Andromeda Strain
Tense, terrific documentary-style thriller about a deadly virus that wipes out a small town in Arizona. A team of microbiologists goes to work in a top secret facility and discovers that the virus, dropped from space on a meteor, is like nothing they know.

The team is three men and a woman. The male characters are more faintly drawn, but the woman, Kate Reid, is a fleshed-out Eight and she provides most of the human interest and dynamism. She's rebellious, sarcastic and outspoken. Her first response to any procedure is to argue with it, then she complies. Close beneath the surface of this abrasiveness, Reid is vulnerable and rather sweet. Arthur Hill plays the by-the-book team leader, a One ("Our best hope is to be grindingly thorough"). James Olson is the psychiatrist, an irritable, introverted Five. David Wayne is the other, older man and a Nine.

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The Breakfast Club
is a surprisingly insightful teenage psychodrama. It focuses on five teens spending a Saturday morning in school detention ("the breakfast club"), a punishment for various infractions. Judd Nelson plays the bored, unhappy Eight, who hassles everyone with scathing, if self-serving, honesty. This prompts the others to reveal themselves in unexpected ways, each coming out from behind their social mask.

Nelson's chief target is Molly Ringwald, a Nine with a 1 wing. She's a complacent Good Girl, alternately drawn to and repelled by Nelson's Bad Boy aggression. The attraction for her as a Nine is his cutting force which slices through her confused self-masking. Nines are also drawn to the vitality of Eights since they tamp down their own sense of industry.

Ally Sheedy plays an intense, incandescent character in the Four/Five range ("When you grow up your heart dies"). Emilio Estevez's character is mostly a One. Anthony Michael Hall is probably a Nine. Paul Gleason plays a supervising Eight teacher who gets into stupid power struggles with Nelson.
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The Doctor
Well-crafted, fact-based story about an arrogant and impersonal doctor who gets a taste of his own medicine when he becomes a cancer patient. William Hurt is the doctor, an Eight, and the film charts his journey from callousness to kindness as he learns to identify with his patients' suffering.

There are two striking contrasts relevant to the Enneagram. The first is the difference between Hurt's early bedside manner and that of his doctor, a Three. Both are insensitive and depersonalized but express it quite differently.

Hurt as an Eight is a subtle bully. He uses rough humor and caricature to stay disidentified with the pain of his patients. When a woman worries about her husband's reaction to her new surgery scar, Hurt jokes that she'll look just like a Playboy Playmate, complete with staple marks. She winces at his remark but he doesn't notice, thinking he's funny. Hurt then lectures his medical students on the professional virtue of not caring about the people you are cutting open. Denial of vulnerable feeling and the tendency to see others as caricatures are both specific defense mechanisms for Eights.

Hurt's Three doctor, by contrast, is crisp, efficient and mechanistic. She depersonalizes by seeing her patients as information. She deals with data and procedure and displays a technical fascination with Hurt's "case." She doesn't see him as a caricature but rather two-dimensionally, as a problem to be solved, a challenge to be met.

The other thing to recognize is that the change Hurt goes through reflects an Eight's progression towards 2. Whereas a defensive Eight disidentifies, Twos have an exact opposite strategy of joining with others. When Eights change and grow, they sometimes develop Twoish strategies for identifying with others. Hurt gradually moves towards his wife (Christine Lahti) and declares his need of her. He also gets more thoughtful and introspective (connection to 5).

The film is low-key and naturalistic with bursts of melodrama. It presents an especially accurate picture of how an Eight might change and grow. Elizabeth Perkins is something of a counterphobic Six, but it's hard to tell because she's defined by the context of her illness and also a little romanticized.
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The Fabulous Baker Boys
Precisely acted, near-perfect little character study of a two brother piano lounge act. Real-life brothers Jeff and Beau Bridges play respectively a nasty Five (4 wing) and a dutiful Seven (6 wing, social subtype). The brothers decide to spice up their piano routines by hiring a singer and into their lives comes Eight Michelle Pfeiffer.

She is one tough cookie. Almost everything she says is a pre-emptive strike, her best defense being a good offense. Her hardness is offset by an edgy insecurity which Pfeiffer shows is just beneath the surface. It's not fear, like a counterphobic Six would have. Rather, she's in a stand-off with the world and has somewhere vowed to never be hurt again. When she and Jeff Bridges get involved, she starts by saying, "You're not going to wake up from dreaming about me and look at me like I'm a princess when I burp, are you?"

