Cinema

Lord of The Rings: This Mythy Mine -stephanie pope

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth. No mother suckled him, no
          sweet land gave large-mannered motions to his mythy mind -Wallace Stevens


The Bridge of Khazad Dûm -John Howe

With a terrible cry the Balrog fell forward, and its shadow plunged down and vanished.
     But even as it fell it swung its whip, and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard's
     knees, dragging him to the brink. He staggered and fell, grasped vainly at the stone, and
     slid into the abyss. "Fly, you fools!" he cried, and was gone. -Lord of the Rings

My friend, cultural mythologist Maggie Macary, and I often talk about movies from a mythological perspective. “Movies,” Maggie comments one afternoon we meet for mochas and myth-talk, “appear to me to reflect the collective dream of a culture when seen against the immediacy of cultural events.” She uses as her example that day an awareness that the movie, Signs begins production within the same timeframe as September 11th, while the number one and number two top movies at the box office one year later on the anniversary of 9-11 are My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Signs.  Maggie’s idea reminds me that Jung considers the folktale in much the same way as Maggie does the movie.
 
Her idea also starts me thinking about my own methodology for reviewing movies from a mythological perspective. “I like to look,” I tell her, “by exploring along the edges of the movie narrative for that unsayable speaking of the mythic action as it plays itself out in the story.”  I suppose what I mean is that I like to look through the movie images as if those images refer to nothing.[i]
 
Neither reducible to this nor that, the image functions in the story action by speaking polyphonically its many onenesses through the eaches in the movie story. For imagining takes the mind through and beyond what the eye sees.[ii] Therefore, this method of review I share begins in image and archetype and re-tells the story via myth. It is meant as merely one possibility for reviewing movies mythically among the myriad of ways possible.[iii]
 
In this short paper I intend not to look at the entire movie, Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.  Rather I intend to look imaginally, archetypally and mythically through a single scene in the movie and follow an image in metamorphoses via imagination, the wise old man archetype and the myth of Chiron.
 
 A Little About Imagining
 
 When I think about an image I like to imagine it as a finger pointing. The image says to me, not this here but something else that is not here. The image, then, is a symbol for something. Yet, it doesn’t try to mean that something. Like the finger pointing, the image is a personified form, a psychic presence made up of an absence. Wallace Stevens, for example, talks about Jove in the Clouds. Jove in the Clouds is a finger pointing. What it points to is that moment of our origin which contains us that is not of our birth by the physical mother or the land upon which the food is grown that sustains our bodies; nor that land that calls home in us our people, nation, and tribe. Jove in the Clouds points us toward the adventure of our second birth. Stevens calls that our inhuman one—our in-one, most human of all. For, wheresoever it will appear, it functions “as the culminating revelation of the character and value of a lifetime…beyond the sorrow of the world…saying yea to life in life’s celebration.” [iv]
 
Now, if a symbol does not necessarily mean anything, if imagining is not primarily about meanings, what good is it? James Hillman says that imagining, particularly imagining things in a personal form, emotionalizes them in a perspectival shifting from head to heart. He writes
 
       …(this) mode of perception penetrates through names and
        physical appearances to personified interior image, from the
        head to the heart…by imagining through and beyond what
        the eye sees, the imagination envisions primordial images.
        And these present themselves in personified forms.[v]
 
The image guides us through what the eyes know (perceiving) into what the heart knows (imagining) allowing us to feel into the hardnesses of things. Between the outer and the inner the image penetrates and lodges. What is without is within as is nature both inner and outer the same. So that finally outer events by way of images move us to experience that psyche, neither here nor there, that is our deepest truth.
 
This means imagining employs another kind of logos called mythic thinking, the accent of which swings away from an interest specifically in the present situation and circumstance of social conditions as equally as it swings toward these relationships. Thus, mythic thinking forms symmetry of expression opposed yet balanced, a juxtaposition. It is particularly the Greeks who seem to have had a fondness for this kind of thinking. Based upon vase paintings from the classical period, the vase, for example, shows in the obverse side the daily life in the city of a contemporary drinking party while the reverse side depicts a Dionysian procession. This expression in art has its corresponding expression in reasoning (reasoning by correspondences), taking place through polarizing and analogizing. This thinking pattern shows up in both art and literary texts.[vi]
 
Like most of the viewing public, I have to wait a whole year before the sequel, Lord of the Rings:  The Two Towers (henceforth LOR) is released. I have to hold that image on the bridge for quite a long time. The thing about that is it reminds me of watching a storm brew in the skies while wondering how soon it will break.  When the second film is finally released, Maggie and I go to see it. When I see the grey Gandalf fall and fall and fall, I think of rain falling. When he lands in the snow on the mountain peaks, the black and the fire of the Balrog gone, I think of white fluffy clouds in the sky after a storm has passed. It is this thinking going on along the edges of that story being told that leads me to look at the mythology of clouds and points me in the direction of the myth of Chiron. This second story-ing is never literally there in the story. The story suggests it to me nonetheless.
 
