Opening stills to WR: Mysteries of the Organism – Dušan Makavejev, 1971Random pixel value: #3F35A4 (R63 G53 B164)
Realised recently that I've been thinking a lot about the parasympathetic or autonomic nervous system...much of this stemming from readings in renegade/unorthodox/mind-body psychiatric therapy, which I was pointed to through watching the utterly engaging (but much under-watched) WR: Mysteries of the Organism several years ago in Montreal. It was Rada who turned me on to Makavejev; she hadn't actually seen WR as it'd been banned in Yugoslavia shortly after its exhibition (and netting of the coveted Luis Bunuel award); it still appears to be under restricted circulation in the West.
Impossible to synopsize and appearing even more radical by today's film standards (and 'standard' is the operational term), WR is ostensibly an exploration of the life and ideas of Dr. Wilhelm Reich, an apprentice of Freud who, like Jung, forked out into independent explorations of the psyche. Once heralded for developing the theory/practice of character analysis, Reich relocated to the US to elude persecution in his native Germany, where he continued exploring the somatic (or in his own, earlier terms, 'vegetotherapeutic') connection to mind, psyche, emotional expression and health.
There Reich continued working on what he called the 'Orgasm Reflex'. This was the sex-fearing, paranoid, communist-scare Eisenhower fifties, and Reich's probing into matters of sex, repression, 'body armoring', social conditioning, and the dynamics between mass vs individual psychology, among other things, brought him under the scrutiny of the State as well as the mainstream institutional psychiatric profession, not least as he began taking patients off the couch and into the uncharted realms of 'body-work'. Treatment involved resolving tensions within the body and the release of 'orgastic potency' in the individual, against the framework of the patient's history of mental/emotional patterning and prior experiences of trauma, disturbance or dis-association.
Reich's notion of 'sex economy' extends beyond the genital focus towards the release of expression of the total organism. Quite radical in distinction to the Cartesian split of mind and body (and even more deeply rooted in Judeo-Christian separation of 'matter' and 'spirit'). But all the same, rumours started circulating that he was 'masturbating his patients'.
Reich's investigations beyond psychiatry and into physics is what finally had him officially branded as a heretic. It was generally assumed that he had flipped his lid when he started publishing independent researches into Orgone Theory. The FBI staked his territory, on occasions mobs surrounded his home, associates were persecuted, and the FDA seized all published material and had them destroyed in an incinerator in New York City. Reich was put on trial, and died in imprisonment two years later.
Even today, the general dispensation on Reich seems to be wreathed in hysteria. The medical community responds with knee-jerk biases to the mere mention of his name, mis-interpretation of his work abounds (often without consulting the sources), perhaps due to his sometimes curious use of terminology (often generated without precedent in the wider fields of science). This is off-set by a burgeoning cult of Reich attracted to his 'underground' reputation and speculative interest in UFO-logy (and accompanying persecution complex) towards the end of his life. One would be hard-pressed to find a self-described Reichian therapist in ones own city anywhere in the world.
Robert Anton Wilson talks about trying to bone up on Reich in the fifties, and having to read one of the last remaining copies of a book which had escaped the oven in a friend's apartment (on pain of not leaving the confines of the residence) in New York. If they were suppressing him that badly, he mused, what were they trying to hide, and what made reading Reich so dangerous? Wilson observes that even the mostly discredited investigations of the Orgone have in recent years seen a resurgence of interest (with some affirmation of its existence asserted by over 100 independent, published papers).
Reich considered himself first and foremost a scientist. For the most part, he had to work with significantly narrow finances to self-fund his studies, and so progress was slow, carried out by a modest and under-nourished research team. But Reich's passions also extended beyond psychiatry and science to a brand of social philosophy and political commentary with an emphatic stress on human individuality, and an underlying belief in freedom (from automatism, State control, the repressive instincts of the family, the ego's self-imprisonment, the denial of the body). And somewhere in that was a profound belief in joy as the essential aspect of man's nature.