Bridges has his own problems with intimacy and has steel trap defenses for letting anyone into his solitude. He's essentially a Scrooge, so he and Pfeiffer keep triggering one another's hardness. Neither will take the risk of the first step. The story ends on a hopeful note, but both of them would have a long way to go. Nobody really grows much, but the film tartly evokes the lonely gulfs that can exist between over-defended people.
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Gloria
Gena Rowlands gives a great performance in a mostly coherent John Cassavetes film. She's a retired Mafia gun moll who winds up protecting an orphaned ten-year-old whom the Mafia wants to kill. Her blunt Eightish hostility gradually softens into a gruff protectiveness of the boy. She is simple, rough-edged and will not back down. In the shocking action scenes she's a snarling, feral force of nature.
Rowlands is playing a self-preservation subtype, a woman who wants nothing more than to enjoy the modest pleasures of her retirement and have a little control over her environment. She initially resists the boy's plight and is decidedly unmaternal in her manner. She wants to be alone (connection to 5).

The connection to 2, however, gets the better of her; we see it in how she surrenders to taking care of the boy and also in a scene where she pleads his case before her mobster friends. She goes placating and seductive, like a weak wolf offering her throat. When this strategy fails, she turns rugged again and fearlessly shoots her way out of Mafia headquarters.

Rowlands was nominated for an Academy Award. The boy (Juan Adames) is meant to be lovably precocious, but at times he's just odd. It's as if he's playing some adult's warped memory of being a child.
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Haunted Summer
details a visit to Italy by romantic poets Shelley and Byron. Shelley (Eric Stoltz) is a solemn, airy Four (3 wing). "I must follow experience where it leads me," he says. His wife Mary (Alice Krige) is a Nine and she is hotly pursued by the Eight Lord Byron (Philip Anglim).

"I don't ask you to excuse me, but I do ask that you imagine that once this heart was affectionate by nature." Byron has an obvious weakness that motivates his compensatory aggression -- a club foot. "I mean to pursue you with every weapon at my command," he tells Krige. She replies: "It is not a battle," but he seems not to hear. Byron's vulnerable beneath all the bad behavior but Mary Shelley still used him as the inspiration for her book, Frankenstein. She does find him daring and interesting even though he's misogynistic, abusive and self-justifying.

I'm Almost Not Crazy
Take a break from all those fictional Eights and meet a real one in action. This documentary of the late actor/director John Cassavetes captures him at work making what was to be his last film. He's a bale full of contradictions - warm, impatient, humble, narcissistic, loving, bossy, funny. He also has passion without rage, which is a pleasure to watch.

Cassavetes has Eight-like problems with clear conception, as evidenced by his eccentric, rambling philosophy of moviemaking. If you've never seen his films, they are famous for their improvisational style and arrhythmic editing. Some are really good, some are just peculiar. A friend of Cassavetes tells a story of a film the director previewed that received a huge popular response. Cassavetes was so disturbed by the excited reaction that he reedited the film to his own inscrutable specifications. It later opened to bad reviews and flopped.

It's obvious that Cassavetes has gusto for what he's doing. He talks at length about wanting to make movies with authentic feeling ("All my work is about love"). He has an ethos of spontaneity and he shows an Eightish underdog sympathy for actors, advocating anarchy and freedom for them. What's not so clear is how this ethos relates to the finished product. You can see the film Cassavetes thinks he's making, but the result was a weird dud no one liked called Love Streams. With Eights, narcissism can compete with the best of intentions.

All in all, though, he's a sweetie, like a teddy bear with real claws. He would be a social subtype for his emphasis on love and responsibility as well as his enjoyment of the group process of filmmaking. Cassavetes involves everybody, and has genuine enthusiasm for the social chemistry of creating something with others. This also reflects an Eight's connection to 2.

The sad part of the film is related to Cassavetes's 7 wing. On the high side he shows excitement, great good cheer and abundant, if jumbled, imagination. The low side of a 7 wing for an Eight can include an almost virulent tendency to addiction, and unfortunately Cassavetes smokes and drinks his way through the film. He died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 59. Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes's wife, appears briefly and she's a Nine with an 8 wing.
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Cassavetes, the actor, is showcased in Paul Mazursky's Tempest, a sometimes slow but surprisingly entertaining update of the Shake-speare play. The actor plays an architect who has a mid-life crisis and retires with his daughter to a Greek island. There he slips into a Fiveish self-absorption that is both crazy and sane. Worth a look for how his Eight character changes and grows. He's lovably eccentric and again a social subtype. Raul Julia plays a Seven and Susan Sarandon shows her usual persona which rides the border of Seven and Six.

