Double Feature: Discovering Our Hidden Fantasies in Film

By Herbert H. Stein

a) What recent smash hit movie secretly depicted fear of the female breast? b) Name some recent films that were preoccupied with castration anxiety? c) Would you be surprised to know that reliving our childhood Oedipal fixations helps us to better understand adult-themed films? You'll find the answers to these and many similarly intriguing questions in DOUBLE FEATURE: DISCOVERING OUR HIDDEN FANTASIES IN FILM by Herbert Stein, M.D. Dr. Stein, a highly-respected Freudian psychiatrist and passionate moviegoer, literally puts our favorite films on the couch and shares his confidential findings with us. In a book that could become a cult classic, he lays bare the truth about unconscious and subconscious themes running through popular culture with fresh, jolting, and often moving insights into some of the most popular films ever made, including JURASSIC PARK, FIELD OF DREAMS, FORRST GUMP, THE SIXTH SENSE, and THE USUAL SUSPECTS. However perceptive we may think ourselves, this book reveals how we unconsciously respond to deeply-embedded archetypal themes in movies and enables us to re-experience films we love in a completely fresh way. Indeed, DOUBLE FEATURE makes our favorite films even more resonant and enables us to articulate even more deeply what it is we love about them. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Apr 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781480496248

Herbert H. Stein

Dr. Herbert H. Stein is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. He is on the teaching faculty of the NYU psychoanalytic Institute. For several years, he has been the editor of the PANY Bulletin (Bulletin of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York), as well as a regular contributor of articles on psychoanalysis and the cinema, most of which are included, in modified form, in this volume.

Book preview

The Museum of Modern Art in New York City has a permanent film exhibit at which they regularly show old films in a small theater. Many years ago, my wife and I happened into that theater when they were showing the closing scenes of The Blue Veil. We probably saw only about fifteen minutes of film, but when it ended, we stood in puddles of our tears. The teenage girl who served as an usher looked at my wife's eyes as we were leaving and said, Oh, you liked it!

What is there about a film, in fact a fragment of a film, that can exert such a strong emotional pull? Since most readers have probably not seen The Blue Veil, I'll fill you in on the fragment that we saw. (In fact, I've never seen the rest of the film.) As we came in, a kidnapped boy had just been recovered from a nanny who had loved him and feared for his welfare with a stepmother. The boy went back to his parents, but no charges were pressed against the nanny. The scene shifts, and we see the nanny, now an old woman, going for an eye exam. The doctor who is giving her the exam recognizes her. It turns out that he was one of the children that she had cared for as a nanny. He invites her to visit his home for dinner that Saturday night. When she arrives, there is a surprise for her. The room is filled with the grown children that she had raised. With joy, she embraces each of them. The host then arranges a phone call, and the nanny is able to speak with the boy that she had tried to save. Finally, the host brings out his own two young children and asks her to stay on with them and help raise his children.

Stated like this, the plot sounds syrupy and mawkish, yet it drove two adults to fits of tears, and we were not alone. In writing about Casablanca, the psychoanalytic film reviewer, Harvey Greenberg, wrote, If I know it's schmaltzy then why am I crying? (Greenberg, H. Movies on Your Mind) The fact is that films frequently have a deeper emotional effect than we can readily understand because they touch upon unconscious fantasies that many of us share. We often don't understand why we react as we do, and we may even try to fight it, but we are responding to a hidden image, evoked silently in ourselves, that has deeper and more personal meaning than the image we see on the screen.

When we go into a movie theater, we tend to give ourselves over to the experience. The large screen and dark room help prepare us to relax our critical faculties. Watching a film is probably a more passive experience than reading a book. When we read, we must actively create internal images from words. Although we do this relatively automatically, it requires an active role for our imagination. A well made film meets our imagination more than half way. We sit back and watch images created by others, hoping that they will reflect our own inner fantasy world. When they do, the film projects our daydreams onto a large screen and presents them back to us as if they were real. By looking at film, we can reveal our shared daydreams and by looking more closely, we can discern the unconscious fantasies that move those daydreams.

