Five days ago, I put on my headphones, turned on some new music, and set out for a walk in the hour before sunset in Cambridge. It was chilly, and I wore no coat, but I walked slowly nevertheless, reveling in the city’s every detail. The next day, Marathon Monday, my evening walk felt differently. I’d avoided tragedy, but only by chance. My mother reassured me that she had been “half a football field” from the second bomb, a fact that cheered her but sounded too close to dumb luck to console me.

Terrorism does not scare me. I would still walk the streets of Boston, and of Cambridge, any day. I’m sure that there are hardly any who feel otherwise; Bostonians are rational, Cantabrigians, too, and they know the odds are in their favor. How do we unpack this feeling, then, the one that robs us of sleep after an attack?

As much as you want to feel when these things happen, there’s a limit you reach, shattered only when you see SWAT teams lined along the street which you drunkenly walked while too broke to pay for a cab some Saturday night. The streets where you smiled at your landlord through his shop’s floor-to-ceiling glass window, entranced by his fingers weaving patches into torn rugs late into the night. Where you walked for hours with friends, exploring the patchwork of public housing and mansions, dingy convenience stores lined next to bookshops for mystics, dissidents, artists, and scholars. And in June, where you danced outdoors with all types at the foot of city hall, not really noticing the diversity until an out-of-towner remarked on it.

Everyone is staring where you once were, and the cops are poised to blow up other bombs found two blocks from your old apartment. An MIT cop, the kind of guy who never expected this sort of thing, gets shot outside of the building where you spent the first three days of your week. Living now, as I do, in Baltimore, one expects a certain amount of crime. You do not wish to be mugged, but you know that the probability of the crime is high.

I never could understand how New Yorkers felt about 9/11. That strange mix of pride and violation, removed from fear and hate. A desire for vengeance, sure, but directed toward individuals not groups. I’ll never be able to process events like this the same way again. It’s selfish, maybe, but that’s a limitation of humans. You can only fully empathize with feelings echoing those you’ve had before, and so maybe we can at least say that acts of terrorism enhance our humanity and community.

Disclaimer: I was surprised by the scattered, incomplete, and sometimes conflicting information I found about Wilhelm Reich online. Take everything here with a grain of salt.

Ted Kaptchuk, the guy studying placebos at Harvard, told his placebo-giving doctors to spend a little extra time with their patients. Give them a rub on the back, the grandfatherly type, while pausing for twenty-seconds of visible introspection, during which the patient may assume that you are pondering how best to proceed with his case. Brushing all of the details aside, those few extra gestures worked; the patients who received them fared better.

That a soft touch might make the patient and practitioner relationship more fruitful has never seemed an odd idea to me. Touch lends itself to trust, for one thing, and it can trigger a subtle wave of pleasure generally lacking from the doctor’s office. The trusting, relaxed patient will be more likely to disclose full information to their doctor, I imagine, and they’d be more responsive to their doctor’s care.

The last time someone touched me therapeutically, I was twenty-three. He was older, let’s say thirty, a reedy guy studying psychoanalysis. His blue eyes matched the blue veins showing through his pale skin, even though it was August and even I, usually pasty to the point of fluorescence, had a tan. We met in a Turkish coffee shop, him reading some book by Wilhelm Reich, who I’d never heard of at the time, and me probably re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow. His eyes caught my attention, then his book, so I started a conversation with him and asked him for a date. “Sure,” he said, suggesting we meet at nine in the morning a few days later at another coffee shop.

It was a tough date to make, but I didn’t have anything else to do. In a week I would be driving out of Boston for a month long camping trip, and from there I’d planned to settle in Baltimore. I hadn’t worked the whole summer, and had spent most of my free time sleeping in, getting stoned, and going out late. It was a dreamy few months for me, one ever content being lazy, but I knew that once it ended I’d probably have to resume waking up early like the rest of the world.

