The Moviegoer'Coming Apart'

A VAMPIRE LIKE woman with a triangle of burns on her chest lights a cigarette and passes it to Rip Torn asking. "Would you like to burn me?"

Torn: "I don't want to especially, but I will if you want me to." (Near the end of the film he will burn another girl. This will be one of the signs that he is Coming Apart.)

Vamp: "It won't be my good unless you really want to" A few minutes later, while the duo make frantic love on the floor:

Vamp: (screaming) "Hurt me!"

Torn: "How?"

Vamp: "Do anything, anything you want,"

Torn: "You have to tell me what you want me to do, dammed."

A good observation. It's not at all clear what is the best way to hurt someone. There are at least two options. First, tell all your victim's friends that he is a bastard, peur ink all over his notebooks, steal his girl friend. This method may indeed make the person go mad. Second, convince someone that you love him, and then, just at the right moment, cease to do so, saying you have always despised him. At the very least , this will induce temporary insanity.

Burning a person with a cigarette is a fair example of the first option. Torn, who plays a psychiatrist and thus knows how to hurt people most profoundly, chooses the second.

Rip Torn is a psychiatrist who decides to act out his sexual fantasies and record the results with a concealed movie camera which films all the escapades which occur in his living room. He leaves his wife, drops his patients, and sets himself up as a photographer to lure women. The movie the viewer sees is the one which the shrink makes. It documents his disintegration.

What I resented most about Coming Apart is that it concentrates on two of the elements that I like best in movies-sex and misery-and yet still doesn't make it.

The sex is clinically portrayed and very unappealing. I hate movies that pretend to be arty skinflicks and then don't come through. I Am Curious (Yellow) falls into this category: you see the pair's equipment and you even see them Do It, but it's as exciting as watching the dissection of a frog. My favorite movie love scene was a very brief, certainly non-pornographic, golden. instant in The Immortal Story . She: "Stop. The earth is moving-it's an earthquake." He: "It's not an earthquake." That's all there was, and it might read like bad Hemingway, but it was the best.

The misery is equally unsatisfying. You can't feel sorry for anyone because you can't begin to identify with any of the characters, particularly the protagonist. My standard for identifying with movie characters is not high: the character may be as unintelligent or misguided as he likes, but he must have some glimmer of good intentions. La Strada , for example, which was very depressing, reached me because I could well have been the clown on the road.

Coming Apart's interest slim as it is, consists in having two avant-garde elements at its center. The protagonist is that archetypal figure of the West in this country: the psychiatrist. In theory this could have been one of the movie's strong points: how the man's highly developed self-consciousness affected the way he lived, etc. In practice, however, Torn is unable to convince you that he is a shrink at all, let alone that any psychiatrist would be motivated to scale the heights of promiscuity in such a way.

Coming Apart's other innovation is that it's filmed from a fixed camera: every scene is the same. This experiment does have interesting implications, but it also intensifies the movie's already pronounced basic tediousness. You would get tired of looking at the same living room even if the bizarre sex were very interesting, which it isn't.

The severely restricted point of view causes this incompleteness of knowledge about the protagonist's motivation. If filmed in a more typical way, the story of the psychiatrist's disintegration might have been augmented by scenes describing what he does when the movie camera is off and the nature of his relationships with his mistress and wife. The fixed-camera experiment is a radical application of the modern assumption that the teller's point of view is all-important in the interpretation of a story. The viewer never knows the "whole" situation, but only the portion that he can see.

In Coming Apart , the camera offers no help in interpreting the happenings on screen, abandoning the viewer to puzzle over the ambiguities. The viewer sees only the abysmal way the psychiatrist treats everyone, and his breakdown. There are no explanations beyond the acts themselves. The question "Why?" is as irrelevant as it is unanswerable, Coming Apart is ironically, post-psychological.

The psychiatrist believes that he is justifying his sexual activities by filming them all. He is observing himself, putting a distance between himself and what he does. In this way he sheds all responsibility for his actions: he is the camera watching it all.

By the end of the movie he has easily seduced a girl who was a former patient of his. The Cardinal Sin. She has lost her job and apartment because of the demands he has made on her. She begs him to take care of her. He is of course unable to do so. The psychiatrist has refused to be responsible for his patients, his mistresses. his wife, and finally for his own actions. His actions and his consciousness have become disattached. He isn't alone in his Coming Apart.