Don Juan DeMarco – Johnny Depp and Marlon Brando Take On Love

Don Juan DeMarco was released relatively early in my clinical career.  Though it is clearly intended and presented as a fable, my sense was that it was a movie that presented a pretty good outline for how a successful treatment might go.  I have shown a clip from it in my Rorschach class for years (Rorschach jokes onscreen are hard to come by) but have not seen it in its entirety since it was first released.  After watching “Through the Looking Glass” with the reluctant stepdaughters, we decided to sample some of Johnny Depp’s early work.  Though the film was originally probably rated R, it is pretty tame by today’s cable standards and the material was not overly uncomfortable for family viewing with savvy late teenagers, though the film was just not particularly interesting to them.

The reluctant wife and I, though noting that it is somewhat dated, enjoyed rewatching it.  She noted that it is constructed much as Life of Pi, with two versions of reality that are being considered.  In both movies, then, there are defenses against difficult material being mobilized.  In Pi, it is against the monstrous within us that is revealed when we do something terrible in the world, while in Don Juan it appears that what is being defended against is the possibility of having done something wrong and/or the failure of the idealization of a loved person.  But what is clearly different between the two movies is that Don Juan invites us to join in the more beautiful – more romantic view of life and to avoid the hum drum quality that life can bring.

We meet Don Juan DeMarco as he is preparing to kill himself.  He is the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest lover”, though we get to sample his exploits and (he is Johnny Depp after all) the sample is quite convincing.  He has been frustrated in love by Dona Ana and is threatening to throw himself from a billboard depicting her.  The problem is that this is not Castilian Spain but Manhattan and he is the only one around who is dressed like Zorro.  The police call in Dr. Mickler, played by Marlon Brando who, overweight and 10 days from retirement, may once have been the world’s greatest psychiatrist (and onscreen a red-hot lover) but is now just dialing it in.  He has an inspired moment, however, when he announces to Don Juan that he, too, is a Don - Don Octavio - and he invites Don Juan to his Villa to discuss this matter before doing something so irreversible as killing himself.  Don Juan agrees and they meet the next day in what is apparent to everyone but Don Juan to be a psychiatric hospital. Don Juan asserts that he is visiting Don Octavio in his Villa.

Don Juan’s romantic view of life is infectious.  The female orderlies are clearly smitten by him and even the male orderly, Rocco, precipitously decides to move to Spain after spending a few days with him.  More centrally, Dr. Mickler begins to see the world – and his wife, played by Mia Farrow – through rose colored glasses, and their love for each other is reignited – as if Don Juan’s passion is infectious.  (I think it worth noting that there is a long tradition of the patient’s impact on the therapist being an essential element of the “cure” of the patient that is depicted in films.  The idea that the therapist is not simply a technician but a human being involved in a deeply human relationship is apparent to film writers and directors if not to insurance companies and some designers of “therapeutic” interventions that focus on the content of what is delivered rather than the process through which it is delivered).

The medium of infection is twofold.  First Don Juan is devastatingly handsome and charming.  Second, he tells the story of woe that brings him to Mickler’s villa in an engaging and romantic style.  Through flash backs we see his parents meet – his father and mother fall in love at first sight when he, a travelling salesman, visits her remote village in Mexico, and then we see Don Juan as a young boy being driven by his love of women – and having a mother with strong sexual morals teach those to him – but who also inadvertently puts him in harm’s way by having him be instructed in morality by a beauty who is married to a man twice her age.  Ultimately, this woman seduces the young Don Juan, her husband discovers they are lovers, challenges his father to a duel, kills his father – Don Juan retaliates by killing the man he cuckolded.  He must now flee – and his mother states that she has “lost them both in one day.”

Don Juan’s view is also patently absurd.  When he goes to sea and his boat is taken over by pirates and he is bought as a slave and has to sexually service one of the sultan’s wives by day the other 1500 in the harem by night, we have plunged into the world of fantasy.  What is intriguing is the detective work that Dr. Mickler does to try to piece together the elements of this delusional world with what he can glean about the biography of the kid, born in Queens, who is also sitting with him (along with Don Juan) each day in his office.  One of the inspired connecting pieces between the two stories (in the alternate version he was raised in Arizona by the same father who was killed in an automobile accident right before his mother ran off and he has now returned to Queens to live with his paternal grandmother) turns on the phrase “lost them both in one day.”  Mickler wonders aloud whether his mother is referring to losing her husband and her son or losing her husband and her lover: so that his father’s death is caused not by the son’s promiscuity, but by that of his mother - whether it was she who had the affair and lost both her husband and her lover on the same day.  From the perspective of the son, he may have chosen to take on the guilt of having directed the sword of the lover to the heart of his father to avoid feeling the shame of having a mother who is morally reprehensible.

These two versions of his life that seem to lie right on top of each other but in fact reach into very different ways of configuring an internal world seem to say something true about the ways in which we use memory to reconstruct our lives so that we have lived as heroes rather than as victims of circumstance – or to suggest that we can live as heroes as a way of distancing ourselves from the fact that we are largely victims of circumstance.  Wouldn’t it be preferable to be a noble from a far away country than to be the son of the Dance King of Astoria – which is the alternate version of his life that Don Juan’s delusions (partly) protect him from.

What Mickler enacts is a process of bearing the truth of the less palatable version of his patient's life in a manner that, in turn, helps Don Juan to bear up under the mantel of that lower truth.  He leaves the hospital cured not by the pills he takes on the last day, but by the realization that Mickler’s regard for him is real – and that it is a regard that takes into account both versions of himself.  He can return to being the kid from Queens (whose name I can’t remember) without losing his essential dignity.  This allows him to voluntarily cast aside the mask that he has worn to hide his shame.

This fairy tale is then a too clean description of what we experience everyday – the “choice” to live our lives according to any one of a number of narrative themes.  In fact we are likely to shift between many – being at moments lost in daydreams that include unlimited power, strength, beauty, intelligence or a host of other components – and drabber, more real, but also more complex, nuanced and guilt or shame tinged aspects.

Johnny Depp’s real life – one that appears to filled with problematic aspects – seems to be filling the airwaves these days.  The star’s lives – lives that have frequently been a focus of interest for us – must be hard to navigate.  Johnny Depp’s characters have traditionally had a tilt towards the fabulized – there is a hint of Peter Pan to them.  Navigating the reality of moving from a young, lithe movie star like he was in this film to the mature character played by Marlon Brando would take a particular kind of psychological transition – one that we are asked to make in everyday life (we go from being children to being parents or parental figures in what seems like the blink of an eye) and we make that transition with varying degrees of grace.  It is as if the young Depp is saying to the old Brando - don't quit being vital and sexy - you still are - as I can be when I am your age.  We don't have to grow old.  The Brando character is saying, in return, "Thank you for reminding me that I am not dead yet.  That said, we are who we are, and I am an old man - one with some grace - but still the mature one - and you should be ready to emulate that."

The movie, as Hollywood is want to do, provides a happy ending.  The kid makes the transition to ordinary boy, but gets to keep the fantasy, too.  This may make for a happy box office, but it leaves something to be desired in modelling how to live a life. The character will now, presumably, be faithful to his Dona Ana, but he will be able to find her and keep her - something that is not possible from the position of being the kid from Queens who was fantasizing about a pin up star.  What would it take for Depp to mature into Brando?  How mature was Brando?  How mature can we become while still having the spark of life alive within us?       

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