Super 8
With Super 8, JJ Abrams has lovingly reconstructed the eighties coming-of-age movie, with added explosions. But it’s more than just a souped-up replica. The freedom and development of both the protagonist, Joe, and of the alien are dependent on the capacity of those around them to help them process their experiences by listening to and understanding their emotional worlds. In this way the film underscores the importance in human development of what some psychoanalytic theorists call maternal reflective functioning.
Super 8 is a film about maternal reflective functioning and why we need it.
Ok, well it’s not only about that. Maybe it’s only a bit about that, but either way, that’s the bit I’m going to write about.
Very quick plot summary: 14 year-old Joe’s mother has died in a factory accident. Joe wants to spend the summer making a movie with his friends, and with Alice. His grieving and psychologically absent father, also the deputy sheriff, wants him to stay away from movie-making, and from Alice, whose father he blames for his wife’s death. Meanwhile, the US air force are failing dismally to contain the destructive rage of a homesick alien who has been imprisoned on Earth by the government for 21 years, and who is now wreaking havoc in Joe’s home town.
Wilfred Bion’s theory of ‘reverie’ describes the way caregivers sense and make sense of a baby’s emotional experience. Babies can’t process their feelings through language so they need someone else to do it for them. Other psychoanalytic writers have described this maternal reflective functioning as ‘attunement’ (Daniel Stern) or ‘primary maternal preoccupation' (D. W. Winnicott). It happens physically (holding, rocking, stroking, speaking) and psychologically (thinking, listening, understanding, asking).
In Super 8, both Joe and the alien once had, and have now lost, access to the emotional containment provided by ‘reverie’. Like an infant, the alien’s inability to use human language meant that it was reliant on someone being able to receive its message of homesickness and grief through touch. But the only person capable of this, Dr Woodward, was quickly discredited and ousted by the military. When the extraterrestrial‘s emotional overtures are ignored and uncontained, they spill out into seemingly senseless and uncontrollable violence.
After his mother’s death, Joe loses his source of psychological understanding. His father cares for but does not really know or understand him. Watching footage of himself as a baby in his mother’s arms, he describes the effect of his mother’s capacity for reverie:
“She used to look at me this way…really look, and I knew I existed.”
Joe is demonstrating a central psychoanalytic idea, articulated best by D.W. Winnicott:
“In individual emotional development the precursor of the mirror is the mother's face…What does the baby see when he or she looks at the mother's face? I am suggesting that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself. In other words the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there." (from Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development, 1967)
Without this ongoing emotional containment, Joe feels lost and flounders. His relationship with his father breaks down. The alien’s murderous destructiveness threatens Joe’s hometown and relationships, but it also mirrors the threat that Joe’s tragic loss poses to his capacity for psychological wellbeing.
When Alice and Joe finally understand the extraterrestrial’s communications, Joe is able to help it channel its energy into returning home. In the great tradition of this movie genre, Joe’s father simultaneously gets in touch with his son’s emotional world, and finally ‘sees’ Joe. The reinstatement of reverie, unclouded by grief, frees the town, and the alien and gives Joe and Alice the freedom to love.
