Violence, Identity Formation,
the Maternal Psyche, & Nihilistic Dream Worlds
By focusing on the seminal period between 1960 and 1999, the article shows how “master” filmmakers such as Hitchcock, Powell, Scorsese, Polanski, and Kubrick create “surrogate wombs” to lure their audiences into, thereby contriving the conditions necessary for in-forming (or transfusing) pathological id-entities into moviegoers. This inevitably entails passing on their own unresolved childhood trauma through the movie mise en scène (specifically via eroticized violence), drawing the moviegoer into symbiotic psychosis. The passive moviegoer then becomes an acting “avatar,” not only within the master director’s movie dream realm, but in the world.