THE WESTERN FILM AND PSYCHOANALYSIS

Ben Parker

“Ideas that are treated, depicted, or deliberately advanced by a work of art are not infantile experience is revived.1 Psychoanalysis therefore
its ideas but materials.”
presents a special case with respect to the venerable critical
—Theodor W. Adorno
topic of “representations of ” any given subject on film.
While the psychoanalytic examination of film has produced
1. shelves and shelves of scholarly work, there are few studies
Movies about psychoanalysis have a strange way of being of psychoanalysis on film—and these tend to be earnest ex-
about something else entirely. Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound aminations of how analysis is portrayed (or, usually, mispor-
(1945), for all of its Dali-crafted dream sequences and im- trayed). The concern of such studies is delimited by how
promptu therapy sessions, is ultimately a remake of the “in- accurately and with what valuation the phenomenon (in this
nocent man on the lam” premise of his earlier spy thriller case, psychoanalysis) is depicted.2 The focus of these analyses
The 39 Steps (1935). Even the childhood trauma in Spell- is not film, per se, but stereotypes of and cultural attitudes to-
bound is only a Freudian variant of the military secrets of ward psychoanalysis, for which film is only the relevant in-
The 39 Steps’ titular espionage organization: both are vital stantiation. For instance, it might be said of John Huston’s
pieces of knowledge unknown to their bearers (Dr. Edwards Freud (1962) that its “main interest today” is that “it shows
and Mr. Memory, respectively). David Mamet’s House of what the American public wanted to think about Freudian
Games (1987), in which Lindsay Crouse plays the therapist- psychoanalysis.”3 But to consider representation only in
author of a book on obsessive-compulsive behavior, is actu- terms of accuracy, stereotypes, positive or negative evalua-
ally a con-man picture, in the same genre as George Roy tions, etc., is already to forget everything psychoanalysis has
Hill’s The Sting (1973) or David O. Russell’s American Hustle taught about representation: how it works not through re-
(2013). Two movies expressly about the life of Sigmund semblance or correspondence, but through distortions, dis-
Freud, John Huston’s Freud: The Secret Passion (1962) and placements, silences, and screens.
David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (2011), are com- In other words, psychoanalytic critical practice itself lies in
posed along the lines of the standard biopic—although implicit opposition to the very premise of “representing psy-
Cronenberg’s film also has a touch of Merchant-Ivory fin choanalysis.” Already in the first dream Freud interprets, the
de siècle sheen. Also deserving of mention is Cronenberg’s dream of Irma’s injection, wherein Freud examines one of
The Brood (1979), a Mad Scientist horror film about a his patients, it is not necessary to be told that psychoanalytic
dangerous treatment called “psychoplasmics,” a form of sessions do not take place in a large reception hall in the midst
primal scream therapy that spawns violent dwarves from a of numerous guests, with friends nearby kibitzing and
sort of external rage-womb. Needless to say, The Brood fails to second-guessing the diagnosis.4 This first representation of
qualify as a straightforward representation of analysis. psychoanalysis is the key to all others: Freud does not com-
In order to depict psychoanalysis, cinema has always had pare the dream of his analytic practice to the mundane details
recourse to nonanalytic cinematic space. The available ge- of his sessions with Irma. The “distortions” or “inaccuracies”
neric conventions of Hollywood are requisitioned as the for- in this representation of psychoanalysis are not subtractions
mal vehicles for this content—not unlike the role of dreams or departures hiding the true object from sight; rather,
in Freud’s theory, which serve as the “other scene” in which psychoanalysis and its theory of the unconscious is this dis-
tance from the empirical “real thing.” In film, this means that
Film Quarterly, Vol. 68, Number 2, pp. 22–30, ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. depictions of psychoanalysis cannot be disengaged from the
© 2014 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please
direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through displacements that dramatize repression and anxiety in the
the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.
ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2014.68.2.22.
generic vocabularies of the thriller or horror film, or—in this
case—the Western.

