A psychologist might well argue that all films are really about psychology because all films are about some aspect of human nature and human relationships - and these are the purview of psychology. Even a film that did not contain any humans (such as a nature documentary or Andy Warhol's hour-long shots of buildings) says something about human nature because it reveals something of the preoccupations of the filmmaker and those who watch the film. But some films are more overtly about psychological issues than are others. The 1945 film Mildred Pierce (a must for anyone who wants to make claims about being a classic film buff) is an especially intriguing blend of the cinematic and the psychological, for not only are the characters in the film replete with more than the average share of psychological twists (and psychopathological tendencies), but the film as a whole may be seen as an examination of the psychology of the entire city of Los Angeles.
The film, which is based on the book of the same name by James Cain, is in large measure a story about how the psychology of the individual is affected by place. We might like to think that we are each possessed of an essential personality: We are who we are, and we would be this person whether we stood on the banks of the Seine or the Nile or the Mississippi. To some extent this is true: If you have been raised in Louisiana and, at the age of 75, take a two-week trip to see the pyramids because this fulfills a lifelong ambition, you will still be yourself as you glimpse the Nile. But you would be a very different person indeed if you had been raised in Egypt rather than the southeastern United States. We are the children of our environments.
Mildred Pierce makes this argument quite convincingly. The Los Angeles that is depicted in this film (and in many films of the 1940s and 1950s) is a liminal place, neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. It is not the country, and it is not subu...