Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain (Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History)

Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain “Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History” is a series devoted t...

Author: Mark Pizzato

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Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain

“Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History” is a series devoted to the best of theatre/performance scholarship currently available, accessible and free of jargon. It strives to include a wide range of topics, from the more traditional to those performance forms that in recent years have helped broaden the understanding of what theatre as a category might include (from variety forms as diverse as the circus and burlesque to street buskers, stage magic, and musical theatre, among many others). Although historical, critical, or analytical studies are of special interest, more theoretical projects, if not the dominant thrust of a study, but utilized as important underpinning or as a historiographical or analytical method of exploration, are also of interest. Textual studies of drama or other types of less traditional performance texts are also germane to the series if placed in their cultural, historical, social, or political and economic context. There is no geographical focus for this series and works of excellence of a diverse and international nature, including comparative studies, are sought. The editor of the series is Don B. Wilmeth (EMERITUS, Brown University), Ph.D., University of Illinois, who brings to the series over a dozen years as editor of a book series on American theatre and drama, in addition to his own extensive experience as an editor of books and journals. He is the author of several award-winning books and has received numerous career achievement awards, including one for sustained excellence in editing from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Also in the series: Undressed for Success by Brenda Foley Theatre, Performance, and the Historical Avant-garde by Günter Berghaus Theatre, Politics, and Markets in Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Sally Charnow Ghosts of Theatre and Cinema in the Brain by Mark Pizzato Moscow Theatres for Young People by Manon van de Water Absence and Memory in Colonial American Theatre by Odai Johnson


Mark Pizzato

GHOSTS OF THEATRE AND CINEMA IN THE BRAIN

© Mark Pizzato, 2006. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–7215–X Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pizzato, Mark, 1960– Ghosts of theatre and cinema in the brain / Mark Pizzato. p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in theatre and performance history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–7215–X (hard. : alk. paper) 1. Ghosts in literature. 2. Drama—History and criticism. 3. Ghosts in motion pictures. I. Title. II. Series. PN1650.G56P59 2006 809.2⬘9375—dc22

2005051450

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To my sons, Luke and Peter, ages 13 and 10, who will carry parts of my ghost into the future much more than this book (Re-member me well) And to my mother, Marie Hammack Pizzato, who died in 1970, yet lives today through the theatres of our brains

I see clearly: we who live are all phantoms, fleeting shadows. Sophocles, Ajax As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport. William Shakespeare, King Lear Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets (“Burnt Norton”)

Contents x List of Figures Acknowledgments

ix xi

Introduction 1. Will the Real Cogito Please Stand Up? 2. Ancient Specters (Prehistoric, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman) 3. Phantom Limbs, Unconscious Zombies, and Multiple Selves 4. Shakespeare’s Roman Shades (Titus Andronicus and Titus) 5. Theatrical Elements in the Mind’s Eye 6. Ghosts of Hamlet Onscreen 7. Selective Spirits in Neural Evolution 8. Noh Desires and The Others 9. Brain Stages Epilogue

1 15

67 97 115 161 203 229 241

Notes Bibliography Index

251 287 305

27 55

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List of Figures x 4.1

4.2

4.3

6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

8.1

8.2

The ancient Roman Titus pours dirt from his hand into his dead sons’ modern army boots in Taymor’s Titus (1991) Flaming sculpture fragments, representing the sacrificed Alarbus, twirl between Titus and Tamora—in Taymor’s first PAN A ghostly tiger, like the rapists Chiron and Demetrius, leaping at the “deer” Lavinia, in another Taymor PAN The father’s murder scene, as seen through Hamlet’s head, in Olivier’s 1948 film The Ghost as a huge patriarchal shadow around Hamlet in the Gielgud/Colleran film of 1964 Zeffirelli’s depiction of an abject Ghost reaching toward Hamlet and the film audience in 1990 The monstrous earth-father Ghost glaring down at his son in Branagh’s 1996 film The Ghost fading into a Pepsi One machine, holding a handkerchief for his poisoned ear, in a hallway with mattresses and a ladder, during Almereyda’s Hamlet of 2000 Ann whispers into the blind psychic’s ear, while a male assistant translates her written swirls, during the séance between ghostly realms in Amenábar’s The Others Grace holds her children, Nicholas and Ann, as she remembers smothering them with pillows and shooting herself, in a prior life

76

85

90 124 128 132 140

150

224

225


Acknowledgments x

I

thank the editors and readers at Palgrave, especially Don Wilmeth, William Fain, Melissa Nosal, and Maran Elancheran, for their appreciation of this project, their advice on its improvement, and their eagerness for its publication. I also thank Bernie Baars, Mark Bracher, Louis Cozolino, Tony Jackson, Larry Hodges, Brooke Holmes, Al Maisto, and Paul Youngman, who read parts of this book, confirming its mix of disciplines and suggesting clarifications. I credit Tony, along with others in our theory reading groups at UNC-Charlotte (Teresa Scheid, Paula Connolly, Mike Corwin, Chris Bongartz, and Kirk Melnikoff ), for sparking and rekindling my interest in exploring brain matters. UNC-Charlotte also gave me a Reassignment of Duties Leave in fall 2003, during which I wrote the majority of this book. I thank my students, who have helped me to analyze some of the plays explored here. And I thank Don Michael at UNC-Charlotte for his artistic eye and technical expertise in helping to make the book’s illustrations. I also appreciate the comments of colleagues at various conferences where I presented parts of this book. An earlier version of chapter 2 was published in the Journal for Lacanian Studies 1.2 (November 2003): 204–23. I appreciate the permission of the editor, Dany Nobus, to republish that material here, as well as his encouragement to me as an early reader. I also thank Herbert Blau, who inspired me two decades ago (at the start of my academic career) with his passions, ideas, and stories about the “blooded thought” of theatre’s material ghosts.


Introduction x

D

o ghosts exist? Many people, now and in the past, have experienced them: a sensed presence—a touch, sight, or sound—associated with the personality of someone who has passed away, yet seems to linger in a certain place or return at a specific moment. Whether ghosts, gods, and other supernatural beings exist in the nonphysical realm is a matter of cultural context and personal faith. But any human being may experience the continued presence of someone who has died, sensing that person through memory and fantasy, in the “mind’s eye,” as Hamlet says, just before he is told that others have seen his father’s ghost externally as well (1.2.186). This book explores both the external depiction of ghosts and gods, in dramas and films of various cultures, and the internal theatre of an illusory Self and Other, contained within, yet shared between human brains. In order to investigate both cultural and neural ghosts, I use the philosophical dimensions of cognitive science and psychoanalysis (especially the revisions of Freud by Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Zizek), and I seek their possible material foundations in neurology and evolutionary psychology. Through these various disciplines, I hope to engage the reader’s own sense of ghosts, in the external and internal theatres of science, art, and personal experience. Ghosts in the brain matter, in a double sense. Ghosts of personalities that have influenced one’s life, plus phantom images and concepts of Self, exist in the brain matter, in the neural circuitry of each person’s particular experiences, memories, and fantasies—through the shared evolutionary structure of the human brain’s anatomy. But ghosts also matter in the brain through their collective projection in a variety of cultural displays, from stage to screen, from ancient to postmodern. By focusing on ghosts in the brain and in the drama,

2


this book presents evidence that the various external forms of theatre today, from stage to screen machinery, as art and entertainment, have their neurological sources in the evolution of theatrical elements within the human brain and body.1 There are, of course, significant differences between the technologies of live theatre and screen performance. This book will explore the human brain’s theatrical drive in both media, with plays translated to the screen in various historical periods, showing the cultural evolution of ghosts and gods through externalized mental images in quick-cut associations, flashbacks, and tracking shots—as distinctive spectral viewpoints. The examples of stage drama investigated here also represent live theatre’s experience of communal belonging and heroic alienation, in the shared mortality of an actor and spectator together in space and time, playing at presence and absence, through fictional death onstage, in much earlier periods of theatre. All of these apparitions have emerged from the human brain’s internal stages and screens, connected by ancient or modern technologies to the theatres in others’ skulls. Modern science developed, in part, through a skepticism about supernatural forces, especially ghosts and gods existing within or beyond the human body and material world (Carter 59–60). But ancient Greek theatre emerged as an art form with a similar questioning of myths and rites, presenting the tragic (or tragicomic) drama of individuals rebelling against fate and the gods, while discovering demonic passions in and between human brains. The existence of divine providence or of bodiless ghosts is a matter of faith, subject to theological debate and personal belief, not scientific proof. Yet, current neuroscience brings us ever closer to understanding the material basis of the mind, with its fictions, fantasies, and constructed realities of Self and Other, as physical or metaphysical.2 Various neuroscientists today utilize spectral and theatrical terminology. Neurologist V. S. Ramachandran and psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas use the terms “phantom,” “zombie,” and “ghost” to describe certain brain mechanisms. Cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars argues for a theatrical model of the human brain. Stephen Kosslyn, like Baars, defines the manipulation of internal mental images in cinematic terms. Neurologist Antonio Damasio describes a “movie in the

Introduction

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brain” through the mind’s eye. Philosophers Daniel Dennett and Slavoj Zizek debate the truth of a “Cartesian Theatre” in the brain. This interest in the mind’s spectral theatricality is a significant part of the recent shift in neuroscience from computer models of the brain toward organic metaphors of the mind’s embodiment, involving “bodily, social, and cultural contexts . . . [as well as] figurative phenomena” (Hart 315).3 Sometimes the emphasis in cognitive science (even when applied to film studies) is on the narrative Self and its semantic categories, rather than on theatrical aspects of the ego’s imaginary personas.4 But I would argue that a comparison of past experiments in theatre and cinema, ancient and modern, with the recent empirical and therapeutic discoveries of neuroscience and psychoanalysis offers a more complete view of the performance of mental embodiment and its evolving cultural contexts—especially regarding the ghosts of Self and Other produced by the human brain.5 Some might say that psychoanalysis, based on private therapy and debatable theories more than empirical research, should not be included with neurology, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, and philosophy under the “cognitive and affective neuroscience” umbrella. Yet, there is support for many of Freud’s theories in current empirical research—with specific ties to Freudian notions of the ego, superego, id, libido, erotic and death drives, dream desires and censorship, infantile sexuality, repression, denial, rationalization, repetition, slips of the tongue, signal anxiety, the unconscious, and the Oedipal complex made by various neurologists and cognitive psychologists.6 Such connections are advocated by the International Society for Neuro-Psychoanalysis (and its journal), based in London and New York. In this book I connect research-based neuroscience not only to Freud (and Kleinian object relations), but also to the psychoanalytic and cultural theories of Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Slavoj Zizek.7 Rather than dwelling on internecine debates, this book explores a broader view of neuroscience and art to find the meeting points of recent theories in evolutionary and cognitive psychology, current neurological research, a full century of psychoanalytic theory, and thousands of years of dramatic expression—through a specific focus on ghosts in the brain matter, in therapeutic discoveries, and in the embodied projections of the stage and screen.

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Lacanian psychoanalysis has had a powerful influence on film studies since the 1970s, through various theories about the screen’s Symbolic and Imaginary orders and the spectator’s gaze. But recently, David Bordwell, Noël Carroll, Stephen Prince, and others have argued for the “post-theory” approach of cognitive science to replace the philosophical and therapeutic speculations of psychoanalysis.8 Joseph Anderson reveals the Oedipal passions in this anti-Lacanian approach, rejoicing that Bordwell and Carroll have “freed film theory from the chokehold of the psychoanalytic/Marxist paradigm”— while offering his own “ecological” film theory, using cognitive science to return cinema to Mother Nature: “to place film production and spectatorship in a natural context” (9–10).9 Instead of perpetuating this generational rivalry, I argue that neurology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science should be combined with Lacanian theory for further insights about the natural and cultural (i.e., the Real as well as Imaginary and Symbolic) dimensions of cinema.10 I ask the reader to keep an open mind about this subject, to expand the theatrical and conceptual horizons within his or her cranium by perceiving new, interdisciplinary perspectives. Anyone who has lost a loved one to death experiences a continued connection to that other personality—even if a ghost does not appear in a vision, challenging the fabric of reality and rationality as in Hamlet. The dead person’s ways of thinking and feeling remain in the memories of the living, as they had been when that person was alive, but fading over time, even if reconstructed in the remembering brain.11 While alive, each of us exists not only in our own brains, as phantom images and ideas of Self, but also in the perceptions and memories of others’ minds, as ghostly characters in those cranial theatres. Whether or not ghosts exist as bodiless beings beyond death, they have a material presence in various cultural contexts,12 as personal visions or theatrical fictions, arising through the brain’s electro-biochemical machinery, through millions of years of evolution structuring human consciousness, through particular psychological experiences in an individual’s lifetime, and through current social ideals. The human mind or soul as a “ghost in the machine” of the brain continues to be researched and retheorized today, by science and

Introduction

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art.13 While neuroscientific views are grounded in objective, repeatable, empirical matters, they also relate to ancient and early modern theatrical experiments, as well as the recent virtual realities of cinema and computer screens. For thousands of years humans have tried to redefine the natural and supernatural forces around them, sometimes displaying onstage a “god from the machine” (deus ex machina), as etiology or teleology of the tremendous good and evil in the human cranium and its various cultures. The chapters ahead compare current scientific models of the brain’s theatre and its phantoms to earlier artistic experiments and more recent embodiments, as they project such cranial ghosts collectively, onstage and onscreen. But first let us consider the outer limits of mass-media, metaphysical theatricality, and its main types of ghosts, in the virtual reality of cyberspace. ANALYZING VR GHOSTS Throughout its history as an art form, theatre has experimented with various ideas of character and fate, in different cultural modes of presenting the Self onstage. Theatre has explored the emotional interactions of Self and Other: through actors, chorus, and audience in performance, and with other figures involved backstage or prior to the show. Since ancient times, theatre has examined the dependence of Self upon the Other in the mind, through communal belonging and conflict, along with the figures of ghosts or gods in particular cultures, watching or possessing earthly characters. (Certain examples are given in chapters 2, 4, 6, and 8.) Today, cinema, television, and the Internet have become our dominant modes for displaying communal ideals of the Self. Yet, these dominant dream screens of our social psyche also point to what they have surpassed and suppressed: the heritage of theatrical ghosts and ritual gods lingering at the edges of current virtual realities.14 Long before Freud and film, theatre functioned as a social psycho-analysis, especially through its ritual origins and elements: a venting of collective dreams and disturbed ancestral spirits, that were analyzed by the watching audience. Eros and Thanatos, as human versions of nature’s reproduction and survival drives,15 have been at the heart of theatre for many millennia.

6


As theatre director and theorist Herbert Blau puts it, “Of all the performing arts, the theatre stinks most of mortality” (Blooded 132). Comparing theatre with film, Blau finds a crucial distinction in the experience of time, regarding the mortal human body. With film there is “the versatile negotiability of cinematic time: arrest, reversal, speedup, and various kinds of optical exchange, the synthetic timewarp of montage, splicing, segmenting, . . . a virtual suspension of time, in the intoxicating control of succession, the feeling that time, after all, is possessed by the cinematic machine. . . .” Theatre, on the other hand, involves a “much more conscious . . . overlay of playing time upon lifetime” (133). This may include a ritual dimension, “the ghost of a ritual pretense.” But it also involves the mortal body’s questioning of belief and transcendence, more so than in cinema. “The theatre is a far more skeptical form than film. . . . In theatre, the body’s specific gravity is always there, subject to time, astride of a grave.” And yet, I would argue that this lure of physical gravity is also illusory onstage: mixed with each spectator’s mental associations of bodily self and other, while watching the “undercurrent of play which inevitably makes the actor sweat.” The human mind projects its transcendent ghosts, not only onto the Author’s immortal characters, but also onto the actor’s material body, in its aura of live presence, especially when a star’s appearance onstage is preceded by totem images on the silver screen or TV tube. The mortal body onstage is thus haunted by immortal desires and mass-audience sublimations, particularly in the “recycling” of texts, images, stage/ screen spaces, and bodies between various dramatic media today (as Marvin Carlson suggests in his study of the “haunted stage”).16 All the world is not just a stage anymore, but also a virtual-reality screening of multiplex movie, channel-changing TV, Internet, videogame, advertising, and news spaces.17 Addressing the haunted hollowness of such virtual realities today, Slavoj Zizek says that cyberspace extends the “disembodying of our experience” from film, radio, and TV (On Belief 54). These newer media reveal that there never was an “immediate material body” in human beings: “our bodily self-experience was always-already that of an imaginary constituted entity” (55). The screen media of film, TV, and cyberspace show the ghost (and Geist) of a postmodern Self as

Introduction

7

always-already mediated: extending, replicating, and dispersing the illusion of an individual ego.18 This postmodern ghost of Self, as illusory, split, and hollow imago, challenges and yet extends the prior ideal of a modernist whole ego,19 as well as earlier ideals of Western culture: the ancient hero’s separation from a tragic ritual chorus and Shakespeare’s early modern, self-reflective characters. Today, the ghostly imagos and godlike superegos of postmodern split-subjectivity continue the human brain’s big-bang of independent, rational thought and habitataltering adaptability. But new technologies and screen fantasies, from cinema and TV to videogames and cyberspace, also mirror ancient dreams of immortality. The movie or television viewer seems to leave his or her body like a ghost, flying through space and time in the various camera angles, tracking shots, quick cuts, and flashbacks. Yet, the spectator becomes even more of an actor in computer dramas and videogames. The ghost of Self acquires godlike powers of interactivity, changing the characters and scenes onscreen, or creating the avatar of a new personality and gender, while wearing that mask in playing with others over the Internet—as well as completing the offscreen diegesis (and onscreen interpretations) by imagining an extended world beyond the frame, like the movie and TV viewer. Zizek defines two types of cyberspace narratives today: the linear maze adventure and the undetermined rhizomatic hypertext, both of which offer the illusion of interactive infinity (Art 37). Zizek also examines these types of screen-play through Janet Murray’s two hypothetical versions of a suicidal, “violence-hub” narrative. In the first version, the player/reader/spectator is put into a labyrinth of the character’s mind, just prior to suicide. The player or “interactor” is able to choose different pathways in the character’s thoughts, trying to escape that dead end. Whichever links are pursued, however, the player eventually ends up with the black screen of suicide. In this mode of virtual reality, “our very freedom to pursue different venues imitates the tragic self-closure of the subject’s mind” (Zizek 38). In Murray’s second version, according to Zizek, the interactor becomes “a kind of ‘lesser god,’ ” with limited powers of intervention into the life-story of the suicidal character. But no matter how that character’s past is rewritten, the outcome is still the same. In this game, “even God himself cannot change Destiny.”20

8


Rather than giving the player an illusory power to change the suicidal character’s mind, with numerous linked pathways of infinite thought, or divine magic to alter past actions and current memories that lead to suicide, Murray’s hypothetical cyberspace narratives challenge the interactor with the tragic self-closure of that mind and its chosen fate. Usually, video and computer games immerse the player/spectator/reader in “the ‘undead,’ perverse universe of cartoons in which there is no death, in which the game goes on indefinitely” (Zizek, Art 37). Their lack of closure serves as a denial of death, “which protects us from confronting the trauma of our finitude.” But Murray’s violence-hub tragedies show the potential of cyberspace art (or of cinema) “to stage, to ‘act out,’ the fantasmatic support of our existence. . . . We are thus invited to risk the most radical experience imaginable: the encounter with the Other Scene that stages the foreclosed hard core of the subject’s Being” (Zizek, Art 43). Yet, this tragic catharsis also reveals that “the Real is simultaneously the exact opposite of such a non-virtual, hard core: a purely virtual entity. . . . [I]ts contours can only be discerned as the absent cause of the distortions/displacements of the symbolic space.” Cyberspace, film, and live theatre are human technologies that extend the interior theatre of the “mind’s eye.” The writing, staging, and screening of personal and shared fantasies—from the beginnings of theatre thousands of years ago to recent mass media—mostly avoids and represses, yet also sometimes explores the Real order of human mortality and its many contingencies. Zizek reminds us that to be “a full member of a community,” one has to assume the “spectral dimension” of its tradition, “the undead ghosts that haunt the living” (Fragile 64). Not only in each person’s mental theatre, but also in the narratives and performances that form a community’s tradition, the individual or collective Self “has to foreclose/repress the traumatic excess of its own violent imposition” in rewriting the past (65). But this “ ‘vanishing mediator’ between the old discursive regime and the new . . . continues to haunt ‘actual’ history as its spectral Other Scene.” Thus, we are not only haunted by ghosts, in theatre and in life. We are also “the materialization of the ghosts of past generations, as the stage in which these past generations retroactively resolve their deadlocks” (90–91). We bear ghosts within our bodies

Introduction

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and brains: both the spirits of the past continuing their dramas and the characters we play as illusions of our-selves for the Other. Katherine Fowkes has shown that many film comedies in the 1990s featured ghosts in masochistic positions, reflecting the submission of cinema (or video) viewers to the screen ritual. The transparent body and disembodied voice of the ghost reveals the fading (aphanisis) of the speaking subject in Lacanian theory, especially the absent presence of the spectator to the screen (48, 89, 97).21 According to another theorist, Linda Badley, film “ghosts of the 1980s and 1990s are often tricksters, and thus explicitly or implicitly the special effects themselves, the fantastic medium as monster” (43). She traces the “birth” of cinema back to the “ghost shows” of prior media: the “phantasmagoria” of stroboscopes, zootropes, and magic lanterns (39–40). But neither of these film theorists considers the much earlier tradition of masochism and fetishism in theatre, with spectators submitting to the ghostly figures onstage, yet also projecting and analyzing their own desires, through the masks and bodies of actors as talismans. The two types of cinema ghosts indicated by Fowkes and Badley—the masochistic, fading spirit (or its horror inversion, as sadistic, possessive zombie) and the fetishistic, spectacular trickster— parallel the two modes of cyberspace experience in Murray’s violence-hub tragedies, reexamined by Zizek. The film ghost (like the spectator identifying with the spectral movements of the camera) might pursue a linear maze adventure, haunting various bodies and buildings, with virtual powers like the cyberspace player in an illusory game of endless possibilities. And yet, the transparent body and disembodied voice of the comic film ghost shows a masochistic submission and ultimate impotence, shared by the spectator/player, like the dead-end pathways of the mind in Murray’s first suicidal adventure, or the vengeful demands of tragic zombie-phantoms onstage, such as Clytemnestra and old Hamlet with their unfinished business and their need to be remembered. (See chapters 2 and 6 here.) Alternatively, some film ghosts are dramatic tricksters, like the cyberspace player enjoying the godlike power of a rhizomatic hypertext, re-authoring the plots of other characters’ lives. But ghosts of that type, like the trickster gods of The Oresteia, Apollo and Athena, are

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also trapped in their medium—in the fetishizing phantasmagoria of cinema, theatre, and the human mind, with illusions of a transcendent Self (or soul) still bound to the Real of mortal bodies and the physical apparatus of performance. Thus, two primary modes of ghosts appear in theatre, film, and cyberspace: the impotent, demanding, abject figure with unfinished business or the potent, mischievous, godlike trickster. Like their zombie and vampire cousins,22 these phantoms point to the death and erotic drives within the human brain, circling a void of the Real, despite desires for transcendence. In the pages ahead, I use Lacan’s psychoanalytic sense of erotic and death drives in relation to the evolutionary psychology of four “F” drives as remnant animal instincts in the human brain (fighting, fleeing, feeding, and sex). These involve the emotions of the limbic system at the core of the brain and the distinct hemispheres of the neocortex at the top, which also correspond, in my view, to Lacan’s Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic orders. The different functions of the brain’s right and left hemispheres will be explored in chapters 2, 5, 7, and 8, regarding maternal and patriarchal ghosts, as well as the Dionysian and Apollonian aspects of theatre.23 (One might also relate this dichotomy to the different aims of Artaudian and Brechtian theatre, from the modern to the postmodern.) While some schools of psychoanalysis discredit Freud’s notion of erotic and death drives (Triebe), Lacan’s phenomenology of the human “lack of being” or “want to be” (manque-à-être), through the evolution of a cultural environment and the individual’s “desire of the Other,” revises Freud’s theory of Eros and Thanatos as not simply a continuation of biological instincts.24 These fundamental drives, as Real forces of lack in humans, have been transformed by the Symbolic and Imaginary dimensions of culture—through the evolution of larger, more malleable brains in a man-made environment, lacking the fully programmed instincts of our animal relatives, yet bearing their remnant energies and neuronal pathways, reinterpreted as primal emotions, conscious feelings, and cultural desires.25 Thus, the philosophical insights of Lacanian psychoanalysis correspond in many ways with the empirical research of neuroscience— especially through the various theatrical interactions of brain, mind, and culture.

Introduction

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Lacanian theory offers a cultural, linguistic, and philosophical view of the ghosts inside the mind’s theatre. But cognitive theory and neuroscientific research also reveals certain aspects of the Self and its projection as ghosts, grounding the phantom apparitions of stage and screen (or real life) in the matter and architecture of the physical brain and its biological evolution—as considered in the oddnumbered chapters here. The cultural evolution of ghosts, shared externally between the theatres of many minds, can be seen in various examples of rituals, plays, and films—examined in the evennumbered chapters. There I try to encounter not only the phantoms of art, but also the Other Scene of neuroscience, in the “hard core” of the unconscious as virtual Real. SPECTRAL THEATRES IN AND BETWEEN BRAINS The architecture of the human brain shares certain structures and functions with other animal species, showing the prior evolutionary stages of the mind and its Self-awareness (Baars, Theater 31–32). Humans share with all vertebrates the basic brainstem (and basal ganglia) of the “reptilian brain,” which regulates automatic functions of the body. Like other mammals, humans have a central limbic system in the brain, involving various emotional drives and aspects of Self (or proto-self ).26 Like other primates, humans have advanced parietal lobes of the neocortex on each side of the head (above the ears) for sensory perception and “designed portions” of the imagination (Dennett, Darwin’s 377). But human brains also bear much larger frontal lobes in the neocortex (also known as the prefrontal lobe or lobes).27 Our bigger brains require a normal “prematurity” of birth for the infant’s skull to fit through the birth canal (Lacan, Écrits 6).28 While the bigger brain capacity, especially in the frontal lobes, creates a tremendous staging area for human language, art, and technology, such cultural developments also produce a “lack of being” in humans. Rather than maintaining instinctual patterns of action to survive within a particular environment,29 humans have moved beyond evolutionary adaptation by dominating and altering their habitats.30 Yet, with the premature infant’s dependence upon the Other as caretaker—and its lack of natural patterns of being—the

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family and culture around a child’s brain become the external womb through which the Self is born.31 The psychoanalytic theory of a human “lack of being” (and “want to be”) is explored in various ways in this book: through Zizek’s debate with Dennett about the mind’s Cartesian Theatre in chapter 1, through the aspects of Lacan’s Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real orders in ancient rites and dramas examined in chapter 2, through the desires of the Other in two Shakespeare plays and their various film adaptations explored in chapters 4 and 6, and through the painful attachments in life and death shown by a medieval Japanese Noh drama and a postmodern international movie in chapter 8. These interrelated psychoanalytic theories and dramatic visions are given a biological grounding through neurology, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science in chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9. Through the Zizek and Dennett debate, chapter 1 considers the illusion of a unified Self in the brain, masking the lack of being, as an aspect of human evolution. Chapter 3 looks at the projections of the Self around and beyond the body, while other selves play various roles within the brain. Chapter 5 explores the stage spaces, actors, directors, and spectators in the theatre of the mind. Chapter 7 investigates the evolution of communal spirits in the social brain, producing a phantom Self through specific neural structures. Chapter 9 and the epilogue delve into the creative and destructive forces of nature evolving, through various stages of hominid culture, toward environmental control, self-awareness, and new dimensions of power in the human species. Such intersections of different disciplines offer a variety of perspectives on the theatre within the mind in relation to human cultural evolution—also presenting points of contact between material, philosophical, and artistic understandings of the Self and the Other, as ghostly actors and spectators. Humans bear a tremendous burden in their awareness of mortality. The fear and inevitability of death becomes another kind of hollowness, along with the loss of natural orders in being human. The ghosts of theatre, cinema, and other dramatic media show a continuing relationship today, as in past eras, to those who have passed through this life, plus the tempting illusion of Self as being immortal. In Euro-American culture, with its evolving emphasis on

Introduction

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individuality, stage and screen dramas reveal the inflated ghost of ego, through the mask of character on the actor, trying to transcend mortality, through heroic thoughts and deeds, or competitive cruelty.32 But dramas not only reveal the specter of Self; they also manifest and question the Other, communally invoking or exorcising the ghosts and gods who bring good or ill to humankind. Thus, the pages ahead explore a mystery that pervades religion, art, philosophy, and science. Why are human beings created in the image of God or gods (and vice versa) to act with divine creativity and tremendous destructiveness, in virtual and real worlds, far beyond any other animal in the evolutionary experiment of life on this planet? The theatre of the mind bears the crux of an answer, especially with its various ghosts.


1. Will the Real Cogito Please Stand Up? x

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inema, television, videogames, and the Internet have extended theatre’s ghosts into new projective technologies. Yet those screen fantasies still hinge upon the communal expression of ghosts within each spectator’s mind: a linking of cranial computers and internal displays to produce a shared illusion. Theatre within the mind, extending to stage and screen performances, manifests the Other in the actor and the specter of the spectator. The persistence of ghosts and gods, in various dramatic media today, can be traced not only to the early history of theatre, in its emergence from communal rituals (as considered in the next chapter), but also to the evolution of the human brain, with its internal stages and screens. Likewise, a long tradition of mind/brain (or soul/body) dualism in Western philosophy, which reached its climax in the early modern, Cartesian Theatre of the mind’s cogito (“I think” therefore I exist), is now being reconsidered, through new views of ghosts in the machinery of the brain. How did the human brain become an internal theatre—and is there a central director or playwright in charge? AN UNCONSCIOUS COGITO In his theory of cognitive evolution, philosopher Daniel Dennett distinguishes certain (“Skinnerian”) creatures, who act directly in relation to their outer environment, from other (“Popperian”) creatures who develop an “inner selective environment,” imagining outside options so as to make better choices and survive more often (Darwin’s 374–76). Dennett sees this selective edge as a crucial evolutionary step toward the use of language by humans as “virtuoso

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preselectors” (377). Humans perform and speak in the brain’s inner environment (or theatre) in order to plan ahead. But the human brain continues to show the heritage of these earlier evolutionary stages (Skinnerian and Popperian) in its “instinctual actions” and its “imitative actions.” It also shows the next evolutionary step of (“Gregorian”) creatures such as chimpanzees, whose inner environments involve “designed portions” that enable the use of tools to redesign the outer environment. Human language is a particularly powerful type of “mind-tool,” joining separate persons “into a single cognitive system” (378, 381). This evolutionary trail reveals the current cognitive levels in the genetic “hard wiring” of the human brain. It suggests a correspondence of Dennett’s three types of creatures—each showing the instinctual, imitative, and linguistic elements of human cognition— with Lacan’s three orders of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic. Dennett’s model, like Lacan’s, stresses the interconnectedness of human minds, as each person forms an inner environment through these various modes of thought and communication. As Dennett puts it, “each individual human brain, thanks to its communicative links, is the beneficiary of the cognitive labors of the others in a way that gives it unprecedented powers” (381). But Lacanian theory also explores the downside to this evolutionary leap. Human minds do gain great creative powers through the preselective skill of imagination and the cooperative tool of language. Yet, fantasies and words block the more direct interaction that purely instinctual (Skinnerian) creatures have with their environments. “The letter kills,” according to Lacan, masking and replacing the Real with Imaginary associations and Symbolic designs (“Position” 275).1 The Real of human nature is thus experienced as loss, desire, and lack of being—transforming our remnant instincts in vastly creative and destructive ways. This evolutionary advantage and tragic flaw of the human mind has produced ritual, theatre, cinema, TV, and the Internet as ways to externalize the inner environments of individual brains. Humans not only remake their external environments through imagination and word-tools. They also use the internal environment of the mind’s theatre to project its drama onto an external, fictional space: sharing

Will the Real Cogito Please Stand Up?

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fantasies, dreams, and ghosts in preselective and rememorative ways, before and after acting in the Real. Dennett describes the inner selective environment of the human brain’s evolution in his 1995 book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. But his 1991 book, Consciousness Explained, disputes the notion of a “Cartesian Theater” within the human mind. Dennett uses current brain research in his postmodern attack on Descartes’s cogito (ostensibly located in the brain’s pineal gland) as a central point of selfawareness in the mind (104–7). He also disputes the “Freudian playwright” in the unconscious as author of our dreams (14). He argues instead that the brain functions more like an “audience” driven by its anxieties to ask questions and form multiple narrative drafts with no single, authoritative, egoistic, or cognitive center of gravity (14, 113, 418). And yet, Dennett ultimately argues that there is no audience within the mind, as there is no theatre (128). How is this view to be reconciled with the model of a theatre-like internal environment in Dennett’s later book? Is he himself creating “multiple drafts” without a consistent authorial ego connecting the two works?2 Dennett recognizes the persistent cultural “meme” (the gene-like idea) of “Self” throughout human history.3 Yet the truth he finds behind this idea is not that of an immortal soul or “ghost puppeteer” (Consciousness 418), but of something more like a computer program— a personality that might survive the death of its bodily hardware by being transferred to other media (430). In the end Dennett admits that “the myth of the Cartesian Theater,” with the Self as a single author (cogito), “comes naturally to us, and is probably even genetically favored as a way of perceiving and thinking” (458). For philosophical as well as scientific reasons, Dennett insists on articulating a postmodern counter-meme, “breaking the single-minded agent down into miniagents and microagents.” But he acknowledges that “the Cartesian Theater keeps coming back to haunt us . . . even after its ghostly dualism has been denounced and exorcized” (107). Dennett’s Multiple Drafts model replaces both the ego playwright and self-reflective audience of the mind with “narrative fragments at various stages of editing in various places in the brain”—stating this phrase twice in his book (113, 135). Yet such repetition exemplifies the ritual patterns of thought in any mind, a tendency to conform to

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certain orders of thought, despite Dennett’s ideal of continual revision. His narrative model repeatedly resists the theatrical representations of memory, dream, and fantasy (113). In contrast, Lacan’s model of Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary orders—both within the mind and in human reality—involves narrative, fragmentary, and theatrical dimensions of thought. Neuroscientific research supports such a view. According to Karl Pribram, “the human brain organizes both a Cartesian Theatre composed of reference frames and a Narrative Consciousness composed of episodically parsed events” (38)—with the former in the brain’s “posterior convexal systems” and the latter in the “frontolimbic systems” (34). Bernard Baars describes parts of the brain as an unconscious audience focusing the spotlight of attention on certain conscious actors onstage, guided by the “observing and agentive” Self as director (Theater 145), as explored further in chapter 5 here. Neuroscientists also argue for a central organizing principle in the human brain—not located in the pineal gland as Descartes speculated 400 years ago, but elsewhere. Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman theorizes a “dynamic core” as the functional cluster of neural mappings in the brain (chapter 7 here). Antonio Damasio finds a “protoself ” in the emotions of animals, which has evolved into the feeling of feelings in human self-awareness (Feeling 22, 230, 310). And Jaak Panksepp maps a “SELF system” in the human brain: “a neuronal structure which provides the basis for self-representation and primal forms of intentionality that help generate distinct emotional feelings” (in Carter 186). Likewise, Slavoj Zizek critiques Dennett’s Multiple Drafts model as only partly correct. “[O]ur conscious awareness is fragmentary, partial, discontinuous: one never encounters a ‘Self ’ as a determinate representation in and of our mind. However . . . the unity of the subject, that which makes him a One, is unconscious” (“Cartesian” 266). According to Zizek, Dennett’s model rejects the “objectively subjective” view of a “theater, a screen in our mind in which the mind directly perceives itself” (267). Yet, Zizek finds this, too, in the Freudian unconscious—in Lacan’s theory that “the Cartesian cogito is the subject of the unconscious” (268). Cogito ergo sum: I think unconsciously, therefore I am. This unconscious subject is not the Symbolic name,


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nor the Imaginary ego, but the Real void temporarily “filled in by the ever-changing centers of narrative gravity” (261)—and of theatrical performance.4 PSYCHOANALYTIC AND NEUROLOGICAL MIRRORS We can see Lacan’s Cartesian Theater, with the unconscious unity of a backstage (or projection booth) cogito, as a further step in Dennett’s evolutionary trail of a preselective environment in the human mind. The unconscious cogito not only produces instinctive, mimetic, and linguistic acts on an internal stage and screen, giving tentative identity to the subject. It also creates symptomatic virtual realities, remaking the external world. Theatre, film, and television are thus preselective and rememorative environments: extensions of the inner Cartesian Theatre, sharing the play of possible worlds that humans could make or could have made real, through dreams and waking fantasies in multiple brains. These dramatic media express the creative and destructive fictions of Self and reality, showing our ego ghosts and superego gods as evolution’s biggest gamble—especially as the world becomes more and more a stage and screen in the postmodern. Dennett says the illusion of Self is a social construction, given temporary stability by a “web of beliefs” (Consciousness 423).5 But Lacan specifies the desire of the Other in the unconscious as the locus for the performance of Self.6 This is exemplified in the infant’s glee at its whole image in the mirror, showing the illusory mask of its own ego in the Other’s view, despite the child’s experience of an uncoordinated and fragmented body as the Real actor (Écrits 3–9). Each mind throughout life creates many Imaginary egos (imagos) as ghost characters that it tries to play in various situations and scenes, using the brain’s internal environment to mirror and rehearse the Self ’s performance in the external drama.7 Of course, we can never see what we look like to others in that external performance of Self. Our identity is dispersed throughout the many internal theatres of those watching and acting with us in life, as well as in the multiple scripts and personas within our own minds. The Symbolic order of

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society helps to nail down our identity with a name, gender, social security number, and other labels. The ghostly potentials of our selves play within, and yet beyond such frames, while striving to fill or express the Real subject as lack of being—misrecognized by language and alienated by the Other’s desire. Even in the predominantly secular, anti-metaphysical postmodern, we perform our ideal egos, internally and externally, for the ego ideals of the Other watching us. Mass-media stars and their characters become the ego ghosts that we mimic, consciously or unconsciously, while superego gods watch and restrain us, or provoke perverse acts.8 But despite our very different ghostly media and diverse gods, we share with all prior human cultures an awareness of character mortality, of life’s temporal stage, and the desire to create an ego that will transcend such a limit, both within the mind and with the Other beyond it. Ultimately, the metaphysical Other may not exist (as Lacan tells us), but it continues to haunt us, like the cogito, with illusions of divinity and soul. Specific ideas about ghosts and gods are embedded in humans at a very young age, not only through the cultural and religious contexts of their particular environment, but also through the direct role models of the immediate family. The infant’s joy at perceiving its whole body in the mirror, between 6 and 18 months, reveals the beginnings of an Oedipal drama within the developing human brain, according to Lacan (Écrits 3–6). The desires of the (m)Other, or primary caretaker, form the illusion of Self in the child, masking its lack of being, like the mirror reflecting a complete body,9 in contrast to the infant’s lack of physical coordination and its eventual fantasies of dismemberment, as a “fragmented body.” The infant already experiences a fundamental alienation from its animal nature, through the Imaginary identity it gains from the desires of the (m)Other, in the external womb of family and culture. But it also endures a further separation from being, evoking fantasies of a lost, symbiotic oneness with the mother (and specific lost objects in the metonymy of desire), through the intervention of language and law, which Lacan calls “the Name and No of the Father.” The phantoms of a whole Self in the mirror and of fragmented selves elsewhere arise through this process of human alienation from


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animal being and further separation from maternal symbiosis. Through the big people outside, the child learns specific cultural figures for the ghosts and gods of the (m)Other’s desires and the Father’s prohibitions—while developing personal fantasies and unconscious symptoms in relation to them. The mirror stage, along with earlier experiences in the cultural womb, indoctrinates the child into human technology. The particular theatre of lacking being around the infant (with diapers, crib, stroller, bottle, toys, etc.) shapes the internal theatre of its developing brain and its illusory sense of Self, as both matter and spirit, in relation to other materials and personas around it. Thus, the ghosts and gods of Self and Other emerge through physical aspects of the human brain (considered in the oddnumbered chapters here) and various cultural apparitions onstage and onscreen (explored in the even-numbered chapters). According to current neurological research, more than 90 per cent of cranial activity in a mature brain is unconscious (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 152).10 This relates to certain Freudian theories, which can now be demonstrated empirically, according to Ramachandran: denial, repression, reaction formation (asserting the opposite), rationalization, and humor—as defense mechanisms of the conscious mind against unconscious contradictions (153–55). Thus, ghosts of Self develop in various stages of life and consciousness, through the theatre of the brain and beyond it, to mask (i.e., hide yet reveal) the many Other selves of unconscious neuronal patterns that etch specific synaptic channels, repeating habitual thoughts and actions that may contradict the mind’s executive controls. The numerous unconscious perceptions, associations, and projections in the brain at any given moment, multiplying exponentially into the past, could never be fully recalled to consciousness. But the brain is still shaped by specific experiences, especially in childhood. The human infant’s normal prematurity of birth means that the gestation of body and brain continue in the external womb of culture (into the mirror stage and other Oedipal phases), altering how the genetic codes are expressed and how the cranial computer becomes wired.11 Experiences in the first two years of life, like traumatic memories later on, are repressed from conscious recall in the maturing brain.12 And yet, such experiences shape the brain’s circuitry in

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fundamental ways. They are recorded in the brain as “habits and beliefs (procedural and semantic knowledge) rather than explicit, episodic memories” (Solms and Turnbull 169).13 Early experiences and severe traumas may be recalled later in life only as reconstructed dramas—or “screen memories” in Freud’s terms. But they have a profound effect on the “neuronal pruning” of the brain: how the wiring is fundamentally organized at early stages and crucial points in one’s life (Solms and Turnbull 145–48). ANIMAL ATTACHMENTS Such neurological research gives a material grounding to Zizek’s Lacanian theory that the unity of the subject is unconscious. The Real order of procedural and semantic knowledge, in the offstage cogito of the brain’s unconscious habits and beliefs, while inaccessible to conscious, episodic memory, nevertheless produces profound effects onstage, through the Imaginary and Symbolic orders of the Self, with its dream ghosts, fantasy gods, and screen memories. Thus, the human experience of Self-alienation, through big-brain consciousness and “lack of being” (or the loss of being in nature as a fully instinctual animal), forms the foundation for the mind’s Cartesian Theatre and its various ghosts performing the desires of the Other. Cognitive experiments with monkeys and rats offer empirical evidence for the profound significance of alienation and separation in the development of the human infant. Newborn monkeys that are isolated for the first 6–12 months of life and then returned to the company of other monkeys act “like severely disturbed or autistic children,” whereas the same procedure with older monkeys has little effect (Kandel 513). Likewise, two phases have been discovered in the human infant’s response to separation from its mother. First, there is anxiety and anger, shown by clinging, following, searching, and crying, as adaptive mechanisms to help the infant find its parent again. But then, after further separation, the infant shifts to sadness and despair, “prepar[ing] the infant for prolonged passive survival achieved by conserving energy and withdrawing from danger” (514). Related behaviors are found with rat pups, showing specific biochemical changes in the mammalian brain, at the “molecular level.”