No human being is without unconscious fantasy. Unconscious fantasies are like magical tales begun in early childhood. They have to do with the people who were most important to us at that time, particularly fathers, mothers, siblings and ourselves. They often reflect childhood understandings of the structure and workings of our own bodies. How and where are babies born? Who does Mommy or Daddy love the most? They involve the pleasures of sexual contact or of warmth and nourishment, the violent destructiveness of rage. Fantasies color our entire existence. They help give meaning and direction to our lives and are closely connected to our emotions, emotions that can be tapped by film makers who know how to evoke them.

For several years, I have been writing short articles on Psychoanalysis and the Cinema for the Bulletin of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY Bulletin). That task has pushed me to look for evidence of unconscious fantasy in popular films. One of the additional benefits for me was that in studying and writing about a film, I inevitably discovered aspects of the fantasies they involved that I had not imagined when I started. Most of the film essays in this book come from the articles in the PANY Bulletin. Two were based on short essays published in other psychoanalytic journals. Although originally written for an audience of psychoanalysts, they have proven to be interesting and entertaining to others as well.

When I present in person to an audience that has just seen the film I am discussing, I tell them, I see you enjoyed the movie, now I hope you'll like the second feature. The second feature is another hidden story within the fabric of the one we see before us. It usually takes place in early childhood, the actors are parents and siblings, and the props are parts of the body. This is not a new idea. Psychoanalysts have long reveled in seeing what they have discerned in their patients and imagined in their theories revealed ever so subtly in popular films. In many cases, the hidden story is at least as thrilling as the one we see before our eyes. These stories are evoked through metaphor, through images that touch on other images, and through characters with whom we can identify or whose roles in the film evoke memories of people with other roles in our lives.

Why did I weep watching The Blue Veil? Even as we take pleasure in seeing the sharing of love between nanny and child, we also grieve for a sharing of love with our own mothers and caretakers that we will never reexperience in full. The film's happy reunions are faintly reminiscent of idyllic moments in our childhood when our tears were met with the comforting contact of a loving parent.

I have grouped the films in this book into chapters, primarily according to the type of fantasy they use. The first chapter involves films that attempt to use a fantasy of reunion to cope with the loss of a loved one early in life, a theme I have found quite frequently in popular film. The three following chapters deal with fantasies of pregnancy and birth, the Oedipus complex, and the primal scene, a psychoanalytic concept having to do with the young child observing parental lovemaking. Chapter five compares three films in terms of the way they use fantasy to help us cope with a particular conflict. Chapter six looks at three films that demonstrate fantasies on many levels, but which I have used to elucidate the relationship between psychoanalyst or psychotherapist and patient. Inevitably, there are essays that could have been placed in any of several chapters. I have separated out three such films that offer innovative solutions to trauma with very unlikely heroes. This is not a closed taxonomy of fantasy in film, merely an attempt to begin to organize some of the fantasies more commonly used in film. In fact, you will find that films for which I have focused on the Oedipus complex also may demonstrate primal scene fantasies, that films with fantasies that compensate for early loss also touch on childhood fantasies of pregnancy and birth, and that examples of different types of fantasies can be seen in virtually any of these films, with a greater or lesser emphasis.

A few words about technique. In examining films, I have used an approach that has served me, and others, quite well in treating patients: Start from the surface and work your way beneath it. I begin with what is clear and right in front of me, and I try to clarify that surface, to understand it as best I can before looking for clues as to what may be better hidden. If a film affects us, the themes reflected in its surface should be reflected in its hidden fantasies. To put it another way, we go from what we know to what we don't know, as if we were walking into a dark room whose entrance is illuminated from the doorway, reaching into the darkness to find another light.

In these essays, I use what might be called an audience-centered approach. Since I don't interview members of the film's audience, I make an educated guess as to what affects the audience and how it affects them, generally using myself as a sample of one. This is obviously not foolproof, and I leave it to the readers to judge for themselves. One of the advantages of discussing film as opposed to clinical cases, for instance, is that any reader can put the tape into a VCR and see for himself. I have not tried to understand the motives of the filmmakers. Obviously, most of the effects they produce in us with their films are not accidental, they are the result of the film makers’ conscious and unconscious purposes. Nevertheless, even if a film, hypothetically, had an effect upon us which was in no way the intention of the film makers, we could still try to examine the film to see how it achieves that result. It is my own belief that any work of art is ultimately a collaboration between the artist and the audience. Sometimes that collaboration may be accidental. I have touched on that in my examination of my own reactions to the film, Three Came Home.

