OOC: commentary on Dark Phoenix scene (Part 1 of 2)
LJ entry: Dark Phoenix
Originally posted: January 23, 2006
Written: January 24, 2006
What Has Come Before: White Queen Emma Frost and White Bishop Jason Wyngarde combined their powers (telepathy and illusion) to wedge cracks into the psyche of Black Queen Jean Grey, toward the goal of driving her batty and out of the Hellfire Club and its Inner Circle. They succeeded far beyond their wildest dreams (or fears), and when they realized that, they got the hell out of Dodge. Before he fled, Jason inserted the suggestion that it was Shaw who was behind the whole ordeal, Shaw who had planned his Queen's destruction with the two psionic adepts, Shaw who was summoned by a sequence of phone calls (also initiated by Jason) to rescue her and thus be at ground zero for his own destruction. Thanks a lot, Jason. You are a worthy opponent!
Note: I will be discussing mostly my poses and interpretations here. Also, I use "Jean," "Phoenix," and "Dark Phoenix" interchangeably throughout to refer to the same individual, the other person in this scene with Shaw.
A car door's slam echoes flatly in the pre-dawn chill of the Hellfire Club's estate, followed a few seconds later by the slam of the mansion's front door. "Is she here?" Shaw demands at the security station, of surprised guards, whom he doesn't give the chance to answer before a Black Pawn falls over himself to lead him upstairs and serve as receptacle for his monarch's fuming, frantic worry. "Where's Harper? No? Well, get her on the damn phone! I want Holland on standby, even if you have to drag her out of bed -- yes, /now/, we might need a medic! Get Garov, and the two of you stand watch in the hall. Go!" Curtly he verbally shoves the other man away, into a pelting run back downstairs. Then he blinks rapidly at Jean's door, straightens the coat thrown haphazardly over a hastily assembled outfit, and brings up weak, shifting mental shields (still the stratocumulus storm brewing, black cloud hunting--). And then he presses his hand to the door, as if checking for heat, and then he knocks, twice, softly.
Jason called Joelle, King's Black Pawn, who called her monarch, who . . . was not home. Or, for that matter, dressed. Very early Monday morning, after four or four-thirty - he was asleep! He was spending the night with his current lover, mercantile heiress Cynthia Gladstone of London, and neither of them was particularly pleased by a dead-of-the-night phone call and hasty departure. Shaw didn't tell her why he was racing home; it never occurs him to tell people things like that because, hello, they don't need to know. He'd driven himself for the tryst, so that's his own car in front of the clubhouse (he has two or three he keeps in the garage there). I like the imagery of the door slamming: flat, cold, empty sound to start the scene.
We players liked take-charge Shaw, too! Joelle wasn't very helpful with details about what was wrong with Jean, and he fears the worst: a telepathic attack that exploded or imploded her into bloody bits. He suspects Emma behind it, as the only other powerful telepath he knows, but he's reserving judgment (after Emma assured him that it wasn't her messing with Jean) until he sizes up the situation. That he does leave a comfortable bed before dawn in this heightened state is a testament to his managerial dedication. He would do this for any of his pieces, and he is genuinely worried about his Queen, after she confessed that her control was slipping. The worry is mostly on the Inner Circle plane, one monarch for another, one professional partner for another, but below the noblesse oblige is a kernel of honest human liking for her as a person. Someone is messing with his piece, his partner, his physician - his - and he will have satisfaction over it.
He called ahead to the clubhouse on the drive across the park (Cynthia has a penthouse on Central Park West) and also started charging up his mutation, just in case. At this point, he's at a moderate level of energy absorption, which I wish I'd explicated better in the scene (but that's why we have commentary, right?). He's entirely awake, at least cognitively, and possessed of the ineluctable momentum of a freight train. He wants to know that Jean is in the house. He wants his Rook available to him for protection. He wants the EMT-trained medic, Black Pawn Sandra Holland, on hand for medical attention if necessary. (More on her later.) He wants Garov and this unnamed pawn who escorted him to stand guard until Harper shows up. He is in control of the situation. It's a good juxtaposition for later action where he is not in control of anything.
On my commute home before this scene, I had the image of him putting his hand to the door, softly, almost gently, testing for heat or steeling himself to see what's inside Jean's room. Again, could have described that better, but the pose was already so long, and I hate long poses because they baffle and torment me. So, on we go. He puts his hand to the door, then knocks.
The air around the Black Queen's quarters crackles with unseen energy, the overcharge enough to raise the hairs of those close by. Beneath the crack of the door, a shifting orange light escapes and flickers: fire without scent or smoke or sound. There are other sounds, though -- bumps and creaks and clatters, the sound of zippers, the sounds of slamming closet doors. And the sound of the outer door and inner opening in tandem, untouched by their owner's hands. Wrapped in a whirlwind of false flame, eyes closed and arms crossed over her chest, Jean hovers a foot above the luxurious rug as her belongings pack and assemble themselves.
Shock, the blank incomprehension of one who doesn't believe working eyes (/are/ they working?), completely stills Shaw, who runs his eyes in the next moment over the room and then her. Swift cataloguing; faster calculation. "May I come in?" he asks with, perhaps, admirable calm and courtesy.
Whatever he was expecting to see inside the room . . . it wasn't this. His visual apparatus absorbs the data, but can't immediately put sense to them. He has never seen Jean using her powers at full tilt, and has hoarded the petty, sniggering belief that she doesn't dare use them fully. Below the respect, below the admiration, below even the misogyny - Shaw does not think much of Jean as a mutant or a person. She's weak. She has this nobility stick up her ass. She's blinkered, and she's a prude. She fails at mutant; she fails at human. He's a general misanthrope, not liking or thinking much of anyone around him, but the hatred is stronger, more detailed, when it's directed toward someone he works closely with and has to depend on. It's a way for his ego to stay assured that he's still powerful and in charge, not weak and vulnerable, himself. Knock down the other person off her pedestal, even if you're the one who put her on it in the first place, which he did.
As much as Shaw despises and scorns Jean, he fears and worships her, too, at a primal, unconscious level he's completely unaware of. She is a powerful woman, and that triggers his mother-love/fear/loathing/desire. With Jean, he sublimates that reaction, all unconsciously, into more acceptable disdain. (How he sublimates it with Emma and with Sal is an entirely different essay I might write someday if it comes up.) His id puts her on a shining ivory pedestal for aweful mother/goddess worship, his ego knocks her right back down, and his superego glosses over it with an assurance of superiority due to his rank, age, experience, and so on. (Sidebar: I will be using Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytical terms throughout this commentary, eschewing the lay meanings for the original definitions.)
Now he is faced with Jean's id and ego unbound, superego on holiday, and he has no idea what to do with it. She is pouring out power profligately, effortlessly, which makes him deeply uneasy if he stops to think about it. He's a physical person; mental stuff freaks him out because he has no direct counter except native willpower, charisma, and intelligence. He rather suspects that none of those three are going to help him here, but it's all he has. He surveys the scene, thinks fast, and goes for calm and courtesy, words I will use frequently to hammer home how much he's clinging to them.
<< "So -nice- of you to ask, Sebastian," >> Jean replies in a sing-song purr, spoken words and mental voice paired and resonant. Her eyes don't open, but her head snakes towards him, so apparently she sees all the same. << "-Do- come in. I'm afraid your hospitality is no longer to my liking, however. I'm such a difficult guest, I know. Wanting my privacy, wanting you to keep your little puppets out of my mind." >> A heavy medical atlas wings past his head, missing by an exquisitely controlled three centimeters, and leaving a rush of air in its wake.
