"I know what you are! I don't want that mind cut open. She's an innocent; she belongs to God!"
That's Mother Superior Anne Bancroft ranting to Sixish psychiatrist Jane Fonda about a nun, Agnes (Meg Tilly), whose sanity Fonda has come to evaluate. Tilly is under investigation for the murder of a baby on church grounds and Bancroft, the One, is out to protect the nun from the antispiritual premises of modern psychiatry.
Bancroft and Fonda go several noisy rounds debating the merits of their respective world views (spiritual vs. psychological). The actresses have a mutual love of scenery chewing and these arguments get plenty repetitious.
Gradually they soften their positions, become friendlier, and the film starts to get a little better. As Bancroft comes off her Oneish rigidity, she reveals a more relaxed human being who is more muddled in her certainties than she would like to seem. The resolution of the murder mystery is of this world but points beyond it.
Meg Tilly is quite persuasive as the nun subject to visions. She speaks in a breathless, childlike voice and beams with God-intoxicated pride. Her fantasies and visions are filled with competition and repressed sexual content. The stories she tells about her history of physical abuse are usual for the background of some phobic Sixes. Actress Tilly is a Six in real life and mostly plays them. I originally thought she was a Two in Agnes, but took another look and saw a character mired in fear and dependency on authority.
Jane Fonda often sounded like a One in her film roles but her basic screen persona was more of an edgy counterphobic Six, and that's what she's like here. Fonda's screen characters frequently fought with Ones. You can see it with Gregory Peck in Old Gringo (page 28) and especially between Fonda and her real-life father Henry in the film On Golden Pond.
This David Lean film is set in an Allied POW camp in Burma during World War II. The Allied prisoners, led by Alec Guinness, are ruled by Japanese camp commander Sessue Hayakawa.
Both Guinness and Hayakawa are Ones. At the start of the film they lock horns over a point of law and neither one will give in. Guinness is thrown into an outdoor cage to suffer until he relents his position in the conflict. He will not. "Don't you see that it's a matter of principle? If I give in now all will be lost." Guinness is willing to die for a point of law.
Hayakawa is too. Guinness is needed out of the cage to help build a bridge for the Japanese across the nearby river Kwai. Hayakawa explains that if the bridge is not completed by its deadline, he will have to kill himself in dishonor. Guinness, still stubborn, replies, "I do not think you understand; I have my orders."
Eventually Hayakawa gives in and Guinness sets about supervising the construction. Guinness insists that it is a point of British honor that this bridge for his enemies should be exceptionally well built. He gets so carried away with this new principle that he very nearly thwarts an Allied attempt to destroy the finished product. Right at the end, he realizes how far off-beam he has gone ("What have I done?") and redeems himself heroically.
This 1957 film is still splendid, a story told with epic texture and great simplicity. William Holden plays a Generic American, probably a Three. He's cynical, pragmatic and opportunistic ("This is just a game, this war").
Guinness's One has a 9 wing, which brings an emotional coolness and detachment. He is impersonal, abstract and wrongheaded in the service of social principle. The difference between the 9 wing and 2 wing is almost that of temperature.
Ones with a 2 wing have warmth and, when defensive, heat.
Hayakawa, by contrast, has a 2 wing and is more easily upset. He yells and
screams while Guinness remains calm. People with this style can be volatile
- they may give hot-tempered, finger-shaking lectures or display a kind
of contained emotionalism.
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Enchanted April, Dr.
Jekyll And Mr. Hyde
Enchanted April is a warmhearted, surprising story of a month's vacation at an Italian villa organized by two suffering Victorian women from gray, sodden London. Film begins with Josie Lawrence (a nervous Six) talking acquaintance Miranda Richardson (Nine) into the scheme:
"I'm sure it must be wrong to go on being good for so long that you become miserable. I can see you've been good for years and you aren't happy. I've been doing things for other people ever since I was a little girl and I don't believe I'm any better!"
More than just needing a vacation, the two share a spiritual malaise. We see them struggling within pinched, pious lives and sterile marriages. To make the excursion affordable, they recruit two strangers (Joan Plowright and Polly Walker) to share the villa. All of the women initially agree that the arrangement is to exclude men.
After some bickering and settling in to the lazy pace of life, a spirit overtakes the visitors one by one. Each kind of melts, both into the redolent sensual environment and towards each other. What overtakes them is like agape, nonsexual, nonsentimental love. The best comes out in everyone and this is very believably evoked.
