Poor Mrs. Clemens! One more castrating mom to add to our culture's most wanted list. She's wanted for turning her son, David, into an "obsessive-compulsive." By depriving him of love, pushing him towards success and achievement; by being more dominant than her milk toast husband; by being sexy but asexual, beautiful but cold, she must suffer the hostility of not only her son, but to a lesser extent, her husband, and her son's doctors--add too her son's fellow "inmate," a sex-crazed teenager, who has "knocked up 13 girls," and whose mom is a hooker.
Anyway, David is deathly afraid of time and death, and he associates these with his upper class mother. Because she is unfeeling, non-communicative, and non-protective, touch itself can kill him. If he is emotionless, it's because his mother is. If he is totally shut off to the world, than his perfectionist mom's to blame. If he cannot develop, it is, in Freudian fashion, because his mother lords it over his father, thus making David mom-dependent, and his father, David's way into the larger world, "nothing but a marshmallow." So it is that Mrs. Clemens is both ice and earth, remote and engulfing, unloving and clinging--to the boy she gave birth to. It's mother-time and mother-love which make touch terrorizing to David. And his outright expressed hatred of her is viewed by him as a step to healing: "parents don't like you when you're sick, and when your well, either." Mrs. Clemens, simply put, is too much mother, who mothers too little.
The true mother is the woman holding her son in the railway station, on the night that David escapes his toxic parents' home. This mother's love is unconditional, sensual, and giving and David claims her as his very own mother. With her as a mom he might in Dr. Swinford's words "take a chance and open up and let love in." Interesting how a scene of blissful maternity can jump start David's recovery.
Lisa, his "patient" and dear female friend is also a prop to his wellness. Lisa, unlike David, has no history, no mother to blame for her multiple personalities. She is free-floating, adorable, innocent, child-like (several years younger than David) and earthy in her dark features. She's capable of a kind of psychic communication, rhyme-speech, and expressed intimacy. She is, in other words, a blessing to David. She's a "pearl of a girl," in his words--words that awaken sensual awareness in both--because she is spontaneous and vulnerable and serves as David's inner self or soul. One of her telling rhymes is "rhymes, time, slime" which seems to point to David's second birth, and to herself as one of its mediators.
Dr. Swinford or "Alan" to his "students" or "inmates" is another of David's safe mediators. He fathers David's development through a kind of liberal, humanistic, "do your own thing" approach. Any constraint is suspect, and creativity is the ultimate form of therapy at his private institution. He is satisfactory to David despite the fact that he passively absorbs more hostility from him than does his hapless father from his mother. His non-judgmental guidance, in a sense, seems to make him a third female kind of figure in David's recovery, but Dr Swinford, in his professional capacity---he's a psychiatrist and a more convincing father figure whose role and profession he will follow--also serves as model for David's autonomy.
That autonomy or rebirth is equivalent to recovery or David's integration into love, authority, and society. This means, above all else, a transcendence of his mother and his worldly birth. But doesn't his rejection of his mother include his rejection of "rhyme, time, slime?" So how will he accept the world without accepting time? Perhaps because he's discovered male time--and male identity (his terror of freak shows and the Geroge/Georgina character). This newly discovered order is controlled, ordered, authorized-- the very stuff that he has abhorred and ridiculed to date, but which now can be viewed differently from a select identity. He has entered Freud's history (the clock is fixed) and left his mother's behind.
The towering museum columns between which the final scene is shot is proof of his elevation into manhood. The tall blond young man walks off into the morning Light (why did it take him all night to reach the museum?) having dispelled the darkness, hand and hand with his little brown-eyed girl. Isn't it ironic that in the mutual rescue scene at the museum that it is David who allows Lisa to grasp his hand when--his rejection of her in the piano room is why she escaped and is endangered--she should be allowing him to touch her.
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