Category: movies

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey got sucked into the usual culture wars meat grinder a few months ago, and, partly for that reason, I had intended to avoid it. I’ve always admired Nolan’s work for its intent more than its delivery. He’s a big concept kind of director, and his concepts are intriguing; it’s just that, in my opinion, he usually misses the mark.

Without really trying, I’d learned a number of details about his adaptation of The Odyssey from all the online debates that were going on. For that reason, I became aware of the strange changes he had made to the hero of the story and this got me intrigued enough to go and watch the film once the initial hysteria had subsided. I was more than pleasantly surprised. If most of Nolan’s films are misses, this one is definitely a bullseye.

Now that I know what Nolan is doing with the film, the culture war debate around it takes on a new light. Clearly, Nolan was not trying to make a film faithful to the original, but his adaptation is far more radical than even the staunchest critic seems to have realised. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen a single take on the movie that begins to deal with the core issues. I suppose it’s no surprise given that the humanities departments of modern academia are in a dreadful state. Still, this provides an opportunity to show why it is worthwhile spending the time to learn how stories work.

Nolan’s adaptation is what is nowadays called a “deconstruction”. This is a fancy word, but everybody is abundantly familiar with this technique since it forms the basis of some of the most famous comedies ever created. The way a deconstruction works is that you take the standard tropes of a story but modify the hero for effect. A classic example that most people would know is Monty Python’s “Life of Brian”. This takes the familiar gospel story but changes the hero from the son of God to a “very naughty boy”.

Another famous example is Don Quixote. Cervantes gives us all the elements of a medieval chivalric romance but changes the hero from a dashing young knight to a well-heeled man having a midlife crisis. In both cases, the deconstruction provides a satire of the original. Cervantes was making the point that medieval romance stories were anachronisms that only silly old fools still believed in. Monty Python was doing something similar with the gospel story.

I suspect it’s because Christopher Nolan uses the deconstruction technique in his adaptation of The Odyssey that some of the culture warrior commentators decided that he was taking the piss out of the original myth. But Nolan’s story is not a comedy. He is making a more serious and far more interesting point. To understand it, we need to be clear about how a deconstruction type of story functions.

In general, the way a deconstruction works is to juxtapose two frames of reference that do not normally go together. The reason why the technique is so common in comedy is because it creates the unexpected. Middle-aged men don’t usually become dashing knights. “Very naughty boys” don’t usually become messiahs (actually, maybe they do). In any case, the use of deconstruction in comedy makes sense, and everybody usually gets the joke. When deconstruction is used in a serious context, the meaning is much more subtle.

The question for Nolan’s film then becomes: what two frames of reference is he juxtaposing? The answer is that he is juxtaposing myth and history. He does so by inserting a historical truth into the original myth where it does not belong, creating the unexpected. Many people intuitively understood this about Nolan’s film but didn’t grasp that he was clearly doing it on purpose.

The historical truth in question is what is called the Bronze Age Collapse. It was the breakdown of an advanced civilisation that had emerged in the eastern Mediterranean around 1250 BC. Nolan inserted explicit mention of this collapse into his adaptation, something that is not present in the original. He didn’t do that as some tricky Easter egg for film or history buffs to discover. He baked it into the story itself.

Therefore, the two juxtaposed frames in Nolan’s adaptation are the history as we know it and the original myth. The problem is that the original myth contained no reference to the history. How could it? The myth pre-dated the collapse. Thus, we get a story where the hero knows something he should not because, in his world, it hasn’t happened yet. Odysseus is a Bronze Age warrior who somehow knows about the Bronze Age collapses

As far as I can tell, this is a completely novel approach. I can’t think of any other film or story that has done this. It would be as if Monty Python had made The Life of Brian about the real Jesus but had given Jesus some kind of new historical knowledge that he couldn’t have had in the original story.

The reason why seemingly everybody has missed this point about Nolan’s film is because a deconstruction only functions when the audience is fully conversant in the two frames of reference that are being juxtaposed. Everybody knows the gospel story. Therefore, The Life of Brian works as a comedy that everybody will understand. However, very few people in the modern West are familiar with the original version of The Odyssey. People know the famous scenes, such as the sirens and the cyclops, but the core meaning of the ancient myth is not understood. That is why Nolan’s adaptation has also not been understood.

