deepest wrath- and warmth-is compelled by his youngest son, the dreamy Akivah who lives with him in harmonious disharmony. Akivah is tagged with the dreaded sobriquet of “screw-up” for repeatedly rejecting desirable matches and a settled life. Instead he pursues a remarkable artistic talent that is anathema to his father.

 for its scrupulously unjudgmental portrayal of a culture too facilely condemned by the political correctniks. The series refuses convenient resolutions. The construction of Hasidic custom is amply recognized; but one also appreciates the nurturing and support offered by this holy community to its people.

The price may seem heavy, but the cost of alienation spurred by assimilation is also intimated. According to Hasidic perception, the latter proceeds inevitably from the broken covenant of secular Judaism with an omnipotently loving God.

French cinema has always featured a unique brand of hectic comedy, with madcap characters, convoluted plots, ratatat dialogue, and racy sex. Its conventions are squarely grounded in the popular bedroom farces of the 19th century Parisian stage. French movie farce was congenially influenced by Hollywood screwball comedies of the thirties and forties.

That unique Gallic humor continued to flourish abroad. But with the exception of a few pictures like the original 

 (1978), it hasn’t appeared in American theaters except in borrowed Anglophone robes-eg, the 

 (2015) recaptures the genre’s pixilated essence. The aging chief of ASK, a high-octane Parisian talent agency, drops dead on his first and only vacation. His partners are left to fend and claw amongst themselves, while nurturing a narcissistic clientele clamoring to have every loopy whim instantly gratified.

Actual stars of French screen and stage sweeten the kitty-inter alia Isabelle Huppert, Natalie Baye, and Francois Bertrand. Piquantly, one doesn’t know if they are playing or playing at playing themselves.

At the series’ whimsical heart are the frenetic, funny, and in the end poignant relationships between the survivors as they jockey for pelf and power. The adulterous Mathias, ever slimily scheming to take over ASK; Andrea, a brash lesbian heartbreaker; the chronically discombobulated Gabriel, brilliant manipulator on the job, a total wreck in his amours; and Lilian, oldest and wisest of the group, who thrived during the glory days of the fifties (her dog is named Jean Gabin). She insists on being called an “impresario.”

A textbook on systems theory could be written about the klatch’s wacky interactions over three hilarious seasons. Suffice it to say that for all their shameless backstabbing and ceaseless client stealing, the agents grow even more intimately bonded by their overwhelming love of cinema and the idiosyncratic high-wire world of its creation. Francois Truffault treasured this lunatic ambience; memorializing it in his triumphant valentine to filmmaking, Day for Night (1973).

The film industry prefers lensing spectacular diagnoses like multiple personality disorder in aid of reaping bigger box office. By this token movies about Alzheimer disease tend to favor the later dramatic aspects over the less exciting but no less harrowing psychological erosion of early to mid-stage dementing illness.

 series addresses these phases with clinical accuracy in the context of an unusually intricate deft narrative. Wayne Hays (a deeply moving performance by Mahershala Ali) was a dyslexic loner from an impoverished rural Arkansas background. The Army recognized his keen intelligence and hunting skills. In Vietnam, he served as a solo deep reconnaissance tracker.

After being discharged he returns to a local Arkansas police force where he proves to be a formidable detective-and an off-putting loner, except for his unlikely friendship with his white partner, Roland West (an affecting Stephen Dorff).

West, himself a gifted sleuth, is drawn to Hays despite the latter’s grinding sullenness and occasional wrongheaded accusations of racism. Hays also becomes captivated by Marian, a brilliant ironic teacher, who perceives the wounded and gentle soul hidden by Hays’ bitter schizoid carapace.

The partners investigate the apparent ritual murder of a boy and disappearance of his older sister. Over nearly 30 years a serpentine plot unwinds in parallel timelines at three levels interpolated by adroit flashbacks.

Hays’s subsequent marriage to Marian seems successful on the surface, but there were troubling undercurrents from the start. Fault lines are exposed when Marion writes a best seller on the case. Hays fears it will compromise the investigation but harbors an inchoate certainty that Marian believes that he’s her intellectual and social inferior, indeed has always thought so.

