Filming the Fractal Contours of Internal Conflict:: Chapter 4 Part 1 of
THE BIG PICTURE: A POST-JUNGIAN MAP OF GLOBAL CINEMA
by James Whitlark, Ph.D.
Filming the Fractal Contours of Internal Conflict
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With regard to the definiteness of the form [of the archetype], our comparison with the crystal is illuminating inasmuch as the axial system determines only the stereometric structure but not the concrete form of the individual crystal. –C. G. Jung, “On the Concept of the Archetype,” CW 20, par. 155. |
Being geometric fractions, fractals are characterized by the self-similarity
of their parts on different scales, so that, for instance, mapping a mile, a foot
or an inch of a coast yields roughly the same pattern. Viewed abstractly, any mega-system
(i.e., a dissipative system that grows in order to survive) will manifest fractal
self-similarity. Human development thus offers parallels between the Gravesean stages
of individuals and of whole societies. In the Graves/Jung sequence, a dialectic between
conscious and unconscious aspects of each stage resembles the reversals between odd
and even-numbered stages. Since in progressing from stage to stage, one retains all
of them (at least unconsciously), they add to the complexity of the psychic “crystal,”
as do any “complexes.” This term (which Jung borrowed from Theodor Ziehen for a dissociated
part of the mind) itself seems to anticipate complexity theory.
In cinema, psychological self-similarity is sometimes obvious as in the original
script of Being John Malkovich (1999). Craig, the puppeteer who was controlling
the title character is himself a puppet, dangling on threads from another puppeteer,
manipulated by the devil. And this script gives the devil a control room within his
head for yet another puppeteer–perhaps God. Or the mise en abyme may be infinite.
What makes this symmetry so evident is that (for ironic purposes), the draft reduces it to so few images (however often repeated) that they constitute a meager, unhealthy ecosystem. Furthermore, behind its simple version of self-similarity on many scales is an assumption from the old hypnosis–people’s influence over one another resembles mesmeric control of victims. Thus, the climax of the script is a contest between two puppeteers, with the devil backing one of them in the hope of possessing the entire human race. Craig sees everything in terms of puppetry. Sex is to him a way of entering someone else’s skin, i.e., turning her into a living toy, extending himself. Furthermore, he is in competition (sexually and otherwise) with his employer, who indoctrinates his employees to make them an expansion of himself. Behind him stands his master, the devil, who, as already mentioned, has a brain ready for domination by another. Considered abstractly, the script’s (and movie’s) subject is participation: how so-called “individuals” are parts of social wholes and also how their own minds are divided.
As rising population and exponentially accelerating technology
complicate participation, it has become a subject of growing interest. According
to one popular theory of it based on the work of the University of London physicist
David Bohm and the Stanford University neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, fractals pervade
the cosmos. This resembles a very old way of regarding the world, the microcosm/macrocosm
of occultism and alternative medicine, which adds a magical element (also present
in Being John Malkovich): analogous parts of the repeating structure become
associated. Reflexology, for instance, envisions the anatomy of the whole body being
reflected in each foot (or hand or ear) so that treatment of the toes helps the sinuses,
and so on. From a psychological perspective, association of parts is easiest when
they are mutually reflecting portions of fractals.
Their being similar, not identical, makes possible artistic, subtle differences, as with that between trailers and the remainder of the film they allegedly mirror. Trailers yield a naively partial (incomplete) message–also “partial” in the sense of seeming to favor a single viewpoint. The partial message has two components: (1) money shots, the film’s chief selling points; and (2) equivocal explanation, presenting a simple message briefly and ambiguously so as not to prevent the whole movie from having a more complex meaning. (The term “money shots” originally referred to the most graphic moments of pornography, but since has been extended to any other pandering to the lowest common denominator in audience response.) The remainder of a film either reinforces the partial message or complicates it.
To take a much—shown example of partial message and complications from television, in the Kung Fu series (1972-1975 plus interminable reruns and sequels), the money shots comprise violent confrontations, shown also in ads for the program. What continue to draw young fans are these moments. In each program, however, they occupy about a minute every half hour. Along with the money shots come scenes of equivocal explanation, seeming to justify the turmoil. Together, they seem to teach a popular message: when people are disturbing, knock them through a wall. Taken as a whole, each episode, however, enlarges the ambiguities nestled in the partial message until they expose its folly. Take, for instance, the very name of the protagonist, Caine.
