Metaphors Foreshadowing Stage 7: Chapter 3 Part 1 of

THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

Exploring the Mental Maze

An archetypal content expresses itself, first and foremost in metaphors. If such a content should speak of the sun and identify with it the lion, the king, the hoard of gold guarded by the dragon, or the power that makes for the life and health of man it is neither the one nor the other, but the unknown thing that finds more or less adequate expression in all these similes, yet—to the perpetual vexation of the intellect—remains unknown and not to be fitted into a formula. —C. G. Jung, “The Psychology of the Child Archetype,” CW 20

According to Jung, the unconscious could only be studied through the metaphors it generated. This problem distanced Jung from the science of his time. In the last few decades, however, complexity theory has learned to deal with the approximate way non-linear patterns reflect similar thresholds at various scales.
This Chinese-box effect of patterns within patterns (e.g., the tree whose branches resemble small trees) helps to explain the proliferation of archetypal metaphors. Additional to the seven primary archetypes of the sequence, countless others include, for instance, the Great Mother. Her simplest function is in stage two as a personification of trustworthiness, since that concept grows out of child-parent bonding. At stage two, her image lies just below the surface, easily accessible to tribal artists who use it as a support for the status quo. In Dante’s Divina Commedia (stage four), however, the Virgin Mary serves on the surface as a symbol for an abstract concept (Prevenient Grace); nonetheless, she draws resonances from the Great Mother (stage 2). Often, at stage six, another amalgam appears, the Wise Woman as Meaning Personified—a very large trope indeed, but built on the maternal and familial associations of the stage-two Great Mother.

Admittedly, therapeutic metaphors can have very small, specific application, as when Erickson would apply an analogy to teach a child’s unconscious which muscles to contract in preventing bedwetting. Jung’s focus, however, was on the larger scales, particularly the process of individuation. Typically, about the mind/body relationship, he wrote:

. . . [I am aware of] cases where the carcinoma broke out . . . when a person comes to halt at some essential point in his individuation or cannot get over an obstacle. …Just as a carcinoma can develop for psychic reasons, it can also disappear for psychic reasons. (C. G. Jung, Letters, Vol. 2, p. 297)

Jung assumed that “archetypal” tropes functioned on even larger scales, not only guiding the body to health or disease, but also directing the course of an entire life from threshold to threshold, and shaping the values of a society as it followed its own path of individuation.
That metaphors are effective does not mean that they always act as swiftly as when Kazantzakis’s lip swelled the moment he imagined himself as Christ. The very name of the 1001 Nights, for instance, specifies the duration during which, according to an Arab saying, the reader is reborn, guided by Shaherazade through the threshold of change. Among the listeners is her husband (bent on murdering wives for fear they might betray him). Slowly, he learns from the tales the courage to trust, an implication of their metaphor of life as adventure (advanced stage three),

Such progressing and repairing may require tropes previously unknown to or misunderstood by the audience. The very novelty, however, creates difficulties in the leading, which always requires starting from what the audience accepts and introducing the change gradually.

Consequently, successful metaphors usually draw amalgams from those of lower levels, usually through ambiguity, as in such a multi-leveled figure as Christ (to whom all the movies examined in Chapter one allude). Many previous books on religion in cinema have made Jesus their focus, because reference to Him is almost ubiquitous (e.g., Kinnard, Jump, Kuhn, May 1982 and 1992). Such time-honored imagery forms precisely what therapeutic metaphor requires for the unconscious to treat it as real. Neither scholarly proof nor suspension of disbelief is needed, just connection to early childhood openness before the individual fearfully defended itself against change.
To guide progress, metaphors reconcile human desires for sameness and variety the only way they can be: an altered state with the timelessness that arises from the unconscious. Of these three components (eternity, time, and trance), the one syntactically present in metaphor is timelessness. Like a perennial truth, metaphor declares X=Y, e.g., The Moon’s a Balloon (to take the title of David Niven’s autobiography as an instance). But, of course, even to Niven despite his stage-five compulsion to artificialize nature, the moon was not really a balloon. Just as petting a puppy may induce a trancelike reverie of childhood, a successful metaphor alters the mind momentarily, because its very nature requires a youthful willingness to pretend.
To transport an audience from its own preoccupations, a skillful communicator—some Shaharezade of cinema—must use tropes—trance against trances—so the listeners can pay attention. One trick, of course, is to choose metaphors corresponding to a stage the audience has actually experienced. In regard to this, Animal House (1978) provides a cautionary example. It shows a young professor praising Satan (the Shadow personified) in order to shock and interest his class. This fails totally, because, as the rest of the movie makes clear, these students have not yet reached stage four; they number a few naïve Trusters (stage two), many Unscrupulous Competitors and mischievous Tricksters (stage three). Only the faculty (if any) evidence attachment to order or its compensatory opposite, the enticements of the Shadow.

When, however, a metaphor succeeds, it holds the audience figuratively breathless, time having seemingly vanished. In any metaphor, however, temporality actually remains, as with Niven’s moon/balloon to allude to the years of his life. Since Jung theorized that the archetypes evolved in response to human history and guided individual development, he recognized their temporality and the precise contexts of their manifestation, yet he preferred to stress their static appearance.
Eventually, Erickson learned to use general metaphors that worked without his needing to know the details of his patients’ problems; their unconscious would find the resolution. Comparably, unless designed as specific therapy, movies are not tropes isomorphic to every detail in their audiences’ situations. “Archetypal” metaphors attain such scope because each one constitutes an abbreviated version of a big picture—the higher the number of the stage, the more inclusive. As mentioned, metaphors at lower-numbered stages anticipate higher-numbered versions of them. The focus of the present chapter is this (incomplete) presaging. Shakespeare, for instance, glimpsed all the Jung/Graves levels: Timon of Athens (stage one); As You Like It (two); Othelo (three); Measure for Measure (four); Twelfth Night (five); The Merchant of Venice (six); The Tempest (seven); Midsummer Night’s Dream (eight)—but anything above stage five—the peak of his period—comes through a thick filter. Whereas stages one through four tend to confuse the psychological and physical (e.g., mistaking MPD for demonic possession), stage five begins to explore the unconscious, but without necessary skills, which do not arrive until stage seven. Consequently, stage five feels confused fascination toward stage seven’s basic trope: life=the edge of chaos.

