The Father, The Son and The Shadow: Who Gets Out Alive?
I spent the weekend with three classic films: Billy Budd, Hud and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Unwittingly, I had crafted an interesting three-part meditation on the nature of the Father-Son conflict and the Shadow's need to force confrontation, destruction and rebirth.
Billy Budd is Peter Ustinov's brilliant and underrated adaptation of Herman Melville's novella by the same name. Billy Budd is a perfect sailor. Young, attractive, idealistic and happy, he is the very essence of the Puer. Forced to serve on a naval vessel, Billy makes fast friends. But he finds himself and his shipmates subjected to cruelty at the hands of a man named Claggart, who lives to make men suffer and squirm. Claggart believes the world is a dark dangerous place, and so attacks others preemptively with patient, manipulative evil. Claggart represents the Shadow. Above both men is The Captain, who is the flawed father of the story. He sees both Billy's goodness and Claggart's evil. When the inevitable confrontation between the two men leads to Claggart's accidental death, the Captain is forced to punish and execute Billy. The Captain and every man on the ship knows it is immoral and wrong. But the law must be serve; the ritual must be obeyed. The sacrifice of Billy Budd can be viewed as a Christ allegory. But from a Jungian perspective, there would seem to be a more intricate dance taking place. The Shadow demands the confrontation. The father avoids it, so the son must be sacrificed. Billy's blood is on the Captain's hands. The Captain is left alive; perhaps by striving to be a better man, he may transform through the loss, shame, and grief.
Hud is a brilliant story written by Larry McMurtry about three generations of men living and working together on a Texas cattle ranch. Homer is the principled old man who owns the ranch. Hud is his drunken, manipulative and selfish son. Homer also has a grandson named Lonnie, a puer who admires both his Uncle Hud and Grandfather Homer for different reasons. Lonnie's father (Homer's other son, Hud's brother) is dead, killed in an accident caused by Hud. Never having forgiven each other, Homer and Hud engage in a proxy war, using the cattle ranch and Lonnie's impressionable psyche as the battlefield. In the end, Homer must die, along with his cows and his ideals. Hud wins the ranch. But he cannot win Lonnie, who walks away in the pivotal last scene as his own man. So again, the Shadow demands confrontation. But this time it is the Father who must be sacrificed. The Puer is transformed, and a young new king is crowned.
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is Tennessee William's classic play about a Southern patriarch called Big Daddy and his ne'er-do-well drunken ex-athlete son Brick. Inflated and egotistical Big Daddy has mastered the material world, but not the inner world. He is dying, and his son Brick is in a fruitless marriage full of resentment and self-destruction. So we have a Father and a Shadow. Where is our Puer? Was he killed off long ago, or do both men carry the archetypal innocence deep inside? In the end, only through confrontation and resolution can Brick get what he craves: for his Father to remember his own innocence and happiness of his childhood, to recall his fond feelings for his own long-dead father. So again the Shadow pursues the confrontation. And a sacrifice must be made with the impending death of Big Daddy. We are left with the Shadow dispelled as Brick promises to sire a new heir to the family name. The lost Puer is regained.
These tales reveal similar insights. In all three stories, the Shadow relentlessly pursues confrontation between Father and Son. In all three stories, Father or Son must be sacrificed; Death must be accepted. And in all three stories, transformation and rebirth are achieved, as difficult as that process may be for all parties involved.
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Great post. I will need to unpack each story separately. As you have layed out the similarities, I must see the differences. I think "Cat" was about shadow but in each of the characters, in the family as a whole. Big Daddy split off his puer nature and projected that onto his son, who was crippled by this projection and kept him locked into his glory days and fearful of growing up. Paul Newman is the classic puer who by not embracing adulthood is unable to have an adult relationship with Maggie who refuses to jump off the hot tin roof despite the heat. This is every man's dream to have a woman who believes in his manhood and is willing to wait for it to emerge. But the core battle is between Big Daddy and his son who end up having to confront their own shadow material constellated by the prospect of death. Big Daddy must embrace his lost self, the self he left behind to become successful and Paul Newman must embrace the Senex, the archetypal old man which is his destiny. The two are thirsty for the truth and this puts them on common ground. As their love for each other is revealed the coldness of Big Daddy melts away and the generativity in Paul Newman is awakened. His wound, like the fisher king, is in the leg as close to the groin as censors would allow. The last scene is he and Maggie expressing their love as man and woman. I like this story because of the strong Aphrodite feminine in Maggie. Big Daddy had a weak counterpart and no match for Big Daddy's southern patriarchal nature brilliantly played against type by Burl Ives who was much softer and more feminine in his own personae. You were right to point out this story as a clssic battle between puer and senex and death is lurking in the background.
