Taking Carl to the pictures

'He gave me some money but I think I lost it' #4

2009-05-18T21:09:00.004+01:00

There Will be Blood: 2007, Paramount Vantage/Miramax

In the last of a series of posts that considers together In the Valley of Elah, No Country for Old Men and There Will be Blood, I've finally reached TWBB. There's some spoilerage so if you don't want to know who wins, don't read on. Otherwise, this concludes my rambling on the subject of the state of the American nation and its men, as discussed in these three great movies. If nothing else, do see them. And there's an intro as well as the two other movies, if that's your thing.

Plot summary

Located this time on America’s western frontier, TWBB takes place chiefly during the Californian oil rush at the turn of the last century. Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis) transforms himself from hard-up silver prospector to oil magnate and in so doing is drawn into a power struggle with the minister (Eli Sunday, played by Paul Dano) of a charismatic Christian sect in the small community of Little Boston where Plainview makes his fortune.

Archetypal themes

Fathers, sons and legacy

The film charts a struggle for the soul of the nation between two ethically questionable belief systems: oil and religion. The oil man Daniel Plainview stands for self determination, exploitation (of natural and human resource, of opportunity), money and a will to progress. He is a man perpetually driven but with no clear object in sight other than always to defeat the competition. He is at once a passionate father and a cruel, rejecting one (like the God of his adversary). His adopted son H. W. is cherished, mothered and fathered by him as another, future self, as a vehicle for his beliefs, abilities and ambitions. But the boy’s disability, a result of the father’s ceaseless drive, makes him the representation to his father of an unconscionable weakness; it makes the boy himself painfully impossible to accept, even at times to speak to or look at; and the boy’s quietness, stillness, love for another is an offensive statement about his father’s loudness, activity, isolation and devotion to hardship.

The father here is therefore attempting to provide a legacy that is at the outset more problematic than in either of the other films, even though some of the content overlaps. Set earlier than either of the others, this film asks whether the originating US faith/myth of male identity is itself ethically flawed.

The film’s other son, Eli Sunday, is the opponent not only of Plainview but of his own father. He is also driven, visionary, deeply avaricious and power-hungry. He and his twin brother (also played by Dano) betray their own father, one for money and the other for control of the family and its homestead. Both are contemptuous of their father’s weakness and inability to make money or derive power from what he has – which could be described as a contempt particularly American in character. In principle Eli should represent the ideal Christian moral standard and God’s will for the nation (as a larger version of the father’s will for his son). In fact there is a clear gap between the will of Eli and the will of God, with Eli ultimately empty of faith and abandoned by God.

Faith and the nation

The struggle between the oil man and the minister is that of capital and religion for the loyalty and labour of the people, for the nation itself. The ultimate, complex victory is for capital, triumphing through ingenuity and then shocking violence over corrupted and venal religion. But what is the object of that victory? Plainview is hollowed out by his insatiable, uncontrollable hunger that damages and destroys even that which he values; and his final words of the movie are ‘I’m finished’.

Belief here is less innocent, more transcendent than in the other films; there is more passion and less honour in the father/son relationships and the Bible is a symbol of person authority used for personal gain, not direct instruction and guidance by God. There is no pre-lapsarian fantasy; TWBB challenges the truth of that very fantasy and suggests a reason for the continuing complicated difficulty between oil and religion, enacted in violence, that is now situated outside US borders rather than at its frontier.

Conclusions

Taken together, then, these three movies explore facets of a cluster of archetypal forms. In a famous dream interpretation, Jung related his patient’s dream of a giant father to her longing for God. God the Father and God the Son are present as referenced and unreferenced figures in these films, standing in front or behind literal fathers and sons who in turn are synecdoches for generations of American men. Fathers and sons pass from one to the next the faith in God the Father and in the archetypal Father, his power as a paradigm of manhood and arbiter of justice. The Law of the Father is a familiar psychoanalytic concept that, in the Freudian model, is explicitly associated with separation from the mother, injunctions against cannibalism and murder as well as incestuous sexual desire. The Lacanian analysis took this further, unravelling the connection between the Law and the creation of identity through response to it. Often discussion around repression and the Law of the Father has revolved around sexual desire; in these films the focus is instead the containment of violence – towards the father, rivals and the self as well as the mother (NCFOM). The transmission of faith from father to son is a location for archetypal interaction and tension in all these films; and in all them it is clear that there is disruption of this transmission that is specific to the American experience now and literally as a capitalist nation and a nation at war. The close connection between the formation of masculine identity and formation of nations and national identity is exposed in all three of these films to the glare of narrative dissection.

It’s also striking, viewing these films close together, how similar are the landscapes that the characters inhabit. They are almost all US borderlands: arid, dusty, with functional and featureless towns whose people work hard for not much. These are harsh places where people lead harsh lives. From the psychoanalytic perspective this intersects interestingly with the Law of the Father, which demands separation between mother and son. In obeying the Law of the Father and separating from, even rejecting, desire for the mother the son deliberately denies himself nurture, nutrition and comfort. This is not the lush, life-giving Edenic idyll where man does not need to work for his food; it is a landscape from which survival is won with a struggle. Given this demand for separation there is no option but to leave the mother only her bloodless, passive and sorrowful role (ITVOE).

Carl says: I find the greatest self-control in the world among the Americans – and I search for its cause… and I find for an answer brutality. I find a great deal of prudery. What is the cause, I ask, and I discover brutality. Prudery is always the cover for brutality. It is necessary – it makes life possible until you discover the brute and take real control of it. When you do that in America, then you will be the most emotional, the most temperamental, the most fully developed people in the world… When I see a man in a savage rage with something outside himself, I know that he is, in reality, wanting to be savage toward his own unconscious self.

Dr Carl Jung speaking to the New York Times, published September 29 1912.

'He gave me some money but I think I lost it' #3

2009-05-03T13:50:00.007+01:00

No Country for Old Men

2007, Miramax/Paramount

In this series of posts I'm looking at three films that share closely their themes of national and personal identity, violence, war and transgression. This time, it's NCFOM; last time it was In the Valley of Elah and you might also want to read the intro to the whole thing. Next time: No Country for Old Men

Plot summary

Set in West Texas in 1980, NCFOM is the story of a sheriff, Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) who on the verge of retirement finds himself pursuing a psychopathic hit man (Anton Chirurgh, played by Javier Bardem) across the state in the wake of a botched drug deal. Chirurgh is hunting Llewellyn Moss, a Vietnam vet who makes his living as a hunter but who stumbled upon the proceeds of the drug deal and is attempting to make off with it to start a new life with his wife.

Like Hank Deerfield in In the Valley of Elah, Ed Tom Bell has devoted his life to the maintenance of order through the containment of violence and the imposition of the will of the group; like Hank, in the course of the film his belief that the maintenance of this order is possible is undermined.

Archetypal themes

Fathers, sons and the Law

Ed has succeeded his father in the job of sheriff; again the film is exploring the inheritance of the Law of the Father, literalised here in the role of the law man, and doing so from the point of view of the son – but the son as he himself is reaching old age. So we wonder throughout the film, whether it is really that America has changed or whether it is simply that Ed Tom has grown old; whether we are simply experiencing the truth that when men grow old the country is no longer their own and they can no longer truly be themselves.

Moss, in the mean time, is prepared to break the law in order to get what he needs to establish and protect his family life; he wants the money so that he and his wife, who is expecting his child, can move out of their trailer and make a new start as a family. Although he is prepared to become a criminal, therefore, he is operating within a recognisable moral order, one that Ed Tom and his father would both recognise: he is struggling to take on the American man’s honoured role as protector and benefactor of the family. But he finds that post-Vietnam America is no longer a nation that affords and enables a man to take on that identity.

Women, wives and mothers

There is no Det. Emily Sanders in this movie; Ed Tom Bell confronts Chirurgh alone. The women in the film – Ed Tom’s wife, Llewellyn’s wife and her mother – support their men, try to understand them but ultimately represent a terrible vulnerability, the powerlessness that Ed Tom and his law enforcement is intended to suppress but which is encroaching on his consciousness. They are the weakness that the archetypal American male identity has hitherto succeeded in denying and projecting elsewhere but which Chirurgh remorselessly brings home.

Violence and order

In the course of the film Ed Tom Bell is confronted with a violence he at first believes he understands but subsequently shocks him with its total absence of moral reasoning. Chirurgh kills not only because he must to achieve his aim, but because he can choose to do so, and choose on a whim – literally the toss of a coin. He is the Id, desire without control and (so) without meaning. Ed Tom Bell has lived his life by the law, the law of his father and, psychoanalytically, this is the Law of the Father, the necessity of controlling and directing desire in order to relate to others and develop as a man. Chirurgh defies the meaning and order that shapes Ed Tom’s experience as a social man, the order on which his identity and his nation’s identity relies. Bell is powerless against Chirirgh’s flat denial of meaning and the law:

‘The crime you see you now, it’s hard even to take its measure. It’s not that I’m afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job – not to be glorious. But I don’t want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don’t understand. You can say it’s my job to fight it but I don’t know what it is any more. More than that I don’t want to know. A man would have to put his soul at hazard.’

If it possible that people can behave like Chirurgh the basic truths that Bell has lived by are undermined; more than that, they lose meaning . If the code Bell has lived by has no meaning, what has his life meant and been for?

Borders and safety

Like In the Valley of Elah and There Will be Blood, NCFOM takes place in liminal territory at the boundary between the nation and the outside world. Chirurgh comes from over the border; he represents transgression intruding from outside, threatening the believed-in inviolability of protected internal space – neither the state nor the Self is safe from others and the Other, however strong and unassailable they feel on the inside.

Foreign war

The themes of violence, order and national/masculine identity come together in the largely unspoken presence of the Vietnam war, the fact of it hovering just outside the narrative field of vision throughout the film. Llewellyn Moss is a Vietnam vet; the war represents for him, and for the psychology of the nation, a kind of rupture which has allowed in difficult experiences and feelings of moral failure, uncertainty and a sudden absence of forward momentum. The nation and the man do not know whether they have failed or whether they have been failed; nor whether recovery and progress are possible. Moss the hunter is Chirurgh’s prey; he, the American man in the prime of life, war veteran and soon to be father, is victim of the amoral violent will to power that has been somehow allowed in by, or has broken into, the national space.

The parallel we are invited to draw is clear: foreign wars that fail in fact or in moral compass do violence to the character of the nation and to the strength and honour of its men; they undermine the ability of the American man to perform his archetypal role. Violence that occurs on foreign soil nonetheless break the hygiene seal around the national identity and the masculine identity that is coterminous with it.

The dream

The pivotal scene for the meaning of the film is the last one, Tommy Lee Jones’ much-discussed final speech about his dreams of his father. The notion of the dream is a rich one and of course directly references the galvanising and purifying symbol of the American Dream. Encompassed in this archetypal concept is the sense of the ideal that motivates us, the shared national ideal and the values and aspirations of our fathers; but also the sense of unattainability and possible falsity. What are we therefore to make of Ed Tom’s dreams? One suggests the loss of something valuable he/we were entrusted with by his/our father(s) (‘he gave me some money and I think I lost it’). But the next, about his father leading him over a cold, dark mountain pass with the promise of warming fire and their being reunited – is this showing the hopeless impossibility that, in death, Ed Tom will be reunited with his father and the truth and certainty of the values he passed onto his son? If so, if the dreams and beliefs by and for which we have lived are false, who are we? Or is dreaming our contact with the truth?

'He gave me some money but I think I lost it' #2

2009-04-17T08:59:00.004+01:00

In the Valley of Elah: 2007, Warner Bros.

This is part of a longer thunky-think about three US films that came out in the same year: In the Valley of Elah, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. My last post was a little intro; this time it's a fairly hefty digression on In the Valley of Elah. The intro is here; to cut to the chase, in essence I think these three films all engage with an overlapping set of archetypal figures and patterns and each constellates them slightly differently; between the three there's not only therefore an interesting compare-and-contrast but a composite or collage picture of what it might feel like to be an American man right now (at least, the kind of maerican man who works in the movie industry...).

The plot

INTVOE follows retired military cop Hank Deerfield (played by Tommy Lee Jones) as he tries to uncover the truth of his son’s disappearance and violent death near his military base in New Mexico. Having followed Hank into the military, Mike had just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. Hank’s personal code of honour is closely bound to the military and its meanings, and thereby to the national identity itself; in the course of the film he, and we, are challenged to consider whether those beliefs were misplaced from the beginning, or whether they have been betrayed by the nation they have both served – indeed that all three have served, as Hank’s other son, Mike’s brother, was killed in action before the action of the movie takes place. Hank’s investigation is assisted by Detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron) a civilian cop fighting misogyny at work and raising her son alone.

Archetypal themes

Violence and the warrior

The narrative and experience of both father and son is seen from the father’s perspective. Hank and his sons, in their devotion to their military careers, are taking on the role of channel and agent for the containment and use of violence as a means to ensure moral order and national selfhood. Violence is an intrinsic element of the human condition and necessary function of the state (already there is therefore a parallel between the character of the individual and that of the nation); the army is one of the means by which it is used and contained so as to limit the damage to, and serve the interests of, the wider group. This vocation is underpinned for Hank by a belief system that honours and values physical hardship, emotional control, personal integrity and an ethic of service (discipline and obedience), and these are the qualities in which he grounds a highly valued ideal of masculine identity. The Warrior archetype is a rich and familiar one, often associated with high ideals and crusades – and the shadow side that goes with them, often connected to the cause the Warrior serves. This is the ideal Hank instils in his sons, the baggage they inherit from him – Mike literally uses his father’s kitbag instead of his new Army issue bag when he goes on active service.

Law and order

The violence Hank encounters in the film is shocking to him, directed as it is not against enemy combatants (legitimate targets for organised violence within the law) but civilians and fellow soldiers; violence perpetrated by and upon the son(s). This is violence without moral meaning to him, transgressive of the values that made acceptable the existence of the military and indeed made its men models of masculine honour -warriors rather than terrorists. The transgression comes not from outside the system, however; it is in following orders on active duty that transgression is initially committed. This corruption can’t be contained, whatever the leaders of the nation believe. The lawlessness of the lawful system cannot then be confined to land across the border and enacted only upon the Other; it is brought home, to New Mexico, and enacted in American towns by American boys against each other. If the system becomes morally corrupted, in other words, it also ceases to operate effectively as a system. What is the difference between the violence Hank’s beliefs permit and that he rejects? Possibly a central conviction of the value of human life and the equal value of all lives; if we train young men to regard some lives as worthless, or at least worth less than their own, how can we prevent them exercising that judgement for themselves instead of solely as directed by the state?

It is not, I think, that the corruption of the individual in this film symbolises the corruption of the nation, or vice versa; nor is there a causal link being exposed. As in the other films, these are archetypal principles that play out in the internal world of the individual in parallel process with the life of the state, literalised both in the forms of national institutions and in individual behaviours.

Christian archetypes

For Hank this is not only a personal crisis (what has the father perpetrated on his sons?) but a crisis of faith in the American ideal: troops in Iraq are following the orders of the state they serve, and it is the loss of that state’s moral compass that makes them both criminals free of any moral code and victims of a loss of honour and humanity. The Warrior fights for a cause, and if that cause is corrupted so is the Warrior’s identity. And there is a specific religious character to the expression of these archetypal forms: Hank’s personal founding narrative is the struggle of David and Goliath, honourable combat (for Middle Eastern territory, appropriately enough) in which ingenuity and moral character can defeat brute strength and the forces of destruction.

To the viewer, of course, it seems perverse to for him to identify with David when the US is the globe’s Goliath. We are supposed to notice this and also at the same to recognise that Hank Deerfield is a David struggling with the unresponsive horror of the US military Goliath. But perhaps the Old Testament narrative we are also involved in is of Abraham and Isaac: another story of violence between strong and weak in which God has taken sides and which is personalised to fathers and sons. For Hank and Mike Deerfield the voice of God has not been heard in time and the slaughter of the son is committed. This is the guilt crisis of fathers who send their sons to war and it is an acute challenge about the relationship between violence and righteousness for a nation at war.

The explicit Christian character of these archetypal themes expands and deepens their resonance: not only do the Old Testament texts provide mythic fathers and sons and warriors to set against the characters in the film but it provides the fathers with a Father. In a famous dream interpretation, Jung drew a parallel between the relationship with the personal father and the relationship with God; the former is the literalisation of a spiritual reality articulated by the latter. With this in mind Hank is struggling with himself as a father, with his nation, with his faith and with his sense of self as he negotiates the distance between his beliefs, his actions and the reality in the course of the film.

The Other and the Self

Here as in the other films there is an anxiety about the idea of national borders, about the exclusion of disruption and difference, protecting an internal order and meaning that is figurative as well as literal. Moral corruption is enacted in Iraq but then more worryingly at home; illegitimate violence is initially directed ‘safely’ towards Iraqis but then escapes control and makes victims of fellow Americans; violence is enacted towards others apparently without consequence but then helplessly enacted upon the self, in suicide; violence is a job done outside the family that nonetheless ultimately destroys it. The Other is, then, the foreigner at whom violence can legitimately and illegitimately be directed and abroad is the space in which it can be exercised (warfare is prosecuted on foreign soil). But the foreigner is also the reflector of American values and agent of self realisation, perhaps particularly in the figure of the immigrant raising the American flag who appears at the beginning and end of the film and the belief that aggression can be kept ‘outside’ is one of the central falsities exposed in the film.

Women and mothers…

There are more women in this film than the other two. Emily Sanders is, like Hank, an agent of order, enforcing the law – in parallel with Hank’s uncovering of the corruption of the masculine/warrior/national idea of morally ordered violence and progress, Sanders’ femaleness troubles the proximate masculine system of policing and justice. She is ostracised by her colleagues not only for being a woman but for being a woman with a sex life; she is given cases of missing and errant dogs to deal with because she can’t or shouldn’t be a law enforcer. What is it that is so dangerous about making this vocation woman’s work? It is partly a problem of identity theft: if she can be like that, how can I define myself as different? But it is also possibly to do with knowing too much: like Tiresias she knows both the masculine system of control (men controlling the violence of other men) and also the feminine space that is created as the sphere to be protected from this system. She is supposed to be what men go home to in order to escape themselves and to give their activities meaning, in other words; by intruding into the masculine system she troubles the distinction between perpetrator and victim, protector and protected. This is referenced in the case of the woman who comes to the police for help, is turned away and becomes the victim of domestic violence. Sanders was acting too much in the masculine system when she rejected the woman and not enough with women’s knowledge. It’s worth noting that, unusually, Sanders is seen to experience violence in the course of her duties as the men do, underlining the questions the film raises about the relationship between and law- and nation-making, and what the introduction of women into that system enables and problematises.

There is also an interesting comparison to be made between Sanders and Joan Deerfield (Susan Sarandon), who represents that more conventionally feminine domestic sphere and expresses to us the effects within it of the system Hank and his sons have served and upheld. The mother of two dead sons, excluded from the reasoning and prosecution of their vocation, she takes and age-old and archetypal position of the grieving mother, a figure largely denied by Hank’s (presumably) Protestant Christianity but nonetheless unexcludable from cultural expression. When moral order is in effect, she stands for what is being protected: internal (domestic) comfort and peace, a safe lack of agency. When that order is disrupted she is the powerless victim and helpless rebel:

[Hank and Joan on the phone]

Hank: Mike was the one who wanted to join, I sure as hell didn’t encourage it!

Joan: Like he could ever have felt like a man if he hadn’t gone. Both my boys, Hank. You could have left me one.

Hank: Joan? Joan, please. Joan, I can’t listen to you cry.

Joan: Then don’t.

[hangs up]

In a different manner than Emily Sanders, therefore, she exposes the myth of a masculine identity founded on the separation from and protection of women and could be read politically as a statement against the denial of the feminine by the masculine – the now-conventional assertion, in other words, that the exclusion and domination of women culturally and politically correlates directly to levels of violence and warfare and that this can apply also to the individual, that a man must be in touch with his ‘feminine side’ to be a balanced human being. Whether and how a woman should be more in touch with her ‘masculine side’ is in general less often and less clearly discussed, which is why there is perhaps a cathartic relief in seeing Charlize Theron not only get punched in the face but then get up afterwards and get on with her work.

…And men and fathers

It also the women in the film that enable us to see Hank as a father, not only in the conversation with Joan above but in his interaction with Sanders’ son David and his telling of David and Goliath, which he concludes as follows:

Hank: First thing David had to fight was his own fear. He beat that, he beat Goliath. Cause when Goliath charged, David just planted his feet, took aim, and waited. You know how much nerve that took? A few more steps and Goliath would have crushed him. And the he threw the rock. That’s how you fight monsters. Lure ‘em close to you, look ‘em in the eye and smack ‘em down.

David: You fight a lot of monsters?

Hank: Sure

David: You win?

Hank: If I didn’t, I would have been crushed, right?

David sees the logic, nods.

Hank: Ok then. You go to sleep.

They’re good principles to teach a child: managing your own fear, being sure of your own convictions and using honour even in aggression. No wonder that after that, David feels able to have his bedroom door closed and the room in darkness. At least for a few minutes, until he asks his mother to open it again, just not so much as usual. It’s a small and humorous scene that shows the truth of the partiality of the conventional fathering perspective – and to some extent the partiality of the mother’s view too.

It also prompts us to consider the Law of the Father in a text that is so concerned with the role of the father in imposing systems, and the function of those systems in determining male identity. The psychoanalytic notion of the Law of father expresses the role of the Father (often but not always the personal father) in prohibiting the infant’s desire for the Mother. The Law of the Father is then in more general terms to with the repression and redirection of desire and the necessary separation from the Mother as part of the infant’s development. Hank’s masculine ideal demands a rigorous separation between mother and child that, too late, he and Joan are forced to regret.

Next time: No Country for Old Men (2007, Miramax/Paramount)

‘He gave me some money and I think I lost it.’

