Movie Roundup: Eights and Nines

By Tom Condon

 

This article is an excerpt from the third edition of my Enneagram Movie and Video Guide. The 3.0 version is an ebook available August 1. A print edition will follow later this year. The Guide was first published in 1994 to help people become skillful at recognizing Enneagram styles and have fun in the process. This updated edition adds 180 new movies. With the advent of DVDs and online streaming, many overlooked films and documentaries are now available as this excerpt highlights:

 

Eights

A Father, a Son, Once Upon a Time

A candid documentary about the public and private lives of actors Kirk and Michael Douglas, with an emphasis on their father-son dynamic. Both are Eights and the film offers a good contrast between the wings, as Kirk is an extraverted Eight with a Seven wing while Michael has a Nine wing.

 

The elder Douglas had a recent stroke and is sometimes hard to understand but in the film as a young man he is portrayed as a fierce Eight, both intensely aggressive and self-centered. Kirk is a reformed bad father and he is still a bit thin-skinned but there is now a genuine tenderness between father and son. Although the film charts Michael’s decades-long battle to emerge from Kirk’s shadow, their current conversations are suffused with mutual love and respect.

 

Both men are determined, entrepreneurial risk takers and share a pattern of chronic infidelities. Where they differ is in their wings and subtypes. Kirk emerges as excitable and imaginative, a big dreamer, whereas Michael is steady, laconic and persistent. Kirk has more of the Self-preservation subtype; his early struggles were about survival, getting his and building something out of nothing. Michael is more of an Intimate subtype, as much a lover as a fighter.

 

The documentary is somewhat sentimental but also honest; a willing attempt to vivisect a still-living family script that Kirk calls “the tragedy of failure and the tragedy of success.” Kirk’s ex-wife, Michael’s mother, makes several appearances and seems a One.

 

The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Hitman

A two-part documentary about the late Mafia assassin, Richard Kuklinski, a frightening figure who left behind a horrendous swathe of damage. Over the years Kuklinski killed at least 125 people, by himself, one at a time. The film is composed of two interviews, done 10 years apart, the latter conducted by a clinical psychologist at Kuklinski’s request. As he talks it’s evident that he knows he’s a monster but wants to know what kind. Although never really sympathetic, the alert viewer can see small hints of vulnerability and quick flashes of the boy Kuklinski was before his father’s depraved brutality co-mingled with the son’s inherent disposition and left a permanent mark.

 

These glimpses are more than eclipsed by the creepy way Kuklinski subtly brags about his skill as a hired killer, relishing the gruesome details and clearly enjoying retelling the stories of his murders. He’s a classic psychopath and profoundly disassociated, a condition the Fiveish psychologist summarizes bluntly.

 

Many people see a figure like Kuklinski – soul-dead, sinister and well beyond redemption – and simply label him evil. In a psychological model, however, calling someone evil is a last resort, down the list after “brain damaged” and “psychopathic.” Kuklinski is an Eight so he’s a specific type of monster; many other “evils” are possible within the Enneagram’s wide diagnostic scope. Joseph Stalin – another profoundly unhealthy Eight with a Nine wing and a Self-Preservation subtype – had the same psychological profile and diagnosis as Kuklinski. Adolf Hitler did not.

 

It is useful to understand the extremes of mental illness and the lower depths of each Enneagram style. That said, be warned that this documentary is not for everyone and could give you bad dreams.

 

Honorable Mentions

Dreams with Sharp Teeth

Harlan Ellison - Eight, 7 wing, Self-preservation subtype

The science fiction writer, a lovable handful, living a life of constructive revenge. His 7 wing brings him a vivid imagination and his subtype makes him litigious.

 

Mr Warmth

Don Rickles - Eight, 7 wing

He invented insult humor. His onstage act is racist, sexist, appalling and hilarious. Offstage he’s a sweet, loyal guy. Note that his humor is based on caricature, an Eight speciality. He gets away with his act because he caricatures himself as well.

 

Shut Up and Sing

Natalie Maines - Eight, 7 wing, Social subtype

Documentary about the fall and rise of the country-rock group The Dixie Chicks, widely shunned for their opposition to the 2003 Iraq war and their dislike of President George Bush. Maines is a defiant, outspoken Eight.

 

 

Nines

Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary, Downfall

Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary is a 90-minute interview with Traudl Junge, Adolf Hitler’s dictation secretary during WWII. Filmed with a stationary camera, the power of her story is conveyed through her words, which amount to a combined confession and disclaimer. Edited from two interviews filmed a year apart, the second interview is partially a response to the first. By that time, she had partially emerged from her denial and is at least a little unnerved by her earlier lack of reaction.

 

Frau Junge, who died shortly after this film was released, was a Nine with a One wing. She presents life with Hitler in an utter microcosm, partly because she occupied his daily inner circle but mostly because, as a Self preservation Nine, she defensively focuses on the mundane. Notice her lack of emotion, her steady citation of banal details – Hitler’s digestive problems, the tricks he taught his dog – as if she is willfully missing the big picture. Junge did as she was told and performed a job that she essentially lucked into. She saw Hitler as a substitute father and herself as a child. She was with him in the bunker when he died. She describes historic events that happened right in front of her in a disconnected way, with a wide-eyed, see-no-evil, bewildered affect. She seems numb.

