BabaDOOK! Jennifer Kent's Psychotropic Fairy Tale

Films aren't bad just because they're familiar and use overused cliches. Think about it, mate, and you'll see great art sometimes comes in colors so familiar you want to scream in overwrought ecstasy like a glue-high teenage time-traveling John Waters in post-Disney Times Square. Soap operas are often trite, cliche'd and overwrought but that doesn't mean we should dismiss Douglas Sirk; costume dramas are often barrenly obsequious but that doesn't mean we should dismiss Jane Campion; and monster under-the-bed suburban mythopoetic fairy tales are often insufferably whimsical and Danny Elfman-scored but we can't dismiss The Babadook. A quick Sheila can take the Gorey-Addams-Grimm signifiers overused by Tim Burton and go deep into their source, the nightmare parable fore, the zone where men (and boys like Burton) dare not go (it's too close to the, um... you know what). It has to be a resourceful and courageous Shelia to go there, but if she's brave and resourceful enough she can slither her scoop down past the popcorn saltless center for the black brass kernels at the bottom of the lowest ebb nightmare bucket. Mmmm-hmmm, good on ya, Sheila! Tim Burton can't even look you in the eye now.

Such a Sheila is the newest great lady Australian filmmaker Jennifer Kent, and The Babadook (2014), out on DVD and Blu-ray this week, but crafts from that Gorey-Addams-Burton cloth a Shining-Repulsion (1) collapse of the consensual real. It's the story of a mom and her squirrelly son going totally bonkers--she half-crazy from lack of sleep and sexual frustration and he from prolonged anxiety about his missing father--and co-creating a poltergeist-ish manifestation of their collective unconscious energies, and if--with its magician's hat and bony fingers--the title monster can come off a little This Way the Wicked Kruger Comes Depp-ensian Dr. Caligari Cat in the Hat 'high on mercurochrome- whimsical, it still has more than enough genuine menace to make it closer to Kubrick than Disney... most of the time, anyway. 

Like our daily dreads, the pop-up book Amelia (Essie Davis) finds on the doorstep starts out Gorey-normal but soon evolves into a genuine, disturbing murderous threat, with drawings of Amelia herself, possessed, stabbing her child to death, gone as crazy as James Mason at the climax of Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life. (1956), making the book half-R.L. Stine, half legitimate death threat, with pull-tabs.

It works because at the core of this archetypal mysterious ghost intruder lurks a great hybrid archetype, and unassimilated animus for mom Amelia (Essie Davis), representing her dark id/shadow wish fulfillment (to be free of her difficult brat once and for all), and a grim devouring father figure for the boy, Samuel (Noah Wiseman). We all know this nightmare figure, so common to sleep paralysis, usually the opposite gender to us, they wait until we're almost asleep, or trying to spend a little me-time, if you know what I mean, then start thumping on doors or rattling chains, hammering away at our nerves as we try to repress your inner rage, until it breaks off and comes back in poltergeist form and your sense of reality shifts and the border between dreams and reality collapses. 

And Kent gets it--probably better than any filmmaker yet--how gigantic adults seem in the eyes small apprehensive children. I had forgotten it myself, having not been a child in quite awhile, but Kent brings it all back, to ground zero of childhood nightmares, that sense of relative smallness. Even Kubrick never quite dared deal with that monstrously large parent element. The one time Jack Torrance seemed bigger than normal he was looming over a model of the maze and neither mom nor son could see him. But Kent shows how children see themselves as normal size and adults as (relative) giants. As her mood gets blacker, Amelia gradually seems to grow to ogre-size; our perspective changes and she's shot from low angles, and her anger at Samuel morphs her (sans CGI) into some dark evil thing. 

When I was very young I used to have nightmares about my mom creeping into my room like a vampire to drink my blood. I can still remember how she moved, like she was simultaneously swimming in slow motion and moving too fast to run away from.  When I was scared in the dead of night I'd run in to her room to wake her so she could stand guard while I went to the bathroom.  This one time though, she sat up slowly and straight like a vampire rising from a coffin and moaned really low... and it was like my nightmare was coming true. I knelt in submission, buried my head in my hands and started crying and screaming, "I'm your son! I'm your son!!" 

We joked about it for years, but at the time I knew true fear. 

Is there anything worse a very young boy can imagine than his mom, his one true protector, turning evil on him? It's easy to forget you ever feared her once you get past the breakwaters of adolescence; the passage of mom from benevolent giantess to a sweet if nagging allowance-payer is a one-way street and we're glad to not have to look back. We modulate our perceptions so that we presume we've always seen from the same height, but a film like The Babadook can remind us, as good horror movies do, of all the terror we grew so hard to forget. 

As I wrote about The Shining, cabin fever is a very hard thing to study, as just showing up to study it rapidly dissipates it. One is either killed like Scatman Crothers or sucked up into the madness, as with the semi-sympathetic father whose poor brain oscillates between giggling sadism and paternal sympathy for Marilyn Burns in Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974). Those kind of characters are so rare in horror that when they show up we take notice. Like Frederic March becoming Mr. Hyde halfway through the terrorized Miriam Hopkins' plea for help, Amelia in The Babadook or Ray's ogres in Bigger than Life and In A Lonely Place exhume that fear our source of comfort will turn on us. Having very little (adult) experience reading children's books I can't be too scared of the Babadook book in theory. But I have relied on The Thing (1951) for most of my life to save me in times of trouble, and if I put it on during one of my regular dark nights of the soul and the film had changed, if Captain Hendry was now a sadist in league with Dr. Carrington, and tortured people or something, that yawning terror of my mom sitting up in bed and moaning like some beanstalk vampire giant in the dead of night would come roaring back. Films are great in that sense, they can be edited but they can't really change, especially on DVD. 

