Horror of Women Month: 13 Women and Haunted Girls

The popularity of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo franchise and the #1 box office of Underworld: Awakening the other weekend perhaps the message will be sent to Hollywood to bring us more crazy cold blooded killer women in black, and maybe less dopey journalists hanging around saying, "Lisbeth, you can't kill people just because they've murdered and tortured women" or snot-nosed cops saying "Kate, not all humans are bad!" WRONG!

I've made a few horror of women lists already, but this is ANOTHER one, with the righteous and popular avenger Lisbeth Salander in mind, as well as women who challenge our desire through their beauty and ambiguity, and characters that blur the line between victim and killer, child and monster; red herring and great red shark.  Here they are in order of scariness:

1. Lili Taylor as the Vampire Doctoral Candidate in The Addiction
1995 - dir. Abel Ferrara
***
It's a crime that his intellectual, druggy, black and white film from druggy intellectual director Abel Ferrara isn't out on DVD. NYU doctoral candidate in philosophy Taylor falls into a heroin addiction metaphor vampirism via a bite by Annabelle Sciorra, who tells her "Tell me to leave." After her successfully defended dissertation she throws a big faculty-and-colleagues party at her pad, filling it with newbie academics and the now-bitten characters from earlier and it becomes a blood orgy.

You can smirk if you want at the earnest philosophy, but doctorate students defending their theses really do talk the way Taylor does here, but Taylor does it better, her dusky New York whisper crossing ably over into voiceover philosophical discourse narration as she pores over Nazi atrocity footage. Christopher Walken is the head vampire who gives her clues on what writers she should be reading, citing Burroughs in particular for his writing on addiction. It's that kind of movie, Abel's and screenwriter St. John's most uninhibitedly Godard-esque, but with none of Godard's more wearying sociological interest. Nietzsche all the way....

2. Margaret O'Brien as Tootie in Meet Me in Saint Louis
1944 - dir. Vincente Minelli
****
Just because you're young and 'adorable - aww' doesn't mean you can't be a cold-blooded killer or "the most horrible." Satan bless gentle Vicente Minnelli for allowing a kind of unassimilated chthonic malevolence in this girl to grow unblemished or checked by dorky MGM-enforced sanitization. She is the pre-Lolita Kali energy, the destroyer of worlds. Her dangerous mission to attack the grouchy neighbor has just the right amount of dread to be overcome, it's inherent, possibly anti-semitic vehemence undercut by the neighbor's appropriately outraged reaction.

For the neighbor it's a mini-Stella Dallas moment, for by playing the menacing other he completes the young girl's mythic rite of passage more effectively than his wearing a mask and gorilla hands ever could. And for her part, O'Brien conveys the mix of dangerous glee and the sudden emergence of her first empathic feeling - sadism's awful realization of self, with peer pressure the rocket fuel to go on anyway. Rivalry and peer pressure.... Would man have landed on the moon without it? The idea of course is that 'trick-or-treating' was not yet commodified and was more like a 'mischief night' back in the 1900-era.

3-4. Valda Hansen and Jeannie Stevens in The Night of the Ghouls
1959 - dir. Edward D. Wood
*
This is truly the “Twilight Time” picture for Wood and his shaggy crew. His last waltz, awash in poverty row defeat that makes previous defeats seem like exalted victories, but once 16 year-old Valda Hansen (dig the awesome use of frame in the middle shot atop) as “The White Ghost” appears in her beautiful white gown, crazy nails and long blonde Lillian Gish wig, with cut bangs, like the collapsing point between a blonde Vampira and Dolores Fuller all is well. When she acts in close-up it’s like watching a whole dramatic theater group in action —her eyebrow twitches, eyes bulge, mouth does pirouettes and flashes long beautiful canine teeth. The nervous, whiny cop so touchingly played by Paul Marco in all three of Wood's monster films, empties his cowboy revolver at her and another unarmed woman–the "The Black Ghost" played by Jeannie Stevens--a brunette who wears a goofball crown and Betti Page bangs. With that crown she's like the doll brought in by some kid your mom makes you play with, who insist on inserting her Cleopatra Barbie into your threadbare action figure fantasia. But then Stevens shows up in a second role, as a weird prop closet mannequin in a Max Reinhart faerie wig with absurd punk rock bangs and all is well once again. (more here)

5. Amber Heard as Mandy Lane in All the Girls Love Mandy Lane
 2006 - dir. Jonathan Levine
***
It's hard to figure out what to write about this film, it gets everything right... enough, and there's not much you can say. It's almost Vertigo-esque, with what in his Hitch book Robin Wood called "lordly indifference" to the rules of revelation in suspense (not that I dare give away a single twist). It's a good portrait of presumptuous douche bags getting annihilated and to my mind, the lack of motivation for it all isn't an oversight, it's the icing on a very diverting cake. In style and drive-in aimlessness it makes a good addition to any post-modern grindhouse night, in good company with Death-Proof, Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil and Wild Things and far better than Kevin Smith's attempt, Red State. And best of all, it's all spoken rather than shouted. Heard is very good with a whisper, almost seducing a frazzled druggy blonde in a toss-away moment, and generally confusing the hormones of the horndogs off on one of their rich dad's remote ranches.

