Analysis of ‘Spellbound’

Spellbound is a 1945 psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, with Michael Chekhov, Leo G. Carroll, and John Emery. The screenplay was written by Ben Hecht, from a treatment by Angus MacPhail, after an earlier treatment by Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, which all was “suggested” by the 1927 novel, The House of Dr. Edwardes, by Hilary St. George Saunders and John Palmer (the two authors going under the pseudonym of Francis Beeding).

The film was a critical and commercial success; it was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and it won Best Original Score. The score, by Miklós Rózsa, inspired Jerry Goldsmith to become a film composer. (I must be honest, though, in saying that I find the love theme rather mawkish, and the spooky music, with the whistling theremin, melodramatic; but you can hear the music and decide its merits for yourself, Dear Reader.)

Here is a link to quotes from the film, here’s a link to the full movie, and here’s a link to the novel by ‘Beeding.’

When we see how often this story was revised, and was “suggested” by the 1927 novel, we see an example of how a Hitchcock film has changed so much of the original story as to retain very little, if anything, from the original (The Birds is another example of such radical changes.).

The few things that Spellbound retains from The House of Dr. Edwardes include the character names of Dr. Edwardes, Constance (Bergman)–though in the film, she’s Dr. Constance Petersen, and in the novel, she’s Dr. Constance Sedgwick (the change of surname owing presumably to a need to accommodate Bergman’s accent, which sounds anything but English), and Dr. Murchison (Carroll). Also retained is the idea of having a mentally ill man impersonate a psychiatrist, though in the film, Dr. Edwardes is impersonated by, as we eventually learn, John Ballantine (Peck), whereas in the novel, a madman named Geoffrey Godstone impersonates Dr. Murchison.

A huge transformation in plot from novel to film is how, in the latter, Constance and Ballantine are chased by the police while she, in love with him, tries to cure him of a guilt complex in which he believes he’s killed the real Dr. Edwardes, while in the former, Godstone not only relishes in his crime of imprisoning, incapacitating (with drugs), and impersonating Dr. Murchison, but also practices Satanism in Edwardes’s mental hospital, a secluded castle on a mountainside in France!

Despite these huge differences between novel and film, though, they do share a few common themes that deserve investigation. Namely, these are the blurred line between doctor and patient, or sane and insane, as well as the juxtaposition of the life and death drives, or Eros (which includes libido) and Thanatos.

The first of these two themes is especially significant in that it calls into question the authority of the psychiatrist. Though common sense reminds us that the doctor is as much a fallible human being as the patient is, we nonetheless have a habit of attributing great wisdom and expertise to the analyst, whom Lacan called “the subject supposed to know.” The novel and film punch holes in this supposed psychiatric authority, in both literal and symbolic ways.

Not only do madmen impersonate psychiatrists in these stories, they also manage to fool the rest of the staff in their respective mental hospitals, if only for a relatively short time. Only Dr. Murchison knows the truth right from the beginning: in the novel, because the real Dr. Murchison is being held against his will by the madman; in the film, because Dr. Murchison is Dr. Edwardes’s real murderer!

In the novel, an old castle in France, the Château Landry, has been made into a mental hospital. Its inaccessibility among the mountains, as well as the evil practices believed by the local villagers to be going on there, reminds me of the Château de Silling, a castle in the German Black Forest, in the Marquis de Sade‘s unfinished erotic novel, The 120 Days of Sodom, adapted as Salò by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which four wealthy libertines (who, being a duke, a bishop, a president, and a banker, are also of dubious authority) sexually abuse, torture, and kill a number of young, often naked, victims. This clash between a place supposedly meant to heal the sick, but really a place of Satanism and/or perversion, underlines the implied anti-psychiatry and antiauthoritarianism of the novel.

In the film, the blurring of the lines between sane and insane, and doctor and patient, can be seen not only symbolically in Ballantine’s brief impersonation of Dr. Edwardes, but also in the growing mental instability of Dr. Murchison, which leads to him murdering Dr. Edwardes, threatening to murder Constance, and finally committing suicide, all with the same pistol. Finally, Constance’s own professionalism as a doctor is taken into question when she lets her countertransference for her patient, Ballantine, run wild: she’s as much in love with him as he is with her.

