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the shadow self : page 3......
.. .. Still, I like fully-realized characters and some of the darker ones seem to fit that profile more often than not. [In the case of May], the story wouldn't be the story if she wasn't so dark and odd. She truly is weird. She genuinely is odd. [May] is attracted to strange things like anatomy; the cat with the missing leg for example; blood and stuff. Most of us have some sort of "freak zone" that keeps us, no matter how weird we are, grounded, I guess. We're all odd in some way or another. Maybe [May] is the type of person that could walk by you on the street. She's not unable to be identified with; [she] just doesn't have a "freak zone." /// |
.. .. When you're an actor, you expose what you make to the public so you have to know what to expect. Not everyone is going to like it or [me] in it. But I just get into it all. Like me with the press and how they talk about my whole career. Saying things like "she's a freak" or "she's pushing it too far." I love that emotion; forcing people to take a stand and have an opinion. Angela Bettis - about her film "May" (2002) from
moviefreak.com
interview:
Drawn to
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| For
as long as humankind has celebrated the creative powers of the mind, we've
been forced to confront the darker side of the imagination: thoughts so
mortifying, so frightening, so contrary to social custom and our own principles
that we recoil in disgust or fear.
In 1852, nearly three decades before the rounding of modern psychology, author Herman Melville [right] offered one of the more poignant observations on the life of the mind. "One trembles to think," he wrote, "of that mysterious thing in the soul, which... in spite of the individual's own innocent self, will still dream horrid dreams, and mutter unmentionable thoughts." ... We know the dangers of denial, and we understand the importance of accepting even the less-than-perfect parts of ourselves. Yet in a culture obsessed with, and increasingly defined by, stories of psychological dysfunction, and in a century punctuated with premeditated atrocity, some of what our own brains conjure up still has the power to terrify us. "For a lot of people, it's like discovering they have an animal inside them," says University of Washington sociologist Pepper Schwartz, Ph.D., who studies sexuality and sexual fantasies. "Oftentimes the feeling is 'My God! Am I one of those weirdos you read about in the paper?'" ... |
.. .. They're clearly linked to our decision-making mechanisms, our ability to distinguish "right" from "wrong," and our capacity to avoid dangerous, unfavorable outcomes. They may also be associated with our creative processes. However, they can spin wildly out of control. in extreme cases, forbidden thoughts may become so powerful that they break out as actual behavior. More often, though, they get "stuck," become virtually impossible to dispel, and wreak havoc on our mental and physical health. from
article Forbidden
Thinking -
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...~ ~ ~ ~......
Working with him [acting coach Roy London], I had a breakthrough as an actor. I could be all the things good girls were not supposed to be: vicious, ruthless, needy... all the dark things. Sharon Stone ... [paraphrased from A&E Biography]
images above from "Basic Instinct" and "Last Dance"
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Hopefully
you choose a character because there's a part of it you understand. And
it could just be the shadow parts -- if you integrate those dark shadow
parts into your life that you normally keep pushing away, they don't have
that power over you anymore.
And in any art, if you don't have that darkness, who cares? Gina Gershon.......[Interview,
Oct 2003] //
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| "A
lot of my images come from that time when you just go to sleep," Floria
Sigismondi said, "and I usually end up writing in the dark or just when
I wake up. People think of women I guess doing softer more beautiful pink
things... I've just got a little bit of that other side."