If one only watches an advertisement for the program, one does
not know what to make of this Biblical allusion. Is he villain or hero? The program
makes clear that, like his namesake, he wanders for a murder, a violation of the
Buddhist pacifism he was taught. The loving care some writers devoted to this pacifism
suggests that for them, it (rather than the violence at the heart of each episode)
was the true message of the program. If that violence had an immediate effect on
children, increasing their aggressiveness by providing them with vivid models for
conscious stage three, these complications were more likely to be slow and subliminal,
nurturing the archetype of the hero or even of higher levels. Furthermore, dramatization
of Caine’s self-divided psyche (or of the countless other “fractal” characters in
cinema) helps the audience recognize that people in general–themselves included–may
have conflicting components–an important insight and first step toward resolving
the conflict. Despite “individuals” being by definition “undivided,” human beings
have some tension between conscious and unconscious as well as between all the sub-systems
that allow them to switch roles when they move from one situation to another.
Fractal Characters–The Dynamics of Self-Division
Being dynamic systems, cerebral and social structures are fractals. In the arts,
fractal characters manifest and model this self-division. Falling between dimensions,
they are shown typically as between two states (e.g., Tarzan between human and ape,
Mr. Spock between human and Vulcan, Christ between human and divine). There are cusps
when George of the Jungle hesitates between saving Ape or romancing a human mate,
or when Spock feels torn between his two sides. Typically (indeed archetypically),
cinema like myth tends to show protagonists making decisions that permit them to
integrate both sides and move on, thus suggesting the possibility of this reconciliation
(which usually also reconciles the film’s partial message and complications).
As to the structure of myth, that popularization of Jungian theory that most influenced George Lucas, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces finds behind a vast body of myth and popular culture a “monomyth.” This is often used in fractal manner (see Palumbo) but it is itself fractal, with a fractal tension between realms of being. Campbell defines the “nuclear unit” of the monomyth as an initiatory passage “from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder” (Campbell 1949, 30). He contends, “The two–the hero and his ultimate god, the seeker and the found–are thus understood as the outside and inside of a single, self—mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world” (Campbell 1949, 40). As diachronically the “nuclear unit” punctuating the narrative resembles the story as a whole, so synchronically self-similarity links the mysterious world, the hero, and God. The implication is that heroes are drawn repeatedly by this resemblance to seek a larger version of themselves, but one with which they are at least partly in conflict. Although Campbell here writes of their finding this, one may suspect the trajectory must be asymptotic unless they entirely desert the human condition.
Campbell describes the beginning of the myth thus: “A blunder–apparently
the merest chance–reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into
a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood” (Campbell 1949, 51).
This certainly sounds like an introduction into chaos, even to the apparent randomness
that actually belongs to hidden order. Next, according to Campbell comes a helper:
“Protective and dangerous, motherly and fatherly at the same time, this supernatural
principle of guardianship and direction unites in itself all the ambiguities of the
unconscious–thus signifying the support of our conscious personality by that other,
larger system, but also the inscrutability of the guide that we are following, to
the peril of all our rational ends” (Campbell 1949, 73).
In fairy tales before they were sanitized for bourgeois children,
supernatural donors tended to combine threat with promise, such as the cannibalistic
witch Baba Yaga (the most common donor in Russian fairy tales) or Grimms’ Iron John
(a mass murderer and kidnapper as well as the giver of a miraculous steed). With
such disorderly help, heroes then overcome a monstrous embodiment of chaos (e.g.,
a dragon) and experience chaos within their own bodies by being slain or dismembered.
Psychologically considered, these helpers and enemies, however, are portions of the
hero’s own mind. Campbell charts this character’s “movement in a dream landscape
of curiously fluid, ambiguous form, where he must survive a succession of trials”
involving “Initiation” and “Return” (Campbell 1949, 97). Campbell ends with other
characteristics of heroes such as a miraculous birth, designed like all of the above
to represent a semi—divine nature. He provides a wealth of episodes, but there is
little point in sketching them all, since most of them are the same: hero enduring
the monstrous and chaotic, i.e., adapting to the need to break free from rigid patterns.
