AUNTIE MAMES
There are many stories of lively eccentric Aunt figures who are Sevens. This sampling begins with 1958's Auntie Mame.

"Life is a banquet but most poor suckers are starving to death!" This gluttonous metaphor is Auntie Mame's credo and she lives it every moment she can. Based on a memoir by Patrick Dennis, this film is adapted from a stage play that celebrated his aunt's eccentric vivacity.

What plot there is spins on how Mame (Rosalind Russell) upsets the Oneish mores and manners of those around her. Since these social conventions are extremely dated, the clash is only mildly amusing. Mame's Sevenness, though, stands out quite clearly. She writes a book called, "Live! Live! Live!" and is thoroughly disapproved of by a fussy, judgmental One banker (Fred Clark). He's Patrick's legal guardian and fights against Mame's corrupting influence ("I'm going to turn this kid into a decent God-fearing citizen if I have to break every bone in his body!").

Mame's a hyperactive extrovert - gregarious, grandiose, charming, fascinated by everything. It's interesting to see how the film presents her as a model of joyous vitality and love-of-living in stuffy upper-class 1958. Decades later she seems kind of tiresome. "You have given me a new interest!" she says rather often. Life is one glorious banquet after another. Without meaning to, the film portrays the sameness that results when a Seven seeks constant excitement and newness.

The portrait isn't entirely one-dimensional. Mame does have feelings and, while struggling through the Depression, she sinks into pain and defeat at times. She's a self-preservation subtype and certainly cares about the people in her sphere.

In the end she's unchanged, though, having taken Patrick's son under her wing. "I'm going to open doors, doors you never dreamed existed," she tells a nine-year-old boy, "Oh, what times we'll have, what vistas we'll see ... !" If you are not a Seven, you may want to lie down for a nap about this time. As a movie, Auntie Mame is talky and stagey but it presents an instructive portrait of the style.

Mame's sister Vera also seems like a Seven and Hermione Gingold plays a befuddled Nine. Mame has a 6 wing.
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Watching Auntie Mame you suddenly realize that it's been remade several times under different titles. Ruth Gordon played the character in 1971's Harold And Maude, the black comedy cult-favorite. This film's style is Sevenish and Maude, while robust and vivacious, is also distinctly impersonal as she seeks out new experiences.

Maude has a counterphobic 6 wing. She has a background as a political activist and is still a crusading antiauthoritarian. She steals cars, replants public street trees and enjoys outwitting the police. She "liberates" people from their attachments ("How the world still dearly loves a cage"), and is a blithe rationalizer ("Consistency is not a human trait"). Her suicide at the age of eighty - opting for death rather than a poor quality of life - seems at once courageous and escapist.

Harold (Bud Cort) is a Nine, although his habit of staging elaborate fake suicides at first seems Fourish. Harold's not a romantic, though; he's passive/aggressively punishing his Two mother for her self-absorption. Pretending to be dead is an apt metaphor for unhealthy Nineyness. Harold's military uncle is a Six. Naturally there's a dour One repressive Minister who's directly opposed to Maude's Sevenish high spirits.
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A less romantic Auntie Mame figure is Sylvie, played by Christine Lahti in 1987's Housekeeping. She's the eccentric itinerant aunt of orphans Lucille and Ruthie (Andrea Burchill and Sara Walker). After their mother commits suicide, Sylvie is called to live with the girls and be their surrogate parent.

Trouble is, Lahti's a flaming Seven and especially flighty (intimate subtype). She's so unsuited for adult responsibility that the girls begin "feeling like we were the parent and Sylvie was the child." They act that way too, especially Lucille, a budding One who gradually builds a firm judgmental stance (reaction formation) against Lahti. "I don't have to help the way I am," she says haughtily, "I'm not like Sylvie!"

