False Mentors
In The Ten Commandments, Moses is tempted to abandon his duty to the Israelites and join his stepbrother, the Pharaoh, as the ruler of Egypt. In The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Jesus (Willem Dafoe) is tempted by the devil to join him and be rewarded with fame, glory and the riches of the world. And in Little Buddha (1993), Siddhartha’s father begs him to stay with him as a prince in his stately palace. In Rank’s pattern of the hero’s myth, the hero must at one point encounter the negative father figure and overcome him. This victory over the negative father or false mentor is often preceded by a temptation to join forces with the dark figure, and rule by his side as father and son. The same ubiquitous theme is recapitulated in modern mythology via the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars films.
GANDALF THE GREY, GANDALF THE WHITE
In Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), Gandalf the Grey (Ian McKellen) is the mentor for each member of the fellowship. But, since Gandalf is a member of the fellowship as well, he, too, is a hero, and he, too, has a mentor figure. Gandalf is a member of the Wizard Council. The chief of this council is Saruman the White (Christopher Lee). As his chief, Saruman plays the role of Gandalf’s mentor. However, Saruman betrays the council and allies himself with the Dark Lord, Sauron. In a moment of critical decision, Gandalf is offered the opportunity to join Saruman and Sauron and rule Middle Earth as a wizard king. Gandalf rejects the offer. He escapes from Saruman’s tower, leads the fellowship through Moria, battles a demon and falls into the depths of Hell. However, he is resurrected as Gandalf the White—the new chief of the Wizard Council. At this point, he defeats his false mentor and replaces him, establishing his character as an immortal legend.
DARTH VADER AND DARTH SIDEOUS
In The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Luke is tempted by Darth Vader to join him and rule the universe as father and son. But this mentor represents a negative father figure—“Darth Vader” literally means “Dark Father.” Luke must overcome this temptation to join the dark side of the Force. He can do so because of the inner strength he acquired when he internalized his positive mentor, Obi-Wan. Each episode of the Star Wars movies presents a different version of the mentor-hero relationship. In The Phantom Menace, Obi-Wan loses his own mentor figure, Qui-Gon Jinn, prematurely, and then decides to take on young Anakin Skywalker as an apprentice—though he himself has not completed his character arc from hero to mentor. In Attack of the Clones, the mentor-hero relationship develops between Obi-Wan and Anakin, though it is clear that Anakin is having trouble mastering his great power over the force. In the next episode, Anakin will leave Obi-Wan and pledge allegiance to a false mentor, Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid)—the Emperor of the Dark Side of the Force, also known as “Darth Sideous.”
In Star Wars, Obi-Wan becomes mentor to Luke, Anakin’s son, and pitches him into battle against his own father, who is now called “Darth Vader.” By allowing himself to be killed, Obi-Wan pushes Luke forward in his development toward becoming a hero, and he also moves himself a step forward, progressing from mentor to legend. In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda—the universal mentor of all Jedi knights—becomes Luke’s penultimate mentor. In this film, Luke must encounter the terrible truth of his own identity, the fact that Anakin is his real father, and he must overcome the temptation to join forces with this false mentor figure. In an infamous scene, Vader holds his hand out to Luke, tempting him: “Luke … I am your father … join me, and we’ll rule the galaxy as father and son!”
In Return of the Jedi (1983), Anakin redeems himself by rebelling against his own false mentor. He kills Palpatine, the Dark Emperor, and saves his son. In the final scene of the series, we see that Luke has internalized both his father and Obi-Wan as positive mentor figures in his psyche. Through the six episode series, Anakin develops from boy to squire, from squire to hero, from hero to false mentor, from false mentor to positive mentor, and then finally from mentor to legend. No other film series has depicted such a powerful, resonant and comprehensive portrayal of the mythological hero’s character arc.