6. Megan Fox in Jennifer's Body
2009 - dir. Karyn Kusama
***
Kusama's big breakout film was Girlfight, which may help explain the ease with which strong women characters come tumbling out of Jennifer's Body: "I have a lot of empathy for those girls who just can’t seem to find a place for their kind of energy, their kind of intensity," she said about Girlfight and that seems a good explanation for the strong sense of "perfect click" between screenwriter Diablo Cody's award-winning sass and Kusama's colorful comic book moxy. They're not afraid to linger on a long close-up lesbian kiss or a gut-munching and have the hipster boy toy be the one who cries and pines at home while our heroine goes off and rips the joint up. I could do without the cartoon mouths. (see more here)

7. Dakota Fanning in Hide and Seek
2005 dir. John Polson
*1/2
In her recent films Fanning seems a little blank, but Hide and Seek, while it may suck in a lot of ways, finds Dakota with the brakes off, bugging her eyes, hair black, and as I wrote for Muze, "with her jet black hair, pale skin, and wide blue eyes, she enters the realm of instant horror iconhood as the alternately frightened and frightening Emily." You'll spot the plot twists a mile off, and wonder how many rewrites must have canceled each other out for such a crummy script but whatever, Elizabeth Shue shows up!

8. Chloe Grace Mortez - Let Me In
2009 - dir. Matt Reeves
***1/2
The original vamp was genderless, feral, romanian, darker complexioned than the Nordics areound her, other, Mortez is more like a true shapeshifter, female in a way that overflows boundaries of even a single species, becoming a kind of vampire pitbull when she goes in for the kill. Mortez is clearly the ace of her age group in this list. She's fathomlessly adult, believably hundreds of years old, the way Kirsten Dunst never quite managed to pull off in Interview with a Vampire.

Instead we get the impression that Mortez was never a child, or a human of any sort, that she's some ageless demon who's settled on the girl child form as the most effective in getting people to come too close. And as I wrote for the Nordic issue " If your parent's world sucks, you don't have to live in it - being made into a monster can set you free -- it's not just an affliction, it's a cure. In the end it's about connection on a level that always seems just out of reach when you're so young and so lonesome some winter nights that even the monster under the bed is welcomed like a new best friend." (more here)

9. Fabienne Dali as La Bruja - Kill Baby Kill!
1965 - dir. Mario Bava
****
It takes a few viewings to really appreciate KILL BABY. It's not as highly regarded as some of Bava's other work, which is probably due to a history of bad prints and title changes, but in the beautiful remastering it has now it's my favorite, it's Bava's FOG, the sleeper, the stealth killer of his oeuvre. I suspect if BABY had a more apt title, maybe with 'black' in it, like BLACK MONDAY, it might be thought of in the same reverent tones as Bava's other blacks, SABBATH and SUNDAY. There are beautiful 'old master lighted' bowls of fruit, great wind effects, sedatives ("give her 20 drops") and an array of strange and wonderful women, including an Anna Magnani-ish bruja (Fabienne Dali), a terrified innkeeper's daughter (Micaela Esdra), a stylish and terrified med student named Monica (Erika Blanc)...and

10. Valeiro Valerio as Melissa Graps in Kill Baby Kill!
1965- dir. Mario Bava
To tie the film even deeper into the neutered gender aspect of the original LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, the ghost girl at the heart of the tale is played by a very spooky boy, Velerio Valeri. S/he's so weird, like Italy's Victorian era version of THE BAD SEED times the SHINING's murdered twins divided by Norman Bates in "wouldn't hurt a fly" drag. Not at all inviting the way, say Mortez or Fanning were as blonde child monsters, Valeri's Graps seem frozen in time like one of those weirdly reptillian children in the renaissance century paintings of cupids or baby Jesuses in the Met.  (mo' here)

Cupid by Lucas Cranach the Elder

11. Eihi Shiina as Asami in Audition. 
1999 - dir. Takeshi Miike
****
There are so very few movies where the woman is not only a killer, but a sick, twisted, sexually aberrant type of woman, that Audition would be awesome just for that, but it's also very well directed by that maestro Godard of gross, Takeshi Miike. It sucks you in with its tale of a lonesome widower pretending to hold auditions for an acting gig but really just looking for a girlfriend. He picks the wrong one! As a stand-in for the Japanese salaryman in all his hopelessly patriarchal expectations and double standards, he deserves it. Notes TWI: "the last half hour is so brutal, so grotesque, so disturbing, so violent that you should hang on only at your own risk." I disagree. It's delightful, hilarious, touching, sad, and very poetic and just. You may never look at 'saw wire' the same way again, but you never looked at it before anyway.

