Stage 3 in Tommy: Chapter 1 Part 5 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
Stage Three in Tommy (1975)
During the early middle ages, Christianity itself took on a veneer of stage three
with God the most powerful, warrior king. Anglo-Saxon translations of the gospels
make the disciples into a band of fighters around a princely Christ. Today, however,
such an interpretation of Jesus is almost inevitably ironic, as in The Who’s Tommy,
which satirically reduces Christianity and British society to that level.
Appropriately for a presentation of aggression and competition, the movie begins during the cataclysms of WWII. Tommy’s heroic flier father disappears mysteriously in it. At the boy’s birth, though, the chorus of Nurses sing “We've won! A son! We've won!” This introduction is not the steady state symbolized by the Lionking’s cycle of anointings and other eternally repeated rituals. Winning belongs to the context of competition, fighting for position, and Tommy is associated with the victory, as if he were the embodiment of it—the Pyrrhic victory that ushered the decline of British power and prosperity.
Unable to remain faithful to a husband who may or may not be still alive, Nora, the mother of Tommy (now about ten) begins flirting with a camp councilor named Frank. He judges her the winner in a lovely-legs competition. On the eve of Nora’s marriage to Frank, her former husband returns, and in rivalry, Frank murders him. To keep Tommy from testifying, Frank and Nora traumatize the boy with the words:
| You didn't hear it, you didn't see it! You won't say nothin' to no one, Ever in your life. You never heard it. |
These symptoms are, of course, well known in psychopathology, particularly in war, but the following case history is perhaps even more illuminating about the tie of Tommy’s malady to his stage:
Eventually, psychoanalytic work brought her [a patient suffering from “treatment resistant facial acne”] in touch with a sense of shame, of “losing face” through being considered “stupid” by her parents. As she was able to come to terms with her own style of intelligence and integrate her general “pariah complex” into a meaningful pattern in her life, the “untreatable” acne disappeared (Whitmont 1993, 70).
In both traumas, the children succumbed to a stage-three coercion of them to accept a very low place in the hierarchy, internalized as “loss of face” (its skin or sensory organs). Like her, Tommy must develop beyond early stage-three to be healed, although (also like her) not before years of suffering.
Since at stage three people are restrained only by fear of shame
or other punishment, Tommy’s inability to denounce wrong doers or protect himself
means that he will be a victim. The Acid Queen makes him a pincushion of hypodermic
needles to “tear his soul apart.” He is next left with sadistic Cousin Kevin to whom
Nora finally presents a large paddle, to encourage his cruelties. Then, “wicked Uncle
Ernie” sexually molests Tommy.
The boy is entrusted to these monstrous baby sitters because Nora feels a stage-four
guilt at Tommy’s state and Frank a stage-three annoyance to be associated with a
handicapped child (a loser), yet both fear that if he actually should recover, he
might testify against them. Consequently, their attempts to help him are half-hearted.
Exacerbating Nora’s guilt is the religious notion that if Tommy is too severely handicapped
to be taught Christian doctrine he will end in Hell, or, as the Chorus politely phrase
it “the eternal grave.” Although this imagery arises from stage-four dogma, its presentation
makes God sound as unmerciful as everyone else in the musical. In place of actual
Christianity, the film substitutes some strange Freudian cult that equates sexuality
and religion. Instead of a statue of the Madonna, one of Marilyn Monroe is supposed
to cure cases like Tommy’s by stimulating the senses, but this ritual proves as unsuccessful
as the malevolent baby sitters.
A subliminal self in the form of a Doppelgänger leads Tommy to a pinball machine, so that the same unconscious that disabled him now gives him a compensatory way to become a Hero. The emphasis is on the competitiveness of the sport. He wins against “the champ” thereby gaining “a million in hand.” Realizing a stage-three dream, he “can rule the world from a yacht in the bay!” The money and yacht, however, go to his parents, while he continues to suffer, subordinated to them.
In the role of the previous champion, Elton John uses the telling slang “mean” and “beat” to describe Tommy’s victory. Metaphorically, they express the cruelty and aggression that are so taken for granted at this stage that one would hardly notice them if the “mean pinball” were not the refrain of the song. What is mildly surprising is his conflation of being a “pinball wizard” with Christ. He narrates Tommy’s being escorted by his “disciples” and becoming the new “lord” and “king.” Exemplary of the emphasis on self in the early phases of stage three, Tommy, though, is still self-absorbed Narcissistically, as shown by his mirror gazing. His mother finally smashes the mirror after a doctor says that he needs some sensation stronger than a machine can supply. She responds to the cue by embracing her son in a more-than-motherly way. Rising from self-absorption to self-expression (i.e., one aspect of stage three to another) he appoints himself as a “Messiah” and calls all those who “ha[ve] the guts” to follow him. His mother continues this conflation of sporting and religious language:
| You're a hero! You are famous! …. You're a god, and you're loved; …. And now that you're whole, You'll be champion of their very souls. Recalling the previous reduction of religion to sex, he says that the “sensation” and “vibration” of his passing by increases the pleasures of sexual intercourse. This slides into more traditional religious language: The few I touched now are disciples Love as One I Am the Light... I Am the Light! |
Immediately, rivalry arises between the new God and the previous one. A Christian minister (seen polishing his Rolls Royce as token of his success) forbids his daughter to go to a meeting celebrating the pinball Messiah. She burns the Bible and comes to hear Tommy’s message of freedom and self-expression, couched in competitive language, e.g., “Let's play to win, tonight!” Indicative of the underlying violence in this “game,” she loses face literally with a wound that requires sixteen stitches. Tommy welcomes the multitudes to his summer camp where “We're drinking all night” instead of sleeping. Despite some allusions to the Lord’s Supper and the pre-crucifixion vigil, the primary association of such all night alcohol bouts is of machismo. Because of his marketable approach to redemption, soon there is “A Tommy Camp in every city,/Millions flocking in like sheep.” Growing tired of the “gips,” such as Tommy’s plan to make his followers resemble him through sensory depravation, they riot and threaten to “rape” him—one of the points where the drama’s association between sexuality and competitive aggression becomes most explicit.
The film ends with Tommy ascending a mountain as he and a chorus sing:
| On you I see the glory. From you I get opinions. From you I get the story. Listening to you! |
He is perhaps now one with his heavenly flier father, though, “get[ting] opinions” and “the story” does not sound like the Truth (what stage four expects from religion). Rather, he seems to be the apotheosis of the heroic struggle for self-assertion. This, after all, is the advance that stage three makes over stage two and Tommy embodies this most positive side. Within that stage, those first entering are most likely to regret losing their part in the tribe and thus are timid and secretive about their self-expression. In the movie, these are exemplified not only by young Tommy (in his psychosomatic avoidance of testifying against his family) but also by the hypocritical characters, including Tommy’s baby-sitters, who at first try to hide their perversions from his parents. After his long regression to stage one, Tommy, however, rebounds to the peak of stage three (the Hero), acting very openly and courageously, most spectacularly in the scene where he hang glides to bring peace to rival gangs. Like Becket’s, Tommy’s virtue rises almost to stage four, but, in the twentieth century, for this to be the highest the protagonist manages is both comic and pathetic. Like all satire, however, the movie’s denouncing the imperfect (in this case the underlying savagery of modern society) implicitly urges the viewers to seek a more moral way, i.e., stage four or above. At any rate, ranging from the original Who album to its presentation in various of their concerts, to the movie, to the musical, and even to an interactive video game, the rock opera has opened the eyes and ears of its audience to how pervasive stage three may still be.
Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 1 Part 6
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