Choose Death: Revisiting TWILIGHT's Junky Delirium.

"I wanted to fly / she made me feel like I could...." 

- Neil Diamond  ("Shilo" - song about his imaginary friend /childhood anima])

"But we can fly... with these!" -  John Lennon

(showing heroin pills [?] to Yoko  - John and Yoko: A Love Story - TVM- 1985)

"You're like my own private brand of heroin"
--Edward Cullen (to Bella) 

"When you're on junk you don't drink" - W.S. Burroughs (Junky)

"I never drink... wine." - Dracula (Bela Lugosi)

"My name is Bela Lugosi... I've been a morphine addict for twenty years."

-- (Martin Landau) - Ed Wood

Bella, flanked by sober, aging air-breathers

Vampirism is every young girl's dream, presuming, that is, that she's smart enough to realize her 'fairest of them all' Snow Whiteness will wither to mirror-mirror aging diva tantrums before she even knows what hit her. If she be fair of feature--and self-confident enough to see that there is, indeed, a lovely young woman in the mirror looking back at her--and if she be wise enough to know that if she's ever to bid surcease time's incessant wrinkly pawing, she cannot help but crave any drug or face cream that might slow mortality's downward spiral.

Small price to pay, killing off your inner Snow White via the junky huntsman, if it means no wrinkles, or baggy eyes, or weight gain, ever. The writing on the mirror-mirror - 'sic transit venustas'.

And if there's no such thing as vampirism or eternal youth, well, some drugs come a close second.

Slowing time to a crawl, killing the appetite and sleep cycle, certain addictive drugs give one the feeling of invincible confidence. Slipping off the leaden coat of teenage insecurity with ease, we slide beyond the mortal concerns of human body maintenance; drugs, love, and vampirism replace glazed-eyed homogenous breather-eater lockstep with an unending thirst, but it's worth it... for some of us. Some of us never feel comfortable in our own skin until we puncture it. If we have to keep puncturing until we're track-marked to open sore ribbons, well, the alternative is worse. For some of us, the thought of living an extra ten years as a senior citizen is a fate literally worse than death. To watch one's Twitter following stagnate, one's zeitgeist fade, the glint of desire going out of the eye of passers-by on the street, surely this is what they mean by 'the living dead.' 

And even more ironic: by the time we know how to use what we've got, it's gone. We realize only when it's absent that something was, once, present. Whether that's an illusion ("happiness is never experienced, only remembered" - old AA proverb) is immaterial. Our minds tell us it would have been possible to hold onto that feeling if only we'd looked harder for the right soul collecting crossroads-dwelling devil.

For the first four films of the Twilight saga, despite her moral boy coterie's protestations, Bella wisely wants to get undead while she's still got that pale flawless skin (her mothers' already shows the results of age and prolonged sun), and that is just one reason why I believe the series so subversive. Bella chooses death. She subverts the fairy tale maturity myth; she jams a crowbar into the wheel of her own maturity. Her saga dually functions, not as  coming-of-age story, but a kind of alcoholic-addict flash-froze fantasia wherein the enchanted bower is returned to with a clear conscience. She's hip to the banality of 'the right choice' as are we, through her eyes. You can argue she merely chooses Edward (Robert Pattinson) and death goes with the deal. 

You can argue Edward is a pretty creepy specimen (old enough to be her great-great grandfather, stalking her and watching her sleep all night after climbing in the window) but he's not really meant as a real person: he's a Jungian archetype, a daemon lover / arrested animus projection --her unconscious mind's ego. Their wedding in film IV represents a union of Self akin to the weddings at the end of fairy tales, i.e. a unification of conscious and unconscious drives into one full awakened human being ready to bring themselves fully into the larger social order as a genuine asset. BUT in Twilight, this unified soul is deliberately stunted, warped, turned carnivorous and threatening to the larger social order. The Twilight saga doesn't reflect the move from bleak Cinderella attic to magic pumpkin coach to married princess -- which would mirror a girl's transition from child to adulthood (the beast becoming the prince)-- but the reverse. Bella moves from sunny Phoenix AZ to the ever-cloudy Forks, WA, like Cinderella choosing to move out of the sunny castle and back to her cozy attic. 

In that sense the series is more a tragedy, wherein unresolved past issues come burbling up to drag our heroine back down, like Antigone, she chooses certain death as a kind of inflexible protest/affirmation of power. She's an embodiment of Joseph Campbell mantra: "When falling, dive." Bella is a Snow White who makes the conscious decision to go back to sleep because she can't be bothered with an awake Prince Charming's cumbersome breathing, snoring, bathroom issues, and beastly eating habits, not to mention all the boring functions one must smile through when one is royalty. Her demon lover demands no attendance at such things; plus he never plays X-Box with his loud buddies all day, or whine when he doesn't get his own way. He doesn't even have a TV. He reads books!

And the idea that Edward has nothing else in his life to do other than read, and to stalk her, protecting her always, is creepy sure, but also relevant to the daemonic animus. The ego to the dark half of our minds, the animus/anima slumbers while our daily waking egoic consciousness goes about its day; it then arises at night to take the ego's place, forcing 'us', the ego, to watch its little plays and dramas i.e. dreams. The anima/animus is the one who literally has no life without us. There is no sun or blue sky for the anima/animus. It can only run loose when we're asleep (or, if we're artists and writers, performers or mystics or schizophrenics, i.e. truly awake). 

Edward's daemon lover archetype ancestry stretches back to the grim roots of myth itself; the roots reach down deep to Eros and Psyche and up through the Romantic poetry of Keats and Shelley, the daemon undead druggy lovers of Coleridge, the Bronte sisters, Poe, La Fanu, and Stoker finally up to the Anne Rice 90s before climbing up to the ultimate teenage Gothic animus, and a vivid portrait of a junky or alcoholic in the early stages of withdrawal, Edward. His reactions to her when they're first paired together in science class are the most accurate depiction of early stage withdrawal I've ever seen. And I should know. He reacts to her like I react to sitting next to a whiskey highball when I'm cranky and irritated and everyone around me is laughing and drinking and I know that just one big sip from that person's glass and I'd be laughing and no longer miserable, and since the glass is right there, offered to me, each minute of not downing it is hell + compounded interest. 

I recently re-watched the entire 5 film Twilight series as it was all playing on one cable channel or other last month, and after the entirety of around 12 hours of film it definitely holds up, especially if you really like dark purples and sad chick music. And lastly, it's great because, for me at least, it's guilt-free, there's no objectification of the female body; rather, we have a rare example of the 'female gaze' sd ythr the sole sex appeal on display comes from the shirtless boys. The fact that the sex appeal of these young men does nothing for me compels me to realize that maybe my vague discomfort is how most women go through their movie watching life, enduring vast stretches of unconscious sexism and objectification, not to mentions gunfights. In Twilight: New Moon Bella goes to the local cinema with her mortal, age-appropriate friend Jessica (Anna Kendrick) and coming out laments how crappy the film was, mainly as there's "No hot guys kissing anybody." Imagine, a film daring to lament such a shallow thing! Then I remember Dracula again. I remembered Bela Lugosi commenting on how Dracula appealed mainly to women:

 "It is women who bear the race in bloody agony. Suffering is a kind of horror. Blood is a kind of horror. Women are born with horror in their very bloodstream... It is women who love horror. Gloat over it. Feed on it..." 

