The more I think about it, the more I am disturbed that Grace Hanadarko (in Saving Grace, reviewed yesterday) is a member of the police force.
If she is in indeed a model of how a woman of the 21st century can be — tough, compassionate, comfortable with her sexuality, more than the equal to any man — why is she enforcing the laws of an unjust society?
There is a scene in the second season when Grace and her police detective buddies are watching TV in a bar (a usual hangout for Grace) and cheering as the newscaster announces that a bad guy is about to be executed. Really? This is a good thing?
I spend a lot of time in prison, evaluating bad guys. Many of them have severe trauma in their background, mental illness, brain damage, parental neglect and mistreatment. Where is the compassion for thy neighbor? As long as we split off the shadow and project it on to others, we are not much different than those folks who drove the scape goat off the cliffs to rid the tribe of evil.
Saving Grace is still good drama, and the opening scene with the tornado still sends chills down my spine. But if Grace is representative of where the culture is presently, she needs some serious rehabilitation.
sparker
Feminine
Somehow in the Wizard of Oz, that the pretensions of patriarchy are exposed, it allows the feminine in the form of that little girl to come forward and the good to assert the power of the feminine.
And I think the whole drama turns on an intuition that American culture was getting inflated in a masculine direction and going much too much into power and development, and it needed to keep itself balanced and remember feminine values.
Movies are the fairy-tales of the culture, the present day mythology.
Dorothy’s journey is also a bit like Alice in Wonderland — rather than descending into a rabbit hole, the adventuress ascends to another realm through a tornado. And, again, the author is a male.
Dorothy made her adventure eighty-years ago; it may have portrayed the pretensions of the patriarchy, but the patriarchy seems to have ignored the movie. She was essentially a little girl; we need mature Dorothies and Alices to make the journey.
Can you think of any movie like these where the leading role was played by a mature woman who successfully navigated the journey into the Unconscious? The closest I can think of is Sigourney Weaver, playing Ripley in The Alien.. She is a bit older than Alice and her sword in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, but it is still the theme of fighting the Jabberworky in a masculine type of combat. This is a model of woman-as-warrior. Not to take anything away from Sigourney and her tenacious strength — but surely there is less muscular way to succeed in the journey….
… One could have known for a long time that there was a deep longing in the masses for an intercessor and mediatrix who would at last take her place alongside the Holy Trinity and be received as the ‘Queen of heaven and Bride at the heavenly court.’ For more than a thousand years it has been taken for granted that the Mother of God dwelt there. I consider it to be the most important religious event since the Reformation. (Jung: Answer to Job)
In 1950, the idea that Virgin Mary was bodily taken up into Heaven was “dogmatically and infalliby“ defined by Pope Pius XII.
Jung became very excited about this as a symbolic movement in the Catholic Church towards the acceptance of the feminine.
However, there didn’t seem to be much follow through on this one within the Church itself; it is as if the collective culture was not ready for it. It does seem that now, early in the 21st century, that there is movement towards the absolute importance of one aspect of the feminine, towards the importance of “Mother Earth” as something that is critical to our survival as a species.
In some ways, the development of ecology as a scientific discipline — the recognition of the interconnectedness of all life — is part of this shift in consciousness. It may not be soon enough to save Mother.