Her love for him, translating into a need to have him, is representative of a Lacanian application of Hegel‘s master/slave, or lord/bondsman, dialectic, a holdover from feudal times. She would be the one in authority over him, as analyst over analysand, but her countertransference weakens that authority.

As Ian Parker says in his book, Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity, “…Hegelian phenomenology…[was]…influential on Lacan’s early work…the psychiatrist becomes a master who discovers that he is dependent on the slave he commands to work, who discovers that he himself relies on the other he imagined he would dominate, for without that domination his activity would amount to nothing. This master-slave dialectic is actually rooted by Hegel…in the feudal relationship between what he preferred to term ‘lord’ and ‘bondsman’, and it only then starts to have retroactive hermeneutic effects on the way longer past historical relations between masters and slaves might be understood…we can already see the spectre of a totalising system of knowledge–very much of the kind [Hegel] is accused of unrolling and celebrating on the stage of history–haunting psychiatry.” (Parker, page 23)

In the novel, that the mental hospital is in a castle, an icon of feudal times, is significant in how early, authoritarian forms of psychiatry came out of the feudal world, thus reinforcing the mystique around the authority of psychiatrists over the mentally ill, an authority that is challenged–symbolically and literally–in both the novel and the film.

“The bourgeois-democratic revolutions that ushered in new forms of the state in Western Europe to guarantee capitalist interests never completely eradicated feudal power relations, and the remnants of feudalism were recruited into and re-energised in specific ideological projects that served class society well. Psychiatry was thus incorporated into the psy complex, the meshwork of practices that individualize subjectivity and regulate the activities of bourgeois subjects…This replication and recuperation of feudal social links under capitalism has consequences for political-economic analysis of the development of psychoanalysis.” (Parker, page 25)

The fact that, back in feudal times, mental illness was perceived as being caused by demonic possession (recall how Hamlet, in having seen his father’s ghost, is quite possibly really mad, and not merely pretending to be) is echoed in the novel in how not only the villagers neighbouring the Château Landry believe that the patients are possessed, but also rightly suspect that Satanism is being practiced there. This devil-worship, practiced by a madman who convinces the medical staff for quite a time that he’s Dr. Murchison, reinforces the blurring between doctor and patient.

As for the authority of those who have practiced psychoanalysis, a method endorsed in Hitchcock’s film, I am greatly influenced by it myself, as many of my articles have demonstrated, but I have no illusions about it. Psychoanalysis is no science. Freud got a lot more wrong than he got right. Wilfred R. Bion was much more insightful, but his own traumas from his war experiences further demonstrate the blurred line between doctor and patient. Lacan, with his frustratingly obscurantist way of communicating his ideas, comes off as a pretentious narcissist.

For all of these reasons, a novel and film about the mentally ill impersonating psychiatrists seems a fitting topic. In the larger sense, people in all positions of authority–be they psychiatrists, politicians, or bosses–are far too often impostors.

The mad can often do an expert job of faking sanity and self-control, as Ballantine does for much of the film, despite his frequent moments of agitation. Psychopaths and narcissists are also frequently skilled at pretending to be empathetic, caring, and socially conforming; we can see Dr. Murchison do this throughout the film, right up to his suicide; we can also see this self-control in Godstone as he impersonates Dr. Murchison through most of the novel.

These characters wear masks of sanity that slip only from time to time. We all wear masks.

The film begins with a nymphomaniac patient, Mary Carmichael (played by Rhonda Fleming), being taken to see Constance for a therapy session. Fleming’s portrayal of a madwoman in the one scene we have of her (most of the rest of her character was removed from the film for having stretched the limits of 1940s movie censorship…rather like repression of unacceptable unconscious urges, is it not?) is, I’m sorry to say, terribly overacted; still, maybe that’s the point. The mentally ill, in their inability to blend in with society, are simply ‘bad actors.’ the sane know how to maintain the dramatized illusion of sanity.

