Perry Kagemusha.pdf

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IMPERSONATION OF THE TRUE SELF

Ted Perry

There is real transcendence . . . in the power to impersonateothers. William Arrowsmith, Cesare Pavese

We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about whatwe pretend to be. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Mother Night

I watch movies for many reasonsentertainment, pleasure, in-formationbut I also watch films to learn something about myown inner life. No worthwhile film gives concrete answers, butsome movies offer a fresh perspective on the struggles of theself. My interest is focused now on three films: Michelangelo An-tonionisThe Passenger, Roberto RossellinisGeneral Della Rovere,and Akira Kurosawas Kagemusha. I will argue that their signifi-cance can best be understood within the context of certain psy-choanalytic theories, particularly self psychology.1

The Passenger (1975) tells the contemporary story of anAmerican journalist, David Locke, who lives in London and ison assignment in Africa, but who is unable to make contact withthe rebels he wants to interview. Given the opportunity, hetrades identities with another man and eventually begins to fol-low that persons itinerary. Knowing that it might be dangerous,Locke goes to one of the mans appointments, only to be killedbecause he is mistaken for that man.

General Della Rovere (1959), set in Italy during World WarII, has as its protagonist a con man and gambler. Caught in oneof his schemes, he is forced by the Nazis to impersonate a Parti-san leader, General Della Rovere, and to go into a prison inorder to get information for them. At the end of the film he

chooses to be executed as the general, along with other politicalprisoners, even though he has retrieved the information the Na-

Psychoanalytic Review, 94(6), December 2007 2007 N.P.A.P.


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zis want and could escape his execution by revealing what heknows.Kagemusha(1980), set in sixteenth-century Japan, follows a

petty thief who impersonates a dead Takeda clan lord, Shingen,because the clans leaders assume that the lords of the otherclans will not go to war as long as they think Lord Shingen isalive. The deceit is eventually discovered, the imposter is kickedout, and a battle with the other clans ensues. Watching the clashand seeing his old clan destroyed, the thief picks up a lance andruns out to the battlefield to his certain death.

These three works have a common narrative. The leadingcharacter adopts the identity of a person he comes to believe is

admirable, gradually internalizes that identity, and willinglychooses the death of the person he impersonates. While theviewer may think, initially, that in impersonating someone elsethe character is falsifying who he is, the irony is that in so doingthe protagonist thinks he is coming to bewhat heis,1 or at leastwhat he wishes to be. While the price of becoming this other selfis death, the deeper and more complex irony is that howevermuch the deaths represent a critical step in each selfs develop-ment, they also truncate that development by blocking the op-portunity to become a true self, to use D.W. Winnicotts term.I return later to Winnicotts distinction between the false selfand the true self. For now, the point is that each protagonist

finds his self false enough to prompt him to jump at the chanceto become what he thinks is a true self, even when it means adeath that paradoxically bars the creation of a true self.

The uniqueness of this type of narrative is not apparent atfirst. Many films seem to resemble Kagemusha, The Passenger, andGeneral Della Roverebecause narrative is inherently about charac-ters who evolve and change. Doubles, or doubling, and filmsabout twins whose identity is exchanged, for instance, can sug-gest impersonation and are prominent in many works.3 Somefilms have characters who change identities,4 and there are a fewfilms in which an actor becomes offstage the character he playsonstage.5 Other films feature characters who impersonate some-

one else.6Doubling, exchanging identities, impersonation, transfor-

mation of the self, death willingly chosenthese are themes pres-


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ent in other kinds of texts, and a number of movies have beenmade based on such sources.7 Dickens A Tale of Two Cities is aclassic literary example. The novel and its film adaptations con-clude with the death of Charles Darnay, but the person who diesis actually Sidney Carton, going to the guillotine in the guise ofDarnay. Cartons last words might easily have been spoken bythe Rossellini, Antonioni, and Kurosawa protagonists as theywent to their deaths: It is a far, far better thing I do, than I haveever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have everknown. Other literary examples of doubling and imperson-ations exist.8

While the films under discussion share similarities with nu-

merous others, the latters protagonists go to their deaths eitherunwillingly, mistakenly, or out of some sense of heroism or self-sacrifice in the service of a higher good. This does not mean thedeaths do not serve some ego need for such characters, but theemphasis in most of these works is on the person dying primarilyfor other people or for an ideology. Even in A Tale of Two Cities,Carton goes to his death as Darnay believing that he is helpingDarnay and Lucie escape to England where they will have ahappy life. In this novel and in other works, characters choosedeath chiefly in order to help others or a cause.