22 WIN T ER 201 4
Jimmy Picard (Benicio del Toro), in the one acre left of sky, in Jimmy P.

2. a clinical environment, all of the expected terminological

Arnaud Desplechin’s Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains toolkit of psychoanalysis: castration anxiety, psychic trauma,
Indian (2014) certainly seems to aspire to a good-faith “repre- dream interpretation, transference, a primal scene, child-
sentation of” psychoanalysis.5 It is based on the 1951 case hood seduction, the Oedipus complex, identification, and in-
history Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, by cestual desires. Especially in its exposition, Jimmy P. holds the
anthropologist-turned-“ethnopsychiatrist” George Devereux, audience’s hand on such concepts as the interminability of
and much of the dialogue is taken verbatim from the docu- treatment, the Greek etymology of “psychic trauma,” the
mented therapy sessions between Devereux and his patient. physiological genesis of symptoms, and so on. In one scene,
The film follows the illness of Jimmy Picard (Benicio del where Devereux presents his findings to the clinic’s staff, a
Toro), a Montana Blackfoot and World War II veteran, and chalkboard behind him is covered with technical terms; at
his treatment by Devereux (Mathieu Amalric) at a military other times he glosses Freudian thought for Jimmy (and
hospital in Topeka, Kansas, where the psychiatric clinic the audience) in nontechnical vocabulary, because “homely
is overseen by Karl Menninger (Larry Pine). Because words bring things closer.”
Devereux is not licensed as an MD, nor approved to practice Amidst all this explanation, however, the characters in the
psychoanalysis—his credentials are tinged by his apparently
film are meanwhile engaged in disavowing that psychoanal-
“exuberant” character and a possibly dodgy past left behind in
ysis is taking place at all. Menninger tells Devereux bluntly:
Europe—Devereux is initially only to provide an anthropo-
“No psychoanalysis.” After first convincing the staff that
logical “consultation,” to discover whether Jimmy is psychotic
Jimmy is not psychotic, Devereux’s ambiguous official posi-
or “merely an Indian,” whose symptoms and behavior are for
that reason inscrutable to science. His conclusion is that tion is euphemized as “counseling” or “research,” and so not
Jimmy is neither psychotic nor unreachable by treatment, and treatment, not psychoanalysis. And if the doctors at the
Devereux begins a course of psychoanalytic therapy. Menninger Clinic are the first to euphemize and mask the
The film patiently (and even credulously) defines and position of the analyst, Devereux is complicit in this dissimi-
dramatizes the premises of Freud’s “talking cure” as a way lation and displacement. When Jimmy dreams about bear-
of restoring coherence to a fragmented and painful personal hunting, Devereux interprets it as referring to their therapy
past. Following the book, the film’s script (co-authored by sessions, as part of the Freudian transference. Devereux
Desplechin and Kent Jones) is scrupulous in laying out, in interprets Jimmy’s dream as about himself, Devereux, whom