"I have this obsession with justice, you see," Six Lawrence says, "I wouldn't love him unless he loved me back exactly as much. The emptiness of it all." Now calmed-down, she's explaining why she has invited her husband to Italy after all. Played by Alfred Molina, he's a status-seeking Three who comically blunders about the villa trying to make deals before relaxing into his wife's warmth.
Nine Richardson's transformation is also sweetly credible. We watch her surrender her piety (1 wing) to a quiet sensuality. She emerges with a tender, firm sense of her own priorities, especially towards her Sevenish husband, who shows up at the villa too.
The most interesting and obvious change, however, is in Joan Plowright's upper-crust One character. She's a very good example of a social subtype, characterized by inadaptability. As a social One she moralizes at others from a position that she is convinced should be true. Plowright judges present events against what would be proper in her remembered literary circles. She grew up around famous authors and acts like their representative. "All I wish to do is sit in the shade and remember better times and better men," she says.
As the villa's atmosphere works its strange magic, Plowright begins to recognize the trap she's in: "All my dead friends don't seem worth reading tonight. They always say the same things, good things, but always the same ... they were - they are - great. But they have one terrible disadvantage, they're all dead. I'm tired of the dead. I want the living." Note the melancholy cast of these statements. As Plowright gets more in touch, we hear her emotional connection to 4 (see "Finer Distinction Notes").
Her playful, sensual connection to 7 also emerges, although not without a fight. It starts with small clues like forgetting to walk with her cane. We see little laughs trying to break through her armor but, at first, she suppresses them with judgments: "Ridiculous! This feeling that I'm going to burst out! At my age! I won't have it!" (This is "reaction formation.")
By day, Plowright moralizes about propriety and rails against "unbridled license." At night, however, she feels something more: "Why am I so restless? I haven't been this restless since I was a child. I feel something is going to happen ... I won't let it, I won't let it!"
Despite her best suppressive efforts, something does happen to Plowright - she lightens up. She starts painting (connection to 4). She also plants her cane in the ground and leaves it there. She makes jokes, gets playful and, at one point, muses: "Isn't it better to feel young somewhere than old everywhere?" The change is both delightful and vivid and at the heart of this subtle, gracious film.
The kindly villa owner (Michael Kitchen) is a Nine with a 1 wing. Polly Walker's character is the most sketchy; she seems like a Three, a Seven and a Nine at different times. What she's struggling with is a life of surfaces and she responds strongly in the end to a desire for inner substance. Her early conflicted exchanges with Plowright have a One/Seven flavor, but Walker could also be a vain Nine caught up in her connection to 3.
I know it sounds unlikely, but Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde (1932 version) makes a perfect double bill with Enchanted April. The stories have no similarities but Joan Plowright and Fredric March display identical character tensions as Ones. March's are much more extreme and amazingly clear; this is a perfect portrait of what's called a "trapdoor One."
March's virtuous, idealistic Dr. Jekyll is too good to be true, but he does make scientific speeches about the dark side of human psychology and the virtues of instinct. Maybe he suspects something about himself for he also refuses invitations to enjoy night life: "A gentleman like me daren't take advantage of London's amusements." Instead he stays in his laboratory dutifully mixing instinct potions until he gets one right. This he drinks down in the spirit of science and in a matter of moments virtuous One Dr. Jekyll is transformed into Mr. Hyde - a Seven.
The change is so total and clear that it's actually kind of stunning. Mr. Hyde is a Seven with a strong 8 wing. His first words as he looks at himself in the mirror are: "I'm free! I'm free! Free at last!"
Mr. Hyde is the kind of Seven that a One would dread turning into. He's a walking Id - pure narcissistic appetite - and he knocks down anyone in his way on the path to pleasure. Most unhealthy Sevens with 8 wings take the word "no" badly because they have little impulse control. Mr. Hyde tells a woman, for instance, "I want you! And what I want, I get!" He throws tantrums when his manic, greedy enthusiasm is opposed. He wants to hear what he wants to hear.
Hyde is very oral, as his protruding teeth suggest. He gulps at fresh rain, loves alcohol and good food. He's fairly irresponsible too: when he beats people up who won't give him what he wants, he quickly turns back into Dr. Jekyll so as to escape consequences.
