Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.

Carl Jung

Each night, in the deceptive vacuum of sleep, we can listen to our subconscious if we try. While this holds the promise of archetypical, transformative visions often associated with Jungian Psychology, it can also yield nightmares driven by irrational fears, most associated with the Freudian view of the subconscious.

Auteur Theory of Dreaming

In this prior post, we contemplated the Auteur Theory of Dreaming, a framework to approach dreaming as our own personal cinema, similar to how accomplished film directors create movies that convey their personal dreams.

The following is an analysis and comparison of the predominantly numinous dream of The Wizard of Oz, where layers of subconscious are revealed, with the paradoxical nightmare of Doctor Strangelove, a vision that combines our ultimate fear (destruction of the world) with the necessary humor that contemplating this madness induces. It’s convenient to align these works with dominant orientations, but we expand our intelligence by finding nightmarish qualities in mystical dreams and jovial qualities in nightmares.

By the time Stanley Kubrick made Doctor Strangelove, his cinematic accomplishments granted him significant artistic control and the ability to get much of his personal vision into his films. The film’s release coincided with the height of the Cold War, just beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kubrick was obsessed with the prospect of world annihilation, researching this extensively and finding a novel called Red Alert that became the basis of the film. A crazy General Jack Ripper, deluded by a conspiracy that the Communists are infiltrating our drinking water to corrupt our bodily fluids, orders a strike on the Soviet Union by capitalizing on a flaw in the chain of command.

Victor Fleming, the director of The Wizard of Oz, worked from silent films to the height of the Hollywood Studio System, where dream factories churned out massive quantities of films before Shiva’s wrath laid waste in the form of television and anti-trust rulings. We could consider Fleming as more of a dream weaver than an auteur, often the fixer of enormous productions that were initiated by other writers and directors (he replaced George Cukor on both Oz and Gone with the Wind, apparently the only director in Hollywood to withstand David O. Selznick’s crushing ego). However, a study across his wide spectrum of films brings forth connected visions, concepts and concerns, accidental or not. Let’s simply contemplate the similarities in the heroic journeys of Dorothy Gale and Scarlet O’Hara.

Now let’s dwell into key psychological aspects of these cinematic dreams.

ANIMUS/ANIMA AND THE LIBIDO

In traditional Jungian theory, the Animus is the repressed male characteristics (the inner masculine) in the female psyche that needs to be developed in order to achieve greater individuation, or the fuller integration of psychic elements (its counterpart in the male psyche is the anima). As the sexual delineation is difficult to grasp without several hours of expensive psychotherapy, it’s best in my view to simplify this as the overall process of illuminating subconscious traits. Sexual delineation is helpful however when we examine how we project ourselves onto those of the opposite sex in our memories, dreams and fantasies.

For Dorothy, her animus is projected onto Auntie Em’s three farmhands who become colorful guides in her dream journey of individuation; the Scarecrow wanting a brain, the Tin Man wanting a heart, and the Cowardly Lion in pursuit of courage. Their journey to the Emerald City, the manifestation of the higher chakras, is periodically stymied by the Wicked Witch, a mental block of green skin and heinous howls.

Poppy Fields and Unusual Weather

Here, they lay eyes on the Emerald City and attempt to speed their pursuit. But the Wicked Witch sets a trap of poppies, inducing Dorothy into deep sleep, her pursuit of higher intellect, emotional strength and courage pushed back into the subconscious. The Good Witch Glinda, possessing thermo-nuclear power over the weather, revives Dorothy with a blanket of pure snow.

Doctor Strangelove opens oddly with a woman in a bikini, then fails to deliver another female character for the rest of the film. We can interpret this from the Jungian aspect as a male psyche devoid of anima images, lacking emotional balance and awareness. We can also see this as the repression of the primal source of the sex drive among the failed masculinity that reigns throughout the rest of the film, fumbling warriors and politicians unable to prevent the nuclear destruction of the world.

General Ripper’s Machine Gun/Loss of Essence

As Freudian psychology dictates, the thwarted sex drive sublimates into other manifestations of power, here into destructive war machines. In Kubrick’s vision, we find the drive for human procreation sublimated into the ultimate form of human annihilation. While bombers race in the sky to their targets in Russia, General Ripper fires impotently at the invading soldiers and explains how he links a Communist Conspiracy to his “Loss of Essence.”

THE PARADOX OF CREATION/SURVIVAL/DESTRUCTION

In Hindu mythology, we have Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver, and Shiva the Destroyer. Comprehending, embracing and fulfilling these endless cycles of destruction and rebirth is perhaps humanity’s greatest challenge, for these primal drives are seemingly in alignment and opposition at the same time. Let’s add to this that our greatest achievements, positive or negative, are realized when these cycles merge with great force, such as when the horrific pain of childbirth resolves with new life entering the world.

This is the realm of the Greek god of divine madness, Dionysus, whose followers entered trancelike states engaging in ecstatic, wild and often dangerous rituals. Our primal drives capable of the most wild and dangerous behavior are also the most fertile and creative. It’s the tumultuous effect that occurs when intense forces erupt from the subconscious.