F ILM QU A RTE RL Y 23
 Jimmy is first idealizing and then criticizing under a dis- and deranges its logic, where in Pursued the Western per-
guised avatar. Once again, the representation of psychoanaly- formed this procedure on film noir.
sis is disavowed: “In your dream, I’m just like the animal A reading of Jimmy P. as a Western is not limited to the
helpers of the ancient braves. Their protection gave courage.” film’s geographic setting or its Native American title charac-
As Desplechin has noted, it is the analyst who is “always ter, however ironically Desplechin courts such a reading.
using masks to disguise himself,” charmingly misrepresenting When the anthropologist Devereux arrives in Topeka to be-
himself as a French psychoanalyst instead of an Eastern gin the analysis sessions that shape the film, he is greeted at
European Jew without a clinical practice.6 Devereux even the train station with a “Welcome to the Wild West!” When
has a “hidden name,” his discarded Hungarian birth name, he is introduced to Jimmy P. at the Army hospital, the pre-
György Dobó. Writing about Devereux’s Jewishness, siding doctor says, “Behold, our Indian brave!” Insofar as
Desplechin explains, “This is the story of a bad Jew who Devereux has a plot of his own, apart from conducting and
meets a bad Indian. A bad Jew because he represents only recording the treatment, it’s a story cribbed from John Ford’s
himself: Devereux has been baptized, he changed his name, My Darling Clementine (1946). In that film, Doc Holliday
he lies unscrupulously. A bad Indian, because aside from two (Victor Mature) plays a doctor from “back East”—while
or three moments where he affirms himself ethnically, he Devereux was born in what is today Romania (then part of
speaks only for himself.”7 It is fitting that Jimmy, too, have Austria-Hungary). Doc Holliday is ambivalently estranged
a secret name. His Blackfoot name is “Everybody talks about not from a country but from his surgical profession—
him,” which is hard to hear now without the Lacanian inflec- whereas Devereux is not allowed to practice by the
tion of the discours de l’autre—the insight that we try to make American Psychoanalytic Association. Doc Holliday is
(again, ambivalently) visited in Tombstone by Clementine
sense of our lives in language that is not our own; the lan-
(Cathy Downs), a woman from his past whom he cannot or
guage of others speaks us, and not the other way around.8
will not marry—while Devereux is visited in Topeka by
Despite Jimmy P.’s theoretical armature—as suggested by
Madeleine (Gina McKee), a married Englishwoman (who
its retention of the book’s original unwieldy and over-specific
arrives complete with a saddle!).
subtitle “Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian” as well as by its
Lest this John Ford angle appear exaggerated, consider
nominal status as a European-directed art film—reviewers
that Devereux and Jimmy, in an entirely wordless scene, go
faulted Desplechin for tweaking and disassembling the
to a screening of Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). The scene
hoariest of Hollywood genre conventions. Matt Zoller Seitz
they watch is one of Henry Fonda speaking to the grave-
read Jimmy P. as “a fusion of two mainstream genres, the
stone of his first love, Ann, debating what path to take in his
buddy movie and the psychological case study,” invoking
future. Del Toro’s next line of dialogue picks up the thread,
Good Will Hunting (Gus Van Sant, 1997).9 Richard Brody
expressing the central regret of his adulthood: “I have always
observed that “Desplechin’s affection for open spaces and the been a man who let a woman die.”
mountains, the conventional settings of classic Westerns— There is another similarity to Young Mr. Lincoln, which is
joined with his attention to their forgotten people—evokes largely a trial film with the probing lawyer Lincoln essentially
an inside-out modern Western.”10 Superficially, this is surely playing “detective” to solve a murder. For Jimmy P., like all
true: many Westerns are set on the geographical terrain of case histories, is also a reconstruction of the past: “The Black-
Jimmy’s past (the Great Plains of Montana) and depict foot believed that dreams foretold the future; we believe that
Native Americans, if not always the Blackfoot. dreams shed a little light on the past.” But it is also a trial film
In the annals of the “psychoanalysis film,” Jimmy P. may of sorts. Jimmy has been cleared in court of paternity for his
well be the first to assume the generic contours of a Western. child with a woman of his tribe, Jane. But this false innocence
This makes it a kind of inversion of Raoul Walsh’s Pursued has only made Jimmy’s guilt more mobile and protean, and
(1947), a Robert Mitchum Western draped over a pseudo- his psychoanalytic treatment is essentially a “retrial,” scruti-
Freudian plot of repressed childhood trauma. Pursued was nizing all of Jimmy’s relationships with women. No matter
not just a Western, but a film noir in disguise, evidence of that Devereux excuses Jimmy’s failure to assume paternity of
the tendency of the Western to absorb and repurpose other his child by telling him, “You couldn’t help it: you were
genres, as noted by André Bazin: “Each influence acts upon young.” Jimmy resists being exonerated: “Everything I do is
the Western like a vaccine. The microbe loses its fatal viru- wrong,” but wrong in such a way that he is helpless.
lence on contact.”11 The difference in the case of Jimmy P. is Jimmy describes this helplessness as though he were a pup-
that here it is psychoanalysis that takes apart the Western pet whose strings were being pulled—an image that occurs to

