Anatomy of a Fall is the Best Depiction of Vulnerable Narcissism on Film

This might be the best movie I’ve ever seen. I was superglued to the couch for 2 hours and 24 minutes while checking my phone an aggregate total of zero times. I honestly think I may not have moved at all. No rolling to my left, not to my right, not laying down to my left on my fun pillows for a 20 minute only to spend the next 20 on its mirror image fold . My body may not have moved other than my eyes blinking, which is saying a dramatic amount given how restless my body can get.

I mean I was taking a walk down by the shoreline the next day and I found myself uncontrollably thinking about the tiny and delicious details about this movie and I kept saying “fuck, that movie was good––dat execution, ugh so tasty”. Obviously I have to write about it.

And to give context to what I consider to be good filmmaking, my top few favourite movies of all time (in pretty much that order) are: Magnolia, Arrival, Leon: The Professional, Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona, Scent of a Woman, Margin Call, High Fidelity, Sicario, Tenet, Nocturnal Animals. It feels warm to list a lifetime of preferences in arts to convey an autobiographical sketch.

It goes without saying––yet tautolologically one always has to say it—that you might wanna watch what someone is claiming might be the best movie ever before you read an autopsy of it. There’s your spoiler warning for a movie that won the best original screenplay Oscar.

There seems to be an accident and a man is dead. He has fallen from the balcony of his mountain home in the French Alps near Grenoble, and his blind son finds him right outside the house when he comes back from a walk. The French authorities decide that the German wife must have done it, so they get their stinky lingeries in a bunch and decide to prosecute her for murder.

Granted, the situation looks a bit sketchy, so you can’t entirely blame the police for at least looking into it. But then you start seeing one of the single most fundamental cognitive biases in confirmation bias leaking out of the psyches of the people investigating it. They seem to really wanna hear what they wanna hear, so that the story makes sense––especially in a way that they decided it make sense. Would you have guessed that ambiguity and lack of clarity is one of the single biggest stressors of humans out there? The unknown scares us. Hence people all around the world, since time immemorial, have been believing in the dumbest fucking things they could efficiently convince themselves of in an effort to self-regulate and calm one’s own nervous system. Science is frequently complex and not easily accessible by all––and people also don’t like feeling stupid––which is why humans tend to cling onto simple explanations for esoteric phenomena. It saves them anxiety in making the unknown into known, and inferiority in struggling to understand the complex––double whammy. And there you go, a creature that evolved to be so very easily impressionable and is a prime victim for sophists and all sorts of people who have some kind of incentive “to be right”.

Now, I think there was a subtle xenophobic component to the treatment Sandra Hüller’s character, also named Sandra, was receiving in the movie. The French folk really wanted to believe that a big bad German must’ve killed a poor good ole Frenchman. He French was limited (at least in the sense of truly conveying her most accurate feelings and ideas), and despite the hot lawyer Vincent’s advice that she really needs to do it all in French to convince the jury, would later on in the movie would switch to English to express herself as well she found appropriate. Which is one of the strong impressions that I got: that she really wanted to express how she felt and what she thought and what she remembered. She is a writer, a prolific one, and although it is unclear if she normally writes in German or English (I actually suspect she wrote her books in English), and self-expression is her stance in life. And it was interesting to observe how she eventually stops playing “their” game on “their” turf when she elects to switch to the language that she finds the most comfortable during the trial.

There are so many little details about the movie that are worth writing at least a paragraph about, to some of which I might actually get to, but the single most fascinating thing that happens in the movie is the scene where the couple’s fight from the day before the death is recreated (not for the participants of the trial, but for the movie audience) when it is revealed that the dead husband, Samuel, was semi-secretly recording their lives––not exclusively, but it seems especially the fights.

