Filming Neurosis

30/09/2026

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Nervous Inclinations

To define the difference between the neurotic, the hysteric and the melancholic in cinema might not be any easier than in life. But at least, in doing so, we have the advantage of no diagnostic risks, as a character remains on screen impervious to our proposals or suggestions. However, let us start with a generalisation, one that in various ways we will aim to modify later on in this piece that will focus on neurosis: hysterics are usually women, melancholics men, and neurotics cover frequently both male and female. To bolster this generalisation over the latter, what better place to start than with a Woody Allen film? The Freud Museum notes, “There are few filmmakers who have represented psychoanalytic concepts as consistently as Allen has; he is the premier Freudian director, having spent several decades undergoing analysis, so it would be remiss of us to omit him.” Equally, he is a director inclined to show neurosis in both his leading characters: while films often deal with a neurotic focus on one, evident for example in The Odd Couple with the often neurosis-ridden Jack Lemmon playing opposite a lugubrious, slothful Walter Matthau, or Ordinary People, with Mary Tyler Moore the neurotic wife with a calmer husband. In Annie Hall, both Alvy Singer and the titular character are equally capable of neurosis if we accept the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s definition that: “neuroses typically were associated with a sense of distress and a deficit in functioning to the extent that they threatened to impair a person’s ability to function in virtually any area of life, including work and relationships. However, they generally were not severe enough to be incapacitating, and a connection to reality was maintained.”

In Annie Hall, while Alvy and Annie are capable of work and capable of love, they can’t accept either without fretting over the implications and the complications. When Alvy walks along the street and sees what looks like a happy, attractive couple, he asks them if this is so, and they reply that indeed they are. He asks them to account for this happiness that eludes him, and the woman says: “I’m very shallow and empty and have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.” Her partner adds that he is “exactly the same.” Allen makes clear these are people who aren’t at all neurotic, as we might wonder if he is also drawing out a contrast that suggests Jewish neurosis against WASPish insouciance. These are tall, white, Protestant-looking people, and are a contrast to Woody’s nervy ethnicity. But while the neurotic Jew is a common enough type, perhaps a stereotype, we should remember that Annie is no less neurotic than Alvy. Daniel Smith may say: “who could dispute the fact that, when it comes to unabashed, even triumphalist declarations of collective neurosis, the Jews have had the market locked down for a long time — so much so, in fact, that they are the only ethnic group I know of that members of other ethnic groups will unabashedly declare to be suffering from collective neurosis.” (New York Times)  Nevertheless, in both Annie Hall and Manhattan, Woody Allen casts Diane Keaton as non-Jews no less neurotic than the characters Allen plays, and she hasn’t been shy in seeing it as a quality she shares with some of the characters she plays.  “Obviously I'm neurotic in some way, because I've been in analysis and things like that," she says. "But I find that all very interesting.” (Stuff) Keaton was born Diane Hall (hence the film’s title) and brought up in Wesleyan Arminianism, a branch of Christian Protestantism obviously quite distinct from Judaism, though no less capable of producing a neurotic.

It is clear that, while Woody Allen and Philip Roth for many years epitomised neurosis in film and literature, this wasn’t exclusively so. Though the Jewish Freud is perhaps more associated with the term than any other analyst, the term neurosis was coined by a Scot: William Cullen, a figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. If we often find neurosis in, for example, a Jewish actor such as Dustin Hoffman, it is no less present in Jack Lemmon (raised a Catholic). If religion doesn’t help much in trying to comprehend filmic representations of neurosis, what might? First of all, best to think of the word as coming from the Greek neuron, meaning nerve or sinew. It is seen as a nervous disorder, and many an actor, whatever their problems with the world in the characters they play, wouldn’t pass for the nervy type. We don’t see it in Clint Eastwood’s work, Cary Grant’s, Audrey Hepburn’s or Grace Kelly’s. In different ways, these are all actors who present the self-assured, while the neurotic is the self-doubting. As the self-assured presents a body in space comfortable with its presence, the self-doubting will usually assume they are in the wrong body, or in the wrong place. They occupy a body as if in dispute with itself. Luigi Pirandello puts it quite well when speaking of humour and says, “every feeling, thought, and idea which arises in the humorist splits itself into contraries. Each yes splits itself into a no, which assumes at the end the same value as the yes.” (‘On Humor’) It is perhaps often why neurosis, whatever the pain involved for the person, can be adopted as a comedic quality by the filmmaker. This might not always be the case, but it is vital to Jack Lemmon's and Woody Allen’s personae. If Robert Frost could say the liberal was too broadminded to take his own side in an argument, this suggests an equanimity far from the neurotic. But the neurotic could claim they never quite know which side of the argument they should be on. They aren’t so much hedging their bets as fraying their nerves.

In Annie Hall, there is a moment all the more useful for our purposes because in the background of the scene we can see a poster for Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face, with Bergman the master purveyor of neurosis in its tragic form, as Allen is its master in comedic manifestation. Annie has just got out of a taxi, arriving late, and admits she is in a bad mood as they queue to see a film, only for the person at the counter to tell them the film started minutes earlier. Alvy says he can’t go in halfway through; Annie says two minutes is hardly halfway, and they will only have missed the credits. They are in Swedish; hardly a language Alvy knows. Alvy insists he has to see a film from the very start and would prefer to kill two hours than lose two minutes. “I’ve got to see a film from the start to the finish cause, cause I’m anal.” Annie laughs and says, “That’s a polite word for what you are.” It is also an informal one for the neurotic that Alvy happens to be, and the film is a good example of taking one to know one. Often films work with contrasts: the neurotic and the practical; the het-up and the calm, the inconsistent and the reliable, famously evident in The Odd Couple. In Annie Hall, Allen plays up the similarities over the contrasts, and sees instead two different approaches to the unequivocally neurotic. It makes sense Allen would offer a scene with both characters in a therapeutic session simultaneously, and use split screen to split the viewer’s sides. As they discuss with their chosen therapists how often they have sex, Alvy says “hardly ever, maybe three times a week.” Annie says, “Constantly. I’d say three times a week.” This is the narcissism without small difference, just the same fact viewed differently. It is funny because we know these are two characters who don’t live in the real world; they live in their heads and expect the world to conform to their expectations of it. This may finally be true of all of us, since we inevitably see the world through our own eyes and nobody else’s.

