The Machinist

                                                                
 The Machinist

The first film we watched to start our psychoanalytical research was "The Machinist". This is directed by Brad Anderson and the protagonist " Trevor Reznik" is played excellently by Christian Bale. The films narrative is that Trevor suffers from chronic insomnia, so bad that at the factory he works at he ends up causing a man to loose his arm in an engineering machine. In the film Trevor meets a man called Ivan that he has never seen at the factory before but he begins to be obsessed with who this character is. This deals with Lacans theory of obsession and it later turns out that Ivan is nothing more than a figment of Trevors' imagination. Ivan was constructed because Trevor couldn't come to terms with a terrible act he had committed. As the mind protects itself from pain, Trevor is not aware of this but is compelled to uncover the mystery. This is very similar to the film Fight Clubs narrative as "Tyler Durden" turns out to be a figure of the protagonists imagination.

The other theory to apply to this film is "The Id, Ego and super ego". This is a theory by Freud and the "Id" is the " dark inaccessible part of our personality" the "Ego seeks to please the id’s drive in realistic ways that will benefit in the long term rather than bring grief" and the "Super Ego is the organized part of the personality structure that also deals with the Egos ideals". This theory is applied to The Machinist because "Ivan" is "Trevors" "Id", this is because we later find out in the story that "Trevor" was in fact involved in a car accident which resulted in the death of a young child. This is a memory which he had repressed as he thought of himself as a monster, this is shown through "Ivan" who is made to look beastly looking with his deformed hand and his strange teeth.

Trevors' insomnia had caused this repressed memory to come out in a negative representation. By doing this Anderson shows how by repressing emotions and memory's then they resurface in destructive and malevolent manifestations. This is similar to Fight Club as "Tyler Durden" is the "ideal" of the protagonist, which comes from the "Super Ego"trying to please the "Ego".