I figured the early date would be a practice run for future early wake-ups, and when the morning came I dragged myself out of bed and to the coffee shop my new friend had suggested. The Turkish place where we’d met was lined with windows on all sides. You sat on soft, tasseled pillows covering wicker seats, and your drinks came in tiny cast iron kettles. It was easy to lose hours sitting there indulging in romantic feelings, imagining intimate meetings with exciting strangers. But we didn’t meet there for our date. Instead, he suggested we go to the kind of place you stay in only because you don’t want your coffee to get cold while you wait for the bus. The shop was annexed to a dingy co-op supermarket, a hold out from Cambridge’s sixties glory days, I guess. There were no windows in the cafe except for a few facing the street, and the walls were a moldy tangerine. Not that anything would feel romantic at such an hour, but this place wasn’t even trying.

The guy came into the coffee place a little after me in a rumpled button up and jeans that hung too loose and short. I gave him the nonchalant, half-attentive smile I was sporting at the time and waited for him to finish the elaborate preparation he favored for his coffee before he sat down. There was a moment of silence at first, but then somehow while finishing our coffee we managed a conversation, one that revolved mostly around him. “I’m studying at the school of psychoanalysis downtown,” he told me. “It’s, um, the only accredited one in the country.” Whatever had been missing in his life—connection to other people, relaxation, pleasure—he found it in psychoanalysis. In particular, he told me, he was interested in physical psychotherapy, sometimes called vegetotherapy. It healed him, helped him get closer to what he couldn’t normally reach inside himself. Psychoanalysis lead him to revelations he would have never had otherwise.

He must have thought I was a monster, because I dismissed his beloved psychoanalysis pretty flippantly. I’ll admit to being an especially unbearable know-it-all that summer. A summer’s worth of acid had cleared up any neuroses I had, and there was no lack of sex in my life. Whatever loop you’re stuck in, acid seems to cut through it and lay it flat for you to examine. It’s easier to toss out your troubles that way. Maybe some people needed ritualistic healing, medicinal touch, or talk therapy to work through that process, but not me, I congratulated myself.  As I sipped my coffee, I looked at him straight through the halo of old mascara rimming my eyes and said that all of his studies and therapy seemed like a waste of time to me. Why sit through all of that talking when the right drug could give you the same revelatory experiences in just minutes?

That’s how we ended up walking back to his bedroom. He promised it wouldn’t be sexual, but strictly professional. Most of all, he promised that I’d begin to see that psychoanalysis works. If I had known more about his hero, Wilhelm Reich, at the time, I might not have believed that. Reich, an outspoken and controversial figure during his life, is best known for his orgone concept. Stemming from the root “org” (impulse, excitement, as in orgasm), orgone describes a universal life force linking libido and orgasms. Reich was obsessed with the libido and the forces that blocked it. Mental illness and neuroses, he theorized, arose from one’s inability to experience full, orgasmic release, and society would benefit if people came more often. These ideas weren’t so popular in the early twenties and thirties, and controversy chased Reich from one European country to another, eventually driving him to the United States.

As it was, my hapless date only explained that, as a new student of Reich-informed psychoanalysis he needed more patients for practicing his favored methods. He explained this to me as we walked up to his bedroom, a closet sized space with just a few feet left over between the bed and his desk. There he rolled a yoga mat onto the floor and told me to lie down. Part of what made Reich so controversial was his insistence that patients strip down during therapy sessions. That made it easy for him to press upon the body armor gathered across their body, until their tension released and allowed emotions pent up in the body to flow. He called this Vegetotherapy.

