The Pacifica Papers - Essays on Pop Culture, Mythology, and Flatulence

By Craig Titley and Steven Samblis

Hollywood screenwriter and television producer Craig Titley (Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Scooby-Doo, Cheaper by the Dozen, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, Star Wars: The Clone Wars) has, for the first time, put together a collection of 24

• Language: English
• Publisher: 1 Habit Press
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781087921259

Craig Titley

Craig Titley is a feature film and television writer/producer who began his film career in the Hollywood trenches as a production assistant for feature films and television movies. He spent three years in film development as an assistant story editor for director Joe Dante (Gremlins, Innerspace) and a creative executive for Nickelodeon Movies before going on to become a successful screenwriter, penning the first live-action Scooby-Doo movie (with James Gunn), Cheaper by the Dozen, and Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief. His latest feature film projects include adaptations of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (with Sam Raimi producing), Arabian Nights, and Dean Koontz's Oddkins. Titley's films have grossed nearly a billion dollars in worldwide box office. In television, Titley worked with George Lucas and Lucasfilm Animation, penning episodes of Star Wars: The Clone Wars. He was a writer/producer on the NBC superhero series The Cape and an Executive Producer and Writer on Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Titley is a graduate of Eastern Illinois University (with degrees in both English and Business Management), received his MFA from the University of Southern California's Peter Stark Program, and is currently completing a Ph.D. in Mythological Studies. He recently launched Discount Anarchy, an all-in entertainment company for film and television production, publishing, games, music, artist management, and concert promotion.

Book preview

1

Pan Without the Peter

Inadequacy and the Geeks’ Revenge

In the world of pop culture, the psychological complex that seems to dominate is The Peter Pan Syndrome. Whether it is manifest in their impulsive child-like behavior or their obsessions with youthful appearances, the Purveyors of Pop Culture seem to have unabashedly proclaimed J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan to be their patron saint. From Walt Disney to Michael Jackson to Steven Spielberg to Kanye West ¹ you will find countless pop culture influencers who have at one time or another proudly and publicly identified themselves with the boy who refused to grow up. It is a somewhat clichéd identification that comes across as chic and charming yet, in reality, it may conceal a darker, unconscious identification with the grotesque Pan who lurks somewhere below the surface of Barrie’s fanciful Peter.

The original Pan was the god least likely to appear on the cover of GQ (Gods’ Quarterly?) and most in need of an extreme makeover. Part man, part beast, he was born with a goat’s hindquarters (legs, tail, hooves, and, one might assume, genitals) and the upper body of a very unattractive man. His face was ugly and wrinkled and not at all de-accentuated by his scraggly goatee or the two horns sticking out of his head. His torso was covered with coarse hair and, just to add divine insult to divine injury, he was short. It is not surprising that when Pan was born his nurse fled in a panic as soon as she saw him (in some versions his own mother rejected him). The other Olympians didn’t have much use for Pan either, ridiculing and taunting him until he left Olympus despised and rejected.

Pan finally settled in Arcadia where he fell in love with the nymph Syrinx. But the feeling wasn’t reciprocated. Disgusted by Pan’s appearance, Syrinx rejected his overtures and, like the nurse/mother present at his birth, fled. Pan pursued her into the Arcadian woods and to the bank of a river. With no way to escape, Syrinx prayed to the water nymphs to save her. Just as Pan was about to embrace her, the nymphs transformed Syrinx into a bunch of marsh reeds. As Pan sighed with dejection, his breath passed through the reeds and created a pleasant sound. Inspired by this discovery, Pan grabbed the reeds, cut them down to different lengths, and fastened them together making a musical instrument which he named the syrinx: ‘Thus, then, at least, you shall be mine’ (Bulfinch, 36).

Pan mastered the pipes, added god of music to his resume, and was soon holding musical court for all the nymphs and Maenads. Although he still suffered the occasional rejection (Echo, Pithys) Pan was now, thanks to his rustic flute, living a sex-filled Dionysian life. His days were spent playing music, getting intoxicated, indulging in orgies with the Maenads, and instilling fear and panic in the occasional wayward traveler. He was no longer the deformed, rejected god who was laughed off of Olympus. Now Pan was a god to be feared and worshipped.

Much has been written about Pan’s connection to human nature and to Nature in general. As the god of woods and fertility, he has become a favorite of Pagans and Wiccans and has had no small role in defining the Christian devil. Yet the psychological core of Pan’s myth has little do with sexy, hedonistic shenanigans. Rather it is a myth of transformation driven by the universal, and very human, longing for acceptance.