12. Beatrice Dalle - Trouble Every Day

2001 - dir. Claire Denis
***

It's that sweet remembrance of things past that suffuses the rest of BETTY BLUE, and lingers on in Claire Denis' TROUBLE EVERY DAY, a glacial, mostly nonverbal film that offers no sense of joy or belonging, only the terror of imagining your own human carnal lust leading you to a grisly agonizing doom; the fate of being ripped apart by a maniacal lover. Such grisly potential forces us as viewers into weird moral positions, like a game of Twister devised by a coked-up pope, as the slow and relentless tug of sexual desire drags lonely people to their deaths like a very long, snaking chain tied to a dropping anchor.I wont spoil the particulars, but the key moment, the grisly highlight, is the sex/devouring scene of Dalle's with a horny neighbor kid who breaks into her locked room, and of course gets far more than he bargained for. Shots of the kids' accomplice downstairs waiting nervously for him, hearing the muffled screams of agony and his ambiguous reaction, reminded me a lot of a key scene, quite similar, in the original I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE. And hey, that's a good thing. (more here).

13. Myrna Loy in 13 Women
1932 - dir. George Archainbaud
***
Imagine of Myrna Loy's Fah Lo Suee character in MASK OF FU MANCHU went off to an ivy league American University, tried to join a sorority and was snubbed for being Asian American. That's kind of the backstory to the film you need to know, because knowing a dish best served cold is on the way helps you endure sleep-inducing scenes of the ladies of the sorority (now 'grown' and led by Irene Dunne) meeting on sunny stage-bound verandas for tea and gossip. Meanwhile Loy meets with her devoted astrologer, Swami Yogadaci (the ever villainous C. Henry Gordon) on a much cooler set, to figure out how and when to assassinate her former snubbers. Loy's the villain, ostensibly, but you'll be rooting for her all the way (unless you've never felt the sting of a snubbing yourself). The big train chase finale is superb!
Ascetic Sensualist Junius Pond notes:

Myrna Loy’s evil mastermind [being a "half-Hindoo, half-Japanese" woman who came here from India, her name is "Ursula Georgi" of all things] has some long and sincere speeches about her isolation at school, and how irrational it was that “you whites and your Kappa society” refused to accept her.  The commercial failure of this movie might have to do with how this character, who looks like a stereotypical villain, gets to explain herself in an articulate way instead of just being a target for boos and hisses. 

Right on, the rubes hated complex motivations in their bad guys, and some still do! That in itself should let you know, 13 WOMEN is a film you'll want to see again and again, especially since parts of it are better than Nyqil, which then makes the weird Loy sequences all the more dreamlike as you gaze on them with one eye open.

That's the list! Admittedly random as it is, moving from girl to woman, to child to wolf killer, it can hopefully counterbalance the Super Bowl's testosterone and endless promos for Smash. 

PS - I know it's not 'Horror of Women' Month (see the top title), it's 'Women of Horror' Month! But sometimes dyslexia carries it's own peculiar relevance. Smash! 

Be sure to check out last February's 'Women of Horror' List!

The Animus Variations (Archetype Series #3)

"He gives the woman spiritual firmness, an invisible inner support that compensates for her outer softness." ~ Man and His Symbols ~ Carl Jung

 The Jungian archetype of the animus is a different beast, literally, than the ethereal anima. Like it's feminine conscious twin it plays many parts - unicorn, daemonic lover or rapist, a symbol of the raw animal violence wrought upon a maturing girl's body by maturity, mensturation, marriage, reproduction, 9-5 jobs, and sex. He can appear in dreams and films as a lover, a son, a killer, a phantom, academic advisor, old Nietzschean shoemaker, father, brother, horse, pizza delivery boy, werewolf boy or a zombie prince depending on the work you've done to exhume his corpse from the basement of your brain.

According to Jung the animus-dominated female never questions the rightness of her beliefs, presuming that her inner voice knows what it's talking about... because it's a man, leading to difficulty with a real life man because if he has any balls he will object to being forced to be a second class citizen under the rules and edicts of her inner father. She's like that hot blonde conservative Elizabeth Hasselbeck. But then Hasselbeck surprises us by being pro-gay marriage, so there you go.

