Two scenes that have come to my attention recently seem to be lingering in my mind for a lttle extra attention. The first is Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and the significance of the only character in the play that is dead (literally) and that is Skipper, Brick's childhood friend. The end of the play reveals that Skipper committed suicide but we are not sure why. Brick is guilt stricken because Skipper reached out to him before he died. He also reached out to Maggie with sexual advances, which she rejected. Brick was seemed attached to Skipper's corpse, inhabiting more of the groud six feet under than above. It was shame that drove him underground. It is clear he must let this person go to move on with his relationships (wife and father). Maggie and Big Daddy resent Skipper for holding Brick in the grave. They also resent Brick's attachment to the puer realm. Brick's release from Skipper (Captain?) is necessary for him to move into adulthood. There is an underlying suggestion that Skipper was in love with Brick in a homoerotic relationship that Brick did not come to terms with either. It suggests the puer realm is the realm of homoerotic love. This sounds very platonic but may be very close to the truth. Brick's wounding is in the leg, as close as one gets to the source of generativity. This makes him impotent. We realize that Brick was carrying the fun loving aspect of Big Daddy, who set that part of himself aside for ambition. He reflects on his own father's carefree and loving nature and realizes that by resenting his father he cast the baby out with the bath water. Brick of course let's go of Skipper precisely as Big Daddy embraces the fun loving aspect of his father and himself. Skipper is sacrificed. He dies then though he's been dead for a while.
Now what does this have to do with Cuckoo's Nest? No idea. So let's proceed. Nurse Ratched is confering with her psychiatrist colleague over the fate of RPM and the "Boys" are talking about how RPM is no ordinary man (superman) and Nurse Ratched breaks in, "Oh. no gentleman, I believe you are very wrong. He is very much just a man." Ratched is like Hera unable to forgive Hercules for being born of the love affair between Zeus and the mortal Alcmene so she sets out to kill him. The story is more ancient than I originally realized. It is the battle between puer and senex and senex always wins because senex is tied to aging. Brick and RPM are more alike than I knew. Only RPM's fate can only be castration, because he is archetypal. Brick is a real person and unsticks himself from the complex and moves on.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Sunday, September 12, 2010
MY Trip to Al Qaeda
I saw a film made by Lawrence Wright based on his book "the Looming Tower". This fits right in with the upcoming webinar from Asheville on politics and a Jungian perspective. Wright tried to get to the roots of how the Al Qaeda were formed and what compels it now. The film is actually a version of his one man stage play based on the book. Wright's message to the world is that we are playing into the hands of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda by damaging our own civil rights and continuing a war we cannot win because we don't understand the "enemy". Wright's belief is that many Muslim's in the world share a commmon sense of humiliation and dread of life that can very easily translate into a love of death. It does not take much to convince a young Muslim who is not allowed to find pleasure in this world to give up his life to destroy the "oppressor" who is the one responsibile for his humiliation. But beyond a love of death there is no plan, no political agenda, no vision of the future except destruction. I imagine Freud's two basic principles Eros and Thanatos being the foundation for this battle. Which people could more perfectly reflect the opposite of a love of death than the Americans who have have such a love for life and are ruled by the Eros principle that death is always a surprise and and a cruel intrusion into our love affair with the outer world. It would take a people who hated this world and loved the afterlife to confront a people who only loved this world and had no understanding of the imaginal realm, the symbolic, the archetypal.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Life Without Father
I attended a recent showing of Tennessee William's "Glass Menagerie" a the Ahmanson Theater. It seems to me the piece is a meditation on the absence of archetypal father energy and the insatiable craving we each carry to heal the father wound.
All three of the main characters miss the literal father in the play, a man of charm who abandoned them long ago. In different ways, this absence is causing them suffering and creating a desperate need.
Amanda, the mother, has not confronted the pain of her marriage failing. She regresses into adolescent girlishness, obsesses with flirtation, and projects her failure onto her daughter in an unending bipolar cycle of unrealistic dreams and bitter disappointments.
Laura, the frail daughter, is devoid of self-esteem. She is unable to function in the world outside the realm of her mother's protection, and can only relate to men through fantasy and the safe role-playing with her glass figurines. Her wound is displayed literally in an awkward limp.
Tom, the brother, is immensely unhappy. Without father energy, he is stuck in the oppression of his mother's suffocating psychological womb. He lacks the passion and ambition to take risks and enter the world. Through guilt and smothering, Amanda's aggression toward her absent husband finds its target in Tom.
So Amanda needs male energy to heal her wound, affirm her beauty and provide a worthy adversary. Laura needs the validation and confidence that a father can instill in a young woman. And Tom needs to find his own manhood, which he seems to be pursuing through contact with other men, be it artistic, professional or sexual.
Into this spider's web wanders Jim, the gentleman caller. Jim is not so much a person as an ideal. He flirts with Amanda and makes her feel young. He values Tom's creativity, calling him Shakespeare and offering words of encouragement about his potential. And he tries to instill confidence in Laura, calling her pretty, dancing with her, and kissing her because "somebody ought to."
But in the end, Jim disappoints them exactly as their father did. He leaves. The father wound is eternal and recurring. Amanda blames Tom, because she cannot be accountable or make the absent father accountable. Tom leaves, but part of him is trapped in that apartment for all time, haunted by the wound that time and distance cannot heal.
In the universal sense, the father wound leaves us each alone in the desert of the world. Our fathers are mirages fading on the horizon. And though our mothers are safe oases, they cannot help us get to our fathers. We are left in the sand between the two, thirsting for something we must find on our own.
All three of the main characters miss the literal father in the play, a man of charm who abandoned them long ago. In different ways, this absence is causing them suffering and creating a desperate need.
Amanda, the mother, has not confronted the pain of her marriage failing. She regresses into adolescent girlishness, obsesses with flirtation, and projects her failure onto her daughter in an unending bipolar cycle of unrealistic dreams and bitter disappointments.
Laura, the frail daughter, is devoid of self-esteem. She is unable to function in the world outside the realm of her mother's protection, and can only relate to men through fantasy and the safe role-playing with her glass figurines. Her wound is displayed literally in an awkward limp.
Tom, the brother, is immensely unhappy. Without father energy, he is stuck in the oppression of his mother's suffocating psychological womb. He lacks the passion and ambition to take risks and enter the world. Through guilt and smothering, Amanda's aggression toward her absent husband finds its target in Tom.
So Amanda needs male energy to heal her wound, affirm her beauty and provide a worthy adversary. Laura needs the validation and confidence that a father can instill in a young woman. And Tom needs to find his own manhood, which he seems to be pursuing through contact with other men, be it artistic, professional or sexual.
Into this spider's web wanders Jim, the gentleman caller. Jim is not so much a person as an ideal. He flirts with Amanda and makes her feel young. He values Tom's creativity, calling him Shakespeare and offering words of encouragement about his potential. And he tries to instill confidence in Laura, calling her pretty, dancing with her, and kissing her because "somebody ought to."
But in the end, Jim disappoints them exactly as their father did. He leaves. The father wound is eternal and recurring. Amanda blames Tom, because she cannot be accountable or make the absent father accountable. Tom leaves, but part of him is trapped in that apartment for all time, haunted by the wound that time and distance cannot heal.
In the universal sense, the father wound leaves us each alone in the desert of the world. Our fathers are mirages fading on the horizon. And though our mothers are safe oases, they cannot help us get to our fathers. We are left in the sand between the two, thirsting for something we must find on our own.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
The Happy Accident of SALT
I saw "Salt" this weekend, and was delighted and intrigued. Though you had recommended it, I knew little of the plot and went in with no expectations.
After seeing it, I discovered that the project was intended for Tom Cruise but rewritten for Angelina Jolie. While Tom would have been fine in the role, a male Salt would have been merely "Mission Impossible: Revisited."
What luck that Tom Cruise was unavailable, though, as I felt most of the story's power resonated in Salt being the only female at the center of the most masculine of all struggles, the Cold War.
Her destructive power was transcendent. Like the Goddess Kali, she was creator and destroyer all at once. Though I had no evidence through most of the story of whether she was acting for good or evil, I found myself rooting for her to just destroy, destroy, destroy. Rather than seem like a minor piece in someone else's chess game, Salt became a powerful grey Queen mercilessly cutting down black and white pawns.
