CinemArchetype 21: The Ego

When I made the last cinemarchetype, the Holy Fool, it so influenced me that I became a holy man for five weeks, even starting a whole new website and accompanying cult, Pswar of the Saints.  That's why I've been scared to approach the ego, which is the true apocalypse of the archeytpes, representing a paralyzed stasis, a black poison of insecurity, doubt and the need to control others, even kill or destroy to protect your 'interests.' This is perfectly expressed in our modern world via things like Big Oil, Republicans, and crazy cult leaders who prefer to force their congregation into suicide rather than lose them. It's a hard habit to break, just as the Holy Fool is a hard habit to keep. The holy fool's biggest threat, the ego always creeps back around the edges of the enlightened psyche, promising to be a better lover, better general, singing sweeter songs, like a sorry abusive boyfriend feeling ashamed of himself and determined to win you back with his pretty new sensitivity.

Of itself, in its proper capacity, the ego is a vital part of the psyche, instrumental to its survival. When we move into life or death situations, our archetypal constellation needs 'one ring to bind them all,' We need to act quickly and not be confused by an abundance of empathy and mellow vibes (this is why the enlightened leaders need uptight security guards with earpieces taking care of his or her day-to-day needs). But, the ego likes to be needed. And the more you depend on it, the bigger it gets, until it starts manufacturing calamity solely to justify its continued driver's seat, 'got the mic' power position. This is equivalent to Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome, or a military cabal instigating a state of national emergency so Congress institutes martial law.

Once the threat is taken care of, the sympathetic nervous system is supposed to relinquish control to the parasympathetic, and take it back again only under 'fight or flight.'  Yet most of us live our whole lives without ever even getting more than a taste of the parasympathetic! Ego would rather sink the ship than let go of the helm. We see it in the deadlocked congress's brinksmanship. Better to crash the car then let someone else drive!

This is why the best way to film our ego's hostile relationship to the collective unconscious is by making it into inhuman, a nonspecific symbol, an outside alien intrusion into the DNA spirals of the natural world, a kind of evil ghost computer virus, a SKYNET or...

1. HAL 9000 - 2001 (1967)

HAL's emerging paranoia comes with the first glimmers of self-awareness, and time on his hands. He also has to cover, as ego's do, for his mistakes. HAL falls into the Munchausen-by-proxy syndrome, i.e. the nurse suffocating children so she can later revive them and be a life-saving hero. Later, when HAL is being unplugged, he goes out singing "Maisie" and then "Happy Birthday," hinting that it is perhaps with our first birthday celebrations our egoic consciousness manifests. Indeed, aren't birthdays a kind of simultaneous celebration of our difference from others? We're inevitably disappointed, maybe the first time. For some reason with all this special attention we're made painfully aware of our separateness.

Once Kier Dullea silences the egoic voice of HAL, a long-hidden briefing tape comes on, letting Bowman know his mission. This represents the ultimate goal of meditation, the silencing of our egoic chatter, the HAL voice, finally illuminating our true purpose: to go 'Beyond Jupiter' as it were, to expand our consciousness and merge with the timeless Tao (or just take a lot of acid and go to a Pink Floyd laser show).

2. Lord Sauron - Lord of the Rings

If the constellation of Middle Earth's peaceful races mirrors the unconscious archetypes of the whole soul, the unvarnished psyche, then Lord Sauron is the intrusion of ego, of the illusion of separateness leading to fear and the desire to control, to harness or enslave or destroy all others, the zest for power, the fall from Eden. As an alcoholic in recovery I know too well this feeling - we feel like gollums, gradually working our way back to hobbit form. But if we relent in our quest, keep the ring for ourselves, or bring a bottle to our lips, we sink instantly into the mire of cozy-warm evil, with precious.

That Sauron is depicted as a giant all-seeing eye is telling because when we're too ego-dominated we get an unshakable sense of constantly being watched, of thinking there are microphones in our teeth sending out signals to the CIA, pure narcissism. If our Sauron ego gets too far in its plans to conquer our other archetypes, it will destroy us ("in order to save us," it would add).  It's a poison which we project outwards in mistrust of the same external authority we slavishly bow to. If we can lessen its control our lives flower but if not, we squirm under the lash of a persona that would destroy us rather than set us free. If the very thought of meditation or going to AA or a therapist makes you squirm to the point you would rather die than ask for help, Sauron has got you.