The real transformation in the tale of Pan and Syrinx belongs to Pan, not the nymph. It is the transformation of an Olympian outcast into an empowered god. Having been rejected by family and friends, one might assume Pan’s destiny had been fixed: he was to live the lonely life of a shepherd, tending to his flocks and keeping to himself. But Pan had one more rejection to face: the cathartic rejection of unrequited love. Not unlike the rejection he may have faced from his own mother, the rejection of Syrinx literally left Pan at the river’s edge, with a choice between an old life doomed to an endless cycle of rejection or a new life forged on his own terms. When Pan heard the music made by his breath passing through the reeds, his choice was made. He constructed a musical instrument and used it to neutralize and rise above his deformity. The syrinx, as he appropriately named his new reed flute, became his ticket to the acceptance (sexual acceptance in his case) that he had been denied in the past.

Psychologically speaking, Pan’s manifest deformity represents any kind of inadequacy, real or imagined, that leads an individual to feel rejected by their parents or peers. Many of these perceived inadequacies are amplified in people who have goat-like personalities (as described by the Chinese Zodiac): shy, introverted, and creative. In today’s pop culture parlance these deformed personality types would be known as geeks. By picking up a guitar, a movie camera, or a microphone the insecure, shy, weak, and unattractive geeks are able to become Pan-like gods and acquire the symbols of acceptance that were denied them in the past: sex, worship, wealth. This Pan-ic transformation is what I call Geeks’ Revenge, a response to a childhood and adolescence of peer and/or parental rejection. In a National Public Radio interview, KISS frontman and self-admitted geek Gene Simmons cites this Pan-ic transformation as the reason why so many formerly awkward, geeky youths are now living out their Dionysian rock and roll dreams as rock gods:

The reason we all wanted to pick up instruments initially...it’s the great aphrodisiac that says that even though I’m short, fat, ugly, bald, and I’m hung like a second-grader [...] if I’m in a rock band, I’ve got a better chance of bedding you than if I was a dentist.

Pan-pipes or electric guitars, the motive is the same: the geeks want sex, not rejection.

However, the Pan-ic transformation is not limited to the world of pop music nor is the necessary form of acceptance always sexual. Steven Spielberg, the most successful director in the history of cinema, is another self-admitted geek who suffered an awkward, lonely childhood. Spielberg’s geekiness was further compounding by a broken home (parental rejection) and by what he felt to be his truly alienating deformity—his Jewishness. Young Spielberg was constantly rejected and attacked, verbally and physically, for being Jewish. When his syrinx appeared in the form of a movie camera, he learned to assimilate and gain acceptance by casting his classmates in his home movies. When several bullies began beating up on him, Spielberg cagily convinced them to star in an action flick [...] they were unable to remain hostile while taking direction—under his control (Brode 16). Like Syrinx, Spielberg’s rejecters were integrated into his transformative instrument. Thus, then, at least, you shall be mine.

Control and domination play a large part in Pan-ic transformations. Pan’s reed-flute, Gene Simmons’ guitar, Steven Spielberg’s camera, and Tom Cruise’s on-set trailer, are all phallic syrinxes that enable the psychologically inadequate Pan-geeks to compete (for mates and resources) against the refined, psychologically well-endowed, alpha-Apollos in the world.

However, not all Pan-ic transformations take one to the heights of fame, fortune, and frolicking in this quest for acceptance. Other modern Pans, unable to find or to master a syrinx that allows them to create art (using the term broadly to include everything from a Banksy painting to an Adam Sandler movie), find a syrinx that destroys. This syrinx is best exemplified by a word that shares the same root: syringe. Drugs and alcohol, while seemingly playing the tune that will compensate for one’s real or imagined inadequacies, only creates a fog of illusion that prevents one from discovering the real key to Pan-ic transformation: self acceptance.

Those who have followed Pan through the woods making music and movies with their modern syrinxes may eventually find love and acceptance from mommy, daddy and the whole wide ticket-buying and downloading world. But if they are unable to accept themselves and their own psychological goat shanks, then not even Peter Pan will be able to whisk them away from the long, lonely, dark night of the soul when the sound of the pipes have faded and all that remains is the cold chill of genuine...panic.

1 This essay deals primarily with masculine figures. However the Peter Pan Syndrome, as well as the Pan-ic archetypal psychology involved, are not exclusive to any one gender.

2

Pan Without the Peter II

A Jungian Look at the Man-Beast

In a previous essay, Pan Without the Peter: Inadequacy and the Geeks’ Revenge, I looked at the myth of Pan through a Freudian lens and posited that the disfigured, exiled Olympian had used the symbolic source of his rejection, Syrinx, to construct a phallic instrument that, once mastered, neutralized his perceived inadequacies. A Jungian approach, however, focusing more on the image of Pan than his mythic stories, reveals a being of duality and completeness rather than a creature of deformity and inadequacy. Through a Jungian lens, we will see Pan as a symbol of the dual nature that exists within each and every one of us, and we will see that his syrinx has a far different transformative power than it does in the Freudian approach.

