True Grit

The story of Rooster Cogburn and Mattie Ross must run deeply in the American psyche for there to be two fims made from the book by Charles Portis. This latest version by the Cohen Brothers is very loyal to the book and the changes they made are interesting to ponder as we will do later. My first lingering imagery from the movie is the final dramatic scene in which Rooster rides Mattie's horse, Blackie, to death and nearly himself to save her life. The brutality that was required to get that done needs special mention. Rooster rides the horse at a gallop for hours and when it slows he takes out a knife and uses it to spur the horse on for many more miles until the horse's "heart bursts" and Rooster is forced to shoot the animal out of compassion. This is a man who is willing to be brutal to get what he wants or do what he thinks is right and in this case he wants Mattie to live. In the book Rooster does not shoot the horse and it is suggested the horse dies from being pushed too far. The imagery of killing the horse raises the level of brutality a little higher and helps to define Cogburn's character. We also feel on a very deep level that the killing of Mattie's horse somehow marked the transition to womanhood. It was something Mattie could not have done herself, it was not yet part of her nature as she tried to stop Rooster from committing the act. This brutality is a key part of the story.

From the beginning Mattie's choices led her on this pathway into the realm of brutality. Of the three marshalls offered her for service to go after Tom Chaney, her father's killer, she chooses the most brutal of the three, the one most likely to get the job done. She wanted nothing to do with being civil or righteous or gentlewomanly, she wanted brutality and if necessary lawlessness. If we look at the father we could see how Mattie would take up this path. Her father was a gentle man and was kind to the man who killed him. He did not have an eye for the brutal nature that Tom Chaney had so did not see this betrayal coming. This weakness in character led to his downfall but also was passed onto his daughter who was determined not to make the same mistake in judgement of character. In fact she had quite an eye for the side of human nature that was able and willing to take advantage of a 14 year old girl and she was ever vigilant about its possibility. But she was not prepared for the darkness and extreme brutality charcteristic of the world she was enetering when she hired Rooster Cogburn. He became her father from the depths of the underworld, someone who was no stranger to this rough and unforgiving western territory, someone who will become her guide and protector, someone with one good left eye suggesting his awareness of the dark unconscious realm.

Jung addresses the problem of unlived life in the parents and the propensity for the child to feel compelled to complete that unlived life. For Frank Ross it was that part of his character that did not see a Tom Chaney when he was right in front of him. When we reviewed the Black Swan (see blog Black Swan- Film's Descent into Darkness) we discussed the unlived life of the Nina's mother which became for Nina her life's mission to live out for her mother including success as a ballerina in fulfilling the role of the White Swan in Swan Lake. Jung says the unlived life returns to us as dead parts of ourselves to which we are compelled to listen. If we do not listen, if those parts of ourselves do not reach our consciousness it will wreak havoc on our lives. Mattie finds from her chosen father in Cogburn what she could not get from her biological father.

Let us address Mattie's lost arm. Mattie's fall into the cave came immediately after her killing of Tom Chaney and is a wonderful image of the fall into the unconscious. The snakes lie in a dead man's belly, hibernating. The snakes represent death and life. They contain the venom and the cure, the poison and the remedy, the pharmakon. That which Mattie needs to complete her life has a price. Marie Louise Von Franz often said there is a cost to consciousness. In that fall she confronts the snakes lying in the belly of a man with a knife. She reaches for the knife to release herself from the vines on which she is caught. This is both her moral dilemna entrapping her as well as the tension between the realm of civilization and the brutality of nature. This is the archetypal realm of the old west. This brutality, this prima materia, this chaos has gripped her and she must break herself free and it is Cogburn that frees her. Cogburn has experience in this realm and has himself escaped the grips of dark aspects of human nature and must show her how. The one eye not only elevates him to god status (the cyclops were all gods) we also understand that he has a different vision than the rest of us. This vision of man's darker nature cost him his right eye. This sacrifice is parallel to Mattie's sacrifice of her arm.


Let us look into Cogburns character at this point. His name suggests he has been wounded by the mechanized world that is emerging at this time in history. Wounded very deeply and we suspect it is in his feeling function. Robert Johnson suggests that there is a cost to western culture in its mechanical short cuts around nature and that cost is in the experience of the feeling function. We are a culture overly dependent on thinking function. We can understand this because with all our science we are still in shock and disbelief when a young man walks into a school with a gun and opens fire on his fellow students and teachers. The most disturbing aspect is we didn't see it coming, we didn't have an eye for this aspect of this young man's nature. This is also the nature in Tom Chaney Mattie's father did not see. Perhaps saving Mattie was redeptive for losing his son and perhaps Mattie allowed Cogburn to reconnect with this feeling side that is loving and fatherly. Saving her was saving himself. This is a little different ending than the archetypal cowboy riding off with his male sidekick into the sunset suggesting escape from the mother realm. This is about a man willing to confront himself on a much deeper level and a girl needing him to do so for her own individuation.