The films that are the focus of this essay are radically differ-ent from these other works in at least one crucial respect. Their

protagonists choose death to achieve something primarily forthemselves. The ego needs served by dying are uppermost, lessimportant than any possible service to a cause or to other peo-ple. In The Passenger, Locke does not go to David Robertsonsappointment at the Hotel de la Glora thinking he will accom-plish something for the rebels to whom Robertson was sellingguns. Locke-as-Robertson goes to the hotel out of his own per-sonal need and because he cannot and will not go back to thelife he has left. Facing death, he becomes, like Robertson, some-one much more involved in life than the mere observer-of-lifereporter who was David Locke.

In General Della Rovere, the con man does not think he is

accomplishing anything for the Italian Resistance by willingly go-ing to the execution of the general he impersonates. Only theGermans and the men about to be killed with him hear the brave


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speech that he makes in front of the firing squad, celebrating afree Italy. This is not a martyr who expects that the speech andhis death will advance the cause of the Resistance. This is alonely death, meaningful only to the con man because he haswillingly chosen it.

In Kagemusha, the protagonist runs onto the battlefieldknowing that he will be killed. The battle is over; all the mem-bers of the Takeda clan are killed or have fled. Unlike the sol-diers who have just died out of unquestioning loyalty to the clan,the former thief, who is not a clan member, makes his suicidalcharge out of loyalty and service to something in himself. Choos-ing such a death means he identifies with and becomes a mem-

ber of the Takeda clan, as well as an admirable person like thelord he has impersonated and has come to idealize.What is unique about all three films, therefore, is that the

protagonists elect death primarily to serve an individual need tobecome who they wish to be; they do not choose death to servea cause, an ideology, or other people. This particular narrativeis quite rare.9

It is helpful to view these films in the context of self psychol-ogy, whose general principles provide a means to understandthe shape of these narratives. As Kohut said in describing someof his patients, It was, however, not the scrutiny of the symp-tomatology but the process of treatment that illuminated the na-

ture of the disturbance of these patients.10

Kohut is assertingthat we learn more about a person from the dynamic process ofrecovery than from a static study of the self. The films underfocus here instantiate just such a dynamic process.

Obviously, these protagonists present themselves as peoplewith faults: antisocial actions, work complications, failure in inti-mate relations, lack of empathy, interpersonally exploitative be-havior. Yet we do not have enough information, at least not ini-tially, about these protagonists to assert that they are deeplytroubled beings. As the films develop, however, there are hintsof confusion in each person. To initiate and make evident thatturmoil, each film begins with a protagonist at a crisis point.

In General Della Rovere, the main character, who uses thename of an Italian colonel, Grimaldi, is a gambler and a conman who has been imprisoned a number of times for fraud,


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deception, possession and dealing of drugs, even bigamy, ac-cording to his arresting officer, a Nazi colonel. Grimaldis situa-tion is desperate because he has lost the money given to him bythe father of a son being held by the Nazis. In previous circum-stances Grimaldi had collected money from a person and usedpart of it to bribe a German lieutenant to do what Grimaldisclient wanted. This time, however, instead of using the moneyto bribe the German lieutenant to keep a mans son from beingtaken from Italy to a camp in Germany, Grimaldi has gambledwith the funds and lost. He dashes around madly trying to re-place the money so that he can give it to the German lieutenant,first by asking his girlfriend to let him pawn some of her jewelry,

then, when that fails, trying to sell a fake ring to several people,and then by promising a woman that in exchange for money, hewill get her husband released. When the woman discovers herhusband has already been executed, she turns Grimaldi in; he isarrested and taken to a Nazi colonel.