The Cyclone Destroys and Creates

In this vision, the destructive force of the cyclone carries Dorothy away within the confines of her home. The spiraling, crashing domicile kills a witch, a metaphorical obstacle in Dorothy’s psyche, and unleashes the fertile, colorful realm of Munchkinland. We see the ruined home, the realm of Dorothy’s former confinement, juxtaposed with the source of the Yellow Brick Road, the path to enlightenment, spiraling outward in the same shape as the cyclone.

Thus far in human history, nuclear weapons are the highest form of Dionysian madness, although we’re just getting warmed up with artificial intelligence, and let’s not overlook Facebook and I Dream of Jeannie. As Friedrich Nietzsche surmised in The Birth of Tragedy, cultural development in Ancient Greece was driven by the conflict between the wild, ecstatic madness of the god Dionysus and the orderly, harmonious logic of the god Apollo. Dionysus brings us to the creative, dangerous threshold of genius, but Apollo keeps us from falling into the abyss.

Dabbling in the apocalyptic realm of nuclear annihilation, even Apollonian logic turns MAD, literally. Mutually Assured Destruction is seemingly the best strategy to avoid all-out nuclear war, notwithstanding the thwarted libidos. Since a nuclear attack initiated by one superpower would be answered with Armageddon by another, why would either side pull the trigger? But just to be safe, let’s ensure we create enough firecrackers to definitively wipe out the planet several times over.

In Doctor Strangelove, the rather tenuous Apollonian logic of the MAD Doctrine is usurped, enabling the ultimate Dionysian creation/destruction. This is not because of the failure of MAD, but rather the incredible suicidal libido of a cowboy pilot.

Rodeo Shiva

Technology fails the planet when the recall code cannot be relayed to Major Kong’s plane, leading him to complete his false mission and trigger the Doomsday Device. Our greatest achievement in madness is carried out by a Rodeo Shiva, the American mythology of masculinity and rugged individualism making the last roundup.

WEAPONS OF MASS LIQUIDITY

While nuclear bombs are the ultimate weapons, we must be ever vigilant for the more subtle weapons that take on innocuous forms, even seemingly meant to help us. Our society’s rampant with accusations of the weaponization of everything from social media to the weather, to toothpaste, and let’s not forget the devastating impact of sarcasm. As noted earlier, General Ripper sees water fluoridation as a Communist plot to ruin society and his personal sex life.

The Witch's Demise

Here we see Dorothy kill the Wicked Witch of the West with a pale-full of water, one of the most common elements on the planet (one wonders how the Witch survived so long in such a water-prone world – protein powder and extra dry martinis?).

What is the connection here? I see the witch’s demise as the visualization of an irrational fear of water, one that an obsessed General Ripper might see in his sleep. It reminds me of dreams where all seems quite normal except out of nowhere, I see the Geico gecko playing in the ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese. I realize then it must be a dream and attempt to gain a Lucid Dream state that enables a direct exploration of the unconscious. Considering that the world is still mega-loaded with warheads, my hope is that potential General Rippers will get the psychological counseling they need with dream analysis, or at least the pharmaceutical equivalent. We can’t afford to be as stoic as General Turgidson, defending his chain of command design while acknowledging that the human element has failed us.

THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE MINE SHAFTS

The Wizard of Oz is the story of a girl wanting to go home, having been cast into a strange world that forces her to mature intellectually, emotionally and build her self-esteem.

Dorothy Goes Home

But home is more than a physical place. It’s the discovery of one’s inner nature. Dorothy tearfully says goodbye to her anima projections as they’ve now been internalized. If we succeed in integrating our psyche through revealing the subconscious, we’ll create a more stable foundation for our mental well-being.

Now let’s consider the character Doctor Strangelove, if ever a Wiz there wasn’t. Strangelove is a Nazi scientist transplanted to Washington after World War II, the Emerald City of the 1960s (several Nazi scientists came to the US after the collapse of Germany, although not all had prosthetic arms and went on to play bumbling detectives). Whereas the annihilation of the human race is a downer for most of us, Strangelove seems gleefully accepting of these developments.

A Strange Love Indeed

Here, he explains how the human race can repopulate quickly by going underground into mine shafts with ratios of ten women to one man, a proposition that garners immediate approval among the political and military elite. Perhaps we’ve seen a glimpse of this scenario at the beginning of the film where General Turgidson’s bikini-clad assistant addresses him within some claustrophobic, mirrored cave.

Yes, this is exciting to the thwarted libidos, but for Strangelove this is much more, the fulfillment of his inner nature, his ecstatic dream, portrayed in his ability to miraculously stand up from his wheelchair. He will now attempt to carry out the Nazi eugenics plan of creating the master race, finding a new home in a distant land. YIKES!

Yet why is this nightmare far from horrifying? Because Kubrick has shown us all along that it’s completely ridiculous. Perhaps the only reason the human race still exists after all these years of wars, toxins, and the creation of doomsday machines is our ability to laugh at our own absurdity. It’s the Dionysian ecstasy of extreme horror clashing with the comic genius of Peter Sellers. If we can find humor in nuclear catastrophe and the mad dreams of fascists, surely we shall endure.

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