An Angel At My Table
"Too shy to mix, my only romance was in poetry and literature." This exquisite biography of New Zealand writer Janet Frame does a fine job of dramatizing the interior life of a socially paralyzed Five. Partly this is done through voice-over - the film is based on Frame's autobiography - but mostly credit goes to lead actress Kerry Fox for the wonderful way she writes shyness and confusion all over Janet's face. The film is episodic and lifelike rather than eventful, even when we are shown incidents like Frame's hospitalization for schizophrenia.

The hospital episode is noteworthy because the diagnosis is totally wrong. Janet isn't schizophrenic - she's defenseless. She's an eccentric, withdrawn loner with poor social skills and overwhelming self-consciousness. During minor social encounters she goes stunned like a doe in headlights. As often as practical, she retreats from the world and hides in her books and writing. She refuses offers of food from others but then eats ravenously when alone (connection to 7). These bursts of secret appetite are related to other odd habits like hoarding and hiding bits of paper and trying not to smile because her teeth have gone bad.

We see a little of how she got that way. She grew up poor in a small, crowded home, straining for space. Frame was overshadowed by an older sister and frightened by her One father's angry outbursts. Life was sometimes rife with nasty surprise, and Janet is shown retreating into her imagination and books. Most Fives develop defenses against social exposure, unpredictability or loss of privacy. As an adult, Frame fears all three.

"I longed to be so full of secrets so that a man could discover them. But for so long I'd blocked all exits and entrances so that I felt as sexless as a block of wood." Nevertheless, Frame travels to Spain, has love affairs and gradually comes out of her shell. You get the impression that she will never marry but, by film's end, she is much more fully in the world and, through her writing, a willing contributor. She's a self-preservation subtype who defends herself by withdrawing.

A lovely, delicate, absorbing movie. The sister Isabel is an Eight.
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Another Woman
Woody Allen movie about a stingy Five college professor (Gena Rowlands) who has retreated to a rented apartment to finish writing a book. She finds herself next door to a psychiatrist's office, and sound carries well through the walls. Rowlands gets voyeuristically distracted from her writing by the confessions of the doctor's patients, especially depressed, feelingful Mia Farrow. What Rowlands hears sets her on an internal quest to resolve the pain of her marriage to unfaithful, astringent Ian Holm (also Fiveish) and to examine the many ways she is haunted by regret.

If this sounds depressive and dry, it is. This is a movie about a lack of passion that itself lacks passion. The static, speechy screenplay forces the characters to act mannered and speak in the formal cadences of diplomats. The photography is darkly somber and reinforces a barren mood.

Nevertheless, Another Woman is quite informative about Fives. Most of the film's other characters are on to Rowland's defenses and make comments like, "She's led a cold, cerebral life and has alienated everyone around her," or "She's a little judgmental. She stands above people and observes them." Rowlands is another self-preservation subtype characterized by withdrawal. We see her refusing most social encounters and reading Rilke to disassociate after one upsetting confrontation. She also has a 4 wing, observable in her abstracted, off-center thinking and her somewhat melancholy yearning for a long-lost affair with decent, vital Gene Hackman.

Throughout the film she flashes back to scenes with him and inevitably realizes she was in love. The slowness of this dawning actually mirrors how disassociated Fives only gradually find their way into their feelings, usually through a lot of rumination.

The other realm Rowlands explores in flashback is her childhood family. John Houseman plays her elderly father, a stern, imperious One who makes a touching speech about his failures in a dream Rowlands has. Houseman was a real-life One and always played them. In another dream Rowlands remembers her father as a younger man, this time played by David Ogden Stiers. The character is still a One and Stiers always plays Ones too, most notably on the TV show MASH.
Betty Buckley and Sandy Dennis both appear as Twos.
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Awakenings
Robin Williams stars as a meek Five in a rather good adaptation of a true story by neurologist Oliver Sacks. The year is 1969 and Williams/Sacks is hired at a state hospital to supervise a ward of apparently catatonic patients. They are the victims of a flu-like epidemic and Williams is hired to supervise the ward in which they are housed. The hitch is that Williams has no clinical experience - he's devoted the last ten years to research. In his job interview he cites an attempt to extract a chemical substance from the bodies of tons of earthworms. When the frowning hospital interviewer says, "But that can't be done," Williams beams proudly, "I know. We proved it!"