Yet the person who cannot see beyond their own moods and expectations is a decent definition of the comically neurotic, of someone who doesn’t really fail to see the world as it is, but usually wishes for it to conform to their expectations of it, given their state at any time. The comic neurotic wants the world to change so they can alleviate their mood. But what partly makes them comic is that the viewer knows even if the world could change to accommodate their state of mind, it would have to change promptly again to keep up with the mercurial. The slightest gesture or wrong word can spiral a character into self-abnegation or insecurity. In the film, Annie and Alvy have been playing tennis doubles, and this is the first time they’ve met. After the game, and after changing, Annie says hi and Alvy says she plays well; she replies that he plays well too — and then reckons it was such a dumb thing to say, just repeating what Alvy has said. “Oh, oh God, Annie…well…well. Ladida…la la” as she prepares to walk away when Alvy offers her a lift. She asks if he has a car and he says no he was going to take a cab. She then says that she has a car and she is going downtown. Alvy says he is going uptown, and Annie says she can go uptown too - that is where she lives. The simplest of interactions become the most intractable of situations, and the comic neurotic is always capable of making a mountain out of a molehill. The therapist’s purpose is to turn the mountain back into a molehill - a sort of radiotherapy of the mind, shrinking the mental melanoma.

In Manhattan, Allen offers characters equally neurotic but slightly less sympathetic, and produces a comic work that absorbs the tragic, if we accept the tragic as no more in this instance than the capacity of making a mess of others’ lives as well as one’s own. In Annie Hall, Allen chiefly focuses on the incapacity of two neurotics to sort out their lives, and we may believe any harm they have done they have done to each other, feeling saddened by their inability to work things out. At the end of the film, the pair meet up again, and Allen shows them going over old times in a montage flashback indebted to Jules Et Jim, before ending on Alvy offering a joke. It is in voice over as we see Annie and Alvy part on the street, through the inside of the cafe window that we a minute earlier had seen from the outside with them in it. Alvy says this guy goes to his psychiatrist and admits to the doctor that his brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken. The doctor says, why doesn’t he turn him in. The patient says he would, but he needs the eggs. Relationships are crazy and irrational, Alvy says - but we keep going through them because most of us need those eggs.  The ending to Manhattan is no less poignant than Annie Hall, but more ambivalent in its bittersweetness, and more troublesome in its ethical complications. The neurosis now rips through numerous characters, with Allen offering New York as a place of sexual experimentation, mendacity and self-absorption. Allen’s Isaac, a writer, is initially with a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl who he dumps after taking up with Mary Wilkes (Keaton again), and, when she decides she is still in love with a married man who broke up with her, who is Isaac’s best friend, he tries to get back together with Tracy — who has decided to spend six months in Europe, partly to get over the affair with Isaac. Isaac cruelly tries to persuade her to stay, but she insists she will go, even though she still has feelings for Isaac, and they might reignite their relationship on her return. “You’ve got to have a little faith in people”, she proposes. But most of the film has shown that this is a high hope, and Tracy is one of the few people who justifies the claim. If Annie Hall explored a neurotic relationship, Manhattan offers a neurotic field. Isaac’s ex-wife has written a book and is in a relationship now with a woman — a reflection of her deepest desires or a consequence of a terrible relationship with Isaac? No doubt a bit of both, but nothing suggests her life is serenely happy and, like most of the characters, lives an ostensibly wonderful life with a miserable one underpinning it. Maybe it is the best one can hope for if we remember Alvy’s remarks to Annie in the earlier film. Life is either horrible or miserable, he says. Horrible is a terminal case: someone with cancer, blindness, disability. Miserable is everybody else. In Manhattan people are lucky — they are able-bodied miseries. Yet they are also all part of this neurotic field so that their interlinked lives play off each other’s unhappiness. Living in Manhattan gives them opportunities — museums, galleries, bookshops — and sexual options aplenty. But while the former might make their lives meaningful (as Isaac notes when he speaks into a tape recorder about all the artists who are important to him), can people offer equal contentment? The one person he mentions whom he knows is Tracy. While much is understandably made of Tracy’s youth and Isaac’s age, in an age-gap relationship that many will see as abusive, she is also potentially the one character who escapes this field because of that age. She can have faith because she has escaped, or has not yet entered, a neurotic world where community becomes one of shared woes over shared practicalities. This isn’t a village where the butcher, the baker and the grocer all feed each other, but where everyone is feeding off each other’s neuroses to generate a permeating despair. Manhattan is still a comic film, but it segues into tragic realisations.

Jung and Freud offered different perspectives on neurosis. Jung reckoned an education not overly strict was important, and added that you should give the neurotic “the chance to bring to light the pictures he carries unpainted within himself, to free the unwritten poems he has shut up inside him, and yet another source of psychic disturbances is removed.” (C.J. Jung) The paintings and poems may be of little broader value, but they will be in releasing psychic energy. Jung sees the escape from neurosis in engaging with the collective unconscious, in absorbing and releasing through the art, the shadows that can destroy us. Freud sees the neurotic in ego-formation terms, as he believes the neurotic illness becomes vital to the patient’s personality, as he says one would think that the neurotics who “raise the most lamentations and complaints about their illness will be the most eager to co-operate and will offer you the least resistance.” Freud reckons “it is rather the opposite.” (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis) What should be a secondary feature of their identity becomes primary, and the loss of the neurosis would be deemed a loss of self. Jung’s proposition is practical and seems to believe that people merely need to understand and find time for the creative side of themselves. Freud’s is paradoxical and shows how much resistance may be involved. Looking at the characters in Annie Hall and Manhattan, many are creative without being any less neurotic, which doesn’t mean Jung is wrong — just that creativity is not a universal cure for neurosis. In certain instances, it may even exacerbate it, as we will find in Bergman’s work.

But before getting to that, we can end our comedic exploration with The Odd Couple and Felix Unger. Unger has been thrown out by his wife and, after suicidal thoughts, his best friend, Oscar, who is estranged from his wife and kids who live in California, allows him to move into his large New York apartment. From one perspective, Unger is the perfect housemate, fastidious, tidy and a good cook. From another, Unger is the nightmarish fusspot who can never leave anything alone: always hoovering, washing up, preparing food. Felix can’t help himself and admits to Oscar, “I am a neurotic nut”. When Oscar witnesses Felix’s obsessive behaviour, Oscar says: “You’re not going to make any effort to change; this is the person you are going to be till the day that you die.” When Felix replies, “We are what we are”, it is a prime example of the loss of the neurosis revealing an identity crisis. When the secondary features become primary, the person believes that what is a condition of their personality becomes an essential feature of it. When Felix says he can’t help who he is, Freud would be inclined to say he won’t change who he is. Not one and the same, which is easily comprehended from the outside, but hard to view from the inside. Oscar can see someone who is making him and those around him unhappy (and probably drove his wife to throw him out), but Felix cannot quite accept he is more than his neurotic state. When Aristotle quotes Evenus, saying  “I say that habit’s but long practice, friend, and this becomes men’s nature in the end”, Felix would be inclined to agree. We also have the saying second nature, indicating habits that become so imbedded that they seem natural. But Freud would no doubt insist that second nature is secondary. To give it the status of primary nature is to give credence to the inessential as the essential. An inclination and a habituation doesn’t make them primary; it just makes them seem like they are. The irony of The Odd Couple is that we don’t see Felix changing; only his lived circumstances. He is thrown out by his wife at the beginning of the film, moves in with Felix during most of it, and then goes to live with a young divorcee and her sister, who live upstairs and take pity upon him after Oscar throws him out. He remains as neurotic at the end as at the beginning, and his second nature will continue to be deemed his primary one.