At the end of the movie Mattie demonstrates her respect and gratitude for Cogburn by visiting his gravesite and we see her as a proud woman who has made her own way in the world despite only one arm. The part of her nature honed from her experience with Cogburn provided her with the strength to grow despite the loss of her father. With her knowledge she becomes a teacher as we would expect but she never marries. Perhaps this is another cost of consciousness given the time in which she lived or she did not need to be married to define who she was, she had fully realized her life's potential.

I would be remiss to not point out that this is the third film we have analyzed involving the indivuation of a young girl into womanhood. Nina, in the Black Swan had no rescuer and we suspect succombed to the archetypal realm wholly but embraced her unlived life with rapture and we suspect her absent father contributes to her lack of resuer. Ree in Winter's Bone, also a young girl seeking her father, has as much grit as Mattie and again demonstrates the need for an archetypal father that makes up for the biological father. For Ree it is her uncle Teardrop who guides her into the brutal world of methamphetamine production, violence, secrecy in the backwoods of the Ozarks. Ree recovers her unlived life symbolized by recovery of her father's hands and his softer, musical nature. Perhaps the emergence of these movies suggests a collective need to balance our overly focused thinking function with exploring the development of the feeling function and it's needs. It is quite interesting that the movies suggest the needs of connection to the feeling function lie somewhere in the realm of nature's brutality (quite paradozical)and perhaps our drive to keep our brutal nature in shadow rather than incorporating it into our consciousness compels us to act it out on those we are least likely to understand.

Cogburn's redemption is in saving Mattie and perhaps it is our imagined redemption as well.

Black Swan

The reactions of fellow moviegoers Saturday night to Black Swan was predictable. Those who were vocal about it thought it preposterous and laughable (incuding my wife). I found it to be a wonderful depiction of a young woman integrating her shadow within a psychologically intense battle ground of the theatre of ballet. The external manifestations of Nina's delusions, hallucinations were violent and disturbing but I believe to be a perfect mirror into the inner violence, drama, that this type of person might experience in real life. So one has to step back from the imagery and not take it too literally to appreciate the psychology of the film. Is this woman in need of therapy? Of course, but pathologizing her problem will only distance her dilemna from our own.

Th story of swan lake must be appreciated as this is the psychological backdrop of the film. Odette is a beautiful woman by night and by day a white swan, the result of a spell placed on her by the evil sorcerer Von Rothbart. The only way to lift the spell is by her falling in love with a prince. Prince Seigfried out hunting one evening witnesses her transformation from swan to woman and falls in love with her and they spend the night together. The next day she becomes a swan again and he plansto marry her but the sorcerer anticipates this and brings his daughter Odile to meet him making her look like Odette. The prince marries her thinking it is Odette and Odette discovers the betrayal and returns to the lake. The prince discovers what he has done and goes to odette and asks for forgiveness which she gives him but it is too late the spell can now never be broken and she decides death is her only escape. In some versions the prince follows Odette to her death by drowning in the lake and in other versions she acts alone.

The ballet Swan Lake becomes for Nina the perfect vas hermeticum within which she will be transformed. Being a swan half the time and a beautiful woman the other half, Nina (Odette) is under a spell cast by the evil sorcerer (Von Rothbart) who originally turned her into a swan. In order for Odette to be freed from the spell (become a whole person) she must fall in love with a prince (Seigfried). Nina's mother is sorcerer who keeps Nina in the mother realm. One is reminded of Rapunzel and the sorceress who keeps Rapunzel in the tower until the prince comes to rescue her. Nina's desire for ballet is the mechanism to work through this enchantment and disengage from this realm and from her mother in the process. Seigfried is the Director who, in his desire for a perfect ballet, tries to push Nina into herself to explore her shadow which is her sexuality, her ambitiousness, her jealousy, anger, rage, all of which is represented by Lilly (Odile) (sounds similar).

I love the fact that the movie begins with the emergence of this "other" that resembles Nina but is in the shadows. It is Nina being persued by her shadow from the very beginning. So the shadow is her and Lilly interposed and this is done visually throughout the movie. As this shadow self emerges it is sexual, confident, enraged at her mother, jealous, ruthless, and all what Nina is not. The stealing of Beth's posessions is very interesting. She wanted to be perfect and the stealing of these things, a nail file, lipstick were a ritualization of acquiring the perfection that she saw in Beth.

