Incendies: Trauma and the Gray Zone in Denis Villeneuve Film

Abstract

Based on the homonymous play by the Lebanese Wadji Mouawad, the film Incendies (2009) has as premise the search of a twin couple, Jeanne and Simon, for the life, and death, story of their mother Nawal - after she goes into a catatonic state. Against the backdrop of Denis Villeneuve's film, our proposal, in this article is to deal with the effects of trauma for both Nawal and her children Jeanne, Simon and Abou Tarek / Nihad in the two places he occupies: son and father of his brothers. We will start with the definition of trauma proposed by Sigmund Freud, in which he defines trauma as a stimulus that exceeds our capacity for assimilation and, based on this definition, we will deal with the ideas about trauma attributed to the psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, in which he divides it in two: the structuring trauma and the destructuring or invalidating trauma. It will be on the basis of these divisions that we will build a justification for the catatonic state of Nawal and the reason that she would have to include her children (all of them) in its history full of "fires".