Movies and the Mind

by William Indick

  Another variation on the trickster figure is the shapeshifter archetype. Aside from being a trickster, Professor Marvel is also a shapeshifter, a character who fluidly changes his physical form throughout the film. He shifts shape from Professor Marvel to the Emerald City doorman to a cabbie to the Wizard’s guard to the Wizard of Oz and then finally back to Professor Marvel again. The shapeshifter gods are present in many myths, most notably in Greek mythology, in which gods such as Zeus would frequently shift shape into animal or human form in order to mingle among humans and meddle in their affairs. The shapeshifters’ supernatural transfigurative powers as well as their deceptive means are indicative of their godly status. Behind their chicanery and deceit is wisdom. The shapeshifter is a particularly resonant archetype because in its ability to transform, it represents the great human potential for development, change and rebirth.

  Uroboros

  Archetypes exist as symbolic themes as well as images and figures. Archetypal themes such as birth, rebirth, death, sorcery and the hero’s journey constitute the plot twists and stories that structure the myths. They represent the psychological significance of major life events, and are symbols of personal change and transformation. Though the hero in film must always develop and transform in some way in order for his story to be psychologically resonant, the final act of returning to the beginning state symbolizes the central theme of “wholeness” and unification. Though the hero encountered many places and figures, they are all parts of her Self. By returning to her starting point, the hero wraps her adventure in a circle, enclosing her experiences in the cycle of her own life story and understanding that the meaning of the journey is derived from the things she learned about herself.

  Uroboros, the archetypal image of the snake eating its own tail, symbolizes the unification of opposites. As an archetypal theme, Uroboros can be seen in the denouement portion of the story, when the hero at the end of her journey returns to the point of her departure. Uroboros in The Wizard of Oz is not only a major theme, but the main crisis and conflict in Dorothy’s story. When Dorothy returns home at the end of the film, she is reunited with her family and friends and all is right with the world. As a “return” theme at the end of the film, Uroboros delivers a sense of closure to viewers, assuring them that every conflict has been resolved, every plot twist has been unraveled and that every character will live happily ever after.

  Vanilla Sky (revisited)

  Vanilla Sky depicts the dream of a male hero with some particularly Jungian symbolism and imagery. David Aames spends a good deal of the film hiding behind a mask. When masked, the character is David’s persona, struggling to get to the root of his conflicts. When unmasked, the character is David’s shadow, a character plagued with flaws such as vanity, arrogance, carelessness and egocentrism. As his persona, David encounters and integrates his wise old man archetype—the positive father figure played by Dr. McCabe, his patient and insightful psychiatrist/mentor. McCabe also represents the “self-regulating system” of David’s unconscious mind. He is the function that is attempting to integrate the disconnected parts of David’s self.

  The anima archetype in David’s dream is divided into three female characters. Julie (Cameron Diaz) symbolizes the shadowy side of David’s anima, the side that represents his passion, lust and guilt. She is a jealous goddess who punishes David for his vanity and insensitivity to women. Her power is the “fury of a woman scorned.” Sophia (Penélope Cruz) symbolizes the light side of the anima, the side that represents his distant memories of his dearly departed mother. Sophia is a goddess of love and creativity. And Rebecca (Tilda Swinton) is a prophet goddess who bestows David with the intuitive wisdom he needs to complete his journey. The symbolic unity of this divine trinity of anima figures is beautifully symbolized in the hair color of the three goddesses—a brunette, a blonde and a redhead.

  The message of David’s dream is that he needs to face his post-accident reality. David must remove his mask and face himself. In the symbol of removing the mask, there is a personal integration in which persona faces shadow, the wise old man becomes integrated and the anima reveals the self. In removing the mask, David reaches his goal of self awareness. He “opens his eyes” to a new life.

  3

  Heroes and Villains

  From a Freudian perspective, the typical hero’s mission to defeat the villain is symbolic of the Oedipal complex, in which the child must repress his illicit psychosexual desire for Mother. In order to explain the internal conflict within the Oedipal complex, Freud created his triarchic structure of the psyche—the id, ego and superego. The id represents the basic drives towards sex and aggression, the superego represents the moral restraints of society, and the ego represents a compromise between the id and superego. In this chapter, Freud’s model of neurotic conflict and his structure of id/ego/superego are interpreted as a model for analysis of conflict in film and the ubiquitous character structure of villain/hero/mentor in movies.

