…in which “A Dangerous Method” forces me to change my mind about Keira Knightley

I totally get it now.

I’ve never quite understood why Keira Knightley is an A-list star, nor why she gets such good roles (like Atonement, Pride & Prejudice, and Never Let Me Go) – until I saw her in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (2011). It always seemed to me she was being cast against type. Whereas those earlier films insisted she was a quintessential English rose, as Lizzie Bennet in P&P she appeared to me more likely to bite one of her co-stars than to to impress anyone with her fine eyes.

What Cronenberg gets (and I didn’t, till now) is that Knightley’s angular, toothy, twitchy affect shouldn’t be suppressed but mined instead.

Now that I’ve finally seen A Dangerous Method, I can’t imagine another actor taking on the role of the hysteric Sabina Spielrein to such effect. Jewish, Russian, fiercely intelligent and tortured by her inner demons, Sabina is the perfect dark mirror sister of Jung’s blonde and blue-eyed wife (Sarah Gadon), who always appears placid, wide-eyed and proper, and sometimes apologizes for errors such as giving birth to a daughter rather than a son. Now that’s a rose of a girl.

Maybe she seems exaggerated, but Jung’s wife embodies the self-control and physical containment of their elite class as well as their whiteness. No wonder Jung (Michael Fassbender) is so thrown by Sabina. For all her physical contortions, Sabina is also open to change, open to the darkest of insights. She opens up her mind and her memories to him with stunning willingness, revealing black thoughts associated with dark sexual urges. The more she ceases repressing those memories and associations, the more she reconciles them and begins to heal — and begins to use her quicksilver smarts in a way that shows her full embrace of the “talking cure”. No wonder she captivates Jung’s imagination, which is only the beginning of his growing disloyalty to his wife.

Knightley’s impossible skinniness only enhances her performance here. Whereas in most other films her body gets presented to us as yet another ridiculous size-00 slap in the face to the rest of us fat pigs (and don’t you forget it, Ashley Judd), in A Dangerous Method her body exemplifies a lifetime of self-punishing neurosis. There’s nothing more improbable than seeing her heavy dark eyebrows and her olive skin — and hearing about her sexual arousal via humiliation — all the while bound up in those cruel corsets and lacy, white, high-necked dresses that on any other woman would be persuasive signifiers of her chastity.

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that what I found most impressive about Knightley’s performance was the way she showed how the later, “healed” Spielrein — the one who no longer screams and juts out her chin — was a recognizable incarnation of the earlier hysteric. Her clenched and slightly hunched shoulders, her black looks, her tight mouth. She’s a whirlwind of intellect and energy, and the performance is brilliant. As the excellent JB writes over at The Fantom Country, “Even in relatively calmer moments, she seems trapped inside a state of ceaseless panic, caught, gasping for air, in the dragnet of some trawler that never sleeps.”

This is especially important for the contrast between her corporeal presence versus that of Jung and Freud, who exert an absurd degree of self-control and containment, like disembodied brains. When she kisses Jung for the first time, his weak response is to note, “It’s generally thought that the man should be the one to take the initiative.” When someone refers to the “darker differences” between the two, we know those differences are both racial and sexual — and that Spielrein is the dark one, the one whose vagina has needs and rages, and smells like a real woman’s vagina (thanks to Kartina Richardson’s terrific piece, “Keira Knightley’s Vagina”). It makes me wish that Knightley rather than Natalie Portman had appeared as the lead in Black Swan — again, a statement I never thought I’d make.

Spielrein and Jung’s other patient, Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), both profess to a startling optimism about analysis: “Our job is to make our patients capable of freedom,” Gross pronounces, a sentiment Spielrein shares but cannot realize. Her own ecstasy peaks as Jung gives her erotic spankings; clearly, humiliation still retains its primary charge. The film doesn’t explore the gendered nature of hysteria, which brought so many women low during those decades a hundred years ago, but it does highlight how one’s freedom was limited by other cultural boundaries — most notably race. Spielrein looks genuinely crushed when her new interlocutor, Freud, pushes her down with the observation, “We’re Jews, Miss Spielrein — and Jews we will always be.”

We don’t very often call it hysteria anymore, but we still see manifestations of inexplicable corporeal neurosis in girls and women that defy explanation, as in the strangely infectious case in upstate New York this year. How amazing it would be to find a filmmaker to address the subject. I’ve always thought that someone could take the 1690s Salem witch hysteria as a case study, Arthur Miller-style, to try to explore some of the contributing factors behind such mass outbursts of tics, twitches, and personal misery. And I’d love to have Knightley involved again, honestly.

