Jungian writer Darryl Sharp (2001) explains that dreams are interior dramas in which the dream is the dreamer, with each element representing part of the dreamer’s personality; dream characters are personifications of our complexes.  In pointing this out, Sharp quotes Jung: “The whole dream work is essentially subjective, and a dream is a theatre in which the dreamer himself is himself the scene, the player, the prompter, the producer, the author, the public and the critic.” (Jung, 1948/1981, p. 266, para 509).  Sounds suspiciously familiar, doesn’t it?  Sort of sends Shiva’s, er, shivers up the spine!  It seems like now would be a good time to expand further, by taking an . . . .

Archetypal Excursion

Downing (1991) in her introduction to Mirrors of the Self, expands on the theater theme, in explicating the archetypal perspective:

As Jung tries to describe how the psyche appears to us once we adopt an archetypal perspective, he offers an account of the psyche as a list of dramatis personae.  The psyche’s own version of itself is animated, anthropomorphic, and dramatic, as though it consists of a group of persons actively interacting to support, challenge, undermine, betray or complement one another. Jung admits that this is a rather comical yet nonetheless accurate view because the unconscious always shows itself to consciousness in the form of personified images.  The psyche’s own privileged symbol for itself is that of a dramatic play rather than of a space divided up into areas, with consciousness representing one subfield and the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious other subfields.  Jung’s way of representing the psyche helps us see it as an energy field, as a dynamic process rather than as a static structure. (p. 4) 

Jung showed that complexes, and not dreams were the royal road to the unconscious and that complexes were the “architect of both dreams and symptoms.” (Sharp, 2001, p. 10)  Archetypes are at the core of every complex and they “present themselves as ideas and images, like everything else that becomes a content of the psyche” (Jung, 1954/1981, p. 227, para. 435).  Although Jung felt that there were as many archetypes as there are different typical experiences, some of the most familiar archetypes that Jung conceived were the ego, persona, shadow, anima/animus, wise old woman, wise old man, etcetera.  

In Chicago, we can look at the different characters as representing these archetypes.  Roxie, as ego consciousness, gets caught up in her persona, “the mask that we wear for the game of living” as Whitmont (1991, p. 14) describes it. The persona is like representative clothing that we wear, useful in social interactions, as long as we do not become identified with our roles. 

Velma, represents Roxie’s shadow, since she basically opposes and compensates Roxie's persona.  Sharp points out that ego consciousness can either work with the shadow, in collaboration, or they can tear each other apart.  Berry (1991) considers the shadow as an “agent provocateur” (p. 22), whose function is to upset or turn around the way we have viewed things and forces another vision upon us.  Billy represents the animus, or inner masculine side of a woman, which show up negatively as bitchiness and fixed ideas in the case of a woman in the grips of “animus possession,” or which shows up positively as advisor and helpful guide (Wehr, 1991, p. 42).  When Roxie is inflated and pulls her diva scene, she is definitely “animus possessed” while before her stardom goes to her head and especially after she comes back to reality, Billy is a positive animus figure for her.  Pregnancy, McNeely (1996) in Mercury Rising points out, can be seen as an animus advantage, becasuse it may be used to manipulate (p. 124), and a false pregnancy would seem to be doubly so.  We will discuss Mama and her role fittingly as the great mother archetype later.  Regarding archetypes, Downing (1991) also notes:

Examine personified images, how the self appears as a dramatic interaction among various personlike forms . . . . None of these figures exists in isolation; each is in dramatic interaction with one another.  As Jung put it, “in the unconscious the individual archetypes are not insulated from one another, but are in a state of contamination, of complete mutual interpenetration and fusion. “he sees that it is often “a well-nigh impossible undertaking to tear a single archetype out of the living tissue of the psyche." (pp. xviii-xix). 

Thus there occurs an endless mirroring among the many different archetypal images.  As in a funhouse or in Hesse’s Magical Theater, these images reflect and shape one another, sometimes in distorted ways. (p. xix).

Since we are in the arena of archetypes, let us see what James Hillman has to say. ∆RC[ch5]

Hiatus In Hades With Hillman

Hillman (1979), in The Dream and the Underworld, discusses dreams and their underworld connection extensively.  Since Roxie spends most of the movie in the underworld of the jail, Hillman’s insights will be particularly helpful.  Hillman says that the underworld is the land of soul, and that depth psychology always comes back to this mythical location.  In the underworld, Hades's realm, we have a psychical point of view as opposed to a materialist one.  Here, Hillman explains, all else has fallen away except “immaterial mirrorlike images, eidola.” Hillman opines that "we may only speak of eidola as they ‘seem,’ ‘appear to be,’ or what they ‘liken unto’ . . . .The word eidolon relates with Hades himself (aidoneus) and with eidos, the ideas and forms that shape life.” (p. 51).  The underworld is also a place of shadows and shades, or skia, the Greek word for these underworld figures. 