5
Religious Symbolism in Film
In the 1930s, overt religious symbolism was a common feature in even the most secular films. Three Godfathers (1936) starts out as a typical western. Three bank robbers (Chester Morris, Lewis Stone, Walter Brennan) are on the lamb with their loot, when they discover an orphaned infant. They each gradually become attached to the baby and they each give their life for its survival. In the end, even the most selfish and greedy outlaw sacrifices his life for the child. The story of three men who come out of the wilderness to deliver an infant son is clearly symbolic of the Jesus story, though it is the martyrdom of the men themselves that signifies redemption. In the final scene, the last outlaw stumbles into “New Jerusalem” with the infant boy in his arms. Before he dies, he leans against a post and a heavenly light shines on his face. A wreath of laurel hangs over his head, and you almost expect him to raise his arms in a crucifixion pose. The message is clear: Even a murderer and a thief can be redeemed through love and self-sacrifice.
Although this movie was billed as a regular run-of-the-mill western, the overt religious symbolism does not seem odd or out of place. Film audiences, especially in the 1930s, were quite at home with the direct parallels made between screen images and religious iconography. Over the years, filmmakers have become less overt in their use of religious imagery; however, the religious symbolism is just as prevalent—it’s just not as obvious. When John Ford remade Three Godfathers in 1948 with John Wayne in the lead role, he stripped the film of most of its conspicuous religious metaphors, yet the story itself retained the essential element of spiritual allegory. The most prevalent aspect of religious symbolism in films is the theme of sacrifice, a crucial aspect of the heroic character that is broadly based throughout culture, religion and mythology.
Sacrifice of the Firstborn Son
Sacrifice is the act of making something holy or sacred by giving up a portion of one’s self. Sacrifice is the central symbol in the Judeo-Christian belief system—a relic from the archaic pagan rituals that are still at the core of Judaic temple services and the Christian mass. The bible stories of Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob, Moses and Jesus all revolve around either literal or figurative sacrifices to God. The sacrifice of the firstborn son is the ultimate act of faith. The father gives up willingly the thing most precious to him—the life that means more to him than his own life. As the ultimate sacrifice, the sacrifice of the firstborn son is held most sacred by God, as he could ask no more and receive no greater sign of faith and devotion.
Literal renditions of the sacrifice theme are depicted in biblical epics. In John Huston’s The Bible (1966), Abraham (George C. Scott) sacrifices his most beloved son, Isaac, to God. And in George Stevens’s The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), the reversal of this theme is depicted when God sacrifices his only son Jesus (Max Von Sydow) to Man. The key to both sacrifices is the element of self-sacrifice in the father and the element of willingness in the son. Both elements are required in the sacrifice in order for it to be consecrated. In sacrificing his only or most beloved son, the father is sacrificing the best part of himself. And in giving himself up freely for the slaughter, the son is the willing lamb—not a victim but an equal partner in the ritual.
Sacrifice is also the ultimate quality of heroism. Mythological heroes like Moses, Jesus, Prometheus and Arthur sacrifice themselves for their peoples. The willingness to sacrifice one’s self to a cause is recapitulated in movie heroes like Shane, who sacrifices his hope for a new life to help the homesteaders. At a certain level of abstraction, every fully developed hero reveals his heroic nature through sacrifice. If there is no point in the film in which the hero puts himself on the line for the sake of his cause, then he is not truly worthy of heroism. His character—in the classical version of the hero archetype—is lacking. The act that makes a normal person a hero is the act of sacrifice.
Crimes and Misdemeanors
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Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) is a morality play on sin, guilt, faith and nihilism. The film addresses issues of religiosity directly, by depicting the protagonist’s father as the embodiment of Orthodox Judaism. The A-plot in Allen’s film revolves around Judah (Martin Landau) and his conflict with his mistress, Dolores (Angelica Huston), who wants Judah to acknowledge their relationship and leave his wife. The first person Judah confides in is his brother Jack (Jerry Orbach)—a cold and objective pragmatist. Jack appeals to Judah’s sense of reason. His option, killing Dolores, seems reasonable because the problem will be solved with absolutely no negative repercussions. Judah has the money to pay for an expert hit man, Jack can engineer the contract, and Judah’s wife will never know anything about it. Jack’s calculation is clean, cold and scientific, but it leaves out the elements of morality and guilt. Jack himself is beyond guilt. His character represents the nihilistic side of Judah’s identity—the scientist within him who cannot believe in fairy tales like sin, God and the existence of unbreakable moral commandments. For these more traditional aspects of his moral personality, Judah must confide in a patient and old friend, Ben (Sam Waterston).