Like animus-dominated women, anima-dominated men tend to believe everything their animas tell them. Mistaking the inner feminine voice for some kind of holy ghost, these poor chaps become sensitive new age males, and they shack up with animus-dominated girlfriends to boss them around like their own anima does, though the girlfriend is contemptuous of them and ends up going for the guy who ignores everything she says because he's either at a way more primitive or advanced level of psychological development.

Jung's caught shit for sexist animus analysis over the years, but we must remember he was after all a man of his time, and was it he who was dissing animus-dominated women or was the dissing coming from Jung's own bossy anima? Luckily female Jungians like Maria Von Franz, Demaris S. Wehr, and Ann Belford Ulanov have picked up the baton on the anima archetype. In fact, as I was reading them to research this post, I gradually had a nervous breakdown as suddenly I thought everything I ever wrote or did totally sucks and stuff, and my ideas are way off, and I'm too negative, and stuff. In other words, anima bullshit! Direct hit, ladies.

In approx. ascending order: 

 

1. King Charles as 'The Pi" - National Velvet (1944)

"Because it represents mind and spirit, Spirit, the Animus is often expressed in an abstract manner. As many young girls know, our sexuality can be quite involved with the horse and the rider. Many young girls learn to masturbate while horseback riding."(Nancy Fenn)

2. The Scarecrow, Tin Man, Lion, Toto / Seven Dwarfs 

 Here the animus is just beginning to anthropomorphicize, so snapshots from the development process find it stuck halfway between an abstraction like a lion, axe handle or horse and a 'human' or in the case of the seven dwarfs, comically neutered and non-threatening. The dwarfs in Snow White and the tin man / lion / scarecrow / Toto /wizard all represent, if you will, gay BFFs from a John Hughes joint,  nonthreatening and chivalrous to our heroine, though perhaps brave and deadly to her foes, in short they are training wheels for the coming relationship with a more genuinely daemonic masculine energy.

3. Robert Pattinson as Edward in Twilight

Edward is an excellent dream lover/animus because he's not projected onto some other man, like a father or teacher, but on, essentially, a tree, a wall, a window shade, the waves of the Pacific. The backlash against the series is even explained by the nature of the animus, as Jung notes: 

"Not all the contents of the anima and animus are projected . . . many of them appear spontaneously in dreams and so on, and many more can be made conscious through active imaginations. In this way we find that thoughts, feelings, and affects are in us which we would never have believed possible. Naturally, possibilities of this sort seem utterly fantastic to anyone who has not experienced them himself, for a normal person "knows what he thinks." Such a childish attitude on the part of the normal person is simply the rule, so that no one without experience in this field can be expected to understand the real nature of the anima and animus. . . . Those who do succeed can hardly fail to be impressed by all that the ego does not know and never has known." (more) 

 4. The Beast / Prince in Beauty and the Beast

"Belle becomes prisoner to a hairy surly Animus who has imprisoned her weak and impotent father (symbolically showing that the old model of the masculine will no longer do, but the new one is still rather rough at the edges).  Through the transformative power of love, Beast is released from the spell of his karma (his previous narcissism that invited the witch’s spell that would teach him empathy) and Belle is able to unite with her idealized masculine.  The fact that in the Disney film Beast is way sexier than his transformed and tepid prince charming self speaks both to the stultifying effects of Disney on true individuation, while hinting that the “Magic Kingdom’s” trickster often comes up with truly dynamic characters (but usually the “bad” or “evil” ones) and the sexiness of the “bad” is a great clue to the real workings of the animus." (Bruce - Vampires: chick magnet, mirror or animus?)

5. Bela Lugosi as Dracula (1931)

Dracula is not just a demon lover, he is a corpse, a bat, a ghostly mist, a dog running across the lawn (unseen by the camera) and as such the inescapable incubus. The men around victimized Mina think some wolf's bane and garlic hung in Mina's window can keep her safe, and then they all go downstairs to the study to drink and talk, leaving her all alone at the other end of the great mansion, vulnerable to a myriad of dream approaches. Of course this is annoying - why can't they just all take turns sitting up with her while she sleeps? But such a thing would be impossible, for the dream lover is patient, waiting in the coming dark, simmering in the shadows until the Victorian repression creates an explosion similar to what sometimes happens in backwoods whiskey stills, or oil drilling.

6. Michael Meyers - Halloween (1980)

I was traumatized just by the preview for this film when it first came out; even as a teenager it disturbed me. That's why I love the above photo, a reminder that at the end of the day, killer and victim are just two aspects of the same psyche and Michael Myers is just an offshoot of Jamie Lee Curtis' sexual anxiety and they're both just actors in the same madcap farce.

