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Often, it’s the throwaway scenes that click. Early on in Brainstorm, the 1983 film about the invention of a device permitting the recording of one person’s thoughts and emotions for playback by others, the scientist-hero Michael Brace retires to his room to toast a Wright |
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Brothers model plane piloted by a photo of Albert Einstein. On its own, outside of being a nice bit of character development, it’s not much. But, when taken as a restatement of a scene occurring only moments before, when Brace offered a similar salute to his co-worker and lover Dr. Lillian Reynolds on the event of their technological breakthrough, something profound occurs. For this substitution of the elder woman by Brace’s birdlike symbol of visionary achievement indicates a combined meaning for the latter scientist that’s especially compelling for those familiar with the avian association of another |
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inventor, as examined by Jungian psychoanalyst Erich Neumann in his 1959 essay, "Leonardo da Vinci and the Mother Archetype" (in ART AND THE CREATIVE UNCONSCIOUS; Princeton University Press – a response to Freud’s own essay on the topic, "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood"; THE UNCANNY, tr. David McLintock, 2003 Penguin Classics). Regarding the plane/lover parallel in light of Neumann’s observations brings other |
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elements of Mike and Lillian’s ambiguous relationship to light and in turn illuminates much of the rest of the picture, just as the amplification of isolated incidents in these characters’ lives provides similar stimulus for reevaluation and, ultimately, transcendent understanding. A troubled production from a perennially troubled studio, MGM, Brainstorm was the center of a dispute between its director, Douglas Trumbull, and the executives who wanted to shut down the mostly-completed picture after the death of one of its lead players, |
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Natalie Wood. Trumbull maintained that the few remaining scenes that were to feature her could be completed using a stand-in, but the studio, possibly eyeing a writeoff, disagreed. The film was brought in, finally, and released, but it was the last feature directorial job for Trumbull, previously known mainly for his revolutionary special effects work on such science-fiction films as 2001: ASpace Odyssey, the film which made his reputation and which in many ways may have defined it ever after as Trumbull dealt with the legacy of working with that film’s master director, Stanley Kubrick. As Brainstorm itself turns on the death of a key female protagonist, the actress’s passing only took the drama one step closer to reality, when the circumstances of its production were already an integral part of the fabric. The story’s close-knit research team, for example, gives the impression of the dedicated film crew operating under the same rubric. Lillian, as apparent mastermind, suggests either story originator Bruce Joel Rubin or the small army of screenwriters brought in to bring the film to fruition, Mike the director who takes the project the rest of the way after her work is basically finished. They are abetted by their middle-aged company-man lab assistant Hal Abramson, who |
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wields a clapboard at one point but otherwise functions in something of a producer’s role, and game thirtysomething guinea pig Gordy Forbes, who, as the lens through which much of the film’s action is absorbed, suggests cinematographer Richard Yuricich. This is roughly the same setup as Trumbull’s only other feature as director, the well-remembered Silent Running, where a similar threesome is complemented by a detached loner who completes his visionary project after the others’ dismissal. Read Kubrick and 2001 for Lillian |
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and the present film, however, and another level to the drama emerges, adding resonance to Mike’s barely acknowledged resentment of Lillian’s putdowns and hogging of the credit for their work (more clearly elucidated in the script signed by Robert Stitzel), as Trumbull has also expressed of Kubrick, along with his gratitude. It is this repressed hostility, in the film as well as its characters, which forms the emotional core of the drama. More than any relation to the filmmaking process, however, the camaraderie of the Brainstorm team evokes the collaborative working of the separate regions of the title organ itself. As the motive force behind the project, Lilliansuggests the higher cerebral functions to which Mike, somewhat lower on the ladder but lacking perhaps only |