2009-04-08T20:09:00.000+01:00

In the Valley of Elah: 2007, Warner Bros
No Country for Old Men: 2007, Miramax/Paramount
There Will be Blood: 2007, Paramount Vantage/Miramax

A digression in three (or possibly four) parts

Carl and I were very interested in these three films, which all appeared within the year. Because I wanted to talk about the three of them together this whole thing is gigantically long and I’m splitting it up a bit and will post it over a few weeks. Try to manage your excitement in the mean time and remember what Dr Freud told us about delayed gratification being the best kind (or at least the most useful) (or at least the most socially acceptable).

Needless to say there is an element of spoilerage in what follows so if you don’t want to know the score, look away for, well, the entirety of this discussion.

So here’s a short intro.

The set-up

These three films lend themselves to being considered as a trio. All American, they also all came out in 2007 and, to my mind, are all preoccupied with the constellation of a particular series of archetypes associated with masculinity, belief and nationhood. The films discuss fathers and sons, hardship, sacrifice, success and belief; and the current state of the nation. Iraq is relevant not centrally but as the unspoken problem that is troubling all these values – even though two of the movies are set in the past. It irrupts symbolically in the continuing central theme of morally unreasoned violence, much of it perpetrated in desert landscapes and border country – uncontained or illegitimate violence that intrudes into liminal physical space, that betrays or corrupts systems of moral order. Two of the films star Tommy Lee Jones; all three attracted Oscar nominations and were critically much-discussed.

The archetypes animating the movies are familiar both as themes in American popular culture (fathers and sons, the national identity) and tropes of American discourse (discussion of what it is and should be to be American, Christian faith and the Bible, America as a nation of God, the relationship with the land and its resources, the border and the frontier, the foreigner, the law and oil). They all suggest deep-seated unease about what kind of a man you are if you are an American man; what kind of person you are if you are a man; what kind of a father you are and what kind of father you had.

Each of the three provides a different perspective on the current state of American masculine identity and of the nation, not because one symbolises or is the cause of the other but because, in these cultural expressions, they are coterminous values.

Next time: In the Valley of Elah.

Black Narcissus: a guide to management for senior women

2009-02-23T20:38:00.005Z

Carl doesn't usually trespass into the world of organisational psychology, but we made an exception for Black Narcissus...

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s 1947 film about a group of nuns establishing a convent in a remote Himalayan community is remarkable for many things, including its chiefly female cast and focus on women’s relationships in the workplace. Using the leadership of Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) as a model, this article seeks to distill the management approach exemplified by the sisters of the Order of St Faith, to the general edification of women occupying senior positions in the modern corporate world.

Find a medium gauge bamboo cane. Insert it (anally) until the tip lodges just behind your larynx. This will initially feel uncomfortable but you will get used to it in time; indeed it will come to stand for everything that is distinct about your management style.

If at all possible, establish your business in a disused brothel.

Selecting your management team is crucial to the success of your enterprise. Appoint one large, butch woman who will do all the work. Ignore her. Appoint also a raging fool, an introverted vegetable gardener and a woman on the verge of psychotic collapse.

These last two appointees will have complex inner lives. Under no circumstances should you acknowledge this. If you find yourself tempted to offer compassion or insight, focus instead on the feeling of the bamboo cane prodding your voicebox.

When distributing tasks, ensure that the most unstable woman in your team has the regular task of heaving a heavy object to and fro over a precipitous drop.

Wearing lipstick is a sign of mental instability. Treat it as such.

Men are a complicating factor in the workplace and should be avoided if possible, apart from help with plumbing and restless natives. Their behaviour can be sexually confusing: men who wear short shorts, jewellery, perfume and fur coats may nonetheless be heterosexual and commensurately troublesome. Fortunately they will be unable to prevent themselves calling you 'old girl' at which point they become far easier to resist.

You believe that people from ethnic minorities are like children. By this you mean very, very stupid. If necessary you can distract them with potassium permanganate. Successful men from ethnic minorities will wear a lot of jewellery, fur and loud colours. They are not necessarily gangsters.

A large man on a tiny pony is not funny. Here again the bamboo cane is a useful way to prevent inappropriate feelings of amusement or warmth.

How alone you really are

2008-08-30T09:00:00.002+01:00

The Dark Knight (2008): written by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan; directed by Christopher Nolan

NB. SPOILER ALERT – if you don't want to know what happens, don't under any circs read the last bit about Anima.

It may not be a surprise to you that Carl and I were very excited about The Dark Knight, given how much we loved Batman Begins. I don't know that we could say which we preferred, though if you ask Carl he just goes on and on about the Bat Bike so I guess that's the clincher for the dead white Austrian demographic. But here, for what it's worth, is our take on TDK and in particular, That Performance.

The Mask

The Batman franchise has made extensive use of the symbol/idea/motif of the mask. It's a cliché of modern emotional discourse that we wear masks – the only thing you're more likely to be irritatingly told by some floaty-scarfed twit is that you have low self esteem and you need to love yourself.

The first instalment of the Nolan-era Batman introduced the possibility that the distinction between a 'true' self and the mask could be blurred. As Anima, Rachel (Katie Holmes) had the job of pointing out to the love-lorn Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) that despite assuming his alter (false) ego through choice and with conscious purpose the distinction between the man and the bat was not as clear as he would like to think – the boundary between the interior truth and exterior presentation was itself a fantasy of separating from the unwanted at the same time as living the denied desire. By the end of the film Bruce Wayne's struggle to know himself has generated only performed identities, the playboy and super hero – each concealment intended to distract from the other and the ego trapped somewhere amid the struggle.

In The Dark Knight we are offered an apparent alternative. Harvey Dent's whole schtick is that he is who he is all the way through – whichever way you turn him you get the same face, unmasked. Ostentatiously heroic and with a democratic mandate that stands for his wholeness and integration (he relates to the whole city, with Gotham standing for the psyche), it is no surprise that Rachel (now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal) is all over him – Anima, after all, has been standing for the need for the ego to relate to all the persons of the psyche instead of hiding purpose and identity through subterfuge.

In the character of Dent that Bruce Wayne sees the possibility of escape from his entrapment in false identity and masking and so of greater unity with Anima – by manipulating the rise of Dent (Aaron Eckhart), Batman can be retired; the ego can express the heroic archetype in a more open and related way that means he gets the girl. The shadowy existence, the masking are no longer necessary.

There is, to my mind, something sinister about being all front and no behind, all heads and no tails; and Dent, despite his lucky prince looks and charm, is both prattish and sinister. At an intuitive level we know that everything must carry its shadow. If you see a creature with no shadow our fur begins to prickle. Dent's purity is also ruthlessness, his lack of complication means lack of empathy and so compassion. Bruce Wayne may not want to have to wrestle with the Shadow but without it the Hero is more subtly unsettling.

The Joker

But The Dark Knight problematises these questions of truth and concealment and Heroes in a new way through the figure of the Joker, played by Heath Ledger -as if you didn't know.

The Trickster is a familiar archetype, and one whose frightening and chaotic characteristics can be too easily overlooked – indeed it is the nature of the archetype itself that motley and conjuring disguise more troubling content.

In this instance the Joker surfaces perhaps the most terrifying possibility inherent in the notion of the mask: what if there is nothing underneath? In TDK we never see the Joker without his make up; we do not learn his name or his personal history; he elaborates serial stories about himself underpinned by no truth, no meaning, no personal narrative. He is the same at the end of the film as at the beginning; he is trapped outside time and change. His cohort comprises the paranoid, the delusional, the schizophrenic, he is the master of meaningless madness in its most alienated and frightening form.

This is the terrible chaos and fear that the masks both of Batman and Two Face are intended to control and subdue. Even as a supervillain Harvey is concerned with the ongoing imposition of order, through justice and revenge. Batman is driven by the need to impose and control moral structure. One may be a grotesque reflection of the other, but they are both standing for the ego's attempt, by production of identity after identity, to contain anarchy, meaninglessness, emptiness.

Even worse, though, is the suggestion is that it is the Joker who creates and controls the masked figures and their elaborate concealing identities: we are determined by our most unconscious, unknown and denied absences. 'I think you and I will be doing this forever' the Joker observes to Batman with amusement, as he hangs upside down in a parody of the bat's pose. The Joker creates Harvey Dent; he is driven by the need to unmask Batman or to keep him unknown. We may come to unravel and expose to ourselves the deceit of our created selves; do we have the courage to consider that we have been driven to do so not to deny our internal chaos and void but by the manipulations of that same unknown reality? Our fantasies of a terrible truth about ourselves that we must mask are themselves a refusal to acknowledge a terrible absence of truth and of self.

For me, the troubling and troublesome writer of the archetypal, chaotic absence that has been articulated by Heath Ledger's joker is Jacques Lacan. Yes, I know, heavy sigh. But he indicates to us, more than Freud or Jung were able to, not only our division from ourselves but the possibility of a hole, a gap at the heart of what we think of as ourselves, a gap that everything else about us is an attempt to heal and conceal.

Fortunately The Dark Knight is a good deal more fun than anything Lacan ever wrote, and much less like hard work.

Postscript: Anima

SPOILER ALERT

It wouldn't be me if I didn't have something to say about this. As a character, Rachel is difficult to regret. She's boring and she's sanctimonious and she went for the wrong guy. And archetypally it may not be a bad thing she's gone; the relationship with the ego had become stuck – they couldn't be together but she would always be waiting, and judging. Perhaps she is a version of the Anima belonging to a child in thrall to his god-like father (see Batman Begins) rather than the ego-reflection of an adult. Anima can shape shift like Doctor Who and by returning in another form, like the regenerated Doctor she permits new possibilities. So let's hope there's another one, let's hope it's Nolan and Bale, and let's hope there's some snogging.

Children of Men: a feelgood movie

2008-04-06T17:10:00.002+01:00

Children of Men, (2006): written by Alfonso Cuaron and Timothy J Sexton, directed by Alfonso Cuaron

What better way for Carl and I to cheer ourselves up on a cold, rainy March day than to re-watch dystopian future fertility disaster flick Children of Men? Based on a starchy novella by PD James it abandons her Daily Mail-flavoured vision of a society in collapse (property prices plummet and anyone can go to university) ,along with her heavy-handed nativity allegory (baby born to a virgin in a shed, yes honestly), for full-blown, twenty-first century, detention-camp-and-terrorist horror. Indeed the film’s as compelling for the nightmarish Britain its characters inhabit, cleverly reminiscent of rolling Sky coverage of a civil war, as it is for the central plot about the survival of a girl and, most importantly, of her baby.

As archetypes go the Child, or Puer, is one of the classics; one might call it the archetypal archetype, though Carl didn’t seem to think that was funny when it tried it out on him earlier. The Child archetype has miraculous properties, connoting and causing the disruption of the usual by the supernatural, the remarkable; it connects the spiritual with the temporal, the quotidian with the transcendent. Cf Christ, the child prodigy, those fat little putti all over Italy in the Renaissance. Cf, in fact, pretty much any baby, depending on how you feel about babies of course but also bearing in mind that we were all one once. Very new infants provoke awe and fear (and boredom, true); we handle them often as though they are tiny, ancient icons taken from the most sacred niche (don’t be rude). This adult, conscious response to the brand-new, aged-seeming newborn and the archetype it literalises is shown to dramatic effect towards the end of Children of Men, when the baby is ushered through the midst of a battle between rioting refugees and armed militia. This child, as in PD James’s book and the Greatest Story that she was revisiting, brings hope and salvation unexpectedly and apparently miraculously.

The overt horror of the world we witness in Children of Men, the world without children, is the shell that remains when this miraculous link with the transcendent is lost. In practical terms the loss of children has meant economic collapse, which in turn has triggered civil unrest that is turning to anarchy. But what is also lost is a relationship that in a religious context would be with God; in this humanist movie it is a relationship with what could be termed the spiritual part of ourselves, the element of humanity that lifts us beyond, and out of, a grim animal struggle for survival not only as individuals but collectively. The element that has enabled us to create culture and beauty as well as squalor and cruelty. This, the film suggests, is not so much what makes us human as what makes humanity and being a human worthwhile. Kee and her miracle baby, representing the restoration of progress towards a future, are being taken to safety with an obscure organisation known as the Human Project, and they are getting there on a ship called Tomorrow. The Puer is the essential but miraculous part of ourselves that enables humanity to progress through time, to learn, to build, to be more than animals.

As with actual children, of course, there is another facet to the Child; their eeriness, so successfully played on by the creepy kid familiar from horror films. The Child comes from whatever there is before consciousness and life, and therefore seems to hover between this world and death or the beyond - the liminality characterises children in the films of Guillermo del Toro, for example. And in ordinary life people who operate close to the Puer archetype are far from being innocent creatures of light; Jung referred to the archetype in full as the puer aeternus, and how wearying is an eternal child: brilliant, gifted, scintillating company, unreliable, needy and incapable of engaging with life in an ordinary, prosaic way. The kind of people who borrow money to buy scratch cards and live on their friends’ floors and you only realise you mind when they've already gone.

But that’s for another time; it’s not where CoM is taking us. It is a film that, through the metaphor and archetype of the Child, shows us our own best and worst possibilities. We have all been babies and we could all be terrorists.

Carl says: the divine child Messias… is the mediator, the symbol of a new attitude in which the opposites are united… heralding the rebirth and restitution… of all that is lost.

Aren't you worried he'll steal your tricks?

2007-12-06T11:49:00.000Z

The Prestige, (2006): written by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, directed by Christopher Nolan.

The point of this film is the twist, so if you haven’t seen it and might want to, don’t read any further. It would ruin the whole thing for you and I’m just too nice to allow that to happen.

Perhaps, if you’re going to have to have a sibling, an identical twin would be the best sort to choose. A sibling that is exactly the same as you and arrives at almost exactly the same time (though the question of who’s oldest is nonetheless important for many twins) might minimise the horror of the fact that you can be replaced. To a child the sibling means the end of uniqueness, the possibility of being loved less or not at all, being succeeded and even usurped. If they have another one like me, will they still want me? Indeed, who is me if there is another one? The sibling, real or fantasised, brings the critical experience of loss – loss of an original sense of self that is, hopefully, then followed by a conviction in the self that cannot be threatened by the existence or proximity of others. In psychoanalysis loss is always the shorthand for death, or vice versa; and in this sense the identical twin, in fantasy, is the denial of death.

In Juliet Mitchell’s book Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge: Polity Press, October 2003), which offers a Freudian model that recognises the role of siblings as well as of parents, she draws out a connection between our sibling relationships and the most fundamental human drives – love, fear, violence. All children, she argues, fear to be ‘dethroned’ by a successor, whether or not that successor appears; the resolution of sibling relationships, even where the sibling is only a possibility, means a tangling with love and hate, through rivalry, competition and identification, that determines our relationship to peers and to otherness that we carry with us through our adult lives. This is in distinction to the vertical and hierarchical relationships we establish with our parents. The brother or sister is both similar to and different from us. With our brothers and sisters we can experience, even at the same time, the ‘ecstasy of loving one who is like oneself’ and the trauma of being destroyed by a usurper.

Mitchell argues that a failure to resolve this intense entanglement results in adult hysteria that can be characterised, among many other things, as a mode relying heavily on masquerade. It’s an interesting landscape within which to view The Prestige, a film that revolves around sibling relationships and lifelong masquerades.

The two central relationships of the film are between identical twins, Alfred Bordman and Bernard Fallon (Christian Bale), a relationship that is itself only revealed at the plot denouement, and between their shared identity as Bordman and the hated rival Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman). Bordman and Angier compete for everything that is important to them: love, success, recognition, superior creativity. In contrast, the twins use two masqueraded identities, as the illusionist and his ingeneur, to share the success and the sex life of one man. They refuse, in other words, their difference; their otherness is sent outside the relationship. This refusal of the death of the unique self, the denial of the possibility of losing love, identity – the only child’s refusal – is destroyed by the literal death of one of them. Only by the destruction of one sibling do they become two brothers, where before they occupied the same space.

The otherness of the sibling that is deposited outside this fantasy twin relationship is played out here in the relationship between Bordman and Angier. Theirs is a connection dominated entirely by competition, jealousy, violent destruction and theft; and, more than that, the deep and frightening sense that the existence of the other threatens and destabilises the whole self. This is the sibling problem in melodramatic, grotesque form: the rival must not only be overcome but subjugated, destroyed and all he has must be taken (back).

Angier too is a created self intended to allow more possibility than can be incorporated in one identity but without the threat of relationship with another. It is because the existence of the brother/rival Bordman is so unacceptable that Lord Caldlow has to recreate himself as Angier to compete with and ultimately replace him. Caldlow’s is the fantasy that if we can emulate our siblings well enough we can replace and eradicate them – the violent fantasy underlying adoration of the brother or sister. His denial of the sibling is if anything more extreme than Bordman’s; he manages to create not an identical twin but a clone, he manages to replicate himself and eradicate all difference. It is a fantasy that ultimately turns inward as the distinctions between these real and fantasised identities collapses and he is caught in a perpetual cycle of fratricide and suicide.

For both Angier and Bordman the refusal to resolve the sibling relationship causes a crisis of selfhood. It precludes the acceptance of the true position of the self as being one among others. The film’s central metaphor is the trick and for both of them the real trick is sleight of hand about one’s own sameness/difference – a trick that cannot finally stave off, and indeed precipitates, self destruction.

The sibling is necessary to our progress as individuals. Neither Angier nor Bordman would succeed without the other; each is driven by the existence of the other but also but also enabled by his own narcissistic creation of an identical self. The Prestige is a film about failing to accept the existence of the other, about how this can drive great success and achievement through hysterical denial; and about the impossibility of this as an attempt to deny the principle of death. But it also holds up to us the possible truths that could underlie our own apparently helpful ambitions, identifications and friendships. For Bordman and Angier the hysterical muddle becomes so severe that there is no clear separation between the death of the brother and the death of the self; between suicide and the murder of a clone. The sibling relationship drives endlessly our articulations of the question ‘who am I? And who are you?’

Juliet says: The resolution of fraternal love and hate would seem to underlie whom we may and may not kill.

Bitch is Hardcore

2007-08-13T20:45:00.000+01:00

Slither (2006): written and directed by James Gunn

WARNING: THIS A SPOILER-ATHON. If you really can’t guess what happens in alien zombie movies, don’t read this before seeing the film. Also, familiarise yourself with the rules of genre and narrative structure. The world will seem a less frightening and unpredictable place.

I’m no aficionado of B movie horror but, as you can imagine, Carl’s quite up for it and especially if the horrific is introduced by anything extra terrestrial (ersatz Catholic hokum, on the other hand, makes him really quite irritable. There was no talking to him after that thing with Tilda Swinton as an angel). So he was well up for Slither and I’m glad I let him talk me into it – and not just because of Nathan Fillion. But significantly because of Nathan Fillion, to be fair.

The central horror motif of the movie is a kind of alien rape, in which two tubes are inserted into the abdomen of the writhing victim so that something unspeakable can be pumped in and s/he is transformed into a vast, swollen womb. This subsequently explodes in a shower of squeaking and speedy slugs that crawl into people’s mouths and become parasites, killing their victims and turning them into the usual (conveniently slow-footed) zombies. Already this is ticking a lot of the required boxes of the genre, and we haven’t got to the teenage girl in the bath or the suburban family zombie sequences yet.

This is already likeable enough, but what interested me is the particular complexion of the conventional relationship with the feminine at the centre of the film. There is always a sexy blonde in a horror movie, and post-Buffy she’s allowed to fire guns, stab zombies in the throat and then give them a good kicking. She also always the vehicle for the anima relationship dynamic, and so it is here. Starla Grant, a Hitchcock-ish classy blonde in pencil skirts and tight cardies, teaches biology at the high school in the run down backwoods town of Wheelsy. The product of a poor and broken home, she has married a rich but fairly repulsive older man, Grant Grant (yes really – scriptwriters clearly ran out of coffee at a critical moment) to escape her lot, but hunky local sheriff Bill (Fillion) still holds a torch for his high school sweetheart. Both men love her and neither feels worthy of her; one of the engaging elements of the film is the genuine pain of the increasingly monstrous Grant as he wrestles with his love for his wife, his knowledge that she doesn’t truly love him but only feels pity, gratitude and loyalty, and his certain knowledge that, if allowed expression, his true nature would only horrify and corrupt her.

So, plot. Driven out of the house after yet another sexual rejection from Starla, Grant goes a local bar and picks up Starla’s alter ego, the dirty blonde Brenda who has, unlike Starla, always fancied him. They go into the woods but when Brenda jumps his bones the sexually frustrated Grant nonetheless rejects her out of love for and loyalty to his beautful young wife. In order to avoid further social embarrassment he goes poking about with a strange object that opens like a vulva (seriously, it’s a vulva) and ejaculates something spiky into his chest. Alien inserted, let mayhem commence.

For a while Grant struggles with the literal as well as a figural monster inside, trying with increasing desperation to protect his wife from the truth and from his violent desire (to shove to tubes into her abdomen and fill her with his little space slugs). Eventually he seeks out the grubbier Brenda, who is poor and a bad (single) mother and therefore presumably up for it with whichever million year old space parasite that happens to be passing. Who says they don’t have class war in the USA? They initiate what poor Brenda thinks is going to be regular old nice sex but it turns out Grant’s needs are far darker than that; he overcomes and penetrates her, watching her twitching body and she is pumped full of his space juice. The problem here is not that the psyche fears sexuality; it is that its own sexuality is so much, darker, more destructive and more violent than it should be.

Brenda and Grant disappear, their presence betrayed only by a trail of savaged animals. After a hunt by the local menfolk, led by hunky Bill, they are discovered deep in the woods (see previous posts and misty woods and the unconscious). Poor Brenda has turned into the parody of an American white trash woman, a vast, distended ball being fed piles of rotting food by her de-evolving lover preparatory to giving birth to her thousands and thousand of revolting offspring. Class war again. Anyway, the usual kinds of high jinks ensue and there are plenty of variations on the theme of women being attacked by disgusting penis-slugs that want to live inside them and destroy them, which is all as it should be. The particular thing it might be worth noting is that Grant has been, in a sense, right; if he had been able to enact his desire on his wife, he would have turned her into a monstrous, animal-like vessel and she in turn would give birth to his disgusting, bestial offspring. His is so horrifying a person that he could destroy his own anima if he allowed himself free rein.