I could have called this book Triple Feature or Multiple Feature, although those titles are less catchy, because the fantasies described here are not the only ones contained in the fabric of these films. Other fantasies may be expressed as well, both from other psychoanalytic perspectives and perspectives that focus on literature, myth, and the history of film. In a recent paper in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Berman (1997) compared multiple interpretations of a single film, Hitchcock's Vertigo, and argued that each viewer and each reviewer approaches the film from his own perspective and interests and is open to different fantasies inherent in the film that can move us. The point is that a film can move us in many ways. In these essays I have looked at some very basic human fantasies that each of these films evokes. In some way, these fantasies are personal for me, and for the same reasons they are also personal to others. They partly explain how films move us, and, more importantly, they help show us what makes us tick.

I might also have included the word, trauma, in the title. Virtually every film discussed here evokes in us a sense of a psychological trauma, an overwhelming blow to our integrity and sense of wellbeing, and an attempt to repair the damage through fantasy. I am not prepared to say that this is a ubiquitous pattern in commercial film because I may well have selected these films for discussion because they centered around trauma and fantasied resolution; but it is clear that the attempt to resolve trauma is at the core of a great many popular films.

Berman, E. (1997) Hitchcock's Vertigo: The collapse of a rescue fantasy,

International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 78, 1997, P. 975—996

Greenberg, H. (1975) The Movies On Your Mind: Film Classics On the Couch From Fellini to Frankenstein. New York: Saturday Review Press/E.P. Dutton

1

Coping with Loss

Shadowlands

In the film Shadowlands, the film's central figure, the scholar and fantasy author C.S. Lewis struggles with a conflict between living in a world of childlike fantasy and growing up to face reality and loss. The source of the conflict is the death of his mother in childhood.

The fantasy focuses upon one of Lewis’ works, a well known children's story, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, about children who pass through a mysterious old wardrobe in a professor's home into a land of magic. When one of his colleagues asks how an unmarried professor would have a wardrobe filled with fur coats, Lewis explains that it was his mother's old wardrobe. We later learn that Lewis has just such a wardrobe in his own attic, still filled with his mother's old coats. Another colleague gives it a Freudian interpretation, suggesting that the children are pushing through the mother's fur, but Lewis dismisses it, as well as a religious explanation, finally explaining with great animation, It's just magic. Magic! Let me show you. The child steps into the wardrobe. The coats are thick and heavy ... The child must push through, they're pressing close, almost suffocating, and suddenly there's white light, crisp cold air, trees, snow, a total contrast, you see. It's the gateway to a magical world. In essence, he is describing a fantasy of what it is like to be born.

Contrasted with this exciting, pleasant fantasy is his intellectualized view, expressed in a lecture he is giving, that God wants us to grow up, that God's greatest gift to us is suffering. But, the film clearly makes the point that he cannot practice what he preaches, that his life-style is designed to avoid and deny the pain of his mother's death when he was still a young boy—avoid through intellectualization that helps him keep an emotional distance from virtually everyone and deny through the creation of his fantasy worlds.

These defenses are assaulted by a young American woman, Joy Gresham, who pushes her way into his life and feelings. When she develops terminal cancer, Lewis must come to terms with his loss, both directly and through his relationship with her young son who is also losing his mother. In the process, Lewis is able to express his love to Joy and to accept the pain of loss.

The conflict that is so explicit in Shadowlands, between denial through fantasy and the acceptance of overwhelming early loss, is a hidden driving force that pushes several other films. In most of these films, the early maternal loss is in the background, almost outside our awareness, so that we do not quite know that it helps drive the fantasy we are watching. One of the clearest examples is the classic, The Wizard of Oz, in which the fact that Dorothy is an orphan is never explicitly stated but clearly understood. The fantasy, which can be understood psychoanalytically in other ways as well, clearly involves idealized and hated mothers, and helps prepare Dorothy to accept her new mother, Auntie Em. Denial in fantasy is described with vivid detail as occurring in children by Anna Freud in The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense (1936), and Oz provides a nice example of that in a film directed primarily at children; but the use of fantasy to cope with early maternal loss has been used by recent films directed at an adult audience, as well.

