Introductin to Cinema as Ota: Introduction to

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

by James Whitlark, Ph.D

The Elgonyi, natives of the Elgon forests, of central Africa, explained to me that there are two kinds of dreams: the ordinary dream of the little man and the “big vision” that only the great man has, e.g., the medicine-man or chief. Little dreams are of no account, but if a man has a “big dream” he summons the whole tribe in order to tell it to everybody. —C. G. Jung, “The Function of the Unconscious,” CW, vol. 7, par. 276

During his 1925 safari to Mount Elgon, Jung added to his psychology this Elgonyi contrast between ota (a great vision), large enough to be of public importance, and vudota (an ordinary dream). The Elgonyi’s ota was for them what common English parlance terms “the big picture.” Jung long investigated how such revelations spread from visionaries or poets to entire civilizations as in his “Answer to Job” (1952), which interprets that biblical book as an ota. He also recognized that the medium for a new Weltanschauung changes from culture to culture: dream-telling round the campfire for the Elgonyi, scripture for the Hebrews, and, in his own day, a host of arts, including cinema.

Indeed, in several senses, film repeatedly purports to be society’s “big picture.” This phrase serves as the name of a DVD store, of a DVD journal, of a “sinema” website, of a Kevin Bacon film, of a movie poster emporium, of a television program, of a video production firm…. The list lacks termination because size pervades the motion-picture medium temporally (epic productions, serials, mini- and continuing series) and spatially (e.g., Hypergonar, Grandeur, CinemaScope, Panavision, Cinerama, I-Max). Film airs in venues from wide-screen TVs to ever-larger, louder theatre complexes with the scent of popcorn wafting from numerous confection stands. Furthermore, as collective dream, cinema both massively reflects and affects international moods, contributing to the worldview, the largest “big picture.” Certainly, too many films substitute massive spending for a sense of grandeur (or, indeed, for any sense at all). Whether well or badly, however, they arise from a present need to relax and view our situation not merely through an easeful, dreamlike filter but a massive one—an ota.

Once, Medieval Christendom furnished the Occident with its overall paradigm; from Galileo’s era onward, science has changed this situation. More recently, post-modern trends (especially deconstruction) have condemned overarching beliefs per se. Nevertheless, as if needing a substitute for suspect theologies and theories, academia has been taking more seriously cultural studies’ chief source of the visionary: cinema. I could, of course, have used any of the arts to illustrate the following updating and expansion of Jungian psychology. A convenient source for familiar examples, though, is “global” cinema. By this I mean, films that are each “global” both psychologically (because they make large-scale generalizations) and anthropologically (because they constitute cross-cultural syntheses). Such works come closest to being ota for our age.

For the Ancient Greeks, the comparable medium was “drama” (from drao, offering sacrifice) in a “theatre” (theatron, from theoein, to witness an epiphany of the gods). An offshoot of Dionysian ritual, Greek drama was therapeutic, tragedy offering purgation (catharsis) and comedy bringing mirth and hope of happy endings. Partly as a defense from clerical regulation, the dramatic arts, after the advent of Christianity, often purported to be mere entertainment, an assumption that still tinges attitudes toward cinema.

This false modesty is subsiding. Film-therapy has become a common adjunct to other psychiatric treatments. An April 12, 2000 article in The Detroit News noted: “Workshops on movie therapy at counseling conferences routinely attract standing-room-only crowds, and films are being incorporated more into clinical training, for instruction in diagnosis and treatment.” On February 1, 2000, the Romance Classics station began a program entitled, “Cinematherapy,” inspired by Nancy Peske’s and Beverly West’s book by that name, merely one of many volumes on the subject. These, however, focus on specifics, such as the value of feminists in the audience learning from feminists on the screen. Certainly, such particular modeling has importance, but the psychological function of cinema in general eludes consideration, because psychology itself lacks a sufficiently broad approach.

When Carl Gustav Jung, the designated professional heir of Sigmund Freud, rejected the latter’s theory as overly narrow and augmented it with ancient and non-Western traditions, psychology had an opportunity for a truly grand vista. Unfortunately, Jung’s search for some ultimate ota lapsed into obscurantism (his own and his most faithful followers) because surveying the human condition exceeded the ability of a single individual or even a single school. Since his death, some former Jungians have begun to emend his more obvious errors and add insights from other schools, but as Andrew Samuel’s Jung and the Post-Jungians (1985) evidences, the project proceeded in a relatively slow manner. With my Illuminated Fantasy: From Blake’s Visions to Recent Graphic Fiction (1988) and Behind the Great Wall: A Post-Jungian Approach to Kafkaesque Literature (1991), I joined the enterprise, drawing on brain research and the psycho-linguistics of Jacques Lacan, but I did not venture far enough to provide a new overview, because there was not yet a paradigm sufficient for a general synthesis.

