AHC/WI: Jungian Hollywood

Using this Guardian piece as a brief reference...

The Influence Of Freud On Movies

(The actual title of the article is so awful, I went with the one that came up on the google page linking to the article.)

Anyone who has seen an average number of films from the 1950s up to about the early 70s can probably attest to what the article is talking about. Sometimes, the psychoanalytic motifs were confined to simply having a stereotypical psychoanalyst on hand as a character, but often they more explicitly employed actual psychoanalytical ideas.

More often than not, the motifs were Freudian, as in the Oedipal theme utilized in Strangers On A Train(at the link). I'm guessing that Freud's emphasis on sex might have made his ideas more alluring to writers and audiences. But I'm wondering if there's a way that Jung, instead of Freud, could have been the go-to shrink for Hollywood screenwriters in that era. I'm mostly thinking of his theory of archetypes, along with the attendant fascination with religion, mythology, and fairy-tales that went along with it.

And what effect would this have on various genres? Horror and science-fiction might be obvious(we could possibly just extrapolate backwards from George Lucas' 1980s infatuation with Joseph Campbell), but I'm also wondering about the other genres that IOTL were heavily impacted by Freudianism. (Which is actually quite a few, from mystery/mystery to romantic comedy).

Or did Jung have his head too full of esoteric mysticism to be accessible to the average filmgoer?
 
the Jungian archetypes such as the hero's quest, and his idea of the shadow (dark side of each of us) and maybe the zen idea of how to make friends with the shadow?

certainly seem like they're ripe with dramatic potential :)
 
the Jungian archetypes such as the hero's quest, and his idea of the shadow (dark side of each of us) and maybe the zen idea of how to make friends with the shadow?

certainly seem like they're ripe with dramatic potential :)

Yeah, but you wonder to what extent a deliberate delve into Jung on the part of Hollywood screenwriters might just seem redundant to what they were already doing. If you're writing bog-standard fantasy-adventure or space-opera, for example, you're probably already dealing with the hero quest(if not by that name), so you might not really see much about Jung's application of the idea to psychology that's going to benefit you.

Though I guess a more conscious usage of his ideas could give the scripts a sturdier conceptual over-arch. But as for the most notable example of that to date...

Galactic Gasbag

Argues that Lucas' original inspiration for Star Wars simply popular sci-fi and fantasy, and his embrace of Jung via Campbell was just an after-the-fact grab at academic glamour.

Ur-daddy Joseph Campbell, on the other hand, found the motif in the original "Star Wars," when Luke, Leia, Han and Chewie fall into the Death Star trash compactor, which promptly sets to work squashing them. This is explicated in the most unintentionally hilarious section of the "Power of Myth" interviews. "My favorite scene was when they were in the garbage compactor," Moyers says, "and the walls were closing in, and I thought, 'That's like the belly of the whale that swallowed Jonah.'" Campbell replies that the scene is "a variant of the death and resurrection theme," in which the hero begins to discover his power.

All of this would make sense if Luke used the Force to hold back the crushing walls. But nothing of the sort happens in this scene: Luke and his friends escape only through the timely help of the dithering robot C3PO. Innumerable action-adventure heroes have had to fight their way out of rooms in which the walls or ceiling slowly close in. Campbell is taking a standard cliffhanger plot device -- one as hoary as having a mustachioed villain tie the heroine to a railroad track, or send her trundling toward a sawmill blade -- and trying to pump it full of significance, with predictably flatulent results.
 
Fellini acknowledged the influence of Jung on *8 1/2* and *Juliet of the Spirits.*

My viewing of Fellini is confined to Amarcord, and(not that it really counts) that tribute film Nine from a few years back. Certainly, the scene from Amarcord with the prostitutes being paraded down the street past the windows full of Marian icons would probably qualify as an appropriation of Madonna/whore archetypes.
 
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