This film features a well-detailed relationship between a Two and a One so it's a nice transition. Kiss Of The Spider Woman is about what happens when a gay window dresser (William Hurt) and a straight Marxist militant (Raul Julia) are thrown together in a South American jail. Story traces the evolution of their friendship from initial hostility to acceptance to mutual caring. Both learn from the other, Julia coming to admire Hurt's capacity for personal love while Hurt wakes to respect for Julia's commitment to social reform.
Hurt's character is effeminate, wears makeup and is highly identified with his mother. He passes prison time by narrating a shallow, glamorous love story that he keeps adding romantic chapters to. Julia listens, half carried away, but inevitably attacks Hurt for his triviality. Julia is serious about his politics - "What life offers me is a struggle. The most important thing is a cause." Hurt is capable of deceit (3 wing) but turns out able to sacrifice for a cause especially as it relates to people he cares for. The abstract Julia gradually relents his rigidities and begins to appreciate Hurt's ethos of personal love.
In an indirect way, the characters bring out each other's latent wing. Responding to Hurt, the impersonal, big-pictured Julia moves from his abstract 9 wing to his more caring, personal 2 wing. Hurt, in turn, moves from the vain, trivializing side of his 3 wing to an ethical, idealistic course of action consistent with his 1 wing.
Film is very good. Hurt won an Oscar for a brave performance. It's brave not because he's gay, but because the role steers so close to caricature yet Hurt still communicates the character's humanity. His exaggerated, dramatic mannerisms are essentially those of a drag queen. Yet, underneath, he perfectly captures a Two with a 3 wing.
Shirley MacLaine plays an overbearing Two mother to Meryl Streep's Six daughter. They are both film actresses, MacLaine a faded one while Streep is on a troubled drug-addicted rise.
As the story begins, Mother is highly competitive and intrusive towards Daughter. She has their identities thoroughly confused, wishes Streep would have the career that she failed to, and has unwelcome opinions about every aspect of her daughter's life.
Shirley MacLaine played a similar role in Terms Of Endearment. This time her character's motives are blatantly prideful - she inflates her own importance in her daughter's life to brighten up her own fading alcoholic star. She's unconsciously self-centered and rationalizes her motives away. She flirts with Streep's dates and talks over her with self-glorifying monologues. The more she denies her alcoholism, the more she nags her daughter about the latter's drug problems.
Progress comes late in the film after MacLaine has a car accident while driving drunk. She's shaken open. In the hospital, she begins to own up to her jealousy towards Streep and sees how tangled her motives have been. As this gets sorted out her genuine caring for her daughter begins to come through.
Streep's grandmother also plays a role in the emotional unfolding. She is a bossy, intrusive, bellicose Eight. MacLaine's character is suddenly shocked to recognize the similarity in their mothering styles. She is able to see and hear herself - something Twos can have trouble doing.
Meryl Streep is quite good in this comedy-drama. "I can see my life happening all around me but I can't feel it." "I know my mother loves me but I can't believe it." These statements of Sixish doubt reflect Streep's ambivalent turmoil throughout the film. She's afraid of her own power and addicted to drugs as a dependent reaction to anxiety. She is passive/aggressive, nervous, edgy and sarcastic.
Her mother both spoils and undercuts her, which is one way to create a Six. Someone who is pampered and hamstrung by turns is likely to have questions about their own strengths. MacLaine's prideful, blind domination is both resented and appreciated by Streep's character. A Six may rebel against authority but then depend upon the same authority for a sense of security and identity.
By the film's end, Streep starts to claim some of her own
power. Streep has a 7 wing. Dennis Quaid shows up as a Seven and Gene Hackman
plays a gruff but kind Eight.
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REAL NICE TWOS
Most movie portrayals of Twos are mixed to negative so I wanted to highlight some characters from different films that show off the likable sides of the style. Some of these roles are larger than others but each is plenty distinct.
In The Spirit
is a daffy New Age comedy-mystery with Marlo Thomas and Elaine May fleeing
a murderer and learning to live by their underused wits. Thomas is a lovable,
hapless interior designer who talks daily to her dead husband and has esoteric
explanations for the most minor of events. She's scattered and fuzzy about
her boundaries - "Let me help you!" is her mantra. Some of her
more Twoish comments include:
"I try to see my sister-in-law once a week - she needs me, she smokes!"
"I don't know you and maybe I have no right to say this but you've got to stop eating meat."
"I've never gotten tired of or left anyone in my life! They've always had to leave me!"