Sacrifice of the First Born Son. Jesus (Max Von Sydow) as the willing sacrifice epitomizes the mythological hero archetype. The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), George Stevens Productions, MGM/UA Distribtors.
Moral Realism
Everyone refers to Ben as “the saint.” Not only is Ben a rabbi, he is an extremely moral and righteous man in every way. For Judah, Ben represents a religious conscience—the faith and reverence in God that was instilled in Judah as a boy by his father. Ben is a positive father figure to Judah, who visualizes and speaks to Ben while solving his moral dilemma, as if Ben were a part of his mind. Ben’s image often links Judah to memories of his actual father (David Howard), who also believed in the existence of a “real moral structure.” The view propounded by Ben and Judah’s father, “moral realism,” is a direct contradiction to nihilism. Moral realists believe that moral laws are solid and unbreakable. When a sin is committed, it is instantly known by God. The guilty sinner will always be punished by God, just as the forces of good will always prevail.
Judah is torn between the faith-based view of moral realism and the skeptical view of nihilism. As he struggles between these conflicting viewpoints, Judah is also torn between his initiative towards self-preservation and his guilt over killing someone he once loved. Ben warns Judah against murder, telling him, “Without the law it’s all darkness.” Judah responds, “You sound just like my father.” Later on, Judah’s internal image of his father invokes a similar warning: “The wicked will be punished.” Both of these interchangeable representations of the conscience express Judah’s lingering belief in the necessity of “a moral structure, with real meaning, and forgiveness, and some kind of higher power, otherwise there’s no basis to know how to live.” Yet darkness and wickedness are becoming the dominating powers in Judah’s world. He quickly loses his ability to see the existence of the “moral structure” that was instilled in him as a boy.
Moral Darkness
Darkness and blindness are common symbolic threads running through the film. Judah is an opthamologist. He is an expert in the field of seeing, yet he cannot see a moral way out of his dilemma. Judah’s patient, Ben, is going blind. There is no irony lost on the fact that the one character in the film who is completely good and free of sin should be inflicted with blindness, a malady closely associated with divine retribution. But the “curse” is strangely appropriate, as Ben’s concept of religion is the acceptance of an all-seeing God based on blind faith. Judah is torn between his own path of agnosticism and his father’s path of blindness to the horrible truths of existence, epitomized in his statement: “In the end, I will always choose God over the truth.”
The B-plot of the film centers on Clifford (Woody Allen). Clifford hates his brother-in-law Lester (Alan Alda), an annoying, pushy, self-centered and arrogant character who is nevertheless incredibly successful. In a tangential but memorable scene, Clifford visits his sister who tells him a disturbing story about being defecated upon by a demented blind date. Ben’s dreadful blindness, Lester’s undeserved success and Clifford’s innocent sister’s unbearable ordeal all reveal a world that is glaringly absent of any real morality or justice. As Judah sees it, the world is an inherently amoral place. When Ben asks Judah, “Don’t you think God sees?”, Judah replies, “God is a luxury I can’t afford.” Ben and his father live in “the kingdom of heaven,” while Judah and Jack live in the “real world”—a dark place inhabited by sick and depraved degenerates, who do awful and disgusting things to innocent people, and get away with it scot-free.
In the final act of the film, after Dolores is rubbed out, Judah feels a desperate urge to confess. At this point, thousands of years of mythology, religion and morality are weighing down upon him, telling him that he must offer a sacrifice to the gods in order to repent his sin and free his soul. Since Judah destroyed a life, he must sacrifice his own life in order to make things right. But Judah never gives in to his desire for self-sacrifice. He never confesses. The film ends in a brilliant twist. Judah and Clifford meet at a wedding and Judah discusses his story as if it were an idea for a movie plot:
…and after the awful deed is done, he finds that he’s plagued by deep-rooted guilt … He hears his father’s voice and imagines that God is watching his every move. Suddenly it’s not an empty universe anymore but a just and moral one…. Mysteriously the crisis is lifted … he’s not punished, in fact he prospers … now he’s scot-free … back to his protected world of wealth and privilege.