“When I touch you, relax,” my once-date-now-therapist said. “Relax more. You’re not relaxing enough—put your weight on me.” He was trying to break through my body armor. Though there are different strains of body psychotherapy, of which Vegetotherapy is one, most call for practitioners to press upon the areas where body armor develops. Reich taught that the armor forms when sex-negative teachings run at odds with one’s libido. After this armor breaks, patients should feel more comfortable expressing and pursuing their libidinal urges. Therapy might break through this armor, and so could an orgone accumulator. The latter was invented by Reich in 1940. The original orgone accumulator was a wardrobe-like structure intended to collect orgone from the atmosphere. It was made of layers of organic materials to absorb orgone and metallic ones that concentrated energy at the box’s center. Sitting in this high-orgone environment, Reich claimed, could have beneficial health effects. Orgone did not just have human effects. According to Reich, it could be harvested via his Cloudbuster device and used to control rainfall and clouds. Of course, there is no proof that either of these orgone-harvesting devices do what they claim to do, nor is there proof of the existence of orgone at all. Reich wasn’t very scientific in his study of the force and its potential powers. Even so, he did have enough of a following to catch the FDA’s attention. In 1954, they banned him from touting the medical importance of orgone, and outlawed the sale of orgone devices. Soon after, Reich was imprisoned for continuing to traffic in such contraband. He died in prison of heart failure at age 60.

It was hard to relax with a stranger sitting right above my head, positioned with his fingers pushing hard against the area just outside of my temples. A couple of times he switched positions, moving his fingers behind my shoulders and then to the rounds of my calves. “Relax on to me,” he said over and over, never sounding satisfied with my physical response. The way he explained it to me, if I could feel comfortable laying all my weight upon him in such a way that we were touching as closely as possible, that would open up a deep channel for conversation between us. He never mentioned any of Reich’s terms like body armor or orgone, and without those pseudoscience terms muddying things up, what he was saying made sense. How could a patient relate effectively to a therapist sitting across the room with a notebook in hand? What an artificial, alienating way to heal someone it seems, when you put it that way. But there is still a disconnect with vegetotherapy. His touch had been intellectually stimulating, but hadn’t triggered any emotional or physical release for me. Having always considered myself a little too easily excited, I was surprised to find that this new way of touching left me feeling not remotely aroused. There was nothing akin to an empathetic doctor’s pat upon your shoulder here; it was only a mechanical prodding, a choreographed routine that made one feel more like a test subject than a patient. No one actually intimate with each other would touch like this, and I never felt any rush of liberated orgone coursing from broken body armor.

After a few minutes, he moved away from me and curled up on the bed next to where I continued lying down. “So tell me about yourself. What do you worry about? What stresses you?” But the whole experience had left me so disoriented, I couldn’t think of anything that I felt comfortable telling him. If orgone existed, and if it had ever caused any blockages in me, then my summer had already shaken it loose. “I’m fine,” I said, “Really fine.”

Hold the cat like you did a baby the first time you picked one up, cradled belly-up between your arms. All four of the cat’s sherbet-striped paws will wave in the air, and he will twist his snaggle-toothed face upward, looking directly into your eyes. A perfect tabby, maybe obese, with green eyes and a smile. The sun itself on a winter day.

If someone like Zadie Smith, the one speaking in “Joy”, can talk like a dog with her husband and then write about it, then surely I can write unabashedly about the cats we keep. The one above, and two females, one tiny and black, the other fluffy and fast.

The black one, Boots, finds dark corners in which to disappear. She’ll stay there for hours watching you with a scornful look. It’s not that she’s shy, but rather that she demands privacy. She swishes her tail, a bony instrument, and meows loudly to announce her entry into a room, as though to warn you to clear a path. Boots never sprawls out on her side. A wound coil even when resting, hind legs tensed and prepared to launch her at the slightest disturbance.

A window chain snapped one day, releasing its pane like a guillotine rushing down on Dusty’s front paw. The window only caught her, and she dangled like that for three hours. By the time she was found, it was too late; the leg had to go. Now Dusty runs from room to room, proving she’s still nimble, impossible to catch, even with only three legs. Often she’ll dash toward one of the other cat’s food bowls, where she’ll nip up a quick bite before exiting the scene. When caught, her cloud of brown fur puffs out. She hisses, but just for show, since she doesn’t have standing to swat away her foe.