That would be the dark and creepy side, which is what makes Sigismondi such a magnet for musicians wanting to create dark and disturbing videos. Fluffy, David Bowie, Tricky, and the grand master of grim Marilyn Manson have turned to Sigismondi for that special flesh-crawling touch. "I think it could get pretty scary if people hide that side of them, and then kind of let it out in other ways, where I'm very visible with it, and it's a safe way," Sigismondi said. .. [MTV.com News article] photo from her official site
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Mask 12by Robert Peluce acrylic on canvas, from
Glass Garage Fine Art Gallery
The mind I love must still have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of -- and paths threaded with those little flowers planted by the mind. Katherine Mansfield ~ quoted in Nat Asssoc of Women Writers newsletter naww.org
 .. .. It is usually precipitated by a life changing loss. Experiencing the death of one's child, parent, or spouse.... Women often make their descent when a particular role, such as daughterhood, motherhood, lover, or spouse, comes to an end. A life-threatening illness or accident, the loss of self-confidence or livelihood, a geographical move, the inability to finish a degree, a confrontation with the grasp of an addiction, or a broken heart can open the space for dismemberment and descent. This journey to the underworld is filled with confusion and grief, alienation and disillusion, rage and despair. A woman may feel naked and exposed, dry and brittle, or raw and turned inside-out. |
 .. .. Each time I had to face truths about myself and my world that I wished not to see. And each time I was chastened and cleansed by the fires of transformation. from article The Initiation and Descent to the Goddess - image above from book by Marion Woodman: Dancing in the Flames : [also see quotes by Woodman on depth psychology: page 2
interview with Maureen Murdock |
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Monstrous little women, mad moppets, deadly dollies, deranged daughters, sinister sisters -- call them what you will, there is no doubt that multifarious images of the evil girl-child haunt the celluloid corridors of popular cinema. A far cry from her innocent sisters, the monstrous little woman is capable of truly shocking crimes. Images of evil children, circulated in posters and film books, are predominantly of feminine furies...
In contrast to her male counterpart, the abject little woman flaunts herself with such wicked style she is perversely unforgettable.
Her diabolical deeds include: matricide (Carrie), patricide (The House That Dripped Blood, 1970), cold-blooded murder (The Exorcist)... pyromania (Firestarter), vampirism (Interview with a Vampire), and witchcraft (Stranger in the House).
We also find sinister little women in other genres -- in film noir (Mildred Pierce), adult drama (The Bad Seed, Heavenly Creatures, Celia), boarding-school films (The Loudest Whisper) and the baby-doll film (Lolita).
..
..from article: Baby Bitches from Hell: Monstrous-Little Women
in Film by Barbara Creedimage: Drew Barrymore in Firestarter (1984)
...Barbara Creed. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film,
Feminism, Psychoanalysis~ ~ ~ ~
 .. ..  |
Rachel Griffiths.. is not surprised by the critical reaction [not to mention high ratings] that this often morbid black comedy [TV series "Six Feet Under"] has attained. Griffiths says that it's due to writer Alan Ball, who also wrote the Oscar winning American Beauty.
"Somehow this guy is someone that can go places that no other writer can take people, where they stay with him and go back for more. He explores their kind of darkest neuroses, and I think it's his discipline of being a sitcom writer that he just knows when to give us a scene or a line that takes the pressure valve and lets our steam out; he's so original." [darkhorizons.com March 27 2002] **American Beauty: The Shooting Script by Alan Ball |
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Rumi wrote a poem called "Night Travelers." It's about how all the darkness of human beings is a shared thing from the beginning of time, and how understanding that opens up your heart and opens up your world. You begin to think bigger. Rather than depressing you, it makes you feel part of the whole. Pema Chödrön - from article: Pema Chödrön & Alice Walker in conversation
related*audiobook: Pema Chodron & Alice Walker : In Conversation
on the Meaning of Suffering and the Mystery of Joy~ ~ ~ ~
Ihad been reading during those years [while writing A Nightmare on Elm Street] a lot of Eastern sort of esoteric knowledge. There's a Russian philosopher who wrote about levels of consciousness and equated consciousness with being awake - which I did throughout this picture. His theory was that consciousness is painful. To know really what's true, to know the truth in any given situation, is painful, often uncomfortable, and it's not pleasant. So most of us, most of the time, will go out what he called 'doors.'
He listed sex, eating, sleeping, being out in a crowd; today you could add television and drugs. Those things ease the pain of consciousness.
