USC School of Medicine - Asklepiad Yearbook (Los Angeles, CA)

Page 48 text:

I Timothy Leary called Fellini ' s Juliette of the Spirits, the first LSD film, since we never know where Juliette is perceiving or hallucinating. And rightly so, since Fellini ' s theme is the psychology of reality— and his subject is Juliette, a bored, middle-class, middle-aged housewife suffering from suburban syndrome: an intolerable anxiety that she is losing her husband. And, like any modern, distressed housewife, she seeks help— spiritual and psychiatric. The search comprises the action skeleton of the film and brings her into contact with 5 charlatans: Bhisma, the Indian faith-healer: lynx-eyes, the private eye disguised as a priest: Susy, the instinctual, sexual witch; Dr. Don Raffaele, the lecherous mainstay of Julliette ' s beach and parasol society: and Dr. Miller, the celibate, breast- less, blond American psychiatrist. Each of these persons is a satire on the modern forms of psychiatric theory and treatment : and Fellini has a notorious opinion on the contemporary effectiveness of this form of medicine. The artist ' s quarrel with the psychiatrist is based upon a strong feeling in the artist ' s mind that age-old insights conceived by the most supreme minds in rare depth and understanding have been taken up by a Pickerbaughistic clique of less gifted men in order to be applied, like aspirin, as a popular remedy for spiritual and mental suffer- ing. He is, perhaps, a simple case of the purist, intolerant of the pragmatist ' s attempt- mg to drive out old devils with old remedies under the guise of a new scientific approach. Detectable in this quarrel is the artist ' s reluctance to formulize the work- ings of the human mind. The artist believes that a complete elucidation is a form not of spiritual release, but of spiritual suicide. And there may be something in his complaint. At any rate, Juliette is an ideal Freudian case study, a victim of childhood suppres- sions and conflicts engendered by an autocratic mother and a father who was banished from the household for running off with a young circus girl. Juliette, in siding with her mother against her father, has felt a life-long guilt, for which she attempts to atone by devoting herself to her husband, Giorgio, as a priestess of his domestic life. Giorgio, like her father, is a ladies ' man. Yet. somehow, she is unable to develop her sexual role sucessfully enough to interest him. She is basically an esprit naturel. a sincere, introspective personality, normally inhibited, in a society where only an artificial attractiveness and a flaunted sexuality count. She is the only character who feels a mature emotion of love that is spiritual and full of affection. However, the arbiters of her society are liberated , that is, they have become ob- sessed with an unabashed expression of their sexual desires, their consensus is that it is a livmg kmd of healthful therapy, a dynamic exercise that will unwrinkle skins, restore vitality, and conquer death. Fellini ' s point is that this attitude is supported by the physicians and psychiatrists who minister to the members of Juliette ' s society. Dr. Miller organizes an afternoon garden party psychodrama to encourage an ex- hibitionism thinly disguised as group therapy; and Dr. Don Raffaele, enthroned on a beach chair, scoffs at Juliette ' s account of her visionary mental life: 44

Page 47 text:

concern In scene after scene of Zhivago, persons parade before us in double exposure: firstly as man the miracle, full of feeling, integrity, with dark design and perfect architecture; secondly, as animal, securer in a pack, without compassion, schemer, destroyer, blight; firstly as soul, then as body. Schizoic Yuri Zhivago, part poet, part physician, is the ideal hero of such a vision. He is also Lean ' s typical protagonist— a pure esthete forced into the irritating position of having to struggle for survival. In Zhivago, not only is the social theory of the Russian revolution thwarted by its body politic, but the sensitive young Yuri becomes also the defeated victim of his own body ' s powers and whims. A high tragic sense evinces itself when we see the physician-poet succumb to forces he has ironically groomed himself to fully comprehend. Although Yuri Zhivago considers himself physician first and poet second, there is a perilous contour to his physician ' s vision, the contour of the University theorist, admirous of the delicate beauty of the living creature, whether good or evil— awed at the exquisite complexity of disease and death, without the special schooling required to defend himself from their ravages. Lean establishes this study in the earliest scenes: Yuri: (spying through microscope lens a bacillus oozing through a rainbow colour field, overlaid in delicious liquid yellows) How beautiful! How very beautiful! Professor of Pathology: Yes, but these beautiful organisms do terrible things to human beings, Yuri. Those organisms turn out to be symbols of the physician ' s oldest enemies, spiteful inexorable fate, human depravity, ignorance: the Bolshevik manifestos, Komarovsky ' s debauchery, Strel ' nikov ' s brigandry, guerilla bands machine-gunning schoolboys, massacres, wars, conflagrations, the bitter elements, and the hateful elbow of destiny interposing itself between Yuri and his beloved Lara. There is also important mention of a mysterious 8 years spent in degradation by Yuri in Moscow ' s alleys. And through these episodes, only Yuri ' s eyes, wide in scientific glare, scanning packed crowds in trenches, in ambushes, in cattle-trains; and raising esthetic objections against the bold new society, which like a scanty cotton bandage cannot stem the life-blood leaking from the revolutionary wound opened across all mother Russia. Lean ' s main philosophic point is that the position of the physician and the poet often isolate them from life as helpless observers. Glass, in the ingenious ways Lean employs it, is the symbol of this isolation; and in each scene windows, lenses, eye-glasses, mirrors are interposed between viewer Yuri and the viewed world. Only when Lara, symbol of Yuri ' s private security, flees to Vladivostok does he smash the frosted glass window of the country estate, ending his juvenile phase, ending his poetic career, ending his detachment. The subsequent 8 years of wandering is only alluded to in the film. To me, it is the most crucial episode of all; since I wonder how much dirtying his hands made a difference in Yuri ' s character. But Lean limits his analysis to the esthete-physician, and, as in Lawrence of Arabia, does not explore the question of the maturation of an esthete. What Lean does say is that, as always, the trained and developed intellectual is utterly innocuous in terms of affecting the forces of the times. The aristocrat-physician loses his effective position of independence, once the imperishable children of the poor indenture and appropriate his technical services as their inalienable right. In this respect Yuri was the last witness of the passing of human compassion from the social milieu of his nation, stood with bitter feeling as the ignorant and untutored enlisted their betters in a scheme by which human integrity was effaced. And if the audience thought for a moment that Yuri ' s poems survived, it missed Lean ' s meaning in the last scene, where the symbol of the new society, the mighty hydroelectric dam drowned out in its billionwatt plunge the delicate modulations of the poet ' s spirit. 43

Page 49 text:

That could be simply bad digestion. Once we are dead, we are but a handful of dust, and if some small bone does remain, we ' d better watch out for the dogs. Go swimming, buy yourself a horse and take it jumping. But, above all, tell your husband to make love to you more often. Ah, against the spirits and against toothaches, there is no better remedy than making love. Bhisma is the first analyst, and Juliette can sense the fraud intuitively. Bhisma is the hermaphroditic impressario of sex, an international con-artist, and his-her reply to Juliette ' s mental question begins with an extemporaneous recital of the love- bites and yelps from the Kama Sutra (Art of Love) Sounds to be uttered to procure pleasure are the Hin! The great sigh! The sound Put! The sound Pat! The sound Plat! . . . Plat, Plat, Plat, Plat! ( . . . siezure). It is significant that a stethoscoped phyisician is in constant attendance as Bhisma rolls in and out of epileptic seizures. The young physician is a symbol of the healing claim in Bhisma. Love is a religion, Juliette. Your husband is your God, and you are priestess of the cult. Your spirit, like this incense, must burn and smoke on the altar of your loving body ... (another siezure). The second fraud is Lynx-eyes, the private eye who dresses as a priest, representing the Western approach (as opposed to the Indian) to pleasure. He is the voyeur, armed with camera and boasting the most modern techniques — a cynical peeping- Tom who never actually Involves himself, but loves to watch others. In this category Fellini puts Juliette ' s closest friends and family; Sylva, the regal mother, Valentina, the visitor Jose (the ideal tranquillizer), and the scoptophilic sculptress ( God has the most beautiful body. ). Lynx-eyes believes that his candid bouduoir spying on husband Giorgio will work the idea! catharsis in Juliette and by a complete laundering reunite husband and wife. At least he proves the errant Giorgio not impotent. Susy is not only a highly sophisticated synthesis of Eastern and Western views, but is the living embodiment of Dr. Miller ' s theory: love thyself and especial ly thine own neuroses. The curious inhabitants of Susy ' s erotic mansion are presented like a tour de force through Baron von Krafft-Ebing ' s Psychopathia Sexualis: a Russian fetishist, the hebephrenic sister, Momi the Farouk-figure, a satyriatic Egyptian seducer, six assorted lesbians, two nymphomaniacs, monks, sadists, masochists, transvestites, and homosexuals. The spontaneous orgies last indefinitely, therapeutically. Juliette flees this House of Usher, brought to her senses by a seducer ' s pass. Juliette, by a series of bold emotional decisions, quite independently of this medical and psychiatric (symbolically if you wish) fiasco, rescues herself from the psy- chological striptease of her environment. She discovers ironically that the real hallucination is this very environment. She sequesters herself from it in a final act of personal triumph and catharsis. ' a» .. 45