Hays grows disaffected by the departments’ delaying tactics and pursues other crimes without West. His reputation fades. Then, a decade later new leads involving a prominent citizen prompt West to ask Hays back aboard. Eventually the career minded West goes along with allowing that the crime be pinned on a dead suspect-a PTSD vet who could have been Hays in a sicker incarnation.

Hays angrily breaks off with West; spends his remaining career in dead-end PR office work. After Marian dies, Hays doggedly refuses to live with his son-also a cop-and languishes in searing solitude. Then, beset with early dementia, Hays realizes that his last measure of psychic wholeness can only be achieved by finally solving the case. He’s helped by Marian’s notes-he conjures her ghostly presence during bad moments-and his renewed friendship with West, still an inveterate bachelor.

In the end he accepts his children and West’s loving support. The case is resolved on an utterly unexpected note, and Hays can now forge whatever wholesome life remains to him before terminal darkness descends. This is the stuff of highest tragedy, invoking Lear’s raging lunatic exile from his authentic self, his rebirth into sanity, and redemption. You don’t often find better than this on or off the small screen.

Tandem gobbling of favorite shows sans commercials became available during the TiVo days of yore. Bingeing escalated with improved viewing technology and the proliferation of cable networks and series. In fact, the phenomenon has been around for millennia. With the advent of the written or printed word one didn’t have to delay finding how Og’s adventures turned out.

Papyrus or paper, scroll or book made it possible for the devotee to read on-and on-through successive cliffhangers until one reached the contented, if sleep deprived, “THE END.”

In an elegant essay on detective fiction, analyst Leo Bellak theorized that readers experienced a rush of “closure satisfaction” when the omniscient sleuth solves the crime, putting one’s unsettled anxiety definitively to rest. I expect that a Roman senator, unrolling the last scroll of Petronius’ 

 in the wee hours, and today’s 5 am boob-tube binger have savored the same exhausted gratification.

But I must wonder: by yielding to that overwhelming yen for an end, now so easily obtained, does the contemporary binger sacrifice that peculiar pleasure-that ineluctably potent frisson-when a take is suspended in mid-air-

The pleasures of a story unfolded serially are ancient and ubiquitous.

Serial Pleasures

After two horrendous crashes of a widely purchased new plane, an aeronautical industry giant 

 of making a crucial safety device a buying option, instead of incorporating it into every craft at no added cost.

A big pharmaceutical company stands suspect of hawking a highly addictive 

, as well as treatment for those addicted to that very product.

Wealthy parents, many celebrities, stand accused of buying kids’ 

-inter alia-through hefty donations to athletic programs for a minor sport. Their children often with little if any experience in archery, air hockey, whatever.

These alleged or actual despicable deeds occasion some reflections on the psychological tactics that facilitate living with oneself, fully aware of complicity in gross wrongdoing. It’s conceivable that some involved may be malignant psychopaths. Not my concern: I believe such warped characters sleep well, even after being caught out. Hitler killed himself arguably ridden with narcissistic rage and despair. These days it seems more likely for bigtime sociopathic offenders, notably in business and politics, to have their legal fixers get them off-or into a tennis court in a minimum risk penitentiary for a few years.

But how do people with a shred or more of superego assuage the pricks of an uneasy conscience knowing they are sliding down a slippery dark slope? Denial and rationalization certainly comprise trump cards in this enterprise. One need not be a malignant narcissist for a modicum of wealth and fame to make one feel entitled to do the slimy in aid of assuring their youngster’s glittering future. To which add the lulling rationale that every neighbor in Beverly Hills or on Park Avenue is doing the same. Of which more presently.

A stressed out, highly stratified corporate milieu could easily seduce one to equivocate over or otherwise minimize malfeasance:

“Maybe I’m exaggerating my responsibility . . .”

“Maybe I’m rushing to judgement without all the facts . . .”

“Maybe what I’m calling wrong is part of a wonderfully helpful, totally safe project the higher ups haven’t revealed to me yet . . .”

“OK, I’ve done bad-but maybe somebody up there will catch it and get me off the hook . . .”

“After all, I’m just a cog in a big machine . . . plenty others share the blame-especially the really BIG big shots!”