This dynamic is very clear and well-drawn; you watch it grow from inception. Lucille intuitively knows that her adventurous, distractible aunt is only a peer. When the girls play hookey from school you can see them longing for Lahti to scold them and set limits. Instead their aunt tries to talk them into further truancy. Lucille eventually seizes responsibility and sets to work "improving" herself to compensate for the unstable circumstances. The house fills up with cans and newspapers, the yard gets overgrown, and, as Lucille says, Sylvie "just wanders away."

This is less objectionable to Ruthie, an introverted bookish Nine, who finds her lively aunt stimulating. It's not unusual for a Nine to take energy from being around a Seven - we just saw it in Harold And Maude. Ruthie's a future novelist and likes to narrate her adventures with Lahti - "Sylvie had no awareness of time; for her hours and minutes were the names of trains. We were waiting for the 10:52 ..."

There's a nice scene where we also see the Seven tendency to rationalize. Lahti "borrows" a rowboat so that she and Ruthie can visit a distant forest. The boat's owner chases them from the shore and Ruthie says to Lahti:

"That man is yelling at us."

"Oh, I know," Lahti says, breezily dismissive. "He always does that. If he thinks someone is watching he just carries on more. It's pitiful - he could have a heart attack someday."

Ruthie says, "It must be his boat."

"Either that or he's some kind of lunatic," Lahti replies. "I'm certainly not going back to find out!" She starts whistling as she rows faster.

Eventually Lahti calls down the forces of Oneness on herself. These are personified by church ladies, a policeman and various legal threats. Lahti panics and herself gets Oneish for a spell. She tries to act properly and cleans up the house. But in the end she resolves the dilemma in a very Sevenish way.
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Hugh Hefner: Once Upon A Time, Star 80
"A quite remarkable adventure" is how Playboy magazine publisher Hugh Hefner describes his rather preposterous life. "A lot of things in my life have seemed like fantasy," he adds, putting it mildly. This unusually sympathetic biography follows Hefner's story from his repressive Midwest upbringing through his swinging sybaritic decades to his later phase as a mellow, older family man crowding seventy.

It's quite easy to see Hefner's libertine Seven lifestyle as a reaction to the Oneishness in his background and within himself. His religious Midwestern mother is almost certainly a One and the family is descended from Pilgrims. The social forces that Hefner opposed and provoked are all represented by Ones in this film. William F. Buckley, fundamentalist ministers and feminist Susan Brownmiller all weigh in with objections. The men are distressed that Playboyless?" she asks her boss, Chris is pornographic and Brownmiller emphasizes the magazine's objectification of women, a charge that Hefner truly does not comprehend.

Hefner himself has a strong One streak (connecting point); it's mainly obvious in his rebuttals to critics and party poopers. He spouts ideas from the "Playboy Philosophy," a rambling manifesto that is both sincerely ethical and crazily warped. The film's cloying narration describes Hefner's life as a "quest for personal freedom and to liberate others from the past." This sort of logic reflects a Seven gone to 1. Hefner certainly has a point or two - sex ought to be less fraught with man-made rules, and moralistic repression is no answer - but his Oneness also seems a defensive reply to the world's wet blankets. Even Hefner wonders whether he might somehow "be coming full circle back to the values of my parents."

As a Seven, he's pretty flagrant. He sorts for beginnings and possibilities, acknowledges a lifelong problem with commitment and is an interested appreciator of each new day. As a child, he "turned to fantasies early, to escape into what I felt was a better world." As an adult he escaped his business woes by flying around the world in his jet. "Playboy is about the play and pleasure of life," he intones.

Hefner has a 6 wing that is somewhat counterphobic (his battles with authority), but also helps him be a loyal friend. He reveals, for instance, a genuine, touching anguish for the people he's lost in his life. He's a self-preservation subtype and has a large circle of acquaintances that he pals around with.

He also displays the kind of willed naïveté and deliberately positive outlook that Sevens have such a knack for. He calls a stroke he had his "stroke of luck," and talks only in terms of what he learned from the medical crisis. Hefner's good-hearted and, all in all, a hard guy to dislike (though he should never again sing in public).