24 WIN T ER 201 4
For George Devereux (Mathieu Amalric), the analytic transference is a set of ambivalent performances and disguises.

him as he suffers through a puppet performance of A a primal scene in his childhood when he walked in on his
Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the film’s most magical mother having sex with a man not his father. Devereux as-
sequences. This oneiric image of excruciating anxiety and signs to this moment the guilt that had become detached from
powerlessness is ultimately also a question of correctly assign- another late-revealed trauma of Jimmy’s childhood, this time
ing blame, as borne out when Devereux locates Jimmy’s a seduction scene. Jimmy had been beaten after being made to
trauma in another scene of viewing: no longer the theater, but penetrate an older girl in the barn. Devereux observes about

F ILM QU A RTE RL Y 25
 A puppet performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Jimmy P.’s most magical sequences.

this scrambling of justice, “You were punished for playing In contrast, in Jimmy P., psychoanalysis is a dramatic prob-
with a girl whose sister died, but this man didn’t get lem, such that Desplechin’s “entire effort [in adapting Dever-
punished.” Jimmy’s trauma compels him to restage this eux’s Reality and Dream] was concerned with dramaturgy.”14
displaced verdict in painful and self-destructive ways. The dream sequences in Jimmy P. are therefore like vignettes
3. or little excursions taking place in some mental theater (or
Jimmy P. has to be a Western in order to be “about” psy- back lot), in the tradition of Spellbound, Freud: The Secret Pas-
choanalysis. An earlier Desplechin film, Kings and Queen sion, and Ingmar Bergman’s dreams in Wild Strawberries
(2004), takes up much of the same subject matter.12 It, too, (1957) and elsewhere.15 It is as though the dream sequences
considers the trials of addiction (prescription drugs rather allow Desplechin to fling open the door to the analytic situa-
than the alcoholism afflicting Native Americans) and pater- tion, replacing its cramped mise-en-scène with sprawling vis-
nity, the aftermath of infantile seduction, and even a psycho- tas and dynamic movement. This approach strongly contrasts
analyst named Devereux! (This earlier “Devereux,” however, with Kings and Queen’s dream sequences, which are com-
is an imposing African American woman and not an ef- posed of black and white archival and newsreel footage, i.e.,
fervescent Hungarian Jew.) Indeed, Desplechin has revealed ready-made, undramatic. Dreams in the earlier film are
that some of the dialogue in the analysis scenes of Kings and merely composites of recycled images, doubled by narration,
Queen consists of “exact transcriptions of an entire passage” of whereas in Jimmy P., the dreams are vivid actions—butchering
Devereux’s book.13 However, where Kings and Queen is inter- meat, hunting, struggling with an assailant—following what
ested in psychoanalysis only as it allows characters to make ex- Devereux describes, in Reality and Dream, as the Plains
plicit their dilemmas, desires, and fears—the scenic equivalent Indians’ conception of dreams: they are “real events.”16
of a voice-over or soliloquy—with every character a beehive of How does Jimmy P. make use of the Western, specifically,
self-destructive neuroses, the film lacks the patience and in representing psychoanalysis? The tropes and citations of
rigor of Jimmy P., as well as its earnestness. Thus, any Western films in Jimmy P. serve both as the day’s residues
interest in mental illness in Kings and Queen is redirected into [Tagesreste, as per Freud]—the stock images for the dream,
a plausibility-straining melodrama of gunplay, sex, and i.e., an available vocabulary to be subordinated, moved
screaming matches, with psychoanalysis present merely as around, and recoded—and as a condition of representability
a dramatic convenience. [Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit] by which psychoanalysis

