WR: Mysteries of the Organism, from 1971, once again. An interesting film that raises more questions than it answers. One of which is whether Reichian therapy ever helped anybody. Do Wilhelm Reich's ideas have any credibility? Of course that may not be the right way to ask the question; the man had many and varied ideas. Of course Dusan Makavejev, the writer-director, was under no obligation to answer such questions, and the matter, or matters, of Reich's thought may not be settled even now.

Reich influenced Mailer in the fifties; I don't know what he thought about Reich or Reichianism in later years. Anyway...to synthesize Marx and Freud, as is mentioned about the younger Reich in the film? Well, he wasn't the only one to try. A number of German-speaking intellectuals sought to do that around the middle of the last century. From a C21 perspective, it strikes one as a silly idea, and a fool's errand. Why the hell would anyone want to do such a thing? Freud was a crackpot. (Having said that, I'll also say that I'm reading Erich Fromm again, another thinker influenced by Freud, after fifty years. Timely as ever, that one. A wise humanist was he.) But I guess Freud was in the air that Reich, Fromm, Adorno, Horkheimer and others breathed, and I was glad to see a Freud portrait serving as a dartboard in WR. Who says there's no such thing as progress?

Reich's idea that freeing up erotic energy is key to creating a society of free humans is a theme of the film, which does not mean the film advocates the idea unreservedly. That freeing-up, in one crucial incident, leads to murder as sequel to sex. Some years ago, Makavejev was in Cleveland for a special screening of WR and I asked him about that. Unfortunately I don't remember his answer. As for my question, now it seems like a draft version of one I would ask him now if I could, that is, “Okay, you are or were obviously interested in Reich, so what do you really think about his ideas?”

To speak of the aforementioned murder, at the end of the film the disembodied head of the victim speaks, then smiles into the camera. And then there is a cut—interesting word, no?--to a photograph of Reich. He too is smiling. This is an ending akin, I think, to Marlow's lie to Kurtz's fiancee at the end of Heart of Darkness. Neither Conrad nor Makavejev is the kind of artist who wraps up the meaning of a work in a neat little bundle. You might not know quite what to make of such endings as theirs, at least not right away, but to think on the matter might take you to interesting places.

One thing about those Eastern Europeans—Conrad was a Pole, Makavejev a Serb—is that they take ideas seriously, and their humor is all the richer for that.