Double Feature

a) What recent smash hit movie secretly depicted fear of the female breast? b) Name some recent films that were preoccupied with castration anxiety? c) Would you be surprised to know that reliving our childhood Oedipal fixations helps us better to understand adult-themed films? You'll find the answers to these and many similarly intriguing questions in Double Feature: Discovering Our Hidden Fantasies in Film by Herbert Stein, M.D. Dr. Stein, a highly respected Freudian psychiatrist and passionate moviegoer, literally puts our favorite films on the couch and shares his confidential findings with us. In a book that could become a cult classic, he lays bare the truth about unconscious and subconscious themes running through popular culture with fresh, jolting, and often moving insights into some of the most popular films ever made, including Jurassic Park, Field of Dreams, Forrest Gump, The Sixth Sense, and The Usual Suspects. However perceptive we may think ourselves, this book reveals how we unconsciously respond to deeply embedded archetypal themes in movies and enables us to re-experience films we love in a completely fresh way. Indeed, Double Feature makes our favorite films even more resonant and enables us to articulate even more deeply what it is we love about them. Dr. Stein helps us to personalize our experiences by describing his own emotional reactions to these movies. Many of the essays in his book have been published in the Bulletin of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York. Stein has also published essays on film in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly and Projections, a magazine put out by the Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film. Double Feature is both a stimulating and entertaining book. It will also enrich Blockbuster Video, because if you're like me, after you finish it you will want to rush out and rent these movies to see them all over again.