| Lutecium a non-school of Lacanian/Freudian Psychoanalysis San Francisco, California |
| Film Event & Open House with Eric Essman, M.A. & Jacques Siboni, M.D. __________________________________________ 2008-2009 Series: Are you going Hollywood? By Eric Essman, M.A. |
“Hollywood,” a south-facing free-standing sign in the hills of the same name, is also a free-floating or loosely-tethered signifier for
corporate-manufactured fantasies, glittering transient celebrity, a certain style of deal making, creative accounting, lavish expenditures
and manipulations of capital, beauty, egotism and narcissistic self-absorption, mania, superficiality, and the commodification of
personality and talent. As the “Going Hollywood” criteria below are meant to suggest, Hollywood is a fluctuating state of mind or being
that crucially depends upon one’s registration in the Imaginary, where to be is to be seen…but also (and perhaps as a consequence)
where privacy is impossible or unbearable.
In its own peculiarly revealing form of self-exhibition, Hollywood is often brilliant at evoking its anxious, noirish, uncanny or extreme
states of being, as a series of remarkable films attests:
Sunset Boulevard, In a Lonely Place, A Star is Born, Day of the Locust, The Last Tycoon, The Loved One, Mulholland Drive, Lost
Highway, Barton Fink, The Player and Inland Empire, for example -- with even the lugubrious bitchiness of Whatever Happened to
Baby Jane? appended as a testament to the psychotic core, the depression, the precocious dementia and premature senescence, of
sadomasochistic spectacle. Join us when the Open House of the Lutecium Psychoanalytic Training Group “goes Hollywood” with a
screening and discussion of one of these mysterious, provocative, lurid, droll and very entertaining confessional films.
corporate-manufactured fantasies, glittering transient celebrity, a certain style of deal making, creative accounting, lavish expenditures
and manipulations of capital, beauty, egotism and narcissistic self-absorption, mania, superficiality, and the commodification of
personality and talent. As the “Going Hollywood” criteria below are meant to suggest, Hollywood is a fluctuating state of mind or being
that crucially depends upon one’s registration in the Imaginary, where to be is to be seen…but also (and perhaps as a consequence)
where privacy is impossible or unbearable.
- If your American Dream is spelled “id” or “ADD,” you’re going Hollywood.
- If your standard operating procedure is a manic defense, you’re going Hollywood.
- If your life dune buggies between memorializing the “Loved Ones” at Forest Lawn and apocalypsing now, you’re going Hollywood.
- If you cast imaginary pearls before real swine, you’re going Hollywood.
- If your patients live at your house, you’re going Hollywood.
- If you’re the Personal Assistant to the Personal Assistant of your Personal Assistant, you’re going Hollywood.
- If the freeway’s a mess and you elect to “go surface,” you’re going Hollywood.
- If you used to be a genius, you’re going Hollywood.
- If your through-line is a few lines, you’re going Hollywood.
- If you know all the angles, especially your best one, you’re going Hollywood.
- If every road leads to the desert or the coast, you’re going Hollywood.
- If somebody stole your idea, you’re going Hollywood.
- If you see dead people. . . if you identify with dead people, you’re going Hollywood; if dead people see you, you’re in Hollywood.
In its own peculiarly revealing form of self-exhibition, Hollywood is often brilliant at evoking its anxious, noirish, uncanny or extreme
states of being, as a series of remarkable films attests:
Sunset Boulevard, In a Lonely Place, A Star is Born, Day of the Locust, The Last Tycoon, The Loved One, Mulholland Drive, Lost
Highway, Barton Fink, The Player and Inland Empire, for example -- with even the lugubrious bitchiness of Whatever Happened to
Baby Jane? appended as a testament to the psychotic core, the depression, the precocious dementia and premature senescence, of
sadomasochistic spectacle. Join us when the Open House of the Lutecium Psychoanalytic Training Group “goes Hollywood” with a
screening and discussion of one of these mysterious, provocative, lurid, droll and very entertaining confessional films.
| ___________________________________________________________________ Saturday, November 15, 2008 1pm - 5pm Alliance Française, 1345 Bush St., San Francisco ______________________________ Screening "Barton Fink" |
| Post-screening talk by Eric Essman, M.A., with Jacques Siboni, M.D., discussant. Meet & greet with Garrick Duckler General admission: $20 / Students: $10 No one turned away for lack of funds |
Up and coming Broadway playwright John Turturro "goes Hollywood" to write for the movies and suffers the writer's block from Hell in
the Coen brothers' Cannes-Award-winning black comedy Barton Fink. Co-starring John Goodman and Judy Davis, Barton Fink is a
wacky, nightmarish look at the pathology of the creative process that vividly illustrates the hazards of not being a good-enough
listener...
the Coen brothers' Cannes-Award-winning black comedy Barton Fink. Co-starring John Goodman and Judy Davis, Barton Fink is a
wacky, nightmarish look at the pathology of the creative process that vividly illustrates the hazards of not being a good-enough
listener...
| Premiering Garrick Duckler's "At the Movies" |
At the Movies is a story – told in movie stills – about Walter Grabbage, a man bent on a particularly difficult feat of destruction. At the
Movies is one of several short films in a forthcoming series by the writer/director Garrick Duckler, which follows the struggles of those
who are (or might be), in fact, beyond repair.
Garrick Duckler, Ph.D., received his doctorate in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago and is currently
training as a psychotherapist at the Psychotherapy Institute. He lives in San Francisco and runs a creative arts/tutoring private
practice: www.garrickduckler.com
Movies is one of several short films in a forthcoming series by the writer/director Garrick Duckler, which follows the struggles of those
who are (or might be), in fact, beyond repair.
Garrick Duckler, Ph.D., received his doctorate in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago and is currently
training as a psychotherapist at the Psychotherapy Institute. He lives in San Francisco and runs a creative arts/tutoring private
practice: www.garrickduckler.com