He's shown as a shy, absentminded professor throughout the film. His apartment is stacked with books, he turns down social invitations to stay at home alone with his piano. When he does venture out, he enjoys going to atriums. The two things that motivate him are the intellectual adventure of research and a basic kindheartedness that Fives sometimes have.

In his work, these qualities prompt him to question whether the catatonics - written off as incurable by the hospital staff - could be somehow helped. He experiments, follows his hunches and eventually finds a drug that works to awaken the patients, at least temporarily. The fallout from this event forms a story that could have been just sugary but instead comes by its sentiment honestly.

The disease, by the way, is a good metaphor for Nineyness. Robert De Niro, a sometimes dull actor, is splendid here as Williams's first test case. His character seems like a Nine but it's hard to tell because he is largely defined by the illness, as are the other inmates. Everyone's asleep. One nurse describes a patient as unable to walk alone: "But he'll walk with me. It's like he borrows my will." A good description of the unhealthy side of Nine.

John Heard plays Williams's administrative nemesis, a One. Julie Kavner is a Nine nurse and De Niro's mother is a Two. Williams is a real-life Seven so he's playing his connecting point.
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Goodbye, Mr Chips (1969)
Peter O'Toole is the title character, a shy Five schoolmaster, and the film follows his life over a twenty year period. It's mainly a love story as he meets and marries Petula Clark, but the movie also shows a Five gradually growing into power.

As the story begins O'Toole is alone, lost in his work, disliked by his students, shy, haunted and elsewhere. He's so constricted socially that he can barely talk. At parties he goes stilted, formal and distant. He hides behind knowledge, uses academic terminology and priggishly corrects people's speech ("How you could ever imagine that a word like 'suitability' could prevail over a word like 'love,' I'll never know"). He's rather sweet in a hapless way; painfully earnest, honorable, gentle, flustered by a kiss on the cheek.

As the episodic story progresses nothing really happens. O'Toole marries, fights a few battles, gets promoted and grows. He becomes firm, committed, and socially comfortable. He's still a little stingy and grouses at the extravagance of his wife's anniversary presents to him. At film's end, though, he has stepped into his own social power in a way that is quite consistent with the Five "character arc." He's grown decisive and takes courageous stands in the world.

The movie is certainly worthwhile for learning about how Fives grow. I have two cautions about it: 1) It is sometimes, er, ... a musical ... and the songs are not so good; 2) The sex roles are very dated and figure awkwardly in the story. Otherwise, O'Toole is excellent and the film is warmhearted. It may be a little hard to find on video.

Petula Clark plays either a Nine or a Two, but it's hard to tell. Sian Phillips plays Clark's friend Ursula, a Seven with an 8 wing. O'Toole is a real-life Seven so he's also playing his connecting point.
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Monsieur Hire
"People don't like me but then I don't like people either. I like silence. I don't talk much." That's precise, dismissive Monsieur Hire talking. As played by Michel Blanc, he's the perfect embodiment of a Five expressing the low side of 8. He's nasty, punitive, standoffish - like Scrooge without the money. He erupts into yelling when threatened and is openly misogynistic. Part of the skill of the (excellent) film is to make us care for someone so willfully perverse and disagreeable. By film's end, Hire transcends his Fiveishness in quite a credible way and becomes almost heroic.

This seems unlikely at first. Monsieur Hire is fairly disliked by nearly everyone in the town where he has his tailor shop. He's stingy, aloof and displays an air of senseless superiority. He's also fastidious and almost unnaturally clean. Even when bowling, he rolls the ball with an arrogant precision.

He also has a past - a criminal record of indecent exposure that is related to the voyeurism that he still practices. At night, when alone, he dims the lights, plays one piece of music and spies on a beautiful neighbor (Sandrine Bonnaire). One day, he passes her on the street, smells her perfume and buys a matching bottle to sniff that evening at his window.

This practice becomes a perfect metaphor for Fiveish hoarding. There is no emotional risk in observing from afar and Hire can have the same experience each night, over and over, alone.

Within the story though, this kink makes him the prime suspect in the murder of a local young woman. A police detective is sure Hire did it and tracks him doggedly. Meanwhile, Bonnaire cottons on to being observed and turns tables on Hire. She seeks him out and wants detailed descriptions of his sexual fantasies about her. She's involved in something criminal and has several motives for courting Hire, but their relationship nonetheless develops a weird intimacy. Hire actually falls in love with her and his hoarding gives way to something like true generosity (connection to 7). Through the perversity comes real feeling and an accurate perception of who she is. In the end he gambles that the strength of Bonnaire's feeling for him will outweigh her other motives. Everyone's actual connection to the murder is also revealed.