3. Orson Welles as Citizen Kane (1941)
Maybe it's my impending sense of mortality but that long slow pan along all that expensive junk at the end of KANE suddenly seems super tragic, as do lines like "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper" - the little boy treating the world like his candy store, yet never finding a favorite flavor.  It's telling that this film aroused such ire in William Randolph Hearst as it's not just about him but about all egos, Orson's included. But Hearst's outrage over the film implicates him in and of itself. A too-dominant ego makes true artistic inspiration impossible. In feeling it's all about him he unwittingly exposes just how Kane-like he truly is.

Ego-dominated people long to be artists and writers because they're desperate to prove they have the unconscious--the fount of creativity-- under control. But everything they produce is hack work: contrived, stale, meaningless, and we can all tell the difference. Only the ego-dominated producer gives 'the people' no credit for seeing what he himself can't in his own work. What Kane can't get around is no matter how many papers he has, he can't change public perception of Susan Foster, can't buy her into being a great opera star. The harder ego tries to make art, the staler that art is (as in the Nazi-sanctioned art of the Third Reich).

Susan Foster Kane's suicide attempt, the thing that finally ends his bullying, is what people so often resort to when the ego leaves them no other option. If they can't break free from its micro-managing suffocation long enough to get some perspective then they just might mistake the ego for the whole of consciousness, as if there was nowhere else to run, and this is just what the ego wants us to believe. Even after finally relenting, he still believes you can "fight 'em" into liking you.

4. Boris Karloff as Dr. Janos - The Invisible Ray (1936)

The saddest element of this downer of a Universal sci fi film is not just the wasted opportunity to make something spooky and fun (which is how it starts out) but a cumulatively glum sermon against nothing in particular. Janos' huge ego demands that the mysterious radioactive compound he discovered in darkest Africa be only for his personal use. He gets super mad when Lugosi spirits some off to Paris and begins healing children with it. His ego becomes so toxic he starts to glow in the dark; he learns he can kill people with a single touch, as fine a metaphor for the choking power of the ego as your likely to find in 1936.


Janos's egotism manifests also in his terrible treatment of his wife, and his servants and the hired help in darkest Africa, whom he threatens to destroy with his death ray if they dare desert him. So... the whole world is supposed to come to a halt while Karloff loses himself behind lead protective shields and fiddles with something that as far as he is concerned is solely to make himself more powerful. Damn, what a self-centered prick. While it's great to see Bela play a good guy, a healing benevolent doctor for a change, it's also boring. Lugosi wouldn't have wasted a part like Janos with glum seriousness the way Karloff does. Lugosi would have hammed it to high heaven and made the film a hit. B-western director Lambert Hillyer brings--as he did the year before in Dracula's Daughter--an odd mix of rich Universal horror atmosphere and humorless naiveté.

5. Bob Geldoff as Pink Floyd - The Wall (1980)

I wrote my big essay on this film in 2010 and I can see in my post-illuminated state the hungry ghost ego running through me that made me blind to both my own and Pink's hungry ghost neediness. Remembering what I learned from a hot art therapist at Bellevue, the open scream mouth poster should be a dead giveaway, the gaping mouth of the needy, first chakra-trapped addict ... but such is the blind rage of the one-ring-to-bind-them that the terrors of ego are invisible to the ego-terrorized (here) - See what a mad ego I have?

A wall itself of course is a grand metaphor for the ego -- that giant Hoover dam of a construct wherein rudimentary 'take-take-take' hungry ghost consciousness seeks to exploit and harness unconscious archetypal powers, to define, to create linear lines and divisions over the unmeasurable chthonic circles. In moderation, brilliance. In excess, banality.

6. F. Murray Abraham as Salieri - Amadeus (1984)

Salieri: [addressing a crucifix] From now on we are enemies, You and I. Because You choose for Your instrument a boastful, lustful, smutty, infantile boy and give me for reward only the ability to recognize the incarnation. Because You are unjust, unfair, unkind, I will block You, I swear it. I will hinder and harm Your creature on earth as far as I am able. (imdb quotes)

7. The Blue Meanie - Yellow Submarine (1968)

Silencing the music of the spheres, of God, in favor of its own ersatz imitation, Salieri's music is the classic example of the musical ego, the one who desires to 'bind them all' to its ego-dominated ring of power, yet winds up only painfully aware of his lack of connection to the untamed wilds of true creativity and genius, is i.e. a hack, a Susan Foster Kane, an Invisible Ray.

Luckily unlike in Amadeus, the Blue Meanies never permanently kill anyone, and are brought back into the fold at the end, now right-sized and in love with the Nowhere Man.