Thomas sparkles in this role, and as the plot unfurls the
character remains lovable but also grows more grounded and sensible. Elaine
May plays sort of an angry Nine, basically receptive but with flashes of
8 and 1. She's exasperated by Thomas but starts to like her. She takes on
a little of Thomas's mystical world view just as Thomas becomes more practical
and humble.
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Men Don't Leave
features Jessica Lange in a sweet, small story about a Nine widow coping
with single motherhood after her husband's sudden death. She has to move
to a city to find work, gets involved with a musician and winds up working
for Kathy Bates, an Eight. Her son (Chris O'Donnell) begins dating a slightly
older neighbor, Joan Cusack, and she's the Two.
"I'm pretty good at helping people," Cusack likes to say in her odd, sweetly overbearing way. She's a little batty, off-center and regularly runs over O'Donnell ("Can we do something about your shirt? It's really not that flattering on you").
Cusack and Lange clash at first, but when Nine Lange suffers some setbacks, she gives up on life and goes to bed for a week. Cusack takes it upon herself to drag Lange out of bed and force her back into the world. Lange ultimately appreciates this intrusive gesture and it's obvious that Cusack is a sweetie.
Kathy Bates is very vividly Eightish. She is bossy, patronizing,
dismissive, domineering, obnoxious and yet ultimately sympathetic. Blinded
by narcissism, she has little idea of the effect of her communication style
and yet underneath she's softhearted. The musician, by the way, is a Nine
and he's played with dry, sleepy understatement by Arliss Howard.
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Punchline casts Tom Hanks and Sally Field as neophyte nightclub comics fishing for their big breaks. They work out of a comedy club managed by Romeo (Mark Rydell), a Two. While this film doesn't quite come together, it has several excellent elements.
Field is a Six housewife and her side of the movie is about her conflict between pursuing comedy and being loyal to her family. Loyalty is a strong pull, but so is ambition. How she resolves the conflict is also very Sixish. John Goodman plays her husband with his usual Nine (8 wing) aura.
Tom Hanks gives a wrenching, sometimes brilliant performance as a bitter, competitive Six who has flunked out of medical school and draws humor from his own considerable pain. He also falls for the unavailable Field.
Rydell, the Two, is supportive and encouraging and tries to be equally helpful to his entire stable of comics. What's nice about the character is his honesty; part of what he offers is level criticism in addition to encouragement. He probably has a 1 wing. It's not what he gives, it's the way he gives it. Romeo's rooting for everyone and always happy when they succeed.
Call this film the "War of the Twos." Zelly And Me focuses on an orphaned little girl (Alexandra Johnes) sent to live with her grandmother (Glynis Johns) and watched over by governess Isabella Rossellini. Johns is a confused, somewhat mean Two, and Rossellini embodies the well-intentioned, loving high side of the style. In a way, they represent two aspects of the same character.
Rossellini has the capacity to love selflessly - "Whatever happens," she tells the child, "I am always with you and you are with me." She is merged with the child and is tender and straightforward in her concern.
Johns is a lot more confused about her motives. She thinks she is loving but she's actually demanding, punitive and jealous (low side of 4). At one point she browbeats the child:
"Say that you love me more than Mademoiselle (Rossellini)!"
The child refuses: "No, I love Mademoiselle."
To which Johns replies, "You're a bad girl. I take you into my house. I clothe you. I teach you manners. Don't you understand? You're all I have in the world!"
This is called "giving to get," and it's the opposite of what Rossellini does with the girl. Johns goes to the nasty low side of 8 and the melancholy low side of 4.
The little girl is something of a budding Four. She lives
in her creative imagination and is wistful for another life. She also internalizes
Rossellini, "introjects" her. This means carrying a beloved person
around inside of you and it's a specific habit of Fours (see "Fours").
She-Devil, Sophie's Choice
Meryl Streep double bill with the actress playing
Twos in both films - one a comedy, the other a tragic-toned drama.
She-Devil is a brisk, feminist comedy about Roseanne (probable Nine, 8 wing) losing her flaky husband (Ed Begley Jr.) to rich, beautiful romance novelist Streep. Roseanne spends the film slowly ruining their lives while rebuilding hers.
This film didn't do well because word got out that comedienne Roseanne had the straight role and Streep was supposed to be funny. Actually she's really funny, playing a spoiled princess who lives in a tasteless, kitschy palace and can't stand too much reality. She has a strong 3 wing and lives very much within her romantic images. She speaks in a high, breathless voice, has exaggerated, melodramatic reactions and turns angrily Eightish when facts frustrate her glamorous expectations. This is a good comic portrayal of a Two and the rest of the film is reasonably fun. Linda Hunt has a small role as a friend of Roseanne's. She has the aura and manner of a Five with a 4 wing.
