For some time now I’ve been wanting to try my hand at the podcast format just to see what’s it like, and after realising that last week’s post left a number of themes unexplored in relation to the Terminator franchise, I thought it would be a good test case to do a more in-depth analysis of the films. So, that’s what I’ll be doing for the next few weeks. This week’s “episode” is a more detailed look at the first film in the series, The Terminator, and includes an introduction that goes over some of the more theoretical aspects of the archetypal analysis of stories and film.
Click the play button below if you’d like to hear my dulcet tones. (Note: for anybody subscribed to my Substack, I’ll be uploading the podcasts there too).
Long-term readers would know that I did my degree in linguistics and worked briefly as a linguist after graduating. I think this must explain my fascination with archetypal analysis since it involves an identical process to linguistics of looking beneath the surface forms for the deeper patterns at play. Even though I’ve been on this archetypal journey for about four years now, I still find it surprising and enjoyable to discover new examples.
So it was this week as I stumbled across a clip of one of the Terminator movies on my internet travels and realised that almost all of that franchise consists of what I call Orphan Stories. That is, they are stories about heroes who are dealing with the challenges of the Orphan phase of life. As is usually the case, pulling at the archetypal thread opened up a number of interesting issues which will take a couple of posts to explore. To begin with, though, we’ll need a quick refresher on the Orphan archetype which provides the grounding for the Terminator films.
The Orphan archetype sits between the Child and Adult phases of life. It is what is generally called adolescence. This is the time of life when we begin to establish our sexual, political, economic, and religious identities. The reason why the archetype is called the Orphan is because it requires us to separate from our parents psychologically and socially in order to find a place outside the family home in wider society.
The Orphan phase of life begins with puberty and ends when we graduate into adulthood, meaning our sexual, economic, political, and religious identities move into their mature phase. Although it can differ from individual to individual, the core components of the Adult phase of life include getting married and having children, beginning our career (economic identity) and fully participating in the political and religious customs of our culture. It is this mature set of identities that we begin to develop during the Orphan phase of life.
We can see from this brief overview that the archetypes imply a developmental progression. For any archetype that we are in, there is only one direction to proceed, i.e., onwards to the next archetype. We can never go back to a previous archetype, but we can cling to the previous archetype longer than we should. This clinging is pathological when it prevents us from moving into the next phase of life, and this dynamic forms the core of a great many stories, including the Terminator movies. They are about the hero moving from one archetype to the next (or failing to do so).
The Terminator movies are nominally science fiction films featuring high-tech robots sent back from a dystopian future. But, with archetypal analysis, we need to look beneath these surface forms and focus on the archetypal dynamic that grounds the challenge faced by the hero. The paradox of science fiction is that, from a storytelling point of view, it functions much more like ancient myth. We can think of the terminator character as the modern-day equivalent of the giants and monsters of the mythical world. He is a primal force which we mere humans must confront as an existential threat.
What Jung realised was that the giants and monsters of myths were symbols of the unconscious. And that’s the exact same role that the terminator plays. He is a symbol of the iron laws of fate. That’s why he comes from the future. The word “fate” comes from the Latin fata, meaning a prophecy or oracle that must come true. In archetypal terms, what must happen is that we must proceed through the sequence of archetypes. It is our fate to graduate from the Orphan to the Adult and from the Adult to the Elder. The question is not whether we make the transition but only how we do it.
The terminator is a messenger from the future who operates psychologically as the bearer of unwelcome news: “Hey, you. It’s time to grow up.” It is because the messenger is unwelcome that he comes from the unconscious mind. More specifically, the message has been pushed into the unconscious but now rises up as a final challenge to the conscious ego. That is what is going on archetypally in the Terminator movies.
Let’s now explore this dynamic more precisely and go through the movies one by one.
The Terminator
The hero of the first Terminator movie is Sarah Connor, a young woman who, while she may technically be an Adult, is really stuck in the Orphan phase of life. Yes, she has a job (economic identity), but we see at the start of the movie that it’s not a very good job, and she is not exactly highly motivated to perform it well. More generally, she is still living the carefree lifestyle of a teenager, free from the kinds of real responsibility that characterise the Adult phase of life.
Sarah needs to grow up, i.e., to make the transition from Orphan to Adult. Since she is already there biologically speaking, her growth must be in the socio-cultural and psychological realms.
It may seem like a long way from a modern high-tech sci-fi movie to a medieval fairy tale, and yet the first Terminator movie has its archetypal equivalent in numerous fairy tales with young female heroes. Fairy tales almost always represent the call from the unconscious in the form of a powerful and dangerous symbol not unlike the terminator.
Moreover, fairy tales make clear that the consequence of not making the archetypal transition is death, either literally or metaphorically. Thus, Snow White is presumed dead after eating the poisoned apple, while Sleeping Beauty is also apparently dead after pricking her finger on the spindle. The terminator’s mission to kill Sarah puts him on a par with the evil queens and wicked fairies of medieval myth. Perhaps the closest fairy tale to Sarah Connor’s story is Cinderella, since Sarah is the modern world’s equivalent of a washerwoman (waitress).
