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FREUD AND FROWNLAND

November 2024
(Essays on this site are from my time at NYU. This essay was for a Freud class at Gallatin. I’d seen Frownland in high school and then a handful of times after that but never got a chance to write about it until now. It’s been sort of a north star for me as a film student, especially as my prospects of making a feature draw nearer.)

In the Interpretation of Dreams, Freud posits the foundation of psychical life, both in dreams and reality, as “the operation of two psychical forces,” where expression “constructs the wish,” and repression “exercises a censorship upon this dream-wish,” effectively “bringing about a distortion in the expression of the wish” (Freud 168). By this, Freud means to say that the unconscious mind is still active when awake, but only gets to express itself in the dream-state, yet in doing so, that expression is still censored, to the extent that the dream wish is never communicated with clarity by the unconscious to the conscious mind.

This operation assumes that the unconscious mind is fundamentally driven to ceaselessly express itself, and this pure expression gets filtered into dream content—a.k.a. dream plot. Within this dream content lay both manifest and latent content, the former of which refers to the discernible action that the subject can recall upon awaking from the dream, while the latter represents the disguised inner meaning represented by the dream through symbols. In other words, manifest content are the distorted manifestations of latent content, of which we have no clear image of, but can assume based on the principle that the unconscious mind is expressing itself through the dream, albeit filtered.

Since the nature of expression and repression contradict each other, their inner and external manifestations naturally generate friction. Freud charts the path taken by the repressed unconscious into dream expression when he explains, “while we are awake, we are aware of a diffuse general sensibility…but only as a vague quality…At night, however, it would seem that this same feeling…becomes the strongest and at the same time the commonest source for instigating dream-images” (Freud 67). Specifically, Freud makes the distinction that what is repressed in the unconscious is pulled and ‘stored’ (without exertion) from the content of our waking lives. This implies that a human’s ability to function upon awaking from a dream and going about their daily life without immeasurable shock (for the most part) stems from the direct closed system stringing reality into our unconscious, then our dreams, and back out through one’s often sparse, but still conscious interpretation of the dream after waking up.

According to Freud, repression is not limited to occurrence in one’s unconscious mind. Studies on Hysteria makes the argument that repressed material can make its way through the body and become observable as neuralgia, a process known as somatic compliance. Things like tics, mental pain, or vomiting are theoretically all bodily impressions of our unconscious mind rerouting trauma (rooted in memory) into a physical sensation. Somatic compliance can be overcome through abreaction, in which a patient “brings clearly to light the memory of the event by which [the hysterical symptom] was provoked” (Freud 6). By putting the affect into words, the traumatic memory supposedly loses the chance of becoming a neurotic disruptor to the subject. Of utmost interest is Freud’s following statement, which admits to the limited effectiveness of abreaction, and his stunted findings: “a neuralgia may follow upon mental pain or vomiting upon a feeling of moral disgust” (Freud 5). Here he describes seemingly more complicated, less easily curable forms of the repressed unconscious expressing itself in waking life. While he notes the connection is not unlike those formed in dreams, this form of somatic compliance suggests an unexplainable, incurable fraction of the unconscious mind’s expression: in some cases, even upon exiting the body and engaging in abreaction, neuralgia is bound to remain.

This begs the question: if Freud suggests some people are trapped with their symptoms, despite an escaped repressed unconscious, what causes this malfunction? He clarifies this phenomena’s cause is “not the trifling psychical injury but the affect of fright,” meaning the lingering fear or anxiety surrounding the trauma-memory point is the dominant force at work (Freud 6). Therefore, the limits of Freud’s theory in regards to how one’s waking life and personal relationships can be affected by the repressed and expressed unconscious are boundless. One must make the argument that repressed content unintentionally escaping a subject (unlike intentional abreaction) can become a habitual method of expression. Specifically, if expression and repression are always occurring within a subject, one could source the cause of their neuroticisms, physical and those found in their character, directly back to the same mechanism censoring the dream wish. If leaving dream wishes unconfronted results in observable change in human behavior, it’s not unreasonable to conclude that personality, and as a result, one’s general philosophies and outlook on life can be intensely affected by the limitless ‘affect of fright.’