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experience, aspires; Hal, the go-between connecting the team to upper management, performs the duties of a sort of corporate medulla oblongata, while Gordy operates as a hypothalamus delivering sensory signals right from the opening scene. Here, he roves the facility in the team’s experimental headgear, testing the transmission of reflex, taste and hearing. As Lillian talks her "angel," Mike, through a cloud of digital noise or visual static to focus on the image of a schematic grid via this human relay center, the sensation is given of a mind being guided by an inner voice toward the realization of some sort of greater blueprint or plan – the director giving form to his screenwriters’ vision. The gradual coming into coherence of the whole sequence suggests the mind emerging from sleep into a dream – the static like the phosphenes |
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igniting inside a pair of recently closed eyelids – or of a fetus into the world, guided by either the steady voice of the Self or of the loving mother within (as without). Trumbull spoke of wanting to create "a kind of first-person experiential cinema" (TOTAL MOVIE #3; Feb-March 2001, p.64), which he partly achieved in Brainstorm via the changing dynamics of the film frame. During the segments where characters experience others’ thoughts, the traditional, boxier screen dimensions expand to full, wide Cinemascope range to create the sensation of a widening of perception. This elastic effect is used from the very beginning, disorienting the viewer at first as the point of view switches from widescreen to the traditional perspective |
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and back again – producing genuine disappointment when reverting
to the narrower, "normal" field for the
bulk of the proceedings. Yet at at least one crucial point, the formula
is broken and the main character’s subjective viewpoint
is represented widescreen, suggesting, on the surface, the narcotic
effect of the brainstorm process carrying over into regular consciousness.
On a deeper level, it situates each perspective within a single
consciousness, in communion with facets of the total personality:
The device puts one in psychic contact not only with others, but with
oneself, as well. When Mike makes his breakthrough, it’s intended
as a similar epiphany for the viewer, an evolution into a new form
of awareness.
This breakthrough is achieved by the replaying of the death experience |
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via the team’s recording device, the story something of a virtual-reality take on Poe’s "Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar." (It also looks to the more recent past of the 1942 The Devil Commands and 1963 Outer Limits "Borderland" episode as well as the future of 1995’s Strange Days and even 2000’s Being JohnMalkovich; in concept, structure and several plot points, it owes a huge debt, as well, to Ken Russell’s 1980 Altered States.) In the Poe, a mesmerist hypnotizes his dying subject in hopes of gaining insight into the supposed afterlife; here, Dr. Reynolds records her own demise as a gift of herself for her younger colleague, presumably to resolve the uncertainties underlying their relationship. Though the intention of a romantic relation between Lillian and Mike is clear, it’s drawn in such subtle brush strokes – several chaste kisses and a warmer than usual compliment – as to seem purposefully vague. This is reflective of the structure of the film itself, which unravels on the screen with no bow toward expository dialogue or traditional "movie" introductions, as though the viewer had been dropped into the picture’s consciousness as by one of its own thought-transfer devices. Factor in the nine-year age difference between Lillian-actress Louise Fletcher and her co-star, a boyish-looking Christopher Walken – whose estranged screen-wife Wood, as Karen Brace, has four years on him, herself – and you have something other than the traditional movie love affair, as is verified, finally, by the twin salutes to Lillian and the Wright Brothers model. Mike’s "plane" toast occurs after passing through a small dinner-party recital given by Karen and attended by her |
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boyfriend Barry and son Chris. In analytic terms, such a gathering indicates the dreaming mind in creative play, peopled by the constituent parts of the ego. At its center is the disaffected anima, or the artistic feminine aspect of the hero represented by Karen, and the even-more-disaffected Self, Barry’s as-yet unexplained presence there a sort of not-Mike displaced from his own psychic family. The scene is, again, a restatement of the smaller-scale party just given in Lillian’s honor, suggesting a connection about to be made, the later event occurring on a deeper psychological plane than the earlier one in order to reveal its inherent meaning. Mike’s retirement to his private, |
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dormitory-like room complete with mini refrigerator
heightens the effect of a mind withdrawing into itself at the start
of a dream while also recalling the similar loner-hero of Running,
alienated from even his fellow crew members aboard a space station.
