The Human Jungle

[Cross-posted as a "TV Noir of the Week" at The Blackboard.]

In addition to everything else that Sigmund Freud wrought, he made inadvertent major contributions to the practice of narrative. Since the Freudian sub-conscious is a place where information can hide, the ascendancies of the mystery as a genre and of the surprise ending as a narrative device can be partly traced to Freud. Further, the process of accessing the sub-conscious can usefully form a major strand of a story’s plot, with the accessor, usually a psychologist or psychiatrist, playing an important and often heroic role, and the end results of the access being one or more cathartic big “reveals.” Variations on this narrative template have been ubiquitous in literature, theater, film, and television for many years, to the point where it can seem rote and tired and needs a special dose of cleverness to revive it (as in The Sixth Sense).

The title of the 1963-1964 British psychiatric television drama, The Human Jungle, perfectly captures the appeal of the Freudian scenario for storytellers. The jungle of the mind, like the actual physical jungle, is wild, it is lush, and there are things in it you cannot see, at least not at first. I wish I could say that The Human Jungle rings interesting changes on the typical psycho-narrative, which was worked pretty hard throughout the post-war era. But in the episodes I have watched, it is fairly standard stuff, offering predictable and humdrum revelations that are insufficient pay-off even for the low investment of a televised hour. Its noir markings are exceedingly faint, although the smoky credit sequence, with our hero-psychiatrist listening pensively to a taped patient session while slow background jazz plays, seems to promise more in that regard.

Herbert Lom plays psychiatrist Dr. Roger Corder with an intense manner (that is however capable of relaxing into friendliness) and a slightly beady stare; one imagines he might be good at hypnosis if required. Like most psychological professionals in this sort of set-up, he is a locksmith who can provide you with the missing key. He is assisted by an ambitious young colleague (check), a trusty secretary (check), and a seemingly madcap but actually quite sensible teenage daughter whom he is raising alone as a widower. The widowerhood provides an aura of personal loss that suggests that Dr. Corder will not have to fake his empathy with patients: he too has suffered.

The episode “Fourteen Ghosts” is quite emblematic of the series and its approach. The wife of a prominent judge has been arrested for shoplifting. Naturally she has no economic reason to steal, so the kleptomania is expressive of deeper issues (as it is in Hitchcock’s Marnie). When a woman shoplifts, then you can be sure that somewhere, sometime, the men in her life done her wrong, and in this case it doesn’t take Dr. Corder long to figure the particulars out; you or I could have done it. Lady Shaw had a difficult relationship with her rigid father, and now has an even more difficult one with her super-rigid husband. Hubby the judge has his own deep unresolved traumas, and Dr. Corder diagnoses that he too should submit to therapy, but of course the judge is having none of that. He wears down quickly, however, this being television, and his shameful war history of responsibility for the deaths of others (implied in the title) comes spilling out.

The Shaw family situation also includes a supportive and sensible daughter, a type apparently thick on the ground in Britain at that time, and a son-in-law who has been unfairly rejected by the judgmental judge for not being “good enough” for his daughter. (A penniless artist! It just won’t do!) Even from my brief description, you can sense the metaphoric group hug this is all going to end with. Another triumph for Dr. Corder!

I am scarcely immune to the pleasures of this type of story; I bawl my eyes out every time I watch Ordinary People. But that is an unusually effective example of the classic-style psychological family drama, partly because it is more realistic: the super-rigid mother played by Mary Tyler Moore adamantly refuses the group hug and packs off instead. It is a standard that The Human Jungle doesn’t measure up to. Despite my fondness for Sixties London in black-and-white, this series is too blah and formulaic in its execution to win me over.