Hypnotherapy in Kundun: Chapter 2 Part 6 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
KUNDUN (1997)
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[W]hen telling a fairytale or anecdote to an originally “normal” client, that client may become somewhat “trancy’” that is, quiet, relaxed, and apparently either very attentive or very preoccupied. This is a state we all experience periodically, is advantageous for the previously mentioned reasons [i.e., it increases suggestibility], and provides an opportunity for the therapist to utilize metaphors in different ways. –David Gordon, Therapeutic Metaphors |
Kundun begins with the snows of the Himalayas changing into repetitive symbols
of a Tibetan sand painting, while the young, future Dalai Lama listens to his mother
tell him a story to put him to sleep. We listen also as we do to a continuation of
the story the next day and to his being put to sleep the next night. Indeed, slipping
into sleep, spirit possession, or trance is a motif, throughout the film–-one that
movies often employ to associate the action with dream and altered consciousness.
Inspired by the Buddhist understanding of life as illusion, Kundun thematizes trance, both in Tibetan rituals and more pervasively. When the Dalai Lama and his entourage themselves watch a film about a monarchy (Henry IV), Melissa Mathiesen’s 16 October 1992 script describes the audience as “mesmerized by this incredible vision.” Since Kundun is also about the worries of a sovereign, the moment is self-reflexive. A comparable device is her motif of “mesmeric eyes”–a term she uses twice to describe one character’s beneficial impact over another one. The audience also is to slip under the influence of such a gaze: “We find the statue of Seventh Dalai Lama, sitting on his golden cushion, and we look, deep into the eyes of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. Fantastic. Deeper. Deeper.” This certainly sounds like instructions for a classic hypnotic induction.
Equally significant is the context of these images. The statue stands by the Dalai Lama who has just fallen asleep. The scene is deliberately bewildering–surreal: “We might have been in a dream, as the camera finally moves back to find the peaceful, protected face of the young Dalai Lama. Asleep.” Similarly, the camera cuts from the “mesmeric eyes” of the high lama of Sera to the infant Dalai Lama who is falling asleep. The image of hypnotic eyes has appealed to directors because it is also self-reflexive: the eyes of cameras contemplating equally entrancing eyes–a highly controlled feedback loop (Dylan Morgan’s definition of hypnosis itself).
Given the Mathiesens’ close connection to Buddhism, the script understandably displays considerable knowledge of that religion, including the importance of trance, hypnotic ritual, and visualization in its Tibetan variety. In a scriptural recitation, for instance, “Taktra Rinpoche begins weaving motion with his hands, delicate, beautiful, hypnotic.” Much in the film alludes to the Buddhist doctrine that life is not radically different from the hallucinations that can be summoned during trance. One of the film’s chief images of reality as a mental construction is the sand mandala, built elaborately into a vivid psychic realm–and then thrown away to show that any mental construct (including the ego itself) may dissolve into the void.
The musical accompaniment to this scene has the prominence of first place on the soundtrack album. Another Buddhist sympathizer, its composer, Philip Glass is famous for a repetitive, minimalist style that suits meditation (according to Erickson’s definition, a form of therapeutic trance). It well suits the film’s style, its countless processions (even of geese and deer), its lingering over mesmerizing shots of sparkling water, the general slowness of action. Glass’s soundtrack teams with exotic themes, employing Tantric horns and gongs, designed by the Tibetans for their strangeness even to Tibetan ears. The same combination of repetition and exoticism marks the visuals. Unlike its competitor, Seven Years in Tibet (1997), which approaches the East by way of a long Occidental introduction and presents Tibet via European eyes, Kundun immerses the audience in Asian culture and dream sequences, an inherently disorienting device.
Abstracting viewers from their everyday lives, much of the dialogue consists of Buddhist philosophy and ritual. There is even a debate on the question, “How does one progress from the realization of one Noble Truth to another?” (“Noble Truth” being a technical term for the basic principles of Buddhism). Instead of focusing on the concrete horrors of Chinese conquest, the film dwells much more on the Dalai Lama’s academic training, as if the general wisdom about suffering in general and its cessation were more important than specific instances of pain. Even when expressing his horror, the Dalai Lama tends to cast it in a form as abstract and repetitive as a sutra, e.g.: “One man. A man has died. One man is too many.” The concrete reality of the deceased disappears in the idea of universal compassion.
Achieving a Gravesean stage-seven abstractness through visuals
might be difficult, except for the Tibetan landscape. The camera pans lovingly across
vast vistas of mountain and snow. Particularly during the journeys near the beginning
and end of the film, the background is as blank and empty as in Zen sumi-e. According
to the script, “Tenzin Gyatso rides a grey mule across the empty, mysterious landscape
of Tibet.” This emptiness spreads during the flight from the Chinese: “Several drawers
are revealed. The drawers are revealed. The boy opens one. Empty. Another. Empty.”
The gardens are also termed “empty.” The prison is “empty.” In a scene where “The
party travels through the emptiness,” the Dalai Lama is shown repudiating all Chinese
ultimatums, thereby freeing himself from the tangle of time-serving agreements he
has entered and returning to the simple, abstract principle of Tibetan self-determination.
