Other Movie Reviews

Interview With The Vampire

If you know something about the Enneagram it's possible to find levels of meaning in the unlikelist places. Take Interview With The Vampire, intelligent and stylish enough as hit movies go. The acting is good and, though gory and boring in spots, the film is absorbing and laced with campy humor. Interview is obviously Gothic but you don't realize what an flagrant Fourfest it is until later driving home. Novelist/screenwriter Anne Rice is a Four with a Three wing and the story is riddled with the character dynamics of these two particular Enneagram styles.

Interview's main character is a vampire named Louis (Brad Pitt) who narrates the story of his human and inhuman lives to a small-time San Francisco reporter (Christian Slater). Louis is a Four and the story very much hinges on his Fourish propensity for whining. While still human in the 18th century, he loses his wife in childbirth and sinks into a passive death-wishing funk. While Louis' grief is genuine he is also seen wallowing in melancholy over the unfairness of existence. He claims that he wants to die but then does nothing about it. Along comes veteran vampire Lestat (Tom Cruise) who offers Louis eternal death-in-life.

Almost immediately after his initiation into the Undead, Louis begins complaining about the conditions of his new existence. His big beef is about feeding-vampires drink blood and killing lots of small unsympathetic animals just isn't practical. Only human blood will do and Louis retains enough of his humanity to balk at the idea of killing people nightly.

Thus begins a dull sequence where Louis resists and laments his need to kill and the viewer is treated to one vampire feeding scene after another. Although repellent at first, all the biting and drinking actually gets boring, much like watching scenes of regular humans raiding buffets. I got restless, fled to the theater's lobby and ate my first hot dog in 10 years.

Louis' dilemma about feeding seems reasonable enough at first. Remembering other vampire movies you think, "Well, he's Undead so the poor guy's probably stuck with having to kill." Midway through the story, however, you learn that Rice's vampires die rather easily which suddenly makes the dilemma seem synthetic. If Louis is really so appalled by what it costs to live in the world why doesn't he just commit vampire suicide?

What came to mind was the way Fours sometimes lament having straight jobs. Life's material demands can be resented by a self-absorbed Four who would rather not have to venture out into the workaday world. There can be a refusal to face facts, a generalized complaint about the spiritual cost of making a living, a vilification of those sell-outs who suck blood in the marketplace. In Vampire the capacity to take worldly action is also negatively represented by the character of Lestat.

Anne Rice cried out publically at the initial casting of Tom Cruise as the vampire. Fans of the novel chorused Rice's complaints--Cruise was short, not blond and too limited an actor to play the evil, elegant Lestat. Rice's comments carried the undertone that a sacred work of art was about to be sullied beyond rdemption.

Cruise is a real-life Three (Two wing) and his performances have pretty much conformed to my dictum that Threes can't act. They have loads of chrisma and are often movie stars but they rarely give their real-life Enneagram style the slip. Performers like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Demi Moore, Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, Burt Reynolds, Kathleen Turner, Wesley Snipes are all examples. They're always playing the same character but vary it a little from movie to movie.

Tom Cruise must have looked at Interview's script and seen what no one else saw, that Lestat is a Three with a Four wing. The character is a chilly killer with aristocratic leanings but despite his haughtiness he is decisive and without apology about doing what's necessary to survive. It's like Rice is vilifying her Three wing but unconsciously acknowledges that action is a way to snap out of Fourish morbidity and self-indulgence. Killing to live is a fact of life even for humans; vegetarians probably terrify carrots. Straight jobs pay off the butcher bills and that's just how it is. At the film's end an impatient Lestat is saying of Louis, "Oh, he's been whining about this stuff for centuries!"

There's another plotline that subliminally reflects the interplay between Four and Three. Lestat "converts" 10 year old Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) essentially to give sad-sack Louis someone to love. In the film's funniest sequence the three characters form a dysfunctional vampire family with Lestat as the disciplinarian father. He tries to groom the feral Claudia, teaching her manners and social skills but she keeps, for instance, killing her piano teachers.

Louis does love Claudia but in a confused way; she is too precocious to be his daughter but is destined to remain a vampire child. Claudia gets melancholic about the idea that she will never grow up. She blames Lestat for dooming her to permanent moppethood geting so angry that she murders him (or seems to). She and Louis then decamp to Paris where they meet a troupe of vampires who eventually avenge Lestat's death. Alone again, Louis grieves the loss of the another true love and then turns fully into an inhuman vampire who can kill without conscience.