  The Villain

  While movie heroes are typically highly moral and civilized people, villains are typically immoral cads who satisfy their primal desires despite the negative outcomes for their victims. The movie villain is the unconscious representation of the repressed id desires. Unlike the hero, the villain is free to express his primal desires in any way he sees fit. In this way, the viewers experience a vicarious sense of freedom and guilty pleasure by identifying with the villain. But the viewer also experiences a sense of psychological resolution when the wild, lawless villain is eventually repressed and defeated by the hero.

  The Black Knight

  In traditional stories, the villain wears a costume that is indicative of his dark nature. In silent films, the “stage villain” was typically dressed in black, with a big black hat, a dark beard and a long curling black moustache. In Westerns, the evil cowboy usually rode a black horse and was dressed in black, while the good cowboy wore white or earth tones and rode a white horse. Jack Palance’s memorable characterization of Wilson, the evil gunslinger in Shane (1953), epitomized the Black Knight costuming of the villain character. While Shane’s (Allan Ladd) jacket was the light color of pure prairie dirt, Wilson’s black outfit symbolized the clear antithesis between his character and the hero’s. In film noir, gangsters uniformly wore dark suits and drove black Cadillacs. In movies for children, the villain is often a witch who wears a black cape, and she is typically accompanied by a black cat, raven, bat or crow. The blackness of the Wicked Witch’s costume in The Wizard of Oz stood in stark contrast to the bright white gown worn by the Good Witch Glinda. The Nazi SS uniforms were jet black, making them the perfect villains in American war movies, in which the good Allied soldiers dressed in honest, natural, earthy greens.

  The Villain Strikes Back

  Filmmakers realized early on that audiences love to identify with villains. Part of the joy of cinema is the ability to enjoy vicarious pleasures through the characters on the screen. Viewers often enjoy seeing villains engage in sin and vice more than they enjoy seeing their heroes exhibit the boring virtues of morality and goodness. Sinners simply have much more fun. Hence, villains are often more popular than their hero counterparts. However, since the basic psychology behind most film plots is the resolution of the Oedipal complex, the filmmakers typically kill their villains at the end of the movie. The solution to this problem was found in the Hollywood sequel formula, in which the villain is miraculously resurrected or freed. In Frankenstein (1931), the monster (Boris Karloff) is killed in a blazing inferno. But in the sequel, The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), we learn that the monster somehow survived by falling into a mysterious stream.

  This type of far-fetched resurrection of the villain is typical in the horror movie genre. In the Halloween and Friday the 13th movies, Michael and Jason, (the psycho slashers), usually die at the end; but somehow, these villains are always resurrected for the next sequel. Viewers responded so well to the robot villain (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in The Terminator (1984) that he was
resurrected in Terminator 2 (1991), but with a twist. Since the Terminator was a robot, the quality of his character depended entirely on his programming, so in the sequel, he was resurrected as a hero instead of a villain. The twist worked. Audiences who had already identified with the Terminator as a villain, were even more willing to identify with him as a hero. In Terminator 3 (2003), the robot returns once again, but this time as a well-established hero, his former incarnation as a villain is just a distant memory.

  The Mentor

  The mentor figure has developed through ancient legends and mythology from the archaic tribal leader or shaman. The mentor figure gave a blessing or instruction to the young hero, bestowed him with a weapon of power and either sent him off into the woods, or led the hunting party out himself. In many cases, it is the mentor who inspires the hero to accept the burden of the quest. For the ancient tribesmen, the hero’s success on the hunt meant the difference between feast and famine. On a mythological level, the journey was made in order to save an environment, a people, an ideal or a way of life. In The Ten Commandments (1956), Moses (Charlton Heston) was inspired by a divine voice speaking through a burning bush to deliver his people from bondage in Egypt. In Excalibur (1981), the Knights of the Round Table were inspired by King Arthur (Nigel Terry) to find the Grail in order to save the dying land. In Star Wars (1977), Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) was told by Obi-Wan Kanobi (Alec Guinness) that he must rescue Princess Leia from the evil hands of the Dark Emperor. In each case, the mentor is a crucial figure for the hero. He enthuses the hero with a grand purpose in the root sense of the word—“en theos”—the Greek term for divine inspiration. The mentor, whether divine or merely the herald of a divine message, delivers the heavenly call of adventure to the hero.