The first Terminator movie presents an innovation on the premise of the young woman’s graduation to adulthood. It is not Sarah herself that is the primary target but her unborn son. Since becoming a Mother is one of the most important components of the Adult phase of life for women, the terminator’s mission represents Sarah’s failure to transition to adulthood. He is a symbol of the shadow form of the psyche that is trying to deny fate. That shadow form forces itself into Sarah’s conscious mind and forces her to make a choice one way or the other.
Following the fairy tale analogy, Kyle Reese, the human who has been sent back to save Sarah from the terminator, is the equivalent of the knight in shining armour or the handsome prince who will break the spell and usher the princess into adulthood. The fact that he initially presents to Sarah like a madman or a homeless person is not a surprise. Just as the ugly frog will turn into a handsome prince if only the princess will get over herself, Sarah must learn to see Kyle for what he is or what he can be. What he can be, of course, is the father of her child.
In summary, the terminator is the all-powerful symbol of fate. He is a prophecy from the future forcing Sarah to confront the archetypal challenge that she has been avoiding. Kyle is the handsome prince who will become the father of Sarah’s child, thereby ushering her into the role of Mother. This change requires her to let go of the carefree life of the Orphan and accept the responsibilities of the Adult.
Of course, Terminator is not a fairy tale with a happy ending. It’s a dystopian sci-fi where Sarah makes the transition to Adult in a world with a bleak future.
Nevertheless, the first movie ends with Sarah’s successful transition into the Mother role and therefore her graduation to adulthood. That leads us into the second movie in the series.
Terminator 2
The hero of Terminator 2 is the young John Connor, and here we see an interesting variation on the archetypal dynamic from the first movie. In the first movie, Sarah was officially an Adult but had not made the transition to adulthood in a meaningful sense. The archetypal resonance of the story is about her need to become an Adult.
With the young John Connor, we have a boy who is on the cusp of the Orphan phase of life but is struggling to make the transition. It’s the same archetypal dynamic as the Netflix TV series Adolescence, which I analysed in recent posts. Just like Jamie, John Connor is off to a bad start as an Orphan, wagging school, disrespecting his foster parents, and getting into crime.
How fitting is it, then, that the evil terminator in the second movie is going to take the form of a policeman? Just like the T-800 in the first movie, the T-1000 is a prophecy from the future, a symbol of what awaits John if he continues down the pathway of crime.
The big twist in Terminator 2, of course, is that the T-800 becomes the good guy who is going to save John. He is now in the same role that Kyle Reese played in the first movie. But clearly the T-800 is not going to fulfil the archetype of the white knight. This raises the question: what archetype does the T-800 fulfil in the second movie? What is its relationship to John Connor?
One option would be the archetypal Elder. This works because John Connor is the right age to be guided by such an Elder. However, the T-800 is not there to teach or instruct John but to protect him. Therefore, he is not an Elder archetype but, rather, a Father archetype.
The T-800 is going to become the Father-figure that John never had. This reading is reinforced by the fact that the movie will involve John also reuniting with his Mother, thus giving us a classic nuclear family configuration.
Terminator 2 involves John Connor experiencing the childhood that he missed because his parents were absent. It’s about resolving his childhood trauma, thereby allowing him to progress to the Orphan archetype. That is why the T-800 needs to “die” at the end of the movie. In order for John to enter the Orphan phase of life, he must separate from his “parents”. The death of the T-800 symbolises the separation from the father. But the happy ending to the story also symbolises the separation from the narrative that Sarah Connor has been bound by and which she has foisted onto John (that he must “save the world”).
Since the action of Terminator 2 is supposed to prevent the dystopian future from happening, that means John and Sarah no longer need to save the world. They are both free at the end of the movie to become normal people again. Thus, we have a three-way archetypal progression in the story. The T-800 learns to stop being the Tyrannical Father, the all-powerful godlike figure that Fathers represent to their young sons, and develop some level of empathy. Sarah learns to stop being the Devouring Mother and forcing her narrative and worldview onto John. That means John is now free to become a normal teenage boy (an Orphan).
That should have put an end to it. But the box office success of Terminator 2 meant that the bean counters in Hollywood were never going to be able to resist the temptation to wring every last dollar out of the franchise. That brings us to Terminator 3.
Terminator 3
We have now seen the pattern that the first two Terminator movies established. The terminator comes from the future as a messenger calling the hero to resolve the archetypal problems they are facing. For Sarah Connor in the first movie, this was her need to move into the Adult phase of life, symbolised by becoming a Mother. In the second movie, it was about Sarah learning to let go and allow John the freedom and space to grow up (become an Orphan). For John Connor, the second movie was about the need to resolve the relationship with his “parents” and thereby move into the Orphan phase of life.
Terminator 3 combines a little bit of each dynamic from the first two movies. John Connor is once again the hero, only now he finds himself in the exact same situation as his mother in the first movie i.e. he is technically an Adult but is stuck in the Orphan mindset, drifting along in a life without meaning or responsibility.
Terminator as marriage counsellor/dating coach?
The terminator’s message from the future is a call for John to become an Adult. This message is reinforced by the fact that the evil terminator is also trying to kill John’s future wife, Kate Brewster. John and Kate’s married (Adult) life is calling them from the future.
