Wild/lives

Trickster, Place and Liminality on Screen

Terrie Waddell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415420426
• eBook ISBN: 9781317724032
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Wild/lives draws on myth, popular culture and analytical psychology to trace the machinations of 'trickster' in contemporary film and television. This archetypal energy traditionally gravitates toward liminal spaces – physical locations and shifting states of mind. By focusing on productions set in remote or isolated spaces, Terrie Waddell explores how key trickster-infused sites of transition reflect the psychological fragility of their willing and unwilling occupants. In differing ways, the selected texts – Deadwood, Grizzly Man, Lost, Solaris, The Biggest Loser, Amores Perros and Repulsion – all play with inner and outer marginality.

As this study demonstrates, the dramatic potential of transition is not always geared toward resolution. Prolonging the anxiety of change is an increasingly popular option. Trickster moves within this wildness and instability to agitate a form of dialogue between conscious and unconscious processes.

Waddell's imaginative interpretation of screen material and her original positioning of trickster will inspire students of media, cinema, gender and Jungian studies, as well as academics with an interest in the application of Post-Jungian ideas to screen culture.

Chapter 1

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Verging on wildness

Liminality and trickster

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If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed.

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1996: 999)

There's a black and white Gary Larson cartoon of middle-aged employees sitting in cramped open-plan offices. An outward looking man discreetly separates himself from the deskbound community by wearing a single feathered cap. ‘Thirty years had passed’, reads the caption, ‘and although he had no real regrets about marrying Wendy, buying a home, and having two kids, Peter found his thoughts often going back to his life in Never-Never-Land’ (1994: 40). J. M. Barrie's (1937/2007) island of lost children has become a rites of passage metaphor, a fantasy of discovery and loss, and a sense of being in the world that's rich, sharp, immediate and heightened – a space governed by trickster. Often characterized as a go-between for gods and mortals, ‘more than human and less than divine … intermediate between heaven and earth’ as Laura Makarius has written of West African tricksters, this figure of storytelling embodies the psychological energy of threshold spaces (1997: 84). It can be thought of as an archetypal agent of change with the potential to guide us through each jolting shift in the process of growing up. These developmental states are analogous to the cyclic shedding of skin where old parts are sacrificed so that new surfaces can take shape. As Larson's nostalgic Peter reminds us, life in the trickster-infested liminal may never be as dangerous or as exhilarating.

A stage between separation from and reincorporation into aspects of social functioning, the liminal is not always as easy to exit as it is to enter. Some of the characters in the following chapters submit willingly, for others it's an imposed discomfort. Few emerge from the experience rejuvenated. Most are incapable of transcendence. All seven texts though, set in isolated locations that parallel psychological states of transition, highlight trickster's relationship to this interim phase. Rather than focusing exclusively on the behavior of obvious trickster figures, Wild/lives goes to the dynamic of the archetype in and beyond each story.

John Izod (2006) and Hockley (2001, 2007) have argued that developing a dialogue with screen images is a way of appreciating and unscrambling our relationship to the archetypal currents in film and television. For Hockley, this emotional and critical connection or ‘negotiation’ ferments in thresholds: ‘it is in the imaginal and liminal space, the void between viewer and screen, that the new and living image comes into being which holds the meaning and reality of the situation’ (2007: 124). This careful and reverent collaboration between viewer and viewed extends to academic textual analysis, where a similar rapport is developed with the production up for dissection. Before diving straight into the following examples of how this relationship can play itself out, it's important to discuss the more commonly understood nature of both liminality and trickster, while keeping in mind that neither of these concepts can ever (realistically) be pinned down. It's a bit like fantasizing Neverland from behind a desk.