The deeper you look into some stories the more you realize that authors write their psyches into their characters. So Rice's Four complains endlessly, the Three (wing) takes action and gets him someone to love. The someone-to-love is deformed and so the Three gets blamed. The Three is murdered, in part, for being a disciplinarian. The deformed someone-to-love is later killed in retaliation for the Three's murder. The Four ends up loveless and turns into a hardened killer, rather like the Three. The Three later turns up alive, which just proves that you can't kill off parts of yourself. This level of Enneagram analysis can get pretty strange but it seems to suggest that Rice is at war with her wing.

Tom Cruise is just fine as Lestat, by the way. When Rice saw the finished film she realized she had been wrong about Cruise's abilities and, to her credit, publically said so. She then spoke of the movie with almost religious fervor having flipped from denunciation to sweeping exhultation. Remember that Fours have a built-in connection to Two and some Enneagram teachers describe the style in terms of "contracted hysteria."

The character of Louis is also an example of a Four motif in films, that of the Melancholy Monster. Stories like The Phantom Of The Opera, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Cyrano De Bergerac all center on a deformed romantic and exactly reflect Four psychology. Note that these stories are all French, a very Fourish culture. Most of Interview takes place in New Orleans--originally a French city--and then Paris.

Note too that Louis' humanistic moralism reflects a Four's connection to One. Lestat goes through a bad patch later in the film and is seen to be depressed and unable to take action. This reflects a Three's connection to the low side of Nine.

A few columns back I wrote about how actor/director Robert Redford's movies reflect a preoccupation with Threeness and generally condemn competitive image-conscious characters. Redford is a counterphobic Six so Three is his stress point. In the director's Ordinary People, the main character is a troubled teenage boy caught between conflicted parents. The boy is a Six with a 5 wing. The mother is a cold unsympathetic Three while the father is a warm-hearted peacemaking Nine. The Three mother rejects the boy and is indicted by the movie for doing so. At film's end, the Nine husband has left the Three mother. The film reconciles the Six son with his Nine father.

Now comes Redford's Quiz Show, just out on video, exploring the scandal that arose when a 1950's Jeopardy-like TV show was revealed to be rigged. The theme of the film is Threeish deception and the scandal is exposed by a disgruntled Six played by John Tuturro. His exposure of the scam is motivated by vanity, competitiveness and status-seeking. As a Six he is caught up in his connection to Three.

Tuturro's is the only clear Enneagram style in the film although there are other interesting undertones. Rob Morrow plays a federal investigator who legally pursues the case. Morrow is a real-life Six and played a phobic Six for years as the Doctor on TV's Northern Exposure. Ralph Fiennes plays Charles Van Doren, the college professor who was later exposed as a fraud. Fiennes is a real life Nine trying to play a Three and he doesn't quite catch it. The film makes Van Doren a more passive participant in the deception than he was said to be in real life. Fiennes the Nine also makes him a nice guy. The movie as a whole is solid and thoughtful.

Some examples of real-life Fours would be: Kurt Cobain, Jack Kerouac, Billie Holliday, Liam Neeson, Julio Iglesias, Joni Mitchell, Robert James Waller, Winona Ryder, Michael Jackson, Judy Garland, Thomas Merton, Judy Collins, and Marlon Brando.

Some examples of real-life phobic Sixes would be: Ellen DeGeneres, Jason Alexander, Mia Farrow, Albert Brooks, Meg Ryan, Pat Robertson, Kim Basinger, Richard Nixon, and Mary Tyler Moore.

Some examples of real-life counterphobic Sixes would be: Julia Roberts, Steven Seagal, Susan Sarandon, Richard Pryor, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Janet Reno, Chuck Norris, David Letterman and Roseanne.

Eights-Bad Boys and a Tall Guy

Three completely different films with similar character dynamics, prompted by a troublemaking Eight. The Breakfast Club is a surprisingly insightful teenage psychodrama. It focuses on five teens spending a Saturday morning in school detention ("the breakfast club"), a punishment for various infractions. Judd Nelson plays the bored, unhappy Eight, who hassles everyone with scathing, if self-serving, honesty. This prompts the others to reveal themselves in unexpected ways, each coming out from behind their social mask.

