Graves/Jung Stages (5-8): Chapter 1 Part 2 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph. D .
Stage Five: Materialistic Analyst of Things/Appreciator of Life Itself
This stage recognizes that there are so many exceptions to the rules of stage four that some principles must be demoted to superstitions, while science yields new ones, fostering technology and a vast economic infrastructure. Before stage-five can dominate a society, four must have produced sufficient peace and order for commerce until money and other material rewards start to be the measure of everything. Examples of its analysis include the industrial division of labor and the scientific method itself. This stage expands mental horizons, but social affections become obscured in the vast bookkeeping of physical details.
Since both three and five are egocentric, they have much in common,
but are not identical. In Wall Street (1987), the greed of stage-five Gordon
Gekko functions in a more abstract world than did the anger of stage-three Conan
the Barbarian. Unlike competing (which is always directed against rivals), materialistic
analysis fights against out-warn practices, traditions, or rules, and for professional
advancement as much as for bank account. Graves termed stage five, “Express Self
Now, but Calculatedly for Material Rewards Now.” By “Now” he meant sooner than in
heaven. The increasing complexity of each stage, however, means that materialistic
analysis tends to payoff later than the earlier, odd-numbered levels. Even more rigorously
than the preceding stages, five requires extreme subordination of all instinctive
drives to its imperative.
Consequently, if conscious professionalism constituted all that
this stage offered, it would produce a society of workaholics. Fortunately, its unconscious
complement is the “archetype of life itself.” Releasing the massive quantum
of energy used to repress it, this archetype manifests in anything that revitalizes
a stage-five consciousness, such as nature poetry read by the philosopher John Stuart
Mill to restore his sanity after a totally scientific education enervated him. For
the Victorian version of stage five, a stock contrast distinguished between “head”
(the scientific, practical conscious mind) and “heart” (the unconscious perceived
via the emotions that surfaced from it). This “heart” connoted such “feminine” attitudes
as compassion and love; even more (to heterosexual male Victorians) it meant their
“heart’s desire,” the inspiring woman who could be the “angel in the house.”
Note that Jung’s core understanding of this pattern (“the archetype of life itself”) has no intrinsic connection with gender. He recognized, though, that men often experience it as a feminine image (which Jung called an Anima) and that women often experience it as a male image (which he called an Animus). According to his previously quoted remark, the “Nixie” is “an even more instinctive version” of the Anima, i.e., a female Trickster, rather than the Anima per se, which arises only after confrontation with the (stage-four) Shadow.
As an embodiment of “Life,” the “Anima” brings new vitality to
a stage-five male. Educating Rita (1983), for instance, concerns an erudite
tutor who, after his youth, has found no access to the unconscious except through
inebriation, until he meets the title character. Serving for his Anima, she gives
him enthusiasm; he teaches her method. Comparably (except for the gender reversal),
Zelig (1984) has Mia Farrow as a prim psychologist who finds an Animus in
her frenetic patient.
Naturally, stage five figures prominently in Yuppie romances, such as You’ve Got
Mail (1998). Tom Hanks plays a very abrasive bookstore manager adept at mass
marketing. Another, more sensitive side of him emerges as he writes to the woman
who owns a small bookstore.
Despite sometimes being complicated by regressions as in Cast
Away, Hanks’s roles usually move from lower-phase stage five (obsessive professionalism)
to the life-appreciating upper phase. In Joe Vs. the Volcano, for instance,
all the women in his life (played by Meg Ryan) are Anima projections, leading him
away from drab work inventorying pamphlets (about such topics as anal probes) to
a life of opulence and sea adventure.
Hanks’s own career began largely with the TV show, Bosom Buddies, where two
young professionals confront the Anima very directly by cross-dressing and simulating
female behavior. Stage-five brings scientific/commercial fascination with classifying
human differences and the leisure as well as resources to act out the full range
of sexual diversity.
In The Natural Mind, Andrew Weil argues that the workaholic,
linear, stage-five drive for material success leaves the unconscious desperately
in need of ways to escape it through mood-altering or psychedelic substances. At
stage five, other alternative life styles (including sexual ones) may fulfill a similar
function. Counter-cultural deviations open chinks in consensus reality through which
repressions can surface and thus from the Romantics to Nineteenth-Century Bohemians
to the vast anti-establishment of the Twentieth-Century, identity explorations of
all sorts have characterized stage-five artists.
In addition to focusing narcissistically on their own level’s sexual
and other problems, stage-five filmmakers (i.e., most filmmakers) often try to offer
their impression of the remaining stages to appeal to a wider range of ticket buyers.
