Private feelings, public conduct: merging worlds?

It's Oscar time, and my favorites for best picture are "The Queen" (nominated) and "Notes on a Scandal" (not nominated--boo, hiss!). For best performance by an actress, I wholeheartedly agree with the nominations of the two players whose marvelous turns make these dramas so good: Dame Helen Mirren, as Queen Elizabeth II, and Dame Judi Dench, as London high school history teacher Barbara Covett in "Notes."

These two movies should be of interest to psychiatrists. "Queen" considers emotionality writ large: the changing societal norms for public sentimental expression. "Notes" concerns personal psychic distress and the destructiveness that desperation can wreak when private pain compels unacceptable public behavior.

"The Queen," directed by Stephen Frears, is a nearly flawless film, a lustrous, suspenseful docudrama that retells the story of upheaval in London and elsewhere, in the days following Aug. 31, 1997, when Princess Diana, recently divorced from Prince Charles, was killed in a high-speed auto crash in a Paris tunnel. Dramatized conversations bring together major personalities at the center of the public dilemma that rapidly unfolded following Diana's death. Featured in particular is the untested relationship between the Queen and Tony Blair, who had become prime minister only 4 months earlier.

Helen Mirren was, as they say, born to play Queen Elizabeth II. In every tableau, body movement, and nuance of feeling she conveys to us, with or without words, she is, simply, majestic. But this movie is far more than a star vehicle. The major supporting players are superb, including Sylvia Syms (the Queen Mother), James Cromwell (Prince Philip), Alex Jennings (Prince Charles), Michael Sheen (Mr. Blair), and their retainers. They engage with Ms. Mirren to play out a delicate real-life drama within the framework of a taut cultural and political crisis, one that is, above all else, a threat to the monarchy itself.

Changing Rules of the Game

Events take place in an enervating, yet suppressed, palace atmosphere, the tension level constantly ratcheted up as the Queen resists repeated appeals from the press, Mr. Blair, and others to acknowledge public outpourings of sorrow. Of course no one knows how many of the film's conversations actually took place, or whether they followed the dialogue spoken here. However, the actors have magnificently sculpted their characterizations to fit popular perceptions of these figures.

But there's more. I would not be surprised if this film is considered a classic decades from now, possibly even in the same league with Jean Renoir's 1939 critique of pre-war French society, "Rules of the Game." The reason is an overarching subtext, not about individual personalities, but about changes afoot in the broad fabric of social custom, with regard to the appropriateness and legitimacy of public emotional expression.

The Clueless Queen

Elizabeth's seemingly callous aloofness from the public in the wake of Diana's death is the result of her conviction, based on her upbringing, she says, that duty requires her to respond with mute stoicism in the face of tragedy. Personal sentiments are an entirely private matter, hence not to be aired in public. One must soldier on. Mustn't grumble. The English way.

The Queen is baffled, even offended, by the cathartic public response to Diana's death. Elizabeth thinks this public sentiment is coarse, tasteless, and out of place. She makes a serious miscalculation when she fails to consider, or perhaps even to perceive, the alternative view, that the rules of public discourse--especially with regard to the open expression of personal sentiments--had been changing around the world for years. Public voicing of personal feelings, in response to poignant events and matters once considered taboo for public consumption, had gradually become the new norm, displacing public stoicism.

The Royals' cloistered existence very probably has always shielded them from accurately gauging the pulse of popular societal movements. But the rest of us surely are aware of the changes in question from many lines of evidence: confessional literature, film and theater; disclosures of personal travail in the news media and on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and the like.

Our Boost of Emotional Transparency

In psychiatry we know this "transparency" phenomenon well and have helped promote and cultivate it, as a stiff rebuke to stigma. Consider the difference between the widespread expression of posttraumatic psychological distress by contemporary military combat veterans and the silent suffering of their counterparts after World War II. The shifting norm of self-disclosure is the ghost in our epidemiology machine, the asterisk beside our prevalence figures. Is depression, for instance, becoming more common, or are people today simply more willing to talk about it (and are they more often asked)?

"The Queen" documents with brilliance and power this major change in societal behavior, a shift that historians may someday look back upon as one of the 20th century's more important quakes in the tectonics of civil conduct.