One recalls the famous Nast cartoon of the Tammany Hall 

, a literal ring of crooks in which each point to the chiseler on either side. In this vein, group psychology has addressed a leader’s role in seducing followers into collective noxious actions they would never take on their own-the Nazis a notable case in point. It’s been theorized that identifying with Hitler’s absolute certainty that his baleful wrong was gloriously right encouraged his followers’ identification and consequent loosening of ethical constraint.

One conjectures that a charismatic corporate chief-or leadership cadre entire-blandly assuring employees about the benefit and safety of the company’s mission/product could engender an analogous loosening of moral fiber. Big bonuses grease the wheels. Fear of being axed, blackballed, with no employable future can be an even more potent reason to keep the whistles unblown. Two of my patients are currently wrestling with this dilemma.

The airline industry, Big Pharma, and college scandals didn’t happen in a socio-cultural vacuum. It’s no less true for sounding trite that the bar for acceptable ethical behavior has been set so low as to reside in the Stygian depths. The articulating reasons for the decline are too many to enumerate here. But the unslakeable pursuit of wealth for its own sake, not merely for accompanying power, is a major contributor.

The lust for lucre pervades our culture at every level. I submit it articulates with a general coarsening of our very social fabric the crucial responsivity to and responsibility for others that hallmarks a viable community.

Increasingly one hears people say that in the boardrooms of business, the halls of Washington, “everyone gets away with everything” in the financial and sexual spheres (to name but two). I expect the statement reflects public distaste and disenchantment. But one must be concerned about a corollary potential to identify with the compromised ethics whether in the halls of business and government, or the mansions of Lalaland.

“Intellectual disgrace stares from every human face.” Greedy indifference may not yet comprise an Audenesque pandemic in our land. But the fundamental justice and decency native to the American spirit has never been threatened so direly with imminent disgrace.

How do people with a shred or more of superego assuage the pricks of an uneasy conscience knowing they are sliding down a slippery dark slope?

Intellectual Disgrace

I thought I’d pondered every possible psychological aspect of cinema, when it occurred to me that I’ve never addressed how to treat a patient’s mentioning a movie. Hence the following.

Context would obviously dictate your response. Most patients refer to a movie in passing (eg, during a short medication check appointment). Replying with a companionable murmur usually suffices. However, always be vigilant when clients mention a film during psychotherapy, no matter how briefly, especially a specific scene, shot, or quote, even a musical theme. Here, deeper delving-free and directed associations, etc-may yield useful, even profoundly healing insights.

A flat disclaimer that you’ve already seen a film can be as off-putting and dismissive as stating you’ve already heard a joke. You aren’t performing brain surgery, but 

 still pertains-especially with new, sensitive patients.

Protect your therapeutic alliance by refraining from criticizing or praising a film, lest you unintentionally give offense. Even when I know a patient well, I don’t share my opinion unless it might be helpful.

Case in point: a woman with ruinous self-esteem was devastated when would-be cognoscenti at a Gotham dinner party savaged her because she found 

 a terminal bore. Wasn’t she aware that the best critics, as well as Manhattan at large, were certain it was Oscar-bound?

She was comforted when I said that I, too, thought the picture a bloated bore. My agreement strengthened a dawning recognition spurred by our work that she wasn’t a socially inept utter boob-her rancorous husband’s default perception. (Of course, I defend to the death your right to admire 

. Even professional film criticism may rationalize private taste into the public area.)

Patients in therapy frequently worry that speaking about a film I haven’t seen will ruin it for me. I emphasize they needn’t be concerned. Knowing in advance that Russell Crowe’s gladiator or the semi-toasted English Patient expires before the credits roll comprises yet another example of the frustrations Freud said came with the job. If a patient’s concern stems from an irrational fear of my disapproval, that’s another matter, calling for exploration.

Hearing about a film is never the same as seeing it. I watch movies many times, including those I review and dislike (I’ve occasionally changed my mind the second time around). Viewing a film or other art work again can enhance insight; so can watching a new film or reading a book that is significant to your patient. And, it may enrich your insight beyond the current treatment.

I often use film as an inexpensive Rorschach during an initial mental status evaluation or later in therapy. The result usually doesn’t indicate much that you didn’t already know. But inquiring about a patient’s favorite movie sometimes proves unexpectedly revealing.

