Since the notion of the Puer Aeternus, the eternal child, is interesting some who have read my last post, I thought I would use an example from film, an old black and white film that I love, to illustrate this particular archetype. Cary Grant is perhaps my favorite film actor, and Alfred Hitchcock, my favorite director. So when the two of them team up, as they did in several films, I am a very happy cineaste indeed. In his 1941 film Suspicion, Alfred Hitchcock directs Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine (who won a Best Actress Oscar for her performance) in a movie about a notorious playboy and the wallflower whom he marries. The question is did he marry her only for her money, and will he murder her to get it?
I think this film uses Cary Grant’s natural charm wonderfully, helped perhaps by Grant’s own puer nature, in order to illustrate the darker aspects of the puer. Again, the question of how much any filmmaker is aware of archetypal concepts is hard to ascertain, but Hitchcock is masterful when it comes to the feat of allowing images to tell a story.
The archetypal theme I want to focus on in this picture is primarily that of the puer, particularly in its undifferentiated and split off aspects. Cary Grant, as Johnny Aysgarth, embodies an unrepentant puer. Joan Fontaine, as Lina McLaidlaw, is a rather spinsterish and vivid example of the senex, despite her youth and obvious beauty. But I’ll touch on the senex another time.
As the movie opens, we see Lina on a train, comfortably seated in her first class compartment when Johnny enters and sits across from her and begins to manufacture an excuse for why he’s now occupying her compartment. He obviously lies as to his presence in the car and even attempts to persuade the conductor that his third class ticket is a first class one, but Lina seems not to mind and is rather intrigued by this dashing fellow. At the end of this scene, the camera pans down to the book that Lina is reading and shows us the title: Child Psychology! There can be no doubt now that Johnny is representative of the archetype of the child.
Lina soon learns that Johnny is something of a playboy and often pictured in the pages of society magazines in the company of women, and never, it seems, are they the same women. They meet again at a fox hunt, where Johnny sees Lina skillfully reign in her rearing horse and realizes that the girl from the train might be able to just as skillfully keep the bit in his mouth. This, I suspect, both intrigues and repels him.
We learn that Lina is bookish, very shy and socially awkward, “a very carefully brought up young lady.” Johnny arranges to show up at her house in the company of several other women who know Lina and invite her to church. As the others enter into the church, Johnny takes a surprised Lina by the hand and they sneak away to the high, beautiful and windy oceanside cliffs nearby (another typical example of the puer with his “head in the clouds” and occupying, as James Hillman would say, the peaks of spirit).
On these same cliffs Johnny attempts to touch her, to rearrange her hair, and Lina pulls away afraid. “What do you think I was trying to do, kill you? Nothing less than murder could justify such violent self defense,” he says to her mockingly. He continues to tease her and even moves in to kiss her, but she turns away and the camera focuses on the snapping shut of her small handbag, used in this scene as an obviously Freudian symbol, as if to say entering her is out of the question until he is willing to take the bit into his mouth, just as her horse had been willing earlier.
They walk back to her home where she overhears her parents saying that she will never marry–that she’s foreordained to occupy a sort of prematurely old, dried up, essentially senex archetypal experience for the rest of her life. As Lina overhears their conversation she turns to Johnny and spontaneously kisses him, a demonstration of her unwillingness to surrender to her fate.
At dinner there is discussion that Johnny is “wild,” a cheat, and a womanizer. Lina is silent and looking forward to being accompanied to the Hunt Ball by Johnny, but he calls and breaks his date and deeply disappoints her because he’s brought something into her life she now misses: a bit of spontaneity, the joy of living life, and excitement. As von Franz suggests, “. . . the child is also a uniting symbol, bringing together the separated or dissociated parts of the personality. . . (100). Lina feels more alive and more complete than she ever has, and Johnny’s absence only serves to highlight what she has been missing.
Johnny has let Lina know at the last moment that he will indeed attend the ball. Not having an invitation, he once again manipulates, this time to get into the ball. He is constantly flaunting the rules because, as Jung states:
Such a type of man is to be bound to [nothing] whatsoever. There is a terrific fear of being pinned down, of entering space and time completely, and of being the specific human being that one is. There is always the fear of being caught in a situation from which it may be impossible to slip out again.
