Put simply, mentalization is the capacity to think about and reflect upon the workings of one’s own mind and other people’s minds. Researchers believe that the ability to mentalize is impaired in people with certain personality disorders, and that this can lead to problematic, distressing and often harmful behaviour, putting both the person themselves and others around them at risk."
So is the predilection toward violent, antisocial behaviour a result of a stunting of the ability to mentalize, or to explain , visualize and contextualize connections?
Unclear to me is the impact of over-immersion into mentalizing (specifically violent, sexually aggressive, antisocial) fantasies versus the impact of lack of mentalzing altogether on said 'violent' anti social men.
Gosling in DRIVE is not much else beyond a man lost in the dreams of being a part of a Hollywood film. Not so different from the Hollywood Characters documented in CONFESSIONS OF A SUPERHERO, he adorns himself with a movie costume, swagger to spare, and a tangential role as stuntman, but resides on the sidelines and in his own imagined dramas.
I saw the film at a prerelease BAMCinematek screening with the director in attendance. Winding Refn said he views the film as a fairy tale about a person who has always dreamed of finding a reason to act out in psychotic violence.
Cora and Shane in TROUBLE exert sexually cannibalistic violence, but more out of a reaction to imprisonment. Imprisonment of the everyday kind, like urban life, married exclusiviity, Shane being a newlywed, struggling against his own nascent criminal path.
Are Cora and Shane less egocentric than Gosling's guy ? Is their visible aggression stealing something from other people to feed their own self centeredness (lack of mentalization/contextualization of connectedness) ? Or is it more of an afterbirth? Coming into being as an overreaction to the pain of being close without the exceptionality of a type of intimacy that really breaks through the separation of self?