At various stages, this trope may be represented with such static images as the labyrinth or dynamic ones such as tempest, pandemonium, intoxication, madness, nightmare, apocalypse, musical improvisation, or wild adventure. Obviously, the affects of these differ, dependent on how frightening and/or mystifying the stage finds it. Since the thought of dealing with that much unpredictable variety challenges inertia most, metaphors of chaos have had evil connotations in conservative periods (particularly where stage four played a major role). Shakespeare’s Macbeth articulates a commonplace of his age that life as chaos would be monstrous: “Life’s … a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing” (Macbeth 5.5.15–19).
Well into the twentieth century that attitude toward chaos continued as in Jerzy Kosinski’s novel and screenplay Being There (1979). In both, most characters read profound meaning into the imbecilic metaphors employed by Chance the Gardener—all of them variations of the central equation: life=the chaos of a garden managed by an imbecile. Stupidly, he finds this reassuring, e.g., “All is well … and all will be well … in the garden”—a bromide delivered in a deep slow monotone, like a stage hypnotist. Being There (1979) portrays this quagmire by placing Chance in a television-induced trance wherein he cannot tell the difference between reality and TV programming. As Erickson found that through rapport he could hypnotize a patient by hypnotizing himself, so the entranced Chance spreads his own altered state to those watching him on television. Using that power much less well than Erickson, Chance is a kind of idiot deity, acting randomly. Being There presents this allegory most clearly at film’s end when, still appearing dazed, he is walking on water. There are other biblical parodies such as the name of the irrational character Eve combined with the pervasive references to the world as (a foolishly managed) Garden. With great consistency and aesthetic taste, the movie develops its large metaphor, but without being therapeutic because it lacks one essential idea—that the unconscious has vast and valuable information to offer.

There were certainly reasons for Kosinski to doubt the trustworthiness of either a personal or collective unconscious. He spent his childhood fleeing a major exemplar of the unconscious run wild—the Holocaust—and devoted much time thereafter to habituating sadomasochistic clubs; he finally committed suicide. His satire of perilous unconsciousness seemed profound to Peter Sellers who had always had difficulty distinguishing his rôles from himself. Obsessively, Sellers identified with the character Chance, so that he aged visibly and lost most of his friends. Kosinski and Sellers may have warned against the psychic depths because their own behaved dangerously, but their imagining those perils did not protect them from them—actually, may have instructed their unconscious to do exactly what was feared. And that fear also sabotaged

A therapeutic use of this very large metaphor—the life=chaosmos analogy—requires a model of the unconscious solving problems productively, as, for instance, in Forrest Gump (1994). It styles its mentally challenged protagonist “the gardener” at the point when large numbers of people are following him, but despite having an impaired conscious mind, he has an admirable unconscious that repeatedly intervenes benevolently as in its curing his crippled legs or imbuing him with extraordinary ability at ping pong. Admittedly, after a childhood case of polio crippled Milton Erickson, he took months to heal himself; as is the way with cinematic metaphors, however, Gump’s recovery is almost instantaneous and his mastery of ping pong miraculously—indeed, ridiculously quick. The film’s humor prevents the audience’s conscious minds from taking these events seriously, but, as Erickson taught therapists, the unconscious is most susceptible when the patient relaxes during joke, play, or such a mysterious metaphor as begins the movie.

A feather floats from heaven to the title character, who places it next to a picture of the monkey Curious George, balanced on a telephone line. At the film’s conclusion, before releasing the feather to float upward again, he remarks, “I don’t know if we each have a destiny or if we’re all floating around accidental–like on a breeze. Maybe it’s both.” This makes explicit the balancing between providence and chance embedded within the metaphoric, angel/bird feather (as the whole film is embedded within the frame of his opening conversation—a hypnotic trick, because trying to keep this frame in mind throughout the long middle of the film strains consciousness, thereby promoting its opposite—as this almost interminable sentence you are reading may be doing for you).

Forrest (whose very name signifies nature beyond human control) has a deep faith in more-than-human forces as when he prays for success in shrimp harvesting, before a hurricane destroys all his competitors. Forrest’s pious interpretations are corroborated by events, but instead of an intellectual theology, he has a faith that sounds childlike: “Life’s like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” Admittedly, a grimmer side of the movie is the motif of famous assassinations and assassination attempts, which punctuate it. Admittedly also, he is named after the founder of the Ku Klux Klan not because his mother admired the man but because she wanted Forrest to remember “sometimes we all do things that don’t make no sense.” These allusions, however, may argue against those who try to force reality to meet their simple prejudices, whereas life has profound complexity.
Systems dynamics was discovered not merely because the computers and mathematical tools became available but because scientists were finally willing to look at the abyss to see if randomness and order coexisted within it. Hence Forrest Gump significantly reinterprets Being There’s reinterpretation of the Edenic metaphor. Often grounded in the mythic past, cinematic metaphors string reinterpretations together—elaborate weavings, but as the following examples suggest, stage-five anticipations of stage seven, nonetheless, are tapestries that manage to be quite rich despite missing some necessary threads.

Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 3 Part 2

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