The interesting twist here, which is nevertheless very fitting from an archetypal point of view, is that the evil terminator in the third movie is a beautiful female. Ideally, the movie would have featured a scene where the T-X seduces John, but I guess that couldn’t be done since such a seduction would have required her to be close enough to him to kill him. Nevertheless, it’s not hard to see the T-X as a symbol of the hyper-feminine, leading the young man astray from his mission to find true love; all very fitting in the age of online porn and OnlyFans.
What John needs to do is connect with a real woman. Since Kate is technically the co-hero of the movie, the terminators also work in relation to her situation. Unlike John, she has already taken a big step into the Adult phase of life by establishing a career that she enjoys. However, she is stuck in a loveless relationship, and so the terminator’s arrival is her symbol from the unconscious to seek true love (with John).
Thus, the archetypal dynamic of Terminator 3 is for both John and Kate to take the leap into the Adult phase of life, a call from the future to get married.
Terminator: Dark Fate
The next two films in the franchise were Terminator Salvation and Terminator Genisys. Both were awful, and the less said about them, the better. It’s no coincidence, though, that neither film had a proper archetypal dynamic at the core of the plot.
That just leaves one more film to talk about, Terminator: Dark Fate. It was also a box office flop. It also features a confused story that has no obvious archetypal resonance. Nevertheless, Dark Fate’s failure is worth analysing in more detail because it at least tries to construct a convincing archetypal dynamic.
Nominally, Dark Fate gave us the same dynamic as the first movie. The hero of the story seems to be Dani, a working-class girl, just as Sarah Connor was.
Just like Sarah Connor was forced out of stasis at the start of the first movie by the terminator killing her flatmate, the terminator in Dark Fate kills Dani’s father and brother, giving us the classic Orphan Story set up (separation from family). Where Dark Fate diverges from the earlier film is that it makes Dani not the Mother of the future leader of the resistance, or even a co-leader like Kate was in T3, but as the future leader in her own right. Thus, she is a kind of combination of Sarah and John Connor.
Another alteration to the standard plot that Dark Fate give us is that it’s not a terminator sent from the future to save Dani but rather a cybernetically enhanced human, Grace. She’s kind of a combination of Kyle Reese and the T-800.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this. The problem is that it’s not clear what relationship is supposed to exist between Dani and Grace. Kyle was the white knight to Sarah Connor in the first film. The T-800 was a father figure to John in T2. Grace doesn’t present any obvious archetypal relationship to Dani. She’s not a mother figure. She’s not a love interest. At best, they are friends. Perhaps because of that, the film can’t seem to decide which of them is the real hero of the story.
This archetypal confusion extends into the relationship between the new evil terminator and the two heroes. The evil terminator, the Rev-9, also doesn’t represent any specific archetype. He’s basically an everyman who just happens to be a killing machine.
A terminator so boring they had to give him an evil-looking twin
In the first movie, the evil terminator was just a blunt force of nature, which worked perfectly as a representation of fate. In the second movie, the evil terminator was a cop, representing the future that awaited John Connor if he continued his life of crime. In the third film, the evil terminator was the beautiful woman, representing the hyper-feminine threatening to get between John and Kate. All these were archetypally and symbolically fitted to the character of the hero.
Yet, in Dark Fate, we are presented with a completely generic evil terminator. He’s so generic that they didn’t even bother to put him on the posters for the movie. Was this just a random blunder? I don’t think so. The problem with Dark Fate is that it can’t figure out who its hero is. Because of that, there is no primary archetypal dynamic to the movie and because that is missing, the writers couldn’t figure out who the evil terminator should be. So, they chose a terminator that symbolises nothing in particular.
All this starts to sound a lot like the problems that plagued the two prior Terminator movies, including the truly awful Genisys, which has to be one of the worst movies ever made. But I think there’s something more interesting going on with Dark Fate. There’s a quite specific reason why the writers couldn’t figure out who the hero is.
Unlike Genisys, Dark Fate not a complete train wreck. In fact, the start of the movie matches the first three in beginning to develop an archetypal dynamic featuring an Orphan hero. Ironically, where Dark Fate really starts to fall apart is with the introduction of Sarah Connor and then the T-800. It’s as if some studio executive said, “recreate the magic of the first movies” and that message was taken as a literal instruction to hire the same actors.
What ends up happening is that Sarah Connor is brought in to quite literally save the day near the beginning of the movie. But this short-circuits the whole dynamic between Dani and Grace.
The protector from the future in this case is Grace. She is supposed to save the hero at the beginning of the movie. Ultimately, the hero of the story, Dani, is supposed to be able to save herself by the end of the movie. The introduction of Sarah Connor to save them both subverts the pattern. That’s not necessarily a problem. Rules are made to be broken. But the introduction of Sarah makes the already problematic question of who the hero is even more problematic. What’s more, it loads the plot with the huge extra burden of explaining why Sarah is there (something which the writers are unable to achieve successfully).