Nelson's chief target is Molly Ringwald, a Nine with a 1 wing. She's a complacent Good Girl, alternately drawn to and repelled by Nelson's Bad Boy aggression. The attraction for her as a Nine is his cutting force which slices through her confused self-masking. Nines are also drawn to the vitality of Eights since they tamp down their own sense of industry.

Ally Sheedy plays an intense, incandescent character in the Four/Five range ("When you grow up your heart dies"). Emilio Estevez's character is mostly a One. Anthony Michael Hall is probably a Nine. Paul Gleason plays a supervising Eight teacher who gets into stupid power struggles with Nelson.

Haunted Summer details a visit to Italy by romantic poets Shelley and Byron. Shelley (Eric Stoltz) is a solemn, airy Four (3 wing). "I must follow experience where it leads me," he says. His wife Mary (Alice Krige) is a Nine and she is hotly pursued by the Eight Lord Byron (Philip Anglim).

"I don't ask you to excuse me, but I do ask that you imagine that once this heart was affectionate by nature." Byron has an obvious weakness that motivates his compensatory aggression -- a club foot. "I mean to pursue you with every weapon at my command," he tells Krige. She replies: "It is not a battle," but he seems not to hear. Byron's vulnerable beneath all the bad behavior but Mary Shelley still used him as the inspiration for her book, Frankenstein. She does find him daring and interesting even though he's misogynistic, abusive and self-justifying.

Diary Of A Mad Housewife stars Carrie Snodgress as a Nine (1 wing) housewife going quietly mad while coping with the demands of her spoiled children and her vain, social-climbing Three husband (Richard Benjamin). She has an affair with an abusive Eight writer (Frank Langella) and though he's pushy and obnoxious, he's also sexy and vital.

There are several nice scenes where she quietly confronts his defenses and meets with ballistic denial and ridicule. He too has a "weakness" he's hiding and he runs Snodgress around, trying to keep her dizzy and unsuspecting. She figures him out anyway and tries to reassure, but he's too insecure to let her. The film shows accurately how a Nine would be unafraid of an unhealthy Eight but might get tired out by all the bad behavior. She wants peace, but he only knows war.

Nines-The Tall Guy

Shaggy romantic comedy featuring Jeff Goldblum as a tall, disorganized American actor trying to make a living in London. The only job he can manage is that of an abused second banana to an arrogant comic (Rowan Atkinson). The story has him trying to change his luck by wooing his allergy nurse (Emma Thompson, a probable One) while landing the lead role in a hilariously awful musical about the Elephant Man.

Goldblum plays an overcomplicating Nine. His life's a dishevelled mess; naked men wander through his apartment, while his chronic allergies keep him sneezing and unfocused. He dates a Czech woman (a Two) for reasons even he can't understand. He does get the Elephant Man job but later learns it's because the producers needed an actor who looked crushed by life.

His obsessive roundabout thinking just can't pull things together but he does awaken enough to pursue Thompson. She's blunt and pragmatic ("I see no point in going out for ten expensive dinners when I already know that I like you") and he likes her desperately. But when the relationship starts to go well, he sabotages it and spends the rest of the movie trying to get Thompson back. Going in circles, this is called.

Goldblum makes a pretty good Nine and he gives the character a nervous Sixish edge that's accurate to the style. This comedy is uneven but generally enjoyable. The satirical swipes at the world of theater are wickedly funny. Emma Thompson is a real life One.

My first book The Enneagram Movie and Video Guide was something of a beast to produce because there turned out to be much more material than anticipated (about 1000 movie characterswho clearly demonstrate Enneagram styles). What was also confusing was how deeper Enneagram related patterns kept emerging. This material was at times so amazing or peculiar that it was hard to know what to do with it. Some of it I included but the rest is saved for future editions.

It began with noticing what might be called "meta patterns"-- consistent ways the Enneagram cropped up in unrelated movies. For instance, high-spirited Sevens and moralistic party-pooping Ones were often in conflict. How often? In about eighty of the movies that I saw (still a fraction of the movies in existence). I couldn't believe how common it was; it began to seem like some lazy screenwriter's shorthand.

In almost every Robin Williams movie, Williams, the Seven, is being hassled or opposed by a One. In his recent dull hit Mrs. Doubtfire, Williams is an irresponsible Seven who is denied custody of his children by Oneish authorities. To be near his family he disguises himself as a British nanny and gets hired. Once around his children--as Mrs. Doubtfire--Williams becomes a firm loving diciplinarian, a One. He turns into his security point.

