Power of the Dark Side

by Pamela Jaye Smith

  Passionate obsession blinds us to propriety, as in Fatal Attraction, with adultery and death; and to higher duty, as in the illicit love between Lancelot and Guinevere that shatters Camelot. Jealousy and envy drive some to madness, like weasely Gollum and his “precious” in The Lord of the Rings. Schadenfreud (delight in another’s misfortune) sells lots of tabloids and reality TV. Troubled adolescents offer plenty of dramatic Shadow stuff: 28 days, Girl Interrupted, My Own Private Idaho, American Beauty. Fear of success or failure — A Star is Born, Sunset Boulevard, The Doors, and many stories about performers deal with these Shadows.

  Grief is a process and guilt a signpost, neither are a destination. Yet, some kids feel they’re at fault for their parents’ divorce. Some parents feel a child’s death is their fault, as in Fearless, where a mom loses her infant when she can’t hold on tightly enough in a plane crash. Many are burdened by misplaced guilt over a sibling’s death, as in Ordinary People.

  Suicide is a major Dweller that has touched many families. Besides the tragic loss of a loved one, suicide can rob others of hope and infect them with despair.

  A. IN ACTION

  An entire industry helps people with their Shadows, from shrinks to self-help books.

  Julius Caesar overestimated Rome’s tolerance for his Imperial ambitions. Both Napoleon and Hitler overestimated their own powers against the Russian winter. Arrogance finds a perfect home in politics; just read history or watch the news.

  The core meaning of jihad is an “internal struggle against evil.” Many personal, familial, and societal conflicts are about people trying to impose their own Dwellers on others.

  The victim culture of late 20th-century America exploits the Shadow: the Twinkie defense, Jerry Springer, reality TV, celebrity confessions, frivolous lawsuits, ad nauseum.

  B. IN MEDIA

  Petulance is not always petty. Achilles, Greek hero of The Iliad and the movie Troy, pouts in his tent over King Agamemnon’s appropriating his hostage girl, Briseas. The warrior’s three-day absence from the battlefield causes grave consequences, and only the death of Achilles’ beloved cousin Patroclus gets him back into action again.

  In The Man Who Would Be King pride and avarice lead to the downfall and death of Sean Connery’s Danny. The Japanese film In the Realm of the Senses shows the tragic unraveling of sexual obsession. In Big Fish a remote son explores his father’s foibles and discovers his own. In Road to Perdition two mob fathers love their flawed sons so much they cover up fatal mistakes.

  The comedy Free Enterprise features William Shatner as himself doing a rap version of Julius Caesar, as the almost-thirty heroes come to terms with their death grip on youth.

  Watch the opening sequence of Apocalypse Now where Captain Willard battles his Dweller. Crushed between desire to be back in the jungle and disgust at the killer he’s become, Martin Sheen’s Willard drinks to excess, fights himself in a mirror, and falls apart.

  Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett in Notes on a Scandal prove the old saying that we are prisoners of our own desires. In The Legend of 1900 Tim Roth is a prisoner of his own fear, a talented pianist stuck on the ocean liner where he was born, afraid to get off the boat and enter the real world.

  Many games use the concept of our own foibles to create villains and drawbacks for players: Xenogears and Xenosaga.

  C. IN YOUR CREATIONS

  Inner Drives Center of Motivation - Lower Solar Plexus: personal identity and power, & Sacral: sexuality.

  Internal problems can be the central conflict or the subplot conflict, occasionally both. In Adaptation the main character’s internal conflict is also the story conflict.

  For secondary and minor characters, internal flaws can enhance depth of personality. Just as we project our own faults onto others, so too can you personify your heroine’s foibles in minor characters. How she interacts with them gives us clues to her internal self.

  Have at least one strong personality foible per character. Give early hints about your character’s problems, like Indiana Jones’s fear of snakes and Carrie Fisher’s drug dependence, both revealed in the first few minutes of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Postcards from the Edge.