26 WIN T ER 201 4
becomes filmic. André Bazin describes the Western as “a form with Clementine, whom he leaves as virginal and un-
in need of a content,” but it is equally true that this content tainted by the West as when she arrived. Ford believes in
(psychoanalysis) is here in need of a form.17 The cultural debris the gratifications of virtue and the perverse satisfactions of
of the Western shows up in the movie as “free,” a loose bundle its violations, and in the power of the symbolic exclusions
of signifiers; at the same time, this generic overlay is the neces- that deny them to his heroes.
sary vehicle for psychoanalysis to become visible onscreen. Jimmy P.’s most decisive reversal of the Western, and most
4. profound psychoanalytic insight, then, is to cast the family as
an unavoidable task, laced with disappointment, banality,
This interplay of form and content can be read through
and without guarantees. There is no “Other” who has all the
three “Western” aspects of Jimmy P. as examples of transposi-
enjoyment. No, Jimmy is left without any sustaining fantasy,
tions, distortions, or translations of psychoanalytic material: in
not even the consolation of being unjustly excluded. As
Desplechin’s use of John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and
Devereux instructs him, “It feels pleasant to feel unjustly
Ford’s sense of the “family romance”; in the clinical herme-
wronged. But you must tear yourself away from the past.”
neutics of landscape by contrast to the classic symbolic-
Unlike Ford’s hero, Jimmy will have family, but Desplechin
mythical Western landscape; and in the revision of the figure
shows the reunion not as closure but as uncertainty, tension,
of the Western’s “Indian”.
resentment, and a sign of a long road ahead.
The last scene of Jimmy P., in which Jimmy reaches out to
5.
his estranged daughter, all but announces itself as a paradoxi-
cal revision of The Searchers’ celebrated image of John Wayne For the most literal-minded viewer, Jimmy P. might qualify as
sweeping Natalie Wood up into his arms and restoring her to a Western just because it takes place there—the West. Genres
her home. Nothing could be further from this sublime ges- can get blurred in this way, when “best of” lists seek to claim
ture of reconciliation than Jimmy’s halting and embarrassed The Last Picture Show or Bad Day at Black Rock or Hud as
meeting with his motherless teenage child (Randi Kennerly), Westerns, however tendentiously. But Jimmy P.’s relationship
a scene which promises only resentment, many questions, and to its surroundings is far from literal. Co-screenwriter Kent
a long road ahead. The psychoanalytic dimension of this cita- Jones, in an interview, stresses the intimacy of the film’s
tion and revision reveals the fantasy that is involved in The setting, which is perhaps counterintuitive for a film about a
Searchers’ conclusion: the difficult technical problems of the Plains Indian, with all its implicit connotation of sweeping
termination of analysis, of the illusions that have to be given panoramas: Jimmy P.’s “relationship to the American land-
up (acceding to castration, for example), are only represented scape is not the wonder of the American landscape in the
intertextually. In Jimmy P., Desplechin and Jones employ the scenes in Montana. It’s not the largeness—everything is all
repetition of a classic Western image to do that work. oriented around these characters and stays strictly in the
As so often in Ford’s movies, The Searchers ends with the realm of the interpersonal.”19
exclusion of the hero from the domestic space, ringing the In an early scene, Devereux analyzes a finger-painting
bourgeois family with a cordon sanitaire. Whether in “Cow- made by Jimmy and explains to the hospital staff that the
boys and Indians” pictures like The Searchers, or Westerns house in the picture must be interpreted as the mother or
oriented around the security of a frontier town, like My mother equivalent, while the mountains are the breasts, and
Darling Clementine or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance so on. This psychoanalytic explanation makes sense only
(1962), or non-Westerns like How Green Was My Valley against the background of the Western film, with its sym-
(1941) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Ford’s heroes never bolic landscapes (overcoded, of course, by an entirely differ-
get to cross over to the promised land of family, democracy, ent ideology). It is as though psychoanalysis were drawing
and security.18 Over and against any such domestic space is upon the “findings” of the Western, which had long since
the domain of lawless violation and primal satisfactions. In discovered how a “verifiable topography” or “authentic lo-
The Searchers, the “Indian” family is brutalized in a frenzied cale” is recast into “fantasy.”20 The landscapes of Westerns
domain of rape and miscegenation. In My Darling are already and unmistakably semiotic constructs: remember
Clementine, Pa Clanton (Walter Brennan) represents one that Red River (1948) is not named after a river but after a
pole of vile, unrestrained pleasure, à la the Primal Father cattle brand, a hieroglyph. What is presented as the contribu-
in Freud’s Totem and Taboo, who brutally whips his sons tion of clinical psychoanalysis here—the transformation of a
into line. Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) is excluded from any “geographic region” into “psychological terrain”—is, in fact,
such form of enjoyment and has no sexual relationship a founding gesture of the Western as genre.21

F ILM QU A RTE RL Y 27
 Landscapes, real and imagined, transform geographic constructs into psychological terrain in Jimmy P.