Lean On Me
Morgan Freeman dominates every scene as school principal Joe Clark, a man who cleaned up and reformed a rough ghetto high school in New Jersey largely with the force of his personality. He wields a baseball bat, bellows through a megaphone, alienates teachers and superiors all in the name of tough love.

At first he seems like a One with an overriding sense of mission, willing to be abrasive for a good cause. Soon it becomes clear that he revels in his reformer role and can be egotistically unfair. This highlights the difference between Ones and Eights. Both styles can be overtly angry in manner, but a One does it in the name of principle while the Eight is glorifying the "strength" of the self. Clark can't openly admit he's wrong but can acknowledge the fact implicitly and indirectly, thus preserving his omnipotent self-image. His mission is opposed by Ones throughout the story. His saving grace is that he genuinely cares about the kids and they know it.

This movie is corny and overdone in places but Freeman is so good that it doesn't matter. For a more lethal variation of an Eight see Freeman's performance in the clever, underrated Street Smart.

Leaving Normal
As a film, Leaving Normal is a) crummy, b) stupid, c) phony, d) all of the above. For starters, there's too much music; it swells up sentimentally whenever the filmmakers think they have hit a Rueful Truth That Touches All of Our Lives. Usually the two lead actresses have just been shouting about philosophical sounding things and the music gets loud so that we know what they said was important. The actresses are traveling, so the film also has a lot of cute vignettes about things screenwriters imagine happen in rural places. You know: where wacky country people with lovable eccentricities live. Then there's the arty photography, the pretentious title, the ... oh, never mind.

The two reasons to see the film are Christine Lahti and Meg Tilly. They play an Eight and a Six respectively, and they do shout a lot, but they still ring true. And the dynamic between them is useful; Eights and Sixes can have trouble getting along because Eights tend to suppress their fears and act strong while Sixes sometimes fear strong, declarative people. In a highly unhealthy relationship an Eight could become sadistic and a Six masochistic.

Here Lahti's and Tilly's characters become good friends and we see the high side of such a union. Both share antiauthoritarian drives. Lahti extends a protective, loyal quality that includes challenges to Tilly's fears. Tilly is also loyal and is willing to confront Lahti on her denial, which Lahti first resents but finally appreciates.

At first they are more obvious in their styles. Lahti has a tough mouth and smokes, swaggers and swears. She's alcoholic, uneducated and has worked as a barmaid for too long. Tilly is breaking out of a short marriage with a man she barely knew but had romanticized (ie: gave him her power). She's apologetic, a little whiny and often beats up on herself. She has panic attacks and is superstitious, projecting lots of power onto outside forces. Lahti yells at Tilly for apologizing too much. Latter replies, "I'm sorry!"

Tilly's quite an active doubter: " I don't know if I should be doing this. How do I know I won't be making the same stupid choices again?" Later she loosens up enough for a romance with Lenny Von Dohlen, a shy, poetic truck driver, himself a self-doubting Six.
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Malcolm X
Sweeping, seamless biography of black militant Malcolm X, splendidly played by Denzel Washington. He's an Eight and the film contrasts his grubby, rough, early life as "a junkie, a pimp, a convict" with his eventual religious conversion and career as a Muslim minister and firebrand.

The conversion occurs while Malcolm is in prison. His life is plainly not working and while he strikes defiant Eightish poses that get him harsh treatment, he's just about reached the limits of aggression for its own sake. He is repeatedly approached by a fellow prisoner Brother Bain (Albert Hall), an upright One, who asks Malcolm fierce, probing questions about his racial identity and what his life could count for. A slow unfolding of the spirit ensues, but what's also nice is the way Malcolm the Eight internalizes Brother Bain's Oneishness. It's as if the only cure for Malcolm's wild aggression is the absolute imposition of Oneish rules and precepts. Eights sometimes internalize ethical Oneishness and it can work well for them.

Malcolm eventually joins the Black Muslim Organization of Elijah Muhammad (Al Freeman Jr.). Latter is a Nine with a strong 1 wing and the film shows both his strength as a spiritual leader and then later his welter of flaws. Freeman is a little like Ben Kingsley in Gandhi, "a sweet, gentle man" who is empowered by piety.

