By Laura Shamas
Contributing Writer
Hollywood’s annual big night is almost here. This Sunday, one billion people all over the world will be tuned to the glitzy, three-hour (or longer) awards show hosted by Whoopi Goldberg, where Tinseltown’s brightest will shine, shine, shine.
Why do so many people watch? Because it is a mimetic reflection of our culture and of the human psyche — a replay of the images and characters that have fascinated us for the past year.
To put it another way: the Academy Awards are on an archetypal plane where the huge cinema screen elevates films and film stars to a “larger-than-life” mythic realm. One night a year, we can see our celluloid gods and goddesses in their “civilian” clothes of haute couture. They stand along side that sleek, golden Oscar statuette, an otherworldly cultural icon in its own right, which symbolically signifies the “best.” As Oscars are handed out, we can review, en masse — as a collective ritual — the key imaginary figures and motifs that were featured in American pop culture for the last 12 months.
The Best Picture category showcases the main characters and stories that have consumed our psyches for the past year. The five pictures nominated this time (“A Beautiful Mind,” “In the Bedroom,” “Gosford Park,” “Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring,” and “Moulin Rouge!”) offer compelling reflections of our emotional, psychological and spiritual responses in 2001.
Love stories, with twists and turns, dominated the big screen in four films: “A Beautiful Mind,” “In the Bedroom,” “Gosford Park” and “Moulin Rouge!” Love is always a popular topic, but in 2001, especially after Sept. 11, we needed cinematic discourses on love to counter-balance the violence we experienced as a nation.
Interestingly, those four films involve a “descent” ordeal connected with love. In “A Beautiful Mind,” protagonist John Nash descends into an irrational, schizophrenic world. During “In the Bedroom,” a taboo love affair leads a family to a downward spiral connected with murder and revenge, a pattern echoed in “Gosford Park,” where the main action literally happens “down the stairs.”
The musical “Moulin Rouge!” is an update on the Orphean myth: Orpheus journeyed down through the underworld to find his lost wife, Eurydice. “Moulin Rouge!” director and co-writer Baz Luhrmann has stated that Orpheus was the foundation for this film because of the plot, but there is also an Orphean connection to music as well, as Orpheus was known for his lyre.
Two of those films metaphorically mine the deep psychological terrain of descent experiences: the collective unconscious, and the liminal disparity between “high life” and “low life.” “In the Bedroom” offers water imagery as a representation of the collective unconscious. The title refers to lobsters as dark red symbols of love that rise from the deep to kill — when lobsters are captured in bedroom traps, they tear each other apart.
Part of “Gosford Park’s” purpose is an examination of the archetypal settings of the “heavens” versus the “underworld.” The movie explores the British caste system in a who-cares-whodunit mystery. Both of these films thematically mirror significant problems that we faced in the past year: Sudden primal danger from the deep which motivates revenge, and alienation due to “class” (“otherness”) that galvanizes the excluded “others” to seek revenge in a violent, covert manner.
In “A Beautiful Mind,” love conquers all. In the acclaimed film adaptation, the mathematic genius Nash is able to overcome the dark demons of schizophrenia to win the Nobel prize. In his final monologue, he credits his achievements to “the mysterious equations of love.” This tribute to love’s transcendent, healing power comforts us as a nation as we continue to mourn the tragedies of Sept. 11.
And perhaps no other movie addresses the psychological and spiritual climate in America as well as the spectacular adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings,” which explores the classic battle between good and evil in the dawning of a new, more violent era.
As a Best Picture nominee, “Lord of the Rings” shows us that the hobbits, aided by elves and fairies — the non-human “others” — lead the way through a most treacherous odyssey to overcome the seductive, destructive power of evil. This film suggests that in owning our “otherness,” we find the spiritual fortitude to “fight the good fight.”
Each year, the ritual of the Academy Awards ceremony highlights films that mirror images in our fears, our hopes and our dreams. It is a significant cultural barometer: Oscar is us.
Laura Shamas is a member of the Writers Guild of America and teaches screenwriting at Pepperdine. She is a judge in the 2002 PEN Literary Awards and a Ph.D. candidate in Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology.
March 21, 2002