The substitution of Lillian by this wooden kit powered by Genius
equates the two in Mike’s subconscious,
finally bringing to mind Leonardo’s so-called "vulture fantasy,"
as regarded by Freud and Neumann. Expressed as an authentic reminiscence in Leonardo’s journals, this fantasy consisted of a single image, of the infant artist-scientist in his crib touched on the lips by the rustling feathers of a bird. (Vagaries of translation indicate that this bird could have been a kite, rather than Freud’s vulture.) So unlikely was it as an actual occurrence, however, that both analysts could only read it as a piece of personal mythology, drawing the association of infant orality and avian presence as the realization of the Great Mother archetype of Neumann’s title, embodied since at least ancient Egyptian culture in the form of the vulture or other such winged creature and apostrophized in the movie by the Lillian/plane |
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connection. To Neumann, She personifies "the all-generative aspect of nature and the creative source of the unconscious" (p.15), synonymous in some circles with Sophia, goddess of wisdom, in others with the Dragon. We might call her the Muse. "In the life of the creative man…" Neumann explains, "the archetypal factor is so predominant that in extreme cases he becomes almost incapable of personal relations…. And this is why many artists, even among the most gifted, have such intense anima relations with the 'distant loved one'…the unknown, the dead, etc." |
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(pg. 17-18). Mike’s attachment to Lillian, then – that is to say, to the spirit of creative enterprise she embodies – is what has caused his rift with Karen, for in her role as the design specialist who helps to make their invention practical Karen also represents the logistical real world from which he is truly alienated. Like Leonardo, of whom Neumann says his eros "never forsook its bond with the infinite, the mother goddess" (p.78), Mike, as a similar "son of the bird mother," is driven to such models of flight in an attempt to escape earthly physical reality, the bane of many a visionary thinker. Neumann charts two courses for such Great Individuals. One is fraught with crisis and hardship – often depicted in terms of the dragon fight, out of which the hero will emerge with a closer identification with the so-called Spirit |
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Father – the other consisting of slower development and a more characteristically inward struggle, never to "wholly depart from the shelter of her spirit wings" (p.22). Brainstorm proves itself a chronicle of both when Mike must first do battle with the now-antagonistic Company in order to play Lillian’s tape, and later when climaxing under the shadow of the plane model writ large in the form of the various prototypes at the National Aviation Museum at Kill Devil Hill. Helping to guide the couple back together is the figure of Alex |
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Terson, who, as head of the research facility for which all work, suggests the "corporate" superego of which each is a facet. As frequently is the case in dream-films, the specific personality to which this superego belongs is so far removed from thekey action of the drama as to remain virtually nameless, the company’s identity represented only as a logo featuring two joined X’s, suggestive of the female chromosome pair. From it, we may extrapolate the once-nurturing environment soon turned stifling and inimical to suggest also the mother and her womb, Mike the child who |
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has overstayed his welcome there. It is Alex who steers Mike and Karen into a working relationship, as though secretly knowledgeable of its greater meaning and purpose. Interestingly, it is he, also, via a dramatically unconvincing bit of plot manipulation (complicated by actor Cliff Robertson’s more likable characterization than the one drawn in the Stitzel script), against whom the film’s version of the Dragon Fight plays out. This "Fight," again, centers on Mike’s efforts to experience the death-tape Alex has put off-limits. As such, it maintains |
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| characteristics of both
an oedipal rivalry with the father over "possession of" and union
with the mother, as well as a postoedipal separation from the "Dragon"
aspect of that mother. In the service of this project, the faceless
Company acts as a slate on which Mike may project
his repressed resentment toward the often belittling and disrespectful
Lillian, so to unite with her ideal aspect only. (The battle also
reads as one between the forces of consciousness typically associated
with such authority figures and the unconscious She represents, holding
wakefulness at bay until completion of the dream and before the agents
of forgetting may erase the memory – and real-ization –
of oneness with this awesome yet intimidating figure.) Before Mike
can experience this apotheosis, however, he must do a certain amount
of housekeeping, some of which he accomplishes himself, others through
the agency of family and friends.
