Movies and the Mind

by William Indick

  Saving the Father

  In a true role reversal, a passive princess who is rescued by a prince becomes an active princess who rescues the prince by slaying the beast herself. Since this is a huge development in character, many stories display a stage of archetype evolution, in which the princess must rescue her old or ailing father. Belle must rescue her father several times in her story. The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas must save their father and his kingdom from the invading hordes. Mulan saves her disabled father by taking his place in the Chinese army. Though the princess is not yet saving her prince, rescuing her father is still a role reversal, as it displays a powerful girl rescuing a passive male figure. This motif is a link between the completely passive princess heroes of traditional tales and the new breed of active princess heroes.

  The Princess in Knight’s Armor

  Sometimes, in order to save her father, the princess must disguise her herself as a male warrior. By dressing up as a male, the female hero takes on the male persona and can therefore follow the traditional hero’s path. As a princess in knight’s armor, she can fight and show her courage like a man. These princess heroes share a common hamartia—the danger of being unmasked and having their female personas revealed. The princess warrior motif is seen directly in the Joan of Arc legend, and has most recently been depicted in Disney’s Mulan (1998). Occasionally, the female hero wishes to express her strength and independence in fields other than the battlefield. In Yentl (1983), the heroine (Barbara Streisand) disguises herself as a male student so she can conquer knowledge of the Torah.

  Princess Valiant

  The later generation of princess heroes shows a steady progression in the amount of traditionally male heroic qualities that a princess hero can display. Belle in Beauty and the Beast saves the prince from his curse with her avowal of love. Here we see a gender role reversal of the sleep of death and love’s first kiss motif. Belle is the active figure, while the male prince lays passive. It is significant that all of this occurs on the prince’s twenty-first birthday, the traditional time at which a male should wed his sixteen-year-old bride. Another coincidence is that the prince’s curse is held within the petals of a magical rose—a symbolic link with the story of Briar Rose, the traditional fairy tale from which Snow White and Sleeping Beauty were adapted.

  In The Little Mermaid, Ariel satisfies many of the traditional qualities of the princess hero, while also displaying some newly evolved characteristics. In the traditional sense, she is an actual princess without a mother. She encounters the wicked Sea Witch who places a curse on her that can only be undone by love’s first kiss. Ariel has the traditional female virtues of beauty, creativity and her lovely siren song. But Ariel has some very untraditional qualities as well. She is assertive, single-minded and brave. Ariel physically saves her prince from drowning, and she actively pursues him throughout the story, despite her father’s objections. Though it is the prince who slays the Sea Witch, Ariel has already displayed her bravery and self-confidence by actively following her own dream and identity and overtly defying her father. In the end, it is her father who must bend—he must allow her to marry the human prince, rather than insisting that she marry the “merman” of his choosing.

  Mulan takes on the largest number of archetypal male hero qualities by actually impersonating a male. In the beginning of her story, she is a nubile girl who is told by her family and the town matchmaker that the only way that she can bring “honor” to her family is by wedding a noble suitor. Unfortunately, Mulan is different from other girls. She does not possess the archetypal qualities of quiet grace and passivity that are valued in women in her society. But as a soldier in disguise, she shows herself to brave, strong, intelligent and resilient. She even becomes a mentor to other soldiers. Mulan leads her allies into a final battle to save the Emperor by having them all disguise themselves as women. Mulan saves her real father by taking his place in the army, and she saves the symbolic father of China by rescuing the Emperor. Along the way, she also saves the life of a handsome soldier prince. Mulan goes on to win not only his heart, but his loyalty and admiration as well. At the climax of the film, at Mulan’s moment of critical development, she kills the evil Hun Lord by herself. Ironically, she disarms him with a fan—the ultimate symbol of feminine meekness and shy humility in her culture. In the end, Mulan brings honor to herself and her family. Most importantly, she earns her father’s respect, not as a passive little girl, but as a brave and valiant warrior.

  From Princess to Powerhouse

  In early Hollywood movies, leading women were either ingenues like Mary Pickford, Helen Hayes and Norma Shearer; or vamps such as Louise Brooks, Theda Bara, Jean Harlowe and Mae West. While the powerful and assertive bad girls or femme fatales got what they wanted for awhile, their only strength and weapon was sex, and they always got their comeuppance in the end. Only the good girls won the prince and lived happily ever after. The hammer that broke the mold was MGM’s monumental epic Gone With the Wind (1939). In the beginning of her story, Scarlet O’Hara (Vivian Leigh) is a pampered princess who pouts and preens to get what she wants. But when tragedy strikes, she becomes powerful, assertive and unapologetically manipulative—all in order to save her father’s kingdom, Tara.

