Keywords

Three Film Archetypes

We will now discuss three of the principle archetypes/stereotypes* that have figured prominently in modern film—the Inventor, the Detective, and the Warrior. We have chosen to separate these three motifs mainly because we believe that even thought they are all of a piece, they can be discussed as primarily having one characteristic or the other. They should be considered a dynamism, or gestalt that works together. Some actors are so identified with a certain type that they are used over and over again in similar kinds of movies—recurring dreams that play a comforting role because they are so predictable and have such satisfying resolutions. For instance, as Kracauer notes, from 1930 to 1933, the now forgotten actor Hans Albers “played the heroes of films in which typically bourgeois daydreams found outright fulfillment” although it was among workers that his exploits resonated in particular.

The Inventor

In some respect, the inventor is a surrogate for the filmmaker. On the one hand, he (and it is nearly always a man) is a pioneer, a visionary, and possibly a genius capable of mastering and manipulating technology and nature; on the other hand, he can also be an exploiter, a mad scientist (analogous to the Dr. Evil of psychology), or else because he is too narrow-minded and arrogant, becomes responsible for unleashing destructive forces. The inventor is both the embodiment of the American dream—driven as he is to explore, conquer and transform—and its saboteur. One of the greatest American films ever produced—Citizen Kane (1941)—is based on the larger-than-life figure of the newspaper publisher and magnate William Randolph Hearst (and directed by the larger-than-life figure Orson Welles). “Kane is America, Kane is us, Kane is a social institution—but Kane is also flesh and blood, a man, an individual,” writes Manvell, “But what is real about him is constantly on the borderland of what is unreal; such a life as this is a melodrama, a human anomaly, a monstrosity.” This dualistic view, he goes on to say, is reflected in the style of the movie, “weaving in and out of actuality like sequences in a nightmare.” The ‘realistic’ sequences are thus very real and the ‘unrealistic’ very unreal: “the

Again I want to emphasize that the use of ‘archetype’ is meant as convenient shorthand for a characteriological classification; it is not meant to suggest a Jungian bias.

Thatcher Memorial Library, haunted by the ungenerous spirit of its founder, Kane’s guardian during his minority, is like a giant morgue, echoing, vast, and empty. Kane’s Xanadu is a domestic cathedral; his wife, unhappy with her puzzles, sits crouched in space beside a fireplace the size of a cottage...” Kane ‘invented’ (if that’s the word) a form of journalism that put a greater priority on selling papers than on accuracy. (Although the claim is certainly exaggerated, Hearst was credited with starting the Spanish-American War because of the boost it would give to circulation.) His influence can still be felt—in fact, it is stronger than ever—in today’s media in which it seems the most rancorous and loudest voices prevail.

Arguably, the most significant inventor ever brought to life on the big screen (in more ways than one) is Frankenstein. The original 1931 film is one of the first to show the unintended consequences of a misguided scientific experiment. Because of his assistant’s error, Dr. Frankenstein transplants a criminal brain into his creation. Frankenstein follows in a long tradition with roots in ancient Greek mythology (Galatea, Pygmalion) and in Jewish legend (the dybbuk) in which man tries to create new life (human, clones, chimeras) at his peril. (The anxiety that this subject raises is echoed in debates over the medical use of stem cells or the safety of genetically manipulated food.) Inventors are also feared because they continue to tinker with and create technology which makes life easier for us while troubling our sleep. Instead of a reconstituted corpse like Frankenstein’s monster, we view technological devices—and their creators—with ambivalence. Our cell phones track our every movement (even when they’re switched off); our family and friends can find out where we are but so can the service providers, governments, and hackers with malicious intent. Are films telling us that the same high technology that fascinates, mesmerizes, and misleads us is the real enemy? Certainly the fear that we are surrendering control over our lives to technology is not new. Kubrick’s eerily human-like computer HAL spawned any number of insidious machines which, in the guise of benign labor-saving or protective devices, infiltrate families, and defy the intentions of their inventors. In the 1977 Demon Seed, the computer at the heart of a high-tech surveillance system takes a young wife (Julie Christie) hostage and impregnates her. The 1998 Enemy of the State is another example of what one critic has called techno-paranoia where the enemy of the title (played by John Voight) is a NSA spook with seemingly enough technology at his disposal to track down every man, woman and child in the United States. Not that man does not fight back. The Star Trek series (both in its TV and film versions) portrays the perennial tensions between man and machine, personified by Kirk the fallible human and Spock the infallible Vulcan. Their conflict harkens back to earlier social dreams such as Metropolis and Frankenstein. While the machine is trained to reason, the human relies on intuition which the machine lacks. The starship Enterprise, a futuristic law enforcement agency, embodies both extremes and aims toward finding a balance between emotion and reason. Its ethic is not to interfere but rather to lend help to other worlds. The inability to find that balance between cognitive and emotional behavior represents the main danger for society.