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If the pup is removed from its mother for just a few minutes during the first two weeks of life, its vocalizations increase, eliciting more maternal care when she returns: licking, grooming, and carrying the pup. This increase of “attachment behavior” by the mother reduces the production of glucocorticoid hormones in the pup’s brain, as a response to stress, for the rest of its life, lessening its “fearfulness and vulnerability to stress-related disease.” However, when a pup is separated from the mother for longer periods (3–6 hours per day for 2 weeks), the opposite occurs: the mother ignores the pup and it shows an increase of glucocorticoid responses to stress in later life. “Thus, differences in an infant’s interactions with its mother . . . are crucial risk factors for an individual’s future responses to stress.” Likewise, repeated stress in humans, with elevated glucocorticoids over many months or years, “causes atrophy of neurons of the hippocampus,” permanently affecting memory, as well as anxiety. Eric Kandel summarizes this research to argue for the significance of biology and cognitive neuroscience to Freudian psychoanalysis. But I would add that it relates even more to Lacan’s insight about the human lack of being, articulated in the specific script of each infant’s alienation and separation from the (m)Other, through the Father’s prohibitions and interpretations. All humans, as members of a bigbrained, prematurely born, symbolic species, share a fundamental loss of natural being (like the infant monkey or rat affected by the loss of maternal attachment). Human nature and its instincts are radically transformed through the inevitable childhood drama of alienation and separation—within a particular family and culture as external womb and man-made environment.14 If rat pups can have their brain wiring and stress hormone responses changed forever, due to short periods of separation from the mother or longer periods of alienation without the maternal rituals of reattachment, then the human infant’s alienation from Mother Nature through language and culture—plus the restructuring of primal emotions in its brain through particular parental rites—must be even more profound. Indeed, it is estimated that the human gestational period has been cut in half by evolution. In comparison with other primates, human pregnancy should last 18 months instead of 9 (Shlain 8n). Thus, the external womb of human culture profoundly replaces the stable

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intrauterine cultivation of genetic instincts—with a highly variable, man-made environment and its alienating, epigenetic factors. The human child bears a definite genetic inheritance within its newborn brain. Yet it enters the external, Imaginary and Symbolic theatre of its family environment “with billions more synapses” than it will use later in life (Solms and Turnbull 146–47).15 The majority of the neural pruning occurs in early childhood, shedding much of the “potential connections between neurons that might be needed to create internal maps and models of the world” (147). But this pruning process continues, to a lesser degree, throughout life. Instead of maintaining neural models for “all the possible worlds we might find ourselves in,” our brains strengthen particular connections through their repeated use, while others atrophy or “die” (146). This selection process of neural pruning will be considered in more detail in chapter 7. The mind’s internal theatre of Imaginary and Symbolic worlds “projects” its sensory perceptions onto three lobes of the neocortex— occipital for vision, temporal for hearing and smell, and parietal for somatic sensation—mapping and modeling the world outside (Solms and Turnbull 21–23). It then integrates and reinterprets such projections, through associations, memory traces, and emotions in other areas of the brain. But humans, as virtuoso preselectors, also continue to use some of their excess neural pathways to stage and screen other possible worlds through fantasies, dreams, and art— with less constraint in the brain’s frontal lobe (212). The shared, external theatres of human culture (and each family) interact with the internal theatre of each person’s brain, extending the use of certain neural connections and possible worlds, while pruning away others. Especially in childhood, but also throughout life, this process sculpts the Real subject of the unconscious cogito, as well as shaping the ghostly figures of Self and Other onstage. In summary, there is neurological evidence for Dennett’s philosophical notion of the human brain’s inner, preselective environment, using language as a mind-tool to redesign the outer environment— although the brain still bears elements of prior evolutionary stages as well, with its instinctive, imitative, and linguistic dimensions in certain anatomical areas. I argue that these dimensions of the human mind correspond to Lacan’s orders of the Real, Imaginary, and


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Symbolic—in the brain and in culture. (Lacan’s fourth order of the Symptom [sinthome] may relate as well to the external displays of various theatre technologies, linking the other three orders in many brains.) There is also neuroscientific support for specific theatrical elements inside the brain, not just its narrative drafting process, which Dennett emphasizes. And there is evidence for, though much debate about, a central organizing principle in the brain: as observing audience and active director (Baars), as dynamic functional cluster of neural mappings (Edelman), as proto- and core self in the animal emotions of human awareness (Damasio), or as the unconscious “ever-changing” center of narrative gravity and yet persistent authorial cogito of the mind’s Cartesian Theatre (Zizek). Neuroscientific evidence can be found, too, for Lacan’s theory of the Real as a split and fragmented subjectivity (like Dennett’s postmodern microagents of the mind), in its lack of being through the cultural desires of the Other. This arises in each child through its primal alienation and specific experiences of separation from the (m)Other, in the external womb of the family environment, pruning the neuronal theatre of the infant’s brain—as in the effects of attachment loss for experimental monkeys and rats. Thus, the ghost of Self emerges as a fictional corollary to the unconscious cogito, along with partial selves and godlike ideals of the Other, in the theatres within and between human brains. Like the primal knowledge in each person’s brain, which is inaccessible to conscious memory, the vast majority of theatrical activity in Western culture can only be partially reconstructed. Yet the traces available today of primal rites and ancient dramas show key elements in the cultural evolution of the human brain’s internal, as well as external, theatres.16 The next chapter looks at such traces in the archeological remains of prehistoric burial rites and the texts of ancient dramas, using current psychoanalytic theories and neuroscientific insights about the ghosts and gods that still play on various stages within our skulls. These theatrical traces will reverberate, too, with the further explorations of Self, selves, and Other in the brain’s internal theatre through chapters 3 and 5. Chapters 4 and 6 will then investigate the Roman shades and medieval ghosts of Shakespeare’s plays, written and performed at the time of Descartes’s cogito

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meditations—but also projecting toward our own time through various film versions. Despite his rationalist epistemology, Descartes needed God as the Other to guarantee his cogito reasoning (as he speculated that an evil genie might be deceiving his brain). The pages ahead explore how the Other is likewise invoked, in various good and evil forms, from the brain’s inner theatre to the spirits of stage and screen.

2. Ancient Specters (Prehistoric, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman) x

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ver 80,000 years ago, prehistoric humans buried their dead—and left animal offerings with the bodies. At the cave of Qafzeh (Israel), “a child was found buried with the skull and antlers of a deer” (Mithen 180).1 In the cave of Skuhl, a body was found “on its back, with the jaws of a wild boar placed within its hands. These seem to imply ritualized burial activity, and a belief in religious ideologies.” At such burial sites, “symbolic tools” have also been found that indicate “advanced linguistic-cognitive ability” (Lieberman 148). At least 70,000 years ago, Neanderthals (a distinct species related to Homo sapiens) also buried their dead.2 Evidence from gravesites throughout Europe and the Middle East indicate certain funeral rites3 with the cadaver placed in a sleeping or fetal position, with the head facing west and the feet pointing east. A few remains have been found with fauna placed in the hands or the body, along with red ocher, a colored pigment possibly used for symbolic ritual. Some Neandert[h]als were buried together, meaning that entire kin groups remained united after death. (Ramanan)

Various species of medicinal flowers were placed on the body at one site (Solecki 249). The “orderly distribution of pollen grains” indicates that the flowers were “arranged deliberately” (Leaky and Lewin, Origins 125). Other sites contain “tool and food offerings,” showing a belief in and preparation for the afterlife (Ramanan).4 There is also evidence that the corpses were bound with thongs, perhaps through fear of zombies and ghosts.5 “The placement of heavy stone slabs upon their graves may also be seen as impeding their dead from

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returning. The defleshing of the body could be symbolic of preventing its spirit from haunting them” (Ramanan).6 These prehistoric humans and Neanderthals had larger brains than the average modern human.7 Their burial sites and possible rites reveal a ghostly theatre within the early human mind: hopes and fears about the Self continuing on or returning after death.8 A theatre within the mind must have preceded the ritual drama evidenced by prehistoric burial sites. An imitative, imaginary, inner environment not only reconceived the living, external environment, but also mapped a potential afterlife—some sense of the cosmos (with significant cardinal directions) beyond the mortal world. Prehistoric humans probably had a more communal and less individualistic sense of Self than we do today. Yet, their graves show an attempt not just to bury kin groups together, but also to aid or avert the powers of a distinct Self within each body: using animal remains, tools, and medicinal plants—or bound limbs, stone weights, and defleshed bones. Through such acts and props, regarding dead bodies and their potential ghosts, we can see, too, a sense of good and evil spirits in the relation of Self to Other, as a drama of agonistic forces in the theatre of each person’s life and death. MUMMY DRAMA Four to five thousand years ago, the ancient Egyptians created much more elaborate burial sites than prehistoric humans and Neanderthals, giving their pharaohs great riches, food, and servants for the next stage of life. But the pharaohs, living and dead, also acted in a processional drama on the banks of the Nile.9 The dead king’s mummy played the role of Osiris, the god dismembered by his evil brother Set and then re-membered by their sister Isis. The dead king’s son, the new pharaoh, played Osiris’s son, the god Horus, who had also been wounded by Set and lost his “Eye of Power” (Rothenberg 134–37, 455–56). But the drama showed the newly crowned pharaoh as mastering the villain, using the power of his father’s mummy and his own lost, yet restored eye (plus the other eye he retained). The restored Eye of Power was repeatedly symbolized by a loaf of bread and various other props in scenes presented at

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different points along the Nile: a sacrificial ram, grain, scepters, crown, stave, milk, meat, carnelian-beads, falcon-standards, plumes, and black and green eye-salve. In one such scene, the young pharaoh (as Horus) called the dead pharaoh’s mummy (Osiris): “noble” and “beautiful” (Rothenberg 137; Gaster 387).10 A fragrant bough was put onboard a barge, with workmen staggering under its weight, to symbolize the continued, ghostly power of the dead king to conquer his chaotic brother. The new pharaoh, as Horus, said to the priest playing Set, “You bend under him, you plot no more against him!” This performance of ghostly control over the rebellious Set was also repeated in various ways—grain on the backs of animals, red paint dressing the barge, and a pillar bound and lowered by a rope—as the show moved to significant locations in the new pharaoh’s domain, along the banks of the Nile (Gaster 389, 391).11 As mentioned earlier, there is a normal “prematurity” in human birth, so that the large brain can fit through the birth canal. This would seem to be an evolutionary defect in our species, making the newborn more vulnerable and dependent. Yet, the infant’s lack of maturity as it leaves the womb transforms its human environment into an external womb. Like the expanded theatre of representation and preselection within the human mind, the theatre of culture outside the mother’s body is a malleable space of becoming, a chora12 within the patriarchal symbolic order. Rather than living by instinct and adapting to the natural environment over many generations, humans change their habitat, taking control of their evolution in fundamental ways. The human infant experiences its final stage of uterine life in a cultural womb that its society and primary caretakers create beyond the severed umbilicus. Through numerous interactions with others outside it, an infant’s sense of Self grows into the illusion of ego, like a whole image in the mirror, screening the Real lack of being and fragmented bodily sensations of the premature, uncoordinated child. This split—between the ideal Self in the Other’s desire and the Real lack in the body—produces good and evil identifications, like the restoring of Horus’s physical wholeness, against the threat of fragmentation, in the drama of the new pharaoh’s coronation rite.13 Horus, with his restored Eye of Power, masters Set. But the evil one

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remains a disruptive danger. The dead father’s mummy, as Symbolic frame for the new king’s theatrical mirror of ego power, also shows dismemberment and wholeness, death and life, in its stiff containment of Set’s chaotic threat, as a noble, beautiful, and heavy corpse— or ghost. The human infant may initially experience the threat of chaos through hunger, loss of physical contact, or overstimulation (the painful joy of jouissance). But the illusory identity of ego and the fragile framework of communal order can be shored up by figuring an external evil, such as the ancient Set or an enemy nation or terrorist group today. There might be actual dangers in a particular human environment, especially for the premature newborn. Yet, the general threat of violence at any point in life, evoking the primal inner terror of ego vulnerability, may trigger a demonizing of the Other, justifying preemptive strikes against characters identified as evil. This is shown by the new pharaoh as Horus mastering Set and thus potential threats in his future reign, by focusing collective anxiety on certain sacrificial objects. Even today, the theatres of war, terrorism, or daily life call for sacrificial martyrs and scapegoats, giving more certitude to the fragile ego, ironically, through its own and the other’s destruction. PARENTAL OTHERS The violent demands of ego ghosts and superego gods, with mortal fears and immortal desires, can be seen more fully in the dramas of ancient Greece and Rome, where Western individualism had its beginnings.14 Not only the melodramatic fight of good against evil, but also the tragic struggle against fate and the gods as divine rulers (or superpowers) became displayed through the new arts of theatre and democracy. Yet, much of the conflict in Greek tragedy of the fifth century BC also focused on the primary cultural womb of each human life: the family. Take the case of Orestes. As a baby he went with his mother to the supposed wedding of his sister, Iphegenia, at Aulis. Instead of participating in her wedding there, Orestes and his mother, Clytemnestra, experienced the sacrifice of Iphegenia by her father,

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Agamemnon, as the goddess Artemis had demanded, so the Greeks could have favorable winds for their war trip to Troy (Euripides, Iphegenia). While his father was gone then, fighting that war, Orestes was sent as a child into exile, while his mother took another man, Aegisthus as her lover. When Agamemnon returned home victorious from the war (in the first play of Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy, 458 BC), Clytemnestra and her lover murdered him, partly in revenge for his killing of Iphegenia. Before coming back himself to that much altered womb of home, Orestes sought the advice of Apollo’s oracle and was told to avenge the murder of his father. Compelled by that superego, Orestes killed his mother and her lover, then fled her ghost and the raging Furies15 (in the second and third plays of Aeschylus’s Oresteia). Positioned thus between both parents’ ghosts, Orestes rebelled against one side—the Furies’ choral, matriarchal vengeance—seeking justice from the patriarchal superegos, Apollo and Athena, as well as from the people of Athens. Orestes’s tragic struggle with furious gods, resolved by the democratic Athenian court (with the goddess Athena casting the final vote in his favor), thus had its start in the bloody womb and ghosts of home. In the second play of the trilogy, Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers Orestes relates the details of Apollo’s oracle to his sister Electra, who helps him to kill his mother and her lover. “ ‘Give them their turn of death,’ it said” (Roche 117).16 Orestes finds himself cast by the Other’s desire in the role of death-bringer. But it is not only the god’s command that he obeys; he also acts in fear of his father’s ghost. (The play takes place near Agamemnon’s tomb.) If he does not kill Clytemnestra and Aegisthus in revenge, Orestes must pay for it, he says, with his own “sweet soul.” His punishment would be both mental and physical: “swarms of worries” and “[l]eprosies that mount the flesh.” But all of these psychosomatic guilt pains, “spells from under the earth,” would arise as the venom of the Erinyes, “springing from my father’s blood.”17 Orestes will avoid these Furies of his father’s ghost, yet evoke his mother’s, by turning her into a ghost.18 Orestes’s sister, Electra, commiserates with him about “that which we suffer from those who bore us” (Roche 123). But she also voices

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the source of the murderous rage that will be turned against their father’s killers: “For we like the wolf are raw / with the savage heart of our mother.” The animal emotions of Orestes’s and Electra’s limbic brains repeat the symptomatic savagery of their mother, after praying to their father’s ghost at his tomb. They want him, as ideal ego and ego ideal, as actor and spectator haunting their neocortex, to “impel” them with rightness and to “look at” them as they act for him,19 using their paleomammalian limbic drives (127). But first they hear from the Chorus of captive Trojan women (who are slaves of Clytemnestra and libation bearers at the tomb of Agamemnon) about their mother’s recent dream of giving birth to a serpent: “Clots of blood it sucked in with the milk” (Roche 129). Orestes identifies with this baby vampire: “I pray this dream comes true in me.” (Later in the trilogy, the Furies also express a vampirelike passion to suck Orestes’s blood, in response to his murder of Clytemnestra.)20 Orestes analyzes his mother’s dream as her guilty desire for self-destruction through her own child. She placed him in that role of snake from her womb to receive a dying jouissance (erotic ecstasy), as predicted in her dream. Orestes uses his internal theatre, his mind’s preselective environment, to enter his mother’s internal theatre of the reported dream, reimagining his role as a snake on that Imaginary/Symbolic stage, before acting it out in the Real. He thus presents to the external theatre audience an intersection of past fantasy and future action, of his mother’s mind and his own, as climax to their erotic, death-drive conflict. “If this snake . . . mouthed the breast that suckled me, [blending] the sweet milk with clotted blood, / and if she shouted out with pain and shock— / then this hideous freak she nursed / means she surely dies: dies viciously.” Orestes is already here a ghost of the fatal snake in his mother’s dream. But he then makes himself a ghost in another sense, before giving his mother her dream of deadly ecstasy. He pretends to be a stranger when his mother appears at the door of his long lost home, saying that he met a man on the road with a message for Orestes’s parents: “tell them he is dead” (Roche 135).21 He uses this disguise to penetrate the cultural womb of his home, where his father has been sacrificed and replaced. Yet, before Aegisthus is sacrificed in turn, as Oedipal stepfather, the Chorus makes the theatre audience complicit

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in that violent act. Addressing Orestes, they refer to the watching ghosts and gods, who want to see a bloody vengeance in his homecoming. “For your friends beneath the earth, / for your friends above, prefer / a brutal rage to joy” (141). But such “friends” are also in the theatron, the auditorium of the ancient theatre. Orestes acts on behalf of those spectators, as well as the paternal specter and patriarchal gods in the theatre of his brain. Once he has done the deed, killing both Aegisthus and Clytemnestra offstage, Orestes is possessed by a tragic passion. He becomes a katharma (cathartic scapegoat) exorcizing the mortal fears and vengeful desires in his audience.22 “Like a charioteer plunging off the course / I cannot reign my bolting spirits in. / Next to my heart a bursting terror waits / to mewl and prance” (Roche 150–51). Yet, in the very next line, he is calm again. He explains that he was justified in killing and will now seek sanctuary with Apollo. Orestes thus becomes, to postmodern eyes, a split Self, both Dionysian and Apollonian (in Nietzsche’s sense), inheriting the multiple drafts of warfare between his parents. The play ends with Orestes also split between the theatre within his mind, projected outside him, and the world of his audience, as it conflicts with his vision. He sees the Furies of his mother’s revenge, “Gorgons draped in black, / teeming with their serpents knotted,” ready to chase him (Roche 152). “You do not see them,” he says to the Chorus and theatre spectators. “But I see them. / I am driven, driven—I cannot stay.”23 The Libation Bearers ends with Orestes driven offstage by a sight that the audience and Chorus can only imagine through his words, showing his alienation from both groups and the disconnection of his internal theatre from theirs. Yet, in the final play of the trilogy, the audience sees the Furies, too, changing the communal connection.24 In The Eumenides Aeschylus expands the fictional world onstage to reveal more of the inner theatre of Orestes’s mind, through the play’s metaphysical characters. The ghost of his mother and the Furies of her vengeance both appear onstage. Although the ancient audience may have believed that the dead Clytemnestra existed in the underworld and rose from there to wake the Furies, modern spectators are more likely to imagine her ghost and these goddesses

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haunting Orestes’s internal environment. He alone saw the Furies in the second play of the trilogy, but that inner metaphysical vision is displayed onstage in the third. The male actor wearing the mask of Clytemnestra’s ghost and the Chorus playing the Furies reveal certain figures of the Real from within Orestes’s troubled mind. This shift in perspective from the second play to the third shows an uncanny relation between postmodern views of multiple or splitsubjectivity and premodern myths of heroes, ghosts, and gods.25 The Western meme of Self—as ancient actor departing from the choral community, as modern Cartesian ego anchored in reason, and as postmodern narrative drafts without a stable author or divine audience— did not develop in a simple linear evolution with each new species replacing those of the past. Prior ghosts of Self haunt each successive period. Some aspects of premodern communal identity may even be returning, for better or worse, through our postmodern splitsubjectivity and mass-media theatres. Orestes’s communal identity is turned inside-out from the second to the third play of The Oresteia. He works with his sister Electra, his friend Pylades, and the sympathetic Chorus of Trojan women in The Libation Bearers to achieve revenge for his father against his mother and her lover. But in the next play, he flees alone to Delphi, to Apollo’s shrine, and is told by that god to continue fleeing to Athens (with the silent Hermes as his escort) in order to find a new community there to judge him. The Eumenides shows Orestes’s desperate need for communal acceptance in another place. Yet it also shows his extreme alienation from home and family through the anti-communal chorus of Furies pursuing him. These choral monsters display the self-destructive fragility of Orestes’s character, after he has killed the woman who gave birth to him. But they represent, too, the demons in any human mind, as it finds its Self through the desires of the (m)Other, with its primary caretakers as initial communal womb, which it must reject in order to find a new identity through a larger community beyond the home. Today’s hollow, postmodern Self, lacking being without a central narrative author in the mind, relates in a particular sense to Orestes’s plight. Godlike egos are magnified by our screen media, along with the mirage of community as mass audience. Yet, the screen

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gods only serve to alienate each spectator even more, once the illusions of fan identification fade. In contrast to the modern Cartesian cogito, grounded in solitary reason, the postmodern theatre of the mind is more like the ancient display of Orestes’s mind onstage—as he shifts between alien, ghostly, and communal identities. A GHOST IN GODS’ DREAMS During the prologue of The Eumenides, a strange thing happens. After Orestes leaves with Apollo’s advice and Hermes as his escort, the ghost of Clytemnestra appears. Yet she not only displaces the other, patriarchal gods who have just helped Orestes. She also arises as a dream of the sleeping Furies. How can a mortal’s ghost (even if she is related to Zeus) be inside the dream of underground goddesses?26 If Clytemnestra’s ghost represents the vengeful desire of the (m)Other within Orestes’s mind, through his matricidal guilt, then the Furies show a deeper, death-drive madness, sleeping in his unconscious. At this point in the trilogy, Orestes has just received patriarchal comfort from Apollo and the promise of a new Self through communal reconnection at Athens with Athena’s help. Apollo also showed Orestes the sleeping Furies, while promising to be his “guardian . . . from a distance” (Roche 161). The Furies are thus the antithesis to, yet also a part of Apollo as superego: the obscene underside27 to his earlier demand that Orestes revenge his father’s death by killing his mother. Apollo now admits responsibility for Orestes’s act: “for I it was who told you to take your mother’s life” (162). But the Furies show the self-punishing violence in that patriarchal demand, as a vengeful, death-drive id (or abject chora) within Orestes, which his superego god can only temporarily anesthetize. Before he leaves the stage in the play’s prologue, Apollo gives his view of the sleeping Furies: “these damsels of disgust, / hoary urchin hags with whom no god can mix, / nor man nor beast—ever” (Roche 161–62). Yet, a woman can apparently mix with these “hags” if she is a ghost in their dreams. Clytemnestra’s ghost, speaking to (and within) the sleeping Furies, recalls the many sacrifices she offered them while she was alive on earth. Now she dwells in the

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underworld, where the Furies also reside. She wakes them from within their dreams to make them chase Orestes, reminding them of the debt they owe through her past sacrifices—and the debt her son owes for her murder. Clytemnestra successfully rouses the Furies, first making them yelp like hounds as they sleep, then getting them to wake one another and chase Orestes in sympathy with her vengeance. In the second strophe of their ode, the waking chorus of Furies recounts how they had been struck inside their dreams by Clytemnestra, hit hard by “a horseman’s goad / Right in the midriff, right / Under the heart” (Roche 165). Clytemnestra said something similar before she left the stage, her words taking effect as she desired, as whips and spurs. (There is a pun here in the original Greek between reproach and dreams, oneidos and oneiraton.)28 Apollo, evoked by the Furies’ complaints, reproaches them as well, sending them away from the territory of his shrine. But first they offer an excuse for Clytemnestra’s murder of her husband: “Such a killing does not count as blood of kin” (168). Apollo gives a similar excuse for Orestes at his trial in Athens later in the play. Orestes’s killing of Clytemnestra does not count as parricide: “The mother is not parent of her so-called child / but only nurse of the new-sown seed” (Roche 186). Apollo gives as evidence the goddess Athena, a fortunate exhibit since she will cast the deciding vote. She shows, as daughter of Zeus, “never nurtured in the darkness of a womb,” that the father alone is the true parent. Of course, this also exhibits a cultural struggle between patriarchal and matriarchal rights—with different views of guilt in familial bloodshed. A modern scientific or postmodern feminist view might side with the Furies against Apollo, unlike Athena at the play’s end. But we can still find kinship today with ancient Greek minds on both sides of this battle of the sexes, through neurology and psychoanalysis. Mark Solms has found neurological evidence to support Freud’s claim that dreams express troubling unconscious thoughts in ways that are coded so as not to wake the sleeper, except in extreme cases. An “arousing stimulus” in the brain activates “appetitive-interest circuits,” which in waking life lead to action; but these are diverted by the “sleep-protection mechanisms” of dreaming (Solms 244). Without

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reference to Lacan, Solms’s terms also suggest the Symbolic and Imaginary aspects of the dream as expressions of Real arousal, deferred to “hallucination” rather than action. Neural mechanisms in the dream work transform the arousing stimulus “symbolically and represent it concretely in the form of a visuospatial hallucination” (246). In The Eumenides, the ghost of Clytemnestra tries to wake the Furies, as appetitive-interest circuits of revenge. But her arousing stimulus, to catch and destroy the guilty ego of Orestes, is deferred through the Furies’ dreaming. As she speaks to them and spikes them with her words, the Chorus initially moans and then cries out: “At him! At him! . . . Get him!” (Roche 164). They are merely dreaming the chase at this point, as the ghost makes clear: “Yelping after game like silly dogs in sleep / which never can stop thinking they are on the chase.” Yet this scene of the ghost talking to the goddesses in their sleep also shows the kinship between the dream mechanism of the human brain and its cultural invention of theatre. Both dreams and theatre defer the violent passions of the drives (the brain’s appetitive-interest circuits), with their danger of communal combustion, into works of Symbolic and Imaginary fantasy—into visuospatial hallucinations without motor activity in real life. This is not enough for Clytemnestra’s ghost. Yet, the artists and spectators of the play enable a dream-like expression, even after the Furies awaken onstage, which may allow for better motor actions in real life through the catharsis of emotions, if this playing with fire does not backfire. Solms goes further in making connections between Freudian psychoanalysis and neurological empiricism in a more recent book, cowritten with Karen Kaplan-Solms. Together they map Freud’s theoretical elements of the mind—superego, ego, and id—onto specific dynamic areas of the brain. For example, they find a meeting between the superego and id in the “ventromesial regions of the prefrontal lobe [where it] merges into the limbic system” (275). This meeting place forms “the ultimate—or at least the deepest— stimulus barrier that the ego has at its disposal” (276). The ancient Greeks displayed such a stimulus barrier of prefrontal-lobe superego against limbic-system id in Apollo’s battle with the (Dionysian) Furies. Both Apollo’s deferral of their hunger into a dream of hunting Orestes and his direct confrontation with

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them, after the ghost of the dead mother spikes them awake with her words, shows this meeting of different gods within the human mind. As the Solmses recall from Freud, “the superego forms a barrier that protects the ego from the incessant demands of instinctual life” (276). Thus, the rage of the Furies, as chthonic goddesses, against “younger Gods” like Apollo (Roche 165), shows the Greek sense of primal stimuli (or remnant instincts) in the brain’s limbic system, which is older in human evolution and shared by other animal species, as well as the threat of older, mother-earth-goddess beliefs and cultures, which the conquering Olympian gods and their human warriors had repressed.29 Likewise, the agreement Athena reaches with the Furies at the end of The Eumenides shows her communal containment of the incessant demands of instinctual life. The Furies threaten to rage against Athena and Athens with a “Leafless and childless Revenge / Rushing like wildfire over the lowlands, / Smearing its death-pus on mortals and meadows” (Roche 192). But Athena reminds them that they were not beaten at the trial, that the votes for and against them were equal prior to her decision. She offers them “a cavernous deep place” as their “promised land,” where they will be “abundantly worshipped.” With a further promise—“you shall be revered with pride and live with me” (193)—she at last convinces them to be peaceful, to become the Eumenides or “Gentle Ones.” Here we see why Apollo sent Orestes to Athens and Athena, why Apollo could not contain the Furies with sleep or rhetoric. It took his sister’s persuasive powers as a young goddess of wisdom to assuage the raging, reciprocal violence of the older, matriarchal goddesses. But this also shows that the Furies are not simply repressed. As the Solmses quote from Freud: “the ego forms its super-ego out of the id” (276). Whether in Athens or in the prefrontal lobe, the superego gods acquire their force from the primal id drives. “The superego is thus both the most abstract and the most primitive part of the ego.” While the Lacanian superego is associated with the patriarchal separation of the child from the maternal id, through the Father’s Name and No in the Oedipal drama, the Oresteian myth presented by Aeschylus shows that both genders are involved on each side of the barrier. Apollo and Athena protect Orestes’s ego and create his

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new communal identity in Athens (for his return to Argos as king). But the ghosts of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon continue to haunt his fragile structure of Self, with their bloody heritage, even if the Furies are temporarily pacified. This exemplifies the gods and ghosts still dwelling in the theatre of the brain today, despite the postmodern disbelief in ancient metaphysics. The Solmses describe the physical organization of the ego, beginning “at the periphery of the body, with the sensory end-organs that convey coded information derived from the outside world to the cortex” (277). This “peripheral perceptual apparatus,” providing the ego’s “first protective barriers” against overstimulation, is “probably genetically predetermined.” But the coded neural data from the body’s senses, after being “analyzed and synthesized” by the spinal cord, brainstem, and thalamus, eventually reach the “unimodal” and then the “heteromodal” cortical zones, which function as the “beginning of the mnemic systems of the ego.” There the learned patterns of perception, association, and memory are stored, filtering new sensations so they do not overwhelm the ego. Otherwise, the brain “would be in an almost constant state of excited arousal,” forcing it to “respond equally to all stimuli,” and thus producing “ego fragmentation or annihilation . . . [in which the] ‘I’ is overwhelmed by a multitude of ‘its’ ” (261, 261n4). Lacan described this threat of ego fragmentation in his theory of the “mirror stage,” where he stressed the vulnerability of the Imaginary ego, especially with the infant’s illusory wholeness in the mirror, to the corps morcelé behind that mask (Écrits 6). The Solmses delineate the basic mold for this spectral mask of Self in “the first months and years of life,” when the “nucleus of the ego,” in and between the “unimodal ‘projection’ zones,” gradually evolves—with connections that “select out certain features of the flood of information” from the senses and then “combine these features into complex synthetic patterns” (256–57). Yet, the shaping and reshaping of an Imaginary ego, within a shifting Symbolic framework of communal connections, threatened by Real losses, continues throughout life— as in the drama of Orestes’s radical alienation from home and parents, his return as a ghost of himself, his primal revenge and

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flight, his pursuit by the ego-fragmenting Furies, and his renewed identity in Athens. Lacan’s Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real orders of superego, ego, and id—shown in Aeschylus’s Apollo/Athena, Orestes, and the Furies of his parental ghosts—are also related to the higher areas of human cognition mapped by the Solmses. The “heteromodal cortical zones” come into play as “ ‘whole-object’ representations come to dominate the fragmentary perceptual operations that are performed at the unimodal cortical level” (259). The infant’s brain no longer analyzes each perceptual scene as various fragments, then integrates them into semantic directories. “Instead we project our expectations onto the perceptual scene, in the form of complex associative representations, and we only adjust these projections if our expectations are not met.” Such learned patterns of expectation, association, and projection, beyond the genetic pre-wiring, are initially “very sensitive to internal and external events,” though they eventually become “relatively permanent” (257–58). Thus, the external theatre of life, as cultural womb, shapes the internal theatre (and cinema) of the mind, whose patterns then screen and structure further perceptions, thoughts, and actions. The heteromodal cortical zones, which were “hierarchically dependent” on the unimodal zones in early life, become dominant instead (259). The brain’s heteromodal zones are located in each hemisphere of the neocortex: the right, visuospatial and left, audioverbal areas of cognition (Kaplan-Solms and Solms 278–79).30 The whole-object representations in the visuospatial right hemisphere are “more closely bound up with object-consciousness,” whereas those in the audioverbal left are more aligned “with self-consciousness” (264). Again, the Solmses relate this division to a notion from Freud that one’s sense of Self arises through language development: “critically listening to oneself and modifying one’s own vocalizations until they match the vocalizations of one’s parents.” However, the neurological map of a split neocortex (with lateralized functions) applies even more to Lacan’s notion of split-subjectivity, which has become axiomatic of postmodern theory. The ego is an illusion of wholeness barely masking the splitting of Self between internal and external representations (of the Other’s desire), as well as between

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right-hemisphere, visuospatial, Imaginary objects31 and left-hemisphere, audioverbal, Symbolic self-reflection.32 Thus, the mirror stage, in infancy and throughout life, is verbal as well as visual. In fact, the significance of the verbal, Symbolic order increases as the subject moves away from its primal relations with the mother figure. Orestes exemplifies this with his progression from a snake-at-thebreast image in his mother’s dream, which he enacts for her, to a newly legitimate, symbolic status through others at the Athenian court. But where is the Lacanian Real in the map of the brain? Of course, it is not located in just one area. Nor are the Imaginary and Symbolic orders solely in the heteromodal zones of the right and left hemispheres. Yet, the Freudian relationships that the Solmses ascribe to certain parts of the brain also point to the unimodal cortical zones, along with the subcortical limbic system and brainstem, as the primary areas of the Real: manifested by fragmentary perceptions of lacking being in the hollow Self and unconscious drives behind conscious desires. Orestes’s fight against his mother and her lover, then flight from the Furies, also illustrates the postmodern subject’s continued fight against and flight from its own abject chora—the lack of a stable, whole, and proper Self. Despite the vast differences between ancient and postmodern cultures, despite the differing dramatic media of theatre and film, parallel structures of the brain express a similar struggle with the Real lack of being, in the extension of human evolution into cultural and theatrical history. Although Euro-American culture has increasingly stressed the autonomous, individual ego—producing the modern dominance of science and materialism over religion and metaphysics— the uncanny ghosts and gods of prior stages still haunt the postmodern mind. In the Symbolic and Imaginary (left and right) hemispheres of the neocortex, and in the Real of the limbic system as animal heritage of the human brain, conflicting societal gods, vengeful parental ghosts, and primal abject Furies continue to threaten the illusory unity of an independent Self. Nature’s great experiment with the human species is still playing out its creative and destructive dramas, through stage and screen, as well as real-life ghosts—in our current evolutionary Geist.

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EAT AND BE EATEN In terms of evolutionary history, something went terribly wrong with Homo sapiens. The development of a bigger brain with an advanced neocortex gave humans a tremendous advantage in adapting to and changing their habitat. But the consequent prematurity of birth and awareness of mortality, along with the extension of the body’s powers through language and technology, inflated the ego (especially the male ego) to make humans the most destructive creatures on earth— capable of extinguishing their own species, along with others in many habitats around the globe. Whether suddenly through war or gradually through environmental pollution and genetic experiments, humans have changed the world’s habitats and accelerated evolution in an out-of-control way. Has the gradual process of nature’s evolutionary experimentation backfired through the human species? Long before the modern and postmodern power to destroy and recreate real and virtual worlds, the ancient Greeks and Romans explored in their drama a fundamental dilemma within the human brain, which still fuels today’s godlike technologies. How can humans survive their consciousness of mortality, their fate as future ghosts? This dilemma is symptomatic of the dual striving for selfawareness and environmental control in human evolution, displayed through tremendous destructiveness as well as creativity in the many experiments of ritual, art, science, and war. For thousands of years, humans have worshipped and feared the good and evil gods of nature and foreign cultures, trying to fend off the forces that threaten to implode the hollow ego. Today, postmodern theory tells us that we are at the end of such metaphysics. Yet we identify with the transcendent stars of the mass media, while dreading the devils of international terrorism. The current advancements of the information age and its global-village theatrics provide vast technological extensions of the audioverbal and visuospatial hemispheres of the brain. But they also magnify the power of the limbic system—the animal part of the human mind—with its potential for tragic violence as shown in the earlier medium of ancient drama. We share with other animal species the four “F” drives in that primal brain: to fight, flee, feed, and fornicate (Ramachandran and

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Blakeslee 177–78).33 Our advanced, self-reflective neocortex frees us to do much more than animal instincts demand. Yet, we are left without the instinctual orders of action adapted to a specific habitat, like other animals have in their evolutionary heritage, to balance the life and death drives. In humans, Eros and Thanatos can be repressed or sublimated, by religion and art, science and commercialism. Their creative and destructive forces may be ascribed to good and evil gods, family ghosts, or neuronal patterns and social rites. But despite great differences among human cultures of the past several millennia, we share with the ancient Greeks and Romans a battle inside our brains, between the neocortical consciousness of mortality, with its transcendent hopes, and the lack of organizing instincts to harmonize our animal drives. Theatre, in ancient times and in various stage and screen media today, extends the conflicts within the brain toward a shared performance experience. Drama, according to Aristotle, offers a potential cathartic healing of its audience (or reader), through tragic sympathy and fear. But theatre can also express the battle of the transcendent neocortex and emotional limbic system in ways that confirm melodramatic stereotypes of clear-cut good and evil figures, with good overcoming evil through justified vengeance (or preemptive strikes). This may focus the drives in a simplistic way, justifying the mimetic acting out of violence by certain spectators in real life, like the hero against the villain onstage or onscreen, instead of a more complex catharsis through the tragic awareness of violent sources and consequences, with characters who are not purely good or evil.34 Aeschylus’s Oresteia shows the battle of F drives, between transcendence and lack within the human brain, through the gods and goddesses framing Orestes’s fight with and flight from his parents and their ghosts: the neocortical (Symbolic and Imaginary) Apollo and Athena versus the limbic, Real Furies. None of these gods are purely good or evil in the end. Nor is Orestes purely innocent, even if absolved. Likewise, Sophocles’s Oedipus dramas display the tragic struggle of rebellion against the gods and their oracles—through a fight against fate and family orders, a flight from the horror of incestuous desire, and yet a return to burial rites in defiance of human

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rule. Sophocles’s plots, like Aeschylus’s, involve Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real powers—of the neocortical and limbic brain—hinging upon the tragic awareness of human mortality and the question of divine transcendence. As the Chorus of Sophocles’s Antigone puts it in their first stasimon: “Numberless are the worlds wonders, but none / more powerful than man . . . / . . . from every wind / He has made himself secure—from all but one / In the late wind of death he cannot stand” (199). The Oedipus drama inspired Freud’s theory of a universal incestuous desire in the human mind. Antigone’s rebellion against Creon’s rule exemplified for Lacan the ethics of the Real (Seminar VII). Thus, Sophocles’s tragic characters foreshadow the modern ideal of independence from the gods and fate—in Renaissance neoclassicism, Enlightenment democracy, and the Freudian ego. But they also demonstrate, in another Lacanian vein, the postmodern return within the human mind of godlike forces for good and ill: the transformed animal instincts of drives in the Real. More extreme forms of godlike, yet bestial drives from the limbic brain, transformed by the human neocortex and its cultural environment, can be seen in Euripides’s Medea and The Bacchae, transcending the mammalian instinct of maternal care for the child. Medea not only fights with and flees from Jason, after he abandons her for another mate. She also kills her own children to get revenge against him. In The Bacchae, Dionysus, the theatre god himself, gets revenge against those who disrespect him by inspiring his aunt Agave to hunt, kill, and tear apart her own son, the repressive King Pentheus— as if he were an animal in flight—after he is lured to watch the feeding orgy of the bacchae (imagined by the audience offstage). These dramas reveal the danger of Real theatrics erupting from the animal part of the human brain, unrestrained by natural instincts and focused by vengeful gods and ghosts toward tragic violence. To the degree that this danger is presented in a complex tragic mode (today or in ancient times), rather than through the stereotypes of melodrama, spectators might become cathartically aware of the destructive potential for vengeful rage in every human brain, including their own, instead of cheering such rage in the hero’s fight against the evil villain.

