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Antisocial
personality and cinema Inside
every particular pattern of personality disorders, different levels of
mental functioning can be found, concerning identity problems,
libidinal-emotional cathexis and the capacity of object relation,
alongside an ideal continuum that goes from primary identification to the
genital object cathexis. The
personality disorders called antisocial by G.Gabbard (1990) or
psychopathic by Mc Williams (1994) appear well depicted in the movies “6
degrees of separation” by Fred Schepisi (1993) and “La Cérémonie”
by Claude Chabrol (1995). Gabbard’s antisocial personality and Mc William’s psychopathic one are structured along a line
of psychopathology going from an extreme pole of psychotic disorganization
to the highest level of social integration. Nevertheless, in our opinion,
the psychotic continuum strongly inclines towards the borderline pole in
its different multifaceted aspects as in the movies, we have chosen to
present. The
main characters of both movies have in common their desperate research for
an identity which satisfies their own narcissistic ideals and share
antisocial aspects, which are more displayed but less destructive in Paul,
the main character in 6 degrees of separation, more disturbing but silent
and hidden in the two protagonists of La Cérémonie. The
outcome of these two illustrative stories seems to set them at opposite
ends of an ideal continuum: the young hero of Schepisi’s movie will lose
himself at the precise moment he tries to have a genuine affective
relationship, while the two “bad girls” in Chabrol’s movie seem to
be pressed into a psychotic outbreak.
Six
degrees of separation by F.Schepisi (USA 1993), adapted from the
play by John Guare, is based on the assumption that the gap between
us and the rest of the world may be bridged by a chain of six persons.
From this alarming yet fascinating mixture of heimlich and unheimlich
(family members and total strangers), begins the story of Paul, a
streetwise young black man. He charms his way into the home of a wealthy
New York art dealer couple, overthrowing the given order, the event about
Paul appearing to be almost a realization (achievement) of Kandisky’s
painting “Chaos, control”, that Flan and Luisa exhibit to their
guests. The painting, painted on both sides, is a symbol of the split
aspects and of the unfinished identity of the fascinating borderline
character Paul, who swings from grandiosity to destruction. The movie
shows us into an elegant flat, full of paintings and pieces of furniture
of great value,
characteristics that make this world a deserving object of desire for
Paul. In fact he yearns after entering it, so much that he has signed a
perverse contract with a young gay in order to learn the key words to
conquer it. There Paul sees the realisation of his early fantasy to be
linked to a primary object
endlessly rich and potentially able to give him every kind of
satisfaction. Since
the first sequences we are aware that two realities intertwine, that
another reality lays under the sparkling
charming surface, but all the same we are fascinated by the young
man Paul. He breaks into, bleeding and calling for help, pretending to be
both a college friend of Flan and Luisa’s children and the son of actor
Sidney Poitier. He is the opposite of
the repressed social reality, in a place where money passes round in dizzy
figures, paintings are Museums masterpieces, and people decide the history
and the destiny of whole nation (South Africa). Paul interferes with his
basic need for an object relation able to give him a sense of genuineness.
He searches for object relation and then he manipulates the object in an
endless excitement. In fact he is unable of holding, after fascinating
everybody he is forced to look for a chance partner to get rid of his
inner intolerable tension. He
would say to Luisa astonished “I needed someone, I cannot stay alone
when I am happy”. Such an outbreak allows him to recover a tolerable
distance from the object, that, as soon as it is found and charmed, must
be eliminated ( discharged) through an orgasmic ejection. That way Paul
recovers a distance, as temporary and uncertain as it may be, from an
object relation which is always too ideal, total and exciting for him. He
appears intelligent, learned, established, in fact he imitates, exploiting
the more admired qualities of the object. Thus he plays the role of a
siren flattering and deluding everyone’s narcissism, but disclosing its
dark side too. Nobody comes out uninjured by Paul’s encounter. He charms
with his borderline’s traps, flattering the grandiose, ideal
narcissistic aspects, as able to satisfy primitive needs of
nourishing, he can cook like a great chef, as to give a learned reading of
a literature text, by chance “Cather’ n the rye ”, by Salinger.