The separation of the mind from the heart was never more vividly illustrated than in the British TV movie Cold Lazarus by the late Dennis Potter. Cold Lazarus (1994) takes place in Britain in the twenty-fourth century when society is being run (or run to the ground) by American corporations. The world Potter envisioned is a dystopia where the streets of London lie in ruins and people are terrorized by a resistance group called RON (‘Reality or Nothing’). But scientific advances proceed apace. It is now possible to realize mankind’s age-old dream of defeating death; scientists at a cryogenic research institute are able to revive the mind, though not the body, of a twentieth century writer Daniel Feeld (played by Albert Finney) who in his second life is reduced to a disembodied head. The head of the consortium sponsoring the research is convinced that he can make a fortune by broadcasting the revived writer’s memories on TV. But all the decapitated writer really wants to do is return to the oblivion of death. However ingenious the film, Potter was tapping into a collective dream that was already old by the time Icarus took his ill-fated flight too close to the sun. As much as humans long for immortality, those mythical—and fictional—characters who obtain it (or almost do) invariably discover the price is far too high to pay.

The Warrior

Why do superheroes like James Bond, Jason Bourne (the hero created by the late Robert Ludlum), and Ethan Hunt (the hero of the Mission Impossible series) arise in the creative psyche and inject themselves so emphatically in popular culture? Are Bond and his fellow superspies characters peculiar to the West? Certainly, Bond films are a recurring social dream that emerged during the Cold War but they have, improbably, survived its end. In later films, the enemy has shifted from the Soviets in a seemingly fantastic direction where 007 is often pitted against an international terrorist syndicate with access to all the fruits of modern technology. What is remarkable about the Fleming and Broccoli creations is how successfully they were able to transcend the confines of the Cold War. (It is well documented that Ian Fleming made use of his own experiences in British intelligence in the Bond novels; what is not so well known is that in giving him his famous codename 007 he was probably inspired by C. K. Chesterton’s 1908 novel The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, a book often referred to as “a metaphysical thriller.”) The transition probably begins after From Russia with Love (1963). The Bond movies did not have to depend on the rivalry between the CIA and KGB for its villains when there were so many waiting in the wings. The tentacles of “SPECTRE” (an anagram for ‘Respect’) extended far beyond the Soviet intelligence services, reaching into the world of drug cartels, the Russian mafia and later other non-state actors like al–Qaeda. In the process, James Bond became one of pop culture’s most recognizable and enduring icons notwithstanding the casting changes that gave us significantly different conceptions of Bond: Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and lately Daniel Craig. He remains a cultural symbol with fastidious tastes: he drives only luxury automobiles (Aston-Martins); drinks only vodka martinis (shaken, not stirred) and wears exquisitely tailored suits; he vacations and engages in thrilling espionage adventures in the most glamorous locales and gambles for high stakes in the most exclusive casinos and stays in only the toniest hotels. He speaks all the most widely known languages, skis, skin dives, plays golf and tennis at the best clubs, and is a gourmet who indulges in haut cuisine. One can make a case that Bond, at least in his earlier incarnations, was a kind of embodiment of the nuclear bomb himself. Take, for example, the lyrics for the title track of Thunderball (1965), a sort of ‘dream within a dream.’

He knows the meaning of success.

His needs are more, so he gives less.

They call him the winner who takes all,

And he strikes like Thunderball.

…

His days of asking are all gone.

His fight goes on and on.