In the Homeric Hymn to Pan we witness the birth of Pan who, according to the poet, was a wonder to behold, with the feet of a goat and two horns—a noisy, laughing child (qtd. in March 581). This half-man, half-goat deity was born as the perfect symbol of the dual natures of human beings (self and shadow) as well as the two sides of our psyches (the conscious and the dark, primitive unconscious). Before we explore these aspects, it is important to consider that what we actually witness in the birth of Pan may in fact be the birth of a child archetype. Although the eternal child designation generally belongs to Pan’s modern manifestation as the more user-friendly Peter Pan, the majority of the stories and images in the Pan mythology revolve around his adulthood. However, the archetypal child need not be a child at all. What is important in the context of Pan is that the child archetype is a symbol which unites the opposites; a mediator, bringer of healing, that is, one who makes whole (Jung, Child 83). If the symbol of Pan is to help make us whole, we must first consider him as the child archetype, the potential future of a harmonic dual nature, not just in the individual but in the human race as a whole.

According to Jung’s essay on The Psychology of the Child Archetype, the archetype can have an ambiguous form such as a dwarf or animal (77). Although not technically a dwarf, Pan is often depicted as being short in stature and certainly animal in nature. Jung also states that the child archetype can also be a witch’s child with daemonic attributes (79). In one variant of Pan’s lineage, it is said that he is the fruit of Penelope’s orgy with all 129 of her suitors (March 582), which sounds suspiciously like seventeenth century witch-lore, and his appearance is indeed demonic, the inspiration for the very look of the Christian Devil.

Pan also embodies, although to a far lesser degree than most child-savior myths we are familiar with, each of the characteristics described in Jung’s Special Phenomenology of the Child Archetype (Child 86). Pan did, in fact, suffer an abandonment as a child. According to the Homeric hymn, When the nurse [i.e. his mother] saw his uncouth face and bearded chin, she was afraid and, springing up, she fled and left the boy (qtd. in March 581-582). In some variations of his myth, it is said that Pan also suffered ridicule from his Olympian peers and as a result fled to the woods of Arcadia.

His form, especially the primitive side, is furthermore symbolic of invincibility in the Jungian sense:

The child is born out of the womb of the unconscious, begotten out of the depths of human nature, or rather out of living Nature herself. It is a personification of vital forces quite outside the limited range of our conscious mind; of ways and possibilities our one-sided conscious mind knows nothing. (Child 89)

These vital forces spring from the goat-side of Pan. However, when combined with his human-side, we have a complete picture of Jung’s Hermaphroditism of the Child which he defines as nothing less than a union of the strongest and most striking opposites (Child 92). This image is nowhere more striking than in the image of Pan.

The transformative nature of Pan begins to be expressed in Jung’s aspect of the child archetype referred to as The Child as Beginning and End. Here we see how the child archetype is both an initial and a terminal creature. The initial creature existed before man was and is his pre-conscious essence [...] the unconscious state of earliest childhood (97). This is Pan’s primitive goat-half. The terminal creature, on the other hand, will be when man is not and is his post-conscious essence [...] an anticipation by analogy of life after death (97). Looking at death symbolically, this post-conscious essence is a transformed being. It is Pan, and us, individualized.

How does the symbol of Pan lead us to this transformative state of individuation? After all, when confronted with our own dual nature, the primitive shadow-side, our instinct is to panic and flee. We must learn, first and foremost, not to flee from this Pan-ic aspect of ourselves by realizing and accepting that we are, in fact two people. In Memories, Dream, Reflections, Jung talks about his own realization:

Somewhere deep in the background I always knew that I was two people. One was the son of my parents [...]. The other was grown up—old, in fact—skeptical, mistrustful, remote from the world of men, but close to nature, the earth, the sun, the moon, the weather, all living creatures, and above all close to the night, to dreams, and to whatever ‘God’ worked directly in him. (44-45)

Jung’s first self is Pan’s human half. His second self is clearly Pan’s goat half. The goal is to bring these two sides, this tension of opposites, together through the process of individuation, a process initiated by Pan when he crafted his syrinx.