But the Babadook terror rolls in both directions: The vulnerability and trust involved with familial love hinges on acceptance of uncanny extremes, for a mother must love even the most loathsome of creatures--the beast, the frog, the rat, the touched and wayward Richard--giving them, at the very least, a kiss, an embrace, a bottle and a place to sleep it off in, in order slowly grow them into a prince. If the mother can't provide this, the child snaps and begins to darken into something worse, trying to create for others the terror he feels as a result of his mom's ambivalence. And the mom, via the uncuttable psycho-umbilical root that connects them even past death, that root no machete or pill can sever, comes tumbling down the well after him, barking at him not to put her in the root cellar. 

Coraline

(SPOILERS) But while, for example, the horrors of cloistered, sexually dysmorphic animus shadow-projectors, like Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski's Repulsion (or Mrs. Bates in Psycho), ended their isolation with their murders and sins exposed, pinned to the patriarchy-enforced consensual reality cork board like still-twitching wasp wings (and old Jack Torrance never quite made it out of his maze), the mom in Baba passes through the Repulsion needle and out of the Overlook cabin fever, past even Ring 2's child services and suspicious neighbors, into the safe press clippings of the Taxi Driver "hero" fantasia. Developing farther in fact than any psychotropic horror character before, Amelia gets all demons safely integrated rather than merely repressed or succumbed to; she learns that madness, once harnessed, becomes genius. If you're not willing to let go of all self constructs, from surface persona right down to your twitching core, you will not not re-merge with undifferentiated consciousness. Amelia's strength as a mom lies not in Ford tough Magdalene invulnerable cloaking and burning as we might expect, but raw Aussie gumption and the power that comes when you finally get down so low, as the saying goes, you can touch off from the bottom and push yourself up to the surface like a rocket, far faster than if you were merely swimming. John Ford had the Depression, war, the harshness of the era, and drink to propel him into genius. Spielberg though, had only his childhood enduring schoolyard bully anti-Semitism, but he was saved by the power of fantasy and Ford's westerns. I've got a personal history with drugs, alcoholism, recovery, decadence, years of undiagnosed depression, spiritual enlightenments and disillusionments, W.C. Fields, Camille Paglia, and Howard Hawks. We all got something to draw on, is my point; childhood trauma informs the choice of comfort. My mom as a vampire translated to a lifetime love of Dracula.

Admittedly, the children's book / nursery rhythm gimmick, while creepy, is also overly familiar: from Edward Gorey (left) and Charles Addams-ish drawings -to everything Tim Burton ever made. But they're all usually tempered with some degree of levity. "Good fright, pleasant screams," as the creepy narrator of The Inner Sanctum radio show used to say. When the death threat implied is tempered with 'just kidding' bad pun, one misses the macabre tone of unedited nursery rhymes or Grimm's Fairy Tales, which offer little Gorey/Burton/Addams-esque macabre winkiness and lots of genuine dread, made all the more chilling by their bland, Hallmark-cheery facade. I was amused by Gorey as a child but now I look at his stuff and think he's way too disturbing for my adult sensitivity. Maybe it's that as children we know where death is, we were just there not so long ago, and so death can't suddenly surprise us. For very young children the big fear is never death--which is too abstract and far away--but of pain, and most of all being lost, separated from one's mother in a strange place, with no phone number or direction to the parking lot. For parents it's that death is suddenly far closer than what might be deemed safe. Babadook's children's book gimmick would be just cliche if not for its blunt unremitting threat, moving slowly and gingerly from playfully macabre to outright hostile, threatening, malicious, obscene even as it never strays from the psychosexual Lynchian ostrich nasal lampshade Joe Campbell crucible in order to harden into what might be a 'next stage in a woman's life" sequel to coming-of-age myths like Twilight, Maleficent, Frozen, and Snow White and the Huntsman.

"I'll make you a bet, the more you deny, the bigger I get!"

All in all, it's pretty Freudian, especially when the pop-ups begin. And the score emphasizes and distorts Amelia's disintegrating mentality; in one great scene Amelia looks for her son and you hear his calling her, muffled and echoed in the mix, making it hard to pinpoint (we're never sure if it's just a hallucination). While the kid is being terrorized, she's downstairs and the cuts back and forth exhibit a profound grasp of the way the repressed emotions and sexual frustrations of a widowed parent can spontaneously generate autonomous external threats, as in Dr. Morphius' monster "from the Id" in Forbidden Planet or (single mom) Jessica Tandy's Birds.

All told, mythically-speaking, Kent and Babadook is what Jane Campion and The Piano used to be, a female furie and her bloody offspring masterpiece, up from down under, come to wade through chthonic swamps of menstrual blood and societal taboo, dragging her son, daughter, piano, canoe, and civilization and darkest shadow id behind her, surrendering to, and then conquering, her darkest shadows as she slouches towards us. In Kent we maybe have found a female Polanski-esque Nicholas Ray to shake the "Yellow Wallpaper" madness and horror back to its primal core, the childhood fear that one day you'll wake up and your parents will be gone, leaving only their demons, their madness, addictions and dysmorphia to babysit you through your slow genetic deflowering. You can't run. You can't hide. You can only endure and stand up, unafraid, unbowed, present your warrior stance, emit your battle cry, and let unflinching courage drain your demons down to shaking junkie shadows. 

Unconditional love: no monster can survive it. And vice versa. 