ReplyDeleteBilly Budd is a classic but I never saw the movie version. I read it long ago so will take a stab at it from my perspective now. I think the Captain as father is Melville's view of hands off God of the 19th century (the one that Nietzsche killed off) a God which allows good and evil to battle in the world while He upholds the law (man-made or natire's law). This God is not compassionate but knows that good cannot exist without evil and Billy's goodness requires another to carry the evil. Billy cannot incorporate or become conscious of the evil in himself so projects it onto Claggart, as do all the men. The same way they project good onto Billy. Billy's one flaw is his stuttering and this is an interesting detail. This part of Billy is impaired. He cannot express himself clearly as if his hesitation is a weakness in his masculinity. He is afraid of imposing his view on the world through speaking clearly. His clarity might alter the outer world. Billy is an introvert and is more comfortable in the inner world. Claggart hates him and hates him for this hesitation because he is a walking paradox. If he is so good why is he so reluctant. Perhaps Billy's hesitation is in his not owning his own shadow. This disturbs his confidence and he holds back. Claggart cannot tolerate this indecisiveness and hipocrisy. He drives Billy to kill him and this is where Billy is weak-in not being able to tolerate his own capacity to hate, to suffer, to cause suffering, to kill. If Billy had not been put to death death he would have killed himself for not being able to tolerate his action. Just like Billy Babbitt in Cuckoo's Nest who killed himself because he could not live with himself having defied his mother and taken on the masculine form that is his nature but remained in shadow. So Billy Budd caused his own death by not being able to take on the masculine form that hid in his shadow, the form represented by self-expression. Kesey believed this was all wrapped up in a huge national mother complex. Melville brought it to the biblical level. I think Melville tried to purge himself of the puer aeternis in his stories and Billy Budd was his way of killing him off. If Billy had trouble expresssing himself, Bartleby the Scrivener simply refused to express himself unless he wanted to say something, or write something and Bartleby's reluctance to do anything that was demanded of him included finally eating. He refused to bow to the demands of nature, saying no to God. Kind of like a little kid pouting and saying no to his mother. "I'll show you I won't eat anything". But Bartleby goes all the way and dies. Perhaps Melville finally rid himself of the puer by simply starving him to death. Kesey got rid of his and stopped writing.
ReplyDeleteAnd now for Hud. We are back to McMurtry and the western. Perhaps noone understood the psychology of the western motif like McMurtry and Kesey. In Hud we have the true nature of the cowboy, emphasis on boy. The narcissistic puer. Hud is the true puer aeternis stubbornly refusing to grow up but in a man's body. His nephew sees the tow types of men and ultimately becomes his own man, as you recognize. It would seem the old man, cynical and angry about what is being taken away from him is the typical Senex. The nursing homes are filled with the same. The old man is tied to the earth in a way that Hud isn't. The old man is tied to its ancestry and he is in the land and the cattle and when they die he dies. Hud cannot connect to the mother realm at all. He is in complex and struggles to avoid being swallowed by the great mother. The old man reconciled with nature and learned how to live with it, and be nurtured by it and respect it. Hud only knows how to take and has a sense of entitlement. One wonders if there is a little of Hud in GWB. You could almost see the same smirk. But the real measure of Hud is in the quinessential western woman, played by Patricia O'Neal. She is sexy, tied to the earth, with a husky voice, a match for a real man. But not Hud. Hud is not in her league and has no clue how to win her over so he tries to take her, just as he takes and abuses nature without giving back, without nurturing, without having a sense of his own generativity, his own feminine nature. He is a wild man who has no connection to the wildness inside him, the wildness Bly writes about-so he acts it out instead of turning it on himself and transforming. The nephew is able to internalize the wildness as well as the ordered and ancestral realm of the old man and he goes off on his own. Hud is left alone with nothing but the land which he has no use for. One suspects he will destroy everything in his path, or run for president.
ReplyDeleteThe stories have wonderful variety, yet they seem to be dealing with the same source material of primordial forces. It is almost as if you gave identical canvases and hues of paint to Renoir, Picasso and and Kandinsky and asked them to paint the exact same subject. The results would vary wildly.
ReplyDeleteI love your insight about George W. Bush. There is a story about him angrily challenging his father during his drinking days at an age when he was old enough to know better. But let's not be too generous; at least Hud could form a sentence ; )