It was as though the imbalance inherent in the all-male world of war and supremacy had to be corrected by any means; only a woman, free of male ego, could move through this world and do what needed to be done.
Did anyone really care if the Russian or American President lived or died in the end? No. We care that Salt prevented the deaths of millions of innocent women and children in the Third World. The Great Mother had an agenda, and men were expendable to save the offspring.
After seeing it, I discovered that the project was intended for Tom Cruise but rewritten for Angelina Jolie. While Tom would have been fine in the role, a male Salt would have been merely "Mission Impossible: Revisited."
What luck that Tom Cruise was unavailable, though, as I felt most of the story's power resonated in Salt being the only female at the center of the most masculine of all struggles, the Cold War.
Her destructive power was transcendent. Like the Goddess Kali, she was creator and destroyer all at once. Though I had no evidence through most of the story of whether she was acting for good or evil, I found myself rooting for her to just destroy, destroy, destroy. Rather than seem like a minor piece in someone else's chess game, Salt became a powerful grey Queen mercilessly cutting down black and white pawns.
It was as though the imbalance inherent in the all-male world of war and supremacy had to be corrected by any means; only a woman, free of male ego, could move through this world and do what needed to be done.
Did anyone really care if the Russian or American President lived or died in the end? No. We care that Salt prevented the deaths of millions of innocent women and children in the Third World. The Great Mother had an agenda, and men were expendable to save the offspring.
Monday, September 6, 2010
Being of No Woman Born
So MacBeth is brought down as the witches predicted, by a man of no woman born and by Birnam wood that was honed into bows for battle. So what of this detail. A man not born of woman was the only one who could kill MacBeth while MacBeth himself was born of woman. So macBeth had a vunerability that MacDuff did not simply by being born of a woman. The wounding inherent in the mother complex was MacBeth's undoing and now we have the full picture. MacBeth could not say no to his wife despite his initial resistance to her suggestions. The witches represent the dark mother and both husband and wife fall completely under it's powers. But it takes a true man, one not under the influence of the mother complex to undo MacBeth. Removed by cesarian section MacDuff symbolically escaped the bondage to the mother complex. MacBeth's moment of truth was when he failed to overcome his wife's corruption and break the shackles that bound him to his mother. All his prowess in battle was simply symbolic opposition to the mother with no true inner strength to confront himself. There is no depth to MacBeth. He reminds me of James Gagney in White Heat. No more perfect image of the devastation caused by the mother complex than a man on top of exploding fuel tanks saying, "Look at me ma, I'm on top of the world".
Get Low
Get Low ia a movie Robert Duvall struggled to bring to the screen. One can see why as the subject is death. An old man who lived most of his life as a hermit decides to have a funeral party while he is still alive with the promise of telling people why he lived that way and a raffle ticket for his 300 acre land for $5. Somehow this movie does not get low enough though I am moved by Duvall's performance. It takes place in the 1930's by the look of the automobiles but Duvall's character lives in the woods. The movie takes place during the winter and chills the viewer by placing one into the cold world of Felix Bush. This coldness suggests the grave he placed himself into when he was a young man. The secret that brought about his self-imposed isolation becomes the hook that compels the story but is less interesting than the man himself and I think we desire to know more about him and less about how he became him. He is a wounded man whose wounds compel him to find healing within and eventually reach out to the community he abandoned years before. Apparently based on a true story I find myself more interested in the man's struggle than his redemption which seems anticlimactic. The last scenes depict the resistance we have to both death and death in life. Coming to terms with one's failings and one's unlived life as well as one's accomplishments is the axis one needs to come to at the end. The axis of how one lived and how one failed to live, our divine (generative) nature and our human (mortal) nature. There is also the puer and the senex drawn together in the story-the younger man played by Lucas Black. I like the Bill Murray character placed in the story for comic relief becuase the inherent heaviness of the mood of the movie but also to show how that heaviness can be transformative. Despite his selfish nature Murray's character seems to grow up a little by the end of the movie.
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