At its most uncontrollable, the power within the unconscious mind’s need to express itself can completely dominate a human being’s nature. This semi-hopeless framing of humanity is explored to a radical extent in the contemporary cult-classic Frownland (2007), an American indie film that, due to its disorienting and fairly unfamiliar thesis, was unable to acquire a distribution deal upon its initial release in the United States. The DVD’s back-cover describes it as “a pitch-black character study of Keith Sontag, a neurotic, manipulative, stridently unloveable New Yorker whose pitiless roommate aptly describes him, to his face, as ‘a burbling troll in his underwear.’” While this description might make the reader assume the film’s tone as being somewhere along the lines of shocking or unsentimental, what makes the protagonist an apt filmic example of a malfunctioning patient in Studies on Hysteria is writer/director Ronald Bronstein’s mise-en-scene, or lack of it. In spite of Keith’s (Dore Mann) unsocialized, abrasive manner of being, it’s a matter of principle to Bronstein that the aimless character be documented with a sensitivity to reality and an unwavering degree of patience. This is made possible by the crew’s minimal aesthetic approach: no filmic lighting, expository dialogue, or easygoing, audience-oriented edit.

The film follows Keith over the course of a week whereupon his relationship with teenage Laura (Mary Bronstein) is in the midst of imploding, his self-absorbed roommate Charles (Paul Grimstad) refuses to pay rent, and his only remaining semblance of a friend Sandy (David Sandholm) does everything he can to avoid interacting with him. A key moment in Keith’s arc shows him calling Sandy in the middle of the night to let him up to his apartment, thinking he might have left his nametage behind. Sandy searches around and, upon Keith suggesting he check under his stack of magazines, finds it. Though it’s never exactly proven, it becomes clear upon Keith’s later arrival to retrieve the object and subsequent attempt to socialize that the entire event was staged: Keith left the nametag under Sandy’s magazines on purpose, forcing his own presence upon Sandy who wants nothing to do with him, let alone in the comfort of his own home.

Frownland is entirely made up of scenes like this, where Keith’s social rejection, (which he’s very much aware of) regurgitates out of him into observable action: he’s stuck in a cycle of awkward interactions that are painful to watch, which he seemingly partakes in (for the most part) to prove to himself that he is needed. Bronstein’s thesis, however, is that Keith is not needed. To get an idea of his uncanny vision of a manic episode, Bronstein cites Frederick Wiseman, the infamous documentarian whose work (Titicut Follies, High School, Welfare) bluntly studied and resultingly exposed corruption within countless American institutions, as he and cinematographer Sean Price Williams’ key photographic influence. The visually grimy atmosphere this provides is directly in tune with Keith’s deranged persona. Bronstein describes his fixation with the not-so prototypical protagonist’s neuroticisms, explaining “I actively groped to puncture the way neurosis is commonly represented in movies....as something sort of attractive or… harmlessly nebbishy… which belies the sort of knee-jerk antipathy that real neurosis catalyzes in people who come into contact with it” (Bronstein). Frownland acts as a direct confrontation of a subject theoretically trapped within a perpetual state of shock, caused by the friction generated by his expressive and repressive instincts, and it implies a coinciding, neverending life of distress.

Like with any film, the viewer aims to root for and identify with the protagonist, but there is little content for one to latch onto that makes Keith’s actions and behaviors relatable. And when there is said content, Keith does something to offset the moment and completely lose any personal connection with the audience. A clear example of this occurs in the film’s only moment of introspection (if one can even call it that), when Bronstein drops the audience into the middle of Keith’s therapy session. Here, Keith’s therapist attempts to help him navigate a traumatic memory where he claims to have felt betrayal upon seeing his mother tear off his father’s toupee. Referring to his father’s absent hairline, Keith explains, “He gave me hope for the future,” followed by a demeaning chuckle from the therapist. They continue working through the memory, but Keith seems to not understand how therapy works: he answers follow up questions with an unsure tone, as if he were being quizzed for a test. It’s clear that even when engaging in abreaction, Keith is clueless as to how exploring himself can assist in his journey of self-betterment.

The fever-dream nature of Keith’s surroundings point to the idea that the reality he’s experiencing, presented as docu-fiction, parallels that of an attempt at recording the unconscious mind expressing itself, in the sense that the audience has a more objective view of the happenings in Keith’s life than Keith himself. To add to that point, the entire nature of cinema, arguably the closest audiovisual medium one has to compare to a real dream, parallels the expression/repression dynamic found in that of the film/filmmaker’s relationship, respectively. Especially in the case of Bronstein who, in an exchange with film scholar Ray Carney, wrote the following: “I put so much of myself...and the crummy discomfiture that I felt all through my 20's...into that character… to the point that i was originally going to play him myself” (Bronstein). One is thus reminded of the independent artist’s cliche mode of being, that expression in a work of art is a biological need in order for the artist to function on a daily basis. In the 5 years it took to make Frownland, Bronstein engaged in a lengthy, paradoxical form of abreaction that when taking his future role as co-writer/editor with Josh and Benny Safdie (Good Time, Uncut Gems) into account, one can assume the filmmaker’s neuralgia, like Keith’s, was destined to remain. Bronstein and Keith are bound to each other, and one can’t exist without the other.