  Self-exploration may find the key to overcoming both your character’s psychological problems and the larger story conflict, as in The Long Kiss Goodnight where Geena Davis emerges from amnesia to discover she’s a superagent and actually can defeat her assassins. The Bourne Identity uses the same plot line. Watch Fight Club and Training Day for characters with interwoven inner/outer conflicts.

  Check out the Seven Deadly Sins for more Dweller ideas: Pride, Envy, Anger, Laziness, Greed, Gluttony, Lust.

  ILLNESSES, WOUNDS, & DEATHS

  Illness and death seem so inherently wrong that we often blame it on disfavor of gods, demons, spirits, or the curses of other humans. Some old cultures sensed such inherent wrongness in defects that they allowed imperfect newborns to die, or like herds of animals, abandoned the old and the weak.

  Eastern medicine views diseases holistically and takes into account both emotions and environment.

  New Age thought offers disease as simply our own resistance to the inherent well-being of existence: there is no evil, just failure to recognize the good. This may be part of how spontaneous healings and psychic surgery work. But for it to last, you must stay consciously aware — not an easy task.

  A. IN ACTION

  One drawback of the create-your-own-reality theory is that if you’re sick, it’s your own fault, so heal yourself. Granted there are psychosomatic illnesses, but if it’s unconscious (or a baby), then how are you at fault?

  Think of all the writers and artists who are alcoholics, drug addicts, or otherwise hindered by a Dweller. Think of what they might have accomplished without that burden. Then again, some say that without the burden, there would not have been the doorway to the other world where creativity lives for them.

  Science continues to leech all the romance out of madness and suggests our fascinating character flaws are just chemical imbalances. Romeo and Juliet are no longer star-crossed lovers, they’re codependent. Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights is no longer a brooding melancholic madly in love with the wrong woman, he’s a depressive. Gypsy’s Mama Rose is no longer just a stage mom, she’s a serious case of mania. Some masochism and sadism have been found to have neurological bases: somehow the pain and pleasure wirings got crossed at an early age and these people truly can not feel one without the other.

  B. IN MEDIA

  Many myths are about finding the magic elixir to heal the wounded king (Amfortas in the Holy Grail stories) or bring immortality to the people (Gilgamesh). Medicine Man, Lorenzo’s Oil, The Constant Gardener, and The Fountain reflect this mythic theme. So do Steve Martin in Leap of Faith, Ellen Burstyn in Resurrection, and the boy in Carnivale, all of whose special healing abilities cause problems.

  The TV series House intelligently combines psychosomatic and physical ailments in plot and subplot to great dramatic effect, such as when a Shadow-side foible (infidelity) leads to an illness (STD). The TV series Monk makes light of a phobia; Howard Hughes in The Aviator suffers greatly from his.

  Some of the most tragic stories are about addictions: Leaving Las Vegas, Days of Wine and Roses, Sid and Nancy, When a Man Loves a Woman. Some can also be funny: Arthur, Postcards from the Edge, The Big Lebowski.

  Tales uplifting and tragic are told about people dealing with afflictions, or not, and what all of us can learn from them: Forest Gump, Rainman, The Miracle Worker.

  Wounded characters can motivate others, as King Amfortas sets Parsifal on the Holy Grail trail (with echoes in The Fisher King), or drive the whole plot, as in Phantom of the Opera where a wounded man’s twisted love brings the house down, literally.

  Though few films are actually about the death process, death scenes are big deals for actors and can bring on tears. Jacob’s Ladder shows one way to depart this world — just let go. Ghost also offers hints — make peace, with love. The Sixth S
ense teaches release as well. Both the Egyptian and Tibetan Book of the Dead are great how-to-die guides.

  C. IN YOUR CREATIONS

  Inner Drives Center of Motivation - Various. The book details illnesses inherent to specific Centers.

  A balance of inner and outer obstacles creates more interesting stories. Matching the illnesses and phobias to theme and plot increases richness. Director Alfred Hitchcock did this well with vertigo in Vertigo and in Rear Window, where a broken leg triggers dangerous voyeurism.