  The enormous popularity of this strong and confident female hero paved the way for new female leads who were sexy and assertive without being a femme fatale. They were also honorable and heroic without being a passive good girl. Katherine Hepburn, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford epitomized the burgeoning archetype of the strong female hero. In an atavistic depiction of this new female archetype, Diane Keaton’s character in Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) defies social expectations for women by living independently, doing drugs, engaging in casual sex and refusing a perfectly good yet very traditional suitor. In the ultimate display of women’s liberation, she even has her ovaries surgically removed, liberating herself completely of the female burdens of pregnancy and motherhood. However, like the femme fatales of the 1930s, Keaton’s character is punished for her iconoclastic expression of women’s liberation. She is killed in the end, ironically by a gender-bending sexual partner.

  More recently, films such as Working Girl (1990), G.I. Jane (1997) and Erin Brockovich (2000) depict strong women who succeed in traditionally male domains using the same archetypal qualities of strength, intellect and courage. The archetype evolution has also been applied to men, as seen in films such as Mr. Mom (1983), A Simple Twist of Fate (1994) and Mrs. Doubtfire (1993). In these films, career-obsessed absentee fathers re-evaluate their paths as they take on the traditionally feminine roles of homemaker and primary caretaker. Robin William in Mrs. Doubtfire performs an actual role reversal, going in drag to win back his children in the traditionally feminine role of nanny and housekeeper. Just as the traditionally masculine world of business and war are now open to women, the traditionally feminine world of full-time parenting is now open to men. The message in all of these films are the same: In a modern world, individuals are not relegated to either masculine or feminine roles based on their sex alone.

  The archetype evolution can even be seen as coming full circle in films where women question the value of pursuing traditionally male goals and ideals. In Baby Boom (1987), a middle-aged woman has given herself over completely to the adventure of success in the highly competitive, male-dominated world of big business. When she is forced to care for an abandoned infant, nascent maternal instincts bring out feminine qualities that she had been repressing. She could not be a nurturing, sensitive and caring person as the “tiger lady” of the business world. But once those latent qualities are released, she realizes that she has given up a lot in order to follow her path of independence, individuality and achievement in the competitive domain. The choice of Diane Keaton’s character in Baby Boom stands in direct contrast to her character’s choice in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. In Baby Boom, J. C. (Keaton) chooses to abandon her path of independence in favor of the more traditional role of mother and homemak
er. This choice does not represent a girl who is passively conforming to the traditional path expected of all females. Her choice is the personal decision of a liberated and mature woman who realizes that success in the male domain is not necessarily preferable to fulfillment in the traditional female role.

  8

  Superheroes and Underdogs

  Alfred Adler was born in Vienna in 1870 to a large middle-class family. He was a sickly and physically awkward child. Like Freud, Adler was educated at Vienna University. After receiving his medical degree and entering private practice as a general practitioner, he reinvented himself as a psychoanalyst. Freud invited Adler into his inner circle of psychoanalysts, a group that eventually became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Adler was the first president of this group, which would later became the International Psychoanalytic Society. Though Adler was initially a great admirer of Freud, he never considered himself a disciple, and always maintained his own individual views that in some ways differed greatly from Freud’s, especially in regards to the significance of sexual drives in neurosis. Freud saw Adler’s unorthodox views as subversive, and in 1911 prompted Adler to declare his perspectives to the group. His theories were denounced by the majority party of strict Freudians in the psychoanalytic school, so Adler left the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, taking nearly half of the members with him. Though Adler and Freud would both practice in Vienna for many years to come, they would never be on speaking terms again.

  Adler and his followers founded a new school of psychoanalysis, which focused on individual development, inferiority and the significance of siblings and birth order on individual psychology. Though he was not as widely published as Freud, Adler constantly lectured and toured the universities of Europe and America, spreading his ideas widely across the international psychoanalytic community. Of his many theories, Adler’s concepts of the inferiority complex and sibling rivalry would become the most famous and influential. Adler would later become a visiting professor at Columbia University. In 1935, he moved permanently to the United States, where he continued to work in private practice and held a faculty position at the Long Island College of Medicine. Alfred Adler died of a heart attack in 1937 while on a lecturing tour in Scotland.

  As with Freud’s Oedipal complex, Adler’s inferiority complex could be seen as the outgrowth of a great theorist’s own personal self-analysis. Freud’s mother was a young, beautiful woman during the days of young Sigmund’s infancy. She doted on her first-born son, favored him above the subsequent children, and showered him with love and affection. Freud’s father, on the other hand, was much older—about twice as old as his mother. His father was a strict authoritarian who demanded discipline, obedience and unwavering respect. Freud would recall through his own process of self-analysis that his earliest feelings towards his mother and father were conflicted with love, hate, fear and aggression.

  Adler’s case was much different. He remembered having feelings of jealousy towards his younger brother when, at a very early age, his mother transferred all of her love and attention onto the new baby. The resulting realization in Alfred was that his brother was the preferred son in his mother’s eyes. His feelings of rivalry with his brother became even more conflicted when, at the age of three, his baby brother died next to him in the bed that they shared. Rather than feeling a sense of rivalry against his father for his mother’s love, Adler experienced a sense of rivalry against his sibling. Within these early childhood memories and feelings came Adler’s conception of the inferiority complex as a primary basis for motivation, as well as the idea that this motivation could be directed through rivalry with a sibling. In both Freudian and Adlerian analysis, the central unconscious issue is the desire for love and possession of the primary love object (Mother), and a resulting sense of aggression towards the rival for Mother’s love. Though their theories are clearly different, both theorists placed the conflicts that arise from the individual’s primary relationships with family members as the starting points and center of unconscious neurosis.

