Do you have a particular childhood memory that stands out far beyond its seeming importance? Freud (1903) called them “screen memories” because he believed that they act as a screen for fantasies and events that were very important, but in some way troubling. What if you could go back and see what had stimulated such a memory?
For many years, I had a clear memory that in my childhood my favorite movie, and also the first movie I ever saw, was Three Came Home. I remembered having seen it with my mother when I was four years old. It was about American women who were captured by the Japanese on a Pacific Island and their experience in the Japanese internment camp. I had vague memories of scenes in which the women were abused and beaten by the Japanese. At the end of the film, allied warplanes flew overhead, and the allies retook the island, freeing the women. In the last scene, three soldiers walked up a road, arm in arm, with the middle one missing the lower part of one leg. I thought that they were the husbands of the women being freed.
Because it seemed to have been important to me at one time, I had a good deal of curiosity about the film. From time to time, it came up in my personal analysis, evoking interpretations and analytic work around my excitement and identification with the Japanese in their sadistic treatment of the women and the significance of the return of my own father from World War II. Three Came Home had not appeared on television or in the video stores, so that I was unable to see it again. A few years ago, I looked it up in a book listing films, which I found in my accountant’s waiting room. I don’t know exactly what I expected to find, but I think that I was excited and relieved to find a tangible relic of this special childhood memory. The brief description roughly fit my memory, but I was slightly disturbed that the film was listed as having been made in 1950. Since I was born in early 1945, it seemed unlikely I had seen it at four, as I had been firmly convinced. Even then, I thought that perhaps I had seen it at the beginning of the year, or that it had been released early. I had also always wondered about the title. I assumed it referred to the three returning soldiers. However, the film focused on the women.
Then one August, I saw a television listing for Three Came Home in the early hours of the morning. I taped it and took it with me to the country to watch during my vacation. I watched many films during that vacation, but Three Came Home was always deferred. I began to realize that although I was eager to see it, I was also anxious about it. I finally sat down to watch it about a day before returning to work.
I learned in the film’s introduction that it was based on the experiences of Agnes Keith, an American woman married to a British civil servant in North Borneo. I was shocked by the opening scene, in which I discovered that Agnes Keith had a little boy, about the same age as I was when I saw the film. It was later revealed that he was four years old, a likely source for my confusion about my age when I saw it. There were a number of reasons why I could have identified with the boy. At the beginning of the film, he is shown playing with a monkey or small ape. I had loved monkeys as a child and my favorite stuffed animal was a monkey. I had also visited “Monkey Jungle” in Florida with my mother, a habitat that for me might have looked like North Borneo.
At the beginning of the film, Mrs. Keith was pregnant. Shortly after the Japanese invasion, we see that she has miscarried. She tells her son that they will not have a baby brother or sister after all, that it will just be her, Daddy and him. He responds, “That’s all right. I didn’t want anyone else, anyway.” At about that time, I had been importuning my own mother to have another child, and, in October, 1950, she became pregnant. I don’t know exactly when I saw the film. It is even possible that I saw it in Florida with my grandmother when I visited her for two weeks during my mother’s pregnancy. That would have been in early 1951. In any case, the issues of pregnancy should have caught my attention.
Viewing the film as an adult, I made these connections with my past with increasing excitement and fascination. I was very much aware that I had seen this same film as a child, and that it had intense personal meaning for me. It was like watching subliminal home movies of my childhood. I realized why the film had been important to me. As the story developed, I saw why I had blocked out such important aspects of it from my memory.
