Nominate the Best Freudian Interpretations of a Scene or Movie...And, What the Heck, How About the Wildest, Most Hilarious Interpretations You've Ever Heard
Jazz: I once wrote that the canoe Jennifer was sunbathing in in I Spit on Your Grave was representative of female genitalia, because she found a safe zone like a warm womb. It then becomes a battle of genitalia as the men speed in on their speedboat and the tip of their boat rises in the air which I said was, " a clear phallic symbol representative of their aggression as the phallus attacks the woman’s vessel. "
In Slavoj Zizeks’s documentary about cinema there are a lot of crazy interpretations.
Since Freudian analysis came into vogue, many productions have hinted that Hamlet might have a thing for his mother. Leave it to the Mel Gibson version to be the only film to completely run with this.
One of my favorite ones was that spaceships are ‘penises penetrating the womb of outer space.’
Sometimes reading critical analysis literature can be very reminiscent of reading a really bad ripped bodice romance. And sometimes it can be just as disturbing,
like the time I read that the ‘baby’ in Eraserhead was Jack Nance’s penis (always crying out for attention and alienating women, see?) and he had to ‘castrate’ it at the end to achieve inner peace. O_o
—PolarisDiB
@Bijoux
I haven’t seen the film, but your interpretation is hilarious. (Or were you being serious? :S)
@Alex
I agree about Zizek.
Jazz: Both. It ended up in my thesis. LOL. But you know those English people love Freud, so I felt pretty safe saying it.
“It ended up in my thesis. LOL. But you know those English people love Freud, so I felt pretty safe saying it.”
I’ve written bodice ripper critical essays. I mean, I’m not sure I want to bring back the whole academia: bullshit? thing, but this is another reason why I preferred production classes to theory ones.
—PolarisDiB
I also wrote that Laurie Strode was only able to hurt Michael Myers when she turned a typical feminine object into a phallus. So when she pulled knitting needles out of two balls of yarn and then penetrated him with one of the needles, she transformed the needles into a phallus.
I fear this ithread s going to unleash the Lacanian hordes…..
Anyway, I have read all kind of nonsense regarding Hitchcock. That Zizek guy sure is weird.
Yes, Hitch. The train at the end of North by Northwest.
Yeah, I love how Myers was toppled by a wire hanger. The only wire hanger in a more terrifying context is Mama Dearest.
vs.
—PolarisDiB
@Bijoux
Both. It ended up in my thesis. LOL.
I’m glad you can laugh about it.
Btw, I’m a little concerned that some may be offended by my attitude—i.e., I think the interpretations are hilarious. Then again, that’s not to say that they’re not sometimes valid—but even when they are, I find it very funny.
@DiB
Sometimes reading critical analysis literature can be very reminiscent of reading a really bad ripped bodice romance. And sometimes it can be just as disturbing,
like the time I read that the ‘baby’ in Eraserhead was Jack Nance’s penis (always crying out for attention and alienating women, see?) and he had to ‘castrate’ it at the end to achieve inner peace. O_o
Love it. (That’s as good an interpretation that I’ve heard of that film.)
“I’m a little concerned that some may be offended by my attitude—i.e., I think the interpretations are hilarious. Then again, that’s not to say that they’re not sometimes valid—but even when they are, I find it very funny.”
Pop Freudianism is academia’s elaborate dick jokes. It’s funny.
The thing is, Freudian psychoanalysis is more than that but not only has those deeper readings of his work been harder to access (they take more time and energy to understand, ergo the pop reading takes over especially since it’s full of penis jokes), but in addition to that misreading of Freud he’s still trended out of mainstream critical framework anyway. So nowadays it’s both a penis joke and a ‘Remember back when we actually thought…?’ type humor.
What he did leave us that subsists in critical analysis is a linguistic tradition and terminology that we are very comfortable with and use with familiarity to this day, he gave us a language for a certain cognitive phenomenon and thus we think in those terms, so he’s sort of self-fulfilling. We may use the term ‘ego’ incorrectly as Freud intended it, but how often still is that term used in daily life to explain arrogance?
—PolarisDiB
I found every grad class hilarious. I would say things like the above and be received with serious nods (but perhaps everyone was laughing on the inside, I like Polaris’ pop freudianism is academia’s elaborate dick jokes statement). And now I see phallic symbols everywhere. Yes, the wire hanger from Halloween always makes me think of Mommie!!
u rule, bijoux!
Thanks, Ruby. I’ve written many more of these interpretations, but I don’t want to overtake this thread :)
Edit: That sounds a bit arrogant. I wrote them all in one paper.
i would love to read your thesis xD
Probably Rob Zombie saw that too, because in his Halloween, Michael’s got some mommy issues…
His Halloween II is a good movie.
Ruby: It’s so, so bad. 60 pages of me pointing out objects that double as a penis.
@bijoux: You did say it’s your baby, so now you have to care for it…
The Dark Knight is a movie about Republicans.
Nah, ‘Most hilarious sociopolitical interpretations’ is for another thread, Dude.
—DiB
Also: let’s not.
—PolarisDiB
We may use the term ‘ego’ incorrectly as Freud intended it, but how often still is that term used in daily life to explain arrogance?
He didn’t coin the term ego any more than he coined Oedipus or Elektra. It was the Greek word for self. Beyond that, the term egoist/egotist (extreme self centeredness) predates him by about a hundred years. Saying someone has a huge ego is simply saying they are full of themselves. I will agree though that Freud is horribly misrepresented in the mainstream to the point where people attribute him with ideas he never had or even outright refuted in order to criticize what they perceive of his work.
I didn’t say he coined it, I said people use it in reference to his writing incorrectly.
—PolarisDiB
I always found his work on The Uncanny pretty fascinating. Recommended reading for any horror lover.
There are a lot of wacky Freudian interpretations of Hitchcock, but the one about the bell tower in Vertigo being a phallic symbol has to take the cake. Not sure where I read it, but it may have been Zizek.
Not Freudian, but I think The Graduate has a purely happy ending and Inglourious Basterds is anti-violence. Those two tend to result in people giving me a lot of crap. haha
Snakes on a Plane – a freudian fable about the dangers of a phallocentric world, where the threat can only be neutralized when all the snake-phalluses are removed through a womb-like opening in the side of the plane.
@Drew
A happy ending for The Graduate is not much of a stretch, but I want to hear your case for IG being anti-violent.
Jazzaloha
Matt’s interpretation of Freudian reading of the shootout in Taxi Driver was hilarious and maybe even valid. (See here near the bottom of the page—with Bickle laying the gun between his legs. Also this: I was going to suggest some significance in that he starts off with the very tumescent .44 Magnum and works his way down to emptying the clip in a much smaller caliber, but I thought that might be pushing the metaphor too far. :))
How about some more?
And what about some of the craziest interpretations you’ve ever heard.