At this point we can start diagnosing shit right and left liberally. Secretly recording people is hallmark trademark narcissistic behavior. The brains of these types of people work in terms of a perpetual victim mentality, where they are deeply paranoid that someone is doing something to them, that the pain they are feeling (usually due to inherent feelings of insecurity and worthlessness and the subsequent self-sabotage) must be the doing of someone else––because they are usually incapable of taking responsibility for their own failures. There is invariably an excuse for each failure, usually accomplished through inaction. “Blame externalization” is one of the core narcissistic traits, where their fragile ego cannot handle even the slightest criticism while they are overly critical about nitpicking everything about others––frequently jumping to stories that “make sense” to them towards reaffirming their victim mentality. And to that end, their brains work towards actions that resemble entrapment: they harass and antagonize people until they finally do something, anything, the tiniest thing they can then frantically criticize and put the entire blame onto, thus regulating their fire-laden nervous system by gaslighting themselves into thinking that “it’s not their fault––they are still perfect little victims”. And secretly hitting record, and going on an “evidence” manufacturing and collecting trip is so extremely absurdly typical of deeply narcissistic people––usually more of the vulnerable variety rather than the grandiose type.

Now that we are at it, let’s give brief definitions to and make distinctions from each of these two types of narcissism: the grandiose type wants special treatment because they think they are awesome and amazing and they truly believe that they deserve the entire world––this variety of this delusion usually allows the owner of these brains to succeed, sometimes wildly in life; and the vulnerable type wants special treatment because they are disadvantaged and disenfranchised and victimized through endless betrayals and backstabbings, hence we need to pity the poor old them and that’s why they deserve the whole world––the world seems to owe them something (ostensibly for all the pain and suffering they went through).

And, poor old Samuel, who is also a writer in his own regard, shacks up with a superior writer, who is a no-nonsense go-getter of a woman who is absurdly prolific, and confines himself into a life of constantly comparing himself to her and feeling like a failure continuously. The narcissist is brain constantly makes value judgments by comparing two things (and most frequently themselves to others), and in their minds things cannot exist and have value in an of themselves. Something always to be better or worse than something else.

Of course, it doesn’t begin that way. It, instead, begins with the first step in the ‘Idealization, Devaluation, and Discard’ cycle. They want to feel special so they endear (i.e. lovebomb) themselves to someone they deem to be cool. So when the cool person likes them, that reflects well on them. The feeling of specialness is achieved. But then in that world of two, they start to feel inferior due to the constant comparisons they are making, and because they also have no desire to succeed in lieu of being able to make excuses for lack of success, they don’t feel inspired by the legitimately aspirational person they successfully attracted into their lives. So instead of allowing to be raised up by them, they simply “devalue” their partner in the dyad and proceed to tear and bring them down. And, boy, is it frustrating when they fail to bring them down, and Sandra keeps writing book after book, achieves robust success, never makes excuses, and lives a life of competence and responsibility while also carrying her improbably insecure husband’s perpetual attempts at self-sabotage that routinely affects their family.

In the recording, you constantly hear Samuel shifting the goal-posts on Sandra, claiming to be a victim because he can’t even speak his own language (French) and that he has to play in her field. And Sandra is like: “bitch are you fucking stupid? I am GERMAN and we are speaking English––which is a mother tongue for neither of us. That is the compromise we made when we got married, after meeting in London, you know, the city in the country where they speak English, where we both had jobs that involved using––at a very high level––the English language––in the country that you yourself chose to move to and work in before you even met me. And I totally speak French with my kid thank you very much. And you are arguing that I am forcing you to do something against your will to your detriment. Nice––classy”. And forgive my tone above, Sandra says it with a completely straight face and zero sarcasm. And the constant defense against Samuel’s deranged behavior through logic, full logic, and nothing but logic by Sandra is just the icing on this Chantilly.

During this fight, we understand the details of this German and French couple who are living in London eventually moving to the French Alps. This mountain town is apparently Samuel’s hometown. And he is of the belief that once they leave London, he’ll be able to be happy. Once he is back in the mountains, he’ll be able to write. Once he is in his hometown, he’ll finally be a good dad (after his neglect of his child leads to an accident that renders the poor kid blind). Once they are there, their money problems are going to be solved. Once that happens, he will finally be able to write great novels and achieve his destiny.