The catch is appetite. Hefner is a sexualizing Seven, an orientation that arises out of problems with the mother. Usually the Seven child feels undernurtured and that sense of lack is converted into a kind of inner hunger. This can lead to addictive behavior, and in Hefner's case the addiction has been to erotic pleasure. The son's sense of distance from the mother later translates into an objectification of women and they become the source of sustenance for a possibly bottomless hunger. Since people generally resent what they are addicted to, the women tend to be worshiped and degraded by turns.

Of course, there are centuries of social tradition that support men turning women into sex objects but what Hefner has done with his magazine is also particular to the psychology of Sevens. As with the life of Casanova, another famous Seven, Hefner's story is about sexual gluttony.

Remember that Sevens, when defensive, tend to rationalize and offer illogical logic that bats away consequence. Thus according to Playboy, being libertine is "sexually enlightened," satisfying endless appetites is called "freedom," and treating women as objects is reframed as "respectful admiration." The demeaning dark side of what Hefner has done is precisely what he deletes. At one moment he muses, "Can I honestly say that during all those years of adventure, which I regarded as a celebration of my life ... can I honestly say that someone wasn't hurt by what I did?" He pauses and you wait for him to connect, but he stops with, "I don't know."
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For a harsher examination of the self-referential world Hefner created, you need to turn to another Seven. Choreographer/director Bob Fosse was quite successful on the stage before he turned to making films. He only made a few, but they were mostly splendid, notable for being both entertaining and dark-edged. Cabaret won awards and Fosse's autobiographical All That Jazz is quite a good, searing portrait of an addictive Seven with an 8 wing. Roy Scheider plays Fosse as lovable and honest but hopelessly hooked on drugs, booze and sex.

Fosse, the man, died eight years later essentially from the lifestyle he so unsparingly showed in All That Jazz. A clause in his will left $25,000 to a group of his friends to "have one on me" and go out together for a big expensive dinner party.

With these credentials, the director made his last film, the tragic, little-seen Star 80, about the short life of Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratten. Stratten haunts the Hefner biography partly because Hefner can't make any connection between the culture of his magazine and Stratten's murder. But Fosse sees it plain, and draws a line from Stratten's sleazy, ambitious husband directly to Hefner.

Eric Roberts (a great performance) plays the unstable husband who plucked Stratten (Mariel Hemingway) from a Dairy Queen and pushed and groomed her for centerfold stardom. As he succeeded, he lost her to Hefner's larger, more professional machine and the wider world of opportunity. Unable to let his "creation" go, he instead shot her and himself to death.

Roberts is playing a crazy, driven Three. He's star-struck, vain, competitive, and narcissistically hostile. Hemingway's Stratten is a sweet, confused Nine with almost no point of view who allows herself to be molded. As Roberts grows increasingly dangerous, she minimizes and explains away his behavior. She also gets swept up in a world of image reflecting a Nine's connection to 3.

Cliff Robertson is ironically cast in a brief role as Hefner. It's ironic because Robertson is a real-life One and in the movies he has mostly played Ones. He makes a good Seven here (real-life connecting point) though he gives the role a Oneish aura. The film shows Hefner disparaging Stratten's husband ("He has the personality of a pimp") without the slightest inkling of their similarities. The Playboy machine puts a genteel sheen on the same mindset that Roberts expresses nakedly.

Star 80 is something of a horror movie, with Roberts as the monster, but it's darkly compelling and smart as almost a direct rebuttal to the Hefner hagiography.
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Lillies Of The Field
Timeless, utterly charming story about a nomadic Seven, Sidney Poitier, traveling through the New Mexico desert. Low on cash he turns in at a nunnery hoping to find some quick work. There he encounters a group of German nuns led by Lilia Skala, a One.

Skala's what used to be called an "old battle axe." Tough, stubborn and determined, she has seen a vision of a new chapel in the desert. She decides that Poitier has been sent by God to build the chapel but he just doesn't seem to know it.