If we’ve proposed women are filmically hysterical, men melancholic and both sexes equal opportunities neurotic, these are of course broad generalisations, and no doubt broad enough for anyone to offer a generalisation in a different direction. But we see the hysterical woman in Woman Under the Influence, Black Swan, Possession and The Piano Teacher, Malina and Tar, and the melancholic man in Le Mepris, Anne and Muriel, The Beekeeper, Le vent de la nuit, Eternity and a Day,  Uzak and Paris, Texas. There are, of course, melancholic women, and Von Trier’s Melancholia has a woman as its central character. And there are hysterical men, at least in life. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen notes while reviewing Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness, “according to a study undertaken by Pierre Marie in 1888 at the Hôtel-Dieu outpatient clinic, there were no fewer than 525 male hysterics and only 179 female ones. The paradigm had changed: ‘Hysteria,’ wrote Marie, ‘is much more frequent in men than in women.’” (London Review of Books). Nevertheless, Borch-Jacobsen speaks of "Freud’s silence over his cases of male hysteria.” And so too, perhaps film, bolstering our argument that men in cinema are often melancholic, but rarely hysteric, even though one may see moments in Jack Lemmon films where hysteria threatens to come through.  Matthau once proposed that Lemmon “is a clean-cut, well-scrubbed Boston choirboy with quiet hysteria seeping out of every pore." (Cape Cod Times) But, like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, he was chiefly an on-screen neurotic, and all have been vital to its comedic manifestation in film form.

Giving neurosis serious reflection, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni have approached it in antithetical ways. Bergman is psychological; Antonioni behavioural. This is evident partly in the shot choices critics have frequently commented upon in each director’s work. Antonioni offers figures in space; Bergman faces in close-up: the often half-empty shot against the full visage. Antonioni’s camera looks at society in its various manifestations but he  insists “it’s too simplistic to say – as many people have done – that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis.” (Cahiers du Cinema) He even says Vittoria in The Eclipse is “a calm, well-balanced girl who thinks about what she is doing. There is absolutely no symptom of neurosis in her” (Cahiers du Cinema), while acknowledging in various ways its presence in Red Desert’s Giuliana. For our purposes we are inclined to see it in much of Antonioni’s work and especially between L’Avventura and Red Desert, which would include La Notte and The Eclipse. It rests on our earlier remark:  about occupying a body as if in dispute with itself. At the beginning of The Eclipse, Antonioni shows Vittoria moving through the apartment she shares with her partner as though he doesn’t know if she wants to stay in or go out, wants to talk or remain silent, finish with him or continue. This seems more than a woman who is trying to get out of a relationship with a man who isn’t keen to let her go. Vittoria may have decided she doesn’t want to be with Riccardo, but there is little sense that she knows what she does want. This is evident in various scenes later in the film. In one, she says to her suitor Piero, “to love one shouldn’t know the other,” then adds, “but then maybe one shouldn’t love at all.” She is in Piero’s apartment as she says it. At the film’s famous conclusion, neither Piero nor Vittoria turn up for their assignation, as Antonioni instead films the spaces in their absence. Vittoria may seem decisive next to Giuliana in Red Desert, but that is to compare like with relative like. Next to the decisive figures we see in Thelma and Louise, Aliens and Erin Brockovich, or All About Eve, Mildred Pierce and The African Queen, Vittoria still appears neurotic.

This could be the difference between American and European cinema, with the former more interested in decisive actions and the latter in troublesome dilemmas. However, Antonioni created a certain female type in early 60s film, someone who never quite saw the world decisively, if we define the word as a perception that leads to a categorical action. In these works, his women don’t cross a room and grab a plate, let alone a gun. They aren’t quite sure what they should eat, who they should sleep with, what they should wear, or how to decorate their shop or apartment. In Red Desert, Giuliana throws various colours of paint on the wall, undecided which one would work for the shop she is going to open. In L’Avventura, Vitti’s character disappears into a store to avoid the unwanted stares of various men in a town Claudia and her lover are passing through. The lover comes into the shop, and they discuss their affair, which has come out of a search for the lover’s girlfriend, who suddenly disappeared. We could say her indecisive body language comes out of guilt, aware that she shouldn’t be embarking on an affair with this man when they both ought to be trying to find Anna. But this seems much more than morality she is expressing, as if the guilt and indecision become an excuse for the body language rather than the other way round. If Freud is correct when he says the secondary features become primary, we can see Antonioni’s female characters at this time finding situations that exemplify their neurosis — over gestures reflecting the situation they are in.

This is partly why we can speak of Antonioni’s behaviourism, quite different, of course, from its exploration in its most famous practitioner, B. F. Skinner, but one fascinated in capturing the surface of a person’s actions, rather than the depth of their thoughts. The director is interested in the strict sense in neurotic behaviour, and often leaves the viewer to muse over what might be at the root of it. Is it a personal crisis or a societal anomie; a problem of the environment or a consequence of urban living? When Antonioni becomes explicitly psychological, his work seems none the better for it. As Giuliana admits that she attempted suicide, Antonioni risks falling into explanation, when his strengths rest more on the inexplicable given manifestation. We know the symptoms, but we don’t know the cause, and we cannot assume Antonioni will narratively offer the cure.