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Along with the fight, flight, and sex drives of the id’s limbic system and brainstem, its feeding drive35 is featured in Thyestes, an ancient Roman drama by Seneca, based on the Greek myth of Orestes’s ancestors and on Greek plays now lost. Despite the tremendous technological advances of Western culture since Roman times, humans continue to demonstrate a godlike potential for both good and evil, while struggling to bear the weight of mortality, the alienation from natural instincts, and the ghostly hollowness of Self—in Mother Nature’s grand experiment of evolution. Seneca’s play, addressing the state terrorism of the Roman Empire and its gladiatorial appetites, through the prior myth of a Greek family, also speaks to the revenge games played by political leaders today, repeating the evils of the past even as they aspire to a godlike transcendence of their mortal heritage. Thyestes reveals the tremendous power of a limbic, neocortical theatre within the brains of readers and spectators, as well as in the characters onstage,36 who sublimate their animal drives in positive or destructive ways. Like Medea and The Bacchae, Seneca’s play offers a partly melodramatic plot with obvious villains and victims. Yet it shows the tragic sources and consequences of repetition compulsions in symptomatic familial vengeance, warping the remnant human instincts of fighting, fleeing, lust, and hunger. Thus, the cathartic awareness of all four F drives in the limbic brain might be evoked, challenging spectators to find a better way to shape the human lack of being—rather than projecting villainy on others and perpetuating the violence of reciprocal revenge. Thyestes begins with the ghost of Orestes’s great-great-grandfather, Tantalus. This ghost is suffering an eternal punishment, which gives us the word related to his name. He dwells in the underworld with unending thirst and hunger, tantalized by a nearby stream and fruit on a tree, both of which he cannot reach. What did Tantalus do to deserve this? While alive he was a rich king and son of Zeus. He invited the gods to dinner and tested their powers of omniscience by serving them his own son, Pelops, as a cannibal meal, without telling his guests beforehand. Only one, Demeter, distracted because her daughter was spending the winter with Hades in the underworld, ate some of the meal. When the gods restored the body of Pelops to

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wholeness and life, Demeter gave him an ivory shoulder to replace what she had eaten. The gods then condemned Tantalus to be tantalized forever in the underworld, as an endlessly famished dinner guest. The theme of a fragmented and cooked human body, served as a challenge to the Other as dinner guest, repeats in the myth of Pelops’s sons, Atreus and Thyestes. They were supposed to share the rule of Argos, but Thyestes stole Atreus’s wife and drove him into exile. Atreus returned and regained power. Then, as shown in Seneca’s play, Atreus pretends to forgive his brother, but instead serves Thyestes’s three sons to him as a peace-meal trick. Atreus’s sons, Agamemnon and Menelaos, though not appearing in the play, are also involved in their father’s trick. Atreus sends them, as unknowing accomplices, to give the message of a peace offering and dinner invitation to their uncle (13–14). Given the betrayal by his wife, Atreus worries that his sons are not his own. It is not until he sees his brother suffering with the knowledge of having just eaten his own sons in the meal that Atreus says, “Now I believe my / children are really mine, / now I get back my / faith in my marriage” (41).37 By taking Thyestes’s sons and feeding them to him, in revenge for his brother taking his wife, Atreus regains confidence in his own progeny. He perverts the sublimated feeding drive of a shared meal, through the prior sibling rivalry of fight, flight, and sex drives, to reassert his patriarchal, Symbolic and Imaginary control. Thus, the ghosts that Orestes inherits, a generation later, come to him not only from his father’s sacrifice of his sister and his mother’s murder of his father, but also from his grandfather’s revenge against a brother by sacrificing three nephews. Indeed, a later son of Thyestes, Aegisthus, turns out to be Clytemnestra’s lover and the co-murderer of Agamemnon in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Yet Seneca shows another, earlier ghost, whose challenge to the gods sets up the curse of reciprocal vengeance in the House of Atreus. At the start of Thyestes, Tantalus is dragged toward the surface from his place of punishment in the underworld. Rather than a ghost waking the Furies (as in The Eumenides), here it is a Fury who rouses a ghost from his afterlife nightmare. Yet, the Fury challenges Tantalus with an even more terrible view than his unreachable food and drink,

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as a spectator of the vengeance between his grandsons. “Now your crime will happen / all over again” (Senaca 3). The Fury offers Tantalus a place at the table, tantalizing the ghost with a holiday feast, away from his eternal hunger and thirst. “We’re giving you a / day of freedom to let / your hunger loose on / this dinner.” But Tantalus prefers his underworld punishment, rather than watching and participating in his own cannibal trick, playing out again in another generation. He threatens to warn his offspring on earth: “Don’t touch the foulness / the Furies make you crave” (5). So he is sent back to his tantalizing punishment and insatiable feeding drive, because he refuses to work for the Fury and perpetuate evil on earth.38 “Love your punishment,” he tells the watching theatre audience (or reader) as well as other ghosts in the underworld (4). Unlike the typical Senecan ghost who craves revenge (as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet),39 this one cautions against the temptation of reciprocal violence. The character of Oedipus has become emblematic of the fateful repetitions and violent regressions of the modern Freudian ego. Tantalus and Orestes might likewise reflect the postmodern yearning to move beyond the horrors of the twentieth century without repeating them. Today’s virtual realities appear to give a godlike transcendence to the mass audience, playing with the pastiche of violent imagery, ostensibly without consequence since it is just a fiction onscreen. Yet, the hollowness of film, TV, videogames, and computers, as extensions of our visuospatial and audioverbal brains, repeatedly evokes new traumas in the Real: from serial killers and their copycats to school gunmen and international terrorists performing for the news media. Thus, we might find ourselves joining the Chorus of Thyestes, appealing to the gods within our minds, if not above, to help us with the bestial passions of warped human instincts: “Stop crime coming back / and grandsons outdoing their / famous grandfather in wickedness. / Why can’t they be tired at last and stop?” (6).40 Many critics of the mass media today call for less violence onscreen. Yet, it may be that our popular screens do not offer enough violence—showing Real sources and tragic consequences to provoke a more profound catharsis. Instead, we get easy, imaginary

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entertainment: the competitive violence of Hollywood action movies and TV “reality shows” focusing our existential anxiety on fictional heroes and fame seekers. These lures of illusory transcendence catch players and spectators in escalating games of screen vengeance, as in the Fury’s taunting of the ghost of Tantalus to a “wickedness competition” (2). Some spectators might even be tempted to act out the Other’s desires in more extreme ways in the Real—like Atreus in his opening speech: “I must dare something so bad / so extreme my brother will / wish he’d done it himself. You / don’t avenge unless you do / something much worse” (7). Like today’s criminals and terrorists, competing for media play and mythic fame, Atreus battles the ghost of his famous grandfather, as well as the brother who stole his crown and wife, to see who can be the most evil and therefore godlike. (In sacrificing his son to trick his divine guests, Tantalus, son of Zeus, posed as greater and more ruthlessly destructive than the gods.) When Atreus conceives his plan to sacrifice his nephews, he uses the inner theatre of his brain to preview the spectacle that would make the ghost of his ego into a god. “The whole picture of / slaughter is dancing / in front of my eyes . . .” (12). The actual slaughter takes place offstage. But a Messenger describes it in detail before Atreus returns. The audience is thus given the task of imagining it in their minds’ eyes, like Atreus in his preview, while the Messenger wishes he could rid his brain of the memory: “roll me in a black cloud / so the horror’s ripped out of my eyes” (25). Again he complains, before beginning his story: “The violence sticks to my eyes.” But the Chorus is impatient to know and see, like the mass audience today, demanding immediate news reports: “Just say it quickly.” They even state that the pain of their “suspense” is worse than the Messenger’s torment in witnessing the bloodshed. As with today’s hungry eyes at film and TV screens worldwide, the Chorus in this play fears, regrets, and yet wants more violence. Of course, the Roman audience, even more than the Greek, would have been familiar with human bloodshed onstage. Seneca was a Stoic, but also an advisor to Nero, who sponsored some of the bloodiest spectacles of the Roman Empire.41 Thyestes, with its melodramatic revenge plot, appeals to such prurient interests. Yet, as a

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complex tragedy, it warns against the temptations of revenge, even when spectators’ imaginations are lured offstage, toward the ruler’s evil rites. The Messenger describes Atreus’s use of props in the sacrifice of his nephews: decorated altars, a purple ribbon for the victims’ heads, incense, holy wine, and salty flour—so that the “ritual’s kept / in case evil’s not done right” (27). Atreus himself played the “priest” in the sacrifice offstage, sang the “death song,” and used a knife to kill each of the three boys in turn, because “he enjoys putting / murder in order” (27–28). The Messenger’s report also gives a ritual order and symbolic frame for the violence in the spectators’ imaginations—an aspect of the news media today that we often forget. Despite the video footage of actual violence, what we see is selected and explained as a story, putting the violence in order and making it appetizing for its mass audience. The Messenger even describes Atreus’s handling of the entrails, his telling “fortunes from the veins,” his cutting up of the bodies, and the sounds of his recipe cooking (30–31). Then Atreus himself appears, gloating that his “head’s touching heaven” (33). And yet, he is not satisfied: “why should it be enough? / I’ll keep going and cram him / full of his sons’ death.” He watches as Thyestes unknowingly eats his own sons’ flesh. When Thyestes belches, Atreus exclaims: “I am a god” (34). Thyestes sings at the banquet and tries to be happy, but he is troubled: “My mind’s warning me / something bad’s coming” (35). Atreus then offers the coup de grace, a cup of wine mixed with blood, as “an old family wine” (36). When Thyestes misses his sons, Atreus also jokes with him: “Think of your sons as here / held tight by their father.” Yet, Thyestes’s body knows, even before he is told where his sons are. His hand spills the wine. His stomach churns: “what’s this shaking inside?” (37). Neurologist Antonio Damasio distinguishes “emotion,” the body’s biochemical communication with the brain, from “feeling” or “the feeling of a feeling,” the mind’s perception and self-awareness of such internal circuitry (Feeling 231–32). Thoughtful feelings in the human mind are mapped in the advanced parts of the neocortex. But the primary emotional drives of fear and lust—involving the animal instincts of fighting, fleeing, feeding, and fornicating—are based in

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the limbic system (Descartes’ 131–34).42 Human beings have evolved various thoughtful feelings as higher order interpretations of instinctual drives and innate emotions: sublimating the four Fs of the Real through art and language—as creative or destructive passions. “Emotions play out in the theater of the body. Feelings play out in the theater of the mind” (Looking 28). Thus, the emotions of Thyestes’s body, during his cannibal meal, communicate biochemically with the feelings in his unknowing mind. But the cannibalism actually began with the feeding and fighting drives of Atreus, as host of the communal meal—through his passion for revenge, pure progeny, and godlike power. Atreus’s desire for revenge remains unsatisfied and his feeling of triumph incomplete, even as the emotions between brothers directly repeat their family’s symptomatic fate. Atreus shows Thyestes his sons’ heads and lets him mourn their deaths. But he waits until Thyestes asks to bury them—before saying where the rest of the bodies are. Thyestes then reacts as if his stomach were a womb: a chora of their abject loss, yet material presence, and the fury of revenge. “Their flesh is heaving / inside me and the / evil shut in is struggling / with no way out and / trying to escape” (39). Thyestes asks for his brother’s sword to perform a Caesarean birth, then beats on his chest to let the ghosts and the evil out. However, Atreus is still unsatisfied. “Even this is too / little for me” (40). His tantalized hunger for violence and thirst for evil intensify. He regrets not making the father himself perform the cutting and cooking of his sons, but it is too late for that. Then Thyestes does something amazingly Stoic.43 He prays to the gods, but not for anything “wicked,” not for revenge (40). He does not ask for divine judgment solely against his brother. Instead, he says to the gods; “call both our causes bad” (41). He requests, in a more tragic than melodramatic mode, that a lightning bolt be aimed at his body, to cremate his sons within himself. Or for the “night to last forever and / cover the vast crime / with endless dark.”44 Atreus, on the other hand, melodramatically projects his own evil upon his rival. He accuses his brother of wanting to give him the same kind of meal. Atreus claims that Thyestes would have killed his nephews and made their father (Atreus) eat them, except that

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Thyestes was unsure they were not his own sons, after his affair with his brother’s wife (42). Atreus says this in answer to Thyestes’s resounding, rhetorical question: “who’d try to balance a crime with a crime?” However, rather than debate any further with his brother, or attack him in return for his villainous accusations, Thyestes concludes: “Avenging gods will come. / I leave you to them / for punishment.” Atreus’s extreme revenge and then further blame against his brother, projecting his own violent desires upon him, shows the selfdefensive destructiveness and ego-inflating lure of evil within the human mind. The human consciousness of mortality, insecurity of ego, and lack of instinctual being may produce extreme distortions of the feeding and fighting emotions. Yet, the theatre of Thyestes’s brain offers a very different picture at the end of the play: selfimmolation to bury his sons within his body, as corpse and casket, or darkness for all. His initial reaction, more like his brother, is to give birth to their fragmented bodies and to his own evil. But rather than continue with the fury of their ghosts in reciprocal vengeance (like Orestes and Clytemnestra), Thyestes accepts the blame for his role already played and ends the violence on his side, at least in his own generation. These distinct responses, by Atreus and Thyestes, to the blame and revenge game, show the flip sides of abject passion in the brain’s limbic system. Reacting through the Symbolic and Imaginary orders of his bicameral neocortex, the Real within Atreus is expressed as an unending drive to fight against Thyestes (in rivalry also with the Ghost of Tantalus), force-feeding his nephews to their father in order to become godlike beyond their famous ancestor. But with such an abject loss and terrible precedent inside him, Thyestes wills another meaning to the fight, flight, feeding, and sex drives of his animal brain, restructuring and refining emotion through cathartic feelings. As the stoic Seneca’s tragic hero, Thyestes accepts the dead body parts of his sons within him and lets their ghosts rest in peace—at least for the time being, with an avenging god still to come in the next generation, as Aegisthus incarnates the vengeance of Thyestes’s ghost in Seneca’s Agamemnon. Seneca’s Thyestes shows all four primal drives that neurologists find in the animal heritage of the human brain. The fight and flight

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emotions become expressed between Atreus and Thyestes as competitive siblings and rulers, especially when Thyestes returns to the city he once ruled and tells his son, early in the play, that he fears his brother’s revenge, despite the overtures of peace-making and shared power. But these emotions and threatening situations are also powered by the fornication drive that forms the backstory to the play: Thyestes’s stealing of Atreus’s wife and the latter’s fear that his sons are not his own. Most dramatically, the feeding drive becomes warped in this revenge play, with the civilized rites of meal preparation and banqueting turned into a savage feast of cruelty—of eating and being eaten, apart from the orders of natural survival. This drama also exemplifies a fifth primal emotion that Lacanian theory might add to current neuroscience: the loss of being that the human animal incurs in becoming civilized through language and culture. The loss of animal instincts, which order the behaviors of other species, makes possible the tremendous flexibility and grand achievements of human culture, technology, and art—through the Symbolic and Imaginary orders of the advanced neocortex. But such a lack of being, through the human control and transcendence of nature, contorts the reproduction and survival drives in the Real of the limbic brain, leading to the destructiveness of “human nature” and its want to be godlike, often in vengeance, as demonstrated by Atreus in Thyestes. A great risk, and yet crucial value, in nature’s experiment with the human species is shown by this ancient Roman tragedy—and the risky value of theatre itself (or of other dramatic media) extending that experiment. Thyestes not only offers a glimpse of Real horror in the human brain, with man as a wolf to man, but also a potential catharsis of the unnerving vulnerability and vengeful betrayals that continue to haunt and tantalize our minds and societies, after two thousand years of cultural evolution. With its melodramatic plot of a clearly vengeful villain pitted against horribly suffering victims, and its display of blood-thirsty, cannibal violence, Thyestes appeals to the fight and flight emotions of the human brain’s limbic system—in ancient Roman times and today. Our massmedia displays of violence, while less destructive of real bodies than the Roman Colosseum, reach millions of spectators each day. TV commercials framing the violence, like cinema’s many erotic moments, engage

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the spectators’ feeding and fornication emotions, as well as fight and flight. Yet, a fifth F, the “fading” (aphanisis) of the subject as a primal experience of the human lack of being, might be even more fundamental than the four Fs of neuroscience. This would make tragic drama— as it reveals the lack of being in both the Self and the Other, especially when exposing fundamental fantasies of vengeance—even more crucial today as a potential cathartic antidote to the multiplex film screens, numerous TV channels, and interactive videogames flooding our minds with melodramatic justifications for further violence. As Atreus reveals in his failed attempt to fill his lack with transcendent villainy, the lure in melodramatic ideals of good or evil may warp the emotions of fear, aggression, sex, and hunger with disastrous consequences for self and others. Depictions of clear-cut heroes and villains (from ritual and theatre to film and TV) have long tempted the human viewer to focus abject emotions, as a victim who lacks being, against a certain “evil-doer” as the Other who has taken it away. This encourages symptomatic repetitions of escalating vengeance in preemptive or punitive strikes, not only in fiction but also in real life. Yet, as Thyestes shows at the end of this play, a tragic realization of lack and loss, with the cathartic awareness of potential evil in one’s own emotions, can create an end to mimetic violence. In this way, nature’s tremendously risky experiment of big-brained humans and their various theatrical media might not play out as a tragic failure. Unlike Tantalus, the ghosts of Self in us could watch and learn from tragedies onstage and onscreen, reconstructing our violent temptations and fantasies to better shape the human lack of instinctual being—for future generations in real life. The next chapter considers how we are (already while alive) ghosts of body image and ego, according to current neurological research, and how we bear multiple “zombie” selves in our brains. It also explores how fantasies of wholeness and fragmentation play on the stages of our inner, cranial theatres, like the divine illusions and piecemeal bodies of Seneca’s Thyestes. Then the following chapter will apply such insights to Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy (and its melodramatic aspects), plus a recent screen version of that play—to consider the further evolution of the human brain’s ghost theatre and its various cathartic phantoms.


3. Phantom Limbs, Unconscious Zombies, and Multiple Selves x

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eurologist V. S. Ramachandran has discovered certain ghosts in the human brain that serve to illuminate the persistent metaphysics of the mind’s theatre, from ancient stages to postmodern screens. Ramachandran argues that the brain does not function like a computer, sending information in a one-way cascade from sense organs to the higher brain centers. His research shows that brain “connections are extraordinarily labile and dynamic” (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 56). He has used mirrors and other devices to help amputees who feel pain and movement in a missing limb. Seeing the illusion of that phantom limb—in a mirror reflecting the patient’s actual arm and hand on the other side—gradually affects a permanent change. It heals the feedback system between the missing limb and the brain’s body-image areas, which had caused phantom sensations with “no countermanding signals . . . [against] stored pain memories” (54). Ramachandran has also devised experiments for non-amputees, giving them the sensation of a three-foot nose or of a tabletop as the extension of their hands. Ramachandran thus demonstrates that the body image is surprisingly malleable. “Your own body is a phantom, one that your brain has temporarily constructed purely for convenience” (58). He argues that the body image is partly genetic and partly experiential: “the brain has a dual representation, one of the original body image laid down genetically and one ongoing, up-to-date image that can incorporate subsequent changes.”1

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The ghost of Self as overall body image, with measurable responses from the limbic system when threatened, extends to one’s car, spouse, or child (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 61). “Just punch it [your car] to see whether your GSR [galvanic skin response measuring limbic emotion] changes.” Thus, the map of the ego, beginning in the body’s Imaginary and Symbolic perceptual apparatus (Kaplan-Solms and Solms 277), connects also with the deepest emotional centers of the Lacanian Real in the human brain. I would speculate that when the extended body image, which includes one’s loved ones, is amputated by the loss of a family member or injured by some other change in communal connections, a phantom may appear, bearing Real pain, as with a missing limb. In this sense the hallucination of a ghost and the terror it may bring is not just madness or superstition. The phantom sensation (as a painful touch, voice, or vision) is the brain’s reaction to the loss of feedback—of “countermanding signals” regarding persistent traces and influences that the dead person left in the neural circuitry of the living.2 Phantom imagery, whether in spontaneous dreams and visions or evoked by Ramachandran’s mirror devices or in theatre and cinema technologies3—may also act in a more positive way to mask the loss by maintaining a persistent image and its characteristic emotions across the same neural pathways—and may even restructure the brain’s wiring. It is possible that new neural paths are created, or reserves are used, to “fill in” the hollow aspects of one’s self-image in relation to others, as with a phantom limb or a blind spot in the visual field (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 34, 252). The reason some amputees see phantoms limbs and others do not (or some people see ghosts, I would add) is that the brain’s assumptions about the world, which reduce the ambiguity of sensory perception, are not only genetic, but also learned (68). As a neurologist, Ramachandran does not speculate very far about the neural pathways of ghost visitations. But he does find “zombies” within the mind, agreeing with Freud’s basic notion of the unconscious: “you are completely unaware of 90 percent of what really goes on in your brain” (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 152).4 Like Dennett, Ramachandran argues that we do not have a single, authorial Self at the hidden controls, but multiple selves and unconscious zombies.

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He clarifies his use of the term “zombie” as “a completely nonconscious being . . . [that is] perfectly alert and capable of making complex, skilled movements, like creatures in the cult movie Night of the Living Dead” (64). There are zombies, for example, in the unconscious “how pathway” and (evolutionarily older) “orienting pathway” of visual perception, functioning even if the conscious “what pathway” is blocked, as in the phenomenon of “blindsight,” in which a patient can point at or manipulate an object while not being able to see it due to brain damage (73–79). Ramachandran also provides an illustration in his book that shows the how-pathway zombie at work in the parietal lobe of the normal reader’s brain (82). “And, as it turns out, there is not just one such zombie but a multitude of them inhabiting your brain” (84). Yet, the illusion of a single “I” is useful, even if untrue. It helps us to organize life, have a sense of purpose, and interact with others (84, 254, 272n11). Ramachandran identifies several aspects of the Self and links each to certain areas of the brain. The malleable “embodied self,” or body image, is located in the advanced neocortex: “circuits in the parietal lobes, and the regions of the frontal lobes to which they project” (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 247). But Ramachandran finds most aspects of the human Self in the animal part of the brain, in its limbic system (and neocortical connections): the passionate, visceral, executive, vigilant, and mnemonic selves. The “passionate self” is found in the amygdala, which “determines whether or not to respond emotionally to something and what kinds of emotions are appropriate.” This is tied to the insular cortex, where there is the “visceral, vegetative self” with its gut reactions, receiving sensory input from the heart, lung, liver, and stomach (248). A brain’s distinctive personality involves these “same limbic structures and their connections with the ventromedial frontal lobes,” as shown by patients with damage in these areas. The sense of an “executive self,” while involving the body image (embodied self ) represented in the neocortex, plus motor commands in the frontal lobes, is located also in the anterior cingulate gyrus and other structures of the limbic system, where “free will” arises, along with the vigilant self and the illusion of unity (249–53).5 The autobiographical or “mnemonic self” resides primarily in the hippocampus, which is “required for acquiring and consolidating new memory traces” (250).

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Thus, the ghost of ego (or the proverbial “ghost in the machine” of the brain)—the illusion of a single, personal identity enduring across time and space—is not just a matter of an internal body image in the neocortex, but also of the will and memory in the limbic system (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 251–52). Even a mystical experience of the divine, turning the Self inside-out, can be pinpointed to the temporal lobes of the limbic system, as shown by patients with epileptic seizures in that area, who experience “a feeling of divine presence and the sense that they are in direct communication with God. Everything around them is imbued with cosmic significance” (179). Ramachandran’s mapping of the brain, locating various aspects of the Self and its experience of God in the primal, limbic system, not just in the reflective representations of the neocortex, corresponds to Lacan’s interrelated orders of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real, as well as to Zizek’s argument about the unconscious cogito. “Knowledge in the Real,” in a Lacanian sense, shows the true, unconscious subject: “Descartes’ subject [turned] inside out” through the drive’s particular repetition compulsions (Salecl 62–63; Fink, Lacanian 43). The Symbolic and Imaginary realms of conscious human reality replace the Real, and yet the Real irrupts into those other orders—so that each produces the others.6 Using Ramachandran’s map (like the Solmses’ in the previous chapter), the Real might be found primarily in the limbic system and in the brainstem below it, interacting with the Symbolic and Imaginary orders, while they interact with each other, in the left and right hemispheres of the neocortex. This combination of Lacanian theory (and the postmodern sense of split-subjectivity) with Ramachandran’s neurological evidence of multiple ego zombies offers a material grounding for divine perceptions: in the Real of the limbic brain’s temporal lobes, which include the amygdala and hippocampus, where the passionate and mnemonic selves reside.7 Ramachandran’s research with temporal lobe epilepsy patients confirms what Lacan argued several decades ago: “The gods are of the field of the real” (Four 45). Without reference to Lacan, Ramachandran concludes: “there are [limbic] circuits in the human brain that are involved in religious experience and these become hyperactive in some epileptics” (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 188). The “kindling” of nerve synapses in certain seizures—through “massive


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volleys of nerve impulses within the limbic system”—intensifies the experience of divine rapture that might be caused in any human brain, although the rest of us get only “occasional glimpses of a deeper truth” or a rare feeling of “communion with God” (179–80).8 The phenomenon of “God in the limbic system” (as Ramachandran and journalist Blakeslee entitle one chapter of their book) may be a particular adaptation of human evolution (183), like the interaction of human limbic and neocortical systems in external rites and theatres—whether or not this corresponds to any absolute Being or eternal souls.9 Each person’s experience of primal, emotional, id gods (like the Furies in The Oresteia), and of advanced, rational, superego gods (Apollo and Athena), or of a modern, patriarchal, monotheistic God, depends greatly upon the ghostly models of Self and Other set into the wiring of the brain through early contacts within a specific family and culture.10 Yet these are also malleable later on, like the bodyimage phantom, through numerous adult perceptions and beliefs.11 If the infant experiences its mother’s body as an extension of itself, before it develops a distinct body image in the mirror stage, then the mother’s absence could be perceived as an amputated body part. The mother’s breast or the bottle, her voice (heard prenatally as well), and other points of contact would be severed from the infant’s extended body and cultural womb. At the other extreme, the mother can be too much present, with her bodily contact overwhelming the child with symbiotic jouissance and marring the development of a separate Self. No matter how “good enough” the mothering, every infant experiences some degree of psychic amputation when the primary caretaker is absent—or boundary incursion (and Kleinian reincorporation by the mother’s body) when there is extra contact.12 Each of these early traumatic experiences might evoke a ghost of the mother, as phantom limb or monstrous god, affecting the multiple avatars and zombies of the Self, forming in the infant’s brain. THE CATHARSIS OF PANIC AND DEPRESSION As considered in chapter 1, experiments with rat pups show that the precarious balance between maternal care and separation, at a crucial

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period of infancy, can have positive or negative effects on the mammalian brain throughout life, regarding anxiety and hormonal responses to stress. Solms and Turnbull, using the terminology of Jaak Panksepp, describe a “panic system,” along with three other basic emotional systems (seeking, rage, and fear) in the animal core of the human limbic brain and brainstem. The panic or separationdistress system, centered in the anterior cingulate gyrus with its ties to other brain areas that involve sexual and maternal behavior in lower mammals, is “intimately connected with social bonding and with the process of parenting” (129–30). Stimulation of this system and its brain areas in animals produces distress vocalizations and separation calls, along with seeking behaviors. As seen in rat pups, this may have the evolutionary logic of increasing the chances of finding the mother again (Kandel 514). But then there is a “shift in the animal’s behavior, from seeking to withdrawal,” like human depression, presumably to protect the infant from being found by a predator (Solms and Turnbull 131).13 This process of the infant’s separation, distress, and return to nurturing (or depressive withdrawal) involves the “care subsystem” in the mother’s brain, with a biochemistry that shows the “sexual underpinnings of mother-infant intimacy, which has long been of interest to psychoanalysis” (131–32). The seeking system, in the human brain’s mesocortical-mesolimbic dopamine area, includes sexual arousal and appetitive hunger (115–16), the two Fs of fornication and feeding. Solms and Turnbull also relate it to the Freudian idea of the “drive” (117).14 The rage system corresponds directly to the fight response and the fear system to flight. Both are centered in the brain’s amygdala. Thus, the panic or separationdistress system might correspond to the fifth F that I am adding to the conventional four: the Lacanian “fading” of the alienated human subject. Solms and Turnbull do not mention Lacan’s theory of the fundamental lack or loss of being in humans. Yet they do define the panic system as “associated not only with panic-anxiety, but also with feelings of loss and sorrow” (129). Lacan made a philosophical distinction between human nature as the loss of being (with an unsatisfiable want to be, manque à être, or desire of the Other) and nonhuman animals living immediately within nature. This theory gains neuroscientific refinement in


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Gerald Edelman’s notion of the “higher-order consciousness” of humans, beyond the “remembered present” of animals (considered in chapter 7 here), and in Merlin Donald’s delineation of mimetic, mythic, and theoretic stages of hominid culture beyond the episodic awareness of primates (chapter 9). The exponential change, from animal to human, in the brain’s experience of panic-anxiety, loss, and sorrow, through the alienation and separation from being (in “normal” neurotics) caused by the Imaginary and Symbolic dimensions of culture as an external womb, replacing the Real of the natural world and primal contact with the mother’s desiring body,15 also relates to biologist Terrence Deacon’s description of our “symbolic species” with altered emotions. “Sorrow is an emotion that almost certainly has been exaggerated and modified by symbolic cognition, due to the power of symbolization to aid the mental representation of what-if scenarios” (420). Deacon argues that a costly “side effect” of human prefrontal lobe expansion is our hypersensitivity to many psychological problems, including “manic-depressive disorders, obsessive- compulsive disorders, panic syndromes, . . . social mood disturbances or disturbed symbolic thought processes” (422–23). Deacon states that when children learn about death “the naturally evolved social instinct of loss and separation [turns] in on itself to create a foreboding sense of fear, sorrow, and impending loss . . . as if looking back from an impossible future. No feature of the limbic system has evolved to handle this ubiquitous virtual sense of loss” (437).16 Current psychotherapy, building upon thousands of years of theatrical experimentation in “catharsis,” may offer a further mediation and cultural evolution of this tragic flaw in human prefrontal lobe expansion, which involves the traumatic effects of Symbolic and Imaginary “hypersensitivity” to Real, limbic, animal emotions and zombie selves. Solms and Turnbull argue that physical changes can be made in the brain through psychoanalysis: in the ventromesial and orbital areas of the prefrontal lobes, which mediate the panic, fear, rage, and seeking systems of the limbic brain—thus showing the capacity of the ego to “inhibit instinctual drives” (104, 136).17 Talk therapy’s reworking of specific personal repressions increases the “flexibility and degree of emotional control that distinguish the

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human adult from the child and from other mammals” (136). This cathartic effect extends “the functional sphere of influence of the prefrontal lobes,” as functional-imaging studies of the brain have already confirmed (287–88). Some of Solms and Turnbull’s Freudian terms correspond to Anglo-American ego psychology, especially their notion of strengthening the ego’s ability (in the prefrontal lobes) to “inhibit” unconscious drives, to give the “higher-level” Self more “free will” by delaying repetition-compulsive acts of the “primitive self ” (99, 280–81). But their argument about changing personal repressions at the ventromesial area of the prefrontal lobes, where they interact with the limbic system, might also relate to Lacan’s French Freud: the psychoanalytic cure as the crossing of fundamental fantasies and the experience of subjective destitution, bringing more of the Symbolic into the Real. Psychoanalyst Bruce Fink describes Lacanian therapy as “a process which goes beyond the automatic functioning of the symbolic order and involves an incursion of the symbolic into the real: the signifier brings forth something new in the real or drains off more of the real into the symbolic” (Lacanian 71).18 This might occur at the ventromesial and orbital areas of the prefrontal lobes, where the Symbolic and Imaginary domains of the left and right hemispheres meet the Real of the limbic, emotional, animal brain within human beings. The distressing lack of being that all humans experience, according to Lacan, through the alienation of an illusory Self in the mirror stage and separation from the (m)Other with the Father’s cultural interventions, is not simply a problem of good or bad mother–infant bonding. It is a crucial, evolutionary drawback in big-brained, symbol-using, prematurely born humans:19 a primal, self-protective depression in the limbic system of the brain. This foundational experience of loss involves the brain’s panic and seeking systems (as in the rat pup’s initial separation calls), producing substitute objects of desire and projections of Self and Other, as ghosts or gods, from neocortical dreams and fantasies to the theatres of external life. The primal fear and rage systems are engaged, too, altering the basic animal instincts of fleeing, fighting, feeding, and fornicating in tremendously creative and destructive ways (as considered in the previous


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chapter). Phantom limbs and spectral figures are key elements of the mind’s internal theatre of loss, and thus of its stage and screen media as externalized, preselective environments. This may be due not only to specific tragic losses in each person’s life, but also to the fundamental effects in the human brain of body-image fragmentation, with the infant’s loss of a nurturing maternal body as extension of itself, and with multiple selves and unconscious zombies behind the mirror-stage illusion of ego wholeness. Regarding the extended body image that Ramachandran describes, with connections of identity to a car and loved ones, and given the foundational lack of being and loss of the (m)Other in infancy, plus further losses throughout life, all human beings are psychic amputees with phantom limb pains. But theatre may help us with such pains, through the illusions of Self and Other onstage and onscreen— giving us feedback figures for the stored memories of primal anguish.20 Such illusions can be comical or farcical to make us laugh at our pains. Or they can be melodramatic, with clear-cut good and evil figures, offering plots that blame the villain for loss and fragmentation, then show the hero battling evil and punishing others in righteous vengeance. Such simpler dramas provide popular, accessible masks, like the whole object of Self in the mirror stage, to cover and contain primal limbic anxieties. But they also reconfirm conventional stereotypes of good and evil people, justifying violence by the former against the latter. Thus, the complex, contradictory emotions and drives in each human brain, with its theatre of multiple selves and unconscious zombies, might be temporarily purged. There might be a superficial catharsis of fear and pity in the thrill ride and tear jerking of melodrama. But there could also be a focusing of aggression against perceived villains in real life, justifying preemptive strikes or punitive violence. A more profound clarification of panic and depression, along with the seeking, fear, and rage systems in the brain, requires the greater challenge of complex characters and tragic plots (or of tragicomic moments within melodrama). Then the blind spots of human identity are not simply filled in. Gaps are opened onstage and onscreen, so that the internal theatres of watching brains might experience more of their own Real drives. This could extend the ego’s “sphere of

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influence” in the prefrontal lobes, not just to “inhibit instinctual drives,” but to reconstruct Imaginary whole objects in the right hemisphere with fragmented, abject emotions from the limbic brain and to alter Symbolic abstractions in the left with deeper (master) signifiers, for further evolutions of Self and society, beyond the repetition compulsions of vengeance.21 For example, Atreus, Clytemnestra, and the Furies, as considered in the previous chapter (or Aaron, Tamora, Saturninus, Chiron, and Demetrius in the next), might be easier to accept and jeer as simple, whole-object villains. But the tragic predicaments of these villains may challenge the audience with further insights about such personalities and the heroes opposing them, beyond purely evil and good abstractions, or instinctual, fight and flight reactions. This might affect the multiple selves, unconscious zombies, and fragmentary emotions in each spectator’s brain, breaking down the binary expectations of polarized symbols and images for more complex, cranial and communal interactions in the Real—altering symptomatic structures of reciprocal violence. Homo sapiens survived and thrived by dominating the environment and overturning the orders of Mother Nature. But they also became surreal egos and monstrous gods to one another. The struggle between limbic revenge and neocortical justice, in the cultural evolution of the human brain, appeared onstage in the ancient Greek Oresteia. The temptation to fill the hollowness of being human with transcendent evil, warping the four (or five) F drives in the animal part of the brain,22 arose through sibling and intergenerational rivalry in Thyestes. These ancient tragic conflicts and crucial symptoms— along with simpler, melodramatic, good versus evil projections— continued into the early modern evolutions of Self in the European Renaissance. But the wrestling with phantom limb pain and unconscious zombies became even more acute, as the ghost of Self in the brain sought to dominate its internal and external environments more completely, replacing the gods with human extremes of good and evil, or something absurdly beyond both. This is explored in the next chapter through Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy (set in ancient Rome) and its recent film adaptation by Julie Taymor, involving the vengeful specters of lost family members and their sacrificial body


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parts. (Zombies and other elements of the brain’s internal theatre will then be examined further in chapter 5.) Shakespeare’s play and Taymor’s film climax in a cruel, cannibal meal, like Seneca’s Thyestes. But they also offer a potential catharsis of panic, seeking, fear, and rage systems in the spectator’s limbic brain, at the stage and screen edges of the prefrontal lobes, as a better form of communion. Ramachandran has demonstrated how the Self as body image can persist, or be altered, beyond the physical limits of the human form— as with amputees who experience phantom limb sensations. If the human Self is a personal and intersubjective illusion, making up for the lack of natural being, then a ghost may appear like a phantom limb on the communal body—to express the persistence of the dead person’s influence within the brains of the living, yet also their fictional alterations of that character. As with Ramachandran’s amputees, ghosts can manifest painful sensations in the brain’s attempt to get feedback from something lost outside yet persisting in the neural circuitry. But a phantom image, like that created by Ramachandran’s mirror device, can also help to express and heal such pain, by restructuring the unconscious zombies and multiple selves of neural pathways in the brain’s intersubjective theatre—as with the cathartic potential of tragic ghosts in drama and film. Each person’s spectral Self exists not only in his or her own brain, but also in the views, memories, and fantasies of others. These phantom limb fictions of my Self persist even after I die, through the character that others make of me, consciously and unconsciously, while I live and afterwards. Celebrities may become “immortal,” but they are also much more fictionalized by their era’s media and subsequent generations, far beyond their own brain’s control. The rest of us, as non-celebrities, continue to exist after death, not on massmedia screens, but in the brains of those who knew us directly and recall us through personal photos, videos, writings, and other traces we leave behind in the living minds of our culture. Thus, the meme of each human personality struggles to survive and be broadcast, like the body and its genes, despite the awareness of mortality. The performance of a character by an actor onstage, or by a person in everyday life, is a projection of Self for the Other who interacts and watches. The human actor has a vast potential to

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remake and transcend its natural stage space, in relation to its Selfidentity and its personification of Other forces, watching and potentially affecting it. But with such neural “plasticity” and cultural flexibility, beyond instinctual patterns of behavior, the animal drives within the human brain (to fight, flee, feed, or fornicate) produce tremendously destructive, as well as creative, desires and actions— striving for immortality. Theatre and cinema not only reflect the architecture of an internal, preselective environment and designed imagination within the human brain (as discussed in chapter 1). They also provide an external, fictional space to share with other humans the godlike creativity and destructiveness within each mind— as in a public, collective dream. This is shown by both Shakespeare and Taymor, in their early modern and postmodern, stage and screen depictions of an ancient Roman general who sacrifices the limbs and lives of himself and his children for the sake of Other phantom limbs: for his sons lost in a war and for the watching (or absent) gods of his world—and the theatre audiences in the future.

4. Shakespeare’s Roman Shades (Titus Andronicus and Titus) x

T

he human species developed its brain parts and their functions over a long, evolutionary time frame. Using the same cerebral structures in the much briefer timeframe of human history, Euro-American culture has emphasized a more and more independent ego in the mind and society, with democratic rights, capitalist free markets, and consumer choices. A crucial turning point for the modern ego came in the European Renaissance, with its rejection of medieval submission to the Christian God and cosmic order, stressing instead that “man is the measure of all things.” Shakespeare’s plays are especially significant in showing this shift from a medieval to modern worldview, even as some of his dramas recall (like much of Renaissance art) the classical, Greco-Roman world of the gods. Shakespeare is also significant to the postmodern, not only for scholars but also for popular culture, through recent film versions of his plays and of his early life as a playwright (Shakespeare in Love, dir. John Madden, 1998). His first tragedy as a young playwright, Titus Andronicus, was a popular hit, set in Roman times and obviously influenced by Seneca’s Thyestes.1 But in times since, it has often been an embarrassment to Shakespeare scholars, with its absurdly extreme acts of violence—including a scene of the main character agreeing to have his hand chopped off onstage.2 And yet, a comparison of this early Shakespearean play with its recent film adaptation by Julie Taymor offers many insights about early modern and postmodern cultures, regarding the shifting figures of ghosts and gods as phantom limbs of the Self, in all the aspects that Ramachandran maps as persistent structures of the human brain.