Constance’s ‘performance’ of a woman totally uninterested in sexual or romantic feelings is impeccable…until “Dr. Edwardes” arrives, that is. Dr. Fleurot (Emery), who up to the arrival of the surprisingly young and handsome “Dr. Edwardes” (In the novel, “Dr. Murchison” is also quite young, unlike Carroll’s Murchison.) and his effect on Constance, has remarked that embracing her is like “embracing a textbook.” So when Fleurot sees her schoolgirl-like crush on “Edwardes,” he can’t help poking fun at her for it.

One suspects that the origin of her countertransference is in her presumably Oedipal relationship with her father, since she complains of how the poets romanticize about love, raising our hopes with it, only for us to be disappointed and heartbroken; actually, our romantic feelings for someone are just a transference of our original Oedipal feelings for the (usually) opposite-sex parent. What’s more, she’s read all of Edwardes’s books, and obviously admires him for his psychiatric expertise, the way a child will regard his or her (then-younger!) parents’ knowledge as quite infallible.

Another patient in Green Manors, Mr. Garmes (played by Norman Lloyd), embodies the opposite, it seems, to Constance’s Oedipal feelings: he imagines he killed his father and has guilt feelings from this delusion, when it’s really just his unconscious wish to remove his father, rooted in childhood, so he could have his mother. Constance reassures him that analysis will help him see the truth buried in his unconscious, and seeing that truth will cure him of his guilt.

Now, Ballantine, in his impersonation of Edwardes, is listening to Garmes talk about his fantasy of having killed his father, and instead of understanding how unconscious Oedipal feelings, rooted in jealousy, can lead to delusions of guilt when the object of jealousy is killed, Ballantine can relate to that guilt and find it very real, since as we learn towards the end of the film, his own guilt complex is based on an accidental killing of his brother, presumably another object of jealousy, another rival for the attention of their mother.

So Ballantine’s most imperfect impersonation of a psychiatrist, especially apparent when he has a mental breakdown during surgery on Garmes, is symbolic of the human imperfections of psychoanalysts, reminding us of the limits of their authority.

To go back to the novel, it isn’t only the authority of the doctors that is questioned (only Constance seems to keep her head the whole time), but also the patients, who though being obviously ill are also often people associated with some form of authority. There’s an extremely forgetful colonel, an ineffectual, foolish druggist named Mr. Deeling, a reverend who finds himself easily brought under Godstone’s Satanic influence, and an elderly woman–normally someone who would be revered as a wise matriarch–who has delusions of being a little girl, and behaves accordingly. And the madman is often referred to as the Honorable Geoffrey Godstone.

The juxtaposition of Eros and Thanatos as mentioned above, of feelings of love and of death, are demonstrated when Constance, always trying to deny her love for “Edwardes,” nonetheless gives in and embraces him. Just at that point, though, he becomes agitated when he sees the pattern of dark lines on her white robe, triggering his memory of ski tracks in the snow where he saw the real Dr. Edwardes fall off the side of a mountain to his death.

Constance realizes that “Edwardes” is an impostor when she compares his signature on a recently-written letter with that of the real Dr. Edwardes in one of his books. A parallel scene can be found in the middle of the novel, when Constance goes through some of the books of “Dr. Murchison” and finds writings on Satanism and the witches’ Sabbath. Not only is psychiatric authority to be questioned, but given the feudal era’s association of mental illness with demonic possession, it can sometimes also be the opposite of therapeutic.

Still, Constance is smitten with John B., as she knows him to be named, and she wants to help him get well, refusing to believe even his own insistence that he killed the real Dr. Edwardes. Her countertransference has gone from an Oedipal one (a ‘daddy thing’) to more of a Iocaste-like transference, with Ballantine, in his vulnerability and fear, being like a son to her.

He leaves Green Manors, having been found out to be not only an impostor but also a suspect in the killing of Dr. Edwardes. He’s left Constance a letter, telling her he’s staying at the Empire State Hotel, so she goes there. She’s waiting in the busy hotel lobby, not far from the elevators, out of one of which we see Hitchcock doing his cameo, him walking out of one of them carrying a violin case and smoking a cigarette.