Case in point: the prized movie of a 17-year-old youngster crippled by OCD was 

. I expected her favorite character would be plucky Dorothy, but instead it was the Tin Man, “My obsessions make me feel just as frozen in place-until Dorothy comes along with that oil-can. Maybe you have one!”

I’m wary of using cinema to teach psychiatric diagnosis or treatment. With rare exceptions, movies aren’t deliberately produced to teach audiences about anything: psychiatry, sinus lifts, or rose gardening. Education may happen, but chiefly it’s a byproduct of telling a riveting tale in aid of boffo box-office. If clinical accuracy has to be sacrificed for moving the plot along, so be it.

A few studies claim benefits from showing a movie to an individual or group of patients suffering from one or another disorder. This probably affords temporary relief to some sufferers, but I’m dubious about long-term relief. I have, however, recommended a film when I think it might energize insight, but not often, and only when I know the client well.

I once treated a gifted young writer who developed a catastrophic depression when his wealthy fiancÃ©e suddenly broke off their engagement. Her tycoon father witheringly criticized my patient’s working-class background and occupation. She had fled the lash of his iron will to marry my patient, only to quail before her father when he threatened to disinherit her.

Several months later my patient met another woman with a striking physical resemblance to his former fiancÃ©e but a totally dissimilar personality. No fool, she had begun to suss out the distorted basis for their relationship and was backing off. When his desolation bred suicidal fantasies, I recommended Alfred Hitchcock’s 

Hitchcock’s masterpiece devolves around a retired detective’s (James Stewart) desperate attempt to remake-Pygmalian-like-a shop-girl (Kim Novak) into a simulacrum of the beguiling, supposedly suicidal high-society wife he had been asked to protect by her (unknown to him) murderous husband.

Stewart’s character had fallen in love with her, then suffered a devastating depression after being unable to save her from jumping to her death, due to the acrophobia that had compelled his retirement. The detective eventually discovers he’s been cruelly hoaxed: the socialite he knew and the shopgirl are the same woman; the latter used, then discarded by the husband after he killed the “original.”

 was crucial in grieving his loss. He eventually recognized that long-standing irrational feelings of not being “good enough” had enforced his conviction he had been responsible for his fiancÃ©e’s feckless abandonment. “Just like Stewart, I fooled myself trying to make a new lover into a mirror of my fiancee,” he concluded, “it was like trying to fix an amputated arm by shoving a pros- thesis into a bloody socket.”

My most memorable case in which probing a film was central to effective psychotherapy was that of a 35-year-old Vietnam vet. Despite an apparently healthy return to civilian life, he was increasingly savaged by long-disavowed post-traumatic psychopathology.

He came from a tough urban ghetto. When he was arrested for petty theft at 18, the judge offered him enlistment as an alternative to jail. He turned out to be an exemplary soldier, rose quickly through the ranks, and eventually commanded a platoon in Viet Nam.

He was a huge fan of war movies, particularly 

 (1945), in which Errol Flynn headed a daredevil commando team. Identifying strongly with the hero’s unflagging competence and love for his men, he was certain he could bring his “guys” back home safely.

He nearly did, until an ambush during their last week of active duty, killed or grievously wounded most of his outfit. He escaped harm, rendering his guilt even more intolerable. He finally entered treatment, convinced that “a man like Errol Flynn would have gotten us through-and I wasn’t that man.” Over several years of psychotherapy, my patient discovered that Flynn’s unfailingly resourceful captain represented a neurotic ego-ideal, woven from adolescent omnipotent fantasies.

Like any therapist, I’m not immune to the pitfalls of countertransference. It’s especially difficult to avoid gabbing about movies with a fellow addict who just happens to be my patient. He or she may be creating a diversion so as not to deal with the headier stuff. But I admit to having taken the bait on occasion, at least temporarily.

 rationalization, but I suspect the Founding Father himself went on and on about some item from his enormous collection of antiquities with the Wolf Man, Rat Man, and company, beyond the object’s therapeutic merit. As far as I know, neither the earlier hagiographers nor acrimonious bashers from the Freud wars have had anything to say on that subject.

Inquiring about a patient’s favorite movie sometimes proves unexpectedly revealing.

