Writer/Director: Boaz Yakin
Actors: Josh Lucas, Jacqueline Bisset, Lucas Haas, Vanessa Kai, Carrington Vilmont,
Adam Brody, et al.
This is a discussion of this film and contains information specific to scenes in the film, often referred to as spoilers.
The film begins with a dramatic portrayal of the traumatic bonding between a Nazi Doctor and a female prisoner; a young woman abandoned by her parents escaping Nazi Germany and how she sacrifices the last of her self respect in order to survive her captivity. Surviving that captivity and suffering from the effects of her trauma now repressed, she marries and becomes the mother of two sons living in New York City. What follows are the desperate measures by the family in grappling with the results of the mother's failure at managing her life and how, like a virus, her abusive past has infected her two sons and the people with whom they are involved, adult men trying to cope with the lives they have inherited.
The oldest son, the scapegoat in the family, which he occasionally projects onto his gifted brother, abuses women in many ways; his life a classic case of the neurotic acting out of his parents' early years of marriage, the mother's repressed memories of her experiences and her repressed rage at her parental abandonment which, as a result of her trauma, she has difficulties containing within herself and acts out upon the oldest son frequently. Deprived of years of love we hear the oldest son confront his now not so unaware mother that he does not have a "nice girl", because he has nothing to give, why she left. We also see the oldest son sacrificing himself in many ways and is looking for love, always having it fail him, a childhood developmental pattern dramatized in the scene when the mother destroys an already neat and clean room, ranting and throwing things claiming he disobeyed her. The second son is the embodiment of the mother's weak, but cold and fearful, obsessive compulsive mother who must have been a pianist, controlling those around her with her weakness and on to whom the mother and father project this weakness. His eating habits that contribute to his disorder possibly come from the family's need to ration food during the Nazi regime. The mother attempts to reveal aspects of her past but does she do it to protect her sons? Do shame and guilt or her fear of what will happen to her if she talks about her experience, keep her from disclosing all to her family? The problems in this family and all the other characters exist because they unconsciously draw to themselves some form of abuse called traumatic re-enactment or repetition compulsion, as they are constantly recreating the mother's trauma, getting deeper into trouble as they progress, blind to the roots of their difficulties, helpless in finding a way out and some form of physical harm has to happen to bring each opus down from its crescendo (to relieve the tension) so they can move on regardless of the consequences. No insight can be gained this way.
The employer is clearly no different in that she permits the kind of abuse the oldest son acts out upon her person. He confronts this on several occasions, admitting his real need to love a woman, his mother, who withholds herself from her husband because she is entangled in her menagerie of male relationships including the Doctor. The employer needs the abuse he perpetrates to constantly create her feelings of superiority that aid her in maintaining her position as the boss. The stabbing seems an impulsive act brought on by a confrontation with her self as well, in which she too decides she has had enough but lashes out at the wrong man, called displacement in Psychology. Or, was it the mother's repressed desire to kill the Nazi doctor which the mother was never able to follow through with for fear of certain death? Here her mother's fearful and weak personality saved her life.
Why kill the mother's ex-lovers? Is this a dramatization of the father's desires or the sons’ desires to kill her lovers, [Oedipus Complex], is it part of the Doctor's own sick sadistic life script and beliefs with which he was brainwashed, or did the mother choose these lovers to save her loyal husband from the wrath of her sons because of her fear of abandonment? I ask myself why they do not get help to stop their insanity but again it is the constant acting out and re-enactments that prevents them from seeing their own desperation. The oldest son, taken in by his fellow employee, experiences closeness and a way out of his self imposed responsibility, only to have his heart betrayed once again. He knows his family is messed up but feels helpless to change them, he wants out. Is there a way out, will it be better, does he get out, or does he simply grow comfortable with the family demons?
I was confused by the ending. Is the mother anticipating being killed and thus takes her last walk to her death? She told her oldest son in their meeting that she was going to be free soon or was she going to murder the Doctor? I have been interested in psychic phenomena and I wonder if she was not only communicating this to her son but also to her husband and the Doctor with whom she has had a long lasting psychic connection, why he has shown up, what Jung calls synchronicity.
The Jews do not hold the world cup for suffering or living with PTSD as is well depicted here. I see all of the characters as probably suffering from the result of some kind of despicable abuse or oppression. What surprises me, is how little people really recognize or understand PTSD, repression, acting out, repetition compulsion, and a host of other maladies specific to victims of abuse when they see it; not just specific to the Jews, but war veterans and their families, victims of rape, sex trafficking, slavery, child molestation, and abuse perpetrated in the name of medicine, science, law enforcement and including that which we have inherited from centuries when no psychiatric care existed or was simply unattainable. I based this observation on the articles I have read about the film.
To me Death In Love is also a depiction of the hidden cruelty within our society as a whole, the incapacity to truly love, the sado-masochism hiding behind what we blindly accept as being for our benefit or best interest. The film was better than expected and I had been waiting to see a film that focused on the subject of abuse and it’s aftermath, although I did see Coming Home, based on the experiences of a Vietnam veteran. I was hesitant in viewing it based on the previews I watched but I have rarely been misled by Bisset's choices in her roles or films though they have surprised me recently, so I felt compelled to see it. This film is different than The Fine Art of Love as the rage is seriously repressed and the cruelty not so obvious. In Death In Love the anger and rage being acted is abounding, real and often frightening.
Excellent acting by all.
Psychoanalysis of Children, Melanie Klein
Origins of Object Relations, Ronald Fairbairn
Splitting and Projective Identification, James Grotstein
PTSD, A Clinical Review, Sidran Press, pgs. 76-83
Beyond the Brain, Stanislov Grof, pg. 240
Life Scripts, Claude Steiner
Synchronicity, Carl Jung
Acting Out, The Neurosis of Our Time, Goldman and Milman