NOTES:

1.) See Pupils in the Bathroom Mirror (SHINING); 

Nicholas Ray in the Grey Flannel Darkness: BIGGER THAN LIFE; 

Le Rayon Bleu de Deneuve: REPULSION

2) See: Age of Asherah: Rosemary's Baby, and:

Make-Up yr Mind Control: 33.3 Ways of Reading Eyes Wide Shut

Cinemarchetype #12: The Sage (Senex)

L-R: Ian McKellan as Gandalf; Richard Harris as Dumbledore; Nicol Williamson as Merlin; Alec Guiness as Obi Wan

The 'one who knows' (at least some) of the dark and light secrets of the world, the Senex/Sage finds the truth at the cost of petty human interaction. To achieve this knowing, first he must be free of the meddling and stale thoughts of the unenlightened, thus the sage goes into the wild to meditate and channel and commune with the plant spirits. He lives outside of the social order, all the better to teach the young warriors--or bullied teens or spiritual pilgrims or astronauts-- who seek him out, so that they might have both sets of tools--the social order and the outside/natural. He may bring harmony to these otherwise warring factions.

'If an individual has wrestled seriously enough and long enough with the anima (or animus) problem...the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form...as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature, and so forth'. (Franz, Marie-Louise von (1978). "The Process of Individuation". 

In other words, when you've done 'the work' - as we say in AA - you can walk out of the swampy nest of your old anima incarnations and into the new freedom of a life with minimal internal/projected conflict. That you've been around the block, and lost your testosterone levels to old age, surely helps in this. And now you are ready to sponsor the younger version of yourself!

Aside from fantasy cinema where he's always around; I skipped a few for sake of avoiding redundancy, like Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid and Rafiki (above) in The Lion King. At any rate, the sage is a pretty rare character in modern film, maybe because a) there are so few in our fucked-up modern age --the TV,  draconian drug laws, trite marital codes and dumbing down of media sees to that, and b) he's left behind earthly desire, and enflaming desire is what non-fantasy film is all about! So how does cinema make him interesting? Pull ze string! His story must be told! In the end, its all about the actor, and the animator, or puppeteer. Rafiki

1. Ian McKellen as Gandalf

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

Frodo: It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill him (Gollum) when he had the chance.
Gandalf: Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play yet, for good or ill before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.

Perhaps in that lies the kernel of the sage's great wisdom --his sense of life and death is more genuinely compassionate, more wise than, for example, the ill-fated mercy gestures of Viggo Mortenson, who spares King Thoeden's sniveling turncoat advisor, Grima Wormtongue (Brad Dourif), and has cause to regret it. Gandalf sees too far into the future and past to be limited by momentary squeamishness or flashes of compassion as befall Viggo. Gandalf's mercy is a more long range brand, and it doesn't extend to fighting his charge's battles. The only time he really steps in is when there's a demon up to his level of skill, so it's more a fair fight, as happens in the climax of The Twin Towers. What a bearded sportsman!

 2. Yoda (voiced by Frank Oz) - 

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Back when Empire came out I was only 13 and Yoda became a training wheels guru. Hewas voiced by the man who also gave us Fozzie Bear and Miss Piggy, so it wasn't too hard to take him into our hearts. Was it an accident he looked a shriveled old Chinese kung fu master? We all considered Yoda the best thing about the film and Yoda fever took over. I can still talk like him! (my brother can too and we'd crack ourselves up saying "Teach you I will, eat you I will" ) Who's to say to what extent Yoda is the wellspring behind my generation's interest in things like yoga, meditation, and even LSD use?

If you ever see a kid trying to move something with the power of the force (see Mallrats), then you know the power and longevity of Master Yoda. While Ben Kenobi let himself get cut down by Vader in the first film, Yoda's too crafty to ever disappear, or even be anywhere specific, and it's with no shortage of bemused nostalgia that we finally got to see him fly into battle in Attack of the Clones, where he was once again the best part of the film, twirling through the CGI air like a hyper-ass curve ball.

3. Terence Stamp as Stick

Daredevil (2003) / Elektra (2005)

Maybe you have to be a Marvel comic book fan in the early 1980s, subsisting on a crumb diet of X-Men and Fantastic Four, to appreciate the neutron bomb force that was the moment Frank Miller took over full writing and penciling duties on Daredevil. Of course when Miller launched the next level of that game, The Dark Knight (for DC), I was  getting too old and drunk to read anymore non-underground comics, and the slick bled-page graphic novel paper (and racked up price) was a bummer to me as I loved the old newsprint smell. But the stint of prime Daredevil which saw the rise and sad slaughter (and fan-demanded rebirth) of Elektra--the hot Greek assassin--still lingers and now my generation rules Hollywood, so why did Daredevil bomb? And Elektra too? Why? Were they too moody? I like them both and amidst both is Terence Stamp as Stick - the blind sage / kung fu instructor and white ninja school operator. His breath of life brings Elektra back from the dead and that's why she gets her spinoff sequel - yer WELCOME!

Man, something about this sage archetype is regressing me to a very young and geeky time, let's fast forward to my jaded state of 1991..

4. TIE: Cecil Humphreys as The Holy Man

The Razor's Edge (1946)

The 1984 Bill Murray remake gets a little bogged down in craftsmanship but the 1946 version of W. Somerset Maugham's opus has retained its fleet-footedness thanks to Edmund Goulding's gift with soapy angst and a solid cast including the delightful Clifton Webb. All the commotion is a great prelude and post-lude to the mystical stillness of the mountaintop where Garfield learns at the beard of Cecil H.

