(A Warning Gentle Reader: Spoilers! Many Spoilers!)
As the possibility of space travel becomes more real to us, the probability of the whole experience being too boring to manage is starting to sink in.
Scientists have just begun to turn their attention to this psychological quandary, but filmmakers have been considering space boredom for a while. Many movies assume some sleep pod technology. But when sleep is not an option on long journeys, the story usually results in nightmarish existentialism. Consider ‘Solaris’ (1972 or 2002), wherein a psychologist on a remote space station has loads of time to interact with an emotionally needy undead version of his wife. Or ‘Sunshine’ (2007), where a long mission causes a spaceship captain to become a serial killer. From a mental health standpoint, movies about long spaceflights assume a worst-case scenario.
And this is why 2018’s ‘Prospect’ feels so different – instead of a nightmare, life in space without sleep pods becomes a ‘dream’.
Watching our character explore the alien wilderness feels like slowly descending into a sleeper’s fertile imagination. Filmed in the Olympic Rainforest, the scenery is overpoweringly green and lush. It’s a landscape that is inviting and prohibiting at once – this place can be a cradle for life, as long as it’s not human. The wet quiet is sometimes pierced unexpectedly by violence, but the world’s ‘base level’ is one of calm activity– like a brain processing in slumber.
I thought of Carl Jung while watching this movie. Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) was an influential early psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology. His work took him to study the occult and mystical practices, and while Jung considered himself a scientist, there are people who refer to him as a ‘shaman’ or even ‘cult leader’. ie – There are reasons why his books are directly perpendicular to the ‘magic spells’ section at Powell’s Books in Portland.
Like his sometimes-friend Sigmund Freud, Jung was interested in the differences in our conscious and unconscious minds. Unlike Freud, Jung believed that dreams were fundamental to our understanding of a person, and that a person’s dreams showed them more clearly than the persona they presented to the world. Jung stated: “The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul.”
When I started to think about the movie through the lens of Jung, I started to dream-analyze the planet our characters are trapped on. If we assume that Cee, our main character, is the dreamer, what do the images mean? What does it mean for her to be digging up tiny wombs and harvesting jewels with her father? What does it mean for the man who killed her father to be tethered to her like a fetus with an umbilical chord? What does it mean for strangers to try and force her into becoming their mother? What does it mean to be in such a fertile place and not be able to breathe?
I wish I could have pubescent Cee sit on my therapist’s couch and ask “So how is that transition from child to woman going?”
Adding to the dreamy atmosphere of the film are the dozen largely nameless characters who fit (with a little squinting) into the “12 Jungian Archetypes” that have become popular on the internet (see note at bottom).
Following the death of her “magician” father, we follow an “innocent” as she is forced to make alliances with the “trickster” to survive. The viewer spends most of the film seeing the characters’ faces haloed or strategically obscured by their space helmets, emphasizing their faces in a way that reminds one of the religious iconography that inspired Jung’s archetypes in the first place. Every character knows what they are, and no apologies are made for it.
In the end, I was left wondering thinking about the rocket flights that bookend the movie, and how they parallel the process of falling asleep and waking. As the main character leaves the planet and hurtles towards what she considers her real life, she seems renewed. While the dream has been traumatic, it has also refreshed her. She is waking with new possibilities and a new perspective. Also, maybe a new trickster dad who is more willing than her previous father to address her psychological needs – if he doesn’t murder her.
Takeaway: Humans spend a long portion of their day sleeping and dreaming, a fact is treated like a nuisance in our society. Many of us think of sleep as just ‘recharging a battery’ for our ‘real life’. But if we, as a species, want to jump into a life among the stars, perhaps we need to prioritize sleep and dreaming.
Perhaps NASA should be scheduling group therapy sessions for astonaughts to talk about nightmares. Perhaps space-travelers will rely on regularly consuming hallucinogenics to add texture to their journey. Perhaps the great leap for humanity will come when we’re not just sending scientists to Mars, but artists, shamans, and Jungian therapists as well.
Maybe when it comes to space travel, the inner journey is just as important as the external one.
A good article about Jung’s ideas on Archetypes:
https://appliedjung.com/dream-archetypes/
A typical un-cited article about “12 Jungian Archetypes” that is popular online but makes me feel confused:
https://conorneill.com/2018/04/21/understanding-personality-the-12-jungian-archetypes/
A good article about scientists studying space boredom: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/magazine/danger-this-mission-to-mars-could-bore-you-to-death.html
A good article about a performance artist who is training as an astronaut:
NOTE ON “12 Jungian Archetypes”:
There are many places on the internet that attribute a list of 12 well-constructed ‘archetypes’ to Carl Gustav Jung, but I can’t find the source material. Jung did study and write about archetypes with some overlap to the “12 Jungian Archetypes” (he did write about ‘mother’ and ‘trickster’, for example), but nothing so clear and straight-forward as the 12 Archetypes. I am by no means a Jung scholar, but it’s my impression that Carl Jung liked his metaphors to be “slipperier than a soup sandwich”, as my Chicago-born partner would say – Jung’s ideas don’t fit neatly into charts and boxes by design. After a few days of research, I suspect that the “12 Jungian Archetypes” were actually constructed by a later scholar to expand on Jung’s ideas and put them in a nice chart (people like a nice chart). So although I am using the phrase “Jungian Archetypes” and think the idea of the 12 archetypes works really well for narrative fiction that has a Jung-ish texture, I don’t currently understand why those 12 archetypes are attributed to Jung. Jung Scholars, come at me.
Supplemental 