трикстер-цитаты
Bassil-Morozow, Helena (2011-10-26). The Trickster in Contemporary Film
The Problem of the Name
A trickster without a name is the one who has not yet had his breakthrough, and the trickster with several names is unsure of his identity - or he does not have a stable identity yet.
***
The acquisition of a name is psychologically equal in importance to the metaphorical moment of emergence from a restrictive space: a bottle, a sewer, a box, a model town, a womb, a narrow mindset. After
***
The name makes individuals unique, it makes them visible. The theme of visibility−invisibility in the dark, overpopulated, technology-obsessed urban environment is especially important in trickster films. The spell of the protagonist’s invisibility is broken when a radical force (an unconscious one, of course - but exteriorised in the form of a dishevelled madman) makes them behave in an unacceptable and scandalous manner.
The Body
The trickster principle refuses to respect both moral/social frontiers and physical borders. Put simply, it denies ‘reality’.
***
... the Joker in Batman, who is a shadow posing as a trickster, undergoes a set of degenerative physical changes - his face is ‘dissolved’ in a vat of chemical waste and has to be remade by a black market surgeon. Because he is a shadow, and therefore ‘closer’ to consciousness than a pure trickster, he is more ‘physical’. As a result, his metonymisation is irreversible. After his fatal fall from the top of the Gotham City cathedral, he cannot be ‘rebuilt’ from fragments. Compared to less shadowy cinematic tricksters - Stanley Ipkiss’s alter ego (who also falls from the window yet gets up and continues his adventures), Drop Dead Fred (who is ‘wiped out’ by a lorry but soon reappears), Jack Skellington (falls from the sky but survives), the Joker is already too conscious and darkly human to become resilient in the true trickster fashion. He has to deal with the limitations of the human form.
***
Tricksters belonging to the more ‘human’ type (as opposed to the grotesque and schematic split-off characters like the Mask, Drop Dead Fred or Beetlejuice) also tend to have problems with their bodies as they demonstrate the issues of bodily non-permanence and brokenness in the literal way. Since the alter ego is not split off to form a separate character, the tricksterish protagonists’ abilities to transcend their human frame are very limited. When the trickster principle ‘hijacks’ a human frame, it has to deal with the limitations of the body.
Loss of Control
The issue of control over body and mind has double significance in trickster narratives. On the one hand, the trickster’s psyche and body are so fluid that he does not always have control over them. On the other hand, he can play tricks with human beings and cause them to lose control over their minds and bodies as well. Tricksters play practical jokes on their victims, but are often deceived and duped in return. This metaphor renders the idea of the interdependence of consciousness and the unconscious. The undercivilised trickster is silly and childlike, and therefore can be easily deceived; but the very adult-like ‘consciousness’ can become so confident in its over-inflated ‘wisdom’ and ‘maturity’ that its vision becomes dangerously narrow. A stagnant vision and loss of perspective makes consciousness vulnerable for the traps set up by the unconscious.
***
While the human form is fragile, creativity is something that can make it immortal.
***
"On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry", Carl Gustav Jung:
"They [works of art] come as it were fully arrayed into the world, as Pallas Athene sprang from the head of Zeus. These works positively force themselves upon the author; his hand is seized, his pen writes things that his mind contemplates with amazement. The I work brings with it its own form; anything he wants to add is rejected, and what he himself would like to reject is thrust back at him. While his conscious mind stands amazed and empty before this phenomenon, he is overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and images which he never intended to create and which his own will could never have brought into being. Yet in spite of himself he is forced to admit that it is his own self speaking, his own inner nature revealing itself and uttering things which he could never have entrusted to his tongue. He can only obey the apparently alien impulse within him and follow where it leads, sensing that his work is greater than himself, and wields a power which is not his and which he cannot command. Here the artist is not identical with the process of creation; he is aware that he subordinate to his work or stands outside it, as though he were - a second person; or as though a person other than himself had fallen within the magic circle of an alien will."