The key to addressing the problem is therefore to review the core meaning of the original in some detail. Once we understand that, we can understand the new frame of reference that Nolan juxtaposes it with. Then, we can understand the core ideas that he is exploring with the film. We’ll spend the rest of this week’s post on the first task and then turn to the second next week. Let’s begin.

Every story, from the greatest ancient myth to the latest cheesy Hollywood action flick, is about the transformation of the hero. To come to grips with the meaning of a story, we must understand that transformation. However, the transformation doesn’t just come out of nowhere. It is grounded in the hero’s dreams, goals, and life context. What sits at the heart of any story is the hero’s core wish. Therefore, our first question when approaching any story is: What does the hero desire?

When we ask this question of Homer’s Odyssey, we get an emphatically clear answer: Odysseus wants to go home. The very first time we meet him in book five of the story, he is weeping on the shores of the island of Ogygia, where he has been trapped for seven years by the goddess Calypso, who wants to make him her husband. Despite the fact that Calypso can grant him immortality, Odysseus laments his situation and despairs that he will ever get home to Ithaca.

Calypso offers Odysseus the chance to become a god, to remain forever young, and to spend the rest of eternity frolicking on the beach. But there is a price he must pay. To accept the offer is to forever sever his connection with his family and his people. The ancient Greeks considered exile a punishment worse than death. The immortality befitting a human being came not from eternal life but from the fame earned by great deeds. If Odysseus does not return home, the memory of his deeds will be lost.

Of course, Calypso’s offer also entails that Odysseus give up any hope of reuniting with his family. He would never see the woman he loves again. He would never see the son he has barely known. For the Greeks, wanting to become a god was a sin that was given the name hubris. Odysseus is free from hubris. In resisting Calypso’s offer, he affirms his desire to live the life of a mortal man.

This is all the more poignant when we consider what Odysseus has gone through beforehand. He spent ten years on the battlefield at Troy, participating in the carnage and slaughter. More importantly, Odysseus was partly responsible for the bloodshed. According to the backstory that every ancient Greek knew by heart, he had inadvertently caused the war by suggesting the mechanism by which it started.

Every eligible bachelor in Greece was competing for the hand of the beautiful Helen, who was the daughter of King Tyndareus. Odysseus was one of the suitors, but he knew he didn’t stand much of a chance. In any case, he was in love with Helen’s cousin, Penelope. The king was worried that the competition between the suitors could lead to violence. Odysseus offered him a deal. The king would help him marry Penelope. In exchange, Odysseus would provide the solution to the trouble with the suitors. Odysseus suggested a pact called the Oath of Tyndareus whereby all the suitors would agree to defend the chosen husband of Helen in the event she was ever abducted. All agreed. All were bound by the deal when Helen later eloped to Troy, thereby starting the Trojan War.

Odysseus’ clever plan to marry Penelope led to him also being bound by the Oath of Tyndareus and therefore required him to fight in Troy along with the others. With hostilities about to commence, a man named Palamedes travelled to Ithaca to collect him. Odysseus and Penelope had just had a son, and he knew from a prophecy that the war would drag on interminably. He attempted to get out of the deal by pretending to be insane. However, Palamedes caught him out by using Telemachus in a trap. Odysseus had to leave behind the woman he loved and his infant son, knowing he would be away from home for years.

Imagine the bitterness Odysseus must have felt from the fact that his cunning plan to marry Penelope had only led to him being estranged from her, not to mention his implicit guilt in starting a war that goes on for ten years. After the war finally ends, he then loses every one of his men on the torturous journey from Troy back to Ithaca. As their king, he bears responsibility for that, too. After thirteen years of pain, suffering and regret, a beautiful nymph (Calypso) offers him immortality. Odysseus can swap his life of trouble for an eternity of pleasure. To call this a tempting offer is an understatement.

A further consideration in Odysseus’ decision-making is the fact that he has no idea whether he even has a home to return to. The world of Bronze Age Greece was run on the principle of might-is-right. Odysseus is a smart man. He must know that the most likely scenario is that somebody has taken his place on the throne, married his wife, and, well, let’s not even think about what they would have done with Telemachus.

The genius of The Odyssey from a storytelling point of view is that we, the audience, already know what is happening on Ithaca because the first four books of the story tell us. We know that Penelope is still trying to hold off the suitors. We know that Telemachus is hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned. We know that the fate of Odysseus’ family and his kingdom is hanging by a thread. We also know that Odysseus does not know any of this.