This movie came days after screening Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in which virtuous One Fredric March drinks down a potion for releasing his instincts. As the beast in him is released he is transformed -into a Seven. Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote Dr. Jekyll, was a Seven in real life. Presumably, he was dramatizing his own interior conflict as Sevens have a built-in connection back to One.

Writer/director Steven Soderburgh's movie sex, lies, and video is great for Enneagram students. It features laser-clear portraits of a Five, an Eight, a Nine and a Three. When I saw the movie again, though, it was clear there was a deeper structure to how the characters interacted. Five is a stress point for Eight and Eight is a security point for Five. Nine is a stress point for Three and Three is a security point for Nine. There are built-in connections within psyches, not just between people. What happens between this film's characters reflects interior Enneagram dynamics as much as interpersonal conflicts.

This is a strange confusing area to but it's safe to say that Enneagram tensions are being played with by movie makers in subtle unwitting ways. In Batman Returns, Michael Keaton's schizoid character is a reclusive Five. When he puts on his batsuit and becomes Batman, he turns into an Eight. In the movie he's battling two foes who share his wings. Danny DeVito plays The Penguin, a Four, and Michelle Pfeiffer plays Catwoman, a Six.

In the original Batman, Keaton was battling with The Joker (Jack Nicholson) a Seven. Seven is a stress point for Five. So Keaton's Five character turned into an Eight (security point) to defeat a Seven (stress point).

The tensions are also played out between a performer's real life Enneagram style and the role they are playing. Keaton is a real life Seven, so as Batman he's playing his both his security point (Five) and then his Eight wing. Nicholson also is a real life Seven so, as The Joker, he's playing his own core style as it fights with a Five. Michelle Pfeiffer is a real life Five so she's playing her wing in Batman Returns.

No, its stranger than that: the shy phobic real life Pfeiffer has an angry anti-authoritarian streak, which is to say a counterphobic 6 wing. Her Catwoman character is schizoid like Batman. By day the character is a meek phobic Six. At night she turns into an angry counterphobic Six.

See any patterns here? When I first started to notice these dynamics, I briefly wondered if I'd contracted some movie reviewer's psychosis. The connections are there, though, and they get more subtle.

Actor/director Robert Redford is mainly a movies star but he shows some acting range now and again. A real life counterphobic Six (5 wing) he has played his wings in movies--a Five in Jeremiah Johnson, Sevens in Out of Africa and Little Fauss and Big Halsey. He's never played a Nine (security point) but early in his career he played several Threes (his stress point). The characters in Downhill Racer and Tell Them Willie Boy is Here were cold unsympathetic Threes and it was almost as though Redford was indicting his own stress point.

He's went on to direct and his two most notable films to date have been Ordinary People and A River Runs Through It. Latter story is about a pair of brothers, one an introverted writer who is very Fiveish (Craig Sheffer) and the other who is a daring roguish Seven (Brad Pitt). So the brothers' core Enneagram styles are the same as Redford's wings.

The actor/director has described his father in a several interviews and Redford Senior always sounds like a flaming One. In A River Runs Through It, Tom Skerritt plays the brothers' minister father, a One. So Redford made a movie about his wings and his father's Enneagram style.

In the earlier Ordinary People, the main character is a troubled teenage boy caught between conflicted parents. The boy (Timothy Hutton) is a Six with a 5 wing. The mother (Mary Tyler Moore) is a cold unsympathetic Three while the father (Donald Sutherland) is a warm-hearted peacemaking Nine. The Three mother rejects the boy and is indicted by the movie for doing so. At film's end, the Nine husband has left the Three mother. The film reconciles the Six son with his Nine father.

So Redford made a movie about a Six-his core style-that also contains a conflict between Three and Nine, his real life stress and security points. And he indicted the Three again just as he did in his own early acting roles. Styles Six and Nine are deeply bonded at the film's end.

There's another level. In A River Runs Through It, actor Craig Sheffer is playing a character based on the book's real life author Norman MacLean, a Five. Scheffer is a Seven in real life so he's playing his security point. Tom Skerritt plays the minister father as a One with a 9 wing. In real life the actor is a Nine with a 1 wing.

