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!