  Live by the sword, die by the sword. Make your characters’ illnesses, wounds, and deaths align with their personalities and actions. The arrogant, mercenary bad guys in Die Hard 2 hijack a plane and an airport, killing hundreds of innocent people. They themselves die a fiery death in a plane crash.

  Check out Eastern medicine correspondences of emotions to illnesses. Repressed rage = skin rashes, anger = liver problems, not speaking up = throat problems, etc.

  WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO

  SILLY PEOPLE

  Sometimes the Dweller sets up housekeeping in a really stupid place, like on a known fault line or flood plain. Having moved from Tornado Alley in Texas to Earthquake Central in LA, I can’t criticize too much; but really, sometimes you just want to say, “What were you thinking?!”

  We’re not talking about innocents hoodwinked by unscrupulous developers into living atop old uranium mines, or health-seeking individuals believing the claims of unscrupulous doctors or pharmaceutical companies. This category is when people flaunt common sense and ignore obvious warnings — the Dark Brotherhood need waste no time on them, as they’ll bring about their own demise.

  A. IN ACTION

  Science has identified an actual risk gene, not surprisingly found in people drawn to danger: skydiving, bungee jumping, extreme sports, and “Look — no hands!”

  Developmental psychologists note that teenagers’ disregard for danger is due in part to undeveloped brain regions that process risk assessment. They truly don’t get how dangerous something might be.

  People who should know better still do silly things, like help Madame Abacha from Nigeria transfer all that money out of the country, or they buy devices off the Internet to increase the size of their %&^.

  B. IN MEDIA

  Trickster gods like the Southwest American Indians’ Coyote help expose silly peoples’ idiocy by leading them on wild goose chases for riches, power, or lust.

  Just think of all those stupid people in horror films who decide to go into that room that just ate their friends or split up and walk alone into the woods where five people just got mutilated.

  Or how about people who pursue obviously bad romantic choices?

  The heroes in most action-adventure movies, martial arts movies, Bond films, and a majority of games manage to escape all the dire consequences that would easily kill normal humans, but the ill-prepared bad guys usually die doing something they should know better than to even try.

  Stupid comedies play off this tendency, be it the Three Stooges or the Dumb and Dumber guys. Sometimes they do best the so-called smarter guys, but mostly we laugh at this extreme portrayal of our own tendencies. Sitcoms are all about silly people telling fibs and evading responsibility.

  C. IN YOUR CREATIONS

  Inner Drives Center of Motivation - Root Center: lack of survival skills brings on silly actions and harmful, sometimes fatal, consequences.

  The discovery of how stupid something is should be revealed to the audience before the character realizes it; that way we worry about them. Or if they’re stupid, we wait with glee to watch them fall.

  If you’re doing a Lesson story, be sure to show the better way to do something: read labels, do soil samples, get second opinions, check references, etc.

  If it’s just a comedy, no worries. No one takes the Road Runner cartoons to task for not giving better life lessons… although we do learn not to order gizmos from ACME.

  THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL

  Spiritual troubles plague believers when some event occurs to shake their faith. This cognitive dissonance can dissolve dogma and cause angry resentment towards the gods.

  Wisdom Teachings call this the Dark Side of Initiation — when the loving aspirations and all-is-one-all-is-good feelings give way to the harsh reality of existence. Without guidance many are lost at this stage of the enlightenment game. Spiritual advisors can help one move beyond this deconstruction of unquestioning faith to find deeper anchorage in what mystics call the ineffable mystery of life and creation.

  Not only religious people face this problem. The idealistic, the optimistic, the ambitious… anyone with a vision of “how it could/should be” can be shattered. Selfish disappointments don’t qualify; painful readjustments of entire worldviews do.

  A. IN ACTION

  Meditations and ancient practices help one past the logic barriers to a higher vision which accepts paradox. As the Buddhist saying goes:

  1) first there is a mountain (our regular perception of reality),

  2) then there is no mountain (that blissful spark of all-is-one awareness),

  3) then there is (years of hard work to embody spiritual principles into regular reality).