A good Seven, Poitier has other plans - Big Plans. He's cheerfully narcissistic about the grand future that he's traveling towards. The trouble in the present is that Skala won't pay him for his handiwork and he can't quite travel on without the money. Gradually it develops that the nuns, who barely speak English, are flat broke and stranded themselves. Poitier's Sevenish tag line, "But I'm just passing through!" sounds more and more feeble as he realizes the situation. For all his bravado, he's a kindhearted man with an active conscience (6 wing).

Skala sucks him into building the chapel by degrees. She maintains her rock-hard certainty that Poitier is heaven-sent and he gradually wilts before her will. The nun also has a 9 wing and is extremely impersonal. This gets to Poitier because he wants to at least be thanked for his contribution since no one will pay him. Skala sees no reason to thank a mere instrument of God and instead remains insulting and oblivious.

Within the Enneagram, Sevens have a mixed connection to One and Poitier shows it. At one point he becomes obsessed with building "his" chapel. This quality of fixation on an Absolute Idea is related, for a Seven, to the low side of 1. On the high side, Poitier shows great dedication and discipline that is also Oneish in flavor.

Skala also shows a little of the One's tension towards Seven as she resists Poitier's charm and playfulness. She manages to let her hair down once or twice as when he teaches the nuns to sing some rousing black spirituals. Again you see the Seven bent towards cheerful escapism directly opposed by Oneish tendencies towards serious, rule-bound commitment. By story's end, Skala and Poitier both reach a kind of middle ground, growing toward each other in small but significant ways.

This film looked like it would be sentimental and preachily Christian, but it's neither. The disarming, graceful comedy flows directly from the lead characters' Enneagram styles.
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Mermaids
Winona Ryder plays Charlotte Flax, Cher's Four daughter in this mother/daughter character study. Cher plays a Seven, and the film presents another good contrast between the two styles. As a teenage Four, Ryder's Charlotte is the soul of romantic misery, fixated on a Niney local boy who is the gardener at a nearby convent.

Charlotte never knew her father but she thinks about him often, displacing feelings onto his myth (introjection again). She has a bit of a martyr complex and longs for an ideal purity to her life and motives: "I do so want to be good and virtuous." To this end she makes plans to become a nun even though she is Jewish. After meeting a real nun she says, "I desperately wanted to ask her what color her bra was and if she had pure thoughts every second of the day." At one point, Charlotte registers at a pregnancy clinic under the name "Joan Ark." Later in the story she takes up fasting.

The core of her behavior is a Four's longing in the face of abandonment, but Charlotte also shows the Four connection to 1. Her mother is a selfish, escapist Seven and though Cher tries to make the character memorably comic, Ryder's character has to compensate for feeling neglected. She will say, "Oh, Mrs. Flax is a really great mother," and then long to live someone else's life. Her romantic preoccupations keep her cushioned from Mom's abuse and Dad's absence.

Cher's Mrs. Flax is a Seven with an 8 wing. Her whole life is a pattern of flight, beginning with running away from home ("If you hate a place, you can get in your car and poof! you're gone!"). To Bob Hoskins, with whom she gets tentatively involved: "I'm never growing old." "But time catches up to you, what can you do?" he asks. "Keep moving," is the reply. Mrs. Flax is meant to be a comically lovable Movie Mother, but she is actually an aggressively undependable Seven - depersonalizing, selfish and glib.

The film soft-pedals Cher's neglect of her children but it's constant. She rationalizes, minimizes responsibility, and deflects criticism with sarcasm ("Oh, now we're going to play, 'Who's the Worst Mother in the World!'"). Her tone towards the children is often impatient and she mostly implies that they are too much trouble: "You're a kid and until you grow up, we're going to live my life my way!"

