THE LONGING OF THE WEAK

One of these days I'd like to see a compilation of references to Sigmund Freud and his theories in popular culture. I don't imagine I'll attempt one myself, but here's a curious entry for such a list.

In preparation for a review on the NUM blog, I re-watched the 1952 musical SHE'S WORKING HER WAY THROUGH COLLEGE, in which star Virginia Mayo is a burlesque performer who only bumps and grinds so that she can earn the money to get her college degree. I remember that whenever I first saw COLLEGE, I happened to have seen the film adaptation of James Thurber's play THE MALE ANIMAL, and thought it interesting that this musical-ized version of Thurber's play more or less reversed Thurber's meaning. I assume that the movie version of the play fairly reflected Thurber's theme, since I've seen other Thurber works in which he was rather scathing toward the fetishization of visceral entertainments like sports and sex-games. COLLEGE is just the opposite, exulting in the world of the senses (with musical numbers that celebrate, among other things, Madame Du Barry, royal mistress of King Louis XV). It's an extremely lightweight film, though the Mayo character is interesting given that she's trying to escape her (rather high class) burlesque past by becoming a playwright, and she ends up writing a play about how great sex and love are.

All of the songs by the well-heralded Sammy Cahn are lightweight too, except for one section of a song entitled "The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of." Here's a link to the full lyrics, but the only section that interests me here is Cahn's curious take on Freud:

I’m sure that Mister Freud
Would really be annoyed
If I presumed to contradict him
To him all dreams are explainable
As the longing of the weak for the unattainable
Admitting Mister Freud was very, very wise
My personal dreams I alone can analyze

I'm not sure if there are any big Freudian references in the original Thurber play, but it's a distinct possibility that Cahn was building on something Thurber wrote, given the statement from this site:

Thurber's first book, Is Sex Necessary?, came out in 1929. It was jointly written with the fellow New Yorker staffer E.B. White. The book presented Thurber's drawings on the subject, and instantly established him as a true comic talent. Thurber made fun of European psychoanalysis, including Freud's work, and theorists who had been attempting to reduce sex to a scientifically understandable level. In 'The Nature of the American Male: A Study of Pedestalism' (1929) Thurber claimed that "in no other civilized nation are the biological aspects of love so distorted and transcended by emphasis upon its sacredness as they are in the United States of America." (Writings and Drawings by James Thurber, 1996, p. 3) According to Thurber, baseball, prize-fighting, horse-racing, bicycling, and bowling have acted as substitutes for sex. The female developed and perfected the "Diversion Subterfuge" to put Man in his place. "Its first manifestation was fudge-making."

Regardless of Thurber's reasons for dismissing Freud, I would certainly also dismiss the psychologist's tendency to view all dreaming-activity in terms of "the longing of the weak for the unattainable." At the very least, this attitude certainly appears in Freud's interpretations of his Oedipus complex, in which a child feels sexual possessiveness toward his/her opposite-sex parent, and takes refuge in fantasies that satisfy that repressed desire.

I've given multiple reasons on this blog for rejecting Freud's views of fantasy, so I won't repeat any of those. But curiously, before Mayo and Gene Nelson sing the "Dreams" duet, the professor character played by Ronald Reagan-- who is very close to the one in MALE ANIMAL-- listens to a stodgy authority figure complain about seeing a play that he thought was "dirty," and the professor objects that this philistine has just talked crap about the Greek classic "Oedipus Rex." This may be a line in the original Thurber play. But whether it is or not, this tip of the hat to Sophocles seems to be at odds with Sammy Cahn's determination to dispel Mister Freud's logic regarding fantasy's origins in "the longing of the weak."

And all this in a film which loosely addresses the conflict between sexuality and the intellect, yet really has no significant Oedipal conflict between its characters...