  Guiding Fictions

  In Adler’s view, neurotic conflict arises from a discordance in the individual’s “self concept.” For example, a person who believes he should be strong and athletic, but instead is weak and feeble, experiences a divergence between his “ideal self” and his “real self.” This divergence results in anxiety or neurosis. Everybody feels a sense of personal weakness in some area of life. Our attempt to overcome these perceived personal weaknesses are “compensatory mechanisms” of ego defense. Adler’s theory of compensation is much more humanistic than Freud’s theory. In Adler’s model, people have positive humanistic drives, not just biological drives. People have a natural desire to become better in both individual and social realms. Rather than seeing great works merely as “sublimation” of sexual drives, Adler saw great works as individual and social attempts at becoming better human beings. By compensating for our weaknesses, we are turning negative feelings about ourselves into positive energy and accomplishments.

  Adler pointed out that our feelings of inferiority are often irrational, arising from a small child’s feelings of inferiority in relation to a parent or older siblings. Being fixated on irrational feelings of inferiority lends an essence of psychopathology to the inferiority complex, as it has no basis in reality, but rather is a product of “unreality.” As a result, the individual’s reaction to a pathological inferiority complex is often guided by fictitious rather than realistic goals. The self-concept that guides the individual’s behaviors and goals, his “guiding fictions,” are set up by his own unconscious to make him feel inferior, inadequate and hopeless.

  From Here to Eternity

  The individual’s neurotic reaction to the inferiority complex is revealed through exaggerated behaviors driven by unrealistic goals, behavior patterns that Adler called “overcompensation.” The classic example of overcompensatory behavior is seen in the perpetually unfaithful spouse, who must constantly seduce new lovers in order to compensate for a personal sense of inferiority in the realms of physical, professional or sexual success. Pathological adulterers such as Captain Holmes (Philip Ober) in From Here to Eternity (1953) do not seduce lovers merely because they are attracted to their sexual conquests. They seduce lovers because they need to convince themselves that they are still superlatively attractive in the eyes of other people.

  Adultery is just one of the symptoms of Captain Holmes’s inferiority complex in From Here To Eternity. Aside from feeling the need to perpetually cheat on his wife, Holmes is obsessed with the notion of having his company win the boxing finals, believing that this honor would get him promoted to major. Just as he overcompensates for his poor self-concept as a man by seducing lovers, Holmes overcompensates for his poor self-concept as an officer by unfairly pressuring a reluctant soldier, Prew (Montgomery Clift), into boxing. For Holmes, overcompensation backfires. In the end, he loses both his wife and his commission as an officer. According to Adler, the only way to stop the cycle of overcompensatory behavior is to address the root of the problem—the inferiority complex—by understanding the unreal feelings of inadequacy motivating the behaviors.

  People motivated by inferiority complexes tend to have guiding fictions that establish goals of superiority. The inner goals of superiority stand as opposing poles to the inner dread of inferiority, providing fantasies of success and achievement that are both comforting and motivating. Adler pointed that out that the striving for superiority can take both healthy and unhealthy forms. Striving for a sense of individual superiority, trying to be the best you can be, is a healthy and well-adjusted superiority drive. However, striving for superiority over others, trying to dominate other people in order to manipulate and take advantage of them, is an unhealthy and maladjusted superiority drive, a superiority complex.

  Tyrannical villains such as Captain Holmes in From Here to Eternity epitomize the drive for superiority over others. The evil acts of these power-hungry characters are motivated by a desire to domi
nate and exploit. In turn, the evil that these men do incite their victims into heroism. Holmes’s tyranny forces Prew to overcome his position of inferiority by refusing his captain’s requests to fight, despite Holmes’s increasingly brutal tactics of persuasion.

  The Underdog

  An inner sense of inferiority and a subsequent drive towards superiority is epitomized by the underdog character. The underdog theme can be traced back thousands of years. From David and Goliath to Arthur, Robin Hood and Horatio Alger, everybody cheers when the puny long shot with nothing but heart wins out in the end. The underdog hero is one we can all identify with. We’ve all felt smaller, weaker and less capable than others. We’ve all dreamed of overcoming impossible odds to accomplish great personal goals. The regular Joe with few assets of greatness who goes on to save the world is the epitome of the underdog formula, but the true essence of the underdog character is what Adler called social interest. The underdog’s struggle to overcome inferiority is not a selfish goal, though it may be a personal struggle. The underdog’s superiority drive is tempered by a “social feeling” for others, the desire to help those around him and make the world a better place for having lived in it.