Field of Dreams

Constructing a Daydream

Field of Dreams is based on the novel Shoeless Joe, by W. P. Kinsella. It follows the book closely in most respects, although paring down the cast of characters. On the face of it, the plot seems childish. A man plows under his Iowa cornfield to build a baseball field that will call back Shoeless Joe Jackson and other major league baseball players of bygone eras. Nevertheless, a number of adults, not all unsophisticated, were absorbed by the film and moved to tears by its finale.

Field of Dreams opens much like a patient coming to a therapist for a consultation, with a short history and a symptom. The opening scene is narrated by the film's central character, Ray Kinsella. He briefly describes his father's life and then his own. He finishes the narrative telling us, I'm 36 years old, I love my family, I love baseball, and I'm about to become a farmer; but, until I heard the voice, I'd never done a crazy thing in my whole life. We then see Ray working in his cornfield where he hears a voice telling him, If you build it, he will come. The voice is like a symptom in a patient, and like many a symptom, it reveals an attempt to resolve an underlying conflict.

The opening history focuses on Ray Kinsella's relationship to his dead father, John Kinsella. There are obvious problems in the relationship. Ray was brought up by an aging father after his mother's death when he was three. Instead of Mother Goose, I was put to bed with stories of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and the great Shoeless Joe Jackson. They quarreled when Ray was an adolescent and never resolved the dispute. John Kinsella never saw his daughter-in-law or granddaughter before he died. The nature of the dispute is somewhat vague. It becomes clearer in a later scene in which Ray explains that his father, who had had an unsuccessful baseball career, pushed his son to become a ballplayer. At fourteen, Ray rebelled. At 17, he told his father, I can't admire a man whose hero was a criminal, and left forever. His father's hero was Shoeless Joe Jackson, a Chicago White Sox ballplayer who was thrown out of baseball for participating in a scheme, paid for by gamblers, to throw the 1919 World Series. The first conflict the film presents has to do with a son's regrets over an unresolved dispute with his father.

The second conflict involves Ray's self-image and aspirations. Ray explains to his wife that he wants to listen to the voice and build a baseball field in his corn because he does not want to be like his father, unsmiling and unable to act on his dreams. He says that he feels that this is his last chance to pursue a dream and be different from his father. Ray is 36, a husband and a father, and he fears that the responsibilities of adulthood, along with the aging process, will drain him of passion. His conflict is one with which many film viewers can identify: facing adult responsibilities and complex realities, including the ultimate prospect of death, and wishing to maintain the excitement, whimsy, and idealism of youth. We have learned more about the dispute between father and son. The son saw the father as joyless. In fact, we can begin to piece together evidence that Ray's father was depressed.

A third conflict is on a societal level. It has to do with the 1960's vs. the 1980's. The film repeatedly contrasts the more excited and expressive 60's with the sober, materialistic, reality oriented 80's. In the opening history, Ray describes himself as having majored in the sixties at Berkeley. Later, his wife Annie, opposing the banning of books in the local school, accuses her opponent of never having experienced the sixties. Having won her victory by enlisting support for free speech and the bill of rights from the crowd, she tells Ray, It was just like the 60's. Later, Ray encounters the disillusioned writer from the sixties, Terence Mann, who sprays him with insecticide, yelling, Go back to the sixties! There's no place for you in the future. The conflict between the idealism and freedom of adolescence and the responsibilities of adulthood is presented on a societal level, perhaps with baby boomers in mind, in the contrast between the 1960's and 1980's.

A final conflict has to do with the boundary between fantasy and reality. This is presented as a continuing tension in the structure of the film, between characters, and within characters. It adds another perspective to the conflicts between father and son, adolescence and adulthood, and sixties and eighties, with flexible boundaries and a blending of fantasy and reality associated with the son, adolescence, and the sixties.

The film does not resolve these conflicts. Instead, it attempts to solve them through the creation of a fantasy. The body of the film can be divided, roughly, into three sections, with a repeating pattern. Each section begins with a voice. Each focuses around a man who has died, either literally or figuratively, and has failed or fallen from grace. In each segment, there is first a verbal re-idealization of this man. This is followed by a moment of near hopelessness in the face of a grim reality (usually the mortgage). At this point, the film's fantasy is expanded in its perceptual content and the number of people sharing the fantasy. The dead man is brought back to life, the boundary between fantasy and reality becomes blurrier, and the audience is drawn further into the film's fantasy.

