The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao: More than 2 Dimensions: Chapter 4 Part 6 of

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

by James Whitlark, Ph.D.

THE SEVEN FACES OF DR. LAO (1964): MORE THAN TWO DIMENSIONS

If a character is fractal (or otherwise self–similar such as a straight line), graphing each of its traits is largely redundant, resulting each time in approximately the same shape. Consider, for instance, a typical fairy–tale princess. She has exalted lineage, wealth, and sexual attractiveness, showing her to be (for a prospective groom) high in desirability—a more general characteristic that subsumes the others.

Likewise, the traits of each fractal character form self–similar patterns, often in more than one way. Thus, ethically, the title character of “The Gallant Little Tailor” is ambiguous (a gallant cheat). The tale also calls attention to his conspicuous cleverness but low lineage (which offends the Princess). Together all these characteristics make him ambiguous in desirability. Comparably, as Hänsel and Gretel fluctuate in moral terms, so also does their cleverness, sometimes high (as in their scattering stones and tricking the Witch) and sometimes low (as in their scattering breadcrumbs and being tricked by her). Detailing all the superlative qualities of a one–dimensional princess may make her easier to imagine but does not increase her complexity.

For Forster, what distinguishes flat from round characters is the number of traits ascribed to them. In the above system, however, dimensionality depends not on the number of traits per se but the number of perspectives the character can assume. At stage four, there is only one reasonable perspective: Truth, imaged as the straight and narrow. Jung said of earlier stages that their individuation had proceeded less far than this toward full consciousness. At stage five, however, capitalists and scientists investigate perspectives other than their own and thereby waver from absolute faith in their own worldview, but without being quite willing to look through another’s eyes (the structure of stage six). At stage seven, a third is added, a viewpoint from which to discover patterns beyond and within stage-six relativism. In secular terms, additional perspectives are redundant, but, if there is a stage eight, it consists of reaching beyond stage seven toward a paranormal perspective or perspectives from which the above three can be viewed (comparable to William Blake’s “fourfold vision”).

Speculation about stage eight takes us in such fantasies as The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao, the story of a man not only with multiple identities but multiple bodies. The movie version borrows some imagery from the original novel, but a theme of supernatural community arises in the cinematic condensation and adaptation—an echo of legends about stage eight. The studio, though, was not sure what they had except that it did not fit ordinary categories. In commissioning an advertisement poster, executives opted for exotic thrift, according to its artist Joseph Smith: “MGM didn’t know what to do to sell the picture. Tony Randall wasn’t a big name. They didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it, but they wanted it to be outlandish, totally different” Rebello 92).

This outlandishness began in its source book by Charles Finney, in rebellion against the respectability that extended back in his family at least to the time of his great grandfather, the Congregational minister who founded Oberlin. Visiting China, however, transformed Charles Finney’s faith when confronting that country’s “overpopulation of human beings, … random character of death, … relativity of morality and religion....” (Finney viii). Dr. Lao embodied this at-least-stage-six revelation that the world was much more complicated than the Gravesean stage four he had been taught.

Finney identified the source of that character as “Lao Tehr, the proprietor of a shop which purveyed live Chinese crickets and grasshoppers in straw cages and who had befriended him...” (Finney viii). The movie’s Dr. Lao has a pet cricket and a lively personality, but, aside from that, little in common with Lao Tehr. Finney did not mention the Chinese figure most like Dr. Lao both of book and film: Lao Tzu. The Lao may mean “old” and “Tzu” is an honorific, usually translated sage, but not all that far from “Dr.” Due to the ambiguity of Chinese ideograms, it could equally be translated “boy,” related to the childlike qualities of the sage, also those of Dr. Lao. Finney once calls Dr. Lao “old boy” (Finney 34). Like the incredibly aged Dr. Lao, Lao Tzu, the founder of Taoism, allegedly has an indefinitely long life span, magic powers, and other characteristics (e.g., helping humanity secretly) that make him a version of stage eight.

Beyond the limitations of individual selfhood, Dr. Lao has at least six personalities, including three from ancient Greek polytheism: Apollonius of Tyana, a faun, and Medusa. Then come miscellaneous ones: Merlin, the Abominable Snowman, a talking snake, the Loch Ness monster and others. (All are presented as part of Lao, yet the title only mentions seven, probably to use a symbolic number.) Each is far-more different physically than in multiple personality disorder, although that disorder does leave some surprising effects on the body. Recorded somatic differences include changes in blood pressure, menstrual cycle, and electroencephalograph patterns. Comer, Abnormal Psychology, 580.