***
The urge to create is sometimes so powerful (operating with ‘tyrannical might’, as Jung puts it) that it blots out the sense of objective reality in the artist and often ruins his or her life.
***
Creativity, and especially music, is presented in trickster narratives as a way of compelling people to lose their vigilance. Tricksters often mesmerise their victims with song and dance.
***
The Joker practises hypnosis on a very ambitious scale. A shadow pretending to be a trickster, he gathers crowds only to poison them - either with gas, like he does at the Gotham City parade, or via chemically altered cosmetic products. The Joker is also flexible and fluid in the best ‘urban trickster’ way in that he infiltrates his victims using the powers of media and advertising. Backed by technology, he permeates physical boundaries to get access to people’s minds.
***
Carl Gustav Jung:
"The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated."
The Trickster Must Die
After the creative, chaotic unconscious energy has been woken up for the purpose of disrupting the stale (personal or social) order, it must go back to its dark wellspring. Depending on the type of the trickster and the genre of the narrative, authors employ various methods of ‘killing off’ the trickster, from harmless dissolution and successful withdrawal of projection, to suicide and murder.
***
The trickster’s death in the narrative coincides with van Gennep and Turner’s notion of the closure of the rite of passage. In narrative terms, the trickster principle is only alive from the end of the ‘exposition’ and to the moment of narrative climax. He is only alive during the ‘liminal period’. The psychological reason for this is that a creature so chaotic, a creature representing the creative-destructive potential of the unconscious, cannot be left ‘out in the open’, without any regulation or control. For the rest of the time he is brooding underground, like the mischievous Loki in Scandinavian mythology. Used in safe quantities, trickster energy has a therapeutic effect and works with what Jung called the transcendent function, a mechanism which promotes and regulates the vital tension between consciousness and the unconscious.
***
The trickster’s role is prompt and functional; he is a sort of psychological plumber. When the protagonist received a wake-up call, the trickster arrives to clear the blockage.
The Problem of the Name
A trickster without a name is the one who has not yet had his breakthrough, and the trickster with several names is unsure of his identity - or he does not have a stable identity yet.
***
The acquisition of a name is psychologically equal in importance to the metaphorical moment of emergence from a restrictive space: a bottle, a sewer, a box, a model town, a womb, a narrow mindset. After
***
The name makes individuals unique, it makes them visible. The theme of visibility−invisibility in the dark, overpopulated, technology-obsessed urban environment is especially important in trickster films. The spell of the protagonist’s invisibility is broken when a radical force (an unconscious one, of course - but exteriorised in the form of a dishevelled madman) makes them behave in an unacceptable and scandalous manner.
The Body
The trickster principle refuses to respect both moral/social frontiers and physical borders. Put simply, it denies ‘reality’.
***
... the Joker in Batman, who is a shadow posing as a trickster, undergoes a set of degenerative physical changes - his face is ‘dissolved’ in a vat of chemical waste and has to be remade by a black market surgeon. Because he is a shadow, and therefore ‘closer’ to consciousness than a pure trickster, he is more ‘physical’. As a result, his metonymisation is irreversible. After his fatal fall from the top of the Gotham City cathedral, he cannot be ‘rebuilt’ from fragments. Compared to less shadowy cinematic tricksters - Stanley Ipkiss’s alter ego (who also falls from the window yet gets up and continues his adventures), Drop Dead Fred (who is ‘wiped out’ by a lorry but soon reappears), Jack Skellington (falls from the sky but survives), the Joker is already too conscious and darkly human to become resilient in the true trickster fashion. He has to deal with the limitations of the human form.
***
Tricksters belonging to the more ‘human’ type (as opposed to the grotesque and schematic split-off characters like the Mask, Drop Dead Fred or Beetlejuice) also tend to have problems with their bodies as they demonstrate the issues of bodily non-permanence and brokenness in the literal way. Since the alter ego is not split off to form a separate character, the tricksterish protagonists’ abilities to transcend their human frame are very limited. When the trickster principle ‘hijacks’ a human frame, it has to deal with the limitations of the body.