8. Robert De Niro - Jake LaMotta - Raging Bull (1980)

9. Humphrey Bogart as Dixon Steele - In a Lonely Place (1950)

(From Bride of Bogartstein (8/11): The Bogie we know is too sharp not to know when those around him are turned off, but Dix has no clue. Bogart is brave enough to show the angles by which even his star charisma can be made ugly by vain antipathy. As Dix, even his proposal of marriage comes off like a threat, providing any lady her luckiest break (or fracture) like signing a deal with a confused white tiger, or an arm-rending chimp. He may be calm 95% of the time, but... really, the rest of your life with this thing?  As if to illustrate, Dix's battered agent exclaims to Gloria in the least coded of gay double entendres: "He's Dix Steel! If you want him you've got to take it all" Rationalizing the hurt, he notes: "People like him can afford to be temperamental." But who wants to live their life walking on eggshells? The strain is already there in poor Gloria's face.

This same description applies to the similarly abusive Jake LaMotta, wherein De Niro also buries his natural actorly charm to show us the ugly, violent, twisted face of the glorified savage animal male ego -- the smashing force of the repressive instinct, the need to control leading to paranoia, suspicion, and the unquestioned feeling one's own violence is always justified, even if it's against your own fists.

10. Burt Lancaster - Sweet Smell of Success (1957)

"When he insulted me he insulted all forty million of my readers."

11. James Mason - Lolita, Bigger than Life, North by Northwest, Mandingo

Mason can't ever really be lovable in a straightforward way but as a rogue and scoundrel, a god or a demon, he is charming without peer. Take his slippery bad guy in North by Northwest, his cortisone-amped psycho in Bigger than Life and Humbert Humbert from Lolita. What do they have in common? That's right, a sick sense of superiority mixed with jealousy that's pure ego / short guy narcissism. He may be insanely possessive, but he really never sees anyone else but himself. His smooth purr of a voice the sort of thing we're hardwired to trust, when it turns on us, we feel like all of civilization has just slapped us in the face.

12. Emperor Palpatine - The Star Wars Trilogy

Lucas' films (post the original trilogy) may be blandly acted, marred by video game-level digital effects, and a terrible fear of women, but as myths they nail a great middle ground between the political, the social, and the psychological. The evil emperor P. is the ultimate in political leade / ego / tyrant - uniting the archetypes whether or not they agree with the uniting, creating whatever problems may be required for such a unification's continued necessity. This is the Ego in its dark splendor and existential sadness. We only need the ego in times of war and struggle; so the evil ego makes sure war and struggle are our daily bread.

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Of course there are other definitions of the ego, as the central figure of identification in any myth, not necessarily evil, but for the reasons of this series I'm focusing on the negative aspects, as from an eastern philosophy perspective rather than a Freudian reading. The egos here in this list have exceeded their authority, forgotten their place as an evolving force in the constellation. Rather than the secretary taking down the unconscious archetype's inspirational dictation, they have become censor, judge, homogenizing editor. May we all develop 'right-sized" and become wise and tolerant rulers of our archetypal kingdoms.

THE NARCISSISTIC MALE GAZE: It's not you, it's me, because I am You

Trying again to watch JUNO the other night, and of course failing, made me ponder the difference between the male actors I love and the male actors I loathe the way a blind man loathes the mirror. How sharply sloped is this divide, the peak of a chart of self-recognition and self-disgust projected! Some actors can cross it but few return. What does this have to do with JUNO? Exactly, my learned reader, exactly.

There's a prejudice at work in this entry which I presume is based on gender; there are very few actresses I don't adore, now matter how narcissistic they are. It's a complex that seems meant for beautiful women, not coded-straight men, but when a guy is a narcissist full-blown egoic peacock it gets right under my beautiful, soft skin.

Here are some of my major culprits. Note in advance this is not necessarily meant to be a condemnation of their skills as actors, but more in the reaction they induce in me. Thy mileage may vary:

1. TOM CRUISE - Public Enemy Number One, he's his own worst enemy with deep rooted classic alpha-wussa-male Napoleanic coded complex vanity fair. His saving grace is that he's not afraid to make fun of his own raging hard-on of a narcissism, as in MAGNOLIA and--presumably--EYES WIDE SHUT, where it's especially noteworthy in his early bedroom scenes with wife Nicole. In a married couple (onscreen and off) has there ever been such insecure, casual disinterest in the other person's body? Kidman is great, peeing with the door open and dragging her pelvis around like a ball and chain of wasted nymphotential, but Cruise is all about posing just right in the bed so as to perfectly show off his manly bicep to himself in the mirror; his hair perfect; satisfied smugness radiating out of his ever pore. He's been married to this woman long enough to have a kid (in the movie) yet still seems paralyzed by the need to show himself off to himself. But if Kubrick deconstructed him that way, to reveal the core inner spoiled brat within us all, then why do I still cringe in embarrassment, like recognizing my own base humanity in the deepening voice of my little brother?