Sam Jaffe -- Lost Horizon (1937)

"We believe in moderation," notes Jaffe, "a little bit of everything." Somewhere I have a poem about seeing Lost Horizon, over and over, high on Percocets this girl Kate sent me and an intense, hallucination-ridden fever after a drunken / Ritalin-spiked weekend trip up to Syracuse in the dead of winter (see my tale of hallucinating a demon in my bookshelf here). It was awesome, being delirious, sweating and freezing at the same time up on my twin bed (I'd boomeranged back from Seattle and was living in my old bedroom) and floating on Percocet and watching a VHS dupe of Lost Horizon on a small TV at the foot of my bed, the tracking streaks like footprints through safe, warm, icy snow on the voyage to Shangri La. And then of course, 'missing scenes' restored with sound and still photos only - which merely added to the surreal ecstasies, as to my hallucinating eyes the pictures' lips were still moving to the words. I still think of Shangri La as a magick place where, as Peter Gabriel once sang, they talk in pictures not in words.

All of which segues masterfully into Sam Jaffe as the Anti-Kurz, dwelling in the heart of lightness, and creating a nice paradise for tepid Ronald Coleman, until said Coleman gets cold feet and lets his sourpuss little brother drag him back down the mountain, all just so the brother's wife can age 100 years in front of his eyes. What a sourpuss, that brother!

Still, the brother had a point - Fuck Moderation!

 5. Nicol Williamson as Merlin - Excalibur (1981)

Another mystical keepsake from my past. My kid brother and I still quote Terry's weird Merlin voice from this film: "Behoooold tha sword of power!" and "A dream to some.... a NIGHTMARE TO OTHERS!"

Excalibur is convoluted enough that ten viewings later and I'm still noticing odd new details and connections; my dad loved the music-- "Siegfried's Funeral March" from Wagner's Parsifal-- and that kept his interest so he helped explain parts I was too young to understand during my first viewing/taping. Now that I'm Merlin's age the brilliance shines, with Williamson a weird half-human asexual elder god splitting the difference between metaphors and 'the real'--the human and the myth-- 'the dragon' in this case becomes a mix of 'the force', 'the matrix,' and the green man spirit of the woods, all tied together into a terrifyingly ambivalent intelligence. I've seen the dragon myself on wet streets at night and in the serpentine glistening of bathroom tiles...

6. Robert Morley as Andrew Undershaft ("Dandy Andy")

Major Barbara (1941)

I came to this movie very late in life, and it's easy to see why since G.B. Shaw's most famous work is Pygmalion which I find a tad shrill and misogynist. I love most of his other work though, especially this film adaptation, a covertly pro-industrial tract that finds the allegedly decadent Undershaft promting his capitalist ideology against his Salvation Army daughter Barbara (Wendy Hiller) and her Ancient Greek teacher fiancee (Rex Harrison). Tussling with him over his choice of fortune-amassing industries, namely arms, as his stodgy ex-wife laments "you can't trust someone who preaches immorality but practices morality," which is like my motto. He's full of wise oaths and bearded like the bard with a pop-eyed curiosity about nearly everything, and a refusal to get dragged into his bourgeois exes dogmatic drippiness, He and his daughter strike a deal: he is willing to grab a trumpet and march with the S.A. if she'll come to his armament factory. "You've learned something, my dear, and that always feels at first like you lost something." I cry every time. Morley's Undershaft is what I hope to grow up to be, not necessarily a weapons manufacturing titan but a guy who even as an aging father can stay in the moment and guide others towards it without real agenda or malice; and Rex Harrison has never looked sexier in his all black S.A. tunic, eyes alight with detachedly ironic religious fervor forty years before its time! And what's worse, the Criterion edition is CUT of the best Undershaft scenes (his showing Harrison his row of framed photos of ex-mistresses, what he has around instead of a wife, and man who amongst ye swingers can't relate?

7. Walter Pidgeon- Morbius

Forbidden Planet (1956)

Based around Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Morbius is an interesting example of the Lacanian non du pere, with its implied understanding of the dualistic nature of prohibition and enjoyment. For in the end, Morbius is all talk when it comes to prohibition. He verbally forbids the captain to land his craft, forbids his hot daughter to go visit the spaceship and flirt with all the crew, but she does anyway and Morbius doesn't discipline her or even seem upset. He listens to her swoon about boys and doesn't get all James Mason in LOLITA on her ass, which surprises and delights us. He listens attentively and withholds his opinion, hardly the actions of a typical 50s dad. And yet, almost to put on a show, his questioning and addressing her in the men's presence becomes patronizing: "Then my little girl never feels lonely or confined?" It's almost like he's posing as the 'anal father' when he's actually the wise sage and is just testing our hero's wooing mettle... like Sarastro in The Magic Flute! (To Dream some Impossible Tree Sloth)

Sarastro, bitches

8. Alejandro Jodorowsky as the Alchemist in 

The Holy Mountain (1973)

"The grave receives you with love. Surrender yourself to the Earth. Return what was loaned to you. Give up your pleasure, your pain, your friends, your lovers, your life, your past, what you desire. You will know nothingness, it is the only reality. Don't be afraid, it's so easy to give. You're not alone, you have a grave. It was your first mother. The grave is the door to your rebirth. Now you will surrender the faithful animal you once called your body. Don't try to keep it, remember, it was a loan. Surrender your legs, your sex, your hair, your brain, your all. You no longer want to possess, possession is the ultimate pain. The earth covers your body, she came to cover you with love, because she is your true flesh. Now you are an open heart, open to receive your true essence your ultimate perfection. Your new body, which is the universe, the work of god. You will be born again, you will be real. you will be your own father, your own mother, your own child, your own perfection." (courtesy IMDB)

Most cinema sages are either fatherly or cuddly or at least not terrifying, but real sages are probably so weird you want to shit your pants and run the minute you see them coming, their damned goats bleating behind them. As he leads a rag-tag group of castrati soldiers and military toy manufacturers up onto the titular mountain, Jodorowsky gradually becomes more human, but the sheer next level craziness of his vision ensures we descend much less so.

9. Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing in 

Dracula (1931)

"For someone who has not lived even one lifetime, you are a very wise man, Van Helsing."

Like Dracula, he comes from the continent, and brings musty arcane knowledge to the relatively sane manners of GB. He easily outguns doubting skeptics like Dr. Seward, noting that "the superstition of today can become the scientific reality of tomorrow" and talks almost as slowly as Lugosi. With his overgrown crew cut, bottle cap specs, and hawk nose, old Van Sloan reminds me a lot of my late German grandfather and/or childhood physician, the terrifying Dr. Scherzinger.

10. Victor Wong as Egg Shen

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

My favorite scene in this favorite John Carpenter film is when Egg Shen, having led Jack (Kurt Russell) and the crew through the underground passages to Lo Pan's secret lair, finds a handy bar and pours them all drinks from a special gourd. When Jack asks what it for, Egg says "it's a good buzz!" then adds this, quoted from IMDB:

Egg Shen: Can see things no one else can see. Do things no one else can do.
Jack Burton: Real things?
Egg Shen: As real as Lo Pan!
Jack Burton: Hey, what more can a guy ask for?
Egg Shen: Oh, the six-demon bag!
Jack Burton: Terrific, a six-demon bag. Sensational. What's in it, Egg?
Egg Shen: Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

Wong is so great in these scenes, and the way the buzz ("I'm feeling kind of.... kind of invincible!," Jack notes) takes hold is inspiring. Why wouldn't there be a magic alcohol potion that makes people better fighters when  they have to go up against magic evil? Only the mighty JC seems to have thought it through, and that's why he is our lord and king, and the Hawks of his time.

11. Michael Shannon as Kim Fowley

The Runaways (2010)

He's sketchy to the nines, but I admire Fowley's rock resonance and with Shannon's reptile cunning he becomes a live wire priest of 70s streetwise gutter rock. There's no sign of him hitting on or being heterosexually pervy with his young charges, other than for the purpose of perfecting their pervy image. It's only rock and roll he cares about, when Curie quits the band Fowley even salutes her spirit of rebellion! The true sage accepts--and even facilitates--being abandoned by his students, and fades into obscurity with glitter-era grace if it completes the myth, unlike...

12. Viggo Mortenson - Sigmund Freud in 

A Dangerous Method (2011)

What a tragedy John Huston's 1962 Freud isn't out, it would make a great double bill with ADM, since in the former's climax Freud is booed out of the seminar where he's presenting his radical theories on infantile sexuality, as Freud boos Jung's radical theories on a myth and magic in the collective unconscious. Thus the anti-establishment becomes the establishment and one of the 20th century's first sages becomes, once more, just an old man clinging to his tattered strands of his old cocoon.

CinemArchetype #2: The Anima

Jung described the anima--the ego of the feminine unconscious to the male conscious mind--as like the sphynx or the Mona Lisa - enigmatic, cryptic, mostly silent - neither alive nor dead nor undead, but a dweller in the space beyond such trivialities. Her refusal to be known fully by her outer male / consciousness is perhaps an underlying cause of so much patriarchal oppression in our world. We can't silence her midnight reproaches so we try to silence her outer projections. But it never works.

In order to placate her we must make an effort to 'find out what she wants' through much patient sitting in asanas and art. She is the ultimate 'unknown' that the male ego spends its life trying to seduce, make contact with, capture on canvas, harness, destroy, embrace... but she can never be fully known or possessed, only accepted as the enigma she is.  And thank god, because if she was ever understood fully, the world would open up into the pure white light of the infinite. And then what do you do with your time? Where do you find your inspiration?

Here's one of my attempts to show that, it's a Dorian Gray deconstruction of a scene from Nightmare Alley (1947). 

Erich Kuersten "Nightmare Alley" 2003

Man projects the anima into his girlfriends, wives, daughters, and then is crushed when she disappears from their faces. The girls of the movies and of his dreams are ageless and enigmatic, so they take over the job. So there's the ghostly obsession of Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo for the 'nonexistent' Madeline, Twin Peaks for Laura Palmer, the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, or the ghost vengeance of a Jess Franco nymphomaniacal heroine like Maria Rohm in Venus in Furs. Or there's her inescapable nurturing, her madonna-like perfection mocking your violent failings even as she consoles you, as with  Jessica Chastain in Tree of Life (below).

Eye's dark pupil, mirrored

Some feminist critics might decry these characters as unreal or male fantasies, but they miss the point - they are male fantasies but who is doing the fantasizing? The conscious man tries to understand his unconscious woman through fantasizing about her. Perhaps it is also the other way around, our inner anima fantasizing life as a man looking at herself in his mirror. Madeline is obsessed with the painting of her past life, like Jimmy is with her present.

Men can't control their unconscious mind (by definition) any more than we can (most of us) decide what we want to dream about when we sleep. If a man can make peace with his anima, either through art, meditation, astral voyaging, lucid dreaming, good deeds or just accumulated wisdom, he is en route to becoming a 'whole' soul. When he writes it is more like dictation. When he paints he just sits back and lets his inner woman guide his hand. The anima steps out of the shadows of the unconscious, halfway during dreams and art (and sometimes really good sex), and he steps into it, halfway, he lets go of the wheel and lets the wife drive for awhile --and then they are married in the Jungian reunification alchemical ritual.  But he will never understand her, never know her except that which she wants to reveal.
=====================

The anima speaks only in dreams or moments of poetic artistic rapture (or madness),
a ghost woman you love more than any living woman,
but you can't easily understand her language...
One day you learn that the language she speaks to you is French,
it takes you years but you learn French and finally you get to understand her,
finally she is yours to understand
for that one conversation.