In La Notte, it is Jeanne Moreau rather than Antonioni’s general muse Monica Vitti playing the leading character (Vitti takes a secondary role). Moreau was always a more assertive cinematic presence than Vitti, more given to grasp what she wants over fussing over what she needs. If she can frequently seem complex in her psychology, she is still usually certain about her desires — evident in different ways in Les Amants, Lift to the Scaffold, Les Liaisons Dangereuse, Jules et Jim and Eva. Antonioni nevertheless demands in this instance neurotic indecision: while in Lift to the Scaffold she wanders the streets in search of a boyfriend who has got himself stuck in a lift, in La Notte, the street wandering is far less purposeful. She leaves a launch party for her husband’s latest novel, and Antonioni shows her absorbing the sounds and sights of the city without purpose. It gives the director the opportunity to explore Milan and show a person lost in a large milieu, while also registering how lost Lidia is in aimlessly moving through the environment. The film doesn’t symbolise Lidia’s state; it symptomizes it. The film proposes that contemporary living is conducive with neurosis, as the various sounds and images create stimuli but will not be inclined to offer stability. If affairs are frequent in these Antonioni films, this has less to do with the possibilities to love than the likelihood of dissatisfaction. Giuliana may be the most extreme manifestation of a character in Antonioni who cannot choose, but Lidia, Vittoria, and Claudia share it as a feature of their personality, leaving Antonioni to offer films that capture in their body language a dispersive narrative world.

Bergman claimed the only great performance in Antonioni’s work was Moreau in La Notte, but adds the Italian never does much with his actors: “he never comes into contact with actors. They don’t know what he wants, and he doesn’t know how to talk to them.” (Ingmar Bergman Interview) Yet this says more about the Swedish director’s preoccupations than it does about the Italian director’s skill with actors. If Antonioni’s characters don’t know what they want, the texture of the character gives way to the complexity of mise-en-scene and the sounds that register that fragmentation. Bergman is often interested in the life the mind offers, over the body that is insecurely located in space. He tends to hone in on features, scrutinising faces all the better to try and recognise the mixed motives evident behind them. Bergman may agree with Jung that creativity is a way out of the neurotic, saying in answer to someone asking if it saved him from neurosis: "Yes, in my case. You know, I was constantly creative. I made two or three pictures a year. I made three or four productions for the theater a year, and for broadcasting, and I was writing scripts for other directors. I was constantly at work, and, of course, that was an outlet.” (Southwest Review) Yet for his characters, creativity accompanies and often exacerbates the neurotic state, as though it gives them an awareness of duplicity and the roles one can play. Neurotic, manipulative and dissembling artists are common in Bergman: in Through a Glass Darkly, Persona, Autumn Sonata and The Hour of the Wolf. The Ingmar Bergman website notes: “In at least 25 of Bergman's films (and in most of his own plays), artists of some kind play an important part.” (ingmarbergman.se) The most famous is perhaps Elisabet Vogler in Persona, an actress recovering from a breakdown who retreats to a small island with her nurse, Alma. The film explores the dissolution not just of Elisabet, but Alma also, as their similarities and differences, their pasts and their hopes, intermingle and almost become inextricable. The film proposes that if Elisabet is a brilliant actress, one shouldn’t take her breakdown at face value: she may be performing a role and extracting from others what she needs to play it. The fragility of Alma can be seen as research for Elisabet, and the line between her neurosis and her creativity, her mental ill-health and her thespian ambition, cannot easily be separated.

In Through a Glass Darkly, the father is a writer, and there is little doubt he is suffering. During a meal with his adult children, as well as his daughter Karin’s husband, David disappears into the kitchen, and we see him sobbing alone. He is a damaged man, and one who has lost his wife partly due to the illness (schizophrenia) his daughter is now suffering from. But later, when David talks about how terrible he feels about it all to the husband, the husband isn’t completely convinced. As David speaks of a suicide attempt, the husband is aware that Karin has told her husband about looking at David’s diary and seeing in it a passage that says “I’m horrified by my curiosity.” The writer sees that even in his Karin’s illness there is writing material.

Bergman may believe that creativity can help deal with neurosis, but he is also aware of its exacerbating qualities as the artist becomes a person with an alibi and a get-out clause for guilty feelings. While someone else might wish to be ‘cured’ to escape these feelings, the artist may believe that to do so would be to risk undermining their creativity. In Jung’s terms, the shadow is their work; when he speaks of the shadow, it is “psychic energy that appears to have been lost[…] that serves to revive and intensify whatever is uppermost in the unconsciousness — tendencies, perhaps, that have hitherto had no chance to express themselves or at least have not been allowed uninhabited existence in our consciousness.” (Jung and His Symbols) Bergman proposes that the shadow is too vital a source of creative energy to be dispelled, and its containment isn’t for psycho-social health, but for creative purposes. Neurosis isn’t cured; it is potentially exacerbated through the alibi, and though one may feel guilt, that is a secondary response to using it for artistic ends. David might disappear into the kitchen and sob as he thinks about his life and what a mess he has made of it, but that won’t stop him from using Karin’s illness for his work if it might benefit it.

While Antonioni moves away from the character to show the surroundings that helped create their neurosis, Bergman moves in on the face all the better to illustrate the complexity of motive when people have complicated reasons for their behaviour. Is Elisabet sick or exploitative, or both? Is David speaking of his suicide to tell the truth or to test the husband’s reaction? We scrutinise Bergman’s faces to understand their thoughts, but accept a fathomless interiority, just as in Antonioni’s work we accept the symptomatic exploration of the urban figure. Antonioni can see neurosis in the world; Bergman seeks to find it inside people. Michiko Kakutani notes, when interviewing the director and others about his work, that he talked to a former director of the Swedish Film Institute, Harry Schein. Schein reckoned Bergman’s “interested in the unhappiness of his friends. He dwells on it — he can get material…” (Ingmar Bergman Interviews)

Both Antonioni and Bergman are masterful explorers of the tragic dimension to neurosis, just as Woody Allen has mastered its comedic manifestation. Yet of course, and in conclusion, actors are central to neurosis on screen. Bergman may have said, “I don’t like to work with neurotic people; because they have to play neurotics, they should not be neurotics.” (Ingmar Bergman Interviews). This may be so, but some actors are better at playing them than others, and may well be able to do so because of the neuroses they themselves carry. Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sharon Stone and Barbara Stanwyck may be as neurotic as Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Lemmon, Monica Vitti and Diane Keaton. But they don’t convey this in their screen persona. Neurosis takes a certain body language, and central to this is the inability to grasp the essentials and attending instead to the peripheral. The former has a valuable place in a goal-oriented cinema where people are supposed to know what they want and be well aware that others are determined they do not get it. This allows for antagonists and protagonists. But as many a psychologist well knows, these aren’t always opposing forces out there in the world as heroes and villains, but conditions of a self, interacting with the environment and with one’s own fears and confusions. Neurotics are good for cinema, let alone creativity, and we should thus be wary of cures.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Filming Neurosis