She's also a spectacular hypocrite. After her daughter has run away and returned, Mrs. Flax lectures, "Running away doesn't solve anything. I'm a grown-up. I don't run away. I just move on!"
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My Dinner With Andre
When I first saw this film in a theater, perhaps a fifth of the audience walked out when they realized it was about a dinner conversation. Those who stayed laughed long and loud as the film is well acted, thought-provoking and joltingly funny.

Like sex, lies and videotape, My Dinner With Andre is somehow about Enneagram styles - neurotic skews and what's beyond them. The utterly alien world views of friends Wally (Wallace Shawn) and Andre (Andre Gregory) are contrasted at a reunion dinner that Wally attends mainly out of politeness.

The first part of the evening is dominated by Andre's rambling, fantastical account of a recent nervous breakdown and spiritual crisis. Andre's an intellectual Seven and he tells his tale with big, imaginative leaps that freely associate unrelated events. He's also a name-dropper and displays an implicit air of smug superiority towards Wally.

Andre has a 6 wing. At times he's full of guilty self-doubt and his initial story is about seeking answers from outside sources. Here and there his story sounds faintly paranoid. He's also angrily self-critical and has been seeking salvation through a Big Idea. Both of these are related to a Seven's connection to 1.

There's a spoof of artistic and New Age thinking in Andre's logic, but what's especially funny is watching Nine Wally lose his battle to stay politely disengaged while Andre painfully unravels. He tries to humor Andre, but is struck by the latter's anguish and sincere attempt to comprehend his condition. Also, Andre is making more sense than he first seems to be, touching nerves that Wally tries to keep asleep.

Turning point comes when Wally blurts: "I don't really know what you're talking about! - I mean, I know what you're talking about, I just don't know what you're talking about!"

Wally then bursts out with a monologue on his philosophy of living. In contrast to Andre's kaleidoscopic style, Wally is studiously mundane. He's a self-preservation Nine and his defensive emphasis is on simple pleasures, maintaining routines and avoiding thorny questions. He's a minimizer: "Do you want to know my actual response to all this? I'm just trying to survive." Wally starts talking about his willed sense of purpose, the pleasure he takes in running errands and checking items off a daily list. If he wakes in the morning and "a roach hasn't died in my coffee cup during the night, I just feel incredible happiness."

About this time, Wally starts to unravel too as his defenses sound more arbitrary and absurd. Both friends keep unpeeling as Wally becomes more heartfelt and Andre less patronizing.

The conversation takes a new turn, as they talk less of their defenses and more about what an authentic life might be like. Andre wonders how he "could cut out all the noise, quit performing and start to listen to what's inside of me." Wally ruefully admits that he feels "adequate to do but not just to be a human being."

It's difficult to explain what finally happens in this film. The conversation keeps broadening and then dropping to new depths, and it's amazing how much ground is opened. When Wally and Andre finally go quiet, it's gently stunning. The friends and the viewer are left hovering above the tender, mysterious void that is beyond masks, defenses and illusions. Andre is far more sober and contained while Wally has come thoroughly awake to himself. The film is essentially the story of an epiphany.
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Night Of The Iguana
Excellent film of Tennessee Williams's play. Comedy-drama concerns an alcoholic defrocked Seven minister (Richard Burton), well out of luck and stranded at a seedy Mexican beach resort. How he got there has a lot to do with being a dissolute Seven with a 6 wing. He's sort of a screw-up, someone who pulls trouble down upon his own head. This is mostly driven by Sevenish appetite; Burton was bounced out of the priesthood for seducing women and drinking. Now a tour guide ("Tours of God's world by a man of God"), he courts disaster by staying drunk, letching after underage girls and infuriating a nasty, intolerant One passenger (the One/Seven tension again).

The latter gets Burton fired and the tour eventually clears out without him. He goes deeper into escapist alcoholic patterns, desperately, if cheerfully, flailing out of control. Part of what is highlighted is how an escapist Seven will not self-contain. It's everyone else's problem. One character eventually ties Burton up in a hammock and won't let him out till he's sober. This is a good metaphor for what Sevens sometimes force others to do - restrain them because they will not restrain themselves. Notice too how Burton goes quiet and contained when finally sober (connection to 5). Once his addiction is broken by outside forces, he returns to himself.