Geek glee for the blended vocal and telepathic output. It was all I could do to hold back on any comics references to Dark Phoenix in my poses. This show is xmm_jeangrey's, not mine. (Not as much mine, anyway. I have some show later on!)
Shaw ducks automatically, vainly, and the breeze ruffles his hair's unbound waves. "Thank you," he replies, holding to calmness and to courtesy like a shield, like the shields fraying, fragmenting, drifting from his clouded mind. Energy courses in him along thick channels, circulating with blood's heated flow, but he's controlled on the outside. He's calm. He closes the door behind him (with only a stray thought of subliminal anxiety: << Left alone with her, out of control? Powers used more, headaches and nerves, what to do what to do-- >>) and says simply, "I don't understand. We haven't found you to be a difficult guest, and of course your privacy is your own. You're the Black Queen of this club. Has someone hurt you?"
A book flies at your head, you're damned well going to duck, even if it's too late and unnecessary. Body reaction. Instinct. (And it let me finish his description by indicating what his hair is doing in this scene.) There's the absorbed energy, flowing through his body. I put much more tele-meta (more of it and more clear) into this scene because an unchained Phoenix would have wider and deeper perceptions. It was fun!
Repetitions of the "calm and courtesy" motif, accentuated by "controlled." Note all the hard-c sounds in the meta, in fact. Such sounds are crisp and clear - ha, ha, I did it again right there - and add to the gestalt. I work very hard to write on several levels at once: semantic, syntactic, phonetic, thematic, and so on. Even if a reader doesn't consciously notice such tricks, the subconscious (and, if I'm being very clever, the unconscious) mind does, and the effect adds to the overall reading experience.
I hope. Sometimes it's just plain ol' purple froth, and sometimes it's just for my enjoyment of playing with language.
The next book doesn't miss. A large and beautiful edition of Gray's Anatomy, birthday present from her colleagues at the hospital, takes Shaw soundly in the side of the head. It bounces. << "Don't play coy with me." >> Jean warns, sing-song game dropped abruptly into Stygian darkness. << "It doesn't become you. Your little shields will hide no secrets from me, you know that, I know that. Stop trying to insult my intelligence by denying your role in all this. Spider back at the heart of your web." >> she pronounces, as more books fly past, but resume missing.
The Gray's Anatomy entertained me for the book itself (a copy of which is sitting at home on my shelves) and for the TV show of that name. Anyway. How terribly symbolic of Jean: smack your patient upside the head with a classic medical tome. Her dialogue is toe-curlingly Claremontian. "I AM DARK PHOENIX, AND YOU WILL ALL FEAR ME, PUNY MORTALS," and so on. More geek glee!
This part of the scene made me think, on the commute this morning, that Jean's attack with the book only reinforces Shaw's contempt for her. The head? That's the best she can do? What a pussy. If he had telekinetic power, he would have gone for more vital areas: throat, gut, and the all-important (for a misogynist!) breasts and genitals. He scoffs at a mere book to the head!
And let us now bow our heads in devout thanksgiving that Shaw has no TK at his command. No one would be safe from him, ever. Especially the women.
The energy flows shift almost immediately with the book's impact: a burst of kinetic brilliance that seeps into the general ambience within and around him, heightening its strength by that many more joules. Shaw winces at the blow (but opiates already oozing through insulted synapses, dulling the pain and stroking dreamy pleasure into slow life) and holds his ground, physically and verbally. "I'm not playing with you," he snaps (so much for emotional ground). "I got a call saying that you were in some kind of trouble, and here I am to see what it is, and you're acting like--" His mind fumbles for some kind of appropriate encapsulation; it seethes with hateful unconscious imagery -- Kali, the Destroyer Goddess, the mother that births and devours -- before providing useful conscious words. "--Like a /drama/ queen, never mind your title. I haven't done anything to you, Jean. Why are you acting like this? With /me/?" Anger surges before hurt before fear before guilt--
A book to the head does hurt. Unlike the comics version, who never seems to break a sweat, let alone feel pain, while he's punching out Sentinels for the love of Mike, this Shaw does have working pain receptors that scream at his brain with OWOWOW. However, his brain also releases a chemical when he's charged up that triggers production of endogenous opiates. Since he's charged now, the opiates have started percolating in his synapses, softening the message of pain and giving him an orgasmic high. (See this commentary for a mini-essay discussing this phenomenon and its psychological ramifications.) The book hurts, but not that much (he winces more out of surprise), and its momentum doesn't even shift his head in place. His body absorbs that energy instead, as indicated in the meta, and he stands his ground.
Emotionally? Not so much. Some of his unconscious panic is starting to percolate to higher levels, resulting in his snappish tone and curt words. The Kali image is pure unconsciousness, and I wish I'd written that better. What his brain is actually producing is blended imagery; those three items in the dash-separated list are different. They're layers of meaning digging down from Kali (specific-cultural, most clearly defined) to the Destroyer Goddess (wider meaning, less detailed, more archetypal, across most cultures) to the life/death mother (most archetypal, basic, primal; the formless icon shared by the collective unconscious). Oh, well. The general sense comes through, and maybe your unconscious responds to it, through the haze of conscious and subconscious wrapping.
"Drama queen." Well, she is. Just look at her. And anyway, Shaw feels utterly attacked, so lashes out. He didn't do anything wrong, so what the hell is this? Anger. Hurt, oh, yes, that, too: Mother is angry, but Son isn't in the wrong. Sniffle. He reacts out of fear, and the guilt . . . the guilt comes from his failure to protect her. Something's gone wrong, and he wasn't on watch for it. He couldn't do anything about it. He failed. He failed her. Son disappointed Mother. Son deserves the whupping that's coming to him. If the attack had stayed on the physical level, he wouldn't have fought nearly as much as he ends up doing, because of that guilt and need for expiation. As it is . . . well. You'll see.
Jean withdraws into herself again, into the flow and the fire, and the room redoubles its' ordering and packing. Shaw's words are absorbed on some level, processed and catalogued, and only the most critical ones relayed to higher thought and decision making. At the surge of anger, and fear and the guilt, everything abruptly stops. The books stack themselves neatly in a box. The suitcases on her bed snap closed. The flames cease. Jean drops lightly to the carpet. And then she opens her eyes and turns them on Shaw. Where the flames went is suddenly apparent. She says not a word further, merely stares him down for a moment of expressionless intensity before casually waving a hand. Her powers condense, convulse, and fling him hard against the opposite wall, her desk chair scooting backwards to catch him before he hits the ground.
Hi, fire eyes!
Shaw doesn't even have time for instincts, which scream along autonomous threads throughout his nervous system to curl up, ball up, protect the vulnerable belly and throat. He slams into the wall like a rag doll -- stunning energy, stunned emotion -- and drops heavily into the chair, tilting it at a crazy angle with the onset of limp and tilting weight. "Jesus," he gasps, and only that. Hands scrabble to grasp the chair's arms and pull him into balance. His mind gropes likewise, through a tumble of outrage (all but drowning out resurgent, stronger visceral fear) and absorbed energy, reaching for comprehension, context.