As a filmmaker, Clifford explains to Judah that the character in his film should get caught, or that he should either confess or somehow sacrifice himself, in order for the plot structure to work. Judah nearly gives himself away, saying that he’s talking about “the real world” and not fantasy, but he catches himself. He walks off and kisses his beautiful wife. He is a happy and unrepentant sinner. The lack of sacrifice in Judah’s story shows how important the sacrifice theme is in the morality and character development of heroes in film, and how divergent this theme is from morality and character development in real life.
God the Father
Sacrifice symbolism also draws out the figurative relationship between God and Man. This relationship, in turn, recapitulates the primary psychological relationship between father and son. There is an Oedipal quality in the son-sacrifice theme—a menacing father destroying his heir and rival—which links the psychoanalytic interpretations of the Oedipus myth and the Hero myth to the religious symbolism in the relationship between God-the-Father and Man-the-Son. Hence, the primal fear of father and paternal punishment (castration anxiety) becomes generalized into a secondary fear of God and eternal punishment (hell anxiety). The designation of the title “Father” for Catholic priests is a clear sign of the ubiquitous God-the-Father symbolism. The representation of the father as the embodiment of God and religious faith is apparent in films such as Malcolm X (1992), The Jazz Singer (1927) and Of Human Hearts (1938). In these films, the relationship’s between the sons (Denzel Washington, Al Jolson and James Stewart) and their fathers (Tommy Hollis, Warner Oland and Walter Huston) directly parallel their relationships with God. The further the sons move away from their fathers, the further they move away from God.
Mother Nature
During infancy, the mother is associated with the natural impulses of the infant. The desires for food, warmth, comfort, love, nurturing—the physical and emotional needs—are initially directed towards the mother. As the child grows, it must integrate the unnatural restrictions of society such as control of the body functions, repression of desire, delaying of pleasure, etc. The father, as the traditional disciplinarian, is associated with these societal restrictions. In this sense, the archetypal mother is unconsciously associated with nature, and the archetypal father is unconsciously associated with rules, society and punishment
. These associations have become transfigured into the collective unconscious in the archetypes of the Earth Goddess, Mother Nature, Fertile Maiden, Mother Madonna and Love Goddess as the symbolic representations of the mother figure. The archetypes of the Wise Old Man, the God of Judgment, the Wrathful God, the God of Social Order and God the Father are the symbolic representations of the father figure in the collective unconscious.
The Mother/Nature associations and Father/Society associations are archetypes that have been projected from the personal conscious of infantile memories into the collective unconscious of gods and goddesses. Joseph Campbell and other mythologists have noted that prehistoric and primitive societies typically have female deities and goddesses as their primary religious figures, as these societies are completely dependent on weather, nature and the fertility of the land for their survival. But as ancient societies became more “civilized,” progressing into the age of kingdoms and city-states, the primary religious figures became male gods rather than female goddesses. Through the establishment of the priestly class, religious devotion became directed towards societal rules, laws and doctrines—elements of society controlled by males in patriarchal cultures. In this sense, the Judeo-Christian tradition represents the divine as male, and the pre–Judeo-Christian traditions represented the divine as either male, female or both. Since film in the twentieth century was mainly a product of patriarchal Judeo-Christian societies, most symbols of female or pluralistic divinity, the “pagan,” have been represented as being evil or malevolent. They have been represented as wicked witches, evil sorceresses, demons, devils and monsters of every kind. Ironically, the only positive images of female divinity have come from the ultra-conservative Disney corporation, which supplied the American collective unconscious with kindly fairy godmothers in films such as Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. Nevertheless, pagan deities—especially in horror movies—have been unilaterally depicted as the epitome of depravity, unholiness and wicked malevolence.
Movies and the Mind Page 8