Welles and Freud

Sigmund Freud and Orson Welles share a birthday of May 6. Of course, even if you believe in astrology, the fact that they were born in 1856 and 1915 respectively would mean different star charts. I saw the birthdays on an almanac site this past week and out of pure curiosity looked at their Taurus description. It said strong work ethics, reliability, and an appreciation of life’s pleasures. Not a bad description of them. My deeper thoughts went to considering if there were any connections they have around psychology, movies, or magic.

From what I read this week, Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, and Welles, a pioneering filmmaker, lived during about the same time. Freud died in 1939, so there was some overlap and certainly Freud’s influence ran through all of Welles’ life. Both were significant cultural figures of their time. They never met and didn’t seem to directly address each other’s work, so I’ll do it for them.

Some people know that Welles was an accomplished magician, and member of both the International Brotherhood of Magicians and the Society of American Magicians. He often did magic in his later year on TV talk shows. He never let his sleight-of-hand skills get rusty and joked that he might need them one day to make his living.

Freud wrote about magic in his essay “The Uncanny” where he explored the psychological concept of the uncanny. The word meant for him feelings of eeriness or discomfort caused by something familiar yet strange. He discussed how magic, particularly stage magic, can evoke feelings of the uncanny because it challenges our sense of reality and rationality, tapping into our subconscious desires and fears. Freud believed magic exploits our unconscious thoughts and desires, blurring the line between reality and illusion.

Those things are certainly part of all films from the earliest experiments that showed that a series of still images project could give give the illusion of fluid movement. Today’s movie magic involves complex illusions from green screens, CGI to AI-generated people and settings.

Welles was used to creating illusions on stage before his film career. I think of how in Shakespeare’s time they needed to do some stagecraft magic for ghosts and other manifestations of the bicameral mind. Did Hamlet see the ghost of his father? It seems the ghost was real and that others on guard duty also saw something, but maybe this hallucination of Hamlet, and also Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and Richard III were pre-Freudian use of psychology by Will.

Freud didn’t write much about movies, as they weren’t prevalent during his lifetime. However, he did write about the concept of “screen memories,” which are vivid but possibly distorted memories from childhood. The use of “screen” because the memories are visual is interesting. Some later scholars have drawn parallels between Freud’s ideas about screen memories and the experience of watching movies, suggesting that both involve a mix of reality and imagination. Additionally, Freud’s theories about the unconscious and dreams have influenced the interpretation of films, especially in the realm of psychoanalytic film theory.

I couldn’t find any direct quotes by Orson Welles about Freud, but several articles said that he expressed admiration for Freud’s work and was fascinated by psychoanalysis. There are certainly Freudian themes and ideas in some of his films. That’s not unusual since Freud’s influence can be seen in all the arts of that time.

Citizen Kane (1941) features complex characters and explores the depths of the human psyche. Its protagonist, Charles Foster Kane, is dissected psychologically through flashbacks and multiple perspectives. Kane’s relationships seem to often return to “screen memories” with his mother and his trauma could easily generate a paper on Oedipal conflict and the influence of early experiences on adult behavior.

Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai (1947) is film noir and Welles goes dark and deep into themes of obsession, desire, and betrayal. The characters of Michael and Elsa Bannister, involve psychological tensions and power struggles reminiscent of Freudian psychoanalysis.

1958’s Touch of Evil is another noir thriller about corruption, guilt, and the dark corners of the human psyche. Welles’ character, Hank Quinlan, embodies Freudian notions of the id gone out of control, with his unchecked impulses leading to destructive behavior.

What an interesting conversation over scotch and cigars I might have heard if the two of them had met for dinner, watched a movie, and let me join them.

Dreaming About the Snow on Kilamanjaro

“Kilimanjaro is a snow covered mountain 19,710 feet high, and is said to be the highest mountain in Africa. Its western summit is called by the Masai “Ngàje Ngài,” the House of God. Close to the western summit there is the dried and frozen carcass of a leopard. No one has explained what the leopard was seeking at that altitude.”