I have found that in the systems dynamics of Ira Prigogine and the other extensions of complexity theory, including developmental biology. Whereas old theorizing about evolution divided between believers in gradualism and in catastrophe, complexity theories offer a combination of the two: sudden changes occur when long processes pass a threshold. Complexity theories thus break from two reassuring paradigms for life: slow development where there is always time to deal with the process and sudden change, associated with the wish to have one's desire immediately. Rather systems dynamics describes abrupt transformations that nonetheless require preparation. Furthermore, foreseeing these thresholds requires a knowledge of large, long patterns because outcomes often move in different directions from the preparation. Indeed, as with a population of rabbits that rises exponentially then crashes, “[T]he operation of feedback in dynamical systems causes things to become or engender their opposite” (Palumbo, “Plots Within Plots …”, 55–77).

Jung observed small instances of this pattern of reversal, which he termed enantiodromia, but he did not recognize that his own sequence of unconscious “archetypes” belongs to an iterating enantriodromia. For its conscious part, I draw on the work of the American psychologist Clare Graves. Individually, neither Graves nor Jung managed to explain very thoroughly or convincingly why psychological development happens in the order they assigned. For this reason, the Jungian sequence remained mysterious, and even though Graves’s came from juried evidence and has received further confirmation through application in politics, particularly in the re-organization of South Africa after Apartheid (Beck and Linscott 1-10) and in business (e.g., in Eisner’s version of the Disney corporation), it has attracted attention very slowly. Seen through the lens of systems dynamics, however, Jung’s and Graves’s sequences complement each other, justifying the arrangement of each. As chapter one hypothesizes, human development swings between them in one grand enantiodromia after another, expanding the worldview at each juncture.

Is it even possible for cinema to contribute to this? Jung and Film argues, “Cinema has the possibility of becoming an imaginal space—a temenos— and by engaging with films a version of active imagination is stimulated which can then engage the unconscious—potentially in as successful a fashion as our conscious attention to dream imagery and other fantasies” (Hauke and Alister “Introduction” 2). Jung’s metaphor for a therapeutic session, a temenos is the alchemists’ vessel where lead turns into gold. Like it, cinema provides a space for psychological maturation, but it does more than this. It leads the mind, either simply as in old-style hypnosis or more subtly as with Milton Erickson.

In his understanding, hypnotherapy was an art of integrating mental states through methods closely resembling literary techniques. Whereas the old hypnosis depended on giving Svengali-like commands, Erickson employed indirect suggestions buried in stories and humor. Being based on narrative, his approach has wide-ranging implications for aesthetic theory, especially film criticism, because cinema, a dream in the dark, has a particularly direct connection to the unconscious.

Indeed, many films even liken themselves to dreams, as in The Wizard of Oz (1939), which ends with Dorothy waking. From the title onward, Field of Dreams (1989) has such an encounter as its governing metaphor, yet is also effective for audiences who take the narrative literally and ignore that they are the intended visitors to the farm—the ones recalling as in dream the America of their youth. Without other advertisement than the film itself, the suggestion embedded within it has led thousands of motorists to visit the baseball diamond in the cornfield near Dyersville, Iowa, where the movie was made (Holwitz 83). The compulsion seems to have functioned as unthinkingly as a posthypnotic direction, whereas any rustic site or memory would have done as well for an audience who took control of their emotional responses.

Until, though, spectators are deliberately sensitive to the psychological processes that they are undergoing, they are most liable to open themselves to what they barely perceive. This does not require the filmmakers to plant subliminals (though some do). Oneric incoherence (Erickson’s primary technique) may even emerge from the convoluted collaboration of directors, writers, actors, cinematographers and editors. Outside of individual control, systems develop their own “chaosmos” (mixture of order and disorder), automatically adjusting to the contexts in which they develop.