Mike’s transformation is set into motion by a chance recording of Karen’s impressions on entering the lab, prompted by his curtness in getting her to try the device and involving her taped flashback to an argument with him at home. A new area of application opens for the researchers when Mike’s playback of Karen’s thoughts rouses instant anger in |
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him, signaling the unit’s ability to document and transfer not only sense impressions but actual emotions, too. (Lillian’s surprised response to these "Feelings!" plays as though the concept of emotion itself were a revelation to the dedicated scientist.) In this respect, Karen acts as many women do in male-oriented drama, as the part of the anima working to connect men with their own feeling-selves – the first step in wiring Mike into the Infinite. It is perhaps no coincidence that their revelation follows the second full-scale party in the film, which takes place at Alex’s country home |
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and appears to be something of a front for the action occurring behind the scenes, an upstairs meeting with the no-surprise funding fathers of the project, the US Military. Here, the barely-disguised hostility toward authority Lillian had displayed in an earlier confrontation with Alex comes earnestly to the surface and finds as its target the unctuous flunky |
| Dr. Landon Marks ("Caltech, ’56"; the name itself, land on marks, may be a pun on the by-the-books precision she disdains and which indeed characterizes the lab on his accession to its directorship after her passing). It is this very anger which the Military represents on a grand scale, with its focus on mass destruction and its pathological perversion of even the most innocuous of technological advances, like a child making a weapon out of whatever new object or toy crosses its sphere of reference. | |||
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In this, one is reminded again of Trumbull’s association with the film featuring the ultimate description of such pathology, 2001, where the ape-man finds he can use a bone to bludgeon his enemy. So it is anger, once again, that the film, as its protagonist, is at odds with, and anger it must reconcile with and overcome before transcendence is possible. Inspired by the trio’s discovery, Mike goes home that night and makes a sort of emotional mix-tape of his own recollections of happier scenes from their courtship, which he offers to Karen as a gift. (His comment to her after |
| playing the tape, "We blew it," is an echo of Wyatt’s remark to Billy in the last act of Easy Rider, suggesting a political dimension to their relationship – supported by Running – on the country’s break from its own humanitarian charter. Every year, this schism looms larger and larger.) Here, the equation of flight with genius is expanded to include love as a similar elevating force, as Mike’s memories include a date at Kill Devil Hill in which he tells Karen that what attracted the Wrights to that location was "the wind." The line is delivered with such awed | ||||
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intonation as to suggest the libidinous drive urging all such creative endeavor and contrasting the contrary motives of their military nemeses. Mike and Karen resume playing and collaborating as a result of this sharing, and it may feel as if the movie is prematurely over, until a phone call the next morning alerts them to a separate though perhaps related |
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issue gaining precedence even while they were reconciling. Often, such communication indicates a message from some unseen region within – more than a "call," it is a calling. Here, the impression is amplified by the fact that the actress playing the caller is Walken’s own wife Georgianne, as Hal’s wife, Wendy, assigning her the role of an extrafilmic anima connecting all characters to their own deeper meaning. When they arrive, Mike and Karen find Hal has spent the last couple days in the basement plugged into a tape-loop he’s made of a sexual encounter Gordy recorded and left with |
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him, which has put him in a perpetually orgasmic state it takes some time and a dedicated exercise regimen to snap out of. The severity of Mike’s alarm, however – shared by the others – over what would have played as a gag in most other science-fantasies of the time (think Weird Science, Zapped, or The Man Who Wasn’t There, for starters) raises a number of considerations about the impact the scene is supposed to carry for the audience as well as his character. First and most obviously, Hal’s "little death" serves as a dry run for Lillian and Mike’s big one. Occurring simultaneously with Karen and Mike’s reunion sex, it also serves as a symbol of how deep and seismic their physical |