Nervous Inclinations

To define the difference between the neurotic, the hysteric and the melancholic in cinema might not be any easier than in life. But at least, in doing so, we have the advantage of no diagnostic risks, as a character remains on screen impervious to our proposals or suggestions. However, let us start with a generalisation, one that in various ways we will aim to modify later on in this piece that will focus on neurosis: hysterics are usually women, melancholics men, and neurotics cover frequently both male and female. To bolster this generalisation over the latter, what better place to start than with a Woody Allen film? The Freud Museum notes, “There are few filmmakers who have represented psychoanalytic concepts as consistently as Allen has; he is the premier Freudian director, having spent several decades undergoing analysis, so it would be remiss of us to omit him.” Equally, he is a director inclined to show neurosis in both his leading characters: while films often deal with a neurotic focus on one, evident for example in The Odd Couple with the often neurosis-ridden Jack Lemmon playing opposite a lugubrious, slothful Walter Matthau, or Ordinary People, with Mary Tyler Moore the neurotic wife with a calmer husband. In Annie Hall, both Alvy Singer and the titular character are equally capable of neurosis if we accept the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s definition that: “neuroses typically were associated with a sense of distress and a deficit in functioning to the extent that they threatened to impair a person’s ability to function in virtually any area of life, including work and relationships. However, they generally were not severe enough to be incapacitating, and a connection to reality was maintained.”

In Annie Hall, while Alvy and Annie are capable of work and capable of love, they can’t accept either without fretting over the implications and the complications. When Alvy walks along the street and sees what looks like a happy, attractive couple, he asks them if this is so, and they reply that indeed they are. He asks them to account for this happiness that eludes him, and the woman says: “I’m very shallow and empty and have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.” Her partner adds that he is “exactly the same.” Allen makes clear these are people who aren’t at all neurotic, as we might wonder if he is also drawing out a contrast that suggests Jewish neurosis against WASPish insouciance. These are tall, white, Protestant-looking people, and are a contrast to Woody’s nervy ethnicity. But while the neurotic Jew is a common enough type, perhaps a stereotype, we should remember that Annie is no less neurotic than Alvy. Daniel Smith may say: “who could dispute the fact that, when it comes to unabashed, even triumphalist declarations of collective neurosis, the Jews have had the market locked down for a long time — so much so, in fact, that they are the only ethnic group I know of that members of other ethnic groups will unabashedly declare to be suffering from collective neurosis.” (New York Times)  Nevertheless, in both Annie Hall and Manhattan, Woody Allen casts Diane Keaton as non-Jews no less neurotic than the characters Allen plays, and she hasn’t been shy in seeing it as a quality she shares with some of the characters she plays.  “Obviously I'm neurotic in some way, because I've been in analysis and things like that," she says. "But I find that all very interesting.” (Stuff) Keaton was born Diane Hall (hence the film’s title) and brought up in Wesleyan Arminianism, a branch of Christian Protestantism obviously quite distinct from Judaism, though no less capable of producing a neurotic.

It is clear that, while Woody Allen and Philip Roth for many years epitomised neurosis in film and literature, this wasn’t exclusively so. Though the Jewish Freud is perhaps more associated with the term than any other analyst, the term neurosis was coined by a Scot: William Cullen, a figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. If we often find neurosis in, for example, a Jewish actor such as Dustin Hoffman, it is no less present in Jack Lemmon (raised a Catholic). If religion doesn’t help much in trying to comprehend filmic representations of neurosis, what might? First of all, best to think of the word as coming from the Greek neuron, meaning nerve or sinew. It is seen as a nervous disorder, and many an actor, whatever their problems with the world in the characters they play, wouldn’t pass for the nervy type. We don’t see it in Clint Eastwood’s work, Cary Grant’s, Audrey Hepburn’s or Grace Kelly’s. In different ways, these are all actors who present the self-assured, while the neurotic is the self-doubting. As the self-assured presents a body in space comfortable with its presence, the self-doubting will usually assume they are in the wrong body, or in the wrong place. They occupy a body as if in dispute with itself. Luigi Pirandello puts it quite well when speaking of humour and says, “every feeling, thought, and idea which arises in the humorist splits itself into contraries. Each yes splits itself into a no, which assumes at the end the same value as the yes.” (‘On Humor’) It is perhaps often why neurosis, whatever the pain involved for the person, can be adopted as a comedic quality by the filmmaker. This might not always be the case, but it is vital to Jack Lemmon's and Woody Allen’s personae. If Robert Frost could say the liberal was too broadminded to take his own side in an argument, this suggests an equanimity far from the neurotic. But the neurotic could claim they never quite know which side of the argument they should be on. They aren’t so much hedging their bets as fraying their nerves.

In Annie Hall, there is a moment all the more useful for our purposes because in the background of the scene we can see a poster for Ingmar Bergman’s Face to Face, with Bergman the master purveyor of neurosis in its tragic form, as Allen is its master in comedic manifestation. Annie has just got out of a taxi, arriving late, and admits she is in a bad mood as they queue to see a film, only for the person at the counter to tell them the film started minutes earlier. Alvy says he can’t go in halfway through; Annie says two minutes is hardly halfway, and they will only have missed the credits. They are in Swedish; hardly a language Alvy knows. Alvy insists he has to see a film from the very start and would prefer to kill two hours than lose two minutes. “I’ve got to see a film from the start to the finish cause, cause I’m anal.” Annie laughs and says, “That’s a polite word for what you are.” It is also an informal one for the neurotic that Alvy happens to be, and the film is a good example of taking one to know one. Often films work with contrasts: the neurotic and the practical; the het-up and the calm, the inconsistent and the reliable, famously evident in The Odd Couple. In Annie Hall, Allen plays up the similarities over the contrasts, and sees instead two different approaches to the unequivocally neurotic. It makes sense Allen would offer a scene with both characters in a therapeutic session simultaneously, and use split screen to split the viewer’s sides. As they discuss with their chosen therapists how often they have sex, Alvy says “hardly ever, maybe three times a week.” Annie says, “Constantly. I’d say three times a week.” This is the narcissism without small difference, just the same fact viewed differently. It is funny because we know these are two characters who don’t live in the real world; they live in their heads and expect the world to conform to their expectations of it. This may finally be true of all of us, since we inevitably see the world through our own eyes and nobody else’s.

