THE FILMS OF NICOLAS ROEG Also by John Izod HOLLYWOOD AND THE BOX OFFICE, 1895-1986 READING THE SCREEN SATELLITE, CABLE AND BEYOND (with Alastair Hetherington) The Films of Nicolas Roeg Myth and Mind
John Izod Senior Lecturer, Department of Film and Media Studies University of Stirling
Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-11470-2 ISBN 978-1-349-11468-9 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-11468-9 © Kenneth John lzod 1992 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1992 978-0-333-52269-1 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1992
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Izod, John, 1940- The films of Nicolas Roeg: myth and mind/John Izod. p. cm. Filmography: p. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-07904-8 I. Roeg, Nicolas, 1928- -Criticism and interpretation. 1. Title PN1998.3.R635196 1992 791.43'0233'092-dc20 91-45431 CIP For Irene - midwayan the epic journey ~ with love Ah quanto a dir 'qual era e cosa dura esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte che nel pensier rinova la paura! Tant' e amara che poco e piu morte; rna per trattar del ben ch'io vi trovai, diro de l'altre cose ch'io v'ho scorte. Dante, L'Inferno
'Every advance in culture is, psychologically, an extension of consciousness, a coming to consciousness that can take place only through discrimination. Therefore an advance always begins with individuation, that is to say with the individual, conscious of his isolation, cutting a new path through hitherto untrodden territory. To do this he must first return to the fundamental facts of his own being, irrespective of all authority and tradition, and allow himself to become conscious of his distinctiveness. If he succeeds in giving collective validity to his widened consciousness, he creates a tension of opposites that provides the stimulation which culture needs for its further progress: C. G. lung, On Psychic Energy Contents
List of Plates ix
List of Figures xi
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction xiii
1 lung's Analytical Psychology and the Cinema 1 2 Threading the Maze 13 3 Performance 28 4 Walkabout 51 5 Don't Look Now 67 6 The Man Who Fell To Earth 87 7 Bad Timing 104 8 Eureka 125 9 Insignificance 152 10 Castaway 176 11 Aria - The Attempt on the Life of King Zog 195 12 Track 29 202 13 The Witches 217 14 Cold Heaven 230
Conclusion 249
Glossary of Jungian Terms 253
Notes and References 258
Filmography 273
Bibliography 278
Index 284
vii List of Plates
1. Tibetan mandala showing the squaring of the circle 2. Maze mandala by one of Jung's patients 3. Performance. Turner (Mick Jagger) impersonates Harry Flowers. (Warner Brothers) 4. Walkabout. The aborigine and a simple mandala. (Twentieth Century-Fox) 5. Eureka. Claude succumbs to his own beauty. (UPI/British Film Institute [Britain] MGM/UA [USA]) 6. Performance. Pherber demonstrates Chas's sexual ambivalence. (Warner Brothers) 7. Walkabout. The children's great journey begins. (Twentieth Century-Fox) 8. Walkabout. The girl shields herself from the sun. (Twentieth Century-Fox) 9. Francis Quarles, Emblemes (1635), Christ on the Cross as the fruit of a tree 10. Don't Look Now. John Baxter pulls his child's body from the pond. (British Lion and Paramount Pictures) 11. Don't Look Now. Laura and the sisters in the washroom. (British Lion and Paramount Pictures) 12. Don't Look Now. John's vision. (British Lion and Paramount Pictures) 13. Don't Look Now. John follows the dwarf into an abandoned church. (British Lion and Paramount Pictures) ·14. The Man Who Fell to Earth. Newton's arrival. (British Lion) 15. The Man Who Fell to Earth. Newton dulls his mind. (British Lion) 16. Gustav Klimt, Judith I, 1901. (Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna) 17. Gustav Klimt, Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907. (Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna) 18. Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1907-8. (Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna) 19. Bad Timing. Alex as conqueror, Milena as victim. (J. Arthur Rank)
ix x List of Plates 20. Eureka. Jack McCann near to death. (UPI/British Film Institute [Britain] MGM/UA [USA]) 21. Eureka. Jack's dinner party. (UPI/British Film Institute [Britain] MGM/UA [USA]) 22. Eureka. Jack feeds the wolves. (UPI/British Film Institute [Britain] MGM/UA [USA]) 23. Insignificance. The Actress on location. (Palace Pictures) 24. Insignificance. The Actress demonstrates the theory of relativity. (Palace Pictures) 25. Castaway. Lucy works, Gerald thinks. (Columbia-Cannon• Warner) 26. Castaway. Gerald and Lucy brought together by their failing strength. (Columbia-Cannon-Warner) 27. Track 29. Martin waiting for a start in life. (Handmade Films/Recorded Releasing VHS Video: Cannon) 28. Track 29. Linda with her baby. (Handmade Films/ Recorded Releasing VHS Video: Cannon) 29. Track 29. Henry presides over the Trainorama conference. (Handmade Films/Recorded Releasing VHS Video: Cannon) 30. The Witches. Anjelica Huston rehearses the Grand High Witch's salute. (Warner Brothers) 31. The Witches. Nic Roeg - caught between implacable opposites. (Warner Brothers) List of Figures
1. The triad and the quaternity 71 2. Mandala constructed from Insignificance 171
xi Acknowledgements
This book has been long in the maturing, and some whom I claim as midwives may not recognise the infant, now it has grown. To my former teacher and constant friend William Rayner lowe the propagation of a fire that has not died - a fascination with myth. Trevor Whitlock helped direct that passion towards cinema and suggested ways of developing it into a book. Grahame Smith involved himself in the project throughout and sharpened my thinking with shrewd observations drawn from our shared teaching. I also want to thank Luke Hockley who shared his knowledge of Jungian theory and kindly advised on a number of points, and Tim Thomicroft who read the typescript and offered helpful comments. Every teacher is fortunate in enjoying the stimulus of students' ideas, and I have had the luck to explore Roeg's films with particularly talented classes at the University of Stirling. To the best of my ability I have acknowledged individuals' contributions in the pages that follow, but my debt to them all for their enthusiasm and energy is large. My admiration for Nic Roeg's films will be plain from the following pages. The discovery that their director is a man worthy of their extraordinary stature provided me with one of the lasting pleasures of a prolonged term of study. I thank him warmly for subtle encouragement and unfailing kindness. A shorter version of Chapter 2 was published as 'I Knew It Would Be You', in The Media Education Journal, 4 (1986); and Chapter 4 appeared in an earlier form as 'Walkabout: A Wasted Journey?', Sight and Sound, 49 (Spring 1980). The author and publishers are grateful to both journals for permission to reprint here. Passages from The Collected Works of c. G. Jung are reprinted by kind permission of Routledge and Princeton University Press.