But the next time you get a chance to talk to her
she speaks only in German.

So now you have to learn German.
So then she only speaks Japanese, and so it goes...
She runs through every language known to man, back into ancient Greek and Latin,
Sumerian, Mayan, and lost Atlantean.
You dog her heels every step of the way.

Finally all out of languages, she refuses to speak at all.
She merely smiles the enigmatic Mona Lisa sphinx smile.

When you finally match her even then, even learn this new language--the hardest of all to learn--the silence...

Then the only thing left for her to hide in
is what lies beyond silence,
and when you go there too, meditate in total quiet, she surrenders
at last, and
you are finally married
and on your honeymoon,
and she's waiting in bed...

But to get her to strip,
you're gonna have to learn poker.
 

1. Kate Hepburn - Bringing up Baby (1938)

In the best romantic comedy there is the idea of a gender-flux sprite as Shakespearian elemental - the sprite who raises mischief and chaos to fluster the male ego, to reduce its prominence in the constellation of consciousness by exposing it to the chthonic forces of nature. Rather than civilizing herself, this untamed tomboy mare wildernesses the civilized; she forces the westward expansion to, at last, contract. She is the inhale after the land-grabbing exhale.  No one is better at this getting a professor to inhale than Kate Hepburn in Bringing up Baby, Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey and Paula Prentis in Man's Favorite Sport?

Katharine Hepburn doesn't normally embody the anima, she's more the 'wild wise woman' (see CinemArchetype 11). She's too independent, too her own woman, too conscious and wily and, like Jane Fonda, contemptuous of the very concept of mystique. But with the aide of a familiar, especially if it happens to a be a wild animal (like a leopard), she nails it. In Bringing up Baby, Cary Grant's absent-minded paleontologist has been keeping his right-brained feminine unconscious on such a tight leash it finally snaps off, freed by the backdraft of whizzing golf balls, golf carts, car running boards, sock burning, crazy phone calls, clothes theft, bone-burying dogs, and finally a vicious leopard shadow twin.

2.  Laura Palmer - Twin Peaks / Fire Walk with Me

Bobby: 

Hey! Where were you for the last hour? I've been looking all over for you.

Laura:

I was standing right behind you, but you're too dumb to turn around.

Laura Palmer's absence creates separate fantasies in all her men. Her dopey eyed self-serious biker hunk, James (I hate him), keeps trying to drag her into a tortured teen lovers-style Twilight-esque devotion, "Quit tryin' to hold onto me so tight, baby," Laura says (after having just tooted up before homeroom), "cuz I'm already gone... gone... gone."

Lynch's female characters tend towards this kind of nebulous lostness, this 'hold me as tight as you want but you'll never find me" paradoxical elusiveness. He knows enough to know how little he knows--how little can be known--about the anima. And because he does know he doesn't know, he's able to depict her frustratingly (to her lovers) ephemeral contours way more succinctly than most. It's a quality tied into cinema, with its form of idealized feminine mystique -- i.e. we fall in love with her via an image onscreen, and she enjoys our collective adoration/attention. The character's (or actress's) lover/husband on the other hand, craving closeness, exclusivity, and full knowledge of her ways and thoughts, might go out of his skull with jealousy and self-pity from having to 'share her'--the real her, i.e. her image--with any lovesick fanboy with a TV set. If we knew her personally, we'd feel less involved, less like we have the right to project our anima onto her. The lens of the anima works in reverse to the regular lens, in that the more you focus on details, to see the 'real' woman below the persona, the less you can see of the anima. When she's in total clarity, your anima has nothing left to work with.

"Women who are of 'fairy-like' character especially attract such anima projections, because men can attribute almost anything to a creature who is so fascinatingly vague, and can thus proceed to weave fantasies around her." - Maria Von Franz

I'd argue with Franz that saying the men weave the fantasies is perhaps a little general, if we're talking about the anima we're talking about a part of the male psyche that is not under the control of the male ego. The feminine unconscious either spurns or approves of the 'screen' woman on which to project itself; while the specifics may be structured by male conscious desire, that structure is just another puerile dead end if the anima is not onboard. If it is, the fantasy goes far deeper than any genital or pre-genital-based eroticism or maternal salve; it goes to the true union of the divided self, which seems--to the easily-spooked male ego--both the ultimate fantasy and a truly terrifying proposition.

3. Maila Nurmi as Vampira

"I once loaned Maila a copy of Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols. In particular, I wanted her to read the chapter on the “anima,” Jung’s term for female archetypes – witches, goddesses, vampires, saints, etc. – that are actually fantasy projections of the inner male psyche, i.e., of the male’s unacknowledged feminine aspects. (When a woman does it, the projection is known as an “animus.”) After returning the book Maila declared, “I am an anima.” - C. Jerry Kutner (BLAD 1/11/08)

4. Brigitte Bardot

"It is better to be unfaithful than faithful without wanting to be." -BB

Bardot is a hero of mine for her decision to use her money and fame to bring attention to animal cruelty, The Brigitte Bardot Foundation. She understands her mythic anima resonance--her remote silence covers men in reproachful invitation. We will never measure up to her staggering hotness, never quench the simple fire of discontentedness in her warm pout. She evades us as effortlessly as a swan evades a pool of sullen sharks. This evasion causes strip clubs to stay in business, the tips are like the replacement divots on the green of missing connection. At least with the foundation, those tips go to a good cause, and are tax deductible. Give what ya can... these wild things deserve it.

