viz. - Psychology

On Psycho-Realistic Action Heroes

Chris Ortiz y Prentice — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 18:34:52 +0000

Image Credit: Prometheus (2012)

Hollywood, you are going about action movies all wrong, then, because you have taken for granted what is the opposite of the actual case. You believe we viewers take pleasure from grandiosity of visual effect, but in fact your viewers are suffering from a spiritual condition of nullity brought on by over-exposure to the visually incomprehensible. How to make us feel anything: that is your challenge! Two recent treatments of the action movie hero provide a neat case in point and will serve for a conclusion to these remarks on the importance of psychological realism to compelling action cinema.

The image below--taken from Timur Bekmambetov’s Wanted (2008)--shows assassin Fox (Angelina Jolie) wielding a large-caliber handgun in one hand, an Uzi in the other, reclining on the hood of a hot red Dodge Viper, presumably holding herself on to the speeding car by virtue of her imponderable leg strength.

Image Credit: Wanted (2008)

If you have read my last two posts, you will not be surprised to learn that I consider this image an excellent example of all that is wrong with action cinema. It goes without saying that it does not represent a physical possibility. All the elements of this scene have been selected for the way they look on the big screen; none of them have been criticized from the perspective of psychological realism. Eminently consumable, it takes its place in the vault of one’s imagination next to countless like it and is immediately forgotten about. Incidentally, Wanted imagines a world where one can bend the trajectory of bullets by waving the gun while you shoot it: as with the image, so with the movie as a whole.

Now let’s conclude by looking at a far better because psycho-realistic depiction of the action movie hero in scientist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) of Ridley Scott’s 2012 Prometheus. In the shot which heads up this post, Shaw is using a semi-automated technology for surgery to manually remove from herself the growing fetus of an alien species. The fanciful elements of this scenario are obvious, but it is treated with great psychological realism. One cringes to watch it. Scott’s only mistake is to have Shaw running about the ship after completing the surgery. Shaw, up to this point, is a believably strong person. Had she collapsed after the surgery from feelings of exhaustion, over-strain, betrayal, sorrow, and fear--not to mention blood loss--her character would have been more relatable and the plot would have benefitted as well. (For instance, the viewer might “pass out” with Shaw only to reawaken in a ship on red alert, with no crew around and possibly an alien intruder on board. It is vulnerability, remember, which lends to action cinema the power to compel emotional response. As it is in the movie, the viewer gets too omniscient a viewpoint to be very apprehensive, and Shaw is going on a mission almost immediately after suturing her lower abdomen.)

As I have argued, it is that with which we are close to which we are able to respond emotionally. The two arrows of choice in the quiver of action filmmakers should be the close-up and the wide angle; the first to capture the knowing look, the quivering flesh. The other because one only dares look out of the corner of one’s eye at a sight that one somehow knows to be too large to comprehend. The Sublime, as the Romantics called it, must be treated tangentially, and in fact, disappears the moment one tries to get a direct view of it.

Image Credit: Prometheus (2012)

Scott understands this remarkably well in this shot, where he produces a psychologically fraught moment by combining a close-up--Shaw’s strong but exhausted and vulnerable person--with a wide-angle--an unknown, armored, large bipedal coming round the corner.

Keep our eyes, Hollywood, on what is at our level, and only gesture towards what we know is there all the time, almost as if it were looking down at us: the “general and universal physical fear” of which Faulkner spoke, “so long sustained by now that we can even bear it.” Adopt psychological realism and you will have made gripping action cinema.

Angst and Paralysis: Visualizing Melancholia from Albrecht Durer to Lars Von Trier

Ty Alyea — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:00:00 +0000

Lucas Cranach's Melancholia Image Credit: Art Tattler

Last week, I examined how painters of the nineteenth century revised the image of Phillipe Pinel, the famous mental health physician, to contribute to an evolving national mythology and edify the physician's archetypal (as well as vocational) role in fostering mental health. While the representation (as well as the specific job description) of the mental health practitioner has changed drastically over the past five centuries, one cannot help but notice that there are striking continuities to be found in representations of people said to be afflicted with maladies of the mind. Today, we will take a look at some remarkable consistencies to be found linking 16th and 21st century visual representations of one of Western society's most frequently visualized maladies: melancholia.

