Cinema

Movie Review: Signs
Of Sky Father: The Stand That Is No Stand -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...
              the sky will be much friendlier then than now....
                                                                                                               
                                                                                             ---Wallace Stevens

There is something in every telling that no more will just be told. Each of us can no longer expect so neatly to be told it.  We have to discover that something for ourselves. Today many of us understand that what we see is determined by how we look while the looking itself is determined by where we stand. Your beliefs about what you are looking at will color what you see like the plaid shirt of Morgan colors our own looking in one scene revealing alien presence in the movie Signs. Perhaps, where you stood before looking may well be where you stand after because you already have a stance and you are holding on to it. If so, you are choosing to look by way of what you already know. Can you say in this that you ever see anything else but what you already intend to see and to believe in the first place? Perhaps you have a belief about belief itself and that such a thing as belief can save you from a life of meaninglessness. After all, everything happens for a "reason", right? And perhaps, just perhaps, you are hoping for proof that this stance is the right one. The only one.

This is not a review about such things. This review opens to another kind of looking; a seeing that is not about believing or meanings but, about make-believing. For the imaginal seeing is a kind that does not hold to a single center. The imaginal is not immovably centered in a single subjectivity and may not even be centered in a single archetypal subjectivity. The imaginal acts in a way that lets all our ways of looking (plural eyes/i's) look at once through likenesses that, while they lean in toward meanings, they also swing away. This review, therefore, intends to do its looking imaginally, archetypally, and mythically via imagination, puer-senex , and the myth of Dema.


Imagination: Nowhere To Stand

Imagination is a stand that is no stand.  The faculty of imagination's helpfulness rests (however briefly) in its ability to open up airy spaces of depth for hearing new voices talking to each other in new ways much like a baby monitor picks up the tangible yet invisible presences of others in a room (or movie) besides baby. The imaginal perspective allows us to learn again to speak from syllables we see in the sounds we hear. It is not about creating a foundation to stand in. Imagining is not imitative of outer reality nor is the concept of images reducible to divinity, biology or ego. "Image is psyche" (Jung 50).

Now, it is the sounds we hear coming over the baby monitor that allow us, like it does Morgan and his family, to make up the meaning dancing in the syllables. It is the sounds and shapes that create the meaning that we see and hear there and not what the aliens' "words" might refer to. This reminds us that words are as energies, while the speaking subject, the first-person pronoun, is limited to and contained by the stuff the words are made of i.e. the morphemes, graphemes and phonemes of sound-symbol realities. This notion renders every sentence's  subjective "I" empty. It has no meaning-existence outside the sentence. Paul Kugler writes, "Each time the first person pronoun is uttered, it projects a different entity, a different perspective and identity. It is positioned in a different location...is merely a function of the place, the position, the site it holds within the textual realm"(3). 

The baby monitor's  "other" voice suggests that everything confronts itself conceptually imprisoned within its own terms, position, and place. Kugler also shares that images comprise a category of Being belonging to liminality (a world beyond the world) as alien presence in the psyche like a spirit of the now dead moment lives on in our memory long after the death of the cherished moment with our loved one (who may or may not have literally died) is gone. In other words, an image is a psychic presence made up of an absence (8). It is a sign for that absence. Image expresses that absence while locating it elsewhere (or no where) beyond death. So the alien image is perhaps as a sign of the mother's absence in the family. And when considering the aliens--from where did they come and go?

Such a landscape as the sky in terms of psychic awareness cannot be a place of absences, however. The sky suggests interiority unseen, but nameable. It is there. You can feel it. And at the same time, it cannot be seen. Like the image of the sky itself, image stands confronted on all sides by vastness, out in the open and right there--nowhere. And, such is where image always stands.

Without being conscious of our moves, you and I, when we first enter the movie theater and the movie, likewise enter the haunted ground of Being, that land of the dead the Greeks called Underworld. This is not the same landscape as the underground of our emotional life likened to the Hess family's entry into that night spent in the cellar. The term Underworld refers to an area of pyschic essences distinct from emotional nature (Dream 44). This suggests that we are viewing the movie at the onset and throughout from psychic space. We are experiencing the images as between a literalism and a metaphor, but not completely as either, while also as both. This, too, suggests that one of the initiations taking place in this "void that is there and felt", the Underworld, must happen to the Hess family underground for that is the image metaphorical of the landscape of emotional nature. The death of the mother and wife motif functions like a void that is there and it is felt as an alien presence so that between underground and Underworld each family member  has an opportunity throughout their long night in the cellar to become there again and felt.

