Cinema & Synchronicity
Thoughts On: Jungian Film Theory
A consideration of the contingency and chance significance of meaning in artistic mediums.
Art finds you as much as you find it. I have been interested of late in a wider conception of cinematic and artistic meaning under a Jungian lens. It is fascinating to think of meaning as related to primordial imagery, the unknown symbol and archetypal patterns in space and time, but there is a reality one has to face when pondering the universal nature of meaning and knowledge. Not everyone feels meaning equally. What's more, our sensitivity to meaning is constantly shifting. One year you may hate a certain filmmaker, or for that case, love another. The next, you may love the former and hate the latter. Things change; meaning shifts. Think of the shows and films you watched as a kid. The quality and depth of those works is radically different to a matured self. I am often taken aback by the material that my younger family members consume on YouTube: creepy adults playing with ponies and barbies, even weirder goons dressing up as Disney and Marvel characters and prancing about in completely nonsensical narratives... I'm sure you understand what I am alluding to. Let us not get lost. Let us consider as an extension of this the first time a piece of work hits you and moves you notably with its meaning. How and why does this happen? Research into more obscure Jungian concepts has presented me with some interesting ways in which to think of this question.
So much of Jungian thought coalesces in a concept he devises (and in part appropriates) from alchemical thought and, most importantly, Taoist philosophy. This concept is the unus mundus. The term is Latin and translates to 'one world'. Understanding this term and its significance is rather simple. Carl Jung, psychoanalyst (and, seen from a certain perspective, philosopher) shared with other psychoanalyst the assumption of there existing an unconscious faction of the mind. Where Freud is commonly thought to have split the mind into two distinct layers (unconscious and conscious) with a buffer zone between them (pre-conscious), Jung split the mind into three distinct layers: consciousness, personal unconsciousness and collective unconsciousness. Important to make note of is the collective unconscious. It must be thought of in somewhat biological terms. Humans all are unique; they have unique bodies. However, part of what makes the body identifiably human are certain universal elements, such as organs. We are all unique biological constructions, but all have in common a heart, liver, intestine, etc. Jung assumed the same of the mind. He assumed that we all have unique unconsciousnesses (quite like Freud), but also universal components quite like organs. He called these common components - these organs we all have - 'archetypes'. Archetypes, according to Jung, are primordial images that represent basic concepts that pre-exist humanity. Two example are found in anima and animus, the idea of male and female. To Jung, these ideas, or archetypes, exist in the unconsciousness of humanity - thus, they are said to exist in a 'collective unconscious'. We are not all connected to this abstract cloud of thought and emotion, but, as said, all have in common these organ-like thought-systems. Important to note before moving on is that the archetypes were not knowable, definable entities; they could possibly be intuited, but the only real evidence for their existence lies in patterns through human history (as may be traced in art).
Jung's conception of mind is related to the unus mundus, or one world, theory because he considered the different levels of the mind to be different worlds in and of themselves. They, possible in a metaphorical sense, are abstractions from different dimensions in space and time. In such a case, the conscious realm is thought to be very different from the world of the personal unconscious, and equally different from the archetypal universe. What forces materialise these different modes of perception - or, as we have been calling them, different modes of reality - is not known. However, Jung asserts that, despite the separation between these distinct realms, they all have roots in one unified system. This unified system is the unus mundus: one world that contains many.
Jung built these assumptions from experiencing overlaps between these distinct worlds. He recounts one particular story. One day, when dealing with a difficult patient, he started dream analysis. The patient tells of a dream about a scarab - a beetle. As Jung tries to analyse the dream, an insect begins tapping on his window: a beetle that he opens the window to, catches, and presents to his patient. Jung considered this a coincidentally meaningful event. It is meaningful as two archetypal events or images manifested themselves together in space and time. But, of course, the telling of the patient's dream has no physical and real correlation to the appearance of a beetle. What relates the two events is the mind and its ability to assign meaning. Jung considers this chance and coincidence, but not merely so: this chance and coincidence has meaning. It represents a resonation between the archetypal and physical world available to the conscious mind. Maybe many of us have stories of such meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained too easily. Yet, I concede also that, to the sceptic, this appears to be nonsense that qualifies nothing scientific in nature. In fact, I lean toward the sceptic when reading Jung's account of what he terms 'synchronicity', as he attempts to use his theory as evidence explaining the ESP (extra-sensual perception) and clairvoyance (communicating with the dead, and other oddities). I'm sure most will remember the ESP test, or card game that is played in the beginning of Ghostbusters. This is a reference to a real experiment performed in the 30s by Karl Zener and J.B Rhine, that seemingly proved the existence of certain individuals with extraordinary ESP abilities. The experiment, many suggest, was bogus and has never been successfully replicated and so is has been conclusively deemed unscientific. This is the side of unus mundus theory and the theory of synchronicity that can be disavowed at present. I believe the true application for these theories lies in art and cinematic theory.