Being the strong badass she is, Sandra is very supportive and takes him at his word, upends her whole life, and makes gigantic sacrifices to help her husband self-actualize. And what does he do in return? Self-sabotage after self-sabotage so that he can constantly hide behind excuses and keep blaming his poor wife. So he wants to write oh so badly, but they have money problems, which were caused by their buying this big house, so he has to take a teaching job in Grenoble, which takes so much of his times that he cannot write. Homeboy created the money problem, and then “self-sacrificed” to solve it. Okay, he only works as an instructor three days a week, so that leaves a lot of time still, no? Of course not, he decides to homeschool his kid which takes all the rest of his time, and then he still cannot write because he is so busy. And simultaneously, he gets to feel like a martyr seeing that he built his entire personality out of a series of self-sacrifices that unfortunately prevents him from becoming the amazing person he was destined to be. And he also gets to pretend to be a good dad by having showy gestures that evidence so (narcissists are frequently obsessed with public showcases of their actions––unless there is an audience, it has no value), and going as far as to accuse Sandra of being a bad mom since he is immediately making another comparison between the sacrificial victim of a parent he is to the cool, calm, and collected––yet still very present––style Sandra has. She, of course, tolerates none of this bullshit.

Deep into this stupid fight Samuel picked towards gathering evidence of what “bad woman” his “tormentor” of a wife is, Sandra does something that my brain straight up cheered for. My head was like “you GO girl, get ‘im!”, when she impresses and inflects definitively as to how he is “not the victim here”. She is so powerfully behind her argument while using the words “not a victim” repeatedly that it just shuts Samuel’s entire personality narrative right then and there. And she tops it off by saying “you need to take responsibility for what you do or don’t do, for better or worse; write or don’t write, I am fine and support you either way, but you need to own it and stop looking for some imaginary enemy that stopping you, which you are convinced is me”. It was fantastic.

What ensues is a glass shattering on a wall and a single slap and them tumbling a bit. But that, in theory, should settle it as we just witnessed such a terminally clinical textbook presentation of vulnerable narcissism. But, of course, that does not happen since humans are stupid and lay people (and I’m including the judges and the prosecutors into this as well even though this is literally all they do with their lives professionally all day every day) hardly ever know what they are actually looking at. They, instead, are fooled by someone who is not an authentic human, but is pretending to be a human by playing the role he thinks he ought to live, with a narrative conveyed as superficially loudly as possible. Goffman’s Presentiation of Self in Everyday Life shenanigans for you. And these inauthentic people (who very frequently end up working for the courts), wouldn’t succeed in recognizing an authentic person’s authentic behavior if their lives depended on it. Instead, they are convinced by the shocking lengths a delusional person has gone to over a period of years to establish a long paper trail of bread crumbs that narrate how they are the victim. “Why would anyone do or say all this?” they would say, “who would go so far if this wasn’t real?”.

Way too many people is the answer. The amount of humans who somehow evolutionarily adapted to prioritize “being right” over just about everything else is truly curious. How exactly was it evolutionarily adaptive for people to pretend to be right when they are gravely wrong? Anthropology literature demonstrates quite clearly how the theory of mind evolved which allowed humans to imagine being other beings––be it another human or a non-human deity entity––and that simultaneously allowed us to believe in nonsensical made-up things while subsequently allowing us to join common causes to collaborate and build civilizations. So the impressionable human mind that believes in stupid stuff said authoritatively and the ability to self-gaslight make sense to me scientifically. But when there is a such a significant price to pay when you are wrong, and somehow us maintaining this maladaptive trait so widely within our species is quite bewildering. Some people are literally okay with burning their entire lives, sometimes the entire world, just to not admit being wrong. It’s fascinating, not in that this is part of huma nature, but in how shockingly widespread it is, almost bordering on being more of the norm in modern populations.

Speaking of the ability to self-gaslight, we need to talk about the incredible portrayal of a terminally despicable prosecutor played by Antoine Reinartz. Now this guy reveled in playing a shit-eating cretin in a shit-eating grin in this here movie. Excellent villain portrayal. He was a bit one dimensional, but to be perfectly honest fair, that is literally by design. Prosecutors are simple creatures who are meant to take a staunch position and die on that hill. My understanding is that they (like most lawyers) do not have a particularly intimate relationship with truth or falsehoods. Life is just a debate club for these sophist descendants. Almost as if natural selection realized that we were routinely creating creatures who did not have an internal compass, who were able to make up a story that “made sense to them”, and argue them until they felt satisfaction in passing on the gaslighting they initially performed on themselves, or failing in that and having zero lingering feelings about it. Really, my best guess is that it does nothing to these people being proven wrong, and that they carry on with zero problems with the fact that they tried to ruin someone’s life, for purely arbitrary reasons, and upon being told (by a jury of peers) that they were likely wrong, carry on as if nothing happened. It is hard to tell, but this might possibly be the gist of it.