And also, in a way, it is the woman in me, my own dream lover anima, my ego's dark unconscious shadow, who loves Bella as a projector screen for herself, for each anima and animus has their own inner daemons to work through, and so it goes, in fractals either direction. My anima rewards me with dreams of paradise (which for some reason is a cavernous basement with concrete floors and VHS tapes on benches and vague memories of having a fling with my friend's hot young mom, who is not the same mother who actually lived there. Her husband's always away--if I can find my way down there and pick a romantic shallow pool, she meets me. I wake up thrilled, longing to recapture my memories of this hidden underground sanctuary. Other times, this basement looks like a cross between some secret room in a Vincent Price movie, the basement lair of Hammer's THE REPTILE, the presidential bomb shelter at the end of TERMINATOR 3 and Bellevue's old hydrotherapy room. Either way, it is my happy place.

Maybe I am prejudiced; Dracula is my favorite horror character. Bela Lugosi is my favorite horror actor, and next to William S. Burroughs, also my favorite junky. And even Bella's name conjures his memory. So it's sad that so many critics I normally respect tow the sexist party line when discussing the Twilight series, never seeing past the 'teen phenomenon' hooplah. Meanwhile these critics respect, some even revere, the more boy-friendly Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings/Hobbit, and Star Wars sagas, which have twenty films between them (so far) and about that same number of  lines spoken by women. Unless they're princesses to be admired from afar, to be kissed before they turn out to be your own sister, and so forth, women seem to be unwelcome in these franchises, yet these films get way more respect in general critical consensus. I can only guess Twilight's detractors are nerds who've never done drugs, or had more than one girl or boy interested in them at the same time, if ever. Don't blame Bella for that, dipshit!

If you're like me, with a loud, bothersome anima who withholds great sentence structure and inspiration from your writing on a whim, then you know she loves movies that feature crazy women she can project onto; and so you know she will reward thee with vast acres of flowing prose when she gets to lock onto an Angelina Jolie in Girl Interrupted or a Natalie Portman in Black Swan, or a Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion, or even Anthony Perkins in Psycho. (Right at the moment I wrote his name, Bogie says "You're a good man, sister" on TCM behind me - synchronicitous!)  Twilight's rife with such crazy feminine energy. My anima loves that it is not life-affirming but a solid romantic mood poem-- tortured as Edward Burne-Jones trying to score laudanum at the strip mall-- and an exoneration of the death wish underwriting everything from self-cutting and anorexia to just partying like there's no tomorrow or even just sleeping late and missing school, going from rainy day "Gloomy Sunday" blues to hooking up with a pallid junky and getting involved in 'the life,' understanding what that means, fully cognizant of all that will be lost, yet nonetheless daring to answer 'not to be' when Hamlet asks his mortal question. To not only dive but to choose to fall, that is the only way we can prove to ourself we're actually free not to.

Only rubes would think such a choice is evil, and that one should dutifully bow to the demands of the life-choosing next-stage animus, the mature woman's bossy inner-father. The woman's demonic lover turns to paternal inner critic and lecturer. Under his rule, she endorses sanctified institutions without question, trusts doctors, school principals, fathers, husbands, and politicians over her own better judgment or her child's tearful tales of abuse. Belittling her husband, mistaking the vehemence of her emotional response to a stimuli for its importance, this new animus argues over SUV parking spots at the kids' soccer practice, feels the need to remodel the kitchen, run for PTA appointments, hire babysitters scrupulously, monitor her children's friend choices, and even approve her own gradual arrival at an assisted living domicile. Tradition and boredom are championed as worthy in themselves as her staid animus gives her a feeling of total belief in her pro-patriarchal stance. We can see women dominated by this stage of the animus in the Tea Party: Michelle Bachman, Sarah Palin, and Ann Coulter let their animus possess them even at the expense of their own gender's liberty. It's just as much about being 'captured' by the animus now as it was at the Edward stage, only now its not interesting. It's only near the final 'second childishness' stage of Shakespeare's seven ages that the younger daemon lover animus returns, to shepherd these 'healthy' choice-making woman into the void. This is even pictured in New Moon, wherein Bella dreams of being all super old and Edward as young as ever, waiting patiently all this time for her to be done with the 'living' he so wishes for her. 

To understand the beauty of Bella's rejection of this fate requires perhaps the mindset of the addict, living in a world of fantasy and altered perceptions, the sort of girl who stays upstairs reading fantasy novels when the sun's out or the one who's depressed and in misery until a hot older drug dealer and his drugs combine to sweep her off her feet. They commit to their daemon lover, refuse to let him go, to consign him to dreams barely had anymore. Sure the choice to stick with this demonic animus is not healthy but who cares? The women who choose to keep their daemon as their animus are our romantic heroines in the truest sense; forsaking the daemon may allow them to exit the fantasy and enter the social order (to upgrade animus projections), but who needs another normal well-adjusted girl? Not the readers and seers and livers-in of fantasy. 

"Many myths and fairy tales tell of a prince, who has been turned into an animal or a monster by sorcery, being saved by a woman. This is a symbolic representation of the development of the animus toward consciousness. Often the heroine may ask no questions of her mysterious lover, or she is only allowed to meet him in darkness..." - Marie-Louise von Franz

 Reality is seldom operating anywhere close to a teenager's inner state. Myths are truer than reality in that sense; they are not at all sentimental, for as Jung notes: "Sentimentality is a superstructure covering brutality" (i.e. John Ford). Myths are terrifying because they unveil that which was hidden for a reason. They are beguiling, addictive; once the light is shown over that shadowed corner of the psyche, the grateful prisoner chained in that corner rewards you with hordes of little treasures its stolen from you on the sly ever since you chained him there (usually around your first day of school): bottles of endorphins and dopas and artistic inspiration its fermenting for just such an illumination. Gradually he gives out less and less for more and more liberty to run rampant in your psyche, doing more damage, costing you jobs, friends, and lovers. There's no line between being rewarded with one's own stolen treasures and mistaking them for gifts and being held hostage in the zone between a daemonic dream lover's ardent wooing and crippling drug addiction, the result either way is a delirious Stockholm syndrome high if you know how to treat the agonies and despair of withdrawal as just another kind of masochistic kick, the muscle ache and burning skin just love 'not given lightly' by your inner whiplash girl child in the dark. Similarly, alcoholism, self-cutting, eating disorders, drug addiction all carry a similar loss of control. In the first film especially human blood is the ultimate narcotic for vampires, the 'vegetarian' diet of animals just barely keeps the Cullen clans satisfied. Being around Bella, for Edward, and not killing her, is as hard as it would be for me to have just one drink. The impossibility of moderate drinking for me (I'd consider keeping it down to seven drinks a night a triumph of self control).

"The pain was my only evidence he was real." - Bella 

Enlightenment doesn't occur from sitting around visualizing images of light, but from integrating the darker aspects of the self into the conscious personality. -- Jung

Blood, the life, love: over the course of five films Bella never has a single real hobby other than desire for Edward, anything else engaged in just a distraction; bringing junked motorcycles onto the reservation for Jake (the werewolf) to fix isn't because she likes him romantically but because the image of Edward shows up whenever she does 'something stupid' - i.e. crashing into a tree. Her various death-defying attempts conjure the spirit of Edward saying "Bella, don't" - trying to wrap her in his overprotective shroud, playing the latter stage animus in place of the dream lover (as above, the promise to return at her death bed). But Bella's misery wobble framing steadies around Jake and Stewart shows she's a far better actress than given credit for, as she modulates brilliantly from pale, shocked jiltee, to anguished grieving misery, to playful and sharp-witted, as often happens when one can tell the person they're hanging with is in love with them, and is therefore a captive audience. Bella's using Jake, really, as exploitative in her way as the first poison-brained white trader to swap furs and bear skins for two-cent trinkets. And using someone to get over someone else is not cool, yet how else are you going to do it?