 

5. Marlene Dietrich 

"Mystery is a woman's greatest charm."

Like Bardot and Garbo she became reclusive once her looks could no longer be maintained. Movie stars like Dietrich are artists of the persona, sacrificing a normal life in the public eye (ala charity galas, Curtis Harrington hag horror TVMs) so their anima cachet can resonate forever, siphoning the energy of our desire until we fall back, weakened by masochistic reverie and aged into shriveled eye stalks while they stay young forever, captured in the mystic black and white eternal, soaking up viewer after viewer like a Bathory sponge of gaze. Our romantic memories, dredged up from our dating history are absorbed into the celluloid of the vampire anima, light up her skin through sleep's latticework shadow. In withholding her 'whole' self (which includes unsavory aspects like suffocating vanity and hausfrau cleanliness-obsession) our inner projection of the anima finds its focus for the first time in Dietrich, again and again, like a dead ship igniting into windswept sails and mizzenmast hoisting. 

 6. Kim Novak in Vertigo (1958)

 "The movie turns on the slightly malicious question, "Who is Kim Novak?" a question which becomes more frightening, and unanswerable, once the secret of her dual identity within the film is revealed. The initial sequences, for all their beauty in summoning up the enchantment of the anima archetype, belong to a familiar-enough theme in psychology and art--the man as victim of seduction. The fall of James Stewart's character Scottie into "acute melancholia complicated by a guilt complex" is what he deserves from biting into this familiar apple. Indeed, the cumulative kitsch elements of the romance--the staginess of the exposition of the preposterous plot; the tourist's view of San Francisco's prettiness in the long, languishing silent sequence; the poor quality of the "museum painting" of the nineteenth-century woman Kim Novak is supposed to be obsessed by; the monotonous unreality Novak brings to the reading of her lines; and the ponderous earnestness of James Stewart as he becomes her victim--all have a wearying effect, much like the depression of coaddiction." - John  Beebe (The Anima in Film) 

6.5. Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie (1948)

A romantic ghost story, it cost a fortune to make and Jones was bland as a ghostly girl, and smitten artist Joseph Cotten more like some genteel old grandfather having his DEATH IN VENICE pre-stroke moment than an ardent young painter discovering his anima muse in a ghost or vice versa. Barely disguising his bafflement with the terrible poetic dialogue that no one in their right mind would ever speak or write, you want to smack Cotten with a cast iron 78 of "In the Gloaming" for making things worse instead of better by bringing cornpone sincerity to what should be a semi-mad poet (like say, Mischa Auer would play him). Instead we're stuck with treacly strings letting us know just how full of macabre melancholic whimsy we're supposed to feel while he mopes around waiting for another vision. Lillian Gish as a nun lets us know the Jennie Cotten he loves is long dead, but hey, he has the painting he made of her, and her promise she will return, leaving him only a scarf as a signifier she was real. It's a scarf she leaves him by the sea like my anima leaves me at the end of THE LACAN HOUR (2004) and I hadn't seen this when I made that movie!

And I'm sorry I've seen PORTRAIT at all, but hey, the final shot of the painting is in color makes it all worth it, like a bit of Oz ruby color stain on Dorothy's farm girl girl dress in black and white reality, which I think would have been a groovy touch. It's worth seeing for that final color shot though, especially if you see that shot having come home high from meeting some random new girl who's really hot and you felt a deep connection with her, and it's trailing you home, a giddy reverie, though you don't have her number or remember her name but your whole life's lit up in ways it wasn't before, and that color shot of the painting comes randomly on TCM, while you're just half watching it and you realize your anima just banked a three coincidence bumper shot, projected three different levels of meaning, and whoa, your writer's block is knocked into the side pocket, freeing the table as she wafts back in your life for another flickering ghost shadow stretch. Just don't try to touch her.

David Thomson writes a great bit about Portrait of Jennie in his highly recommended Have You Seen...? He covers the troubled history of the film, how Selznick was in some ghastly downward spiral, blind to everything but pleasing his wife at the time, Jennifer Jones...

"One cool observer of the whole fiasco was Alfred Hitchcock, at the end of his rope with Selznick and nearly free of his contract with him. My reason for saying that is the hunch that the man who would make Vertigo learned a lot from Portrait if Jennie: the erotic allure, the morbid sexual fantasy, the being in and out of life, the green light even (the original Jennie ended in a wash of green [which has been restored by TCM - EK]) and above all, the intuition that this love story would work best if allowed to strike dread." (682)

7. Lana Del Rey

The critics who attack Del Rey for her 'makeover' from Lizzie Grant show in their hostility just how effective this adopted persona is as an anima. She is the Marlene Dietrich of her time and we should remember that Marlene too had a makeover upon coming to Hollywood -- losing thirty pounds and four back molars, among other modifications. There's not a single Hollywood star, I'm fairly sure, who is 100% 'real' according to Del Rey's detractors' definition. So it speaks to the raw archetypal sore spot Rey's poked that so many critics feel they must attack her, while others, like me, feel the need to defend her. When you become something to fight over, it's not even 'about' whether you're 'real' or not. If someone tells you they had a dream about a witch would you say, "Bro, that witch is totally fake"? Of course not. What's important is that Del Rey is the anima of 2012; she is the amnesiac succubus, the Diane Selwyn of Mulholland Dr. and the candy colored clown they call the sand woman in Blue Velvet. Her seemingly augmented visage is like if Madeline / Novak had plastic surgery to resemble the portrait of Carlotta Veldez.... or

