Posts Tagged ‘childhood trauma’
JOKER
Smile Though Your
Heart Is Breaking
& Hate In A Traumatized Boy
Arthur Fleck is Joker. That’s the name of Todd Phillips’s 2019 film and Joaquin Phoenix’s well-deserved Best Actor Oscar-winning character. Arthur must be a Joker, a self-made stand-up comedian. He must laugh, though his heart is breaking. And, being a comedian is the best way to keep laughing. Isn’t that right …? No, he’s not…
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THE LAST BLACK MAN
IN SAN FRANCISCO
When There’s No Home
In A Mother’s Heart
What are the basic ingredients in Joe Talbot and Jimmie Fails’s The Last Black Man In San Francisco? An old Victorian house. A young man who has no home. A mother who abandoned him and can’t keep him in her heart. A necessary fantasy. A Greek Chorus (that speaks the anger, hate, and under it,…
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TAXI DRIVER
A Hero? Reality Or Grandiose Fantasy?
Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro), age 26, is Taxi Driver’s lonely, alienated “hero.” Yes, he’s a Vietnam War vet, ex-marine, and likely has his share of PTSD. But, his problems stem from something much deeper than war trauma. He must have suffered some kind of childhood trauma, to be sure. He wouldn’t be so troubled if…
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SUMMER WITH MONIKA (1953)
Why Reality Ends An Idyllic Summer Love
Summer love on a deserted island isn’t real life. That’s the Gordian knot in Bergman’s 1953 Summer With Monika. This erotic and heartbreaking film tells the story of two adolescents caught in the throes of an idyllic love. It’s a love they both long for, given their troubled and sad early lives. And also an escape…
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WILD STRAWBERRIES (1957)
A Cold Mother Sentences You To Loneliness
“One sleeps in one’s childhood’s shoes,” Bergman remembers Swedish poet Maria Wine, saying, and “that was the real starting point of Wild Strawberries.” (p. 212*) It’s true. And, some live inside the echoes of a cold mother. Every psychoanalyst knows how our childhoods slumber within each waking and dreaming moment of our lives, creating their…
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VICE
Tyrants & Bullies & Childhood Trauma
What makes someone greedy; heartless; manipulative; and corrupt? So hungry for power that anything goes; even law; morality; & a daughter? Adam McCay’s Vice doesn’t answer questions of what or why. Vice tells the story of who and how. Yet, let’s for a moment think about Dick and Lynne Cheney as two parts of one…
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