And that's why Bella is so great both as a character and as Stewart's performance: she is not just one person, she has many facets and not all of them are admirable but Stewart plays the less admirable as if they were admirable, which is admirable in itself. When geeky mouth breathing classmate Mike (Michael Welch) finds out she's been dumped, he awkwardly asks her out to a movie with a romantic title like 'first kiss' or something and she snaps, "How about 'Face Punch' have you seen that?" as if she just made it up to send him a clear signal she's not into him.  That Face Punch turns out to be a real movie hardly matters to the brilliance of the scene--its refreshing savagery, it's code of small talk revealing the elaborate complexities of trying to keep clueless guys from hating you while spurning their advances. It probably wasn't even a real movie before she mentioned it. She creates the future before her like a reverse wake, like a zipper uniting the conscious and unconscious halves of psychic jacket, Edward and Jacob zipped together into androgyne Bela.

I can really only think of one or two heroines in film who measure up to that level of realistic fuckerwithery: Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind and Cathy in Wuthering Heights. Out of touch critics in the house can't rear back like startled horses over those ladies' behaviors as they do with Bella's, because they're old established literary classics, written by, not surprisingly, female authors. Each has a character smart enough to act like she doesn't know how smart she is, who slouches and mopes and takes advantage of seeming obtainable but is really quite grandiose and fierce, who plays coy and clueless about how much various boys are crazy over her: a total of traits that, in the rom-com world, would be the purview of bitchy villains, not protagonists. They each have two boys madly in love with them, one wild and dangerous and one anemic but reliable. The twist in Twilight is that the wan, pale anemic one is the unreliable love choice -- the vibrant anima mundi-reflection of the Jake / Rhett / Heathcliff is relegated to the lesser mortal bin, the wolf boy; Edward's name even sounds like Edgar, who marries Cathy and becomes as subjected to her capriciousness just as Jake is at the mercy of Bella's in Twilight. 

It's this reversal I most resonate with, because Bella is more than just one of a series of female-penned wantons daring to reappropriate the gaze, she is also one of the 'hurrah for the next who dies'-style lost generation, the Lucy Westerna rather than the Mia Harker. She is the modernist woman 'who chooses death,' realizing in it a truer choice (as in free will) than the one of life and health and mortality because among other things it's a choice that gives her a chance to stare down her fears, to embrace the demon and daemon, to ride over the cliff and into legend rather than get old and fat. Such women include Evelyn Venable in Death Takes a Holiday, Kate Winslet in Titanic, Assumpta Serna in Matador, both chicks in Thelma and Louise, Ava Gardner in Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, Dietrich in Morocco and Dishonored, Sherri Moon Zombie in The Devil's Rejects.  Only by deliberately choosing to act against their own 'best' interests---with gaggles of men and authority figures trying to talk them out of what they're planning--can these romantic feminine characters be free. Whether that freedom lasts another week or a few seconds is irrelevant. Freedom is beyond such things as time. Sooner death comes, the sweeter the terrifying narcotic immediacy of the remaining life (see: Twilight's Cinematic Ancestors). The movie ends either way, so why not go for broke?

Twilight's reversal-of-logical-maturation metaphor is emblematic of death and addiction but also to the solitary life--that of the writer, a life spent largely with the unconscious, getting to know, as it were, one's second undiscovered second psyche through allowing it as free a reign as possible at the typewriter. The risks are many: madness, depression, and spirals of self-destruction. The animus might not even come to see you. It might disappear for months, absent from all dreams, writer's block. All good free-flowing inspired poetic 'flights of fancy' come from this daemonic other. That's why my favorite of the five Twilight films has been New Moon, mainly because the brilliant intertextual use of Bella's birthday to invoke a range of age-related fears and longings (including the dream where she's super old, perhaps the most honest and strangely honest metaphysical rendering of birthdays since 2001), and a high school English class assignment, Romeo and Juliet, which contextualizes both Bella's various adrenalin-rush seeking self-destructive behavior (she becomes, as her human friend says, disapprovingly, an adrenalin junky) as well as the more obvious (and fascinating) 'rescue' of said animus, preventing it from dissolving and reforming as the next phase of adult maturity takes over and the buzzkill 'always right' tea party drip, the safety-first counselor moves in: "Bela, stop."

Addicts surely relate, but even more cogently than Romeo and Juliet, Twilight's arc of Bella's pitiless insistence on becoming a vampire reminds me of Antigone, wherein she chooses to disobey the king's order and bury her slain brother, knowing full well his burial ensures her death. This loyalty to the dead to the point of a conscious, clear-eyed choice against one's own life, reflects the way feminine contrary fearlessness conquers even fate. You get to tell all the smarmy idiots who 'just want what's best for you' to fuck off; you can place your head in the lion's jaws with no fear:

"I shall lie down
With him in death, and I shall be as dear
To him as he to me.
It is the dead
Not the living, who make the longest demands:
We die for ever… "  -- Antigone 

For Romeo on the other hand, there's just grief fueled by brashness. Rather than Antigone's (or Bella's) cool detached insistence on 'forever' with her love, consider Romeo's coffin-side sonnet:

"... I still will stay with thee,
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again. Here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber maids. Oh, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh. Eyes, look your last.
Arms, take your last embrace. And, lips, O you
The doors of breath, seal with a righteous kiss
A dateless bargain to engrossing death."

Bella meanwhile finds herself the target of a tracker dirtbag vampire in the first film, and must face him but yet "can't begin to regret the choices that brought me face to face with death, they also brought me closer to Edward."

Romeo is seeing death as a negative, of value only to make life's fleeting moments extra sweet, like Edward he finds life precious only via absence. He's a hothead. World-weary flesh? Unlike Edward, Romeo's never been anywhere; his flesh isn't weary from anything but navel-gazing. His act is merely one of youthful grandstanding, a poseur. If he'd just suffered a few beats more he'd be there when she awoke. Rather than Antigone's or Bella's cold, logical insistence, their refusal to judge death as negative, to back down even with death's teeth at their throat, their measured, carefully-thought-out resolve, he acts purely from cowardice (afraid of the continued pain of loss) and impulse.

Sure Bella needs a hobby, or interest in something, other than Edward, but neither she nor Antigone are living in 'reality.' They are in a story, a myth, they're only one aspect of unified whole. That's the fundamental mistake of so many movies: they think they must somehow reflect 'reality' and set a 'good example.' Just look at the roster of Oscar nominations and you see it -- the moralizing, the historical heft, the inspiration. Who needs it? Only the bourgeoisie, who love to hear their New York Times-instilled opinions validated in a way they hope will elevate the under-educated.

Shakespeare and the Greeks are lionized by the Academy largely for being so long dead. They never cared for setting good examples or reflecting reality, rather they cared for myth, which is a deeper truth of the psyche, a recognition of the impossibility of a fully known Self. The bourgeoisie let these subversive messages pass since they carry the patina of the museum and the text book. And for all their grants and memberships, the bourgeoisie are not ones to scratch below the surface to the subversive undertow of myth. Reflecting the sum total of the unconscious and waking selves, the dream of night and the reality of day merged in the titular time, through symbol and archetypes and and performance, myth is the only language the unconscious speaks. In dreams and in narratives woven from shadows on the cave wall, myth guides us towards fuller consciousness, acceptance and incorporation of dark energies as well as light.

Like the best myths, Twilight cares only for sleep, for chasing the phantom shadows of the romantic animus into the forest depths, and kicking the dull rescuing woodsmen to the curb. Bella fixes herself to Thanatos like a lamprey. She stays true to her animus' original projection. Stephanie Meyer's series is a success because it understands the dimensions and limitations of the anima/animus persona so keenly, and understands as well that there's no truth left in waking reality unless the unconscious depths of the ego are nourished, and listened to.

"Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens" - Jung

In recognizing themselves in their airbrushed pale-skinned phantom Edward animuses, Twilight fans find the same thing that once hypnotized legions of Garbo lovers in the death dream silent theater of the 20s. Their desire for Garbo was so perfectly transmuted onto the screen their love wasn't the male proprietary gaze but something both pre and post-sexual, even pre and post-maternal. The image of her projected face awoke something in their unconsciousness, leaving the rest of their waking reality and relationships seem like vague shadows by comparison (the wives of these smitten men were known as "Garbo widows").

 

... the animus is also sometimes represented as a demon of death. A gypsy tale, for example, tells of a woman living alone who takes in an unknown handsome wanderer and lives with him in spite of the fact that a fearful dream has warned her that he is the king of the dead. Again and again she presses him to say who he is. At first he refuses to tell her, because he knows that she will then die, but she persists in her demand. Then suddenly he tells her he is death. The young woman is so frightened that she dies. Looked at from the point of view of mythology, the unknown wanderer here is clearly a pagan father and god figure, who manifests as the leader of the dead (like Hades, who carried off Persephone). He embodies a form of the animus that lures a woman away from all human relationships and especially holds her back from love with a real man. A dreamy web of thoughts, remote from life..." - Marie-Louise von Franz

The mistake most Hollywood films make is to misinterpret Franz's "dreamy web of thoughts" as a condemnation, and to make sure their films have no such permanent mistakes on the part of their heroines. But kids need to see their dreamy webs onscreen. They don't need to see a realistic depiction of the maturation process, they see enough of it already. They don't need the visibly uncomfortable gym teacher creeping even into their most private reveries to caution them about protection. Before it shifts gears, the anima unconscious is aggressively contemptuous of goodness and safety, and even sexual gratification, and all the other mundane biological and sociological aspects of becoming an adult. The more one tries to eliminate all danger from their lives, to replace the perfection of the dream lover with some drab human orgasm grabber and baby haver, the farther away death becomes in their field of vision and the staler and duller real life grows. Their animus takes charge, gets bossy, obsesses about the letter of the rules and regulations, pointing out with glee the sinners and rule-breakers, sparking the pyre and laughing in paroxysms of self-righteous sadism.

And so it is not surprising that Twilight draws such rabid hostility from critics, their own mature animas pouring on the venom to convince them going back to the ex-animus, the daemonic lover as opposed to the scolding moralist. If they'd had a good therapist they might know enough to question their initial hostility, as I do in the opposite camp. I know my love of the series comes partly from rueful experience as an alcoholic, an experience seldom satisfied by contemporary myths. In the beginning I loved alcohol so much, I worried my friends, who'd been drinking long before me. I never even picked up a drink at all until high school graduation. It was such a perfect match it scared them. I almost killed myself a dozen times over and had to stop drinking altogether after a paltry 13 year-run. But I regret nothing! And if heroin had been offered to me, or speed, I probably would have gone for that, too. Now it's cigarettes. Every time I see some woman on TV with no fingers or throat or hair croaking her warnings about smoking through her tubes I just mute the sound like I'm sure Poe's Prospero wishes he could have done that striking clock chime in Masque of the Red Death. But these are the choices we make. And if more people made conscious choices to destroy themselves in these slow and pointless ways maybe our world wouldn't be so gruesomely overpopulated, or our country wouldn't be going bankrupt from too many old people draining Social Security. It's only when we're no longer afraid of death that we collectively can truly be free, and take the crowbar out of the spokes of the circle of life. In this sense, Twilight is like a lone dark spot in the unending light, or a light in the darkness --there is, after all, no difference in the end, a Yin/Yang split only works in conjunction with the other.

We see a bit of Western Civilization's knee-jerk pro-life jingoism in New Moon, wherein Edward dumps Bella, and flees with family in tow, hoping she moves, grows up (turning her essentially into an 'Edward widow'). But Bella learns she can get him to appear in a vision by risking her safety through typical teenage bad choices, forcing him to move from  demon lover to paternal but neglectful lecturer, telling her to turn around, to not get on the motorcycle, to not jump off a cliff, etc. He's not meant to be the stern authoritarian, that's supposed to be her next animus. It's great because we hate Edward for causing her so much pain. We relish with her the chance to bother him by remote control through such disregard for personal safety, forcing him to reveal a stern buzzkill authoritarianism that is utterly without effect or genuine authority, i.e. she recognizes that authority as a voice in her head rather than gospel. The adult animus turns so many women into dour nags, mistaking their dream lover's stern authority as gospel truth. Bella rejects that animus out of hand, forcing Edward into the role.

It's so bitterly fitting that even after the female director of the first film, Catherine Hardwicke, scored a hit both artistic and commercial and the film made zillions, she would be  replaced by a guy, Chris Weitz, for subsequent film, him borrowing a lot of her aesthetic sense  as well as all the animal and color symbolism. The first thing a film company does when they see a woman has made a hit film is to take over the sequel and kick her to the curb so she doesn't queer up this hit 'they've' lucked onto. I'll quote at this time a woman, from one of the few mainstream sites worth a damn, The Guardian:

"Twilight the film has been a massive success, but its audience is dismissed as fangirls, groupies, teenyboppers, airheads. It is sneered at by the same critics who misogynistically savaged Sex and the City and Mamma Mia, two other films made for women, with such blatant transparency. Strange that the belittling should be so vociferous; we women are the biggest group in the world, yet our viewpoint is ridiculed and denied, our testimony ignored. But that's the way it goes. The studios will use Twilight's profits to fund more films in which there are no decent roles for women, no women in major positions behind the scenes, no women directors. That's happened with Twilight's sequel: Hardwicke has been sacked and replaced by the guy who made The Golden Compass. The female gaze has been blinded yet again." -Bidisha, Guardian 2009."

I wouldn't go that far, Chris Weitz does an amazing job of preserving the female gaze, and there's still tons of mythic resonance on all sorts of levels, but there's also a sense of really picking up on what made the book and first film work - whereas to me the weakest of the series is Eclipse, which is directed by the dude who made 30 Days of Night - which makes sense as Eclipse is almost a sequel to that film as well as New Moon (I even lumped them together before I knew they had the same director in a post on the Nordic Circle rom-hor genre).  It's a fine enough film, with more action and flashbacks, as opposed to grand archetypal coming-of-age myth junky metaphor soap subversion and brilliant purple and mist scenery of the first two films. I should point out too that The Golden Compass has a young capable girl in the lead, boys to the side, wicked stepmother and a Catholic stand-in bad guy contingent similar to the Volturi in New Moon. Bad box office killed the chance for any sequels, alas, and the Christians backlashed it both for the anti-religion angle and, no doubt, the capable girl with powers angle.

It's a case again perhaps of deep-seated castration anxiety undercutting a lot of parents' good sense. But since when have fairy tales and myths had anything to do with sense? If they did, Red Riding Hood wouldn't even talk to the wolf in the first place, and all kids would be bored sick, and then probably have to go talk to wolves for real and get eaten and it would be your fault, mom!