The Structures of Fractal Characters
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I say to you: one must still have chaos within
–Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra |
Admittedly, being simple may have contributed to its longevity.
It provides a metaphor for readers’ first vague realization that some characters
are more complicated than others. Thus, as late as 1985, Helmut Brackert tried to
extend it to fairy stories (in his introduction to a collection of them):
Let us confine our attention to the most important category, that of one—dimensionality.
It is congruent with other aspects of the fairy tale; the fact that internal and
external are as yet undifferentiated, that all lies under a magic spell, that time
plays no part, that characters seem isolated from each other. Without undergoing
any psychological development, learning and experiencing nothing, fairy tale characters
are nonetheless able to enter into a spontaneous communion with all that is, with
people and animals, with plants and even with stones. (Brackert xxiii).
I am dwelling here on folk stories because the analysis of cinema is today a branch of popular culture, itself an offshoot of folklore study–as if movies were urban fairy tales. Considered thus, Brackert’s approach, if valid for Märchen, might be applicable to films. Unfortunately, his insight seems to be that if (as with Forster) novelistic characters have two— and three—dimensions, then fairy tales (or their personae or both) must in some way possess only one. Jung, a probable influence on the passage, sometimes wrote of the unconscious as being timeless and of folk literature as invoking this quality. As narratives, however, fairy tales as obviously involve time as do fantasy movies; therefore, in combining the temporal and atemporal, they are hybrid and liminal. As to their characters not “undergoing any psychological development,” this liminality often makes fractal characters exemplary of psychological change.
First, consider a rare exception: a non-fractal character, indeed, a one-dimensional figure. We are unlikely to find so simple a being in any full movie, so let us turn to a one-paragraph tale, the Grimms’ “Stubborn Child” (Das eigensinnige Kind). God kills a little girl for unswerving disobedience to her mother. Even thereafter the corpse continues to be obstinate, holding her arm above her grave until her mother beats it into the earth. Responding to the feedback of parental discipline, children ordinarily internalize the parental voice, which becomes a conscience (Freud’s superego, Lacan’s “Law of the Father”) in conflict with the child’s ego, i.e., a source of mental division. In her constant willfulness, however, this girl is a one—dimensional (and thus) non—fractal character. A straight line could graph her attitude. She manages this because her story is but a paragraph and some other minor figures are that unvaried (perhaps comparable to some comic shorts in silent films). More often, though, characters are (like real people) fractal. For instance, Hänsel and Gretel’s father (in the Grimms’ published versions) first refuses to abandon his offspring, then consents, later welcomes them home, again accedes to his wife, and feels deep remorse (Ellis 154-194; Rölleke 70—81). Both in its raggedness and repetitions the chart of his vacillations (with measure between one and two) resembles a fractal, because, unlike the stubborn girl, he responds to feedback.
Having a fractal protagonist often renders a story itself fractal.
In the Grimms’s “Sleeping Beauty,” spindle—pierced Rosamond, for instance, forms
the rose within layer upon layer of hedge, where many princes are immobilized by
piercing thorns. The effect of her suspension is to create a series of approximate
imitations of her situation–all the inhabitants of the castle asleep, while, on a
larger scale, the area comes to a halt; “the wind ceased, and not a leaf fell from
the trees about the castle” (1993 97). Like the protagonists of “Snow White,” “The
Seven Sleepers,” “Rip Van Winkle,” and “The Glass Casket,” Rosamond’s life is a line
interrupted by a long repose, depicted as an absence. Unlike the Disney cartoon (which
follows all Disney products in capitalizing on the value of imagination), the Grimms
never mention her dreaming. Their version belongs to a Christianized, then secularized
culture with impoverished vocabulary for discussing, mental division (a loss of the
idea of possession by a god but not yet a Romantic idealization of dreams and imaginings).
This broken-line fractal is one of the simplest patterns possible for a film, such
as the following.
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4 Part 2
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