Johnny and Lina leave the ball and go for a car ride during which he tells her about all the women he’s been involved with. He says there are such a number of them that he counts them to help him fall asleep at night. Franz would say that Johnny “takes too much from the anima of the women around him. . . then suddenly, one day he has had enough, and just walks out.”
Lina tells him she loves him. He doesn’t like this, for he has strong feelings for her too. They stop by Lina’s home to have a drink, and Johnny asks her father’s portrait, which hangs unmistakably and imposingly above the fireplace, for permission to marry Lina. As if to signal the impending disaster resulting from the union, the General’s portrait falls of the wall.
Lina and Johnny elope and take an elaborate honeymoon around Europe. They come home to the beautiful new house Johnny has bought and decorated (expensively), complete with a servant. Johnny evades questions Lina asks about how he could afford it. It isn’t long before Lina finds out. A telegram arrives requesting Johnny repay the money he borrowed to finance his honeymoon trip. He confesses to Lina he’s been broke all his life, but adds that she’ll have plenty of money some day when she receives her inheritance, so why not live for the moment! Lina, finally seeing Johnny more clearly, tells him that he’s incredibly naive and that he should find a job. But Johnny resists, saying that if “worse comes to worse,” they’ll simply borrow more money. True to the psychology of the puer, work seems to be the most repellent thing to him in the entire world. Franz writes that Dr. Jung noted but one cure for the puer–work. “Work is the one disagreeable word which no puer aeternus likes to hear, and Dr. Jung came to the conclusion that it was the right answer.”
The film goes on to show Johnny going to work for his cousin, Captain Melbank, managing Melbank’s estate. At the same time Johnny’s good friend, Binky Thwait shows up and introduces himself to Lina. Binky is wealthy, stupid, and childish; a child in an adult’s body, and the perfect friend for Johnny. Binky knows all of Johnny’s manipulative and shady behaviors, and finds him all the more attractive because of them. Eventually we learn that Binky has a fatal vulnerability: when he drinks hard liquor, he has a violent, choking, coughing fit that Johnny ominously says will kill him some day.
Learning from a busy body that Johnny hasn’t quite gambling, Lina goes to Capt. Melbank’s office to speak to Johnny. She learns from Capt. Melbank that Johnny has been fired for embezzling funds, and hasn’t worked there for over six weeks. Capt. Melbank tells Lina that he won’t immediately prosecute Johnny, and he’ll give him some time to pay back the money. Things are getting tough now for Johnny. Lina’s father passed away and left her only her current allowance, so no financial boon is in the offing for Johnny who is beginning to fear Lina will leave him now that she knows he’s lost his job. Subsequently, Johnny and Binky form a partnership to develop real estate. Johnny comes up with the plan, and naturally Binky comes up with the cash. Indeed, Binky signs his assets over to Johnny under the terms of their partnership. Eventually Johnny comes to the conclusion that the real estate development plan won’t work out and calls it off.
Johnny, Lina, and Binky are playing anagrams and Lina is absently fingering her tiles and realizes that she has formed the word “murderer” with her tiles. She fears that Johnny will kill Binky for the money that has been set aside in their partnership. A close call at the cliffs results in Johnny saving Binky’s life. Lina is relieved to find that her fears are unfounded, and Johnny plans to accompany Binky as far as London on Binky’s trip to Paris to dissolve the partnership, but she later learns that Binky has died while in Paris from a choking, coughing fit after drinking a large glass of liquor offered to him by an unidentified Englishman.
Lina of course fears that it was Johnny who fed Binky the liquor that killed him. She visits a friend of hers named Isabelle, who is a mystery novel writer. Isabelle describes her most recent novel in which a man who cannot swim is led across a damaged footbridge. He falls into the river and drowns. Isabelle compares this to what happened to Johnny’s friend, Binky. She also mentions she has loaned one of her book’s with a similar plot to Johnny some time earlier.