There was a time when women screenwriters ruled in Hollywood, before the code came into effect, and talking to wolves was all the rage. But with the arrival of the code in 1934 came the feeling that, as now, telling women's stories is too important to be left to women. So stories of grandiose emotion and feeling were replaced by smug sermonizing where childish women are brought to heel, weened of their immature desire to be independent by endured humiliations at the hands of twits. Twilight dares to undo all of that, to go back farther than even the pre-code box office tallies can reach, down into the murky recesses of the Brothers Grimm, Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, and pre-Inquisition alchemical magick, straight like a hot shot into the archetypal vein, the pulsing warm narcotic rush of the eternal feminine distilled and uncut, so primal it invokes knee-jerk revulsion from most men, a revulsion so deep they don't even recognize it, merely sense it as their chained-up anima kicking the floorboards, trying desperately to be heard among the macho ego din.

If, as Bidisha says above, the profits will be used to fund more male-centric films, well, we can only hope more films about women ruling the dark abysses of true myth will succeed at the box office. Snow White and the Huntsman and Black Swan did well by their women, even if directed by men, and even Disney has dared, for the first time ever, perhaps, to make an evil queen the star of a film, Maleficent (a very interesting name, as her own 'male-efficient' animus is already running the show). Starring Angelina Jolie with Art Deco cheekbones, it could be a bust of CGI 3-D boondoggle like that James Franco Oz, or it could rock. One can only hope it doesn't end with her falling in love with some doe-eyed dork prince and abandoning her witchy black magick ways so she can dote on him hand and foot, as is done, say, in post-code films like I Married a Witch and Bell, Book, and Candle.

I still remember when Jolie sparked bonfires with her Gia-Foxfire-Girl Interrupted power. We'll have to see if there's any of that blood left in her, or if her legions of biological and adopted kids have drained her dry. I'm happy she saved the world and all, but some of us just want to watch that world burn.

What's tragic isn't that we want it to watch the world burn, but that we have to clarify the 'watch' aspect to placate nervous censors, the NSA, common 'decency', and Batman. When we let life-affirming paternalistic morals rule even our dreams then our dark shadow hearts may have no choice to but to act out into the real, or worse, retreat --until all that's left are church socials, Lassie, freckled children, chaperones, white picket fences, and enough treacly strings to drive even a good girl straight to the devil. Isn't that why he set it up? Why he put the morals in and took himself out? The devil can't corrupt your soul when he's busy on the screen. His biggest triumph is convincing us not to put him there, not to project him out at all, just let him smolder unseen in his buried celluloid coffin like a sulky genie, until even the tiniest spark...

My alternative mix for the last two TWILIGHT movies.

Cinemarchetype #12: The Sage (Senex)

L-R: Ian McKellan as Gandalf; Richard Harris as Dumbledore; Nicol Williamson as Merlin; Alec Guiness as Obi Wan

The 'one who knows' (at least some) of the dark and light secrets of the world, the Senex/Sage finds the truth at the cost of petty human interaction. To achieve this knowing, first he must be free of the meddling and stale thoughts of the unenlightened, thus the sage goes into the wild to meditate and channel and commune with the plant spirits. He lives outside of the social order, all the better to teach the young warriors--or bullied teens or spiritual pilgrims or astronauts-- who seek him out, so that they might have both sets of tools--the social order and the outside/natural. He may bring harmony to these otherwise warring factions.

'If an individual has wrestled seriously enough and long enough with the anima (or animus) problem...the unconscious again changes its dominant character and appears in a new symbolic form...as a masculine initiator and guardian (an Indian guru), a wise old man, a spirit of nature, and so forth'. (Franz, Marie-Louise von (1978). "The Process of Individuation". 

In other words, when you've done 'the work' - as we say in AA - you can walk out of the swampy nest of your old anima incarnations and into the new freedom of a life with minimal internal/projected conflict. That you've been around the block, and lost your testosterone levels to old age, surely helps in this. And now you are ready to sponsor the younger version of yourself!

Aside from fantasy cinema where he's always around; I skipped a few for sake of avoiding redundancy, like Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid and Rafiki (above) in The Lion King. At any rate, the sage is a pretty rare character in modern film, maybe because a) there are so few in our fucked-up modern age --the TV,  draconian drug laws, trite marital codes and dumbing down of media sees to that, and b) he's left behind earthly desire, and enflaming desire is what non-fantasy film is all about! So how does cinema make him interesting? Pull ze string! His story must be told! In the end, its all about the actor, and the animator, or puppeteer. Rafiki

1. Ian McKellen as Gandalf

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

Frodo: It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill him (Gollum) when he had the chance.
Gandalf: Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play yet, for good or ill before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many.

Perhaps in that lies the kernel of the sage's great wisdom --his sense of life and death is more genuinely compassionate, more wise than, for example, the ill-fated mercy gestures of Viggo Mortenson, who spares King Thoeden's sniveling turncoat advisor, Grima Wormtongue (Brad Dourif), and has cause to regret it. Gandalf sees too far into the future and past to be limited by momentary squeamishness or flashes of compassion as befall Viggo. Gandalf's mercy is a more long range brand, and it doesn't extend to fighting his charge's battles. The only time he really steps in is when there's a demon up to his level of skill, so it's more a fair fight, as happens in the climax of The Twin Towers. What a bearded sportsman!

 2. Yoda (voiced by Frank Oz) - 

The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Back when Empire came out I was only 13 and Yoda became a training wheels guru. Hewas voiced by the man who also gave us Fozzie Bear and Miss Piggy, so it wasn't too hard to take him into our hearts. Was it an accident he looked a shriveled old Chinese kung fu master? We all considered Yoda the best thing about the film and Yoda fever took over. I can still talk like him! (my brother can too and we'd crack ourselves up saying "Teach you I will, eat you I will" ) Who's to say to what extent Yoda is the wellspring behind my generation's interest in things like yoga, meditation, and even LSD use?

If you ever see a kid trying to move something with the power of the force (see Mallrats), then you know the power and longevity of Master Yoda. While Ben Kenobi let himself get cut down by Vader in the first film, Yoda's too crafty to ever disappear, or even be anywhere specific, and it's with no shortage of bemused nostalgia that we finally got to see him fly into battle in Attack of the Clones, where he was once again the best part of the film, twirling through the CGI air like a hyper-ass curve ball.

3. Terence Stamp as Stick

Daredevil (2003) / Elektra (2005)

Maybe you have to be a Marvel comic book fan in the early 1980s, subsisting on a crumb diet of X-Men and Fantastic Four, to appreciate the neutron bomb force that was the moment Frank Miller took over full writing and penciling duties on Daredevil. Of course when Miller launched the next level of that game, The Dark Knight (for DC), I was  getting too old and drunk to read anymore non-underground comics, and the slick bled-page graphic novel paper (and racked up price) was a bummer to me as I loved the old newsprint smell. But the stint of prime Daredevil which saw the rise and sad slaughter (and fan-demanded rebirth) of Elektra--the hot Greek assassin--still lingers and now my generation rules Hollywood, so why did Daredevil bomb? And Elektra too? Why? Were they too moody? I like them both and amidst both is Terence Stamp as Stick - the blind sage / kung fu instructor and white ninja school operator. His breath of life brings Elektra back from the dead and that's why she gets her spinoff sequel - yer WELCOME!

Man, something about this sage archetype is regressing me to a very young and geeky time, let's fast forward to my jaded state of 1991..

4. TIE: Cecil Humphreys as The Holy Man

The Razor's Edge (1946)

The 1984 Bill Murray remake gets a little bogged down in craftsmanship but the 1946 version of W. Somerset Maugham's opus has retained its fleet-footedness thanks to Edmund Goulding's gift with soapy angst and a solid cast including the delightful Clifton Webb. All the commotion is a great prelude and post-lude to the mystical stillness of the mountaintop where Garfield learns at the beard of Cecil H.