I've managed to turn up only a couple of Reich's writings over the past few years, both yellowing (but decently-worn) editions published by Noonday Press in the 60s. The first, The Murder of Christ, is somewhat pedantic and a bit too prescriptive in tone for my tastes. But the other, a Selected Writings, provides a pretty illuminating insight into his ideas from therapy to physics to politics.
Stills from WR: Mysteries of the Organism – Dušan Makavejev, 1971WR
Which brings us to Makavejev's WR, which follows on Reichian themes, and Reich himself, some fourteen years after his death. There is really no other film I can think of like it – not just radical in content but in the way it breaks with established forms of narrative, structure and delivery. Instead, there's a constant juxtaposition of themes, ideas and modes of expression. Morphing from film essay to journalism, satire, and theatre, you become aware of the film's construction simultaneous to a challenging, paradoxical openness in its deployment of form.
In both English and Serbo-Croatian, WR begins as a biography of Reich – interviews with his widow, son, barber, greengrocer, associates – and then starts weaving together historical montages, demonstrations of bioenergetic therapy, a staged 'social realist'-type satire, advertising jingles, and 'documentary' scenes of a 'mad' poet staging an interventionist mock military performance in downtown NY.
There's much, much more: a transgendered couple provocatively feeding off each others' popsicles and turning heads in Times Square, interviews with Betty Dodson (of The Vagina Coloring Book fame), Cynthia the 'Plaster Caster' (tenderly molding over the prick of Screw magazine editor Al Goldstein), arcane footage of electro-shock therapy (upsettingly played up against the tune of Lili Marlene), clips from a biography of Stalin (in which a heavily made-up actor spills appliquéd tears over the tomb of Lenin, with the Kremlin in spectacular backdrop), mass seizures...you get the idea – delving into the details is pointless.
The film doesn't meander between themes so much as cut off anticipatory responses within the nervous system...and becomes like an engaging game. Meaning, you are engaged in a sense of play within the dialectical framework (I really, really hate to use that phrase, but it seems apposite) of the film.
But it's not always easy to find. Yet to be issued on DVD, you can download a torrent on Demonoid (a fuzzy digital transfer from VHS, the kind where you start going blind reading subtitles on snow) or better yet, if you happen to be living anywhere in the GVRD, the Pacific Cinematheque will be screening a rare print from June 29th to July 1st (mark it, mark it, mark it on your calendar).
What makes the film so seemingly prescient today (as it must have been in its time) is that it mines, unflinchingly, the faultline between sex (as expressive of the individual) against institutional power (as seeking to wrest control of the primary sexual urge). There are multiple explorations of this faultline – the representation of the State (the Soviet Bloc and the US Government) and the burgeoning of Mass Consumerism (of the Madison Ave. suits era) as the controlling forces both outrightly and insidiously staking claims to the body and desire.
Repression versus Expression. And at the same time, Makavajev manages somehow to portray a sense of the approaching fall-out: the Sexual Revolution of the seventies and its potentially mis-directed or co-opted (by consumerism) object-related notion of freedom (hairstyles and fuzzy drinks followed by casual sex); at one point, under query, Reich's widow Eva pointedly remarks in a heartbeat that 'The American Dream is Dead'.
And then there is the Body, so exhaustively present throughout. If you can't read the subtitles, you might miss the import of some of the most powerful scenes in the film. A young revolutionary – sexually and politically intense and in the flower of womanhood – falls for the 'pure' body of a Russian figure skater, an 'artist of the people' whose said body is held in virginal thrall to the State. Denial of his own essential but mis-placed urge leads him to an act of desperate murder at the close of WR.
The. Autonomic. Nervous. System.
But oh, yeah, I think I started by talking about the autonomic nervous system. And so we come to the father of Bioenergetics, Dr. Alexander Lowen:
Dr. Alexander Lowen, MDLowen features heavily in WR, in some of the more intense scenes where he demonstrates some of the broader principals of bioenergetic practice.