  Some say this Dark Night is what happened to the Peace Movement of the 1960s after the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. Topped off by President Nixon’s Watergate scandal, the disillusioned idealists retreated further into sex, drugs, and rock and roll and let the dreams die. Others argue it just went underground and is resurfacing as retiring, empty-nest, former-hippie Baby Boomers get second wind.

  “A cynic is just a wounded romantic” fits this pattern. Too many brilliant idealistic people get shot down by the ugly parts of humans and nature, then they spend the rest of their lives licking their wounded hearts while building up armor so that nothing can ever disappoint them again. Simon and Garfunkel’s “I am a rock, I am an island” lyrics express this.

  B. IN MEDIA

  Some of our most beautiful art and poetry have been wrested from this Dark Night. In the 16th century, Spanish Carmelite St. John of the Cross wrote The Dark Night of the Soul, still relevant today for poignant longing and loneliness, as well as advice to others passing through this phase.

  There’s a moving speech in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when Sam Gangee encourages Frodo to continue the quest to get the ring to Mount Doom. Sam refers to stories which insist there’s something good in this world and it is worth fighting for.

  Douglas Adams’ sci-fi novel The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul plays off this iconic phrase and concept. TV heroine Buffy has a number of Dark Night crises throughout the Vampire Slayer series, as do other humans, witches, and vampires. G’Kar in the TV series Babylon 5 emerges from his Dark Night a better man; Ambassador Molari does not.

  C. IN YOUR CREATIONS

  Inner Drives Center of Motivation - Heart & Crown: Spiritual issues spring from and effect these higher centers.

  Old Testament hero Jacob wrestles all night with an angel. Jacob wouldn’t give up, demanded a blessing, and got it. Use this Dark Night metaphor for your characters: they wrestle with a problem, are wounded, then using strength and stamina, gain benefit from the suffering. Like some recovery systems advise, it’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from it.

  First establish your character’s beliefs (see “What Dark Side?”) and then proceed to shake them apart. Some people go back at a higher turn of the spiral, from literal to metaphorical interpretation of holy writ, perhaps. Others move on to casual agnosticism. Still others strike out in pain, while some retreat into darkness.

  Have your disillusioned character expose human corruptions within the spiritual system. Have it parallel a similar problem within himself. Sexual and financial scandals are perfect examples.

  Expand a character’s beliefs from parochial (religious) to universal (spiritual) via a Dark Night.

  GANG-RELATED

  Peer pressure, mob psychology,
the lemming instinct… it’s bad enough having your own Dweller on the Threshold blocking your way. Worse yet is having a gang of them. Too many people are never given the chance to be individuals; many others are afraid to do so lest they incur the wrath of others or fail in their efforts. Our animal nature tends towards herding and hive mentality. Our human nature tends towards individuation. Our spiritual nature tends towards group consciousness: working for the greater good without sacrificing the self. The gang-related Dweller stops us from rising above the animal level.

  A. IN ACTION

  Exiled from cliques, wounded egos can strike back in school shootings. Gang wars, race riots, ethnic cleansing, and genocide are extremes of this Gang Dweller.

  Though it’s supposedly the next step in the evolution of human consciousness, shifting from tribalism or feudalism to a (somewhat) individualist system causes resistance and often bloodshed: Periclean Greece, unification of the Warring States in China, Renaissance Europe, the Age of Enlightenment, the Philippines’ People Power revolution, and the attempted imposition of democracy in Iraq.

  Failed revolutions can often be attributed to the Gang Dweller taking over. The 1790s French Revolution touted Liberty-Fraternity-Equality, but it resulted in a blood-drenched dictatorship and a return to feudal monarchy. The 1917 Russian Revolution slid almost immediately from feudal monarchy to gang-controlled pseudo-equality. See more under Latin American history and current events.