the invisible confidant
by Douglas Messerli
Rebecca Emcken (screenwriter and director) Cognitio
/ 2018 [20 minutes]
I don’t think I have to remind the readers of My
Queer Cinema that in these essays I reveal all aspects of the plot in my
larger discussion of the film. But the power of Danish director Rebecca
Emcken’s short film Cognitio lies in its ability to convince the viewer
that the hallucination of a young man, Tobias, locked away in a psychiatric
hospital is real.
Such an imaginary friend has other benefits as well. He praises Tobias’
art. He even encourages the boy to masturbate, something apparently Tobias has
been too guilty to do since he was 15, but now engages in, imaging a sexual
encounter with his new friend. Egil even serves as the agent for Tobias’
break-in to a drug cabinet for Ritalin and other pills that helps him to get
high. But even an imaginary friend can appear, at times, to be as controlling
as a father (the word which at one point Tobias’ applies to Egil), freezing him
out of other friendships he might have had with real fellow patients such as
Frederick (Mikkel Rishøj), and finally, betraying him just as apparently other
real friends have in Tobias’ past.
Naturally, in a quiet voice of a psychiatrist, the doctor suggests that
they provide him with medication to help alleviate his hallucinations.
But
director Emcken, helped through Clara Kokseby’s intense musical score as well
as her cinematography, so convinces most viewers of Emil’s actual existence
that numerous of the commentators on YouTube site and elsewhere are totally
convinced—at least in their first time in watching the film—that it is the
hospital doctors who are refusing to believe Emil’s “real” guilt, convinced of
the relationship between the two boys, as if it is the fantasy figure who had
successfully succeeded in forcing the doctors to doubt Tobias’ sanity.
We
live in an age when scientific truths are regularly brought up for severe
questioning, and when the real function of medical institutions such as
psychiatric wards are openly challenged—although surely this began long before
with the horrific visions of psychiatric wards and hospitals as early The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), The Snake Pit (1948), Harvey (1950),
Suddenly Last Summer (1959), One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975),
and numerous others.
But
a second viewing of this film makes it clear that early on in this 20-minute
work, when the doctor asks about his patient’s interaction with his fellow
patients and suggests that Tobias try harder to befriend others, that she would
obviously have noted if indeed Tobias had made friends if Egil were a real
being. And it’s quite clear that Tobias’ own mini-rebellion against Egil, as
he temporary befriends the soccer-playing Frederick, is a momentary attempt to
cure himself by escaping his fantasy friend for one of the other patients. A
second viewing forces us to realize why, when Tobias insists that it was Egil
who really stole the drugs, the nurses don’t even bother to question the boy
laying on the same bed, or at least to suspect that the two might have gone in
on the raid together? There is no other. Certainly, skeptical viewers are clued
in to the truth when, as Tobias and Frederick sit talking and Tobias suddenly
turns to talk to Egil, Frederick calmly gets up and walks away, clearly
realizing that he cannot communicate at the moment with someone who has an imaginary
other to whom he speaks.
Despite the film’s clever ability to delude many of its viewers, it also
provides them with evidence of the truth.
What did trouble me, however, about the
doctors is why they didn’t probe the boy about his fear of sexual contact or
recognize that his created friend is someone he imagines as a possibly gay
buddy. What have his parents done to him to make him so terrified of gay sexual
activity? Did he get bullied, beaten by other boys he approached when he was
young? Most of the observers commenting on this film had approached it as a
possible LBGTQ story, but afterwards felt somewhat disappointed and confused by
Tobias’ sexual identity. But the film makes Tobias’ desires quite apparent. So
why don’t the doctors query him about it or at least pursue the causes of his
hallucination? It is a gay love story, but without the immediate possibility of
Tobias finding the other with whom he might fall in love. And it appears that
institutional science will not be an agent in helping him to find or even
realize that there are others like himself. They rid him of his hallucinations
but surely will not resolve the cause.
Los Angeles, February 9, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February
2023).
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