  The mentor is a father figure whom the young hero must identify with. He is a positive father figure, who typically stands as an opposing force in the hero’s psyche, contrasting with the negative or false father figure. In this sense, the positive father figure represents the superego, while the negative father figure or villain represents the id. The hero represents the ego, torn between the opposing poles of good and evil. The hero’s primary task is to learn some basic truths about his identity, morality and personal integrity from the mentor. He then must integrate these character lessons into his own psyche. In Pinocchio (1940), the Blue Fairy is the divine figure that endows Pinocchio with life, but the mentor figure he inherits is Jiminy Cricket, the “little voice inside his head,” externalized into a physical conscience. It is Jiminy’s job to constantly remind Pinocchio about his goal to become a real boy, and about the virtues of honesty and self-sacrifice which will gain him that reward. In Star Wars, Luke’s real father is an evil figure who is not present in his life. When Luke adopts Obi-Wan as his new mentor and father figure, he accepts his divine destiny as a Jedi knight, and he accepts the challenge of rescuing the princess (Carrie Fisher).

  Guilt

  The child’s moral development begins as a fear of Father and the punishment he inflicts for naughty behavior. Freud’s conception of guilt owes much to Nietzsche, who defined guilt as self-imposed psychological punishment, derived from the memory of actual physical punishment. The child associates the pain and fear of punishment from Father with a negative affect. Eventually, the memory of outwardly inflicted physical pain becomes a taste of self-inflicted psychological pain. This self-inflicted psychological pain is what we call “guilt.” As an enforcer of moral rules, guilt is a much more powerful force than physical punishment, because guilt begins working even before we do something wrong. The mere idea of committing an immoral act results in a pang of guilt, which deters us from committing the act. Furthermore, since guilt is an unconscious force, it can detect desires and wishes hidden deep in the psyche—desires that the individual is not even consciously aware of. Hence, unresolved Oedipal feelings of inappropriate desire for the mother or repressed aggression towards the father can exist below the conscious level, resulting in unconscious guilt that can express itself through a myriad of neurotic symptoms. The anxiety-ridden neurotic is completely unaware of the deeply buried feelings that torture him and block his ability to enjoy healthy emotional relationships. Untangling the complex web of unconscious memories and guilt can be a painfully long and torturous process for the neurotic, and a remarkably lucrative process for his psychoanalyst.

  Libido

  The Oedipal complex is fully resolved when the child’s developing ego becomes balanced by the acquisition of the opposing force to the id, the superego. The child’s superego is his moral conscience, the structure within the psyche that holds all of the moral rules and principles held sacred by society—as well as the psychological imprints of the authority figures who punished him as he was growing up. So, in a traditional sense, the superego is the internal representation of the boy’s identification with his father. On a symbolic level, the superego is the father. And at the level of myth, the superego is the mentor who guides the hero and informs him of his moral purpose.

  The power of the superego arises from its ability to impose guilt, the teeth of the moral conscience. The psyche is a perpetual battleground between guilt and the libido, the sexually charged psychic energy that originates from the id. If guilt is the immovable object of morality, then libido is the unstoppable force of desire. These two unconscious forces can never conquer each other, and they remain in constant conflict, forever locked in a tug-of-war over control of the psyche.

  The Underdeveloped Superego

  The character with no respect for rules or authority suffers from a lack of guilt. The challenge of the guiltless character is to constrain his unbridled libido and develop a conscience. Often times, the character with an underdeveloped superego is the villain. Since this wild man has no internal conscience, his id must be defeated and punished by an external moral conscience—the hero. In westerns, the clash between guilt and libido is symbolized by the big shootout, in which the good hero faces the evil villain in mortal combat. Movies such as My Darling Clementine (1946), High Noon (1952) and Rio Bravo (1959) all build up to the final showdown between the sheriffs who represent law and order, and the villains who represent the lawlessness of the Wild West.