What leaps out immediately for me in this pose is the repetition of "tilting." I would like to claim, in my esteemed and experienced writer's way, that I planned that. I didn't. By and large, I'm in control of my writing, but you know, accidents happen. I work to improve! Maybe one of these days, I will learn to proofread my poses before I hit Enter. . . .
During an attack, instinct tells the body to curl up into a fetal ball (well, if it can't just fight-or-flight) to protect the vital organs. Shaw can't do that before he's flattened against the wall. Ow. That does hurt, and if he weren't a mutant (or weren't charged already), the blow would have cracked and broken several ribs and bruised him from heels to crown. It's a lot of energy to absorb, which his body valiantly does. He's still below his peak, but getting there. He'll start to show signs of physical breakdown, failed absorption, with another one of these blows.
And, at last, Jean advances. Expression abstracted, the silk of her dressing gown rustling gently, she picks her way across the carpet like a lady crossing the ballroom floor. Her head tilts as she pauses, three feet off, to regard Shaw. She smiles, then, pretty and girlish, and reaches out to gently caress his mind and body, feeling the blood singing through arteries primed with adrenaline, sensing the amped-up crackle of electrical potentials releasing and building anew. Finding what she wants, she rests a delicate mental finger against juuuust the right spot, and Shaw's muscles are listening to a new master. Her. << "You won't like this," >> she murmur-thinks, voices soothing. << "But the search for the truth is always a little painful." >> Fondly, she pats his cheek and allows her fingers to rest there, heightening the ease of mental contact as she throws wide the doors of his mind and walks on in.
First, though, he has telepathic blows to deal with. Sigh. He hates that. He hates that.
Action potentials are hot.
Under the touch -- and the /smile/ -- Shaw shivers, but then that falls away when the doors open. Mental expands; physical recedes, through the ripple of his muscles' tremors and the rush of his blood's tide. His conscious mind remains in shock from the barrage of attacks, and thoughts flex and flow sluggishly. A muddy pool of signifiers: words, images, emotions. Blame. (Of her? Himself? Who--?) Hate/fear/loathing/desire, that bestial gradient, like shuffled layers of piquant and moldy cheese. (For her? For whom--?) The pool laps through the open doors, welcoming her unwillingly, but pulling back with her entrance, sucking away and down and deep into the abyss of the unconscious, where monsters lie and answers lie with them.
So now we come to the heart of this commentary, the reason why I'm writing it: What Is Going On In Shaw's Unconscious. Psychoanalysis, ahoy!
We begin, however, with the conscious mind, after passing through the boundaries of his physicality. I'm proud of the transition mostly because I remembered to pose it and not just go right to the mental plane. I wanted the sense that Jean is making a journey and has to pass through various portals to find what she's looking for. First up: the physical sensations that encompass and ground him. When they fall away, she's in the conscious layers of his mind. I inverted traditional conceptualization to make the conscious mind a pool of water and the unconscious a neatly organized place. Water is the classical symbol of deep emotion, mystery, strangeness, and so on, but it's on top here, churned up by the physical and emotional assault. The unconscious water mixes with conscious symbols, making mud. Making a mess, frankly. When Shaw is attacked - well, this is why he doesn't think so clearly in those times, hm? The iron control he has on his unconscious cracks or breaks, and a mess, it is made in his higher mind.
His conscious mind isn't entirely sure what's going on - thus, the parenthetical questions. There's all this unconscious mud, but what does it mean? How can his thoughts pick out clear meaning amid the detritus? They can't. Maybe Jean could, if she lingered and tried, but the answers she wants certainly aren't here. There is cheese. Cheese is not, however, an answer. (Cheese is my attempt to provide more than audiovisual meta. Some emotions are like cheeses! Oh, well. I like "bestial gradient," at least.)
With the anthropomorphizing of the pool, I was thinking vaguely of the Watcher's pool outside the gates of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring. Shaw has monsters in his lower mind. Everyone does. As xmm_jeangrey said the other day to me, show me someone without issues, and I'll show you a corpse. Indeed.
Into the abyss! Hello, Nietzsche. I can't not make references to his work, considering that the comics Shaw is always prating on about how his mutation makes him a true Übermensch, like, we get it, dude, shut up. (I don't care much for most comics versions of Sebastian Shaw, although I'll do nods at canon for fun.)
Not for this darker side of the Phoenix are the niceties of following memories to see where they lead. Touch too deft, too trained to be picked out by a flatscan, all Shaw's left with to go on are his involuntary paralysis, the fingers gently tracing the lines of his face, and the distant concentration on Jean's fine features as she works. And, around it all, the queasy, uneasy feeling that -something- is being done. With no care for the consequences to Shaw, Jean parks her consciousness deep within his mind and begins tearing the bars off any mental cages that interest her. Here be dragons? There are things that even dragons fear.
I asked that Shaw's conscious awareness not be drawn in with her, to face his deeper mind. He knows he has issues and problems; he knows he grew up crooked inside. But he's not prepared to deal directly with those demons. Someone pushed unprepared into confronting unconscious desires, needs, concepts - that way lies insanity, and I wanted to keep him sane.
He's had brushes with professional counselling over the years, I should add at this juncture. When he was a child, he was picked on in school (being small and scrawny, a late bloomer, not to mention poor and withdrawn) and, besides, showed up now and then with bruises and cuts of the sort that people get "walking into the door" and "falling down the stairs." Naturally, school counselors were concerned and tried to help him. He refused it, and so did his family (and terrifying, if his father found out that someone was asking that kind of question of his son - more bruises the next day, best not to say anything to anyone ever again!). After his mother killed herself, her pastor came by to try to talk with him. That did not go over well with either son or father, who had no patience for the God talk: the man got run off the property and was made to understand in exceedingly clear and direct terms that he was never to come back, nor were any of his brethren. A hospital chaplain made a similar attempt following his father's death in the cancer ward, and seventeen-year-old Shaw brushed him off after the first few sentences. A few more school folks (counselors, teachers) tried again when he was getting into crazy fights before he went off to college; they got a roomful of sneering adolescent superiority and no headway made. Since then, nothing. He's been therapy-free, but boy, does he need it. Pity.
The unconscious's outer cagework gives way with creaks of protest, but does give way before Phoenix fire. Inside is a stark contrast with the upper mind's cloudy waters: an office hallway, walled and tiled bright white, lined with closed doors, most of which bear some sort of marking. Fluorescent light pulsates in the ceiling; even brighter are the waves of emotions pouring through the symbolically formed space. Primal urges soak the hallway and doors, and even the very light, with tangible color and tastes of sounds.
We can suppose she passed through the subconscious, which is only the underside of the conscious mind, anyway, in her pose. And now, the unconscious! It's neat and clean, organized and well-lit. It's what his conscious mind should look like, except I was being clevah and inverted the symbology because I thought it'd be more interesting that way. (At some point, perhaps, we'll see what his full conscious mind looks like when it's not churned up by violence.)
I contrasted Dark Phoenix's fire with water, for obvious symbolic reasons, but note how the fire of her being hasn't make the water steam or boil. She's not trying to hurt him that way, and the mind is powerfully resilient, anyway. His unconscious defenses do fall to her entry; however, they aren't destroyed, only torn back. Again, resiliency: he's had decades to put those defenses into place, and while she could fight and ruin them if she put her mind to it, it would probably shatter him beyond repair, and he'd have nihilistic, Pyrrhic victory that way. That kind of thing is important to him. Mmmm, ego.