Jurassic Park, thus, has lone t-rexes and some visitors being hunted individually
(stage 1), the brontosaurus herds and Hammond’s grandchildren (stage-2), villains
and heroes (stage-3), an ethical message (stage 4), ecology (stage 6), and even references
to chaology (stage 7). The film, nonetheless, devotes its energy primarily to stage-five
professionals. It presumes a public craving the fullness of life, represented by
so primordial a nature it must be produced technologically (the genetic manipulation
in the narrative/the special effects of the movie). Indeed, the primary imperative
of stage five is to artificialize the world, i.e., materialize self-expression.
Movies Focusing on Stage Five: Sabrina (1954 and 1995),
Some Like It Hot (1959), Harold and Maude (1979), What’s Up, Doc
(1972), Billy Elliot (2000), and any other film that treats an awakening to
the material variety of life (even if, as with Jurassic Park, that variety
brings thrilling danger).
Stage six: Empathizer with Everyone/Intuitor
of Meaning
This stage translates the previous appreciation of life into an
ecological empathy with every being. People dissatisfied with stage five’s mere accumulation
cultivate empathy, generating social structures ranging from liberal government to
secular charities (e.g., save-the-whale). At stage six, a sympathetic effort to befriend
each entity on his, her, or its own terms replaces dogma. Stage six’s insistence
on “political correctness” (i.e., politely presupposing universal equality) condemns
any effort to classify people–such as Graves’s system itself (a product of stage
seven).
Stage-six’s conscious attitude appreciates every person and perspective so much that all values become relative. Exemplified by many-minded Hamlet’s dependence on the Ghost to guide decisions, stage six needs desperately its unconscious complement, the Archetype of Meaning, a voice of wisdom from the depths. In the (stage-six) Star Trek series, for instance, the right decision more often comes from Kirk’s or Picard’s intuitions than from such embodiments of reason as Spock or Data. Of course, since stage six respects everyone, Spock, Data, the stage-three Klingons, and even the stage-five Ferengi have loveable qualities as do the villains.
Despite a liberalism so pervasive that one whole movie (The Voyage Home, 1986) centers on saving a whale, Star Trek, nonetheless, almost always is stage-six only in content not stylistically. The style most appropriate to stage six is multi-perspectives, as in Rashomon. Generally deemed too complicated for audiences, such an uncompromising presentation of stage six is uncommon in cinema.
Given the rarity of such an easily recognizable style, stage-six films may sometimes be confusable with other even-numbered ones all of which are social (whereas odd-numbered ones are self-expressive). The even stages, however, do differ from one another. At stage two, tribals will trust and help one another, but only to the extent that they see each other as kin. At stage four, people will do such charitable labors as the rules require–but exclusively those who accept the rules are eligible for help. The rest are shunned, excommunicated, or executed as embodiments of the Shadow. For the first time at stage six does someone say, I want to know you better so that I can help you according to your uniqueness. Graves phrased this stage, “Sacrifice Self Now, for Self Actualization for Self and Others.”
Whereas the lower stages divide their conscious and unconscious aspects diametrically, from this stage upward the two grow closer together; therefore, stage six champions consciously a matter of the heart: harmonizing with others. This greater awareness of the subliminal, however, does not guarantee completely reliable self-knowledge or even sanity. I am thinking of the movie Blade Runner, because of revelations about Philip K. Dick, the stage-six author of the book on which it is based. According to documents made public since his death, he believed that he channeled a Wise-Old-Man figure named “Thomas.” During the period of this possession (chiefly 1974), he engaged in uncharacteristic behavior, including denouncing people as communists to the FBI (while he normally defied the United States government and complained of persecution by it). His diary (titled “Exegesis”) later remarked of this period:
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I cooperated fully with my oppressors. There was no further degree to which I could be turned around–I went all the way, due to the override [i.e., his takeover by the Thomas personality], and experienced a sense of (1) having done the right thing for God and country; and (2) a total loss of anxiety, of exculpation (naturally). (Quoted in Rickman, 203) |
Even before his “possession,” his fictions became famous for their stage-six style:
a varied cast of characters, with the narrative shifting to the viewpoint of each;
nonetheless, he wrote that despite his declining faith he testified in his science
fiction to his feeling of God’s presence, i.e., to a sense of one Meaning behind
everything (Warrick, 83). In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, (the source
of Blade Runner), a divine presence manifests in Deckard’s vision of the Christ-like
Wilber Mercer who tells him to follow the police directive and kill the escaped androids,
even though Mercerism otherwise stresses stage-six empathy.
In the commercially released version of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott translates this conscious/unconscious division of the novel into a sensory split. Visually, the camera lingers on artificial sight. Instances of this range from glasses to the androids’ synthetic eyes to mirroring surfaces, cameras and photographs. These constitute an often-noted eye/I pun, which reminds the viewers of multiple perspectives–the conscious level of stage six. In contrast, a voice-over (like an incorporeal discourse in the mind) interprets the action, explaining why despite Deckard’s growing empathy for the androids he needs to execute most of them, then live with one of them. Scott thus captures powerfully the dynamic structure of stage six, but perhaps because Dicks’s version of the split was already pathological when he wrote the novel, Scott finally decided to delete the narration in his Director’s Cut.