When One Dr. Jekyll comes to and realizes what havoc Mr. Hyde has made, he's horrified. In fact, he immediately plunges to the low side of 4 and becomes self-pitying, tormented and melodramatic about his defect. He's full of regrets and apologies for Mr. Hyde's bad behavior and vows more strongly each time to repress his Seven streak ("I'll fight the monster! I promise to defeat it!"). The harder he suppresses Mr. Hyde, of course, the more easily the latter comes out (repression just makes these things worse). Jekyll again gets Fourish: "I'm beyond help! I'm in hell! I have no soul. I'm beyond the pale. I'm one of the living dead!" The cycle continues downward to the end.
I really recommend this film for how clearly it shows a One in tension to stress and security points. Dr. Jekyll's fiancée's father is also a One. A further wrinkle is that author Robert Louis Stevenson was a Seven in real life. Sevens have a connection to One, going the other way, so Stevenson personally would have known the conflict he was fictionalizing (see "Sevens: Seven's Connection to 1").
Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde is well made with art direction
inspired by German Impressionism, and March's dual performance is masterly.
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Superb, poignant fact-based story about the disappearance of a young American (John Shea) during a coup in a nameless South American country.
Jack Lemmon gives an excellent, restrained performance as a Calvinist One. He's Shea's intolerant religious father, forced to follow the mystery of his son's vanishing when official searches come up clueless. Lemmon arrives in the country cranky and sarcastic, spitting disapproval at daughter-in-law Sissy Spacek (a Six).
He radiates judgment and righteous anger as he refuses Spacek's assertion that the government might be responsible for Shea's disappearance. "I don't want to hear any of your antiestablishment paranoia! I've had enough of that from my son. If he had settled down where he belongs, this never would have happened in the first place!"
Spacek alternates between fighting with him and making peace. Lemmon gets so nasty with his judgments that even he realizes he's gone too far and apologizes. He's not uncaring, just dour and controlling.
This is more reaction formation. Lemmon's trying not to feel a growing anguish that his son may be dead. He's also polarized in a One/Seven conflict. Shea appears in flashback and it's clear that he's a Seven; he's fun-loving, jaunty and antiauthoritarian (counterphobic 6 wing). It's easy to imagine their estranged relationship, based on Lemmon's judgmental comments. You can tell he's been disidentifying with his son's Sevenness for years. As Lemmon and Spacek continue their search, Father begins to appreciate his son; he surrenders to their similarities and starts liking the very qualities he formerly disapproved of.
This film also shows a moral tension between Ones and Threes.
David Clennon plays the U.S. Embassy representative, a calculating fellow.
American foreign policy is the real villain of the piece and most of the
Embassy representatives are unhealthy Threes. The Ambassador says, "There
are 3000 U.S. firms doing business here; I'm pledged to protecting a way
of life and a damn good one." To this end he justifies his means. Lemmon's
final reply to the lot of them is: "I just thank God that we live in
a country where we can still put people like you in jail!"
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Another movie with similar themes is The Killing Fields, a well-staged, harrowing account of the 1970s war in Cambodia. Fact-based story is from the writings of New York Times reporter Sidney Schanberg (Sam Waterston), an excitable, self-righteous One. He has a 2 wing and is prone to loud anger and moralistic rages. The U.S. military machine is personified by creepy, cold-eyed Craig T. Nelson, a representative Three.
Critics passed on this well-made movie partly because it's a downer and has a couple of notable flaws. Harrison Ford, however, is wonderful as a misanthropic One going gradually mad. He's a brilliant inventor who is supremely nonadaptable to the tenets of civilization.
As the film begins, Ford is loudly building a case against modern life, partly, it seems, because he can't fit into it. His blistering, defensive diatribes are funny, accurate and yet crazily off. He convinces his wife and family that life in modern America is a hopeless compromise and that the only solution is to sail south to raw jungle and there create an ideal civilization.
Once there, Ford builds ingenious structures, but human realities get in the way of his realizing utopia. The film shows how loony a One can get while thinking that he makes sense. Ford is impersonal, cruel, reckless and brilliantly self-justifying. He has a strong 9 wing, and his degeneration reflects the One's connection to the low side of 7. You might also see similarities betweeen Ford's character and Alec Guinness in The Bridge On The River Kwai.
