The best Venice film festival of my youth opened twenty-five years ago with the most underrated and hilarious of Woody Allen’s films, Broken Harry. Broken Harry is full of wonderful scenes, and I generally cite the one where Judy Davis screwed Woody Allen for writing a novel that she screwed up a bit of everyone (nobody gets as hysterical as Judy Davis under directed by Woody Allen).
Since yesterday, however, I’ve been thinking obsessively about another scene. Woody Allen’s wife is a psychoanalyst and discovers that her husband has been cheating on her. With one of his patients.
It’s a wonderful fight with Woody Allen saying heinous things like it’s your fault, we never go out, I only see your patients (she receives at home); and kirstie alley yells at him now it’s my fault you don’t meet anyone to fuck she dumps him and walks away then remembers more details of his abomination and comes back to make him new sluts. Meanwhile, a patient is lying on the study couch.
Excuse me, you keep talking, I can even hear you from over there, she says to Tapino, who is complaining about his father-in-law and at whom the psychoanalyst shortly afterwards yells at her husband. (If “Broken Harry” hasn’t lowered the number of adherents to psychoanalysis, I really don’t know what can).
I’ve been obsessed with Instagram psychologists lately. The one that puts clothing sponsors under the diagnosis. The one who makes the diagnosis under the self-timer in a bikini. The one who makes memes about patients who pay them late. (There are men too, but the most notable ones that come to mind are women who are more prone to paid exhibitionism). Every time I think: Aren’t these people throwing away order? But who is it that is treated by such people?
One psychoanalyst-turned-TV-personality and ranking-book author is said to make far more appointments than he can keep, which is why you already know your afternoon session will never last an hour : what you say about the fifth minute, he’s going to tell you here, that’s exactly the point he has to think about until next time.
Is he a villain? Maybe; But what are you that will heal your psyche from someone you saw on TV?
Since yesterday, all I can think of is patients. Since Ferragni’s husband created a series of Instagram stories, the first of which states: “Today I don’t know why I chose to listen to the psychologist’s session the day I discovered I had pancreatic cancer”.
listen again? That is, he records the sessions? And then he uses them like bedtime stories? But does the psychologist know? Is there a minute on this Children’s Day when there’s no more evidence? I’m not asking if he has at least a moment on the toilet because I already know the answer: one of his favorite formats is filming his son interrupting him while he’s sitting on the toilet (locking himself in must be something phobic ).
Since yesterday I’ve been thinking about the patient of “Broken Harry”: if he were of the generation for which it is normal to be the zapruder of himself, you know what fantastic material he would then resell on the hysteria of the cuckolded psychoanalyst could ?
But then: is this generational thing true? Luckily I don’t know anyone in their 30’s but they make a living registering all or just Ferragni’s husband all the time and because of that meticulousness he’s become a multi-millionaire and most of his peers haven’t?
Because he knows his chickens, the man who, when he has nonsense to talk about, calls the psychologist into the cameras of a documentary – and when he has cancer, hands him the audios on Instagram instead (if the film theme is strong, you can do that Worry less about the Carrelli) – microscopic audio snippets of Instagram of himself crying and the psychologist asking about things, leaving us to interpret. “Wanting to share, obsession with protagonism or narcissism as an end in itself”: we can imagine the worst of his reasons, so much skill anyway (but above all: cancer fills him up so much anyway, and he will do something of what he thinks, communicatively ).
Since yesterday, alongside Broken Harry, I’ve been thinking about a story they told me that I want to use in any Self Economics presentation, then I forget it.
It is the story of a guide from Pompeii, an aborigine who, after arriving at the fresco of Narcissus, explains the legend to the tourists. Narcissus, the guide explains, reflected in the water and found himself so irresistible, but so irresistible, but so irresistible that he eventually fell into the water, drowned and died. In short, the guide closes with an equally irresistible Campanian diphthong, “a total crush.” At least that’s not lost in the phone’s microphone, if not metaphorically; and that one does not die from metaphors is a very good truth.