All this gets even worse when Schwarzenegger is wheeled out later in the movie. Perhaps the main reason that Dark Fate can’t figure out its hero is because it has to carry the weight of the heroes from earlier movies. The result is a completely confused archetypal dynamic that works for none of the characters.
POV: you’re a Gen Z actor trying to get a lead role in a Terminator film
I can’t imagine it was intentional, but the spectacle that Dark Fate provides us with is a couple of ageing boomer actors (Linda Hamilton and Schwarzenegger) parachuting into a movie where they don’t belong and leaving the younger actors with no room to move. Presumably they also took the lion’s share of the payroll too. Sounds like a perfect metaphor for wider society these days.
But what we see in Dark Fate is not just a question of boomers being boomers and refusing to step aside for the next generation. It raises a number of interesting issues around fame, individuality vs archetypes in storytelling, and the nature of modern media. We’ll explore those in next week’s post.
As part of the research for my upcoming book, The Initiation of Nietzsche, I’ve been revisiting the works of the philosopher and the broader cultural background of the 19th century in which they emerged. It’s something that we take for granted nowadays, but one of the big cultural shifts that occurred at that time was, in Nietzschean language, the freedom of interpretation, especially in relation to the Bible.
This trend had begun with the Reformation but we have to remember that the main instigators of that movement were all university scholars. Their rebellion against the Catholic Church was born out of their ability to read the Bible and especially their belief that the Church’s official translation, the Vulgate, was incorrect. It must be remembered that, at that time, the average person in Europe was illiterate and there were no vernacular translations of the Bible anyway. Thus, the average person was not free to make their own interpretation even if they wanted to. One of the main achievements of the Reformation was to make the Bible available to the general public in their own language.
But just having Bibles in vernacular translation was not enough. People needed to be literate in order to read them. In Protestant lands in the aftermath of the Reformation, there was a massive push for literacy among the general public so that people could read the Bible for themselves. Teaching literacy was mostly carried out by the various Protestant churches. As a result, literacy in the Protestant lands was much higher on average than in Catholic ones, although the Reformation also sparked a Catholic response which resulted in more emphasis on education.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see what would happen once everybody was able to form their own opinions on the holy book. Luther himself had spent hundreds and hundreds of pages discussing the finer points of scripture with Erasmus. If you’ve ever seen a long internet thread where two people are arguing past each other and never coming to an agreement, you have some idea of what the correspondence between Luther and Erasmus is like. It’s no surprise, then, that Protestantism gave rise to thousands of different sects all claiming a slightly different interpretation of the holy book.
At that time, most people saw the Bible as being infallible and any misunderstandings were the fault of the reader. However, the inconsistencies in the text perhaps inevitably gave rise to a new idea that took root among scholars and philosophers. The Protestants had noticed problems with the text, but they had blamed the Church for its sloppy scholarship. They never doubted that the text itself came from God. The scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries, however, eventually got round to the notion that the text itself was not the direct word of God. That opened the way for a whole new set of interpretations.
Eventually, we get to philosophers and scholars such as Feuerbach or Renan, who no longer interpreted the Bible as the word of God or Jesus as the son of God but rather treated it all as the work of man. Feuerbach claimed that all theology was really just a projection of human psychology. Meanwhile, Renan claimed that Jesus was a teacher and reformer, rather than the son of God.
This was all fine and there was some interesting work done by these thinkers. Nevertheless, there was a big a problem with their analysis, one that was intolerable to Nietzsche. Now, because Nietzsche framed his critique in terms of logic and science, he has been placed in the same camp as modern atheists who come from the positivist or similar schools of thought. In fact, Nietzsche couldn’t abide the scholarly approach to the subject precisely because he could see the power behind the religious viewpoint. The lukewarm approach of the scholars watered down both the logical and religious viewpoints into a paltry compromise.
Nietzsche set out to highlight the tension that existed between the logical and religious viewopints by engaging in a new method of interpretation. He no longer reserves the right to reinterpret the gospels according to a different overarching framework of understanding; he proclaims the right also to call the authors of the text into question. Thus, in The Antichrist, Nietzsche, in his usual bombastic and belligerent fashion, proclaims the writers of the gospels as bigots and madmen. From there it follows that the actual text itself cannot be taken at face value and this gives Nietzsche the licence to reverse engineer the story. Jesus becomes an “idiot”. His unwillingness to fight back against crucifixion follows from this fact. The whole rest of the gospel is just a fiction born out of the desire of the disciples to turn a farce into a heroic quest with a happy ending.
This extreme degree of reinterpretation follows from genuine problems in how we understand the text. For example, nobody these days can believe the parts of the gospel where Jesus miraculously heals the sick, brings a woman back from the dead with the touch of his hand, or walks on water. But if we simply ignore or reinterpret those parts of the story, then how do we argue against others who might want to ignore another section of the text? If everybody is ignoring different parts of the text, then everybody will actually be telling a different story and we’re no longer even talking about the same thing. The grounds for a shared interpretation then break down.