The hero is the person that remains conscious, remains awake, up to the point where it's so painful you want to kill yourself. Most people, if they get near that level, turn around and go the other way; some people actually kill themselves, and some people break through to a sort of clarity where they're truly conscious. That became the framework for the film.
Wes Craven - from Dimension Online interview by Steve Biodrowski, Dec 12, 2001 / photo from wescraven.com
A Nightmare On Elm Street (1984) [dvd] starring Heather Langenkamp and Robert Englund
...book: Nightmare on Elm Street by Bob Italia, Wes Craven
-related page:.....nurturing mental health : films/filmmaking~ ~ ~ ~
| "The
primitive dread of death resides in the unconscious -- a dread that is
part of the fabric of being, that is formed early in life before the development
of precise, conceptual formulation, a dread that is chilling, uncanny,
and inchoate, a dread that exists prior to and outside of language and
image." -- from book: "Existential Psychotherapy"
Adolescents, by and large, have a pretty keen awareness of these issues. They tend to have less denial operating for them than perhaps we do at most other ages of life. But when they finally get thrown out into the world, other needs -- needs for economic success, or raising a family -- begin to press in. And to satisfy these needs, their fear of death gets pushed into obscurity or the unconscious. If people in their 20s had more death awareness, would that in fact temper their ambition or drive? My hunch is yes. It would certainly do something for those who are most ruthless, who tend to make others most miserable. Some sort of greater awareness of their own finiteness and what their time on earth really is, and what they really want to do with their lives, could help improve them. Irvin D. Yalom, MD .. Salon magazine interview, 1996 - posted on yalom.com books by Irvin Yalom:*Existential Psychotherapy......When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession |
The knight gains a brief reprieve The
Seventh Seal
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| It
had been foretold... "Into each generation a Slayer is born. One girl in
all the world, a Chosen One.. with the strength and skill to fight the
vampires, to stop the spread of their evil and the swell of their numbers."
For every vampire in the world, there is a Slayer. ...synopsis
from UPN Buffy site
~ ~ The person who looks has the power. Taking the [quotes by Meehan and Williams], one can theorize that Buffy is indeed a revolutionary female character. She is not the victim of her series, but the hero. Her strength exceeds that of any gender, including the demonic. She has saved male and female victims equally. Buffy is not afraid to look. from article The Third Wave's Final Girl : Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Irene Karras related article: Warrior Women On Screen by Douglas Eby ...Ladies of the Evening: Women Characters of Prime-Time Television - by Diana M. Meehan Williams, L. "When the woman looks" - in The Dread of Difference : Gender and the Horror Film |
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ChatMod: Did
you find yourself lost in Darla? I imagine she could be a scary place to
find yourself on any given day.
Julie Benz: Yes. She's definitely lived in my dark places, the places where I don't like to go. She took a toll on me emotionally. It's hard to go to work every day and deal with that kind of anger, then come home to a normal life. I am a much more cheerful, lighthearted, happy person than Darla was. talking about her role of vampire Darla on "Buffy The Vampire Slayer" and "Angel" - from scifi.com chat about acting in series "Taken" |
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 .. A writer has a responsibility to tell stories that are dark and sexy and violent, where characters that you love do stupid, wrong things and get away with it -- that we explore these parts of people's lives, because that's what makes stories into fairy tales instead of polemics. That's what makes stories resonate, that thing, that dark place that we all want to go to on some level or another. Joss Whedon.....[theonionavclub.com Sept 5, 2001] |
Whedon
talks about his frustration with those who mistake his creations for guilty
pleasures.
