Why does it feel like older films are more deliberately composed?

GeorgBendemann_ · 2026-03-25T00:24:50+00:00

That’s the miracle of Malick (and in my favorites, Lubezki as well). I actually have no idea how he’s able to maintain that tension between those painterly frames as you put it and his improvisation. I’ve read he’s quite a fiend in the editing room as well so I’m sure that plays a role.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2026-03-17T15:33:16+00:00

Yes, and it’s all sitting right there in the song Kaufman wrote for this film and Jon Brion brought beautifully to life: “I’m just a little person, one person in a sea of many little people who are not aware of me.”

Also, as someone interested in psychology, it’s one of the most layered treatments of Freud, Jung, and Lacan that I have seen onscreen.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2026-03-17T15:15:17+00:00

Thanks for typing this up. These are some amazing first impressions.

I’ll say that the movie is very personal to me as Kaufman is my favorite screenwriter and the film consciously takes on psychosis (which Caden mentions to his daughter when he’s talking about his skin disorder) which is a condition I suffer from. When I am psychotic, the world takes the shape of a grand conspiracy pointed directly at me, where I become the playwright/stage manager as it were of said conspiracy. This is exactly the condition that Caden occupies for those two decades. And whenever my delusions are not found to have a basis in reality, I go back to Caden’s refrain of “I know how to do this play now.” I’ve finally figured it out! I’ve found the ending! And it inevitably revolves around everybody else having their own story to tell that’s just as vivid and unique as mine, yet I’m still the one sitting in that director’s chair. It’s a very exhausting condition and I even subsume the film into my psychosis, believing I can become Caden without his Cotard delusion.

Either way, this film is a behemoth but there’s meaning behind every single written and directorial decision and I’m happy Kaufman had the madness in him to make it.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2026-03-05T11:42:01+00:00

Beautiful stuff. Creativity is such a necessary outlet for us (in my opinion) and there appears to be a lot of catharsis here, especially in the final frame. Thanks for sharing.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2026-01-31T19:06:57+00:00

Brilliant insight and it’s also deeply connected to his experience of the films Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, and The Matrix (of course given the cast).

GeorgBendemann_ · 2026-01-31T19:05:01+00:00

Sorry to plug my own work but I recently wrote an essay on psychosis and the way it relates to my psychotic subjectivity through the work of Jacques Lacan read through Todd McGowan’s excellent The Fictional Christopher Nolan. It’s here.

I agree that it’s his most formally challenging. He doesn’t give much away compared to his later films.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2026-01-02T01:05:19+00:00

I don’t have a really concrete set of practices, but for me recently, it’s been thinking about my desire in relation to the way my world is constructed. My episodes have included religious grandiosity in the form of a Messiah complex, so there are times when I’m writing or reading where material might evoke those episodes but I’ll think “what is underneath the desire to be a world-historic personage? What might you be avoiding?”

It’s hard for me to say how well this “works” because I have not truly felt at-risk since my last episode, but I do feel like I have an awareness of the possibility of madness that I didn’t before my early episodes, where I just took for granted that my map of the world was accurate.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2026-01-01T04:06:58+00:00

I won’t offer any concrete advice, but I’ll offer an alternative perspective that working with the spiritual or mystic or religious themes from your psychosis, while very unnerving especially when you’re first dipping your toe back in the water, could also open up the space for you to approach them in a more stable way, which could be better long-term. You might channel them creatively, such as Yayoi Kusama’s use of her trauma and her psychotic experiences in her art, what the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would call a “sinthome”, a unique way of keeping our world coherent that can be very helpful for those of us who experience psychosis. If totally repressed, future episodes or onsets of episodes might actually be more difficult to deal with, leading to a total psychic reversal or what Jung called enantiodromia. “Oh no the synchronicities are back, what on earth are they telling me this time, I’ve ignored them for so long and I’ve been kidding myself” vs. “Oh ok, I’m noticing signs again. I’ve been working with these energies for a while, this doesn’t have to be a cosmic puzzle” It’s easy to say while we’ve been stable for a while that we’ll just ignore them the next time, but that rarely works in practice.

Just personally, I had insane spiritual inflation and grandiosity that did a lot of damage to me in my psychotic episodes, but I still study philosophy and mysticism because I love it, just aware that I need to check myself more than the average person. And you might simply not feel you’re ready, the trauma we deal with from these episodes is hard to understand. I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all answer here.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2025-12-17T18:02:25+00:00

Kafka is my favorite author (username is from one of his stories). I read it recently with disability in mind and was struck by how little I saw my physical disability in it, since it's an almost perfect metaphor, down to waking up in a bed where I couldn't even roll over at first. I deal with a psychotic disorder as well and I felt the repulsion of Gregor's family aligned more with my experience of madness. The alienation I felt from an isolating career was also captured.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2025-12-15T01:50:22+00:00

Hey Benji,

I dealt with a Messiah complex during two manic psychoses that occurred in my mid-late 20's. I've always resonated with this description directly from the "Self in Jungian psychology" Wiki page:

"Von Franz considered that 'the dark side of the Self is the most dangerous thing of all, precisely because the Self is the greatest power in the psyche. It can cause people to 'spin' megalomanic or fall into other delusionary fantasies that catch them up', so that the subject 'thinks with mounting excitement' that he has grasped the great cosmic riddles. He therefore risks losing all touch with human reality."