At the time I saw the film, I was five or six years old, and presumably at the height of my Oedipal rivalry with my father. In that rivalry between father and son for the mother’s affection and contact, the Japanese overseers in this film are clearly the boy’s allies. They immediately separate the men and women, and are nearly comical in their concern that there be no kissing between husbands and wives. The children go with the women, forcing mother and son together. As the film progressed, I saw numerous views of Agnes Keith and her son lying in bed together. At times, she embraced him or affectionately put his hand to her lips, repeating a gesture the boy’s father had made early in the picture in putting his wife’s hand to his lips. In a highly dramatic scene, Mrs. Keith, who has malaria, sneaks out of the compound during a storm to rendezvous with her husband for an embrace and a kiss. The tension builds as we wait to see if she will return before a Japanese officer checks to see if she and her son need quinine. Nearly miraculously, when he arrives, she is safely back in bed with her son as she should be in this Oedipally reversed situation. When a group of Australian soldiers flirt with the women in the camp and try to get to them by climbing the barbed wire fence, they are mowed down with Japanese machine gun fire.
The Japanese themselves are not entirely puritanical. In a later scene, Mrs. Keith fights off an attempted rape. There were also the scenes of torture that I had vaguely recalled as well as a more subtle flirtation between Mrs. Keith and the Japanese commander, played brilliantly by Sesue Hayakawa. I don’t doubt that as a child I was both excited and frightened by such scenes, especially when they were juxtaposed with the less explicit scenes of mother and son cuddling in bed.
In fact, there were two circumstances in my early childhood in which I was alone with my mother with my father absent. For my first eleven and a half months, my father was a soldier in Europe. It is not surprising that for that and more general reasons I would have remembered Mrs. Keith’s husband as having been an American soldier. The other circumstance was when my mother and I visited my grandmother in Florida. Since my father never went to Florida, it was an experience that she and I could share without him. It seems likely that the memory of the film served as a screen for my fantasies about those experiences.
At the end of the film, the allied war planes do fly over, roughly as I had remembered, but there was no retaking of the island. The war ended, the Japanese guards disappeared one day, and the men began filing into the women’s camp. There were no three men arm in arm as I had remembered, although there was a shot of a man with an amputation walking arm in arm between his wife and daughter. In the last scene, Mrs. Keith’s husband comes limping along, using a stick for a cane. The husband and wife embrace and the (deposed) son burrows in with them. The title was now clear. The three who came home were the father, mother, and son. That included the boy whom I had repressed and did not include the sister who was never born in the film, but was born to my family in May, 1951.
The fact that my memory involved a film gave me the unusual opportunity to review the actual stimulus for a screen memory. Obviously, that stimulus was perceived differently by a five-year-old boy than by a mature man, forcing me to try to reconstruct the original impact of the film. As is common with reconstructions, I never actually remembered my childhood experience of seeing the film, but I was vividly reminded of my emotions at that important time in my life. The experience demonstrated nicely the interaction between fantasy, defense, and memory. Some of the distortions in my memory arose from my partial confusion of my own identity with that of the boy in the film. I took on his age and he adopted my soldier father. Although I probably did see the film with my mother, the specific memory of having seen it with her is a representation of the repressed fantasy that she and I had shared an exciting experience. (Watching the film that summer revived that excitement so that, in a sense, I once again considered it “my favorite movie”.) The larger distortion, the elimination of the boy from my memory, involved defense against the frightening realities of the film (the boy was, of course, in great danger) and, more importantly, against the very powerful and dangerous fantasy of eliminating paternal and sibling rivals to lie in bed with my mother.
My experience also says something about the meaning of a film to a viewer. As an adult, I thought that it was a good film. Perhaps the subliminal Oedipal dynamics contributed to that. However, the personal impact and meaning that it had for me as a child was beyond the intention of the filmmakers. To paraphrase Branch Rickey, it is clear that some of the impact of art comes from that luck which is the residue of design.
Freud, S. (1903) Screen memories. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: HogarthPress and The Institute of Psychoanalysis. vol. 7.
Previously Published:
Stein, H. (1993), A Screen Memory: My recollections and distortions of the 1950 Film, Three Came Home. Psychoanalytic Quarterly. 62:1 109-113
And in Double Feature: Finding our Hidden Fantasies in Film by Herbert H, Stein (EReads, 2002)