Sam Jaffe -- Lost Horizon (1937)

"We believe in moderation," notes Jaffe, "a little bit of everything." Somewhere I have a poem about seeing Lost Horizon, over and over, high on Percocets this girl Kate sent me and an intense, hallucination-ridden fever after a drunken / Ritalin-spiked weekend trip up to Syracuse in the dead of winter (see my tale of hallucinating a demon in my bookshelf here). It was awesome, being delirious, sweating and freezing at the same time up on my twin bed (I'd boomeranged back from Seattle and was living in my old bedroom) and floating on Percocet and watching a VHS dupe of Lost Horizon on a small TV at the foot of my bed, the tracking streaks like footprints through safe, warm, icy snow on the voyage to Shangri La. And then of course, 'missing scenes' restored with sound and still photos only - which merely added to the surreal ecstasies, as to my hallucinating eyes the pictures' lips were still moving to the words. I still think of Shangri La as a magick place where, as Peter Gabriel once sang, they talk in pictures not in words.

All of which segues masterfully into Sam Jaffe as the Anti-Kurz, dwelling in the heart of lightness, and creating a nice paradise for tepid Ronald Coleman, until said Coleman gets cold feet and lets his sourpuss little brother drag him back down the mountain, all just so the brother's wife can age 100 years in front of his eyes. What a sourpuss, that brother!

Still, the brother had a point - Fuck Moderation!

 5. Nicol Williamson as Merlin - Excalibur (1981)

Another mystical keepsake from my past. My kid brother and I still quote Terry's weird Merlin voice from this film: "Behoooold tha sword of power!" and "A dream to some.... a NIGHTMARE TO OTHERS!"

Excalibur is convoluted enough that ten viewings later and I'm still noticing odd new details and connections; my dad loved the music-- "Siegfried's Funeral March" from Wagner's Parsifal-- and that kept his interest so he helped explain parts I was too young to understand during my first viewing/taping. Now that I'm Merlin's age the brilliance shines, with Williamson a weird half-human asexual elder god splitting the difference between metaphors and 'the real'--the human and the myth-- 'the dragon' in this case becomes a mix of 'the force', 'the matrix,' and the green man spirit of the woods, all tied together into a terrifyingly ambivalent intelligence. I've seen the dragon myself on wet streets at night and in the serpentine glistening of bathroom tiles...

6. Robert Morley as Andrew Undershaft ("Dandy Andy")

Major Barbara (1941)

I came to this movie very late in life, and it's easy to see why since G.B. Shaw's most famous work is Pygmalion which I find a tad shrill and misogynist. I love most of his other work though, especially this film adaptation, a covertly pro-industrial tract that finds the allegedly decadent Undershaft promting his capitalist ideology against his Salvation Army daughter Barbara (Wendy Hiller) and her Ancient Greek teacher fiancee (Rex Harrison). Tussling with him over his choice of fortune-amassing industries, namely arms, as his stodgy ex-wife laments "you can't trust someone who preaches immorality but practices morality," which is like my motto. He's full of wise oaths and bearded like the bard with a pop-eyed curiosity about nearly everything, and a refusal to get dragged into his bourgeois exes dogmatic drippiness, He and his daughter strike a deal: he is willing to grab a trumpet and march with the S.A. if she'll come to his armament factory. "You've learned something, my dear, and that always feels at first like you lost something." I cry every time. Morley's Undershaft is what I hope to grow up to be, not necessarily a weapons manufacturing titan but a guy who even as an aging father can stay in the moment and guide others towards it without real agenda or malice; and Rex Harrison has never looked sexier in his all black S.A. tunic, eyes alight with detachedly ironic religious fervor forty years before its time! And what's worse, the Criterion edition is CUT of the best Undershaft scenes (his showing Harrison his row of framed photos of ex-mistresses, what he has around instead of a wife, and man who amongst ye swingers can't relate?

7. Walter Pidgeon- Morbius

Forbidden Planet (1956)

Based around Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest, Morbius is an interesting example of the Lacanian non du pere, with its implied understanding of the dualistic nature of prohibition and enjoyment. For in the end, Morbius is all talk when it comes to prohibition. He verbally forbids the captain to land his craft, forbids his hot daughter to go visit the spaceship and flirt with all the crew, but she does anyway and Morbius doesn't discipline her or even seem upset. He listens to her swoon about boys and doesn't get all James Mason in LOLITA on her ass, which surprises and delights us. He listens attentively and withholds his opinion, hardly the actions of a typical 50s dad. And yet, almost to put on a show, his questioning and addressing her in the men's presence becomes patronizing: "Then my little girl never feels lonely or confined?" It's almost like he's posing as the 'anal father' when he's actually the wise sage and is just testing our hero's wooing mettle... like Sarastro in The Magic Flute! (To Dream some Impossible Tree Sloth)

Sarastro, bitches

8. Alejandro Jodorowsky as the Alchemist in 

The Holy Mountain (1973)

"The grave receives you with love. Surrender yourself to the Earth. Return what was loaned to you. Give up your pleasure, your pain, your friends, your lovers, your life, your past, what you desire. You will know nothingness, it is the only reality. Don't be afraid, it's so easy to give. You're not alone, you have a grave. It was your first mother. The grave is the door to your rebirth. Now you will surrender the faithful animal you once called your body. Don't try to keep it, remember, it was a loan. Surrender your legs, your sex, your hair, your brain, your all. You no longer want to possess, possession is the ultimate pain. The earth covers your body, she came to cover you with love, because she is your true flesh. Now you are an open heart, open to receive your true essence your ultimate perfection. Your new body, which is the universe, the work of god. You will be born again, you will be real. you will be your own father, your own mother, your own child, your own perfection." (courtesy IMDB)

Most cinema sages are either fatherly or cuddly or at least not terrifying, but real sages are probably so weird you want to shit your pants and run the minute you see them coming, their damned goats bleating behind them. As he leads a rag-tag group of castrati soldiers and military toy manufacturers up onto the titular mountain, Jodorowsky gradually becomes more human, but the sheer next level craziness of his vision ensures we descend much less so.

9. Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing in 

Dracula (1931)

"For someone who has not lived even one lifetime, you are a very wise man, Van Helsing."

Like Dracula, he comes from the continent, and brings musty arcane knowledge to the relatively sane manners of GB. He easily outguns doubting skeptics like Dr. Seward, noting that "the superstition of today can become the scientific reality of tomorrow" and talks almost as slowly as Lugosi. With his overgrown crew cut, bottle cap specs, and hawk nose, old Van Sloan reminds me a lot of my late German grandfather and/or childhood physician, the terrifying Dr. Scherzinger.

10. Victor Wong as Egg Shen

Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

My favorite scene in this favorite John Carpenter film is when Egg Shen, having led Jack (Kurt Russell) and the crew through the underground passages to Lo Pan's secret lair, finds a handy bar and pours them all drinks from a special gourd. When Jack asks what it for, Egg says "it's a good buzz!" then adds this, quoted from IMDB:

Egg Shen: Can see things no one else can see. Do things no one else can do.
Jack Burton: Real things?
Egg Shen: As real as Lo Pan!
Jack Burton: Hey, what more can a guy ask for?
Egg Shen: Oh, the six-demon bag!
Jack Burton: Terrific, a six-demon bag. Sensational. What's in it, Egg?
Egg Shen: Wind, fire, all that kind of thing!

Wong is so great in these scenes, and the way the buzz ("I'm feeling kind of.... kind of invincible!," Jack notes) takes hold is inspiring. Why wouldn't there be a magic alcohol potion that makes people better fighters when  they have to go up against magic evil? Only the mighty JC seems to have thought it through, and that's why he is our lord and king, and the Hawks of his time.