This is, in other words, an animus position in which true relationship with the anima cannot be achieved because of an over-acute awareness of the darkness and deformity of the deepest self. True relationship, the fear is, would mean the loss even of the fragile, distant relationship that does exist, would mean seeing the horror you know in yourself reflected in the eyes of the one you love, and result in total rejection. This is a male psyche permanently divided from itself by a terror of its own darkness, a psyche that cannot create in love because knowledge of its own violence and ugliness seems insurmountable. All it could create is monstrous offspring that perpetuate the original furious destruction. A male psyche that cannot permit itself to love.

Starla would, it's apparent, be far better off with clear-skinned, clear-eyed sheriff Bill, who probably doesn’t nurse fantasies of two-tube rape and alien babies. Nonetheless, he is only another face of Grant; Bill too does not initiate a relationship with Starla because he doesn’t feel he can offer her what she deserves (wealth and security and all the uptight cardies she can buy). These are not alternatives for Anima to choose from; they are two aspects of the same psyche in which the dark has overcome the ego and rendered it powerless. It is only when Anima has confronted the darkness in the form of Jabba-like Grant (touchingly, surrounded by photos of his Earth-wife that he’s presumably spent ages trying to pin up with his great slimy tentacles), wounds him and, with Bill’s help, destroys him that she and Bill can set off into the sunset (dawn, in this case, as it happens). In other words, it’s only when the fullness of the darkness is expose to anima that the full relationship of animus and anima can be achieved and that darkness put in its right place. And anima herself in the process also develops, or at least is seen more fully; Starla is allowed finally to leave the ironed knitwear bheind and put on a leather jacket, stab things in the throat and generally prove the point that Bill makes to her earlier in the film: that she doesn’t need his protection because she’s entirely able to take care of herself. No pedestal needed.

Anyway, what can I say; I liked it and I suggest you watch it if you get the chance. And, because I’m nice, here’s a picture of Nathan Fillion.

Carl says: it costs [men] enormous difficulties to understand what the anima is. They accept her easily enough when she appears in novels or as a film star, but she is not understood at all when it comes to seeing the role she plays in their own lives, because she sums up everything that a man can never get the better of and never finishes coping with.

Thom says: When you were here before, Couldn't look you in the eye,You're just like an angel, Your skin makes me cry;You float like a feather,In a beautiful world,I wish I was special,You're so fuckin' special;But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo,What the hell am I doin' here?I don't belong here.
Creep (Radiohead: Pablo Honey (2003))

X Men III v2.0

2007-03-03T15:38:00.000Z

An old friend mentioned to me recently that he’d read my rant about X Men III (which was very gratifying, because I’m such a mong I have never been able to get the comments function on this blog to work and I didn’t know anyone was reading it). Anyway, the inflation to my ego was rapidly reversed when I realised that he had an intelligent question for me about it, and I’m not used to those, I usually need advance notice in writing.

Ian’s question was, is there not a point early on in the film when Magneto is not simply interested in controlling and exploiting Jean Gray, but instead is genuinely supportive of her more chaotic, subversive qualities?

Well, the first thing to say is that it’s ages since I saw X Men III and frankly I can’t remember much about it because my brain’s full of other things, like Britney’s breakdown and the new series of Battlestar Galactica. From what I recall, Magneto is attracted to her subversive, anarchic powers initially, until he realises the extent of her power.

And that made me realise that I’ve missed the whole archetypal point. X Men III is not (only)about difficulty with the feminine, it’s about difficulty with the ultimate Other, God. Jean has to be a woman because it represents the otherness, the unknowability, of God; and the central conflict of the film is between temporal structures of power that confer status, provide narrative cycles, and support the notions of progress and control that our epoch is so committed to – versus the atemporal, ineffable and transcendental qualities associated with divinity. Charles Xavier and Magneto are both furiously trying to deny and hold back a power from outside time and control and visibility and knowledge that can knock their plans awry, refute and destroy the systems of meaning (ideology, morality, order, goals, beliefs) that have enabled them to live their lives (consciously).

This interests me in all sorts of ways. The struggle with the idea of God preoccupies not only our society but our relationships with other societies also wrestling the same difficulties. Is a religious society a good or bad thing? Is God a fantasy that is no longer helpful to a more advanced age? Rebellion against God is a story as old as religion itself; for Christianity, at least, discussion of rebellion and submission is at the very core of the faith. X Men III expresses this archetypal struggle, the fury of the non believer in response to faith and religious practice.

So then in re reading Jung’s Answer to Job, I find that Jung related very closely the archetype of God and that of the unconscious (our own unknown, transcendent, subversive nature) and with the archetype of the Self. So another facet of this might be X Men III as the expression of the rebellion against, or struggle for power with, our own unconscious and the attempt to deny, contain or eradicate its power – the questionable motive for many analysands in the psychoanalytic process, I should think, and who can blame them. An intriguing light to cast on the more common notion of struggling with ourselves.

Clever Ian. Stupid me.

Please note: Clever Ian shown may not be actual Clever Ian.

Carl says: we cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities… Strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special content of it, namely the archetype of the self… We can arbitrarily postulate a difference between these two entities, but that does not help us at all. On the contrary it only helps us to separate man from God… Faith is certainly right when it impresses upon man’s mind and heart how infinitely far away and inaccessible God it; but it also teaches his nearness, his immediate presence…

X Men III v.2.0

2007-03-03T15:00:00.000Z

An old friend mentioned to me recently that he’d read my rant abut X Men III (which was very gratifying, because I’m such a mong I have never been able to get the comments function on this blog to work and I didn’t know anyone was reading it). Anyway, the inflation to my ego was rapidly reversed when I realised that he had an intelligent question for me about it, and I’m not used to those, I usually need advance notice in writing.

Ian’s question was, is there not a point early on in the film when Magneto is not simply interested in controlling and exploiting Jean Gray, but instead is genuinely supportive of her more chaotic, subversive qualities?

Well, the first thing to say is that it’s ages since I saw X Men III and frankly I can’t remember much about it because my brain’s full of other things, like Britney’s breakdown and the new series of Battlestar Galactica. From what I recall, Magneto is attracted to her subversive, anarchic powers initially, until he realises the extent of her power.

And that made me realise that I’ve missed the whole archetypal point. X Men III is not (only)about difficulty with the feminine, it’s about difficulty with the ultimate Other, God. Jean has to be a woman because it represents the otherness, the unknowability, of God; and the central conflict of the film is between temporal structures of power that confer status, provide narrative cycles, and support the notions of progress and control that our epoch is so committed to – versus the atemporal, ineffable and transcendental qualities associated with divinity. Charles Xavier and Magneto are both furiously trying to deny and hold back a power from outside time and control and visibility and knowledge that can knock their plans awry, refute and destroy the systems of meaning (ideology, morality, order, goals, beliefs) that have enabled them to live their lives (consciously).

This interests me in all sorts of ways. The struggle with the idea of God preoccupies not only our society but our relationships with other societies also wrestling the same difficulties. Is a religious society a good or bad thing? Is God a fantasy that is no longer helpful to a more advanced age? Rebellion against God is a story as old as religion itself; for Christianity, at least, discussion of rebellion and submission is at the very core of the faith. X Men III expresses this archetypal struggle, the fury of the non believer in response to faith and religious practice.

So then in re reading Jung’s Answer to Job, I find that Jung related very closely the archetype of God and that of the unconscious (our own unknown, transcendent, subversive nature) and with the archetype of the Self. So another facet of this might be X Men III as the expression of the rebellion against, or struggle for power with, our own unconscious and the attempt to deny, contain or eradicate its power – the questionable motive for many analysands in the psychoanalytic process, I should think, and who can blame them. An intriguing light to cast on the more common notion of struggling with ourselves.

Clever Ian. Stupid me.

Please note Clever Ian shown may not be actual Clever Ian.

Carl says: we cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities… Strictly speaking, the God-image does not coincide with the unconscious as such, but with a special content of it, namely the archetype of the self… We can arbitrarily postulate a difference between these two entities, but that does not help us at all. On the contrary it only helps us to separate man from God… Faith is certainly right when it impresses upon man’s mind and heart how infinitely far away and inaccessible God it; but it also teaches his nearness, his immediate presence…

Pan's Labyrinth

2006-12-30T12:01:00.000Z

Pan's Labyrinth (2006): written and directed by Guillermo del Toro

Pan’s Labyrinth is a complicated film and all I’ll attempt here is to try to indicate some of the things that interested me in it when I saw it. It’s also a great film and a very dark one (look away now if you don’t like little girls getting injured by bad men): and it’s a film that was shown in about three UK cinemas and then for only about a day and a half, so this isn’t the most accessible of my travails; but fuck it, it’s the turn of the year and the only other thing I’ve seen recently is Eragon, and that’s so bad it actually lowers your IQ to watch it. I’d just exhort you, if you get the chance and you feel up to a load of Franco-era violence, to see this movie. But also be aware that, in the last para or so of what follows, I’m going to mention what happens at the end. I’ve put that bit in purple in case you forget – but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Ofelia is a little girl taken, after her father’s death, to live with her pregnant mother and her stepfather somewhere in the wooded regions of Spain after Franco’s victory. So that’s one thing to love about it: you don’t get many evil stepfathers in fairy tales, and it seems to me there should be more of them. Her stepfather, Captain Vidal, commands a detachment of Franco’s troops keeping order in an apparently subdued local population. Ofelia, her mother increasingly ill in the last stages of pregnancy with the Captain’s son, is looked after more and more by Mercedes, a mysteriously beautiful, wise and unknowable housekeeper employed by the Captain at the mill where they all live and which he has sequestered as his HQ

On arrival in the woods, Ofelia is almost straight away drawn into the heart of an ancient labyrinth near the mill, where she meets an ancient faun. Apparently friendly, he tells Ofelia that she is the long lost daughter of the king of the underworld, and that to come into her inheritance as his princess she needs to complete three tasks. With her acceptance of these tasks begins Ofelia’s descent into darkness and violence: she struggles to complete the faun’s missions, to keep her mother and her baby brother alive and to evade the malignant machinations of her vicious stepfather; but as the anti Franco rebels draw nearer the mill and her mother’s health reaches a crisis, Ofelia simply can’t protect all the people she needs to, and especially not herself.

This is that rare thing: a story about the quest of the little girl. We know all about boys and wizards and swords; this is a film about the little girl’s quest to become a woman, or rather her decision about whether to accept that fate at all. Ofelia sees all too clearly what men do to women and what women become when they attain their biological inheritance. This is not as simple as becoming mothers; Mercedes, although maternal in a powerful way, has no children or partner.

I should be clear that this is not a film about women being victims and their lives thus being unlivable. Ofelia has a good deal of animosity towards men, and a fair chunk of that is repressed. As the death of Old Hamlet played out Hamlet’s hatred of his father, Ofelia too has fantasised her own father’s death and idealised him after the act. As for Hamlet, the stepfather provides a safe focus for the previously denied jealousy and resentment of the Father, who takes away the Mother; but for the little girl perhaps also turns the Mother into a love rival, so a double theft. So far, so Freudian; but Jung perhaps also reminds us of the wider, archetypal, associations of the Father. The Father (as opposed to the father, ie your own dad, who may or may not do this) can be the one who, rather than offering the protection of the Mother, insists on the introduction and eventually the initiation of the child into the world, with all its risks, ambiguities and difficulties. This began for Ofelia when her father died and the world became a more uncertain place; and whatever Captain Vidal’s psychotically cruel failings, he certainly shows Ofelia what kind of place the world can be, and causes her to find her own, more adult, resources in order to deal with it.

Hard to see this is a favour, though; for Ofelia, on the cusp of pubescence, men do not seem to offer much in the way of prospects. They die (her father); they steal her mother away, and they make her ill (Vidal), they kill her (her baby brother) and they spend the rest of the time creating a violent and divided society in which to try to live. They bring loss to women, loss of their autonomy, their control of their bodies and ultimately of their lives. To be a woman is to be in relationship with men and thus to know blood, fear, powerlessness, pain and death. To be an adult woman is to love those who hurt you, to sacrifice. This is enough, politically, to resonate with us; but for Jung this politically expression of divisions - within communities, between men and women, within families – is itself an archetypal articulation of the fear of union within the self. One of the ways in which he discussed the union of the elements of the Self is as an alchemical marriage. His description of this process, which results in the resolution and integration of unconscious contents and the birth of the individuated soul, is long and complicated and would take up far too much room here. But the useful thing is offers us in this context is a metaphor for the relationship between opposites in the psyche as the relationship between male and female. The alchemical metaphor also enables us to keep it in the family, as the king and queen in the alchemical marriage are brother and sister. Ofelia, in talking to her brother in the womb and trying to keep him alive, even though he is the product of a union between her mother and the hated Vidal, expresses her attempt to initiate the process of becoming fully herself.

One of the stages of the alchemical process is for the king and queen, having initially united, to descend to the underworld. Ofelia is therefore pursuing her quest to come into her kingdom with conscious and unconscious intentions. It’s not that the underworld provides an alternative to this awful reality: it’s dark, slimy, it is inhabited by terrifying (I mean it, really terrifying) monsters that want Ofelia dead. It’s not so different from the world above. But it offers her one thing life in the world cannot: the possibility of remaining a little girl, reunited with a ‘true’ father who mostly exists in the film only as an idea and who is buried at the darkest roots of her unconscious.

I’ve quacked on at length elsewhere about the feminine and woods and the unconscious, and of course an ancient labyrinth is also an ancient metaphor for the womb (Theseus and the minotaur being, among other things, a story about the fear of what a woman’s got inside her and where we came from). So no need for me to digress on Ofelia’s interest in returning to the womb (to the safety of being with her mother and her father, before she began to fantasise his death) but also an attempt to find the resources in herself to counter the life she is having to live. What’s interesting is that Ofelia doesn’t want to come back.

Ofelia’s quest, then is to be reunited with the Father, which means being a princess but also staying a little girl (she will not be the Queen). She is returning to a time when she was her father’s princess, when he had not left her and her mother unprotected. With him reinstated Ofelia can be a little girl again, no need to protect her mother and baby brother. It also returns her, in the language of psychoanalysis, to the time before the guilt at her own furious and jealous rage against him. It perhaps also has a spiritual dimension; Jung sets out an interesting case history to demonstrate the operation of archetypes in the unconscious, in which a woman patient, having brought a series of dreams about her father into analysis, realises that in fact they are dreams about God, in which God is being expressed through the figure of her personal father.

So let’s dwell for a sec on the idea of the Eternal Child. For Jung, the Puer Aeturnus was one of the most magical archetypal figures. The Puer represents the most miraculous, prodigious and transcendental possibilities of the human soul. Like the infant Christ the Puer connects the temporal with the eternal, representing the possibility of miraculous birth of new possibilities. People inhabited by the Puer are those annoying, delightful sorts who are apparently effortlessly good at things, charming and flakey as hell. They find it hard to accept the humdrum reality of life as she is generally lived, and drive those around them crazy with their rebellion against it, not least because the rest of us suspect that there’s a touch of arrogance underneath all that guileless sparkle.

Ofelia, in wanting to be reunited with God now instead of negotiating the grim, rocky path of time-trapped ordinary life, is expressing the refusal of the Eternal Child to have any truck with the trials if incarnation, life and death. The imminent arrival of a new brother turns this into a critical concern. Will the new brother take this role over from Ofelia? Juliet Mitchell’s absorbing book[1] about the significance sibling relationships for the development of the individual puts this movie in an interesting context. Among her arguments is that we understand ourselves as different in our relationship with our parents, and in particular the mother: she, through not only her sex but her generational difference, can give birth, and children cannot. But in comparison to our siblings, potential or actual, we realise that we are the same, replaceable; we are forced to view ourselves as one in a series. The brainy, resourceful Ofelia is her father’s little princess and her mother’s doughty defender. Usurped by the little prince, blood son of the new father, she will be made to turn into a woman, will be like her mother, not protected by her. In one sequence she opens her beloved book as, next door, her mother starts to miscarry. Blood spreads itself across the blank pages in the outline of a womb and ovaries and, horrified, Ofelia hears her mother begin to cry out in pain. No wonder Ofelia wants to stay a little girl, and her own kingdom in which to be hero.

Pan’s Labyrinth is, then, among many others things, the expression of a quest; but not for mastery in life, as usual. Ofelia, the eternal child, is a little girl refusing to grow up and choosing, ultimately, to accept death, not life. One of the richest and most moving of the film’s qualities is that, at the end, Ofelia dies; and we only believe that she lives on in the underworld if we believe that her trials and adventures with the faun have taken place outside of her imagination. If not she has simply committed suicide, in a refusal to accept reality over the power and purity of the life of the mind. Enthroned eternally under the earth with her father, mother and brother restored to life but kept safely distant atop dizzying thrones, she is the girl who refuses to take on womanhood, with its knowledge of darkness and violence.

Carl says: With the decline of alchemy the symbolical unity of spirit and matter fell apart, with the result that modern man finds himself uprooted and alienated in a de-souled world… It seems as though it were only through the experience of symbolic reality that man, vainly seeking his own ‘existence’ and making a philosophy out of it, can find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger.

[1] Siblings, Juliet Mitchell (Polity: 2003).

Thoughts on Bond and bums

2006-12-10T11:42:00.000Z

Casino Royale (2006): directed by Martin Campbell

This week Carl and I let Sigmund come with us. But we made him sit in the row behind and he wasn’t allowed any nachos.

Amidst my furious lechery, I found myself, during Casino Royale, wondering what it is in Bond we continue to find so compelling. Not in the movies overall, which are full of things exploding and bright, shiny stuff to look at. I mean in the character of Bond himself – a character who acts so powerfully in our imaginations that we can tolerate him being played by half a dozen different actors without it seeming to make him any less clear and vivid a figure.

There are, of course, as many reasons for this as there are viewers of the movies, in fact more. But one of the themes that strikes me most powerfully coming back to Bond this time for Casino Royale is that of control. Bond is always in complete command of any situation, however unexpected, unlikely and apparently ineluctable. There is no end to his arcane skills, whether its his fluency in myriad languages, his deft touch with technology, or his astonishing gift for gambling. This last is, of course, central to the plot of Casino Royale but also to its meaning: such is James’s ability to command the world around his that even risk and chance are turned by him into certainty, intentionality and success. He can never be bested, is impossible to outwit, outfight or outmanoeuvre. He is thus the figure we retreat into to escape not only our own limitations but our fear of those limitations; he our refuge from the fear of failure.

He is even outside the control of time. Bond is a character with no narrative arc; even in this much-discussed film of Bond’s origins there is little genuine sense of seeing an early version of a man we know as an older and different. Some pieces are fitted into static jigsaw, no more than that. Bond has been played by a number of men and has aged as they have, to be rejuvenated with each new incarnation. He’s the opposite of the other face-changing contemporary hero, Doctor Who, whose reincarnation is named, discussed and made intrinsic to his story. For Bond age and change are irrelevant and unmentioned. And each of his stories, where the films are concerned, is the same story; the formula of the films is the core of what many people love about Bond, even though from a psychoanalytic perspective this repetition starts to look neurotic.

Bond himself is, of course, an instrument of control, the control of HM Government in its post imperial imperialist projects. In his apparently lawless and destructive violence he in fact a weapon for the imposition of order and the retention of control.

Bond’s lack of a history, of a life that moves forward, makes me think about our own fear of life, a fear that sometimes appears in the guise of a fear of death. We want to be young, never to suffer sickness or weakness, but this is a fear of being alive and having experience, not a horror of our own mortality. This desire for sterility, un-life, is reflected in Bond’s endless, convulsive fucking, which never seems to result in a pregnancy test, let alone a child – sex is divorced so thoroughly from reproduction in Bond movies it seems almost vulgar to reintroduce the association. There’s something oddly child-like in this sex play that can’t produce children, at least if you share Sigmund’s view of children as being always and at all times obsessed with sex. In Bond we are refusing to submit ourselves to life, we are demanding a total control that can only exist in fantasy.

So the reason Sigmund came with us is that you can’t really talk sensibly about control without thinking about Freud. The anal phase is possibly the best known , or most notorious, of the stages for infant development that he posited. Failure to pass successfully through the anal phase, he theorised, strands the adult in a drama of control and retention, still psychologically refusing to shit neatly and on the direction of the parent. Those arrested in this stage withhold, whether emotionally or financially. They can be preoccupied by dirt or money, they are drawn to and/or repelled by filth, destruction and disorder. Western societies may not now toilet train our children as brutally as did the Viennese bourgeoises who trailed across the Persian carpet in Freud’s consulting room but we all still must experience struggles for control of ourselves and our functions early on in the formation of our personalities. The experiences and ideas around these struggles remain with us in our adult lives.

Speaking of naughty shitting, this train of thought reminds me of the vision of the child Jung, a deeply religious and intensely mad little boy who was appalled and traumatised by his temptation, eventually given in to, to imagine God having a huge shit on a church. Jung, in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, relates the tremendous relief he felt when he finally ‘allowed’ himself this abominable vision – the thought itself being a kind parallel process to the relief of having a poo. . Having been brought up by his pastor father to think only with awe and solemnity of God, he found him self gifted with a vision of God’s arse as an act of grace, the gift of knowledge that others did not have.

Bond is never allowed the incredible relief that goes with the worst happening, with the release of what’s most shameful in us. The realisation of fear – the realisation of that awful stuff about ourselves being released, of our loss of control – means we can come out form under the burden of it. Bond is stuck, for Freud, in the fantasy of constipation in the struggle with his parent. For Jung, he is possessed by a neurotic fear of failure and of existence that is preventing him fully embracing life and God.

