This was a powerful film with brilliant performances by both Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde in a dark and deadly dance of sado-masochism. Thanks to their courage in tackling these roles many of us have been saved from its powerful grip.
Night Porter is about Max, a sadistic, mentally disturbed Nazi Soldier awaiting trial for his atrocities during the holocaust while working as a night porter in a hotel. During the holocaust he commits heinous abuses upon Lucia, an it girl, during her captivity. He torments the girl, yet makes her believe he is her protector, at one point, after a performance before many SS soldiers, displaying the head of one of the male inmates in a box. He does this in an attempt to bind her to him while keeping her in fear for her own head, a story he later claims to be Biblical, but I viewed as possibly a distortion of the writer’s personal reality, a vindictive, artistic interpretation of Holofernes, clearly in which he seems to be taking vengeance on beautiful, seductive women. One might think his childhood interpretation of this event deserved rectifying by abusing seductive women and could be related to Hitler and his personal interpretation of this event in the Bible. Fairbairn states with regard to similar circumstances, “the badness of an object was not the child’s sadism but was a reflection of maternal deprivation.” His instincts have been perverted so as to cause him to desire such relationships in order to satisfy his sexual needs. Fairbairn states, “what ranked as crucial for the child was the establishment of a satisfactory object relationship during the period of infantile dependence”.
With this in mind, it becomes clear they are both victims of unfulfilled infantile desires and positive parental deprivation, Lucia’s deprivation having been created for his purposes in his god-like conception of himself. The behavior acted upon Lucia is part of the “traumatic bonding”, defined in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, a Clinical Review, Sidran Press and is described in the Stockholm Syndrome. At some point Max and Lucia part, never to see each other again until she arrives at the hotel with her husband, where Max happens to be employed. It is also possibly a re-enactment of his own infantile deprivation.
His sadism, acted upon her, pervert her natural childhood instincts, replacing her parental attachments and creating in her a masochistic dependency. He frequently re-enacts the infliction of pain and suffering he endured, with her, then dissociated from her consciousness until she encounters him at the hotel. The traumatic bonding resulting from her abuse, by him, is why she has arrived at the very hotel where he is working. This happens, in part, because of their traumatic attachment, this re-involvement seeming to be what Jung called synchronicity, but is actually the repetition compulsion. Lucia is attempting, however unconsciously to master his abuse of her. The period of abuse imprinted a new but violent and abusive paternal attachment. In the scene above, it appears she is being deliberate when she throws the bottle from the sink onto the floor. I assert that she is actually acting out, like a child would do. She is angry and the only behaviors she can draw on in her mental repertoire are of a violent destructive nature. She destroys a bottle of lovely perfume which represents her own self and is the only way she can communicate her pain and suffering to him. She isn’t clear that he is going to be hurt until he grimaces at her and she realizes she has hurt him. She thinks she is being like him and is a good girl, because pain and suffering are the end result of his actions and the numbing out she had once employed to protect her, was at work again. He is oblivious to her need at times, her pain and suffering but at times seems to want to lover her. Only after he presses her hand into the broken glass under his foot does she realize she has caused pain by her actions.
Recognizing the imprinting is difficult in relationships where there are more than just the parents involved. Many innocent children and young adults are stereotyped by the behaviors of parents, relatives and communities, so it is assumed Lucia is trying to hurt him and it is questionable Rampling is showing us otherwise. Lucia is simply using the only behavior she has learned, to get the love and attention she wants from him, which just happens to be abusive. He feels he has to hurt her in order to keep her attached to him. Later it appears she did recover but their meeting again resurrects her old patterns of being with him and she falls into the same depravity she had once escaped.
Here is seems it is futile to even attempt recovering from an abusive, violent past. It is clear this is far from the truth. Behavior patterns are like memes and verbal behavior in the brain. These patterns can be corrected but awareness of the problem must be developed and maintained in order to extinguish these poor patterns of relating and they can be corrected. This dilemma is also dramatized in Death in Love, when the Doctor appears in the city where his victim lives. Lucia is like the mother in Death In Love only she does not have children on which she inflicts her trauma, she seeks to inflict it on her tormentor, Max. Again Fairbairn remarks that “a healthy object (meaning caretakers) relationship is critical during the period of infantile dependence”.
The encounter triggers her memories of the events that occurred between them during her captivity, as well as Max’s, called flashbacks. Their relationship is reignited with numerous scenes dramatizing their relationship during Lucia’s captivity, their libidinal energies now driven by the need for violence; suffering and pain. In one scene, we see her clearly exhibit sadistic behaviors, Lucia acting the loving obedient but flirtatious child, deliberately smashing a bottle onto the floor of the bathroom after locking the door. Upon unlocking the door, Max bursts through stepping onto the glass cutting his foot. Lucia then reaches under his foot at which time he crushes her hand into the glass, again inflicting sadistic harm upon his “little girl”. Here, from my own synchronistic observations, I recognize scenes from The Woman In Green in which a long needle is driven into the hand of a stage performer in order to demonstrate hypnosis, I later re-enacted by stepping onto a nail in a board while crossing a creek.