The nonphysical Earth, invading as Underworld, the chthonic Earth, is compared by the Greeks with sky as the whole celestial hemisphere curved below our Earth-in-space---"as distant from the earth as heaven above...a pneumatic region of air and wind...(where) the dead are clad like birds, their element evidently air" (Dream 38).  Morgan, now thought of as Morgan Sometimes Breathing, or more properly Morgan's asthma portends that he still belongs more to our world here than to that other. For in the grip of that other, he is as dead yet, without breathing, also alive. He does not breathe the air there (the air by the way, is the image of a poisonous air, meaning an alchemical solution). His breath is a breath of life not death. He does not belong to the world below Gaia or Ge. He belongs to the Upperworld. This world is both the living world of his father and the Underworld's mythological converse, that whole celestial hemisphere curved above our Earth-in-space (heaven above or the realm of god or gods and immortality). While still in the grip of the chthon, Morgan Sometimes Breathing becomes the healing revelation that soothes the anguish of his father (now to be thought of as Our Father) and frees Our Father from the spell of Death the Mother itself.


Puer-Senex

One of the major motifs, themes, or patterns pervasive throughout the movie, Signs is that of the redemption of the father. When Mother/Wife dies so does god in the father (god the father). The questing that opens in both father and son brought on by this loss represents the necessity (the presence of Ananke) of seeking again the fathering spirit in a puer aeternus of renewal. Both father and son (who seems about that age ripe for a male initiation rite) must now seek out and extract a new spirit for life from this wife/mother-matter and then allow it to bring all of them together again as a family. Hillman, sensitive to the (chthonic) soul and body and not mother as counterpart to spirit, shares that it is within the background of alchemy and alchemical pairings that puer-senex appears. Of this he writes, "Spirit seems differently imagined in alchemy, implying a different theory...of psychic movement. In the hero myths, the psyche moves mainly by means of the will into an enlargement of rational order. In alchemy, it seems to be an enlargement of imagination" (GMS 168-69).

Because of the science fantasy, the use of the corn crop for something other than a food source and the thinking of both as a sort of conquest of matter, I thought the psychological background the movie's images might work best in would be the archetype of the great mother and the myth of the hero. However, the movie reminds me that there is no "baby" and Hillman points out that the heroic myth is but one of many possibilities within alchemical operations. He writes

...the generation of the new does not come about through a royal pair producing the divine child, a puer, as a third figure. The generation of the new in alchemy is not directly linear, not a declension or descent. Rather, generation tends to be circular: the new is prefigured from the beginning in the old, and the king is himself both senex and puer. In this sense the alchemical representation of development seems never to depart from the unity of the archetype; development of puer consciousness is not away from or against matter (mother) but always a mercurial business involved with her... (GMS 170)

Indeed the generation (stirring up of energy) is circular in the movie. One only has to think of the plan to catch the pranksters who are making the crop circles and the circles themselves. One can further imagine the "run" as the casting of a circle that somehow (by magic) has enclosed the house in "contained" space and has marked it off like a closed vessel, vas, or container. From the very beginning of the movie we are asked to see the fiction in the round.

To view the crop circles we must shift perspective by shifting position from our family's view to the impersonal eye of the camera lens and this requires a viewing from a different distance. We must also do this in the chase scene around the house. In fact we are asked to constantly shift perspective to view the thing running round the house.

To view anything round is to view it from its many sides. To develop this way of seeing anything the clues we have been given by our camera's eye, subjectivity within the contextual frame of this scene, tells us three things. First, we must constantly shift our point of view. Second, this continuous shifting seen archetypally is a puer movement. And third, what this shifting perspective accomplishes is the opening up of spaces for viewing anything in multiple ways and from differing distances. I might add here that what our great roving Camera Thousand Eyes is looking for are the fragments of our differences in likenesses that, although they are vastly different things and worlds apart, they nonetheless belong together (Miller 47).

Jung calls movement in a circle circumambulation and indicates that it is indeed, in terms of mythical significance the marking off of a sacred area, in psychological terms expressive of fixation and concentration, and morally it becomes significant of activating, into light and dark forces, the human nature (25). Hillman, working with this image as a turning in many ways or polytropos, suggests that this puer-senex movement of circulating expresses a movement of consciousness away from its awareness of itself as a literal story and  toward the awareness of itself as an imaginal one (Puer 122). Our literal tale of the Hess Family gives way now to the mystery of the imagination in what Joseph Campbell has termed the hieratic pantomime, making visible on earth the forms of heaven (Hero, 387).

The Myth of Dema

Campbell indicates that the leading theme of this mythology of the Dema is the coming of death into the world (Primitive 176). This, as well, is the major psychological problem to be resolved among the Hesses in our movie-story.  Furthermore, the Dema, who "through man's act of violence, are made the very substance of his life", are something akin to the Christian sense of the communion ritual (182).  Our Father loses his faith the day his wife is killed in a car accident and refuses to accept the revelation in this moment of the world as it truly is--monstrous. Our Father who art in heaven, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven the Christian prayer begins. That death should feed on life this way, Our Father cannot accept. Nor can he accept the god or gods that claim this. Our Father has quit the round.

It is this that our little peep,  Miss Bo of the Blue Dress reminds us from the beginning-- that life is monstrous. " There is a monster outside my room. Can I have a glass of water?", she says. Before you and I ever enter the movie, the myth precedes us. And what next happens imaginally in the movie amounts to the reenacting of the primitive myth of Dema.[1]  For it is not just that this death (of the mother) has come into the world, but  the way that it has come (like in the myth) is by killing.