Unconscious desires permeate this mental construction with synesthetic flair. Colors felt, sounds tasted - whee, fun. It's a slight nod to a character I had with a conscious perception system wired that way, lucky him. Plus, it's cool. I dig the cool.
Down the hallway traipses Jean, footsteps light and clicking in Italian pumps as she adapts her presence to the surroundings. Now a businesswoman in a burnt red suit, she trails her fingers questioningly across walls and doors, stopping to examine the markings when she spots one catching her eye.
A sign hangs slightly crookedly from a thumbtack stuck deep in the door's wood. On age-curled paper, a boy's handwriting proclaims "No Girls Allowed!" but it's an older hand that has crossed out the middle word and neatly lettered over it "Women." As Jean stops for examination, the turret gun mounted in the ceiling above the portal swivels with ball-and-joint smoothness and targets her: a laser light the color of the door, bruised brick-red, spots her forehead, and machinery behind it ratchets in preparation to fire.
As I commented to someone: Shaw's unconscious has turret guns. Of course it does. Raise your hand if you're surprised. Thank you. (I really like the turret guns. Raise your hand now if you're surprised.)
Here is the first of the three doors that I wanted Dark Phoenix to rip open. The sign is a boy's, for a treehouse club: childish, innocent, innocuous. It's the man who's gone back and made the misogyny clear and permanent. This whole plane is symbolic, so of course Shaw didn't actually imagine a sign or writing on it. It's a representation of his attitude toward women. Everything in this telepathic section of the scene is highly (deeply, whatever) symbolic, and Shaw has no direct conscious awareness of it. He knows what he feels toward women, say - that is, he thinks he does, but he doesn't know it all, not consciously - but how his hidden mental processes symbolize that viewpoint? No clue.
Now, do these symbols exist without an observer? If Shaw isn't aware of them, and if a telepath weren't poking around to glimpse them, would they vanish? Is observation forming them from a void? Is Jean interpreting what she experiences in Shaw's mind in terms her mind can understand? I tend to think not. These symbols are intimately his; she could (and will, in this scene) impose her own on the unconscious surrounding her awareness, but they existed before her and will exist after her. Shaw gets hints of them in dreams, if he remembered them. If he did intensive therapy, he might work with them himself. They are real. They have their own life. Jean isn't making them up. Shaw already did that for her! (Unconsciously.)
Jean eyes the turrest swivelling towards her, head tilted to one side again, ever so curiously. She lifts a hand to feel at the laser dot on her forehead, warned of it by Shaw's own mind, wrapped in it as she is. "Oh, that won't do at -all-," states Jean. She concentrates for a moment, and the turret gun transforms itself into a bowl of peonies with a startled pop and a few ruthlessly altered mental connections. The door is then kicked open with abandon.
So Jean has read Douglas Adams. (The peonies are a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference.) She's removed the defense mechanism on this pocket of Shaw's unconscious. It will regenerate, because complexes are just that strong, but until it does . . . well, more on that in a minute.
Sunlight pours out like a reproach, rich and golden and sparkling pure. It illuminates the door (now weeping bruised blood down its violated height), the surprised peonies, and the room inside, which sprawls as a clear-skied pasture, unbound by fences or, indeed, horizons. Grass ripples softly to infinity under an infinite bowl of blue. The only features on the plain are close to hand. Three horses are arranged in a triangle, nose to tail to nose to tail to nose to tail. They're mares, each of a different color and in a different configuration. The bony black crops mouthfuls from the grass her entrails, hanging clear of her belly, brush with oozing amniotic fluid. The rangy bay, cinnamon in hue, is struggling to rise to her feet; the hole in her chest cavity beats regularly like the heart that is no longer there. The sleek white lies on her side, and on her head perches a crow several times outsized. With the door's opening, the bird mantles and squawks with a beak dripping vitreous humor drawn delicately from the mare's up-staring, empty eye.
Welcome to the way Shaw manages his misogyny. With all the hatred and violence in him toward women, he could have turned into another Ted Bundy-style serial killer; instead, his unconscious made this room, a loop of sublimated emotional imagery, probably under his superego's insistence (with a little collaboration from his ego, which likes feminine attention).
To go back to the door for a second, it's red because that's the color of passion, strength, vitality, love; but it's brick-red, dark and dull, because of the perverted nature of the emotional loop within. When Jean kicks open the door, it starts weeping blood, combining imagery of injury (blood) and sorrow (tears). Defense mechanisms exist for a reason, both to protect what's inside from outside interference and to shield outside interference from what's inside. But Jean transformed - neutralized, neutered - the turret gun that would have shot her down, and she kicked open the door that would have blocked her. Shaw's unconscious protests these moves, trying to protect itself and shield her. Then again: hey, it's her baggage to carry around. She wants to deal with this shit, come on in.
The sunlight is a glorious contrast to set up the scene in the room: the purity of its illumination, signifying vision, sight, understanding. His unconscious is not ashamed of this construction; it does not hide the room in shadows. The construction has helped him survive in society - why would there be shame about it? Both sky and pastureland are infinite, freedom and openness symbolized, but the figures in the field are kept close to the door, within the unconscious's control. The horses never roam from their triangular/circular arrangement, and the crow never flies away from them. The loop is paramount; it must never be allowed to change, or else ramifications will rise to Shaw's conscious mind and thus the world beyond.
Horses symbolize strength and vitality, too, as well as freedom, wildness, and sexuality, especially sexual drives. These are mares, symbolizing women - specifically, the three women in his life who have affected him the most. The black is his mother, as indicated by her color and physique (his mother was thin, wasted away from her faulty recessive mutation) and by the amniotic fluid dripping from her exposed intestines (her open belly echoing the womb from which he came). The bay is his fiancée, who had cinnamon-brown eyes and whose death tore his heart out. The white is his Queen, Emma Frost, whose eyes he can always feel on him, even when she isn't there, and in whose eyes he sometimes hates to see himself and what he's become.
The mares are in various stages of destruction and rebirth. The black grazes despite her oozing wound. The bay is struggling to get up to join her. The white has been taken down as prey, but when the crow's finished with her, it will move on to the next mare, the black, and leave the white to struggle to her feet as the bay is now doing, and the bay will be grazing by then, and the cycle goes on and on. The wounds never heal, and the crow is never satiated.
The crow is a symbol I've been using for Shaw from my first scene with him: ravens and their feathers often appear in his telepathic space. Crows and ravens are clever birds, capable of being tamed and trained. They haunt battlefields, feeding on carrion. Thus, they are a symbol (an incarnation, in fact) of the Celtic goddess of war and death, the Morrigan. (After all, Shaw is a war profiteer, a death merchant, through his mundane business.) The Morrigan is often interpreted as part of a triple goddess-in-one - Maiden, Mother, Crone - and thus we have triangles and triads again. (I used threes heavily throughout this scene, especially in my syntactical constructions: three items in lists, three adjectives strung together, etc.) Three is a sacred, mystical number. This very scene is divided into three sections of beginning (physical confrontation), middle (unconscious delving), and end (defeat).
I also used the crow specifically dipping its beak into the white mare's eye because it's a direct reference to another crow, also oversized and tormented (as Shaw is), doing that to prey it's taken down, in one of Julian May's book in the Saga of Pliocene Exile tetralogy. The reference is for xmm_mastermind and me. Go, us.
[Continued in Part 2.]