''I hate it when people talk about 'Buffy' as being campy... I hate camp. I don't enjoy dumb TV. I believe Aaron Spelling has single-handedly lowered SAT scores.'' But despite these inevitable misreadings, Whedon's heart will always be with genre fiction. Like Buffy herself, genre fiction is easily undervalued, seen as powerless fluff. But Whedon finds it uniquely forceful: using its vivid strokes, you can be speculative, philosophical -- and create stories that are not merely true to life but are metaphors for a deeper level of human experience. ''It's better to be a spy in the house of love, you know?'' he jokes. ''If I made 'Buffy the Lesbian Separatist,' a series of lectures on PBS on why there should be feminism, no one would be coming to the party, and it would be boring. The idea of changing culture is important to me, and it can only be done in a popular medium.'' from
Must-See Metaphysics by Emily Nussbaum,
|
...related books:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Slayer by Joss Whedon
Buffy The Vampire Slayer: The Script Book by Joss Whedon
Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Philosophy: Fear and Trembling in Sunnydale - by James B. South
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A cocky and witty vamp from 19th century England, Spike got his former (pre-bloodsucker) name, William the Bloody, because of his bloody awful poetry. In 1880 the sensitive poet was sired by his Vampire lover Drusilla and dubbed Spike because of his penchant for torturing victims with railroad spikes. Spike has killed two Slayers: one lived during the Boxer Rebellion; the second was a punk rock kid in New York whose trench coat has become part of Spike's signature look. from profile of vampire Spike at upn.com/shows/buffy
I didn't need to do any research to play Spike's violent side. I think the evil lives in all of us. Spike is simply that side of all of us unleashed. We operate in a world with social constraints, and with Spike, those constraints are completely taken off. There are times for everybody where they want to take a baseball bat to another person. It's just that we don't usually do that. Spike does. James Marsters - about his role in "Buffy.." - quotes from "Bad Blood", Sci-Fi TV #9, February 2001 - posted on Absolute Spike site
....
Are you interested in more dramatic roles? Christina Applegate: Absolutely. Actually, the films I'm waiting to hear if they're going to go my way are all dramas. I don't have any comedies in the works right now. ... I love the darkness. I'm a dark creature and I don't think I could be funny if I didn't have that. ... [Assoc Press Ap 1 2003]
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So good guys, if they're true to life, are actually as interesting as villains in a very different way. Another thing about villains is usually, unless it's totally meant to be a naturalistic genre, if it's something like horror or science fiction you have the wonderful opportunity to be larger than life. That is so much fun. It gives you a chance to kind of exercise muscles in your imagination in a way that you're not allowed to do when you're being naturalistic. You're being constrained by reality. That's why it's so much fun to play someone like the Borg Queen.
*****Alice Krige*****[herorealm.com/HotFish interview 2001]
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In Steven Spielberg's classic, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Richard Dreyfuss gives us an incredibly compelling, dynamic and utterly convincing view into the daimonic drivenness of the artist. 
..
..He actually is compelled, against all convention, to become an artist, a sculptor, in order to find some way to realize and give meaning to the vision in his head -- in that story, a vision implanted by extraterrestrial visitors.
But art in general can be conceived of as a process of trying to perfectly realize in the outer world a particular interior vision, emotion or idea, regardless of its origin. Stephen A. Diamond, Ph.D. - a clinical psychologist who works with many clients in creative professions -
from interview: The Psychology of Creativity :
redeeming our inner demons
~ ~< In Close Encounters of the Third Kind*(1977), Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) becomes obsessed with recreating Devil's Tower out of shaving cream, mashed potatoes and finally a mud sculpture that takes over his living room, driving his family away.
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Said Seinfeld writer Peter Mehlman of David: "Larry is very in tune with his own deepest, darkest, most embarrassing thoughts -- and he's utterly unabashed about sharing them." ... In 1999 David wrote and starred in "Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm", a one-hour special for HBO which spawned the critically acclaimed HBO series the following year.**[hbo.com/larrydavid]
*book:*The Seinfeld Scripts: The First and Second Seasons by Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David
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more : the shadow self : page 1***the shadow self : page 2****the shadow self : page 4..........the shadow self : resources: sites articles books ........
--related pages:.......depth psychology...........dreamwork.........intuition / instinct.........mythology
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