If you’re loud, you might never see Copernicus, the third cat. He’s skittish, and will only let himself be seen if the crowd seems right. Sharp noises and heavy steps send him skittering beneath the nearest bed frame, where he will sit until hours after the perceived threat has gone away. Those determined to make his acquaintance, however, will find the attentions of this cat worth waiting. When he finally decides that you’re safe, the tabby’s love will exceed all other felines’. Once he climbs your legs and flops over on your lap, you’re stuck. There’s no escaping his heft once he’s settled in: You will pet him. What do you want to touch? His fur is velvety behind the ears, soft and feathery on his belly. His purr grows as you stroke him, from a quiet gurgle toward a deep, gravelly grind. Sometimes, when he really wants to feel good, he’ll hold out his two arms in front of him until he catches them on your hand. Without opening his eyes, he’ll rub your hand against his nose til the urge is sated. Petting him, if you want to do it right, takes at least twenty minutes.

Cats only ever seem to have one or two personality traits, bundled alongside a handful of predictable behaviors. If you touch him there, he will bite your finger; if you move the string this way, he will bat at it; shake the treat jar just so, and he’ll run to you. Until I had three in my house, I never could sympathize with cat collectors. But if it’s so easy to understand a trio of them, why wouldn’t one want to add more to the brood? Five, six, ten padded-foot housemates, I can imagine, lining shelves like books and lazy-licking their paws or chasing clods of dirt, as it may go.

When we walked in here the sun was still in the sky, but now it has fallen, or maybe retreated behind the roof above us, the smoke and sand, too. And you at my side with your arm outstretched, your longest finger tip an inch away from my pinkie, but with this board on me I’ll never move to reach.

When they told us the sky would fall, I didn’t believe it. Photographs lie, maybe, the meteorites made bigger by perspective. Did they hear my doubt? Come crashing from above into our barn, one meteorite, making what we do from here a lot easier.

If I had believed in this tragedy, it might have brought us together. Arms clasped around each other in fear, tension becoming huddled fear. What is infidelity at the site of cosmic annihilation? Nothing, nothing, a slip of the phallus just, in this larger scale, barely. Her and I being the same, when you put it that way (which you might have anyway). The roof’s wood has splintered into my side, and it hurts enough to make me feel forgiving.

But for you, something different. Heavy weighing on you, the meteorite itself. When you told me about her, you kept your lips straight, your eyes like a teacher’s educating me. This is how men work, this is how your life will be, and I couldn’t help but stay calm. Only small tears found their way down my cheek, and only my stomach rebelled, contracting and opening, tides of acidic protest; scraping myself against stone. Slow, reserved, accepting. Ready to enter, with you, the voided partnership we might tread from now. No tenderness, but sparse utility.

When I was ten I imagined dying for the first time. Mom told me Grandma was gone, would never come back. Died, a word I’d heard but never understood. Grandma had pressed so hard against herself she’d simply stopped being, like a marshmallow squeezed flat between your palms. And as all of her being collapsed into one point, an explosion of good. Memories and triumphs, we all have them, I think, exploding into fragments for the benefit of the living. But my death is just a collapse without a spring, and I can’t see anything beyond my pinkie anymore.

Black fading.

“Tolstoy keeps a keen eye on his characters. He makes them speak and move – but their speech and motion produce their own reaction in the world he has made for them.”

- Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature

My dad never quite looked the part. Twelve years my mother’s senior, he was thin and leathery, his skin hardened by a tanning regimen that not even the bright orange blondes of my high school could have rivaled. Every summer day he sat oiled and stretched over a thatched vinyl beach chair, the radio playing classic rock while my brother and I splashed nearby in a kiddie pool. I’ve yet to see anyone match the deep brown-red skin color, a strange one outside of easy racial classification, he attained in August and kept until the sun returned in the spring. Somewhere hidden on that darkened canvas lay a few tattoos and scattered scars. A parachute, I remember, a few shrapnel bumps, and other skinbound souvenirs from his Vietnam service. Around his neck he wore a gold chain, one just thick enough to suggest that he, the wearer, had purchased it as a status symbol. A thick gold ring with a heavy onyx stone and another chain, wrist-sized, rounded out his jewelry collection when they weren’t under pawn shop glass. My father’s real achievement, of course, was his glossy black hair and matching black handlebar mustache. Everyday after his shower, he waxed the long, thin ends of the mustache into two perfect curls centered between his deep dimples. I wasn’t allowed to touch his face while the wax set; if I did, even just to plant one kiss on him, dad said his whole mustache would fall off. So surely did I believe him, it wasn’t until last year that I realized he was probably lying about that.

It is easy for me to revisit my father’s physical appearance. My Daddy, the kicky eccentric self-parodying Italian, whose cartoonish appearance may have influenced my own flamboyant style. Those details well-captured and recited, the ones that mask any hint of my father’s behavior. I’ve always tried to gloss over the dark days he authored, pushing them aside to skulk off and wither in my memory’s forgotten corners. From the time I was little, my relationship to my father depended upon forgiveness and forgetting, and an understanding that he was not to blame for his moods. Before having my brother and I, my father served three Vietnam tours as a paramedic. His military career ended with a spray of shrapnel into his legs, a perfect injury severe enough for him to be listed as 100% disabled, but mild enough that he could still walk alone to the VA hospital when his pain meds needed a refill.

Nearly two decades passed between that injury and my birth, a surprise for a man who thought himself infertile. Dad played his part well, sometimes. He did best on pay day, when his government-issued check gave him enough money to take my brother and I on a small spree. We’d go see an age-inappropriate movie, eat chicken nuggets at McDonald’s, and, when times were good, take a run through KB Toys before picking out a present. “Ain’t I a good Dad?” he’d ask, before listing all of the things he’d bought us in the last year. Other respectable moments of fatherhood include the times we’d curl on the couch and watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, the booming, paternal voice of Captain Jean-Luc Picard encircling those memories of my father with unearned warmth.

Only scraps of sound and tears remain of my father’s worst days, the one’s I trained myself to forget almost as soon as they happened. Trying my hardest, I still cannot recall too many details. My parents’ fighting peaked in the house we had, briefly, after fleeing the city for the suburbs. To think of it now sets my heart racing still; even to hear the mildest arguing triggers a recall of the anxiety I felt in those days, hiding in the corner of my tiny pink bedroom waiting for it to end. Sometimes I’d duck into my brother’s spare bunkbed just so we wouldn’t have to be alone during it. We heard my mother, yelling desperately “Don’t Go!” while my father berated her and threatened to leave. Not empty threats, but ones he delivered with absences lasting a night, a few days, a week. Me always hoping to soothe things over, not understanding the why of their words, stretching myself across the hood of our car, the one my mother used to get to work, while he drove it from our house. That is, until one day I learned how to not-feel during those incidents, to bury myself in books and wait for it all to be over. And even when it ended, when my father left for the last time, the not-feeling stayed with me, left me hovering ten yards above my emotional vicissitudes, watching myself go through them as though they were biological functions that I could rationalize and will to leave.

When I was old enough to realize what it meant when my father said he was a Veteran, I wanted to know more about what he had seen. Couldn’t there be some logical explanation for everything he had done to my mother, my brother, and I? My mother’s self-esteem depleted, my brother left thinking all of the pain was her fault, and me numbed to everything. Did he see his best friend die, did he kill a child there? Am I not old enough to know? Movies, books, tell the stories of Vietnam, but never my father.

Ten years ago he took ill, and he has not left his bed since. It’s a good time to forgive him, but I have a hard time doing it without understanding what’s been driving him these last twenty-five years. It’s selfish, it’s irrational, and forgiveness should not require a condition like that. But when I ask my father about the war, I still feel disappointed when he shrugs and says “It was bad.” He makes light of it, showing me pictures of himself, young and clean-shaven, playing with the pet monkey he kept over there; only the happy memories, only the shallow ones.