I can think of 7-8 cases where my own therapy clients had concurrent legal issues, including a few where I had to give expert or witness testimony, either written or orally, and the above paragraph is the impression that I was left with. Because, it is really hard to come up with an alternative explanation that is more on the parsimonious side than the convoluted excuse-making that is required for thinking prosecutors are doing public service––at least in an unhinged and litigious country like the USA that has its long obsession and fetishization with violence. I do believe that culture plays a role on how behavior manifests, and France is much different from places like the US. Regardless, humans are humans at their core, traits and warts and all, and extreme behavior in extreme cultures just makes things more salient for the lay eyes to see and comprehend. In short: the French prosecutor might just be a less unhinged, and more tempered version of what an American one might be (or replace America with any other country with authoritarian regimes).

I find it nightmarish to have a job (i.e. regular lawyer) opposite to these types sadistic people who are pretending to be public servants. Word by word, what one lawyer of a therapy client has said to me was: “assistant prosecutors have 800 cases at a time, and they don’t even bother looking at the evidence until before the trial, if at all. They just elect to prosecute things without knowing anything, because they are chasing a high score that makes their bosses happy, and they have zero interest in public good, or the truth. They are too lazy to actually do any public service when they can just offer plea deals which will likely be accepted (because it makes people feel like they are dealing with an unreasonable wall), which makes the system more money, increases sinecurial bureaucratic glut (thus justifying and strengthening their money pump), and if not accepted, in return, some defense lawyers make money and public resources are wasted. And apparently judges never chastise assistant prosecutors for trying bullshit cases, ostensibly because they are also in on them. And then I skip out on asking the last question as to how one can have a career dealing with this degree of stupidity since the answer is that it makes them money. Humans creating problems to harm others to charge them an arm and a leg to solve, monetizing suffering––the story of human history.

Now the French police in the movie did not seem to be as scummy, more procedural if anything, but the expert witnesses and the forensic people seems a bit too dedicated fans of stupid Netflix crime shows and appeared to revel in making up grotesque conjectural speculations from random pieces of “evidence”. The fact that the judge kept allowing (or that the hot lawyer Vincent not constantly objecting like Camille Vazquez) idiotic, presumptuous, and ostensibly racist/xenophobic words by witnesses was a bit bizarre––which may very well be the rare not-so-realistic aspects of the movie (although I am hard pressed to believe at this point that such dumb things would not happen in court). People––including ones whose job it was to be objective and impartial––really wanted to believe what they wanted to believe. Decide on a truth and go nuts.

And all this leads me to believe that it is the same type of brain that really wants to believe something, not something arbitrary but something grotesque about another human (which actually reveals their own nature more than anything else), and their job is them projecting their dark thoughts onto other innocent humans.

Who the fuck goes to law schools?

I have an answer for that. I think people who lack an internal compass, a sensitivity to what’s right and what’s wrong, and an inability to care about truth––they go to law school. They go, so in a world where they seem blind to any internal guiding light, someone can teach them man-made rules about right and wrong, so they have some boundaries within which they might not feel as lost and anxious due to not knowing right from wrong. No wonder these partial humans grow up to be unable to care about the truth, and have no qualms about being manipulated themselves as long as they get “a win”. That’s the type of piece of shit that is powerfully portrayed in this prosecutor character. Gaslighters are really good at what they do because they themselves are incredibly gullible and are able to make up any lie to themselves and start believing in it seconds later. If you are so impressionable and deludable to your own lies, naturally you come off really convincing. And we employ and build entire systems around these types of (non-clinically but colloquially) schizophrenic people.

