Alex Gigler

Psychology & Film Contributor

Alex writes The Inner Life, TV Intelligentsia's Psychology & Film column: film criticism about the selves we construct, the people we need, and the losses we struggle to accept. His essays bring psychoanalytic thought into conversation with the specific choices of filmmakers: a silence, a changed friendship, a face, a piece of movie history rewritten. He is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology in the PsyD program at Pepperdine University. His essays are interpretations of the work, never assessments of a viewer.

Editorial rolePsychology & Film Contributor, The Inner Life

TrainingDoctoral candidate in clinical psychology (PsyD), Pepperdine University

LensPsychoanalytic and developmental readings of film and television

Based inLos Angeles, California

What he covers

How films model emotionMourning, melancholia, rage, envy, and the defenses characters build against what they cannot bear to know.
Relationships on screenSeparateness, dependence, projection, and the life that forms between two people.
DevelopmentWhat it takes for a character to become a person, and what a story teaches a viewer about that work.
Festival coverageFeatures and the animation slate, filmmaker interviews, and capsule verdicts for TVI's festival guides.

Selected work

The Inner LifeOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood: Mourning, Melancholia, and the Refusal of LossTarantino's counter-history as a refusal to mourn. The Inner LifeFrances Ha Does Not Fit: The Psychology of Becoming a PersonWhat happens when the people a person depends on insist on becoming real. The Inner LifeThe Fiction of Being: A Psychoanalytic Reading of PersonaA mute actress, a nurse who cannot stop talking, and the self that forms between them. All criticismReviews and EditorialsWatched reviews, editorial arguments, and The Inner Life in one place.

Scope and boundaries

Alex is a PsyD doctoral candidate in clinical psychology. His essays use clinical and psychoanalytic ideas to read fictional characters and the structure of a film. They are not diagnoses of real people, not advice, and not an assessment of any reader or child.

For attribution or source questions about The Inner Life.

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