11. Michael Shannon as Kim Fowley

The Runaways (2010)

He's sketchy to the nines, but I admire Fowley's rock resonance and with Shannon's reptile cunning he becomes a live wire priest of 70s streetwise gutter rock. There's no sign of him hitting on or being heterosexually pervy with his young charges, other than for the purpose of perfecting their pervy image. It's only rock and roll he cares about, when Curie quits the band Fowley even salutes her spirit of rebellion! The true sage accepts--and even facilitates--being abandoned by his students, and fades into obscurity with glitter-era grace if it completes the myth, unlike...

12. Viggo Mortenson - Sigmund Freud in 

A Dangerous Method (2011)

What a tragedy John Huston's 1962 Freud isn't out, it would make a great double bill with ADM, since in the former's climax Freud is booed out of the seminar where he's presenting his radical theories on infantile sexuality, as Freud boos Jung's radical theories on a myth and magic in the collective unconscious. Thus the anti-establishment becomes the establishment and one of the 20th century's first sages becomes, once more, just an old man clinging to his tattered strands of his old cocoon.

CinemArchetype #7: The Shadow

The Shadow is that most threatening of archetypes, the malevolent root chord of the subconscious. As opposed to the anima/unconscious which is more collective and soul-based, the subconscious is the basement of repressed memories and desires, a dank cellar stuffed with taped-shut moving boxes that still shift back and forth occasionally like something's trying to escape from them. Freud's big short sighted flaw in his visualization of the subconscious was perhaps insisting that these dark lower storage cubby holes were merely to store the still-beating heart of our repressed memories and desires. For the purposes of 'the Shadow' this is no doubt true. As soon as we learn to hate ourselves, the shadow is there to take the hate off our backs so we can function in daily life.

But in successfully denying the eros, the freedom, the lust and passion and abandon of uninhibited desire, the conscious subject eventually becomes stale, plays it safe, has nothing interesting to say, becomes a derivative Body Snatchers pod-style copy of their former self. If they want to get their mojo back they need to traipse gingerly down into the basement and poke around in those taped-up boxes, find some vitality and get the hell out of there fast, maybe work out a treaty --let the demon out in a small safe setting --a kickboxing class, the dance floor, or--as Buddhists do--via sex.

If this is not done, the conscious self grows weak and watered down and the repressed shadow goes up in proof.. until it finally explodes in a whiskey still fireball / autonomous complex.

 As humans we unconsciously understand this and our culture invariably has pressure valves in place, some air holes on those boxes, a special outlet moment or holiday when the demons are uncrated and marched into the light so they can breathe and stretch. Such holidays have been with us since the dawn of time: Halloween, solstices, May days, drunken wedding receptions, bachelorette parties, post-prom beach trips, peyote ceremonies, etc., but in incorporating the shadow even for a night or afternoon we face all our collected hate and revulsion, our rage, all the repressed junk in mid-fermentation. That's why it's best to depressurize early and often, so that resentment-ferment doesn't have a chance to build...

"Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a Shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness. At all events, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions." - Jung, Psychology and Religion: 131

 1. Mila Kunis as Lily - The Black Swan (2010)

"If the shadow figure contains valuable, vital forces, they ought to be assimilated into actual experience and not repressed. It is up to the ego to give up its pride and priggishness and to live out something that seems to be dark but actually may not be. This can require a sacrifice just as heroic as the conquest of passion, but in an opposite sense." -- Dr. M. L. von Franz 'Man And His Symbols', Dell Publishing/ copyright: 1964, by Aldus Books, Limited, London

Especially as Black Swan is a film about doubles you would think Portman and Aronofsky would be more honest about the doubling used in her dance scenes -- the perfect meta refraction of the impossibility of a unified Self.

2. Orson Welles as Harry Lime - The Third Man (1949)
As a writer of westerns, Holly Martin (Joseph Cotten) makes a living by translating American history into the formulaic story of good triumphing over evil; you can tell which side is which by looking at the color of their hats (black =bad / white=good). But when Holly blunders through the mire of  post-war Vienna, he finds that all hats are gray.  He reacts, as ugly Americans will, as if it's his duty to translate the gray shades into a high contrast ratio so he can figure out who he should save and from what. As if emblematic of that gray area, Harry Lime lies 'dead' until Holly becomes so far in over his head that his repression mechanism--his ability to distinguish good and evil-- fails, and Lime bursts out of the shadows, literally.

Not exactly evil, Lime creates evil through the black market watering down of antibiotics in post-war Vienna, something any of us might be capable of in such topsy-turvy circumstances. Harry's freedom from moral restraint is a superb shadow to Holly's burdensome, nosy parker idealism.

"...the dark side of his being, his sinister shadow…represents the true spirit of life as against the arid scholar."  - C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

 3. Andy Serkis as Gollum - Lord of the Rings Trilogy
Gollum is the end product of spending too much time in the crack den that is wearing the ring and entering that other realm, the gradual lessening of worldly faculties at the great enhancement of the other. Frodo must access Gollum's use of the secret routes through the mountain of Mordor, but not become a Gollum himself. In other words, he must train his darker self to get the light through to its completed task without going overboard and letting himself be subsumed all the way, like...

 4. Peter Parker as Dark Spidey - Spiderman 3 (2007)
I hated the first two Spidermans but like the third, mainly because it redresses the problem of Tobey Maguire's sad sack "I'm too busy meddling in New York's crime world to pay my rent, but I'm really trying!" wussiness as Peter Parker. I can't abide his tourist-like wally wannabe hangdog malarkey in the first two films, not to mention his cop-out refusal to kiss Mary Jane at the end. What a pisher! But all the balls Parker was holding underwater come bouncing up when black alien goo affixes itself to him in the 3rd go-round. Suddenly he's not afraid to stand up for himself and expose Topher Grace's photoshopped attempts to steal his job at the Daily Bugle, or to strut down the street wowing the girls who pass him in all directions, and to order around the landlord's lovestruck daughter like a personal maid.

Of course as Manson once sang old ego is a too much thing. His ego comes in and overdoes it and Parker ends up becoming like a grandiose coked-up Spider Hyde, but at least, by the end--thanks to his own encounter with the shadow and its eventually balanced incorporation into his psyche--he's able to stop blaming criminals and landlords for his namby pambiness and in forgiving the world, he forgives himself, and we're finally left with a real hero.

5. Owen Wilson as Hansel in Zoolander (2001)
As Hansel, Owen Wilson is not really a shadow in a negative sense, but he represents the aspects of self Zoolander really needs to absorb, like the ability to turn foes into bros, and to see the world as warm and inviting instead of as merely a vehicle for the endless deluge of adoration that keeps Zoolander's hungry ghost nose ever troughside. In short Hansel is an anti-shadow, representing the easygoing compassion Zoolander's ego has kicked to the cellar over the years.

 If we study this in relation to Lily in The Black Swan, we're left with the story of an artist's evolution--perhaps the inverse of a superhero-- as aspects of suppressed altruism and tactile extroversion are allowed to open up a closed-off narcissist with the result he's less worried about people's perceptions of him and more genuinely concerned about others' welfare. To do that you got to get humble. Lordy, it's hard. Druggy tea helps.

"Jung says that if we could fully meet our Shadow, we would be immune to all any moral or verbal insinuations. We would already have seen this for ourselves. Finding this sort of transformation to a state beyond guilt is a task for the hero/ine who has the strength to descend into the underworld and wrestle dark creatures." - Tony Crisp  (Archetype of the Shadow)

6. Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden - Fight Club (1999)

From  (Masculinity and Self-Annihilation. ): The quest for liberation seldom extends beyond that liberation, and this is why revolutions so quickly turn into dictatorships, and the joy of Saturday night’s ecstasy turns into Tuesday’s deep depression, and the girl you love to party with turns out to be destructively bi-polar. Norton tries to halt Tyler’s spread of malice, but it is too late; you can't blind yourself twice, you can only try to 'double see'.