Synchronicity describes moments where our body and mind assign absolute significance and meaning to a seemingly random or chance event. I think this happens all the time in highly unsensational ways. As discussed, the meaning we assign to films, to drama and action in the cinema, is entirely contingent on our existential and psychological composition. This composition of self is always shifting, and so one can often find themselves at a loss of words when they are suddenly struck by the meaning within a certain artwork. There is a fear and melancholy about this, too. Films may lose their meaning to us; they slip into nostalgia and irrelevance, and maybe reemerge as suddenly significant one day, but meaning in the body shifts; it is certainly not constant. I thus propose that great experiences of meaning in the cinema are rather coincidental. That is why they are precious. They are sublime as we do not comprehend their emergence and fear the mortality of the moment.
This happens to me every now and then. Most recently, it happened to me not in a cinematic context, but when listening to music. Music was playing (somewhat randomly) on YouTube. YouTube, of course, is fuelled by algorithm and big brother Google's ever-watching eye, and so the chances of me liking a 'randomly selected' song are statistically increased. Nonetheless, a song started to play - and I really liked it. I liked its feel and tone, it resonated with a personal sense of self I held at that moment. The song finished - a few hours later, I found it again. I kept listening to it. I had an urge to write about it. I read the song's lyrics. The song started to resonate and speak to my conscious conception of the unconscious activity I am experiencing in my life at present. How coincidental that the song perfectly expressed something I felt, and, in reading its lyrics, illuminated the mechanisms of my present emotions. This is not a sensational coincidence, but it is not a highly likely event. But, more important than this, it was a meaningful event that resonated with the unconscious factions of my self. I think this must be called artistic synchronicity; in cinema, let us call it cinematic synchronicity. Let us use this term to put into language and analyse meaning and significant cinematic experiences. After all, let us all recognise that there are varying classes and types of meaning in the cinema. Synchronicity seems to be a mechanism of discrimination whereby we can distinguish a smart film from a poetic and deeply resonant work. Who knows if the work will remain as such, but the moment existed in space and time, and how beautiful that is. Cinematic synchronicity. My last experience of this came in Sam Mendes' 1917. What a tremendous film.
Before coming to a close, I must mention that this theory does not necessarily posit that all films are relative, empty and essentially equal. The quality of a film indeed impacts the chances that it will resonate in the primordial mind. Alas, there is so much more than primordial material laced into a cinematic space that the translation becomes ever more contingent. And, most importantly, however good a film may be, the body and mind may not be receptive to it at a given time - or, to the opposite, may be particularly sensitive to it at another. For this reason, for the fact that there are so many factors about this true and deep resignation between image and unconscious, I think it is only sensible to consider events of profound affect to be somewhat rare and, to a significant degree, chance. Thus the necessity of synchronicity as a concept in the theoristation and structuring of meaning in cinema.
I bring this concept of synchronicity into the realm of film theory because I believe it allows us to understand all the better what cinema really is. I hold the assumption that cinema is made, in large part, for the communication of meaning. With synchronicity, this vision shifts ever so slightly. Cinema grounds one in the unus mundus with its evocation of meaning. This, for now, is what I conceive to be the ultimate goal of cinema. It unifies the various realms we may experience in life. It puts into conversation consciousness and unconsciousness, expressing the profundity of the collective unconscious as to ground one in harmony and the way of things. In this sense, cinema is a construct, or a materialised space, in which the chance of synchronicity is increased. The dramatisation of life in various modes presents one with actions and events of archetypal significance. The significant happenings are presented as to produce a synchronistic immersion in meaning that dissolves self into absolute unity: the unus mundus. Such is something of a fabrication or simulation, but this movement into an intermittently immortalised state of harmony and an alignment of an illusive Tao seems to me to be what cinema is constructed for.