 Jason, Freddie, Chucky and all those copycat 1980s slashers were never scary like Mike Myers. He is the ultimate and original 'slasher' because he came to kill us where we actually lived, in the banal suburbs, not in some coal mine or closed camp site or prom train, but right there, where we all were, shivering as the October shadows got longer every day on the way home from school, shivering in our beds at night because this monster might be loose in our own neighborhood, and we knew he could not only kill us, he might even be us.

Now that I'm out of the danger zone (i.e. old and not a virgin) I watch Halloween all the time, the original version, and it's finally apparent that Michael really loves Laurie Strode and just likes scaring her, chasing her around, letting her stab him with hangers and sewing needles, and of course killing all her friends as biblical payback for their surrendering to mindless hormonal desires instead of making popcorn and watching The Thing with her on Halloween. And like Marlon Brando at the end of Last Tango In Paris, Michael is shot right at the moment his mask comes finally off and the invincible boogey man is revealed (for all his automaton shambling) to be just a disturbed boy man, as I dimly remember he looks like Mark Ruffalo. 

In that sense he's the ideal animus for a girl during the bloody process of mutating from girl into woman, the time when Edwards and horses and five-speed vibrational tin woodsman just won't cut it anymore, but you're not quite ready to rip yourself open. He's the nightmare fantasy projection of the fear felt by Irina in Cat People, the fear that your desire might just kill someone if you ever let it out of the basement, and he also fits what  Maria Von Franz calls 'the dark animus' which wraps its host in "a cocoon of dreamy thoughts, filled with desire and judgments about how things 'ought to be', which cut a woman off from the reality of life." And we might add, justifies her animus's old testament 'correction' methods.

7. Marc Wahlberg in Fear (1996)

"It could of all been different Mr. Walker. You should have let nature take its course... " 

 When good anima projections go bad, look out. This clever enough to be dumb mix of Fatal Attraction, Straw Dogs, and Looking for Mr. Goodbar is, to my mind, the unofficial Halloween 2, wherein our gamin has moved from penetration anxiety represented by Michael Myers to the anxiety of dissolving ego boundaries that the first flush of real sexual pair bonding can bring. Wahlberg does a great job as a jacked psycho wooer and it all makes a zippy reminder that there are no shortcuts to animus integration. If a guy seems too good to be true, he's usually neither. Check under the hood, and follow him home to his skater squat. 

The above quote shows the tricky deals the animus is all about - the sense that 'this could have been paradise but you fucked it up, and now you deserve the hurt I'm going to bring.' but smart women know this is all just head games. The tricky old animus will say whatever it knows you want or are afraid to hear, after all, it created the wanting and the fear. The woman's job is to sort through the ultimatums and judgments, and not to mistake vehemence for authority.

8. Clark Gable /Leslie Howard split - Gone with the Wind (1939)

Scarlett O'Hara's refusal to choose her more potently realized animus, wild beast tamer Rhett Butler, in favor of fey Ashley Wilkes shows her refusal to move, as it were, from Camp Edward to Camp Wahlberg. Butler is a true daemonic male, with strange powers and deep sexual current that transcends the borders and boundaries of Scarlett's fading antebellum world. Wilkes is the pale prince of the old order. It's not until she can actually have Wilkes, i.e. he is made 'tangible' that his effete meekness repulses her rather than attracting her, and she is finally ready to submit to the contradictory impulses of her Rhett. And of course, that's Rhett's cue to move out, but that of course makes him doubly sexy to her and her determination to win him back shows a dawning self awareness of her own 'dance of intimacy.'

9. Robert Townsend as Charlie - Charlie's Angels

"If we EVER would have seen Charlie's face the show would instantly lose its mystique; it would be the equivalent of a sexual awakening for better or worse... (but) while Charlie remains unseen, the show stays in a perpetual pre-sexual twilight zone. The girls are all basically nuns in this regard, with Charlie as Christ. They are devoted to him as an ideal of mature manhood in the abstract. He is always kind, assured, generous, on top of things, displaying wealth and a sense of cool, like James Bond with a Blofeld style set-up. If the angels could only see his face, they'd be in heaven -- for five seconds--then disillusioned, scrambling to find other screens for their animus projection. In avoiding their gaze, he maintains his all-important air of mystery" (Thy Name is Charlie - 2006)

 

10. Vincent Cassel as Thomas in The Black Swan (2010)

"While Leroy seems at the outset to be somewhat of a sexist, ready to take advantage of Nina, he doesn't. He appears as the manifestation of the animus archetype, having a dangerous potential, but ultimately, his interest is more in bringing out the best of Nina in the performance. It is because of her refusal in the face of his advance that she reserves for herself his respect. He is willing to give her the chance to prove herself worthy. He demonstates his higher aspect when Nina falls for his seduction by rejecting her and turning this into a lesson to Nina that what she has yet to learn is how to seduce. Leroy urges her to begin to discover her sexuality and thusly her darker side. While it may seem harsh treatment, this was symbolic of the very real potential of the animus to induce change and growth as well as guidance in the psyche of a woman. Dr. M.-L. von Franz states, 'But if she realizes who and what her animus is and what he does to her, and if she faces these realities instead of allowing herself to be possessed, her animus can turn into an invaluable inner companion who endows her with the masculine qualities of initiative, courage, objectivity, and spiritual wisdom.'" (L. Ray Haines)

