Category: movies

We are back for the second in our mini-series analysing the Terminator film franchise from the point of view of Archetypology. Up this week is what is undoubtedly the greatest of the Terminator films: Terminator 2. When we apply the archetypal lens to the story, we find a family dynamic which revolves around the mission of the hero, John Connor, to resolve childhood trauma and take the leap into the Orphan phase of life. In order for John to achieve his mission, Sarah Connor must overcome the Devouring Mother archetype and the T-800 must give up the role of Tyrannical Father. All of them must learn to bypass “fate” by destroying a worldview which is holding them back.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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?

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.

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.

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: