The Trickster in Contemporary Film

The Trickster in Contemporary Film This book discusses the role of the trickster ®gure in contemporary ®lm against the cultural imperatives and social issues of modernity and post- modernity, and argues that cinematic tricksters always re¯ect psychological, economic and social change in society. It covers a range of ®lms, from Charlie Chaplin's classics such as Modern Times (1936) and The Great Dictator (1940) to contemporary comedies and dramas with `trickster actors' such as Jim Carrey, Sacha Baron-Cohen, Andy Kaufman and Jack Nicholson. The Trickster in Contemporary Film offers a fresh perspective on the trickster ®gure not only in cinema but in Western culture in general. Alongside original ®lm analyses, it touches upon a number of psychosocial issues including sovereignty of the individual, tricksterish qualities of the media and human relationships in the mercurial digital age. Further topics of discussion include: · common motifs in trickster narratives · the trickster and personal relationships · gonzo trickster and the art of comic insurrection. Employing a number of complementary approaches such as Jungian psychology, ®lm semiotics, narrative structure theories, Victor Turner's concept of liminality and Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of ®lm, as well as anyone with an interest in analytical psychology and wider critical issues in contemporary culture. Helena Bassil-Morozow has been teaching Film, Drama and Literature in various higher education institutions and in private practice for over seven years. Currently she is an honorary research fellow of the Research Institute for Media Art and Design, University of Bedfordshire. She is the author of Tim Burton: The Monster and the Crowd (Routledge, 2010). The Trickster in Contemporary Film Helena Bassil-Morozow First published 2012 by Routledge 27 Church Road, Hove, East Sussex BN3 2FA Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Copyright Ø 2012 Helena Bassil-Morozow All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identi®cation and explanation withoutintenttoinfringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Bassil-Morozow, Helena Victor, 1978± The trickster in contemporary ®lm / Helena Bassil-Morozow. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-415-57465-5 (hardback) ± ISBN 978-0-415-57466-2 (paperback) 1. Tricksters in motion pictures. 2. TrickstersÐCross-cultural studies. I. Title. PN1995.9.T78B37 2011 791.43©67±dc22 2011014006 ISBN: 978-0-415-57465-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-415-57466-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-80221-2 (ebk) Typeset in Times by Gar®eld Morgan, Swansea, West Glamorgan Paperback cover design by Andrew Ward Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall For Matthew Contents Foreword viii Acknowledgements xii Introduction 1 1 Common Motifs in Trickster Narratives 24 2 The Trickster and Personal Relationships 47 3 The Trickster and the Economic System 86 4 The Trickster and Contemporary Powers 120 5 Gonzo Trickster and the Art of Comic Insurrection 142 Conclusion 179 References 182 Film references 188 Index 191 Foreword Christopher Hauke It is all too easy to feel cheated by a book title. Initially raised expectations can be dashed after the ®rst 20 pages. But what you are holding is the reverse of this. What is the opposite of feeling cheated? Being unexpectedly, substantially rewarded, that's what! The Trickster in Contemporary Film offers so much more than its straightforward title suggests. The book manages to include just about every example of the movie trickster from the expected Dumb and Dumber (still hilarious and subversive after innumerable viewings) and Jim Carrey's brilliant performance in The Mask, to the unexpected such as Jack Nicholson's ®lms and ± a reminder we could not do without ± the work of Charlie Chaplin and his Modern Times. Before we are made fully aware of the scope of her theme and how far she will extend it, Helena dives straight in to remind us how the trickster `re¯ects the human condition, with its ups and downs, and its explosive mixture of the tragic and the comic . [while] this is also a book about the psychology and anthropology of failure and success' (p. 2). The trickster has huge signi®cance for our own modern times, and the cinema screen is the primary site for its projection, `because cinema tends to be the psychological mirror of society' (ibid.). Helena prepares the ground for us ®rst by going into the anthropology and mythology of the trickster ®gure as it has appeared across the world and over many centuries. Unlike standard texts on the trickster, her approach is individually carved to her own subject