6. for “the war of Secession” or “for cattle rustlers,” just as in

Jimmy P. uses the Western’s figure of the “Indian” not only a myth the trial of the hero can be varied endlessly.26 It is as
for reparative representation, but as a theoretical site for much this mythic image that is at stake in Jimmy P.’s psycho-
negotiating psychoanalytic concepts. The entire film, but analytic sessions as is the more immediate (character-specific)
especially Benicio del Toro’s astonishing performance in the etiology of Jimmy’s neurosis.
title role of Jimmy, is plainly a corrective to the legacy of As to the latter context: the European Western film often
ignorant and hostile representations of Native Americans critically foregrounded the race politics of its Hollywood
(often projected as being ignorant and hostile themselves) in predecessors. Enzo G. Castellari’s Keoma (1976) is at once the
Hollywood Westerns.22 At the same time, though, Jimmy P. most forceful and most desolate of the late-period Spaghetti
does not simply put forward a humane and specific image of Westerns, even as it takes direct aim at John Ford by casting
a marginalized and ill person struggling, with dignity and a recognizable member of Ford’s acting company, Woody
autonomy, through racism and more quotidian problems. Strode, in its story of a tormented “half-breed” caught up in
Jimmy’s anguish and his cure—in other words the psycho- the falsehoods of the West’s civilizing, paternalistic mission.
analytic structure of his characterization—can only be However distant in style from the bombast of the Spaghetti
understood starting from the Western’s “Indian” and the Western, Desplechin’s film and his “Indian” belong to this
fantasy-structure that it projects.23 revisionist tradition.
Furthermore, considering his status as a French art house The fantasy-structure to which the psychic and filmic
director, Desplechin’s Western and his “Indian” should be image of the Indian belongs is carefully delineated in
situated in the contexts of French auteurist readings of Devereux’s Reality and Dream. There he notes that the
Hollywood directors (especially Ford) and of the history of Plains Indian culture “corresponds most closely to the non-
revisionist European Westerns—rather than in the strictly anthropologist’s stereotype of the Indian. It is the world of
American context.24 As to the former, for André Bazin, the braves with waving plumes, who, mounted on spotted
Western was clearly a fantasy-structure, a mythic projection horses, hunted the buffalo or fought the U.S. Cavalry,”
belonging to the “dimensions . . . of the imagination.”25 As and these tribes “were veritable godsends for the movie
in dreamwork, the fermentation of myth permits substitu- industry.”27 But by 1948, when Jimmy’s case history
tions and displacements rather than strict historical corre- begins, this “ancestral” way of life belongs to a faded “past
spondence. Thus, “the Indian menace” could be substituted era of glory.”28 It is a past that stands in stark contrast to

