Recent Sightings

Star Maps is an offbeat, watchable slice of life that follows an ambitious young Mexican-American as he returns from Mexico to live with his birth family and pursue his dream of being an actor in Los Angeles. He's pressed into the family business of selling maps to the homes of movie stars-except that's not the family business. The boy's father is a pimp and he puts his son to work on a tight schedule.

The film contrasts a matter-of-fact normalcy with the damage this lifestyle does. The Twoish mother is recovering from a nervous breakdown while the family's Nineish daughter is frantically trying to pretend she has a normal life. The father (Efrain Figueroa)-an unhealthy Eight and the villian of the piece-is slowly revealed to be a brutal maniac. Partly he is acting out of his own background, trying to "toughen up" the boy for life in a hard world. But he lies to everyone and when the boy has a real chance an acting job the father steals it for himself.
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This same kind of monster father is on display in This Boy's Life. Robert DeNiro plays an unhealthy Eight (a self-preservation subtype) who values objects over people. Leonardo DiCaprio plays the abused son and Ellen Barkin is the abused Sevenish mother.

Good Will Hunting, just out on video, is a good case study of a troubled young Eight played by Matt Damon. Robin Williams is effective as Damon's Five psychiatrist. As a Five, though, he demonstrates a strong connection to Eight. Ben Affleck could be a cheerful Six; he seems that way in this film but he has a minor role. In Chasing Amy he played a Nine.
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6/1

NICO/ICON is a German documentary just out in American video stores. The subect is Nico, a German avant garde singer who found underground fame in the 1960's as a member of Andy Warhol's Factory and as the lead vocalist for The Velvet Underground. She's a Four and the film begins by chronicling her rough childhood and fortunate young adulthood as a model, made possible by her striking beauty.

She subsequently defiles that beauty through heroin addiction and a nomadic, rootless life as a toneless singer of morbid songs. One song is about admiring her childhood toys just before she breaks them; another is about feeling a sense of loss for she knows not what. Nico had a Five wing, consistent with her solitary nature, deadpan, alienated manner and sullen vanity.

The film captures Nico in a 1960s context and ascribes some of her more self-destructive behavior to artistic temperment. But Nico's downward slide is typical of a deeply unhealthy Four. This is a story of damage and squalor, of squandered opportunity. You can almost feel her drive to wreck it all and hasten her own death. "That's what makes the whole thing so sad," says one friend, "to have all the assets and still fail."
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There are other recent films that nicely showcase Fours. The Dark Side of the Human Heart is a weird Argentine movie about a poet who renounces normal life and becomes a street person. Meanwhile he's on an abstract quest to find the perfect woman. The story is sometimes monotonous but instructive about Fours.
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For a healthy Four see Maya Linn, A Strong Clear Vision. Linn is the Asian-American sculptor who created the Vietnam war memorial in Washington, DC. She is a self-preservation subtype, a risktaker who realized her inner vision of the memorial against a typhoon of opposition. She's inspiring and I'd recommend this film to any Four who needs a role model.
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Washington Square features a good villianous One father, played by Albert Finney. His daughter (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is Niney and over the course of the story she acquires a resigned bitter focus as she surrenders to her father's control of her life. Outwardly, you can see her change from placating tactfulness-wanting to make peace-to the dead-eyed bluntness that Nines have after they give up on themselves.

Jennifer Jason Leigh is a real-life Nine and often plays them (Miami Blues). Albert Finney, a real-life Seven, also played a terrific One in The Browning Version. Maggie Smith plays a clear Two in Washington Square .
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4/29
Ulee's Gold. Real life Seven Peter Fonda said that he played his father Henry in this film. If so, Henry Fonda was a One with a Nine wing. Repressed, foreboding, alienated, Fonda's Ulee Jackson is roused from his numb stupor by a family crisis that forces him to care. By story's end, he's subtly but believably different.

