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In recent issues of International Psychoanalysis, I wrote about films, Field of Dreams and Contact, which strongly suggest a fantasy of returning to the womb to meet a father long gone and a mother who died too early to be known. Last month, I wrote about Crouching Tiger/Hidden Dragon and The Hours which suggest a fantasy in which death offers a reunion with a loving mother and a return to a time of blissful memory. In The Hours, suicide by drowning may be linked with a return to the quiet of the womb. In Pan’s Labyrinth, we have all of these fantasies wrapped up in a family romance.

In August and September, I published articles on this website on the films, Field of Dreams and Contact. I gave them subtitles, “Magical Womb” Part I and II, respectively. With each, I tried to demonstrate a fantasy of a womb with magical properties to overcome death and separation. In each, the central character is reunited with parents long lost in this magical womb.

A magical place where conflicts are resolved, parents and children reunited and death overcome

Field of Dreams is based on the novel Shoeless Joe, by W. P. Kinsella. It follows the book closely in most respects, although paring down the cast of characters. On the face of it, the plot seems childish. A man plows under his Iowa cornfield to build a baseball field that will call back Shoeless Joe Jackson and other major league baseball players of bygone eras. Nevertheless, a number of adults, not all unsophisticated, were absorbed by the film and moved to tears by its finale.

Syriana confuses the viewer. In the opening scenes, we move rapidly from the middle of the desert, to a Teheran nightclub, to a Georgetown garden, to a board room, to a family breakfast table in Geneva, Switzerland; from a bus loading workmen, to a missile sale, to a man cutting flowers while explaining oil deals, to a corporate argument over a merger, to a young American family eating breakfast. We are continually given snippets of conversation, passed off rapidly. We are introduced to multiple characters, with names thrown around like a juggler’s batons. We struggle in each scene to understand what is going on and in most cases can’t complete the task before we are in the next scene, having to re-assimilate. We are left with an impressionistic flow of visual and auditory stimuli. We can make some sense of it, but are at the same time aware that we are missing important details. One of the film’s earlier titles was “See No Evil”. In fact, we often are not sure what we are seeing.

We cannot literally put Marshal Will Kane on the analytic couch, but he has much in common with a young man who was analyzed by Dr. Arlow.