On a psychological level the scratching at her self was like cutting which is a way to ward of anxiety and more symbolically a way to get at the self lying beneath the surface only taking it to a literal extreme. It is also a way to feel as though one is regaining control over one's self, just as bolemia and anorexia are similar attempts to hold on to control. But the Director (therapist) is encouraging Nina to let go. This is not something she will accomplish by controling herself but only by letting go of herself.

So the Director, as the hero, must pull Nina out of the mother realm and away from the literal mother. Nina (Odette) must die so the merging of the black swan and white swan can create the transcendant third. The integration of the shadow must result in the death of the ego, the old self, the staus quo. When Nina offers her final words that she is now perfect, she is really saying she is whole, complete, she is now individuated. This movie is a wonderful allegory of individuation.

We may also see Nina as the puella capitvated by this archetype. As a swan she is in the realm of sublimatio flying high in the sky. The swan is connected to the sky and the water (unconscious) but in order for Nina to become a whole person she must come down to earth (coagulatio). The tension between these two realms will create a third called circulatio, the merging of these two realms. "It ascends to the heavens and descends to the earth and receives the power of above and below. Then you will have the glory of the whole world. Therefore all darkness will flee from you (Edinger).

It is a perfect image at the very end of the ballet and the movie in which Nina falls to the earth-her swan nature must become personalized, so she can become a person she is inetended to be. Flying high above the earth she was ambitious and fantasy-bound so the fall on stage was both the death of the puella, the swan nature, the death of Nina and the integration of the black swan Lilly, who she killed psychologically. In the audience we see the mother who seems to need Nina to complete this transformation, as much as she resisted it in life and perhaps a transformation her mother was never able to complete.

Wild Horses

I am in high school living with Grandpa, but Grandma is not there. She has already passed. Grandpa and I have settled into incongruous daily routines. He works, I study. We don't eat together.

I take it upon myself to invent a new kind of air filter by combining a vacuum with a lighting fixture. When you turn the light on, the vacuum sucks dirt out of the air. I show others, but no one is impressed.

I go outside and mount a large wild horse. I am now in the North Woods of Wisconsin. As I ride, the horse goes where he wants, and he takes me to a small town I remember. The town has been renamed "Larry King, Wisconsin." Evidently Larry used to vacation there.

There are other wild animals wandering the streets. Big horses, elk, moose, deer. They are vivid and beautiful. They run aimlessly, and I keep thinking we will collide as we move through the random herd. But my horse guides himself, and the animals instinctively avoid collisions.

It occurs to me that I should try to control this horse somewhat. Otherwise, I fear I will go nowhere. I take the reins and try to impose my will on him. He is resistant. Time will tell how this relationship works out.

Lunatics' Asylum

I am trapped in an asylum with criminally insane people. Like Cuckoo's Nest, we are all in pajamas. And while most are medicated, I am not.

The inmates are at the same time an active group of criminals pulling off some sort of internal heist. We are in the final stages of an intricate robbery from the institution which will gain us what is perceived as material profit, but not freedom. This is true insanity. We are not even robbing Peter to pay Paul, but rather robbing Peter to pay Peter.

There is a member of the crew that hates me. Though he makes no obvious threat, I feel silent tension and know there is malice. Another inmate, one that I trust as a brother, comes to me and whispers in my ear,"He is coming for you. Be prepared. And slit his throat when he does."

I do not want or understand this conflict, but I know it is coming. I know I am different than the other inmates. I am more clear-headed and innocent, and one individual at least hates me for this.

I prepare. Looking through my surroundings, I find a small nail file. I palm it with my thumb so it is ready at hand. I explore places to hide. There is a loft with small cubby areas where one might feel safe; but there is an exposed wall where other inmates can peer in. It will not do to hide.

In the common area, inmates are being handed large doses of prescription meds in intricate combinations. Soothing music plays. Inmates eagerly consume their drugs, happy to stop feeling again for a while.

In another area, other inmates are tidying up the last details of the heist, including my nemesis. He sees me and pulls a handgun. I dash forward, flicking away his gun and grabbing his head with one hand while I jam the nail file into his neck with the other.

Though I aim squarely for his jugular vein, he does not bleed. Nothing but air is released from his wound. I do not know if he is alive or dead.

In my head, I hear an old Italian phrase and response.

"In bocca al lupo."

"Crepi el lupo."

Translation.

"Into the mouth of a wolf."

"May the wolf die."