During the interrogation, we learn that the con mans realname is not Grimaldi but Emanuele Bardone. The Nazi colonelthreatens him with prison for appropriating a title, for crimesduring wartime, and for bribing a German lieutenant, whichmeans Bardone could be imprisoned or even executed for hiscrimes. The colonel offers him a way out if he will impersonatea Partisan leader, General Della Rovere, who was recently killed.

The colonel wants Bardone to go into prison as the general inorder to learn what he can about the Partisans plans. Bardoneagrees and is placed in a prison holding many political prisoners,one of whom is a Partisan leader named Fabrizi. Bardone is tolearn which prisoner is actually Fabrizi, since he is imprisonedunder some other name.

Kagemushaalso begins with a protagonist at a critical pointin his life. He is about to be crucified as a thief, perhaps even amurderer, but the brother of the Takeda clan leader LordShingen notices how much the thief looks like the lord. Ratherthan let him be crucified, the brother brings the thief to meetShingen. The lord agrees that the resemblance is striking (the

same actor plays Shingen and the thief). Because the demeanorof each man is quite different, it is clear who is the lord and whois the thief. While the lord is calm and serioushe is referred to


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as a mountainthe thief is raucous and foolish. Yet he is assert-ive enough to point out that the lord has stolen and killed on agrander scale than he, the thief. Impressed with the mans hon-esty and forthrightness, the lord and the brother decide to de-tain the thief so that he can be used to impersonate the Takedalord.

The Passengeralso begins with a character whose life is at animpasse. Locke is trying, unsuccessfully, to locate a rebel groupin Africa. On the way back from one attempt, his Land Rovergets stuck in the sand and he has to walk back to his hotel, wherehe discovers that another European, staying in the next room,has died. Locke impulsively trades identities with the man, David

Robertson, swapping their passport photos, dragging the mansbody to his room, and telling the desk clerk that Locke is dead.None of the workers in the hotel, including the desk clerk, no-tices the difference. Trading identities seems precipitous, an ac-tion not justified by Lockes circumstances at the moment.

While each protagonist has come to a critical juncture in hislife as the films begin, we do not assume that they have a particu-lar psychological problem. As each story unfolds, however, thereare signs of real defects in all three. We get a hint of such aproblem in General Della Rovere when, during a bombing raid,as bombs are falling around the prison and the prisoners are

screaming, Bardone asks to be let out of his cell so he can ad-dress the frightened inmates. Speaking as the man he is imper-sonating, the con man is passionate and convincing: Friends!Friends! This is General Della Rovere. Show some dignity andself-control. Youre men! Show these swine you are not scaredof dying. They should be scared! Every bomb that is droppedbrings them closer to the end and us closer to freedom! He isconvincing as the general, and the men quiet down. The ferventspeech serves the Resistance, helping the men to believe in theircause and to face death with courage. But when Bardone returnsto his prison cell, we see that however ardent his speech, it waspretense, for he is extremely frightened and himself scared of

dying. The speech may have been more of an attempt to stopthe men from screaming, which scares Bardone as much as thebombs, or he may have momentarily thought he was the general.


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Either way, the person who gave such an impassioned speech isnot the same person we see back in his cell.The protagonist ofKagemushahas a similar episode. For the

first part of the film he is not shown impersonating the lord, andhe is not even told when the lord dies. One night, he reverts tohis persona as a thief and sneaks about the castle, intent on steal-ing something. He sees a very large urn and, thinking it containsvaluables, cracks it open, only to be faced with the body of thelord. The shock of seeing the dead lord is heightened becausethe thief is seeing his mirror image; he can not help but feel thathe is seeing his own death. Completely unnerved by the sight,he accidentally makes a sound and is discovered. Taken before

the clan leaders, who were hoping he would impersonate thedead lord, the thief is so panic-stricken by the sight of the bodythat he refuses to impersonate the lord any longer.

A similar exposure of a protagonists flaws occurs in ThePassenger, but the evidence is more obvious than it is with theother protagonists. More clearly than Bardone or the thief,Locke is presented as a wounded and defective self. His personallife is not satisfactory, at least in the sense that he and his wifeare not close, and she has a lover. During a flashback to an ear-lier conversation between Locke and Robertson, before the lat-ters death, Robertson claims that wherever he goes, the air-ports, taxis, and hotels are the same. Locke differs, saying I

dont agree. Its us who remain the same. We translate everysituation, every experience, into the same old codes. We justcondition ourselves. Not only do his words suggest hopeless-ness and a lack of vitality, the manner in which he says thesewords is affectless, implying how trapped he feels within thesame old codes.