The inevitable ooze of archetypes and texts

Conflating Jung's idea of archetypal patterns into stereotypes is a common and misleading practice. As culturally constructed categories born of prejudice, stereotypes often drive ideological agendas, while archetypes are thought to be inherited unconscious patterns, unknowable as pure energies in themselves and only recognizable through projection. Although these hubs of energy have similar characteristics and meanings, their visual manifestations are culturally and historically tempered: ‘The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived … it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear’ (CW 9i, para. 6). These structures shouldn't be thought of as remnants of memory, but latent possibilities that when stimulated significantly influence psychological behavior. Jung championed their power to function autonomously, emerge unexpectedly, and seize or grip those under their influence, producing a range of responses from compulsive urges to an overwhelming sense of the numinous (CW 5).

James Hillman argues that it's difficult to grasp the nature of a particular archetype before its expression as a fantasy image. There is no precursory energy – the image is the archetype: ‘the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world … axiomatic, self-evident images to which psychic life and our theories about it ever return’ (1989: 23). From Hillman's perspective, our relationship with these images is best explored by interacting with them on their own terms rather than rushing to impose rational meanings. This idea of responding exclusively to an image or thematic motif on its own terms, while possible with fantasy and dream material, is more problematic when it comes to cinema and television. We can ask how and why we're affected by what we experience, yet the forms before us are far from pristine. Archetypal energy on screen is more likely to be communicated through an intertextual fusion of aural and visual stimuli rather than a contained, static or pure image.

While screen narratives as reinvigorated myths are archetypally rich, they're also imbued with a range of extratextual influences. Trickster characters and patterns are correspondingly tainted, so it's unrealistic to pin them down to a pat set of descriptors or confine them to one text. Any number of past cultural and fantasy manifestations of the figure inevitably inform later interpretations and vice versa. Similarly, the idea of trickster, as with all unconscious structures, only becomes meaningful when realized through art and imagination. In understanding that this intertextually driven relationship is personal, I hope to sooth any authoritarian voice or claim to know trickster. Even though the following chapters are effectively expressions of my relationship with each text, impacting texts, and the archetypes filtering through them, there's enough historical and contemporary familiarity with trickster for this to be both a shared and challenging experience – as Susan Rowland notes, ‘Archetypal images are part of the dialogue of cultural exchange’ (2005: 101).

In acknowledging that these energies can never be summed up, it's necessary to borrow common trickster features from a variety of past narratives to appreciate how they've been reincorporated as aspects of liminal experiences in this collection of contemporary films and television programs. ‘Plucking’ is inescapable. From early post-structuralist writings on intertextuality (Mikhail Bakhtin, 1929/1973; Rowland Barthes, 1968/1977; and Julia Kristeva, 1969/1980), the idea that readers are writers, viewers are producers, and that all texts take shape from a series of complex extratextual relationships, has become a given of contemporary media and cinema discourse. Just as all creative works are leaky, unbound, and as John Frow argues, not ‘structures of presence but traces and tracings of otherness’ formed out of, ‘cultural and ideological norms; out of the conventions of genre; out of styles and idioms embedded in the language; out of connotations and collective sets; out of clichés, formulae, or proverbs; and out of other texts’, so too is the analysis of these products (1990: 45). The screen examples in Wild/lives are not just revamped trickster stories (few depict identifiable trickster figures): they carry within them the combined, enmeshed energy of trickster and liminality. The nature of this dynamic is, of course, open to interpretation when considering Jung's caution that all archetypes, by virtue of their unconscious nature, are accessible only through metaphor (CW 9i). Each screen conjuring of trickster not only varies in its interpretation of the pattern, but is also tempered by the context in which it's read and received by the reader/viewer.

Trickster as metaphor

Whenever anyone asks me to define trickster as a presence in popular culture, I'm uncomfortably reminded of US Supreme Court Justice, Potter Stewart's much cited ‘I know it when I see it’ statement on hard-core pornography (Jacobellis v. Ohio, 1964). Like obscenity, trickster is ubiquitous, partially hidden, demonized, celebrated, timeless, pleasurable, transgressive, subjective and therefore notoriously difficult to define with absolute clarity. The energy is so ubiquitous, and seems to infuse unconscious activity to such an extent, that it's in danger of, as Andrew Samuels once intimated, becoming a metaphor for the ‘psyche itself’ (1985: 270). Yet there's also a sense of being able to recognize its footprints.