Sophie's Choice takes place in post-World War II America and focuses on Sophie, a Polish concentration camp survivor. Character study essays Sophie's relationship to a manic-depressive Seven (Kevin Kline) and writer/narrator Stingo (Peter MacNicol). Latter is a sort of Nine-by-default in that he plays the audience, but the character is not well developed. We witness events through his eyes and he is a reporter of stronger personalities than his own.
Streep's Sophie accents the codependent quality Twos can have ("Sophie loved to tell how Nathan had saved her life"). She's full of appreciation for Kline: "Thank you for making me to bloom like a rose." She also tends to romanticize her parents: "My father was a civilized man living in an uncivilized world," or, "No child ever had a more wonderful father and mother."
Sophie is exceedingly Fourish partly because it's a connecting point for a Two and partly because she's haunted by her concentration camp experiences. The story contains flashbacks so lengthy that it's really like two films. The one about the concentration camp is powerful and the other a bit draggy. Combined they are quite affecting.
The abusive quality of the Sophie/Nathan relationship is clear. She's hysterical and he's manic and they have lots of highs and lows. Still, Sophie is among the nicest of our movie Twos; you get the sense of a well-intentioned person who was overwhelmed and broken by ghastly events.
Nathan is described by Stingo as "utterly, fatally glamorous," and possessing a "generous mind." Kline vacillates between cheery Seven expansiveness and angry paranoia. This is partly what manic-depression is like and partly the behavior of a Seven with a 6 wing.
Star Trek V - The Final
Frontier
The Star Trek series is generally enjoyable for
its ensemble acting and busy space operatics. For those unfamiliar with
the series, this installment is as good as most. Star Trek IV- The Voyage
Home is far and away the best of the bunch.
Star Trek V features that movie rarity, a noneffeminate male Two. A renegade Vulcan kidnaps the Starship Enterprise and leads the Star Trek crew past the Great Barrier in search of a planet believed to be inhabited by God. God turns out not to be who He seems and even has an Enneagram style, that of an unhealthy Eight. Based on the tenor of his comments, most Enneagram teachers agree that the historical Jesus was probably a Two. Sybok, the Vulcan, is an explicit Christ figure but without the self-transcendent quality. This is Jesus with an ego: Sybok is prideful, self-justifying, flamboyant and deluded about the loving purity of his motives. Mr. Spock describes him as "a passionate Vulcan who believes that the key to self- knowledge is emotion."
Actor Laurence Luckinbill is wisely allowed to steal the movie; he plays Sybok with the charisma and messianic zeal of a cult leader. You might notice the wet-eyed, earnest way he focuses in on people. His tone of voice is seductive but not sexual, inviting intimacy and offering soothing help. Sort of a siren song of codependency.
One of the Vulcan's tactics is to merge with another person and to draw them into a kind of therapeutic ritual. He sets it up by saying, "Your pain runs deep. Let us explore it together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. Share your pain with me and gain strength!" The result of this "sharing" is a melted-down, vulnerable convert who believes that Sybok is a savior and will follow him anywhere. (This is how cult leaders do it, folks.)
Elsewhere Sybok says, "I don't control minds - I free them!" and charges on with naïve certainty about the goodness of his mission. This confusion about motive and blindness to self-interest can be a problem for Twos. Far from being altruistic, Sybok seems lonely, longs for approval and is searching for a symbolic father in his quest to find God (connection to 4). He tells Captain Kirk, "I so much want your respect." After Kirk replies that Sybok is insane, the latter looks genuinely wounded.
When things go rather badly in the meeting with God, Sybok realizes his blindness, and repents his pride ("This is my arrogance, my vanity!"). He makes an authentic sacrifice that reflects a jump from the low to the high side of Two.
For Star Trek fans, Captain Kirk is a Three with a 4 wing. He's competitive and performance-oriented, yet thoughtful and humanistic. I've read and seen interviews with actor William Shatner and he too is a Three with a 4 wing, so this would be Enneatype casting. * Dr. McCoy is a One with a 2 wing. He's cranky, rigid and judgmental. Much humor is mined from his principled eruptions.
The other regular characters are underwritten. Chekov might be a Six. Scotty, the Chief Engineer, is likely an extroverted Nine with an 8 wing. He plays the kind of sidekick role usually reserved for movie Nines, but he's grumpy and aggressive at times.
In Enneagram books, Mr. Spock has been pegged as both a One (9 wing) and a Five. In the old (and truly awful) TV show, Spock was definitely a One. He was rigid, principled and logical - a kind of preachy know-it-all.