Malcolm's eventual disillusionment with Muhammad is first preceded by Eightish denial - he refuses to believe that Muhammad fathers children out of wedlock and is politically ruthless. When Muhammad reveals that it's true and blithely rationalizes the facts, Malcolm goes from denial to crushing disillusionment and says, "I could conceive death but I couldn't conceive betrayal." Actually betrayal is something Eights often fear. For some, it is worse than death.

By this time, too, Malcolm is powerfully committed to his cause, and the combination of Eight and One forms the basis of his take-no-prisoners preaching style. He's fiery, a little vengeful, and absolutely unsparing in his descriptions of white America's treatment of blacks. He's so controversial that he unnerves both the white establishment and his own organization which finally marks him for death. The film shows very well how an Eight could assume a leadership role and pursue it with unyielding commitment and courage. The portrayal is powerful and not the least bit sentimental. The film's epilogue - essentially a lecture - is so different in tone that it should have come after the credits.

Malcolm is an introverted Eight with both wings. In interviews Denzel Washington is very much the same way, so this would be Enneatype casting. The portrayal also shows an Eight's connection to the high side of 2 in Malcolm's devoted relationship to Muhammad and in his mellowing towards white people near the end of his life. The high side of 5 is evident in the way Malcolm becomes both studious and introspectively self-searching.
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Reversal Of Fortune
Ron Silver plays real-life lawyer Alan Dershowitz who defended Claus von Bulow (Jeremy Irons) against charges of attempted murder of his wife, Sunny von Bulow.

Silver plays Dershowitz as a relatively healthy Eight (social subtype). Motivated by justice, he champions underdogs and defends poor people for free while charging the wealthy von Bulow full fee. "I've got to feel like some constitutional or ethical issue is at stake," he says, and it takes him a while to decide to defend von Bulow. "You have only one thing in your favor - everybody hates you."

Many movie Eights are villains, so it's nice to watch a productive one. Dershowitz inspires his law students, takes risks, and pushily engages the world. He dislikes von Bulow and doesn't disguise the fact. He's honest, demanding and impatient. He also has a soft heart and a streak of insecurity. Silver gives a vivid, likable performance in a superb film.

Irons is most likely playing a Three with a 4 wing. He's subtly competitive, status-seeking and wears an enigmatic mask. His character is playing a role of himself. Glenn Close, though in a coma, is a Two.
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September
Somber, whiny Woody Allen film about a group of depressed people spending an angst-filled weekend in a house in Vermont. Part of the problem is that everyone is in love with someone who's in love with someone else. Denholm Elliott loves Mia Farrow, a depressed, complaining Six, who loves Sam Waterston, a self-pitying Four. He thinks he loves the married, unavailable Dianne Wiest (Nine) who has gotten temporarily away from a life where she "was just going through the motions." Waterston the Four tells Wiest, "You haven't even left yet and I feel like I'm going to lose something that I'll never ever get back."

When Farrow's mother gusts into this stale atmosphere, things liven up considerably. She's an Eight, played by Elaine Strick, and she's loud, crass and delightful.

Strick would like to resolve her relationship with Farrow and this drives most of her behavior. She's secretly grieving her failings as a mother, but she covers her guilt with aggression, which is a defense for Eights. She offers Farrow unwanted opinions and simplistic homilies. She doles out criticism and then says, "Don't be so defensive!" when Farrow responds badly. Mom doesn't have a clue ...

She does try hard, though. She's basically good-natured, both well-meaning and gregarious. When she is unfair to Farrow late in the story, she apologizes and corrects her mistake. What she can't quite manage to do is switch places and identify with Farrow's feelings. Identification with others can sometimes be difficult for Eights, because of the tendency to caricature that I mentioned earlier. Eights avoid the weakness in others because it reminds them of their own.

By the way, the Strick/Farrow conflict in this film illustrates the different time orientations that Eights and Sixes can have. Strick lives very much in the present and the near future while Farrow is recycling the past. Strick is also keenly aware of aging and sums it up in this very Eightish way: "It's hell getting older. All the strengths that have sustained you all through your life start to disappear one by one."

Look for gruff Jack Warden, howlingly miscast as Strick's physicist husband. He almost always plays Nines and does here too.
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The Shootist
Art imitated life in John Wayne's last movie. He plays an aging gunfighter who is dying of cancer, just as Wayne himself did a couple of years after the release of this film. Wayne was an Eight in real life and his gunfighter reflects a kind of mellowing that the actor himself publicly admitted just before dying.