| encounter, shown only in aftermath, must have been, as well as indicating the spiritual upheaval attendant with that experience: "It was more than just a sexual fantasy, it was a – a feeling that I had. I’m more than I was, Mike. More." When Hal is retired by the Company, it’s a quirkier, lighter resolution of his character than the decommissioning of that other HAL, the supercomputer of 2001, suggesting that here, too, we may be seeing the similar transcendence of a functional aspect of consciousness on the way to a greater psychic elevation. Finally, the sudden eruption of this material in the basement of the Abramsons’ home suggests a revolution in some | |||
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lower region of the psyche, a reaction to the Braces’ re/union signaling that there is something "more" – private, contrary and relatively buried – calling for attention before their reconciliation can go much further. Mike’s response to Hal’s orgasmic bond with life indicates that he is still more erotically inclined toward death and the visionary irrational, a tendency he must play through to its equally enraptured resolution. As indicated, this occurs courtesy of Lillian’s undying spirit of scientific inquiry. After a day in which Marks and his team have been pushing the limits of Gordy’s endurance as experiential guinea pig, Lillian has a fatal heart attack as if in sympathetic response, and records the episode on tape; as the attack is mainly triggered by her anger at fumbling with an instrument, we realize it is also her rage which must be resolved before transcendence can be attained. It is the frustration of the Great Mother thwarted and dyspeptified by such small and |
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ineffectual men as populate the scenes from her life that flash through Mike’s mind as he monitors her death experience later. Many of these scenes involve conflicts with Alex regarding unfulfilled projects and with another, unidentified man who may be either a physician, analyst, priest, or ex-husband, concerning her health. Both indicate unmet maternal desires, the need to bring into the world something of herself before she expires. Unfortunately, as a result of these frustrations, what is inside her is mainly death, as epitomized by her chainsmoker’s cough and the toll |
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| this takes on her system.
The cigarette provides a metaphor for a life inhaled to its fullest
when Trumbull’s otherwise prosaic closeup
on a burned-out butt indicates Lillian’s life finally gone out;
we see it also in a more inspired moment at Alex’s, when Lillian
lights a smoke off of someone else’s cig. It’s a death Mike
has to experience, however, by playing the tape, and for various reasons.
Primarily, it’s another version of the Dragon Fight, accomplished
not by confrontation – the stereotypically masculine way –
but by the feminine way of communion, relation.
When Lillian is in the throes of her seizure she calls Mike for help, and, as with Hal, it comes as a call from within. Mike’s arrival casts a halo over her head by the light from his opened door, so we recognize him as her glory and her image Beyond, that being in the portal she gives birth to by means of her death. Likewise, Mike has to replay this death to realize his own rebirth – to experience firsthand her aches, her disappointments, and to see it all in relation to |
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the whole of humanity before seeing it to its rest and resolution. He must become the Great Mother, and the association will bring him vision. When he calls her name from offscreen it’s as from the other side of a dream, like a person waking himself by calling out in his sleep that which he has discovered at its center. In the funeral following, it’s easy to see he’s a changed man. There, Michael asserts a new authority, as though possessed of the spirit of Lillian herself, when deflecting Alex’s inappropriate attempts to talk shop. Alex’s handing the project to him at this point suggests |
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the Self bestowing the grace of her character upon him, as shown in the next scene, where Michael appears haloed himself back in the lab, Lillian’s presence literally surrounding and illuminating him. The appearance of Hal – 3/4 of that hal/o – to announce his "flying the coop" literalizes her spirit’s taking wing, which he enables by helping Michael rig up the machine. Marks’s surveillance of this action problematizes Michael’s seeing his mission through to its conclusion the way consciousness often throws roadblocks in the path of dream-immersion; it also provides an embedded metaphor for both the studio’s meddling in the filmmakers’ efforts as well as these creatives’ constant disruption of their own transcendent 2001 mindtrip at the climax of the story. As Hal cues the tape for the first time, Marks hooks Gordy up to a tap. Michael soon discovers that the physical sensations the device replicates include the symptoms of actual death and so has Hal disengage these functions, but Marks, whom Lillian had pegged as "a hack at Stanford and a hack at Bell" isn’t that clever, and his mistake fries Gordy. Thus Michael inadvertently sheds his surrogate body, permitting the dream-like transcendence of his real-life |