The first voice is, If you build it, he will come. The central figure of this segment is Shoeless Joe Jackson. Ray comes to believe that the voice means that if he builds a baseball field, Shoeless Joe will return to play on it. Despite his doubts, he starts to build the field. As he does so, he tells his wife and daughter about Shoeless Joe in what amounts to a re-idealization. First he describes Shoeless Joe's grace and baseball skills, then debunks the argument that Jackson helped throw the 1919 World Series. He has also begun to reconstruct a positive image of his father. As Ray talks about his father describing Shoeless Joe, Annie says, That's the first time you've ever smiled talking about your father.

At this point, in the context of film convention, the audience does not know if Ray's voice is in his mind as a psychotic event. Only Ray hears the voice. He doubts his sanity. He even asks some farmers if they hear voices in the field. He tells his daughter that Jimmy Stewart talking about Harvey, the invisible rabbit, is a sick man. The film's music goes from a song about being crazy to What a day for a daydream.

At the point at which Ray and Annie realize that they cannot afford the field and think about plowing it under, the fantasy expands. Ray's daughter Karen says, Daddy, there's a man on your lawn. Two things happen. Shoeless Joe Jackson appears on the field, playing and talking with Ray. He is also seen and heard by Annie and Karen. When Karen asks, Are you a ghost? Shoeless Joe says, What do you think? She replies, You look real to me. Well, then I must be real. Seeing is believing. Joe runs off, disappearing into the corn, with Ray's promise that he can return with other banned team members. Although boundaries do exist (Shoeless Joe cannot step beyond the baseball field), there has been a partial breakdown in the film of the boundary between reality and fantasy.

The second voice tells Ray, Ease his pain. This time the man involved is a fictional author of the 60's, Terence Mann (played by James Earl Jones), who has given up writing and working for causes. (In the book, Shoeless Joe, this character is J.D. Salinger, but Salinger would not let his name be used for the film.) We see a school board book censorship meeting at which Annie begins the eulogy for Terence Mann, calling him ...a gentle voice of reason in a time of great trouble. He coined the phrase, ‘Make love, not war'. Ray researches Mann, and continues his verbal resurrection, describing his accomplishments.

He realizes that his mission is to take Terence Mann to a ball game. Annie questions it, arguing that they can't afford to have Ray leave the farm to go on this adventure. At the crucial point, fantasy overwhelms reality in the form of a dream that is shared by Ray and Annie in which Ray is at Fenway Park with Terence Mann.

Ray finds Mann, who is originally bitter and cynical. Mann explains, eventually, that he lost hope when They killed Robert, they killed Martin, and elected Tricky Dick twice. His full resurrection through the regaining of passion occurs throughout the film. Mann goes with Ray to the game. On the way back, when he is about to leave Ray and Ray is about to give up his quest, fantasy overwhelms reality again as Terence Mann shares Ray's vision and acknowledges that he has heard the third voice.

The third voice comes to Ray at the ball game, accompanied with graphics on the stadium scoreboard. The voice says, Go the distance. The man involved is Archibald (Moonlight, Doc) Graham. He played one inning for the New York Giants in 1922 and never came to bat. (There is an Archibald Moonlight Graham listed with those statistics in the baseball encyclopedia. The real Graham played in 1905 and died in 1965 in Chisholm, Minnesota.) Ray and Terry go to Minnesota to find Moonlight Graham. They find out that he was a doctor who died in 1972. As they research him, he, too, is idealized in written and verbal accounts of his exploits as the town physician. Ray and Terry don't know what to do with the information and are ready to give up when the boundaries between fantasy and reality break down further. Ray steps out of his motel room in 1988 into a street in 1972. He meets Doc Graham and talks with him. Graham describes his one inning. Ray asks him, If you had one wish... Doc Graham would like to bat against a major league pitcher. Ray offers to take him to Iowa and his field, but Graham cannot leave his town and his wife. Ray pleads that to give up a dream would be a tragedy for some men. Graham replies, If I were a doctor for only five minutes, that would have been a tragedy.

Ray leaves, and he and Terry head back to Iowa. The boundaries between fantasy and reality have been further intertwined with Ray's little time travel. They become hopelessly blurred with the next sequences. Ray picks up a young hitch-hiker who says he is a ballplayer and introduces himself as Archie Graham. At this point, the audience will be overwhelmed with confusion if it attempts to unravel reality from fantasy. The only choice is to accept the fantasy as real or leave the theater.