Bonnaire seems at first a Three and then a Six with a Three streak. Her Enneagram style was finally unclear, although the motive for her actions is loyalty. The detective after Hire is definitely a Four. He's preoccupied by the youth and beauty of the murdered girl and is haunted by his melancholy fantasies about her.
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Only The Lonely
The script for this tame comedy-drama feels like a first draft. The thin story - lonely middle-aged nice-guy leaves home and gets married - is bulked up with a lot of fake ethnic goo. It is a virtual remake of the 1950s movie Marty, which featured identical characters who were Italian; this time they're Irish.

The types are good, though. The late John Candy plays the nice-guy Nine (1 wing). He's the guilty, peacemaking son of Maureen O'Hara, a domineering Two. She's meanhis drives him to eavesdrop on a phone, reflecting both a 1 wing and the low side of 8. Candy initially placates her bullying but into his life comes Five Ally Sheedy, a solitary mortician.

The new relationship starts out unpromisingly as the shy Sheedy speaks just ten words on their first date. The baffled Candy starts to excuse himself when Sheedy blurts:

"I had a wonderful time tonight."

"You did?" asks Candy, amazed.

"I have this thing ... this introverted kind of thing."

"That just means you're shy."

"No, it's worse than shy ... I guess it doesn't help spending eight hours a day with people who don't talk back to you. I'm trying to get past it."

With this assurance, things continue well until the couple's first meeting with Candy's mother. The jealous, hostile O'Hara tries to run over Sheedy while Candy minimizes and sues for peace. Sheedy stands up to O'Hara but then later gets angry at Candy for not protecting her. She promptly breaks off the relationship.

This might seem like a manufactured crisis for the film's undernourished plot, but Sheedy's overreaction is also very Fiveish. She makes too strong a boundary to make up for having been vulnerable. This happens more than once before the film is over.

Nice-guy Candy finally has to take a stand ("Getting married is the only time in my life where I've made a decision without thinking of my family first"). O'Hara grows a little, lets Candy go, has an insight or two ("I'm not a lovable person but I can take care of myself"). It's a somewhat daring performance; O'Hara's character is, among other things, an open racist. She gives the film a little life and Sheedy's Five character is worth a look. Latter plays a similar character in The Breakfast Club.
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SCHIZOIDS
Here are two unrelated movies with identical character tensions related to Fives:

The Nutty Professor - Remember those Jerry Lewis movies where he bounced off walls and screeched like a gibbon? This isn't one of them. The Nutty Professor is Lewis's restrained, kind of cute version of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde. Lewis plays the Dr. Jekyll role as a nerdy, socially hamstrung Five (6 wing). He's a disorganized college professor who invents a potion that brings out what's latent in human nature. What's latent in him is his connecting point; when Professor Lewis drinks the brew he instantly turns from a Five into an Eight.

Latter character is obnoxious, overconfident and socially pushy. He's like a lounge lizard but brazen and loud. Lewis flips back and forth between the two styles, confusing and irritating the movie's other characters. Stella Stevens is good as a Oneish woman who fights with the Eight Lewis. Young kids would like this movie a lot.
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Batman Returns is a sequel to the megahit Batman in which Jack Nicholson played a villainous Seven. This time out, Batman (Michael Keaton) is battling two foes, The Penguin and Catwoman, for the control of dank, surreal Gotham City.

Like Robin Williams and Peter O'Toole, Michael Keaton is a real-life Seven playing a Five. His Bruce Wayne is a rich recluse who is shy, absentminded, etc. He has a big mansion and a giant bat cave that is well stocked with computers. When crime strikes he jumps into his bat suit and becomes an avenging Eight. This back and forth dynamic is present throughout this movie as well.

The bizarre Penguin (Danny DeVito) is a Four. He's deformed, was abandoned at birth, and is on a melancholy quest to rejoin the world and find respectability. He's a social subtype, driven by shame. He tells Batman: "When it all comes down to it you're just jealous because I'm a genuine freak and you have to wear a mask."

DeVito's character has strong shades of The Phantom of the Opera. He has a Monster Complex and longs for the world's respect. DeVito overacts and his sequences go on too long, but the style is quite plain.