The Punisher’s been sweeping lately.

I don’t know his real name, but we call him that because he’s always pacing, hard fist grinding into open palm, huffing to himself. He always wears an unlabeled black basketball jersey with sagging black sweatpants, though sometimes when its sticky he goes shirtless. From the iron-railed porch where he perches two yards above the sidewalk, he see everything in his neighborhood, bright and dim. In neighborhoods like this, you’ll find blocks with both a safe end and a rough one. The Punisher is just barely on the bad side, his dismal house looking like the cheery development a few yards away sucked all of the life out of his place.

People come in pairs to visit him. They park across the street, look nervously at each other, and one usually asks if the other is sure they have the right place. The Punisher’s business is the kind you don’t advertise with a sign outside your front door.

Every day this week, I’ve seen him sweeping the sidewalks of his street. There are no leaves to be pushed away; They haven’t even fallen yet. But you can hear his broom’s straws rasping against concrete from a block away, amplified by a row of homes that are all brick wall and tarred yards.

Teshigahara weaves Okuyama and Hira’s story with that of a young woman. She shares with Okuyama disfiguring facial burns, though hers cover only part of her face. She covers them well with her long hair, but not perfectly. The image that stays with you is the burn, not the beauty:

Face of Another’s elegant visuals will remain with me for a long time, even though the film as a whole does not rise to the expectations set by its excellent imagery. At times the conversations between Okuyama and Hira are too clunky, describing each concept the film raises to its most minute detail. Dr. Hira reminds Okuyama again and again that by wearing the mask, he may find himself assuming a new identity. If everyone began wearing masks, Hira speculates, familiar social structures would crumble. Families would not cohere, crime would go unpunished, vice would flourish. Dr. Hira delivers his predictions with absolute conviction, making them seemed dated in today’s world of DNA testing and “anonymous” internet communication. We know how to reveal an individual’s identity with absolute certainty in specific cases using molecular signals. Meanwhile, the number of “anonymous” hackers revealed and punished by the FBI grows steadily. The idea that one could hide behind a simple, physical mask seems quaint now, when even utmost digital protection cannot provide true anonymity.

One wonders, in the face of such dialogue, whether Teshigahara does not trust his examination of identity and appearance to be merit enough for The Face of Another to exist. Why else would he have devoted so much screen time to transparent attempts to outline the societal implications of his plot line? In fact, the film stands more powerfully if one views it less as a vehicle for exploring the power of realistic facial masks, and more as a general commentary on the face.

Two individuals, Okuyama who strives to hide his deformity and the young woman who decides to surrender to hers, provide enough behavioral commentary on the nature of identity and its relationship to our fragile, manipulatable faces. Both suffer from a lack of physical closeness to others. Throughout the film, strangers and family avoid contact with the two, presumably because they find their faces too repulsive to approach. Being wealthy and successful, Okuyama uses money and connections to secure a pristine looking mask with which to cover his dense, raised scars. With his newly masked face, Teshigahara impersonates a stranger and seduces his wife. But while he thinks he has tricked her into adultery, she knows all along that the masked man is her husband in disguise. Even within the film, a feigned face is not enough to hide one’s true identity. Okuyama does achieve closeness with his wife, even intimacy, while wearing the mask. The still above shows Okuyama and his wife’s legs intertwined beneath a table. Teshigahara beautifully captures their limbs’ tender dance around each other.

When Okuyama accuses his wife of committing adultery, he demonstrates his own shortsightedness. Would she have shared such easy foot play with a stranger she had just met? Could she have done so? If you were to ask her, she would certainly say no. Of course she was upset. After all, if his wife could tell who Okuyama really was beneath his false face, why couldn’t Okuyama sense that his wife knew who he was?