Yet the person who cannot see beyond their own moods and expectations is a decent definition of the comically neurotic, of someone who doesn’t really fail to see the world as it is, but usually wishes for it to conform to their expectations of it, given their state at any time. The comic neurotic wants the world to change so they can alleviate their mood. But what partly makes them comic is that the viewer knows even if the world could change to accommodate their state of mind, it would have to change promptly again to keep up with the mercurial. The slightest gesture or wrong word can spiral a character into self-abnegation or insecurity. In the film, Annie and Alvy have been playing tennis doubles, and this is the first time they’ve met. After the game, and after changing, Annie says hi and Alvy says she plays well; she replies that he plays well too — and then reckons it was such a dumb thing to say, just repeating what Alvy has said. “Oh, oh God, Annie…well…well. Ladida…la la” as she prepares to walk away when Alvy offers her a lift. She asks if he has a car and he says no he was going to take a cab. She then says that she has a car and she is going downtown. Alvy says he is going uptown, and Annie says she can go uptown too - that is where she lives. The simplest of interactions become the most intractable of situations, and the comic neurotic is always capable of making a mountain out of a molehill. The therapist’s purpose is to turn the mountain back into a molehill - a sort of radiotherapy of the mind, shrinking the mental melanoma.

In Manhattan, Allen offers characters equally neurotic but slightly less sympathetic, and produces a comic work that absorbs the tragic, if we accept the tragic as no more in this instance than the capacity of making a mess of others’ lives as well as one’s own. In Annie Hall, Allen chiefly focuses on the incapacity of two neurotics to sort out their lives, and we may believe any harm they have done they have done to each other, feeling saddened by their inability to work things out. At the end of the film, the pair meet up again, and Allen shows them going over old times in a montage flashback indebted to Jules Et Jim, before ending on Alvy offering a joke. It is in voice over as we see Annie and Alvy part on the street, through the inside of the cafe window that we a minute earlier had seen from the outside with them in it. Alvy says this guy goes to his psychiatrist and admits to the doctor that his brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken. The doctor says, why doesn’t he turn him in. The patient says he would, but he needs the eggs. Relationships are crazy and irrational, Alvy says - but we keep going through them because most of us need those eggs.  The ending to Manhattan is no less poignant than Annie Hall, but more ambivalent in its bittersweetness, and more troublesome in its ethical complications. The neurosis now rips through numerous characters, with Allen offering New York as a place of sexual experimentation, mendacity and self-absorption. Allen’s Isaac, a writer, is initially with a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl who he dumps after taking up with Mary Wilkes (Keaton again), and, when she decides she is still in love with a married man who broke up with her, who is Isaac’s best friend, he tries to get back together with Tracy — who has decided to spend six months in Europe, partly to get over the affair with Isaac. Isaac cruelly tries to persuade her to stay, but she insists she will go, even though she still has feelings for Isaac, and they might reignite their relationship on her return. “You’ve got to have a little faith in people”, she proposes. But most of the film has shown that this is a high hope, and Tracy is one of the few people who justifies the claim. If Annie Hall explored a neurotic relationship, Manhattan offers a neurotic field. Isaac’s ex-wife has written a book and is in a relationship now with a woman — a reflection of her deepest desires or a consequence of a terrible relationship with Isaac? No doubt a bit of both, but nothing suggests her life is serenely happy and, like most of the characters, lives an ostensibly wonderful life with a miserable one underpinning it. Maybe it is the best one can hope for if we remember Alvy’s remarks to Annie in the earlier film. Life is either horrible or miserable, he says. Horrible is a terminal case: someone with cancer, blindness, disability. Miserable is everybody else. In Manhattan people are lucky — they are able-bodied miseries. Yet they are also all part of this neurotic field so that their interlinked lives play off each other’s unhappiness. Living in Manhattan gives them opportunities — museums, galleries, bookshops — and sexual options aplenty. But while the former might make their lives meaningful (as Isaac notes when he speaks into a tape recorder about all the artists who are important to him), can people offer equal contentment? The one person he mentions whom he knows is Tracy. While much is understandably made of Tracy’s youth and Isaac’s age, in an age-gap relationship that many will see as abusive, she is also potentially the one character who escapes this field because of that age. She can have faith because she has escaped, or has not yet entered, a neurotic world where community becomes one of shared woes over shared practicalities. This isn’t a village where the butcher, the baker and the grocer all feed each other, but where everyone is feeding off each other’s neuroses to generate a permeating despair. Manhattan is still a comic film, but it segues into tragic realisations.

Jung and Freud offered different perspectives on neurosis. Jung reckoned an education not overly strict was important, and added that you should give the neurotic “the chance to bring to light the pictures he carries unpainted within himself, to free the unwritten poems he has shut up inside him, and yet another source of psychic disturbances is removed.” (C.J. Jung) The paintings and poems may be of little broader value, but they will be in releasing psychic energy. Jung sees the escape from neurosis in engaging with the collective unconscious, in absorbing and releasing through the art, the shadows that can destroy us. Freud sees the neurotic in ego-formation terms, as he believes the neurotic illness becomes vital to the patient’s personality, as he says one would think that the neurotics who “raise the most lamentations and complaints about their illness will be the most eager to co-operate and will offer you the least resistance.” Freud reckons “it is rather the opposite.” (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis) What should be a secondary feature of their identity becomes primary, and the loss of the neurosis would be deemed a loss of self. Jung’s proposition is practical and seems to believe that people merely need to understand and find time for the creative side of themselves. Freud’s is paradoxical and shows how much resistance may be involved. Looking at the characters in Annie Hall and Manhattan, many are creative without being any less neurotic, which doesn’t mean Jung is wrong — just that creativity is not a universal cure for neurosis. In certain instances, it may even exacerbate it, as we will find in Bergman’s work.

But before getting to that, we can end our comedic exploration with The Odd Couple and Felix Unger. Unger has been thrown out by his wife and, after suicidal thoughts, his best friend, Oscar, who is estranged from his wife and kids who live in California, allows him to move into his large New York apartment. From one perspective, Unger is the perfect housemate, fastidious, tidy and a good cook. From another, Unger is the nightmarish fusspot who can never leave anything alone: always hoovering, washing up, preparing food. Felix can’t help himself and admits to Oscar, “I am a neurotic nut”. When Oscar witnesses Felix’s obsessive behaviour, Oscar says: “You’re not going to make any effort to change; this is the person you are going to be till the day that you die.” When Felix replies, “We are what we are”, it is a prime example of the loss of the neurosis revealing an identity crisis. When the secondary features become primary, the person believes that what is a condition of their personality becomes an essential feature of it. When Felix says he can’t help who he is, Freud would be inclined to say he won’t change who he is. Not one and the same, which is easily comprehended from the outside, but hard to view from the inside. Oscar can see someone who is making him and those around him unhappy (and probably drove his wife to throw him out), but Felix cannot quite accept he is more than his neurotic state. When Aristotle quotes Evenus, saying  “I say that habit’s but long practice, friend, and this becomes men’s nature in the end”, Felix would be inclined to agree. We also have the saying second nature, indicating habits that become so imbedded that they seem natural. But Freud would no doubt insist that second nature is secondary. To give it the status of primary nature is to give credence to the inessential as the essential. An inclination and a habituation doesn’t make them primary; it just makes them seem like they are. The irony of The Odd Couple is that we don’t see Felix changing; only his lived circumstances. He is thrown out by his wife at the beginning of the film, moves in with Felix during most of it, and then goes to live with a young divorcee and her sister, who live upstairs and take pity upon him after Oscar throws him out. He remains as neurotic at the end as at the beginning, and his second nature will continue to be deemed his primary one.