Fonda's precise, nuanced performance in Ulee surprised everyone but he gave a hint that he could act in the recent Nadja, a campy atmospheric vampire movie. Fonda played Van Helsing the vampire killer as a goofy off-kilter Seven while Elina Lowensohn had the title role, a clear Four.
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The Edge looks like an overheated, testosterone-laced adventure about a plane crash in the Alaska. It is, but there are some exciting sequences and two strong performances by Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins.

Baldwin is playing a sort of Seven with an Eight wing. Hopkins plays his real life style (Five), an emotionally constricted billionaire who has to translate his book knowledge about wilderness survival into Eightish action.

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3/30
In the Company of Men sports two clear portraits of a sociopathic Three (Aaron Eckhart) and a Threeish Six (Matt Malloy). They set out to romance and then emotionally devastate a Niney deaf woman played by Stacy Edwards (from tv's ER).

The film is a nominal indictment of the way some men treat women but if you know the Enneagram it has several levels. Actor Eckhard said he deliberately studied sociopaths and he gets the syndrome letter perfect. Many are profoundly unhealthy Threes. The character is a corporate Three, something I discuss in The Enneagram Movie & Video Guide.

Malloy, the Six, also behaves close to type. As the nasty scheme progresses he grows guilty and ambivalent. While attempting to confess to Edwards he winds up attacking her. Apart from a ham-fisted scene or two, this film is pretty good.
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Primal Fear is a not-too-bad thriller with a relationship at its center between an Eight (Edward Norton) who for most of the movie pretends he's a Nine and his defense attoney, a Three played by Richard Gere. Gere squares off in morality arguments with One with a 2 wing Laura Linney, an actress who has said that her idol is Joanne Woodward- a One with a 2 wing.
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Due to a seamlessly busy schedule I've not seen Titanic but I'll offer some blindfolded guesses about the movie's possible Enneagram styles - assuming it actually has them.

Kate Winslet has played a Four with a 3 wing in most of her films, from Heavenly Creatures (true story of two unstable teenage Fours who murder one of the girls' mothers; recommended for the way it contrasts the 3 and 5 wings) to Sense and Sensibility (near-perfect movie; Emma Thompson's a clear One, her real-life style).

In Titanic, Winslet's older self is played by 87 year old actress Gloria Stuart. I've not seen Stuart's early movies but watched her in a number of recent tv interviews. She also seems a Four with a Three wing.

In real life, Leonardo DiCaprio is a multi-talented Seven with maybe an 8 wing. You can see him playing this style in the fairly awful Total Eclipse. Kathy Bates who, I think, plays Molly Brown in Titanic, often plays Eights (Men Don't Leave, The Late Show) and is maybe at it again in the new John Travolta movie Primary Colors. Her other notable Enneagram role was as an insane Two in the well-acted horror movie Misery.

It also looks like part of Titanic takes place in the present and features a character based of the shipwreck's discoverer, Robert Ballard. Ballard is a Seven and Bill Paxton plays the explorer figure in the movie. Paxton is also a Seven and plays them (the recent not-so-hot Traveller) as well as Sixes (the flaming paranoid soldier in Aliens).

Billy Zane, who plays Kate Winslet's husband in Titanic, has knocked around in B movies for years mainly playing Threes and Sixes. But he made a stunning debut in the grim, enthralling Dead Calm, an Australian film noir about a couple (Sam Neill and Nicole Kidman) with the worst luck in the world. Out on a sailing vacation, recovering from the accidental death of their young daughter, the couple comes across a stranded ship and rescues its lone survivor (Zane). They too-slowly realize that he is a psychotic counter-phobic Six.

The movie shows how dangerous deeply unhealthy Sixes can be. Zane's character is a "victimizing victim," someone who projects his own hostility and then lashes out at the people he has projected onto. Enneagram students often struggle with the difference between Eights and unhealthy counterphobic Sixes because both can be destructively aggressive. One key difference is that unhealthy Sixes almost always see themselves as victims while Eights never do.

Sam Neill (Jurassic Park) is Fiveish as always. Nicole Kidman, who I suspect is a real-life Three and often plays them (see Malice and especially To Die For), is faintly Eightish in Dead Calm. She gives words like "plucky" and "resourceful" new meanings. This movie is not for sissies.
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