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one soon after and leaving a home for it to return to following. Through this ek-stasis, or removal from oneself, Michael experiences explicitly what is the subtextual nature of a lot of film, from Citizen Kane to Easy Rider and beyond: the breakdown of the ego into its constituent parts so that one might realize the true, or core self within – visualized here as a matrix of floating spheres serially bursting into prominence flashing-before-your-eyes style. This first monitoring session takes Michael from a bit of horseplay between him and Lillian to more stressful scenes of Alex repeatedly |
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declaring a previous project of Lillian’s "dead." As the experience sends Michael straight to the hospital, these visions, though seemingly as innocuous as Hal’s, should likewise not be regarded frivolously. If we take each character as an element within a single consciousness, Alex in these vignettes would represent the steady, rational voice of the superego trying to get the Lillian-emotional self, still in shock from the rupture, used to the idea that she, too, is dead. But for Michael, equivalent to his own adolescent son Chris in the oedipal triangle implied here – as reinforced by the aforementioned project’s name, Triad – the issue suggests a recognition of the end of the family romance in which the child associates itself as part of the parents’ erotic unity: "Triad is dead." Michael’s loss of consciousness and subsequent spell in the hospital then mirror the non-REM sleep-state, in which mental activity is similarly dulled in anticipation of the next dream-cycle. In this condition, the mind assimilates information borne up in the dream and integrates it into the personality as well as into the next round of psychic activity. The experience empowers him to assert himself as he never had before. The eighties were a time of intense examination of gender roles, with a concomitant attempt to break out of the confines imposed by these stereotypes; witness the role-reversal comedies of the day such as All of Me, Just One of the Guys, and Mr. Mom. There was a simultaneous movement in contemporary sci-fi features such as Shocker |
| and Lifeforce as well in which, similarly to Brainstorm, psychic communion with a supernatural feminine figure yielded a likewise form of transcendence. So Michael’s project here will be to disrupt the macho-military "structure" which is impeding his progress toward refinement and psychic evolution through the melding of the male and female personalities, so to reach the next stage in his visionary development. When he instructs Karen, however, "You’re married to the first man in the history of the world who has a chance to take a scientific look at the scariest thing a person ever has to face. And you have to help me," his subtle posturing represents a bit of a regression | |||
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from the film’s previous valorization of the genius female while at the same time indicating an acknowledgement of Alex’s design to get the couple back together in a fruitful, cooperative relation. The release at the end of the decade of Field of Dreams, where the wife is again there only to serve her husband’s visionary ambitions, signaled a more |
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traditional mechanized-totalitarian science-fiction vision of the future (see Fahrenheit 451, THX 1138, Soylent Green, A Boy and His Dog, et al), representative of the adolescent’s fear of sterile, businesslike adulthood. Chris’s presence and later experience with the device emphasize this theme, as both father and son seem to act out one another’s maturational dramas. Michael’s discomfort with his own role as adult and father is demonstrated both realistically and suggestively: realistically, when sidestepping Chris’s snideness in front of guests, in his early non- |
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| confrontational attitude toward Alex, clear underling status with Lillian, and acquiescence to Barry’s presence in his house during Karen’s recital; suggestively, in a hallucination he experiences while hacking into the system post-shutout. As Michael discovers here, his work has been exploited by the government into a brainwashing tool playing on the viewer’s subconscious fears, in a tape introduced by Marks at a presidential-looking desk. Since this intro |