In the subsequent movies, actor Leonard Nimoy drolly underplays the character and it's written differently. The movie emphasis is on Spock's emotional reserve and uninfluenceable quality ("I am not predisposed to reveal things of a personal nature"). He still values logical courses of action but not necessarily the right course of action. He seems more like a Five in the films, but confusion is possible because a One with a 9 wing can be very impersonal and withdrawn like a Five. What cinched it for me was seeing actor Nimoy interviewed at length; he's a real-life One and based Spock on his own character.
If you have seen the Star Trek spinoff, Star Trek - The Next Generation, Spock's rough equivalent is an android named Data. This character is a Five (6 wing), a living computer who is forever trying to find human feeling within himself (latent 4 wing). Captain Picard is an inventive, flexible One. He sorts for multiple options (high side of 7), has a melancholy streak (connection to 4), but Picard's basic commitment is to ideals. His second in command, Commander Riker, is a Three with a 4 wing just like Captain Kirk.
The Klingon Worf is a One with a 9 wing. He is sharp-tempered
but has the abstract, removed quality of a Nine. Counselor Deanna Troi,
the ship's psychotherapist, is a passive, receptive, empathic Nine. She
has the Good Girl/Model Child aura that Nines with 1 wings often display.
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* Just about a week after I first published this review, excerpts from Shatner's reminiscences about Star Trek were published. Here is what he says about the Captain Kirk role and his own personality:
"I always played Kirk fairly close to home. Kirk's wisdom, courage and heroic capacities were all fictional, but at his core he was, for the most part, me. I wasn't so much acting as I was reacting. We were basically one and the same although Jim was about perfect and I, of course, am perfect."
STUPID CREEPY THRILLERS (SCTs)
Unhealthy Twos can be maliciously selfish, all the while believing they are acting in the name of love. A number of suspense movies have based their plots on this tendency. An unhealthy Two character will fasten their "love" obsessively on the main character and plague them dangerously, invading the boundaries of the other's life, until the Two has to be stopped with force. The Twos show lots of hostility (low side of 8) and usually some melancholy yearning (low side of 4).
Fatal Attraction
is a good example of the genre. Clearly made by men, this film put the women's
movement back a few years with its portrayal of career woman as nutso succubus.
On another level, though, Glenn Close is playing a very accurate Two. Almost
immediately after bedding down with married man Michael Douglas, she starts
invading his life at every turn.
"I'm not going to be ignored!" she screams histrionically. Her character's initial lack of definition is the flip side of her later hostile self-inflation. She does it all for pride and to stave off a yawning emptiness. This is a good portrait of what's called a borderline personality - an unhealthy Two with big boundary problems.
Douglas is playing a Niney character but it's not really
clear. Film is slick and skillful but also hollow as a drain pipe. It is
almost a remake of 1971's Play Misty For Me. Jessica Walter played the crazy
Two (scarier than Glenn Close) and Clint Eastwood had the ambivalent Nine
role.
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Misery is more intelligent than Fatal Attraction and Kathy Bates won an Academy Award for her role as the "Number One Fan" of writer James Caan. Latter has a horrible car accident in the middle of winter and is rescued by Bates and kept in her mountain home.
"I'm your Number One Fan. You're going to be just fine," she tells him. "You've got a lot of recovering to do and I consider it an honor that you will be doing it in my home."
"We're put on this earth to help people, Paul, as I'm trying to help you. Help me to help you, Paul."
He does need help - his legs are broken - and it's only gradually that he recognizes that the flattering, helpful Bates is actually murderously hostile.
This highly exaggerated character embodies the split Twos can have between ostensible giving and hidden selfishness. The more she waits on him, the more demanding she grows, even to the point of burning his latest manuscript and making him rewrite it. She's not seductive like Glenn Close was; Bates's character would be more a self-preservation subtype who expects special treatment in return for all she gives.
Bates masks her hostility with a disassociated good girl role. She has a warped 1 wing, and plays at an image of goodness. She's not sexually seductive, but instead acts like a prepubescent child. She talks in baby talk, objects to swearing and says things to Caan like: "Forgive me for making you feel all oogie." As her hostility more openly emerges she starts to swear. She later breaks Caan's foot with a hammer as she says, "God, I love you."
This is a high grade SCT that builds its suspense in small
increments. Caan has a Niney, passive-reactor role but he also seems a little
like a Four. Richard Farnsworth, who always plays Nines, is a sheriff looking
for Caan. Frances Sternhagen, who always plays Ones, is Farnsworth's scrappy
wife.