[Commentary for X-Men MUCK. Please see the full list for more.]
Originally posted: January 23, 2006
Written: January 24, 2006
What Has Come Before: White Queen Emma Frost and White Bishop Jason Wyngarde combined their powers (telepathy and illusion) to wedge cracks into the psyche of Black Queen Jean Grey, toward the goal of driving her batty and out of the Hellfire Club and its Inner Circle. They succeeded far beyond their wildest dreams (or fears), and when they realized that, they got the hell out of Dodge. Before he fled, Jason inserted the suggestion that it was Shaw who was behind the whole ordeal, Shaw who had planned his Queen's destruction with the two psionic adepts, Shaw who was summoned by a sequence of phone calls (also initiated by Jason) to rescue her and thus be at ground zero for his own destruction. Thanks a lot, Jason. You are a worthy opponent!
Note: I will be discussing mostly my poses and interpretations here. Also, I use "Jean," "Phoenix," and "Dark Phoenix" interchangeably throughout to refer to the same individual, the other person in this scene with Shaw.
A car door's slam echoes flatly in the pre-dawn chill of the Hellfire Club's estate, followed a few seconds later by the slam of the mansion's front door. "Is she here?" Shaw demands at the security station, of surprised guards, whom he doesn't give the chance to answer before a Black Pawn falls over himself to lead him upstairs and serve as receptacle for his monarch's fuming, frantic worry. "Where's Harper? No? Well, get her on the damn phone! I want Holland on standby, even if you have to drag her out of bed -- yes, /now/, we might need a medic! Get Garov, and the two of you stand watch in the hall. Go!" Curtly he verbally shoves the other man away, into a pelting run back downstairs. Then he blinks rapidly at Jean's door, straightens the coat thrown haphazardly over a hastily assembled outfit, and brings up weak, shifting mental shields (still the stratocumulus storm brewing, black cloud hunting--). And then he presses his hand to the door, as if checking for heat, and then he knocks, twice, softly.
Jason called Joelle, King's Black Pawn, who called her monarch, who . . . was not home. Or, for that matter, dressed. Very early Monday morning, after four or four-thirty - he was asleep! He was spending the night with his current lover, mercantile heiress Cynthia Gladstone of London, and neither of them was particularly pleased by a dead-of-the-night phone call and hasty departure. Shaw didn't tell her why he was racing home; it never occurs him to tell people things like that because, hello, they don't need to know. He'd driven himself for the tryst, so that's his own car in front of the clubhouse (he has two or three he keeps in the garage there). I like the imagery of the door slamming: flat, cold, empty sound to start the scene.
We players liked take-charge Shaw, too! Joelle wasn't very helpful with details about what was wrong with Jean, and he fears the worst: a telepathic attack that exploded or imploded her into bloody bits. He suspects Emma behind it, as the only other powerful telepath he knows, but he's reserving judgment (after Emma assured him that it wasn't her messing with Jean) until he sizes up the situation. That he does leave a comfortable bed before dawn in this heightened state is a testament to his managerial dedication. He would do this for any of his pieces, and he is genuinely worried about his Queen, after she confessed that her control was slipping. The worry is mostly on the Inner Circle plane, one monarch for another, one professional partner for another, but below the noblesse oblige is a kernel of honest human liking for her as a person. Someone is messing with his piece, his partner, his physician - his - and he will have satisfaction over it.
He called ahead to the clubhouse on the drive across the park (Cynthia has a penthouse on Central Park West) and also started charging up his mutation, just in case. At this point, he's at a moderate level of energy absorption, which I wish I'd explicated better in the scene (but that's why we have commentary, right?). He's entirely awake, at least cognitively, and possessed of the ineluctable momentum of a freight train. He wants to know that Jean is in the house. He wants his Rook available to him for protection. He wants the EMT-trained medic, Black Pawn Sandra Holland, on hand for medical attention if necessary. (More on her later.) He wants Garov and this unnamed pawn who escorted him to stand guard until Harper shows up. He is in control of the situation. It's a good juxtaposition for later action where he is not in control of anything.
On my commute home before this scene, I had the image of him putting his hand to the door, softly, almost gently, testing for heat or steeling himself to see what's inside Jean's room. Again, could have described that better, but the pose was already so long, and I hate long poses because they baffle and torment me. So, on we go. He puts his hand to the door, then knocks.
The air around the Black Queen's quarters crackles with unseen energy, the overcharge enough to raise the hairs of those close by. Beneath the crack of the door, a shifting orange light escapes and flickers: fire without scent or smoke or sound. There are other sounds, though -- bumps and creaks and clatters, the sound of zippers, the sounds of slamming closet doors. And the sound of the outer door and inner opening in tandem, untouched by their owner's hands. Wrapped in a whirlwind of false flame, eyes closed and arms crossed over her chest, Jean hovers a foot above the luxurious rug as her belongings pack and assemble themselves.
Shock, the blank incomprehension of one who doesn't believe working eyes (/are/ they working?), completely stills Shaw, who runs his eyes in the next moment over the room and then her. Swift cataloguing; faster calculation. "May I come in?" he asks with, perhaps, admirable calm and courtesy.
Whatever he was expecting to see inside the room . . . it wasn't this. His visual apparatus absorbs the data, but can't immediately put sense to them. He has never seen Jean using her powers at full tilt, and has hoarded the petty, sniggering belief that she doesn't dare use them fully. Below the respect, below the admiration, below even the misogyny - Shaw does not think much of Jean as a mutant or a person. She's weak. She has this nobility stick up her ass. She's blinkered, and she's a prude. She fails at mutant; she fails at human. He's a general misanthrope, not liking or thinking much of anyone around him, but the hatred is stronger, more detailed, when it's directed toward someone he works closely with and has to depend on. It's a way for his ego to stay assured that he's still powerful and in charge, not weak and vulnerable, himself. Knock down the other person off her pedestal, even if you're the one who put her on it in the first place, which he did.
As much as Shaw despises and scorns Jean, he fears and worships her, too, at a primal, unconscious level he's completely unaware of. She is a powerful woman, and that triggers his mother-love/fear/loathing/desire. With Jean, he sublimates that reaction, all unconsciously, into more acceptable disdain. (How he sublimates it with Emma and with Sal is an entirely different essay I might write someday if it comes up.) His id puts her on a shining ivory pedestal for aweful mother/goddess worship, his ego knocks her right back down, and his superego glosses over it with an assurance of superiority due to his rank, age, experience, and so on. (Sidebar: I will be using Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytical terms throughout this commentary, eschewing the lay meanings for the original definitions.)
Now he is faced with Jean's id and ego unbound, superego on holiday, and he has no idea what to do with it. She is pouring out power profligately, effortlessly, which makes him deeply uneasy if he stops to think about it. He's a physical person; mental stuff freaks him out because he has no direct counter except native willpower, charisma, and intelligence. He rather suspects that none of those three are going to help him here, but it's all he has. He surveys the scene, thinks fast, and goes for calm and courtesy, words I will use frequently to hammer home how much he's clinging to them.
<< "So -nice- of you to ask, Sebastian," >> Jean replies in a sing-song purr, spoken words and mental voice paired and resonant. Her eyes don't open, but her head snakes towards him, so apparently she sees all the same. << "-Do- come in. I'm afraid your hospitality is no longer to my liking, however. I'm such a difficult guest, I know. Wanting my privacy, wanting you to keep your little puppets out of my mind." >> A heavy medical atlas wings past his head, missing by an exquisitely controlled three centimeters, and leaving a rush of air in its wake.