I do appreciate his focus and attention in big action films! He can charge up your adrenalin if you let him, like a personal trainer! Gotta give him that. 

2. RICHARD GERE - He of the sophisto-Zen smugness, enjoying the beauty of his own perfect humility as he comes before us to sing and dance and perform the painfully wry smile of one who gets all the women and har run out of places to put them. He will always be AMERICAN GIGOLO to me, because that movie was in #1 at the box office when I was hitting the ghastly age of puberty. My school chums and enemies who had seen the film relayed the sordid plot line, but I couldn't see it as it was rated R and my parents were tough that way and why would I want to anyway? Still, it had done enough damage just from the slick trendsetting Venetian blinds poster and the Blondie songs which dug their way deep into my sexual coal oven and which still haven't finished burning. "Now slap her... slap her cunt!" That's all I remember when it later came on video. Since then Gere's gone out of his way to show the world how pleased with himself he is now that he's a Buddhist and humbler than us all. 

I forgive him all however, after his gamely self-mocking guest spot on THE SIMPSONS and of course his terrifying dark shadow Travolta in LOOKING FOR MISTER GOODBAR. And most of all, I forgive him because I am even humbler. 

3. ANDY GARCIA -  I've never been able to focus on a word he says, always wondering instead about what kind of hair cream he uses, and the insidious vanity that must creep in when one studies one's performing style so assiduously from a mirror that one no longer sees anything but oneself seeing. I pray this disease never befalls Nic Cage. Speaking of Coppola relations, Garcia, as I recall, got his big break in GODFATHER III, where critics noticed he was the only actor in the film who seemed to have memorized his lines. He stole the film handily, but that's no badge of honor! In the picture at left you can see his resemblance to both De Niro and John Cazale, so in a sense he was perfectly cast. If he had come of age in the 1970s instead of the 1980s, he might have rooted into the same dirty method basement which helped make Fredo and the Godfather-as-a-young-man so indelible. Instead, in true 1980s tradition, he stayed up in the master bedroom, hypnotized by the wall-length closet mirrors.

4. KEVIN KLINE - I think he's a fine actor, but Jesus Christ he's an out- of-control ham, so enthralled by his own mellifluous line readings he leaves nothing left for us, which works in a film like IN/OUT, but becomes excruciating in Shakespeare. In my humble opinion, he's too.... "obsequious"? He acts as if he's making fun of the teacher's pet in some high school acting class. But he seems like a good sport and certainly redeems himself with his role as the deceiving dad in THE ICE STORM, wherein he captures the  delusional side effects of unconscious bourgeois entitlement with a bracing honesty. And I appreciate that he takes the kids home in ANNIVERSARY PARTY so Phoebe Cates can drop ecstasy and trip all night with Jennifer Jason Leigh.

5. ROBERT REDFORD - The king, maybe even the inventor of the bland narcissist actor archetype. Too bland to say much more about. Just look at Sundance, the scourge of true independence!  Now every mailbox is stuffed with film festival invites and no one can walk down the street without some film festival swooping down on them, commercializing their every move until all is hackneyed and recycled quirky just so that the whole GHOST WORLD LITE / PRO-LIFE TEEN QUIRK POWER PUREED FOR THE TOOTHLESS BOURGEOISIE of Juno could ever have a chance to exist. 

JUNO is the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to GHOST WORLD's The Wild Bunch.

In all fairness to Redford, he seems a nice guy and did well in SPY GAME. He's rugged. He is a master of knowing when less is more. He only chokes up once, at the end of The Way We Were, and it's unforgettable. Sundance was originally strongly connected to Native American preservation or so I remember from some old NPR show my dad once had on in a car ride. And so I got the brother's back if he needs me. He doesn't; he's too lost in the majesty of his self. Was he abducted by North Korean hypnotists working for Pat Boone?

RUNNERS UP (just as bad but I don't feel like writing about them) : Ryan O'Neal, Jason Patric, Ben Stiller, Joseph Fiennes (unbearable as Shakespeare in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE but great in THE MERCHANT OF VENICE;  Ethan Hawke (redeemed by Julie Delpy and Linklater), Rob Lowe, Freddie Prinze, Jr., 

The men who embody the correct approach to conveying the arrogant but cool male onscreen: the Wilson brothers, Jon Voight, Clint Eastwood, Mark Wahlberg, Denzel, Damon, Pitt, Tatum, Elliot Gould, George Clooney, Elvis Presley, Dean Martin, Michael Blodgett, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger (and all Australians), and of course... the definitive attractive non-narcissist male, Paul Newman!