If Frownland exists as a filmmaker’s expression propelled by the unconscious mind’s driving force (the affect of fear, according to Freud), one can view the film’s plot like an extension of the subject’s manifest content, a distortion (albeit consciously and intentionally constructed) of what’s inside. To the average viewer, what’s “inside” Bronstein may seem akin to a nightmare; the film’s climax comprises of a long take in which Keith projectile vomits, literally struggling and ultimately failing to contain himself. But that’s not where the film ends. Bronstein stages the film’s final moments on a rooftop the next morning, where Keith wakes up in a daze and stares out at the city, the sun blinding the camera as it rises. This one scene flips Bronstein’s initial thesis on its side, hinting that the fever dream may never end for Keith, but it’s at least not always a nightmare. While what’s expressed onscreen has been primarily self-effacing and torturous, bringing things down to a light simmer makes one wonder if Bronstein feels keen to protect Keith (and possibly himself) before rolling the credits. Keith’s latent content is unclear, like a subject’s would be in reality: there’s no way to trace the exact source of his neurotic malfunction. Trapped in a life of endless awful social interactions, Keith may very well not be needed by anyone, but at least in solitude, there is no one around to remind him that this is the dominating force in his life.

^{^{Sources

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams, Basic Books.
Freud, Sigmeund and Breuer, Josef. Studies on Hysteria, Basic Books.
Bronstein, Ronald. Frownland (2007), Factory 25.
Chaiken, Michael. “Au Hasard Frankenstein: An Oral History of Frownland,” Criterion Collection.
Bronstein, Ronald and Carney, Ray. Letters 79, #9, people.bu.edu/rcarney}}

MOSS, WISEMAN, & THE CASE OF TITICUT FOLLIES

May 2024
(Essays on this site are from my time at NYU. This essay was for a Psychoanalysis class at Gallatin, where I was prompted to psychoanalyze an author/artist through their work. There are limitations to filmmaking as there are to any other craft, and this essay merely aims at exploring these limits. The situation with Wiseman and most confrontational filmmakers is something I’m not totally at ease publicly psychoanalyzing in a conclusive way, like I attempted to do with here. That’s a critic’s job. However, I hope the essay can influence anyone who reads it to see as many of his movies as they can.)

In Hating In The First Person Plural, Donald Moss introduces the collection of psychoanalytic essays by drawing from personal experience in an anecdote where he describes watching newsreels of war footage as a young child. His honest account depicts a complex relationship between his younger self and the films, in which the act of identifying with jewish Holocaust victims and as a result, disidentifying with Nazi perpetrators, activated a state of “raw and hungry fascination” within him (Moss xxii). Essentially, the passage is Moss’s attempt at distilling an understanding of his own psyche, one which derived a degree of satisfaction from the otherwise traumatizing imagery, yet without necessarily condemning himself. Instead, the disidentifier is stuck between two realms, that of continuously chasing their appetite for said content and proving themselves innocent of the pseudo-sadistic voyeurism they’re possibly engaging in. This unrelaxed scenario is more commonly known today as a byproduct of morbid curiosity, a concept that dates as far back as Aristotle¹and has reached popular heights in the algorithm-reliant, viral age of Tiktok and Instagram Reels. However, in keeping with Moss’s exposure to the black and white, 16mm texture of his early years, one is reminded of the iconoclastic, underappreciated American documentarian Frederick Wiseman.

Wiseman, who boasts a filmography of forty plus documentaries, is primarily known for his observational filming style adopted relatively early on after the advent of lightweight sound and camera equipment during World War 2. Alongside Robert Drew and the Maysles brothers, he was a pioneer of what has come to be known as the direct cinema movement, in which the development of capable equipment coincided with an emerging inclination for realism in motion pictures.

With his debut film Titicut Follies (‘67), Wiseman exposed the absurd maltreatment of inmates at Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, with sequences of note depicting a force-feeding and the embalming of a patient’s corpse. It was the first American film to be banned for reasons other than obscenity, the result of a drawn out court case in which Wiseman was accused of infringing upon a subject’s right to privacy. The eventually overturned case’s subject in question was filmed naked in his cell while being taunted by guards and deemed too incompetent to provide consent for filming by the state of Massachusetts.