Meanwhile some letters arrive for Johnny, and as he bathes, Lina reads them. One letter is a reply to a request Johnny made to borrow money against his wife’s life insurance policy. The insurance company tells him they can only pay upon the event of his wife’s death. Lina begins to fear that Johnny may try to kill her. She doesn’t want to believe it, but can’t stop herself from having such thoughts.
Johnny and Lina attend a dinner party at Isabelle’s house. In attendance is a forensic pathologist, and the conversation turns to murder. Johnny remarks that it would be easy to poison someone, and that there must be thousands of murderers walking around free. Lina asks Johnny if he thinks they are happy and he simply replies, “why not?” Later at home Johnny and Lina are completely alone; the servants have the evening off. Lina is terrified that Johnny will kill her–poison her, and she’s overwhelmed by her fear and falls into a faint.
The next morning she awakes to find Isabelle attending her. Isabelle tells her that Johnny has been “worming” all of her secrets out of her, such as the poison, which is untraceable. Lina is now absolutely convinced Johnny is planning to murder her, and asks Isabelle about the poison, “Is it painful?” Isabelle replies, “Not in the least. In fact I should think it would be a most pleasant death.”
The next scene is quite famous. In it Johnny is bringing a glass of milk up the stairs, to Lina lying in her bedroom. The milk is brightly lit while everything else in the scene is dark. Lina, as are we, is led to believe the milk is poisoned (Hitchcock put a light bulb inside the glass of milk to illuminate the milk). Johnny kisses Lina good night tenderly, as if it were for the last time.
What we are seeing in this film is Cary Grant increasingly filmed in shadow, as if to highlight a growing malevolence–and this malevolent cast is often the shadow of the puer. Speaking of this shadow von Franz says: “Here, usually, is a very cold, brutal man somewhere in the background, which compensates the too idealistic attitude of consciousness and which the puer aeternus cannot voluntarily assimilate.” Even more to the point of illustrating our John Aysgarth in this film, von Franz goes on to say, “This brutality, or the cold realistic attitude, very often appears also in matters related to money. Since he does not want to adapt socially, or take on some regular job and work, he must get money somehow.”
The denouement: Lina wakes up and plans to leave Johnny. He insists on driving her, and she is once again convinced that he will try to kill her. As she struggles with him in the moving car, Johnny brings it to a halt and tells her of his shame at being unable to provide for her the way he (and everyone else) thinks he should. It becomes clear that the poison is for Johnny; that he was going to kill himself, not Lina.
This wish for death–suicide– is a classic puer move. According to von Franz, the puer aeternus always keeps his revolver in his pocket and constantly plays with the idea of getting out of life if things get too hard. The disadvantage of this is that he is never quite committed to the situation as a whole human being; there is a constant “Jesuitical mental reservation. . . I shall not go through the whole experience to the bitter end if it becomes too insufferable . . . Transformation can only take place if one gives oneself completely to the situation.”
What we see in the movie’s final scene is Johnny’s apparent willingness to commit himself “completely to the situation.” He and Lina experience a rapprochement and return to their own home transformed in themselves, and in their relationship, with a chance to start their life together anew.
This film deals with the shadow of the puer in such a way that few films seem to. Often in film, the puer is depicted as purely charming and child like; mercurial and clever in the way of Hermes The Thief, or hard to pin down romantically like an Eros figure. In this film, Hitchcock shows the darkness of the puer–the potentially cruel and calculating aspects that one does not always think of when thinking about the puers in our lives.
There are other archetypes present in the film as well; along with her father, Lina herself seems to embody a great many of the characteristics of the senex. Another nice result of this film is that we get to see how, as James Hillman describes, when puer and senex are united, both are invigorated. The senex is not merely a dried up old goat that devours his/her own creations, but is able to develop a wisdom and generativity that ages gracefully and vitally. Similarly, the puer takes on a wisdom and a groundedness that makes him genuinely charming and graceful; not merely a caricature of childhood, but a responsible adult who can encounter life with a light, deft touch. Knowingly or not, Hitchcock has demonstrated these archetypal images very well in this film, but this frequently happens in cinema. There are any number of movies, particularly movies that become perennial favorites or cult classics, which reflect strong archetypal patterns, and they are memorable because, in the reflected archetypes, we find our own lives and ourselves.