JOHN 1z0D
xii Introduction
For those who admire them the potent appeal of Nicolas Roeg's films seems to spring from the fusion of certain specific attractions. The first of these is their extraordinary power, which makes itself felt in the impact of characters and action on the spectator's emotions. Secondly their vivid style adds greatly to their allure. The third has to do with the way they present us with puzzles, often about people whose nature the spectator half recognises, but cannot immediately understand. While these elements can be separated in order to identify them, they are experienced in concert. To take a typical device, essential narrative information may be helCi back by a combination of brisk cutting and the seemingly random dispersion of fragments from a chronological sequence across a number of scenes - as is true in Bad Timing. Here the withholding of information causes puzzlement since the spectator suffers frustra• tion of the wish to discover a character's motivations. On the other hand, the delayed revelation of the true nature of those drives has all the greater impact just because one has been kept waiting in suspense for it. Were this all, however, Roeg might be the director of skilful entertainments and nothing more. A fourth factor combines with the others and endows the films with particular force. Roeg's narratives often run parallel to ancient mysteries, which they retail in variations designed to accommodate humanity's late twentieth-century perception of its condition. Their expositions of characters and stories rework some of the great myths recorded by humanity in the unending search to understand the nature and circumstances of both the, individual and society. Many of the films (Eureka is the prime example) interlink human actions and emotions with universal events, and insist on their connection. The planets, the elements and the stars are never far away. Thus Roeg's audiences witness his characters playing out their lives on a cosmic stage; but the characters themselves, however, are by no means always aware of the fact, although some (like Lucy in Castaway) learn it eventually. Others (for instance the Baxters in Don't Look Now) live bounded by pre-occupations so intense that they see little but their reflected needs wherever they look.
xiii xiv Introduction
This juxtaposition of the universe with the microcosm of the individual psyche typifies a structure which embodies major themes. Since the films employ myth to relate the outer and inner worlds, they are peculiarly well suited to an analysis that uses Jungian methods. For (to- summarise a central thrust of Jung's work), he found myths act in two interlocked ways at one and the same time. Firstly, they express humanity's needs in its assessment of and dealings with the external world; and simultaneously they present a covert guide to the unconscious mind not merely of individuals, but of their people. For both Roeg and Jung the search for enhanced knowledge of the world and self is nothing less than a religious enterprise. It comprises a major impetus behind every quest for the Godhead because the search for the self cannot be extricated from the search from the Numinosum in the human psyche. For some people the evidence of a close match between the structures of Roeg's films and those of Jung's analytical psychology raises the question whether Roeg himself is consciously a Jungian. It has to be said that this question does not have the importance for a Jungian that it must for someone who thinks of the authorial drive as predominantly an expression of the individual's conscious will. For if myths and icons have archetypal roots in the manner Jung ascribes to them, it follows that they must be potentially available to all members of a culture. The fact is, however, that as a voracious reader with an eclectic appetite, Roeg does know Jung's ideas; but he does not discuss his films as though he were working to a Jungian programme, other concerns seeming to be uppermost in his mind. However, the analyst's theories concerning myth and the psyche do correspond with the way Roeg himself appears (certainly to this observer) to experience thought. Noticeably when he talks, be it about films, books or abstract ideas, he does not do so in a disinterested, speculative way. He engages with them as if they were an integral part of himself, and he reports ideas as though (however he might judge them rationally) he has had experience of them. In short what he reads he knows for its intuitively tasted potential truth. The primacy of intuition and emotion in his mental processes, if this observation is correct, fits sweetly with the Jungian's know• ledge that affects rather than theories, judgement or ideals drive the individuation process. The search for the self is not led by reason but by the buffeting insistence of emotions which force the often unwilling subject to go on an inward journey of self-discovery when Introduction xv he or she would expect to find far greater comfort in tranquil apathy. Roeg's films too work exactly this way, battering their audiences with feelings whose cause is inexplicable without careful probing of the texts that arouse them. Therefore the spectator's search for understanding of the films often merges with and awakens the process of self discovery. By addressing us in the vivid, dislocating way they do, the films not only puzzle us concerning the fate of their characters, but also disturb our own tranquillity so that we cannot respond to them without experiencing comparable feelings. This in essence identifies the source of the power of Roeg's cinema. In a time and for a people without formal faith, they offer a substitute for organised religion, and do so by enticing their audiences to look inwards for the secret sources of mystical power that, whether they know it or not, reside within themselves.
JOHN IZOD