This sets up the core dynamic of the story. Odysseus’ test is not about his cunning or his intelligence in terms of calculating an outcome. His intelligence must tell him that the situation is hopeless and that he has no family to return to. The story is about his raw drive to do what is right even when the situation is hopeless. Perhaps more than any other story in history, The Odyssey is a test of the hero’s desire, his resolve, and his determination.

In the truly great stories, the hero’s personal journey is representative of the larger beliefs of the culture to which they belong. Odysseus wants to go home. But that is not merely a personal preference on his part. For the ancient Greeks, the polis was the centre of an individual’s identity. Indeed, the individual scarcely had an identity otherwise. Wealth was tied to land, and land was a prerequisite for full membership of the polis. Home was the place of one’s ancestors and one’s progeny. There was nowhere else to go to start a home. That is why exile was considered such a brutal punishment.

While fighting honourably on the battlefields of Troy, Odysseus retained his identity as a warrior-king. However, the ten years that follow, which constitute the time span of The Odyssey, are a very different matter. During that time, Odysseus is in a limbo state. Ancient Greek identity was predicated almost entirely on outward appearances and physical presence. By being away from home for so long, and given that nobody knows where he is or whether he is even still alive, Odysseus is one step away from ceasing to exist. The only faint glimmer of hope rests in his wife and son, who refuse to accept what everybody else on Ithaca assumes to be true, which is that the king is dead.  Penelope and Telemachus are under enormous pressure to give in. If they do so, then Odysseus really is finished. It won’t matter whether he is physically still alive, his identity will be gone and his exile will be permanent.

Thus, the theme of desire, resolve, and determination also includes Penelope and Telemachus. Their intellect would also tell them that Odysseus is almost certainly dead. They also hold on nevertheless.

When we say that Odysseus’ core desire is to go home, the meaning of that desire is like the rings of an onion. It expands outward to incorporate his personal history, the history of the Trojan War, the fate of his wife and son, the future of his kingdom, and the core truths of ancient Greek culture. As if all that wasn’t enough, there is a divine element to the story, too. The Odyssey begins with Zeus himself declaring that Odysseus must return home. Every Greek myth revolves around the hero pleasing or displeasing the gods. Odysseus’ core desire aligns with the gods. That is good. But every wavering of his desire brings down divine punishment. It is not an exaggeration to say that the balance of the cosmos rests on Odysseus making it back to Ithaca.

Odysseus’ desire to go home is therefore about reclaiming his identity in the widest possible meaning of that word. He must reunite with his family, reassert his right to the throne, and reclaim the privileged position with the gods that every ancient Greek ruler must have. By re-establishing his own identity, he achieves the same outcome for his wife and son. They, too, have been limbo for twenty years. Penelope is famous for having successfully stalled the suitors for the whole time, no mean feat given that King Tyndareus was at his wits’ end about what to do with the suitors for Helen. Meanwhile, Telemachus has grown up without a father. For both of them, the man they once knew must be little more than a memory.

Telemachus probably doesn’t even remember his father, given that he was only an infant when Odysseus went off to fight in Troy. That is why his journey in the story is to discover the family identity which is his birthright. He travels to Pyros and to Troy, where he learns about his father from those who fought alongside him in war. By meeting the greats who earned fame on the battlefield at Troy, Telemachus proves that he can hold his own in grown-up company. He is finally ready to stand up to the suitors when he returns to Ithaca.

The importance of the final showdown is hard to understate. As we have already noted, the Bronze Age was predicated on might-is-right. Only physical strength could hold a kingdom together. This was self-evidently true in relation to external enemies, but the problem of the overzealous suitors was a form of internal division. What was really going on with all the trouble over the marriage of Helen was that a civil war was brewing. The Oath of Tyndareus was designed to prevent a war among the Greeks. It ended up leading to a war against the Trojans.

It cannot be a coincidence that The Odyssey ends with the same problem that began the Trojan War. Odysseus had tried to avoid civil war with a cunning plan, but that only ended up leading to a much larger conflagration. When faced with the exact same dynamic on his return to Ithaca, he no longer tries to avoid bloodshed. The showdown with the suitors at the end of the story shows that Odysseus has learned his lesson. It signifies that he has learned to rule the way a Bronze Age king must: by force. The fact that his son joins him in the battle is significant because it is the final stage of Telemachus’ initiation, as he proves himself also capable of doing what is necessary to hold the kingdom together.