The Movie on Your Patient’s Mind

Dr Greenberg recommends that, because of spoilers, BlacKkKlansman be seen before reading his review.

The so-called “problem” film emerged during the 1930s during the Great Depression. It rejected Hollywood’s traditional addiction to neat happy endings. Films like 

 (1940) addressed the era’s poverty and economic injustice. Studio moguls were initially doubtful about “message” movies’ commercial viability. Who wanted dispirited audiences to exit the theater more bummed out then when they came in? The problem genre proved unexpectedly popular. Warner Brothers, under the charismatic dictatorship of Darryl Zanuck, notably figured in producing inexpensive, gritty hit message pictures. Eventually other studios cashed in on the trend.

With the onset of World War II, problem films probed homebrewed and worldwide fascism. After the war, profitable subjects included veterans’ angst (

 [1949]). By now the genre has become a staple at vastly higher production costs; stoked by the abundant injustices of our day-predatory corporations, human trafficking, homophobia, so forth.

Film scholars have been particularly interested in these classic message films. Message films received due critical praise but were also taken to task in some quarters for minimizing a social problem’s complexity and pervasiveness in aid of a tidy felicitous finish. The genre’s social difficulty commonly involved a single or few victims. A courageous reporter, staunch lawyer, or incorruptible commission exposed a few rotten apples who received due punishment. Some critics on the left warned that audiences might be lulled into believing that no further action needed to be taken in the real world. (To be fair, while the problem movie took on controversial topics, it also had to adhere to the studio mandate that good always happily prevailed.)

, Spike Lee’s new film, is his most scorching inditement of racism. Lee’s achievement is hallmarked by subtle deployment of the problem genre’s promise of a satisfying resolution throughout the entire film-until an astonishing, exceptionally disturbing conclusion, of which more presently.

 is based Ron Stallworth’s memoir about his experiences as Colorado Springs’ first African American policeman during the Vietnam era. (Stallworth would later become the department chief.) He’s introduced peering from below at a recruitment ad proclaiming equal opportunity employment. The sign’s imposing height and appearance slyly imply little enthusiasm in higher circles for its placement. Ron (John David Washington, Denzel’s son, replicates his father’s insouciant cool) comes across as an earnest, eager cipher. One will discover that opaque deferentiality is his default position when dealing with the white world.

He’s interviewed by a whipcord tough chief and an impassive, bloated black political hack. Ron responds to their loaded questions with studied calm; states that he was brought up “right,” in a military family; has no vices; can stand up to racist baiting. Ron is hired and promptly sent to the record room where fellow officers call black suspects “toads.” He requests a transfer with his signature terse respect, the chief suspects his would-be examplar might turn whistle-blower. Ron is dispatched to a tiny “intelligence” unit. Its staff is unexpectedly congenial. Ron gratefully identifies with their waggish, renegade spirit.

Ron is assigned to monitor a fiery Stokely Carmichael speech at the university’s black student caucus. He’s instantly smitten with its alluring leader, Patrice (a feisty Laura Harrier). She possesses the requisite big afro, granny glasses, and right-on salute. Lee not only wonderfully captures the movement’s look and speech, his mellow mise-en-scene evokes the Vietnam era’s hallmark details with ineffable “suchness.”

Ron passes himself off as a potential activist. He’s more interested in courting Patrice than spying on her comrades. He finds Carmichael’s black-power hyperbole offputting; it nevertheless spurs a dawning awareness of his own self-deception-imagining that he could easily get along with crude racist reality.

Hence, his impulsive call later from headquarters to a local KKK chapter seeking new Aryan-pure blood. Ron’s impersonation of an equal opportunity hater is so convincing he’s asked to join. Since the Klan has lately posed another threat to the status quo, his improvised goof winds up sanctioning the chapter’s infiltration. A white team member, Flip Zimmerman-a non-practising Jew (Adam Driver) assumes Ron’s name, a different professional identity, and address. He, too, comes to question his complacency. Flip’s quick rise in the chapter gets David Duke’s attention in Washington, enabling phone chats with the fatuously cheery leader and the “real” Ron.

, Lee has continued to underplay the Klan’s menace. The prevailing tone has been jocular/satiric (eg, Duke’s wacky truths about identifying “hidden” blacks by their speech nuances).

The Klan klatch resembles a bumbling preadolescent clubhouse, with arcane symbols, secret words, arcane regalia. Despite flaunting a murderous arsenal, the doofus bunch doesn’t bring off a single cross burning because of utter incompetence and the undercover unit’s tip-offs. When Duke visits Colorado Springs to induct new members, Lee begins unpacking the old holocaust mentality of Duke’s new, supposedly user-friendly “nationalist” Klan. The ceremony is a sinister mirror of a church mass robed in priestly vestments, Duke openly advocates extinction of the impure legions of blacks, Jews, and Catholics threatening God-given white Christian rule. A celebratory screening of DW Griffith’s 

 follows, its mockery and mayhem giddily cheered on by the yahoo initiates and their families.

In a simultaneous student meeting elsewhere, an aged activist describes the gruesome torture and lynching of a friend during his boyhood. Intercutting between Klan and student meeting recapitulates many of Griffith’s seminal contributions to cinematic rhetoric. Lee clearly uses the device here as an anti-tribute.

Shortly afterwards Ron pulls off Patrice’s last-second rescue from a bungled Klan bombing, which causes the chapter’s exposure and dissolution. Back at headquarters, Ron receives a high-five from all. Too boot, the arch-sleazy racist cop is entrapped in sexual misconduct by the team, and jailed. The rejoicing is extinguished by the chief summarily ordering the record of the team’s triumph expunged.

Haunting memories of the elder activist’s scarifying tale echo in one’s mind as Lee delivers the devastating deconstruction of the problem genre’s disingenuous conclusion he’s been cannily preparing the viewer for. Patrice and Ron meet at her apartment. As they debate their relationship-now she knows he’s a cop-there’s an ominous rap at the door. In a magisterial Hitchcockian tracking shot the pair seems to float uncannily forward, as the background eerily recedes. The two move toward a tiny pinprick of light in the window. Lee’s camera swoops down revealing a giant burning cross, circled by an obscenely capering coven of klansmen. History is knocking at the door!

Lee instantly jump cuts to actual TV coverage of the fatal confrontation at Charlottesville between white supremacists and protestors. The sequence utterly confounds every assertion of “good people” on both sides. While this scene comprises a fraction of 

, one realizes with a start that all that’s come before was a necessary prelude to the director’s jarring wake-up call.

 ends in utter silence: an inverted American flag fills the screen, the distress call is emphasized as the flag’s luminous color fades to stark, lingering black and white. The conclusion is a derisive response to Lee’s establishing sequence: the famous scene from 

 (1939) in which the camera pans across a multitude of wounded Confederate soldiers, and rises to a fitfully stirring “Stars-and-Bars.” 

-Zanuck’s Griffithian triumph-never depicts a whit of slavery’s intolerable suffering.

Safely ensconced in our seats, rapt in Lee’s front story, we’ve been lulled into feeling safely distant from the racism raging in a deeply divided America. Lee has dashed the comfortable illusion of social progress, given back to us the keys of responsibility for honorable action to stem the swelling tide of racism, as well as the host of articulated evils destroying our country’s social fabric.

 is threaded with references to the distorted glosses on racial injustice that have pervaded American cinema since its inception Lee chiefly targets the problem film’s facile comfort. Lee’s withering denunciation embraces Griffith’s repugnant summons to violence, implicit commendation of slavery in 

, as well as the pseudo-positive depictions of the sixties blaxploitation genre-at one point even Ron and Patrice argue whether the phallic stereotypes of 

 (1972) offer African-Americans more empowerment.

 was the first feature ever shown at the White House. Woodrow Wilson called it “history written with lightning,” inaugurating a resurgence of a nearly defunct Klan. A century later, Lee answers Wilson’s detestable accolade-illuminating with actinic brilliance enduring racism’s repugnant emblem of national disgrace. 

Dr Greenberg practices psychiatry in Manhattan, New York. He continues to publish frequently on film, media, and popular culture. For many years, his cinema column appeared in Psychiatric Times. Please address communications to Dr Greenberg at HRGSMES@AOL.COM.

The most scorching inditement of racism yet in film. Warning: spoilers.