Bond in this sense, then, perhaps represents the force of our own repression and our love affair with it. He is the archetypal hiding place from our fear of our own lives and our own limitations. We rejoice in Bond as king on the bathroom throne, triumphantly refusing to shit.

And that’s never a sentence I thought I would write.

Next time, less poo, I promise.

Sigmund says: The unconscious is the larger sphere, which includes within it the smaller sphere of the conscious… The unconscious is the true psychical reality.

Batman Begins #2

2006-10-21T19:25:00.000+01:00

‘Power you can’t buy – that’s the power of fear’ Falcone, Batman Begins.

In my last post I set out what I think are some of the more apparent archetypal figures and patterns in Batman Begins (Warner Bros., 2005). In this post I give an analysis of the narrative of the narrative on the basis of those patterns.

The film opens with a cloud of bats swarming the screen, which segues into a first scene set in the gardens of the Wayne mansion. Rachel is chasing Bruce, who holds an arrowhead. This is the time of harmony experienced very early in life, before the experience of separation (from the mother) and recognition of the separate consciousness of the ego. The ego and Anima play together in a unity that pre-exists individual experience – this is a time represented, for example, by the concept of the Garden of Eden in Western culture. The arrowhead represents direction, possibly destiny, and also holds the possibility of violence. The undifferentiated ego holds the arrowhead but, after falling down the well and being swarmed by bats, Bruce gives it Anima – he is unable to act as guardian of his destiny at this stage.

The well or cave that the child Bruce has fallen into connects to a cave complex (pun kind of intended) that lies beneath the mansion, a complex that Bruce was apparently unaware of until this moment. He is terrified by this experience – which stands for the experience of exposure to the power of the Mother and the unconscious. Dark, enclosed spaces are often symbols for the Mother and, by extension, for the unconscious, as the unconscious is a realm dominated by the Mother. Bruce’s father rescues him – the power of the masculine ego can draw him out of the unconscious and, if he successfully integrates the qualities of the Father the adult man can thus rescue himself – he Thomas Wayne also attempts to diminish the terror with morality (frequent weapon of the Father) – ‘Why do we fall? So that we can learn to pick ourselves up’.

The pattern repeats. We cut to the adult Bruce, imprisoned somewhere in central Asia, who has become a violent man divested of name and identity in his prison uniform. He is rescued from his cave-like cell by the mysterious Ducard, who knows his true name and again provides a moral analysis for Bruce’s experience. Ducard is reaching into the dark recess into which Bruce has fallen and is offering him a route out.

In jail and then on his way to R’as ah Ghul’s sanctuary Bruce is helped by two old men, the helpful old man being a frequent archetypal representative of the principle of Spirit. Ducard himself also shares some of these qualities. Spirit appears in quest narratives when the hero is at his most hopeless, his most desperate; Spirit offers help but also facilitates the self reflection or ‘lucky idea’ that provides a way out of the entanglement. Spirit, in other words, is the magical quality in the psyche that rescues us when we are apparently at the end of our resources, and is often represented in fairy tales by old men or magical animals (Yoda, arguably, illustrates both categories; Mr and Mrs Beaver in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe more squarely represent the latter).

And so it is for Bruce. Ducard, with his magical flowers and explosive powders, his ability to teach men to be invisible and his almost supernatural insights, is offering a s/Spiritual path for the questing hero (after all, Liam Neeson is a Jedi). The sanctuary itself looks like a temple and, of course, is in the East – the Westerner’s projection of the qualities of Spirit and the quest for consciousness.

It’s also worth noting that this sanctuary is in a wild and remote mountain pass, a cruel and cold landscape that stands for the more ruthless and savage qualities of the Mother archetype that initially were hinted at in the cave. More usually associated with nurture and protection, the Mother can also abandon and deny nourishment, and this precarious temple like home on the edge of a precipice connotes those dual qualities. The Mother presides over the unconscious, a place of danger as well as inspiration. The home of R’as ah Ghul draws together and articulates the narrow area of balance between these apparently conflicting qualities.

The action, after a brief exchange between Bruce and Ducard, turns back to the experience of the child Bruce and in particular the scene of his attempt to get his father to understand the depth to which he is haunted by his own fear. His father tells him that scary creatures are even more afraid than Bruce, and then shows him the pearl necklace he intends to give Bruce’s mother. The three of them go to the opera but leave early because Bruce is afraid. In a dark alley behind the opera house, Bruce watches as his parents are shot dead (see my last postfor more on this sequence).

Bruce has come into his princely inheritance, but is not yet able to take on the king’s mantle – we see the small boy dwarfed and shivering in his father’s coat in the police station. At the funeral the CEO of Wayne Enterprises tells him that he and his Board will ‘be watching the empire’ until Bruce is old enough to come into his kingdom. You know you’re in trouble when Rutger Hauer says things like that to you.

It’s made clear, then, that Bruce has a task to accomplish before he can come into his mature identity, signified by control of Gotham and Wayne Enterprises. Cut back to Ducard and the adult Bruce, and their discussion of Bruce’s struggle with his own guilt, buried in anger, and the question of how to live with this anger. In a parallel process to Bruce’s internal struggle, they gasp the conversation during a duel on a frozen lake (the paralysed emotional contents of Bruce’s psyche). Ducard tells Bruce that he must channel his anger into vengeance; and makes an interesting, if brief, reference to his own loss of his wife, i.e. his loss of contact with the feminine, remarking that in time the pain of loss makes one hate the lost. Perhaps this is a small indication of severance of the contact with the feminine that must balance masculine power if it is not to become distorted, overblown.

We then see the younger Bruce’s own, failed attempt at vengeance. Returning home fro college with the intention of killing his parents’ murderer, Shill, at his remand hearing, Bruce insists he cannot live in his own home, so haunted is it by his father. He cannot stay; in other words, he cannot inhabit his haunted psyche. He meets with Rachel in the kitchen, location of warmth and nourishment, and she talks nostalgically about when she lived at the mansion too, in other words encouraging Bruce to ‘come home’ to himself. She does not want him to attend the hearing, indicating and advocating (she is a lawyer) the qualities of the psyche already articulated through the Father, those to do with repression and denial of personal difficulty. Anima thus indicates the elements of the individual soul that do reflect the Father, however much the ego seeks to reject those qualities by projecting outside onto the personal father.

At the hearing Bruce is Hamlet-like in his paralysis and can only watch as Shill is assassinated at the orders of Gotham’s crime boss, Falcone. Afterwards Rachel challenges him to look beyond the personal fact of his loss to the disintegration of Gotham, of the whole Self: the failure to integrate the Shadow through alienation from the Father – has brought it to the point of fragmentation. Like Denmark, there is something rotten in Gotham – and Rachel says as much. Bruce is being shown his quest: to find another way to integrate the struggling elements of the city/psyche into a stable Self – a way to integrate the Father and the Shadow, in this psyche closely connected.

Rachel sends him into a confrontation with Falcone and a further discussion of fear and power. Falcone reiterates Rachel’s challenge: ‘You think that because your mommy and your daddy got shot you know about the ugly side of life. But you don’t. You’ve never tasted desperate.’ The quest must take Bruce further into darkness and initiation than hitherto – he must take charge of it rather than passively receiving experience. Anima has prompted this, Falcone drives him on his way. The prince sets out on his quest, discovering his own strength, ingenuity and capacity for endurance in his journey through moral and literal wastelands.

The culmination of this journey, his near-initiation into the League of Shadows, exposes the archetypal, archaic nature of R’as ah Ghul and the League, who were present at the ruin of Rome and of Constantinople. The League stands for an eternally recurring pattern of destruction, the violent restoration of purity. Having integrated elements of the Spirit archetype and the archetypal qualities associated with justice and patriarchal power, however, Bruce can find his own direction and rejects the League as too pitiless, to unbalanced a paradigm for his own identity. He rediscovers his direction and returns to Gotham (thanks to the ever-helpful Alfred, perhaps the most helpful old man in fiction) to address the city’s disintegration, having recognised this as his own responsibility. In leaving he burns down the mountainside retreat, representing not only his break with the League and the cleansing of his motive but also the light and passion of the Spirit – Spirit archetypes often being represented by fiery visionaries.

Returning to Gotham Bruce is returning from the grave – he had been gone so long that he was presumed dead and his inheritance had passed on. Again, the theme is the return to the unconscious/death/darkness to find inspiration. He does not, as Bruce Wayne at least, make himself known to Rachel, perhaps suggesting that he knows she cannot easily be brought into relationship with either of his new identities, the playboy and the dark arbiter of justice. He can at least now inhabit his own home, and he also makes a home in the caves beneath, implying a new balance between the deepest, most unconscious self and the closer, more developed, more contingent qualities of the self. The bats, in fact, have started to come into the house.

Bruce now sets about the key task, staging an underground coup to reclaim the city and his company, bringing representatives of the police and justice system, and of his father’s firm (Lucius Fox being another older man who’s handy to have around the place), into his network.

Bruce eventually reunites with Rachel by accident, as he leaves a hotel and she enters. In this encounter he tries to get her acceptance of his splitting of his identity but she undermines it, problematising the question of who he really is and how he can know himself. Nonetheless, as a gift for his thirtieth birthday she returns the arrowhead, signifying that it is time he took back responsibility for his own destiny and direction but also that he needs to take care that he has not lost his way, not least by continuing to build a relationship with her.

By this point in the movie the marvellously wicked Dr Crane (Cillian Murphy) has come to the fore. His asylum, Arkham, is the darkest recess of the darkest place in the city, the Narrows, and he is the most horrifying shadow aspect of the doctor: the doctor who makes you sick. In this he is the Shadow in particular of Thomas Wayne, and he stands for the fear and power of madness, in other words of the mind over the body and the unconscious over the conscious – the fear that Thomas Wayne sought to deny. Crane applies his panic drugs both to Batman and to Rachel, seeking to overpower Anima and ego; through his eyes we also see the terrifying truth of Batman, the contorted and salivating face that, in the original DC Comics, was the face of R’as Ah Ghul himself. The archetype of evil, we are being reminded, is a projection of internal reality. Ah Ghul is much a projection of the individual psyche as Rachel or Alfred.

Batman rescues Rachel, acknowledging the need to keep relationship with Anima (‘stay with me’ he growls at her as they flee to the Batcave). Through a wild tunnel in the forest and under a waterfall they sweep into the cave, a symbolic return to the dark womb of death and unconsciousness - we cannot truly return to the womb to be born again, so a fantasised return is always in fact a fantasy of death. And all this by way of Bruce’s celebration of his birth, with the party guests gathered above in the mansion. Here is the ambivalence of birth - without it there is no consciousness, no life; but there is also no pain of separation and the only way to regain that unconscious unity is death.

In the climax of the movie Bruce realises that R’as ah Ghul has used his own resources - Wayne Enterprises’microtransmitter, Thomas Wayne’s elevated railway, the water supply channelled through Wayne Tower - to bring about the destruction of the city. In other words, the Shadow is seeking to destroy the psyche that is beyond redemption, the Nazi’s fantasy of purity through destruction. But Bruce now knows and lives with the Shadow to the extent that the archetype cannot take him under its total power, and he is able to save the city and those he cares about. The Shadow destroys the house of the Father, again with fire and again the fire connotes knowledge and the passion of the Spirit for the achievement of the great vision (Gotham’s destruction or rescue).

At the close of the film Bruce is nailing up the well that he fell into as a child. Perhaps he can now connect with his unconscious resources at his own will; or perhaps cannot risk another unintended fall. Rachel arrives and for a moment it seems there is to be the expected romantic uniting of ego and Anima to close the film, but in fact she again raises questions and concerns about whether this splitting of identity into Bruce Wayne and Batman can in fact offer the means to provide a stable Self. Nonetheless she commends Bruce for finally living up to his f/Father. Bruce tells Alfred he intends to rebuild the house exactly as it was, and finds his father’s stethoscope in the wreckage – has he therefore escaped his father’s s/Shadow? The stethoscope, though, offers a means to find out what is inside, what the heart is doing, and perhaps therefore indicates the possibility of future insight and the continuation of the quest to successful conclusion. That it is not complete we know: Crane is still on the loose, the lunatics are out of the asylum and the Trickster, apparently is on the way.

Carl says: The archetype of the spirit is capable of working for good as well as evil but it depends upon man’s free – ie conscious – decision… Man’s worst sin is unconsciousness.

Reasons to be cheerful: shooting on Nolan’s next Batman movie, The Dark Knight, begins in 2007 and will again star Christian Bale in the title role.

Batman Begins

2006-10-07T08:59:00.000+01:00

Warner Bros., 2005. Screenplay by Christopher Nolan and David Goyer.
Batman originally featured in DC Comics and was created by Bob Kane

‘A guy who dresses up as a bat clearly has issues.’ Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins.

Christopher Nolan’s revamp of the Batman franchise, the 2005 release Batman Begins, is a very twenty first century version of superheroics. It is self aware in its exploration of the psyche of the hero, of the area between mental health and ill health which the superhero often allegorically treads. It explicitly draws on childhood trauma as a spur to adult weirdness, uses altered states of consciousness and the release of the unconscious as a core plot device, mental hospitals, their patients and their creepy doctors feature prominently. There is extensive discussion of the impact of father/son relationships and Bruce Wayne is, for the early section of the film, shown to suffer nightmares. It’s a film that knows what it’s about.

Like many super hero movies, from the Jungian perspective BB is inhabited by and explores elements of the heroic quest archetype. For Jung, the archetype of the quest was a part-expression of the journey of the male psyche into consciousness, a man's journey to become most fully himself. In terms of the family dynamic, and for those attuned to the influence of Freud, this required separation of the ego from the earliest identification with the mother and a resolution of the early competition with the father, in other words the Oedipal conflict. Bruce, the young prince, must make a long and difficult journey and overcome many obstacles in order to come into his heroic inheritance (not only the role of Batman but of controller and owner of Wayne enterprises, the source of his influence and resources; and of the moral leader and guardian of Gotham in both personae). This journey takes him into darkness (representing his own unconscious), where he finds the inspiration and resourcefulness to come into his power. His lonely wanderings in the early part of the film are a figurative death (he is missing presumed dead in Gotham when he comes back) from which he returns reborn into a new identity and purpose – death and resurrection being the central motif of arguably the most powerful quest archetype of our time, the life of Christ. He thus experiences initiation (both through the death of his parents and his training with the League of Shadows) and is aided in his quest by archetypes of the Spirit (principally his butler Alfred and the appropriately crafty Lucius Fox).

In this post I cover the particular complexion of the Shadow in this version of the quest myth, Father and Mother in the film and the role of Anima. Next week I'll say more about how all these dynamics operate in the narrative itself. For more on Jung and quest archetypes, see this stuff here.

Fear and the Shadow

Particularly strong in the BB incarnation of the myth is the Shadow, in this instance associated with fear and with masculine power. Fear is repeatedly and explicitly discussed in the film. The 'primal' event is the intense fear experienced by the young Bruce when he falls down a well and is swarmed by bats. He re-experiences this fear at the opera – a production of Boito’s Mefistofele, based on the Faust legend and thus making the association between destiny and fear and darkness in the soul – and asks to leave. In a deserted alley behind the opera he watches, terrified, as his parents are shot dead by a thief. His dying father tells him ‘don’t be afraid’.

As an adult man, prompted by the moral lecture of his childhood sweetheart Rachel, he confronts Gotham’s crime boss Falcone in order to show that he, like his father, is unafraid of criminal power – that is, power outside the structures of society and morality. A Freudian might describe this as the struggle between id and superego. Falcone tells Bruce he should be afraid – Falcone's power that goes beyond money, it’s the power of fear. He tells Wayne that the anarchic underworld of the gangster is ‘a world you’ll never understand and you’ll always fear’. Bruce sets off immediately to confront and overcome that fear, sinking deeper into gangsterism until he ends up in a jail somewhere on the fringes of the world (remote Asia is the edge fo the world as far as Hollywood is concerned), beyond the reach of the ordinary structures of law and order. Here he is rescued by a man calling himself Ducard (Liam Neeson) who take him to the mountain retreat of Ra’s Ah Ghul and his League of Shadows. It is not after all the criminal and the violent that Wayne fears; Ducard tells him ‘you fear your own power, you fear your own anger, your own power to do great and terrible things.’ In other words, he fears what is within, not what is without; he is withdrawing his projections. Again Bruce attempts to initiate himself into his own fear so as to go beyond it; in his final trial before he can join the League of Shadows, Ah Ghul tells him ‘you must become fear... you have to become a terrible thought… embrace your worst fear and become one with the darkness.’ With these words the hallucinating Wayne opens a casket to release a cloud of bats, the motif representing Bruce's most deep rooted terror.

Returning to Gotham Wayne makes plans to inhabit his own fear, as Ra’s Ah Ghul’s training has shown him. 'As a symbol,' he tells the faithful Alfred (Michael Caine), ‘I can be elemental, terrifying.’ He makes a secret, alternative home for himself in the very cave whose bats terrified him as a child and creates his alternate identity out of the symbol of his fear, the bat. ‘It’s time my enemies learned to share my dread.’ In the mean time, Gotham is being gradually drawn under the control of Ah Ghul through his agent, Dr Crane, inducer of paranoid psychosis through the use of the same hallucinogen that was used in Wayne’s mountainside training – a drug that causes intense panic. This drug will enable Ah Ghul to bring Gotham to its own destruction through the release of the feared contents of every individual unconscious in the city. It will devour itself in a frenzy of its own fear, beginning with the Narrows, the slums where the most feared elements of the city’s society dwell.

Throughout the film, then, we are dealing with fear from a variety of sources and experienced at a number of levels. Bruce Wayne is attempting to find a way of living with fear. He confronts it; he makes it a part of himself. And yet we are left wondering exactly what it is that he is afraid of. Precisely because his greatest fear is un-nameable, beyond the symbolic realm of language and speech, it can be represented only through symbol, bat. Where language fails only symbols will do. In his journey through the narrative Bruce explores the possibility that he fears the people who killed his father, or of the kind of people who killed his father – in other words the dread the wealthy feel of the poor. He wonders whether what he fears is his own guilt and failure – in other words, he fears the truth that he caused his parents’ death. Or perhaps it is his anger that he fears – he is frightened of the hate he feels for the father who failed to save himself and to save Bruce’s mother, who has made Bruce ashamed of feeling fear. Is he afraid, as Ducard claims, of his own power? He rejects the roles of billionaire capitalist and leader of an assassin vigilante group because he is afraid of his own possible actions – and after all, he seems to have some significantly violent tendencies. It seems none of these can be quite right; at the end of the film he is still living in, and as, his own fear, unable to express it and live with it other than through the life of the symbol itself.

Good fathers, bad fathers

Closely associated with the figure of the Shadow (fear of what we may become) in BB is that of the Father. Initially the set up is to do with the loss of the Good Father – Bruce’s father Thomas Wayne (Linus Roache) is in many ways almost God-like (more complex than it might seem - for Jung’s view on God and his biggest mistakes see his Answer to Job). Deriving power from his enormous wealth, Gotham is Thomas Wayne’s creation, one in which he intervenes to secure the ends he considers most important. All Gotham's power and water, in other words, the necessities of life, run through Wayne Towers, the heart of the city in the full figurative sense. He considers himself solely able to rescue the city from economic depression and improve the moral qualities of its citizens. Not only that, Wayne is a doctor; he has power in the business of life and death, he has the power to heal.

He is also, in my view, distinctly creepy; he's a repressive, suffocating force. He tells Bruce to repress his fear – ‘don’t be afraid’ – he refuses to acknowledge and accept Falcone’s ugly side of life. He simply refuses to accept the darkness of individual in his paternalistic insistence on the goodness of the human soul, and it is this failure that ultimately means he cannot, unarmed, defend himself and his family against the uncontained criminal who, under a different system, would not even be on the street. He thus leaves his young son alone and unprotected in the dark world he denied.

Yet Bruce cannot escape his father to find his own identity. He is invaded by his father: his psyche, represented by the Wayne mansion (houses being a familiar Jungian symbol for the psyche) is not his own. ‘It’s my father’s house,’ he snaps at Alfred when asked why he won’t stay there, and adds that he wants to pull the place down. On one hand Bruce struggles to live up to his heroic father and to sustain the grief at his loss; on the other he furiously resents him. Bruce's quest is to withdraw the projection of the Good Father, in other words to integrate those qualities into himself instead of associated them with an external figure. What if Thomas Wayne is also in Bruce, and what is not?

Ducard initially appears to offer a higher, more spiritual kind of path, a more elevated kind of fathering altogether. He trains Bruce Wayne as a warrior and turns him almost into a shaman – able to confuse and mystify his opponent, to become invisible and distort reality. Here is a fuller acceptance of power, beyond morality into the world of the Nietzschean superhero, a kind of masculine identity that goes beyond the normal human structures and is arbiter of pure justice, a fuller and more biblical God than the older Wayne’s anaemic New Testament tendencies. Bruce discovers, however, just in time, that this masculinity is too savage, too unbalanced; it comes to represent elements of the Bad Father, also a projection. This time he does destroy his (new) father’s house, burning it down. Nonetheless, he has learnt from Ducard: the training has enabled him to free the possibility of action in himself, and channel the violence that made him first a failed murderer and then a hired thug. His experience of darkness, difficulty and failure, in other words the qualities archetypally associated with death, has inspired him and provided new resources for his quest. This is the positive function of the descent into, in other words, dominance by, the unconscious and it features commonly in quest narratives

It's also worth observing that Bruce Wayne has a good deal in common with another tortured hero, Hamlet – beyond even a taste for a good deal of theatrical black. The father’s death arouses guilt in the king-in-waiting who knows that’s what he secretly wanted. There is an attempt to stifle the guilt with anger and direct blame outwards in a desire of vengeance but neither can act; it's as if each knows the real problem isn't the uncle/gangster . When the prince finally does confront the act of revenge it turns out badly – Polonius gets it and Falcone gets to Shill first. Both are drawn to death, both are disgusted by their own capacity for wickedness. Neither finishes his degree.

