Steven Spielberg's new film, War of the Worlds, is Hollywood's big, veiled portrait of 9/11. It is surprising, in a way, that it has taken this long. Traumatic experience has been Hollywood's bread and butter since the same Spielberg had his main character face death in the form of a great white shark in Jaws. Only a matter of weeks ago the number one film at British and US box offices was Batman Begins, whose wellsprings are two distressing experiences of a young boy—the murder of his parents and his falling into a nest of bats. Nearly 10m people around the world have seen this film so far. Another 40m are likely to in the next few years.
Such examples are not unusual. The intensity of mainstream cinema, its adrenaline-charged quality, has explained its licence to print money for decades. Hollywood is, let's face it, a kind of traumaland, a Disneyworld of distressing events. Sometimes it's even serious about such events. The climax of Alfred Hitchcock's film Marnie, for example, depicted what psychologists call in vivo exposure: to find out what is causing his wife's sexually unresponsive, kleptomaniac behaviour, Sean Connery's character takes her back to her mother's house where, he believes, she witnessed something mentally disruptive.
Marnie at least had a crack at depicting the cause and effect of mental life in a grown-up way, but it was still unconvincing. Mature filmic treatments of traumatic events are to be found elsewhere. In the world of documentary, John Huston's Let There be Light (1946) and Kim Longinotto's The Day I Will Never Forget (2002)—to name just two—brilliantly conveyed, respectively, the treatment of traumatised second world war GIs and the agonies of female genital circumcision. Forget the rollercoaster ride of sensation that is mainstream cinema. These and many other documentaries showed that filmed imagery could render painful human experience credibly and precisely.
The best example I know in fiction cinema is Elem Klimov's Come and See. Filmed in the Soviet Union in 1985, it is set in Belorussia in 1943, as the Nazis sweep eastwards, sacking villages as they go. One 15-year-old boy's whole family has been murdered. The film shows his flight through peat bogs, his disorientation and tinnitus—the way his head seems to flood with panic and mental noise. It is unforgettable: proof that, at its most serious, cinema can depict traumatic experience better than any other art form. There is something fundamental in this. In fact, I believe that cinema is itself structured like traumatic experience.
Sidney Lumet's The Pawnbroker helps explain what I mean. Made in 1964, it depicts the dull, repetitive life of New York city pawnbroker Sol Nazerman, played by Rod Steiger. We see him at his store everyday, talking to his customers in a monotone. Then mental images of Nazerman's days in Auschwitz-Birkenau intrude silently, with increasing persistence, into his numb daily life. Psychologists call these intrusions "flashbacks." So do filmmakers. This is no accident of terminology. Just as traumatic memory is discrepant and nonlinear, so is film editing. No other art form can jump about in time and space as film can. As if to prove the point, there are no records of traumatised patients reporting flashbacks that pre-date cinema. There are no flashbacks in Shakespeare.
But there's more. Film is naturally capable of depicting the more permanently altered states in which traumatised people sometimes feel that they live. Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colours: Blue portrayed Juliette Binoche's grief at her husband and daughter's death as a somnambulation interrupted by a series of blackouts, signified by fades to black and musical intrusions. Most of these involved close-ups of Binoche. Right from the earliest movies, especially at the time of silent cinema with its huge close-ups of Greta Garbo, it became clear that the magnified human face was distinctly new in human culture. Never before had human beings been offered the chance to inspect faces like their own in lit, flickering, available close-up.
Cinema can do two things at once. It can represent experience in a way that feels direct, but has no real consequences. It feels like living while not actually being like living, because in life you have to deal with the consequences of a terrible event, whereas in a movie you watch its repercussions—and then the credits roll and you're out the door. Movies allow us to enter disturbing experiences in a uniquely vivid way without breaking down, or hyperventilating, or having feelings of being unable to cope. Indeed, at their best, they are like the moment at which a traumatised person feels that they are beginning to recover.
If this is so, then the closeness of cinema and trauma should be explored. Might movies even help with treatment? No clinical studies have asked this question; perhaps it is time to do so. Movies take us on the trauma ride and let us see where that ride goes, without being hurt. If any art can help, movies can. They, more than any, plot the path to recovery, show that it is possible, that people have traversed it, that it is safe, even when it is frightening.