The technical term for a story where the hero gets what they desire is a comedy. The Odyssey is a comedy to the extent that Odysseus and his family get what they want, which is not just that he physically returns home, but that he retrieves the identity which he was in danger of losing. Odysseus is reunited with his family. His reputation and fame are secured, as is his place on the throne. Telemachus is initiated into manhood and is ready to take over the kingship at a later time. Since all of this accords with Zeus’ command, both the earthly and divine realms have been returned to equilibrium. All the main threads of the story are resolved in favour of the hero.

This brief overview suffices to lay out the main themes of the original story and provide us with the reference point we need to understand Christopher Nolan’s adaptation. The original myth is an extended test of Odysseus’ desire to go home even though he has no way to know if home is still there and every reason to believe that it’s not. The might-is-right ethic of the Bronze Age should have seen Odysseus lose his crown. The suitors should have won the day. Only the incredible perseverance and dedication of Penelope and the assistance of Athena and other gods preserved for him a slim chance of success. Odysseus’ task is to keep his resolve during a ten-year journey featuring incredible temptation and numerous setbacks where his identity is hanging by a thread.

In his adaptation, Christopher Nolan changed the core desire of his Odysseus. In doing so, he changed the meaning of the whole story. The culture warriors were correct in this, but they missed exactly how radical the change is and what further meaning is thereby created. The truth is that Nolan’s Odysseus is not ancient Greek at all. He is a modern man. How that works and what it means are subjects we’ll tackle in next week’s post.

“So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.”  Revelation 3:16

It might sound like a strange thing to complain about, but one of the problems with the modern world is that there aren’t enough things to hate. Everything is meh, lowest common denominator slop, mediocrity in the mass. Almost by definition, you can neither love nor hate mediocrity, and so we go through life lukewarm.

Against this background, I was almost excited to recently stumble across a film that I genuinely hated. In our era of mass entertainment, where so much is produced that is instantly forgettable, it’s very rare to find something worthy of being hated as opposed to simply ignored. Once I’d gotten over my surprise, an intellectual question arose: why did I hate this so much? I’m still not one hundred percent sure I have the answer to that, but I’ll have a crack at summarising it in this post.

There are several other paradoxes that the film manages to engender and which form a large part of what makes it so infuriating. It’s a work that is simultaneously pretentious and genuine, realistic while also engaging in ridiculous fantasy (magical realism – God help us), and nominally all about feelings and emotions even though the story creates no genuine emotional highs or lows. I still can’t figure out whether the whole thing isn’t some kind of postmodernist joke. Nevertheless, even if the movie was intended as a satire, that’s not the way I interpreted it, and the whole reason I stuck with it until the end was because the opening of the film seemed to me not just genuine, but also had the potential to explore some very interesting questions about the modern world.

For the most part, the movie sits squarely within the “realist” genre, i.e., a story about everyday life. This kind of realism is actually a fairly recent innovation, beginning mostly in the late 19th century. The work of Dostoevsky would be a prime example since his stories take place in second-tier towns of second-tier provinces, featuring the lives of ordinary people. But Dostoevsky made up for the averageness of his characters by having them go through very dramatic events involving murder, injustice, betrayal and the like. What he implied was that anybody could be called on to face the biggest questions of life. You didn’t need to be rich or famous, and perhaps fame and fortune are even hindrances that distract from the real issues.

We see a similar approach to realism in the work of Camus. For example, in his novel, The Stranger, Camus explored the possibility that it was possible to commit murder and feel nothing about it. This is the darker side of the subjectivist position. If transcendence and meaning lie in the individual, the good news is that anybody is capable of experiencing it anywhere in the world, even in the middle of nowhere, as per a Dostoevsky novel. However, the individual is also free not to experience it. Camus explored the ramifications of that.

It is in this realist tradition that The Worst Person in the World belongs. The story presents us with an everyday character in the form of Julie, a bright young woman from Oslo. In a wonderfully condensed opening sequence, we find out that Julie was a straight-A student in school who went on to study medicine, not because she was interested in it, but because it seemed like a good use of her intelligence. She quickly learned that she had no interest in becoming a doctor and transitioned into psychology instead. When that also bored her, she tried her hand at photography. Julie’s experimental approach to her studies mirrors that of her love life. Meanwhile, we find out that her mother is supportive of her throughout this period and that she is half-estranged from her father, whose opinion is therefore irrelevant.