Rachel Dawes

Rachel Dawes is the Anima figure who appears in every quest narrative and stands for the tensions within the psyche, its otherness and its destiny. She stands by and for the significant moments in the development of the masculine psyche: she and Bruce are chasing in each other for possession of an arrow (giving direction) in the opening sequence of the film, through an edenic kind of garden, when Bruce falls into the old well. It’s Rachel who then goes to fetch help. She literally occupied his childhood home, the home he has such difficulty reinhabiting; she comes to his parents’ funeral. She is present at Shill’s hearing, at which Bruce nearly becomes a murderer. Her challenge to him about how he can move on from the loss of his parents (‘look beyond your own pain’) sends him to confront Falcone and from there onto his long journey into the world beyond society’s limits. Interestingly, she does not knowingly see him for a while after his return to Gotham (she does meet Batman); and when she does, it’s the playboy she sees, and she questions his belief that he can hold together the separate personalities of his psyche – in other words, his way of uniting himself into functionality.

Rachel also articulates and acts as reminder of the conflicts in Bruce: between wanting to live up to his father and wanting to lose him; between revenge and selflessness; between order (she works for the District Attorney) and anarchy (crime and deprivation). She seems to be on the side of Bruce as his good father’s good son, and of a functioning civil society: she is more or less the only character who believes Gotham’s civil structures – politics, the police, the justice system – can still be saved. She therefore also perhaps stands, along with Alfred, for the hope of order being restored in the psyche (Gotham) and therefore also in Bruce. She does not accept, as the superhero’s girlfriend so often does, the dual life of the hero. Instead she problematises it as a solution to the struggle of light and dark in the soul. Alfred, towards the end of the film, accuses Bruce of letting the superhero get in the way of the duties of the man; Rachel, at the end, rejects Bruce because he has let the need to find an accommodation with his won the Shadow has taken precedence over the other elements of the psyche. His love affair with his own darkness has led him away from the romance with Anima. The Batman (dark warrior prince, or Dark Knight as Batman is sometimes referred to) has driven out the lover-prince. Rachel raises the question of whether being Batman is really his destiny.

Martha Wayne

If there wasn't a mother in the picture somewhere we wouldn't be talking about Jung, so I'll finish with some thoughts about where she is in BB. I would argue she’s the greatest mystery of the film, linked closely with the question of what it is that Bruce really fears. Martha Wayne is Thomas Wayne's greatest love – he dies protecting her, not Bruce. She is associated with his father’s denial of fear feelings – for example, he distracts his son from talk of whether scary creatures feel fear with the pearl necklace he has just bought for his wife. She wears the necklace to the theatre and it is stolen and destroyed by her killer, connecting repression of fear with the failure of Bruce’s father to prevent his own and her death. It represents the failure of his world view and his failure of his son.

Bruce’s mother is beautiful but distant – she hardly speaks, she shows concern when he has been rescued from the well but hardly powerful emotion. She is a beautiful and distant goddess who Bruce never mentions. We never see mother and son together; she appears usually at the back or to the side of shot. She is less the personal mother, more the presiding goddess in the mansion of the psyche.

As for the symbolic Mother, that is, the archetype that stands behind and shines the woman, her realm underlies the house of the Father and is the source of fear and miraculous resources – the unconscious realm where Bruce finds his inspiration from the Shadow. That si the significance of the cave and well swarming with bats. This is where he first experiences the fear of what he cannot know or name, and it where he makes is own, most secret home of the other self, Batman. The Mother, whose realm is the unconscious, is the source and home of fear. Is Bruce’s father’s worship of the goddess-mother perhaps another fact of his repression of the primal fear associated with the Mother? Through failing to keep her alive he loses Bruce the opportunity to perpetuate the cult; perhaps if he had been able to do so he too would have been able to keep fear, the Shadow, in the unconscious. As it is he returns constantly to the watery, womb-like cave, where he obsesses, in his violent bat fantasies, about the return to the womb, that is, about death. It is this womb of death, the desire to return to the time before and after life, that also inspires the fantasies of purification and destruction articulated by Ra’s Ah Ghul, fantasies to which Bruce is for a time drawn.

So what does this all add up to? Next week, I look at how these archetypal patterns operate throughout the film.

Carl says: Life is always bringing us up against [the problem of]… the uncertainty of all moral valuation, the bewildering interplay of the good and evil, and the remorseless concatenation of guilt, suffering and redemption. This path to the primordial religious experience is the right one, but how many can recognise it? It is ambiguous, questionable, dark, presaging danger and hazardous adventure; a razor-edged path, to be trodden for God’s sake only, without assurance and without sanction.

2006-09-10T11:46:00.000+01:00

Conclusions

Three versions of the quest, then. In the first to be made, played out over Episodes IV-VI, Luke oscillates between identification with and separation from the Mother as he matures. He is aided by manifestations of the Spirit and the Father as well as by Anima. His personal father complex provides the route via which the Shadow can enter the psychic drama, ultimately to be withdrawn as a projection when the ego takes on dark psychic contents as its own. The scattered persons of the psyche are finally reunited in a restoration of peace and order, albeit at the cost of guilt and the fear of punishment attaching to the erotic relationship with Anima.

In the second trio of films to be made, Anakin takes the opposite choice, rebelling not against the domination of the Shadow and the disunity of the psyche but against the very order and stability Luke will seek/has sought to restore. He chooses to go further than Luke and to satisfy his desire for Anima. It is his mother complex that gives the Shadow a foothold in Anakin’s story and he confuses the Mother with Anima to the extent that they become indistinguishable. The Mother’s threat to punish by her absence becomes clearer as Anakin pursues his destiny with greater determination and fear of this punishment drives the choices that take him to the Dark Side and confuse the goal of his quest. In the end he sacrifices Anima in a misguided attempt to save her and/or the Mother, resulting in his possession by the Shadow. Anakin is perhaps braver than Luke in pursuing his quest, and he pays a high price for his bravery.

Over the cycle of six movies the full journey of Anakin/Vader permits, more than the two discrete stories, a role for failure and destructiveness. Without Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side Luke’s journey is impossible. With a full range of hope, loss, fury, talent, ambition, failure and sin included in his story Anakin has the most developed experience and possibility. It is this that enables him to hurl the Emperor out of the narrative and whose action, through his transgressive relationship with Anima, literally produces the personalities that will save him. This is the most complex, poignant and nuanced of the three quests that overlap through the Star Wars films, but even so it is only a qualified success. Anakin’s quest is completed not at the point of his greatest maturity and maximum power, not at the apogee of the sun’s arc, but at the point of his death.

When taken together the six films, rather than offering a narrative of quest and resolution, are dominated rather by the archetypal theme of the male psyche’s troubled striving for consciousness when the possibility of success is perpetually threatened by the withholding, absent, jealous Mother and the consequent guilt attached to the inevitable romance with Anima – a romance, thanks to the maternal transference, imbued with a disquieting incestuous quality. By the end of this journey we have pursued with Lucas, the certainties of A New Hope have disappeared. It’s no longer possible to distinguish the heroes from the villains; as the opening text of Episode III explains, ‘there are heroes on both sides.’ And Lucas’s direction in the last section of Revenge of the Sith makes clear that Vader is ‘born’ as Luke is born; there can be no psychic Shadow without the ego to experience it, but perhaps even more disturbingly, what future is there for the ego without the Shadow/ Perhaps this accounts for the curious flatness of the final sequence of Return of the Jedi where we see Luke alone between the duo of Han and Leia on the one hand the trio of ghostly Jedi Masters on the other. It is hard to imagine Luke’s future after the close of the movie.

Lucas’s professional life spent working through the quest myth, a progress on which film goers have accompanied him, draws attention not only to the tensions to which the male psyche is subject in making its life journey; it shows us our own possession by the archetypal heroic quest. The quest is a product of the collective unconscious that impresses itself upon us when we need it, a tool that gives us perspective on our own experience. Seeing through the archetype of quest we see our own longing for progress, triumph, movement. But we also see how, as we draw close to those goals, we begin to realise that they are not the solution we had hoped for our inner need. In Episodes IV-VI Luke does not question whether the status of Jedi knight is a worthy goal for his life’s work; by the end of Episode III we understand why Anakin has begun to doubt that it can ever be (good) enough. Jung’s adherence to the quest myth is expressed in his theories of individuation and the journey to consciousness, and belief in the progress of the soul towards transcendence. More prosaically, Lucas’s is cast in terms of the Jedi. In this way his films remind us of the troubling nature of our own notions of success and failure, the moral complexity of following our personal destinies

In purely psychodynamic terms, Star Wars is an expression of the classic family drama and the (sexual) guilt it engenders in the western male. In cultural terms it expresses the anxiety of a nationhood formed by experience of civil war as well as of a society longing, after the shocks of Watergate and Vietnam, for return to the simplicity of right and wrong. Psychosocially, it provided a framework for the feelings and responses of a one of the first generations to grow up with widespread divorce; or, with a longer perspective, the impact of the separation for the father from the domestic sphere by industrial capitalism, making him a distant, unknown and terrifying figure who enters from another world. An archetypal reading of the films does not disrupt any of these other meanings; rather it amplifies them, providing a perspective by which Star Wars is not ‘ really about’ George Lucas’s early life, or the Oedipal crisis, or the hero’s quest, or the American civil War, or Vietnam, or divorce, or capitalism; rather, all these phenomena are expressions of pre existent archetypal energies. This does more than free interpretation of texts from particular ‘truths’ whether personal, historical or psychoanalytic: it demonstrates what Jung meant by a collective unconscious, an unconscious that dreams us.

2006-09-10T11:45:00.001+01:00

‘I want her alive!’

The connection between these two sets of dynamics, the first concerned with the identity of the masculine consciousness and the second with the possibility of relationship with the feminine, is made by the relationship between Shadow and Anima, ‘those two twilight figures of the psyche’[1]. Lucas establishes the significance of this opposition/conspiracy from the outset: the first main character we meet in Episode IV is Leia and the next is Vader, the opposition between the two underlined by the visual contrast of her youthful, feminine beauty and softly draped white robes with his hard, black armour, violent behaviour and dramatic bass voice. It is Leia, not Luke, that Vader is hunting in Episode IV and it is Leia with whom he finally makes his peace in Episode VI. In Episodes IV-VI these two combine their efforts covertly to move Luke along in his journey to consciousness: Leia precipitates Luke’s decision to embark on his heroic quest, not only by providing an image that fascinates his imagination when projected by R2D2, but also by her attempt to get the plans of the Death Star to the rebels; it brings Vader in pursuit and his stormtroopers destroy Luke’s home and family. Later on, it’s Leia who discovers and controls the release of the information that will enable the destruction of the Death Star. In Episode V Leia rescues Luke when Vader has driven forward his journey by revealing himself as Luke’s father and severing his right hand. In Episode VI it’s Leia that makes contact with the Ewoks, enabling the destruction of the Death Star’s defence shield and it’s Vader’s invocation of Leia that catalyses his final duel with Luke. Episodes IV-VI can therefore be read as a struggle both between Leia and Vader for Luke and by Leia and Vader on behalf of Luke, a struggle staged for his benefit by which he can develop.

In Episodes I-III Anakin’s experience is drive by the political agendas of Palpatine and Amidala, and in Episode III by their direct appeals for his loyalty. In Episode I Anakin is discovered on Tatooine by Qui Gon and Amidala as they arrange her flight from the occupied Naboo, an occupation orchestrated by Palpatine, and he is present at the battle for Naboo (again orchestrated by Palpatine) because Qui Gon must go with Amidala when she insists on returning to her planet. In Episode II Anakin is brought back into contact with her by Palpatine’s renewed efforts to have her assassinated and stays with her because this danger demands that she have a Jedi bodyguard.

In Episode III the Emperor’s attention has shifted to Anakin as Vader’s shifted to Luke in Episodes V and VI. Palpatine makes explicit use of Anakin’s fear of losing Padmé in his temptation of Anakin to the Dark Side; Padmé repeatedly attempts to diffuse these fears (‘I promise I won’t die in childbirth’) but fails. When Anakin pledges himself to Palpatine he does so to save Padmé and relieve his own fear: ‘I will do whatever you ask. Just help me save Padmé’s life. I can’t live without her.’ It is Palpatine who names him Vader; it is Padmé who unwittingly transports Obi Wan to Mustafar for the final struggle with Anakin; it is Padmé who precipitates Anakin’s final separation from her by challenging his move to the Dark Side. She makes a final demand for his desire, ‘all I want is your love,’ and she refuses to follow him. This triggers the release of Anakin’s barely repressed resentment and anger, which in turn prompts Obi Wan to come to her defence and challenge Anakin for their final duel. When Anakin is nearly killed it is Palpatine that searches for and rehabilitates him as the Vader we recognise. The twin roles of Anima and Shadow are then directly related as scenes of the birth of the Skywalker twins are intercut with the Emperor’s transformation of Anakin into Vader and Vader’s first, heavy breath.

It is therefore the epic tension between these two archetypal ‘twilight figures’ that provide the framework for the story of psychic development, initiates the narrative and lends momentum to its subsequent unravelling as the ego struggles to move towards full consciousness. Where the hero myth becomes questionable and compromised, the importance of these two elements of the male psyche for the development of that psyche is as ineluctably apparent at the end of Episode III as it was at the beginning.

[1] C. G. Jung, CW vol. 9:I, para. 222.

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‘I’ve been seeing her in my dreams… vivid dreams… scary dreams’
- the ongoing problem with Anima and the Mother

The six films, divided into two trios, offer us three versions of the quest, with Vader’s story across the six films forming the third. In each, the possibilities for masculine consciousness are constellated differently. The ego is not in any of the three quests able to find a comfortable relationship with Anima. Luke cannot find full relationship with Leia but does at least find stability in that relationship and with the Mother. Anakin demands to have both Mother and Anima. His mother complex interferes with the Anima relationship to the extent that neither he nor Padmé can survive. Taken across all the movies, his transition to the function of Shadow in Episode IV, makes him the express opponent and covert ally of Anima, a dynamic to which I return below. In Episode VI he uses Leia to draw Luke into battle (‘Your feelings have now betrayed her too… if you will not turn to the Dark Side, then perhaps she will’), and then uses Luke to make peace with her (‘tell your sister… you were right’); but there is to be no ongoing relationship and these are his dying words.

2006-09-10T11:44:00.000+01:00

‘I’ve been seeing her in my dreams… vivid dreams… scary dreams’
- Anima, Episodes I - III

Jung said that ‘the serious problems in life… are never fully solved. If ever they should appear so it is a sure sign that something has been lost. The meaning and purpose of a problem seem to lie not in its solution but in out working at it incessantly.’[1] It is the more explicit return to this theme of honouring both Mother and Anima in Episodes I-III that suggests this is, for Lucas, the ‘serious problem’ with the heroic quest.

For a start, Anakin’s mother Shmi Skywalker is a self effacing presence on the screen, usually entering a scene alone and without any apparent friend, partner or ally. Although she is to become a powerful figure in his psyche, Anakin’s actual mother is a marginal, distant presence in his life, regarded by herself and others as bearing no very close relation with him. Mother and son rarely even touch each other. Strangest of all in this depiction of the mother-child relationship, when it becomes clear that Anakin is to be freed from slavery but his mother is not and they must therefore separate, she puts up no struggle to stay with her son and expresses no anger, in fact no emotion at all other than resigned acceptance. She even encourages him to leave Tatooine with Obi Wan, though Anakin is only around eight years old: ‘son, my place is here. My future is here. It is time for you to let go… to let go of me. I cannot go with you.’ The scene of Anakin’s separation from his mother is one of only three occasions on which they are seen to touch. Even so, neither appears to shed a tear at what is likely to be their final goodbye. Anakin’s departure from Tatooine, like Luke’s, is not an occasion for strong emotion. Perhaps this illustrates the sterility and danger of the initial identification with the Mother that is always indicated by Tatooine. It certainly reflects the emotional rigidity of the Star Wars movies. But there is something particularly uneasy about the relationship between Anakin and Shmi; and it sets the pattern for maternal punishment in Episodes I-III. In this second trio of films the Mother does not devour, she withdraws herself and her love. It is loss and absence that Anakin fears in his complex and yet this is necessary for separation. It’s a fear present in all six Star Wars films in the visual motif of derring do above a vertiginous drop: Luke and Leia swinging over a chasm to escape the imperial guard, Luke and Vader duelling in Cloud City’s reactor shaft, Luke falling out of the base of the city into Leia’s craft, Luke and Vader’s final duel in the Death Star, Mace Windu and Palpatine struggling at a vast broken window high in a Coruscant mega block. In view of this is significant that Anakin’s final battle with Obi Wan takes place the bottom of a ravine; he has received his punishment, taken the step into the void. But as an object of real anxiety, it is in Episodes I-III that the Mother’s withdrawal of herself as punishment comes to the fore.

In the mean time Padmé is associated visually and functionally with Shmi and as soon as Anakin leaves Tatooine in Episode I a transference of the maternal relationship to Padmé is effected. Both are awake during their night flight from Tatooine to Coruscant; Padmé is too concerned about the plight of her oppressed people to sleep. That maternal and also goddess-like anxiety is elided with her feelings for Anakin:

Padmé: Are you all right?

Anakin: It’s very cold.

[Padmé gives him her jacket]

Padmé: You’re from a warm planet, Ani. Too warm for my taste. Space is cold.

Anakin: You seem sad.

Padmé: The Queen is worried. Her people are suffering, dying. She must convince the Senate to intervene, or I’m not sure what will happen.

Anakin: I’m… I’m not sure what’s going to happen to me. I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again. I made this for you. So you’d remember me. I carved it out of a japor snippet. It will bring you good fortune.

Padmé: It’s beautiful, but I don’t need this to remember you. Many things will change when we reach the capital, Ani. My caring for you will always remain the same.

Anakin: I care for you too. Only… I… miss…

Padmé: You miss your mother.

Thus Anakin’s departure from the warmth of identification with the mother (Tatooine) to embark on his psychic quest (through the cold of psychic space) towards maturity is marked by this early experience of the tension between the longing for the personal mother, the longing to be free of her and the longing for relationship with Anima, onto whom many of the aspects of the maternal relationship have been transferred. For the male psyche, relationship with the Anima is often coloured by the personal mother complex: the relationship with each reflects the other. For Anakin it seems that to have one means to lose the other.

In this way the connection between Mother and Anima complicates the relationship with the latter, which is necessary for consciousness and maturity, by introducing the guilt both of incest, as in Episodes IV-VI, and of infidelity. This dilemma plays out in Episode II, by which time Anakin is old enough for it to be mediated through his adolescent sexuality. The erotic desire for Anima is established as relating to Anakin’s burgeoning mother complex in a sequence of scenes in which he rescues Padmé from an attempt on her life. The section begins with a conversation between Obi Wan and Anakin as they guard Padmé’s chamber – a position evocative of erotic and chivalric possibilities. Anakin is tired because dreams about his mother are disturbing his sleep. He tells Obi Wan, ‘I’d rather dream of Padmé. Just being around her again is intoxicating.’ The reference to Shmi appearing in Anakin’s dreams indicates the activity of the mother complex in the unconscious. His wish to replace that influence with Padmé’s shows clearly the projection of the mother onto Anima, providing a route to relationship with Anima but also obscuring her.

Meanwhile the assassin Zam Wesell has sent two deadly Koununs into Padmé’s chamber while she sleeps. Sensing danger, Anakin bursts into the room and destroys them, ending the scene standing astride over Padmé as she lies prostrate on her bed, lightsabre held aloft. Anakin’s adult phallic strength brings him closer to realising his sexual desire for, and exercising power over, Anima – both impulses previously expressed by Jabba the Hutt towards Leia. This uncontained desire indicates, in the morality of the films, Anakin’s confused and potentially compromised moral compass, even though it is intrinsic to the progress of the quest.

As the relationship with Padmé develops and is further eroticised, the presence of the Mother in the unconscious becomes more troubling. Sent to Naboo with Padmé to ensure her safety, Anakin is bothered by nightmares about his mother. The two women are again associated:

Anakin: You’re exactly the way I remember you in my dreams.

[…]

Padmé: You were dreaming about your mother earlier, weren’t you?

Anakin: Yes. I left Tatooine so long ago; my memory of her is fading. I don’t want to lose it. Recently I’ve been seeing her in my dreams… vivid dreams… scary dreams.

Instead of accepting his literal separation from his mother Anakin is trapped in a pattern of transference and projection of her, hoping ultimately to find permanence and a restoration of the original identification. As Luke’s father complex is animated by the archetypal Father/Shadow, so Anakin’s mother complex brings him into discussion with the archetypal Mother. This is the ground of his complex and a familiar pattern for those dominated by the Puer: a desperate desire for restoration and returning that cuts across any hope of questing, moving forward to maturity and individuation (becoming a true Jedi). Amidala tells Anakin their love isn’t possible given the paths they are each on, and he acknowledges ‘it would destroy us’. Anakin’s desire for Padmé is therefore connected to his quest (to become a Jedi Master) because she inspires him; but also threatens that quest. What is emerging in Anakin’s story is the moral ambivalence of pursuing the quest and even the possibility of successfully completing it. It’s not clear whether the Anima relationship can ever be freed of the jealousy of the Mother who is the source of psychic life, and therefore whether the quest can ever truly succeed.

It is notable that this struggle and the subsequent love relationship between Anakin and Amidala takes place on Naboo, a planet that continues to be ruled by a woman (Queen Jamillia, still flanked by four handmaidens) and in this film represented as a place of lush natural landscapes, waterfalls and lakes. ‘Everything here is magical’ remarks Anakin at one point and indeed the love story between the ego and the Anima is taking place in a kind of Eden, the archetypal maternal to which he so desperately want to return. He wants Anima to bring the Mother back; he cannot accept that she moves the Mother further away in promoting the journey to consciousness.