On Mount Kilamanjaro, Tanzania, today there is snow. There is less of it now, but there is still ice and snow year-round on the mountain’s upper reaches. There are massive glaciers, ice fields, and towering walls of ice that blaze in the equatorial sun and beckon.

I’ve been sick this past week and trying to stay in bed and get some healing sleep. There has been snow here the past week. I read or watch a movie until I start to drift and then I put my head on the pillow. Naps don’t usually bring me dreams, but I did have one about climbing a snowy mountain. Taking it as a sign of “something,” I took down my copy of the complete short stories of Ernest Hemingway. I prefer his stories to his novels. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” is one of the longer stories and it is a good one. It is about Harry, a writer, who is dying of gangrene from a wound, and Helen, who is with him on safari in Africa.

Hemingway never climbed Kilimanjaro, but his safari camp in 1934 was near its base. He came down with amoebic dysentery and was flown for medical help to Arusha and the plane passed Mount Kilimanjaro. That flight provided the material and inspiration for the end of his story in which Harry dreams he is on the plane that was supposed to come and fly him out and it passes the top of the mountain.  

“…looking down he saw a pink sifting cloud, moving over the ground, and in the air, like the first snow in a blizzard, that comes from nowhere, and he knew the locusts were coming up from the South. Then they began to climb and they were going to the East it seemed, and then it darkened and they were in a storm, the rain so thick it seemed like flying through a waterfall, and then they were out and Compie turned his head and grinned and pointed and there, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.”

Kilimanjaro from a plane   – by MAS pilot – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

The western summit of the mountain is called by the Masai people “Ngaje Ngai,” the House of God,” and that is where Harry knows he is going.

I doubt that the leopard was seeking God. Perhaps, as with human mountain climbers, it climbed because it was there and was a challenge. One interpretation is that Harry is like the leopard. In college, I wrote a paper on this story and argued that Harry is not the leopard, but the hyena. The hyena is not noble or a true hunter. It is a scavenger.  He didn’t climb the mountain to the top. There’s no mention of Harry ever seeking God. If he thinks that he is headed for Heaven, he’s dreaming.

And in my dream? I guess I was the leopard. But as the story’s epigraph says, I don’t know what I was seeking on that mountain. God?

Harry talks about how he has wasted much of his life and his talent by taking the easy path and marrying and being with rich women. Hemingway also takes the opportunity to get in a dig at his “friend” (who I think he was actually jealous of), F. Scott Fitzgerald. The “someone” in the quote was Ernest.

“The rich were dull and they drank too much, or they played too much backgammon. They were dull and they were repetitious. He remembered poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of them and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, Yes they have more money. But that was not humorous to Scott. He thought they were a special glamorous race and when he found they weren’t it wrecked him just as much as any other thing that wrecked him.”

They made a film adaptation of the story in 1952 starring Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward. But that’s Hollywood, so they threw in Ava Gardner as a character not in the story at all and changed the story almost completely. Hemingway, who disliked the typical Hollywood happy ending and most adaptations of literature, was still happy to be paid for the rights to his story. He said he could not bring himself to see the movie (but I suspect that he did out of vanity and curiosity). In a 1954 article for Look magazine, he said that a hyena that was voiced by the director Henry King from behind the camera was the best performer in the picture. He called the film “The Snows of Zanuck,” referencing the producer, Darryl F. Zanuck.

It’s not a spoiler anymore to say that in Hemingway’s story, Harry dies in that tent in Africa with the hyenas sniffing outside. The film added a lot of “backstory” about Harry’s life before the safari. For the film’s conclusion, Helen clears the infection by following instructions in a first aid manual and the calvary medical party arrives by plane just in time. The vultures and hyenas who have been awaiting Harry’s death leave. Ah, Hollywood.