What’s brilliant about this opening sequence is that it is an accurate representation of the life of most young people in the modern West. The modern world forces us to be experimenters. That’s true of our career, while the whole point of the modern dating game is to try different partners. There are good aspects to all that, but one of the potential downsides is an over-abundance of possibilities, none of which seem to work out, and so you drift around looking for something that you can’t really define. That’s clearly what Julie’s problem is. She’s looking for something but doesn’t know what it is. So far, so good. The beginning of The Worst Person in the World gives us a very modern hero with a very modern set of problems.

One of the reasons why this setup is so interesting is because it avoids two of the main female archetypes that modern film and literature are fixated upon. The first is the Girlboss, which Hollywood has been ramming down our throats for more than a decade. The second is the woman whose life is a shambles. This is a favourite of the romantic comedy genre. In Julie, we have a character who is capable and intelligent, but isn’t interested in following default social scripts or impressing anybody. She’s neither a Girlboss nor a ditz.

Things get even more interesting from there because what happens next is that Julie gets herself into what seems to be a loving and stable long-term relationship. She meets Aksel, who is fifteen years older than her and is a successful comic book writer. They fall in love and begin living with each other. The relationship is serious enough that Julie spends a weekend with Aksel’s family on holiday. This leads to the first important issue that our hero will face, also a very modern problem: when to have children. Aksel wants children, and, even though she is not against the idea, Julie doesn’t want to yet. Aksel asks her what she wants instead, and she doesn’t know.

Within just the first fifteen minutes, the film gives us the promise of something really new and fresh: an intelligent young woman who doesn’t want to be a Girlboss but also doesn’t know if she wants to become a mother. A number of interesting questions are posed. Why is Julie so indecisive? She’s clearly very intelligent but doesn’t know what she wants in life. As a result, she flits around here and there trying different things. Nevertheless, she seems to have found some certainty in the relationship with Aksel, and their relationship is serious enough that the question of children has arisen. Aksel has now asked Julie to make a genuinely life-altering decision. Presumably, it’s the first time she’s had to do that, and she declines to commit.

Meanwhile, we also find out that Julie is now working a minimum wage job in a bookshop. She has gone from training to become a doctor, one of the highest-status jobs in the modern world, to a low-status job. Does she care about that? Is she happy in the bookshop, or is she bored and dreaming about something more? We don’t really know, and so this becomes another theme that we expect the movie to explore. If anything, the opening fifteen minutes sets up too many avenues that the story could take, and it’s not clear what’s going to happen next. That’s a nice problem to have, and, in any case, the overall theme is clear. Julie needs to figure out what she wants in life.

A big part of the reason why I ended up hating The Worst Person in the World is that, after such a promising beginning, the story almost systematically fails to deliver on any of the themes it introduces. If it wasn’t for such an excellent opening, I never would have stuck with the movie til the end, but I got trapped in a sunk cost fallacy and kept watching to see whether they would either resolve the issues or, by failing to resolve them, make some other point. Neither of these things happened.

The sunk cost problem was made worse by the fact that there are a number of genuinely charming scenes throughout the film that are interesting in themselves. The trouble is that the film wants to pretend that these scenes are unrelated even though it presents them in a linear fashion and even though there is a clear narrative progression through them. That’s another paradox that exists in this film. It wants to be postmodern and not have to worry about silly little things like narrative continuity, while also giving us what is very obviously a story with a well-defined and interesting hero. It wants to both be a story and not be a story at the same time.

This postmodern wink-wink, nudge-nudge tactic ends up being used as a way for the writers to systematically avoid dealing with any real issues. One of these occurs around the midpoint of the film. We know that Aksel wants to have kids, but Julie is not ready. Fine. They argue it out. Julie “wins” the argument, and things seem to settle back into stability. In fact, Aksel and Julie seem perfectly happy together. The movie goes out of its way to show us that.

Imagine, then, that the very next thing that happens is that Julie is going to cheat on Aksel, even though the film has shown us quite clearly that they are happy together. Why would she do that? Is she dissatisfied? Is she bored? We don’t know, and we don’t ever really find out, just like we don’t find out whether she likes working in the bookshop or any of the other issues that the film introduces. It becomes clear by the midpoint of the movie that the storywriters have no intention of resolving any of these issues. As a result, the film never deals with anything meaningful. The result is that we as the audience face the same problem as Julie: a lack of meaning. Julie doesn’t know what she wants, and we don’t either. But we do get to spend the whole movie watching her not find out.