To make Dr. Lao beyond definition as good or evil, Finney conflates the two, for instance, making Apolonius satanic yet part of the benevolent doctor. Less challengingly, the scriptwriter Charles Beaumont makes him a blind prophet, like the mythical Tiresias. (Beaumont’s formula is to diminish magical fractal characters with age or other impediments to emphasize their humanity and thus place them in a fractal limbo between divinity and mortality.) For Apollonius’s role as magician, Beaumont created the senile character Merlin, once the greatest wizard living, now unable to manage card tricks. Blasphemies remain, but become much less clear in the new context. Thus, for instance, Merlin optimistically advertises, “I do magic. I create; I transpose; I color; I transubstantiate....” From the lips of Finney’s arrogant rival of Christ, Apollonius, these words boast of Transubstantiation, changing the elements of the mass to the Flesh and Blood of God. From Merlin, they are but colorful descriptions of powers he no longer even possesses.

Finney’s novel overflows with such distasteful creatures as the following: “The gadarene swine itself. Fiend-infested, it searches the earth for salvation, but finds it not. Biblical beast, it symbolizes the uncleanliness of all flesh” (Finney 86-87). When Beaumont suggested that George Pal film the novel, the latter naturally wanted to look at the book. Wisely, the scriptwriter presented instead his own dramatization of it—which, nonetheless, contains enough of the original to adorn its cinematic stereotypes with evocations of stage eight (Hickman 147). Beaumont shaped the story into a Western, combining the allure of exotic magic with the reassuring familiarity of the Old West. Buried within it was the partial message: life is miraculous—an old idea particularly familiar to the public from the classic fantasy It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

To bring the incongruous elements together, Pal had to render the equivocal explanations unusually so. In one of these, Tony Randall at first seems clearly didactic, switching from his pseudo-Chinese sing-song to his own voice and slowly declaring: “The whole world is a circus if you know how to look at it. The song of the birds, the way the desert looks at night...every time you look at a handful of dust and see not the dust but a marvel in your hand....” The imagery resembles the mystical synecdoches of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:

To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour

Stage seven strives toward larger and larger worldviews, until there comes a numinous experience that at least seems to be beyond time and space, consequently beyond the “distancing” that characterizes that stage (since the very idea of “distancing” is a spatial metaphor). Blake evokes the Self (i.e., a state beyond the limitations of the ego). Beaumont, though, presents the idea in a sufficiently toned-down form for a mass audience. Indeed, he immediately undercuts the pretentious scene with complications. The boy, to whom Lao reveals it, complains, “I don’t understand,” and Randall, returning to his sing-song intonation, laughingly responds, “Neither do I.” This undercutting, however, also suits the Taoist subtext, for, according to the Tao Te Ching, what can be put into words is not the eternal truth and a wise man admits his ignorance.

Another equivocal explanation comes in a synecdochic movie within the movie (a conspicuously fractal moment of self-similarity between sequence and whole film). The episode shows the ancient city of Woldercan. It appears magically above the circus crowd in Abalone, itself comparably in peril of obliteration. Actors from the larger movie take part in this smaller one. While Woldercan is destroyed like Sodom, God proclaims its doom—in Tony Randall’s normal voice. This is more than a small hint that the vastly powerful sorcerer Dr. Lao is divine and the many faces are His masks. God/Randall condemns the ancient citizens for selling their souls, which do not appear very real to them compared to palpable silver. They need to be able to envision the invisible and marvelous, the value of themselves and each other, coming together into a future community. Lao’s magic teaches the Abalonians to have faith in the unseen (as miracles do in Judaism and Christianity). If, however, even the idea of a wise Chinese may upset some racist spectators, the notion of masks of God—particularly hideous ones such as Medusa—lacks mass–market appeal, so a kind of dream–within–a–dream presentation obscures the heresy.

A third Equivocal Explanation has Lao’s serpent persona tell the villain that the circus is sometimes like a mirror. This interprets the many scenes where people learn about themselves from the circus’s magic. Indicative of this mirroring, instead of appearing to be a face of Randall, the snake looks and sounds like the villain with whom it speaks. Eventually, aided by such strange miracles, that villain and almost everyone else reform, reuniting the community, whose citizens now suspect that Abalone is not alone. Thus, the dissolution into chaos—of which divine/human Dr. Lao was apotropaic fractal—ends in the most conventional wholesomeness; nonetheless, a little boy, who misses the unbounded magic, is left in tears.

Continue to THE BIG PICTURE Chapter 5 Part 1

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