Posts by Dr. Sandra E. Cohen
ELLE
Trauma & Perversion
Where Does Triumph Come In?
Trauma. We know it. We experience it. We’re left with its aftermath – when Director Paul Verhoeven’s “noir thriller,” Elle, careens to its conclusion. Leaving the theater, my mind was spinning. As Verhoeven says, the film has: “an enormous amount of ambiguity, gaps that are in the narrative on purpose for the audience to fill in.”…
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WEINER
What’s Wrong With Anthony Weiner?
A Psychoanalyst’s Answer
The big question in Josh Kreigman and Elyse Steinberg’s documentary Weiner is: “What’s wrong with Anthony Weiner?” Why would a political official destroy his reputation and his career? Why would he humiliate his wife? Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC’s Last Word posed this million-dollar question to Weiner on national TV: “What is wrong with you…I mean…
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NETFLIX’S LOVE
A Dance Of Insecurities
Obstacles to Making Love Work
Is it real? What does it take to make love work? Netflix’s Love by Judd Apatow, Paul Rust, and Leslie Arfin raises some important questions. What takes an attraction farther than a romantic fantasy? What allows two people who’ve been hurt in the past to get beyond the fear of being hurt again? Sometimes we don’t…
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JANIS LITTLE GIRL BLUE
Singing For Her Feelings
To Be Heard
“I sing because I can experience a lot of feelings…” Otherwise, Janis Joplin had no one to hear. The most chilling part of Amy Berg’s documentary, Janis: Little Girl Blue, is to witness the cold formality of Mother and Father Joplin. No one can miss Janis’s hunger for love. Less obvious are the roots of…
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LOSING GROUND
When A Call For ‘Mama’
Is Unanswered
What is lurking below the surface of a highly intellectualized philosophy professor’s emotional control? We find out in Losing Ground, filmed in 1982 but recently released by Milestone Films, noteworthy for being the first feature-length film produced and directed by a Black American woman. Kathleen Collins, who died an early death of cancer in 1988,…
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CAROL
The Questions &Answers
Love Can Bring
Carol, directed by Todd Haynes, starring Cate Blanchett as Carol and Rooney Mara as Therese, is a story of love. More deeply, though, Carol is a story about why we’re drawn to love a certain person. In each attraction, something missing is sensed and desired in the other. Love can bring us to ourselves in a…
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