If the film were simply vacuous nonsense or a bit of light fun, it would at least be consistent. But what makes it all much worse is that the film knows how to introduce interesting issues, only to leave them unresolved. If it happened only once or twice, it could be put down to a mistake, but it happens time and again. The worst example of that occurs around the midpoint of the movie, and this is where I really got mad. At exactly the moment when a proper moral issue arises, the film suddenly drops its rigorous realism and introduces firstly a gaping plot hole and secondly a scene of magical realism that comes out of nowhere. The events unfold like this.

Aksel is a successful comic book writer who is having a launch party for his latest work. Julie goes along but quickly gets bored. She tells Aksel she is going home. Not very supportive behaviour and raises the question of whether Julie has a problem with Aksel’s work, but Aksel seems not to mind. He kisses her goodbye, and we have a nice scene where Julie walks home in the early evening through some picturesque Oslo neighbourhoods. On her walk, she stumbles across a bar where a wedding reception is taking place and decides to crash the party. She meets a handsome man called Eivind, and they hit it off. After a few drinks, they both tell each other they are in relationships and agree not to cheat. What follows is a charming scene where they share a series of intimate moments that threaten to get sexual but never do. Early the next morning, we see the two of them part ways without exchanging any details. To re-emphasise the point that nothing untoward has happened, the characters tell each other (and us) that they really didn’t cheat. It was all a bit of platonic fun.

Because this scene is so pleasant and endearing, we almost forget the larger context in which it has taken place. Let’s think about it from Aksel’s point of view. His long-term girlfriend, the woman he has been living with for several years, has told him she’s going home. Therefore, when he gets home himself later in the evening, he will expect to find Julie there. But, when he arrives, Julie’s not there. What would Aksel do in this situation? Obviously, at the bare minimum, he would send her a text message to find out where she is. If he gets no response, he would try to call, and if there’s no answer to that, he would start to worry. That’s what it means to be in a long-term relationship. It’s basic common sense.

More importantly, however, although we know that Julie is just having a bit of platonic fun, Aksel is certainly going to have a very different opinion on the matter. The idea of his long-term partner spending an evening drinking and flirting with another man is probably not going to appeal to him. Therefore, when Aksel calls to ask where Julie is, her response will be very revealing. Will she lie to him? If so, it proves that she knows that the evening with Eivind is inappropriate. Furthermore, if she’s prepared to lie to Aksel about it, then we can infer that there are problems in the relationship. If he believes the lie, then we learn something about Aksel.

All of this is standard fare in any number of romance movies, but this film decided that these issues simply didn’t need to be addressed. This might have been forgivable if the rest of the movie wasn’t almost excessively realistic in its portrayal of the minutiae of modern life. Having gone into great detail about other aspects of Julie and Aksel’s relationship, the story decides to skip what is, up to this point, the most important thing that has happened, a truly make-or-break moment. I started to wonder whether the only guiding principle of the film is simply to do the opposite of what the audience would expect. Perhaps the story is nothing more than a postmodern pastiche that is clever enough to know how to invert common tropes but has no concern with having the end result make sense.

In any case, we never see whether Aksel tried to call Julie, whether Julie lied to him, or whether there was any questions asked when she got home early the next morning. That would have been bad enough, but what happens next is even worse. Julie and Eivind had not exchanged phone numbers when they said goodbye after their evening of fun, but, what do you know, Eivind just happens to stumble into the bookshop where Julie works. What are the odds? He tells her he wants to see her, and she is clearly interested in the offer. That is when, out of nowhere, and in a movie that has until now been rigorously realistic, we are subjected to an extended scene of magical realism. Time stops for everybody else in the world except for Julie and Eivind. What is the purpose of this incredible suspension of the laws of nature? To allow them to have another night of fun, and this time the no cheating rule has been dropped.