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Other plays by Shakespeare have more obvious ghosts, such as the father figure who desires vengeance in Hamlet (see chapter 6 here) and the betrayed friend who haunts the dinner table in Macbeth, or the battlefield in Julius Caesar. Ancient gods appear (performed by spirits) in The Tempest, summoned by Prospero in a wedding masque for his daughter. But the implied ghosts, performed gods, and amputated body parts in Titus Andronicus, onstage and onscreen, show a pervasive sense of trickster spirits and zombie drives persisting in the violent human mind, despite the scientific and philosophical revolutions of the Renaissance and postmodern eras. Most feature film directors adapting Shakespeare in the 1990s chose his more famous works:3 Franco Zeffirelli with Hamlet (1990); Kenneth Branagh with Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Hamlet (1996), and Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000); Richard Loncraine with Richard III (1995); Oliver Parker with Othello (1995); Baz Luhrmann with Romeo and Juliet (1996); Trevor Nunn with Twelfth Night (1996); Michael Hoffman with A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1999); and Michael Almereyda with Hamlet (2000). But Julie Taymor, the only female in this group, chose an early, disreputable play by the bard for her first feature film in 1999. She had previously moved from avant-garde theatre success as a puppet-maker and director to Broadway stardom with The Lion King. (In the 1990s she also made a one-hour film for PBS television, Fool’s Fire, and a PBS film of her own staging of Stravinksy’s Oedipus Rex.) In 1994, she directed Titus Andronicus off-Broadway with a mix of “stylized and naturalistic imagery” (Taymor 178), combining various settings from ancient Rome, the fascist 1930s, and today (Wrathall 24).4 She brought this mixture of styles and settings to her subsequent screen adaptation. She found that the play’s “juxtaposition of heightened drama, ruthless violence and absurdist black comedy . . . speak[s] directly to our times, a time whose audience feeds daily on tabloid sex scandals, teenage gang rape, high school gun sprees and the private details of a celebrity murder trial” (Taymor 174).5 Instead of simply reflecting violence and villainy, Shakespeare’s play “turns them inside out, probing and challenging our fundamental beliefs on morality and justice.” Thus, Taymor’s Titus exposes the violent ghosts and gods within its characters, in various social periods, and in the mass media today.6

Shakespeare’s Roman Shades

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Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus took his Elizabethan audience back in time to the ruthless patriarchy of the Roman Empire. But he presented his spectators with a dilemma still current in their own era: to obey patrilinear rules and rulers, even when cruel, or to risk social chaos. The problem of royal succession haunted the rule of Elizabeth, since her father, King Henry VIII did not produce a son who could rule for long, despite Henry’s papal rebellion and six wives. His daughter, Elizabeth, the “Virgin Queen” who ruled England when Shakespeare wrote this play, likewise had no apparent heir. However, in adapting this play to the screen, Taymor found a different concern for her postmodern audience. She shifted the initial focus of spectator identification from Titus (in the battle for patrilinear power) to his grandson, Young Lucius, who is merely an innocent witness and messenger in this tragedy of patriarchal errors and parental revenge. Shakespeare starts his play with a battle between princes after their father has died. Saturninus claims his right to rule the Roman Empire as “first-born son” (1.1.5). His younger brother Bassianus desires more democracy in his favor, encouraging his fellow Romans to “fight for freedom in your choice” (1.1.17). Marcus Andronicus, “tribune of the people,” presents his brother, Titus, who has just returned to Rome from war and victory over the Goths, as the people’s choice instead.7 Taymor’s film begins differently. Her audience is not so much concerned with patrilinear succession, given the pervasiveness of democratic elections in determining rulers today (even when there are ballot problems in Florida). But the sacrifices demanded by war are of recurrent concern, given the involvement of the United States in two world wars and more recent conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and the former Yugoslavia. Indeed, Taymor’s screenplay of Titus begins with the narrative: “We could be in Brooklyn or Sarajevo” (19). The film opens with a close-up of a 12-year-old boy’s head in a primitive paper-sack mask.8 A blue light flickers on his face from an unseen TV. Sounds are heard from it: a cavalry horn, an order to soldiers (“OK, on your toes, men”), and Popeye’s voice (“We gotta save Olive Oil”). The masked boy bites into a large hot dog on his fork. Then, a medium shot reveals his war toys moving of their

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own accord on a 1950s style, chrome-edged, red-topped, kitchen table.9 A toy helicopter with blades turning and soldiers crawling with guns make mechanical noises in the soundtrack. This added opening to Titus frames the film with a reflection of the various selves that Ramachandran maps in the human brain: the malleable body image (with the boy’s mask), the visceral self (as he eats), the executive/vigilant self (in the free will of moving toys as autonomous extensions of the boy’s play), and the mnemonic self (as miniature ancient warriors and modern G.I. Joe dolls represent various historical periods and evoke the viewer’s personal associations of childhood). The boy’s passionate self is exhibited even more as his playing with war toys and food becomes furious and wild, with his teeth and eyes visible in violent glee through the holes in the paperbag mask. He beheads a toy Roman soldier with his knife. He crashes a toy plane into a piece of cake that looks like a hill or building with tiny soldiers on top and around it. He pours ketchup from a bottle onto crawling modern soldiers. He dumps milk from his glass onto the increasing mess on the tabletop. He pours sugar onto a robot toy. This destructive play, with enticements heard from the TV, climaxes as the boy stands on his chair and throws the cake down on the table, shattering its plate. Then the innocent game becomes a real war scene. As the noises increase, the boy puts his hands over his ears (outside the bag) and hides under the table. A fireball explodes through the kitchen window. The boy is picked up by a man in a tank-top shirt and boots, with a “World War I leather helmet” and goggles on his head (Taymor 19). He takes off the boy’s paper mask of playful power to reveal a crying, terrified child. He carries the boy down a dark wooden stairway, kicking open a door and arriving within the ruins of an ancient Roman amphitheatre.10 He lifts the boy; an invisible crowd cheers. The boy sees the ruins of a house, perhaps his own home, on fire within the arena. Then he finds one of his toys, a small Roman soldier, in the dirt of the arena and picks it up. Suddenly, real soldiers enter through the arches, their bodies caked with blue clay, their legs marching stiffly in unison like puppets or enlarged toys.11 Some of them carry the wrapped bodies of Titus’s 21 dead sons. The Goth captives in a wagon cage are also brought into the arena, along


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with shining armor in a glass tank. Titus, the victorious Roman general, enters in a horse-drawn chariot. However, this is not simply a time-machine trip through history. The soldiers do look like ancient Romans, as well as the boy’s toys, and they demonstrate their martial moves with daggers and long spears. Yet, modern vehicles follow them into the arena ruins: motorcycles and primitive-looking tanks. As Taymor states in her screenplay, “Time is blended. In costume as well. It is simultaneously ancient Rome and the second half of the twentieth century” (20).12 The boy turns out to be Young Lucius, the grandson of Titus and a minor character in Shakespeare’s play, but a major witness throughout Taymor’s film (and in her earlier stage version). The initial scene of his destructive play mixes toys from different periods, his experience of real violence in the kitchen, and his journey through the rabbit hole to meet Roman soldiers in ancient arena ruins. This makes Young Lucius a link for the postmodern audience between today’s playful fantasies of screen violence and the real bloodshed of the world, present and past, as depicted through the brutality of Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy. For, according to Taymor, “this play is as much about violence as entertainment as it is about violence itself” (qtd. in Wrathall 25). An eclectic mixing of time periods is an often-used technique in postmodern theatre, especially with stagings of Shakespeare. Yet it is rarely seen in mainstream films, where continuity is expected in the historical diegesis. Adrian Noble used a similar device of a boy’s fantasy world as the abstract setting for his film version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1996). Although she uses the same actor in the parallel role (Osheen Jones), Taymor does not show her boy spectator falling asleep and dreaming the play, as Noble did his.13 Taymor’s child witness is an active player in the drama: a “conjuror” or godlike director in the initial battle of toy soldiers and food bombs on the kitchen table (Taymor, qtd. in Wrathall 25). Instead of showing the play within the boy’s fantasy as merely a dream, Taymor reveals a tie between the boy’s destructive glee as a god over his toys, Titus’s mournful ecstasy in the sacrifice of his sons and a captive, and the extremes of vengeful destruction that follow. The film audience is thus reminded of its own illusory, godlike (and trickster ghost) position, vicariously vulnerable, yet metaphysically

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impervious to the violence onscreen. Young Lucius crosses that screen edge: not only playing violently with his toys while watching the TV screen, but also falling into the violent spectacles of Shakespeare’s play. As this child becomes both spectator and player, he reflects the potential complicity of today’s audience as well: innocently enjoying the violence at a certain screen distance, yet playing themselves with the puppetry of power—if not on the kitchen table, then in the mind’s theatre—and thus participating in the desire to see more sacrifice and vengeance onscreen. Taymor’s initial imagery, added as a prelude to Shakespeare’s play, expresses all four primal drives in the animal part of the human brain. It combines feeding (with the boy’s phallic hot dog foreshadowing the play’s final cannibal meal), fighting, fleeing, and the erotics of child’s play (in the penetration of the cake by the plane and the ejaculation of ketchup and sugar onto the toy warriors). But as it proceeds, the film interweaves characteristic, historical modes of the fight or flight drives: the ancient Roman repetition of sacrificial and martial violence, the early modern crisis of patriarchal succession, and the postmodern ruins of history as terrifying (or terrorist) baggage, not just a playful pastiche of the simulacrum. All these modes can be seen when Shakespeare’s drama begins in the arena ruins and the boy watches the action along with the film audience, yet closer to it as their surrogate, like a Greek chorus. Another sense of self is displayed in Taymor’s adaptation, beyond the various animal drives and limbic selves within the brain. The “social self ” (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 253–54) is at risk for both Titus and Young Lucius, after the boy finds himself within the drama as a relative of the general and his many sacrificed sons. Taymor chooses to begin the dialogue in her film with Titus’s first line in the play (shifting Shakespeare’s beginning, with the princes’ debate about the throne, to a later scene). After the soldiers dance with their daggers and spears, Titus removes his helmet and hands it to Young Lucius. The unseen crowd cheers. The soldiers remove their helmets as well, leaving an outline of mud on their faces. Then Titus speaks to the stone ruins of the arena around him: “Hail, Rome, victorious in thy mourning weeds!” (1.1.70). Titus’s social self, as victorious general, rises with the greatness of Rome, yet


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remains embedded in the spreading weeds and pervasive mourning of war’s destructiveness. (The pun on “morning” is made more ironic as the scene is shown at night, with arena ruins lit by unseen modern instruments.) Such abjection at the heart of a collective ego, with its illusory triumph and unity, will soon erupt as further violence within the state of Rome, depicted by Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy.14 Yet, Taymor’s film focuses initially on the ruins of Rome, inhabited by the boy’s enlarged toys, as ghosts of victory and loss, persisting through the mourning weeds of the postmodern. The human brain’s evolution of a social self, beyond the instinctual habits of animals in a certain habitat, produces transcendent art works and triumphant civilizations, yet also the recurrence of war and abject mourning. Titus presents his 21 dead sons and 4 remaining live ones to the unseen Romans in the amphitheatre and to the film’s invisible spectators. The camera gives those spectators a ghostly view, hovering over the wrapped corpses on stretchers and the live sons standing in a line beside them. Then Titus sheaths his sword, his body faltering a bit as he does so, and Young Lucius puts a hand on Titus’s arm to steady him. But a further slaying will be demanded by the audience of ghosts, past and future, in the arena ruins, and by the pain of Titus’s phantom limbs in the 21 wrapped bodies on display, as well as by his living sons’ hunger for vengeance. The Roman gladiator games, which were eventually played in such an amphitheatre, began as funeral entertainments to pacify the ghosts (manes) of the departed. Taymor’s resetting of this early scene of the play in arena ruins emphasizes the demand of past spirits— and future mass-media spectators—for bloodshed as sacrificial entertainment. But the dialogue in Shakespeare’s text also shows why Titus is driven to sacrifice a prisoner of war, Alarbus, the son of Tamora, Queen of the Goths, while burying 21 of his own sons. Lucius (father of Young Lucius), speaks for the four remaining sons, requesting the captive victim: “That we may hew his limbs and on a pile / Ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh / . . . / That so the shadows be not unappeased” (1.1.100–3).15 Taymor evokes these fraternal shadows, prior to Lucius’s request, with her overhead shot of the multiple mummies on stretchers, as the camera then moves down to a low shot at their feet, the bodies fully wrapped, identical in death,

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individuality erased. Unlike the Egyptian mummy of the dead pharaoh, representing the god Osiris properly mastering the evil Set, these mummies as props onscreen present a tragic demand for further violence, haunting the victors of war even beyond the sacrifice of Alarbus. Shakespeare’s setting in ancient Rome means that his characters believe in the threat of unappeased ghosts, like his Elizabethan audience (with their repressed Catholic heritage), to a greater degree than Taymor’s postmodern spectators. But the premodern tradition of ancestral ghosts and mythic gods, presented in shadow puppets and masked drama, which Taymor absorbed in her four years of theatre work in Indonesia (1974–1978), appears in subtle ways in her film, Titus, two decades later. During these two decades, Taymor developed her own use of puppetry and masks in many numinous spectacles on the American stage. Likewise, her stage version of Titus Andronicus “juxtaposed stylized and naturalistic imagery” (Taymor 178).16 Her film of the play begins with realistic yet oddly juxtaposed images: the boy at play on his kitchen table, the explosion through his window, his trip downstairs to appear in the ancient arena with his burning house, and the stiff-legged, puppet-like soldiers with blue-mud and armor as masks. The dead sons of Titus then become still-life puppets, props showing the abject loss and spirit of revenge, as “mourning weeds” in the living. The sacrificial rite that Titus and his remaining sons perform in the family catacomb, to appease such ghosts, triggers further violence throughout the play. Titus’s social self, as Roman general and father of 25 sons and 1 daughter, folds inward at the loss in warfare of 21 of those limbs, with the ingrown pain of an abject rage in his mnemonic, visceral, and executive selves. While a postmodern audience might not believe collectively in the threat of unappeased manes, which the screen corpses portend, Taymor’s spectators may certainly identify with the ghostly pain that Titus now bears within his brain. This will soon be expressed in the violence onscreen: not only with the sacrifice of Alarbus, but also with further acts of vengeance for the unappeased shadows in the minds of Titus and his enemies. The ghosts that haunt Titus in the course of the play, from his dead sons and other lost body parts to his enemies’ vengeful specters, are emphasized even


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more by the stylized imagery of Taymor’s film. She adds to the play, at surreal moments, certain “Penny Arcade Nightmares” (or “PANs”) as she calls them, translated from her stage version to the screen. Taymor thus offers ghostly, symbolist figures for her film audience, like the translucent shadow puppets and ideographic gestures she used earlier in her theatre career. However, a significant difference remains between the ancient or early modern sense of ghosts actually existing in some other realm17 and the postmodern skepticism about any metaphysics. Today’s ghosts, as extensions of the mind’s inner theatre, depend upon the living for their existence. Their materiality and mortal vulnerability is shown, too, in Taymor’s film, as she mixes time periods and shifts the shadow play from toy soldiers, muddy bodies, and mummies to amputated body parts and superimposed images that incarnate specific symbols in Shakespeare’s violent poetry. Yet, even such spectacular additions to the stageplay may serve to remind a postmodern audience that the ghosts onscreen depend upon inner theatres to exist: the collaborative playfulness, collective mourning, and vengeful desires of spectators’ brains. A FATHER’S HONOR AND A MOTHER’S LOVE After Titus’s speech to the ghostly audience in the arena ruins and the sheathing of his sword, Taymor cuts to the Roman baths, showing naked soldiers washing the mud of war off their bodies. One of them, sitting on a bench in the baths, has an amputated leg. Here again, in this added scene, the film audience is reminded of the material sacrifices and phantom limbs in any war, ancient or postmodern. Then Titus and his living sons bring the 21 dead ones into the family catacomb: “sacred receptacle of my joys, / Sweet cell of virtue and nobility” (1.1.95–96). Taymor’s film shows Titus (as in her stage version) ritually pouring sand into his sons’ empty boots, although just eight pairs are shown18 (see figure 4.1). This simple gesture poignantly reveals the absence now of so many live, young bodies— like those seen marching and washing a few scenes earlier. The contradiction here between the mournful touch of earth, from Titus’s hand to the boys’ boots, and his “joys” in this “cell,” is bridged by the

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Figure 4.1 The ancient Roman Titus pours dirt from his hand into his dead sons’ modern army boots in Taymor’s Titus (1991)

intervening lines, spoken with ironic bitterness to the spaces of the tomb, by Anthony Hopkins in the role of Titus: “How many sons of mine hast thou in store / That thou wilt never render to me more?” (1.1.97–98). Hopkins’s flat delivery, throughout the catacomb scene, despite the burial of 21 sons and the sacrifice of Alarbus in retribution, demonstrates Titus’s determined focus on ritual propriety and patriarchal obedience—repressing his own abject pain. His attitude represents not only the right of a Roman general to sacrifice a captive warrior, or of a Roman father to kill his own disobedient son, as Titus actually does later in the play’s first scene. With the mother(s) of his sons absent here and throughout the play, Titus shows, like Shylock, Lear, and Prospero, how patriarchal authority can become terribly cruel without maternal mediation—or, in terms of human evolution, how the experiment of a big brain and external cultural womb can fail catastrophically, causing vengeful waves of reciprocal violence. To his four remaining sons, Titus hands over Alarbus, the eldest son of Tamora, Queen of the Goths. But she, also a war captive, pleads “with tears in passion” for her son’s life (1.1.109). Her passionate self appeals with a “mother’s tears” to Titus’s compassion, likening her impending loss of a son to his losses. However, the


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phantom pain in Titus’s filial limbs requires the sacrifice of her son to “appease their groaning shadows,” as he explains to her (1.1.129). With Tamora pleading for mercy, Titus pours a ritual wine into the mouth and over the bare chest of the bound Alarbus—in Taymor’s screen version—foreshadowing the further sacrifices of other children in this drama, culminating in an Atrean feast. Tamora asks Titus to transcend his phantom pain and “draw near the nature of the gods” by being merciful (1.1.120). But Titus slices her son’s chest, drawing blood to mix with the wine. Titus’s executive self overrides any compassion as fellow parent and presents a unified ego as transcendent superego, with godlike vengeance. His sons kill Alarbus offscreen, then return with the news that his “limbs are lopped / And entrails feed the sacrificing fire” according to the proper Roman rites (1.1.146–47). Taymor even shows Lucius dumping the pink flesh into the fire onscreen. Yet those lopped limbs and immolated guts will return with a vengeance, as Fury-like phantoms of loss, through the bodies of Tamora and her remaining sons, Chiron and Demetrius—who already hope that the “gods may favour” their mother in revenge (Taymor 29).19 The gods certainly do favor Tamora’s vengeance—through Shakespeare’s plot and the audience’s desire for a revenge tragedy. In subsequent scenes she rises from prisoner of war to Empress of Rome, when Saturninus becomes Emperor and chooses her as his wife. First, however, Taymor’s film shows the battle between brothers, Saturninus and Bassianus, for control of the throne—a scene she moved from the start of the play until after the burial of Titus’s sons and the sacrifice of Tamora’s. Taymor shows the confrontation as blended history. Newspaper headlines held by Young Lucius announce the death of the prior emperor. The dead ruler’s enlarged face appears on banners along the wall opposite the palace. Roman soldiers on horseback and motorcycles lead the entourage of Saturninus—who stands in a 1930s convertible protected by bulletproof glass (like the more recent “Pope-mobile”). Bassianus in a 1950s convertible also speaks through a microphone to his supporters, as the two groups converge and tussle at the palace steps. Their mother is missing from this conflict. But Marcus Andronicus mediates, announcing that Titus is the candidate selected by the Senate.

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Titus rejects the crown and throws his political weight in the patriarchal direction of honor, favoring the dead emperor’s first-born son, Saturninus, as successor to the throne. Taymor then puts Saturninus on a metal throne that looks like an overlarge stuffed chair with an even larger wolf head behind it. A low angle shot of Saturninus lifting his feet to jump off the throne makes him look childishly malicious, like Young Lucius earlier. Saturninus takes Lavinia, Titus’s daughter, as his bride—even though she’s betrothed to his brother, Bassianus. Once again, Titus honorably agrees. But his sons rebel and help Lavinia escape with Bassianus. One of Titus’s sons, Mutius, stops to face his father as the others flee. Titus slays him.20 Taymor shows this on the palace steps with Titus stabbing his son in the back as Mutius turns away to watch his cohorts escape. Yet, the new Emperor does not value Titus’s sacrifice of his own son for the sake of patriarchal order. With Lavinia gone, Saturninus takes the vanquished Queen of the Goths as his Empress. Thus Tamora, the mournful mother, shoots up the ladder of power to plan her revenge on the man who sacrificed her son. Taymor’s film, with Allen Cummings in the role, emphasizes Saturninus’s boyish uncertainty as he empowers her. Jessica Lange as Tamora also conveys the incestuous, substitute mother finding her advantage, even as she becomes “a handmaid to his desires, / A loving nurse, a mother to his youth” (1.1.334–35). Earlier, Saturninus called Titus “father of my life” (1.1.256) pointing to a full Oedipal triangle in the young Emperor’s subsequent rejection of Titus and perverse bonding with the captured Queen. Next, Titus confronts his mourning sons in the family catacomb as they try to bury Mutius. Titus refuses to let a “traitor” be buried with his other sons, until the living ones plead, along with Titus’s brother, Marcus, for the father to forgive this rebellious corpse and painful phantom limb. Such a strict father who adheres to the patriarchal tradition of the eldest son inheriting the throne, who agrees to the political marriage of his daughter against her wishes (in Saturninus’s revenge against his brother for attempting to get the throne), and who slays his own son after losing 21 in war, surely seems a villain. Yet Shakespeare’s tragedy explores the sources and consequences of Titus’s villainy, making him a tragic figure. The loss


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of his sons in war, plus the treason of his daughter and living sons, creates a multiple, phantom pain in the amputated and rebellious limbs of his paternal ego. Although he declined the crown, his social self as military leader continues to threaten the young Emperor whom he helped to put in power. His ritual sacrifice of Alarbus produces an abject rage in Tamora, turning a mother’s love into vicious cruelty and causing Titus’s remaining children to suffer, even more than Mutius at his own hands. Shakespeare creates various villains—Saturninus, Tamora, Chiron, Demetrius, and Aaron the Moor—to set up Titus’s tragedy.21 Yet those villains’ motives are also shown, and the play initially encourages sympathy for several of them through the sacrifice of Alarbus, complicating the revenge melodrama with various tragic identifications and plot twists. Taymor’s film increases the audience’s pity and fear for Tamora and her sons by first showing them as captives in the amphitheatre, exhibited as plunder in Titus’s victory against the Goths and as victims of his brutal Roman game. The desire for vengeance in Tamora, Chiron, and Demetrius may be shared to some degree by the audience after seeing the sacrifice of Alarbus as a prisoner of war. But the Goths’ pleasure and excessiveness in punishing Titus and his children eventually becomes horrifying—twisting the spectator’s sympathies toward tragic catharsis, even as the initial victims become shockingly evil as villains. Saturninus’s evil derives from his insecurity as a young Emperor, which causes him to suspect Titus as a powerful general (even after the old man declines the crown) and to reject him as an ally. Saturninus’s choice to marry Tamora, after Lavinia escapes with Bassianus, shows his quick impulse for revenge, plus his desire for the captive Other as Oedipal mother. She also wants to avenge the Oedipal father for separating her from her eldest son. Thus, the basic fight and fornication drives in the animal brain (the paleomammalian limbic system and reptilian brainstem) become warped in the young Emperor’s mind—through his triumph over his brother and his choice of the captive Goth as his queen. This is emphasized in Taymor’s film through the boyish gestures of Alan Cumming as Saturninus and his quick personality change between perverse glee with his queen mother, Tamora, and childish rage against the old

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man, Titus. But the film audience also sees, through Taymor’s switching of initial scenes and her added prelude, that Saturninus is an extension of Young Lucius, especially in the boy’s introductory play with the TV set, kitchen table, and toys. Indeed, all the characters of Shakespeare’s play become ghostly extensions of the selves in that first boy’s violent game and in the postmodern spectators identifications with him. Shakespeare’s characters are phantom limbs of our visceral, vigilant, executive, mnemonic, and social selves in Taymor’s presentation of the play onscreen—with mournful abjection and insecure power distilled into vengeful, tragic rage. Young Lucius’s parents are palpably absent in the film’s initial kitchen scene. If Titus serves as a classical ghost of modern patriarchy, with his ruthless sense of Oedipal obedience, then Tamora is the ghost of a social-climbing, career-oriented super-mom, even more absent from the kitchen. And Aaron the Moor represents the perverse, other father of racism’s abject revenge. Taymor views him as the “mirror image of Titus” (178). Titus begins with honor and morality, then turns cruel by the end, “while Aaron, the loner, evolves into a loving father, ready to sacrifice himself for the life of his child.”22 Aaron (Harry Lennix) initially appears to be just a servant or slave of Tamora, also captured by Titus. Eventually, however, he rises with them, from abject imprisonment to the heights of power, through Saturninus’s choice of a Goth queen and her sexual desire for the Moor. Taymor shows Aaron exchanging glances with Tamora at a wild, palace party (part Fellini’s Satyricon,23 part Roaring 20s, part PBS ballroom dancing). Taymor suggests Aaron’s profound isolation there, as the only black man in the midst of all the jazz music, immobile while everyone else moves to the beat. This depiction sets up the later “speeches of Aaron that reflect his fury at the bigoted world surrounding him” (178). He faces the camera in his asides, as does Tamora, fixing the movie viewers in a complicit gaze like co-conspirators, or as the vengeful gods that Chiron and Demetrius had prayed for.24 The film shows Aaron and Tamora sneaking away from the Emperor and other party guests, to meet on a palace balcony. She approaches him but he gestures for her not to embrace him or speak. This added scene presents Aaron as much more than a slave to


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Tamora, perhaps as a terrorist puppeteer. He guides her in looking over the balcony’s edge at the war of words brewing between Saturninus and Bassianus in the piazza below. Tamora joins them then, evoking a temporary truce between the Emperor and his brother, who stands with Titus, his daughter, and sons in ancient ruins, beside a gigantic hand and foot from a broken statue. With this setting, and the added balcony scene, Taymor shows that Tamora’s kindness now is merely a way to solidify her power and plot a greater revenge, through Aaron’s aid. Tamora and Aaron, as perverse parental pair, meet next in the woods during a royal hunt. Taymor shows them in a sexual embrace, as Aaron kneels between her legs and they kiss on the forest floor. In the prior scene, he had tutored Tamora’s sons in a plan to rape and mutilate Lavinia, murder Bassianus, and pin the blame for the latter on Titus’s remaining sons. Tamora helps implement this plot by manipulating her boys. But Aaron was the mastermind, as he says himself in his later confession (5.1.98–101). Taymor presents Chiron and Demetrius as nearly killing each other in extreme sibling rivalry over the idea of wooing Titus’s already married daughter—until Aaron channels their hellish “heat” (2.1.134–35). Later in the film, Taymor shows Aaron grinning as he takes Titus’s amputated hand in a plastic Ziploc bag and attaches it to the rear-view mirror of his sports car, after helping Titus to cut it off, ostensibly in exchange for the lives of his two sons. Still later, Taymor adds a scene of Aaron playing pool with the Goth brothers, who also play video arcade games. This sets up Aaron’s use of a broken pool stick to stab and kill the nurse who brought him his black baby, Tamora’s child, and told him to end its life because its skin was a sign of his sin. This becomes the turning point in the film’s presentation of Aaron, who develops from nihilistic villain into protective father.25 He continues to spew villainous words, even when caught by Lucius and the Goth army, while trying to escape with his child. Knowing he will be killed, Aaron only regrets that he did not do more evil in his lifetime. Yet, he barters to spare his son’s life in exchange for a full confession. Toward the end of her film (after the gruesome deaths of all the major characters except Lucius), Taymor shows the Clown

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holding the black infant in a cage, high over his head in the amphitheatre, like he held Young Lucius in the movie’s prelude. The film ends with Young Lucius freeing the baby from the cage and carrying him out of the amphitheatre, toward a sunrise at the horizon. Taymor thus gives a glimpse of hope that the next generation will somehow find less racism and vengeful violence—even if Aaron and the other villains of the play are presented as extensions of the boy’s initial destructive lust. But this hopeful ending to the boy’s nightmare is nearly overwhelmed by the tragic cruelty preceding it. In the forest scene Tamora pretends she was threatened with death by Bassianus and Lavinia; this lie focuses her sons’ passionate rage against those bodies. Chiron and Demetrius kill Bassianus to “witness” their love for their mother (2.3.116). Lavinia then appeals to Tamora for mercy as a fellow woman. Tamora responds: “Remember, boys, I poured forth tears in vain / To save your brother from the sacrifice, / But fierce Andronicus would not relent” (163–65). Lavinia asks to be murdered and not raped. Yet the lost son and brother, Alarbus, as painful phantom limb to the villains’ social selves, demands a greater sacrifice. Lavinia is not only raped by Chiron and Demetrius; her hands and tongue are cut off. The evil tutoring of the Goth boys by Aaron and Tamora extends Titus’s initial ritual violence with Alarbus, and his subsequent sacrifice of his own disobedient son, toward the amputations of Lavinia’s tongue and hands, of Titus’s hand, and of the heads of two more sons (as phantoms returned to Titus along with his amputated limb). This wave of sacrificial amputations in Shakespeare’s play exemplifies the continued significance of ghostly revenge from the classical to the early modern stage and the postmodern screen—especially with the time twists of Taymor’s film. The human mind’s struggle to maintain a stable body image and social ties, despite their inevitable fragmentation in life and death, may not produce a widespread belief in ghosts today. But the power of unappeased spirits and lost limbs persists in this drama and film, warning us about the painful pleasures of revenge that perpetuate both phantom and real violence—as with the recent ghosts of 9/11 demanding, in many American minds, the sacrifices of further war.


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PANNING FOR FLESH AND SPIRIT Taymor’s film, with its unusual introduction and subsequent blending of historical periods, positions the audience as co-witnesses and vicarious players in the boy’s nightmare of Shakespeare’s play. Although a minor character in the drama, Young Lucius is given a central role by Taymor, showing the movie viewers an extension of their various selves in his chaotic play with war toys and food, while entranced by the blue light of the TV screen and its many voices. The tempting pleasure of godlike power over others’ bodies becomes tragically magnified during the drama: from Titus’s sacrifice of Alarbus, to Tamora’s and Aaron’s revenge plots, to the Goth boys’ wildness— and even to the one surviving hero, Lucius, who wants to hang Aaron’s innocent black baby. Taymor’s film frames the revenge tragedy with postmodern reflections of the viewer’s illusory, transcendent power: in the boy’s TV-lit play, in the arena space as opening and ending to the drama, in the mixture of modern and ancient vehicles of war and politics, in the contemporary costumes and settings that include classical fragments, and in the added visions of each surreal “PAN.” The boy’s violence on the kitchen table sets up a potential identification for the film spectator with the playwright’s and filmmaker’s power to create fictional destruction onstage/ onscreen. But the boy suffers with his relatives in the revenge play as villain, victim, and hero. This encourages the audience to find their own flesh, as well as spirit, in the ghostly shadows onscreen, in the puppetry of mutilated bodies, and in the godlike forces unleashed by human minds gone awry. While initially supporting his grandfather in the arena display and catacomb sacrifice (where he purifies the swords of ritual bloodshed with fire), Young Lucius then spurns Titus, leaving with his father and uncles as they help Lavinia to flee with Bassianus. He thus expresses the audience’s disgust with his grandfather by disappearing from the screen—until after Bassianus is killed, Lavinia raped and mutilated, and Titus’s remaining sons condemned by the powers of Rome (two to death and one to exile). The film viewers stand in for Young Lucius while he is gone, as witnesses to the cruelty of their toys onscreen.

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Taymor also brings the film spectator inside the shadow play of ghosts and gods by inserting surreal scenes at strategic points that reveal more of the interior theatre within and between characters’ minds. These “Penny Arcade Nightmares” give the violence a lyrical development, putting the postmodern audience in the godlike position of being entertained, yet moved at a vicarious distance, by the excessive bloodshed. The antique look of many of the PANs offers a classic film feel. But they also exhibit a layering of images that is obviously high-tech. Thus, the surreal imagery becomes mythic and personal, ancient and postmodern, while visualizing the symbols in Shakespeare’s text—especially the spirits of the dead that hunger for vengeance through the living. Taymor herself describes the PANs as “portray[ing] the inner landscapes of the mind as affected by external actions. . . . They depict, in abstract collages, fragments of memory, the unfathomable layers of a violent event, the metamorphic flux of the human, animal and divine” (183). Taymor’s PANs show fragments of bodies and various layers of the human mind’s violent drives: from the Real of the animal brain (limbic system and brainstem) to the Symbolic and Imaginary hemispheres of the neocortex, involving specific fantasies, memories, and consequences of vengeance between characters. The first PAN occurs when the three remaining sons of Titus return with his brother Marcus, his daughter Lavinia, and her husband Bassianus—to confront the new Emperor. Tamora makes peace between Saturninus and the others, but then the film reminds its viewers of the blood debt remaining between Tamora and Titus. At the end of Shakespeare’s scene, which Taymor sets on the palace steps, amidst pieces from a gigantic ancient statue, she adds a surreal vision between the figures of Titus and Tamora facing each other. With flames between them, life-size limbs of a broken sculpture twirl toward the cinema audience (see figure 4.2). Its classical torso then appears with a bloody line where Titus had marked Alarbus before the sacrifice—before his limbs were “lopped” by the generals’ sons (1.1.146). The sculptured chest breathes “faster and faster for just five seconds and then stops” (Taymor 64). This vision, framed by the bodies of Titus and Tamora, shows the real loss of sons in both of their minds—in the visceral, mnemonic


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Figure 4.2 Flaming sculpture fragments, representing the sacrificed Alarbus, twirl between Titus and Tamora—in Taymor’s first PAN

areas of their limbic brains. Yet the specific imagery of fire and body parts reflects the executive will of the father and vigilant despair of the mother in the marking, dismembering, and sacrificial burning of Alarbus’s body. It also reveals the Imaginary and Symbolic dimension of that body in pieces (regarding the embodied and social selves of Titus and Tamora) becoming a furious, fiery ghost of reciprocal vengeance. The broken sculpture, representing Alarbus’s body parts, is not just on fire as a past sacrifice. The zombie-like corpse morcelé, kindling the reciprocal violence between characters, fuels the play’s further sacrifices, its various amputations, and its final cannibal meal, despite the apparent peace treaty in this scene. The next PAN also involves a sacrificial body, with animal and divine dimensions. Here Taymor mixes Judeo-Christian imagery with classical and Shakespearean symbols. Titus pleads to the “grave fathers” of Rome to spare his sons’ lives, after they are condemned for the murder of Bassianus (3.1.1). Asking the tribunes to pity them, he mentions his own bloodshed in war and his “two and twenty sons . . . [who] died in honor’s lofty bed” (10–11). And yet, Titus himself caused the death of the twenty-second son, when he refused to pity Mutius, who had dishonorably aided Lavinia’s escape with Bassianus. Apparently, Titus has changed his view of Mutius’s and his other sons’ rebellion. The once haughty, victorious general, who could have been emperor, now grovels on the ground for a pardon—valuing the lives

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of his remaining sons over his life or their honor. This change in Titus’s executive and social selves is easy to miss in his wordy speech, especially within a film. But Taymor stresses Titus’s metaphysical regret with her second PAN. As Titus speaks to the stones of the road, that road rises into a vision of angels with trumpets flying around an altar on which the bound sacrificial body of a lamb lies. Its head changes into that of Mutius whose name is on the altar. The vision ends as the camera moves into “the black hole of a single trumpet” held by one of the angels (Taymor 94). Titus thus becomes like Abraham, except that Titus completed the sacrifice of his son without Jahweh’s intervention.26 Now Titus sees how he lacks a merciful god and forgiving patriarchy, as he loses two more sons and lies face down, arms out in cruciform, on a crossroad made of stone. Titus then meets his mutilated daughter. Taymor shows Lavinia now—as earlier on a tree stump in the swamp, in the surreal scene of her rapists taunting her—with twigs tied to her amputated wrists as if they had sprouted branches.27 Blood pours from her mouth when her father asks her to speak. Thus, the reality of violence in the film becomes also like a PAN. Titus offers to cut off his own hands because they have fought “in vain” for Rome (3.1.73). He suggests again near the end of the scene that he, Lucius, and Marcus should cut off their hands and bite off their tongues—in sympathy with Lavinia. But Young Lucius, who returns in the next scene of Taymor’s film to witness Titus actually cutting off his hand in a futile attempt to save his sons’ lives, offers a more practical answer to Lavinia’s lack. Taymor adds a couple scenes—after that paternal sacrifice and the return by the Emperor of Titus’s hand with his sons’ heads—showing Young Lucius in a statue carver’s shop, picking a pair of wooden hands for his aunt and then giving this present to her. Taymor thus finds another way to stress the specific suffering of a certain character, and to involve the film audience directly in the phantom limb pain. But this time it is through the compassion of the boy as the spectators’ alter-ego, rather than through a subjective, hallucinatory PAN. Taymor’s background in metaphysical puppetry and shadow play is also evident with Lavinia’s new prosthetics. In the next scene, Titus reads his daughter’s gestures at the dinner table to “interpret her


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martyr’d signs” (3.2.36). This becomes even more meaningful as she wears wooden hands from a saint’s statue. The pain in her phantom limbs is increasingly present onscreen, shared by her father and the film audience: from tree branches at her wrists to a tongue-less dumb show with a church icon’s hands.28 Another PAN occurs as a real event in the drama, just before the film’s added scene in the woodcarver’s shop (Taymor 107–10, 184). Titus has, with the help of Aaron, cut off his own left hand and sent it to the Emperor in exchange for his sons’ lives, since they have been condemned to die for the murder of Bassianus. In Shakespeare’s text a Messenger soon returns with Titus’s hand and his sons’ heads (3.1.236–67). Taymor uses the Clown for this gruesome gift-return and tripling of the sacrifice. The same figure who took Young Lucius away from his home, to journey down the rabbit hole and into the arena in the film’s first scene, now drives a small, rusty, souvenirseller’s truck or “sideshow wagon” into Titus’s yard (Taymor 107). He and a little girl in a red dress unfold some stools for the remaining Andronici to sit on and enjoy a show, as carnival music plays. The little girl exchanges smiling glances with Young Lucius. The Clown uses a megaphone to bark some Latin phrases, which Taymor adds to the script, about the law’s aim to correct through example and to remove evil “so that others can live more peacefully” (107). Then the red metal shutter on the side of the wagon is opened, revealing a “still life” of Titus’s hand on black velvet and his sons’ (Martius’s and Quintus’s) heads floating in two large specimen jars. The filmmaker’s choice to display the amputated heads and hand as a play within the play reflects the postmodern movie viewer’s appetite for violent spectacle. Especially with the little girl and Young Lucius as part of the show and audience (recalling the same boy’s initial, kitchen table display), Taymor questions the innocence or innocuousness of screen violence as simply fictional fantasy. Here Titus and his fellow spectators cross the inner stage edge and take up the body parts. But first, as in Shakespeare’s text, Titus laughs at the absurd return of his sacrifice and harkens to the zombie-ghosts in the dumb show: “these two heads do seem to speak to me” (3.1.271). They tell him to avenge the “mischiefs” in their perpetrators’ “throats” (273–74).29

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Eventually, Taymor will show Titus accomplishing this specific revenge for his sons in a double sense. Tamora and Saturninus will not only swallow the flesh of her sons, as shown in Shakespeare’s text. Each will also be killed through the throat: the Empress stabbed there by Titus’s knife and the Emperor force-fed a long spoon by Lucius, then shot. In the current scene of the sideshow wagon (as with the deaths of Titus and Lavinia at the end) the one-handed general’s heroic choice of melodramatic vengeance is undercut by tragic absurdity. He makes his colleagues vow with him “to right your wrongs” (3.1.278).30 But then he gives one of the heads to Marcus, takes the other in his own remaining hand, and tells the hand-less Lavinia to pick up his amputated hand in her teeth, while he sends Lucius to gather a Goth army against Rome. This switching of hands and heads, as Lucius leaves to rally Titus’s conquered enemies as his new allies, is a dizzying reminder of the chaos and ironic perpetuation of pain that occurs as reciprocal violence spreads. Taymor’s added Latin prelude, along with her carnival-like theatrics, recalls how the law and mass-media today attempt to restrain vigilante violence by offering surrogate punishments and poetic justice as entertainment to appease the potential rage of spectral spectators. But the gods of vengeance continue to demand more victims, whether onscreen or in life. Unlike Hamlet, where the King’s conscience is caught in The Mousetrap’s mimesis, here the capital crime is displayed by the rulers themselves. Yet both Hamlet and Titus have their mourning refocused by the play within a play and ultimately succeed in vengeance, while losing their own lives and more loved ones in the process.31 Taymor regards Titus Andronicus as highly as Hamlet, calling it “one of the greatest” by Shakespeare and “the first theatre of the absurd” (qtd. in Johnson-Haddad 36). She emphasizes the poetic insights of the play’s absurd violence with each PAN, especially the next two, which show Lavinia’s traumatic memory of rape and Titus’s metaphysical vision of revenge—both involving the initial victims of the play, Tamora and her sons, in their own vicious, yet foolish vengeance. Another absurd scene occurs before Taymor’s next PAN. After Lavinia takes her father’s amputated hand in her teeth and receives