The visual unity of beginning and end contrasts with the heterogeneity of his trip
to China, where, among the massed millions, he might have lost his way except for
the dream or vision of ghosts from his past, reminding him of how much had been lost.
Pacing and Leading
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When you see me, you see yourself. –The Dalai Lama, Kundun |
Advancing from a frozen state or no-longer adequate stage is frightening, feeling as if one were losing at least a part of oneself. To create a reassuring environment for hypnosis, Erickson would unobtrusively imitate aspects of the clients’ behavior, including posture, breathing, gestures, tonality, and characteristic gestures–a process called “pacing.” Done obtrusively, such imitation would be rude mimicking and thus distinctly threatening. Done skillfully, however, this repetition presents the client with a mirror, which calms the desire to stay the same and holds the attention Narcissistically. Once pacing establishes rapport, the client may then unconsciously identify with and imitate the hypnotist, who can then lead–first into deeper trance and then toward some suggestion. Erickson would sometimes achieve this by hypnotizing himself once he had achieved rapport, as Kundun iterates images of meditation, possession, sleep, and trance.
In Kundun, cinematic rapport may come partly from an only slightly modified form of pacing. On more than one occasion, the Dalai Lama sits watching movies, like the audience. In many other scenes, he is enthroned observing plays, rituals, and the action unfolding around him or dreams the visions the audience also sees. Admittedly, a movie cannot imitate an audience’s breathing and other body movements, but, once the spectators begin to be in rapport with the film, its rhythms of soundtrack and visual editing can affect their corporal ones. In Kundun, cuts are coordinated with Glass’s score, like a music video, thereby maximizing the effect.
As already mentioned, with a New Age film such as Kundun,
much of the audience is likely to belong to the already converted–those who admire
the Dalai Lama and wish to be like him. According to the psychologist Heinz Kohut,
early in their childhood, people acquire what he calls the “grandiose self,” a feeling
of being the center of the world, i.e., the focus of their parents’ attention. Consequently,
an audience may enjoy pretending to be someone who resembles this grandiosity, e.g.,
the incarnation of the Bodhisattva of Mercy, the Dalai Lama–a godlike king who begins
as a humble infant in the provinces and is magically recognized as the kundun,
the Presence of a constantly changing quasi-divine energy.
Pre- or Post-logical Thinking
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[W]e can imagine God as an eternally flowing current of vital energy that endlessly changes shape… –C. G. Jung, CW 11, par. 555 |
Magic follows non-logical processes, which depth psychologies presume reflect the
unconscious–and the movie abounds with the supernatural. The regent dreams the details
of the finding of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, who identifies infallibly many items
that had belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama. Many years later, the fourteenth
Dalai Lama senses the presence of the thirteenth Dalai Lama’s false teeth in a locked
drawer. Such identification of one person with another is an analog for the identification
the audience is to make with the protagonist. And the very idea of the Dalai Lama
as an endlessly reincarnating, constantly changing embodiment of the Compassion,
responding to the needs of the world, serves as an ideal model for the transformations
of the audience.
Hypnotic Suggestion
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It is like a dream experience. –The Dalai Lama, Kundun |
Instead of simple indoctrination, the audience learns spiritual lessons along with the Dalai Lama. The first of these is the Buddhist concept of impermanence (very like Erickson’s therapeutic suggestion of change). As the young Dalai Lama is told, “Things change, Kundun.” Thus, he says, “And, things change…. I believe this–things will change.… Impermanence.” He repudiates communism and affirms his commitment to reform with the words: “But we want change for Tibet…. We need change, we know that.” The mood for this theme is set at the beginning by the constantly shifting light on the lake: “The color of the lake changes–from brilliant turquoise, to a deep, murky, unfathomable darkness. … The water’s color changes again, to a deep purple, then blue again, then red, then indigo.” Her choice of colors has the red (prefiguring the communist invasion) at the penultimate position, as if to predict liberation. The drama itself is, of course, a record of radical metamorphosis: a boy transformed from obscure commoner to prince, and, on a sadder note, a country deformed from medieval theocracy to modern communist dependency.
The Dalai Lama’s other major lesson is each person’s place in all
this transience. As a chorus of children declares, “May I be the doctor and the medicine,
/ And may I be the nurse, /For all sick beings in the world, until everyone is healed.”
Thus, the Dalai Lama tells a communist officer, “Buddha is our physician, General,
he will heal us. Compassion and enlightenment will set us free. You can not liberate
me I can only liberate myself.” As political comment, this is grotesquely naïve,
but as psychological one, it has merit. It is one of the first lessons he learns
as a child, in a scene where the camera with him looks at the room through a red
veil, emblematic of the (political and other) distortions that divide us from reality
but also of the entrancing effect of this confusion. The words about Buddha as universal
physician are repeated again and again; they stands both for the process of his learning
and the assumption that learning can make one into a healer of oneself and of the
whole world.
Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter
2 Part 7
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