If we’ve proposed women are filmically hysterical, men melancholic and both sexes equal opportunities neurotic, these are of course broad generalisations, and no doubt broad enough for anyone to offer a generalisation in a different direction. But we see the hysterical woman in Woman Under the Influence, Black Swan, Possession and The Piano Teacher, Malina and Tar, and the melancholic man in Le Mepris, Anne and Muriel, The Beekeeper, Le vent de la nuit, Eternity and a Day,  Uzak and Paris, Texas. There are, of course, melancholic women, and Von Trier’s Melancholia has a woman as its central character. And there are hysterical men, at least in life. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen notes while reviewing Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness, “according to a study undertaken by Pierre Marie in 1888 at the Hôtel-Dieu outpatient clinic, there were no fewer than 525 male hysterics and only 179 female ones. The paradigm had changed: ‘Hysteria,’ wrote Marie, ‘is much more frequent in men than in women.’” (London Review of Books). Nevertheless, Borch-Jacobsen speaks of "Freud’s silence over his cases of male hysteria.” And so too, perhaps film, bolstering our argument that men in cinema are often melancholic, but rarely hysteric, even though one may see moments in Jack Lemmon films where hysteria threatens to come through.  Matthau once proposed that Lemmon “is a clean-cut, well-scrubbed Boston choirboy with quiet hysteria seeping out of every pore." (Cape Cod Times) But, like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, he was chiefly an on-screen neurotic, and all have been vital to its comedic manifestation in film form.

Giving neurosis serious reflection, Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni have approached it in antithetical ways. Bergman is psychological; Antonioni behavioural. This is evident partly in the shot choices critics have frequently commented upon in each director’s work. Antonioni offers figures in space; Bergman faces in close-up: the often half-empty shot against the full visage. Antonioni’s camera looks at society in its various manifestations but he  insists “it’s too simplistic to say – as many people have done – that I am condemning the inhuman industrial world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis.” (Cahiers du Cinema) He even says Vittoria in The Eclipse is “a calm, well-balanced girl who thinks about what she is doing. There is absolutely no symptom of neurosis in her” (Cahiers du Cinema), while acknowledging in various ways its presence in Red Desert’s Giuliana. For our purposes we are inclined to see it in much of Antonioni’s work and especially between L’Avventura and Red Desert, which would include La Notte and The Eclipse. It rests on our earlier remark:  about occupying a body as if in dispute with itself. At the beginning of The Eclipse, Antonioni shows Vittoria moving through the apartment she shares with her partner as though he doesn’t know if she wants to stay in or go out, wants to talk or remain silent, finish with him or continue. This seems more than a woman who is trying to get out of a relationship with a man who isn’t keen to let her go. Vittoria may have decided she doesn’t want to be with Riccardo, but there is little sense that she knows what she does want. This is evident in various scenes later in the film. In one, she says to her suitor Piero, “to love one shouldn’t know the other,” then adds, “but then maybe one shouldn’t love at all.” She is in Piero’s apartment as she says it. At the film’s famous conclusion, neither Piero nor Vittoria turn up for their assignation, as Antonioni instead films the spaces in their absence. Vittoria may seem decisive next to Giuliana in Red Desert, but that is to compare like with relative like. Next to the decisive figures we see in Thelma and Louise, Aliens and Erin Brockovich, or All About Eve, Mildred Pierce and The African Queen, Vittoria still appears neurotic.

This could be the difference between American and European cinema, with the former more interested in decisive actions and the latter in troublesome dilemmas. However, Antonioni created a certain female type in early 60s film, someone who never quite saw the world decisively, if we define the word as a perception that leads to a categorical action. In these works, his women don’t cross a room and grab a plate, let alone a gun. They aren’t quite sure what they should eat, who they should sleep with, what they should wear, or how to decorate their shop or apartment. In Red Desert, Giuliana throws various colours of paint on the wall, undecided which one would work for the shop she is going to open. In L’Avventura, Vitti’s character disappears into a store to avoid the unwanted stares of various men in a town Claudia and her lover are passing through. The lover comes into the shop, and they discuss their affair, which has come out of a search for the lover’s girlfriend, who suddenly disappeared. We could say her indecisive body language comes out of guilt, aware that she shouldn’t be embarking on an affair with this man when they both ought to be trying to find Anna. But this seems much more than morality she is expressing, as if the guilt and indecision become an excuse for the body language rather than the other way round. If Freud is correct when he says the secondary features become primary, we can see Antonioni’s female characters at this time finding situations that exemplify their neurosis — over gestures reflecting the situation they are in.

This is partly why we can speak of Antonioni’s behaviourism, quite different, of course, from its exploration in its most famous practitioner, B. F. Skinner, but one fascinated in capturing the surface of a person’s actions, rather than the depth of their thoughts. The director is interested in the strict sense in neurotic behaviour, and often leaves the viewer to muse over what might be at the root of it. Is it a personal crisis or a societal anomie; a problem of the environment or a consequence of urban living? When Antonioni becomes explicitly psychological, his work seems none the better for it. As Giuliana admits that she attempted suicide, Antonioni risks falling into explanation, when his strengths rest more on the inexplicable given manifestation. We know the symptoms, but we don’t know the cause, and we cannot assume Antonioni will narratively offer the cure.

In La Notte, it is Jeanne Moreau rather than Antonioni’s general muse Monica Vitti playing the leading character (Vitti takes a secondary role). Moreau was always a more assertive cinematic presence than Vitti, more given to grasp what she wants over fussing over what she needs. If she can frequently seem complex in her psychology, she is still usually certain about her desires — evident in different ways in Les Amants, Lift to the Scaffold, Les Liaisons Dangereuse, Jules et Jim and Eva. Antonioni nevertheless demands in this instance neurotic indecision: while in Lift to the Scaffold she wanders the streets in search of a boyfriend who has got himself stuck in a lift, in La Notte, the street wandering is far less purposeful. She leaves a launch party for her husband’s latest novel, and Antonioni shows her absorbing the sounds and sights of the city without purpose. It gives the director the opportunity to explore Milan and show a person lost in a large milieu, while also registering how lost Lidia is in aimlessly moving through the environment. The film doesn’t symbolise Lidia’s state; it symptomizes it. The film proposes that contemporary living is conducive with neurosis, as the various sounds and images create stimuli but will not be inclined to offer stability. If affairs are frequent in these Antonioni films, this has less to do with the possibilities to love than the likelihood of dissatisfaction. Giuliana may be the most extreme manifestation of a character in Antonioni who cannot choose, but Lidia, Vittoria, and Claudia share it as a feature of their personality, leaving Antonioni to offer films that capture in their body language a dispersive narrative world.

Bergman claimed the only great performance in Antonioni’s work was Moreau in La Notte, but adds the Italian never does much with his actors: “he never comes into contact with actors. They don’t know what he wants, and he doesn’t know how to talk to them.” (Ingmar Bergman Interview) Yet this says more about the Swedish director’s preoccupations than it does about the Italian director’s skill with actors. If Antonioni’s characters don’t know what they want, the texture of the character gives way to the complexity of mise-en-scene and the sounds that register that fragmentation. Bergman is often interested in the life the mind offers, over the body that is insecurely located in space. He tends to hone in on features, scrutinising faces all the better to try and recognise the mixed motives evident behind them. Bergman may agree with Jung that creativity is a way out of the neurotic, saying in answer to someone asking if it saved him from neurosis: "Yes, in my case. You know, I was constantly creative. I made two or three pictures a year. I made three or four productions for the theater a year, and for broadcasting, and I was writing scripts for other directors. I was constantly at work, and, of course, that was an outlet.” (Southwest Review) Yet for his characters, creativity accompanies and often exacerbates the neurotic state, as though it gives them an awareness of duplicity and the roles one can play. Neurotic, manipulative and dissembling artists are common in Bergman: in Through a Glass Darkly, Persona, Autumn Sonata and The Hour of the Wolf. The Ingmar Bergman website notes: “In at least 25 of Bergman's films (and in most of his own plays), artists of some kind play an important part.” (ingmarbergman.se) The most famous is perhaps Elisabet Vogler in Persona, an actress recovering from a breakdown who retreats to a small island with her nurse, Alma. The film explores the dissolution not just of Elisabet, but Alma also, as their similarities and differences, their pasts and their hopes, intermingle and almost become inextricable. The film proposes that if Elisabet is a brilliant actress, one shouldn’t take her breakdown at face value: she may be performing a role and extracting from others what she needs to play it. The fragility of Alma can be seen as research for Elisabet, and the line between her neurosis and her creativity, her mental ill-health and her thespian ambition, cannot easily be separated.

In Through a Glass Darkly, the father is a writer, and there is little doubt he is suffering. During a meal with his adult children, as well as his daughter Karin’s husband, David disappears into the kitchen, and we see him sobbing alone. He is a damaged man, and one who has lost his wife partly due to the illness (schizophrenia) his daughter is now suffering from. But later, when David talks about how terrible he feels about it all to the husband, the husband isn’t completely convinced. As David speaks of a suicide attempt, the husband is aware that Karin has told her husband about looking at David’s diary and seeing in it a passage that says “I’m horrified by my curiosity.” The writer sees that even in his Karin’s illness there is writing material.

Bergman may believe that creativity can help deal with neurosis, but he is also aware of its exacerbating qualities as the artist becomes a person with an alibi and a get-out clause for guilty feelings. While someone else might wish to be ‘cured’ to escape these feelings, the artist may believe that to do so would be to risk undermining their creativity. In Jung’s terms, the shadow is their work; when he speaks of the shadow, it is “psychic energy that appears to have been lost[…] that serves to revive and intensify whatever is uppermost in the unconsciousness — tendencies, perhaps, that have hitherto had no chance to express themselves or at least have not been allowed uninhabited existence in our consciousness.” (Jung and His Symbols) Bergman proposes that the shadow is too vital a source of creative energy to be dispelled, and its containment isn’t for psycho-social health, but for creative purposes. Neurosis isn’t cured; it is potentially exacerbated through the alibi, and though one may feel guilt, that is a secondary response to using it for artistic ends. David might disappear into the kitchen and sob as he thinks about his life and what a mess he has made of it, but that won’t stop him from using Karin’s illness for his work if it might benefit it.

While Antonioni moves away from the character to show the surroundings that helped create their neurosis, Bergman moves in on the face all the better to illustrate the complexity of motive when people have complicated reasons for their behaviour. Is Elisabet sick or exploitative, or both? Is David speaking of his suicide to tell the truth or to test the husband’s reaction? We scrutinise Bergman’s faces to understand their thoughts, but accept a fathomless interiority, just as in Antonioni’s work we accept the symptomatic exploration of the urban figure. Antonioni can see neurosis in the world; Bergman seeks to find it inside people. Michiko Kakutani notes, when interviewing the director and others about his work, that he talked to a former director of the Swedish Film Institute, Harry Schein. Schein reckoned Bergman’s “interested in the unhappiness of his friends. He dwells on it — he can get material…” (Ingmar Bergman Interviews)

Both Antonioni and Bergman are masterful explorers of the tragic dimension to neurosis, just as Woody Allen has mastered its comedic manifestation. Yet of course, and in conclusion, actors are central to neurosis on screen. Bergman may have said, “I don’t like to work with neurotic people; because they have to play neurotics, they should not be neurotics.” (Ingmar Bergman Interviews). This may be so, but some actors are better at playing them than others, and may well be able to do so because of the neuroses they themselves carry. Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sharon Stone and Barbara Stanwyck may be as neurotic as Woody Allen, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Lemmon, Monica Vitti and Diane Keaton. But they don’t convey this in their screen persona. Neurosis takes a certain body language, and central to this is the inability to grasp the essentials and attending instead to the peripheral. The former has a valuable place in a goal-oriented cinema where people are supposed to know what they want and be well aware that others are determined they do not get it. This allows for antagonists and protagonists. But as many a psychologist well knows, these aren’t always opposing forces out there in the world as heroes and villains, but conditions of a self, interacting with the environment and with one’s own fears and confusions. Neurotics are good for cinema, let alone creativity, and we should thus be wary of cures.


© Tony McKibbin