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wooden hands from Young Lucius, the family sits down to a meal (as mentioned above). Titus jests with his daughter that she should take a knife between her teeth and make a hole against her heart so that her tears “May run into that sink” and drown a certain aspect of herself, “the lamenting fool” (2.2.16–20). Thus, Shakespeare’s text points to the visceral, abject self of Lavinia, from brain and tears to heart, through her father’s dark humor about suicide—as he interprets her “map of woe” and tries to save her from the “outrageous beating” of her sorrowful heart (12–13). Marcus criticizes Titus’s taste here for black comic violence, but Titus responds that he himself shares Lavinia’s sorrow and her risk of total despair, with his own loss of a hand. After studying his daughter’s gestures some more, Titus criticizes Marcus for using a knife to kill a fly on the banquet table. Taymor has Young Lucius use the knife instead, so that the film audience, through their surrogate witness, can be drawn directly into the madcap absurdity of the scene. Ironically, having just suggested that his daughter use a knife against her own heart, Titus now condemns his grandson as a “murderer” and says, “thou kill’st my heart,” because the fly was “innocent” (3.2.54–56). Whether in jest or madness, Titus reminds Young Lucius and the film audience of the extensive consequences of any act of violence, which are rarely presented today despite the many fictional murders we witness onscreen. “How if that fly had a father and mother?” (60). But the boy says it was a “black” fly like “the empress’ Moor” (66–67; Taymor 113). So then Titus takes the knife from him and attacks the fly on the table many more times, showing the absurd jouissance of excessive revenge. This sets up the next PAN. Lavinia takes her nephew’s book, Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and turns the pages with her wooden hands and teeth, showing her father and uncle the story of Philomel, which parallels her own rape and tongue excision. Titus and Marcus also recognize the setting in the book as similar to the woods where the ravished Lavinia was found. Marcus then asks a question that reverberates with Taymor’s initial setting of the film in the boy’s destructive play: “O, why should nature build so foul a den, / Unless the gods delight in tragedies?” (4.1.59–60). With the film audience as gods delighting in this tragedy, Marcus shows Lavinia how to write

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in the dirt with a staff, holding one end in his mouth and guiding the rest without using his hands. Taymor’s Lavinia also starts to take the staff into her mouth, in imitation of her uncle (as the play’s stage directions state). But that triggers her traumatized, mnemonic self to position the staff against her cheek instead, and then furiously write the names of her attackers in the dirt. As she does so, the screen shows a surreal, bluish-tinted scene of her standing on a classical pedestal (like the stump on which Marcus found her). She is not shown being raped, or being physically touched at all. But her body writhes in pain as her petticoat billows up, revealing her legs as in the “iconographic image of Marilyn Monroe holding her dress down over the subway grating” (Taymor 117). Lavinia, however, has deer hooves instead of hands and a doe head on top of hers. The enlarged, raging faces of Chiron and Demetrius as ghostly shades in the tree branches around her turn into trickster tigers leaping toward her. The rape is not shown onstage in Shakespeare’s text. Taymor gives the audience this flashback onscreen (like she did in her stage version) to demonstrate that the traumatic event did not happen just once, but continues to repeat as part of Lavinia’s current mnemonic identity—especially as she writes the attackers’ names. The deep “woe” that her father had tried to interpret in her tears and her wooden hands now becomes expressed in symbolist imagery

Figure 4.3 A ghostly tiger, like the rapists Chiron and Demetrius, leaping at the “deer” Lavinia, in another Taymor PAN


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onscreen for the film viewer to read. Taymor takes her cue for these phantoms from earlier references in the play, by Titus and Marcus, to Rome as a “wilderness of tigers” and to the raped and mutilated Lavinia as a “deer” (3.1.54, 89, 91). Indeed, Taymor claims that in her stage and screen versions of the play, “every image, every idea comes from the text” (qtd. in Johnson-Haddad 35). The film shows Taymor’s unique artistry in emphasizing certain ideas, images, and poetic terms from Shakespeare—with particular sensitivity to Lavinia’s tragic plight in this PAN, which makes her death at the hands of a loving father even more poignant. At the end of the drama, Titus kills Lavinia by breaking her neck. She submits to this act as another kind of play within a play: an absurdly tragic scene, as dinner entertainment for Tamora and Saturninus, while they dine unknowingly on the flesh of Chiron and Demetrius. In Shakespeare’s text, Titus questions the Emperor about whether the famous Virginius was correct in executing his daughter because she had been raped. When the Emperor agrees in principle, Titus shocks him and the Empress by playing out the role in real life. But this nightmarish skit by father and daughter relates, in Taymor’s film, to the earlier PAN of Lavinia’s continued suffering as objet d’art on the column and to her father’s prior attempt to study her tears and the “martyr’d signs” of her wooden hands. Titus does not kill his daughter because she has been deflowered. Instead, he uses the Virginius reference, like Lavinia used Ovid, to give some meaning to their shared suffering, ending it with her death and his revenge upon the dinner guests.32 The shock of the story acted out also challenges the movie audience with Real violence as absurd performance, through the prior PANs of ghosts and gods, as fictions of trauma and vengeance within the characters’ brains. In another tragically absurd scene, earlier in Shakespeare’s play, Titus invokes the absent Roman gods who have failed to guarantee the patriarchal order that he tried to maintain in his initial sacrifice of Tamora’s son and his own. In Taymor’s film, Titus gathers his kinsmen at night by knocking on their doors and creating a parade, with Young Lucius pulling a little red wagon that contains bows and arrows, nets, picks, and shovels. They approach the palace where the film shows the naked Saturninus in bed, sleeping on the breast of

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Tamora. Her sons, along with other orgy guests, are arrayed around a large pool on which floats a large inflated mermaid. Outside, Titus tells his grandson to shoot an arrow and says that Astrea, goddess of justice, has left the earth (4.3.4). He tells his kinsmen to cast the nets: “you may catch her in the sea” (8). He gives others the picks and shovels, along with a letter, and tells them to dig to the center of the earth and give Pluto his “petition . . . for justice and for aid” (11–17). One of his kinsmen, humoring Titus’s madness, replies that he should get help from the goddess Revenge, because Justice is busy with Jove.33 Titus responds that they will “solicit heaven, and move the gods / To send down Justice” (51–52). Titus gives out various arrows with notes attached and says they are petitions to Jove, Apollo, Pallas Athena, Mercury, and Saturn. Titus says that they will also “afflict the emperor in his pride” (63). Taymor shows the arrows arching over the palace and coming down through the central hole in its pantheon-like ceiling, hitting and deflating the mermaid in the orgy pool, frightening the guests into flight, and even reaching the furniture in Saturninus’s bedroom. In Shakespeare’s text, Titus and Marcus talk about the arrows hitting the zodiac gods in the night sky and Saturninus complains that the arrows and scrolls flew “about the streets of Rome” (4.3.65–72; 4.4.16). But Taymor gives a real sense of danger to the absurd missives and their targets. Along with the existential absence of the gods, in Titus’s mad attempt to invoke their aid, for justice or revenge, Taymor suggests that her film spectators might be struck to the quick—even in the apparent safety of their voyeuristic, godlike power. Taymor’s final PAN arises during the most absurd scene in the play. Tamora dresses up as the goddess Revenge, along with her sons as the gods Rape and Murder, to taunt Titus into arranging a meeting of the Emperor and herself (as Empress) with Lucius and the generals of the Goth army, now advancing on Rome. Tamora, as Revenge, even leaves her sons with Titus at his request, allowing him to take them prisoner and use them for his banquet. Perhaps she considers him mad and therefore her sons not in danger. Perhaps she thinks her sons are expendable or that such a “hostage” is necessary to negotiate the peace treaty, as Saturninus had suggested earlier


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(4.4.106) and Titus himself states (5.2.134–36). Tamora had planned to “disperse the giddy Goths” through the peace banquet (78). But she and her sons are more than giddy as Goths with their supposed power over Titus’s “lunacy” (70)—playing trickster gods who epitomize the evil acts they have already performed. This giddiness in evil shows a tragic flaw, even in these melodramatic villains, leading to their catastrophic fall in Titus’s final, sacrificial feast. Taymor takes the absurdity of this plot twist and makes it more real as fantasy. She shows Titus alone in his bath, writing insane notes with his own blood, using his amputated wrist as an inkwell (Taymor 149). The film thus takes a metaphor from the script—with Titus saying, “in bloody lines I have set down” (5.2.14)—and realizes that image more literally onscreen. But this extension of the script’s playful, nightmarish imagery also shows how theatre and film relate to the interior environment of the human mind. Taymor’s Titus envisions the gods—Rape, Murder, and Revenge—as surreal figures in the fog of his bathroom window, appearing through his insane scripting of the bloody lines. The playacting of Tamora and her sons now matches Titus’s phantoms of vengeful desire—from the pain of lost sons and body parts, as seen in each preceding PAN. This exemplifies how theatre may function not merely as escapist fantasy, but also as cathartic exorcism—for the phantom, yet Real pains in individual spectators and their community. Taymor’s film shows the final PAN as both a fantasy and materialization of the godlike, limbic drives of vengeance and destruction within Titus’s haunted brain (in its rage system). Tamora, Chiron, and Demetrius—as Revenge, Rape, and Murder—are gods projected from Shakespeare’s writing, back to ancient Rome (where Titus writes his bloody lines) and forward to the collective dream screen of Taymor’s postmodern audience. She shows Chiron as Rape wearing outstretched owl-wings on his head and “a little girl’s training bra and panties” on his torso, plus white stockings on his legs (Taymor 154). Demetrius as Murder wears a tiger-head hat and smokes from a tube attached to Tamora’s enlarged breast. As Revenge Tamora wears “a crown of daggers” reminiscent of the Statue of Liberty, plus black makeup over her eyes, “like Blind Justice,” and two “coned gauntlets” where her hands should be. Titus first sees these PAN

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hallucinations through the steam of his bath, in blue and red tint with the names of each figure in Latin, framing the strange images. Titus speaks to his closed window, but Revenge invites him, as in Shakespeare’s script, to “Come down” (5.2.33). So he opens his window and sees them actually standing in his garden below. He then comes out of his house in his white bathrobe to confer with them— not only crossing the dream screen fantasy, but also recognizing and taking advantage of the actors to enact revenge through them. However, Titus’s temptation to “embrace” Revenge (5.2.69) yields a further, tragicomic horror for the screen audience. After Tamora leaves and the boys are captured, Taymor’s film shows them hanging upside-down in Titus’s kitchen, squirming. Titus tells them he will cut their throats and grind their bones to dust, combining it with their blood to make a “paste” for the “coffin” crust of his meat pies— thus feeding to their mother the “two pastries of your shameful heads” (181, 186–93). By showing Chiron and Demetrius hanging upside-down to be sacrificed onscreen (unlike the earlier sacrifice of Alarbus), Taymor evokes sympathy for these villains as victims, even as Titus recounts their crimes. Lavinia also appears with a basin in her wooden hands to collect the blood that will drip from their bodies, as her father prescribes. The actual killing of the villains as sacrificial victims and cannibal food thus encourages complex identifications beyond the plot’s melodramatic resolution, through Titus’s vision of revenge.34 This is especially so in Taymor’s film as the Goth villains, strung up like animals, are told that their mother will feed on them, will “swallow her own increase” like the earth (191). After Titus slices their necks, the brothers twist in the air with their death throes, their blood dripping onto the kitchen table and into Lavinia’s basin. Film viewers might sympathize here not only with the vengeful father and traumatized daughter, but also with these new victims. Or at least the spectator will be shocked by the extreme pleasures taken in the progress of Revenge, from phantom limb sacrifices and playful yet brutal god-actors35 to poetic justice in the flesh. Taymor then shifts the mood, yet intensifies the tragicomic irony, by showing the two meat pies “à la ‘Betty Crocker’ ”: cooling on an open windowsill of the kitchen, with sunlight shining through the


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curtains that wave in the breeze and with Italian music playing (Taymor 163). She also brings the final cannibal vengeance home to her postmodern audience as Anthony Hopkins appears (like a cross between the Galloping Gourmet and Hannibal Lecter) in a white chef ’s cap, to serve up the slices of life. He grins with pleasure, mimicking the chewing, as Tamora and Saturninus partake. However, Taymor returns her audience to a tragic horror scene with the subsequent acts of violence. She makes a striking contrast between the gentle, fatherly embrace that Titus gives Lavinia, as she submits to the quick breaking of her neck, and the absurd brutality of the other killings. Titus’s knife stabs Tamora in the throat as she chokes on her sons’ flesh. Saturninus then leaps upon the long banquet table, runs across it, pulls a candle off the candelabra with his teeth, and stabs Titus in the chest with the spikes of that metal instrument. But Lucius pulls the Emperor back across the entire length of the table to stuff the long spoon down his throat and shoot him in his banquet chair. In a final, time and place twist, the film freezes the action, then shows the banquet table and its violent tableau inside the initial arena ruins. Not only are the Roman and Goth dinner guests, along with Young Lucius, staring at the remains of the Revenge feast. Modern spectators are also shown a further distance away, standing against the ancient gladiatorial arches. Lucius then takes command. Aaron, bound in cruciform, is set into a deep hole in the arena sand, to die there of starvation in a Tantalus-like punishment for his unrepentant evil. However, Taymor cuts the part in Shakespeare’s text where Young Lucius kisses his dead grandfather and says, “Would I were dead, so you did live again” (5.3.169–73). Instead of the next generation being bound to that vengeful ghost, Taymor shows Young Lucius freeing Aaron’s black infant from a cage, then carrying him out of the theatre of sacrificial sport. The final lines of the play are still used at the end of Taymor’s film. Lucius commands that Tamora’s body be given no funeral rite, but be thrown “to beasts and birds of prey” that they alone may “take pity” on her, since she had none for her victims (5.3.199–200). Yet, the final film image suggests another twist to this sentence for Tamora— and the similar fate given to Aaron. For it is their child that Young

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Lucius rescues, perhaps preventing perpetual vengeance in succeeding generations. But this depends also on the beasts and birds in the cinema audience. If they can take pity, like the boy, beyond the drama’s distortions of the feed, flight, fight, and fornication drives in the animal part of the human brain, then there is hope for a tragic catharsis beyond vengeance.36 The threat of primal violence appears in prehistoric rites, in ancient Egyptian coronation dramas, in classical Greek and Roman plays with onstage Furies, and with Shakespeare’s vengeful ghosts and gods, as well as today’s movie phantoms. But all of these specters point to a common human hope for cathartic peace, beyond the destructive fears of mortality, the abject panic of personal loss, or the mournful rage that seeks reciprocal vengeance. In our postmodern era, we no longer believe in the ancient cosmologies of good and evil gods. Yet we may be reaching the limits of half a millennium of modern faith in the omniscience and omnipotence of scientific man as the measure of all things—with global warming, weapons of mass destruction, and other tragic follies of human technology. So we yearn for a sunrise like that at the end of Taymor’s Titus: the divine horizon of a better human Self, traumatized by the villains of history and family, like Young Lucius and his black baby, but renewing life beyond melodramatic vengeance—through godlike spectatorship. The next chapter explores a neuroscientific model of the mind’s theatre to discern such a possible cathartic horizon of the Self and Other, extending from the stages and screens inside the brain to the human remaking of the world.

5. Theatrical Elements in the Mind’s Eye x

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eurologist Antonio Damasio argues that nature evolved from animal to human consciousness, and human conscience, as a progression from proto-self to core self, plus autobiographical and extended selves (Feeling 16–17, 135–37, 230, 310). Even if there is not a single homunculus as cogito controlling a Cartesian Theatre within the mind, Damasio finds this humans generate not only a “movie-in-the-brain,” but also the “appearance of an owner and observer for the movie within the movie” (11, 160).1 He argues that emotions existed in animals, prior to human evolution, but “were entirely unknown to the organisms producing them” (30). Consciousness evolved with humans as nature invented a “rightful owner of each individual life”—through the “apparent self [that] emerges as the feeling of a feeling” (30–31).2 As explored in chapters 1 and 3 here, Dennett and Ramachandran argue, through philosophy and neuroscience, that the individual Self as owner and spectator of the theatre in the mind—or of the movie in the brain—is illusory. Yet, Damasio’s insistence upon the foundation of a nonconscious proto-self in animals, evolving to a conscious core and autobiographical self in humans, from body and emotions to conscience, also bears validity (Feeling 22). If the mind’s internal theatre/cinema evolved as nature’s great experiment to know itself feelingly (or as a random game of survival that led eventually to our self-conscious species), then the various ghosts and gods in different human cultures express a further extension of the Self, both illusory and true, knowing a life beyond mortality. The apparent drive toward self-awareness in the evolution of the human species may be just a fortuitous accident or an unlucky sidetrack, rather than the

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inherent teleology or etiology of nature itself. But Damasio’s notion that nature invents the “rightful owner of each individual life” with human consciousness as the emergence of a reflective self, through the feeling of feelings beyond animal emotions, also indicates an immortal drive toward higher-order consciousness (or toward God in/as all of nature/culture, becoming aware of its Self ). Even if the human Self is a phantom, it may be symptomatic of a material force within nature—a struggle toward the survival and procreation of the fittest to know as well as act. But such super-natural knowledge also becomes unbearable in many human beings and thus shielded by various masks of Self, by external spectral apparitions, and by a ritual reliance on the divine as author, director, or spectator. Orestes, Atreus, and Thyestes appeal to and yet challenge the immortal gods watching their dramas. Aeschylus’s tragicomic hero survives the hound-like Furies of his animal brain, and the vengeance of his mother’s ghost, with the help of Apollo and Athena, as his frontal-lobe advocate and judge. Orestes acquires a new communal Self in Athens, despite the rage of the Furies and split decision of the human jury—as the collective Other determining his fate, along with the mediating audience of gods. Atreus, however, like his grandfather, wants to challenge the divine audience with his superior evil. “I’m striding as high as the / stars, I’m above everyone, / my head’s touching heaven. . . . / . . . / . . . I / do wish I could stop the gods / escaping and drag them all / to see my revenge” (Seneca 33). Thyestes, in the horror of his tragic fate, despairs that any mediating gods could be watching. “Earth, how can you / bear all this evil? / . . . / . . . But earth is / unmoved. Heavy and still. The gods have left” (37–38). Created two thousand years ago, in an earlier stage of human cultural evolution, the expressions of Seneca’s characters prefigure the transcendent evil of dictators and the existential abjection of their victims in many eras after his time, especially in the holocausts of recent centuries. Because of the long timeframe of biological evolution, we have the same basic brain structures as the ancient Greeks and Romans. But we must bear even more horrendous histories, with greater dangers in current human technologies—while interrogating the ghosts and gods of postmodern culture, projected by theatre and film makers.

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Shakespeare also looks back to Roman times, and reaches ahead to ours, as his Titus questions the watching gods. After the tribunes fail him as audience, Titus sacrifices his hand in the hope of saving his sons. Then he prays: “If any power pities wretched tears, / To that I call” (3.1.208–9). Titus kneels with his tongueless and handless daughter, demanding that “heaven shall hear our prayers, / Or with our sighs we’ll breathe the welkin [the heavens] dim,” thus forming clouds and rain as a sign of their abject emotion (210–13). Titus debates with his brother, Marcus, whether “reason” or this poetic image could encompass his and his daughter’s trauma. But the watching theatre audience already knows about the further trick in Aaron’s game plan—and that it soon will be too late for heaven or reason to help Titus’s family. Titus shows this, too, in a later scene, shooting arrows at the constellations in the sky, absurdly demanding justice from the heavenly gods of the zodiac (4.3.50–52)—and from the roof over the Elizabethan stage, which was known as “the heavens.” Between these two scenes, Marcus echoes his brother’s interrogation of nature and the gods, as creators and spectators of human misery. Referring to the woods where Lavinia was mutilated, he asks: “why should nature build so foul a den, / Unless the gods delight in tragedies?” (4.1.59–60). Why indeed, we might continue to ask in our postmodern era, would nature build so foul a den through the human mind and its reconstruction of the world, unless the gods within us delight in tragedies? Is there an Other as audience, desiring tragedy, in the evolution of the human brain—along with the apparent Self as “rightful owner”? INNER THEATRE The work of neuroscientist Bernard Baars suggests a partial answer to this mystery. He offers a theatrical model of the mind, with human consciousness appearing like an actor onstage, in the spotlight of attention, while most of the mental activity of the brain is unconscious, like an audience watching and directing the show. “All unified models of cognition today suggest some sort of unconscious audience, including unconscious memory archives and automatic routines . . .” (Theater 46). Baars characterizes the audience in

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theatre, and within the human brain, as a legislature.3 “Some audience members may hiss or applaud certain messages from the stage, or build coalitions to help their favorite actors compete against others for access to the stage” (46–47). With various ideas and perceptions continually competing for the limelight, the Other of an unconscious audience legislates the focus of conscious attention. Baars does not refer to the Lacanian definition of the unconscious as “the discourse of the Other.” Focusing mostly on the mechanism of the individual brain, Baars does not explore what I have called the external womb of culture, as the Other shaping the development of the human Self—by transforming natural instincts with learned conventions, communal patterns, ritual practices, symbolic language, and legislative rules. Yet, Baars does suggest that the modes of theatricality in cultural evolution express fundamental structures of the human brain in its biological evolution.4 “It may be that evolutionary biology discovered the same style of functioning eons ago. Quite different animals may solve similar problems in similar ways, and human technology occasionally rediscovers biological solutions as well” (Theater 61). The human invention of ghosts and gods, as well as ritual and theatre, in various cultural representations, reflects the brain’s own theatrical architecture:5 the illusory Self as director, the unconscious Other as audience, and the “limited capacity” of conscious stage space (Baars, Theater 53). But why do the ghosts of Self and the gods of the unconscious delight, not just in theatre, but in vengeful, destructive tragedies—both in stage fiction and in real life? Theatre may be an attempt to appease such ghosts and gods, as they demand sacrifices within the brain and collectively in particular cultures, by offering tragedy (or comic parody) as fictional destruction. If so, theatre often fails—providing insight after the loss, but only a temporary or partial catharsis to prevent its repetition. And yet, theatre, cinema, and other dramatic media are still evolving today, not just as entertainment, but as cathartic arts extending the ghost theatres of our brains. Neuroscientists also describe certain cinematic aspects of the human brain.6 The mind’s eye can zoom in and out when viewing an imaginary object (Baars, Theater 73). It pans, scans, and rotates


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images—except this it moves the imaginary object, instead of moving a camera lens (or eye) across and around it (Kosslyn, Ghosts 128–29).7 Like conventional cinema, but with a differently shaped screen, the human imagination creates a limited visual field, a “flat oval” of about 45 degrees in height and 120 degrees wide, similar to external viewing through the eyes (Baars, Theater 73–74).8 In fact, mental images use the same parts of the cortex as visual perceptions (74).9 Internal speech uses the same brain areas as external speech (75). The brain uses these and various other “projection areas” to create an internal, spatial environment, matching the outer one, with multiple senses moving beyond a limited oval screen. But there is a time lag of about half a second between perception and consciousness: “our brains either backdate, or rearrange our experiences (rather like an editor cutting a film) so they seem to happen in logical order and real time” (Carter 26). Thus, the brain’s inner theatre involves aspects of both stage and screen (including the animated objects of puppetry) like the three-dimensional spaces of computer-generated virtual reality (VR). Baars states that the human brain may have five internal stages, one for each of the five senses, “switching rapidly back and forth several times per second” (Theatre 73). The internal, preselective environment of the brain is a penta-sensual, virtualreality theatre, involving conscious mental imagery with camera-like framing and focusing, as well as theatrical spotlighting and animated object manipulation, plus dialogue and sound track, along with touch, smell, and taste—all edited together. The brain fuses information as it switches between the various sensory stages and screens to construct its holistic, spatial representation of external reality or to construct fictional fantasies and dreams. This involves contradiction, as well as synchrony, between the brain’s five sensory stages (each of which includes multiple “projection areas”). In an e-mail response to my questions in May 2003, Baars gave the example of “an early talking movie in which the sound track is slightly delayed from the film track. In that case we can get interference between the sounds and sights. When they are in sync, we get augmentation between them—they work together. The same is true for all the other senses. (Try tapping your hand to music, for example, and then stopping. Moving along with the music tends to increase

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our participation, and our ability to create a single whole experience out of it.)” Baars mentioned that there are “30 different visual projections areas” in the brain, combining to form that sensory stage and screen, including one area that is “like a TV raster, with dots and lines.” There are also “crossmodal areas” in other parts of the brain, “where different sense modalities come together in the same neurons.” And Baars speculated that there are “transmodal areas, especially in the front of the brain, which take abstract information from different senses. For example, if you close your eyes you can still move around, because you have a spatial representation that is not limited to vision.”10 According to Baars’s e-mail, the abstract concepts and sensory percepts, as actors competing for the limelight on the brain’s stages, if “consistent with each other (like the meaning of a word and the sound of that word), . . . augment each other. If they are inconsistent, they can interfere” (like the Lacanian Symbolic and Imaginary orders, I would add). Baars used further theatrical and cinematic terms for the augmented fusion, or contradictory interference, between sensory and abstract actors in the brain: “rehearsal is a big thing for continuity” as in the learning of a new language by living with those who speak it. “Editing is also part of rehearsal. We have to learn what not to pay attention to.” Baars gave the example of combining syllables from adjacent words in hearing a spoken language. “With proper ‘mental editing,’ ” the syllables are cut and “spliced in the right places—but there are no physical gaps between words, that’s an illusion.” Such conscious brain processes, according to Baars, “impose unity and consistency.” But unconscious ones “allow a lot of contradictory messages to bounce around at the same time. So it’s as if the audience (sitting in the dark unconscious) can have lots of different things in mind. In the spotlight on stage, however, consistency is enforced at any single moment.” Thus, according to Baars’s model, the brain has an unconscious “Self as contextual” (like the unconscious cogito discussed in chapter 1 here). But this involves fragmentary and contradictory audience members, “shaping conscious experience” as more unified in the spotlight. They form a “self concept” (or ghost of the Self, in my terms) as an “effort to make pieces of the Self into objects


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of consciousness.” This ghostly self-concept becomes a somewhat stable actor onstage within the brain and yet various fictional characters performing externally for others in different situations. Recent experiments in behavioral therapy have shown the low threshold needed for credibility in virtual environments, when a phobic patient or Vietnam veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder wears a head-mounted display to simulate a certain fearful situation. With the entire visual field covered and with directional sounds, patients only need minimal computer graphics and a few acoustic details in order to relive past traumas or experience potential terrors—helping them to deal with such memories and fears in real life (Hodges; Rothbaum et al.). They make the virtual reality real, as a consistent and unified world, claiming to see and hear more than the computer displays. Their brains are cocreating the experience, through their interior memories and fantasies, building upon the computer-generated perceptions. But this also occurs in theatre and cinema, depending on the viewer’s vicarious identifications and the technology’s tricks. For example, an Omnimax movie auditorium may seem to tilt and fly as the scenery moving by wraps around the spectator’s peripheral vision—if the viewer accepts that illusion and adds personal associations. Baars’s theatrical model describes how the brain itself constructs a three-dimensional virtual reality on its inner stages and screens. As Baars told me in his e-mail; “An example I like is flying at night in an airplane, and seeing the inside of the plane tilt, when you get into the landing pattern. But there is no visual comparison framework to see that tilt! There’s no sun, no clouds, no stable objects. It all comes from your inner ear, which has a kind of biological gyroscope. But every time it happens, I see it, just as if it’s a visual thing.” Thus, the brain’s collective staging and screening of sensory perceptions, through prior patterns of Imaginary and Symbolic concepts, “fills in the missing elements” on some stages, creating an augmented, holistic, three-dimensional experience of the world outside it, and of fantasies or dreams generated within. Baars’s theatrical and cinematic metaphors also point to the development of these art forms, along with computer-generated VR, as extensions of the brain’s inner environment. Such interpersonal, artistic, and technological theatres

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involve the inner stages and screens of various brains (in performers and spectators), connecting communally through the external womb of human culture. Neurologists have discovered specific neural pathways for the brain’s unconscious, yet highly active audience, which produces credible perceptions in the spotlight of consciousness. Regarding human vision, Ramachandran delineates three pathways of neural activity (as I mentioned in chapter 3): a primal “orienting behavior” pathway and the more recently evolved “what” and “how” pathways (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 74–79). Only the “what” pathway is conscious, as shown in the phenomenon of “blindsight.” Someone with damage in the “what” pathway cannot see and identify an object, but can reach out and grab it precisely. The person’s brain sees where the object is and how to grab it, but the person is not visually conscious of it. Perhaps the unconscious “orienting behavior” and “how” pathways in the Omnimax theatre spectator are tricked by the enveloping screen’s peripherally moving images, producing the sensation of flight, even though the conscious “what” pathway can see that it is just a movie projected on a spherical screen. A similar thing may happen with the wide screen of a normal movie theatre, or with the smaller rectangle of a television set, depending on the intensity of the spectator’s gaze—and a willing suspension of conscious disbelief at the fictional framework of the scene.11 Live theatre has evoked this experience for many centuries prior to cinema—through poetic imagery and innovative stage technologies, such as perspective scenery with vanishing points. But today’s cinema, TV, Omnimax, and computer-generated VR greatly extend the human ability to create external screens around the spectator for further personal projections, shared communally. Ramachandran also describes the “filling in” of the visual field by unconscious neural pathways or zombies within the brain—both in patients with a blind area in their vision and in the normal brain’s natural blind spot of each eye (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 103–4). The brain “interpolates” what might be in the blind spot, using the statistical regularity of its experience of the world, and thus economizing on visual processing. All of this is unconscious; the conscious mind only sees a continuous, filled-in image.


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A similar process occurs, one might add, in film viewing. At 24 frames per second, the mind sees movement, rather than a series of still images.12 The spectator’s mind also sutures the cuts of the edited film and completes the diegesis beyond the edges of each scene, in what may be a combination of conscious, changeable, “conceptual filling in” and unconscious, irrevocable, “perceptual filling in,” to use Ramachandran’s terms (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 103)—or of Symbolic/Imaginary and Real orders in Lacan’s sense.13 Thus, cinema extends the trompe l’oeil of theatre, tricking the brain’s zombies and making the ghost of Self feel like it is flying through the camera’s godlike view or leaping across time and space in the edited film. The mortal spectator experiences the conflict within each scene and the adrenalin rush of danger, with the fight and flight (or feed and fornicate) drives aroused. In that virtual reality, the film viewer is both mortal and immortal: making a conceptual choice to participate with vicarious feelings and bodily emotions, while experiencing the perceptual filling-in, yet also escaping the physical damage or death suffered by characters onscreen. Today’s movies, television shows, computer screens, and videogames, as pervasive virtual realities, extend the outer prosthetic technology of the brain’s inner theatre, presenting new habitats for survival rehearsal. This increases the potential delusions of each ego ghost. Yet it may reveal, through specific works of art, the tragic truth of mortal fate and immortal illusions. A GOD’S EYE VIEW For many centuries, theatre has given spectators a godlike power to watch characters suffer and die, with lifelong conflicts condensed and given a meaningful shape onstage. Ancient Greek and Roman characters struggled with the gods and fate, while human spectators watched from the auditorium along with a statue of the Greek theatre god, Dionysus, or other gods in Rome. During the Middle Ages, biblical stories and allegories of the soul were performed, not only for the human audience in church spaces or town squares, but also for a watchful, judging, Christian God. Early modern performances of perspective scenery with infinite vanishing points (in Italy and France) or of poetic, spoken decor (in England and Spain) captured

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the sublime powers of nature and culture onstage, reflecting the ostensible omniscience and omnipotence of Renaissance rulers. Even the limited scene of the modern box set, with its fourth-wall illusion, gave the human spectator a sense of godlike power, watching the scene’s intimacies as an unseen ghost. Today’s cinema, TV, and interactive computer devices give the postmodern spectator, for better or worse, even more of that illusory divinity—through vast panoramas of movement, leaps of faith in space and time, and allseeing close-ups. Tremendous advances in modern technology, dominating and changing the natural environment, have replaced ancient gods and theocracies with Western science and humanist rulers. Yet Ramachandran’s neurological research reveals a new sense of “zombies” and “phantoms” within the brain, projecting into the cultural environment between humans. Unconscious ghosts continue to operate in the mind and culture, filling in the blind spots of Self (the awareness of mortality, dependence on the Other’s desires, and various fears of the unknown) with hallucinatory appearances in real life or with fictional specters onstage and onscreen. Ramachandran uses the examples of his patients’ hallucinations (plus those experienced and depicted by James Thurber) to demonstrate that all brains project imagery onto the gaps in perception. Such fantasy spaces and images are usually masked by “baseline” sensory signals (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 111), except when imagination is given free-play with damage to the brain or eyes, or in the fictional spaces of theatre and cinema. All human brains, individually and collectively, bear the ghosts and gods of an unconscious audience that delight in (and sometimes turn into) fantasy projections.14 But why is there a desire, in humans and their gods, for tragedy to be watched and replayed, again and again, on the stage and screen—or in real life? Audiences of Taymor’s Titus and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus might enjoy the characters’ tragedies, even as Marcus asks his question about bloodthirsty gods. Yet each spectator also bears a zombie audience of unconscious neural pathways that fill in the gaps onstage and onscreen with personal associations: memories and fantasies that join with the drama to make its tragedy more real and potentially


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cathartic for the viewer. Of course, Marcus is primarily asking about his own dramatic world: whether the ancient gods are causing or enjoying his family’s suffering. But this concept also reflects the human beings watching the play or film, especially as they take the place of the gods, more and more from early modern to postmodern eras—through theatrical illusions of omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality. Current performance screens increase that danger, as well as its possible catharsis, through their mass illusions of transcendent stars and audiences. We, as godlike spectators of the Andronici tragedy, are offered the chance to learn from their drama, even if we cannot bring justice to it, like Titus’s tears and arrows demand. But we also bear the temptation to repeat inherited, sacrificial demands (as he does early in the play and Atreus does in his), to taste transcendence by taking power over others in real life. If theatre, cinema, and other mass media do not clarify the tragedy in that illusion, for the victors as well as their victims, then the zombie audience of remnant animal drives in each of us may clamor for more—through the reckless desires of the Self as a future ghost. WAR ROOMS OF CHANGE Baars’s theatrical model of the brain describes two sets of zombies working at the edges of the stage: those backstage and those in the audience, as unconscious manipulations and interpretations, producing the conscious actors of concepts and percepts onstage. Baars locates the “self ” as a “framework” backstage—as stagehands and director, the unconscious “agent[s]” and “knower” of Deep Goal and Conceptual Contexts, as well as immediate expectations and intentions (Theater 144–45). This sense of Self as unconscious cogito “seems to work behind the scenes of the theater, pulling invisible strings to control the spotlight, shaping the actions planned and carried out with the aid of the theater, and to some extent perhaps, the actors themselves” (145). Baars recognizes that a real-life “tragedy” may challenge that structure of Self in the brain’s theatre: “losing a beloved friend or spouse . . . [is] experienced as a great gap in oneself ” (146). Such trauma violates deep, unconscious levels of

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expectations and intentions. “As the brain adapts to the violative experience, new levels of context appear.” Backstage Self-orienting contexts, as well as zombie audience interpretations by memory specialists, automatic routines, and legislative members (46), change inside the brain due to external experiences that reshape the stage space and spotlight of a person’s particular consciousness. Baars admits that changes to the physical body or personal environment may produce strange restagings by the brain’s internal theatre. Right-hemisphere stroke patients display “a remarkable inventiveness and flexibility in maintaining beliefs about their paralyzed side that are plainly untrue”—claiming this the limp limb belongs to someone else and showing a fierce hatred toward it (Theater 148–49). He also comments that the “self-alien syndrome” of depersonalization is experienced by a majority of young adults in their “loss of self ” (149–50). Baars even states that the extreme selfalienation of “multiple personality” disorders due to abuse in childhood shows that “separate, deep contexts emerge in such individuals, and that perhaps, under circumstances of repeated traumatic stress, it could develop in all of us over time” (152).15 Through traumas and other personal experiences, the brain’s theatre develops different directors—and may have several competing for control backstage. Ramachandran goes further than Baars in connecting his neurological research with the Freudian theories of denial, repression, displacement, and reaction formation—as brain mechanisms for maintaining the ghostly mask of a stable Self or ego, in contrast to specific changes outside and within (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 134–57). At every moment each of our brains “are flooded with a bewildering array of sensory inputs,” says Ramachandran (134). Using “stored memories” of Self and world, the brain sifts through this “superabundance of detail” and orders it into a “stable and internally consistent ‘belief system’—a story that makes sense of the available evidence.” However, like Dennett’s sense of the Self as multiple narrative drafts, this belief-system story is always subject to revision. Ramachandran points out that the brain could “tear up the script and start from scratch” with each anomalous input, each “little piece of threatening information”—but then “you would go mad.” So, the left hemisphere either ignores the anomaly or distorts it “to preserve


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stability.” Yet this is always a tenuous solution. There are other directors and playwrights in the wings who are ready to experiment with alternative belief-system scripts. Perhaps this threat of instability is even necessary for personal and cultural growth—like the chaos of random genetic change, against the conservatism of cell copying, in biological evolution.16 Ramachandran offers the analogy of a “general” in his war room who gets bad news from a scout just before a big battle and uses “denial” or “repression” (shooting the scout or hiding the report), while lying to other officers, so as not to appear indecisive (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 135). Ramachandran relates this war-room general, primarily in the left hemisphere, to the Freudian “ego”—and gives his own examples of denial and repression in anosognosia patients, who refuse to recognize a paralyzed limb (caused by right-hemisphere brain damage) as the general in the left brain overrides that knowledge. But Ramachandran also describes, in contrast to the executive ego and its “defense mechanisms” in the left hemisphere, a “Devil’s Advocate” located in the right.17 (One might relate this cranial dichotomy to the Apollonian and Dionysian forces that Nietzsche found in ancient Greek theatre, as a universal dialectic of human culture.) Ramachandran applies this split-brain neurology to Freud’s theory of ego defenses against the id. The left hemisphere “relies on Freudian defense mechanisms to deny, repress or confabulate— anything to preserve the status quo. The right hemisphere’s strategy, on the other hand, is to play ‘Devil’s Advocate,’ to question the status quo and look for global inconsistencies” (136).18 Ramachandran argues that this conflict occurs within all our brains, not just in exemplary patients. “For denial is something we do all our lives . . . [such as] defiantly denying the finality and humiliation of death” (137). So how does Ramachandran’s model of the war-room general and devil’s-advocate scout match with Baars’s theatre of the mind? I consider split-brain neuroscience further in chapter 7, regarding psychoanalytic theory. But for now, combining the models of Ramachandran and Baars reveals the uncanny theatre of conflicting forces within the brain—through an empirical basis that connects neurology, cognitive science, and psychoanalysis. As Freud elaborated a century ago,

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the ego is not the master in its own house. The human mind bears “the desire of the Other,” according to Lacan, shaping and yet conflicting with the illusory mask of Self. Even Lacan’s definition of the unconscious as “structured like a language,” as being “the discourse of the Other,” corresponds (in my view) to Ramachandran’s “language of nerve impulses” in the zombie audience and contextual stagehands of the brain (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 66). As with the art form of theatre, many forces in the brain’s theatre work collaboratively and struggle in conflict together. The left-brain general and right-brain devil, while struggling with consistency and innovation backstage, present concepts and percepts in the spotlight of consciousness, to be further focused by the zombie audience of memory specialists and automatic reactions, including emotional drives, in the brain’s limbic system and elsewhere. Thus, the “war room” of the general contains its own war—to maintain some consistency while fighting in the theatre of war outside. The human brain needs both its generals and scouts, its conservative and experimental directors, as Ramachandran describes. “[T]he left hemisphere is a conformist, largely indifferent to discrepancies, whereas the right hemisphere is the opposite: highly sensitive to perturbation” (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 141). In some cases, this internal struggle may produce multiple personalities, distinct selves as generals and devils, which Ramachandran interprets as the “balkanization” of belief systems to avoid an all-out civil war among them (147). This also suggests why humans in numerous cultures have projected their gods and devils into the cosmos and hallucinated ghosts or zombies—making exterior theatres of ritual, stage, screen, and real-life perceptions, to match the monsters within. The multiple selves of the brain, like individuals in a community or a nation, become more united and decisive when facing a common external enemy.19 The general (or president) takes control. But that often involves self-deception and self-defensiveness, with the brain’s belief system focused on vengeful aggression toward the scapegoat outside, rather than realizing the devil within—as shown in the tragedies of Thyestes and Titus Andronicus. Ramachandran’s war theatre model suggests the many pressures on the brain, from inside and outside, to form the illusory mask of a


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stable ego. The ideal of Self within the mind, plus the performance of Self in everyday life for others outside (Goffman), means that we live in multiple theatres: with deep goal and conceptual contexts in each brain and various social contexts between us. The left-brain general and right-brain devil are not simply ego and id. The former may be primarily Symbolic/Imaginary, in Lacanian terms, and the latter Imaginary/Real. But both struggle with superego demands that come from conflicting social orders outside—incorporated from birth onward. Particular family legacies and personal traumas alter the “wiring” of the human brain,20 materializing a specific script of human alienation. Yet, we all share the fundamental human trauma of being born into language and culture with a theatrical mind that must make up its Self, apart from nature’s instinctual orders, through the Other’s desires and demands. Thus, humans are born beyond nature, in culture’s wondrous achievements of physical survival and technological creativity, but also in a “foul den” of devils and zombies, with watching ghosts and gods, inside and out, who delight in the tragic repetition of warring worlds and Self-defensiveness. STAGE AND SCREEN WOMBS Baars and Ramachandran focus primarily on the workings of individual brains. Yet Baars’s model of unconscious specialists in the audience and contextual agents backstage, creating concepts and percepts in the spotlight of the mind’s theatre, points to the profound influence of other persons outside each brain as well. The masks of ego perform their illusions inside the brain—within a Symbolic, superego framework of deep goal and conceptual contexts as director and stagehands, for an Imaginary/Real audience of memory specialists, instinctual zombies, and gestalt legislators—in order to present the Self for others outside. The Self ’s inner performance occurs on the stage of consciousness, through its unconscious framework and audience, circulating between the feedback loops of the left and right hemispheres and limbic system, with remnant animal drives as id emotions, becoming the feeling of feelings in the limelight of human self-reflection, involving numerous interactions with the Other as mirror.

