Directed by Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, "The City of Lost Children" unfolds in a fictional port city characterized by its gothic and dystopian atmosphere. The film features a character named Krank, who cannot dream and thus suffers deeply. Krank attempts to alleviate his pain by stealing dreams from children, but due to their fear of him, all he obtains are the children's nightmares.

The turning point of the story occurs when the little brother of a strong circus acrobat named One is kidnapped by Cyclops and his gang and taken to Krank. Alongside One's efforts to rescue his brother, dark activities such as those occurring in Krank's laboratory and the stealing of children's dreams come to the forefront.

Krank, abandoned by his creative father, is rigid, cruel, and devoid of empathy and compassion. Irvin, known as "uncle" with a brain inside an aquarium, tells Krank about the inability to dream:

"Last night, I thought that if all these children only have nightmares, it might be because of the evil within you. Why don't you search for the cause of your suffering in the molecular examination of your own tears?"

When Krank asks, "Who can make me cry?" Uncle Irvin tells a story:

"Once upon a time, there was a gifted inventor who decided to create his wife and children in the laboratory since he didn't have any. He started with his wife and designed her as the world's most beautiful princess. Unfortunately, a wicked genetic fairy cast a spell that prevented the princess from growing more than three feet. Then he cloned six children from his own image; loyal, hardworking, so much like him that no one could tell them apart. But fate deceived him again and gave them all a sleeping sickness. The inventor, longing for a friend, grew a brain in the aquarium, but it had migraines too. And finally, he created his greatest masterpiece; a man smarter than the world's smartest man. But sadly, the professor made a serious mistake. The man was intelligent but had a flaw; he could never, ever dream. He was so unhappy that he was aging rapidly."

At this point in the story, Krank sheds a tear, but the brain interrupts his joy, saying:

"With time, the masterpiece thought he could be saved by a tear..."

Dreams, as is known, are an important part of psychoanalytic work. Freud proposed that dreams originate from unconscious material, and Bion expanded this view by stating that dreams play a critical role in processing raw sensory-perceptual impressions into meaningful experiences. Sensory experiences cannot be easily processed and form beta elements, scattered data devoid of meaning and causality. Processing these data and transforming them into meaningful experiences require what Bion referred to as alpha function.

Beta elements encompass experiences that cannot be transformed into dream thoughts or memories during sleep and wakefulness. As experiences become dreamlike, that is, enter the process of symbolization and meaning-making, the individual transforms them into alpha elements. Processing experiences involves digesting emotions and thoughts associated with them. Bion viewed the mind as a digestive system; thoughts and emotions are considered the mind's food source. When there are difficulties and obstacles in digesting food, a person experiences indigestion and what cannot be digested makes the person sick or prompts a vomiting need.

Thomas Ogden likened beta elements to the snow on a broken television screen. In snow, nothing can be related to each other and cannot be interpreted in relation to other things. In the absence of alpha function, the person experiences an unnamed terror and mental noise. Untransformed elements into alpha elements are not recorded as unconscious memory; instead, the person holds them in a raw state, ready to vomit or share with others. This situation prevents the person from developing skills such as dreaming, thinking, remembering, forgetting, mourning, etc.

Alpha function allows the individual to think about emotional experiences, turn them into a meaningful and consistent narrative, and learn from experiences. This skill develops through the inclusiveness of the caregiver in the early period. The caregiver processes the baby's tensions, sensations, feelings through hi own mind. In other words, she perceives them, interprets them correctly, and returns them to the baby in digestible units by giving appropriate responses. This process initiates subjectivity construction and develops awareness of experience.

Jeanne Magagna, in her work on baby observations, regards not crying as unexpressed, therefore frozen sadness in psyche, and this sadness as hidden tears. Crying is a physiological response that babies are born with. It is experienced over time as a response accompanied by different emotions and plays a role in calming psychological tension. Magagna describes how being without a mother at the beginning of life can lead to tears freezing as the baby's only way to tolerate difficult experiences. In the presence of a caregiver who sees, hears, and holds with love, crying strengthens the baby's capacity to experience and make sense of emotions. Unfortunately, in the scenario where this does not happen, we can talk about repressed crying. In this case, the only way for the baby to tolerate difficult experiences is to lose awareness of the feelings and freeze the sadness.

In the film, the creative father has abandoned the family. Krank is both fatherless and motherless. He experiences a lack of containment that would allow him to process his painful experiences in his psyche. The clones that could be seen as siblings have been rejected because they remind him of the creative father, and maybe they were a reminder of him. Uncle Irvin, who is a brain, sometimes reflects Krank's experiences back to him with retaliation and fuels his hatred.

Krank, who has become increasingly cruel due to his hatred, continues to steal children's dreams out of envy, but what he sees in these dreams is his own destructiveness, loneliness, and underlying terror. He gets angry when children cry; he cannot approach them with love and compassion. He makes others cry as he cannot cry himself, and becomes the nightmare of the children's experience. Perhaps Krank tries to process his own unprocessed emotional experience by making children live the dream of his experience, but what emerges is a dream interrupted, a nightmare.

References

Bion, W. R. (1962). Learning from Experience. Karnac Books.

Freud, S. (2014). The Interpretation of Dreams. Wordsworth Editions.

Magagna, J. (2014). On Crying and Being Left Alone With One’s Grief: Connections Between Infant Observation and Psychotherapy. Baglam Publishing.

Ogden, T. H. (2007). The Analytic Third: Working with Intersubjective Clinical Facts. Routledge.