Mary Tyler Moore is a Six in real life, so in Ordinary People she's playing her real life stress point (Three)--just like Redford the Six used to. I'm almost sure that Donald Sutherland is a Nine and Timothy Hutton is a Six with a 5 wing so the two actors are playing their core styles.

How performers are chosen for movie roles is rife with the influence of the Enneagram. When I was in college and took an acting class, the professor used to say, "If you play a role in real life, you won't be able to act." What he meant was if you were image-conscious and had a social persona in real life you would have a difficult time in letting yourself go and becoming someone else within a role. The idea was that the actress has to surrender her personal self and give herself over to a totally different point of view and way of being.

The professor was talking about what is called "character acting," where a performer seems to take on a new character with each role. He omitted what's called "personality acting", which is when a performer develops a persona that they essentially play from role to role. Huge film careers are built by personality actors and they almost always are considered movie stars rather than character actors. They also almost always play their personal Enneagram style.

Here's a random list of performers who have tended to play their real life styles: Diane Keaton (Six), John Wayne (Eight), Arnold Schwartzenegger (Three), Tom Cruise (Three), Woody Allen (Six), Katherine Hepburn (One), Charlton Heston (One), Tom Hanks (Seven), Robin Williams (Seven), Eddie Murphy (Seven), Gregory Peck (One) Glenda Jackson (One), Sidney Poitier (One), Tony Curtis (Seven), William Shatner (Three), Kathleen Turner (Three), Cybill Shepherd (Three), Susan Sarandon (Seven), Wesley Snipes (Three), Marilyn Monroe (Six), Harrison Ford (One), Greta Garbo (Five), Kirk Douglas (Eight), Albert Brooks (Six), Jack Lemmon (Six), Rosalind Russell (Seven), Mel Gibson (Six), Errol Flynn (Seven), Michael Caine (Seven), Goldie Hawn (Seven), Michael Keaton (Seven), George C. Scott (Eight), Cary Grant (Seven), Peter O'Toole Seven), Gary Cooper (Nine), Jack Nicholson (Seven), Sharon Stone (Three). This phenomenon is so pervasive in movies that I named it "enneatype casting."

After I realized that personality actors tended to play their real life Enneagram styles, I began to wonder if there was any relationship between the roles character actors played and their personal Enneagram styles. The words of my college professor lingered. Character acting meant jumping completely out of your own skin and taking on a totally different character.

What emerged instead was kind of astonishing. Character actors don't exclusively play their real life core Enneagram styles the way personality actors do. Character actors do, however, play their wings, stress and security points. Only rarely does a performer play an Enneagram style that is completely unrelated to their own.

Take Five Michelle Pfeiffer again. She's played a Six (her wing) in the movie Frankie and Johnnie as well as in Batman Returns. In The Fabulous Baker Boys, she played an Eight (security point). In the film Dangerous Liaisons she played a Nine (no intrinsic connection). Jack Lemmon is a Six in real life and he played them in movies for years. He's also played Threes (stress point), a Seven here and there (his wing) and Ones (no connection).

Here's some other character actresses and actors and roles they have played: Meryl Streep(real life One): Sophie's Choice, She-Devil (Twos, Streep's real life wing). The French Lieutenant's Woman, Out of Africa, Plenty (Fours, Streep's real life stress point). Postcards From the Edge (Six, no connection).

Richard Burton (Eight): Night of the Iguana (Seven, his wing). Beckett (Nine, his other wing), Anne of 1000 Days (Eight, his core style). Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Five-stress point).

Al Pacino (Five): The Godfather, Part II (Five). Scarface (Eight-security point). Frankie and Johnnie (Seven-stress point).

Vanessa Redgrave (One): Mary Queen of Scots (Two, her wing). Julia (Nine, her other wing). Isadora (Seven-security point).

Peter O'Toole (Seven): Beckett (Eight, his wing). My Favorite Year (Seven, core style). Goodbye Mr. Chips (Five-security point).

I have pages and pages of this stuff. The Enneagram connection between performers and their roles is so consistent that its eerie. Friends of mine have been trying to disprove the pattern but keep finding more examples instead.

This formula certainly demystifies character acting. Playing a character who has your wing or stress point is not quite the same as slipping completely out of your own skin.

And who knows how many performers play their parents? That's another built-in style, as inherent as a stress point or wing. Real life Five Anthony Hopkins often plays Fives or Ones. In interviews he speaks often of his father, who sounds for all the world like a One.

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