Hillman (1979), in this underworld perspective, urges us to “notice the fantasy in the moment, to witness the psyche’s shadow play in our unconscious daily living” (p. 52). This kind of consciousness is reflective: “seeing into the flickering patterns within that physical reality, and within the eyes themselves… So again, entering the underworld is like entering the mode of reflection, mirroring, which suggests that we may enter the underworld by means of reflection” (p. 52).  Hillman then describes the metaphorical quality of dreams and the underworld:

According to Plato, dream images are comparable with shadows, “when dark patches interrupt the light,” leading us to see a kind of “reflection,” “the reverse of the ordinary direct view" . . . Like any visual shadow, these images shade in life, giving it depth and twi-light, duplicity, metaphor.  The scene in a dream (the root word scene is akin to skia, “shadow”) is a metaphorical version of that scene and those players of yesterday who have now deepened and entered my soul…. We perceive images with the imagination, or better said, we imagine them rather than perceive them…. The shadow world in the depths is an exact replica of daily consciousness, only it must be perceived differently, imaginatively.  It is this world in metaphor.  (pp. 54-55) ∆RC[ch6]

Since we are on the subject of metaphor, no one, in my opinion, has spoken more eloquently regarding metaphor than Robert Romanyshyn (2001), who has written an entire book on the metaphorical nature of psychological life, entitled Mirror and metaphor: Images and stories of psychological life. Romanyshyn explains that we are always in some metaphor, and that the events and conditions in our lives reflect the metaphorical nature of the psyche and psychological life.  Romanyshyn is a master metaphorician, playfully alluding to things that remain elusive.

Romanyshyn’s Response Regarding Reverie ∆RC[ch7]

Romanyshyn views reveries as “the royal road to the soul of the world.” (2002, p. xiii).  Film, as a medium for portraying Roxie’s reveries, is especially apt. Romanyshyn feels that film and television consciousness are more like dreams, because they are not linear and they shuttle back and forth between different realities.  In this way, reveries mirror the complex (meant in both senses of the word) nature of psychological reality, blending together facts and fiction, sense and nonsense, continuity and discontinuity, order and chaos.

According to Romanyshyn (2002), the mediums of film and television, like dreams, have a multiperspectival collage type of consciousness, where the ego is exposed to a feeling of being awake in one’s dreams. He notes that media images have become first cousins to the hysteric body, with its symptomatic confusion of memory and event, fantasy and dream.  Romanyshyn sees media image consciousness, with its metaphoric nature, as the shadow of literate book consciousness.  And let us remember that media image consciousness gained ascendancy in the 1920s when movies, and radio became more widespread and prominent, and the very beginnings of television transmisson occurred, too. The dream, Romanyshyn writes:

Is an invitation which asks to be played with by a wakeful consciousness aware of its continuous and reciprocal relation of making the dream while being made by it.  In doing so, the dream infects the seriousness of cogito consciousness with play . . . . The dream, then, breaks though to a consciousness which in its playfulness is participatory, and which in its sense of participation accepts its oxymoronic character of created-discoveries, of serious play, of constructed origins.  It breaks through to a consciousness which in its acceptance of paradox is radically metaphorical . . . . Its images, like Magritte’s pipe, are not what they appear to be and yet are. (p. 21) 

Romanyshyn (2002) remarks that the features of television consciousness were sufficient to ban the poet-singer from Plato’s polis, because of the danger of “becoming enmeshed in the poet's song one would become diffused, distracted, unfocused and without fixed moral direction . . . that one would become plural in place of the unified, self-contained, self-organized and autonomous individual” (p. 23)

The poets that Plato so assiduously banished from the polis (Romanyshyn, 2003, lecture) have slipped back in through the musicals, their poetry set to music.  “Poetry at once projects a fictive world and helps describe an empirical one—mimetic and constructive”  (p. 23).  Lagos-Pope (1988) explicates that along with the poets, repressed energies found in the fantastic were also exiled:

Plato expelled from his ideal Republic all transgressive energies, all those energies which have been seen to be expressed through the fantastic: eroticism, violence, madness, laughter, nightmares, dreams, blasphemy, lamentation, uncertainty, female energy, excess.  Art which represented such energies was to be exiled from Plato’s ideal state. (p. 177)

After looking at Chicago (Marshall, 2002) and Roxie’s reveries in particular, its safe to say that these repressed energies have indeed returned and with a vengeance, paraphrasing Poltergeist II: The Other Side: “They’re back” (Gibson, 1986)!

Roxie’s reveries are also poetic; they are comprised of musical numbers, and can be seen as are poems set to music.  Whitehead (2001, online) playfully points out that song and dance, which is the biological basis of music, serves several functions, including grooming—which enables alliances; entrainment—making sure everyone is on the same page, and the creation of emergent order—where several selfish individuals are melded together into a “great big selfish individual” (p. 82).  Poet Octavio Paz’s (1991) description of poetic thought, shows its relevance to Roxie’s reveries:

The operative mode of poetic thought is imagining, and imagination consists, essentially, of the ability to place contrary or divergent realities in relationship.  All poetic forms and all linguistic figures have one thing in common: they seek, and often find, hidden resemblances.  In the most extreme cases, they unite opposites.  Comparisons, analogies, metaphors, metonymies, and the other devices of poetry—all tend to produce images in which this and that, the one and the other, the one and the many are joined.  The poetic process conceives of language as an animated universe traversed by the dual current of attraction and repulsion.  In language, the unions and the divisions, the love affairs and the separations of the stars, cells, atoms and men are reproduced.  Each poem, whatever its subject and form and the ideas that shape it, is first and foremost a miniature animated cosmos.  The poem unites the “ten thousand things that make up the universe,” as the ancient Chinese put it. (p. 158)

As previously mentioned, the Broadway musical Chicago (Fosse, 1975) is based on the idea that life is vaudeville and the entire musical takes that form.  In this way it is like art chirography, and the mouse’s tale in Alice in Wonderland, which takes the form of what it speaks (Gardner, 1998), This dissertation does so, as well, in being a bricolage while talking about bricolage, using examples which are bricolage, and often times using images which have been bricoled together. 

Continued on page 5