11. Harvey Keitel in The Piano (1993)  

"As it happens we do not observe the fourth stage of animus development in The Piano because Ada does not reach it. This final phase parallels the advanced evolution of a man’s anima. In it men and women consciously develop and share contrasexual traits in their relationships, so that each can love both the dominant and the subordinate gender characteristics in their partners. The man can admit to his feminine elements, the woman to the masculine in her. This then represents from the woman’s perspective the final stage of animus development with which we began. It enables her to escape from the third stage, fixation in which can mean self-loss because she risks sacraficing the momentum of her own development by never going beyond the patriarchal definition of the feminine role. (The Piano, the animus and colonial experience 73)

12. Alphonse Ethier as Adolph Craig in Baby Face (1933)

Abused and pimped out by her beer hustling father since the age of 14, Stanwyck's 1933 pre-code heroine could be forgiven for having a pretty crappy animus, but actually she has a great one in awesome German cobbler who drops by the speak to drink some beer and read her Nietzsche. Before she kills (?) her no good father and leaves for the city, the German tells her to "use men!" Later he sends her a copy of Nietzsche's Thoughts out of Season with this passage underlined:

"Face life as you find it, defiantly and unafraid! Waste no energy yearning for the moon! Crush out all sentiment!" 

The censors didn't want young women finding out about this kind of power so they edited out the title book altogether and re-shot the cobbler's monologue to make it more about being a good little girl. HarumpH! The point is, the 'real' version has been found and restored! Animus triumphant! Even if she ends up wasting energy yearning for moon-faced George Brent, Babs' goldigger still has a first class animus in her ruthless cobbler, the only man in her life who hasn't hit on her and who therefore she can trust. Sorry, but Craig just wants to instill some genuine revolutionary insight into a girl who, if our nation had its way, would just stay in the coal country where she 'belonged' and obey her father's brutal pimp edicts. I would say in this case Babs chose her animus wisely.

12 Animas in Descending Ghost Order: (Archetype #2)

Jung described the anima--the ego of the feminine unconscious to the male conscious mind--as like the sphynx or the Mona Lisa - enigmatic, cryptic, mostly silent - neither alive nor dead nor undead, but a dweller in the space beyond such trivialities. Her refusal to be known to her outer male is perhaps an underlying cause of so much patriarchal oppression in our conscious world. We can't silence her midnight reproaches so we try to silence her outer projections. In order to placate her we must make an effort to 'find out what she wants' through much patient sitting in asanas and art; she is the ultimate 'unknown' that the male ego spends its life trying to seduce, make contact with, burn, capture on canvas, harness, destroy, embrace... but she can never be known or possessed, only accepted and embraced as the enigma she is.

Erich Kuersten "Nightmare Alley" 2003

Man projects her into his girlfriends, wives, daughters, and most of all, the girls of the movies and of his dreams. The impossibility of desire for an image--the ghostly obsession of Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo for the 'nonexistent' Madeline, or the town of Twin Peaks for Laura Palmer; or the inevitable pull of the devouring anima, her reproaches and condemnation as inescapable as death itself, as with the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute, or the ghost vengeance of a Jess Franco nymphomaniacal heroine like Maria Rohm in Venus in Furs. Or there's her inescapable nurturing, her madonna-like perfection mocking your violent failings, as with  Jessica Chastain in Tree of Life (below).

Eye's dark pupil, mirrored

Some feminist critics might decry these characters as unreal or male fantasies, but they miss the point - they are male fantasies but who is doing the fantasizing? Perhhaps it is the other way around, our inner anima fantasizing life as a man looking at herself in his mirror.

Men can't control their unconscious (by definition) any more than we can (most of us) decide what we want to dream about when we sleep. If a man can make peace with his anima, either through art, meditation, astral voyaging, lucid dreaming, good deeds, or just accumulated wisdom, he is en route to becoming a 'whole' soul. The anima steps out of the shadows of the unconscious, halfway, and he steps into it, halfway, and they are married in the Jungian reunification alchemical ritual.  But he will never understand her, never know her except in what she wants to reveal.
 