8. Rita Hayworth as Gilda (1946)
"They go to bed with Gilda but wake up with me." 

Del Rey's weird lips make her a kind of anime comic book version of Rita Hayworth, who showed she understood her persona's hypnotic effect when she famously said the above line. But Hayworth never bowed to the pressures of being an anima, of trying to be a living archetypal image. Rather, the anima rather bowed to her insistence that she was indeed a woman and not a phantom projection. Her image is strong enough it can thrive even in such a self-imposed prison--one literally imposed almost by force of her animus onto her in Gilda--thus Stephen King's novella "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" is about prison. That's why I always get a little sickly claustrophobic watching Gilda - the feeling of suffocation caused by her seedy choice of men, namely the very square-headed and seemingly shorter than her Glenn Ford, who tries to rope her off the way those icky brothers all tried to rope BB in ... and God Created Woman (1957), by cockblocking her, stifling her libidinal-elemental archetypal freedom. I've hated him ever since, regardless of his role (he's pretty great in this, tho).

9. Ava Gardner as Pandora in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)

Di Chirico "The Profit," 1915

No one was going to cockblock or stifle Ava Gardner's libidinal-elemental archetypal freedom, not a possessive homicidal bullfighter, a racing car driver, or any of the would-be suitors who dash themselves upon her rocks in the haunting and underrated (naysayers need to watch it again on Blu-ray) Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. Only James Mason, the original flying dutchman who promises her deathless timeless love aboard his slick craft, knows what to do with all Pandora's aching archetypal beauty. And he embraces her enigmatic grace first by painting her before he even meets her (top), and then after she angrily blots out her face with white he incorporates the white into a De Chirico type mask, restoring and enhancing her unknowable elemental mystery rather than trying to reign it in like the other men orbiting her. An archetype himself, the Dutchman whisks her from the time-bound concerns of mortal men and into the constellations where she belongs.

 10. 4-Way Tie: 
a. Gene Tierney as Laura (1944)

Falling in love with a painting is easy; your anima projects right onto it like a silver screen. But if the painting comes to life (as you so devoutly and ill-advisedly wish) all of a sudden it's not a projection screen but a dark, swirling muddy mess of paint that never dries and thinks you're beneath her social class... or at any rate you think she thinks that. Detective Dana Andrews falls in love with Laura via her image while investigating her murder, but when Laura appears suddenly off the canvas and replaced by a real woman in a boxy raincoat and sour wet expression she's no longer an anima, and he's disappointed as well as intimidated. Naturally his anima is going to have to pick more reliable projection screens if he wants to develop an unhealthy obsession - hence her preference for dead celebrities like Marilyn Monroe (like Poe for his Lost Lenore), who will hopefully not suddenly return from the grave and demand you get a job or take out the trash. 

b. Rebecca (1940)

The painting / initialed sundries, and sumptuous bedroom of truly dead Rebecca on the other hand is so fogged up in anima-projection that her still living and ever-brooding Laurence Olivier all but ignores his real life new young wife, played by Joan Fontaine. He loves young Fontaine at least in part because she seems pliable, young and as anti-anima as possible. Meanwhile Rebecca's ghost overflows all screens and no real woman can compete lest she become more ruthless and wicked than Rebecca herself. 

C. Ligeia - Tomb of Ligeia  (1964)

All of the Corman-Poe cycle films are filthy with devolved animas but as the morbid end game of the de-evolution of a psyche where the anima projection screen endures even into death, Ligeia takes the metaphor deep. In Laura the woman in the painting was still alive, in Rebecca dead, and in Ligeia undead, alive in cat form and hot corpse-spirit possession form, i.e.  abstracted into necrophilia (this is one of the few films where 'pussy-whipped' is a genuine action).

11. Christine Gordon as Jessica Holland in I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Jessica is a great example of the unassimilated anima; the one that will not fade all the way back into the shadows nor merge into the male consciousness even in part; thus she is a cross between the madwoman in the attic ala Jane Eyre and the painting of Rebecca. She was evidently Rebecca-esque in life--i.e. manipulative, slutty, and bi-polar--and now she is halfway into becoming as dead as Rebecca, as undead as Ligeia, and as immortal as her own (nonexistent) painting.  And as an anima she serves only to cockblock her nurse and tear a tropical island family apart, all while Calypso singer Sir Lancelot recounts her misdeeds in his honeyed, irresistible voice. 

12. Dead Wives Club / Women in Refrigerators

I'm not the first to question Leo's insistence on dead wives: check out Nathaniel R's awesome Dead Wives Club poster above. The question is, why? An anima has actually more power in her 'dead' state, yet is less of a threat; she is neither bound up in the eternal sleep of zombie Jessica and the sleeping Snow White nor alive like Laura or Bardot. She is free to rule the psyche of the 'male' consciousness without worry of clashing with the 'real' thing. In other words, unlike Dana Andrews in Laura, Leo never has to worry about his obsession suddenly coming to life and doing un-anima things like taking too long in the bathroom or nagging him about his drinking. He can just stay up late and guzzle hooch and stare at her framed photo--eyes welling up with tears. This is the ideal state for all actors afraid of being upstaged or getting too intimate and open, i.e. unmanly; the dead wife allows all the anima interaction to occur deep down in the dream state, so she can't embarrass you in front of your friends. And it's a great excuse for binge drinking... and not stretching. Amen

13. Queen of DISKS!