A drunken lout (played by Wallace Ford) sits next to her and annoys her until the hotel detective (played by Bill Goodwin) gets rid of him. This hotel detective, well-meaning and wanting to help her, catches hints from her body language and facial expressions to help him figure out what she needs. He fancies himself something of a psychologist, since one needs to be one in his line of work. His discussion of his skills in human psychology with Constance, who as an actual psychiatrist finds his skills most charming, is yet another example of the film blurring the distinction between doctor and non-doctor.

As Constance tries to analyze Ballantine, he–not wanting to confront his traumas–tries to resist her probing, even getting angry with her. Such hostility to the doctor is as frequent a manifestation of transference as are feelings of love. Again, in this love/hate relationship we have an example of the juxtaposition of Eros and Thanatos.

Eventually, Constance and John end up at the home of her old teacher and mentor in psychoanalysis, the elderly Dr. Alexander Brulov (Chekhov). Though this doctor is a good, capable man, he has his own clownish eccentricities and idiosyncrasies that remind us of how human therapists also are. For example, he makes a few on-the-spot diagnoses that come across as rather ludicrous: he claims Ballantine has “photophobia,” and is a “schizophrenic.”

And in spite of Brulov’s assertion that “Women make the best psychoanalysts until they fall in love. After that they make the best patients,” he also shares some of that old-fashioned Freudian sexism, wishing that Constance wouldn’t fill his ears with “the usual female contradictions. You grant me I know more than you, but on the other hand, you know more than me. Women’s talk. Bah!”

Recall how Freud, on the one hand, wanted to have more female psychoanalysts to shed light on the “dark continent” of female psychology (hence his famous question, “What do women want?” and his daughter, Anna, becoming an analyst), yet on the other hand, he believed women to have a less-developed superego, and therefore a less-developed sense of morality.

Brulov quickly figures out that something is wrong with “John Brown,” and when he finds the man descending the stairs with a razor in his hand, held like a murder weapon, and with a wild look in his eyes, Brulov resolves to drug John’s milk to knock him out for the rest of the night.

Ballantine seen drinking the drugged milk is one of two significant POV shots that Hitchcock put in the film, the other being the one when Dr. Murchison points his pistol at his face and shoots himself. Apart from the POV linking the two shots is also the fact that both characters have obvious mental health issues, Ballantine in the film impersonating a psychiatrist, and in the novel, a madman impersonating Dr. Murchison.

Ballantine’s taking of the razor blade, as if to use it as a murder weapon, can be seen as a case of what Freud called “the compulsion to repeat,” in that Ballantine, imagining himself to be Dr. Edwardes’s murderer (rather than just the accidental killer of his brother), is repeating an expression of his toxic shame, in the futile hopes of processing that shame and thus eliminating it. Luckily, he never successfully reenacts that supposed inclination to murder on either sleeping Constance, with her white blanket and its dark, straight lines caused by shadow–which obviously has triggered Ballantine–or on Dr. Brulov.

After his long, drug-induced sleep, and an argument between Constance and Brulov over whether to treat him or hand him over to the police, Ballantine wakes up and describes the dream he’s just had to the two psychoanalysts. The designs for the dream, fittingly, were done by surrealist Salvador Dalí.

We see the inside of a gambling house with curtains with eyes all over them, suggesting that it represents Green Manors, and that the eyes on the curtains represent the guards of Green Manors, or just criticizing eyes in general. A scantily-clad woman, representing Constance in a wish-fulfillment for Ballantine, is going around from table to table kissing all the male guests in the gambling house.

Someone with huge scissors is cutting all the eye-covered drapes in half, suggesting a wish to eliminate all those critics watching guilt-ridden Ballantine, who has been playing cards with an elderly man in a beard…Edwardes. The card game could represent a therapy session between the two, since Edwardes’s unorthodox methods included allowing his patients to enjoy recreational activities…like in the skiing incident.