Bond is licensed to kill, he can always escape to fight another day; he does not have to get bogged down in tedious diplomatic negotiations. “He looks at the world and wants it all,” the song continues. It is an attitude that is shared by most of Bond’s avaricious antagonists who are prepared to use any means possible, even launching nuclear strikes, to maintain or extend their power. Bond certainly is not troubled by any conscience. He is a man of action whose days of asking are all gone (although one doubts that he ever asked for anything to begin with). And for those of us who lived through the Cold War, the fight did give every indication of going on and on with either endless stalemate or nuclear extinction as the only possible outcomes. Beginning with From Russia with Love (1953) onward, though, the Soviet Union had already begun to lose some of its cachet as a worthwhile opponent. In that film, Bond and a beautiful Russian agent make common cause to defeat SPECTRE which, we discover, has been manipulating events to bring about a confrontation between the Soviet Union and Great Britain for its own malevolent purposes. Bond films prefigure the fear prevalent in the social dream today of a faceless enemy, possibly sponsored by a rogue state or operating from the safe haven of a failed state, an enemy in other words that transcends boundaries or national loyalties.

But Bond has also proven capable of evolving. As personified by Craig, he is more downbeat and jaded, more emotional (Bond grieves over the death of a girlfriend), and less of a skirt chaser. He has arguably done a better job of adapting to political and cultural changes than Hugh Heffner whose magazine once celebrated Bond as a kind of idealized playboy.

The stories in the Bond form a kind of a bridge from the period of ideological warfare to our own, where the fear of a frigid colossus or a nuclear exchange has been trumped by fears of uncorked psychopaths and dirty bombs in the hands of the true believers.

In the recent Quantum of Solace (2008), Bond’s antagonist is not a terrorist but rather a mogul who has enriched himself by despoiling the environment. Whatever their motivation, the evildoers in Bond films are invariably deranged masterminds prepared to destroy or subdue the world through catastrophic violence even if it means bringing about Armageddon. That we are now confronting fanatics who threaten to blow up the world might account for why audiences tend to shun movies that feature Islamic radicals. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communism left filmmakers (as well as thriller writers) temporarily bereft of a convenient evildoer. After 9/11, radical Islamic terrorists assumed the role of boogieman. People do not want to go to the movies to see fictionalized versions of events they can watch unfolding every night on the TV news (Neither Syriana in 2005 nor The Kingdom in 2007 was a box office success).

The heroes in these thrillers all have a mission of sorts: to let us see the world from a particular institutional rather than ideological slant. Bond, Bourne, and Hunt may all be anti-conformists and renegades who routinely disobey orders but they never challenge the status quo. On the contrary, they actually defend it. The warriors who dominate our social dreams are seen as forming the vanguard against the barbarians who are armed with high-tech gizmos. They are the successors of the tight-lipped cowboys who with a six-shooter brought justice to the Wild West. In that social dream, too, the heroes were defenders of existing institutions, perpetually locked in a struggle to keep chaos at bay.

The Detective

With the possible exception of the sheriff in Westerns, no cinematic hero has had more of an influence on audiences than the detective—the rumpled, jaded, romantic, hard-drinking figure who walks the mean streets and puts his life at risk to unravel a mystery. In one form or another, this figure appears in a variety of related genres—the crime film, the gangster film, the thriller, and the film noir. He is distinctly American although his ethnicity may vary—Mr. Moto (Japanese), Charlie Chan (Chinese) and “Easy” Rawlins (African-American)—and he tends to be a loner even though he is frequently ensnared (and betrayed) by a femme fatale. Our image of the detective was to a large extent shaped by the film adaptations of Dashiell Hammett—The Thin Man series and The Maltese Falcon (1931, 1936 and 1941) and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe particularly as he is portrayed in The Big Sleep (1946) and Farewell, My Lovely (1942, 1944 and 1975). The detective or the private eye flourished during the classic age of the film noir, a period that extended from the late 1940s to the late 1950s. (Orson Welles’ 1958 Touch of Evil is generally regarded as the last noir of the classic period.) Usually shot in black-and-white, dimly lit, and set in forbidding urban environments, film noir was influenced—visually and thematically—by German expressionism. The protagonist of these films could also be policemen, boxers, grafters, or victims like the ill-fated hero of D.O.A. Who has only hours to discover who killed him. Just about every character is cynical, embittered, avaricious, or despairing and that includes the femme fatales, corrupt policemen, jealous husbands, and alcohol-addled writers who also make regular appearances in film noir. The cities where these films take place–Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Chicago—are mazelike and labyrinthine, filled with traps and pitfalls for the unwary. More often than not the action occurs at night in bars, nightclubs and anonymous hotel rooms; even the daylight is uncertain and the weather forecast always seems to call for rain. As a social dream, these films reflect the anxiety and apprehensions prevalent in society in the aftermath of World War II. “It is as if the war, and the social eruptions in its aftermath, unleashed demons that had been bottled up in the national psyche,” Nicholas Christopher writes in his study of the genre. The Red Scare was at least in part responsible for the sense of paranoia that hangs over many of these films, especially Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and no wonder since the films were created by many directors and screenwriters suspected of Communist sympathies who were hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee, blackballed from the industry and in some cases thrown into prison. One of them was Dashiell Hammett. The Red Scare was another social dream—a dream that was not confined to the screen.