Moreover, if we can’t believe in the miracle cure part of the story, then we can’t just ignore it. We need an explanation for why it was put in. That explanation has to come back to the writers and their audience. Did they really believe it? Were they just following the literary convention associated with stories about prophets? Either way, we’re no longer worried about the story itself but the writers and broader cultural context in which it was written. Nietzsche’s seemingly ad hominem analysis is correct in principle, even if we disagree with his deliberately inflammatory opinion.
One of the larger points that Nietzsche was making was that once you allow for freedom of interpretation, you also open the way for radically divergent takes on a story. In Nietzsche’s analysis, Jesus goes from being a hero to being an idiot. Such inversions are something we have to live with in our time. For example, some people think Trump is going to save the USA, others think he’s going to destroy it. It’s the same man. Only the interpretations differ. But interpretations are how we make sense of the world. Therefore, in some sense, we’re not even living in the same world when we can’t agree on the basic facts of reality.
Nietzsche foresaw these problems, and that’s why later in his life he came to see the Reformation as a disaster. While the sacred text was in the safe hands of the church leaders, all the little inconsistencies could be quietly left out of the discussion. This is a variation of what Socrates called the noble lie. It might sound like a good idea to open the discussion of “truth” to everybody, but then you just get endless bickering.
It should be clear that this process of simply leaving out the inconsistencies in order to create a sensible narrative is exactly what governments do all the time. We all just lived through possibly one of the most extreme examples of that in history with the corona debacle, which was so absurd that the only way to deal with it is to never speak of it again and pretend it never happened. But that’s the point that Nietzsche was making with his re-interpretation of the gospel. An idiot and a group of madmen came up with a story that was a complete fabrication. Nevertheless, that story changed the world. From a cause and effect point of view, it makes no sense. We need another way to understand it.
The other way that Nietzsche laid the groundwork for and which Freud and Jung refined was psychological. Even if the gospels are complete fabrications, they still constitute one of the greatest stories ever told. The fact that the story has all kinds of logical contradictions is only a problem if you think the world runs on logic. And that ended up being one of the central points that came out of the whole episode. What if the world doesn’t run on logic? Or, what if “nature” runs on logic but there is a higher force that is beyond logic? The illogicality of the story then becomes a feature, not a bug.
Perhaps ironically, the situation we face now is very similar to that in the Levant during the time of Jesus, where there was a seemingly endless string of saviours and prophets all competing for attention while the Jewish religious authorities struggled to maintain control of the narrative. The fact that John the Baptist and Jesus were both put to death is evidence for how threatened those authorities were. Socrates met the same fate in large part due to the tumult in Athens in the 4th century. It seems hard to believe, but the current ferment is exactly the kind of milieu that could give rise to a new messiah in our time.
It’s rather a strange coincidence that both Canada and Australia had elections in the last week. It provides a nice excuse to talk about the numerous parallels between the two countries, which apparently led to almost identical election results, with unexpected wins to the left-leaning parties. (The victory to Labor in Australia was not unexpected, although the magnitude of it certainly was).
Canada and Australia appear to be in some kind of competition to see who can blow the most insane real estate bubble. Those bubbles are in turn fuelled by unsustainable immigration, and yet the elites of both countries have zero intention of reducing the intake, with the entire subject of immigration rendered verboten in the public discourse. Both countries have hollowed-out manufacturing sectors and a heavy reliance on commodity exports to fund a decreasing standard of living. In short, both countries are on a road to nowhere and just had an election where neither party offered anything except more of the same.
To understand the current situation that Australia and Canada find themselves in, we need to zoom out. Let’s zoom all the way out to the 16th century, and let’s talk about the country that would eventually give rise to both Canada and Australia: England. At the start of the 16th century, England was a backwater whose economy was predicated on the commodity export of wool, which it traded primarily with the Benelux countries, whose wealth came from turning that wool into clothing.
The ruling class of England wanted a piece of the action and set about a long-term plan to develop their own clothing industry. This is what is known in the business world as vertical integration. Since the English owned the raw materials, they could cut out the middleman by developing the ability to manufacture the final product. That’s exactly what they eventually did. Once their domestic clothing industry was up and running, the English cut exports of wool to the Benelux countries.
This was an early example of using protectionism and other trade and economic measures to grow domestic industry. Since the technological improvements that came with the manufacturing of clothing led directly to the industrial revolution, it’s hard to understate how important this was to the later success of Britain and its evolution into an imperial power. Britain’s initial imperial success came from being an exporting powerhouse predicated on the innovations that came with a vibrant domestic manufacturing industry that had been deliberately nurtured into existence.
Fast forward to the 19th century, and there was a big policy shift in Britain towards what some historians have called the “imperialism of free trade”. Britain threw off its protectionism and ran an imperial policy based on control of trade and financial markets. At the same time that Britain decided to pursue free trade, there were two primary rivals emerging: the USA and Germany. Both of the latter countries had learned from Britain’s example and were using protectionist measures to provide a safe haven in which domestic industry could grow. In some sense, Britain was the beneficiary of that since its consumers received cheaper goods. But the tradeoff was the loss of domestic industry.
If all this is sounding very familiar, well, yes, it’s the same pattern the US has gone through in recent decades. But there’s one more parallel which is directly relevant to our time. Once the deleterious effects of free trade on domestic industry became impossible to ignore, some elites in Britain started to realise that a reversion back to the old paradigm was needed. Thus, by the early 1930s, Britain was once again pursuing protectionist policies alongside its two rivals, Germany and the USA.
