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. Naturally, as it is the polar opposite.
Of itself, in its proper capacity, is ego poses no threat and is vital to survival. When we move into life or death situations we need 'one ring to bind them all' so we can act quickly and not be confused by an abundance of empathy and mellow. But without calamity to justify its continued overlording, the Ego must make some, creating a state of national emergency and suspending democratic elections until such time as the threat is abated.... and god help anyone who tries to actually abate it. On the political front an ideal example is Bush's tightening of power and invading Iraq after 9/11, meanwhile giving Bin Laden a two week head start. On the personal front, the sympathetic nervous system is supposed to relinquish control to the parasympathetic, and take it back only under 'fight or flight.' Yet most of us live our whole lives without ever even getting more than a taste of the parasympathetic! Cuz our ego is whack.
This is why the best way to film our ego's hostile relationship to the collective unconscious is by making our ego representatives inhuman, such as...
A perfect artificial intelligence, it's telling that HAL's emerging paranoia comes with the first glimmers of intellect, and time on his hands. He also has to cover, as ego's do, for his mistake. With conscious awareness, the back hand of problem solving, the Munschausen by proxy syndrome of the firemen who when he has no fires to occupy his time goes mad and has to start some. Later when HAL is being unplugged he goes out singing Maisie and then Happy Birthday, hinting that it is perhaps with birthday celebrations our egoic consciousness manifests. Indeed, aren't birthdays a kind of simultaneous celebration of our difference from others, and ideally a celebration where one's friends and family honor us? If the honor is lacking or we're disappointed in our gifts, we never forget it. The resentment manifests into permanent misanthropy. In HAL's case this develops as a result of his inability to admit he's made a mistake.
Once Kier Dullea silences the egoic voice of HAL, a long-hidden briefing tape comes on, letting Bowman know his mission, at long last, telling him of the obelisk, something that's still being kept from the public. This represents the ultimate goal of meditation, the silencing of our egoic chatter (HAL's singing), and illuminating our ancient mission: to go 'Beyond Jupiter' --to expand our consciousness and attain the stars.
The constellation of Middle Earth peaceful races is the unconscious archetypes then Lord Sauron is the intrusion of ego, of the constant of the self- of the desire to control, to harness all the other powers it generally cannot control in the archetypal constellation. As an alcoholic in recovery I know too well this feeling - we are like ex-gollums, gradually working our way back to hobbit form and from thence across the sea to Elvish kingdoms. But if we relent and bring that ring, bottle opening to our lips, we sink instantly. Our dark ego sails spring up and we go sailing downward in a spiral to the bottom of a dank cave.
Our average ego-dominated mindsets, where the archetypes exist only in dreams and seldom in our day-to-day thinking, represent the imagined future of Middle Earth should Sauron win the battle. That he is reflected by a giant all-seeing eye is telling because this is how we might imagine our inner demon, or controlling super-ego, but the ego constellation also houses the Id and Super-Ego, so this makes sense. Our sense of constantly being watched, of thinking there are microphones in our teeth for example, stems from being too ego-dominated. Our ego if it gets too far in its plans to conquer our middle earth will destroy us, 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 relinquish control. 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.
Maybe it's my impending sense of mortality but that long slow pan along all that expensive junk suddenly seems super tragic, as does 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 anyone who can bake like his mom. It's telling that this film aroused such ire in William Randolph Hearst as it's not just about him but about all ego, Orson's included. Ego makes true inspiration impossible --the bigger the ego the more hack-like and stale the art, as it chokes the life out of the unconscious, from which true creativity emerges. And we can all tell the difference. What Kane can't get around is no matter how many papers he has, he can't change Susan Foster into a great opera star.
Susan Foster Kane's suicide attempt, the thing that finally ends his bullying her into singing, is what people so often resort to when the ego leaves them no other option. If they can't break free long enough to get some perspective they 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.
4. Boris Karloff - The Invisible Ray (1936)
The saddest element of this not entirely successful Universal sci fi film is not just the wasted opportunity to make something spooky and fun, but Karloff's character's huge ego's demands that the mysterious radioactive compound he discovered in darkest Africa is only for her his personal use. The story ends up so bogged in this bitter man's ego (he gets super mad when Lugosi spirits some off to Paris and begins healing children) that all the joy runs completely out of it. Karloff's ego is 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 on creativity and art as your likely to find in 1936.
Karloff'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 run away on 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. 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 depression, naiveté and ennui. We can only imagine how much more relish Lugosi would have brought to Karloff's role, recognizing as he often did that you can liven up a stale script if you give it your all. Karloff often preferred to sleep through some of the lamer material so watching him knock off the innocent is strangely joyless, Anyway the matte shots and special effects are first rate.
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:
In 1997, though, the film--directed by Alan Parker and written by Roger Waters--found its way to me via a big VH1 premiere marathon. It was on 24 hours a day and I'd done recently done a voiceover for a Curve Perfume ad ("Curve for men, Curve for women") which VH1 and MTV were playing--also around the clock-- during almost every break, so I watched THE WALL over and over, in a drunken haze of self-satisfaction, taking a heroic swig from my 1.75 Ten High bourbon bottle every time the Curve commercial played. In the process, THE WALL became mine, associated with my big Curve perfume glory and whiskey exaltation.... I've never been able to see more than 20 consecutive minutes on DVD, but on TV I can watch it endlessly. Ads and station breaks help metatextualize the film's repetitive jumble, and bracket the moments of animation so psychedelic as to make YELLOW SUBMARINE look like RUN SILENT, RUN DEEP. Ads are part of the whole meta thing, man... since a big part of the film is about selling out, and about... watching... TV.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.
[addressing a crucifix]
Salieri: 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)
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. 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.
+ Humphrey Bogart - In a Lonely Place
(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, temporarily calm 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, and if you want him you've got to take it all" Rationalizing the hurt, he notes: "People like him can afford to be temperamental.
(PS - this same description goes well for the similarly abusive Jake La Motta, 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 its against your own fists)
"When he insulted me he insulted all forty million of my readers."
Mascon can't ever really be loveable 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, and imagine him like the later version of Humbert Humbert, Lolita having driven him insane to the point he not only killed Quilty, but her husband and child, and she's grown up to be Eva Marie Saint. This is love only in the sickest sense, as with his grandiose mania in Bigger than Life, he really never sees anyone else but himself, never hears any voice but as compared with his own.
By contrast, the similarly cast Claude Rains lets us see the insecure boy who desperately want to believe Ingrid Bergman loves him for who he is and not to steal his uranium samples. Mason would just show us the icy desire, the reptillian apex of ego that blocks out all longing and desire the way the moon blocks out the sun, the desire that could still throw Ingrid from the train with an icy grip while voicing his regret in resonant purring.
Lucas' films (post the original trilogy) may be blandly acted and overbaked but as myths they nail a great middle ground between the political, the social, and the psychological. The emperor is the ultimate in political leaders / 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 importance. This is the Ego in its dark splendor and existential sadness.
Of course there are other definitions of the ego, as the central figure of identification in any myth: Luke Skywalker, Nina in TheBlack Swan, but for the reasons of this series I'm focusing on the negative aspects, as from an eastern philosophy perspective rather than a Jungian hero's journey per se. The egos here in this list have exceeded their authority, forgotten their place as an evolving force in the constellation. Rather than the secretary, noting and utilizing the unconscious archetype's inspiration, they have become censor, judge, downpressa man... May we all be so lucky as to utilize their lessons in our own inner dealings, to become wise and tolerant rulers of our archetypal kingdoms, allowing each aspect of the Self its vote like wise, chaste kings of old!