A consideration of the contingency and chance significance of meaning in artistic mediums.
Art finds you as much as you find it. I have been interested of late in a wider conception of cinematic and artistic meaning under a Jungian lens. It is fascinating to think of meaning as related to primordial imagery, the unknown symbol and archetypal patterns in space and time, but there is a reality one has to face when pondering the universal nature of meaning and knowledge. Not everyone feels meaning equally. What's more, our sensitivity to meaning is constantly shifting. One year you may hate a certain filmmaker, or for that case, love another. The next, you may love the former and hate the latter. Things change; meaning shifts. Think of the shows and films you watched as a kid. The quality and depth of those works is radically different to a matured self. I am often taken aback by the material that my younger family members consume on YouTube: creepy adults playing with ponies and barbies, even weirder goons dressing up as Disney and Marvel characters and prancing about in completely nonsensical narratives... I'm sure you understand what I am alluding to. Let us not get lost. Let us consider as an extension of this the first time a piece of work hits you and moves you notably with its meaning. How and why does this happen? Research into more obscure Jungian concepts has presented me with some interesting ways in which to think of this question.
So much of Jungian thought coalesces in a concept he devises (and in part appropriates) from alchemical thought and, most importantly, Taoist philosophy. This concept is the unus mundus. The term is Latin and translates to 'one world'. Understanding this term and its significance is rather simple. Carl Jung, psychoanalyst (and, seen from a certain perspective, philosopher) shared with other psychoanalyst the assumption of there existing an unconscious faction of the mind. Where Freud is commonly thought to have split the mind into two distinct layers (unconscious and conscious) with a buffer zone between them (pre-conscious), Jung split the mind into three distinct layers: consciousness, personal unconsciousness and collective unconsciousness. Important to make note of is the collective unconscious. It must be thought of in somewhat biological terms. Humans all are unique; they have unique bodies. However, part of what makes the body identifiably human are certain universal elements, such as organs. We are all unique biological constructions, but all have in common a heart, liver, intestine, etc. Jung assumed the same of the mind. He assumed that we all have unique unconsciousnesses (quite like Freud), but also universal components quite like organs. He called these common components - these organs we all have - 'archetypes'. Archetypes, according to Jung, are primordial images that represent basic concepts that pre-exist humanity. Two example are found in anima and animus, the idea of male and female. To Jung, these ideas, or archetypes, exist in the unconsciousness of humanity - thus, they are said to exist in a 'collective unconscious'. We are not all connected to this abstract cloud of thought and emotion, but, as said, all have in common these organ-like thought-systems. Important to note before moving on is that the archetypes were not knowable, definable entities; they could possibly be intuited, but the only real evidence for their existence lies in patterns through human history (as may be traced in art).
Jung's conception of mind is related to the unus mundus, or one world, theory because he considered the different levels of the mind to be different worlds in and of themselves. They, possible in a metaphorical sense, are abstractions from different dimensions in space and time. In such a case, the conscious realm is thought to be very different from the world of the personal unconscious, and equally different from the archetypal universe. What forces materialise these different modes of perception - or, as we have been calling them, different modes of reality - is not known. However, Jung asserts that, despite the separation between these distinct realms, they all have roots in one unified system. This unified system is the unus mundus: one world that contains many.
Jung built these assumptions from experiencing overlaps between these distinct worlds. He recounts one particular story. One day, when dealing with a difficult patient, he started dream analysis. The patient tells of a dream about a scarab - a beetle. As Jung tries to analyse the dream, an insect begins tapping on his window: a beetle that he opens the window to, catches, and presents to his patient. Jung considered this a coincidentally meaningful event. It is meaningful as two archetypal events or images manifested themselves together in space and time. But, of course, the telling of the patient's dream has no physical and real correlation to the appearance of a beetle. What relates the two events is the mind and its ability to assign meaning. Jung considers this chance and coincidence, but not merely so: this chance and coincidence has meaning. It represents a resonation between the archetypal and physical world available to the conscious mind. Maybe many of us have stories of such meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained too easily. Yet, I concede also that, to the sceptic, this appears to be nonsense that qualifies nothing scientific in nature. In fact, I lean toward the sceptic when reading Jung's account of what he terms 'synchronicity', as he attempts to use his theory as evidence explaining the ESP (extra-sensual perception) and clairvoyance (communicating with the dead, and other oddities). I'm sure most will remember the ESP test, or card game that is played in the beginning of Ghostbusters. This is a reference to a real experiment performed in the 30s by Karl Zener and J.B Rhine, that seemingly proved the existence of certain individuals with extraordinary ESP abilities. The experiment, many suggest, was bogus and has never been successfully replicated and so is has been conclusively deemed unscientific. This is the side of unus mundus theory and the theory of synchronicity that can be disavowed at present. I believe the true application for these theories lies in art and cinematic theory.
