E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

I am sad to read in today's Guardian that Alice Miller  has died.  Miller was the author of books that explored and explained the traumas of childhood and children, in ways that took their side against "toxic" parents.  As a poet whose early work explored child abuse, and the traumas of infancy and youth - and as a person who was in psychoanalysis for seven years in my twenties - I can only say that Miller's influential quarrel with Freud was significant.  However, some of her claims and extreme positions were themselves traumatic.  It will be important to sort out her legacy, now that she is gone.

Eyewear saw Shutter Island last night - how could I not? Scorsese is one of the best Hollywood directors of our time, and his sense of film history is second to none. Hearing he was doing a genre picture (which Sight & Sound observed is his " The Shining ") from an auteur/ homage angle - referencing Fuller, Lewton , and Hitchock - was thrilling. The film itself is disappointing, if only because expectations were raised it might be a masterwork. Instead, Shutter Island is a slow-moving, at times melodramatic, thinking-person's movie, with disconcertingly various elements - including ultra-violent depictions of Dachau, child murder, suicide, and mutilation; psychoanalysis; film theory; and 50s retro kitsch. Spoiler alert : the main problem is, anyone who knows the sub-genre of sane-men-in insane-asylums is likely to guess the "twist" - hardly a twist and more a foregone conclusion. There is, as a writer, only one binary option when putting a fish into a ...