As Anakin and Padmé’s relationship grows closer his nightmares continue and worsen as he fantasises/foresees his mother’s death. Unsurprisingly, this complex and compromised relationship with the feminine is increasingly associated with corruption of the archetypal power of the Spirit and loss of Jedi status, in other words a balanced masculine consciousness. But it is also striking that the Jedi institutionalise the principle clear in the world of Star Wars that erotic association with the feminine acts against the development of morally acceptable masculinity. To achieve the status of Jedi knight Anakin must deny his corrupting desire for Anima. The Jedi are now in league with the Mother to prevent total separation and the pursuit of quest.

Anakin’s desire for Amidala risks the permanent loss of the Mother. His declaration of love for her is followed by an especially horrifying nightmare involving his mother that prompts him to go and find her. He arrives on Tatooine in time to see Shmi die from wounds received from the Tusken raiders who have taken her prisoner. The impossibility of redeeming his early experience and returning to the mother is made ineluctably apparent. In a frenzy of anger he slaughters not only the raiders but their wives and children. The activation of the negative mother complex has opened the way to the Shadow, as the Emperor attempted to do when he taunted Luke with his own anger with the father/Father at the end of Episode VI. Palpatine will refer to this incident in Episode III when he is tempting Anakin to the Dark Side; at this point in Episode II conflict has emerged between Anakin’s love for his mother, his feelings for Padmé and his duty to the Jedi. From now until the epic finale on Mustafar Anakin will have few associations with the maternal imagery of moons, forests and caves; he is losing contact with the inspiration of the unconscious.

Padmé is doomed from now on to be both substitute for and usurper of the maternal relationship. She will, for Anakin, incorporate the ambiguities of the Mother as well as of Anima – the threat of the withdrawal of love, absence and/or destruction, a limiter of the ego’s power but also the instrument of male destiny, nurturer and lover. As Anima she is for the journey of the individual psyche; as Mother she is for keeping Anakin identified with herself through the Jedi and the Republic. In Episode III Padmé will express confusion about whose side she is on, and it’s no wonder.

No surprise then that the maternal is at the core of the emotional, psychological and political action in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. Hard upon Anakin’s rescue of Chancellor Palpatine, his latest father figure, he is reunited with Padmé, who tells him ‘something wonderful has happened’ – she is pregnant. Nonetheless she appears anxious and despite his assurance that ‘we’re not going to worry about anything’, so is Anakin. When he suggests they finally stop hiding their relationship it is Padmé who tells him not to ‘say things like that’; she has taken on the role of the Mother in assigning guilt to erotic relationship with Anima and this puts her, narratively speaking, in a position of total deadlock. Later, she points out that they could both lose everything if their relationship, and their children, are discovered; she won’t be allowed to continue as a Senator (it’s not explained why) and Anakin will be thrown out of the Jedi Order. And yet she is entirely committed to it.

Padmé’s impending motherhood makes her the object of all the resentment, guilt and desire Anakin experiences through his mother complex and this is expressed in his nightmares about her dying in childbirth. Killing in her in dreams, he becomes desperate to save her in actuality and this sets him on a path of true personal destiny, free of the institutions of the Jedi and the Republic – institutions Luke Skywalker will work so hard to restore, though our faith in them is now shaken, having seen them through Anakin’s eyes. Anakin’s love for Anima and its confusion with his feelings about his mother lead him to embark on a personal quest that is clearly, in the morality of the film, immoral. He is guided away from it by Yoda, Obi Wan and Mace Windu. By now the values represented by these figures are sufficiently muddies for it to be unclear what quest Anakin can hope honourably to pursue.

After spending almost all of the film confined in her apartments by her shaming pregnancy, Padmé breaks free to precipitate the final convulsion of Anakin’s crisis. Following him to Mustafar, unwittingly carrying Obi Wan as a stowaway, she tries to bring him back to the side of order and the Jedi, an attempt that ends with his brutal attempt to strangle her. Despite the fact that no lasting damage is done she soon dies in childbirth, for no readily apparent reason. In pursuit of his quest and of Anima, through the conflicting demands of the mother complex, Anakin therefore loses all three and becomes the creature of the Shadow. As Lucas has grown older he, and we, apparently believe less and less in the possibility of succeeding in the heroic quest, sabotaged and wrong footed at every turn by the desires and jealousies of the feminine; and we have begun to question even the goal for which the quest is pursued.

[1] C. G. Jung, CW vol. 8, para. 771.

2006-09-10T11:43:00.000+01:00

‘I’ve been seeing her in my dreams… vivid dreams… scary dreams’
- Anima, Episodes IV - VI

The unease with Anima is first apparent in the relationship between Leia and Luke. As first it appears that there will be a romance between them. After all, she is a princess and he is her rescuer. In fact there is a tension between Han and Luke because of it, a tension Leia plays up to when, to annoy Han, she kisses Luke on the mouth (Episode V). Leia and Luke are both virginal, asexual figures, but that there is some kind of fascination between them seems clear. Luke’s first words when seeing Leia’s recording, projected by R2 D2, is a breathy, ‘who is she? She’s beautiful.’ Neither of them, however, act on this attraction. Both seem more comfortable with a relationship of reverence for Leia the virgin than anything more embodied. The carnal, sexual masculine is a source of such discomfort, in fact, that it is hived off into another character entirely, Han Solo, and only he dares to take the icon from the niche. He and Leia form a love relationship, though it is rarely shown in physical intimacy but is rather a kind of alliance. Even with Han acting as a buffer for the erotic relationship with Anima, though, there is an ambivalence about its moral acceptability: immediately after their first kiss they are nearly devoured by a space slug; when Leia tells Han she loves him he is plunged into a fiery pit and imprisoned in carbonite, an element associated with the base and earthy.

Episode VI’s opening scenes on Tatooine articulate this discomfort with Anima more expansively. When the film opens the imprisoned Han is in the possession of Jabba the Hutt; and if Vader is the dark side of the Spirit, the ego’s dominant archetypal identification, then Jabba is the dark side of the secondary ego qualities embodied in Han. Han’s opportunism hardens into Jabba’s exploitative greed; Han’s vigorous sexuality carries with it the possibility of Jabba’s degradation and abuse of women. It is this latter quality in particular that is foregrounded in the scenes that follow, with Jabba’s ersatz court noticeable for the presence of scantily clad women employed as dancers and entertainers. One is dropped into the pit of a slavering monster, the Rancor, for the entertainment of the assembly. Leia is captured while attempting to rescue Han and is turned into a kind of sex slave by Jabba. She next appears lying next to him, attached to him by a chain and dressed only in a metal bikini, a genuinely startling image of Leia given the modesty of her costumes hitherto, which barely delineated the contours of her body (Lucas famously required that Carrie Fisher’s breasts should be taped down to prevent them bouncing). There is an unsettling suggestion of the possibility of rape when Jabba tells Leia with menace, ‘soon you will learn to appreciate me.’ In this sequence Han and Leia are therefore held prisoner by the darker qualities potential in their relationship, that is, that it will coarsen into a dialogue of power and submission.

In Jabba’s palace, therefore, we are seeing the debasement of relationship with Anima, the relationship of the individual with his soul. Desire becomes ownership, intimacy becomes contempt, unity becomes dominion. It is this pattern that is literalised in society’s subjugation and disempowerment of women, in every relationship of power and exploitation by a man of a woman. The moral of the story is, however, more complex than a political objection to sexual exploitation of women. There is an undoubted erotic charge in the sight of Leia almost naked. She may be the subject of exploitation but she is also beautiful and sexy, and for the first time apparently sexually available. This, as much as Han’s chaste flirtation, is Hillman’s Eros connection with Anima. Like all archetypal manifestations it has a dark side, in this case expressed by the Hutts. We are therefore implicated, titillated as Jabba is by Leia’s near nakedness as much as we are, with Luke, determined to rescue her. We admire the chaste, unsullied Luke but perhaps we are closer to the gross Jabba. By now the unequivocal association in the Star Wars universe of overt sexuality, the feminine, degradation and shame is established. The relationship with Anima is drawn directly into, and reveals the archetypal qualities of, the virgin/whore polarity. The repressed resentment and anxiety in the longing for Anima is being brought to the surface: resentment at her power and anxiety about our own capacity for exploitation and cruelty. It is worth noting in passing that none of Leia’s male companions make any reference at all to the outfit Jabba has forced her to wear, though Han in Episode V makes reference to her wearing more ‘feminine’ clothes. It is as though to do so would be to exacerbate her humiliation and expose their shameful desire.

The difficulty is both compounded and expanded upon when it turns out that Luke is saving himself and the others not just from Jabba but from devoration by the Sarlacc. This ‘omnivorous, immobile beast is almost entirely concealed beneath the desert sands. Only its foul mouth extends to the surface, ringed with grasping tentacles ready to pull any prey unfortunate to fall into the shifting sands. Its maw is more than three meters in diameter, and is a mucous-lined hole brimming with inward pointing teeth. At the center of the mouth is a smooth, pointed beak containing a fat, muscular tongue, blindly flexing in hopes of capturing a savory morsel.’[1] This is perhaps the clearest articulation among many similar images in the first three Star Wars movies of fear of re-absorption by the vagina, by the primal body of the Mother (hinted at repeatedly in the cave motifs of Episode V for example). Its juxtaposition with the scenes in Jabba’s palace makes a clear link, first hinted at when Leia and Han kissed and then were nearly eaten by the space slug in Episode V, of the connection between the erotic elements of the relationship with Anima and the risk of destruction through devoration by the Mother. This danger is entirely separate from that of destruction by the father complex/Shadow – Vader and the Emperor are nowhere to be seen in either of these instances. It is also significant that the scene takes place on Tatooine, the planet of the withholding Mother of the ego’s early identification. And it is precisely this archaic, troubling mother complex that, from outside the ostensible and explicit framework of the narrative (Empire vs Rebellion, Vader vs Luke, father vs son) threatens to disintegrate the Self entirely, reabsorbing the ego and Anima and embodied male self into the primal mother – in the belly of the Sarlacc, ‘you will find a new definition of pain and suffering, as you are slowly digested over a thousand years.’

Fortunately Luke is able to rescue them and Leia is once again brought into protective custody. This rescue also provides the opportunity for the saga’s one triumphant feminist motif: Leia leaping up, almost naked, to strangle Jabba with the chains of her own (sexual) captivity. Nonetheless, taken overall the sequence of scenes in Jabba’s palace draw out a skein of possibilities and concerns around the feminine and in particular around the figure of the Anima that go beyond a Freudian reading of sexual guilt. The masculine consciousness reaches Anima through desire and must do so to further his psychic journey; but to do so is a moral risk and invokes the wrath of the Mother, who threatens the re-imposition of total identification with her (reabsorption/death). The relationship with Anima must be made safe if the quest is to continue. The necessary resolution of Luke and Leia’s relationship takes place in a scene redolent of maternal symbology, by moonlight on the wooded moon of Endor, with Leia taking on the appearance of a kind of woodland goddess. The scene begins with the one and only discussion of mothers by either Luke or Leia:

Luke: Leia… do you remember your mother? Your real mother?

Leia: Just a little bit. She died when I was very young.

Luke: What do you remember?

Leia: Just images really. Feelings.

Luke: Tell me.

Leia: She was very beautiful. Kind, but… sad. Why are you asking me all this?

Luke: I have no memory of my mother. I never knew her.

Then, after a brief discussion of Vader and the Force, Luke tells Leia: ‘You have that power too. In time you'll learn to use it as I have. The Force is strong in my family. My father has it...I have it...and...my sister has it...’ In this way their true relationship is revealed to Leia.

The Anima relationship, therefore, is made safe through strict limitation in the realm of the protecting Mother. The Hutt palace/Sarlacc sequence expresses the struggle throughout Star Wars, a struggle that is not resolved in spite of the scene on Endor, to accept the male individual’s erotic desire for his own Anima without being punished by the jealous Mother. The troubling conclusion from Return of the Jedi is that the essential erotic quality of the relationship with Anima is wrong, that at best it must be held at one remove (Han and Leia rather than Luke and Leia), that if it were brought any closer it would be a transgressive (incestuous) relationship and that even then it risks drawing the wrath of the Mother. Given the importance of Anima and of the maternal for the development of the masculine psyche, this throws into question the very possibility of consciousness, of the success of the quest.

[1] Official Star Wars website. URL: http://www.starwars.com/databank/creature/sarlacc/index.html [7 July 2005]

2006-09-10T11:42:00.000+01:00

‘I’ve been seeing her in my dreams… vivid dreams… scary dreams’
- the Mother

The Mother, as we have seen, is also significant and also complex. The ambivalence towards her experienced in the heroic quest is apparent not least in the fact that actual mothers tend, in Star Wars, to come to sticky ends, a tendency that reaches apotheosis in Episode III. The oscillation between attachment to and separation from the Mother as well as the vigorous presence of the Mother in her darker and more universal aspects (the Death Stars, caves, empty space, Hoth, Tatooine, Geonosis, Mustafar, the sanctuary moon of Endor, Naboo and Alderaan) are patterns that underlie the entirety of the narrative and indicate this same ambivalence. It finds its direct articulation in Anakin’s adoration of his pregnant wife, his fantasies of her death and his ultimate brutality towards her. The Mother provides sanctuary and inspiration; she also threatens reabsorption and/or punishment by withdrawal.

2006-09-10T11:41:00.000+01:00

‘I’ve been seeing her in my dreams… vivid dreams… scary dreams’
- Leia and Padmé

The substantial articulation of the feminine therefore relies entirely on the role of Carrie Fisher as Leia and Natalie Portman as Amidala/Padmé. Both characters are assigned high status both socio-politically (as princess, queen and senator), as spurs to action for other characters (being rescued and protected), as possessors of knowledge both military and moral - and therefore vulnerable to kidnap and interrogation - and to a limited extent as guerilla leaders (Leia directing the activity of the rebels on Hoth in Episode V; Padmé directing tactics for the retaking of occupied Naboo in Episode I). Leia is vulnerable but courageous (‘help me, Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope’) dressed almost always in soft virginal white. She seeks to be part of the action and to defend herself but usually needs rescuing and protection. She represents high ideals – democracy, opposition to dictatorship, devotion to the cause – and she represents order, political and moral. Her sexuality is muted; she kisses both Luke and Han but appears uneasy and even frightened by expressed sexual desire, for example in the scene in which she and Han kiss for the first time (‘you’re trembling’). This reflects, as we will see, anxieties in finding relationship with Anima. Amidala/Padmé is subject, like her planet, to exploitation and coercion and she, like Naboo, generally lacks the means to defend herself. Indeed she actively resists moves to equip her planet for self defence (‘We must continue to rely on negotiation… I will not condone a course of action that will lead us to war’). As Amidala she is static, iconic, helpless; as Padmé she is girlish, impulsive and loving. She is angelic (the child Anakin asks her ‘are you an angel?’) and numinous, ‘just being around her […] is intoxicating.’ Her vulnerability is complete with her pregnancy, which reduces her to an object to be protected and contained in semi-secret by Anakin. Nonetheless she is the agent of his transformation into Vader – ultimately by her chasing him down on Mustafar and challenging his attachment to the Dark Side that itself is driven by his desire to keep her. Amidala feels love and is an object to be possessed in love. Like Leia she embodies both political order and the principle of rebellion, the conflict that will prove so productive in the Star Wars galaxy.

Neither woman is truly self determining; this is a narrative in which the explicit power of the feminine is strictly circumscribed and frequently marginalized. Rather the two women have a totemic value for the male quest for personal destiny and a catalytic function to drive forward the masculine journey to consciousness. Their fate is to be protected at all costs and touted as symbols of a just cause, but strictly limited in their exercise of personal autonomy and power. Indeed the boundaries of behaviour for women in these films are so tight that Amidala must have an alter ego (Padmé) in order to break out of her queenly leading role and engage in action. Although Anima is, as always, of dynamic importance to male consciousness, therefore, the male soul these characters represent has qualities of maiden and virgin goddess: innocence, courage and attachment to ideals so high they are almost unworldly. Both characters are at once Artemis leading the hunt and Persephone naively waiting for rape or rescue, the latter an archetypal quality bound up with the acceptance of the principle of death and failure and therefore crucial in particular to The Empire Strikes Back and Revenge of the Sith[1]. Both appear to demand devotion and love, and the finding of a course between these two attitudes proves troublesome for both Luke and Anakin. This is the quality of Anima, however; she demands the activation of Eros; ‘she comes to life through love and insists on it… Perhaps only through love is it possible to recognize the person of the soul.’[2]

[1] For the significance of failure in the archetype of Persephone and the connection with death, see James Hillman, Revisioning Psychology, pp. 208-9.
[2] Ibid., pp43-4.

2006-09-10T11:34:00.000+01:00

‘I’ve been seeing her in my dreams… vivid dreams… scary dreams’

One of the most interesting archetypal dynamics in Star Wars, and particularly in the context of its treatment of the quest, is that between Anima and Mother; and this despite the fact that, although the feminine is a powerful presence in the films, women themselves are in short supply. The first three films are striking for their lack of any use for women. In Episode IV the only woman apart from Leia granted any lines is the short-lived Aunt Beru, who is never seen outside the home and whose function, in her few lines, is to make sure people have what they need and to represent the importance of truth to oneself – characteristics often associated with the nurturing ‘good’ mother and never after reprised in the Star Wars cycle. In Episode V Leia is the only woman to speak or even to appear. In Episode VI the only woman permitted speech apart from Leia is Mon Mothma, a leader of the rebel alliance who delivers a briefing to the rebels shortly before the final destruction of the Death Star. This is an interesting reprise of Leia’s Anima role in Episode IV as the holder of hidden knowledge hidden that facilitates the ego’s destruction of infantile identification with the Mother. Mon Mothma is the only woman apart from Leia to speak in episode VI unless you count the animated alien lead singer of the Max Rebo jazz funk band in Jabba the Hutt’s lair, voiced by Femi Taylor. The scene given to the Max Rebo dance band is in fact notable for the unusual number of female extras in non speaking roles, used as non-human backing singers and slave girls to denote the exploitative, decadent and cruel anti-morality of the Hutts. This, as we will see, is significant in terms of the Anima/Mother dynamic.

Episodes I - III, made some twenty years after the first trio, moderate this visual and aural/oral exclusion of women: Episode I is the only film of the six to contain more than one significant female presence, with Amidala sharing a good deal of screen time with Shmi Skywalker. We also see and hear from a female fighter pilot, a female captain of a Republic cruiser and Anakin’s friend Jira; additionally, Queen Amidala is often accompanied by her identical, mostly silent handmaidens. In Episode II we see, but do not hear from, more than one female Jedi and the assassin hired by Jango Fett to kill Amidala is a female changeling, Zam Wesell - interestingly, it’s Anakin who realises that this helmeted figure is female rather than male, underlining his sensitivity to the feminine. Amidala still has a female retinue, one of whom, Cordé, is assassinated near the beginning fo the film. The Jedi’s repository of knowledge is under the care of a woman, Madame Jocasta Nn, making a familiar association of the feminine with arcane knowledge[1]. There is a female waitress in the café Obi Wan goes to for intelligence in his investigation of the assassination. And Naboo is still under the leadership of a woman, Queen Jamillia, accompanied as Amidala was by a female retinue. In Episode III we see two female Jedi; Padmé’s funeral cortege includes the Queen of Naboo and other women, again silent. The final scenes of the film show the young Aunt Beru and the Queen of Alderaan (not granted a first name even in the film’s credits) cradling their adopted infants. But the only feminine voice heard in the film apart from Padmé’s is that of the robot midwife presiding at Luke and Leia’s birth. There is room in Episodes I -III for only one female leading character, Amidala, as there was room only for Leia in Episodes IV-VI.

[1] C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (London: Fontana Press, 1995), p.69.

2006-09-10T11:33:00.000+01:00

‘You’re the nearest thing I have to a father’

The maturation of masculine consciousness is shaped in Star Wars by the relationships and elisions between the archetypal presences of Spirit, Father and Shadow. The characters of Obi Wan, Yoda, Vader, the Emperor, Qui Gon, Anakin and Luke all exhibit the functions of at least two of these archetypal values. It is the instability in the function of these characters, among other things, that points to their archetypal qualities and therefore to the more complex possibilities opened up by the narrative.

Luke has relationships with a succession of father figures in Episodes IV-VI as he develops his masculine identity: starting with the repressive Uncle Owen, he moves on to Obi Wan and Yoda, struggles against his true father, Vader, and completes his progress by making a powerful relationship with him. Anakin’s relations with father figures are more ambivalent – in one sense, as the product of a virgin birth, he is in total denial of the Father and this again connects to the perpetual theme of rebellion. His remark to Obi Wan that ‘you are the nearest thing I have to a father’ follows Obi Wan’s rueful (and accurate) prediction that Anakin will be the death of him. The whole Jedi Order represents to Anakin the father that refuses to let him succeed to power, with Obi Wan as the chief focus of his resentment for being, among other things, ‘overly critical’. Their relationship, before its final collapse, settles into a more comfortable, less fraught fraternal model. Anakin’s final and most destructive fathering is from Palpatine, the Sith Lord who becomes Emperor through coopting Anakin’s extraordinary powers. The Emperor’s ability to spot and exploit psychic weakness, in this case Anakin’s secret desire for his mother and sexual relationship with Padmé, is what makes him powerful and dangerous. His apparently open and direct appeal to Anakin in Episode III, ‘I need your help, son’ is the only time Anakin is addressed so frankly and warmly by a father figure and he is naively helpless to resist. Jedi fathering, by contrast, is dictatorial, disciplinarian and frigid. Where the Jedi are distant and assert status, the Emperor is intimate and flatters. Where the Jedi demand celibacy, the Emperor tells Anakin that in alliance with him Anakin can save his wife. In tempting Anakin to revenge himself on the older men who keep him back by destroying their Order and usurping their power the Emperor is himself the archetypal Father who exploits and controls the son for his own ends – the Father who sends a nation’s sons to war or puts them to work in life-shortening heavy industry. The Vader who wants to make an alliance with his son so that they can rule the galaxy, and is prepared to destroy him if he refuses, is also a reflection of this Father – the Father who also feels sexual jealousy of the Mother in the Oedipal conflict. Anakin, as the future Vader/Dark Father, expresses this ambivalence to his children in his shocking slaughter of the ‘younglings’ the children in training at the Jedi Temple.