The story is told through the eyes of Ford's son (the late River Phoenix), a Nine. Helen Mirren, a fine actress, has a nothing role as Ford's Niney wife. Andre Gregory plays a preachy One minister whom Ford loathes, but they are similar characters and shadows for each other. Gregory's a real-life Seven so he's playing a connecting point. Ford is a One and Phoenix was a Nine, so this is Enneatype casting.
The Official Story
Quiet, intense film set in 1970s Argentina during
a time of horrific political repression. Norma Aleandro gives a moving,
dignified performance as a sheltered, upper-class school teacher who slowly
awakens to the idea that her adopted daughter may be the orphan of parents
murdered by the country's military regime.
She's a One and the more she learns about her daughter's background, the more she has to pursue the true story ("It's important to me as it is to any moral being"). Chief perpetrator of the official story is her husband (Hector Alterio) who arranged the adoption in the first place and still knows a secret or two. He's also a One, but a different kind - he's a self-preservation subtype which makes him an overwrought worrier.
The difference between Aleandro and Alterio that emerges is between moral courage and moral cowardice. Alterio is worried about losing all he has and tries myriad ways to dissuade Aleandro. He's a deeply unpleasant man, but something of a torn villain and oddly sympathetic by the end. His frantic will to preserve his status and material well-being has a ranting Oneish cast. But it blinds him to larger moral issues and turns him almost accidentally against his wife.
Also interesting are the scenes between Alterio and his father. The father is a liberal, freethinking One who douses his son with disapproval. You can almost see how Alterio would have formulated his conservative principles in direct reaction to the father's imposing ideals.
This deserved its Academy Award for best foreign film. It's really a good one.
Old Gringo
Gregory Peck plays a character based on the One American writer Ambrose
Bierce who vanished and presumably died in turn-of-the-century Mexico during
the Mexican Revolution. He begins the film by angrily renouncing his work
at a press conference and vowing to disappear from the public forum.
It's a corny role - the Crusty Old Disillusioned Idealist - but Peck makes the most of it. He manages to suggest a broad, open, philosophical cast of mind even as he tends towards judgment and categories. When Ones relax, they get curious and interested in things (high side of 7). Peck stays flexible and suspends judgment as he tries to comprehend perspectives of war that confound moral categories. He also grows wistful and full of feeling (connection to 4).
At other times, Peck's Oneishness asserts itself: "You're so eloquent but you say such appalling things," Jane Fonda tells him. In Mexico a wounded soldier asks if he's going to die. "Yes," Peck replies. When later criticized for not offering a dying man comfort, Peck says, "He deserved the truth at least once before he died."
Overall this is a lavish, uneven melodrama. It features
50-year-old Fonda improbably cast as a 30-year-old virgin. Jimmy Smits plays
an Eight revolutionary and the film vacillates between showing him as a
brooding, violent idealist and a sexy hunk who looks good in white muslin.
Peck's performance, though, is really worthwhile.
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One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
This adaptation is more naturalistic and less clichéd than its source novel by Ken Kesey. It is basically about a One and a Seven squaring off in a state run psychiatric hospital. The One is the head nurse who oversees a ward of severely disturbed men, including Jack Nicholson's manic Seven character. In the book she is a figure of conscious, angry, rule-bound repression. In the movie she is brisk and calm, like a One who doesn't know she is angry.
While the Big Nurse is unable to comprehend the madness that surrounds her, she does understand management. Louise Fletcher plays her as orderly, even cheerful - like Mary Poppins with steel teeth. When an inmate commits suicide she is genuinely upset and oblivious to her role in bringing it about. The anticreative, antisexual tendencies of the One style also figure in the story.
The character of Billy Bibbit is a phobic Six and Chief Broom, the taciturn Indian, is a Nine. He's played by Will Sampson.
Katharine Hepburn is a One in real life and for much of her long career she played Ones, Twos or Sevens. These are respectively her core style, her wing and her connecting point. In real life Hepburn speaks in brisk epigrammatic sentences and has been known to be perfectionistic and severe. In interviews, she is funny, self-critical and judgmental of others. More than one interviewer has claimed they were castigated for being just minutes late for their appointment.
Profilers have often described Hepburn in terms of her New England roots. The cultural cliché for people from that part of the USA describes a One. New England Yankees are thought to be moralistic, stern, hardworking and rule-bound. Part of this image is probably based on legends about the early pious Puritan settlers. The term "Banned in Boston" refers to strict community standards that have led to the occasional censoring of public performances in that New England city. The license plate for the state of New Hampshire carries the uncompromising motto, "Live Free or Die."