Ava Gardner also plays a Seven but with an 8 wing (her real-life style). She's lusty, aggressive and expansive. Deborah Kerr plays an eccentric, pious Two with a 1 wing ("What is important is that one is never alone"). She is very similar to Joan Cusack in Men Don't Leave (see "Twos"). Burton was an Eight in real life so he's playing his wing.
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Nothing In Common
Seriocomic study of a young, successful advertising executive, a Seven, very well played by Tom Hanks. The film charts his struggle with emotional responsibility as he copes with the divorce of his aging parents.

Mom (Eva Marie Saint) is an oblivious Nine waking up to how angry she has been while married. Hanks's real trouble, though, is with his ailing father, a grumpy, volatile Eight played by Jackie Gleason.

"Do you have any idea how much money I'm being paid to stay this immature?" Hanks asks a girlfriend to whom he cannot commit. He starts the story glib, cocky and juvenile. A boy-man, Puer Eternis. He is shown to be highly creative in his work and his abilities are clearly based on the fun-loving, imaginative Seven style of thinking.

As the movie progresses, Hanks has to deal with acute frustration and his own angry responses (he shows flashes of an 8 wing). As he copes with his father's medical needs and those of a difficult Eight advertising client, he goes through a rite of passage and believably begins to grow up. The film starts with a synthetic TV sitcom quality but turns into something both funny and unexpectedly touching.

Gleason is good as the father although the character is quite unpleasantly selfish. He does convey the fears and frustrations of aging, especially as they affect an Eight (7 wing). Sela Ward plays a corporate Three, the client's daughter with whom Hanks gets involved. She's crisp, efficient and hollow, but nice underneath. Hector Elizondo is Hanks's good-guy boss and he's a Nine. Eva Marie Saint is a Nine in real life. Jackie Gleason was a Seven with an 8 wing. Tom Hanks is a real-life Seven and almost always plays them.
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Tucker - A Man And His Dream
Jeff Bridges is good in a role that glorifies being a Seven. He's a dreamer-in-denial automaker who tries to compete with the large auto companies by building a well-designed, unusually safe new car in 1940s America.

He fails. Based on a true story, the film downplays the fact that the real Tucker was squashed like an ant and died in jail for his efforts. Instead, the movie's tone is celebratory, cheering on a little guy with big dreams. Director Francis Ford Coppola is a Seven (8 wing) and Tucker failed big at the box office, so there's some irony afoot here.

Bridges is shown as cheerfully ignoring everyone's advice against mass-producing a new kind of car. He has a Vision. This film shows a Seven fixated on the low side of 1, growing obsessed with a Big Idea. "What's the difference if we build 50 cars or 50 million? It's the idea that counts!" he says. Again, rationalizing is a defense for Sevens. Each time Bridges meets discouragement, he makes even bigger plans to suppress his own fears. He maintains a relentless enthusiasm, keeping a big frozen smile on his face (he practices in the mirror). When Bridges gets especially frustrated he throws tantrums and yells a lot. This also has a connection to 1- Sevens can get critical and enraged when opposed. The yelling also reflects an 8 wing.

Bridges gets monotonous and shallow after a while, but that's the point about narcissism. Note too how impersonal he can be in the service of the dream. He neglects his kids, because he can't quite snap out of the obsessive trance that he's in.

Martin Landau again plays a cautious, pessimistic Six (5 wing). He's Bridges's loyal, skeptical accountant who is endlessly sorting for what can go wrong. Someone has to.

Dean Stockwell has a standout cameo as Five billionaire Howard Hughes. He's disassociated and weird, showing the abstract aura of a Five with a 4 wing. Joan Allen plays Tucker's wife as a breezy Seven.
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