It may be possible this part of the film can generate thoughts about scalding the mouth, tongue and throat. People do often think clearly about what a film is suggesting. The viewer may not voice his or her thoughts about what they saw going on. This can then be passed onto others like Kay who may act out these thoughts. This is likely how she came to be entangled in the film and is in keeping with what Dr. Joseph Murphy mentions in his book The Power of the Subconscious Mind. She had been in prison prior to drawing her sketch, was traumatized and is likely why she was unable to recollect Murphy’s book or even collect her thoughts enough to consider a film was plaguing her life. If there was a writer connected to her they did a poor job of informing her of the dangers surrounding her. I didn’t know about the film when I drew the praying mantis image in 1992, and had consumed many products since then that were scalding hot. During the time I was homeless and living in my car, I even purchased a cup of hot water and dumped chili powder in it. So it is clear discussing a film is almost essential.
Moving on it is clear the director romanticizes a sadistic act on the part of Max when he serves Lucia piping hot coffee. It took only 15 seconds for him to move from the table to her bedside. It would be impossible for the coffee to cool in that amount of time. “He’s scalded her mouth”, these could have been the thoughts generated by the viewer or viewers. In the film, the only other explanation for Lucia’s lack of response would be that she chose not to respond to Max’s actions and then attempts to quell his cruelty by seducing him, triggering her memories of her imprisonment and sexual violations and so the cycle begins again. This is how she adapted to him during her imprisonment and even in her freedom still responds to him as her mind has been flooded with the thoughts she generated during her captivity, ideas she used to stay alive.
This is the nature of their bond with each other now, she as an adult woman and he as a civilian. Now he wants to love her as a man would love a woman but their affair is more or less a kind of sadistic play between each other, Lucia manifesting her childish masochistic flirtations, setting off Max’s sadistic desires he attempts to control. In hopes of changing her and saving her he keeps her locked up in his apartment at one point chaining her to a chest claiming he is keeping “them” from taking her. He also wants to prevent her from testifying against him which she has threatened to do. He provides her medical treatment she refuses claiming there is no cure, also suggesting her reasons for her appearance at the hotel is more than chance.
The ending is climatic as the two sink further into depravity, trapped in past mental content, transferences abounding and still inflicting pain, one on the other. They are acting like animals, he caressing her mouth as if to caress and care for her vagina which gives him pleasure, but wanting to cut out of her vagina that which makes her seductive and wanted by others. Both, on the verge of starvation, in an attempt to prevent Lucia from being taken into custody and Max arrested for his crimes, they leave the re-creation of their prison, the apartment, and take their final steps to freedom. Shots are fired, both falling to their death.
Now what this could also depict is some couple watching the film The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. Some guy takes his girl to this film and she gets traumatized from seeing the woman’s head in a pan. Of course her mother has already been hypnotized by the film The Woman in Green. From the time they leave home to the time they get to the theater, they are entangled in the mental content of numerous people they then begin to act out after they get home. The boy’s parents and the girl’s parents are now possessed of the content of the film. Some crime was reported on the news their parents were listening to or one of the fathers was a WWII vet who witnessed his buddies get shot down during the war. One of them feels a sharp piercing pain in the back. The head scene could be the artist Gentileschi who painted the depiction of Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes after she was raped.
It could be some primitive in the Amazon cutting off the head of an animal or some local butcher. It is clear the man is traumatized, thinking the woman wants his head and then makes a present of it in a box while in a dream state. The television is often referred to as the box. The box is in the head, so he isn’t just giving her the box he is projecting or even transferring the content of what he views onto or into his wife or girlfriend, making her seem mentally ill.
The analysis linked above is actually what the film does to the viewer and is a description of what The Brain that Wouldn’t Die did to the two depicted in the film after they viewed it. The viewing of the film created a traumatic bonding between the two viewers. This of course was not an unusual thing to have happen in the 50’s. Young men who were after a particular girl would take her to a scary film in order to cause her to get closer to him. No doubt this gave rise to the multitude of divorces that occurred in the 70’s.
Maybe the rapist (the writer) cut off his head and put it in a box, maybe a box set of books. but it isn’t the writer’s head it is the reader/television viewer’s mind in the books, likely the wife or girlfriend, who is cooking up the crap he consumes, thus they decide women need to be the ones hypnotized.
What happens if he seeks treatment? He will likely continue his behavior and seek a female therapist for help. If she avoids getting caught up in his game she will appropriately direct him to a male therapist.