Health does not come easily at any stage, but six has special problems,
as illustrated by Star-Trek episode 64 (“The Empath”). A superhumanly intelligent
alien tortures Enterprise officers. Thereby, he motivates an empath to heal even
though she assumes the pains of her patients and may die in the attempt. She represents
conscious stage six, liable to all the sufferings (including psychological ones)
of the afflicted, yet the ability to enter minds thus is a precious one. Despite
at first seeming sadistic, the alien stands for that stage’s archetype, Meaning (aka
the Wise Old Man or Woman), willing, if necessary, to be ruthless in a compassionate
cause. The problem, of course, is that, being outside of consciousness, this ruthlessness
. Consequently, the next stage makes the search for Meaning a conscious activity,
that it may better be monitored and pursued methodically.
Movies Focusing on Stage—Six Content: Gandhi (1982), Babe (1995) and any other film that respects
many different beings.
Stage Seven: Distancer/Immerser in the Undivided
Self
Each stage progresses from a limited understanding to a panorama that arises as repressions surface. (Ironically, each final panorama tends to reveal the liabilities of that stage, propelling one into a higher one.) Comparably, the stages themselves become evermore inclusive through stage seven, which tries to comprehend life in all its multiplicity. It seeks patterns as elaborate as those intuited in stage seven, but devotes the enormous effort to render them methodical. Some institutions (e.g. the ashrams of India, monasteries of ancient China, and think tanks of the U.S.) permit people to distance themselves from the preoccupations of the lower-numbered stages for the pleasures of ruminating upon vast configurations. Such distancing, for instance, is the attitude of systems dynamics, which has stood back far enough from particulars to see interdisciplinary analogies between markedly diverse processes. Comparably, for many people, a final state (often in old age) is to retire from the present squabble and look at the larger picture–how all the turmoil fits together. If they have reached stage seven, this is not a single materialistic analysis (stage five) but a synthesis of many processes combined with the empathy mastered at stage six and everything else that has been learned along the way.
The conscious mind, however, flounders in such complexity. Chaology, for instance, supplements human brains with computers yet even so finds much of the world disconcertingly unpredictable. By its very name, the best-known stage-seven philosophy, Jacques Derrida’s “Deconstruction” attempts both to destroy and reconstruct, but, according to him, the interrelationship of everything to everything else defers judgment indefinitely (As deconstruction has been watered down by many of Derrida’s imitators, it has become a stage-six way of saying everyone is equally right because all issues are indeterminable. Derrida’s own strategies, however, are to show how the interrelationship of everything to everything else defies conscious analysis and thus thwarts academic philosophy).
In Derrida’s own stage-seven version of it, as has often been remarked (see, for instance, Magliola), Deconstruction was anticipated by Madhyamika Buddhism, designed to show reason incapable of comprehending a world so interconnected that analysis arbitrarily chops to pieces the significant patterns. The purpose of Madhyamika, however, is to divert the mind from conscious logic to a meditative synthesis of conscious and unconscious–what Jung called the Self. Unless people have hurried from stage to stage so quickly that they have not thoroughly developed each one, they have at the end of each some coalescence of conscious and unconscious, but the Self is the largest version of this integration. Previously, the split between the unconscious and consciousness helped the latter to mature, but has at this point become a handicap (cured by the advent of the Self).
Both because few people reach stage seven and because it is inherently reclusive (i.e., un-dramatic), it hardly ever appears in film except somewhat obliquely as in The Matrix (1999). There the characters are mechanically sedated, confronting the paradoxes of that cybernetic dreams. Halfway through the film, the protagonist wakes to consciousness and uses martial arts to integrate his Self so that he can bend the matrix to his will. The sequel, Matrx Reloaded, is even more intricate, presenting Neo’s life as shaped by a computer conspiracy to rectify an inherent glitch in its program, so that, he is a product of a self-divided system attacking itself. (Since oblique and mangled reflections of stage seven provide special problems, all of chapter 3 describes them.)
As the most advanced mental structure, the Self resists ordinary articulation so completely that, according to Jung, it is the actual object of mysticism. Indeed, an experience of the Self also constitutes one of Reality, because the two reflect each other, providing (again, according to Jung) para-psychological knowledge of and influence over Reality. Perhaps this is because Jung learned of the Self via comparative religions, occultism, and myth.