In his essay, Moss describes the purpose of newsreel screenings as “moral instruction…to see what had been done to people like us by people like them” (Moss xxii). The footage essentially functions as anti-Nazi propaganda, and Moss’ focus on the power of violent material’s ability to motivate viewers to disidentify with perpetrators is relevant to Massachusett’s case considering their successful banning of the film.

Wiseman had initially received approval to shoot at Bridgewater from Nixon’s future Attorney General, Elliott Richardson, who advocated that the film could convince legislatures to grant additional funding to state hospitals. Yet despite his progressive agenda, the Democrat-controlled state legislature saw the case as an opening to discredit the Republican AG for providing Wiseman unwarranted filming permissions. From the perspective of Massachusetts’ legislators, Jim (the naked subject) is the identified victim, but instead of disidentifying with the guards as one could argue Wiseman is attempting to get audiences to do, their case reframes the media/viewer dynamic so that in keeping the film obscured, the public disidentifies with the filmmaker and Richardson.

The nature of the case is interesting in that the proposed victim (identified) is Jim for both parties, yet the prosecution and defense teams cite each other as the proposed perpetrators (disidentified). Though the dis-/identification Moss describes is specifically in relation to the experience his younger self had with recorded subjects on a screen, the argument here is moreso about the relationship between the public and the vaguely negative ideology associated with Follies, Wiseman, and Richardson as a result of the case’s decision.

In reference to hate-fueled group-thinking, Moss elaborates that “we enlist these hatreds in a struggle for self-definition… these hatreds express a yearned-for solidarity with like-minded others,” essentially relaying that engaging in social forms of hatred occurs in an effort to define the ego (Moss xviii). Setting boundaries within one’s personal palette of values and opinions that, when observed amongst compatible individuals, creates a sense of wholeness in one’s own character. Where Moss and fellow Jews around him share their hatred for Nazi offenders, an inner wanting for social bonding is satisfied. In the same sense, Massachusetts elicits the terms of identification in their case against Follies, spun into representing privacy-infringing Republicans.

On the flip side, Moss’s essay can be referred to in an attempt to understand Wiseman’s infamously self-dissected shooting style. The filmmaker’s process is unlike most documentarians in that he does essentially no research in advance of production, refrains from facilitating interviews, and mixes sound while directing a 2-person crew. Hundreds of hours’ and tens of thousands’ of dollars worth of film is compiled and trimmed over the course of a year into a largely plotless, subjectively stylized feature. In discussing his ethical approach to filming, Wiseman explains, “I think I have an obligation to the people who have consented to be in the film, ... to cut it so that it fairly represents what I felt was going on at the time in the original event” (Poppy 1). The statement reflects a dynamic in which the filmmaker interacts and manipulates his compiled footage under the guise of identifying with his primary subjects, disidentifying with any confrontational, violent forces that confront them as he shoots, in addition to refraining from engaging in any similarly harmful exploitation as the filmmaker.

With this knowledge, Wiseman can be contextualized as the ultimate model for radical disidentifiers, having made a career out of the ceaseless observation and recording of public institutions with largely progressive social results. His avid self-awareness of the impossibility of extracting an objective document from stockpiles of footage poisoned by his own subjectivity mirrors Moss, whose writing serves as a form-following attempt to absolve himself from what most deem a mortal sin⸺arousal by “contemporary malignant social phenomena” (Moss xxv).

Considering the fact that Wiseman quit his primary occupation as a lawyer upon taking interest in directing, as well as having spent a year attempting to convince hospital administrators to grant him filming privileges, one can assume the internal self-sustenance of his passion, like many directors, was partially fueled by the innate psychological fixation that can result from documentary shooting. Films like Rear Window (‘54) and Peeping Tom (‘60) all exaggeratedly act as metaphorical portraits of this exact phenomena, where the filmmaker expresses a sense of being haunted by his own gaze, wrestled with by creating drama revolving around a characters’ observational vocation.

In a retrospective interview conducted by Vice Magazine, Wiseman described what it’s like when shooting becomes intense, prompted by the interviewer’s reference to Follies’ infamous force feeding scene, where an inmate is held down and has a feeding tube run through his nose. The filmmaker answers, “there’s a corner of my mind that’s amazed that people can treat other people this way” before continuing to explain, “when you’re in the midst of it, it’s hard to go beyond thinking, well, this is a great scene” (Pearson 2). Much like Moss, Wiseman is sharp enough to “renounce” the subject of his disidentification without transgressing himself (Moss xix). Nearly every interview with him demonstrates an intense speaker eager to discuss his work with precision.