  Other times, the hero is the one with the underdeveloped superego. If he is an antihero, he may have to overcome his libidinous ways in order to defeat the bad guy. In Rio Bravo, Dude (Dean Martin) must overcome his weakness for booze in order to help the sheriff (John Wayne) defeat the bad guys. In The Tin Star (1957), Morg the bounty hunter (Henry Fonda) must restrain his impulse for killing and demonstrate to his young disciple (Anthony Perkins) that he is capable of capturing a wanted criminal alive. If the protagonist is a fallen hero, he typically loses his battle with his own libido. In De Palma’s Scarface (1983), Tony desperately needs the love and respect of his sister (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio), the only pure thing left in his life. But Tony’s anger, mistrust, violence and drug abuse destroy his relationship with his sister, and lead to his bloody downfall.

  The Overdeveloped Superego

  The character plagued by guilt, neurosis and anxiety suffers from an overdeveloped superego. Woody Allen’s character in many of his movies is a perfect example of the guilt-ridden neurotic whose every decision is racked by second guessing and self doubt. Some heroes have such an overpowering sense of guilt that their neuroses become psychologically debilitating. The challenge for these heroes is to learn the unconscious root of their guilt, and to overcome it. In Ordinary People (1980), Conrad (Timothy Hutton) is a clinically depressed and suicidal teen. Through psychotherapy, he discovers that he is punishing himself for surviving a boating accident in which his beloved brother died. When this unconscious dilemma is brought into the light of conscious thought, it is unraveled and defused. Guilt loses its psychological power when the hero understands that it is merely an irrational and inordinate form of self-inflicted punishment.

  In most cases, however, a deeper understanding of the guilt driving the hero’
s anxiety would destroy the basic motivation behind his character. John Elder (John Wayne) in The Sons of Katie Elder (1965) is driven throughout the film by his guilt over abandoning his poor mother. In The Elephant Man (1980), Dr. Treves (Anthony Hopkins) is driven to help John Merrick (John Hurt) by the guilt he feels from exploiting the poor man as a human abnormality. Superheroes are particularly prone to overdeveloped superegos. The superhero in Batman (1989) dedicates his life to fighting crime after witnessing the death of his parents and feeling guilty that he did nothing to stop the horrendous crime. Similarly, the superhero in Spider-Man (2002) becomes a crime fighter when his uncle is killed by a criminal that he could have stopped. And the superhero in Superman (1978) gives up normal life for crime fighting when his adoptive father dies of a heart attack, and Superman feels guilty for not being able to save him. The link between overdeveloped superegos and highly motivated superheroes is extremely strong in comic books and film. For the sake of Metropolis, let’s hope that Superman never goes into therapy.

  Father

  The resolution of the Oedipal Complex involves the child’s identi-fication and psychological integration of the father figure. However, the father figures provided to us by fate are often not the ones that inspire us to achieve our desired identities. The replacement of a false, negative or absent father figure with an inspirational one is a common theme in many films. In Of Human Hearts (1938), Jason’s father (Walter Huston) is a simple country preacher with very strict demands for moral behavior. Jason (James Stewart) bristles under the strict authoritarian rule of his parochial father, but he finds an alternative father figure in the town physician. Dr. Shingle (Charles Coburn) is a man of science, not a man of God. Dr. Shingle is a libertarian as well as a kindly and understanding man. To his father’s chagrin, Jason begins to identify with Dr. Shingle, and disobeys his father’s wishes by reading medical books rather than the bible. Eventually, Jason’s identification with Dr. Shingle precipitates a complete split between father and son, and Jason leaves his father’s house to become a doctor instead of a preacher. By the end of the film, Jason’s father has died and Dr. Shingle has replaced him not only as a mentor for Jason, but as a surrogate husband for Jason’s mother (Beulah Bondi) as well, completing his role as a replacement father figure.