28 WIN T ER 201 4
the disintegrating, marginalized, materially straitened racist thought, but the function and scale of “Indians” in these
conditions to which Jimmy returns from his service in films is subordinated to a different ideological sequence or
World War II. triad, so that their final reference is no longer to nineteenth-
In a sense, then, the Hollywood image of the Native century Native Americans, but to a Fordian universe that
American (however negative) overlaps with and is ambiva- barely even requires “Indians.” Revision of this sort—the
lently shared by the latter-day Plains Indian. Devereux overdetermination of a symbolic schema—is continuous be-
writes that the historical reality of tribal life becomes imagi- tween Ford and Jimmy P. Devereux refuses to separate the
natively transmuted into a heroic “past, which the old see figures of Jimmy’s ex-wife, sister, and mother. Each question
through the rosy glasses of nostalgic memories, [and which] he poses (for instance, whether a Blackfoot is allowed to beat a
is transmitted to the young in a manner which never even woman) is pointed toward this series of symbolic women, not
hints at the darker side of primitive ways of life. . . . As the toward any discrete biographical persons.
present-day Indian sees it, White invasion did not destroy a The most vulgar, if hopefully outdated, understanding of
world compounded of glory, gangrene, thrills and lice. the Western is that of a “Cowboys and Indians” picture. By
Rather did it obliterate a wondrous earthly version of the no means is Jimmy P. a Western solely because of the Native
‘Happy Hunting Grounds.’”29 In other words, Jimmy’s Americans present, on and off horses, in it. Nor should it
treatment has to confront the way in which this disparity be- be deemed a depiction of psychoanalysis simply because
tween the glory of the ancestral past and the indigence of the terms like “transference” and “Oedipus complex” get tossed
present is subjectivized as a psychic loss. In Jimmy P., this around. Rather, I would argue, Jimmy P. had to be a Western
structure of melancholia is emphasized by the distance be- precisely because it is about psychoanalysis.
tween the Hollywood “Indian” and the lived experience of
unaccommodated populations. Notes
For the Plains Indian in particular, the fantasy of unim-
1. Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James
peded enjoyment in a long-lost indigenous past (the “Happy
Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1955), 546.
Hunting Grounds”) badly matches up with the distorted 2. For example: Janet Walker, “Couching Resistance: Women,
cinematic image insofar as the Western’s “Indian” tends to Film, and Postwar Psychoanalytic Psychiatry,” in Psycho-
be imagined “as intensely sexual.”30 Ford’s films have taken analysis and Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York:
an enormous critical beating for their depiction of Native Routledge, 1990); Glen O. Gabbard and Krin Gabbard,
Americans.31 In Ford, though, the role of unrestricted en- Psychiatry and the Cinema (Washington, DC: American
Psychiatric Press, 1999); and Celluloid Couches, Cinematic
joyer is not confined to the “Indian” but is an open slot in an
Clients: Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in the Movies, ed.
ideological disposition, available also to Lee Marvin in The Jerrold R. Brandell (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004).
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance or the Clanton clan in My 3. Alain de Mijolla, “Freud and the Psychoanalytic Situation on
Darling Clementine. The psychoanalytic import of this lost the Screen,” in Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Par-
enjoyment and its vital role in the cure cannot be represented allel Histories, ed. Janet Bergstrom (Berkeley: University of
solely by Jimmy P.’s scenes of analysis, even though these California Press, 1999), 193.
4. Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, 107–21.
scenes are often lifted verbatim from the case history’s inter-
5. Co-screenwriter Kent Jones laments that, heretofore, “the
views; rather, it depends on the revision and citation of the actual practice of psychoanalysis in movies has been very,
Western and its forms. very poorly served. It’s been portrayed as a joke. It’s almost
Not only in this film, but in the classic Western as well, the uniform.” See “Looking for Jimmy: Kent Jones on Adapting
figure of the “Indian” is presented only under heavy revision, Jimmy P.: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian,” interview with
e.g., in John Ford’s work, where their portrayal is “probably Anne-Katrin Titze, in Eye for Film, February 14, 2014,
www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/feature/2014-02-14-interview-with-
an unconscious impulse.”32 Just as films with psychoanalysis kent-jones-about-jimmy-p-psychotherapy-of-a-plains-in-
as their ostensible subject (Spellbound et al.) are not more or dian-feature-story-by-anne-katrin-titze.
less accurate “representations of ” therapeutic practice, but in- 6. Tom Hall, “A Conversation with Arnaud Desplechin,”
stead go to work upon the raw material of existing generic Hammer to Nail, February 14, 2014, www.hammertonail.com/
conventions, so the “Indians” of John Ford’s Westerns are not interviews/a-conversation-with-arnaud-desplechin-jimmy-p-
psychotherapy-of-a-plains-indian/.
(more or less racist, more or less sympathetic) portrayals or de-
7. See “Arnaud Desplechin: ‘Jimmy est surtout un humain, un
pictions of Native Americans, but rather are overdetermined honnête névrosé,’” Le Monde, September 5, 2013. Author’s
elements of an ideological schema of history. To be sure, the translation.
“Indian” is imagined and represented with all the coloring of 8. Jacques Lacan, Écrits, vol. 1 (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 518.