It should be noted that he only indulged in admitting satisfaction from whatever moment of crisis a scene may be offering by initially damning the circumstances that caused the subject’s suffering in the first place. A career made out of not necessarily participating in a group’s oppression, but in seeking and engaging with spaces where such activities are rampant is the very center of Wiseman’s filmic moral fabric. When psychoanalytically inspecting him in relation to Moss’ writing, one can’t help but project the writer’s eerily thematically adjacent anxieties onto one’s understanding of Wiseman’s relationship to his own camerawork. Specifically, when Moss says “my eyes alone, and not I, were responsible” and describes “aiming for the proper ethical gaze” in reference to the visual obsession. Wiseman’s ability to detach himself from surrounding subjects prompts one to question whether his intrapersonal ethical reasoning came to fruition before or after shooting morally questionable content.

In the same article, Wiseman repeats similar rhetoric when discussing his reason for refusing to cut Jim’s scene from the final film, saying, “I wanted to show the way he was treated because this was no way to treat a human being, obviously, no matter what crime he committed” (Pearson 5). Though the filmmaker’s detached cinematic approach makes him appear to be a political sidestepper, the series of statements reveal the documentarian’s overall output as having a particularly progressive political ethos. Given the prevalence of liberal political views in the intellectual and art spheres that celebrate his work, the self-preserving nature of his film philosophy seems extra-careful. It’s as if the filmmaker feels slight discomfort that his previously misinterpreted, and therefore possibly unclear political objective reinforce the need to assert every decision behind his vast body of work, despite being extensively lauded. Thus, the magazine reader is less likely to fall under the same line of thinking as Massachusetts’s state legislators, though by now, Wiseman has nearly sixty years’ worth of praise and recognition to fall back on in the event of another witch hunt.

In his ultimate act of disidentification, Wiseman would spend the next twenty five years working to make Titicut Follies publicly available in the U.S., in addition to generating a reliable, annual output of similarly socially conscious documentaries. Not unlike the archetypal journalist or social worker, the filmmaker presents himself as more directly concerned with exposing corruption and documenting humanity in all its nuances than with adhering to any possible commercial appeal. This coupled with the fact that his works haven’t garnered much financial success offers up an image of a now 94-year-old Wiseman, unknowingly a statuesque model of Moss’ theories on hate. When Wiseman describes having “learned to pay as much attention to peripheral thoughts at the edge of my mind as to any formally logical approaches to the material” (Peploe), one can’t help but make the connection that maybe the filmmaker is clueless as to the fixation Moss seems to have come to some sort of conclusion on. Moss explains, “Fifty years later,… I still watch [the newsreels], still hope to use them self-curatively. But the cure eludes me; I remain implicated” (Moss xxv).

Wiseman’s practical philosophy to dealing with the ethical fogginess that emerges given the nature of his work is his way of going with his gut, the mere trusting of his subconscious. Meanwhile, Moss more fatalistically concludes that through endless self-investigation, the only thing he can make of his obsession is, kind of hilariously, accepting its presence in response to an overwhelming and incidental sense of inner confusion. Viewers of Wiseman’s films are left to question whether or not his and Moss’ captations², though born under different circumstances, function as two sides of the same mental coin.

^{Footnotes:

1. “We enjoy and admire paintings of objects that in themselves would annoy or disgust us.” Aristotle, Poetics.

2.“In Lacan's use, the term describes the way particular images, as well as elements of external reality, can ‘catch hold’ of the psyche and become important formative agents for the subject. We approach this meaning when we speak of something ‘capturing’ our attention or "captivating" us.” https://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/terms/captation.html

^{Sources

Moss, Donald. “Introduction: On Hating in the First Person Plural: Thinking Psychoanalytically about Racism, Homophobia, and Misogyny.” Other Press, New York.
Titicut Follies. Dir. Frederick Wiseman. Zipporah Films, 1967. Film.
Poppy, Nick. “The grandfather of cinéma vérité talks about domestic violence, Domestic Violence and the reality behind reality films.” Salon.com, 2002. Interview.
Pearson, Jesse. “The Follies of Documentary Filmmaking.” Vice Magazine, 2007. Interview.
Ritchie, Kevin. “11 doc lessons from Frederick Wiseman.” Realscreen.com, 2015. Article.
Peploe, Lola. “Frederick Wiseman, The Art of Documentary No. 1.” The Paris Review, 2018. Interview.
Cooper, Sean. “Frederick Wiseman’s City Hall.” Tablet Magazine, 2021. Article.}}

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