Where Luke is, as ever, compliant with the Father’s function to separate him from the Mother, Anakin’s story in Episodes I-III is the model for a psyche that fails to come to terms with the Father archetype. In resisting the Father’s power to separate him from the Mother, Anakin himself is overtaken by the archetype to become the Dark Father that haunts the whole saga; and yet over the whole cycle he is the character who finally unites the Father’s, possibilities and brings peace to what remains of the family. One of the possibilities of the Father that’s therefore opened up in Star Wars is that of his contradictory and unpredictable nature, explored at some length by Jung in his Answer to Job[1]and of finding a stable ground for making relationship with him: in Star Wars he is characterised almost always by a Kleinian split between Good and Bad. The immaturity of the central consciousness and the vastness of the Father potential makes it almost impossible to understand him as a whole until the very end of Episode VI.

The splitting off of the Bad Father also provides a route into the narrative for the Shadow, encompassing both the negative elements of the Puer Aeturnus (an archetype with which the character of Anakin in particular is associated), of the Spirit and the Father himself. Jung described the Shadow, very significantly in this context, as the ‘dark side’ of the personality: ‘a man who is possessed by his Shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps.’[2] Anakin, standing in the light of his own talent and falling into the trap of his own loss and ambition, is possessed by the Shadow (Palpatine), and as such precipitates the fragmentation of galactic stability and the loss of all he loves, in particular his relationship with the soul through Anima – in other words, psychosis. This relationship between the Emperor and Vader articulates well the dialogue between the personal complex and the archetypal power that animates it. It is appropriate that Luke is the only character apart from Vader to meet the Emperor face to face; it means that he, as ego, has insight into the relationship at the heart of the Dark Side. For the other characters in the films Vader is the evil Empire incarnate. But we, and Luke, know that it is Sidious/Palpatine that is the ne plus ultra of the Shadow in Star Wars, an hermaphroditic figure associated with death and dark rebirth, most clearly in his twisted birthing of Vader on a planet of the darkest maternal power. In this act, the Shadow is animating the Bad Father, providing an archetypal vessel and energy for Luke’s personal father complex. The Shadow gives shape, identity, even personality to the darkest personal contents. As Shadow the Emperor manifests his will through the darkest elements of the individual psyche, which enable him to move in, to possess: ‘strike me down with all your hatred, and your journey towards the Dark Side will be complete’. His presence is demonic, his threat is to psychic autonomy and the stability of the Self represented by Anakin and the Republic, both of which he subjects to his will.

Jung insisted that the Shadow is an essential and eternal part of the psyche: ‘the darkness that clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the gateway of dreams.’[3] Yet the apparent message at the end of Episode VI is that the Shadow can and should be destroyed. It is here that the structure of the epic becomes significant. Lucas began with the end; the destruction of the Emperor is followed, in our experience of the films, with his slow rise to power. And his assumption of imperial control is followed by the story of its defeat. And so on. This is a repeating struggle, not a linear narrative that moves from cause to consequence. Star Wars is a cycle of struggle, with, among others, the Shadow that is an eternal component of every psyche. More than that, after Episode III we are left wondering whether the point is, after all, that Vader’s fall and possession by the Shadow is necessary. Without Vader the Emperor cannot be destroyed; without Vader, Luke has no quest.

All these possibilities of the Father and the Shadow are then overlapped by the Spirit. The Jedi, the Sith and the Skywalkers all have in common their connection with the Force, the ‘ancient religion’ that the rest of the galaxy abandons in the course of the epic. The Jedi embody the positive characteristics of Spirit: the wise old man, hobgoblin or woodsprite who brings maturity, urges reflection on the situation in which the psyche finds itself, warns of dangers to come and provides the means to deal with them. In Star Wars Spirit brings balance to the phallic power of the masculine identity, expressed by sabre-wielding fighter pilots Luke and Anakin, and involves at its core a balanced and spiritually informed relationship with the power of the collective unconscious, the Force. Only this knowledge enables the Jedi to bear their phallic weapons with precision and power. In this respect these figures are key to successful completion of the quest. But the Shadow qualities embodied in the Emperor and Vader are also in part the negative aspects of Spirit: possession by a sense of zealous mission; an extension of the personality beyond the personal, in other words the acting out of personal hate and anger on the rest of the world on an epic scale; the loss of free will and fragmentation of the personality that has been overwhelmed.

Between the three broad archetypal principles, therefore, is constellated a wide variety of possibilities for the questing male consciousness, psychic possibilities that encompass transcendent wisdom, invasive darkness and every relationship to power that comes in between, all in the context of relating to the unconscious (the Force). The difficulty of the quest is not therefore simply the pain of separation and the overcoming of fear of the Father; it involves negotiation of all these possibilities and the need to find, somewhere among them, conscious identity – all the while knowing that identity could prove horrifying rather than unifying.

[1] Ibid.
[2] C. G. Jung, CW vol. 9:I, para. 222.
[3] Ibid.

2006-09-10T11:31:00.001+01:00

The story so far: archetypal dynamics

Episode IV: A New Hope is the most classic and straightforward expression of the quest in the Star Wars cycle. Frustrated farm boy Luke leaves the arid Tatooine (infantile identification with the mother) where he has grown up to become a rebel fighter pilot. He’s prompted to do so by his first ever glimpse of Anima (R2D2’s projection of Leia’s plea to Obi Wan for help): she connects him with his latent desire to become like the father who, he believes, died heroically, fighting for the rebellion. The destruction of his home and family as Vader (Shadow/Bad Father) tears up Tatooine in his search for R2D2 and the information Leia has hidden in its circuitry then makes Luke’s departure inevitable. Having been miraculously rescued from death at the hands of Tusken Raiders and given a lightsabre by the mysterious Obi Wan (Spirit, which typically acts to rescue, inspire and provide talismanic resources), who has powers to channel the Force (ie the relationship with the unconscious), Luke makes contact with the earthy, dynamic Han Solo. The three men set off to help Leia and find her aboard the vast, dark sphere of the Death Star, the Empire’s greatest weapon. With the help of the others Luke rescues Leia from the clutches of Vader and, introjecting the Spirit in the form of the now-dead Obi Wan, he joins the rebel fighters and destroys the Death Star by flying along a deep canal in its surface and dropping a bomb through a tunnel into its heart – symbolically destroying the possibility of re-absorption by the Mother. All the elements are here: the princess needing rescue, the wise magician and the destruction of the monster, culminating in a kind of coronation ceremony at which Luke and Han are awarded medals by Leia in the presence of the assembled rebel army. This is a relatively uncomplicated fable exploring the infant’s separation from the Mother, ie an unconscious identification, in order to achieve consciousness that is represented in the recognition from Anima in the final ceremony.

By contrast Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980) is a darker film and the dragon-slaying is both less successful and less central to the action. Nonetheless, it shares many of the heroic motifs of the first film. Again Luke leaves his (new) home when Vader discovers and attacks the rebels’ base on the ice planet Hoth; but not before he has again been rescued from death (this time by freezing) by a vision of Obi Wan and the miraculous appearance of Han. Where in Episode IV Luke’s greater consciousness was brought about by the death of Obi Wan, in this film he more deliberately seeks out contact with the unconscious, going to the misty, forested swamp planet of Dagobah to seek training from the one remaining Jedi Master, Yoda, who appears as a kind of ancient wood sprite speaking an archaic form of English. Then, in the middle of the film, we meet for the first time the Emperor who commands Vader. Suddenly a space opens up between the archetypal Shadow and his agent, the Dark Father, who acts through Luke’s father complex. The distinction between Father and Shadow, and that between the personal complex and the archetype, (ie the interaction between the two layers of the unconscious proposed by Jung) is explored in a pivotal scene in which the Emperor and Vader discuss Luke and his significance. It is at this point we see a gap between to open between the Emperor’s agenda and Vader’s. Vader is given the task of bringing Luke to the Dark Side and sets a trap by taking Han and Leia hostage. Luke succeeds in rescuing Leia but Han, the embodied, earthy male ego quality, is left frozen alive in carbonite. In the final scenes Luke confronts Vader on a gantry above a vast reactor shaft and is subjected to a psychological assault reminiscent of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. Vader tells Luke that he does not know his own importance: ‘you have only begun to discover your power. Join me and I will complete your training.’ When Luke refuses Vader inflicts a severe wound, severing Luke’s right hand, which clutches the lightsabre he inherited from Anakin. This physical wounding is followed by the psychological blow: ‘Luke, I am your father.’ Intending to trade on Luke’s sense of the inescapability of his own darkness, Vader tries again: ‘join me, and we will rule the galaxy as father and son.’

In this early bout in the Oedipal struggle, then, the Father is clearly the superior force, energised by the personal father complex. Luke must mature further, taking ownership of his own projected darkness, before he can confront him as an equal. The Father’s very domination and savagery is in itself an agent of progress in the quest: the severing of Luke’s hand, clutching the inherited lightsabre, represents the need for him to separate from his over identification with the Good Father, the shadow side of which complex is the projection of Vader the Bad Father. When they meet again in Episode VI Vader will acknowledge Luke’s greater maturity and power represented by the lightsabre he has built for himself.

At the end of the film Luke is rescued again, this time by Leia in a rare show of ability with the Force that will become significant later on; but the overall feeling is of escape rather than triumph and it is not until Episode VI that we see the quest again in the ascendant. At the archetypal level this is a narrative of fragmentation, failure and death, the breakdown necessary for psychic growth. The fact that Episode V is largely concerned with Luke’s experience of failure is the first intimation that Lucas’s relationship with the notion of quest may not be uncomplicated as Episode IV implied.

This connection between failure/death and psychic rebirth in Episode V is underscored through repeated use of womb/birth images, initially suggested in the destruction of the Death Star in Episode IV. At the beginning of Episode V the rebels have made their base in caves tunnelled into the ice of Hoth; early on Luke is attacked by a massive ice beast and taken back to its cave, where it intends to devour him; Leia and Han take refuge in what they think is an asteroid cave but have in fact flown into the mouth of a vast space slug; on Dagobah Luke enters a mysterious, primal cave and duels an image of Vader. Beheading him, Vader’s iconic helmet melts away to reveal Luke’s own dead face. After his rescue from death by Obi Wan we next see Luke in the medical centre suspended, unconscious, in a glass tank full of clear fluid that is healing him; and after his fight with Vader and revelation of his paternity Luke falls through Cloud City and through a tunnel at its base, emerging to be saved by Leia. This wealth of image reflects, among other things, the interior action of the film; the struggle is Luke’s confrontation of his own darkness, his journey into the unconscious and subsequent rebirth. The images make clear the danger inherent in this interior quest: the return to the womb provides new information but also always holds the risk of destruction.

The more usual quest structure is restored, at least overtly, in Episode VI: The Return of the Jedi in that it sees the final destruction of the Empire. By now Luke is himself close to full consciousness (ie a Jedi) and is therefore able to turn rescuer rather than rescued. He snatches Leia and the defrosted Han from Jabba the Hutt who has been holding them on Tatooine – the home planet from which Luke originally escaped. Here, then, the ego is able to release the other elements of the psyche from the power of the unconscious and find right relationship with them, and particular Anima. On the forested moon Endor, and by moonlight, he talks to Leia about her mother as a way of bringing her to the realisation that they are brother and sister. Having stabilised this previously troubling relationship, Luke turns to the task of confronting the Shadow, the split off Bad Father he now recognises as his own projection. In a climactic scene with the Emperor and Vader he names Anakin Skywalker and calls his identity out of Vader; Vader finally turns away from the Dark Side and destroys the Emperor who has been orchestrating the dark power throughout the films. It’s therefore Vader who’s the triumphant hero, finally delivering on Obi Wan’s conviction (in Episodes I-III, which of course were written after the making of Return of the Jedi) that Anakin is the Chosen One who will bring balance to the Force. Luke’s restoration of galactic order is thus achieved through separation from the Mother and a coming to terms with the power of the Father, with whom he has finally been able to have dialogue in full consciousness. Peace and order is restored in the galaxy and in the Skywalker family as masculine consciousness apparently reaches its zenith.

Episode I: The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999) goes back in the chronology of Star Wars to follow the development of Anakin Skywalker, the child who will become both the villain and the final hero of Episode VI. Already, therefore, it shifts our perspective on who the hero of Star Wars really is and the possibilities he embodies. In the course of the film Anakin is rescued both from his mother, Shmi, and from an identification with the Mother represented again by Tatooine, the planet on which he is kept as a slave. As in Episodes IV-VI, he makes this break with the help of Spirit (Jedi Qui Gon Jin) and Anima (Queen Amidala and her alter ego Padmé). Amidala is leader of one of the peoples on the paradisiacal planet Naboo, paralleling Leia’s relationship with the doomed Alderaan. Naboo has been invaded by the capitalist/imperialist forces of the Trade Federation with the covert collusion of Senator Palpatine, the future Emperor. In the climax of the film the young Anakin, a miraculously gifted pilot with Jedi qualities, destroys the mother ship that controls the invading army of the Trade Federation; the scene is intended to parallel Luke’s destruction of the Death Star, the figurative dragon-slaying.

Episode II: Attack of the Clones is set ten years after Episode I and Anakin is now in some ways a clearer parallel to Luke, not least in that he too is attracted to the role of romantic hero: as Amidala’s bodyguard he has the opportunity to save her from an assassination attempt. But where Luke was unfailingly courageous and highly principled, Anakin is resentful of his Jedi superiors, in particular his teacher Obi Wan, and struggles with his own ambition and desire for power. Irritating the teenage Anakin may be, but he is more complex in his relationship to the quest than Luke was/will be. The primary focus for his inner conflict is his relationship with Anima and the Mother: he wants to be the romantic hero for both of them. Anakin is haunted by his longing to return to his mother, so much so that he abandons his Jedi duties to find her. He returns to Tatooine but arrives only in time to see her die, a trauma that triggers a crisis of violent fury and denial. Anakin’s desire to return to his mother is in direct conflict with his quest to become a Jedi, and also seems to be negatively associated with his growing attachment to Padmé (Anima). Where Luke obligingly complied with the requirements of the quest, the need to separate from the Mother, find relationship with the unconscious maternal, allow the assistance of Anima and Spirit and find dialogue even with the Shadow element of the psyche, Anakin rebels. This repeating pattern of rebellion is in itself interesting – Luke is a rebel fighter but in fact wants to restore order (the Republic), where the Empire in fact stands for a more fundamental rebellion against the principles of compromise and collectivity. In Episode II the Republic does indeed seem a doubtful enterprise that warrants resistance, weak and vulnerable as it is to manipulation and the goal of Anakin’s quest is less clear. Nonetheless, Anakin and Padmé participate in the defeat of the Droid Army mustered by forces opposed to the Republic and the film ends with a triumph of sorts, or at least the perpetuation of the flimsy status quo. The final scene is the marriage of Anakin and Padmé in the Eden of Naboo, the ego tying Anima closely to itself.

Anakin is therefore altogether a more troubling kind of hero because of his ambivalence about the value of the quest. He wants it all: the dyadic relationship with the Mother, erotic connection with Anima and her promise of discovering personal destiny, the power of the Father and achievement of consciousness. In Episode III: Revenge of the Sith we see the impossibility of these desires and Anakin’s consequent breakdown into psychosis, his subjection to his own Shadow. This fragmentation is triggered by the Mother, in fact by Padmé’s revelation that she is pregnant. Anakin’s eroticised relationship with Padmé has literally borne fruit and this provokes a crisis of fear, guilt and resentment expressed in his dreams of Padmé’s death in childbirth – dreams that parallel those in that tormented him in Episode II about his mother’s death. The significance of Padmé’s pregnancy is two fold: first it makes manifest the complete elision of Anima with the Mother in Anakin’s psyche and their association both with violence and with absence; and second it expresses the Mother’s role as holder of the potential both of birth and death. Padmé’s pregnancy kills both her and, in a sense, Anakin, but it also produces Luke, Leia and, indirectly, Vader. All three are necessary to the resolution of the galactic/psychic crisis. Nonetheless, his refusal to permit separation from the Mother, now tangling with his Anima relationship, is the catalyst for Anakin’s turn to the Dark Side. The goal of his quest is now hopelessly confused – where once it was clear that the summit of his achievement would be to become a Jedi Master, Anakin ends not by slaying dragons but children, and nearly killing his wife. The moral is that the attempt of the ego to control the activity of archetypes can only end in failure, the acting out of desire for the Anima has troubling results and that the Mother jealously resists the move to separation.

The very repetition of the quest in the two trios of films, separated by twenty years, thus brings to the surface tensions and complexities in the quest archetype. There are two particular matrices of archetypal activity where the complexity operates: the Spirit/Father/Shadow group and the Anima/Mother patterns. The Anima/Shadow axis bridges these two groups of dynamics.

2006-09-10T11:31:00.000+01:00

‘Do you remember your mother?’

Whether you employ the Freudian or the Jungian understanding of the quest, however, there’s an immediate problem in applying it to Star Wars: there are virtually no mothers. There are, in fact, no nuclear families. Luke Skywalker is brought up by adoptive parents who die early on in the first film and go more or less unmourned. Leia is also brought up by adoptive parents she scarcely mentions, even after they have been killed, as she watches, in the destruction of her planet. Neither Luke nor Leia show any curiosity about their biological mother. Towards the end of Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, 1983) they have a short conversation about her and Leia evinces a few sense impressions but these are of a woman we now know is her adoptive mother, the Queen of Alderaan. In Episode I: The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999) Anakin Skywalker is the product of a virgin birth who leaves his mother at a very early age to pursue a Jedi training, living with other children at the Jedi Temple with the celibate Masters. Tormented in adulthood by his mother’s absence Anakin goes in search of her, only to arrive in time to witness her death. Padmé’s family are never mentioned and a scene with them was cut from the final edit of Episode II: Attack of the Clones (George Lucas, 2002). Padmé dies as soon as her children are born in Episode III. The film finishes with the only two images of whole families in the cycle and they are brief: the Organas and the Skywalkers cradling their adoptive children. An hour into Episode IV, all these parents will be dead. These two shots, together with three or four brief images of Ewoks cradling infants, are the only occasions upon which parents are seen in intimate relationship with children.

In the three generations of the Skywalker dynasty around which the films revolve, therefore, there is not one single instance of a complete and sustaining family unit. This in itself has been offered as one of the reasons for the films’ success, speaking as they did to a generation of American children affected in the 1970s by a rapid rise in levels of divorce thanks, among other things, to the introduction of no fault divorce laws. But the absence of the mother for whom the Oedipal contest is staged presents a problem for any reading of the films as an expression, in a galactic setting, of the family crisis and/or its archetypal inspiration.

Jung’s later elaboration of the significance of the hero’s quest, however, gives us a useful pointer. He likened the quest to the sun’s diurnal journey, contained in the symbolic realm of the Mother: ‘she contains in her darkness the sun of “masculine” consciousness, which rises as a child out of the nocturnal sea of the unconscious, and like an old man sinks into it again.’ [1] The father complex, then, offers a means to separate from the mother and reach consciousness; but the power of the maternal unconscious underlies all of life and it is to this that man returns in old age. Armed with this perspective we find that, rather than being present only in her absence and as such the trigger for psychopathology, the Mother contains the whole drama of the Star Wars films as a largely unconscious presence. In Episodes IV- VI we constantly find ourselves in the realm of the Mother in the vast stretches of space, in a diverse range of vessels including, of course, the Millennium Falcon, in caves and on planets and moons of primordial heat and cold, forests and swamps and in the horrifying dark moons of the Death Stars. Throughout, the Mother is alternately containing, offering sanctuary, and exposing, destructive, her presence vast, terrifying and impersonal. She is returned to and abandoned repeatedly in Luke’s sojourns on Tatooine, Hoth, Dagobah, the moons of Yavin 4 and Endor and the Falcon. In Episodes I - III the Mother is explicitly acknowledged in the character of Shmi Skywalker and is a more proximate power, acting mysteriously in the disturbing dreams of the adolescent Anakin and Anakin the father-to-be. Episode III also contains the fullest articulation of violence towards and horror of the mother in the collapse of Anakin and Padmé’s relationship under the emotional pressure of her pregnancy and in her subsequent death in childbirth, apparently from a broken heart. But the maternal is also present in the prairies and lakes of Naboo, the aridity of Tatooine and Geonosis, the stormy sea planet of Kamino and perhaps most spectacularly on the volcano planet of Mustafar, where Vader has his dark birth. As the epic has developed, the Mother has perhaps become a more conscious figure; but her most pervasive presence in the movies is subliminal, as though her meaning is too vast and complex to be consciously understood or articulated.

The action of the films is thus contained within the feminine in a way that points directly to archetypal material. As Jung indicated, where we find the unconscious mother (planets, ships, caves, outer space and a figure of dreaming) there also we will find archetypal contents being constellated and crystallised to aid the journey of the individual psyche. The pattern of separation from the Mother for greater consciousness and return to her for inspiration is especially noticeable in Episodes IV-VI; the tensions of this oscillation come closer to the surface in Episodes I-III.

Having found the mother, therefore, what does an archetypal reading of the quest in Star Wars tell us about the quest itself and what insight does it offer into the astonishing response the films have provoked in several generations of movie goers?
[1] C. G. Jung, Answer to Job, p. 98.