The film was a critical and commercial success. Maybe more people have seen it than have read the story. The film is in the public domain, though I suggest that even if you watch it, you still read the story.

Aliens and Ethics

from Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam”

from the original poster for E.T.

I think I may have started considering alien ethics while watching episodes of The Twilight Zone as a kid. There’s the one where the earthlings go into an alien spaceship because of a book the aliens showed them titled How To Serve Man. The earthlings see the human race leaping into the future. Unfortunately, the book turns out to be a cookbook.

There was another one where the aliens realized that they could get us to defeat ourselves by just making us fearful of aliens so much so that we suspected and attacked each other. When strange things happened and aliens were suspected. Another odd one starring Agnes Morehead had her living in a little cabin under attack by tiny aliens. I rooted for her to smash all of them, only to find at the end of the episode that the Earthlings were the tiny creatures and she was the giant alien.

Aliens were generally the enemy in films and TV of the 1950s-70s. If they did come to Earth to help us, we would inevitably misunderstand their intentions and try to kill them.

I think that Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1977 and E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial in 1982 changed things so that more people started to think that those aliens might be more helpful than harmful.

I caught an old episode of Stephen Hawking’s Universe. Hawking had always pretty much dismissed the idea of aliens visiting us, but here he seems to be more open to them. But his aliens are not Spielberg aliens.

“If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

I found an article in the London Times and another in the New York Times that also got to thinking about Hawking’s thoughts. In the NYT article, Robert Wright (author of Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny) wonders if Hawking’s conjecture about the motivations of aliens who show no sign of existing might not be “the most untethered thought experiment ever.” In his book (which takes its name from the non-zero-sum games used in game theory), he points out that historically humans want cooperative, nonzero-sum situations – even if it’s not a part of our biology.

But is it part of alien biology?

Hawking goes with natural selection which creates organisms that have pretty mean-spirited self-interest.
Of course, alien life forms might be anything from microbes, to simple animals, to beings far more advanced than us. Maybe they will just use Earth for its resources and then move on. That’s a scenario in many science-fiction stories. And would that be so different from our own human history of conquer, colonize and use up natural resources and the beings we find there?

Wright references Peter Singer, who has written a number of books on ethics. Singer suggests in his book The Expanding Circle that we have made a lot of moral progress in the ways we treat others. Singer thinks our “expanding circle” of moral concern could go beyond our species. He sees that starting on Earth with all sentient non-humans, as exemplified by animal rights advocates.

I’m hopeful about the progress of humans in this direction. I would think that an alien race that is advanced further along so that they could come to Earth would be more advanced on the moral scale too.

Those Spielberg movies had a big impact on my alien thinking – but those childhood scares from The Twilight Zone still have a hold on part of me.

Cinematic Religion

Paramount Pictures poster – Link

I realized I was pretty tough in a previous post concerning the 1956 film The Ten Commandments. Despite the datedness of the film by 2023 standards, it was a very big film at its release and it did have an effect on my thoughts about religion as a child.

It is an epic religious drama film that was produced, directed, and narrated by Cecil B. DeMille. It was made for big screens, shot in VistaVision with color by Technicolor. It always seems to rerun on broadcast television near Easter.

It is not based on the Bible, though it uses passages from it as dialogue, especially the Book of Exodus. The screenplay also used versions of the story found in the novels Prince of Egypt Pillar of Fire and On Eagle’s Wings. It is a dramatized version of the story of Moses, an adopted Egyptian prince who ultimately delivers the enslaved Hebrews.

Charlton Heston is Moses, Yul Brynner is the Pharoh Rameses, and there are plenty of other Hollywood stars playing these Middle Eastern figures.

This is actually Cecil B. DeMille remaking his silent film of the same name as a big-budget sound film. They filmed in Egypt and the Sinai. It had one of the biggest sets ever constructed for a motion picture, and thousands of players and crew.