As in the Freudian interpretation, I believe Pan’s crafting of the reed-flute to be the cathartic moment in his mythology. But here, in the Jungian analysis, the syrinx is not a symbol of phallic compensation, but rather it is a tool for individuation. The flute, formed from the reeds that had once been the feminine nymph Syrinx, is the symbol of anima/animus energy. It is sex internalized, not sex externalized. I believe this to be the uniting force for Pan’s two sides. Prior to crafting his flute and making the music of his united soul, Pan was merely a deformed creature alone in the Arcadian woods. However, once he mastered the instrument, literally injecting the anima into his system (syrinx = syringe), Pan became individualized. With this new vital energy flowing throughout his being, he reigns supreme in the woods, laughing and dancing, transforming and affecting all those around him with the beautiful music of his syringe/syrinx.

Thus we see that Pan, in the Jungian analysis, is a perfect symbol of individuation. A symbol that can help us embrace our shadow, discover our anima/animus, unite the two-side of our psyches, and transform us into something whole, something new: the future.

3

Māyā and the Matrix

Reloading the Cosmic Dream

"W hat is the Matrix?"

In the last year of the second millennium this question appeared around the world on billboards and bus stops, in shopping malls and sports arenas, all part of an advertising blitz designed to generate interest in an unheard of motion picture, starring a B-level actor (at that time), written and directed by an unknown pair of brothers ¹, and set to be dumped into the marketplace during a season when the studios generally release the films in which they have the least amount of faith. However, the world was very interested in the answer to the provocative question, and The Matrix, along with its two sequels, went on to gross over 1.6 billion dollars in worldwide box office ² and became an international phenomenon. Though it may be tempting to dismiss the film as mere pop entertainment, its collective resonance cannot be ignored—its profitability is secondary to its prophet-ability. The reason for the unique success of The Matrix phenomenon may very well be that the film reshapes, contemporizes, and visualizes a perennial Hindu philosophy. The question What is the Matrix? first posited in 1999 is no different than the question the ascetic Nārada asked of Vishnu countless millennia ago: ’let me comprehend your Māyā’ (qtd. in Zimmer 29). If, as Heinrich Zimmer contends, the philosophies contained within Hinduism’s mythical tales thrive on the ever-renewed assent of successive generations (40) then we will see that The Matrix has served Māyā well. By examining the film’s philosophical underpinnings and comparing and contrasting them to the original Hindu philosophical construct, we hope to gain new insight into old questions: What is the nature of Māyā? What is its source? How does one peel back the curtain? What is the reality that lies behind it? And finally, why was Māyā created?

Māyā, in Hindu religion and philosophy, is the world-as-illusion, it is the measuring out, or creation, or display of forms (Zimmer 24). In Myths of Light, Joseph Campbell calls it the world of that rippling pond [...], the fractured sparkling image of reality that is no reality but only its broken surface (48). He further describes it as a prism through which the forms of the world are projected (49). Nearly twenty-five hundred years earlier, in what could perhaps be the first Western attempt to unveil Māyā, Plato, in his Allegory of the Cave, described these forms as distorted shadows projected onto a cave wall and accepted as reality by the bound humans who witness them (Rep. VII, 205-208). In the early nineteenth century Arthur Schopenhauer, working onward from Plato’s theory of Forms and Ideas, calls this shadowy Māyā-world the world as idea subordinated to the principal of sufficient reason (8) ³ and refers to Māyā as the veil of deception which covers the eyes of mortals, and makes them see a world of which one cannot say either that it is, or that it is not: for it is like a dream (8). And finally, at the end of the millennium, the Wachowskis’ The Matrix brought the concept of Māyā into the modern computer age where the world-as-we-know-it is visualized and intellectualized as a virtual cyber-world known as the Matrix:

MORPHEUS. The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around you, even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

The deceptive world of the Matrix is clearly Māyā and, according to Zimmer, Māyā is Existence (25). But what is the source of this illusory world of existence?

The Power of Illusion, according to Alain Daniélou, "may be compared to an introspective deliberation (vimarsa) which would plan things. It may be represented as a ‘divine thought’ of which the Universe would be the materialization" (Daniélou 29). This generative Divine Thinker is Vishnu in the tales of Nārada and Mārkandeya. However, when perceived in terms of Schopenhauer’s Will or a collective substratum, the Hindu myths and philosophies that see Brahmā as the Divine Thinker seems more appropriate:

The source of the manifest world is [...] neither Visnu nor Śiva, neither concentration nor dispersion, but the result of their opposition, their equilibrium [...]. The Immense-Being (Brahmā), masculine or personified form of the Immensity (brahman), represents the possibility of existence resulting from the union of opposites. Hence Brahmā is the source, the seed, of all that is. (Daniélou 232)

This union of opposites as a source of Māyā is a key to understanding the Cosmic Dream. The secret of Māyā, according to Zimmer, is opposites. Māyā is a simultaneous-and-successive manifestation of energies that are at variance with each other, process contradicting and annihilating each other (46). It is not surprising then, that the source of