Putting Movies Under Analysis : Film: Author/psychotherapist Geoffrey Hill’s O.C. discussion group was the springboard for a book examining the echoes of ancient archetypes in all genres.

Geoffrey Hill, author of “Illuminating Shadows: The Mythic Power of Film,” sees a lot of movies but doesn’t talk about them much.

“I guess that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book, because I used to talk about what I saw in films, and nobody would understand,” Hill said. “They’d say, ‘What are you talking about? You just make these things up.’ They just didn’t seem to get it. . . . I thought, either I’m becoming crazy or I’m really onto something here. So I wrote a book about it.”

What Hill sees in film are echoes of ancient archetypes, patterns and conflicts that tie filmmaking to humanity’s mythic tradition.

“I look at film as really like ancient tribal storytelling,” said Hill, a psychotherapist who splits his practice between offices in Anaheim and Los Angeles.

“In archaic civilizations, the tribe would sit around the campfire, and they would tell stories. . . . (Films are) a definite evolution of taking the story from the campfire to the machine.”

Under Hill’s analysis, Roger Corman’s 1960 B-movie horror film, “Little Shop of Horrors,” is not simply a camp classic, it’s an articulation of “the global, primordial, perennial war between the sexes, which is a metaphoric extension of the separation between the sky god and Terra Mater, Mother Earth.”

Even Charles Griffith, writer of the original “Little Shop,” was intrigued by the interpretation, so he and one of the film’s main actors contacted Hill and met him for lunch.

“Both of them were just shocked that I saw so much symbolic meaning in this cheap $30,000-budget film--(symbolism) that they had no intention whatsoever of including,” Hill said. “They were complimented that I saw so much and that I liked the film so much, but they were still rather shocked that I would see so much there.”

The fact that the mythic overtones he ascribes to film aren’t always intentional doesn’t faze Hill.

“I think sometimes some of the best films are the ones that are done without necessarily intending to do this kind of stuff,” he said.

In fact, films with deal directly with mythic subjects, such as “The Ten Commandments” and the “Star Wars” trilogy, tend to bore Hill. “It’s the spiritual element that is hidden . . . that is much more fascinating to me.”

The films in Hill’s book cut across a variety of genres and periods, from Ingmar Bergman’s art-house classic “The Seventh Seal” and Martin Scorcese’s blistering “Taxi Driver” to such crowd-pleasers as “Shane,” “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Field of Dreams.”

“I wanted to show that no matter what the genre or type of film, whether it was a mainstream popular film or whether it was an odd, esoteric film that not everybody has seen, that the same kind of archetypes definitely come through,” Hill said.

Although Hill professes a lifelong interest in film, his brand of mythic analysis, and the genesis of some of the specific interpretations he outlines in “Illuminating Shadows,” are rooted in an informal film discussion group he led in Orange County from 1985 to 1987, when he was living here.

“Twice a month I would show a film and we would discuss it,” Hill said. “We explored films politically, economically, literally, mythologically--and, we joked, even cinematically. We talked about the movies themselves. . . .

“The more I started analyzing films, the more common themes that I saw just repeat themselves. . . . There are a lot of polarities, whether it’s between masculinity and femininity or between spirituality and sexuality. Things just seemed to repeat themselves, and I started seeing overall themes and patterns and archetypes. There were just too many repeating things to just mark off as mere coincidence.”

Uncovering the mythic aspects of movies is not simply an academic exercise for Hill, who reads widely on film theory but has no formal education in the field. A film’s mythic core, while usually beneath the surface, can still connect with the average viewer.

“I think the average person is really looking for entertainment or perhaps escape, perhaps some emotional healing without necessarily calling it that,” Hill said. “They want to feel good somehow. I think what goes on at the deeper level is that all of a sudden something touches them at levels that they’re not aware of, and that’s where the magic begins--that’s when mythology somehow resonates with this ancient archetypal wisdom that somehow can change a person.

“That’s why I believe that enough good exposure to the arts and humanities, to the good kinds, can definitely change a person’s life. . . . I definitely feel changed by what I call the sages of the world, the real seers who have somehow tapped into that which is more important in life, and are able to translate that wisdom and religion into their art somehow.”