Synchronicity describes moments where our body and mind assign absolute significance and meaning to a seemingly random or chance event. I think this happens all the time in highly unsensational ways. As discussed, the meaning we assign to films, to drama and action in the cinema, is entirely contingent on our existential and psychological composition. This composition of self is always shifting, and so one can often find themselves at a loss of words when they are suddenly struck by the meaning within a certain artwork. There is a fear and melancholy about this, too. Films may lose their meaning to us; they slip into nostalgia and irrelevance, and maybe reemerge as suddenly significant one day, but meaning in the body shifts; it is certainly not constant. I thus propose that great experiences of meaning in the cinema are rather coincidental. That is why they are precious. They are sublime as we do not comprehend their emergence and fear the mortality of the moment.
This happens to me every now and then. Most recently, it happened to me not in a cinematic context, but when listening to music. Music was playing (somewhat randomly) on YouTube. YouTube, of course, is fuelled by algorithm and big brother Google's ever-watching eye, and so the chances of me liking a 'randomly selected' song are statistically increased. Nonetheless, a song started to play - and I really liked it. I liked its feel and tone, it resonated with a personal sense of self I held at that moment. The song finished - a few hours later, I found it again. I kept listening to it. I had an urge to write about it. I read the song's lyrics. The song started to resonate and speak to my conscious conception of the unconscious activity I am experiencing in my life at present. How coincidental that the song perfectly expressed something I felt, and, in reading its lyrics, illuminated the mechanisms of my present emotions. This is not a sensational coincidence, but it is not a highly likely event. But, more important than this, it was a meaningful event that resonated with the unconscious factions of my self. I think this must be called artistic synchronicity; in cinema, let us call it cinematic synchronicity. Let us use this term to put into language and analyse meaning and significant cinematic experiences. After all, let us all recognise that there are varying classes and types of meaning in the cinema. Synchronicity seems to be a mechanism of discrimination whereby we can distinguish a smart film from a poetic and deeply resonant work. Who knows if the work will remain as such, but the moment existed in space and time, and how beautiful that is. Cinematic synchronicity. My last experience of this came in Sam Mendes' 1917. What a tremendous film.
Before coming to a close, I must mention that this theory does not necessarily posit that all films are relative, empty and essentially equal. The quality of a film indeed impacts the chances that it will resonate in the primordial mind. Alas, there is so much more than primordial material laced into a cinematic space that the translation becomes ever more contingent. And, most importantly, however good a film may be, the body and mind may not be receptive to it at a given time - or, to the opposite, may be particularly sensitive to it at another. For this reason, for the fact that there are so many factors about this true and deep resignation between image and unconscious, I think it is only sensible to consider events of profound affect to be somewhat rare and, to a significant degree, chance. Thus the necessity of synchronicity as a concept in the theoristation and structuring of meaning in cinema.
I bring this concept of synchronicity into the realm of film theory because I believe it allows us to understand all the better what cinema really is. I hold the assumption that cinema is made, in large part, for the communication of meaning. With synchronicity, this vision shifts ever so slightly. Cinema grounds one in the unus mundus with its evocation of meaning. This, for now, is what I conceive to be the ultimate goal of cinema. It unifies the various realms we may experience in life. It puts into conversation consciousness and unconsciousness, expressing the profundity of the collective unconscious as to ground one in harmony and the way of things. In this sense, cinema is a construct, or a materialised space, in which the chance of synchronicity is increased. The dramatisation of life in various modes presents one with actions and events of archetypal significance. The significant happenings are presented as to produce a synchronistic immersion in meaning that dissolves self into absolute unity: the unus mundus. Such is something of a fabrication or simulation, but this movement into an intermittently immortalised state of harmony and an alignment of an illusive Tao seems to me to be what cinema is constructed for.