The trickster of analytical psychology, of course, isn't a tangible entity, but a means of describing thought and behavioral processes. As with all archetypes, it's inextricably linked to other energies within the complex network of the unconscious. Simply put, archetypal patterns both merge and spring from each other like the multiple, regenerating heads of the Greek hydra, or the intertextually configured media. Trickster, therefore, can be understood from multiple perspectives and as a component (whether latent or active) of other surfacing archetypal structures. Jung, for instance, links trickster in certain manifestations to the darker side of the personality he calls shadow; the motif harboring both personal and collective material unacceptable to the ego or center of consciousness (CW 9i, para. 469). In its capacity to stir repressed or unrealized aspects of the personality, one might see trickster as a key component of individuation, an ongoing process of psychological development where, as Rowland succinctly writes, ‘the ego is brought into a relationship with the archetypal dynamics of the unconscious. In individuation the ego is constantly made, unmade and remade by the goal-directed forces of the unconscious’ (2002: 177).

This oscillating play or dialogue of conscious and unconscious material that allows for greater self-perception (individuation) is referred to as the transcendent function (CW 8). The more dynamic concept of the Self, though, is trickier. The ‘self’ and the ‘Self’ in analytical psychology can be complicated; annoyingly Jung doesn't capitalize the latter, and so contemporary theorists have done this to lessen the confusion. Lower case denotes a sense of identity and individuality (the ‘I’), whereas uppercase ‘S’ refers to the concept of a supreme archetypal regulator governing both conscious and unconscious functioning (CW 14, para. 133). It can be argued that all archetypal forms stem from, and are elements of, the Self. Jung talks about this function variously as: an archetype of ultimate potential in its capacity to unify psychic material (CW 9ii); the hub of the personality, ‘a psychic totality and at the same time a centre, neither, of which coincides with the ego but includes it’ (CW 9i, para. 248); a symbol of wholeness taking the form of mandalas – Sanskrit for circle – and quaternities – four-pronged images (CW 14, 9i); and the transpersonal or numinous ‘god-image’ often symbolized in myth and Jung's alchemical musings as the divine child, Christ, the sun, the philosopher's stone, and, as we'll see in the following chapter, gold (CW 5, 9ii, 14).

As Miller reasons, the relationship between the transcendent function and the Self is open to interpretation:

The issue of whether the Self guides the transcendent function or the transcendent function leads to the Self raises an intriguing possibility: that the Self and the transcendent function are different iterations of the same concept, a union of conscious and unconscious.

(2004: 71)

Miller continues to discuss how Jung often collapses these two components of the psyche (the unifier of opposites and the symbol of totality) into the same structure. In his analysis of midlife liminality, Murray Stein follows this practice when he claims that the Greek trickster Hermes is, ‘the archetypal Self in the form of messenger and guide’ (1983: 22). I'll take this perspective as well, by arguing that trickster as a form of the Self (an avatar perhaps) also works to ease the boundaries between conscious and unconscious material. The inner liminal experience might then be thought of as an interim period when the Self attempts to perform this bridging process. It's in this precarious stage, where strands of unconscious material rise to the surface, that a greater sense of perception can potentially develop. Self, transcendent function and trickster can therefore be viewed as interwoven.

Attempting to document trickster's connection to the myriad of unconscious energies driving our thoughts and behavior is beyond the scope of this study. While the Jungian-based properties of the psyche mentioned above are core to Wild/lives, they're only a sample of the archetype's slip-sliding face. ‘I know it when I see it’ has never been a satisfying way of nailing a concept that defies classification. Yet there's always the possibility of grappling with distinguishing features. For trickster, as with porn, the key is to be alert to its cultural manifestations and the force of its movement through us.