There is one further twist in the pretzel. The field is now the site of ball games between heroes of bygone days. Archie gets his at bat against a major league pitcher, knocking in a run with a fly ball to right. Then, Ray's brother-in-law comes over to convince Ray he must sell the farm or lose it to foreclosure by him and his partners. He still cannot see the ballplayers. He is a hold-out for the 80's, materialism, and tight boundaries. Ray refuses, and in a little scuffle, his daughter Karen falls off the stand and lies unconscious. Annie is going to call for help, but Ray tells her to wait as he watches Archie Graham drop his mitt and step out over the boundary of the field. As he does so, he is transformed into the elderly Doc Graham. He confidently knocks a piece of hot dog out of Karen's mouth, reviving her. With this, fantasy and reality are inextricably bound (Karen would have died if not for the intervention of a doctor who had died sixteen years earlier.) and even Ray's brother-in-law can see the players.

Doc Graham, as a creation of the film's fantasy, provides a perfect father figure. Unlike Ray's father, Doc does not have to give up his idealism or his belief in dreams to enter into the world of adulthood and responsibility. Played by Burt Lancaster, he maintains a sparkle in his eye and a wonderment and gullibility about the possibilities around him. Nevertheless, he is able to forego his dreams, not masochistically or with depression, but with an eager desire to meet his responsibilities to his wife and his town. He recognizes that the tragedy would have been if he had missed being a doctor, missed the adult part of his life. Similarly, having saved Karen, he willingly accepts leaving the field forever. He reassures Ray that it's all right. He is not afraid of death.

But the film does not resolve conflict in this way, by taking Doc Graham as an ideal and coming to terms with reality and death. The fantasy that has been created moves on to blur the differences between father and son, to present a message that fantasy and idealism will automatically win out, to blend the idealism of the sixties with the pursuit of pleasure of the eighties, and to deny death.

Death plays an important part in this film. Terence Mann lost hope after they killed Bobby and then Martin. Death separated Ray from hopes of reconciliation with his father. Most importantly, it probably accounts for the father's depression. We learn that John Kinsella was beaten by life. The opening segment stresses his disillusionment with the Black Sox scandal. He lived and died with the White Sox: died a little when they lost the 1919 world series, died a lot the next year when eight members of the team were accused of throwing that series. In those opening scenes, we also see the wrecking ball destroying Ebbetts Field (a tragedy, indeed). However, the real tragedy is deliberately glossed over. "Mom died when I was three, and I suppose Dad did the best he could." With this passing comment, the film tells us that Ray's life began with a tragic loss.

In the final scenes, death is overcome. Terence Mann nervously disappears into the cornfield with the ballplayers, with the intention of returning to write about what's out there. Finally, Ray's father appears as the team's catcher, a young man without the weight of his later years. Ray gets to meet his father and to play catch with him.

The conflicts have not been resolved, they have been blurred or overcome through the fantasy. Father and son are reconciled. There is no competition and no aggression. Death is only a matter of location. The mortgage is covered by a steady stream of visitors who pay $20 to see the heroes of their youth. It is of interest that one of the prices paid for indulging in idealizing fantasies is that eventually the daydreamer becomes a passive observer. After all is said and done, the answer to our problems is to watch ball games.

At the end of the film, we see Annie turn on the lights while Ray plays catch with his father. She looks on like an indulgent mother. Ray asks his father, Is there a heaven? and is told, Oh yeah, it's the place where dreams come true. Ray looks at Annie and Karen and says, Well, maybe this is heaven. At the end of the film, the camera pans skyward as if to ponder the question.

I cannot help thinking that a little boy would be told that Mommy went to heaven. In Annie's constant support and final motherly gesture and in Ray's finding heaven, we have the final piece, the mending of all wounds. Through the field of dreams and its conquest of death Ray experiences closeness with the mother he barely knew. The film would appear to say that only through fantasy can such tragedy be overcome.

Contact

A Voyage to Inner Space

In Field of Dreams, a man is reunited with his long dead father and with the vague images and fantasies that remained of his mother, who had died when he was a small child. Contact, a film released nearly ten years later, makes explicit this theme of

Reviews for Double Feature

[jeff · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great book. It taught me so much about analyzing films. Author writes clearly too.