The Dema are the ancient gods, the spirits of primal nature, and their rites are derived  "in the act of a mythology inspired by the model of death and life in the plant world" (171). During these rites the Dema themselves rise from the earth. For you and I, in terms of soul, this reference to earth means the same thing as Underworld. The aliens can now be likened to the Dema as coming and going in an instant from the Underworld.

The myth of Dema is closely connected to the plant world. Seeing the aliens among the corn rows and linking them to the crop circles as well as the sense on the part of the father that these beings are "hostile" affirms the interdependence of movie and myth as expressive of the deeper sense that the myth conveys: the world as a single state of being lives on death, and to do so, it must kill (177).

The myth Campbell tells of Dema, is a myth of ritual slaying re-enacted by the head-hunting cannibals among the Marind-anim of Dutch South New Guinea at the conclusion of one of the boys' puberty rites. On the final night of ceremony a young and virginal pair in there first act of love-making are slain while still in the love embrace. The dead young are then dragged apart, cut up, roasted, and eaten (170-71).  The sense of this killing is not murder Campbell tells us. Further, what we think of as being neither of heroism or murder and yet is killing, can be considered to be of the primal force of nature (178). The problem for Mr. Hess becomes how to reconcile with this monster world.

In his accounting Campbell quotes a Professor Jensen who makes the distinguishing link between this ceremonial killing and car accidents. The following is that lengthy but vital passage.

As Professor Jensen has pointed out, the number of lives offered up in such rites is far less, proportionately to the population, than that sacrificed in our own cities in traffic accidents. However, among ourselves such deaths are thought of and experienced generally as a consequence of human fallibility, even though their incidence is statistically predictable. In the primitive ritual, on the other hand, which is based on the viewpoint of the species rather than on that of the individual, what for us is "accident" is placed in the center of the system--namely, sudden, monstrous death--and this becomes therewith a revelation of the inhumanity of the order of the universe. And in addition, what is thus revealed is not simply the monstrosity of the just-so of the world, but this just-so as a higher reality than that normally sensed by our unalerted faculties: a god-willed monstrosity in being, and retaining its form of being only because a divinity (a Dema) is actualizing itself in the entire display (181).

This crucial text allows us now to view the mother's death as a sign for the divinity who offers itself in a love-death that by dying supports and sustains the just-so (the divine nature) of the world. Therefore, in the grip of Dema as Mother Death, the son is offered back to the father as a revelation of this. The now transubstantiated substance of the world works here in paraphrase of the ritual sacrifice of Christian mass. Our Father, accept this sacrifice for our good (the good of Chthon) and for the good of all. From then on in the movie, our father does. In reclaiming his son he affirms in psychological acceptance his own sacrificial act--his wife's death.

So that now, finally, we come round to my own beginning in this review. Regarding the little quote I borrow from Wallace Stevens, the excerpt is taken from a poem entitled Sunday Morning. Sunday Morning makes a great title for the final scene in the movie. Our father is seen, as if on Sunday morning, dressing for Sunday services, services he will officiate. He can do so now because he has seen beyond this world that other that sustains it. He was not told it. Such things as this cannot be told. He had to seek it out following his sorrow, through all of its labor, risk, pain, uncertainty, and failure. All these attributes belong to puer for puer represents the quest for the fathering spirit (GMS 167). And so, through his seeking out of that certain something that cannot be spoken by any tongue familiar or foreign, our father discovers a treasure seldom attainable by anything less than enduring love. He discovers his own capacity to father.

Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.
                                               --Sunday Morning

End Notes

[1] see Ch 5 of Campbell's Primitive Mythology for a compilation on the variations of this mythic motif.

Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With A Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon, 1949.

          ---The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. New York: Viking, 1976.

Hillman, James. “The Great Mother, Her Son, Her Hero, and the Puer”.  Fathers and Mothers. Ed. Patricia Berry.Texas: Spring,  1990.

          ---Dream and the Underworld. New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

          ---“Puer Wounds and Ulysses’ Scar” and “Senex and Puer”. Puer Papers. Texas: Spring, 1991.
   
Jung, C.G.. Alchemical Studies. Vol. 13 Collected Works. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. Ed. Sir Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerald Adler. Ex. Ed. William McGuire. Bollingen Series XX. New Jersey: Princeton, 1983.

Kugler, Paul. “ The ‘Subject’ of Dreams.” C.G. Jung Page vol. 3 No. 2 June 1993:1-17.
http://www.cgjungpage.org/articles/pksubj.html.

Miller, David L.. Three Faces of God: Traces of the Trinity in Literature and Life. Pennsylvania: Fortress, 1986.

Signs. Shyamalan, M. Night. Exec Prod. Kathleen Kennedy. Cast: Mel Gibson, Jaoquin Phoenix, Patricia Kalember, Rory Culkin, Abby Breslin. Duration: 106 minutes. Touchstone: Blinding Edges Pictures, August, 2002. Video release date: January, 2003.

Stevens, Wallace. Sunday Morning. www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/stevens4.html.