However, the key point to understand is that the protectionism was not carried out at the national level but within three primary trading blocs. There was the British Empire. There was the German-dominated trading zone of central Europe. And there was the American zone that included South America and also Japan, the Philippines, etc.
Although Australia and Canada were nominally independent nations at that time, the reality is that we were very much a part of the British Empire, and trade and foreign policy were set in London for the most part. Thus, despite its proximity to the USA, Canada’s main trading partner at the start of WW2 was still Britain.
Heading into the war, the GDP of each of the three trading blocs was almost identical. If we think about it purely in terms of economics, let’s pretend Britain and the US stayed out of the fight. Germany would have united continental Europe into a trading bloc that very closely resembles the current EU. Setting aside the moral and political issues, that might have been a somewhat stable equilibrium, but there was a wild card in the pack.
Russia had made significant advances in industrial production in the 1930s. By the end of the decade it was, at least in terms of raw industrial output, comparable to the other three trading blocs. Germany’s breaking of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a game changer for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it opened the possibility that not only would Europe be unified but that it would also incorporate Russia. That would have easily been the largest trading bloc in the world.
In summary, by the start of WW2, there were four primary economic blocs: the British Empire, the German Empire, the USSR, and the USA. Britain and Germany went to war, followed shortly thereafter by the USSR. The USA got to stay out of the fray. That was its first big advantage. Its second big advantage was that the British Empire was not what it used to be. All that free trade and hollowing out of domestic industry had left the British with reduced capacity to compete with the Germans in war production. The Americans agreed to supply the British firstly via the Cash and Carry mechanism and then, when all British gold had been transferred to Washington, via the Lend Lease program.
The result was that the British Empire was bankrupt by the end of the war. The German Empire was also finished. That just left the USSR, which had also accumulated large debts to the USA via Lend Lease but which decided simply to default on those and gobble up land in Eastern Europe, thereby ushering in the Cold War.
The upshot of all this is that both the British and German economic blocs were merged with the US bloc after the war, with the USSR creating its own bloc in eastern Europe while also attempting to expand into Asia. Since Canada and Australia were both members of the British Empire, our allegiance was transferred to the US by default. It’s important to understand that, even though this period was nominally a “decolonising” and “anti-imperial” time, in actual fact the USA had inherited the mechanism of imperialism that Britain had created, which is to say, domination through control of trade, financial networks and military alliances. For Australia and Canada, the transfer of power from Britain to the US was so subtle that few even noticed, although the arrival of Coca-Cola billboards and Hollywood films should have provided a clue.
In the decades immediately after WW2, most nations in the now US-led western trading bloc were allowed to run relatively protectionist economic policies, and these facilitated domestic industrial production during the post-war boom. That was all thrown away, however, with the collapse of the USSR and the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s and 90s, with markets opened up and manufacturing exported to China.
The whole thing looks a hell of a lot like the same blunder that Britain made back in the 19th century with its “imperialism of free trade”. Manufacturing in every western nation has been hollowed out in exchange for a “services-based economy”. The US Empire now runs almost exclusively on control of financial networks rather than on the production of goods and services. For its part, China has pursued exactly the same strategy that Britain, Germany, and the US once followed of nurturing domestic manufacturing through protectionist measures.
From the point of view of Australia and Canada, we’ve been through all this before. In the 1890s, there were enormous asset bubbles caused by British free trade and monetary policy. In the 1980s, the same thing happened under a similar set of policies pursued by the US. Logic says that the same thing should be about to happen, and Australia and Canada are in their familiar position of being pawns in a game over which we have little real control.
And that brings us back to the recent elections. On the surface of it, it’s quite incredible that the general public of Canada and Australia should so eagerly vote for more of the same given how fast our standard of living has slipped in recent years. But the reality is that the governments in our countries are not in control of the levers that could actually change the economic situation. The big decisions are now made in Washington D.C and Beijing.
Despite these similarities, there are several interesting differences between the status of Canada and Australia. Firstly, Canada’s economy is now completely dominated by the US. About 3/4 of Canadian trade is with its southern neighbour. By contrast, Australia trades little with the US, and we are relatively diversified compared to Canada, with China, Japan, and South Korea being large trading partners.
A second big difference is that Canada is being weaponised by China in its trade fight against the US, not to mention being used as a trading post for fentanyl distribution. Canada is kind of like that character who wanders in between the hero and the villain in a movie shoot-out.
Australia certainly benefits from our geographic distance. But we’ve been given much the same role as Canada in the imperial arrangements. Our job is to supply commodities and raw materials. The result is a hollowed-out economy that is apparently now entirely predicated on immigration, for which we simply cannot produce the housing stock, leading to a truly insane housing bubble that, if it were to crash, would make the 1890s look like a picnic.
Against this background, I suppose the recent election results in both countries make some sense. Neither party was promising any change to the status quo because neither country is in a position to make such a change. Both Canada and Australia are pawns in the larger power game going on between the US and China. In that sense, voting for the fluffy-cuddly leftist parties is the best bet since they are the ones who promise to keep you “safe” and “protected”, which in this case is code for protected against the economic machinations of global powers.