On two instances in the movie, you see Sandra protecting Samuel’s memory out loud, once during the first conversation with the hot lawyer where she says “no, he wasn’t like that”, and once again in court when the hot lawyer makes his sweeping argument as to how Samuel was suicidal loser on his way out. The reason why she does this is very simple: she’s projecting her own world onto others.

Humans do that. Samuel was a cynical insecure loser, and he was constantly projecting his judgmental, manipulative, and malevolent thoughts onto others. He lacked empathy and did not have the capability to imagine a more benevolent creature than he in others. Similarly, being the competent doer that Sandra was, she projected her own competence, positivity, and logical attitude onto others and spent an entire marriage and some more weeks after her husbands death completely being unable to paint a picture of a self-sabotaging destructive loser in her husband whom she loved.

One of the significant sources of these wildly diverging points of views is revealed during the testimony of the therapist—who seems really incompetent but honestly, it wouldn’t be the first time I would’ve encountered an incompetence of that specific variety in a colleague. These vulnerable narcissistic types are good at convincing therapists of their long-wrought victim story, and therapists usually really struggle to doubt all that. To be fair, it took me several years into a job to realize that the people who go too far in feeling so supposedly constantly betrayed, and castrated, and judged, and diminished by their partners usually do that to themselves, and it is all in their heads. Then this idiot psychiatrist prescribes Samuel antidepressants so that he can be more okay with the prison he is in (even though he created it himself), disregards the fact that coming off them without titration can cause suicidal ideation, and adds to the discrimination Sandra has received from all these expert witnesses. Some people really seem to be born with a victim mentality, they put themselves in a position to become legitimately victimized, and failing that, they make up a story via self-gaslighting, and then spend the rest of their lives feeling sorry for themselves, angry at the entire world, and extracting sympathy from anyone who will listen. It is their sun, and food, and water all at once. They can only live off people’s sympathy like some sort of negative energy vampire.

What happens at the end of the movie? The kid becomes the real MVP. He is really torn because his dad’s carefully constructed delusional lie of as life starts showing some cracks. He does the experiment with the dog, finds evidence that his dad was actually an insecure suicidal loser, and elects to protect his mother by telling a lie people will believe in, instead of the truth that they never would. In the flashback scene where the fight happens, we hear the characters with their own voices. In the flashback scene that recounts the kid’s memory of his father “revealing to him being suicidal”, it is the kid’s voice. He made it up. He made up a lie to be able to enlarge the actual truth, so that people could see it. His father decided to burn the entire world to hide his insecurities. And it wasn’t enough that he (likely) chose to bitch out and die (unless it was just an accident, we’ll never know), but he was gonna cause further pain and suffering behind them––typical par course for narcissistic people who routinely leave a trail of destruction behind themselves (most to their own detriment).

When the kid goes back home, he goes to his mother and gives her a hug, where his head stays higher and Sandra’s head is in his chest. This seems to convey a message of “I protected you mom, I got you”.

What else happens soon before that? The adults are having a “celebratory” dinner and Sandra expresses not feeling any relief, but instead feeling empty. Someone who committed murder would have likely felt some sort of “rewarding” feeling upon being cleared of charges and avoiding punishment. Instead, she just lost her husband, and has to back to an empty home, in a country that’s not her own, in a town where people treated her like a stranger for a year and a monster for a month. That would leave you empty.

And at the very end, she goes to her husband’s office to sleep on the couch there, as she previously mentioned she would regularly do (while giving context to Samuel’s impotence and their sometimes sleeping in separate beds). Empty home, no object of her trauma bond to the manchild she took care of and cleaned after for years. And all she can do is to smell him on a couch and a pillow before the odors completely fade away and he is completely gone.

This is how you make a fucking movie. Nuanced, deep, subtle, showing and not telling, not an ounce of fat, nothing to trim. I always thought Leon was a perfect movie in that sense, while Magnolia wasn’t perfect but it was hard to be that ambitious and produce something as tight. This movie sets out to tell a deep story about human nature, an aspect of human nature that is often overlooked and not adequately understood, and smacked it way out the ballpark into a different zip code. Holy hell, this is a literally perfect depiction of vulnerable narcissism, and I believe tops my chart as of now as a piece of art that has showstoppingly high explanatory power about human nature as a whole.

I kinda wanna write an entire book version of this article now.