7. Rutger Hauer as Wulfgar - Nighthawks (1981)
A terrorist in the 1970s mold ala The Baader-Meinhof Complex and Carlos, one can draw a line in the masculine psyche sand from Hansel's transcendental bliss to Tyler's liberation of the civilized man from staleness to violence, to Wulfgar's freewheeling Thugee-ish super-terrorist. His famous line to Sly Stallone's cool cop is "We're not heroes, we're victims!"

The shadow Wulfgar represents posits an alternative to complacency in the face of corrupt leaders' genocide and oppression in far-off regions while the population grumbles but does nothing to stop it. The terrorist mentality is one of nomadic quid pro quo, so violence done against the Arab people in Palestine is retaliated for by random bombings in NYC ten years later. Wulfgar  treats 'this world' like a dream - who cares, Holly, if some of those ants down there stop moving? Or as he says to a guy right before he shoots him point blank with a Mac-10, "You're going to a better life." The cops must move towards the reverse, making the worse life stick around -- the larger picture can't matter, they support 'this life' for better or worse--and in the end, wrongs and rights cancel themselves out and leave only Disney left standing where once beautiful Times Square filth did thrive.

8. Bela Lugosi -- The Wolf Man (1941)
A metaphor for our young country's anxiety about our seemingly inevitable intrusion to Nazi-occupied Europe, The Wolfman shares a main character with The Third Man: Larry Talbot is very similar to Holly Martin. Like Holly, Larry gets in over his head with his distinctly American self-righteous naivete. But then Talbot goes farther than Holly, becoming a killing machine, starting with the old gypsy's werewolf son Bela (Lugosi) and since in the process he's bitten, Talbot ends up inheriting the curse. In other words, Bela is the shadow Larry incorporates all too well; he gives this new animal force its own time slot --nights of the full moon--to run amok, and lets Larry pick up the pieces.

Released a year before Pearl Harbor, The Wolf Man reflects the anxieties of a country determined not to waste its boys' lives in any more war-torn European quagmires. In other words, we in the US were Talbot and Lugosi was the Axis, Evelyn Ankers the innocent populations of free Europe. In killing the guy who tried to take over the world we are now forced to take it over in his place. We become the inheritors of the global house keys by default, as well as the full moon madness of heavy power.

Talbot's main flaw as a person is that he's thick-headed and presumes the world runs how he was taught it should in schoolbooks, and that Evelyn Ankers must fall in love with him because he's chosen her... and his dad owns everything in town. The wolfman self represents the logical end point of that attitude: the date rapist or Mai Lai massacre-maker (or that amok nut in Afghanistan). As the conquering white male we have been led to expect a world waiting to embrace us unconditionally. When it doesn't happen all we can think of is the world must be insane, so we can take from it whatever we want. Let the Larry of tomorrow morning pick up the pieces! Rrroaaarrr!

9. Maria Montez - Cobra Woman (1944)

The evil twin is a reliable marker for 'the shadow' in Jungian archetypal psychology, but through the fractured lens of Hollywood's pre-PC 'exotica' mill, the twins (both played by Maria Montez) become a swirling, intoxicating spectacularly colorful miscegenation fantasia. The good twin, Tollea, is about to be married to a bland honky seaman with the deceptively 'native' name of Ramu (Huntz Hall). We first see her innocently getting ready for her wedding under the watchful eye of the British consulate, and then she's kidnapped... by Lon Chaney Jr.!

Ramu too will have his evil shadow too, in the form of Martok (Edgar Barrier) the sinister counsel to evil cobra princess Naja. Ramu even subdues Martok and changes clothes with him, cementing their link. As this is all occurring under the draconian misogyny of the code, both Naja and Tollea seem incapable of thinking for themselves without male guidance, but the main difference is that Tollea is part of a happily 'civilized', i.e. colonial present, with loving old British consuls fussing over her trousseau, while Naja represents the threat of the unassimilated Other, the shadow of the Commonwealth. Her violent sacrificial ways are a link to the Thugees (Gunga Din), Fu Manchu, and countless other savage 'yellow' or 'brown' or 'black' menaces that served in the era's pop culture as both villains and justifications for British subjugation. We might recall that Mel Gibson even justifies Spanish conquistador subjugation of the Mayans this way in Apocalypto. 

 10. Josh Brolin as Trupo - American Gangster (2007)

Though he's presented as the film's only real bad guy--a dirty cop compared to the 'clean' one played by Russel Crowe and an amoral, greedy thug compared to the upstanding citizen drug kingpin played by Denzel--it's hard to not root for Trupo just because he alone seems to have some genuine moral complexity, and balls. When we see, for example, Crowe counting out hundreds of thousands of drug money dollars he found in an abandoned vehicle and is now about to impound in evidence, we feel the contempt of the cops looking on who would have loved to just pocket the cash and forget all about its origin, and why not? Meanwhile the whole idea of the war on drugs is a farce anyhow, so it's hard to root against cops taking a cut to look the other way. Is it the dealer's fault if kids get shot in the process of cops launching an armed attack on their innocent heroin and crack processing tenement room? Personally I don't think so. Brolin's character may be evil but at least he has archetypal resonance and appreciates the value of a dirty dollar. (see "A Well-Tempered Potier")

11. Orson Welles as Hank Quinlan - Touch of Evil (1958)
 To understand this shadow one need only look at the goofball "Mexican" political policeman (Chuck Heston) in Touch of Evil vs. the corrupt and corpulent Welles. Here Heston has a hot Janet Leigh on his arm and the best this 'Mexican' can do is send her off to some remote hotel alone to be terrorized, as she'd later be in Psycho. He can neither focus on his case--calling her every five minutes, petulantly saying "I'd like to be able to take care of my wife in my own country!"--nor sexually satisfy Leigh, instead using every excuse in his book to avoid the terror of her sultry negligee languor.

Quinlan, on the other hand, has bulldog focus, sensing through his game leg the weird gay frisson of Vargas' avoidance of his sexual responsibility ("where's your wife, Vargas?") and actually getting things done, even if it's through cheating. His eventual destruction leaves Vargas in the position of having killed a cop, and being forced to realize that Quinlan's hunch was right, the kid really did plant that bomb.

And it never dawns on Vargas that if his wife should be killed or successfully railroaded for murder and drugs then his love of law and order might seriously be questioned and he'd go all Dirty Harry on them much the way Quinlan has (his own wife having been strangled years ago, no doubt triggering the beginning of his rule-bending corruption). Once Chuck finally realizes his bride is missing he storms the Grandy bar, shouting "I'm not a cop anymore I'm a husband!" and trashing the joint. Vargas is too thick-skulled to see that his rage over his missing wife essentially turns him into Quinlan, a once-honorable cop who's spent decades in that bar-trashing state, still making sure no one else gets off on technicalities like the strangler of his wife did.

She was strangled, Pete. 

 12.  Scar - The Lion King (1994)

"Scar could be considered Simba's Shadow Archetype in Jungian terms: he is an adult with young Simba's headstrong and cocky nature and immature understanding of what being king means ("I'm the king, I can do whatever I want"). The plot is only solved when Simba defeats Scar, removing from himself his childishness." - TV Tropes

Yikes, that Scar one hit a little too close to home! I'm out. My shadow is capped, you hear? CAPPED!