Long-term readers would know that the archetypal relationship between Orphan and Elder has been a particular interest of mine in the last few years, especially as it relates to its manifestation in film and literature. Learning to identify archetypes in stories is valuable on the assumption of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye that the stories we tell ourselves (and the archetypes that we use) reveal patterns in the broader culture. If that’s true, then the question arises, what does the manifestation of the Orphan-Elder relationship in modern film and literature reveal about those archetypes in the broader culture?
The first thing to note about that is that the Orphan-Elder relationship almost never appears in stories that are realistic portrayals of modern life. Instead, its most common manifestation is in the science fiction and fantasy genres. That’s why we get Elders such as Obi-Wan, Yoda, Dumbledore, Morpheus, Gandalf, and the like.
One kind of Elder
Another kind of Elder
A variation on this pattern is when the story nominally takes place in a realistic modern setting, but the Elder offering initiation to the Orphan is a foreigner. Thus, in Karate Kid you have the Japanese Elder, Mr Miyagi, paired up with American teenager, Daniel. The same idea was behind Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which gave us two Japanese Elders, Splinter and Shredder.
I would argue that the Tom Cruise movie, The Last Samurai, is also an Orphan-Elder story with Cruise’s character receiving initiation from the samurai, Katsumoto. The same idea is behind the initiation of Jake in the movie Avatar. He is inducted into the foreign tribe of the Na’vi.
Yet another kind of Elder
Although the use of foreign and fantasy elements in these stories reflects the absence of the Orphan-Elder relationship in the modern world, it’s also true that it is a realistic depiction of initiation, which requires a break from normality. That’s why armies have boot camps. These form a sudden and severe departure from everyday life.
The hazing kind of Elder
It’s also why hazing rituals used to be given to apprentice tradesmen (before that became illegal). The point of initiation is that you are being inducted into a new world (the adult world) that is unlike that which you have known up until this point (childhood). Because modern society has no such initiation, it can only represent it as an aberration.
There is a third way in which modern storytellers can represent the Orphan-Elder relationship and that is in a criminal context. That’s what the Netflix show Adolescence does by having Jamie arrested at the beginning. As I noted in recent posts, his “initiation” is incredibly similar to that received by an adolescent boy in tribal and warrior societies. But in Jamie’s case, it is the justice system stealing him from his bed and carrying him away from his parents.
More broadly, though, organised crime works as a context to depict initiation because such organisations still operate in that fashion in the modern world. Thus, bikie gangs and other crime syndicates use hazing rituals and other formal methods to induct new members. The initiate usually must pass a proper test to prove that they are up to the job, which almost always amounts to committing some crime or other.
And this leads us into the subject of this week’s post because I happened to catch a film a few weeks ago featuring just such an initiation into a crime organisation. The movie is called In Bruges. I’d never heard of it before and had no idea what it was about, but I decided to give it a chance.
These days, most of the time I give an unknown film a chance, I find myself reaching for the off button by the 10 or 15 minute mark. So it was a pleasant surprise to discover that not only was In Bruges worth watching, it’s actually one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a great piece of storytelling with a couple of surprise twists, likeable characters, excellent acting, and cool dialogue. What surprised me more, though, was that the first big twist in the movie sets up a classic Orphan-Elder relationship that begins in the criminal world and then turns into something far deeper. The movie is really about what Orphan initiation means in the modern West.
The story begins with two Irish hitmen arriving in Bruges after a job gone wrong in London. The younger man of the pair is Ray (Colin Farrell), who was supposed to knock off a priest but accidentally killed a young boy. The older gangster is Ken (Brendan Gleeson). The two have been sent to Bruges by their boss Harry (Ralph Fiennes) and told to lay low until the furore around the death of the young boy has subsided. For the first half of the film, the story works as an odd-couple comedy with the two very different men getting on each other’s nerves now that they’re stuck in a quasi-domestic relationship in a Bruges hotel.
As the experienced gangster, Ken is unperturbed by the death of the boy. Presumably, he’s seen worse in his career. He’s delighted to take some time off work to be a tourist and see the sights of Bruges. Ray, on the other hand, can’t sit still, which is partly due to his guilt over the boy’s death and also because he’s a young man looking for fun, which he later finds in a romantic love interest, Chloe. With Chloe to take his mind off his guilty conscience, Ray also starts to enjoy himself, and both men look like they might have a pleasant stay in Bruges after all.
Then the brilliant twist near the midpoint of the film hits.
Now, maybe I missed the cues earlier in the movie, but the twist turns the story from an oddball comedy into a very unique kind of Orphan-Elder story. Harry, the big boss back in London, calls Ken and tells him the real reason he ordered him and Ray to go to Bruges. It’s not about laying low after all; Harry wants Ken to kill Ray so that there’s no loose ends over the death of the young boy.