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Thus, the ghostly masks of ego inside the brain also perform for an external audience and social framework. Given this double theatre of society and mind, each person struggles to maintain a stable sense of Self, despite the vicissitudes of daily life and the multiple zombies and phantom personas lurking within the brain’s auditorium and wings. Such external and internal pressures upon the ego mask produce denials, repressions, and reaction formations (paradoxical lies) to nail down the stage space of identity—against the unnerving flexibility and disruptive experiments of lacking being in big-brained humans. Slips of the tongue, disturbing dreams, perverse actions, or hallucinatory phantoms sometimes occur—on internal and external stages—outwitting the superego director (as war-room general) backstage. But these abnormal fantasies and displays also demonstrate the continual competition of concepts and percepts inside the normal brain, fighting for the limelight of consciousness, while cooperating to conform with prior paradigms or rebelling together to create new shifts (Baars, Theater 43, 47, 52).21 The tragedies that humans produce, in fantasy, in fiction, and in real life, are both mourned and enjoyed by the gods watching and ghosts performing within the human brain—as it becomes a crucible for bio-cultural experimentation, intensifying the evolutionary drive of nature to know itself feelingly. Anyone who has worked in theatre or filmmaking knows how much conflict there can be as creative personalities try to cooperate together on the same show. Baars, Ramachandran, and Damasio show that such creative conflicts externalize the theatrical architecture and multiple competing artists within each human brain.22 Theatre and cinema become shared spaces of many individuals’ unconscious minds. Playwrights, directors, designers, stagehands, cameramen, editors, actors, and spectators collaboratively and competitively re-present their fantasies and dreams, desires and fears— including their hidden zombies, ghosts, and gods. Some of the terms Baars uses for his theatrical model of the brain, such as “spotlight” and “director,” are distinctively modern elements of the stage. They did not exist as paradigms of ancient Greek and Roman or early modern Elizabethan theatre. Yet, these terms illustrate how today’s theatre, film, and interactive computer


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technologies further externalize the structures of the human brain— through the current accelerations of cultural evolution. Reason is not enough to contain the torrential rain and storming seas of Titus’s abject emotions, in Shakespeare’s play or Taymor’s film. The lack of a natural order for big-brained humans has opened the floodgates of creativity and destructiveness—of inspired, yet reckless ghosts and gods, exercising their power to change both nature and culture, without omniscience. Yet theatre, cinema, and other dramatic media continue to build new wombs, nurturing and helping to contain the tragic, vengeful passions raging in each human mind. Such externalizations of the theatre in the brain, through tragedy and related genres, provide fictional play zones not only to indulge in escapist fantasies, but also to exorcise the competing ego ghosts and destructive zombies within our brains—and in the war theatres of conflicting social orders shared by human beings. Many of us in the new millennium are walking a tightrope of reason over an existential abyss, lured by flights of VR fantasy, yet aware of our inevitable mortality, while lacking the safety-net of afterlife beliefs, which helped others in prior eras (and today) with the insecurities of being human. An early stage in this postmodern vertigo occurs in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The son’s uncertain relationship to his father’s ghost and to his mother’s desire produces a profound indecision about righteous revenge and the “sleep” of death, about the authority of the Other and the stability of the Self. Specific film versions of this play, from the 1940s, 1960s, 1990s, and 2000 are examined in the next chapter to explore the cultural evolution of a modern and postmodern sense of Self, along with its ghosts and gods, from Shakespeare’s time to ours—as the perception, fantasy, and dream theatres within human minds become shared, onstage and onscreen.


6. Ghosts of Hamlet Onscreen x

T

he evolution of big-brained humans, beyond instinctual conformity within a certain natural habitat, has led to the cultural development of an illusory Self in each individual mind, especially with the stress on individualism in modern EuroAmerican societies. As discussed in prior chapters here, the dramas of ancient Greece and Rome, of Shakespeare’s early modern England, and of recent American cinema display the godlike powers of the mind’s inner theatre. They also show the cultural evolution of a ghostly ego, as insecure mask of lacking being, involving many destructive temptations. Greed, self-defensiveness, and revenge warp the natural drives within the human brain in order to grow, maintain, or recover the ghost of Self (as communal identity) against an enemy Other. The human species has triumphed over its natural enemies and prior habitat limits, covering the globe with its own kind. And yet, modern humans continue to make enemies, not only in conflicts between nations, but also within families and local communities, as well as in the war theatres of individual minds. Gods and ghosts watch the greedy, self-defensive, and vengeful battles of humans, according to the ancient and early modern dramas examined so far in this book: The Oresteia, Thyestes, and Titus Andronicus. Such spectral figures manifest the unconscious audience within the brain: as contending superego ideologies forming various patterns of interpretation (Apollo and Athena against the Furies) or as phantom egos of lost communal members focusing the spotlight of attention (Clytemnestra, Tantalus, and Titus’s sons). The haunting of a play by a ghostly spectator, and the modern loss of gods that order human fate and action, becomes even more significant as we

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move from Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, Titus Andronicus, to his most famous one, Hamlet, written a decade later, in 1601.1 This play, with its uncertain hero and demanding ghost, exemplifies the insecurities of the modern ego in its Renaissance beginnings. Various film versions of Hamlet in the last half-century demonstrate further developments in the haunted, modern and postmodern ego—with scientific powers, humanist values, and individual rights supplanting, but not overcoming nature, fate, and the gods. Current neuroscience and psychoanalysis also reveal a continued reality of specters and spectators within the human brain, forming the masks of Self-reflection and split-subjectivity in the hypertheatre of the postmodern. This chapter explores the metaphysical, yet material theatre of Hamlet at various historical points: from the original Renaissance stageplay to film versions of the 1940s, 1960s, 1990s, and 20002—to trace the watching ghosts and absent gods in the cultural evolution of the modern and postmodern species of Self.3 PURGATORIAL FIRES There are many ghosts in Shakespeare’s plays. Stephen Greenblatt defines four types: as a figure of false surmise, as a figure of history’s nightmare, as a figure of deep psychic disturbance, and as a figure of theatre (157). But these types are often mixed together. In Richard III, the ghosts function not only as dream material, revealing a psychic disturbance within Richard, or as a memory of those he murdered, but also as “ineradicable, embodied, objective power[s] . . . in the collective consciousness of the kingdom and in the mind of God” (180). They offer a blessing to the victorious Richmond as well as a curse for the villainous Richard. Caesar’s ghost haunts Brutus in Julius Caesar and causes that assassin’s suicide, as both a personal projection of his mind and a supernatural force of history’s nightmare, existing “objectively in the cosmos of the play” (182). Brutus kills himself, he says, so that Caesar’s ghost will “be still” (5.5.50). But that ghost expresses “a political and social upheaval that no one, least of all Brutus, can fully control or even comprehend” (Greenblatt 184). In Macbeth there is a further “penetration of the ordinary world by demonic spirits” (191). Banquo’s ghost, like the three witches, appears on the “border or membrane where . . . psychic

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disturbance and objective truth meet” (193).4 In Cymbeline the ghosts are “deceased family members who have no direct power to help the living, but who remain deeply involved in the honor and fortunes of the household” (197). This shows a link to “certain Catholic ghost beliefs” lingering in the Protestant England of Shakespeare’s time (199).5 Greenblatt presents evidence that William Shakespeare’s father, John, was a covert Catholic. John Shakespeare died in 1601, the year Hamlet was probably written. (Also, William Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, died 5 years before, at the age of 11.) Greenblatt argues that Hamlet, which bears Shakespeare’s “richest and most complex” use of the ghost device (157),6 reveals that “the Protestant playwright was haunted by the spirit of his Catholic father pleading for suffrages to relieve his soul from the pains of Purgatory” (248–49). Evidence for this also occurs in a document discovered in the roof of the Shakespeare home, a testament by John Shakespeare pleading for masses and prayers of indulgence to set him free from Purgatory after death. Greenblatt parallels this plea not only to the apparition in Hamlet, demanding revenge from Purgatory, but also to Prospero at the end of The Tempest, asking his audience for the “indulgence” of their applause to set him free (261). Thus, with Shakespeare’s relationship to his own paternal ghost, and with the “Protestant attack” upon prior Catholic beliefs at that time, “the space of Purgatory becomes the space of the stage,” as a place for communication between the dead and living, through personal and political conflicts (256–57). What the Ghost in Hamlet wants (like Prospero in The Tempest), even more than revenge, is to be remembered and valued in the minds of the living—“Within the book and volume of my brain / Unmixed with baser matter,” as his son promises him (1.5.103–4; Greenblatt 207). Greenblatt does not consider how the Ghost’s desire for revenge may be keeping him in Purgatory,7 nor how his demands create a purgatory in the life of young Hamlet, witnessed by the spectral audience at the edge of the stage, nor how all three parties might experience a cathartic purging at the play’s end. But I agree with Greenblatt that Hamlet’s Ghost, like the apparitions in other Shakespeare plays, is both an objective force of historical Geist in the rotten state of medieval Denmark (as in the religious conflicts of

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Shakespeare’s own time) and a personal projection of the mind’s spirits, shared between characters onstage and spectators around it.8 In this chapter I explore particular depictions of that ghost from stage to screen, as both historical Geist and personal projection, as potentially false phantom and true figure of an inner theatre. These depictions reveal significant aspects of the secular metaphysics of our time and reflect the purgatorial spaces of Self, loss, revenge, and remembrance within “the book and volume” of the brain’s theatre and its “baser matter.” Using Ramachandran’s and Baars’s terms (from chapters 3 and 5), the Ghost may be seen as figuring the zombie audience, director, and stagehands in young Hamlet’s melancholic brain: the legislative memories along with conceptual and deep goal contexts driving him toward a more focused mourning and active response. As Greenblatt points out, Hamlet addresses the Ghost not as a spirit, but as a zombie-like figure: “a ‘dead corpse’ that has burst out from its tomb” (238). Yet, this zombie appeared first to other men, to Marcellus and Barnardo, then to Horatio also, before revealing itself to Hamlet. It refuses to speak to those others, but it is seen by them. Thus, the Ghost is not just a projection of young Hamlet’s own troubled brain. It is the painful phantom limb from a communal wound: the collective fantasy of a full-bodied zombie appearing in “warlike form,” armored for battle (1.1.47). Apparently, it cannot fight or take revenge on its own. It needs to work through the living. But the depiction of this zombie-like Ghost, as more material or spiritual, as a collective phantom limb or personal projection, and as an abject specter or godlike trickster (the main types of cyber-ghosts mentioned in my introduction) varies greatly among the different film versions, as they use the special effects of the cinematic medium to display the edges of death and Purgatory within the brain. A VICIOUS MOLE MAKING UP THE MIND Laurence Olivier directed and starred in the first major film version of the play in 1948. He begins his film by allowing the audience to read onscreen, along with his voice-over, some edited verses from Hamlet’s speech before he first sees the Ghost, concerning “some


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vicious mole of nature” in particular men that breaks down the “forts of reason” (1.4.24–28). In Shakespeare’s script, as again later in the film, Hamlet says these lines in criticism of King Claudius’s latenight partying. With the recent experience of war for European and American audiences in 1948, this opening of the film focuses on the “vicious mole of nature” not only in the hidden villainy and tragic vengeance of this play, but also in the historical brutality of modern humanist nations. Yet, Olivier does not choose to depict Claudius and his court as deranged Nazis or wild Japanese. He does not update the play with a modern setting and familiar costumes. He keeps it in medieval garb and sets it in a high-walled castle, with an overhead shot of Hamlet’s dead body, held on the shoulders of other men on top of a castle tower, while Olivier’s voice-over states: “This is a tragedy about a man who could not make up his mind.” Their sudden vanishing, with the mist swirling around the stones and a cross-fade between castle walls, makes the setting more ethereal than material. This shows the fragility of human constructs and habitats, as well as the monstrous specters arising from human nature’s vicious mole, threatening the “forts” of reason, especially for the original audience, given its recent trauma of World War II. Olivier’s initial summary of the play points to a particular tragic flaw in its hero, his own vicious mole of indecisiveness in fighting the vicious mole of nature in others. But there is also more to the “make up” of Hamlet’s mind that this film explores, through its historical and personal ghosts. Peter Donaldson points to the symptomatic imagery of the castle staircase on which Hamlet meets and follows the Ghost, and its position above him, as related to a specific trauma that the director experienced as a child. At age nine, Olivier, wearing a Scottish kilt in his first days at All Saints choir school, was “nearly raped” by an older boy on a staircase (Donaldson 21). The older boy, trapping little Laurence alone on the way up to the choir loft, “threw himself on top” of Olivier’s body and tartan skirt, according to his autobiography (qtd. in Donaldson 36). When the older choirboy heard someone coming, he pushed Laurence down the stairs and escaped above him, “farther up towards the top of the building.” Donaldson finds certain aspects of this traumatic memory appearing repeatedly in Olivier’s

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film. “Staircases are often the setting for violence, the locus of a repeated pattern in which someone is thrown down on the steps and the attacker flees upward . . .” (39). The “abusive” Ghost ends his first meeting with Hamlet by ascending higher up the stairs and disappearing (42–43). But the young Hamlet repeats this pattern with Ophelia, rejecting her and leaving her on the stairs as he rises higher, continuing “the cycle of abuse [that] the ghost’s visit initiated” (43–47). Hamlet returns to the abused position later in the film with a high-angle shot of him, repeated four times, as the film audience looks down at him on the floor of his mother’s bedroom reaching upward (like Ophelia on the stairs)—when the Ghost visits him there (49). Donaldson argues, like other scholars, that Olivier was directly influenced by Ernest Jones’s Freudian theory of an Oedipal complex in Hamlet, as shown by the film’s explicit kisses between mother and son (and with Olivier’s casting of the 27-year-old Eileen Herlie to play Gertrude to his 40-year-old Hamlet).9 But Donaldson also points to Olivier’s specific struggle with his homosexual desires and with the passivity and effeminacy of his early roles—imitating his mother, for example, while playing Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew, shortly after her death when he was 14 years old (21–22, 35, 49). Olivier’s father reportedly walked out during that performance and forbade Laurence to ever act again, though he later changed his mind (22–23). Donaldson analyzes the visits of Hamlet’s spectral father in the film as “a kind of feminization,” with Hamlet being “invaded by the ghost”— like the criticism of Olivier’s effeminate acting by his own father and the assault on the stairs in his memory of childhood (43). Donaldson thus defines Olivier’s Hamlet as the tragedy “of a son unable to find a non-abusive father” (63). But this also shows the theatres within Olivier’s and Donaldson’s brains interacting through the medium of cinema. The traces of primal personal memories and further conceptual associations, through an unconscious zombie audience and contextual director’s stagehands, within the filmmaker’s and scholar’s (or others’) minds, produce both the movie onscreen and its playing out in the viewer’s internal spotlight of consciousness. The Ghost of Olivier’s Hamlet is both historical and personal, spiritual and material—with numerous


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neuronal pathways in artists’ and spectators’ brains connecting through the flickering film images, even across many decades and through the different medium of the screen. Yet, Olivier’s Ghost is presented as more of an abusive, godlike trickster, rather than the weak, abject zombie or absent, shadowy specter in later film versions (addressed below). As Donaldson mentions, Olivier’s Hamlet “takes the place of the ghost” at certain points in the film (46). Olivier also performed the Ghost’s voice, slowed down electronically (66n24). But Donaldson does not consider how the film audience assumes the Ghost’s patriarchal, omniscient, controlling point of view—through Olivier’s struggle with his personal ghosts and the film’s post–World War II appeal to make up the mind beyond repeated tragedies and vicious moles. The Ghost in Olivier’s film initially appears to the watchmen and Horatio in its full armor, yet as a diaphanous shape in the swirling mist. After the Ghost’s initial appearance, the camera turns in a panoptic circle and then floats through the castle, giving the cinema spectator a ghostly ride as voyeur of empty rooms, showing Hamlet’s chair with an open book on it and passing through a window into Gertrude’s bedroom. In the next scene, Gertrude plants a kiss on the lips of the sullen Hamlet—with the film audience spying on them in the Ghost’s place. When Hamlet himself sees the Ghost, after his “vicious mole” speech, his figure goes out of focus, becoming diaphanous, too, with a heavy heartbeat in the sound track. The mole is thus in him and in the movie viewers identifying with him, as inactive and speculative selves. They are like the vengeful, watching, yet impotent “old mole,” as Hamlet calls the Ghost later (1.5.162), although that line is cut from Olivier’s film. The inner theatre of Hamlet’s brain, with its ghostly desires and zombie moles, is also shown by Shakespeare’s script. Prior to meeting the Ghost (and just after his mother’s kiss in Olivier’s film), Hamlet prays that his own “too solid flesh would melt” (1.2.129). He complains of the “frailty” of women, as shown by his mother’s lack of mourning for his father. “O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer” (1.2.150–51). Thus, the abject emotion of loss in Hamlet’s limbic system, in the animal heritage of his brain, continues to mourn longer than his mother’s.

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It focuses into a rage against her, against all women, and against his own flesh, beyond discourse of reason. Olivier’s film gives most of Hamlet’s “too solid flesh” soliloquy as a voice-over, putting the audience inside his head, hearing his internal thoughts, rather than seeing them spoken. Hamlet himself becomes ghostlike in his meeting with the Ghost: his flesh blurring, as if melting at the sight of his father’s spirit. Olivier cuts Hamlet’s lines about the Ghost being zombie-like and displays this phantom limb as an evanescent apparition of the father’s lost Self and the son’s uncertainty. Even before the apparition, Hamlet clearly idolizes his father, as a “Hercules” compared to Claudius or to himself (1.2.153). “O God,” he says, when lamenting his mother’s lack of mourning, perhaps as much to, as about his father, the demigod. Hamlet also tells Horatio that he sees his father in his “mind’s eye” (1.2.185). Yet he is uncertain whether the Ghost, when it appears, is “a spirit of health or a goblin damned,” from heaven or from hell (1.4.40–41). When it draws him apart from the others and speaks to him alone, saying, “If though didst ever thy dear father love,” Hamlet responds: “O God” again—as if addressing God in his father, not just making an exclamation (1.5.23–24). The Ghost had already appeared to the mind’s eye of Hamlet’s internal theatre, when Horatio tells him it has been seen by others outside. But the report of the collective vision, by Marcellus, Barnardo, and Horatio, begins to externalize his memories, along with theirs, of the old king in his war armor. The Ghost first appears, two times, to Marcellus and Barnardo, then again to them and Horatio, just as they are telling him their ghost story. Horatio is skeptical, but seeing the Ghost with the others convinces him. It is not just in their imaginations or in his; it has an objective reality because they see it together. And yet, Hamlet’s experience of the Ghost is distinct from theirs. It beckons him to another place and speaks to him alone. This intimacy and change in the apparition shows that there are several ghosts: projections from the minds of characters in different places—matching the more objective, historical Geist of political rupture in the collective womb (or chora) of their human habitat. But all three aspects of the Ghost have a material


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basis. The abject, mute memory of a lost ruler, the verbal superego of an idolized, godlike father within his son’s mind, and the phantom limb of a current communal wound—all are grounded in the “baser matter” of characters’ brains and their country’s social organism. Olivier’s film focuses much more on Hamlet’s brain than on the communal chora, as the place of the Ghost’s becoming. As Hamlet separates from his friends and follows the Ghost, the film focuses on his feet climbing the castle steps in the swirling mist. That foggy ectoplasm continues to swirl around him and around the figure of the Ghost when they meet again on a higher platform. The Ghost explains that he is the “father’s spirit” and doomed to Purgatory for a time, due to sins in his “days of nature” (1.5.9–12). He then explains his murder as “unnatural,” repeating this word again (1.5.25–28). And he describes Denmark as a social organism with its “whole ear . . . abused” by the false story that he was stung by a serpent, rather than poisoned through the ear by Claudius (1.5.36–38). The film shows Hamlet’s face in close-up, eyes closing tearfully, as the details of the crime unfold. Then it cuts to the back of young Hamlet’s head, which becomes transparent. Through it, the spectator sees King Hamlet asleep in his orchard. He is poisoned by Claudius’s hand and wakes briefly to point at the villain before dying. Thus, old Hamlet’s final day of nature is shown, along with the unnatural crime of the real serpent in the garden, through young Hamlet’s imagination—as restaged by the theatre inside his head (see figure 6.1). The godlike father, as superego Ghost, gives Hamlet a double bind: contradictory commands and cautions that will haunt him throughout the play. He commands that his son avenge his “foul and most unnatural murder / . . . / If thou hast nature in thee” (1.5.25–81). Thus, the Ghost, as old mole, summons the emotive, vengeful, fighting drive in the remnant instincts of Hamlet’s animal brain—through the father’s armor and murder tale. The Ghost commands the vicious mole within his son to attack the forts of reason in the current rotten state of Denmark—training Hamlet’s animal nature against the unnatural serpent now wearing the crown. The Ghost also commands Hamlet to enforce the taboo against “incest,” presumably between Claudius and Gertrude, as brother

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Figure 6.1 The father’s murder scene, as seen through Hamlet’s head, in Olivier’s 1948 film

and sister-in-law, in the “royal bed of Denmark” (83). Yet, the Ghost cautions Hamlet not to taint his mind, nor to contrive against his mother (85–86). Hence, the Prince’s double bind. The young Hamlet’s mind is already tainted by the Ghost’s appearance outside, as well as inside its cranial theatre. Hamlet soon promises to take an “antic disposition on” (172). But that will also express the abject struggle within his tainted mind. He will find it impossible not to contrive against his mother, especially when he meets her in the royal bedroom. Olivier’s movie offers a very Freudian interpretation of the play. The Ghost is re-membered by the tainted mind of Hamlet, not only in his vision of a diaphanous spirit and projected crime scene, through the back of the character’s head, but also with the kiss on the lips, which his mother gives him prior to that paternal encounter, and again in his meeting with her later in bed. Hamlet fights his own incestuous lust in attempting, yet delaying, vengeance against Claudius. Hamlet “cannot make up his mind” because his uncle has


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taken his place with his mother, fulfilling Hamlet’s own Oedipal desires to remove his father and go to bed with his mother. Hamlet must punish himself as well—and break the Ghost’s injunction to leave his mother alone—before he can reach a catharsis in his own purgatory of fornicating, fighting, and fleeing drives. As a prelude to the famous “To be, or not to be” soliloquy, the camera spins dizzily up the castle stairs and finds Hamlet at the edge of the battlement, looking down at ocean waves crashing against rocks below. The camera zooms once again through the back of Olivier’s head, this time revealing a ghostly, floating, skull-less brain hanging over the waves. Thus, the baser matter of Hamlet’s inner theatre is shown as a ghostly stage where he plays at the choice of life or death, being or not being. He fingers a “bare bodkin” with its point near his chest, then drops it accidentally and watches it fall to the crashing surf below (3.1.76). Hamlet could free himself from the current pressures of his father’s spirit and his mother’s kisses, by falling like that bodkin. But he fears such a flight and the “undiscovered country” of dreams that might come after the sleep of death— like or unlike the Ghost’s purgatorial fire (79). By taking this speech out of its context in the play, where Claudius and Polonius are about to use Ophelia to test Hamlet’s melancholy while they spy on him, Olivier centers the film on Hamlet’s body and brain, with its inner theatre, instead.10 Olivier stresses the movie viewer’s role of spying on Hamlet, in his romance with death, as his brain hangs over the waves and he stages a potential suicide. Likewise, after he kills Polonius in his mother’s bedroom, thinking it was Claudius spying on him, and hears his father’s voice, Hamlet points toward the cinema spectator, telling his mother to look that way at the Ghost. Then a small, strange, floating shape, somewhat like the brain hanging over the waves, is visible in the shadows at the edge of the room, in the place where the movie viewer had been spying on Hamlet and his mother. When the Ghost leaves, the cinema spectator is again in its place, with the camera as specter pulling back, out of the room, as Hamlet points. Next, with the Ghost apparently gone, Hamlet kisses his mother’s forehead as they sit together on her bed and he tells her not to go to Claudius that night. She kisses him on the lips when he asks for her “blessing” and

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they kiss on the lips again before he leaves to “lug the guts” of Polonius into another room (3.4.173, 213). Thus, the movie voyeur watches, like the Ghost, seeing even more of Hamlet’s passion with his mother, before he discards the body of the eavesdropper who was mistaken for the surrogate, Oedipal father. If the Ghost is a figure for the audience within Hamlet’s brain (itself shown as a ghost over the ocean waves), then the cinema spectator plays a ghostly role, too, as legislative memory specialist, haunting each scene with particular associations and attentive desires. Olivier’s construction of scenes, spaces, and viewpoints in Hamlet reflects the cranial dimensions of the cinematic apparatus, extending the brain’s inner stages and screens. But all of this is centered in the mind and body of Olivier, as director and actor, with the modern audience and superego Ghost merely watching at the periphery, calling for the revenge climax, despite the detours in other rooms, through the plays within the play. Olivier offers a modernist depiction of Hamlet as universal, Freudian metanarrative. The vicious mole of lust in Hamlet, battling the commands of his idolized superego, produces indecision and delayed revenge, resulting in the deaths of Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, Gertrude, and Hamlet, as well as the targeted villain, Claudius. That is the tragedy, resonating with the recent experience of British and American audiences on the world scene in 1948: Hamlet did not act decisively to avert a wider massacre. Although we are now in the twenty-first century, in a postmodern era, we also find the temptation of this modernist metanarrative returning through America’s war on terror, its 9/11 ghosts, its preemptive strikes against usurping serpents, and their apparent poisons of mass destruction. Hence, the Freudian viewpoint of Olivier’s Hamlet—with its warning against the vicious moles of lust, terror, and vengeance—is not a universal metanarrative, but a returning trauma, even in our postmodern (or neo-modern) era. SHADES OF PATRIARCHY Olivier’s view of Hamlet as “a man who could not make up his mind” focuses on this problem as the essential, modernist truth of


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the play. Yet it also suggests something beyond it: a postmodern subject whose mind is split, fractured, fragmented, and dispersed. This unmade mind appears more and more in the other films of Hamlet that I am charting here, from the 1960s to the 1990s and 2000. The patriarchal Ghost becomes more problematic, in various ways, as does Gertrude in her Oedipal relations with Hamlet— demonstrating how both the Self and the Other lose their universal wholeness and central gravity in the postmodern evolutions of culture and mind. Bill Colleran’s 1964, black and white film of John Gielgud’s stage production presents the Ghost as a large shadow on the wall behind Hamlet and his friends. Towering ten feet above their heads, the shadow is the only figure of the Ghost that ever appears, with broad shoulders and triangular helmet. However, Hamlet and the other characters face the audience, with their backs to the shadow, as they address the Ghost. Wearing simple, dark, modern clothes, they stand within the shadow’s form. Yet they find the figure outside of their bodies, across the stage and screen edges, in the watching audience. The Ghost is not a projection from within their minds. It is an encompassing shadow around them, projected as the collective spirit of watching theatre and film spectators. When Hamlet chases the Ghost, he reappears alone on the empty stage through a tall slit that opens in the backstage wall. The Ghost’s shadow, reappearing upon that wall, now has a crease splitting it in the middle, with the greater darkness of that rectangular slit. Gielgud, the director, does not play the role of Hamlet, as Olivier’s did in his film. Here Richard Burton plays the lead, but Gielgud voices the Ghost in a deep, echoing tone. Unlike Olivier, Gielgud keeps Hamlet’s lines about the Ghost as a zombie. Yet, this Ghost is even more distant and incorporeal—with its flat shadow on the wall. Its only substance is the communal body of the watching theatre or cinema audience. Hamlet turns his back to the audience and camera when the Ghost gives details of the murder. There is no mime show here, displaying the orchard crime through Hamlet’s head. But there is a change in the spectacle when Hamlet is shown again, in a wider shot, facing the audience. The tall, rectangular slit dividing the Ghost’s form becomes brighter than the rest of the shadow, as if fueled by an

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Figure 6.2 The Ghost as a huge patriarchal shadow around Hamlet in the Gielgud/Colleran film of 1964

inner light. Hamlet is also lit more brightly, with his human form still inside the Ghost’s shadow. This film version, using the bare space and subtle techniques of a prior stage production, points, like Olivier’s movie, at the cinema spectator as ghostly voyeur. Yet, Hamlet and Gertrude do not kiss, nor does he wrestle with her body on the bed. (In fact, there is no bed onstage.) The focus is on the actors’ bodies, with a bare stage and simple costumes. This recalls many experiments in British and American theatre in the 1960s, especially director Peter Brook’s theory of the “empty space.” However, the gigantic shadow of the Ghost, projecting from the audience space and split by darkness and light as it speaks to Hamlet, suggests the looming threat of an oppressive, patriarchal society, haunting all the characters and spectators, especially 1960s youths. It also shows the split-subjectivity of a postmodern Hamlet, pressured by the superego-Ghost’s contradictory demands, by the mysterious desires of his mother, and by the Other in the audience.


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Tony Richardson’s film of Hamlet in 1969 presents the encounter with the Ghost in the dark tunnels of Elsinore Castle, rather than on its high platforms as Olivier did, or on an empty stage like Gielgud’s.11 However, Richardson never shows the armored zombie or phantom. The Ghost is always offscreen, appearing merely as a bright light on Hamlet’s face (Nicol Williamson) in close-up, with an echoing voice he alone hears.12 Thus, Richardson’s film Ghost, although presented as a personal aura around Hamlet rather than the huge, collective shadow in Gielgud’s production (and Colleran’s film), also points to the invisible movie viewers watching, like divine tricksters, offscreen. The Ghost is not just a phantom limb produced by Hamlet’s mournful mind; it is a specter created by the many brains viewing and completing the diegesis of the film. These Hamlet films of the 1960s move the presence of the Ghost further and further offscreen. They show the fading power of patriarchy and the growing skepticism about its commands in that era, even when a loving son like Hamlet wants to get revenge. However, Franco Zeffirelli’s film of Hamlet in 1990, at the end of the cold war, presents a more direct mourning for the patriarchal corpse—and a zombie-like spirit returning. THE MUMMY’S PASSION Zeffirelli cuts the initial apparition of the Ghost and shows a funeral rite in a crypt instead, with the dead King Hamlet (Paul Scofield) wearing his armor in an open, stone coffin. Prince Hamlet (Mel Gibson), in a dark cloak, takes a handful of dirt from a bowl and drops the soil onto the corpse. Gertrude (Glenn Close) takes a metal flower pin from her hair and puts it with the body.13 Such ritual offerings—like Titus’s pouring of dirt into the boots of his dead sons—reflect innumerable gestures of mourning since prehistoric times, with gifts for the dead and signs of their return to Mother Earth (as explored in chapters 2 and 4). Then a heavy, stone lid is set over the coffin and Claudius puts a large sword on that, signifying the repression of phallic energy within the grave and yet its threat of return. One can see similarities here to the Neanderthal stone covering the grave, or to the mummy of the dead pharaoh, with its weight

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on the bearer, as Osiris masters his evil brother Set in the ancient Egyptian coronation drama, transferring power to the pharaoh’s son as the god Horus. However, in Hamlet’s Denmark, the evil brother has already taken the throne instead of the son. Zeffirelli moves some of the lines from Shakespeare’s throne room scene into this initial crypt rite, with Claudius saying that young Hamlet is “the most immediate to our throne” and that he has for him “no less nobility of love / Than that which dearest father bears his son” (1.2.109–11). Gertrude throws her outstretched arms onto the closed coffin lid, looking up at Claudius with a tear on her cheek. But a few scenes later, after the new king announces he will take her as his bride and queen, she smiles and runs to him, giving him a long, passionate kiss. Here the audience is given a direct sense of mourning for the material loss of a great patriarch—instead of a huge shadow haunting an empty stage or an armored figure ready for war in the swirling mist of the castle (as in earlier films). Gertrude’s loss of her phallic master is also shown, and her vulnerability on the stone coffin lid without him, until she moves into the arms and meets the lips of Claudius. After the scene changes to another room upstairs and Claudius leaves, Gertrude kisses her son, too, on the forehead, eyelid, and lips. She advises him not to seek his father “in the dust” (1.2.71) and convinces him to stay with her in Claudius’s castle rather than returning to Wittenberg. Thus, Zeffirelli shows the Oedipal double bind, for both Hamlet and Gertrude, more explicitly than Olivier.14 Zeffirelli presents a Lacanian view, emphasizing the mysterious desires of the mother at the crux of Hamlet’s conflicted identity, as well as the son’s lust for her and the father’s ghostly intervention, like Olivier’s Freudian depiction.15 With the casting of Glenn Close in the role (after her famous femme fatale portrayals in Fatal Attraction [1987] and Dangerous Liaison [1988]), Zeffirelli may even suggest to some in the audience that Gertrude planned the murder of her husband with Claudius. But if so, she is still caught between the power of that new patriarch and her son’s mournful rage, which her kisses attempt to control—while also expressing her apparent desires for both men.16


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The Ghost manifests the Other as audience in Hamlet’s brain: a father whom he idealized and suddenly lost, now watching and wanting revenge. The father’s spirit was incorporated into Hamlet’s psyche long ago, as he separated from the primal (m)Other mirroring his Imaginary ego as an infant, in order to find a Symbolic identity beyond that as a child and young adult. But Hamlet also bears the mother’s desires in his brain, reinterpreted through the father’s recent death and her reaction to it. Thus, the Ghost appears not only to encourage revenge, as an extension of the Symbolic wound in Hamlet’s brain (especially in his left hemisphere) from his father’s “untimely” death, the election of Claudius as king instead of young Hamlet, and the insufficient mourning given a great man by his community.17 The Ghost also manifests a strong suspicion in the Imaginary (right) side of Hamlet’s brain that his mother is somehow guilty for the father’s demise—as well as showing the Real limbic drives of a tragic audience and director, of memory traces and deep goal contexts, pushing Hamlet to act, yet entangling him in a double bind. “Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest. / But howsomever thou pursues this act, / Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven / And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge / To prick and sting her” (1.5.84–88). The Ghost’s demand is clear: Hamlet must take revenge against Claudius. He must stop the “damned incest” of his uncle usurping his father’s place in his mother’s bed. But how can he do this without blaming his mother— especially if she bears the thorns of “adulterate” guilt in her bosom (42)?18 Zeffirelli twists these textual tracings of the paternal and maternal ghosts in Hamlet’s tainted mind to present a postmodern father’s corpse and postfeminist mother’s erotic body, although the action is still set in a medieval castle. Given the questionable status of Western patriarchy in the twentieth century and the recent advent of conflicted supermoms, Zeffirelli’s film uses the personal memory traces and unconscious directors in spectators’ minds of the 1990s, as well as certain clues in the early modern script, to produce his Hamlet, Ghost, and Gertrude—as all tragically flawed.19 He cuts more than half the total number of lines in the play (Macdonald and

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Macdonald 46), dispensing with the Fortinbras’s frame and various secondary characters, to focus instead on an active Gertrude and suffering Ghost, as antagonists and yet allies to Hamlet. When the Ghost appears to Hamlet, he is a pale old man wearing a coarse, brown robe and long belt hanging limply—not the armor described in the script. After a long chase through corridors and doorways, Hamlet loses sight of his father. But the Ghost appears again, sitting near the edge of a castle turret and speaking intimately with Hamlet, who drops his defensive sword. Close-up shots bring the audience inside the father–son conversation. No scenes of the crime are shown. Instead, the Ghost’s physical presence is stressed. His face shows the pain of betrayal; his arms rise over his head, when he speaks of his bondage in Purgatory, as if pulled by shackles. Just before leaving, he extends his hands to touch Hamlet’s face—reaching also toward the movie viewers and toward the spectral audience within their brains, as they identify with the young prince. This Ghost is an abused, not abusive figure. He is an abject, pleading zombie, not a commanding specter, or enlarged shadow, or numinous aura (as in prior films)—though he still may be a trickster.

Figure 6.3 Zeffirelli’s depiction of an abject Ghost reaching toward Hamlet and the film audience in 1990


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Zeffirelli portrays the Ghost as a (sym)pathetic, suffering ego, rather than a powerful, punishing superego. Impotent to take revenge on his own, he suffers a double torment: seeing the current injustice in his kingdom on earth, with “the whole ear of Denmark / . . . / Rankly abused” (1.5.36–38), while also bearing the punishment for his own sins, “confined to fast in fires” below (11). Yet, he thus manipulates his son’s fate in Denmark with the demand for revenge to cure the “whole ear” of the communal audience while he watches from Purgatory—perhaps extending his time there with his vengeful desires. Unfortunately for the young Hamlet and various other characters who perish during the drama, the Ghost’s revenge is not played out as a clear melodramatic triumph of good over evil. But the tragic course of Hamlet’s actions, resulting in the deaths of all those characters en route to Claudius’s punishment, means that the play’s spectators may experience a greater catharsis of their own vengeful desires—through the purgatorial theatres of betrayal, regret, and blame within their brains as well as Hamlet’s. Like the Ghost, with his material, suffering body and yet pervasive, watching spirit, both antagonizing and encouraging Hamlet, Gertrude becomes a complex, tragic figure in Zeffirelli’s film. She seems to suffer with her husband’s body, when it is put inside the stone coffin, in the added funeral scene. Subsequently, she shows such physical affection for Claudius and her son that she appears to be both a villain and a victim. She may have committed adultery with Claudius, before her husband died. She is certainly manipulating her son on the new king’s behalf. Yet, she seems genuinely surprised when Claudius stands in horror (holding his own ear) at The Mousetrap’s display of ear poisoning in the garden. Perhaps she loves all three men, but did not know about or collude with the murder of Hamlet’s father by his uncle. As in the original script, Hamlet visits his mother because she summoned him, according to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. En route to her bedroom, he passes up the chance to kill Claudius while the murderer is at prayer. But Zeffirelli cuts the lines, after Hamlet leaves, of Claudius admitting the insincerity of his confession (and most of his lines before that). The film focuses on what Hamlet experiences, rather than showing the melodramatic villainy of his uncle.

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The cut to Gertrude’s bedroom also emphasizes Hamlet’s desire to confront his mother with her complicity in the murder. (Hamlet might have followed Claudius instead and waited for him to commit another sin, so he would be condemned when killed, like his brother. Indeed, Shakespeare gives the audience a further soliloquy from the villain, stressing his will to sin again.) After Polonius hides behind the arras, Zeffirelli shows the newly arrived Hamlet being slapped in the face by his mother, for offending his “father” (Claudius) with The Mousetrap trick (3.4.10). But Hamlet points his sword at her breast, making her sit at his command. She cries for help, whereupon Polonius also calls out and Hamlet stabs his hidden body. After discovering his mistake in killing the wrong villain, Hamlet accuses Gertrude of “kill[ing] a king” (30). He chases her and forces her to sit on the bed. There, he demands that she compare the portraits of his father and his uncle that they each wear on chains around their necks—pulling her down and choking her with the chain on hers. Hamlet’s lines in the script—idealizing his father’s image as akin to the gods Hyperion, Jove, Mars, and Mercury (57–59)—echo the Ghost’s words to him earlier, lamenting Gertrude’s turn toward “a wretch whose natural gifts were poor / To those of mine” (1.5.51–52). But Zeffirelli changes Hamlet’s rage at his mother’s infidelity into a more erotic scene. Hamlet not only idealizes his father’s godlike image,20 on the chain around his neck, but also takes the father’s place with his mother in bed. Hamlet materializes the phantom pain of his father’s lost phallic body, by sitting astride Gertrude and thrusting his torso against hers, while describing her “In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love” (3.4.93–94). He thus demonstrates the “Rebellious hell” (83) within his own brain: both his fantasy of taking the Ghost’s place in the primal scene and the pain of his missing paternal limb, with Claudius’s castrating usurpation of the regal bed and throne. Gertrude completes the passion, in Zeffirelli’s scene, by kissing her son fully on the mouth, stopping his conflicted accusations.21 It is through the mother’s kiss that Hamlet opens his eyes and sees his father’s Ghost approach him with hands extending toward the bed— and thus toward the vicarious movie spectator, as in the initial


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apparition. The Ghost seems at first to intervene as Oedipal father, in order to stop the mother–son incest and whet the “blunted purpose” of another passion (3.4.112). But then he gestures toward Gertrude and tells Hamlet to get close to her again: “O, step between her and her fighting soul! / . . . / Speak to her Hamlet” (114–16). In Zeffirelli’s film the close-up of “amazement” on Gertrude’s face, which the Ghost also observes (113), expresses both her shock at her son’s apparent madness and her guilt at being caught with him in bed—by a phantom limb from her son’s mind. The film shows what each character sees: Hamlet’s view of the Ghost and Gertrude’s view of nothing there in the arched doorway— even though Hamlet asks her to look again as he sees the Ghost leaving. Sharing both Hamlet’s vision and Gertrude’s view of “Nothing at all; yet all that is” (3.4.133), the film audience sees how the Ghost is a personal projection from Hamlet’s inner theatre. This is stressed by Zeffirelli’s elimination of the first apparition of the Ghost to others without Hamlet present. Hamlet describes the Ghost, while it “steals away” from Gertrude’s bedroom, as wearing “his habit” (135–36)—which is also how Zeffirelli showed the phantom in the earlier apparition at the battlements, instead of wearing his armor, as the script states. Gertrude points to the source of the current specter as being inside Hamlet’s cranium: “the very coinage of your brain” (138). But Hamlet insists: “it is not madness” (142). Both are correct. The Ghost is a phantom limb produced by Hamlet’s brain to match the painful wound of losing his father and seeing his mother’s love go to another man. His suspicion that the usurper of Gertrude’s love is also the murderer of his father, as confirmed by The Mousetrap’s reception and Claudius’s private confession, makes all the more reason (not madness) for the Ghost to appear again. The Ghost shows the double bind in Hamlet’s mind: to express his passions for and against his mother, even if letting his uncle off the hook for the time being. In spying on Claudius’s confession, Hamlet decided to wait until his uncle was sinning again before killing him, perhaps during intercourse with Gertrude: “in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed” (3.3.90). But now he orders her not to go to bed with Claudius and to keep his secret that he is only feigning madness (3.4.160, 182–89).