At the time of its release, was the most expensive film ever made. It paid off grossing approximately $122.7 million at the box office during its initial release, making it the most successful film of 1956 and the second-highest-grossing film of the decade. According to Guinness World Records, in terms of theatrical exhibition, it is the eighth most successful film of all time when the box office gross is adjusted for inflation.

In 1957, the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, but only won Best Visual Effects.

I have still vivid memory of the scene where Moses’ staff becomes a cobra. I also recall my childhood confusion when Ramses’ priests are able to do the same “magic trick.” Of course, Moses’ snake satisfyingly devours the two others.

The most well-known scene in the film is when Moses parts the Red Sea. In its time, that was an awesome special effect. I have a much more powerful memory of that scene. My family was driving home from the Jersey Shore one summer night when I was very young and the film was playing at the Amboys drive-in which was close to the Garden State Parkway. You could always see the giant screen from your car. (Probably that caused a few accidents over the years.) As we passed, Moses parted the sea. Very impressive.

The Ten Commandments is broadcast at Passover in the United States on the ABC Television Network. Watching it again this year, I had many of the same feelings as when I saw it as a boy. So much cruelty by Ramses and by God. So many people die. These Bible stories made me doubt that this God was a good one. Certainly not a kind one.

As a child, I wondered how much of this story was true. Did God really allow Moses to turn the Nile River into blood? Enraged at the plagues, Rameses orders that all first-born male Hebrews will die. That seems believable. But God’s “cloud of death” instead kills all the first-born of Egypt, including the child of Rameses and Nefretiri. That, I doubted. Did the Red Sea part so the Hebrews could cross and escape Ramses soldiers? And did God drown all the soldiers who followed them across? So much death.

A Dude and A Zen Master

Jeff Bridges as The Dude in The Big Lebowski

You know The Dude, right? Maybe you know him as His Dudeness or Duder or El Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing. But don’t call him Lebowkski. Maybe you can call him Jeff Bridges.

The Big Lebowski is a 1998 film that didn’t do very well when it was released but has achieved cult status since. It’s a comedy with some film noir elements. It was written and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Jeff Bridges stars as Jeff Lebowski, known as The Dude. He is an unemployed Los Angeles slacker who loves to bowl.

The film’s conflict occurs when he is a victim of mistaken identity. Some kidnappers mistake him for a millionaire also named Jeffrey Lebowski whose trophy wife has been taken.

Mr. Lebowski signs on The Dude to deliver the ransom to secure her release. This possibly easy-money job falls apart because The Dude’s friend Walter (John Goodman) decides that they can keep the ransom and dupe the kidnappers.

Joel Coen has said that he wanted to do a Raymond Chandler kind of film noir mystery. It reminds me the most of two of Chandler’s novels –  The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep.  It feels like those stories because of its episodic, ridiculously complicated plot, oddball L.A. characters, and ongoing attempts to solve the mystery. The mystery itself might not be the kidnapping plot as much as figuring out why two thugs working for Jackie Treehorn beat up The Dude and urinated on his rug.

An even bigger influence may have been the film versions of those two novels.  I’m thinking that the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep with Robert Mitchum more than the classic Bogie and Bacall film may have been an influence. And The Long Goodbye remake with Elliot Gould which was directed by Robert Altman feels even closer to the contemporary Los Angeles of Lebowski.

ThisBut here is a leap – the film has been embraced by some Zen practitioners. It’s not the first odd film that has been seen to have a higher spiritual meaning. I already wrote about “The Zen of Groundhog Day” and there is a scene in that film where Phil, who is stuck in a time loop of repeating the same Groundhog Day over and over, is in a Lebowski-ish bowling alley. He asks two bowlers drinking with him, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?” One guy replies, “That about sums it up for me.” And The Dude might agree. And be quite happy with that loop.