Michelle Pfeiffer steals the movie as the wild Catwoman. She too is schizoid, but her poles are between phobic and counterphobic Six (5 wing). By day she is fumbling, self-effacing and ambivalent. "How can you be so mean to someone so meaningless?" she asks her boss, Christopher Walken, an evil corporate Three. She's loyal to his abusive authority but turns on him (and men in general) when she becomes the rebellious counterphobic Catwoman.

Pfeiffer brings a lot of energy to the role(s) and she milks the contradictory nature of Sixes for a lot of humor. Catwoman is plainly drawn to Batman, but she can't let herself have him. She's just as self-defeating as her daytime alter ego, but in a more flamboyant way. Both sides of her have big authority problems, but as Catwoman she attacks what she's afraid of even when it means losing what she truly wants.

Michael Gough plays Batman's butler/confidant, and he's a One. The movie's director, Tim Burton, is also a Five (4 wing).
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sex, lies and videotape
This is a great movie for students of the Enneagram. It is solely about the neurotic skews of a Nine, a Three, an Eight and a Five. Watching this film is a lot like the experience of doing therapy - the focus is close and tight on what's incongruent and accidentally revealing about everyone's behavior.

The Five, played by James Spader, is an aloof voyeur with a probing-yet-distant intensity. He has a hobby of videotaping women whom he has convinced to talk about their sexual histories. Socially, he maintains the withdrawn noncommittal role of interviewer. Alone, he replays the tapes, inhabiting a kind of secret garden of sexual fantasy in the emotional safety of solitude.

As events unfold, it becomes obvious that Spader's videotapes are a symbolic, abstract Fiveish attempt to understand why his last relationship went wrong years earlier. His defenses start to crumble when one of the other characters turns the video camera on him and says, "You've had an effect on my life, whether you like it or not." Spader confesses that he had spent years constructing his life so that he would have no effect on anyone. At the end, he acknowledges the failure of his defenses and starts to grow. He destroys the videotapes and commits to a real relationship in the world. The character has a counterphobic 6 wing and goes towards what he is afraid of.

Andie MacDowell plays a sexually repressed housewife whose Three husband (Peter Gallagher) is cheating on her. Much humor develops from her Nine style of minimizing and abstracting while she ignores the obvious emptiness of her life: "It seems so stupid talking about my problems when poor children are starving," or "Everything's just fine in my life but for some reason I keep thinking about garbage." Eventually she wakes up from her sleepy denial and becomes honest, focused and clear.

Laura San Giacoma plays MacDowell's younger sister, a tough Eight. She's having an affair with husband Gallagher behind her sister's back. She and Gallagher have a conflict that is probable for an Eight and a Three who don't like each other.

Writer/director Steven Soderbergh went on to make Kafka, a dull fictional film about the writer. The real-life Kafka was a Five and in the film he's played by real-life Five Jeremy Irons.
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Turtle Diary
This low-key charmer must be the definitive Five movie. Glenda Jackson and Ben Kingsley star in a Harold Pinter story about two shy, lonely Fives who conspire to steal some sea turtles from a city zoo. Aided by an Eightish zookeeper, the plan is to release the turtles at the English coast where the Gulf Stream will take them to freedom. The execution of this caper generates some ironic suspense but the film's real pleasure is in watching the Jackson and Kingsley characters as they change and grow and bloom.

As the story begins, both are shown as quietly eccentric and restless with the sterility of their lives. Jackson is a reclusive writer of children's books and Kingsley manages a bookstore. They actually meet at the turtle aquarium where each spends solitary afternoons watching the animals dreamily swim.

Both characters are Fiveishly constricted but express it differently. Jackson's trouble seems more social; she is tortured, garbled and near-paralyzed when interacting with others. Underneath she has a spiritual anguish she can't articulate, but her night dreams are all of freeing the turtles. "They're imprisoned," she says simply, when asked why she wants to carry out the plan. The anguish is obviously for her own unrisked life and she conspires haltingly with Kingsley to free the turtles and somehow herself.

Kingsley's timidity is around action rather than interaction. Socially, he is secretive but finesseful; he bandies and repels and distances others with irony. But he's also impotent in a futureless job and when his loutish neighbor bullies him, Kingsley meekly tries to bury his anger in obsessive housecleaning. Springing the turtles becomes a metaphor for taking initiative. When he decides to carry out the plan he begins to display a delightful zest for living.