BlacKkKlansman Still Birth of a Nation

The ubiquitous compulsion to binge on TV coverage of the 2017 presidential race prompted me to fabricate, and anatomize the diagnosis of “Election Addiction Disorder.”

 I predicted the enormous craving for pre-election news would quickly dissipate after the polls closed, saving a few disgruntled true believers-presumably those unable to grieve a Trump smashing defeat.

Of course assumption of a Clinton triumph proved utterly wrong. Party favoritism played no part in my misread: I wasn’t much enamored of either candidate. But the London bookies had been uncannily spot-on about previous elections in the colonies, their chief aim only being to amass a mountain of quid. Brit oddsmakers predicted a Clinton victory as certain as Big Ben’s chime-so who was I to disagree?

Bingeing on news about the latest White House rumpus has escalated exponentially since the election, stoked-inter alia-by the Mueller investigation; the possibility of a disastrous trade war; and the threat of exchanging missiles with a North Korean adversary who sports the same bellicosity and gonzo hair-do.

In my practice, I’ve been encountering despair, anxiety, and insomnia related to coverage of the West Wing rumpus room, augmenting patients’ previous difficulties. Spouses complain about sleep deprivation caused by a mate binge-watching into the wee hours. The addict often insists upon his or her partner’s presence for argument, solace, or simply being on the other side of the mattress as an irritated transitional object.

Whatever their political views, victims are haunted by an inchoate sense that the wheels are coming off the car, with nary a mechanic in site. Some sort of Yeatsean second coming seems looming just over the horizon. Patients who lived through 9/11 report dreaming about the fallen towers. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity,” said Yeats.

 I hear these sentiments echoed frequently in and outside the office.

CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News had addressed every quiddity and quoddity of the tumultuous campaign scene to vast profit. Eighteen months into the New Order no end to the Oval Office hurly-burly is in sight. Network honchos appear convinced that their mandate to keep viewers glued to the tube will continue indefinitely, as well as the tsunami of cash.

In this setting, tropes and technology reinforcing the feedback loop between coverage and consumer during the campaign have been cleverly enhanced. Now the news breaks from one nanosecond to the next. Whether the subject is ominous or trivial, it’s portentously trumpeted.

In the green and salad days of Murrow, Huntley and Brinkley, a chief anchor commented on the day’s events, then switched to a colleague as occasion dictated. Simultaneous splitscreening of multiple commentators roughly paralleled the rise of news-as-infotainment and pervaded the 2017 campaign coverage.

A pair of simultaneous talking heads originally sufficed. The number increased during the campaign, then escalated exuberantly to 6 or even more. Daily shows like “Morning Joe” and “Fox and Friends” feature a bevy of “regulars,” joined by one or more expert of every stripe, live and splitscreened. These continue breeding like rabbits.

Some are current or former high office holders: generals; diplomats; attorneys. Even mental health professionals have had a say. Some are respectable and bear attention; others are dubious bloviators, hack lobbyists; party-line spear-chuckers, and so forth.

Discourse ranges from collegial to acrimonious. The attack mode increasingly prevails. On the small screen as in the halls of power, going low commands higher recognition than common courtesy and civility.

Inevitably several commentators have become major celebrities themselves, in this culture of celebrity. The majority wear their laurels lightly; but others ooze smug self-satisfaction-especially off-putting when the broadcaster was once reasonably modest. As a function of ego-bloating, subjective opinions are frequently stated as received truths.

I am hardly the first to observe that political coverage now comprises an ongoing reality show. The reasons why so many stay riveted to the screen are complex. Speculations on individual motives follow.

 The pleasure principle certainly plays a role for junkies and ordinary viewers. Key broadcasters on the left and right can be genuinely informative and entertaining. The morning show coffee-klatches generate a comfortable, if totally spurious camaraderie-the bogus warmth of being in the know with Mika and Joe.

 Uncertainty has never sat well with the species since the first caveman worried whether a wild wind or a wild beast was howling in the stygian night outside his cave. Addicts are particularly angst-ridden about being caught off-guard, if deprived of the network clangor, especially when the event at hand threatens life, limb, or stock market account.

The 16th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes

 posited that humanity’s native state was unremittingly savage. For Hobbes there was no Eden, only homo homini lupus-man is wolf to man. From his dank perspective, society was constituted lest we rend each other to pieces.

Freud echoed Hobbes’s pessimism about the human condition in 

 He described the process of acculturation as the induction of a mass obsessional state. Governments, laws, codes of conduct, served uneasily to keep a lid on the collective id. Civic and religious rituals reassured one that the status quo would remain perpetually in place. In this context, one speculates that the binger’s incessant “checking in” may comprise a paradoxically comforting ritual: if the talking heads weren’t there whenever we tune in, then neither would we be. (Freud also argued that “surplus aggression” was an inevitable consequence of keeping up the illusion of stability. With characteristic irony, he conceived that bloody warfare would be an inevitable consequence of projecting that surplus upon whatever convenient enemy.)

Throughout the centuries, during times of uncertainly before one or another calamitous prospect, those who felt-or were in fact-powerless, instinctively looked to charismatic others. Leaders temporal or secular, sundry prophets, sadhus, gurus, believed they possessed potent, indeed omnipotent power to head off apocalypse or lead their acolytes out of it. One wonders if celebrity commentators now have acquired the cachet of the pseudo-messiahs of yore. The media guru may also be perceived as an avatar of a higher political power, confirming viewer/follower belief in the stupidity, evil, or elitism of a detested “other.”

I believe news programming is pitched at sustaining analogous tension. From this perspective, the commentators’ long and loud debating engenders a sense of cliffhanging: intimating that a resolution is near vis-a-vis North Korean nuclear sabre rattling, construction of a Mexican Wall, or the Stormy Daniels scandal.

Clearly, no such closure is in sight for the cascade of problems under endless scrutiny by the news sachems. Instead of 

. The moguls and their fellow travelers aim to keep the game afoot, the audience mesmerized, while enormous wealth continues to flow from hawking car insurance or psoriasis remedies.

My previous column cited Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the classic study of mob behavior by 19th century journalist Charles Mackey.

 Mackey famously concluded that we go mad en masse about stock market bubbles or fashion fads, then recover our wits singly and slowly.

For some viewers the sheer amount of yacketing about crucial or jejune issues comprises one great clot of undifferentiated, indigestible verbiage. They’ve recovered their wits, totally turning off an avalanche of blather that may yet generate its own extinction. One hopes that the awakening will spread. But as of now, there seems no end to the extraordinary popular delusion manufactured by political broadcasting.

I haven’t heard of 12-step programs for news junkies. I can only advise my bingeing patients to follow the lead of the healed; turn off the babble absolutely, lest your brain turn to Swiss cheese; get down and get cognitive; commence deconditioning. Confine viewing the daily jabberwocky to a few moments; watch only those weekend shows that offer calm reprises. I advise sleep deprived mates to slumber elsewhere until the afflicted partner gets the message. Instead of watching the incessant babble, I suggest reading the news in peace and relative sanity, over decaf or cocoa or Jack Daniels. I recommend publications like 

, although that suggestion would certainly consign me to the rack, thumbscrew and flame in certain quarters.

Finally, one is reminded of the story of the Boston grand dame, who was asked whether she would be voting for Franklin Roosevelt or Wendell Wilkie. “Neither,” was her tart reply, “It only encourages them!!”

Dr. Greenberg practices psychiatry in Manhattan, New York. He continues to publish frequently on film, media, and popular culture. For many years, his cinema column appeared in Psychiatric Times. He has appeared frequently on national and international network and cable television programs including Good Morning America, Today, CBS Evening and Sunday News, PBS, CNN, Showtime, and BBC-TV. Please address communications to Dr. Greenberg at HRGSMES@AOL.COM.

 Greenberg, HR. Election addiction disorder. 

 Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Thomas Hobbes: Moral and Political Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/hobmoral/. Accessed June 20, 2018.

 Freud S. Civilization and Its Discontents (Standard Edition). New York: WW Norton and Co; 1989.

Bingeing on news about the latest White House rumpus has escalated exponentially since the election. Whatever their political views, patients are haunted by an inchoate sense that the wheels are coming off the car, with nary a mechanic in site.

Author | Harvey Roy Greenberg, MD

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