Lowen was himself a student, then patient, of Reich's in the fifties. I'd first mistaken the techniques in the film as belonging to Primal Therapy (Arthur Janov's 'revolutionary' psychiatric treatment of the same period, often mis-nomered as 'Primal Scream Therapy' due to the popularity of his book, The Primal Scream.)
insert meaningless trivia here > John Lennon's treatment with Janov inspired much of the rawest, nakedest and most emotional cuts off his first record with the Plastic Ono Band (especially heart-stoppers like 'Mother' and 'My Mommy's Dead'), though he later retracted support of Janov and referred to him as 'the one-eyed witch-doctor leading the blind' on Walls and Bridges – ah well, read all about it on Wikipedia...I did.
The principal element that informs both Reich's and Lowen's practice is of energy. And the essential expression of energy is in movement.
And so, the health of the individual is manifested in increased motility as well as increased expression. Reich points out that the literal root meaning of the word emotion (e-motion) is of moving out. The natural flow of all life, even on the cellular level, is towards moving out. And so even an amoeba has expression, motility, emotion.
Reich also identifies pleasure as the natural expansion of the organism...anxiety and displeasure (or repression) is the contraction of the organism. So a depressed organism withdraws from the periphery towards the centre, going inward, and all parasympathetic (unconsciously deployed) impulses also draw inward...blood-flow decreases and has to fight its way through contracted vessels, breath shortens, and the individual begins to develop muscular armouring (expressed through the imposition of conscious, sympathetic control) as a way to fight off psychic disturbance and the prevalence of a mind-body schism. Whereas an organism in pleasure is in a state of flow, moving from the centre to the periphery and out into contact with the world.
Reich and Lowen both emphasize the importance of breath in all this, as essential to maintaining flow in the biophysical organism.
I often wonder if what Reich considered to be the ground-breaking discovery of the Orgone does not at some level resemble the much earlier-discovered Dao of the ancient Chinese, with some marked distinctions. Both practices are based on non-dualistic observations of nature, emphasizing flow as well as the relationship between mind and body. And then there is also the never under-emphasized importance of breath, or pranic, abdominal chi breathing that informs everything in eastern disciplines. Plus, as anyone getting into Mantak Chia knows, true Daoists have been well-acquainted with Orgasm Theory, Microcosmic Orbits and Sex Economy for generations.
The appeal of Lowen, in contrast to Reich, is his accessibility. According to Lowen, you don't 'have a body', you 'are a body'. And that simple trip-wire switch of phrasing (which Lowen excels at) helps one ease into re-considering ones relationship to the corporeal self.
It wasn't until recently that I even thought of looking up Lowen. But one day I emerged from the VPL carrying three of his books – Pleasure, Joy and Bioenergetics.
I started with Pleasure because, well, I'm a sucker for anything with the word pleasure in it. And because we live in a fucked up world (truly fucked up, and yes, also truly beautiful) I've been finding myself haunting a lot of self-help sections of late. (I once described the experience to Tess – of scanning the rows of titles and, like J. Mascis, feeling the 'pain of everyone', and then that line from Parzival leapt into the forebrain: What Ails Thee?)
Lowen's method involves having the subject engage in exercises in which involuntary tremors start to take over, triggering a release that is both intensely physical and emotional at the same time. I've tried a couple of these in the last month, and it's almost startling...a vibratory phenomenon verging on catharsis takes over as it builds to momentum, all from assuming some fairly simple postures for protracted lengths of time.
In WR, you get to see subjects in the full throes of release...surface eruptions of anger, expressions of deeply-ingrained infantile hostility exploding to the fore, often accompanied by a marked vibratory excitation of the body. Almost like religious seizures...but definitely not expressing the same kind of release. These are people whose biographical traumas are beginning to exit through the medium of their bodies. The most striking of these scenes documents a mass group channeling out in a gymnasium filled with quivering, trembling bodies:
To be continued...