Virgilius Solis the Elder's Melancholia .4VS Image Credit: NIH - Images From the History of Medicine

Though a predecessor in some ways to depressive disorders and depression, the concept of melancholia carries with it a number of spiritual and behavioral connotations that cannot be mapped onto contemporary (American) diagnostic categories without losing a number of significant and complex meanings; the complete edition of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), for example, devotes 1400 pages to the topic. Thankfully, a multitude of paintings and woodcuttings can help us demonstrate dimensions of melancholia that depart from contemporary mores of classifying and understanding such diseases.

Though melancholia proper was frequently associated with men as well as women, a significant contingent of artists chose to visualize the malady in the representation of dejected women. One can notice a number of significant similarities in the works of Lucas Cranach (1472-1553), pictured at the top of this post, and Virgilius Solis the Elder's Melancolicus .4 VS (1514-1562), directly above this image.

Cranach's painting depicts the melancholy figure as an angelic figure who is sitting in the corner of a room, looking blankly ahead. Since antiquity, Melancholia was understood in humoreal terms as an overproduction of black bile--in fact,the word "melancholia" simply means "black bile" in ancient Greek. And we can see this blackness in the top-right corner of the image. In the darkness we can barely make out the images of what appear to be witches on broomsticks--perhaps haunting the mind of this angelic figure whose countenance and posture seems to be in stark contrast to the disposition of the swinging cherubs. One almost gets a sense of a kind of swirling of the mind contrasted with the body's immobility. Likewise, we see a little dog sleeping at her feet. Solis's image includes some distinct similarites: the woman in this image sits with her face buried into her hands amidst a grouping of animals. As a counterpart to the stick held by the subject of Cranach's painting, we see that Solis's toga-wearing figure seems to be holding a sort of measuring compass. Does anyone have an idea of the significance of these items?

Albrecht Durer's Melancholia I Image Credit: Wikipedia

These images, in turn reflect some of the elements found in Albrecht Durer's depiction of melancholia. Durer (1471-1528) was an instructor of Cranach's, and we can see some similarities in their stylistic choices. Once again, we see the reclining dog at the feet of an angelic woman, and a sphere image as well. To take a guess at an answer to the question I offered in my previous paragraph, I will venture to guess that the compas in Solis's image, like the spheres in Durer and Cranach's pieces, may have something to do with rational/scientific creation--perhaps to an extent that it has an effect on spiritual existence. We may also note that Durer's image is replete with images of bells and (what appear to be) time pieces. And in the background of this otherworldly image, we see light (or perhaps the rays of "melancholia" itself) radiating from the distance.

Which brings us to our final images from Lars Von Trier's film, Melancholia (2011). As we see halfway through this trailer for the film, we notice a nude Kirsten Dunst laying on rocks, taking in the glow of a rogue planet, aptly named "Melancholia," which is on a collision course with the earth. Given this contemporary setting, Von Trier's choice to depict depression as a personal and cosmic apocalypse seems to be a throwback to the way in which the malady has been depicted for the bulk of its history. An analysis of the film yields further comparisons, as Dunst's character rejects scientific explanations (or in this film, wishes) that attempt to mitigate the danger. However, somewhat subversively, we see that the main character relishes in her melancholy, and fully accepts the doom it brings. Viewers might also note that one of the first images in the film is a horse that sits on the ground just as we first see Dunst's character--a strange image that nonetheless fits perfectly with five centuries of melancholia's representation.

Interior decoration and Psychology

LaurenMitchell — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 20:13:32 +0000

According to this New York Times article, office décor and location can be very important if you are a psychologist.

Apparently everything, including furniture, wall hangings, books, and office location, both reflects the philosophical underpinnings of a psychologist’s practices and can impact a patient’s response to those practices. A recent article in the journal Psychoanalytic Psychology argued that complications in the therapist/patient relationship may be caused by holding therapy sessions in the therapists’ homes, where too much information about the therapist’s private life may be brought into the therapy session via the more personal office environment. However, other psychologists argue that there’s also a danger in creating too clinical of a setting--one that’s entirely devoid of all personal effects.

The article discusses some very interesting examples of this phenomenon: one very strictly Freudian therapist placed nude watercolors of herself in her waiting room, another offered patients a place to sit on a dirty couch with cheap stuffed animals on it, and a child psychologist placed a book of Robert Mapplethorpe nudes on the coffee table of the waiting room.

If your style choices are statements about who you are, then it only makes sense that in a field where identification between patient and therapist are critical personal style could have some pretty serious repercussions.