matter, introducing the character of the trickster almost like one would a genre in ®lm. Drawing on examples from all over the world, she covers all the trickster tropes such as boundary crossing, the body and its scatological events, sexuality, the penis and loss of control, and the strange link between the human and the animal, the outraged and the outrageous. Helena is a ®lm scholar who can ®nd and link accurate ®lm examples to the mythological character, but she is also a Jungian ®lm scholar and this is where we hit bedrock. Carl Jung was a psychologist who reckoned all of humanity had ways of seeing and behaving which lay `beneath' both the conscious mind and the personal unconscious. Myths and characters such as Foreword ix the trickster found in human stories world-wide form part of the evidence for this collective unconscious. The trickster is an archetype, part of our unconscious human potential found in everyone and every culture. Jung discovered the Winnebago trickster stories to be rich in material relevant to the psychology of modern humans. Riding on the carnival trailer that is modern ®lm, The Trickster in Contemporary Film offers a new perspective on `how contemporary ®lm presents the tricky relationship between consciousness and the unconscious in the ``civilised'' mind' (p. 3). Like many recent texts that use Jungian thinking, Helena is picking up on something that is at the heart of Jung's psychology but has too often been subsumed beneath attention to Jungian psychology purely as a clinical treatment. Central to Jung's psychology is the idea that modern consciousness suffers from an over-reliance on the rational, the linear, the pragmatic and the pro®table. This perspective constitutes Jung's `psycho-political evaluations of modernity and its discontents' (p. 3) as Helena calls it. Our contemporary neurosis is a neurosis of post-industrial, post-Enlightenment, positivistic and capitalist society. Helena acknowledges the post-Jungian Andrew Samuels (who pointed out the link between Hermes, the trickster and the shape-shifting nature of capitalism) when she asserts `the trickster dwells at the heart of the capitalist system' (p. 3). What could be a better theme than the trickster to explore the wider ®eld of the challenges to modern capitalist life from Julian Assange and WikiLeaks on the internet to ®lms about Andy Kaufman and Sacha Baron-Cohen's real life twisting of realities that equally challenge our idea of what is `acceptable'. As Helena says, `The trickster in . ®lm is often a metaphor for repressed potentiality, of futurity, of dormant change . an intrinsically rebellious and artistic power in the human psyche which saves us from mental entropy and ensures our progress as individuals' (p. 8). In The Trickster in Contemporary Film Helena has delved into the archives and deals us an intertextual hand rich in originality and surprises. She launches off from KereÂnyi and Radin noting how the trickster's function `is to add disorder to order . to render possible, within the ®xed bounds of what is permitted, an experience of what is not permitted' (p. 6). She then contextualises this function within the concept of habitus devised by the philosopher-anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. As a dynamic between the individual and his surroundings, the habitus produces individual and collective practices `deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action' (p. 9) which are resistant to examination or change and act to the advantage of those who hold power. Helena points out how, `This view directly taps into the socio-political role of the trickster principle, which is a chaotic, spontaneous force whose primary aim is to challenge the universal in¯uence of the social order' (p. 10). This position is backed up further using the work of Clifford Geertz, Marshall Berman and Zygmunt Bauman involving different versions of postmodern social x The Trickster in Contemporary Film critique. Historically, using Bakhtin on the ```thousand-year-old develop- ment of popular culture''' (p. 21), Helena asserts that our movies continue the tradition of Cervantes and Rabelais: `The trickster of modernity is the trickster of the emerging capitalist world ± closely associated with the problematic relationship between the individual and society' (p. 22). This is of course another major theme of Jung's ± the urge towards individu- ation in every individual and the strain that `mass man' and conformity puts on the psychological need for personal authenticity. As the book says, `The trickster's efforts to become a man, and an independent one at that, can be seen as both ludicrous and heroic because .

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