Geek glee for the blended vocal and telepathic output. It was all I could do to hold back on any comics references to Dark Phoenix in my poses. This show is xmm_jeangrey's, not mine. (Not as much mine, anyway. I have some show later on!)
Shaw ducks automatically, vainly, and the breeze ruffles his hair's unbound waves. "Thank you," he replies, holding to calmness and to courtesy like a shield, like the shields fraying, fragmenting, drifting from his clouded mind. Energy courses in him along thick channels, circulating with blood's heated flow, but he's controlled on the outside. He's calm. He closes the door behind him (with only a stray thought of subliminal anxiety: << Left alone with her, out of control? Powers used more, headaches and nerves, what to do what to do-- >>) and says simply, "I don't understand. We haven't found you to be a difficult guest, and of course your privacy is your own. You're the Black Queen of this club. Has someone hurt you?"
A book flies at your head, you're damned well going to duck, even if it's too late and unnecessary. Body reaction. Instinct. (And it let me finish his description by indicating what his hair is doing in this scene.) There's the absorbed energy, flowing through his body. I put much more tele-meta (more of it and more clear) into this scene because an unchained Phoenix would have wider and deeper perceptions. It was fun!
Repetitions of the "calm and courtesy" motif, accentuated by "controlled." Note all the hard-c sounds in the meta, in fact. Such sounds are crisp and clear - ha, ha, I did it again right there - and add to the gestalt. I work very hard to write on several levels at once: semantic, syntactic, phonetic, thematic, and so on. Even if a reader doesn't consciously notice such tricks, the subconscious (and, if I'm being very clever, the unconscious) mind does, and the effect adds to the overall reading experience.
I hope. Sometimes it's just plain ol' purple froth, and sometimes it's just for my enjoyment of playing with language.
The next book doesn't miss. A large and beautiful edition of Gray's Anatomy, birthday present from her colleagues at the hospital, takes Shaw soundly in the side of the head. It bounces. << "Don't play coy with me." >> Jean warns, sing-song game dropped abruptly into Stygian darkness. << "It doesn't become you. Your little shields will hide no secrets from me, you know that, I know that. Stop trying to insult my intelligence by denying your role in all this. Spider back at the heart of your web." >> she pronounces, as more books fly past, but resume missing.
The Gray's Anatomy entertained me for the book itself (a copy of which is sitting at home on my shelves) and for the TV show of that name. Anyway. How terribly symbolic of Jean: smack your patient upside the head with a classic medical tome. Her dialogue is toe-curlingly Claremontian. "I AM DARK PHOENIX, AND YOU WILL ALL FEAR ME, PUNY MORTALS," and so on. More geek glee!
This part of the scene made me think, on the commute this morning, that Jean's attack with the book only reinforces Shaw's contempt for her. The head? That's the best she can do? What a pussy. If he had telekinetic power, he would have gone for more vital areas: throat, gut, and the all-important (for a misogynist!) breasts and genitals. He scoffs at a mere book to the head!
And let us now bow our heads in devout thanksgiving that Shaw has no TK at his command. No one would be safe from him, ever. Especially the women.
The energy flows shift almost immediately with the book's impact: a burst of kinetic brilliance that seeps into the general ambience within and around him, heightening its strength by that many more joules. Shaw winces at the blow (but opiates already oozing through insulted synapses, dulling the pain and stroking dreamy pleasure into slow life) and holds his ground, physically and verbally. "I'm not playing with you," he snaps (so much for emotional ground). "I got a call saying that you were in some kind of trouble, and here I am to see what it is, and you're acting like--" His mind fumbles for some kind of appropriate encapsulation; it seethes with hateful unconscious imagery -- Kali, the Destroyer Goddess, the mother that births and devours -- before providing useful conscious words. "--Like a /drama/ queen, never mind your title. I haven't done anything to you, Jean. Why are you acting like this? With /me/?" Anger surges before hurt before fear before guilt--
A book to the head does hurt. Unlike the comics version, who never seems to break a sweat, let alone feel pain, while he's punching out Sentinels for the love of Mike, this Shaw does have working pain receptors that scream at his brain with OWOWOW. However, his brain also releases a chemical when he's charged up that triggers production of endogenous opiates. Since he's charged now, the opiates have started percolating in his synapses, softening the message of pain and giving him an orgasmic high. (See this commentary for a mini-essay discussing this phenomenon and its psychological ramifications.) The book hurts, but not that much (he winces more out of surprise), and its momentum doesn't even shift his head in place. His body absorbs that energy instead, as indicated in the meta, and he stands his ground.
Emotionally? Not so much. Some of his unconscious panic is starting to percolate to higher levels, resulting in his snappish tone and curt words. The Kali image is pure unconsciousness, and I wish I'd written that better. What his brain is actually producing is blended imagery; those three items in the dash-separated list are different. They're layers of meaning digging down from Kali (specific-cultural, most clearly defined) to the Destroyer Goddess (wider meaning, less detailed, more archetypal, across most cultures) to the life/death mother (most archetypal, basic, primal; the formless icon shared by the collective unconscious). Oh, well. The general sense comes through, and maybe your unconscious responds to it, through the haze of conscious and subconscious wrapping.
"Drama queen." Well, she is. Just look at her. And anyway, Shaw feels utterly attacked, so lashes out. He didn't do anything wrong, so what the hell is this? Anger. Hurt, oh, yes, that, too: Mother is angry, but Son isn't in the wrong. Sniffle. He reacts out of fear, and the guilt . . . the guilt comes from his failure to protect her. Something's gone wrong, and he wasn't on watch for it. He couldn't do anything about it. He failed. He failed her. Son disappointed Mother. Son deserves the whupping that's coming to him. If the attack had stayed on the physical level, he wouldn't have fought nearly as much as he ends up doing, because of that guilt and need for expiation. As it is . . . well. You'll see.
Jean withdraws into herself again, into the flow and the fire, and the room redoubles its' ordering and packing. Shaw's words are absorbed on some level, processed and catalogued, and only the most critical ones relayed to higher thought and decision making. At the surge of anger, and fear and the guilt, everything abruptly stops. The books stack themselves neatly in a box. The suitcases on her bed snap closed. The flames cease. Jean drops lightly to the carpet. And then she opens her eyes and turns them on Shaw. Where the flames went is suddenly apparent. She says not a word further, merely stares him down for a moment of expressionless intensity before casually waving a hand. Her powers condense, convulse, and fling him hard against the opposite wall, her desk chair scooting backwards to catch him before he hits the ground.
Hi, fire eyes!
Shaw doesn't even have time for instincts, which scream along autonomous threads throughout his nervous system to curl up, ball up, protect the vulnerable belly and throat. He slams into the wall like a rag doll -- stunning energy, stunned emotion -- and drops heavily into the chair, tilting it at a crazy angle with the onset of limp and tilting weight. "Jesus," he gasps, and only that. Hands scrabble to grasp the chair's arms and pull him into balance. His mind gropes likewise, through a tumble of outrage (all but drowning out resurgent, stronger visceral fear) and absorbed energy, reaching for comprehension, context.
What leaps out immediately for me in this pose is the repetition of "tilting." I would like to claim, in my esteemed and experienced writer's way, that I planned that. I didn't. By and large, I'm in control of my writing, but you know, accidents happen. I work to improve! Maybe one of these days, I will learn to proofread my poses before I hit Enter. . . .
During an attack, instinct tells the body to curl up into a fetal ball (well, if it can't just fight-or-flight) to protect the vital organs. Shaw can't do that before he's flattened against the wall. Ow. That does hurt, and if he weren't a mutant (or weren't charged already), the blow would have cracked and broken several ribs and bruised him from heels to crown. It's a lot of energy to absorb, which his body valiantly does. He's still below his peak, but getting there. He'll start to show signs of physical breakdown, failed absorption, with another one of these blows.
And, at last, Jean advances. Expression abstracted, the silk of her dressing gown rustling gently, she picks her way across the carpet like a lady crossing the ballroom floor. Her head tilts as she pauses, three feet off, to regard Shaw. She smiles, then, pretty and girlish, and reaches out to gently caress his mind and body, feeling the blood singing through arteries primed with adrenaline, sensing the amped-up crackle of electrical potentials releasing and building anew. Finding what she wants, she rests a delicate mental finger against juuuust the right spot, and Shaw's muscles are listening to a new master. Her. << "You won't like this," >> she murmur-thinks, voices soothing. << "But the search for the truth is always a little painful." >> Fondly, she pats his cheek and allows her fingers to rest there, heightening the ease of mental contact as she throws wide the doors of his mind and walks on in.
First, though, he has telepathic blows to deal with. Sigh. He hates that. He hates that.
Action potentials are hot.
Under the touch -- and the /smile/ -- Shaw shivers, but then that falls away when the doors open. Mental expands; physical recedes, through the ripple of his muscles' tremors and the rush of his blood's tide. His conscious mind remains in shock from the barrage of attacks, and thoughts flex and flow sluggishly. A muddy pool of signifiers: words, images, emotions. Blame. (Of her? Himself? Who--?) Hate/fear/loathing/desire, that bestial gradient, like shuffled layers of piquant and moldy cheese. (For her? For whom--?) The pool laps through the open doors, welcoming her unwillingly, but pulling back with her entrance, sucking away and down and deep into the abyss of the unconscious, where monsters lie and answers lie with them.
So now we come to the heart of this commentary, the reason why I'm writing it: What Is Going On In Shaw's Unconscious. Psychoanalysis, ahoy!
We begin, however, with the conscious mind, after passing through the boundaries of his physicality. I'm proud of the transition mostly because I remembered to pose it and not just go right to the mental plane. I wanted the sense that Jean is making a journey and has to pass through various portals to find what she's looking for. First up: the physical sensations that encompass and ground him. When they fall away, she's in the conscious layers of his mind. I inverted traditional conceptualization to make the conscious mind a pool of water and the unconscious a neatly organized place. Water is the classical symbol of deep emotion, mystery, strangeness, and so on, but it's on top here, churned up by the physical and emotional assault. The unconscious water mixes with conscious symbols, making mud. Making a mess, frankly. When Shaw is attacked - well, this is why he doesn't think so clearly in those times, hm? The iron control he has on his unconscious cracks or breaks, and a mess, it is made in his higher mind.
His conscious mind isn't entirely sure what's going on - thus, the parenthetical questions. There's all this unconscious mud, but what does it mean? How can his thoughts pick out clear meaning amid the detritus? They can't. Maybe Jean could, if she lingered and tried, but the answers she wants certainly aren't here. There is cheese. Cheese is not, however, an answer. (Cheese is my attempt to provide more than audiovisual meta. Some emotions are like cheeses! Oh, well. I like "bestial gradient," at least.)
With the anthropomorphizing of the pool, I was thinking vaguely of the Watcher's pool outside the gates of Moria in The Fellowship of the Ring. Shaw has monsters in his lower mind. Everyone does. As xmm_jeangrey said the other day to me, show me someone without issues, and I'll show you a corpse. Indeed.
Into the abyss! Hello, Nietzsche. I can't not make references to his work, considering that the comics Shaw is always prating on about how his mutation makes him a true Übermensch, like, we get it, dude, shut up. (I don't care much for most comics versions of Sebastian Shaw, although I'll do nods at canon for fun.)
Not for this darker side of the Phoenix are the niceties of following memories to see where they lead. Touch too deft, too trained to be picked out by a flatscan, all Shaw's left with to go on are his involuntary paralysis, the fingers gently tracing the lines of his face, and the distant concentration on Jean's fine features as she works. And, around it all, the queasy, uneasy feeling that -something- is being done. With no care for the consequences to Shaw, Jean parks her consciousness deep within his mind and begins tearing the bars off any mental cages that interest her. Here be dragons? There are things that even dragons fear.
I asked that Shaw's conscious awareness not be drawn in with her, to face his deeper mind. He knows he has issues and problems; he knows he grew up crooked inside. But he's not prepared to deal directly with those demons. Someone pushed unprepared into confronting unconscious desires, needs, concepts - that way lies insanity, and I wanted to keep him sane.
He's had brushes with professional counselling over the years, I should add at this juncture. When he was a child, he was picked on in school (being small and scrawny, a late bloomer, not to mention poor and withdrawn) and, besides, showed up now and then with bruises and cuts of the sort that people get "walking into the door" and "falling down the stairs." Naturally, school counselors were concerned and tried to help him. He refused it, and so did his family (and terrifying, if his father found out that someone was asking that kind of question of his son - more bruises the next day, best not to say anything to anyone ever again!). After his mother killed herself, her pastor came by to try to talk with him. That did not go over well with either son or father, who had no patience for the God talk: the man got run off the property and was made to understand in exceedingly clear and direct terms that he was never to come back, nor were any of his brethren. A hospital chaplain made a similar attempt following his father's death in the cancer ward, and seventeen-year-old Shaw brushed him off after the first few sentences. A few more school folks (counselors, teachers) tried again when he was getting into crazy fights before he went off to college; they got a roomful of sneering adolescent superiority and no headway made. Since then, nothing. He's been therapy-free, but boy, does he need it. Pity.
The unconscious's outer cagework gives way with creaks of protest, but does give way before Phoenix fire. Inside is a stark contrast with the upper mind's cloudy waters: an office hallway, walled and tiled bright white, lined with closed doors, most of which bear some sort of marking. Fluorescent light pulsates in the ceiling; even brighter are the waves of emotions pouring through the symbolically formed space. Primal urges soak the hallway and doors, and even the very light, with tangible color and tastes of sounds.
We can suppose she passed through the subconscious, which is only the underside of the conscious mind, anyway, in her pose. And now, the unconscious! It's neat and clean, organized and well-lit. It's what his conscious mind should look like, except I was being clevah and inverted the symbology because I thought it'd be more interesting that way. (At some point, perhaps, we'll see what his full conscious mind looks like when it's not churned up by violence.)
I contrasted Dark Phoenix's fire with water, for obvious symbolic reasons, but note how the fire of her being hasn't make the water steam or boil. She's not trying to hurt him that way, and the mind is powerfully resilient, anyway. His unconscious defenses do fall to her entry; however, they aren't destroyed, only torn back. Again, resiliency: he's had decades to put those defenses into place, and while she could fight and ruin them if she put her mind to it, it would probably shatter him beyond repair, and he'd have nihilistic, Pyrrhic victory that way. That kind of thing is important to him. Mmmm, ego.