2006-09-10T11:30:00.000+01:00

The quest and psychoanalysis

From a psychoanalytic view the quest is often interpreted as a metaphor for the journey to maturity and separation from infantile identifications. In the Freudian model it describes the Oedipal crisis and its resolution by repression of desire for the mother and entry into the world of the father. But for Jung the Oedipal story was in itself a symbol for the ego’s lifelong relationship with the unconscious, a cyclical relationship of closeness and separation:

‘Because man has a dim premonition of this original situation behind his individual experience, he has always tried to give it generally valid expression through the universal motif of the divine hero’s fight with the mother dragon, whose purpose is to deliver man from the power of darkness. This myth has a “saving,” ie therapeutic significance, since it gives adequate expression to the dynamism underlying the individual entanglement. The myth is not to be casually explained as the consequences of a personal father-complex, but should be understood teleologically, as an attempt of the unconscious itself to rescue consciousness from the danger of regression. The ideas of “salvation” are not subsequent rationalisations of a father-complex. They are, rather, archetypally pre-formed mechanisms for the development of consciousness.’[1]

This explanation references two useful ideas for the analysis of texts: that there is a set of pre existing ‘archetypal’ forms that emerge in human expression; and that there is a relationship between these archetypes and the psychic experience of the individual. Jung proposed that archetypes arise from the contents of the ‘collective’ unconscious, a separate layer of the psyche from the personal unconscious whose contents are unknown to the individual and expressed symbolically through archetypes - a symbol being an approximate expression for something that has no direct expression because it is unknown. For Jung, this is a teleological process: the imagery expressing these unknown contents is generated by the unconscious in its striving for psychic and spiritual development. It is trying to draw the attention of the conscious mind to new positions and potentials that can ultimately be introjected, thus expanding the possibilities of the individual psyche.

Archetypes are slippery, unstable, they shape shift and make their appearances at the least likely times and in the oddest of circumstances:

‘their tales and their figures move through phases like dramas and interweave one with another, dissolve into one another…. Archetypes are not definitely distinct. One instinct modifies another; one tale leads to another; one God implicates another. Their process is in their complications and amplification, and each individual’s psychic process involves attempting to follow, discriminate, and refine their complications.’[2]

Rather than having their meaning defined, an archetype can only be amplified, its meanings and resonances circumscribed rather than fully articulated. They can never therefore be emptied of meaning but will always re-emerge in other times and places in a new aspect; ‘the most we can do is dream the myth onwards and give it modern dress.’[3] In analysis the task is not to de-encrypt them and thereby undo them but ‘to dissolve the projections in order to restore their contents to the individual who has involuntarily lost them by projecting them outside himself.’ [4]

Jung is clear that archetypes feature frequently in myth and fairytale: ‘we can treat fairy tales as fantasy products, like dreams, conceiving them to be spontaneous statements of the unconscious about itself.’[5] Archetypal figures often occurring in fairytales and present in the Star Wars epic include the old man/Spirit, the eternal/miraculous child (also known as the Puer Aeturnus) and the Anima. It is worth pausing on the purpose of the Anima, given her importance for the male psyche. She represents the ‘soul image’ of masculine consciousness; that is, she represents to the male consciousness the image of that individual’s psyche. Appearing in dreams and fantasies as well as in personal relationships she can personify the male individual’s problems and confusions, the current emotions of his soul, more generally his sense of his own inner life and its importance. Like all archetypal figures, Anima is independent of the ego, hence her often subversive or uncanny qualities. And she is brought to life in the psyche by love, as Psyche in Greek mythology was paired with Eros. Certainly the relationship with Anima in the Star Wars saga is always tangled, often unsettlingly, with love and desire. The Shadow is also a frequent presence in fairytale as well as an eternal element of the individual psyche, representing the darkest, most hidden of our qualities that are the inevitable partner of our consciously recognised and accepted selves.

The quest itself also archetypal, proceeding as follows: through a series of trials and initiations (often at the hands or through the agency of the Father, for example the father who sends his youngest son away) the boy hero separates from unconscious identification with the Mother (for example through a symbolic dragon slaying) and achieves consciousness, often assisted in mythic representations by Spirit archetypes (wizards, goblins, talking animals). In the fairytale of Star Wars Luke and Anakin exhibit many of the hero archetype’s typical characteristics - ‘the divine generation from a virgin… his flight and concealment, his lowly birth … the wisdom of the …. child …. the breaking away from the mother’[6] - characteristics they share with the great archetypal hero of western culture, Christ. And as the hero the two Skywalkers are ‘first and foremost a self representation of the longing of the unconscious, of its unquenched and unquenchable desire for the light of consciousness.’[7]

[1] C. G. Jung, Collected Works, trans R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge, 1971), vol. 4, para. 738.
[2] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (New York: Harper Perennial, 1975), p.148.
[3] C. G. Jung, CW vol. 9:1, para. 271.
[4] Ibid., para. 160.
[5] C. G. Jung, CW vol. 13, para. 240.
[6] C. G. Jung, Answer to Job, trans R. F. C. Hull (London: Routledge Classics, 2002), p. 54.
[7] C. G. Jung, CW vol. 5, para. 299.

2006-09-10T11:29:00.000+01:00

Introduction: Freud, Jung, Lucas and the Hero

With the release of Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005), George Lucas’s thirty year exploration of the quest myth is, apparently, complete. So anxious was he to capture the quintessence of the myth in the first film Episode IV: A New Hope (George Lucas, 1977) that he involved Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces[1], in the writing of the screenplay. Campbell later remarked that George Lucas was the best student he ever had.

What Lucas may not have foreseen, but nonetheless has done a good deal to bring about, is his ascension to the role of the hero at the heart of the Star Wars myth. His vision and inspiration, actual and putative, are now central to a mythic complex incorporating profit, technology, fandom and the development of much of the popular cinema that has followed. As the films were made, and in particular with the decision to go back in the fictional chronology of the Star Wars universe to focus on the character of Darth Vader in Episodes I-III, the hero and the quest became more complex; just as in life Lucas’s journey to dominate the corporatised movie industry he once deplored has evidenced the ironies and ambiguities of personal destiny.

The initial and continuing success of Star Wars has often been explained as the response of a cinema-going public that in the late 1970s longed for heroes. In the beginning the world of Star Wars was one in which good triumphs over evil and the two can easily be distinguished. But the final instalment in the saga is an orgy of violence, darkness and betrayal. The boyish hero becomes a figure of monstrous evil; the princess dies in childbirth; the Jedi, representatives of all that is good and honourable, have been slaughtered. This enormous release of emotional energy and closure of the narrative at its darkest moment uncovers an ambivalence about the quest and its consequences that would have been hard to imagine when the story ended with dancing Ewoks under Endor’s newly liberated sky. In what follows I explore the particular texture of the archetypal heroic quest pursued in these films and to draw out in particular the collection of motifs and anxieties that have constellated around the Mother and the Anima.
[1] J. Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

2006-07-22T18:09:00.000+01:00

Thinking too hard about Star Wars.

In the rest of this section is a long piece I wrote having spent ages wondering a) why so many people like Star Wars and b) whether you could get any value out of 'reading' the films through the filter of Jungian theory. On the latter point you'll have to make up your own mind, if you get to the end of what follows. On the former I'm afraid I'm no further on. They really are toss, you know.

Given the inordinate length of this essay (not unlike the films themselves. That's what we call parallel process, kids), I've broken it up into sections on the major themes. Hope that helps. Here are quick links to the different sections, if that helps with navigation.

Freud, Jung, Lucas and the hero

The quest and psychoanalysis

'Do you remember your mother?'

The story so far: archetypal dynamics

'You're the nearest thing I have to a father'

'I've been seeing her in my dreams...vivid dreams... scary dreams'

'I've been seeing her in my dreams' #2 - Leia and Padme

'I've been seeing her in my dreams'#3 - the Mother

'I've been seeing her in my dreams' #4 - Anima, Episodes IV-VI

'I've been seeing her in my dreams' #5 Anima, Episodes I-III

'I've been seeing her in my dreams' #6 - Anima and the Mother

'I want her alive!

Conclusions

2006-07-22T18:01:00.000+01:00

What did Jung mean by 'archetypes' and why do I care?

Central to a Jungian approach to narrative and image (and therefore film) is the concept of the archetype; and central to an understanding of what Jung meant by ‘archetype’ is the distinction between his proposed structure of the individual unconscious and that employed by Freud. For Freud the unconscious is formed as a repository for repressed memories, desires and affects. Some of these repressed contents then attempt to re-enter the conscious mind in distorted or disguised form as dreams or neurotic symptoms. The task of analysis is to decode these image or symptoms, returning the hitherto repressed desire to consciousness where it can be dealt with directly. For Freud, therefore, a symbol emerging from the unconscious should be understood as an expression whose manifest meaning conceals a latent meaning that can and should be brought out and concretised in the analytic healing process. An example would be Freud’s tracing of a patient’s dream about her daughter lying dead in a box to her repressed desire, when pregnant, that the foetus would die.[1]

Jung, however, pointed to the persistence of dream images and symptoms after their ‘meaning’ had been exposed. This suggested to him that there was more to the contents of the unconscious than the individual’s assortment of known but denied recollections and desires. The unconscious, he proposed, also contains the unknown: that is, contents that have never been known to the individual consciousness but that may yet emerge. On this basis he posited a dual structure for the unconscious: a layer known as the ‘personal unconscious’, containing the repressed experiences, desires and feelings of that individual; and the ‘collective unconscious’ or ‘objective psyche’, whose contents transcend the boundaries of the personal and are shared by everyone at all times. The collective unconscious, he wrote, is ‘identical in all men and thus constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us.’[2] The contents of this collective unconscious are expressed symbolically - a symbol being an approximate expression for something that has no direct expression, hence his apparently absurd assertion that a penis is a phallic symbol. Material from the collective unconscious has to be expressed symbolically, exactly because the conscious mind has had no previous knowledge of it and therefore has no language for it.

For Jung, this is a teleological process: the imagery expressing these unknown contents is generated by the unconscious in its striving for psychic and spiritual development. It is trying to draw the attention of the conscious mind to new positions and potentials. This development sought by the unconscious takes the psyche beyond the personal into the transpersonal, or spiritual, realm and its goal is, for Jung, ‘individuation’, ‘the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated… having for its goal the development of the individual personality… It is an extension of the sphere of consciousness, an enriching of conscious psychological life.’[3]

The symbolic expressions of the collective unconscious are also referred to as archetypes. An archetype is the outcome of the collective unconscious expressing itself to the conscious mind through inhabiting a pre-existent form ‘that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche and can therefore manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at any time.’[4] In other words, archetypal expressions make use of a vocabulary of images that have emerged in human expression repeatedly across human history. A more recent writer about archetypes, James Hillman, puts it another way: archetypes are ‘root metaphors’ that we see, respond to and generate ourselves as a means to interact with the collective unconscious through our own consciousness. ‘They give our psychic functions – whether thinking, feeling, perceiving or remembering – their imaginal life, their internal coherence, their force, their necessity and their ultimate intelligibility. These persons keep our persons in order, holding into significant patterns the segments and fragments of behaviours we call emotions, memories, attitudes and motives.’[5] Archetypes are the characters we are drawn to in books and films, the repeating patterns and persons of fairytales, the meaning and function we ascribe to our behaviours and feelings.

Examples of archetypal figures often occurring in fairytales and present in the Star Wars epic are the old man (Senex), the eternal/miraculous child (Puer Aeturnus), the trickster (Hermes) and the Anima. Anima is for men the most significant of these, representing as she does the ‘soul image’ of masculine consciousness. That is, she represents to the male consciousness the image of that individual’s psyche. Appearing in dreams and fantasies as well as in personal relationships she can personify the male individual’s problems and confusions, the current emotions of his soul, more generally his sense of his own inner life and its importance; she can also connect consciousness with the imagination: ‘she is both the bridge to the imaginal and the other side.’[6] Anima is independent of the ego, hence her often subversive or uncanny qualities. And she is brought to life, argues Hillman, by love, as Psyche in Greek mythology was paired with Eros.

Archetypal forms encompass both positive and negative poles and can be endlessly elaborated. They will be inflected by passage through the individual psyche, the unique pronunciation of a word that’s known to the objective psyche of everyone, everywhere. They can, therefore, and often are, culturally coded and historicised. An example is the use of the cross in Christianity, endlessly mined for ideological, political and moral meaning, repeated and re-presented throughout Christian communities and yet continuing to be an unfathomable and eternally wondrous symbol of myriad resonances, never emptied of personal meaning for the believer. Never, in short, fully defined or finally understood.

The key to identifying images of the collective unconscious, which Jung frequently describes as ‘primordial’, lies in the personal response to the image. Contact with an image of the objective psyche will fascinate even though the image is likely to transcend any personal associations. The image may be non-human or impersonal and indeed can often be abstract, for example a cross or a mandala. The image may emerge from within but appear to have a life of its own, occurring and developing beyond the power of the conscious will – the imagery of space and space travel in David Bowie’s songs, for example, as much as an individual’s lament that she always is attracted to the same kind of man. Quintessentially, symbolic contents will carry large amounts of energy and experience of them will be numinous, ie have spiritual or transcendental qualities: ‘the concentration of psychic forces have something about them that always looks like magic.’[7]

An example Jung cites is that of a woman patient who had formed a transference to him of her relationship with her father. They had identified and discussed this transference but seemed to have reached an impasse in the therapeutic process. They began to discuss her dreams and it became clear her dream imagery repeatedly indicated the patient-therapist relationship. The therapist/father, however, usually appeared in some distorted form: very old, supernaturally large, and often associated with nature. In one dream the therapist figure stood next to the woman on a hill side covered with wheat, he a giant and she tiny. He lifted and held her in his arms, rocking her, as the wind swept over the wheat field and stirred the wheat. The dreams, then, seemed simply to be a representation of the transference, made boring with repetition, of the father-love onto the doctor, with the divine aspects particularly emphasised. All they lacked was the conscious criticism of the survival of this transference, in other words they lacked the sense that there was something ‘wrong’ with the transference. What could be the purpose of this stubborn repetition? On reflection, Jung came to conclude that these dreams were a sign that the unconscious was attempting to reach beyond and through the personal father complex to God, to ‘free a vision of God from the veils of the personal, so that the transference to the person of the doctor was no more than a misunderstanding on the part of the conscious mind.’[8] In this instance, therefore the collective unconscious was reaching through the personal experience to try to communicate something of importance to the conscious mind of the patient: her longing for God.

‘Archetypes’, Jung insisted, ‘are among the inalienable assets of every psyche,’[9] the means by which we all have the potential to develop greater consciousness. Great gift as they are, however, to the quest for personal destiny, archetypes are not easy to work with. As Jung himself had call to reiterate on several occasions, an archetype does not ‘mean’ something else; an archetype constellates a set of possibilities to be made use of by consciousness at a particular moment of need. Archetypes can be difficult to identify, woven as they are into the largest patterns of our behaviours and beliefs. When we occupy ourselves with origins and causes, with growth and change, we are in the archetypal realm of the mother. When we are concerned with love, as are Augustine and Freud and Richard Curtis, we are occupied by an archetype, by Eros or Christ or Aphrodite, depending on how the archetype manifests in us and the face it is showing.[10] Archetypes are slippery, unstable, they shape shift and make their appearances at the least likely times and in the oddest of circumstances. Rather than having their meaning defined, an archetype can only be amplified, its meanings and resonances circumscribed rather than fully articulated. Archetypes are in large degree autonomous; they are not to be integrated into the psyche as personal, recovered contents might be, but rather ‘come to terms with’ by a process of dialogue when they are present. They are not, most importantly, symptoms to be treated but helpful effects that walk alongside us, sometimes all our lives, altering themselves to our particular needs. In analysis the task is not to de-encrypt them and thereby undo them but ‘to dissolve the projections in order to restore their contents to the individual who has involuntarily lost them by projecting them outside himself.’ [11]

Working with archetypes is a process of continual examination of symbolic expressions and translation of current understandings into a different metaphorical system, language; ‘archetypal ideas are primarily speculative ideas, that is, they encourage speculation.’[12] Archetypes can never therefore be emptied of meaning but will always re-emerge in other times and places in a new aspect; ‘the most we can do is dream the myth onwards and give it modern dress.’[13] .

This work of amplification is not, as Jung himself glumly remarked, simple; it ‘not only requires lengthy and wearisome researches, but is also an ungrateful subject for demonstration.’[14] By a process of finding analogies for the functional meaning of an image (not analogies for the image itself) we can find a dialogue with archetypal images; but we cannot either aim to define or explain, lest we lose the lineaments of the unknown that is seeking to suggest itself; and nor can we go too far as all archetypal contents are linked and we therefore risk bringing the entire network to the surface and losing sight of the image itself:

‘their tales and their figures move through phases like dramas and interweave one with another, dissolve into one another…. Archetypes are not definitely distinct. One instinct modifies another; one tale leads to another; one God implicates another. Their process is in their complications and amplification, and each individual’s psychic process involves attempting to follow, discriminate, and refine their complications.’[15]

[1] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, transl. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (Penguin Books, London, 1991), pp 237-8.
[2] C. G. Jung, Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, publ. in Von Den Wurzeln den Bewusstseins (Zurich, 1954); excerpt quoted in Jung: Four Archetypes, transl. R. F. C. Hull (Routledge, London and New York, 2003) p 2.
[3] C. G. Jung, Psychological Types , transl H. G. Baynes, revision R. F. C. Hull (Routledge, London, 1971), pp. 450 – 452.
[4] C. G. Jung, Collected Works 1964/75; quoted in Don Frederickson, Jung / sign / symbol / film, in Jung & Film: Post Jungian Takes on the Moving Image, eds Christopher Hauke and Ian Alister (Brunner Routledge 2001), p 30.
[5] James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology (Harper-Perennial 1992), p128.
[6] Ibid., p43.
[7] C. G. Jung, The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales, Volume 9i, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Bollingen Foundation, 1959); excerpt quoted in Jung: Aspects of the Masculine, transl R.F. C. Hull, ed John Beebe, (Routledge, London and New York, 2003), p 159.
[8] Ibid., p 85.
[9] C. G. Jung, Four Archetypes, p 17.
[10] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 124
[11] C. G. Jung, Four Archetypes, p160.
[12] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p. 117.
[13] C. G. Jung, Collected Works 9:1, 1959/68, quoted in Jung/sign/symbol film, Jung & Film, p 36.
[14] C. G, Jung, Collected Works 9:1, 1959/68, quoted in Jung/sign/symbol film, Jung & Film, p 36.
[15] Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, p148.

2006-07-22T17:57:00.000+01:00

What has psychoanalysis got to do with the movies?

From its origins, psychoanalysis has found rich inspiration in literature as well as in more conventional study of case histories. As products of the unconscious ordered for communication to others, literature can provide particularly clear examples of the principles of psychoanalysis, and the psyche, in operation. Shakespeare, Goethe, Zola and Rider Haggard are just a few of those whose work provided material for Freud; in fact his interpretation of Hamlet has overwhelmed productions of the play for much of the last century. Jung was drawn, among many other texts, to the scriptures and myth of numerous cultures including the Upanishads, the Mahabharata and the Vedas as well as the Bible.

The further resonance of psychoanalytic ideas with film has been a relationship of long standing. As many have previously noted, there is continuity between the images of dreams and those of cinema, the image being the language of the unconscious. Film offers us, therefore, a perspective on the psyche; like a dream, we can ‘read’ a film as an articulation of the characters, sub personalities, archetypes of the psyche and their interaction, representing to our conscious minds our own psychic conflicts and dynamics.

2006-06-25T19:49:00.000+01:00

X Men III

There are, I suppose, a number of reasons X Men could piss you off. For me it was to do with Jean Grey.

For quite a lot of the film I was quite excited. How progressive, I thought. Looks like it will turn out that a woman will be more powerful than tired old patriarchal ideological conflicts (paternalistic mind controlling bald chap Charles who knows what's best for you, vs evil militaristic masculine dark side Magneto - both to do with control, both to do with power). Jean Grey will become the new paradigm, etc.

But it turns out that, actually, women who are more powerful than men are dangerous aberrations and should die - in fact with their good, compliant selves they beg for death because they know they're an offence against nature. Chaste and compliant Storm knows her place and therefore earns the honour of getting to run Charles Xavier's beneficent moral mind control regime. Shame Jean didn't have the wit to comply and repress too.

Plus there's all the stuff about how you can tell Jean's gone m/bad because she starts liking sex (alarming poor shrinking violet Hugh Jackman. You can see how he'd fear for his purity). But then I should have guessed because she first appears out of the depths of a lake, and I know my Freud - enough to know you can't trust these woman-type people with their wombs and leakages.

So politically this film got right on my tit end. But then from Carl's point of view, I'm taking it all too personally. To kvetch on about the film as misogynist is to literalise; this is a film about the fear of the masculine consciousness of the feminine within the psyche. The feminine resides in every male psyche as the most mysterious, hidden and 'other' aspect of the Self. This feminine aspect of the male is his Anima. Anima represents to the male consciousness the image of that individual’s psyche. Appearing in a man's dreams and fantasies, she also turns up in real life in his in his personal relationships. She can personify a man's problems and confusions, the current emotions of his soul, more generally his sense of his own inner life and its importance; she can also connect consciousness with the imagination (inspiring the love or creation of songs, paintings, novels... any creative product of the psyche). Anima is independent of the ego, hence her often subversive or uncanny qualities (a witch, a goddess, the one who got away; the femme fatale of noir). She is powerful and frightening and the temptation to repress her unsettling influence - to stab her to death with your adamantine claws - can appear irresistible.

So actually Carl and I aren't poles apart on this one. X Men III is a film about patriarchies being created by, and then sustaining, repression of the feminine. It happens in the psyche of the patriarch in parallel with his acting out of the repression on the world (ie real, actual women) . Still, we can always comfort ourselves with Famke and Halle looking hot in leather. Oh, hang on...

Carl says: 'The anima image, which lends the mother such superhuman glamour in the eyes of the son, gradually becomes tarnished by commonplace reality and sinks back into the unconscious, but without in any way losing its original tension and instinctivity. It is ready to spring out and project itself at the first opportunity, the moment a woman makes an impression that is out of the ordinary.'