Everyone will be changed by the contact with Paul, admirable outline of a
borderline personality. This is anyway the dreaming side of the coin,
where Paul, like the Hamelin piper charms everybody in the greatest
open eyes fantasy of the century, just cinema, the place where
everybody can satisfy his own omnipotent desires: he is the son of actor
Sidney Poitier and they all will play
“Cats”, the movie his father is going to direct. Everything
would go on wonderfully, if Paul himself didn’t break the spell
abruptly, letting a streetwalker gay into Flan and Luisa’s flat. This is
the other side of Kandiski’s painting, the chaotic one. On
the border of these two opposite worlds stands the doorman, Super-Ego
censor, who can let you enter or throw you out. Yet Paul corrupts him
every time, from the very beginning, showing off his bleeding wound and
his pretension to be a college friend of the Kittredges’ children. Then
the corrupted doorman Super-Ego will attack Flan’s paternal role: in
fact he accuses Flan, who denied his illegitimate son Paul, because of his
negritude. Here comes on stage a young couple that Paul will overwhelm,
actually he will attack the ideal couple that makes him face something
different than a combined undifferentiated object. As a matter of fact
Paul cannot recognise both the paternal role and the parents’ couple,
consequently he cannot have an adequate Super-Ego and consciousness of
guilt and responsibility, therefore he will repeatedly swing between
idealisation and persecution. Flan and Luisa have wealth, power, children,
the young couple has the wealth of love, youth and innocence and Paul
attacks and shatters them with his need that doesn’t tolerate any
procrastination. He invades their lives and separates them, forcing the
young man to question his latent homosexuality. The attack against the
couple goes on together with
his desire to be adopted by an ideal couple of parents. Yet splitting
doesn’t allow him to be aware of the destruction he brings forth. Paul,
so able in charming and manipulating, acts the part of the others’ ideal
object: he is the ideal son for all the parents he meets, and they feel
themselves the ideal parents they would have been for their children. They
all fall under his spell, then they suffer the blow to be caught in the
snare set by an impostor. Yet, after the encounter with the skilful
imitator he is, order must be re-established. At the end he upsets the
environment he passes through, disclosing truth and falsity. Facing the
object and relating to it changes Paul and it finally ruins him, as it
changes Flan and Luisa, forcing them to question the value of their
obsessed social circle. Flan looks for the core of creativity, but he also
needs wealth and social security, so that he will make of Paul the
ultimate anecdote for good cocktail conversation. On the contrary Luisa,
in a more feminine way, questions the sense of life, the beginning and end
of things, the border of human experiences, therefore she will be more
sensible to Paul’s fascination, becoming both his victim and his
executioner. Actually Paul will no more be able to use his defences and he
will find himself lonely and deprived, in the very moment in which he
passes from the certainty to posses the ideal object, to the sudden lose
of it. The relation between Paul and the others as it is common with
borderline personalities, stands on a very excited sensory level. He needs
to be in contact, to see his object of cathexis, while the others need to
get rid of him telling again and again about Paul, who fades away little
by little, becoming the unreal character of a movie fiction, an anecdote
to repeat to their friends. Thus they win back a stable identity, shared
in a tale among equals. For Paul the object relation is basically
(essentially) impossible, yet wanted. In fact isolation and separation
from the object is something he may not afford. When he is sent in prison,
he will committee suicide being compelled to face the lack of identity in
the relation with an object, that he can only partially recognise as
“not me” and for this reason it is forever either magnificent or
persecutory. The escape from the relation with the object is marked by
impulsive outbreaks which are both discharge and attempt of anal
controlling. In turns they take the place of the representation of the
object as “ not me”, that Paul is not able to do. The character,
skilfully outlined by the scriptwriter, suggests the dilemma that makes
the borderline personality disquieting yet fatally charming, of how it is
possible to reconcile self narcissistic cathexis and object relation both
without losing the object and maintaining it, without losing the self.
Paul can show his needs, and his wounds too, stirring up love and
sympathy, but it is a deception distracting from his genuine need that has
to remain masked, because it is disgraceful. Besides it is part of his
role game that the chosen object discloses his genuineness, owing to the
magic omnipotent qualities he attributes to the object, that has to be a
perfect mirror of his grandiose narcissism. Paul amazes continuously with
his sudden turnings from a level of mental functioning to another.
Actually his aim is to remove undesirable affects from the object, in
order to keep it at a distance. This is due to the necessity to avoid
mental and affective contents ( A.Bauduin 1995), that will be traumatic
for him, exposing him to an unbearable proximity to the object. The
turning of behaviour and mental functioning has the purpose to find a
psychic retreat (J. Steiner 1993), in the contact with a psychic dimension
difficult to signify and to work through. In the mean time it gives shape
to a genuine need for a stable outline of identity. Paul’s
problem seems to be that of succeeding in staying alone, without attacking
the object. He has built his antisocial defences on a borderline level,
but he lives a genuine experience of contact with Luisa. While speaking
with her at the telephone he releases (relaxes) trusting her, certain that
he has found the “good” object, but he loses himself, because Luisa,
his ideal object, hasn’t got the right information to identify him. This
confirms his lack of identity. When Luisa goes to look for him at the
police station, she will realise that she doesn’t know even his surname,
his address, who he is. The only mark to identify Paul is at the end the
pink shirt of one of her children, that Luisa herself gave him. Imitation
seems to be the only base of his unfinished identity. This
repeats Paul’s trauma falling
apart in the affective
encounter with the object which doesn’t
find him and it is not able to identify him. Actually he is continuously
looking for an object that recognises his genuine identity as it often
happens in antisocial personalities. In fact Paul presents a defensive
antisocial structure in a far more fragile borderline personality
organisation. Deliberately
he manoeuvred his homosexual friend, into making a perverse agreement, so
that he could enter the world
of rich, upper class families. Yet, it is he who ends up as the victim of
the process of fascination he himself has activated.