The young woman, meanwhile, lacks the resources to disguise her injury that Okuyama has. She works, it seems, with World War II veterans. Even the crude boys who come on to her as she walks to work would never embrace her, and she turns instead to her brother’s attention, which he gives in the form of shame-powered kisses. Their physical love is a violent exchange, his every touch pressing aggressively into her flesh. Even so, her face settles into restful acceptance as they fall upon her.

The young woman drowns herself at the film’s end. Before doing so, she claims to see another war coming, one that will start the next day. Perhaps she was burned by atomic waves, and still fears the onset of World War III. Or, perhaps, she can no longer bear being looked at with disgust. I found myself happy to see her die, clad in white, innocence and acceptance still emanating from her.

3 Women

Female breakdowns, fainting and hysteria. Sounds quaint when you put it that way, like something you’d read about in a nineteenth century novel. But Persona and many other films revisit the pressurized madness more broadly associated with women than men, and they explore it with more nuance and diversity than my beloved Romantic novels ever did.

Robert Altman’s 3 Women, an attempt to capture a poignant dream the director had, shares elements with Persona. In it, Sissy Spacek’s character Pinky develops an unhealthy obsession with Shelly Duvall’s Minnie. The latter is a self-asserted boy magnet, even though the men with whom she flirts respond to her with ridicule. The film layers scenes of delusion, obsession, rejection, and violence to form a chaotic experience that cannot be understood easily. Why Minnie clings so eagerly to the men who reject her and how those same men come to admire Pinky’s version of Minnie’s traits and identity so readily is unclear. One wonders if the whole thing is a  bad dream that Minnie has upon meeting the spooky Pinky, whose watery blue-eyed admiration for Minnie is by nature creepy. Pinky stares for too long at Minnie, reads her diary, and wonders aloud what it’s like to be twins. In Minnie, Pinky searches for a strong identity that she’s never before had. Even Pinky’s parents barely seem to know their daughter. They have nothing to say to her when they come to visit her in the hospital. No one’s ever noticed Pinky, and Minnie’s got more personality than she get fit in her tiny frame.

Meshes of the Afternoon, directed by Maya Deren, explores a woman’s unraveling of a different sort. The experimental short opens with Deren, who also stars in the film, witnessing her housekey’s percussive tumble down a flight of stairs. Deren picks it up and walks us thorugh her home, the camera alternating between first person shots and close-ups of Deren’s body parts. We examine her eyes, her feet, her abdomen. The layering of house tour and panning over Deren’s body suggests that in some way, Deren herself is a piece within the home, something to be admired for physical traits. A steamship hums in the background while the screen transforms into a door-window-as-porthole view of a black-shrouded figure on the walkway leading to Deren’s home. The figure has no face, we see as it turns toward the camera, and it walks away before a running Deren can catch up to it. It floats away, never identified nor caught, and Deren’s failure to catch it dooms her to loop through the same routine. A kitchen knife follows her. She can see her warped reflection in its blade, and the force of that revelation sends her reeling. Deren can’t escape her own shadows, and knows that her demons will wrap ever tighter around her. The dark  figure returns and enters her home, but Deren still hasn’t regained her bearings. She stumbles up the stairwell and can hardly reach the second story of her home. She watches the still faceless figure place a flower on her bed. It turns in her direction and seems to “stare” her down before disappearing.

Real life examples of the tension wrought by sexuality abound. In America, we know the classic story of a pop star, someone like Britney Spears, crashing under the pressure to be perpetually pretty and ogled over. Her trajectory did not have an end so tragic as that of South Korean performer U-Nee, the talented pop star and dancer who hung herself in 2007. Forced by her record label to become sexier, to alter her body, in spite of her talents, U-Nee’s depression grew deeper. I don’t know much about U-Nee, but it’s easy to project upon her. Presenting a faux-sexuality brings one to a dark place. Men may not know how strongly their gaze may reconfigure a woman, especially one who goes from unnoticed to lusted-laden.