The proprietor of the gambling house, wearing a mask, suddenly appears, accusing the elderly card player of cheating. The former, representing Murchison, as we eventually learn, threatens to “fix” the latter; in other words, Murchison is threatening to kill Edwardes, and the masking of his face represents Ballantine’s repression of the memory of Edwardes’s real killer.

Next, we see the elderly man standing at the edge of a sloping roof on a building. The slope of the roof represents the snowy slope of the side of a mountain, where Edwardes and Ballantine were skiing. The elderly man falls off the roof; then we see the masked proprietor again, hiding behind the chimney of the roof. He’s holding a warped wheel, shaped a bit like a revolver. He drops it on the roof.

What the dream is trying to remind Ballantine, albeit in an extremely distorted form so as not to wake him in a state of great distress, is that Murchison, hiding behind a tree, shot Edwardes in the back, causing him to fall off the mountain to his death, so Murchison could stay on as the “proprietor” of Green Manors, instead of being replaced as such by Edwardes.

The dream ends with Ballantine being chased by a great, shadowy pair of wings down a hill. A speculation of angel wings leads to him recalling where the skiing with Edwardes occurred: a ski lodge named Gabriel Valley. Ballantine and Constance go there to ski, in the hopes that they can bring up more memories to fill in the puzzle of his troubled unconscious. As they’re going down the slope, though, the two skiers are also hoping he won’t, in a fit of repetition compulsion, kill her, too. In this scene, we again see the juxtaposition of Eros and Thanatos.

Just before they reach a precipice, he remembers the time he, as a child, accidentally killed his brother. Little John was sliding down a side ramp, where one puts one’s hand to go up or down stairs in front of a building, and his brother was sitting at the bottom of the ramp, with his back to John and ignoring his cries to get out of the way. John’s feet knocked him off and onto a spiked fence, stabbing the spikes into his guts.

This sliding down and killing someone became a repressed memory that returned to Ballantine’s conscious mind in the unrecognizable form of him sliding down a snowy hill on skis and seeing Edwardes in front of him, like his brother, then seeing him fall to his death. Such returns of the repressed in unrecognizable new forms is common enough.

His innocence of the death of Edwardes seems fully established, except for when the police find the body, right where Ballantine says it was…and with a bullet in the corpse’s back. Ballantine is arrested, tried, and convicted.

Refusing to give up on Ballantine, Constance keeps searching for ways to acquit him. She discusses her heartbreak over his conviction with Dr. Murchison, who lets it slip that he knew Edwardes “slightly” and didn’t like him. (He’d earlier said he never knew Edwardes…though Constance wasn’t in the room to hear him tell this lie!)

Suspecting him, she discusses Ballantine’s dream with Murchison, who freely interprets it in a way to help Constance incriminate him. Since under his calm shell, he is also mentally ill, Murchison in his cooperation with her is demonstrating the promptings of the death drive, especially when he pulls his gun on her. The imposter Murchison of the novel, though at first denying he’s really Godstone, also freely admits to it when the evidence against him is stronger.

In the POV shot of Constance leaving the room with Murchison’s pistol following her, we can expand on the parallels with the POV shot of Ballantine drinking the drugged milk. The perspective is of a madman who either has impersonated or is impersonating a psychoanalyst; the person being looked at is a real psychoanalyst. One receives a drug and sleeps; the other receives a bullet and dies–“to die, to sleep, no more…”

The person seen in both cases, an actual, sane doctor, as opposed to the madman seeing the doctor, is a metaphorical mirror, in the Lacanian sense, of the mentally-ill viewer of him or her. The doctor being watched is thus the ideal-I of the viewer, who in his frustration cannot measure up to that ideal, and therefore must be knocked out or killed.

In these observations we see how Spellbound can be understood to be a critique, allegorically speaking, of the psychiatric profession. One must be careful to ensure that the therapists are as psychologically healthy as humanly possible, for the line between doctor and patient is blurred. Hence, when Constance tells Ballantine that all psychoanalysts must first be analyzed themselves before they can begin practicing, he says, “Ah, that’s to make sure that they’re not too crazy.”