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She agrees (198–200). Zeffirelli’s actors emphasize this new alignment of mother and son: Hamlet holds Gertrude’s face in his hands as he tells her to confess her sins and avoid his uncle’s bed. The director also moves part of Hamlet’s subsequent speech with Gertrude (about undermining his enemies) to a separate scene of their parting, where she hugs and kisses him as he leaves the castle grounds, bound for England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This clarifies Hamlet’s passionate shifts in the film, as he struggles with both parental specters in his head: from blaming his mother for adultery and for the murder of his father, to his own raging pleasure with her in bed, to his guilt at being caught in such a detour, to his realignment with her—and thus of her with his father—as allies in vengeance.22 Hamlet distinguishes his mother’s guilt from his uncle’s, telling Gertrude to confess her sins “to heaven” (3.4.150), while waiting for Claudius to sin again so he can send him elsewhere in death. Hamlet needs his uncle to be purely evil—calling him “villain” many times— so that he can turn his fate into a melodrama of righteous revenge. With the blame for Denmark’s rot projected fully on Claudius, Hamlet’s father and mother can be purged of their sins, as victims and allies with their son. Thus, all three characters are reordered through the director/playwright in Hamlet’s brain. Zeffirelli shows Hamlet’s clever switching of death sentences with the sleeping Guildenstern and Rosencrantz onboard ship, as well as their execution—making Hamlet into a James Bond–like escape artist, by displaying scenes that are only described in the original script’s dialogue. Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (through Gibson’s Mad Max charms) maintains a cheerful panache after his return from the high seas, in spite of his meetings with Yorick’s skull, with Ophelia’s casket, and with the phantoms in his brain that those remains evoke. Hamlet is ready for his melodramatic finale, confident that he will beat his villain. Yet Zeffirelli also stresses the tragicomic ironies in his hero’s triumphant violence. Hamlet seems ready to make friends with Laertes as they start their final fencing match, despite their fight at the gravesite about competing passions for the dead Ophelia. Hamlet asks Laertes’s “pardon” and claims, in the “presence” of the royal assembly, that only his “madness” caused the death of Polonius (5.2.227–33).


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Hamlet says that such madness is already his punishment and his own “enemy” (230, 240). Thus, Hamlet attempts to pacify another paternal ghost—the vengeance of Polonius within his “brother” Laertes (244). Zeffirelli cuts most of this speech, but the exchange still conveys Hamlet’s attempt at reconciliation. Laertes’s half-smile onscreen shows his masked conspiracy with Claudius, and yet a partial recognition that he and the Prince have the same enemy within them: a phantom, limbic, lost father turning into a vengeful, violent, self-punishing madness in each of their neural theatres. Hamlet jokes about the fencing match, entertaining the aristocratic audience standing at the edge of the raised wooden stage in Zeffirelli’s film and the cinema audience beyond the screen. He pretends the sword is too heavy, winks at his mother (again showing their alignment), high steps across the stage, and stops the match for a big, false sneeze. But Laertes cheats. He cuts Hamlet’s arm during a break in the match. This changes Hamlet from light-hearted trickster to raging avenger. He punches Laertes, picks up his brother’s poisoned sword, and stabs him with it. He then stabs Claudius—also avenging Gertrude’s death from the poisoned wine. Hamlet forces Claudius to drink the wine, too, with Gertrude’s confirmation of his villainy and Laertes’s dying confession that “the King’s to blame” (5.2.321). Thus, Hamlet makes Claudius into a public villain, projecting that phantom demon from his own cranial theatre onto a stage of laughter, violence, and tragic mourning in Zeffirelli’s film. The melodramatic villain is revealed and punished, yet the tragic hero and his allies also die, guilty and flawed, as Laertes and Gertrude side with Hamlet in the end. Hamlet may be sending Claudius to the “other place” of Hell, as he threatened earlier (4.3.34–35), killing him when his sins are unconfessed. But Hamlet may also be putting himself and his mother in Purgatory, like his sinful, violent father, to have their “foul crimes . . . of nature / . . . burnt and purged away” (1.5.12–13). He makes multiple ghosts, in Ophelia’s family as well as his own, out of his father’s demand for vengeance and his mother’s mysterious, conflicted desires—with the watching minds of the court audience and cinema spectators staging his Last Judgment. Zeffirelli’s joyful avenger becomes a ghost, as triumphant hero and tragic fool, haunting his audiences.

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EARTH FATHER, FULL TEXT, AND FLASHBACKS Zeffirelli cut half of Shakespeare’s text, yet he made Gertrude and Ophelia more complex characters than in prior film versions, with added scenes of mourning and madness, while also making the Ghost a more material, sympathetic figure. Six years later, Kenneth Branagh directed and starred in a four-hour film of Hamlet, a fulltext version based mostly on the second folio.23 Zeffirelli’s nonarmored zombie appeared in a medieval setting, with a fully physical form—yet abject, pale, and weak, not horrifying. His film presented the lamentable decomposing of a traditional patriarchal figure (along with the complexity of female mourning and madness) to a postfeminist audience of 1990. However, Branagh offered a monstrous, threatening, fully armored zombie, while resetting the play in a Victorian-era palace24 and the surrounding woods. Branagh conquers the entire script onscreen for his 1996 audience, reflecting their neo-imperialist world of military coalitions, war-crime tyrants, and iconoclastic revolutions, through parallels from the previous century. In his screenplay, Branagh refers to Claudius as being “in Norman Schwarzkopf mode” when he plans to use the King of Norway to restrain a bellicose Fortinbras (12). The actions of that ally, confronting his own troublesome nephew, and many other incidents (including Hamlet in bed with Ophelia) are shown explicitly in Branagh’s film, though merely mentioned or suggested by Shakespeare’s script. With such additional illustrations, Branagh makes Fortinbras a pervasive figure at the edges of Claudius’s corrupt reign and features Ophelia’s rebellion against her hypocritical father. At the end of the film, when Hamlet defeats Claudius but fails to survive him, Fortinbras’s soldiers burst through the windows of the palace to take control. They also tear down the statue of old Hamlet outside the palace—as with the overthrow of Stalinist rulers and their statues in Communist Europe in the 1980s (or more recently in Iraq). Branagh thus connects Claudius’s tyranny with the prior rule of Hamlet’s father and with the Ghost’s destructive demands. This not only emphasizes the sins of both kings, but also the play’s triple ending of sons avenging their fathers’ deaths: Hamlet against his uncle,


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Laertes against Hamlet, and Fortinbras against Denmark’s royal family, after his father was killed on the battlefield by the ruler whom Hamlet idealizes. All three patriarchs appearing in the play—old Hamlet, Claudius, and Polonius—are sinister figures, ripe for overthrow in Branagh’s film. A whore is added to Polonius’s room as he arranges for Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in France. Flashbacks reveal Claudius flirting with Gertrude as his sister-in-law (while old Hamlet still lives) and taking her to bed as his wife, during the wassail cheers of his own reign. In the presentation of the Ghost, Branagh creates an even more distinctive view of that patriarch as monster. Branagh begins his film with a guard on duty in front of the palace gates. A statue of the dead King Hamlet towers over him. Its monumental hand suddenly moves on the sword hilt, though perhaps merely in the guard’s imagination. After Horatio and Marcellus arrive, the Ghost appears and towers even higher over them, as seen through their low-angle view up at it and its very high-angle POV (point of view) of them. Later, when Hamlet meets the Ghost, it leads him into the wintry woods outside the palace walls: through bare trees, bubbling and foaming fog on the ground (like the surface of a witch’s brew), cracking vents in the earth, and fiery tongues shooting up from the forest floor. As the huge, helmeted head of the Ghost, with its burning blue eyes, speaks (see figure 6.4.), Branagh also shows the body of the old king on a slab in his mausoleum and then sleeping in his orchard while Claudius pours the poison into his ear. But unlike Olivier’s film, Branagh does not reveal the murder scene through the back of young Hamlet’s head. This may cause confusion for some spectators, as to whose view of the murder is being shown, the Ghost’s or Hamlet’s. Is it a memory or merely a scene imagined? As Lisa Hopkins puts it; “this represents his [the Ghost’s] memory of what happened, but by the same token the fact that he was asleep means that this cannot be his memory of how it happened” (“Denmark’s” 242). The dying father does wake up and hold his ear in the flashback, indicating that he realized how the murder was committed. He also gestures toward someone he sees offscreen, who is then shown to be Claudius, as in Olivier’s version. Yet, both films display the murder scene from another observer’s viewpoint,

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Figure 6.4 The monstrous earth-father Ghost glaring down at his son in Branagh’s 1996 film

not the Ghost’s subjective experience or Claudius’s, making the audience a complicit witness with Hamlet in reimagining the crime. Cinema often plays the trick of showing a subjective flashback as objective reality—although framed as a particular character’s viewpoint.25 This gives the film viewer the illusion of divine omniscience, traveling through time as well as space, forwards and backwards, suturing the linear narrative.26 Yet this also reflects the ghost of Self in the brain’s theatre, which offers a similar authorial illusion, with multiple narrative drafts continually revising and filling in the fragments of memory, perception, and fantasy into a linear whole, despite the mind’s meandering streams of consciousness (or the blind spots in vision, as considered in chapters 3 and 5). Hopkins says that a further flashback during the Ghost’s speech, of Claudius playing a curling game and holding Gertrude by the waist, must be false. “Even more insidiously, he cannot possibly be remembering the scenes of courtship between Claudius and


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Gertrude . . . [Yet this] makes absolutely understandable Hamlet’s reluctance to proceed on the Ghost’s word alone” (“Denmark’s” 242).27 In my view, however, this flashback, in a series of several brief scenes, shows both young Hamlet and old Hamlet being present while Claudius flirts with and hugs Gertrude. This is confirmed by Branagh’s screenplay (36). The film also shows a quick view of a corset being untied—a flash of Hamlet’s or the Ghost’s imagination, reconstructing the past, not necessarily remembering what was seen (although memory involves reconstruction as well). Indeed, young Hamlet’s face, staring up at the Ghost in the woods, is shown before, between, and after these flashbacks, framing them as the Prince’s imaginings, or his uncanny receptions of the Ghost’s memory. Yet, Hopkins sees the flashback of Claudius with Gertrude not only as a false memory presented by the Ghost, but also as undermining the movie viewer’s faith in the entire film. “[I]t makes us reluctant to believe what we are shown, especially when we note how many of these ‘flashbacks’ are indeed of people telling us about things of which they do not have personal knowledge” (“Denmark’s” 242–43). Hopkins gives other examples of such “flashback” deceptions: the Trojan War scene shown during the Player’s speech, Claudius’s partying with wassail while Hamlet criticizes it, and the confrontation between Old Norway and Fortinbras as the Ambassador gives his account of that. However, these scenes are not necessarily presented as flashbacks of those characters’ experiences, nor as their direct memories—certainly not in the case of the Trojan War. The scenes could be taken as displaying what each character imagines as he speaks. Or they might be seen as a trip backward in time or to another place, as objective flashbacks. Either way, these scenes primarily function as illustrations of wordy areas in Shakespeare’s text. Branagh flatters his mass-media audience with a god’s eye view (especially if these are objective, timetravel flashbacks), while also pandering to the postmodern taste for extra imagery, in compensation for the four hours of submission to this full-text movie.28 These cinematic flourishes show the director’s effort to help movie viewers enjoy Shakespeare—and, perhaps, his fear of being rejected by mainstream spectators.29 The illustrations during the Ghost’s speech function this way as well, attempting to make the full text of Hamlet more palatable to a

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mass audience. Yet, the movie viewer may also be drawn into these flashbacks as subjective viewpoints in the intimate meeting of minds between phantom father and mournful son. Branagh thus offers a postmodern, neurological insight with the multiple narrative fragments and fantastic imagery added to the Ghost’s storytelling—in contrast to Olivier’s direct modernist depiction of the scene through the back of young Hamlet’s head as he stands on the castle platform. Here the theatre within the Prince’s brain creates an earth-father Ghost, a different monster from the initial, towering, statuesque figure that appeared to others. It draws the son into an erupting and fiery space of sylvan nightmare. The Ghost not only talks about its unnatural murder, but also restages it as a fictional scene between father and son. Young Hamlet’s brain gives his phantom limb the power of being both a director and actor of the murder scene: a mind within his mind (and yet extending beyond it) revealing the villain and playing the victim. This shows the unconscious, contextual director and memorial audience in the son’s mourning brain, represented through a phantom figure as screen memory and the Prince’s retrospective hallucination—presented also to the movie viewers by Branagh as director. Of course, the Prince, played by Branagh, will later restage the scene, too, to test his uncle’s and mother’s reactions. The Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is itself a flashback figure, re-manifesting its past appearances, alive and dead. Barnardo has just started to tell his story of the Ghost’s prior apparition, when it “comes again” like a flashback onstage (1.1.40). After it leaves, Marcellus asks, “Is it not like the King?” Horatio answers, “As thou art to thyself ” (58–59). He thus suggests the thesis of this book: the Self is a ghost and yet based on a Real subject (lacking natural being) in the unconscious. Likewise, the Ghost shows its reality as phantom limb in the painful loss and hollowed memories of those who view it. Horatio recognizes the Ghost through its armor and its frown, using his own memories of the old king (60–63). But the Ghost also manifests a collective memory that becomes more personal during its next apparition, in leading young Hamlet away from the others toward a private conversation with his re-membered, phantom father.


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While most of Branagh’s film stresses the perverse, patriarchal politics of the court, with opulent palace scenes and see-through mirrors for spying, Hamlet’s private visit with the Ghost involves a monstrous depiction of Mother Nature instead. The “angry parle” that Horatio recognized in the Ghost’s frown, through his memory of old Hamlet’s warrior strength against the “sledded Polacks on the ice” (1.1.62–63), becomes in the Prince’s private meeting an eruption of the earth itself. Horatio and Marcellus also witness this when they catch up to Hamlet and only the voice of the Ghost remains, saying “Swear” while the earth quakes and trees shake (1.5.149). This shift in setting from the palace gates, where the moving statue and towering Ghost first appear, to the bare-limbed trees and eruptive soil, with foaming fog, fire, crevices, and phantom voice, shows more than just horror movie effects. As he chases the Ghost through the woods, Hamlet speaks of the “sepulcher” where the corpse was laid (1.4.48) and a flashback shows the body there, without armor, on a clean slab. Yet, Hamlet finds an audience with his father’s war-like phantom in the very different space of a wintry wooded clearing. The towering figure whispers harshly, but then the intimacy grows between father and son (through close-ups of their faces, lips, and eyes). When the apparition leaves to avoid the morning, Branagh’s Hamlet kneels to the ground and then falls face forward into the dirt, as he says, “O earth! What else? Shall I couple hell?” (1.5.92–93). He continues to speak to the earth, while telling his father’s Ghost that he will remember him and his “commandment” in the “book and volume” of his own brain, as a “distracted globe” (94–103). The Ghost returns (or remains) as a moving voice, speaking through various crevices in the earth, to Hamlet and his friends. Branagh’s emphasis on the dead-of-winter forest, with its fantastic foam and fire, plus the quaking, gaping, and speaking earth, makes this scene into a memento mori about the Real of nature, as lost womb and ultimate tomb for all human beings—obscenely living on beyond us. The evolution of big-brained humans over many millennia meant a continual war against nature, to control and change environmental dangers and inadequacies, instead of just adapting within a given habitat. Yet, our survival with the fittest genes,

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altering natural fitness through cultural priorities and Self-awareness, meant a double dose of traumatic loss in all humans: the lack of past, instinctual patterns of being, connected to nature, and the consciousness of a future, mortal end to Self. Throughout most of recorded history, gods have been worshipped, through rites and offerings, to continue the human dialogue with various forces of nature—in the hope of some existence of Self (or soul) beyond death. Shakespeare’s early modern drama demonstrates a turning point in this dialogue with the Other, from ancient ritual obedience and theatrical rebellion to the Renaissance sense of human independence in remaking the world beyond nature and the gods. Yet, as Hamlet’s Ghost shows, Renaissance humans were still not free from natural and cosmic hauntings. Branagh’s film, while mostly set in a Victorian palace, reveals, with its earthy eruptions in the Ghost encounter, an uncanny, postmodern return to the monstrous emotions of loss within the human brain—of an abject chora in nature’s remnant limbic system, fueling further disruptive passions, through the cracked ideals of Renaissance humanism and modern imperialism. Certain details in the rest of Branagh’s movie also point to the primal drives of Mother Nature and the animal emotions in the brain’s limbic system, through the play’s patriarchal battle for fitness of survival and rightness of rule. Hamlet wears a skull mask when Polonius goes to talk with him—after Polonius shows Hamlet’s love letters (and makes Ophelia read them out loud) to the King and Queen. The Ghost appears in Gertrude’s chamber, right after Polonius’s death, as a statuesque figure, with a cloak over its head and shoulder—as it not only whets, but also mourns Hamlet’s blunted purpose, while memorializing the rotten state of Denmark like a gravestone. Hamlet’s inspiration to sacrifice himself for the Ghost’s revenge, when he meets the “twenty thousand men” of Fortinbras’s army, going to “their graves like beds” while fighting for a plot of land “not tomb enough . . . / To hide the slain,” is shown with the camera pulling back farther and farther, until Branagh’s figure becomes a tiny dot on a wintry hillside (4.4.60–65). Next, after the intermission between the two halves of the film, Claudius gives a ghostly voice-over with a montage that reprises prior scenes, as if not


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only old Hamlet, but also the bad brother is a spirit watching the drama with the movie viewers. Later, Laertes brings a mob with him, to confront Claudius about his father’s death, bursting through the palace doors—like the foam and fire rising from the earth when Hamlet met his dead father and began his own confrontation with Claudius. In a similar epic spectacle, Fortinbras’s men break through the windows to take control, after the deaths of Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet during the poisonous fencing match. This repeated political emphasis on a corrupt regime being overthrown by popular mobs, with old Hamlet also associated in such corruption as his statue is torn down in the end, shows the evolutionary process of human culture continuing beyond the Prince’s successful revenge and yet genetic failure to rule. Whether Fortinbras and his generation will bring a better world—as a postmodern audience still hopes for, at the other end of the twentieth century—remains to be seen. But the ending of Branagh’s full-text Hamlet warns its mass audience that phantom limbs and statues of lost loved ones, when armed for a war (based) on terror, might indeed reveal a “goblin damned” (1.4.40), focusing the primal emotions of fear, lust, panic, and rage in the earthy, limbic brain toward tragic heroism and self-destruction. CORPORATE BOSSES AND VIDEO GHOSTS As if haunted himself by Shakespeare’s ghost, and yet also by the impatient mass-media audience, Branagh re-members a full-text, four-hour Hamlet onscreen, but with numerous illustrations and flashbacks. His Ghost becomes a blast from the past, showing patriarchal, imperial corruption, plus Mother Nature’s final reckoning and continued demands—as a superego, death-drive zombie arising from statue and sepulcher. Only four years later, Michael Almereyda presented a very different Ghost onscreen in his Hamlet (2000), updated to a current, millennial Manhattan, just prior to 9/11/01, with Claudius as the new CEO of the Denmark Corporation, taking over after the death of his brother, inside the skyscraping Hotel Elsinore. While still a demanding superego figure, both spiritual and materialistic, Almereyda’s Ghost is an ethereal apparition like

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Olivier’s, yet palpably human like Zeffirelli’s, not a monstrous statue or earthy zombie like Branagh’s. Unlike his British predecessor, the American Almereyda drastically cuts the original script to fit a running time of less than two hours.30 But even with its many cuts, the film presents a continued struggle between the great words of the ghostly Author behind the text and its postmodern, video-cultivated audience. The famous American dramatist, Sam Shepard, plays the Ghost, and Generation-X star, Ethan Hawke, performs a slacker Hamlet, portraying his peers’ suspicions about the inherited benefits of patriarchal, virtual-reality capitalism.31 The Ghost does not appear to the guards and Horatio at the start of this film. Instead, the bright lights of Times Square are shown, from pedestrian level, including a sign displaying the Denmark Corporation’s name and logo (a red, partially open, camera-lens shutter), then the glittering steel and revolving doorway of Hotel Elsinore. Hamlet’s face first appears in close-up on a grainy, black and white video screen, giving the “lost mirth” speech from Act 2, Scene 2. At his mention of man’s noble reason and infinite faculties, with angelic action and godlike apprehension, as “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals” (303–17), an animal X-ray is shown in the grainy video, then a human(ist) face from a Giotto fresco. A Stealth bomber takes off within the video screen, then a bomb explodes in the cross-hairs, hitting its target like an American surgical strike on TV, and a cartoon monster with sharp teeth and a long tongue appears briefly.32 The mortal Hamlet is also shown in color, watching himself on his small, black and white, editing screen, as the phantom self onscreen speaks of man as the “quintessence of dust,” then disappears into video snow. Thus, Hamlet’s lost mirth, while realizing the animal cruelty of the divine in the human brain, becomes the initial theme selected by Almereyda—like Olivier’s focus, a half century before, on the “vicious mole” in human nature, but shown here through the ironic beauty of high-tech war in a video-oriented information age. Hamlet himself is a ghostly presence in these initial video cuts: an artificial product of human culture, a virtual-reality figure, and a mirror-stage image of Self, produced by the theatre within his brain. Instead of showing the father’s armored Ghost with an angry frown, as an external, collective flashback,


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Almereyda shows the son as a reflective phantom, on a screen within the screen. This suggests Hamlet’s lineage from the Renaissance selfmade man, struggling with medieval rot, to the modern self-help imperialist, wrestling with nature’s remnant cruelty, to the postmodern mass-mediated Self, attempting to fill the hollowness of being with more virtuality.33 From the beginning of this film, the Prince creates a double of himself, as video ghost. The videotape he leaves behind, when he dies at the end, will tell his story, along with Horatio’s words. Hamlet is depicted as a filmmaker onscreen, even though the movie’s director does not play the lead role, as in the Hamlet films by Olivier and Branagh. Instead of making a modernist whole ego in his video mirror, Hawke, as Almereyda’s Hamlet, presents a fragmented, schizoid, postmodern gestalt in multiple mirror stages and screens. After the prelude of his own ghost on the video-editing screen and a red “HAMLET” title card for Almereyda’s film, the Prince points his video camera at others who are watching his uncle (Kyle MacLachlan) give a speech—including the press with cameras standing in the back of the room also taking footage but solely of the new CEO. Hamlet thus attempts to capture, control, and restructure the reality around him through his video equipment. Unlike the other photographers, he shoots in various directions and looks into a separate editing screen, which he carries in his left hand, along with the camera in his right, while wearing yellow sunglasses. He passes under a picture of the old King/CEO of Denmark, his father, on the wall. Then Claudius, with the applause of his audience, kisses Gertrude (Diane Venora) and tears up a front-page photo of Fortinbras in USA Today to show his confidence in taking hold of the queen and corporation, despite a continued threat from the outside. Gertrude smiles joyfully, yet has a drinking glass with her, as she often does in this film. She dances with Claudius as they leave the press conference and he gives permission for Laertes departure. The struggle for power, for fitness of survival, is shown here as a fight to control images and bodies, within the context of skyscrapers and corporations. Thus, Almereyda’s Hamlet points uncannily toward the subsequent Twin Towers tragedy and the WorldCom, Enron, Tyco, and ImClone betrayals, connecting Shakespeare’s 400-year-old

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drama to millennial terrorists and deceitful businessmen, who would dominate the news headlines for several years following the film’s release. But it also draws on a prior spirit of intergenerational mistrust. Gertrude is clearly older than the slacker Prince (unlike the casting in Olivier’s and Zeffirelli’s films) and very much aligned with Claudius. As she walks outside with Hamlet in the next scene after the press conference, dark skyscrapers tower over them (in a lowangle shot) and she holds his arm, asking him to cast his “nighted color off ” and accept the fact that “all that lives must die” (1.2.68–72). She gets him to promise not to leave for Wittenberg (as Claudius had also demanded while holding Hamlet’s arm); then she leaves in a limo with her new husband. But the Prince finds the ghost of another Gertrude in his video footage. There, in the grainy, black and white past, she clings to his father’s arm, while Hamlet’s voice-over gives the “too solid flesh” soliloquy about suicide (1.2.129) and then recalls how his mother would “hang on” his father (143). He watches the ghosts of his parents on the TV screen, on a makeshift editing table in his Hotel Elsinore room. Almereyda gives the film audience a view of Hamlet, in his mournful, mirthless, video-watching, and then of the ghosts filling the screen, as if moving the spectator inside the son’s POV and memorial musings. Movie viewers see Hamlet’s fingers playing with the editing machine and fast-reversing the phantoms onscreen, from Gertrude with old Hamlet, to Ophelia’s face—as the Prince’s internal thoughts are heard: “a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer” (150–51). Thus, Almereyda not only presents Hamlet as a young filmmaker trying to make sense of his world, and to fight back against his avuncular enemy, through video imagery. This Hamlet film also draws its audience into the movie theatre and various ghosts inside the Prince’s brain, represented through his voice-over and screen-editing associations. The audience not only hears about the beast in Hamlet’s limbic system, mourning his father and raging against his mother’s betrayal. They also see the other Gertrude, who apparently loved Hamlet’s father in the past, yet became the current queen who let go of him at his death to remarry “within a month” (145, 153). The viewer then sees Hamlet’s association of her with Ophelia, who is also shown in the present (in color)


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waiting at a fountain where she had arranged to meet him—where he stood her up and where, later in the film, she drowns herself. The video scenes made by Hamlet were actually shot by the actor, Ethan Hawke, offering the audience a sense of the theatre inside his head as well (Walker, “ ‘Harsh’ ” 327). They have a very different texture from the flashbacks in prior Hamlet films, with bluish-grey hues, fuzzy figures, and subjectively mixed montage. Instead of being an objective time-travel trip for the movie viewer or a direct look into the memories and imaginings of certain characters, their illusory materiality as video imagery is shown. Thus, old Hamlet’s ghost appears first through his portrait above his son in the press conference room, then in the grainy TV screen on his son’s editing table, along with past images of Gertrude and Ophelia as other ghosts, like young Hamlet at the start of the film. (They, unlike the father, are not dead yet, but will be by the end.) The Ghost here is physically present as an artwork within the film, through the virtual representations of framed portrait and video screen. Instead of being a collective projection on the castle platform, in the play’s first scene, the Ghost appears as the moving image of old Hamlet while still alive: not a zombie returning from the dead wearing his customary armor, but a memory captured in the past by his son’s camera and his son’s mind, then re-created onscreen. During the series of video clips, as remembered and watched by the Prince on his editing machine, old Hamlet puts his hand against the invisible camera lens, darkening the screen and thus emphasizing physical connection, yet mortal distance, between father and son— or between the film characters onscreen and their apparitions in spectators’ minds. Extreme close-ups of young Hamlet’s eyes and brow are shown, punctuating his self-made video memories and encouraging the film audience to believe we are seeing the ghosts inside his brain, experiencing his phantom limb pain directly. Of course we are not, except in the sense of re-membering and re-creating the movie he is in, through our cranial theatres, as we watch and survive beyond him. But this also shows how ghosts are created in real life, within the brain and through projections outside it. They are parasitic figures, surviving as influences and personas in the minds of the living who develop the fictions further.

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Almereyda’s Ghost also appears as a full-fledged phantom, beyond young Hamlet’s video memories, on a surveillance video monitor—in a flashback scene. Horatio’s voice-over gives his memory of seeing the apparition with his girlfriend, Marcella, and the skyscraper’s security guard, Barnardo. The view on the surveillance screen is of the top of the Ghost’s head, as it stands in an elevator. When Horatio and his companions catch up to it, it is walking away from them through a narrow hallway toward a Pepsi One machine. It then fades away, as if into the soft drink machine, recalling the postmodern consumer, as well as corporate executive, consumed by cultural desires. It is not wearing the old king’s armor and helmet, nor a present-day power suit, but a dark leather coat and a “countenance more in sorrow than in anger,” as Horatio, also wearing leather, tells the Prince in his hotel room inside the same skyscraper (1.2.232). When Hamlet himself sees the Ghost (after being awakened by a phone call from Barnardo), it appears on the balcony of his room. He does not have to chase it. He opens the glass door and the Ghost

Figure 6.5 The Ghost fading into a Pepsi One machine, holding a handkerchief for his poisoned ear, in a hallway with mattresses and a ladder, during Almereyda’s Hamlet of 2000


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enters the room—as a material figure, wearing a dress shirt, red tie, and coat, while also carrying the leather one. The Ghost holds a handkerchief to his ear as he starts the story of the garden poisoning. Then he grasps the Prince’s head, making “each particular hair stand an end” (1.5.19). A war scene plays silently on the TV screen in Hamlet’s room. The Ghost makes Hamlet back away as Almereyda’s camera circles them both. Eventually, young Hamlet sits in the chair by his editing table, to hear the rest of the murder tale. No flashback is shown. But the Ghost hugs Hamlet tightly at the end of his story, saying “remember me” with a strong embrace, before suddenly disappearing. This version, like Zeffirelli’s, focuses on the father’s body and words, as memory and demand given to the son, in the double-bind desire of vengeance against Claudius yet no harm to Gertrude—with the film spectators as circling, spectral witnesses to the present moment. After the Ghost leaves, the Prince is shown alone in his skyscraper room. Then, through a close-up of the TV screen, people in the street appear, with the Denmark Corporation’s circular lens-shutter logo superimposed over them and a blue globe with clouds revolving inside it. A robotic feedback signal is heard, “the electronic squalling of an Internet connection riding a surf-like sound of white noise” (Almereyda 35), along with Hamlet’s voice-over: “The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” (1.5.188–89). After the logo dissolves into electronic snow, the Ghost appears again at a distance, outside on the balcony, as Horatio and Marcella join Hamlet inside the apartment. They do not swear on Hamlet’s sword, for he has none, and the Ghost does not speak again from below. They simply look out the glass at the father on the balcony, smoking in his leather coat and looking down at the many lights of other skyscrapers and the traffic far below in the night. The Ghost looks back at them briefly before vanishing. Although the text is much abridged, Hamlet still tells his friend: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (1.5.166–67). But he changes the “your” to “our,” thus including his own video view of the world in that liminal metaphysics. Here the Ghost is not a threatening, monstrous, zombiestatue as in Branagh’s film, yet it bears a similar sorrow, anger, and

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rage for violent remedy, while haunting the skyscraper’s hallway and balcony, instead of the eruptive earth. As in Zeffirelli’s depiction, this Ghost wears ordinary clothing and reaches out to touch. But here the Ghost grabs young Hamlet’s head, both fiercely and gently in the twists of its speech. (The father’s hair is also combed like the son’s.) It is not a huge shadow or brilliant aura like Gielgud/Colleran’s or Richardson’s apparitions. It may fade into a Pepsi One machine and vanish from the balcony, but it is not a spectral trickster, luring the Prince up vertiginous steps or toward a cliff edge, as did Olivier’s phantom.34 Indeed, “it” is much more a “he,” a victim of the massmedia world and corporate imperialism, like his son. Almereyda’s Claudius, as the film’s villain, personifies the rottenness of American, capitalist, mass-media patriarchy, like Denmark’s corporate logo, branded on the Times Square screen and on the personal, video associations of young Hamlet’s brain. But old Hamlet, as the former CEO, was also a part of this culture and its temptations of executive power. The Ghost on the balcony and in the Pepsi One machine thus points beyond simple melodramatic identifications of good or evil, of victim, villain, or hero, in patriarchal characters. There is something rotten in human nature as well as corporate culture. The time is again out of joint in the year 2000 and Hamlet cannot set it right, except through more bloodshed. Although he tries to use his animal emotions and video memories toward creative filmmaking, he becomes caught in the evolutionary fight to survive through control (which the Ghost also personifies): from genetic to cultural legacies, from the selection of fittest species to the power wars of human history, to today’s alpha leaders in the millennial hunting packs of corporate expansion. Ironically, the ultimate triumph of Fortinbras’s take-over bid is undercut by Almereyda’s film; it is shown as just another TV news story in the end (read by Robert MacNeil, formerly of the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour).35 But this again reflects the shifting sands of video realities around and within young Hamlet’s brain, demanding bloodshed to make the virtual real. Almereyda briefly presents an alternative voice to both the dense poetry of Shakespeare’s text and the Social Darwinism of the film’s capitalist setting—through a screen within a screen. While Hamlet


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pays more attention to his homemade video of Ophelia on his handheld editing machine, a Buddhist monk (Thich Nat Hanh) is shown on his TV set, proposing the word “inter-be,” instead of the verb “to be,” because, he says, “it’s not possible to be alone, to be by yourself. You need other people in order to be” (Almereyda 37).36 Hamlet then writes his love note to Ophelia and delivers it to her in the redlit dark room where she hangs her photographs to dry. But their meeting is interrupted by her father. So Hamlet, alone in his apartment once more, with his fingers at the editing buttons, watches a video he has made of himself with a gun against his temple, in his mouth, and under his chin, as his onscreen persona gives the phrase, “To be or not to be,” over and over. Hamlet tries to “inter-be” with Ophelia, but his timing is also out of joint, regarding the “control” administered by Polonius, as a Romeo-and-Juliet-like patriarch (Almereyda 137). Hamlet can only inter-be with his own suicidal face on the screen, although that video ghost also smiles, offering the illusion of control over mortality and virtuality. In the next scene, Hamlet continues to be haunted by his own ghost and the paternal ones. While walking in a hallway, he looks at his face on video, in the hand-held, clamshell monitor, giving fragments of the “vicious mole” speech, removed from the earlier Ghost scene (1.4). But he is surprised by Polonius, who walks up behind him and peeks over his shoulder at Hamlet’s screen mirror. The skyscraper’s glass wall also reflects the faces of Polonius and Hamlet in subsequent shots of this scene. More mirror-stage ghosts within and between these characters are revealed in the next two scenes. Almereyda adds a scene to Shakespeare’s text, with Hamlet walking wordlessly into Claudius’s office and pointing a handgun at the CEO’s chair, desiring to kill the villainous Other, but only finding a ghostly space, with the black-leather corporate throne empty and a black bag behind it marked “BOSS.” Then Polonius reports on Hamlet’s love letter, as the boss emerges from the skyscraper’s indoor swimming pool, while Gertrude lounges beside it. Other buildings and an avenue far below appear outside the glass wall of the natatorium, as if the scene is shot in a false heaven of surplus wealth and pleasure, floating in the clouds. After her father shows off the love letter, sealed in plastic like police

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evidence, Ophelia stands at the edge of the pool and imagines jumping in (which we see), covering her eyes and briefly escaping the patriarchs’ attempt to decipher and control Hamlet’s madness. But here, unlike the similar use of a swimming pool for Juliet’s escapist pleasure in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo ⫹ Juliet (1996), this heroine is alone, without her lover, and offering a preview of her eventual suicide by water. Thus, we see the desires of the Other haunting Hamlet, beyond the vengeance of his father’s ghost: in the skyscraper conspiracy of Claudius and Polonius against him, in Gertrude’s complicity with them, and in Ophelia’s wish “not to be.” It is then that Almereyda shows Hamlet’s full “To be, or not to be” speech (moved up to 2.2 from 3.1). Hamlet walks through the “Action” aisles of a Blockbuster Video rental store, wearing a knitted cap, flaps splayed, with the famous speech given first in his voiceover and then spoken by him. Hamlet’s repeated phrase “To die, to sleep” (60, 64) is visually mocked by the many film dreams of death in the videocassette boxes he passes. Also, three screens flicker above his head, showing multiple images of Brandon Lee walking through flames in The Crow II—an actor who died during the shooting of that film and was thus reconstituted as a ghost, from surviving footage recycled to complete it (Lehmann 97). The particular ghosts inside Hamlet’s cranial theatre, expressed by his speech about an “undiscovered country” after death and by his earlier filmmaking attempts at reconstructing pixel memories, are reflected here in the onscreen action of a ghost actor above his head and in the walls of video boxes that he strolls past, some with colorful, individual covers, but one section with just the Blockbuster corporate cover on each. Here, too, patriarchal, mass-media culture ultimately controls and capitalizes upon the artist’s and spectator’s personal, phantom limb pains, despite public fantasies of escapist entertainment or cathartic healing. And yet, there’s the rub. In cinematic sleep what dreams may come, refracted through the myriad, individual, idiosyncratic theatres of spectators’ brains? Or, what ghosts live in the brains of others, as extensions of one’s personality, yet fictions beyond it, after one dies? Like a Buddhist, Hamlet glimpses a hope in death as nothingness, as a sleep without desire or dream: “to say we end / The


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heartache, and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to” (3.1.61–63). But the human Self does not live or die solely in one brain. Self-consciousness may disappear, sleeping permanently with the death of the brain’s natural flesh. Yet, Hamlet is haunted by what dreams may come in his afterlife: not only how he experiences a Protestant hell or Catholic purgatory, but also how his ghost survives in the minds of Horatio and of other audience members. His final request to his friend to stay alive and “tell my story” (5.2.349), echoes his father’s demand, “remember me,” and shows that their ghosts do live on materially in the neural theatres of others around them. Although Hamlet’s dying request to Horatio is cut by Almereyda, the material ghost of Self, living on through others’ memories and fantasies, is expressed in this movie’s many twists of mechanical reproduction—with multiple mirrors of intertextual, intercranial, film and video replications. Dispensing also with the traveling players in Shakespeare’s script, Almereyda shows Hamlet collecting fragments from other filmmakers’ videos, rented at Blockbuster, to make his own Mousetrap ghosts and thus catch the conscience of the King. But which king? Is Hamlet aiming solely at the superego of Claudius (or of Gertrude with him)? How much does his father’s Ghost also watch, as a figure of Hamlet’s own demanding, vengeful superego? Almereyda turns the play within a play into a film within the film, made by Hamlet and shown in a corporate screening room. But it is also shown to those outside the glass walls of Hotel Elsinore, through the cinema screen to the real-life audience, who haunt the skyscraper along with old Hamlet’s Ghost—as judging superegos and mimetic ego mirrors. Even without the players, Almereyda shows Hamlet being inspired by other, more ghostly actors, while his voice-over gives parts of the “rogue and peasant slave” speech (2.2.560–617). The Prince watches James Dean on TV, “suffering beautifully in East of Eden,” and shoots this screen with his video camera (Almereyda 57). Then he works at his editing table, with John Gielgud on the monitor as Hamlet, speaking to Yorick’s skull (a scene in Shakespeare’s drama that was shot for this film, but cut). Hamlet makes his personal video Mousetrap to catch the spirits of dead actors he admires, plus as much

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of his postmodern audience as possible, along with Claudius’s conscience and his father’s Ghost—who might be “a devil . . . [with] power / T’assume a pleasing shape,” using the Prince’s “melancholy” to abuse and “damn” him (2.2.611–15).37 Hamlet tries to prove, not just to himself, but also to the Other in his corporate screening room (and in Almereyda’s audience) that his father is not a devil and that his uncle is. But with his Mousetrap video, Hamlet also shows that there is a devilish trickster, as directorial ghost, along with unconscious technicians and audience, in his own brain, drawing pleasing shapes out of melancholy to abuse and damn others—even as the Prince twists together the recycled video clips, to move beyond his current damnation of abject despair, toward cathartic revelations for others in his rotten community. Just before The Mousetrap screening, Hamlet discovers how technology can turn against him, along with family members and loved ones. When Ophelia returns his letters and they begin to kiss passionately, he discovers that she is wearing a bug on her body. Their private conversation has been picked up by microphone for the patriarchal Other to hear. (Polonius was shown, in the prior scene, putting the device on his daughter’s body, thus also touching her intimately in hiding the bug under her blouse, as Claudius and Gertrude look on.) And yet, in the next scene, Hamlet tries to turn the panoptic technologies of surveillance and eavesdropping against the mass-media CEO. With his borrowed videos, he shows an “idyllic happy family” of father, mother, and little boy (Almereyda 68), with loving hugs between father and son, the boy being put to bed by the father, and a model of the earth turning. Then his video displays: microscopic imagery of squirming cells, a cut-out cartoon of a poison bottle and blue liquid poured into an ear, bodies falling to the ground, a wilting orange rose, the little boy coming downstairs, a porn scene, an audience applauding, and a sinister person putting on a crown in a mirror. Hamlet as filmmaker thus presents a recycled pastiche of video and cartoon ghosts to demonstrate devilish villainy in ideal family scenes and the body’s own cells—while the audience onscreen, in the film within a film, applauds, and the other audience does not, as the CEO spectator rises to ask for more light. Here Almereyda suggests the paradox of divine powers conceived within the human brain: a trickster theatre of angels and devils, of


