The English Patient: Fantasies of Being Skinless and Being Buried Alive?
English Patient: I did not experience a love story. It was a story of pathological, sadomasochistic obsession. I could have found that interesting in a movie, but please don’t tell me that was love.
I am not sure why I am revisiting this except I still find this movie creepy. NOT a love story. It also happens to be the last Academy Award show I watched because…this…
Much like Elaine on one of the Seinfeld episodes, I didn’t like the movie The English Patient (“Sex in a tub — that doesn’t work!”). But the sex-in-a-tub thing wasn’t the reason. After reading a paper titled: Diagnosing The English Patient: Contributions to Understanding the Schizoid Fantasies of Being Skinless and of Being Buried Alive — well I had to reconsider my reaction to the movie. Clearly, I had missed something first time around.
So, I rented it, popped some corn, located an old stale box of Raisinets (hidden away since I try not to eat such things anymore) and took out my notebook.
How I ended up finding this paper is unclear. Internet search gone bad. I was looking for a paper written by David McClellan on the words of war but ended up with this paper one.
Most movies I don’t like I don’t even remember but I have remembered The English Patient. In fact, my dislike of the movie found a little dark hole in my psyche, and I have wondered more often than explainable, why. After all, it won numerous awards, other people loved it, there were the obvious metaphors of interest — woman as the desert, lost in a desert of love, and of course obsessions, striking transcendent landscapes, and the always popular, passion, love and tragedy. This is the kind of movie I typically love.
In case you are not familiar with this movie, here is the synopsis with the major plot line blown: Through a series of flashbacks the English patient’s strange tale is revealed. In fact, he is not English at all, but a Hungarian named Count Laszlo deAlmasy, an emotionally detached man working as an explorer and mapmaker in Cairo. His interest is stirred by the arrival of two young Brits, Geoffrey and Katharine Clifton. Soon Almasy and Katharine are having an affair that is both passionate and pathological. The husband Geoffrey finds out (since they don’t do much to hide it) and plots a soap-opera-like suicidal plane crash which is supposed to wipe out all three of them. Ironically, of course, only Geoffrey is killed, and Katharine is injured.
Almasy escapes unharmed but now, stranded in the desert, he carries the severely injured Katharine to a cave. Almasy tells her he will leave for help and will return for her. She begs him to come back to get her so she can be taken back to England to be buried, but his journey back takes longer than expected (did he think it was a 30-minute round trip?). To get safe passage back to the cave he helps one of Rommel’s spies cross the desert to get to Cairo and turns over Geoffrey’s reconnaissance maps to the Nazis, which allows the enemy to take Tobruk killing thousands. Almasy finally gets back to the cave, retrieves Katharine’s body (long dead and gross by now, although she appears fresh as a rose) and puts her into his plane. It is at this point that he is shot down over the desert (where the movie begins) becoming permanently disfigured by fire and ends up in a bombed-out monastery in Italy with Hana, the nurse who vows to stay and care for him to his death.
The intriguing diagnosis described by Dr. Doidge is that the movie is representative of schizoid personality disorders. All of the characters including the desert itself can be seen as metaphoric aspects of a complex schizoid world of which Almasy plays the key role. In case you wanted specifics, key schizoid characteristics include introversion and withdrawal into a fantasy-type belief system (but with a skilled ability to role play at ordinary social relationships), narcissism, a breakdown of boundaries between the self and others, depersonalization, and self-deprecating object relations such as obsessive love. Fears of schizoid personalities often involve a smothering effect of love likened to being buried alive as represented by caves and loss of the external boundaries between themselves and others such as in being skinless.
Good god. NOW this movie makes sense to me! Although it was tagged as the great romance of the year, I did not experience a love story (obviously many did). It was a story of pathological, almost sadomasochistic obsession. I could have found that interesting in a movie, but please don’t tell me that was love. It’s like Tom C and what’s-her-name — how many years do we give them between couch jumping and custody agreements?
Seeing it the second time was no different. I still couldn’t find any affection or compassion for the icy Katharine, and Almasy — he still left me with a bad taste on my breath like filterless cigarettes and diner coffee. Psychotic desperation is not love and, in this case, ended up killing thousands of people. Lust, craziness, and obsession is not love — it’s lust, craziness, and obsession.
I can totally get into a good lust, craziness, and obsession story but I was expecting love. English Patient left me in pain like a big Band-Aid had been ripped off…well, from someplace sensitive — twice! Ouch.