Graves, however, presumed that our era has made stage seven more common, by providing material means appropriate for it to express itself. Just as early-capitalist division of labor and scientific dissection coincided with the materialistic analysis fundamental to stage five, and just as ecology and socialist cooperation coincides with the empathy of stage six, so globalization could be laying a foundation for stage seven. According to the three-time Pulitzer-Prize-Winner Thomas Friedman, globalization is “the inexorable integration of markets, transportation systems, and communication systems to a degree never witnessed before–in a way that is enabling corporations, countries and individuals to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before, and in a way that is enabling the world to reach into corporations, countries, and individuals farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before” (Friedman 3). The Self is where the ego drops its defensive boundaries and consciousness integrates both with surrounding Reality and with the unconscious depths. It thus seems apt for the integrated economics/politics/culture of globalization (though Friedman shows it presently to be dominated by stage five).
Graves had little experience with individuals at stage seven. Nevertheless,
from a small sample he provided a vague description (focusing as much on what it
does not do as on what it does): “Express Self Now, but not at the expense of Others
or the World, so that Life May Continue.” He hesitated to portray stages above this
one.
Movies Evoking Stage Seven:
The X-Files (1998), Magnolia (1999), Little Buddha (1994), Powder
(1995), and any other movie about life as an intricately connected, esoteric pattern.
Stage eight: Member of a Paranormal, Planetary
Community?
Whereas stage seven culminates in a holistic experience (the Self), stage eight–if it exists–goes even further to inhabit what, following McLuhan, Graves termed the “global village.” Graves’s system–where odd-numbered stages are self-expressive and even-numbered ones social–suggests that stage eight will itself form a community. Since conscious and unconscious mind united at the conclusion of stage seven, stage eight does not divide the two. This sounds sufficiently different from ordinary humanity so that mythology rather than history provides clues to its possible nature.
Throughout the world appear legends of saints and sages whose vision quests have brought them into near madness only that they mightß return to society and help to unite it as they have united themselves. According to the legends of the Buddha, for example, his enlightenment first taught him that life brings suffering and unremitting change (the conscious insight of stage seven). Next, he attained to Nirvana, a state beyond categories (the Self?). Finally, he spent an intense period deciding whether to keep this attainment to himself or to teach it to others, who might not be ready for it. The intricacy required in founding a community for such teaching sounds like stage eight (though, like most religious institutions, the Buddhist sangha soon lapsed into a stage four, only intermittently thereafter raised to higher levels).
Pointing toward those elevations, the Zen Oxherding Tales describe a herder who disappears, becoming one with the universal flux, and then returns, a portly monk, meeting a disciple. In this last stage, as he enters the city he has “bliss bestowing hands.” He converts sinners to Buddhas and brings dead trees back to life at a single touch. In Buddhism and Jungian Psychology, J. Marvin Spiegelman comments on this final stage:
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When we are with our smallness, we can see ourselves serving the Self-within as our larger totality, like Christ, the God-within. When we are with our “bigness” … we can see ourselves in the undivided totality of the Buddha-man here represented. (Spiegelman, 81) |
Presumably, the eighth stage would consist of people for whom absorption
of the ego into the Self comprises not merely a new experience but a developing source
of knowledge and energy available for practical application to global concerns (the
dead trees brought back to life both figuratively and literally). Graves presumed
that humanity could rise through an uncountable number of stages, but he also thought
of stage eight as a higher-scale version of stage two (which remained the pinnacle
of human development for thousands of years).
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Realistic dramatizations of change usually focus on conversions within stages rather than between them. In the movie Becket (1964), for instance, the title character develops in stage three. Representative of the pre-capitalist urbanites of the feudal era, he has become chancellor through unscrupulous intrigue. He has either lost or never adequately formed the familial trust of stage two. Consequently, he cannot express love for his mistress or keep from rejecting her if she is forced to shame him by sleeping with the king. His reformation requires his recalling stages one and two. He encounters a Saxon family, reminiscent of his own. Later he meets a model of the heroic in a peasant monk, ready to die for his cause. After becoming Archbishop, Beckett does not really enter stage four, the level toward which Medieval Christendom aspired; he explains that he is willing to sacrifice all not for Law or Rules per se but for “the honor of God.” The character is identifying with a stage-three, reputation-obsessed version of divinity, but his willingness to die heroically for that honor arises from a much larger notion than the personal ambition that he ultimately found unsatisfying.
Actually, at least in the last few centuries, every stage has existed simultaneously, and some people cycle through stages, e.g., stage four for Sunday morning, two for the rest of the weekend, and five for the workweek, even at the risk of sometimes feeling bored with stages below their peak and overwhelmed by ones above it. When successful, the shifting gives a recreative change of pace. Using this effect, movies sometimes arrange stages into cycles, dialectical contrasts, and/or complementary patterns. Dissecting all their intersections within a single movie might well require a book-length treatise, so the following confines itself to the major contours.
Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 1 Part 3
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