For both, the turtle jailbreak is a way of moving towards the world. Jackson quells her basic anxiety and risks falling in love. Kingsley becomes more self-assertive, going to the high side of 8. He handles his bully neighbor quite differently after the caper. He also gets more cheerful and expansive (high side of 7). At one point while transporting the turtles, Kingsley comments that he hasn't had a thought in several hours. Jackson knows exactly what he means; both of them are so involved in life that they aren't thinking about it.

The film gently sabotages our expectations that its two stars should get together romantically. They're actually wrong for each other. Both have the same dilemma and express two aspects of the Five style. Jackson has a 4 wing and Kingsley a 6 wing. Kingsley's other neighbor is a Two; her fate underscores the need to seize life today.
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The Vanishing (Dutch version)
This is one of a thimbleful of films that features a Five villain. In 1965's The Collector, Five Terence Stamp kidnaps and imprisons a woman because he wants to possess her. His motivation is a metaphor for Fiveish hoarding, a desire to have gone mad. By contrast, The Vanishingarry Met Sally; Martin Shor features a Five serial killer whose actions are driven by a disassociated ideal of precision and a counterphobic desire to master fear.

The story hinges on one quiet event. An arguing young Dutch couple on vacation in France pull off at a truck stop. In bright daylight under utterly ordinary circumstances, the woman vanishes.

There are no clues, no residue and no case that the man, Rex Hofman (Gene Bervoets), can make to the police. They believe she simply jilted him. The case is eventually investigated but remains unsolved.

All would be over except that Rex Hofman is a melancholy Four who pines away for his lost love and grows obsessed with finding out what happened to her. He plasters France with missing person posters and goes on television to talk about the case and keep it alive. He's so haunted and preoccupied that his subsequent lady friend leaves him because she can't compete with the memory of the vanished woman. Hofman knows he's far gone but he's so morbidly romantic that he can't stop. An interviewer asks him: "Do you have hope (of finding her)?" "No," he replies. "Then why pursue it?" "It's a homage." (Introjection again.)

In parallel, we see scenes of Mr. Lemorne (Bernard Pierre Donna-dieu), a precise, calm, solitary Five who is leading a double life. He's a family man with a wife and daughters who withdraws to a country house to plan out the specifics of his abductions of women. We see him rehearsing conversations with intended victims and timing steps with a stopwatch. He notes down the results of each practice session as if he were conducting a lab experiment, and indeed, he's a chemistry teacher in ordinary life.

This is a madness of detail and Lemorne speaks about it indirectly to his unsuspecting wife: "It has become a passion. You start with an idea in your head. You take the first step, then the second. Then you realize that you are up to your neck in something mad. But that doesn't matter; you persevere for the pleasure of persevering, for the satisfaction you get from it."

Lemorne is so confident in his ability to disguise that he subtly brags about his connection to the crimes. When he finds out that Rex is still searching for the lost woman, Lemorne sends him postcards and solicits a meeting. He eventually seeks out Hofman in Holland and offers him a ride back to France where he promises to explain everything about the vanishing. Hofman is so obsessed and Fourishly drawn to finding out what happened that he accepts the ride.

Along the way, Lemorne explains himself in matter-of-fact detail. He knows he's a sociopath and speaks of experiments and philosophical questions that have led to his secret habits. It becomes clear that he loves the detailed planning involved in his crimes, though he observes: "The best plan can be wiped out one moment to the next. That saddens me." The love of disassociated planning in Fives is related to the low side of 7.

Lemorne basically describes a history of dealing with fear by going against it. He has a counterphobic 6 wing and is obsessed with risk. He also describes in his calm, perverse way how a philosophical dilemma led to his first abduction. After one day saving a drowning child, Lemorne says, "my daughter was bursting with admiration. I thought that her admiration for me wasn't worth anything, unless I could prove myself absolutely incapable of doing anything bad. And since there is no white without black, I had, therefore, to conceive the worst thing that I could think of at that time."

This kind of logic reigning supreme is part of what's so chilling about The Vanishing. The film's style itself is Fiveish. It's dry, existential, and builds suspense from the accumulation of small details. There's not a wasted scene in the movie and, while it may spook you, there's little overt violence.

Be sure to avoid the dopey American remake of this story with Jeff Bridges and Kiefer Sutherland. Director George Sluizer redirected his original film, this time in a flat pedestrian fashion. It's as if someone had said, "George, the original was brilliant! Now how about a version that really bored, lazy people could enjoy?" Jeff Bridges plays a Five alright, but as a drooling weirdo, which robs the killer of his frightening ordinariness and completely telegraphs the story. It even has a happy ending.
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