People love to talk about the synergy between Cronenberg and his frequent male lead, Mortensen, as being one of the great director-actor combinations of the last decade. But now that I’ve seen what Cronenberg got out of Knightley, I want him to unearth new roles for her instead so we can see more of what she can really do once she lets go of the English rose routine. I totally get it now: Knightley can act. And I’m genuinely looking forward to more of it.

Why feminism matters to universities, II; or, Ashley Judd rocks

Back in May I held forth on the subject of why feminism matters to universities with other goals in mind.  But today I’m inspired to write on it again after trawling through news, both recent and from a few years ago, about the actor Ashley Judd.  What, you say?  You mean “Kiss the Girls” and “Ruby in Paradise” Ashley Judd, the youngest member of the freakishly beautiful and always very carefully put-together Judd clan of country singers?  Just a look at her collection of feminist t-shirts and you’ll know why I’m impressed.  She’s a kick-ass feminist, a remarkably smart and eloquent woman, and an intelligent and informed political figure — and she attributes the beginnings of these identifications to a college class she took.  We seldom want to acknowledge that our beautiful actors have brains or political opinions, but Judd just completed a master’s degree in Public Administration from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and has been an outspoken feminist since her undergrad days at the University of Kentucky.  (She majored in French and had minors in art history, theater, anthropology, and women’s studies.  Busy.)  Just recently she’s been earning even more stripes as a public intellectual and humanitarian due to her work overseas, and is especially astute as a commentator on the ties between violence against women and the global economy.

Back in 2004, she was interviewed in a Marie Claire article (see transcript here) about such resolutely unpopular topics as feminism and reproductive rights (which she supports).  “So are you a feminist?” the journalist asked.  Here’s her response:

First of all, I think it’s important to define “feminism.” Feminism means that you support social, political, and economic equality for women.  Maybe if it were described in those terms more often, more people would say they’re feminists.  There are still people who say they’re not feminists because they don’t wear Birkenstocks or let hair grow under their arms!  Yes, I’m a feminist.

Q:  Where did your ideas about feminism gel?

In college.  I took a women’s-studies class, and it changed my life, opened everything up for me.  College taught me to trust that I had a certain innate intellect, with which I could do a lot.

I’m not afraid to admit it:  I read this and it warmed the cynical spaces in my heart, and not just because I’m teaching those kinds of classes.  It’s very similar to the experience I had in a class on feminism in college.  I started out as an 18-year-old who wasn’t sure whether I was a feminist and ended up as a firebrand.  (Staying in the university has only pointed out more how necessary feminism is.)  It reminds me in my current life as a college professor that sometimes I forget that one of those students who isn’t speaking up might actually be having a feminist come-to-Jesus experience because of the classes I teach, and that they too will trust that they have “a certain innate intellect, with which they can do a lot.”  Hey, if I can teach anyone to trust their own intellects, I’ve achieved something great. 

And man, Judd is putting her money where her mouth is.  After completing the Harvard MPS in May 2010 she’s raised her game to a new level.  Just last month she published an op-ed on CNN.com about the mass rapes of women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo; but this was no simplistic hand-wringing exercise.  Rather, she ties these rapes to the broader socioeconomic problems in West Africa over conflict minerals — not just diamonds, but other minerals used to make electronics.  The fact that those minerals are so invaluable to our profits-crazed electronics market plays a role in the fact that governments in places like Congo are so unstable.  Who suffers?  Women; one estimate has it that 400,000 women there have been raped by soldiers and others.  In addition, she’s worked as an AIDS activist and educator, and as a spokesperson about prostitution and STDs.  Her profile as an observer of international human rights violations is certainly more informed than many politically-active actors and really ought to make her more prominent into the future.  

She took on Sarah Palin’s aerial shooting of wolves from helicopters; last summer, she spoke before the National Press Club to oppose mountaintop removal in Appalachia (video here) in a way that’s both intelligent and moving, calling it a form of environmental rape — but again tying it convincingly to the distressed poverty of that region:

“I am here to tell you, mountaintop removal coal mining simply would not happen in any other mountain range in the United States.  It is utterly inconceivable that the Smokies would be blasted, the Rockies razed, the Sierra Nevadas flattened, that bombs the equivalent to Hiroshima would be detonated every single week for three decades.  The fact that the Appalachians are the Appalachians makes this environmental genocide possible and permissible.”

Sometimes I find out more about actors and I’m distressed by their utter narcissistic myopia; but every once in a while I find out more about someone like Judd and I wish we could sit on my sofa and talk about feminism, geopolitics, and movies.  Ashley, I’m so impressed and so happy you’re fighting the good fight — and it reminds me to keep up the optimism that maybe I’m fighting it, too, even when it doesn’t seem that way.