Another unambiguous sign of how he feels about himself isthe way he approaches his work. He may be a well-known jour-nalist, but he is unwilling to probe very deeply, even when he isinterviewing people. When his wife points this out, he makes noapology, saying thats the way the game is played. That Locketries to be only an observer is evident when he is interviewing

an African witch doctor, educated in Europe. The witch doctorseizes the camera and aims it at Locke, saying that they can nothave a real interview unless he, Locke, is also willing to answer


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questions. The implication is that the journalists questions aresuperficial and meaningless; indeed, the very tone in Lockesvoice when he asks questions of the witch doctor is mechanicaland dead, indifferent to the questions he asks. Even worse, whenthe camera is turned on Locke, he becomes anxious, even fright-ened, as if the camera might penetrate his mask and reveal theself he has become and does not want exposed. Antonioni, whorarely uses the convention of shot/countershot, employs a formof it in this instance to emphasize Lockes panicky reaction tobeing looked at. Given what we learn about Locke, it becomesunderstandable why he leaped so impulsively at the chance tobecome someone else.

Locke, feeling trapped within his codes and having the cam-era turned on and exposing him; Bardone, confusing himselfwith the general during the bombing raid; the thief, confrontinghis own death when he sees the dead lord: These incidents re-veal that all three protagonists are unstable. Although the filmscontain clues that each character is troubled in some way, theclearest sign of disturbance is that the three imposters graduallymerge with the persons they are impersonating, an improbablefeat if their own internal selves were strong and secure. It is onlyin retrospect, as we see how each person becomes empoweredby the self he is impersonating, that the meaning of the threefilms is revealed and D.W. Winnicotts distinction between the

false self and the true self proves useful. While it was not imme-diately obvious to the viewer, each protagonist must have begunas a false self. For Winnicott, a false self is constructed out ofother peoples expectations and external reality; that is, the falseself is built up on a basis of compliance. . . . Only the true selfcan feel real, but the true self must never be affected by externalreality, must never comply.11

Each protagonists path from a false self to what he believesis a true self occurs as he takes on another persons identity,which becomes an idealized self that the protagonist wants to beand believes he can be. While two of the men are initially forcedto impersonate another person, all three choose ultimately to do

so. The change, in one way or another, saves each protagonistfrom the consequences of his old selfcrucifixion, a jail sen-tence, personal and professional failure. What follows in each


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film is a progression from the old identity to a union with thenew self and then to the death of the new self that the old selfhas ingested. Although we never know quite enough about theearlier life of these three protagonists to declare that the selfthey presented initially was a false self, one created through com-pliance and external reality, we can certainly see that the deaththey choose at the end of each film is not forced on them byexternal reality, nor is it chosen out of a desire for compliance;each man could easily avoid this fate. The death of each charac-ter has nothing to do with compliance with the forces of externalreality but is the result of free choice.

The path is slightly different in each film but similar overall.

Each protagonist begins to slip more and more comfortably intothe role of the person he is impersonating, seeming to becomethat person, or at least to incorporate his ideal characteristics.InKagemusha, although the thief initially refuses to impersonatethe lord, he changes his mind when he sees the lords body bur-ied in a lake and realizes that spies may have watched the burialand reported it to the leaders of the other clans. As the imper-sonation proceeds, he still acts sometimes like the fool that hewas, but there are moments when he acts so much like the lord,or adopts a pose that so resembles one the lord enacted, thatthe people around him are in awe, even though they are awareof his true identity. At those moments he appears actually to

be the lord, and in one of those instances a witness says thatthe lord lives through him.