From that moment on, wealth fascinates him and brings about his
downfall. His fantasy of manipulation actually covers his genuine need for
identity, a sense of belonging and the chance to find a primitive and
megalomaniac Ego Ideal, which is to ruin him in the end. La
Cérémonie by Claude Chabrol (France 1995) goes further deep
into the subject of antisocial aspects of personality. Paul had
provocative and promiscuous sexual behaviours, he spreads suffering and
chaos all around him, he causes death too, unwilfully, finally he ruins
himself, maybe he committees suicide. The two girls of La Cérémonie,
Sophie and Jeanne (Sandrine Bonnaire and Isabelle Huppert, awarded a prize
in Venice for their memorable starring) drift onto one of those
distressing and incomprehensible (unaccountable) slaughter that sometimes
afflicts the daily news. In order to understand what’s going on we need
to make a distinction between the two protagonists. In fact they present
an antisocial character structure differently organised : in the ideal
continuum of antisocial personalities, that we have supposed at the
beginning of our paper, Sophie tends more than Paul and Jeanne towards the
psychotic side. Arrogance, lack of emotions, contempt, primary envy,
characterise Sophie, who can do everything very well, her mistress says.
Yet, looking better, she has the typical abilities of the autistic child:
she cooks, cleans, performs in a perfect automatic unemotional way, but
she can leave everything as soon as she is attracted by something else,
without even waiting to be gratified or acknowledged for her job. Sophie
is deprived ( empty) behind the protective shell she has built around
herself. On
the other end, Jeanne, is devoured by primary envy. The object represented
by the rich family, the
mistress, Melinda, they are imagined having all she wants and cannot have.
This is the reason why she has to attack them. Actually she provokes, she
plays to destroy everything, yet having reached a symbolic level, she
would not act it. Meeting Sophie, her psychotic side, Jeanne comes in
touch with her primitive Self, identified with the handicapped small
daughter she has lost for carelessness, more than for a precise child
murder purpose. In this very moment she should afford and recognise her
guilt, but she cannot do anything else than collapse progressively towards
psychosis. Excitement increases in both the girls. In fact self excitement
takes the place of the object as an early manner of self-holding (F.Tustin).
Her Ego defences regress and she is pushed more and more towards a drive
and mental undifferentiated level of functioning, to the point of impact with
Sophie, when she pulls the trigger. Soon after the massacre Jeanne will
separate from Sophie and goes to die in a car accident, that sounds very
likely a suicide. Killing
the ideal object Jeanne has killed her own Self, too. Sophie
is an incomprehensible, disturbing character, her face almost lacks of
mimic, her conversation is a “minimalist” one. She would answer “ I
don’t know, I don’t mind, maybe, yes, sure, okay, don’t bother
you”. She doesn’t complain, but she doesn’t enjoy too, she is not
inquisitive like Jeanne is and she doesn’t want to be matter of
curiosity. In fact she is closed up, to mask her secret, that is her inner
void. Protecting her shell is what is worth while. When she first enters
her new accommodation, she closes the curtains and switches on television.
Television is in fact the only apparent link of communication with the
outer world, the switched on television gives her a noisy background to
plunge in and to be linked to like a phlebo-clysis pipe giving endlessly
and unemotionally. Void
and lack of symbolic dimension is her shameful secret. Nothing can root
and growth inside her, “scripta manent”, but this is exactly the
point, Sophie is dyslexic, she cannot read. Her indifference and
detachment is the way she avoids the experience of the intolerable feeling
of shame. Shame represents the object’s look annihilating
and killing her, instead of giving comfort and love. Here comes the
necessity to destroy the object, or better the identification of the
object: Sophie kills to make the object vanishing ( disappearing) and let
her coming back to an undifferentiated state, her psychic retreat. This
psychic retreat (J.Steiner 1993) is the only tolerable state of
retreat from the dull, unreflective reality, that nonetheless Sophie
doesn’t alter, having in fact a superficial adaptation at a certain
level of functioning. To hide the secret of her surface, masking her lack
of identity, she can blackmail and even slaughter a whole family. A
childish narcissistic rage of impotence appears on her face with no mimic
when she has to read the written note, that she cannot decipher. The
dramatic sequences describe
her feeling of impotence: she looks for her old dyslexic book of exercises
and uselessly tries to repeat the unknown sounds and to connect them to
symbols that have no meaning for her. When Sophie comes in touch with
Jeanne, probably the first person with whom she has an emotional relation,
at least after her father suspicious death, in the very moment of
identification of the object, she begins to imitate Jeanne. Yet she
doesn’t possess Jeanne’s symbolic level, she cannot play the other’s
provocative game, therefore she does it to a more primitive, concrete
level: while Jeanne plays to shot chocolate on the bed, she shots bullets.