Interpretations and applications

Jung argued that, ‘all mythological figures correspond to inner psychic experiences and originally sprang from them’ (CW 9i, para. 457). It's worth noting the resistance to the idea of trickster as a collectively unconscious energy. In the introduction to their edited collection of essays, Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms (1997), William J. Hynes and William G. Doty make a distinction between trickster as a psychological pattern and a mythological figure of oral/literary tradition, by claiming that archetypal thinking necessitates the clumping of tricksters together as homogenous, universally imagined figures. They distinguish themselves and their fellow authors from this position by insisting: ‘we do not argue for archetypal roots in a transcendental human psyche, and we are less interested in origins than in cultural manifestations’ (1997: 2). This idea of the archetype echoes anthropologist Robert Pelton's claim that, ‘the trickster is not an archetypal idea, but a symbolic pattern that, like the high God or the Divine Mother, includes a wide range of individual figures’ (1980: 3). This kind of thinking displays a limited understanding of what Jung and post-Jungian thinkers understand the archetype to be. A common view of Jung's position is that this patterning, when made conscious through the imagery of dreams, myth or contemporary media storytelling, manifests in a variety of forms and impacts differently on each member of the audience.

As figures of myth, tricksters have been variously described as: ‘culture heroes’; the original agents of fire, water, sun and the division of sky and earth; life/death guides or conveyers of souls to the underworld (psychopomps); transformers able to kick-start progress for the benefit of humanity; and shameless fools. In cross-cultural mythic traditions and contemporary media re-readings, they've been interpreted through a number of perspectives and disciplines including anthropology, linguistics, media, art, drama, education, literature, music, business/management, politics, analytical psychology, gender and religious studies. Although I've discussed trickster and the manifestation of this energy in popular media elsewhere (see Waddell, 2006), the following is a broad scan of research that grapples with the possible meanings and definitions of specific trickster tales.

In his 1980 analysis of the West African tricksters Ananse of the Ashanti (West African Ghana), Legba of the Fon (West African Togo and Benin), Eshu of the Yoruba (West African Nigeria), and Ogo-Yurugu of the Dogon (West African Mali), Pelton understands trickster as a transformer that exposes us to life's complexity, chaos and sacredness. A double-sided character that shape-shifts between sexes and human/animal forms, it encapsulates a potent sense of fertility or becoming that for Pelton, ‘continually provokes intercourse between what is outside man and what is inside him’ (1980: 234). Lawrence Goldman's (1998) reading of Papua New Guinea's child-centered, transformative trickster, Iba Tiri (Iba – water, Tiri – fool) echoes Pelton's trickster attributes, but in a departure from the West African figures, Iba Tiri's direct association with water and Highland water-ways marking territorial boundaries, empowers it with the capacity to nourish and spoil, unite and fragment. Paul Radin's (1956/1972) research on the North American Winnebago Trickster and Hare cycles central to the myths of indigenous Siouan-speaking communities in Eastern Nebraska and Wisconsin, was core to Jung's theorization of trickster as an, ‘archetypal structure of extreme antiquity … a faithful copy of an absolutely undifferentiated human consciousness, corresponding to a psyche that has hardly left the animal level’ (CW 9i, para. 465). The Winnebago's central figure Wakdjunkaga (tricky one) again displays common characteristics of gender/sex transmutation, human/animal hybridity, phallic potency, lust, promiscuity, hunger, profanation, non-fixity, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Verging on wildness: Liminality and trickster
• 2 From the slime to the scream: Pigs, whores and random acts of soiling ∼ Deadwood
• 3 Channeling the ‘inner warrior’: Bear whispering as an extreme sport ∼ Grizzly Man
• 4 Waiting for godonlyknows: The island with agency ∼ Lost
• 5 Lost in space: The pull of a sentient planet and its avatars ∼ Solaris
• 6 Drop and give me ten: The game, the shame, the pain ∼ The Biggest Loser
• 7 Dog day afternoons: Furbabies and hellhounds ∼ Amores Perros (Love's a Bitch)
• 8 Tell me about the rabbits Carol: Fear and misandry in the underworld ∼ Repulsion
• Conclusion
• References
• Film references
• Television references
• Index