Awakenings (1990)

            ‘Awakenings’ is a 1990 film directed by Penny Marshall based on a book written by neurologist Oliver Sacks in 1973. This film is based on true story and acted by two legendary actors, Robin Williams as Dr. Malcolm Sayer and Robert De Niro as Leonard Lowe. One aspect of the film which captured my attention was Dr. Sayer’s unconditional love towards his catatonic patients. 

As shown in the beginning part of the film, despite his paperwork, Dr. Sayer didn’t have any experience in handling any patients before in his life and he does not like to interact much with other people due to his shyness. But after he appointed as physician in local hospital at New York City, he became very dedicated and caring towards his catatonic patients until he find out about L-Dopa and determined to take risk by giving it to his patients even without other doctors knowing this action in order to help awaken them from catatonic state. Need for achievements from ‘Maslow's hierarchy of Needs Theory’ can be used to explain his action as he was too passion and determined with his work that encourages him to took challenges. There is one scene in the film that I’m really admiring Dr. Sayer. The scene Leonard angrily pushes Dr. Sayer to fall down on the floor and other patients were laughing at Dr. Sayer. But he never get irritated and yet keep calm and understands the emotion of his patient and still tried his level best to help Leonard. This portrays his love and caring towards his patients. I admire this scene because not every doctor will understand and accept humiliations from their patients and this quality is lacking in our current generation doctors.

Attachment theory can be used to explain the relationship of Mrs. Lowe towards her son, Leonard. Her attachment style best explained in the scene where Mrs. Lowe complains to Dr. Sayer regarding her son’s sudden interests in girl. Since Mrs. Lowe spends her entire life looking after her son, she can’t accept that her son had start distance himself from her in order to send time with his love interest, Paula. She states “Leonard would die without me” but actually she is the one who can’t live without Leonard as she create her self-concept as primary caregiver to Leonard. Without looking after her son, she become useless as it was her main job to look after Leonard for more than two decades. Even when Dr. Sayer explained to her that Leonard no longer needs her attention as he used to last time, she still not convinced due to her secure attachment style with her son. 

One aspect of the film that causes change in my perception is that when all the patients who awaken after receiving L-Dopa, they starts to live as though they are normal person. Even though, for some patients there had some major events had happened in all those years such as spouse got divorced or dead in family. But, they were still accepting their fate and starts to living as normal human beings even though for short period of time due to the limited duration of the L-Dopa effects. This teaches me a lesson to appreciate all the values and time that I am having at this moment and enjoy the life as nobody knows what’s going to happens in the next minutes in our life.

Cinema Paradiso (1988)

              ‘Cinema Paradiso’ is an Italian film directed by Giuseppe Tornatore in 1988. The film had won several awards including Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1989. The film portrays the friendship between the main character, Salvatore Di Vita (Toto) and his fatherly figure cinema projectionist, Alfredo. The film illustrates how the whole villagers are being kept unity by one common entertainment media, the Cinema Paradiso. It was the place where Salvatore Di Vita developed his passion towards film and spent a lot of his free time watching movies and eventually became a famous filmmaker in later part of his life.

In this film, Classical Conditioning can be seen in the scene where Father Adelfio scold young Toto for fall asleep and not rings the bell during the prayers in church as he mentioned “I cannot remember if you don’t ring the bell”. This shows that his memory was classically conditioned to the bell that Toto supposed to ring during the prayers. Without the bell, his mind can’t recall what he supposed to do next. Yet there is another scene that portrays classical conditioning is that during at the Cinema Paradiso, the priest rings the bell for any romantic kiss or embrace scene and projectionist Alfredo automatically marked that particular sections of film to be censored later without the priest says any word. This shows Alfredo conditioned to mark any particular scene whenever he listen to bell’s ring.

Based on Erikson's stages of development, Generativity vs. stagnation shown clearly by Alfredo when he wanted Toto to succeed in his life rather than ended up being in their village, Giancaldo. Since Alfredo spent most of his life in cinema projection room, so he doesn’t want Toto to have same fate as him even though he knew Toto have passions towards the films. He knew Toto can’t find his dreams in their village. So, that is the reason why he asked Toto to leave their village of Giancaldo permanently and never returning back again even to visit his biological mother and sister including write or think about them. Since Toto lost his father to the war at the very early stage of his life and Alfredo himself didn’t have any child, he become a father figure for the six-year-old Toto and consider him as his own son. For example in one scene, when Toto pretend to injured his leg and succeed to have ride with Alfredo, he asked question regarding his father’s physical appearance. And to which Alfredo replied “He was tall, thin and have a big moustache just like me!” Yet in another scene Alfredo show his fatherly love toward Toto by helping the poor Toto from being punished by his mother, Maria for not buying milk for his sister but instead uses that money to watch cinema. Year later when Toto now as successful filmmaker returns Giancaldo for Alfredo’s funeral, he notices that Cinema Paradiso is now to be demolished to make way to a parking lot. Then, he understands why Alfredo thought it was important that he leave Giancaldo.

              The romantic relationship between Toto and Elena Mendola left incomplete at the end of the film. It is understood that Elena’s father doesn’t like their relationships and they lost contact to each other as soon as Toto leaves town for military service. This hurts Toto very much and he never get involved in any marital relationship in his later part of life. It can be assumed that Alfredo had tell Elena to keep distance from Toto so that her romantic attachment won’t become a barrier for him to become success in his life. Having loved him so much, she might just give up her love in order to see Toto become success in future.

              At the very last scene of the film, Salvatore Di Vita watches montages from Alfredo's reel which Alfredo's widow gave to him. As he watches all the scenes in the reel, he smiles as it reminds him that Alfredo had promised to give all the censored romantic scenes to him when he was a kid and now Alfredo had full-filled his promise even after his dead.