Unconscious desires permeate this mental construction with synesthetic flair. Colors felt, sounds tasted - whee, fun. It's a slight nod to a character I had with a conscious perception system wired that way, lucky him. Plus, it's cool. I dig the cool.
Down the hallway traipses Jean, footsteps light and clicking in Italian pumps as she adapts her presence to the surroundings. Now a businesswoman in a burnt red suit, she trails her fingers questioningly across walls and doors, stopping to examine the markings when she spots one catching her eye.
A sign hangs slightly crookedly from a thumbtack stuck deep in the door's wood. On age-curled paper, a boy's handwriting proclaims "No Girls Allowed!" but it's an older hand that has crossed out the middle word and neatly lettered over it "Women." As Jean stops for examination, the turret gun mounted in the ceiling above the portal swivels with ball-and-joint smoothness and targets her: a laser light the color of the door, bruised brick-red, spots her forehead, and machinery behind it ratchets in preparation to fire.
As I commented to someone: Shaw's unconscious has turret guns. Of course it does. Raise your hand if you're surprised. Thank you. (I really like the turret guns. Raise your hand now if you're surprised.)
Here is the first of the three doors that I wanted Dark Phoenix to rip open. The sign is a boy's, for a treehouse club: childish, innocent, innocuous. It's the man who's gone back and made the misogyny clear and permanent. This whole plane is symbolic, so of course Shaw didn't actually imagine a sign or writing on it. It's a representation of his attitude toward women. Everything in this telepathic section of the scene is highly (deeply, whatever) symbolic, and Shaw has no direct conscious awareness of it. He knows what he feels toward women, say - that is, he thinks he does, but he doesn't know it all, not consciously - but how his hidden mental processes symbolize that viewpoint? No clue.
Now, do these symbols exist without an observer? If Shaw isn't aware of them, and if a telepath weren't poking around to glimpse them, would they vanish? Is observation forming them from a void? Is Jean interpreting what she experiences in Shaw's mind in terms her mind can understand? I tend to think not. These symbols are intimately his; she could (and will, in this scene) impose her own on the unconscious surrounding her awareness, but they existed before her and will exist after her. Shaw gets hints of them in dreams, if he remembered them. If he did intensive therapy, he might work with them himself. They are real. They have their own life. Jean isn't making them up. Shaw already did that for her! (Unconsciously.)
Jean eyes the turrest swivelling towards her, head tilted to one side again, ever so curiously. She lifts a hand to feel at the laser dot on her forehead, warned of it by Shaw's own mind, wrapped in it as she is. "Oh, that won't do at -all-," states Jean. She concentrates for a moment, and the turret gun transforms itself into a bowl of peonies with a startled pop and a few ruthlessly altered mental connections. The door is then kicked open with abandon.
So Jean has read Douglas Adams. (The peonies are a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference.) She's removed the defense mechanism on this pocket of Shaw's unconscious. It will regenerate, because complexes are just that strong, but until it does . . . well, more on that in a minute.
Sunlight pours out like a reproach, rich and golden and sparkling pure. It illuminates the door (now weeping bruised blood down its violated height), the surprised peonies, and the room inside, which sprawls as a clear-skied pasture, unbound by fences or, indeed, horizons. Grass ripples softly to infinity under an infinite bowl of blue. The only features on the plain are close to hand. Three horses are arranged in a triangle, nose to tail to nose to tail to nose to tail. They're mares, each of a different color and in a different configuration. The bony black crops mouthfuls from the grass her entrails, hanging clear of her belly, brush with oozing amniotic fluid. The rangy bay, cinnamon in hue, is struggling to rise to her feet; the hole in her chest cavity beats regularly like the heart that is no longer there. The sleek white lies on her side, and on her head perches a crow several times outsized. With the door's opening, the bird mantles and squawks with a beak dripping vitreous humor drawn delicately from the mare's up-staring, empty eye.
Welcome to the way Shaw manages his misogyny. With all the hatred and violence in him toward women, he could have turned into another Ted Bundy-style serial killer; instead, his unconscious made this room, a loop of sublimated emotional imagery, probably under his superego's insistence (with a little collaboration from his ego, which likes feminine attention).
To go back to the door for a second, it's red because that's the color of passion, strength, vitality, love; but it's brick-red, dark and dull, because of the perverted nature of the emotional loop within. When Jean kicks open the door, it starts weeping blood, combining imagery of injury (blood) and sorrow (tears). Defense mechanisms exist for a reason, both to protect what's inside from outside interference and to shield outside interference from what's inside. But Jean transformed - neutralized, neutered - the turret gun that would have shot her down, and she kicked open the door that would have blocked her. Shaw's unconscious protests these moves, trying to protect itself and shield her. Then again: hey, it's her baggage to carry around. She wants to deal with this shit, come on in.
The sunlight is a glorious contrast to set up the scene in the room: the purity of its illumination, signifying vision, sight, understanding. His unconscious is not ashamed of this construction; it does not hide the room in shadows. The construction has helped him survive in society - why would there be shame about it? Both sky and pastureland are infinite, freedom and openness symbolized, but the figures in the field are kept close to the door, within the unconscious's control. The horses never roam from their triangular/circular arrangement, and the crow never flies away from them. The loop is paramount; it must never be allowed to change, or else ramifications will rise to Shaw's conscious mind and thus the world beyond.
Horses symbolize strength and vitality, too, as well as freedom, wildness, and sexuality, especially sexual drives. These are mares, symbolizing women - specifically, the three women in his life who have affected him the most. The black is his mother, as indicated by her color and physique (his mother was thin, wasted away from her faulty recessive mutation) and by the amniotic fluid dripping from her exposed intestines (her open belly echoing the womb from which he came). The bay is his fiancée, who had cinnamon-brown eyes and whose death tore his heart out. The white is his Queen, Emma Frost, whose eyes he can always feel on him, even when she isn't there, and in whose eyes he sometimes hates to see himself and what he's become.
The mares are in various stages of destruction and rebirth. The black grazes despite her oozing wound. The bay is struggling to get up to join her. The white has been taken down as prey, but when the crow's finished with her, it will move on to the next mare, the black, and leave the white to struggle to her feet as the bay is now doing, and the bay will be grazing by then, and the cycle goes on and on. The wounds never heal, and the crow is never satiated.
The crow is a symbol I've been using for Shaw from my first scene with him: ravens and their feathers often appear in his telepathic space. Crows and ravens are clever birds, capable of being tamed and trained. They haunt battlefields, feeding on carrion. Thus, they are a symbol (an incarnation, in fact) of the Celtic goddess of war and death, the Morrigan. (After all, Shaw is a war profiteer, a death merchant, through his mundane business.) The Morrigan is often interpreted as part of a triple goddess-in-one - Maiden, Mother, Crone - and thus we have triangles and triads again. (I used threes heavily throughout this scene, especially in my syntactical constructions: three items in lists, three adjectives strung together, etc.) Three is a sacred, mystical number. This very scene is divided into three sections of beginning (physical confrontation), middle (unconscious delving), and end (defeat).
I also used the crow specifically dipping its beak into the white mare's eye because it's a direct reference to another crow, also oversized and tormented (as Shaw is), doing that to prey it's taken down, in one of Julian May's book in the Saga of Pliocene Exile tetralogy. The reference is for xmm_mastermind and me. Go, us.
[Continued in Part 2.]
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