Petzold’s (2015) film Phoenix
retells a story, originally in a French novel and a British film from the
1960s, Return from the Ashes,
starring Herbert Lom by cutting the story down to the bones.
I suggest those bones are a rich and productive
understanding of a set of cognitive skills and processes, and derived knowledge
about them, recently called ‘mindreading’ but once referred to as ‘theory of
mind’.
The story concerns Nelly, recently released from Auschwitz
in 1945 with terrible facial injuries, which allow doctors to ‘recreate’ her
face, so that she is facially unrecognizable as Nelly following her operation.
Although Nelly was incarcerated because she was thought to be Jewish, she was
not. Rescued and helped to recover by a Jewish friend who wants her to create a
compact in which the two women would start a new life together in Palestine in
a new Israeli homeland, possibly as a couple (although the potential is never
more than hinted).
Nelly longs however for reconciliation with her husband,
Johnny, whom, she has been told, betrayed her and caused her arrest by the
Nazis. She finds him working in a cabaret bar (the PHOENIX) serving the
American army in the US section of Berlin but he does not recognize her.
However, when Johnny does eventually take notice of her it is to see her bodily
likeness to his late ‘wife’, Nelly. She can be trained to ‘enact Nelly’ in
order for both to gain the wealth inherited from relatives lost to Nazi
oppression. Nelly is convinced that if she enters into this ‘deception’ with
Johnny, she will discover the truth of his enduring love for her and hence
restore, from the ashes, her former identity. Yet Johnny resists Nelly’s
apparent ability to act Nelly as if she
were Nelly.
Petzold pares the story down to Johnny’s deception plot and
thus ensures that the whole drama focuses on acts of mutual detection of the
contents of each other’s minds: desires, beliefs and thoughts. Theory of mind
pre-supposes that a belief that others have minds, that the contents of that
mind define self and behaviour but that these contents cannot be known with
certainty.
Nelly’s quest in Phoenix
is to determine with increasingly nuanced interpretive flights the exact
contents of Johnny’s mind: he may have betrayed me but there was a good reason
for it that need not contradict my belief on our MUTUAL state of being in love.
Nelly learns, if anything, that the uncertainty of the other
is not the problem in life, it is the failure to embrace the potential that
uncertainty can be liberating and that certainty
about one’s own or others’ identity may be a trap. Nelly experienced life
as a Jewish woman under Nazism without being a Jewish woman, in that sense a
victim of the misprisions that constitute the guesses we make about what each
of us contains. But she also learns that no other choice of identity lacks
constraint. Invited to embrace Jewish identity so that she can learn to sing
German songs again by her Israeli pioneer lover, she finds an ambiguous way to
freedom by rejecting that option too and reverts to a song in English where she
speaks softly of uncertainty. It brings liberation into an identity that will remain
unknown just as the film refuses the closure of the known ending. Theory of
mind liberates not because it offers a way out of deception but that it makes
the route to deception the same route as that by which we attain true mutual
and unimprisoning empathy and identity as human beings.
Phoenix: A film ‘about’ theory of mind’
Phoenix: A film ‘about’ theory of mind’
Petzold’s (2015) film Phoenix retells a story, originally in a French novel and a British film from the 1960s, Return from the Ashes, starring Herbert Lom by cutting the story down to the bones.
I suggest those bones are a rich and productive understanding of a set of cognitive skills and processes, and derived knowledge about them, recently called ‘mindreading’ but once referred to as ‘theory of mind’.
The story concerns Nelly, recently released from Auschwitz in 1945 with terrible facial injuries, which allow doctors to ‘recreate’ her face, so that she is facially unrecognizable as Nelly following her operation. Although Nelly was incarcerated because she was thought to be Jewish, she was not. Rescued and helped to recover by a Jewish friend who wants her to create a compact in which the two women would start a new life together in Palestine in a new Israeli homeland, possibly as a couple (although the potential is never more than hinted).
Nelly longs however for reconciliation with her husband, Johnny, whom, she has been told, betrayed her and caused her arrest by the Nazis. She finds him working in a cabaret bar (the PHOENIX) serving the American army in the US section of Berlin but he does not recognize her. However, when Johnny does eventually take notice of her it is to see her bodily likeness to his late ‘wife’, Nelly. She can be trained to ‘enact Nelly’ in order for both to gain the wealth inherited from relatives lost to Nazi oppression. Nelly is convinced that if she enters into this ‘deception’ with Johnny, she will discover the truth of his enduring love for her and hence restore, from the ashes, her former identity. Yet Johnny resists Nelly’s apparent ability to act Nelly as if she were Nelly.
Petzold pares the story down to Johnny’s deception plot and thus ensures that the whole drama focuses on acts of mutual detection of the contents of each other’s minds: desires, beliefs and thoughts. Theory of mind pre-supposes that a belief that others have minds, that the contents of that mind define self and behaviour but that these contents cannot be known with certainty.
Nelly’s quest in Phoenix is to determine with increasingly nuanced interpretive flights the exact contents of Johnny’s mind: he may have betrayed me but there was a good reason for it that need not contradict my belief on our MUTUAL state of being in love.
Nelly learns, if anything, that the uncertainty of the other is not the problem in life, it is the failure to embrace the potential that uncertainty can be liberating and that certainty about one’s own or others’ identity may be a trap. Nelly experienced life as a Jewish woman under Nazism without being a Jewish woman, in that sense a victim of the misprisions that constitute the guesses we make about what each of us contains. But she also learns that no other choice of identity lacks constraint. Invited to embrace Jewish identity so that she can learn to sing German songs again by her Israeli pioneer lover, she finds an ambiguous way to freedom by rejecting that option too and reverts to a song in English where she speaks softly of uncertainty. It brings liberation into an identity that will remain unknown just as the film refuses the closure of the known ending. Theory of mind liberates not because it offers a way out of deception but that it makes the route to deception the same route as that by which we attain true mutual and unimprisoning empathy and identity as human beings.