1. Kate Hepburn - Bringing up Baby (1938)

In comedy there is the Shakespearian / Hawksian elemental aspect - the sprite who raises mischief and chaos in her drive to expose the male ego to the chthonic forces of nature, rather than civilizing herself like the old west, she wildernesses the civilized, she forced the westward expansion to, at last, contract., ala Hepburn in Bringing up Baby or Carole Lombard in anything, or Paula Prentiss in Man's Favorite Sport?

 Katherine Hepburn doesn't normally embody the anima, she's too independent, her own woman, too conscious and wily, but she could do it if she had the aid of animal familiar, especially if it happened to a be leopard. Cary Grant's absent-minded paleontologist has been keeping his right-brained feminine unconscious on such a tight leash it finally snaps in the form of golf balls, car theft, sock burning, crazy phone calls, clothes theft, bone burying dogs, and finally a vicious leopard shadow twin to her trained leopard Baby, singing all the while.

2.  Laura Palmer - Twin Peaks / Fire Walk with Me

Bobby: 

Hey! Where were you for the last hour. I've been looking all over for you.

Laura:

I was standing right behind you, but you're too dumb to turn around. 

"Women who are of 'fairy-like' character especially attract such anima projections, because men can attribute almost anything to a creature who is so fascinatingly vague, and can thus proceed to weave fantasies around her." - Maria Von Franz

3. Maila Nurmi as Vampira

"I once loaned Maila a copy of Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols. In particular, I wanted her to read the chapter on the “anima,” Jung’s term for female archetypes – witches, goddesses, vampires, saints, etc. – that are actually fantasy projections of the inner male psyche, i.e., of the male’s unacknowledged feminine aspects. (When a woman does it, the projection is known as an “animus.”) After returning the book Maila declared, “I am an anima.” - C. Jerry Kutner (BLAD 1/11/08)

4. Brigitte Bardot

"It is better to be unfaithful than faithful without wanting to be."

Bardot is a hero of mine for her decisison to use her money and fame to bring attention to animal cruelty, The Brigitte Bardot foundation. She understands her mythic anima resonance--her remote silence that covers men in repfroachful invitation--and she adds the mundi --she's now anima mundi. 

 

5. Marlene Dietrich 

"Mystery is a woman's greatest charm," Dietrich famously said. She embodied that. Like Bardot and Garbo, she became reclusive once her looks could no longer be maintained or the maintenance become a bother. They were perhaps the first three true artists of the anima persona. They sacrificed a normal later life so their anima cachet could resonate forever as the true vampires of our century; the anima of the movie siphoning the energy of our desire until we fall back, weakened by masochistic reverie, romantic memories dredged up from our dating history and absorbed into the celluloid of the vampire anima, lighting up her skin in that Von Sternberg latticework shadow 'lectricity. In witholding herself from her image, our inner projection of the anima finds its focus for the first time, like a dead ship igniting into windswept sails and mizzenmast hoisting. 

 6. Kim Novak in Vertigo

"The movie turns on the slightly malicious question, "Who is Kim Novak?" a question which becomes more frightening, and unanswerable, once the secret of her dual identity within the film is revealed. The initial sequences, for all their beauty in summoning up the enchantment of the anima archetype, belong to a familiar-enough theme in psychology and art--the man as victim of seduction. The fall of James Stewart's character Scottie into "acute melancholia complicated by a guilt complex" is what he deserves from biting into this familiar apple. Indeed, the cumulative kitsch elements of the romance--the staginess of the exposition of the preposterous plot; the tourist's view of San Francisco's prettiness in the long, languishing silent sequence; the poor quality of the "museum painting" of the nineteenth-century woman Kim Novak is supposed to be obsessed by; the monotonous unreality Novak brings to the reading of her lines; and the ponderous earnestness of James Stewart as he becomes her victim--all have a wearying effect, much like the depression of coaddiction." - John  Beebe (The Anima in Film) 

7. Lana Del Rey

The critics who attack Del Rey for her 'makeover' from  her old Lizzie Grant self show in their hostility just how effective the Del Rey persona is as an anima for our modern era. She is the Marlene Dietrich of her time, and we should remember that Marlene too had a make-over upon coming to Hollywood -- losing 30 pounds and her back molars, among other modifications. There's not a single Hollywood star, I'm fairly sure, who is 100% 'real' according to these detractors' definition. So it speaks to the raw archetypal sore spot Rey's poked that so many critics feel they must attack her, while others, like me, feel they need to defend her. When you become a pop culture archetype it's not even 'about' whether you're 'real' or not; if someone tells you they had a dream about a witch would you say, "bro, that witch is totally fake"? Of course not. What's important is that Del Rey is the anima of 2012 - the amnesiac succubus; the Diane Selwyn of Mulholland Dr. 2012 - "this is the girl. Her seemingly augmented visage is like if Madeline / Novak had plastic surgery to resemble the portrait of Carlotta Veldez.... or