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Unlawful Entry mixes up Fatal Attraction's ingredients and pours them into a different pie pan. This time the Two is a male cop (Ray Liotta) who fastens his obsession onto a scared Six (Madeleine Stowe), who's married to Eight architect played by Kurt Russell. They are a troubled yuppie couple, victims of a burglary, who first take comfort in the overly solicitous Liotta.
When hotheaded Russell sees through Liotta's manipulations, the cop begins to invade the couple's life and uses the force of law against them. Russell is framed for a crime and jailed so that Liotta can move in on Stowe.
The story gets really stupid, but since it's character-driven, there are some worthwhile Enneagram dynamics. Russell is a decisive Eight and scaredy-cat Six Stowe lets him take care of her. Under stress, however, Russell gets loud and authoritarian and Stowe goes defiant. She also yo-yos in her loyalties, a weakness that the seductive Liotta plays upon. He offers her police protection, especially appealing to a scared Six.
Liotta acts little-boyish with Stowe, pretending to be shy and speaking in a baby voice. This is part of the seduction: Twos will sometimes make themselves seem childlike to ingratiate and appear nonthreatening. Later their voice tones can change ... Liotta, like all the villain Twos, is destructively Eightish.
This is the film that unconsciously asks the question: "What if you were paid $30 million a year to blindly act out your Enneagram style?" This documentary about singer Madonna follows her on tour and shows us a thoroughly flaming Two. The prideful, interpersonal tendencies of the style are evident in most everything Madonna says and does.
Within the intensity of show touring it's quickly clear that the singer has structured her world so that it reflects entirely back on her. She has a strong need for positive feedback from others and assigns herself the role of mother hen to her crew and group of dancers. Of the latter she says: "By the time we left Japan I found myself growing really attached to the dancers and I started feeling like a mother to them. When we finally got to America I got the chance to meet the mothers of all the children I had temporarily claimed as my own."
As a mother, Madonna is pretty confused in her motives. Most of her statements reflect the sincere desire to give fused with patronizing self-interest. Here's how she talks about the dancers:
"They're innocents - they haven't been anywhere - this tour was the opportunity of their lives. They've suffered a great deal, whether with their families or being poor or whatever, and I wanted to give them the thrill of their lives. I wanted to impress them. I wanted to love them."
She reflects a little later on her own motivations, but even her insights are fraught with pride:
"I think I've unconsciously chosen people who are emotionally crippled in some way or need mothering in some way because I think it comes very naturally to me. It fulfills a need in me ... to be mothered."
Mixed-up Twos mother by metaphor. That is, they give to someone else in a confused attempt to give to themselves. This is what Madonna's talking about, and she demonstrates it constantly. "Let Momma get her makeup done," she tells one hovering adult dancer. When he leaves, she says, "Oh God, I just love having children to watch over." Later she holds a prayer before a show that she's anxious about and says: "All my little babies are feeling fragile and I just want you to know that I love you all and I appreciate everything that you are doing for me and I'm here if you need me."
Madonna has a strong 3 wing which brings ambition and social effectiveness as well as an extra dose of vanity. Her 1 wing is smaller; it comes out in her concern about AIDS victims and also in her reaction to censorship. Madonna's father asks her if she could tone down the sexual content of her show and she replies, "No, because that would be compromising my artistic integrity!" She's also histrionic on the subject of being an artist, a trait related to the low side of 4. When it rains in Japan, she says, "I think the only thing that kept me from slashing my wrists was the thought of coming back to America and doing the show as it should be done." Some of Madonna's slow-paced songs are very melancholy, a Two connected to her own Fourish emotions. Offstage she also shows flashes of 8.
There are three subtype themes within the Two style and Madonna demonstrates a mash of them all. Intimate Twos act seductive as a means of eliciting sexual attraction and therefore approval. A seductive Two may have little actual interest in following through on an attraction and in Madonna's case, her sexuality is channelled into her public persona. She wants to attract you to know that she's worthwhile and she switches on the persona almost constantly. This subtype can also get aggressive to get attention or break through to deeper relationship.
The main subtype theme she has is ambition. Twos, especially with a 3 wing, can affiliate with powerful people or will have their own ambitions as they lead to being seen and accepted (Madonna's tour is called "Blonde Ambition"). Madonna's deliberately provocative style is also consistent with this subtype. She doesn't care if you like her as long as you notice her.
A third subtype theme for Twos takes a "Me First"
attitude and acts out of a sense of haughty entitlement. Madonna would feel
justified acting like a prima donna considering how much she believes she
gives to others.
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