 

The film shows how a Nine can passively participate in something morally awful and only half admit it. Moreover, Junge barely suffered any consequences. At the end of the war she was arrested, jailed for three weeks and then released. She slipped away into a quiet, nondescript life in Munich until she finally agreed to be interviewed for this film just before she died.

 

Junge’s recollections became the basis for the 2006 film Downfall about Hitler’s last weeks, a document-of-record film so detailed it is almost dull. It is worth seeing for the amazing performance by Swiss actor Bruno Ganz which goes well beyond the familiar impersonations of Hitler. Critics complained that the film humanizes Hitler, as if understanding someone so abhorrent is the same as condoning him. But Hitler had a lot of help, some of it from a mass movement composed of ordinary people. Simply demonizing him lets the rest of humanity off the hook.

 

Enneagram students sometimes assume Hitler was a Four because he studied to be an artist as a young man. Do a little homework, though, and Hitler unveils as a classic paranoid, lashing out at his own shadows especially when under stress. He was an insane counterphobic Six and projection was a key component to his personal reactions and the colossal damage that he did. Ganz’s performance captures the essence as well as the details of that condition. Hitler’s platonic mistress Eva Braun is a real-life Nine in book after book. She is portrayed in Downfall as a passive, pleasant young woman of indefinite glamour.

 

Sketches of Frank Gehry

The late Sydney Pollack’s documentary about his architect friend Frank Gehry, famous for his irregular, rule-breaking buildings with their striking, curvaceous Cubist style. The most famous is the distinctive Guggenheim modern art museum in Bilbao, Spain.

 

Gehry is a Nine with an Eight wing, a contradictory combination. He is modest, self-effacing and intuitive but also admits to being stubborn, rebellious and competitive. As one friend says, “You shouldn’t be put off by the kind of Columbo-like exterior, the crumpled raincoat, the shuffling self-effacing manner. Frank’s got the biggest ego in the business.”

 

Pollack plays the role of the audience, asking the architect prodding questions about his work. The relaxed, off-the-cuff style of the documentary matches Gehry’s indirect, informal manner. One fact makes perfect sense: Gehry was originally an artist. He is as much a sculptor as an architect.

 

The running dialogue between the two friends helps to trace Gehry’s approach and creative process, from sketch to cardboard model to finished building. Unable to render an overview of what he does, Gehry is still disarmingly transparent, willing to have others explain his work and personality, chief among them his psychiatrist.

 

One Nine-like pattern to watch and listen for is in how Gehry relates the decision points in his life. As he tells it, they were all motivated by outside forces: He changed his name at his wife’s behest, followed the career recommendations of teachers and claims he would have had an entirely different occupation had someone had steered him that way. Describing his time in a therapy group, Gehry says, “I was angry but I wouldn’t express it. For two years I was in that group and never said a word. One day they all pounced on me. They said, ‘You’ve been sitting here for two years judgmental as hell.’ They uncorked me and I realized they were right. Because all of them were saying it, I couldn’t dismiss it.”

 

Since the film was made by his friend, it is somewhat adulatory and the only featured critic of Gehry is toothless and unimpressive. Sydney Pollack’s Enneagram style, that of a counterphobic Six, is not obvious in the main film but you can see and hear it in the Q and A portion of the DVD.

 

For architecture fans a good companion film is My Architect by Nathaniel Kahn, son of the justly famous architect Louis Kahn. A nomadic, big-dreaming Seven as well as a closet bigamist, Louis left behind three families with three different women along with many jaw-dropping buildings.

 

Then there is First Person Singular: I. M. Pei, a portrait of a humble, gentlemanly Threeish Nine, who creates structures by immersing himself in the culture and location of where he is to build. He then shapes the finished product to blend with and expand the context. Pei’s work certainly has an individual stamp but his emphasis is on merging, something Nines do well. Pei’s wife also figures in the documentary and seems a sharp-focused One.

 

Honorable Mentions

Charles Bukowski: Born Into This

Charles Bukowski - Nine, 8 wing, Self-Preservation subtype

Pungent yet romantic documentary about the late poet-novelist and cult hero who celebrated his grubby, outcast, alcoholic lifestyle.

 

My Best Fiend

Werner Herzog - Nine, 8 wing, Intimate Subtype

Klaus Kinski-counterphobic Six, 7 wing

Filmmaker Herzog – willful, stubborn and obsessed – details his relationship with his frequent collaborator, actor Kinski, a nearly psychotic Six.

 

This So-Called Disaster

Sam Shepard - Nine

Fly-on-the-wall doc about Sam Shepard’s staging of one of his plays and the creative process involved. Shepard is honest, receptive, collaborative and unsure of himself.

 

 

From The Enneagram Movie and Video Guide 3.0 available for download Aug 15 as an ebook. Go to www.thechangeworks.com for Tom Condon’s products, workshops and blog.