"I won't be wronged, insulted or laid a hand on. I don't do these things to others and I require it from them." Vulnerable because of the medical diagnosis, Wayne's gunfighter is still tough, but he also reveals the tolerant, innocent goodwill that Eights can have when unguarded.

He has mixed feelings about what he has done for a living, but all in all says, "I've had a hell of a good life." He is without self-pity about his fate and genial beneath his crabby façade. He has enough conscience to put things right with the people he cares about and he decides on a death that is, to him, morally useful and dignified.

Wayne gives a fine performance in a movie that is more a character study than action western. James Stewart as his doctor and Lauren Bacall as his landlady are both Ones, and the Eight/One dynamic is really evident. Bacall partly disapproves of and partly admires Wayne's rough dealings. Wayne is rude and feisty towards her judgments but he also respects her.

Ron Howard plays Bacall's son, something of a Nine but it's not clear. He angrily stands up to Wayne's bossiness and, typical of an Eight, Wayne likes him for it. Hugh O'Brian has a cameo as a gambler-gunfighter and an aura of a Three.
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Twenty-One
This movie is luridly advertised as a frank, bold exposé of a sexually liberated young woman. Naaah - she's a blunt Eight (Patsy Kensit). Kind of a healthy one too, and the film is mainly a character study as Kensit finds her way through a difficult year and relocates from England to the U.S. Along the way, she talks into the camera about her life and her monologues are unvarnished and antiromantic ("For a while now in my life, sex and love have come in different packages ..." begins one). You can almost tell that she's an Eight from the assured way she walks and occupies space. But she also talks tough, has aggressive reactions and likes to play the Bad Girl.

Like our other Eights, she thinks in caricature and when she checks an aggressive response to someone in the film, she still says something judgmental to us. There's a lot of frank sexual content in what she talks about and this is related to the role lust plays in an Eight's life. It's also not unusual to find a female Eight who is outwardly mild-mannered but then has a profane, colorful mouth.

At bottom, Kensit's character is a genuinely nice person (high side of 2). She has a certain sense of propriety and a code of ethics that prevents her from acting out too harmfully. She loves her father in a tender, uncomplicated way. He is an amiable, befuddled Nine who is splitting from Kensit's Threeish mother. "I have a thing about pissing my father off," she says, "but if I were ever caught sexually molesting animals he'd defend me and there's no one in the world I trust more."

The family dynamics are consistent with the backgrounds of some Eights. Kensit's passive father and preoccupied, image-oriented mother make for a kind of power vacuum that an Eight child would tend to fill up with inflated demonstrations of strength.

Kensit's doomed affair with a drug addict (a dull passage since it's obvious what will happen) reflects the low side of the connection to 2, the tendency towards codependence. She triesmpany being raided. This personalize to rescue him loyally even though his fate is really out of her hands.

The other thing to note is that Kensit has a 7 wing. She has a cheerful outlook and rebounds well from difficulty. "I don't think you should abolish morals and guilt, but I do think there's only one life and you'd better work out a way to enjoy it."

She has a woman friend who is only ever seen eating Chinese food and the woman is a Seven.
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White Hunter, Black Heart
Clint Eastwood in an unusual, more or less true character study of film director John Huston and his obsession to kill an elephant during the making of the film The African Queen.

Huston's Eightness is the actual subject of the film and he's textbook - bullying, obnoxious, protective, profane, funny and, finally, humbled. "It's not a crime to kill an elephant, it's a sin to kill an elephant and that's why I want to do it." The sociopathic, antipuritan tendencies of the Eight style are well displayed. He won't do anything anyone wants him to precisely because they do. He favors underdogs and minorities yet his affection for them is self-serving. He enjoys cruel practical jokes and, in one memorable lengthy scene, he ruthlessly insults an anti-Semitic English woman.

Jeff Fahey plays Eastwood's screenwriter sidekick and he's in the Nine/One range. He has bemused tolerance for the director at first. As it grows clear that Eastwood is pathologically destructive, Fahey gets more and more Oneish.

White Hunter is talky and forced at first and it's odd to see the taciturn Eastwood with so much dialogue. But once the story gets rolling it has surprising punch. A brave, compelling, anti-macho tract.
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