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 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. Progress!

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 (see: Blue Valentine) though the girlfriends are contemptuous of such behaviour and end 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 big phallic baton of the animus archetype. In fact, as I was reading them to research this post, I gradually had a nervous breakdown as suddenly I realized everything I've ever written totally sucks and stuff, and my ideas are way off, and I'm too negative, and stuff. In other words, anima bullshit! Direct hit, o inner bee-yatch! 

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 develop and so we find in this film it is 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, the lollipop gelded 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 for the next stage 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 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 to backwoods whiskey stills.

6. Michael Meyers - Halloween (1980)

I was traumatized at 13 just by the preview for this film when it first came out, and 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 and they love each other.

 Jason, Freddie, Chucky and all those copycat 1980s slashers were never scary like Mike Myers. He was 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 shivering because 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 wholooks 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 they're not quite ready to rip all the way 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 order to pine for hopeless 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 a 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, and of course that makes him doubly desirable--the best of both worlds--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 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, power, connections, and a sense of cool that doesn't preclude him keeping a string of bimbos that only we see traipsing past his desk. 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. But by so assiduously avoiding their gaze, Charlie 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 the awesome German cobbler who drops by the speak to drink some beer and read her some 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 book altogether and inserted a letter instead saying she'd misunderstood his teachings and was a big disappointment for being so ambitious and super slutty. 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 old Adolphe 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. Use MEN!