The most dramatic instance of this transformation is whenthe former thief gets close to the lords grandson, who at firstdoes not think the thief is his grandfather. As the thief more andmore becomes the lord, he convinces the boy and they growvery close. In another sequence, during an extended battlescene, with the thief posing as the lord and sitting above thebattle, he momentarily becomes the scared thief again. The en-emy is surrounding him and killing some of his guards; he isfrightened and wants to flee but restrains himself. A large enemycontingent approaches the spot where the thief-as-Lord Shingen

sits, but seeing him, fearless and immovable as a mountain, theyturn away and the Takeda clan wins the battle.

Afterwards, pointing to the bodies of the soldiers who died


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protecting the imposter, the lords brother says, They died foryou. Realizing that these men died for him, the protagonist be-comes even more willing to take on the role and responsibilitiesof the Takeda clan lord. Gradually, the transformation fromthief to lord becomes more pronounced, so much so that thethief, almost believing he is Lord Shingen, tries to ride a horsethat only the lord was able to ride. When the thief is thrown tothe ground, the lords mistresses discover he lacks a scar the lordhad. Once it is revealed that the thief is not Shingen, he is nolonger useful and is expelled from the castle.

The Passengerproceeds along a similar path. As Locke be-gins to follow the itinerary of the man whose identity he stole,

he discovers not only that Robertson was selling guns to thesame rebels that Locke sought, but that Robertson was actuallysympathetic to the rebels cause. There is no logical explanationfor why Locke continues to follow Robertsons itinerary, exceptthat he seems to be seeking something, some meaning, somedirection. A young woman he picks up along the way pushes himtoward one more of the mans appointments. When he balks atgoing, she says, You cant be like that, just escaping. Robertsonmade the appointments; he believed in something. Thats whatyou wanted, didnt you? Locke replies that Robertson is dead,and the girl answers, But youre not. Theres irony in her state-ment. Yes, Robertson is dead, literally, but Locke as another self

is alive. She is suggesting that his only hope for a meaningful lifeis to move beyond impersonation, to actually internalize the bestparts of Robertson. Locke must come to believe in something,as Robertson did. She knows Locke has learned that Robertsonwas not an arms dealer interested only in money but a worthyperson who supported the efforts of the rebels to overthrow acorrupt government.

In going to the appointment at the Hotel de la Gloria,Locke-as-Robertson is fully aware that no one might be thereand also of the danger. He knows that the police are followinghim, as if he were Robertson, and he must suspect that Robert-son was a target of the government wanting to stop the flow of

arms to the rebels. Nevertheless, Locke goes to the hotel andchecks in as Robertson. The transformation, or at least the de-sire to convert himself into the person who believes in some-


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thing, is evident. At that point, the possibility of believing insomething is more important than the danger.The next stage of this evolution from a false self occurs

when each of the men dies the death of the person he imperson-ates. The three protagonists have come to experience the otherperson as part of themselves, a selfobject; that is, an objectthat we experience as part of our self.12 The three men are soconvinced that they are this idealized self object that theychoose that other persons death.13 The choice is not an act ofcompliance or forced onto them from some external source.The path of each protagonist to a new self is indicative of theidealizing transference that Kohut describes as a merger with a

source of idealized strength and calmness.14 However nobleand meaningful to each protagonist, each death has a tragic di-mension because it blocks the next stage of development, whichinvolves confronting the inevitable shortcomings, the normalfrustrations and disappointments, of the idealizing transfer-encethat is, encountering those failures [that] lead to thegradual replacement of the self objects and their functions by aself and its functions.15 Such a process is necessary to move pastthe weaknesses and limitations of the idealized self object in or-der to realize the true self. That the protagonists believe they areattaining such a true self is clear, but their deaths ironically and

sadly prohibit this achievement.As General Della Rovere, the former con man Bardone notonly chooses the death of the man he impersonates but does sowith courage and conviction, even writing a final note to thegenerals wife, saying My last thoughts are of you. Long liveItaly. The internalization of the idealized general is complete.Bardone has discovered which of the prisoners is the Partisanleader Fabrizi, but he refuses to identify the man. The Nazi colo-nel almost begs Bardone to disclose this information and escapeexecution. But Bardone knows that in doing so he would be be-traying Fabrizi and revealing that he is not the general he hasbeen impersonatingwhich is the same as betraying himself. As-

suming fully the identity of the general, the former con manchooses to die by firing squad, the death designed for Rovere.For Bardone, too, meaning is more important than death. He