I’ll admit, I hate magical realism with the fire of a thousand suns, but, at the very least, it seemed that this scene finally meant that something interesting was about to happen in a film that had started so promisingly and then delivered little. Perhaps now we were going to see a proper confrontation that would reveal something deeper about the characters. Julie had now cheated on Aksel and decided to break up with him. This didn’t make a lot of sense since, as far as we have been led to believe, they were both happy together, but at least we might now learn the truth about the relationship. Maybe there are all kinds of skeletons in the closet that will be revealed. Furthermore, we can expect to finally find out what Aksel is made of. Is he clueless? Ignorant? Dumb? Is he going to take this lying down? As for Julie, is she going to continue to lie? Will she show remorse, or what?

Once again, the film had managed to set up a whole host of unanswered questions. Once again, it systematically manages to avoid all of them. But at least we get an answer to one question: Julie is prepared to lie. Upon finding out that she wants to break up with him, Aksel asks her directly whether she has met somebody else. She tells him, no. We know she’s lying. The story knows she’s lying. And, yet, the lie is glossed over, and we go into a heated argument that takes place under false pretences because Aksel is ignorant of the truth. The absurd irony is that the movie’s only real message seems to be that we should live day-to-day and be in touch with our emotions, and yet all of this amounts to blatant dissociation. What is the point in being in touch with your emotions if those emotions are based on systematically ignoring basic facts about reality?

In the broader scope of the story, these developments also subvert our expectations for where things were going. Julie began the movie as merely an indecisive young woman. She is still indecisive, but now she has become a liar and a cheat into the bargain. Is the movie going to hold her accountable for this? Absolutely not. In fact, it gets even more preposterous towards the end, but I won’t bore anybody with the details. Once again, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the storywriters were just inverting common tropes for the sake of it. Stories about romantic infidelity are a dime a dozen, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one where the cheater lies and then nothing happens after that. Most people feel bad about such things. Does Julie? We don’t ever really know. And that becomes the whole problem in general; we don’t ever really find out what’s going on with Julie at a deeper level because the story never forces her to confront any of these issues.

For that reason, The Worst Person in the World is not really a story at all because the whole point of stories is to force the hero to confront difficult truths about themselves or the world at large. This is even true of tragedies where the hero comes to grief. In fact, tragedies force the hero to deal with the most difficult aspects of existence. What becomes clear by the midpoint of The Worst Person in the World is that Julie is not going to be forced to confront any real difficulties whatsoever. The one person in the film who now has a genuine reason for grievance against her, Aksel, is going to get wheeled out later on to do nothing more than simp for her. There’s a whole other essay I could write about the gender politics of the movie, but the short version is that the men in the story all suck. More specifically, they exist for the sole purpose of giving Julie what she wants, and when they fail to do that, they are removed.

For that reason, The Worst Person in the World becomes a monodrama. There is not a single scene where Julie is not the centre of attention, and the sole purpose of every other character is simply to give Julie whatever she wants whenever she wants it. Even the laws of nature are there to serve Julie’s every whim. It’s pure narcissism. After such a promising start, The Worst Person in the World ended up being a piece of self-absorbed garbage, and, by the end, I was seriously bitter about the fact that I had got sucked into watching it. The only thing that could have saved it was some kind of twist ending that made clear that the whole thing was a joke. But there was no twist ending, and if there is a joke in there somewhere, it is very well hidden.

And so we get a story that is nominally a piece of hardcore realism portraying the lives of normal young people in Oslo, which nevertheless feels completely unreal because it is incapable and unwilling to explore any of the issues raised. The result is just a series of scenes that flit past like a group of social media posts. Julie thought she was in love but then met somebody who seemed better, only he wasn’t better, so she moved on to the next thing, and then the next thing. Even against this background, the story could have explored what it would mean for Julie to overcome that. To say it again, that’s the whole point of a story: the hero confronts some of the negative aspects of their reality and tries to do something about them. The reason we use the word “hero” is because it requires courage and strength of character to do this.

The true shame of The Worst Person in the World is that it correctly identifies a number of modern problems while giving us a hero who seems capable of confronting them and then completely fails to do so. That is why the film is worth hating. It provides nothing more than a piece of escapist magical realism. If you’re going to use magical realism, why not use it to solve the hero’s problems? Why not solve the world’s problems while you’re at it? The thing is that, even in stories where magic forms a normal part of the universe in which the characters live, magic is a dangerous and difficult thing because the use of it requires you to commit to a moral and intellectual point of view about how the world should be. That is what The Worst Person in the World systematically fails to do. It doesn’t have the courage or the strength of character to even make an attempt.

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: