Characters On The Couch

How a psychologist thinks about your favorite Film & TV characters.

Film

LEO HURWITZ
A Pioneer In The Beginnings Of
America’s Documentary Film Part 1
Leo Hurwitz’s Family Influences

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Leo Hurwitz (1909 – 1991), a pioneer documentary filmmaker, was part of a small group who founded America’s documentary film. Notably, Leo and his colleagues invented the social documentary form. According to his son, Tom Hurwitz, Leo’s films “exemplified a new way of making films about the real world. And about ideas that help us …

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A Pioneer In The Beginnings Of
America’s Documentary Film Part 1
Leo Hurwitz’s Family Influences

MOTHER!
Narcissism? Yes, But, Mother Earth?
… I Don’t Think So.

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The environment? Really? Narcissism is more like it. I’m sorry, Darren Aronofsky. Not in a million years would I think Jennifer Lawrence’s character in Mother! is supposed to be Mother Earth, if I hadn’t read an interview with you. But, even so, she isn’t exactly an earthy type of woman. Bountifully giving to everyone and then having …

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Narcissism? Yes, But, Mother Earth?
… I Don’t Think So.

WIND RIVER
Confusing Gap in FBI Agent
Jane Banner’s Character

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Where does Wind River’s Jane Banner, FBI Agent, (Elizabeth Olson) fit into the mix of marginalized Native Americans and a white Game Tracker (Jeremy Renner) with a significant loss of his own? And, who was she anyway, coming out of nowhere in all her conspicuously dissimilar blonde beauty? We never really know. The film, with …

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Confusing Gap in FBI Agent
Jane Banner’s Character

ELLE
Trauma & Perversion
Where Does Triumph Come In?

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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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Trauma & Perversion
Where Does Triumph Come In?

WEINER
What’s Wrong With Anthony Weiner?
A Psychoanalyst’s Answer

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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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What’s Wrong With Anthony Weiner?
A Psychoanalyst’s Answer