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considers himself a new and true self, the brave General DellaRovere.In The Passenger, the representatives of the African govern-

ment find Locke and, thinking he is the arms dealer Robertson,kill him. Just before that scene we saw Locke lying on his side inthe hotel bed, but after it we see Locke on his back. In otherwords, he seems to have died looking his assassins in the face.Locke made no attempt to thwart his murder; he accepted hisdeath. Like Bardone, Locke courageously chose the death of theman he impersonated. When Lockes wife shows up at the hotel,goes to the room that is supposed to contain Lockes body, andis asked if she recognizes the body of David Robertson, she says,

I never knew him. On one level, she means she never knewRobertson, but on a deeper level she does not recognize Lockethe man who would trade identities and face death unflinch-ingly.

Her words come at the end of a long tracking shot in whichthe camera moves past Locke, still alive on the hotel bed, andtravels outdoors as we hear a gunshot, then turns around to lookback at him on the bed, now dead. The shot is quite remarkableas it moves through the barred window of the room and thenfloats out into the open space outside the hotel. The shot hasbeen interpreted in many ways, but the intellectual claims aboutthe meaning of the shot miss the experience of the viewer,

which is the kinetic feeling of freedom, as if not only physicalbut psychological barriers are being breached. Something thatwas imprisoned is now free. A version of the earlier shot/count-ershot sequence with the witch doctor, in which the camera wasturned on an anxious Locke, is being repeated, but this time thecamera moves gently, and when it turns around and looks atLocke, he is at peace. These two variations of shot/counter-shot (though technically long takes) are dramatically different.In the first, the witch doctor forcefully takes the camera fromLocke and jerkily turns it on a Locke who is fearful and appre-hensive of being seen. In the second instance, the camera is notyanked around but instead moves gracefully of its own initiative,

piercing freely the barred window of the walled room. The cam-era makes the viewer feel what Locke must have felt in his lastmomentsthat for the first time he is escaping the walls of the


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same old codes and the conditioning, inside of which he hasbarricaded himself for so long.The final stage inKagemushais a little more complicated but

the idea is the same. After the thief is exposed and is expelledfrom the castle, the son of Lord Shingen leads the clan into bat-tle. The thief watches the battle as it unfolds and sees the mus-kets of the enemy destroy every wave of fighters that the Takedaclan advances. When it is absolutely clear that the Takeda clanhas been obliterated and the field is strewn with dead and dyingmen and horses, the thief races onto the field, picking up a lancealong the way and advancing in the direction of the enemy as ifhe, too, fights for the clan. The effort is completely futile, and

he is shot. While he does not literally die the death of LordShingen, he dies the death that befalls the clan. His identifica-tion with the idealized Lord Shingen, whom he impersonated,and with the Takeda clan, which he headed as Lord Shingen, isaccomplished. Dying, the thief stumbles to a nearby stream, fallsin, and floats past the remnants of a submerged banner of theTakeda clan. He dies the death of the clan, the clan members,and symbolically of the head of the clan, Lord Shingen. Yet involuntarily dying, the thief believes that he has supported histrue self.

Each impersonator in these three films is presented withonly two options, both of which involve some form of self-sacri-

fice: either expunge the new self and return to the old self,which is to live physically but to fail psychologically, or to electthe death of the new self, which is to triumph psychologicallybut to die physically. All three men choose death in part becausein the final moments before that death they are alive psychologi-cally for the first time. Winnicott would have portrayed all threeprotagonists deaths as a mode of clinical suicide, a physicaldeath but a psychological victory: Suicide in this context [theTrue Selfs efforts to come into its own] is the destruction ofthe total self in avoidance of annihilation of the True Self. Whensuicide is the only defence left against betrayal of the True Self,then it becomes the lot of the False Self to organize the sui-

cide.16However contradictory it may be to die physically but live

psychologically, even if only for a few minutes, the films enact


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just such a paradox. With a protagonist who impersonates anadmirable and vigorous self, each film effectively dramatizeswhat is otherwise difficult, because so subjective, namely, the tra-

jectory of the selfs struggle to fulfill its own design. It is espe-cially important to point out that all three deaths are only super-ficially futile. Clearly, there is nothing altruistic about them. Ifthe usual sense of heroic is to die for others, or for some causegreater than the individual, these deaths are not heroic. How-ever, the three protagonists go to their deaths for somethingmuch more personal, for a sense of being a self greater than theself that began the film.