Loss of Control
The issue of control over body and mind has double significance in trickster narratives. On the one hand, the trickster’s psyche and body are so fluid that he does not always have control over them. On the other hand, he can play tricks with human beings and cause them to lose control over their minds and bodies as well. Tricksters play practical jokes on their victims, but are often deceived and duped in return. This metaphor renders the idea of the interdependence of consciousness and the unconscious. The undercivilised trickster is silly and childlike, and therefore can be easily deceived; but the very adult-like ‘consciousness’ can become so confident in its over-inflated ‘wisdom’ and ‘maturity’ that its vision becomes dangerously narrow. A stagnant vision and loss of perspective makes consciousness vulnerable for the traps set up by the unconscious.
***
While the human form is fragile, creativity is something that can make it immortal.
***
"On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry", Carl Gustav Jung:
"They [works of art] come as it were fully arrayed into the world, as Pallas Athene sprang from the head of Zeus. These works positively force themselves upon the author; his hand is seized, his pen writes things that his mind contemplates with amazement. The I work brings with it its own form; anything he wants to add is rejected, and what he himself would like to reject is thrust back at him. While his conscious mind stands amazed and empty before this phenomenon, he is overwhelmed by a flood of thoughts and images which he never intended to create and which his own will could never have brought into being. Yet in spite of himself he is forced to admit that it is his own self speaking, his own inner nature revealing itself and uttering things which he could never have entrusted to his tongue. He can only obey the apparently alien impulse within him and follow where it leads, sensing that his work is greater than himself, and wields a power which is not his and which he cannot command. Here the artist is not identical with the process of creation; he is aware that he subordinate to his work or stands outside it, as though he were - a second person; or as though a person other than himself had fallen within the magic circle of an alien will."
***
The urge to create is sometimes so powerful (operating with ‘tyrannical might’, as Jung puts it) that it blots out the sense of objective reality in the artist and often ruins his or her life.
***
Creativity, and especially music, is presented in trickster narratives as a way of compelling people to lose their vigilance. Tricksters often mesmerise their victims with song and dance.
***
The Joker practises hypnosis on a very ambitious scale. A shadow pretending to be a trickster, he gathers crowds only to poison them - either with gas, like he does at the Gotham City parade, or via chemically altered cosmetic products. The Joker is also flexible and fluid in the best ‘urban trickster’ way in that he infiltrates his victims using the powers of media and advertising. Backed by technology, he permeates physical boundaries to get access to people’s minds.
***
Carl Gustav Jung:
"The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when, irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized and, as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated."
The Trickster Must Die
After the creative, chaotic unconscious energy has been woken up for the purpose of disrupting the stale (personal or social) order, it must go back to its dark wellspring. Depending on the type of the trickster and the genre of the narrative, authors employ various methods of ‘killing off’ the trickster, from harmless dissolution and successful withdrawal of projection, to suicide and murder.
***
The trickster’s death in the narrative coincides with van Gennep and Turner’s notion of the closure of the rite of passage. In narrative terms, the trickster principle is only alive from the end of the ‘exposition’ and to the moment of narrative climax. He is only alive during the ‘liminal period’. The psychological reason for this is that a creature so chaotic, a creature representing the creative-destructive potential of the unconscious, cannot be left ‘out in the open’, without any regulation or control. For the rest of the time he is brooding underground, like the mischievous Loki in Scandinavian mythology. Used in safe quantities, trickster energy has a therapeutic effect and works with what Jung called the transcendent function, a mechanism which promotes and regulates the vital tension between consciousness and the unconscious.
***
The trickster’s role is prompt and functional; he is a sort of psychological plumber. When the protagonist received a wake-up call, the trickster arrives to clear the blockage.