Although there are spiritually healthy films, in Hill’s view, films have destructive possibilities as well. For example, Hill cited “the whole ‘Rambo’-’Rocky’ -Schwarzenegger-Chuck Norris genre . . . that’s essentially made for an audience of testosterone-peaked boys between the ages of 18 and 18 1/2. Those kinds of films don’t really do much other than perpetuate a kind of a paranoid, militaristic type of attitude.”

Hill had built a successful Orange County practice in the ‘80s, but left it behind for a self-described “mythic journey” in which he moved to New York and did little but read and write for six months.

It was during his time in New York that he wrote his first two film essays, on “Little Shop of Horrors” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Hill found a supporter in John Beebe, editor of the San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, who helped hook him up with a publisher for the book, Shambhala, based in Boston and London.

Hill doesn’t segregate his interest in film and his professional life. In fact, since returning to his practice in California in 1988, he’s likely to recommend particular films to patients as part of their therapy.

“I’ll prescribe movies to them,” Hill said. “I have catalogued hundreds of films on dozens of topics that I go through . . . and it works. It has an effect on them.”

For a person with a chemical dependency, for instance, he might prescribe “Barfly,” “Under the Volcano” or “Ironweed”--three films with alcoholic main characters.

“Those films themselves don’t have what we would call a clinical resolution to the problem of alcoholism,” Hill said. “Nonetheless, I think they’re very honest depictions of the dynamics of the disease. That would help the alcoholic look at himself or herself in a more accurate light, which is really part of the healing process.”

In his practice, Hill said, “I give people books to read and movies to watch and poems to read and poems to write and so on. That is the essence of real humanity. . . .People seem to find some real value in it. It certainly worked for me.”

In fact, he is now contemplating a book on the use of film in therapy. Another, on which Hill has already been working for several years, is a study of creativity.

Hill admires Jung, whose approach to psychology is central to Joseph Campbell’s lifelong explorations of the relevance of ancient archetypes to the modern world. But he is skeptical about some of the other giants in the field: “I don’t even pretend to even practice psychology in the traditional sense, because I don’t even see that Freud and Skinner and Rogers are really the great psychologists. As far as I can determine, the great psychologists are the Ingmar Bergmans and Vincent Van Goghs and Georgia O’Keeffes and Tolstoys and Dostoevskys. These are the true psychologists and sages of the world.”

Mythic Connections in Films

From “Illuminating Shadows: The Mythic Power of Film,” by Geoffrey Hill

“The cinema has become to the modern world the collective cathedral of primitive participation mystique. It is the tribal dream house of modern civilization. Our participation in the cinema is our participation in myth.

“According to analytical psychology each of us has stirring within us the symbols, archetypes, and myths of a vast collective unconscious borrowed from ancestors of the distant and recent past. Through a familiarity with symbols, religion, and mythology, mythic connections can be found in even the most secular films, as in the most secular psyches.”

--On “Little Shop of Horrors,” (two film versions and stage version):

“It is significant that most of the victims eaten by the plant in the three versions are over-masculinized characters employing phallic objects to selfishly procure advantage over the more passive characters in their lives. The sadistic dentist who painfully inserts penetrating tools into patients’ vulvic mouths is eaten by the plant in all three versions. The burglar in the 1960 version who brandishes a gun to achieve his phallic goals, becomes another victim.”

--On “The Seventh Seal”:

“The leitmotif in this celluloid morality dream is the human soul stuck in the eternal conflict between the archetypal divisions of male and female, heaven and earth, high and low, life and death. . . . Death is the awesome reminder that a permanent separation of opposites terminates the game.”

--On “The Graduate”:

“Ben walks into his apartment one day to be surprised by the presence of Mrs. Robinson, who presents a legal threat. We are reminded of Heracles who is appointed to rescue Persephone from the underworld, only to be confronted by Cerberus, the watchdog of the deep.”

“From the nave below, Ben’s image outside the glass upstairs presents him as an icon of the crucified Christ, with outstretched arms, as if he were a stained glass figure of the gospel passion. At both sides of this dying savior we see the shape of crosses made by the support bars of the window, as if to represent the two criminals who died on each side of Jesus.”