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appears widescreen, we expand our reading of it to infer Michael’s repressed insecurities as a similar hack elevated to a position of power and responsibility in the wake of Lillian’s departure. The "covert operation" to which Marks refers, then, indicates Michael’s feelings of inferiority threatening to undermine him at such a crucial juncture. His vision proper features the simple image of a man in a Clockwork Orange-style shock-torture chair, but with the intriguing detail of being depicted from a second-person point of view, making Michael the presumed interrogator, as actually occurs in his son’s hallucination, following. When Michael accosts Karen immediately after his session with accusations of Alex’s having sold them out, the intensity, again, and seeming left-field nature of his rant are illustrative of a late-breaking |
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| oedipal eruption, shared with Chris, who is at that moment checking out the device his father has, in his upset, left running upstairs. Chris sees pretty much the same thing as his father, only from the victim’s perspective, his black-dressed dad’s declarations of "It’s mine" rendering the Freudian undercurrent explicit. Like Michael with his first session, the experience leads to a psychotic break, landing Chris in the hospital and jettisoning him from the duration of the film, as though his borderline character had been resolved. Their twin fantasies then suggest a necessary |
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"torturing out" of the boy in Michael, the father’s subsequent actions a reciprocal acting-out of the complex to its resolution for the incapacitated – dreaming – boy, a similar developmental leap. The father-son relationship suggests as well Trumbull’s working out of his own feelings toward Kubrick, with whom he shared a similar possessory dispute. Viewed now as a fantasy unspooling in the convalescing boy’s mind |
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– that is to say, in the psychic space representing the incompletely matured part of Michael himself (his "boy") – Karen and Michael’s decamping to a resort ostensibly to sort out their marital issues suggests a newly unified psyche regrouping in order to resolve the oedipal trauma which has put him into shock. The fact that their dispute is a ruse intended to throw off the government agents so obviously tailing them emphasizes the importance of their working under the radar of the consciousness. A couple of these goons are shown watching the Mamoulian Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, oblivious to the split identities of the subjects playing out before them as the couple engage in evasive double-speak while patching into the Company’s hardware. It also hints at an awareness that Michael must separate |
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the visionary anima aspect of Lillian from the Dragon Mother in order to ascend. As noted in CINEFEX #14 (1983), the several stages of Lillian’s death tape were modeled after the regression theories of psychologists Stanislav and Christina Grof (p.78) which culminate in a re-experiencing of the birth trauma under more hospitable and controlled circumstances. Following a series of images featuring |
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| figures wrapped and suffocating
in their own entrails (suggesting both the hidebound soul not yet
able to break from its physical constraints
and ascend, and the regressing fetus strangling on its placenta),
Trumbull takes us even further beyond into an ethereal next-world
of lights and balletic butterfly-souls making their way toward a radiant
light – a scene so resonant as to be cited in such divergent
films as, again, Lifeforce and Field
of Dreams. It’s also reminiscent of nothing so much
as the Stargate sequence of 2001, which Trumbull had
largely engineered and for which he felt Kubrick had absconded with
the credit. When taken with the vastly similar
journey through Saturn’s rings of Trumbull’s Silent
Running, one gets the impression of a stalled visionary himself
compulsively returning to that same scene of troubled birth in an
effort to finally overcome the trauma of – not only rejection
from that idyllic and nurturing environment – but of connection
as well to the mythic figure who has so callously betrayed him. The
"out of body" experience he longs for has not only to do with his
own body, but with the mother’s as well – the fetus’s
desire for birth.
Michael’s "Maybe we could meet someplace where we had a good time before" is a setup for the couple’s rendezvous at Kill Devil Hill, reinforcing that location as a symbol of romantic as well as aviationary flight accomplished by the coming together of not only the male and female of the species but of those masculine and feminine qualities, besides – what really will give mankind wings. What they’ve "lost" is the harmonious unity of these beginning Michael is so eager to return to in the womb of the qualities, and where they will find it again is in that same |
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primogenetic evolutionary unconscious.