In some of her better roles Hepburn has played a variation on this cultural image. Two of many examples are the 1955 David Lean film Summertime and the 1974 comedy Rooster Cogburn.
Summertime features Hepburn as a lonely One spinster off on a solitary vacation to Venice, Italy. She's middle-aged, never married, and melancholy (connection to 4). She romanticizes marriage ("Two - that's the loveliest number in the world!") and doesn't want to be a burden to other traveling couples.
This vulnerable condition makes Hepburn ripe for the peeling by shopkeeper smoothie Rossano Brazzi. He acts like a romantic Four, but sounds more like a Seven, with his live-for-today credo. He's a cliché Italian male and less well-drawn than Hepburn, but his invitation to her is to abandon her rules and fling herself at the moment and him.
She gradually does, but irritably resists Brazzi several
steps of the way mainly on moral grounds. He's married but counters her
objections with "European" arguments - he and his wife have an
understanding, Americans are just prudes, etc. Anyway, she relents, goes
a little wild, dances barefoot and surrenders to the romantic atmosphere
(Lean films Venice as sensual rather than spooky). She loses her self-consciousness,
becoming more in touch with her needs (high side of 4), and also more playful
and funny (high side of 7). Part of this character change can be measured
in her treatment of a pesky street boy who adopts her. At first she is stern
with him, but she grows more softhearted and generous towards the boy as
the story moves along.
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The film is corny, stately, and yet well done. Despite its cruel prognosis for an unmarried woman, we see a One learning how to enjoy life in a way that's realistic for the style.
Rooster Cogburn pairs Hepburn with John Wayne in an amiable, chatty adventure-comedy that kids might enjoy. This was Wayne's next-to-last movie and he was getting good at broad self-parody. He was an Eight in real life and played them always in films (see The Shootist in "Eights"). In Rooster, he's got a comic 9 wing and has gone mellow and slovenly with haphazard flashes of the old aggression. These come up in response to Hepburn's lectures and hectoring (she's a Minister's daughter).
Some of their arguments are quite funny as she levels Wayne with cold-eyed, accurate criticism and he blusters and swaggers helplessly in defense. Defending his love of whiskey, Wayne says, "Life ain't easy, Sister. It don't hurt to make a fool of yourself once in a while." Hepburn replies evenly, "Yes, once in a while ... but not more often than not. Marshal Cogburn, you're in a sorry state: you're unsteady on your feet, untidy in your person and rank with the smell of sweat and spirits. Cleanliness and abstinence are next to Godliness, or had you forgotten?" Wayne loses every round, of course ("she's frightening!"), but somehow they find each other appealing.
This movie is also notable for Wayne's kind, respectful treatment of a young Indian sidekick. Maybe he was trying to make up for all his early Westerns ... This Eight/One dynamic is also visible in Class Action (see "Sixes") and Malcolm X (see "Eights").
Other good One roles for Katharine Hepburn are in The Philadelphia
Story and The Corn Is Green. She played Twos in Suddenly Last Summer, Long
Day's Journey Into Night, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and, I think, The
African Queen (Humphrey Bogart was a Nine). She plays a Seven in On Golden
Pond. An exception I found was Hepburn's role in The Lion In Winter, where
she plays a ruthless Three.
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Adaptation of John Irving's picaresque novel about a writer's life. The writer is a Four (Robin Williams, giving the role a Sevenish cast) and his One mother figures prominently in the story.
Glenn Close plays the mother and she's a lot like the Big Nurse (One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest), only nicer. Her big beef is with men; she's shown to be on a lifelong crusade against the lustful nature of the opposite sex. Here's how she explains to her young son why he has no father: "I always wanted a child but you need a man. You know what men are like; full of lust. (Your father) was dying. I wanted a child. It seemed like a good arrangement. He wouldn't be hanging around with legal rights to my body." Elsewhere she goes on about another man: "He's full of lust. I can smell it a mile away." When someone replies, "Attraction is just natural," Close says, "Diseases are natural too; it doesn't mean we have to give in to them."
She starts a suffrage-like movement to minister to the needs of abused women. Close has a 2 wing and is another social subtype.
The movie is overlong, but well-constructed. It makes a
consistent and warped equation between feminism and man-hating. John Lithgow
is funny as an ex-football player who's had a sex change operation. He's
a Seven though at first he seems like a Two.
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