It is even more important to point out that the choice of

death, however meaningful to each protagonist, does not com-plete the creation of Winnicotts True Self, which is what theprotagonists might imagine they achieve. The deaths are poignant,if not tragic, because they actually prohibit the achievement of aTrue Self, since that would require moving past the idealizingtransference to the replacement of the idealized self object witha True Self. These films can be viewed as metaphorically drama-tizing an idealizing transference with a therapist, but that is onlypart of what is needed to achieve a True Self. Not only is thenew sense of self short-lived; it is not the final stage in the pathfrom a False Self to the emergence of a cohesive, independent,and vital True Self. By no means does that minimize the achieve-

ment of the three films, which so powerfully and uniquely dra-matize the selfs struggle to find actualization and affirmation.

NOTES

1. For my limited understanding of this subject, I have been influenced pri-marily by a few works of Carl Rogers, D.W. Winnicott, and Heinz Kohut. Iam drawn to these writings because the films examined in this paper areless illuminated by Freudian drive-and-defense theory or by an examinationof the libidinal and aggressive impulses than by the way in which they de-pict the selfs efforts toward affirmation and actualization.

2. Carl Rogers, What It Means to Become a Person, inOn Becoming a Person(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961) 113.

3. For example, Kieslowskis The Double Life of Veronique, Hitchcocks Vertigo,WhalesThe Man in the Iron Mask, David Cronenbergs Dead Ringers, MayaDerensMeshes of the Afternoon, and the Bunuel/Dal Un chien Andalou.

4. For example, John Frankenheimers film, Seconds.


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5. For example, Max Nossecks film, The Brighton Strangler, and George Cu-

korsA Double Life.6. For example,Victor, Victoria, Yentl,Mrs. Doubtfire,Tootsie,Sommersby.7. For example, Il fu Mattia Pascal, the novel by Pirandello, and Natalie

Zemon Daviss reconstruction, The Return of Martin Guerre, both of whichwere made into films.

8. An intriguing antecedent is a seventeenth-century French play by Rotrou,The Veritable Saint Genest, which tells the story of Saint Genest, or Genesius,a Roman actor who, while performing before the Emperor Diocletian inan anti-Christian play, was suddenly converted to Christianity as he playedthe role of a Christian. For this change of heart he was tortured and be-headed.

9. One of the few works I know similar to the films is Poulencs opera, Dia-logues of the Carmelites, based on a text of George Bernanos and set at thebeginning of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The op-eras heroine, Blanche, joins a Carmelite nunnery, saying For me the

world is very strange, like an alien place in which I cannot live. Eventually,she leaves, but when the nuns are condemned to death on the guillotine,Blanche willinglysome would say foolishlychooses to join them, eventhough she has already left the nunnery and could easily escape the deathsentence.

10. Heinz Kohut and Ernest S. Wolf, The Disorders of the Self and TheirTreatment: An Outline, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 59 (1978):413.

11. D.W. Winnicott, Classification,The Maturational Processes and the Facilitat-ing Environment (New York: International Universities Press, 1965) 133. Inthe same volume see his Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self,pp. 14052. There is a subtle hint of a false self in General Della Roverebecause the con man uses a fake name, Colonel Grimaldi, marking him ina literal sense as someone who lives as a false self.

12. Kohut and Wolf, p. 414. For these authors, there are two types of self

objects: those who respond to and confirm the childs sense of vigour,greatness and perfection; and those to whom the child can look up andwith whom he can merge as an image of calmness, infallibility and omnipo-tence. The first is the mirroring self object and the second is the idealizedparent imago.

13. Ibid, p. 414.14. Ibid, p. 413.15. Ibid, p. 416.16. Winnicott, Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self 143.

The Psychoanalytic Review

Vol. 94, No. 6, December 2007

Wright TheaterMiddlebury CollegeMiddlebury, VT 05753E-mail: [email protected]

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