F ILM QU A RTE RL Y 29
 9. Matt Zoller Seitz, “Jimmy P,” February 14, 2014, www. more deeply than I express here, by the performance Benicio
rogerebert.com/reviews/jimmy-p-2014. gave in The Pledge—where he was playing a Native
10. Richard Brody, “Arnaud Desplechin’s ‘Jimmy P.’,” New American. I haven’t seen a Native American role in recent
Yorker “Front Row” blog, February 17, 2014. American film as deep and as violent as what he gave in The
11. André Bazin, “Preface” to Jean-Louis Rieupeyrout, Le Pledge. It’s just a stone of pain that you can see on screen. This
western; ou, Le cinéma Américain par excellence (Paris: mumbling that Benicio had, to me he had the ability of being
Éditions du Cerf, 1953), 5. Author’s translation. Jimmy.” Jonathan Robbins, “Interview: Arnaud Desplechin,”
12. Certain themes in Jimmy P. also run through his other films. Film Comment, February 7, 2014, www.filmcomment.com/
Desplechin points to “the threatening figure of the older entry/interview-arnaud-desplechin.
sister” in Jimmy P. (also present in Kings and Queen) as “a 23. Michelle H. Raheja, of Seneca descent, notes that these cine-
thing I already filmed in La Sentinelle—I don’t know where matic “representations have also been key to formulating In-
it is coming from.” See Hall, “Conversation with Arnaud digenous people’s own self images.” See Reservation Reelism:
Desplechin.” Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native
13. Arnaud Desplechin, “J’ai un rapport d’identification maladif Americans in Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
avec mes personnages,” L’Express, September 13, 2013. 2011), ix.
14. Ibid. 24. For instance, the otherwise informative Celluloid Indians:
15. See Michael Koresky’s video essay, “Bergman’s Dreams,” on Native Americans and Film (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
the Criterion Collection website for the importance of dreams Press, 2011) by Jacquelyn Kilpatrick, herself of Choctaw and
to numerous Bergman films. Cherokee descent, makes no mention of European
16. George Devereux, Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Westerns. In Peter C. Rollins and John E. O’Connor’s edited
Indian (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 145. volume, Hollywood’s Indian: The Portrayal of the Native
17. André Bazin, “The Evolution of the Western,” in What Is American in Film (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
Cinema?, vol. 2, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: 2003), the only mention of European Westerns is in an essay
University of California Press, 2005), 152. about the curious case of the Finnish Western genre.
18. “Like Ethan in The Searchers, Ringo in Stagecoach, Ole in 25. Bazin, “Preface,” 7.
The Long Voyage Home, [Tom Joad] is a transitional figure, 26. Ibid., 9.
both prophet and sacrifice, doomed to live shuffling between 27. Devereux, Reality and Dream, 8–9.
two necessities, his need for security balanced by the call of 28. Ibid., 10, 19.
history streaming past his door.” John Baxter, The Cinema of 29. Ibid., 97–98.
John Ford (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1971), 92. 30. Kilpatrick, Celluloid Indians, xvii.
19. See Titze interview, “Looking for Jimmy.” 31. See Robin Wood, “Shall We Gather at the River?; The Late
20. Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns (Chicago: University of Chicago, Films of John Ford,” in Theories of Authorship: A Reader, ed.
1996), 4. John Caughie (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981),
21. Ibid., 58. and Michael Dempsey, “John Ford: A Reassessment,” Film
22. Del Toro, who is Puerto Rican, also played a Native American Quarterly 28:4 (1975).
in an earlier film, Sean Penn’s The Pledge (2001), which led to 32. Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford (Berkeley, CA: University of
his casting as Jimmy. Desplechin recounts being “really struck, California Press, 1968), 94-5.

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