Conclusion

We have seen that film can be a transmitter of a social dream even when—especially when—the filmmaker is unaware that he is creating a dream. At the same time, we have shown how audiences can become a collaborator in this dream, imposing their own fantasies and memories on the film so what they see on the screen is both the filmmaker’s vision and their own. Some skeptics have taken issue with the idea that films have the capacity to embody and convey a dream, pointing out that for the most part, Hollywood film studios (and their counterparts elsewhere in the world) are in it for the money. So what else is new? But that misses the point. To be sure, studios and the individuals they hire aim to manipulate us. (Think of the many ‘tear jerkers.’) But as Kracauer has noted in his landmark study of the German cinema, the manipulator has to have good (or at least compelling) material to manipulate. “Even the official Nazi war films, pure propaganda products as they were, mirrored certain national characteristics which could not be fabricated. “He goes on to say that if Hollywood ignored the wishes and desires of the public it would pretty soon find that no one was going to see its products. In the long run, he writes, “public desires determine the nature of Hollywood films.” But what are these public desires? Sometimes, until the filmmaker shows them their desires, the spectators (and the filmmakers) are not aware of them. In other words, the filmmaker is helping us recall a dream we had forgotten on waking. As Kracauer says: “What films reflect are not so much explicit credos as psychological dispositions those deep layers of collective mentality which extend more or less below the dimension of consciousness.” What Munsterberg was the first to realize was that the power of films to do this was derived partly from the collaborative vision of the filmmakers and their teams of technicians but also partly from the techniques employed by the new medium—close-ups, flashbacks, and flash-forward, jump-cuts, etc. Thanks to their capability for violating causality, juxtaposing seemingly unrelated images, sequences and sounds, or revealing characters’ memories or emotions so vividly films proved capable of duplicating the experience of dreaming better than any other mass medium. As the influential art historian Erwin Panofsky noted, the spectator may remain in a fixed position throughout the duration of a movie, “but only physically… Aesthetically, he is in permanent motion, as his eye identifies itself with the lens of the camera which permanently shifts in distance and direction. And the space presented to the spectator is as movable as the spectator is himself. Not only do solid bodies move in space, but space itself moves, changing, turning, dissolving and recrystallizing… ”. Kracauer cautions that while films may reflect the longings and anxieties of a culture or a nation that does not mean that there is a “fixed national character” but rather that the medium can tap into “such collective dispositions or tendencies as prevail within a nation at a certain stage of its development.” He contended that by examining the Expressionist films of the 1920s like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Metropolis, for instance, it would be possible to get a sense of the “fears and hopes” that swept Germany immediately after World War I”. He also points out that the dreams of a particular nation are often similar to those of many other nations. If circumstances are similar enough—say, economic deprivation or war—other people will share the same dreams. All the same, even if psychological states (of individuals, cultures or nations) are influenced to a great degree by external factors “psychological tendencies often assume independent life, and, instead of automatically changing with ever-changing circumstances, become themselves essential springs of historical evolution.” These “dispositions” can outlast their original causes and undergo their own metamorphosis; sometimes “in cases of extreme political change” in which the political system dissolves or collapses, it can trigger a breakdown of the psychological system of a people as well. As social dreams, as an expression of unconscious fears, hopes, and psychological distress, films can both anticipate and predict these changes. We dream in the darkness of the bedroom and we dream in the darkness of the theater. Perhaps, the principal difference is that we do not pay for the former and we are obliged to pay for the latter—in other words, they are the dreams that money can buy.