The feds in charge facilitate this reunion when they figure out
what’s going on and cut him off, necessitating his relocation
to a public phone at the Wright Brothers National Memorial there. |
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from that chromosomal feminine place of nurturance and protection. These lights are then duly transformed into first the pay-phone halo over Michael when Karen finds him there and next the inner light he envisions on his journey beyond. The umbilical wires tethering him suggest an infant reborn but not yet ready to sever its ties to the mother, as further demonstrated when Alex and Marks pull the similar cables under the lab flooring and Alex orders them cut, only to be thwarted by the Abramsons shutting down the entire control room – the body’s cessation of mental and physical functions at the point of demise. Alex’s resigned command to "Let go" of the lines at this point suggest the superego giving the dying personality permission to do same, and Michael, safely moored, is free to transcend. Having long since shirked the figure of Lillian herself – not seen in her own tape since Michael left the hotel – and even the colossal corpus of Earth as a whole, Michael experiences another world of indefinite shapes made out of the same light as formed the opening images of the film, as of film itself. Their angelic appearance suggests the last of Lillian making her way back home – that is, integrated into the Self – Michael again and finally being guided by the Good Mother toward a kind of resolution. In turn, his laying to rest of a troubled soul whose unfinished works suggest the many film projects Trumbull similarly was unable to get off the ground in the years between Silent Running and this film indicates a reconciliation with that revered mentor who denied him credit in life but bestowed her genius on him in death. Afterward, Michael is able to stumble to his feet once again and begin his movement back to the spirit of life calling him through the voice of his wife – a return to the real woman versus the feminine principle to which he had become enthralled. "We made it," he boasts while turning with her to regard the planes inside the Memorial, symbols of interior flight and the genius that was both its origin and result. It’s also a reversal of the "We blew it" that constituted his first steps back into her affections. Turning back, he urges her again to "Look at the stars," those legendary dead souls of our ancestors lighting the night and inspiring lovers to their romantic best, then sweeps her up in his arms to, presumably, carry her across the new threshold he has lately pioneered. Just as swiftly they, too, are swept into their own memory bubble like those Michael witnessed on his first excursions into the mind of the Great Mother, as the proscenium again goes widescreen – the film commending itself to the viewer, a similar vision to be shared through the magic of technology in the hands of one who has seen the next world that is everywhere around us in this one, and come back to tell us about it. |
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not a consequence of revisions in the wake of Wood’s death, but part of the director’s intentions all along. Why he would choose this path is puzzling. It suggests nothing so much as a director who can envision the visionary but not the vision itself, or a man with insufficient faith in that insight to be able to throw himself wholeheartedly across the threshold. When Michael returns to his starting point – the stars now like the static of those |
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opening images – trying to make his way toward the larger grid with neither Lillian’s guidance nor Gordy’s instinct to back him this time, the viewer senses another point being made than the one to which the filmmakers are consciously striving, and it’s a bit of a letdown. It’s an indication that Trumbull himself is out there without a net, and all he can come up with for a vision of the Beyond – much like Roger Corman’s conundrum at the end of X – the Man with X-Ray Eyes – is a glorified light show. Not surprisingly, Trumbull forsook feature filmmaking after Brainstorm and now sits on the board of IMAX. Six years after this last narrative, however, he directed a short for the Leonardo Da Vinci festival in Milan called Leonardo’s Dream. Adam Groves, in SHOCK CINEMA #26 (Fall 2004, p.16), describes the film as positing the inventor as "depressed that none of his inventions have come to pass…except one that transports him into the year 1989," suggesting the director still licking his wounds over his Hollywood disappointments. Still, we can see in Karen’s |
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cries for Michael to come back from the brink at that phone booth the third feminine call after Wendy’s and Lillian’s, and here we may perceive the focused meaning neither he nor his director might have. For if Trumbull was not completely successful in delivering on Alex’s invitation to "knock my socks off," he was at least able to offer a blueprint – a grid – for the rest of us to take to the next level, and here it lies, in this feminine voice. There is a similar creative call sounding from both inside and outside men even today, and it is a genius sound, an exhortation to return to |
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our rightful station in the domestic sphere and never to leave it again, to reconcile with our estranged animas and father figures both and thus become the stars we are – one point in a constellation, like a throwaway moment in film that may mean little on its own yet which can unlock the greater meaning of the whole. "Look at the stars," the genius of Trumbull’s movie finally seems to be saying, but know also the stars within. |
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