The encounter makes them both assassins: Jeanne regresses to the psychotic
part identified with the handicapped child she has guiltily lost, while
Sophie in an effort to go towards the object Jeanne, seems to become
warmer and lively. Jeanne is in fact a borderline, better adapted to
reality than Sophie, but regressing in the meeting with her. Jeanne is
envious, but she recognises the object that she must take under control,
even spy it, opening and reading people’s mail, as a post officer,
before delivering it. Her relation with Sophie is based on the necessity
for control, she discloses Sophie’s secret, but while Sophie is unable
to tell her story and can only laugh about it, Jeanne can speak about
it, even if in a basic lack of consciousness of responsibility and
guilt. Finally they laugh with connivance, tickling one another, in a
self-exciting, self-sensory manner. Finding one another, recognising to be
similar, gives a narcissistic support to them both, a sort of narcissistic
swallowing, which gives rise to a crescendo of excitement , that none of
them is anymore able to control. That must fatally exit in a drive
discharge, a kind of orgasmic explosion. Jeanne
becomes more and more provocative and rude, Sophie more and more
incomprehensible, as her secret is more and more surrounded. Their
complicity increases together with provocative behaviours. They are alone
against the whole world, inaccessible. Yet they are like two homozygous
twin: one, Jeanne, is the sensor reacting in an excited sensory manner,
chaotic and total, the other, Sophie, provides pure destructive energy,
that will finally explode. Together they are a time bomb, they play a
risky exciting game, that for Jeanne represents a regressive aspect, for
Sophie represents an attempt of relation, out of control and with no
limits. Their stories intertwine and
when
Sophie is fired, owing to her blackmailing Melinda, Jeanne by force lives
an intolerable feeling of exclusion and abandon from her ideal imaginary
family, but she will probably not be able to kill, by herself. Sophie,
deprived and void, when her secret is disclosed, should face shame and
envy in comparison with Melinda, loved and pregnant, a full of life
against her emptiness. At this point they need one another more and more,
they are one unit: Jeanne unable to afford the destructiveness caused by
her incapacity of a constant object relation acts Sophie’s rage, as
the vital part she lacks of. Sophie stands in any case at her side,
superficially sharing the dramatic feeling to be a careless killing
mother. From here on they collapse one onto the other. The anxious
crescendo of excitement portrays the progressive estrangement and the
psychotic retreat of the two girls, who oppose uneducated television
programs, to reality, using it as a means to escape.
Their searching for a psychotic triumph turns into its catastrophic
opposite. Their symbiotic link gives rise to the delusion of omnipotent
control, which in turn leads to final
psychotic explosion: by killing the whole family they succeed in
destroying the persecutory inner object. Sophie becomes a cold, detached
assassin, that will clean up after the massacre. Jeanne, on the contrary,
reveals her emotional involvement
taking Melinda’s stereo, direct evidence of their murder, and driving
towards a mortal car accident, equivalent of suicide. The slaughter of the
whole family that had tried to help her is the confirmation of the
psychotic denial of her origin and dependence and of the latent capacity
for destruction, remained silent after her suspected parricide. Her rage
is of an autistic kind, it can turn indifferently towards the object or
the Self. The emptiness of Sophie’s mind, where symbols and words cannot
be inscribed, becomes void of the murder of a whole family, swept away
probably only because it was a family. Nothing and nobody survive: Sophie
in fact has no history, we don’t know what happened before she came on
the scene of that unlucky family either we know what will happen after.
The psychotic triumph looked for by the two companions turn into the
catastrophic end of Jeanne, while Sophie, as far as we know, might escape
once more the encounter with the social life, that is with reality. Paola
Golinelli and
Maria Vittoria Costantini
Bibliography Baudin
A. Passaggi all’atto, regressione
formale, controllo anale, Vléme Colloque Franco-Italien 25et 26
Novembre 1995-Paris Gabbard
G.O. (1990) Psychodynamic Psychiatry in Clinical Practice, American Psychiatric
Press Inc. McWilliams
Nancy (1994) Psychoanalytic
Diagnosis understanding personality structure in the clinical process
The Guilford Press, New York, London. Steiner
J. (1993) Psychic Retreats Routledge,
New York, London. Tustin
F.(1990) The protective shell in
children and adults Karnac Books Ltd, London
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