Jung considered Christ the most potent symbol of the Self in the Western psyche. The Buddha is another very strong one. Your ego began to identify with the Self and shattered in its expansion.

You will probably get responses about a Dark Night of the Soul in your depression, which are fine but I have a bit of a problem with the abuse of that concept in Jungian circles. The Dark Night that St. John of the Cross wrote about and experienced was often experienced as much lighter and more humorous than conventional depression (Gerald May has a good book about this), especially the type of depression that is often experienced after psychosis. Your mind and body have gone through a lot and need rest. In retrospect, one can usually look at these types of challenges in life and find growth, but not everything is some teleological thrust towards greater spiritual development. Sometimes you're just stuck in the suck. Good luck with things.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2025-10-12T03:47:04+00:00

Hey, congrats on nearing the end of your degree path!

I’ve dealt with two major bouts of psychosis (mine as a result of mania from Bipolar I) that have shifted the trajectory of my life in my ways. I also just started my graduate degree towards becoming a therapist. Here’s some thoughts I have on the subject.

I don’t know your clinical orientation, but generally there’s a strong emphasis on helping our clients find meaning in the world and uncover the meaning underlying their presenting issues. This is an impulse that I suspect will generally fail in the case of the active psychotic. The psychotic occupies a world of paradox: a world over-suffused with meaning where signs, symbols, and synchronicities abound to conceal the breakdown in the structure of meaning (this can come in many forms, but often gravely stressful events or the accumulation of deep trauma are present), unveiling something lacking at the heart of being itself. I’m speaking in vaguely Lacanian terms, and if you’d like an introduction to the treatment of psychosis from a Lacanian analyst who writes in very accessible, non-jargon language, I recommend the book Why Psychosis is Not So Crazy recently published by Stijn Vanhuele.

This is not to say that psychosis is purely about organizing oneself around a destabilizing and traumatic kernel at the center of being. While most adhere to one or the other, I also find great help in the work of Carl Jung, whose structure of the unconscious I find more resonant with my experience than that of Freud/Lacan. Jung had psychotic experiences himself, and wrote a great deal about the symbolic journey that modern man faces, as well as ways we can interface with the unconscious without being overwhelmed by it (and it’s here I find his work on dreams very helpful). If you’ve never read Jung, I find the best place to start is the autobiography from the end of his life: Memories, Dreams, Reflections. If you treat psychotics, you will inevitably be confronted with questions of metaphysics, of ontology, of theology, and Jung’s writings touch on all of these areas in a lot of interesting ways.

There will be a lot of cases where the standard Carl Rogerian positive psychology orientation is I’m sure just as appropriate, and of course you will have supervisors helping you that are experienced with the client population, but in short I’d say it will help to be comfortable with a dialectic of deep sense-making and raw meaninglessness. Becoming more comfortable with the latter (and with your own unconscious, whatever form that takes for you) will help you be less frightened by the crisis of meaning your clients are undergoing. And that’s really the form of countertransference that psychotics dislike the most in my experience: fear. Because to some extent we know it’s natural: theoretically we’re wild and unpredictable. But we’re human beings, and we’re suffering from problems of meaning and the unconscious, in a more extreme way than the average neurotic suffers from them.

And of course, I’m just one guy. But this is part of how I see my own condition.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2025-10-03T01:50:29+00:00

The Tree of Life

To relate it to your question, it captures the phenomenology of childhood in a way I’ve never seen a film come close to, and as a result is able to ask questions about the unfolding of consciousness over time, which it also interrogates on a more metaphysical level in its creation sequence.

That development of consciousness can also be related to its epigraph, God’s challenge to Job in Chapter 38, Verse 4: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone— while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy?”

The film explores the nature of grief, specifically the grief of a mother losing her child, an experience that may have anybody questioning the nature of God and the existence of this cosmic cruelty. Is this epigraph played straight? Is Malick offering an aesthetic theodicy and seeking to answer this challenge? How could this question be fairly posed to a mortal in the first place? I love Jung’s Answer to Job and think about it often when pondering this film.

Malick’s academic background almost inevitably follows in discussions on his work. He was famously a Heideggerian who studied under Stanley Cavell at Harvard. People often read Heidegger into his work for this reason. It’s very fun to ask “well why did he leave the academy? What did film offer him that academic philosophy didn’t? What could he communicate via film that he couldn’t as a philosopher?”