What we learn at this point of the story is that the botched assassination was actually Ray’s first job. It was his induction into the crime syndicate, his test to prove his worth, a test he failed. This twist forces a re-evaluation of Ray’s character. We realise his scatter-brained behaviour earlier in the film was not just due to the stress of the situation but the fact that he’s not a career-criminal. His genuine remorse over the situation also reveals that fact. In fact, Ray is just a young fool who got in with the wrong crowd.
As the audience, we learn that. But, more importantly, Ken learns it too, and this sets up the brilliant second half of the film because now Ken has a moral conundrum as well. Presumably, an assassin like Ken does not get to know his victims before he kills them. But, after a couple of days in Bruges, he’s gotten to know Ray and also to like him. He knows as well as we do that Ray is in over his head. Crucially, because Ray has failed his gangster initiation, it’s not too late for him to be able to attain some kind of redemption. That’s true in the sense that he’s young enough to start again. It’s more importantly true in the sense that Ray has not yet learned how to kill without remorse. He still has a conscience.
The fact that Ray still has a conscience inadvertently awakens Ken’s conscience too, which has presumably been kept quiet during his long service to the syndicate. Ken is the Elder in the story. His job is to initiate Ray. But it turns out that Ray has something to teach Ken. The man who apparently had no problem watching a young boy get killed now has the job of killing another young man who, while not entirely innocent, is also not entirely guilty either.
Thus, what begins as an oddball comedy turns into a potential double-redemption arc, one that involves both the Orphan character of Ray and the Elder character of Ken. In theory, it’s too late for Ken to attain redemption. He’s already a career criminal. But Ray is just a dumb kid who should never have been given the job in the first place. Thus, Ken is presented with the chance of redeeming Ray, but in order to do so, he must betray his orders. He must choose between his conscience and his duty.
I won’t spoil any more of the story. Suffice to say that there are a couple more twists that keep the audience guessing right til the end. In Bruges turned out to be one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s also quite a coincidence that I saw it at the same time that I was working through my analysis of Adolescence, because the inversion that comes at the midpoint of the movie is very similar to the one I analysed in the tv series.
As I pointed out in recent posts, Adolescence is really about the father, Eddie, and the pain of the parent who must let go of their child. In Bruges gives us a similar perspective, only now it is about the pain of the Elder who must let go of the Orphan. Ken can let Ray go metaphorically (kill him) or literally. The latter option would be to let Ray out of the initiation into a life of crime and into something more like the “normal” initiation that we all receive in the modern West.
Because induction into a crime syndicate is one of the few areas of modern life that does fulfil the criteria for a formal initiation, In Bruges is able to contrast this formal initiation against the “normal” initiation in Western culture, which really looks like no initiation at all. If Ken lets Ray go, Ray will be without an Elder. This matches the broader absence of the Elder archetype in modern. But what In Bruges symbolically shows us is that this process is not easy for the Elder, just as Adolescence shows us that it is not easy for Parents to let go. It’s not easy because it makes the Elder redundant. But it’s also not easy because it entails leaving the Orphan to face the pain of the world alone.
As I alluded to in last week’s post, the ideal behind the lack of initiation in the modern West is at least partly contained in the stories of Wagner’s Parsifal and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In Bruges shares this ideal to a large extent. Like Parsifal and Alyosha, Ray is the pure fool whose naivete is what allows him to confront the world directly, including all of its most difficult aspects. To initiate the Orphan almost always amounts to killing the pure fool, or inner child. Thus, Harry’s order to Ken to kill Ray works perfectly as a piece of symbolism that Wagner and Dostoevsky would have understood. When the Elder initiates the Orphan, he kills the Child.
According to this way of looking at it, initiation is always a narrowing of the individual. Ray can be initiated into killing other people, but only by killing the part of himself that might object i.e. his conscience. It is because Ray has failed initiation that his conscience is still there to torture him over the death of the innocent boy. In Wagnerian or Dostoevskyan terms, it’s because the innocent in Ray is not dead that he can empathise with the innocence in the world and suffer with it. That is something that Harry can no longer do. Ken also couldn’t do at the start of the movie, but he learns by association with Ray.
Thus, In Bruges follows in the footsteps of Parsifal and The Brothers Karamazov in showing us the Elder whose role is precisely not to initiate the Orphan. It turns out that the hardest form of initiation is no initiation at all. If there’s no Elder giving us orders, then there’s nobody we can blame when things go wrong (except ourselves). The same goes for punishment. Ken and Harry can punish Ray for his blunder. But in doing so they only turn him into a kind of Pavlovian machine who does what he’s supposed to not from conscience but from fear.
By giving Ray a couple of days with nothing to do, Ken and Harry accidentally allow him to face his own conscience and thereby to open up an opportunity for redemption. Ken realises that because he’s spent time with the young man. Harry does not because he’s back home in Britain calculating the best way forward in a purely intellectual fashion. Even crime bosses need to be rational and logical. Thus, the second half of the movie also plays out as a kind of spiritual battle between the two Elders.
In Bruges ends up providing one of the rarest types of stories in the modern West: an Orphan-Elder story based in real life. The more I write about it, the more I come to think that it might actually be a modern classic. Since this post has ended up becoming a movie review, I suppose I should end it by giving the film a rating: