PsycCRITIQUES (2007). 52 (30) np. Climate of emotion A review of the film The Great New Wonderful (2005) USA. Directed by Danny Leiner. Review by Keith Oatley The Great New Wonderful is the name of a business in New York that makes multi-layered birthday cakes at four-figure prices. It is also the name of this movie, directed by Danny Leiner and written by Sam Catlin. Presumably, too, the name alludes to the new New York, after its old wonderfulness was shattered on the morning of September 11, 2001. The clue to the film’s subject matter is given when, after the opening shot which pans towards the southern end of Manhattan without the World Trade Center, a white title in sans serif font on full-screen black announces: “September 2002.” Every movie has a concept, and the concept of this one is that everybody in New York, maybe everybody in America, has been emotionally affected by the attack on the Twin Towers. Maybe we have been driven in on ourselves. The film follows five different stories of New Yorkers. They are not connected in plot, although in the second half of the film some of each story’s principal characters find themselves in the same elevator when it lurches to a stop. The lights go out for a few seconds. When they come back on, the characters all look pensive. At the next floor, one is nearly trapped by the doors as he leaves, and one of those who stays says: “You made it out alive.” “Barely,” he replies. The protagonists in the stories are Sandie (who barely made it out of the elevator) and his psychotherapist (played with élan, respectively, by Jim Gaffigan and Tony Shalhoub); the sylph-like Emme (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal), proprietor of the company that makes the extravagant cakes; two decent young people David and Allison (Tom McCarthy and Judy Greer) who have an impossible pre-teen son Charlie (Bill Donner); Avi and Satish (Naseeruddin Shah and Sharat Saxena) whose hair is graying and whose jobs are to act as bodyguards to a Pakistani general; and Judie (Olympia Dukakis) a woman getting on in years who makes collages of cut-out magazine pictures and meals for her husband with whom she does not otherwise communicate. With September 11, 2001, New York acquired a new emotional climate. The idea of such climates was proposed by De Rivera (1992). He describes climates of fear, of optimism, of depression, and so on, in different places at different periods of history, and he raises the question of how far governments may contribute to them. The film is slow at first. The climate it depicts is of emotions beneath the surface. By halfway through, the film gathers pace when, in each story, an outburst occurs. One is reminded of Kierkegaard’s (1844/1957) discussion, in The Concept of Dread, of those who are shut up inside themselves and who, when they express an emotion, do so in a way that is sudden and excessive. Empirically, Galea, Ahern, Resnick, et al. (2002) published the results of a survey of New Yorkers taken a few weeks after September 11, 2001, and found that there was an increased incidence of symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. These symptoms were more common among people who lived

close to the World Trade Center, or were directly affected by the disaster. A subsequent survey of American Airlines flight attendants found among them a raised incidence of this disorder (Lating, Sherman, Everly, et al., 2004). This is a serious issue but, counter-intuitively, the film is an allusive comedy, and this makes us think perhaps harder about these matters than we might in a more earnest film. The story in the movie that is most explicitly keyed to the events of September 11 is of Sandie, who is scheduled for counseling for a traumatic event that happened in his office building. The event is not described, though we are told it happened during an afternoon rather than a morning, so it was not itself the destruction of the World Trade Center. The psychotherapist is one Dr Trabulous; make what you will of this name. To hint at the makeshift nature of the counseling, the sessions take place not in a therapist’s office but in the coffee room of Sandie’s workplace. Dr Trabulous’s first comment after asking his client’s name is: “You seem angry.” Sandie demurs, though he says he might be a bit anxious at the upcoming sessions. We the movie-goers peer at this somewhat embarrassed guy, but see nothing of the anger. Is it the special talent of those who work with the unconscious that they can see beneath the surface? Dr Trabulous persists: “You’re furious,” he says. “I’m actually quite concerned that at any moment you may pick up your chair and hit me on the head with it.” The question of whether psychotherapy can harm clients, as well as help them, was asked quite early in the empirical investigation of its effects. Truax and Mitchell (1971) found at that time that whereas about a third of therapists made a beneficial difference to their clients, many therapists were ineffective while some were actively harmful, or “psychonoxious.” The question of harm or help has been raised again recently with the increase of therapy for the emotional effects of traumatic events, and it is reassuring that meta-analyses of such therapies have shown overall beneficial effects (Bradley, Greene, Russ, et al., 2005). Dr Trabulous is the most broadly comic turn in the movie, so we are not altogether surprised when, after several sessions of his insufferable intrusiveness, Sandie does indeed hit him with a chair. Trabulous goes to the bathroom to inspect his abrasion in the mirror, and emerges with an expression of selfsatisfaction. By contrast, Sandie is seen walking along a road in a piece of parkland, staggering and disheveled. A teenage couple drives by. They stop, and the young woman in the passenger seat leans out of the window to ask: “Are you OK?” Sandie replies: “I think I’m lost.” In the other four stories, the outbursts are all different, but all point to the same question: “When something occurs that is traumatic and hard to make sense of, can our emotions disappear beneath the surface so that they may later erupt? But perhaps the consignment of our emotions to the underground is not so involuntary; perhaps we may sometimes try to suppress them. Is anything wrong with this? It turns out there is: Gross and John (2003) have found it seriously impairs our interactions with each other. References Bradley, R., Greene, J., Russ, E., Dutra, L., & Westen, D. (2005). A multidimensional meta-analysis of psychotherapy for PTSD. American Journal of Psychiatry, 162, 214-227.

De Rivera, J. (1992). Emotional climate: Social structure and emotional dymamics. In K. T. Strongman (Ed.), International Review of Studies on Emotion, Vol 2 (pp. 197-192). Chichester: Wiley. Galea, S., Ahern, J., Resnick, H., Kilpartrick, D., Bucuvalas, M., Gold, J. & Vlahov, D. (2002). Psychological sequelae of the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City. New England Journal of Medicine., 346, 982-987. Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 85, 348-362. Kierkegaard, S. (1957). The concept of dread (W. Lowrie, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (Original work published 1844). Lating, J. M., Sherman, M. F., Everly, G. S., Lowry, J. L., & Paragine, T. F. (2004). PTSD reactions and functioning of American Airlines flight attendants in the wake of September 11. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 192, 435411. Truax, C. B., & Mitchell, K. M. (1971). Research on certain therapist interpersonal skills in relation to process and outcome. In A. E. Bergin & S. L. Garfield (Eds.), Handbook of psychotherapy and behavior change: An empirical analysis (pp. 74-111). New York: Wiley.