So much mental illness seems an issue of pressure and tension, of one’s internal feelings battling against personal and societal expectation. Pinky’s love for Minnie moving from obsession to action, Maya Deren’s housebound restlessness erupting as violent visions, and U-Nee’s forced sexuality triggering self-annihilation. When there are no other apparent outlets, one must take extreme actions. Before medication and expertise, the treatment of mental illness must start with an understanding of individuals who feel too ashamed or scared or proud to reveal what bothers them. Helping those people is less an issue of clinical treatment, and more a matter of changing society to a more accepting and expressive climate, one that appreciates the unique issues faced by women, in particular.

Persona‘s women fall into each other, like fingers interlaced, so similar that one cannot distinguish herself from the other. The two share fair hair, soft features, light skin, a resemblance emphasized by a veil of black and white film. Liz Ullman’s Elisabet Vogler, emphasis on her plump, expectant features, is silent. Alma, nurse to the now-silent actress Elisabet, chats incessantly while the two stay alone together in a beachfront home. The home belongs to Elisabet’s doctor, a stern chain-smoker, who hopes that her employee Alma will convince Elisabet to speak again. Before long, it is clear that Alma has become more of a patient than Elisabet is. After a career of tending to other’s needs, she is relieved to use Elisabet as her psychoanalytic outlet. In a thick night of never-empty drinks, Alma, who once claimed total fidelity to her fiance, admits to an orgy with strangers, a woman and two young men. Perhaps Alma hopes that her sincere confessions will shake Elisabet into speech. Her inebriation, however, implies another motive. How light it feels to talk, how good, when one’s audience is sure not to judge verbally. As Alma shares her story, curled in an armchair with Elisabet lounging across the room, she fidgets and demurs. She adopts flirtatious mannerisms shared by sheepish girls talking about their first kiss at a slumber party. Recalling the story brings back old arousal for Alma, and her eyes search Elisabet’s for sympathy, understanding, or any of the other emotions for which we wait after telling a story exhibiting us at our most primal. There is no absolution for Alma the confessor, however, not from Elisabet. She grants no validation of Alma’s lust-driven spontaneity. The women lurch toward real intimacy but never achieve it, in spite of their isolation together, and Elisabet only smirks when Alma tacitly begs for some sort of appreciation for her outpouring of honesty. Now Elisabet, having played so many roles on stage and at home, is the audience as Alma expresses the doubt and self-consciousness putting her in tension with the wholesome nurse persona she usually performs.

Elisabet denies Alma a critical element of communication. For all of the talking Alma does, Elisabet never reacts to what her nurse says. While Alma felt relieved to finally burst free with all of her sins, she did not feel any better afterward. She perhaps expected Elisabet to be compelled by such soul-baring to speak, to tell her nurse “You are OK. You are not a bad person. That must have been hard for you.” Instead, mute Elisabet smirks knowingly, as though her nurse’s tawdry but banal story does not surprise her at all.

No one else witnesses their unidirectional communications, save the viewers of Bergman’s’ film. Elisabet’s mute lips and constant smirk create conditions approaching solitary confinement for Alma. Delusions dance across days of living death for the frail-minded nurse. How can you confirm what you experience is true without any communication, tacit or explicit, of it being so? Consider when Alma hears Elisabet say “You ought to go to bed, or you’ll fall asleep at the table.” Elisabet denies speaking, but we viewers and Alma heard her do so. Alma feels a whisper of madness, remembering the physical and mental reality of Elisabet’s brief words but having no way to ascertain whether they occurred. Elisabet has an incredibly amount of control over Alma, in this regard, and it would be easy for her to engineer further breakdowns for her nurse. As the only two characters with whom we viewers are intimate blend together, it becomes even harder to tell what is true and what comes from paranoia and our scrambling toward logical consistency. We become as mad as Alma, as pliable in the hands of Elisabet as the lost nurse is.