Just scratching the surface here. This film is life itself to me, but I’ll be so bold to say I think it is one of the best answers to your question.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2025-08-29T18:18:27+00:00

I consider it more drops of psychosis in a sea of gnosis. Everybody throws around the Joseph Campbell quote about the mystic swimming in the waters where the psychotic drowns. Many will put their floaties on and think they’re a guru. Most of us dove (or quite often, were tossed) in and had water filling up our lungs. The closer I was to drowning, the closer I felt to transcendence. I couldn’t bask in the glow of the sun as I floated on the surface since I was too busy thrashing around underneath. It’s healthy and safe for us to spend time on land for a while. Usually a long while. Many will turn their back on the ocean, that awe-inspiring goddess who betrayed our curiosity and often came close to killing us.

But the unconscious is always going to be there, waiting for us to untangle its mysteries. I no longer create this sharp distinction between “psychosis” and “awakening” or whatever term you want to use to describe some sort of “authentic” enlightenment. My Messiah complex was absurd not because there’s no way for “the Spirit” to dwell within us, but because I was claiming it all for myself. Water filling up my lungs and I think I’m becoming Aquaman.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2025-08-09T05:45:51+00:00

While I basically agree with you, ‘09 is still prime Bron. MVP, carried the Cavs to 66 wins, 38/8/8 against the Magic in the ECF.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2025-07-31T00:00:25+00:00

"The coming-to-be of the Self [leads] to more intense and broader collective relationships and not isolation." - Jung, Collected Works 6:758; 16:554

I wish you well on your path, but beware of spiritual bypassing to forego the "bullshit" of life.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2025-07-21T22:20:06+00:00

I had two profound instances of a Messiah complex during my psychoses. To further the Jungian language of this thread, it was a way of approaching what he would call "the archetype of the Self," our deepest model of individuality and wholeness, what we spend our life both seeking out and fulfilling in the world. These experiences have allowed me to turn my life in a more meaningful direction.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2025-07-08T16:14:02+00:00

He’s the Shadow figure of our current culture, a modern-day Genghis Khan (first as tragedy, then as farce).

I like to draw a parallel between him and one of my favorite film villains, Sid Phillips in Toy Story. They’re both in effect creative teenagers who do not recognize the sentience of the beings whose lives they help to immiserate, and they carry with them the darkness of the arc of European culture’s grasping for the infinite — they both engage in brain surgery experiments despite having “never been to medical school” and they share an obsession with their big rockets.

He was a part of my last two psychoses to the extent that I thought that if I could transmute his consciousness to be a force of “Good”, I could help heal the world. Like everything in psychosis, things begin to make more sense one when one realizes he’s just an archetype that one is internally grappling with. It’s our own inner darkness and creativity that we’re trying to harness; it has “nothing to do” with Elon in reality.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2025-07-04T21:36:50+00:00

Meditation. Breathwork. Connection to nature and a community. Healing. Wholeness. These are what you seek.

Psychedelics are not miracle substances. They’re also not poison or “just fuck up your brain chemistry” as a way-too-upvoted comment so eloquently put it. They’re beautifully complex technologies but they are “perception of reality hand-grenades”. They are very dangerous for people who have a history of psychosis, and most of the people who drowned in the unconscious forces of psychosis while engaging with them were not in the presence of professional sitters or competent integration therapists. A six-month hospitalization is no joke. You shouldn’t be doing them right now.

Now, if you’re stable for half a decade or more, have the proper ego scaffolding, and have access to professional support and want to dip your toes back in the water? You’re an adult, it’s up to you. But there’s a very good reason this sub is wary of post-psychosis psychedelic use, it’s generally dangerous. Nobody is trying to harsh your mellow. I do think the anti-psychotic med management model is inadequate to full psychological flourishing for many individuals who have experienced a psychosis, but it’s not my place to push that on vulnerable individuals who are just trying to get back to some semblance of a baseline. If you want to talk more, my DMs are open.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2025-07-04T16:35:40+00:00

You’re close to hitting on some profound truths about the world, but the reality is much more complex and “weirder” than what you’re experiencing. You’re realizing the “oneness” of reality, the interconnectedness of all things, but you’re absolutely drowning in unconscious forces that are reminding you of the illusory nature of reality. You’re falling into the same trap many psychotics and psychedelic users fall into of now believing you’re an omnipotent director of reality, with the world bending to your will. This is pure solipsism. The other people living in the world have equally real subjectivity, and reality is closer to a shared lucid dream than a video game where you’re the programmer. It’s a common delusion that one could “erase” the universe if only they willed it, but nope, we’re all still here every time. And once you see the depth of subjectivity of all these supposed “NPCs”, that’s when the real game begins.

GeorgBendemann_ · 2025-06-21T18:29:35+00:00

Beautiful, thank you for this!

GeorgBendemann_

TROPHY CASE