"Notes on a Scandal," directed by Richard Eyre, is a psychodrama about the intense relationship that develops between two London high school teachers. Barbara (Ms. Dench) is cynical, lonely, and close to retirement; Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), an art teacher, is 37, and the married mother of two teens, a new arrival on the faculty and surprisingly naive. Both women are complex, vulnerable, and needy, and these shared attributes draw them toward each another. This is a splendidly constructed and enacted drama of the heart, full of bitter humor (from Barbara) as well as cliffhanger emotional tension. Ms. Dench and Ms. Blanchett both excel, and the supporting players are also very good.

Sheba gets off to a rotten start at school, unable to control her students' behavior. Barbara, having honed over the years disciplinary skills that would do a drill sergeant proud, comes to the younger teacher's aid after a bad student row. Barbara reaches out to befriend Sheba after this, and we come to understand that the older spinster is a well-closeted lesbian, still nursing her grief after another teacher spurned her--actually fleeing her job and the city to get away from Barbara--the previous summer. Now attracted to Sheba, Barbara makes several calculated moves to insinuate herself into the younger woman's life.

Sheba is carrying a heavy load: besides a new career, she's coping with an unfulfilling marriage to Richard, an older writer (Bill Nighy), and the demands of a boy-struck daughter, Polly (Juno Temple) and Down syndrome son, Ben (Max Lewis). In addition, Sheba--who has no inkling about nor interest in an erotic entanglement with Barbara or any woman--becomes involved in a sexual liaison with one of her students, 15-year-old Steven (Andrew Simpson).

Setting a Trap

Barbara fortuitously discovers the affair, lets Sheba know she knows, and pledges to keep their secret, if only Sheba will end her little romance before real damage is done. It is through this ostensibly solicitous gesture, with its unspoken shading of emotional blackmail, that Barbara becomes Sheba's confidant and coconspirator, thereby intensifying her grip on Sheba. From here a series of misadventures unfolds, the details of which need not concern us. By the end, no one has been spared a stiff dose of humiliation and dislocation: not Barbara, Sheba, Richard, Steven, or anyone else associated with them.

The breathtaking screenplay for "Notes," by Patrick Marber, was adapted from Zoe Heller's 2003 novel. Marber pushes the psychodynamic limits here, moving the viewer close to the tipping point for suspension of disbelief, just as he did in his equally bold script for the 2004 film "Closer" ("Too Close for Comfort," CLINICAL PSYCHIATRY NEWS, January 2005, p. 24). Marber surely ranks among the psychologically savviest of today's screenwriters.

The Fruits of Desperation

Two developments in particular test us. Why should Sheba yield so readily to young Steven's amorous overtures? And, later, why should the usually cool-headed Barbara make such raw demands for Sheba's allegiance, right in front of her family, in a nasty encounter the day Barbara's cat must be put down? The answer in both cases has to do with desperation: the vulnerability, the longing, that these women have been enduring, expressed by each in a manner consistent with her own psychological makeup.

We've been told and even shown that Sheba has a vicious and unloving mother. Presumably Sheba already had developed a severely neurotic personality long before she married Richard. But she persevered admirably, raising two kids, one an especially tough challenge. Now, strained at home and at work, her reserves have run dry, leaving her at risk for impulsive behavior.

Barbara, we can surmise, has struggled through painful decades of despair over her largely unfulfilled homophilia. Her mode of relating to people--her students, Sheba, everyone--is to control them completely. Sheba is correct to call her a "vampire" near the end. Barbara does not feel for others: She manipulates them to indulge her vanities and buttress her security. Unfettered by empathy, she can be an indifferent teacher, yet also a brilliant classroom disciplinarian.

But there's more to her. Barbara's desperate neediness is palpable, manifested poignantly when she loses control, especially in a scene with Sheba's family when she virtually commands Sheba to stay with her instead of attending Ben's play. Despite Barbara's offensiveness, we can see her psychological fragility, and that makes her a sympathetic, if deeply twisted, character.

DR. ATKINSON is a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University, Portland. For more reviews, visit his Web sites at www.Psychflix.com and www.AtkinsonOnFilm.com, which contains a listing of his favorite films and performances from 2006. Share your thoughts with Dr. Atkinson by writing him at [e-mail].

BY ROLAND ATKINSON, M.D.