Groundhog Day didn’t come from Zen Buddhist roots. The original idea for the story supposedly was The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom), a book by Friedrich Nietzsche in which the author gives a description of a man who is living the same day over and over again. Some Buddhists and others embraced the modern-day reincarnation and karma story of  Groundhog Day and Phil’s journey to reach an understanding of what he is meant to do with his life.

The Big Lebowski, 10th Anniversary
Limited Edition DVD comes in a bowling ball

At least one Zen Master, Bernie Glassman, saw Zen in The Dude. He is a friend and teacher of Jeff Bridges and now they have written a book together, appropriately titled The Dude and the Zen Master.

Glassman is a well-known Zen teacher. His book Infinite Circle: Teachings in Zen is based on workshops he gave as Abbot of the Zen Community of New York. He had been an applied mathematician and aerospace engineer and sometimes works examples of science into his conversation.

In his approach to enlightenment, you will not reach it by doing Zen. But when you are enlightened, then you will be doing Zen.

If that circular reasoning (or path that is an “Infinite Circle”) sounds like a Zen koan, it is intentional. Their new book actually looks for the koans within the film. And, yes, the idea that the film was made by the Coen (Koan?) brothers is mentioned. Glassman is certainly well-versed in these teaching stories. He wrote the foreword to The Book of Equanimity: Illuminating Classic Zen Koans.

If it wasn’t for Glassman’s other work, you might toss off this book’s approach to the film and Zen as a joke. Certainly, there is some levity in the book. It has chapters with titles like “The Dude is Not In,” and  “Sorry, I Wasn’t Listening,”

So what does it mean in Zen terms to be like the Dude when “The Dude abides?”  We abide, as in “lives”, in a place and a time. We also abide in the sense of “approve.” We abide in the sense of “obey.” But The Dude is “not in” and he does not approve of much of what happens and he certainly does not abide by the rules. The Dude is not here.

The book came out of ten years of conversations and one intense week of recorded conversations for the book. It also certainly has some intention to introduce us to their Zen work in the world. Glassman has Zen Peacemakers. Jeff Bridges has his End Hunger Network.

So, is this really a kind of Buddhism, or is it more of Dudeism? Well, actually, Dudeism, is an online religion devoted largely to spreading the philosophy and lifestyle of The Dude that was founded in 2005. It is also known as The Church of the Latter-Day Dude and the organization has ordained over 150,000 “Dudeist Priests” all over the world via its website.

In The Dude and the Zen Master, the dialogue is pretty wide-ranging from Zen and the movies to the importance of simply doing good in a complicated world.

Bridges and Glassman

One thing that The Dude does is that he is there. That is a lesson Bridges learned from his father, another actor.  It is important to show up. In Zen, that matters. Showing up.

Glassman says in the book that “Trillions of years of DNA, the flow of the entire universe all lead up to this moment. So what do you do? You just do.”

In Buddhism, that translates as the difficult part of daily practice.

Glassman, who is the voice of knowledge in the book to Bridges’s experiences, also compares The Dude to Lamed-Vavnik who is one of the men in Jewish mysticism who “are simple and unassuming, and so good that, on account of them, God lets the world go on.”

The Dude is not a trained  Zen Master. He is an intuitive Zen Master. The Dude will always prefer to hug it out than slug it out. “I dig the Dude,” says Bridges in the book. “He is very authentic. He can be angry and upset, but he’s very comfortable in his own skin. And in his inimitable way, he has grace.”

Jeff Bridges brings a lot of his insights from his acting work to the Zen table.  Are we all actors wearing masks? Can we live in the moment of a “scene” without being consumed by the character we are playing?

If you want to throw the Big Questions net even wider than the Coen brothers’ one Lebowski philosophy, there is a book for you that goes into 13 more of their films. The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers by Cathleen Falsani looks at the big subjects of their films. Want to examine the nature of evil? Watch No Country for Old Men. Seeing their films as their own moral universe doesn’t really seem so outrageous.