 The Bridge of Khazad Dûm
 
The most memorable image for me from the movie, LOR is of Gandalf facing the Balrog on the bridge of Khazad Dûm. I marvel that there is a bridge, a bridge between worlds.  I marvel that the scene itself actually occurs in the first film, the story of what happened afterward to Gandalf the Grey is told by Gandalf the White in the second film, while that we didn’t see, the metamorphoses of Gandalf depicted as if from memory in his moment of telling, fictionally happens in a nowhere space between endings and beginnings. So much suggests to me already that we are in a landscape beyond life and death, one where there are no beginnings and no endings either.
 
I also find it remarkable that this film is the second of a trilogy. Its theme and plot unfolds the battle to preserve a mythical landscape or inscape (a landscape that exists nowhere) called Middle Earth. Neither here nor there and not belonging to either beginning or ending, yet having gathered to itself both past and future, Middle Earth is an image itself in metamorphoses without fixity.
 
Upon the bridge of Khazad Dûm the Fellowship of the Ring encounters a fiery, dragon-like creature called a Balrog as they attempt to leave the mines of Moria. The bridge itself is an edge place, a gateway between realms or a threshold crossing. It is both a limit we cannot pass mentally and that border where differing reasoning worlds meet betwixt and between our reasons.
 
The bridge is very thin. I remember feeling dizzy when I first see the fellowship racing down it. I can’t hold myself in the seat. I have to clench my fists against the sides. In my seat, I find myself experiencing the bridge’s edge through my own sensations of edginess. These two things; the bridge as a thin place or place of liminality and the movement across it, remind me of being in transition and acting out inside myself a rite of passage that places me here in my body-experience in a mythological place much like that place where they are in the movie. David Miller writes of this experience of liminality
 
        It is as if to say that somewhere between what we may have
          sensed to be on the one hand a limit and on the other hand
          a limitlessness or wonder, there is an edge. And if we could
          live on this continuous threshold, life might itself take on an
          edge, so to speak, and our comprehension might be
          considerably extended beyond preconceptions about the limits
          of life and its limitlessness….[vii]
 
Now, if the bridge is an edge, then the guardian at the edge of this bridge of to and fro is the Balrog of Morgoth. Tolkein first creates this image for The Book of Lost Tales (1916-17) as a terrifying type of warrior.[viii] And, if the challenge to consciousness here is to live in the continuous movement of the illumination of a life opening, then the shadowy fire creature appears as that reflex of the last vestiges of one’s own ego that blocks the way to the achievement of this expanse of consciousness within the ground of being.
 
 Gandalf : Wizard, Mentor and Wise Old Man
 
The wizard Gandalf is to Frodo what the wizard Merlin is to King Arthur. Jung refers to this image as a spirit motif and tells us the archetype constellates most often where a profound reflection and/or new idea is required but not yet available to consciousness. Then, “the knowledge needed to compensate the deficiency,” Jung declares, “comes in the form of a personified thought, i.e., in the shape of this sagacious and helpful old man.”[ix] The main point here is the revelation that the archetype is the archetype of spirit and its purpose is to turn the energy of affect toward a thinking that unfolds an in-human experience born from the thunderbolt of an illumination pinned by confrontation and realization.
 
Another term used to describe this spirit archetype is mentor. The role of mentors are to provide aid, training and wise counsel. Interestingly enough, Mentor is also a character in Homer’s Odyssey who guides Odysseus’ son, Telemachaus. Mentor in the Odyssey is really the goddess Athena so Mentor’s advice is en theos, god-inspired.[x]
 
At first Gandalf does not seem to me a match for that which confronts him. He is wise, yes, but also old and bent and grey.  Tolkien himself describes Gandalf at this moment as “like a wizened tree before the onset of a storm.”[xi]  The Balrog now rises from the depths of the mine and his shadow looms large upon the bridge of Khazad Dûm. Grey Gandalf turns. While in that turning, down the center of his face I notice the thinnest thread of white light. One notes immediately in this turning back a foreshadowing and a re turning refrain. The white light begins to thicken down the middle of Gandalf’s face and form.
 
Gandalf uses his wizard staff like a shaman’s pointing stick. He strikes the immovable spot directing the energy of all he knows to this pinpoint purpose. The looming Balrog hisses and storms. “You Shall Not Pass!” Gandalf thunders. Terror tightens in the jaw of his echo dying as it tremors along the thinning bridge. In the next moment Gandalf will fall to his death in the fight of his life. Tolkein writes
 
    With a terrible cry the Balrog fell forward, and its shadow
    plunged down and vanished. But even as it fell it swung its
    whip, and the thongs lashed and curled about the wizard's
    knees, dragging him to the brink. He staggered and fell,
    grasped vainly at the stone, and slid into the abyss.
    "Fly, you fools!" he cried, and was gone.
 