Modeling such an evolutionary process, the chaologist John H. Holland had a computer itself generate diverse rules: “Consistency be damned: if two of his classifier rules disagreed with one another, then let them fight it out on the basis of their performance, their proven contribution to the task at hand—not some preprogrammed choice made by a software designer” (Waldrop 185). Typical of far-from-equilibrium systems, imagery in dreams acquires a comparable, spontaneous arrangement, often the same pattern for several in a row, a fractal self-similarity, revealing an iterative deep structure. More and more (to the dismay of old-fashioned critics), movies also form series, because this arrangement satisfies some profound need of audiences, who long to watch particular fictional worlds evolve, not merely to recapitulate old thrills but to amplify and elaborate emotionally charged themes.

This desire for inclusiveness—for the truly “big picture”—tends toward colossal amalgamations. Even in the silent era, for his Christ saga King of Kings (1927), Cecil B. deMille hired Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, and Moslem clerics to research or bless the production (deMille 279). Indeed, his choice of a religious subject was itself symptomatic of a penchant for global thinking, since traditionally, the most encompassing “big pictures” have come from mythology. Cinema’s formative period, in which he worked, was already an age of comparative religions, groping toward some universal, like Jungian theory (much of it from between the World Wars) or like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), its collage of allusions itself modeled on cinematic cuts. These works came from an epoch already aware of too much for any overall vision to cohere simply or smoothly. Reflective of this epoch, Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (1931) demonstrated that no all-encompassing system could be simultaneously complete and consistent.

By the 1920s, cinema was outgrowing conscious control like an ecosystem. “In a dynamic ecosystem where many different levels of organization are interacting with one another—’different’ from the viewpoint of different scales in space and in time—general statements about the effect of complexity or redundancy on the dynamics at one level can always be refuted with counter–examples resulting from observations of the effects at a different level of organization” (Atlan 191). Like a healthy jungle (which maximizes variety and complexity), movie production has a penchant for large, intertangling processes.

Even the interpretation of a single word thus may be far from a minor matter. In filming the parted sea of The Ten Commandments (1923), for example, a staff member had been trying to placate the biblical literalists. He therefore depicted the place between the divided waters as completely “dry” (yabbashah in the Hebrew of Exodus 14:22). But the process of translating a text into the cinematic medium meant that literalism was too simple. Depicted miracles require a strand of verisimilitude amid the supernatural, a surrealism to bring the audience into the dream.

With 3000 people and 8000 animals waiting at budget-breaking cost, technicians raced to drench the sand. Mist evaporated as quickly as sprayed. Desperately, the crew called for black paint, but lacked a sufficiency to dye one–and–a–half miles of shoreline. Finally, the entire cast picked up kelp and dashed about tossing it like confetti (Goodell 151). This farce was only a slightly more extreme than usual instance of the constant cinematic struggle to create fictional worlds, that, like the environments of real ones, have multiple, complementary levels in tension with one another (as here between miraculous dryness and believable wetness).

“[I]n dynamical systems chaos and order are different masks the systems wear...” (Briggs 20). John Briggs and F. David Peat state, “as we look at the greatest art, we realize that even in classical forms there is always a dynamism of chaos within the serenity of order” (Briggs 110). The German physicist Gert Eilenberger sees the attraction of this edge in “the harmonious arrangement of order and disorder as it occurs in natural objects—in clouds, trees, [or] mountain ranges . . .” (Gleik 95).

Briggs identifies that fascination as “holism”: “At any moment, the feedback in a dynamical system may amplify some unsuspected ‘external’ or ‘internal’ influence, displaying this holistic interconnection” (Briggs 21). Of course, directors are not always willing to open themselves to this serendipity, but when they are (and have the knack to utilize it effectively), the result may be much richer—as Jung presumed the arts become by following what he called “synchronicities,” psychologically significant coincidences that mirror unconscious and collective forces.

Since we are in an age of details, I shall be turning throughout the book to specific examples of these paradoxes and synchronicities: therefore, I conclude this introduction with a historically important instance of cinema’s intricacy. Because the meeting of East and West was one of Jung’s most pervasive themes in his approach toward the universal, I choose the composite of Buddhism, Shinto, Taoism, and Occidental ideologies in Rashomon (1951). As with later cases, I shall not be treating the movie as an entirely self-contained entity but as an ota, a developing vision, reflective of and influencing social changes.

CONTINUE TO : THE BIG PICTURE INTRODUCTION PART 2

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