Being present and abiding seems to mean taking the world for what it is. Suffering comes from desire but it also comes from trying to push the world away or expecting it to be different without your own action.

Maybe we all need to abide.

The Dude and The Stranger (Sam Elliott) at the bowling alley (spoiler alert) at the end of the film.

Walkabout

Walkabout refers to a rite of passage where male Australian Aborigines undergo a journey during adolescence and live in the wilderness for a period as long as six months. It’s a vision quest taken to extremes.

My introduction to it was through a fill called  Walkabout by Nicolas Roeg. I saw it the year I started college and it really intrigued me.

It follows the journey of a sister and brother who are abandoned in the Australian outback and their meeting with an Aborigine boy who is on his walkabout. Together they journey innocence into experience in the wild.

The film has a cult status these days, but back in the early 1970s very few people I knew had ever heard of it. Of course, I was not alone in having a crush on the unnamed girl in the film played by Jenny Agutter.

The film was unconventional and had almost none of the “plot” that we expect in a film. Years later, I saw a “director’s cut” but by then I had forgotten the details from my original viewing. (A benefit of the aging brain and memory is that you can re-experience things you loved as if they were new again.) The scenes of frontal nudity and realistic, survival hunting scenes seemed perfect in context, but unusual at the time.

So, that film led me to read the original book and several other non-fiction books about the walkabout experience. I even tried once to teach the book to middle school students, but they just didn’t get it.

I loved the idea that the seeker followed “songlines” that their ancestors took. These songlines (or dreaming tracks) of the Indigenous Australians are an ancient cultural concept and motif perpetuated through oral lore and singing and other storytelling dances and paintings.

The songlines are an intricate series of song cycles that identify landmarks and mechanisms for navigation. They remind me of the songs of whales. I can’t explain how they work any more than I can explain the whale songs or how migrating birds find their way. Though I have read about all of these things, I don’t think I really want to know (at a scientific level) how it works.

Each song has a particular direction or line to follow and walking the wrong way may even be sacrilegious. You don’t go up one side of a sacred hill when that is the side to come down. That would send you in the wrong direction both literally (on a map) and figuratively (in your life).

What is it about being alone in the wilderness that tunes (or, more likely, re-tunes) our awareness of the natural elements and our connection to them, and even to some creational source? Though I and my ancestors are a long way from that natural life, something remains inside us.

Like the vision quest, the walkabout is an initiation into the teachings and mysteries of the self and the universe. The seeker both finds truths and has truth revealed.

While the walkabout may have Aboriginal roots in Australia, and the vision quest is associated with Native American traditions, the journey is not unique to only those locations. That is why that film eventually led me to read about the archetypical “hero’s journey” and the search for the Holy Grail.

I wish I had a true vision quest or walkabout tale to tell you. I still hope that someday I will.

I have taken two much smaller journeys.  On one full moon weekend journey, with some guidance from someone who knew more about it than I did,  I sought my “guardian animal” in a vision or dream.

I wish I could say it was a wolf that I found because I have always felt an affinity to them, but it was a rabbit. (Of course, I was in New Jersey at the time, so a coyote would have been about as close as I was to come to a wolf – and we know the coyote is the trickster.)

I have also felt some kind of connection to rabbits since childhood.  The rabbit in my vision was quite real and I felt led me. I say that because I followed it and it never ran away but would stop, look back at me, wait, and then continue. I followed it for what seemed like a long time, and then, while I was looking at it, it disappeared.

That’s how I would describe it. Disappeared.

We were at the top of a rocky outcrop. There was a small stream ahead of us and down the rocks. I did not see a life direction or message in where I had been taken that day.  But I felt that I was at a place where I had a good, clear view. I did not know exactly where I was, but I was not lost. I could find my way back to where I had been, but I didn’t see where I needed to go next.

In the traditional Lakota culture, the Hanblecheyapi (vision quest) means “crying for a vision.”  I am still looking.