Many of us are aware of the rising spiritual current, the Kundalini in its impulse toward the realization of Being/Self/Atman. More rare is our awareness of ntum. Ntum is the divine elixir—the medicine, the indwelling, immortal part in all things. This image of the energy of Ntum belongs to the Kung ritual and spiritual tradition. The Bushman legend of Botswana retells the myth
 
      A woman named Be was alone in the bush one day in  Namibia,
       when she saw a herd of giraffes running before  an approaching
       thunderstorm. The rolling beat of their hoofs grew louder and
       mingled in her head with the sound of sudden rain. Suddenly
       a song she had never heard came to her. Gauwa (the great god)
       told her it was a medicine song. She went home and taught it to
       others.[xii]

The women sing these songs to their men to awaken their hearts. The men say the supernatural potency of ntum is “a death thing” or “a fight”. One cannot mistake the similarity between this description of ntum and this scene on the bridge of Khazad Dûm. Nor can one fail to acknowledge in purpose and intent the realization of the divine substance---to awaken through the imagining power of personified formation, imagine del cuor, the image in the heart.
 
The image of the Balrog and Gandalf joined by the thunderous reach of the lightening whip guides us through what our eyes know (life lives at the edge of death) into what the heart knows (I and this Other---This Death--- are one in our deepest identity). So that finally, we each have come to experience with our being what we now can surely say; that what is without is within, as is nature both inner and outer the same.
 
 The Myth of Chiron
 
Returning our thinking to the story, we come with this realization of return to the grand lines of nature as inner and outer the same.  We can each now think of this as our having been awakened spiritually at the heart. Or, we can consider it as the return in psyche of our ability to personify. With this in mind, we turn back to the story and to the image of Gandalf the White.
 
The white thread of Gandalf’s own spiritual nature falls upon his person and portends his fate the moment he turns to face the Balrog upon the bridge of Khazad Dûm. The confrontation and fall and the defeat of the Balrog and death of Gandalf the Grey culminates in a mountaintop birth, the birth of a new spiritual form or psychic reality. Next we see him, Gandalf is as if of white light. This is not all. Gandalf takes to his person as his mode of movement swift, a white stallion. The horse image emerges from out of the abyssal, fatal fall or “wound”. “The horse is born where the deep opens up.”[xiii] The white color unites them both as one being or nature or mythologem. One can now look, if one wishes, through the myth of Chiron, for Chiron is that personified form of civilized animal (half man and half horse) nowhere found.
 
In retelling his own story, Gandalf shares that he and the Balrog are locked together in conflict for a long time. They fall and fall and fall for a long time. Eventually, the Balrog meets his death and so does Gandalf; he loses consciousness. This is to say, he loses the Gandalf he was. Later awakening, Gandalf finds he comes to rest upon a snow-capped mountain peak. He is no more a grey soul. He has another kind of soul-skin or anima skin or animal skin. He is made or remade from his own woundedness.
 
Following our color code, Gandalf in the moment of battle is a mixture of dark and light; the effect of his affect involved is grey, yet it is expressed as a set of fully differentiated oppositions requiring movement---the best statement of which I think may be stated---he attempts for the entire body of fellowship, the entire psyche, the passing through from within at this juncture at an impasse with itself.
 
The image of Gandalf expresses ambiguity while embattled; the affairs of a wizard are subtle.  It is from behind the white-light eyes of the shadowy Balrog that the truth of Gandalf, his awareness or whiteness of himself as such, emerges. The actual image of the Balrog is a reflection back to Gandalf of himself. This is the realization that stops him and turns him back to face his unity with the Balrog.

The Balrog’s face, like a mask, is both blackened in fire while the Balrog’s eyes are of fire’s white light. The abyss itself, the alchemical vessel of rebirth, unites the injuring two (the two injuries or fragmentations) by fire and fall. Each is no more what they were, but are remaking from what they are united in for now and for always.
 
The story-ing itself depicts both a mythologem, a fantasy flowing into a particular motif, and a mytheme, the constellating of personified forms in action.[xiv] Now, “if we could live on this continuous threshold, life might itself take on an edge, so to speak, and our
comprehension might be considerably extended beyond preconceptions.”[xv] It is the White Gandalf that suggests to us that such a living is not only possible, such a living is living in us here and now. In other words, this is the fate of ourselves today, confronted as we are by postmodern thought. We are to bring to birth in ourselves such a light as this.
 
This mythy mine suggests that each of us must now examine the Chiron in our own story, and then seek out this bridge to the outer incarnation in matter of its psycho-spiritual potencies. It suggests, too, that we are all of us advantaged by the wizards, and mentors and wise old ones of the collective ancestral and uniquely unconscious, yet everywhere the same, Psyche.
 
So that finally, this mythy mine, following the model behavior of Gandalf and working from that mentoring role, has provided you with one such amulet-methodology against the dragon-forces that you must encounter so that you, too, where you need to, may cross when your time comes, the bridge of Khazad Dûm.