8. Rita Hayworth as Gilda

Del Rey's weird lips make her a kind of anime comic book version of Rita Hayworth, who famously said "they go to bed with Gilda but wake up with me." But Hayworth never bowed to the pressures of being an anima, of trying to be Gilda's living archetypal image, the anima rather bowed to her insistence through all the shimmering womanhood that she was indeed a woman. Her image is strong enough it can thrive even in such a prison, thus Stephen King's novella "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" That's why I always get a little sick watching Gilda - the feeling of suffocation caused by her seedy choice of men, nameley the very square headedand seemingly shorter than her Glenn Ford, who tries to rope her off the way those icky brothers all tried to rope BB in ... and God Created Woman (1957), by cockblocking her, stifling her libidinal-elemental archetypal freedom.

9. Ava Gardner as Pandora in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951)

Di Chirico "The Profit," 1915

No one was going to cockblock or stifle Ava Gardner's libidinal-elemental archetypal freedom. Not a possessive homicidal bullfighter, a racing car driver, or any of the would-be suitors who dash themselves upon her rocks. Only James Mason, the original flying dutchman who promises her deathless timeless love aboard his slick craft, even knows what to do with all her aching archetypal beauty. And he embraces her enigmatic grace first by painting her before she even meets him, and then after she angrily blots out her face with white he incorporates the white into a De Chirico type mask, restoring and enhancing her unknowable elemental mystery rather than trying to reign it in like all the other men. An archetype himself, he whisks her from the time-bound concerns of mortal men and into the constellations where she belongs, something born out not by the rather muted British direction but by Jack Cardiff's breathtaking Black Narcissus-level of color.

 10. 3-Way Tie: a. Gene Tierney as Laura (1944)

Falling in love with a painting is easy. Your anima projects right onto it like a silver screen. But if the painting comes to life, as you so devoutly wish, all of a sudden it's not a silver screen but a dark, swirling muddy mess of paint that never dries and thinks you're beneath her social class. Dana Andrews is terrified as now his unconscious feminine ego is outside of his own unconscious and freed into byzantine reality where he can't 'own' it as he'd like.

b. Rebecca (1940)

The painting of dead Rebecca on the other hand is so strongly projected onto by the anima of her still living and ever-brooding Laurence Olivier that his real life new young wife played by Joan Fontaine hasn't a prayer to compete. He loves young Fontaine at least in part because she seems pliable, young and adrift, a good canvas for anima projection, but Rebecca overflows all screens and no one woman can compete with her mythic archetype for a man's love.

C. Ligeia - Tomb of Ligeia  (1964)

All of the Corman Poe cycle films are filthy with devolved animas. Ligeia is the morbid end game of the de-evolution of a psyche where the anima projection screen is suddenly ripped into death. In Laura the woman in the painting was still alive, in Rebecca, dead and in Ligeia, undead, alive in cat form, in other words abstracted into fetish and obsession over cats (this is one of the few films where 'pussy whipped' is a genuine action).

11. Christine Gordon as Jessica Holland in I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Jessica is a great example of the unassimilated anima; the one that will not fade all the way back into the shadows nor merge into the male consciousness even in part - a cross between the madwoman in the attic ala Jane Eyre and the painting of Rebecca. She was evidently Rebecca-esque in life, and now she is halfway into becoming as dead as Rebecca and yet as immortal as her painting. Laura comes back intact, forcing Dana eventually out of the spell. But Jessica comes back as a zombie, halfway to image halfway to life, and works only to cockblock her nurse and tear a tropical island family apart, all while Calypso singer Sir Lancelot recounts their misdeeds. 

12. Dead Wives Club / Women in Refrigerators

I'm not the first to question Leo's insistence on dead wives, check out Nathaniel R's awesome Dead Wives Club poster above. But this entry I thinks answers the question why he always has one. An anima has actually more power in her 'dead' state, she is neither bound up in the eternal sleep of zombie Jessica and the sleeping Snow White nor alive like Laura or Bardot. She is free to rule the psyche of the 'male' consciousness without worry of clashing with the 'real' thing. In other words, unlike Dana Andrews in Laura, Leo never has to worry about his obsession suddenly coming to life and doing un-anima things like taking too long in the bathroom or nagging him about his drinking and intimacy issues. He can just stay up late and guzzle hooch and stare at the photo of her and maybe some dead children, smiling into the camera behind the artistically cracked glass of the picture frame on his bedstand. This is the ideal state for all lazy males - the dead wife allows all the anima interaction to occur deep down in the dream state, so she can't embarass you in front of your friends. Good luck with that Leo! One day a girl will get too close, and your whole dodgy construct of self will cave in!