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loving parents and traumatic primal scenes, projected from mortal cells to transcendent heavens and hells—made real on earth through the external womb of language and culture. Though there are no words in Hamlet’s Mousetrap (except for “poison” on the bottle), its images evoke symbols that course through the right and left hemispheres in each character’s brain onscreen—and in the skulls of those watching the movie beyond it. Like the poison that the Ghost describes moving from old Hamlet’s ear “through / The natural gates and alleys of the body” (1.5.66–67), the imagery onscreen in young Hamlet’s film (and throughout our mass-mediated world) infects all bodies in the audience, for good or ill. The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, reveals, through Almereyda’s adaptation, the dramatic failure—not just of patriarchal capitalism, but also of theatre, film, and cyberspace—to create a postmodern heaven on earth through the vast potential of the human brain’s inner stages and screens. And yet, there remains the hope that further virtual realities will not simply repeat the cruelties of human nature, if each Hamletic generation overcomes its inherited self-despair, parental traumas, and vengeful ghosts—to evolve our godlike technologies toward a more humane inter-being, instead of the perpetual fight for survival power. Some of Almereyda’s choices do not make much sense. Claudius confesses his sins out loud in his limo, not knowing that Hamlet has replaced the driver. But Claudius should know that someone is driving who might hear him say: “O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven; / It has the primal eldest curse upon’t” (3.3.36–38), especially as the driver (Hamlet) then swerves suddenly. The confession is fragmentary, compared with the original script, but Claudius also says out loud: “ ‘Forgive me my foul murder?’ / That cannot be, since I am still possessed / Of those effects for which I did the murder” (52–54). Perhaps the limo driver is already involved in that conspiracy and so Claudius is not concerned with what he might overhear. But then why would the driver let young Hamlet take the wheel, without Claudius knowing? Next, Hamlet brings the car to a stop and points a gun over the back of his seat to shoot his uncle, having heard the admission of guilt. But he loses his nerve and leaves the limo, not giving the reason in Shakespeare’s text (3.3.73–96). There, Hamlet’s decision not to kill Claudius, when the murderer is in prayer and might go to

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heaven absolved of his sin, raises the question of ultimate justice in the play—as Catholic forgiveness or Protestant predetermination, in human or divine hands. Almereyda merely shows Hamlet balking at his best opportunity to get revenge, without an insight as to why. But his reason must be different from the original script: in the film, Hamlet hears Claudius doubt out loud that he can be pardoned, whereas in Shakespeare, the Prince enters the room after Claudius’s speech and only sees him at prayer. In the film, Claudius looks repentant, with his face in his hands, as Hamlet points the gun at him. Perhaps Hamlet is likewise questioning his own reasons for murder, and challenging the Ghost’s demand (as that of a “goblin damned”), while sympathizing in that moment with his uncle. But why then is Claudius’s line, “Try what repentance can. What can it not?” (3.3.66), spoken as a voice-over that Hamlet cannot hear? Is it meant to echo Hamlet’s inner thoughts, instead of giving an explicit reason for his delayed revenge—which will cost six other lives? Hamlet eventually kills Claudius on a rooftop terrace of the Elsinore skyscraper during his modern fencing match with Laertes, using blunt foils. After being shot in the chest at extremely close range by Laertes and shooting him back in the struggle, with Laertes collapsing from his wound, the more bloody Hamlet stands (with Horatio’s help) and shoots Claudius on the other end of the terrace. Inexplicably, Claudius’s bodyguards do nothing to intervene, though one starts to pull the CEO away, then disappears in the next shot. Almereyda also tries to give Gertrude a more heroic role in this scene, indicating that she realizes the wine has been poisoned by Claudius and she knowingly drinks it to keep it from killing her son. But why then does she drink from the glass and not drop it or spill its poisonous contents on the floor instead? Despite such problems, many details are apt and insightful in this film, which Almereyda calls “an attempt at Hamlet—not so much a sketch but a collage, a patchwork of intuitions, images and ideas” (xii). Polonius hides behind a closet door and full-length mirror in Gertrude’s room to spy on Hamlet’s meeting with her. Hamlet shoots him through the mirror, leaving a web of fragmented glass on the door. The dying Polonius staggers out, zombie-like, one bloody hand covering the fatal bullet wound in his right eye. This reflects the


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material vulnerability of the movie viewers’ eyes as they watch the film (like Buñuel’s Andalusian eye slit). The Ghost, another spectator, appears in Gertrude’s bedroom to whet Hamlet’s blunted purpose. When the Prince speaks to his mother, as the spectral Other desires, he shows the painful pressure in his psyche of that phantom limb, yelling back at his father: “Do not look upon me!” (3.4.128). Yet, the Ghost continues to look, not stealing away as in Shakespeare’s script (135–37). The Ghost is shown again in a reaction shot, after Hamlet sympathizes with his mother’s “cleft” heart (157) and kisses her briefly on the lips. It is never shown leaving the room. Almereyda adds a further apparition of the Ghost, after Hamlet’s return from the trip to England and his fight with Laertes at Ophelia’s grave. Hamlet visits Horatio’s apartment and tells of his newfound trust in “a divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10). Just before this discussion, Horatio and Hamlet close Marcella’s bedroom door, where she lies asleep. They do not see, yet the movie viewer is shown, a translucent Ghost sitting in the chair by her bed, “grave and sympathetic, as if sharing her troubled dream” (Almereyda 113). The Ghost also appears during Hamlet’s discussion with Horatio, after Marcella wakes and joins them. It stands at the edge of the room, leaning against a wall and exchanging a look of recognition with Hamlet, who sees him there just after his speech about a “special providence in the fall of a sparrow” showing that the “readiness is all” (5.2.220–23). The Ghost appears once more at the end of the film, along with other characters in Hamlet’s dying flashback of various clips from the movie in black and white. Almereyda’s screenplay has the Ghost also present on the rooftop, glimpsed by Gertrude as Hamlet holds her and they both are dying (125)—though this part is not shown in the final version onscreen. Through these added apparitions, the director suggests that the Ghost is always at the edges of the drama and in various characters’ dreams and visions, especially in the intersections between the hero, his allies, and his enemies. It watches, desires, and sometimes makes demands, as the Other that connects them, like the film’s audience. Olivier’s phantom swirls in the castle mist, drawing young Hamlet’s brain toward vertiginous, cliff-edge heights. Colleran’s and Richardson’s tricksters float at the edges of the stage, as shadows and

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auras of theatrical space and the watching audience. Zeffirelli’s zombie emerges from a burial scene and fortress walls, to spur his son’s vengeful desires. Branagh’s monster erupts out of a statue and through the earth, as the death-drive pressures of culture and nature. But Almereyda’s Ghost haunts the entire Elsinore skyscraper: in Hamlet’s editing monitor, on surveillance cameras, in elevators, hallways, and hotel rooms. It also appears elsewhere in the city (in Horatio’s and Marcella’s apartment) as a collective extension of living characters’ minds. Despite the death of the body, the old CEO’s Ghost continues to exist, both on videotape and in the neural theatres of those who knew him—like his son at the play’s end, joining the spectral audience. The verbal poetry in Shakespeare’s plays, condensed and embellished in recent films, especially those by Taymor, Branagh, and Almereyda, demonstrates a shift in the cultural connections of the brain’s neocortical theatre: from left-hemisphere, audioverbal bias toward right, visuospatial. This also involves a cultural shift from Renaissance hierarchical control and Enlightenment confidence in rationality toward a more extensive, postmodern combination of left-brain, Symbolic technologies and right-brain, Imaginary passions, in relation to limbic, Real drives. The next chapter explores such shifting cultural connections through the playful, yet traumatic inter-being of Self and Other, inside and between human neural theatres. Even in the predominantly secular, postmodern era, divinity still shapes our ends: if not metaphysically, then at least through the communal Other of parents, language, and culture, producing ideal figures that populate our brains, “Rough-hew them how we will” (5.2.11). Through the external womb of family and society, from the mirror-stage illusions of Self to various fictions of the Other in popular culture, we incorporate a sense of “special providence”: deep goal and conceptual contexts, memory traces, and interpretive patterns of emotion, as unconscious director, technicians, and audience members in the brain. Various brain phantoms and contextual operators will be explored in the following pages to consider how humans have evolved a cosmic, theatrical architecture of shared, yet competitive spaces for ghosts and gods.

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amlet compares the heights of human awareness, involving “large discourse . . . and godlike reason,” to the legacy still in human beings of “bestial oblivion” (4.4.36–40). “What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more” (33–35). The current chapter and chapter 9 explore this bestial legacy of the human species and its evolutionary past, as it gradually developed the mind-sharing technologies of language and godlike reason: from the basic survival mechanisms of animal oblivion (to feed and sleep)—through numerous changes in genetic programming, neural wiring, epigenetic experience, and social construction over millions of years—to the communal ideals that shape Self-consciousness today, in the competitive marketplace of the brain’s theatricality. Prior chapters of this book argued that theatre and cinema extend the inner performance elements of the mind toward the interactive spaces of characters and their spectators, onstage and onscreen. But the current chapter turns this homology outside in. The ghosts of Self and Other exist not only inside the theatre of the mind, based in material synaptic connections and anatomical interactions, while projected as stage and screen fictions, or as phantom limb sensations for some mourners in real life. Communal forces and personas outside the brain also shape the development of each human being’s particular neural wiring, through group selection and reentrant mapping within the cranium, recapitulating the evolution of higher-order consciousness in our species. In chapters 2, 4, and 6, we saw specific examples of cultural developments in spectral performance: from ancient ritual and drama to

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Renaissance theatre to modern and postmodern film. Such displays extended the “actual” and “as if ” representations within human brains to the external “what if ” of shared theatrical space and time, testing the conflicts and potential actions in personal fantasies and cultural forces—to understand cathartically, instead of acting out in real life.1 Some characters incarnated ghosts and gods, onstage or onscreen, while others were haunted by them or rebelled against them. The Other shaping the Self, through numerous familial and social influences, was manifest as the furious gods and demanding ghosts of an abject mother (in the Oresteia), grandfather (in Thyestes), sons (in Titus Andronicus), or father (in Hamlet). With the film versions of Shakespeare’s plays, we also saw various depictions of spectral forms, as personal fantasies and collective apparitions, tying early modern tricksters and zombies to distinctive modern and postmodern concerns. But how did human brains and their cultures evolve the desire and ability to share personal fantasies collectively? Or create the consciousness of Self as different from, yet haunted by the Other? NEURAL DARWINISM AND COMMUNAL GROUP SELECTION To explain the tremendous evolutionary expansion of the human brain and its complexity of consciousness, Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman devised a theory of neuronal group selection with three tenets: developmental selection, experiential selection, and reentrant mapping (Edelman and Tononi 83–85).2 The human brain evolved through Darwinian natural selection, when genetic mutations led to anatomical advantages in particular individuals, whose survival rate gradually altered the species. The development of each human today bears the legacy of that genetic experiment over millions of years—as the initial anatomy of the infant’s brain is structured by natural selection, “constrained by genes and inheritance” (83). However, the building and shaping of the brain, both inside and outside the womb, also involves “somatic selection” through the epigenetic effects of the environment on individual animals. According to Edelman, “from early embryonic stages onward,” specific connections between

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billions of neural synapses in the human brain become wired through group selection. Each neuron grows a myriad of branches, which are then pruned into particular neural groups by competitive usage. The neurons strengthen or weaken (some dying away if unused) through “individual patterns of electrical activity,” firing and wiring together.3 “This entire process is a selectional one, involving populations of neurons engaged in topobiographical competition” (Bright 83).4 Beyond developmental selection, which builds the brain’s basic anatomy from genetic codes to sprouting synapses, the process of “experiential selection” continues to shape and revise the mutable wiring inside each individual cranium (Edelman and Tononi 84). A “secondary repertoire” of neuronal groups is shaped, during the early embryonic period “and throughout life,” as circuits strengthen or weaken (firing together or not) through external “behavioral experiences” in relation to “diffusely projecting value systems” from inside the brain. “This mechanism, which underlies memory and a number of other functions, effectively ‘carves out’ a variety of functioning circuits (with strengthened synapses) from the anatomical network by selection” (Bright 85).5 The first two tenets of Edelman’s theory, developmental and experiential selection, explain the “great variability and differentiation of distributed neural states that accompany consciousness” (Edelman and Tononi 85). But the third, “reentrant mapping,” describes the “integration of those states.” Larger brain areas map neuronal groups together, coordinating in space and time, through “massively parallel reciprocal connectivity” (like the Internet marketplace) involving multiple paths “where information is not prespecified.” Reciprocal signaling increases the likelihood of correlated groups, “in reentrantly connected but different maps,” being selected for activity— with particular neurons exciting or inhibiting their neighbors in the competition for such pathways (Bright 85–86).6 Thus, the “unit of selection” for Neural Darwinism is not the individual neuron. Unlike Darwin’s theory of natural selection, where the individual animal (phenotype) is the unit for change, repetition, and evolution, Edelman’s theory of the brain involves group selection as the basic unit, because “no individual neuron is selected in isolation . . . [or] has the properties alone that it shows in a group” (87).7

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I would argue that the concept and image of Self in the human mind involves numerous potential characters,8 each based in particular brain maps and neuronal circuits, shaped by genetic inclinations and epigenetic experiences, competing for selection on the brain’s inner stage (like other concepts and percepts in Baars’s model) and in the performance of everyday life. The character that is presented onstage as the whole Self, either in the mind as a ghostly ego or on the external body as a mask for others, is not selected in isolation, but through an ensemble of selves (as Ramachandran describes), consciously and unconsciously producing a lead persona, a spectral personality as mental and physical mask of “myself.” Edelman’s theory shows the foundations for this. Yet, like many neurologists and cognitive scientists, he focuses on the individual brain and its mechanisms. As we shall consider later in this chapter and in chapter 9, some neuroscientists are beginning to explore the social construction of each human mind through a myriad of cultural networks outside the brain, involving the forces of (what I would call) communal group selection, as well as neuronal circuitry.9 The ghost of Self within the mind, re-presented as a mask on the surface of the body (or in other apparitions), is not only staged through a competitive ensemble of actors, directors, stagehands, and spectators inside the cranium. These interior factors are themselves produced by various communal forces and personalities: selective groups surrounding each human individual with epigenetic influences (beyond the parents’ initial genetic contributions), both inside the womb10 and then, throughout life, in the external womb of culture. Edelman describes how each mapping of a neuronal group “independently receives signals from other brain maps or from the world,” and yet multiple, local maps are “reentrantly connected” to produce the higher-order structure of “global mapping” and thus “perceptual categorization” (Bright 87–89). He gives the example of correlated inputs of vision and touch, received independently, but converging— as in Baars’s sense of multiple sensory stages in the brain’s inner theatre (considered in chapter 5 here). According to Edelman, the “driving forces of animal behavior,” as well as animal perception, are “evolutionarily selected value patterns that help the brain and the body maintain the conditions necessary to continue life” (94). Such


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value patterns can be found in basic internal survival mechanisms and in “species-specific behavior patterns” (or instincts) directly selected by evolution (90, 94). But most “categorization” of behavior builds epigenetically, through individual experience and somatic selection in neuronal groups, upon prior genetic “values” in the body’s structure. These values are “phenotypic aspects” of the organism constraining neural growth, such as the fact of having a hand with a certain shape and grasping ability, or a baby’s natural reflexes, or hormonal pathways throughout the body, or the orientation of visual sensors toward light (Edelman and Tononi 88). Edelman thus describes the “small loop” of somatic selection as interacting with the “grand loop” of natural selection, through competing neuronal groups inside the individual that lead “to diverse phenotypic behaviors in different individuals of a species,” affecting the survival of the fittest and the genes passed to new generations as value patterns (Bright 97). Edelman mentions that genetic group selection sometimes occurs in nature, as when female bees forgo reproduction to increase the frequency of their genes in a sister queen (Bright 48). Yet he finds that “most natural selection occurs not at the level of genes or groups of individuals, but rather at the level of individuals themselves.” Edelman does not consider how communal group selection might operate in the grand loop of various human cultures, through alterations in values and categories, as when the basic evolutionary values of individual survival and genetic reproduction (expressed in the fear of death and desire for sex) are outweighed by specific categories of self-sacrifice: for example, a soldier or terrorist losing life and family to die for country or cause.11 Such epigenetic social demands and their representational ghosts, altering genetic values through the group selection of particular ideologies and ideals outside the brain, will be the eventual focus of this chapter—with examples shown in drama and film in chapter 8. Like Dennett’s evolutionary stages of consciousness, from direct interactions with the environment, to an internal preselective environment, to such an inner theatre with mind tools (considered in chapter 1), and like Damasio’s notion of a proto-self and higher selves (chapter 5), Edelman describes a “primary consciousness” in

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some animals evolving to “higher-order consciousness” in humans. He defines primary consciousness as “the ability to generate a mental scene in which a large amount of diverse information is integrated for the purpose of directing present or immediate behavior” (Edelman and Tononi 103). This occurs in most mammals and some birds, as shown by indirect behavioral testing and anatomical similarities to human brains (Bright 122–23). It may also include some reptiles, such as snakes, depending on temperature—since cold-blooded animals with a primitive cortex would need a stable biochemical milieu to sustain primary consciousness. The making of a “mental scene” in the theatre of primary consciousness requires four properties: perceptual categorization, concept development, categorical memory responsive to value, and reentrant mapping as an integrative mechanism (Edelman and Tononi 102). Perceptual categorization in the animal brain “carve[s] up the world of signals into categories useful for a given species in an environment that follows physical laws but itself contains no such categories” (Edelman and Tononi 104). Edelman, as a neurobiologist, wants to avoid the pitfalls of panpsychism in his theory: “the laws of physics are not violated, . . . spirits and ghosts are out” (Bright 113). However, I would argue that the “ghosts” of Self and Other, as perceptual and conceptual fictions created within the human mind and sometimes projected onto the stage, screen, or real-life environment, are based in the perceptual categorizations of primary consciousness as an internal theatre—shaped in turn by physical laws and cultural ideals. Nonhuman animals do not practice the external arts of theatre or film; they do not have the higher-order consciousness and cultural demands of humans (or our projected ghosts). And yet, some animals have evolved a primary consciousness similar to ours, through the selective advantage of creating a complex mental scene (Edelman and Tononi 109). In a fraction of a second, new sensory perceptions can be incorporated with short-term memories from previous categorizations, thus constructing a “remembered present.” But such consciousness is “limited to a small memorial interval” around the present, lacking the concept of a personal self and the ability to model a past or future (Edelman, Bright 122). “An animal with primary consciousness sees the room the way a beam of light


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illuminates it. Only that which is in the beam is explicitly in the remembered present; all else is darkness.” Such an animal does have long-term memories, but it is not generally aware of those memories (functioning as unconscious value-categories), nor can it plan an extended future based on them. Baars’s notion of a spotlight onstage within the human mind becomes an even narrower beam in Edelman’s description of primary consciousness, as the mindfulness of a remembered present in animals. Thus, the ghost light of our evolutionary past haunts the theatre of the human mind—especially with the difficulty most of us have in being fully mindful in the present moment (unless using Buddhist meditation). Edelman defines animal and human memory as basically procedural: “a process of continual recategorization . . . [through] motor activity and repeated rehearsal in different contexts” (Bright 102). Thus, animals with a cranial theatre of primary consciousness rehearse their actions in different contexts of a briefly remembered present, creating procedural memory categories, limited mental scenes, and “concepts” (prior to language). Animals use nonlinguistic concepts “to combine different perceptual categorizations related to a scene or an object and to construct a ‘universal’ reflecting the abstraction of some common feature across a variety of such percepts” (Edelman and Tononi 104). Such abstract, universal, relational concepts involve general properties of physical experience: up and down, inside and out (Bright 108, 246–52). These are akin to the categorical “schemas” that Lakoff and Johnson have theorized as the basis of human language “embodiment,” from physical to conceptual structures. In Edelman’s own terms, relating linguistic theory to brain matter, the concepts in primary consciousness involve a “mapping of types of maps,” occurring in the frontal, temporal, and parietal cortices—through the evolutionary linkage of brainstem and limbicsystem values with thalamocortical categories (Bright 109, 118–19). Applying Lakoff and Johnson’s notion of embodied metaphors that “we live by,” I would argue that Baars’s “theatre of consciousness” is also such a metaphor, evolving in our human brains from primary animal consciousness, like the basic schemas of language concepts. Primary consciousness correlates Self and Other in present and past. “Past signals related to value (set by internal control systems)

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and categorized signals from the outside world are correlated and lead to memory in conceptual areas . . . linked by reentrant paths to current perceptual categorization of world signals” (Edelman, Bright 120). This involves cortex percepts and concepts with top-down inhibitive effects. It also involves limbic emotions and brainstem value systems that have vast neural webs fanning up from the stem to all areas of the brain, using chemical neuromodulators akin to the drugs in psychotherapy today (46, 88–89, 105). All of these neuronal systems are coordinated by reentrant signals between separate brain maps, like “a string quartet” with the players “linked by myriad fine threads . . . [giving] ongoing signals shared among otherwise independent instrumentalists” (Edelman and Tononi 106). This ensemble orchestration, with the global mapping of local maps of neuronal groups, is further defined as a “dynamic core” of functional clustering, always in process, not in one stable place, “across many levels of organization without any superordinate map” (106, 139–44). The dynamic core, “generated largely, although not exclusively, within the thalamocortical system,” creates integration, yet with highly differentiated complexity. Only with the evolution of “higher-order consciousness” in human brains, involving reentrant connections “between language centers and conceptual centers,” does full Self-awareness begin (110, 194). THE OTHER’S REACH The integration, yet complexity of the brain’s dynamic core involves the particular competition between individual neurons and neuronal groups for activation and thus survival, yet also the cooperation between groups in reentrant mapping—and in further maps of maps toward functional clusters and the overall dynamic core of consciousness. Edelman uses the photo of a spiral galaxy of stars in outer space to provide an approximate “visual metaphor” for his dynamic core hypothesis (Edelman and Tononi 145). In my view the dynamic core as functional cluster—involving conflicts between some individuals and some groups, while others cooperate to varying degrees of integration and complexity, shifting in space and time— corresponds, too, to the social Other as a cultural vortex of communal


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ghosts (specific psychological pressures and personalities, with material sources and effects) surrounding and interpenetrating human brains, as epigenetic influences in utero, in infancy, and throughout life, yet also as eventual expressions of those brains. Edelman locates the dynamic core of consciousness solely within the brain, but describes an amorphous, shifting interplay between conscious and unconscious systems: “the same group of neurons may sometimes be part of the dynamic core and underlie conscious experience, but at other times may not be part of it and thus be involved in unconscious processes” (144). Thus, the ghost of Self as dynamic core of consciousness—even shadier, though closer to its material roots, than the fictional images and concepts of Self—interacts on a shifting stage edge with directors, stagehands, and spectators of the unconscious (with deep goal and conceptual contexts, plus interpretive memory traces, according to Baars’s model). The brain’s genetically inherited, though changing, unconscious “values” (biochemical, phenotypic, bodily functions and species-specific, instinctual behaviors), as bases for perceptual and conceptual categories in the primary consciousness of animals, become tremendously more complex, ideological value systems in the dynamic core of human culture and its many neuronal bodies. Conflicting and cooperating human values—articulated in various ethics, moralities, and perversions—might also be seen as ghosts of the social Other (inherited beyond genetics), consciously and unconsciously shaping individual identities and actions, through the vast expansion of the hominid brain, with its numerous social experiments over millions of years.12 Edelman calls perceptual categorization “value-free” in the limited present awareness of primary consciousness, although interacting with “value-dominated” memory (Bright 121). This provides animals with the ability to “abstract and organize complex changes in an environment involving multiple parallel signals . . . [as] significant indicators . . . of danger or reward.” Here Edelman suggests a multiple reentrant mapping between the animal brain and its complex environmental signals. With the evolution of human brains and bodies, transforming their environment as well as adapting to it, a new intersubjective mind develops, through numerous exchanges of local

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and global mappings, within and between complex, yet integrative cranial structures and their communities, in the Self and social Other.13 “Higher-order consciousness adds socially constructed selfhood to this picture of biological individuality” (133). Edelman describes such an evolutionary leap as freeing “parts of conscious thought from the constraints of an immediate present”—through the “richness of social communication,” which allows “anticipation of future states,” planned behavior, and the ability to “model the world” (133–35). Although this gave our species a clear evolutionary advantage, it produced both adaptive and “maladaptive” properties (Edelman, Bright 135). Edelman does not explore the tremendous violence between individuals, among cultures, and against the natural environment throughout human history. But such violence in our species is due to the evolution of higher-order consciousness as Edelman describes it: (1) the freeing of consciousness from the immediate present, (2) the richness of social communication anticipating the future, yet often avenging the past, and (3) the planned behaviors that model and remold the world, through the theatres of art and war, inside and outside the mind. Edelman does mention that “qualia” (interior subjective states), recategorized by higher-order consciousness and refined by language, lead to the passions of a human Self “developed through social and linguistic interactions”— and to a world “that requires naming and intending” (136). The human, intersubjective world thus becomes a profoundly theatrical environment of names and intentions, through the ghostly personas and reentrant mirrors of Self and Other, freeing us from the narrow spotlight of a remembered present in animal consciousness. Yet it also manifests the terrors of mortality, in a vanishing past and spectral future, with violence and pain threatening our transcendent illusions. “This world reflects inner events that are recalled, and imagined events, as well as outside events that are perceptually experienced. Tragedy becomes possible—the loss of the self by death or mental disorder, the remembrance of unassuageable pain.” Many human cultures throughout history, including some subcultures today, have worshipped animal totems to focus tribal identity into an integrative, socially dynamic core of multiple,


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intersubjective brains. The modern ideal of an independent Self remains haunted by the animal inheritance of primary consciousness and by the communal ghosts of higher-order consciousness, despite the apparent freedom of the human mind from the narrow present, from primal emotions, and from instinctual survival values. The evolution of Western religion, philosophy, and science, from animism and pantheism to monotheism and secular humanism (including the ostensible overcoming of metaphysics by postmodern theory), involves the gradual consolidation, not eradication, of communal ghosts and bestial natures. Such ideological reshaping of cognitive categories, emotional qualia, and memorial values in the brains of successive generations produces more coherent yet complex, ordered but rebellious, dynamic cores—with empires, democracies, and mass-media technologies transforming the Real of human nature. Thus, particular conflicts of categories, emotions, and values appear in the dramas of various historical cultures—as trickster gods, passionate furies, and vengeful ghosts express the dynamic cores of individual brains and collective minds. Violence is inherent to human nature and magnified through human culture. The basic, cooperative and competitive values of survival and reproduction—in each brain’s neuronal groups, reentrant maps, and egoistic core—join or fight with other minds. This produces societies, ideologies, and leaders that build new civilizations by destroying others. Today’s dominant cultures are not focused on drawing power from animal spirits, nor from ancestral ghosts, through explicit rites of possession. But the bestial furies and surviving graces of particular family phantoms in each human brain do become summoned in the historical Geist of capitalism. We fight for financial and ideological success beyond individual oblivion, contributing our lifetime’s legacy to the competition between and reproduction of certain stars, brands, and products as collective, transcendent fetishes. “Remember me,” Hamlet’s father says as the Ghost. But such a request involves the horrors of past events and future vengeance (on the early modern stage and in various presentations from modern to postmodern screens), exemplifying the Pandora’s box of human consciousness, which continues to release its tragic demons today.

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Edelman states that Freud’s notion of repression “is consistent with” his own model of primary and higher-order consciousness (Bright 145). His theory of neuronal group selection “strongly implicates value-dependent systems in memory formation”—with Self and Other discrimination requiring “memory systems that are forever inaccessible to consciousness.” Repression keeps unconscious those strongly value-laden recategorizations that threaten the Self. “And given the socially constructed nature of higher-order consciousness, it would be evolutionarily advantageous to have mechanisms to repress those recategorizations that threaten the efficacy of self-concepts.” Borrowing from Edelman’s neurology and Lacan’s psychoanalysis, I would argue that ghosts—the materially based, socially constructed, personally idiosyncratic mappings of uncanny forces in mortal, human consciousness—may be manifested externally in various forms, but exist in the brain in certain fundamental ways. 1. Illusory Self-concepts and ego images represent the functional cluster, integrative complexity, and ideal coherence of a shifting, dynamic core. 2. Repressed value-categories erupt in dreams and particular symptoms, or in works of art, pointing to unconscious memory traces and traumatic past experiences, while threatening to disrupt the dynamic core’s Self-control. 3. Discourses and desires of the social Other circulate within the unconscious, through families, friends, and media personalities as epigenetic influences, pruning the neural circuitry. 4. Genetic codes, remnant drives, and primary animal consciousness persist as evolutionary foundations in each new individual. Many of us today do not believe in ghosts as souls of the departed, returning to this world with material appearances and effects, or as personal spirits existing beyond mortal life. But even those who do not believe in such things experience a sense of Self, as persona for the functional dynamic core in their brains—involving the fear of death, lost ties to other humans, the idealizing of certain cultural figures beyond their mortality, and the hope to be remembered after


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death by the collective Other, which lives on. Edelman asks: “What would be the result of accepting the idea that each individual’s ‘spirit’ is truly embodied . . .” (Bright 171)? He suggests that a “persuasive morality” might be developed with the recognition that “we are at least all brothers and sisters at the level of evolutionary values” (171–72). I am skeptical of this. Although I find Edelman’s empirical research and neural theories insightful, through his “beliefs in a brain-based view” (171), I find that inherited survival values are often twisted in cruel ways, through the successful evolution of the human brain and its cultures. This is exemplified by greedy egos in many historical periods, taking violent control of others to reproduce their own genes and ideas, to make their names and personalities live on. I agree with Edelman that each individual’s spirit is “precious because it is mortal and unpredictable in its creativity” (171). But the ghosts of Self-perpetuation within the human brain produce tremendous destruction as well as unpredictable creativity. The tragicomedies of theatre and cinema show this double-edged sword of higher-order consciousness: not only its transcendent aspirations, but also its unbearable awareness of mortality and its traumatic repetition patterns—through the social Other’s reach in shaping minds collectively. Ghosts of the intersubjective Other are also vampires, drawing their neural afterlife from many living bodies and brains, especially when a family member, close friend, or well-known celebrity dies and then returns in the conscious category mappings and unconscious value patterns of those still alive. Specific personalities that sculpt the circuitry of an individual brain, as primary caretakers in infancy or intimate friends and public figures throughout life, persist in their influences. Like software leaving a dead computer to function further in related hardware, Clytemnestra’s ghost and furies, Titus’s sons, and Hamlet’s father continue their programs, obsessively demanding vengeful bloodshed—through the actions of the living. These ghosts, as characters onstage or onscreen, also need the watching audiences to perpetuate their fiction. Yet, the drama’s vampirism may benefit spectators’ brains as well, if it cathartically engages and purifies their cognitive categories, limbic emotions, and survival values, helping them not to repeat such tragic drives in their

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own lives—as Tantalus’s ghost suggests by refusing to see a repetition of his cannibalism, in the conflict between his grandsons. There are positive spirits, as well as vengeful vampires, in our brains. Consciously learned skills, such as playing a musical instrument (Edelman’s example as a violinist himself ), are initially conscious as cognitive and motor activities. Yet they also involve unconscious circuits in the basal ganglia, reinforced by the repeated, chemical (dopamine) rewards in the firing of the brain’s dopaminergic value system.14 Eventually, the detailed mechanical procedures become more and more unconscious, until the playing just comes naturally. “In this way, global mappings that are related to a particular task can be constructed or linked during consciously guided learning until a smooth, apparently effortless sensorimotor loop is executed speedily, reliably, and unconsciously” (Edelman and Tononi 188). Musicians’, composers’, and other artists’ brains call upon the ghostly “muse” of divine inspiration, using consciously learned skills that have become innate routines—and thus acquire unconscious, creative spontaneity. The beauty and power of art’s muses, especially in music, dance, theatre, and cinema, sometimes move large populations to consolidate their minds in repetitive, violent ideologies and actions—from ritual sacrifices in various ancient cultures to war throughout human history, to the mass spectacles, propaganda media, and repressive governments of recent fascist and communist regimes. The social Other’s reach also extends to the unconscious repetition compulsions in global capitalism’s mass marketing of violent media and fetishized products, especially through movies, television shows, and video games. Despite the apparent liberation of the human mind from animistic magic and tribal identities by modern science and democracy, ancestral ghosts continue to haunt our brains with the demands of memory and tradition. These ghostly mappings are revealed by repetitive patterns of thought and action, especially with enemies, allies, and vengeance. Each new generation represses, yet mimics them—unless it can reach a dramatic catharsis in real life that clarifies and moves beyond such a legacy. Edelman connects his theory of Neural Darwinism to Freud’s notion of unconscious repetition, as well as repression. He cites


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“exceptionally clear evidence” that neural connections in the basal ganglia—a set of large nuclei involved in complex motor and cognitive acts, with reciprocal pathways between the thalamus and cortex—have very different structures than in most of the thalamocortical system (Edelman and Tononi 184–85). Basal ganglia neurons are “organized in parallel loops that are independent from each other and thus do not engage in the kind of cross talk one sees in the cortex” (185). They do not emerge in a single functional cluster like the dynamic core. Such “long, one-way, parallel loops found in the basal ganglia seem to be just the architecture one would envision to implement a variety of independent unconscious neural routines and subroutines.”15 Along with unconscious details of automatic motor routines, the basal ganglia are involved in “a large number of cognitive routines having to do with speaking, thinking, planning, and so on,” which may be unconscious in the same way (186). Thus, the mechanical sense of an “unconscious” according to cognitive science, as the 90 percent of brain activity that we are unaware of, begins to meet the cultural, intersubjective “unconscious” of Freudian psychology—through the neurology of brain matter (178, 190). According to Edelman, the dynamic core of higher-order consciousness “can be powerfully affected by a set of neural routines that are triggered by different core states,” bringing about yet other core states of consciousness, through unconscious pathways in the basal ganglia and perhaps other cortical appendages such as the cerebellum (Edelman and Tononi 176). Global mapping by the dynamic core allows it to “hierarchically organize a series of preexisting unconscious routines into a particular sequence” (187). But this mapping is highly dynamic: “our cognitive life is typically constituted by an ongoing sequence of core states,” triggering unconscious routines, which also trigger other core states, “in a series of cycles.” The organization of neuronal groups as independent, parallel loops in the cortical appendages means that a “winner-take-all competition” there contributes to “the sequential unity of behavior and thought” (186). Only one unconscious routine is activated sufficiently at any given time to functionally connect with the core. However, these unconscious pathways, with their routines of action and thought, can also disrupt such apparent unity, shifting the core’s dynamic states toward

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uncanny repetitions beyond conscious control (in the Freudian sense of the ego not being the master in its own house). Edelman gives the example of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), as unconscious motor and cognitive routines are “triggered with excessive frequency,” and thus experienced as “ego-dystonic, that is, unwelcomed and unwilled” (189). I would view such a symptom, shown in the extreme with OCD, as corresponding to the Freudian sense of repetition compulsions that are in all of us to some degree: “fixed, rigid unconscious routines that are forced upon one’s consciousness” (Edelman and Tononi 189). Edelman mentions psychoanalyst Arnold Modell, who uses the theory of neuronal group selection to redefine Freud’s concept of painful repetition compulsions (Bright 182). Modell says that Freud was correct “in judging repetition to be a fundamental biological phenomenon” of the human mind (Modell 60). But Modell sees an alternative to Freud’s notion of the “death instinct” (beyond the pleasure principle) in Edelman’s explanation of memory as the dynamic reconstruction of the past through present contexts and categories, thus producing “a repetition of that which is painful inasmuch as the refinding of perceptual categories transcends the seeking of pleasure.” This also supports the Freudian theory of transference (Nachträglichkeit) or the “retranscription of memory” in therapy (Modell 18). The patient’s emotions “actively scan the human environment in order to refind an affective category” (60). This may “induce a complimentary counter-transference response” from the therapist, which can become a form of “affect training” that involves “repairing developmental deficits” (61). Although involving unwilled repetition, transference (or projection), if managed therapeutically, can still result in learning, because “when novelty is encountered there is a retranscription of memory in a new context” (64). Theatre and film, at their best, offer a similar possibility. Spectators’ brains repeat personal categories and retranscribe memories (from their own inner theatres) as their emotions actively scan the performance environment, onstage or onscreen, refinding affective categories that might be challenged and changed by the new context—as in Aristotle’s theory of tragic drama evoking a catharsis of sympathy and fear. I have argued elsewhere (in Theatres of Human


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Sacrifice) that Aristotle’s ancient idea of katharsis acquires a new validity today through Lacanian theory, as the purification of desire, not just the purging of emotion. Complex tragic or tragicomic violence, onstage and onscreen, offers the possibility of clarifying sympathetic emotions and desires in the spectator—to the point of an ethical encounter with the Real terrors of loss and vengeance in oneself, rather than projecting the melodramatic fear of evil onto stereotypical villains and justifying further violence against them, perhaps in real life. This notion of catharsis—as an ethical purification of desire that reconstructs symptomatic fantasies—addresses the Lacanian problem of the drive and its painful repetition compulsions. Lacan redefines the “death instinct” as a drive produced by the human immersion in culture and language, not by a natural force in all creatures (which Modell critiques in Freud’s theory).16 This erotic and deadly drive, with the lure of words in place of things, can be seen in the ontogeny of the infant’s gradual alienation from its natural being, through the desire and discourse of the (m)Other—and in the brain’s evolution from primary to higher-order consciousness, in Edelman’s terms.17 INTERSUBJECTIVITY, FREE WILL, AND ALIENATION Our brains’ higher-order, language-oriented, socially constructed consciousness sets us free from the narrow, remembered present of other animals. But it also produces a vast inner theatre of past and future selves and scenes, through the dramatic dependency of the human infant upon the external womb of culture and its vicissitudes, replacing the natural environment. This complexity of human internal and external environments creates the uncertainty, anxiety, repetition patterns, repressions, and melancholic alienation of the Self ’s core consciousness and its competitive unconscious pathways. Such spectral competition of Self and Other, of memorial categories and instinctual values in the brain, shows the value of both theatre and therapy, which can recategorize the ghosts inside. Edelman, without reference to Lacan, describes a “continuous drive toward language” in the developing human baby, unlike

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“higher apes, such as chimpanzees, even though they appear to have semantic capabilities with some degree of self-differentiation” (Edelman and Tononi 198). In the theatre of human infancy and its mirror stages, “cues from outside [the baby’s brain] are transformed by emotional exchanges with the mother that begin to have motor and, therefore, conceptual significance.” In Lacanian terms, the Symbolic concepts of human culture transform the baby’s sense of the Real—of internal, survival values and external, sensory things— through Imaginary perceptions of Self and Other, even prior to language, in preverbal communications and affective recategorizations. According to Edelman, “we can be sure that, from birth, the baby is constructing his or her own ‘scenes’ via primary consciousness,” eventually involving the “refurbishment of concepts through gesture, speech, and language,” in metaphorical narratives and “play.” The infant plays with the world through an intersubjective theatre, not only outside but also inside its brain. It absorbs particular categories, concepts, and words of the Other, while neural circuits spread, prune, group, map, cluster, and core into higher-order consciousness—with the spotlight of a growing Self-awareness onstage and numerous pathways of phantom directors, trickster stagehands, and zombie spectators operating in the unconscious offstage.18 Edelman also raises the possibility of “splinter cores” (Edelman and Tononi 189). Sets of neuronal groups may function as “unconscious neural processes . . . in the thalamocortical system itself ” (not just in cortical appendages), without being “incorporated into the dominant dynamic core.” Primary sensory and motor areas might normally be “in contact with the core at ports in or ports out without contributing directly to the core.” But also, in abnormal disconnection, neural processes that “ordinarily participate in the core . . . may remain functionally insulated from it.” Edelman suggests here a material basis for Baars’s theatrical model of multiple, unconscious stagehands and directors—with various deep goal and conceptual contexts in the ordinary brain, or the extreme self-alienation of split selves in multiple personality (dissociative identity) disorders. “Is it possible that the thalamocortical system may support more than one large functional cluster at any one time? Could some active thalamocortical islands or splinters have broken away from the mainland?”


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(Edelman and Tononi 189–90). Edelman says it is impossible to be certain at present, but “such functional or anatomical disconnections may underlie . . . pathological dissociations,” such as hysterical blindness and split-brain syndrome (190). Edelman then relates his hypothesis of splinter cores to Freud’s notion of unconscious repression, expressed by “slips of the tongue, action slips, and the like.” In his earlier book, The Remembered Present (1989), Edelman makes more specific ties between his theory of Neural Darwinism and Freud’s ideas of repression and repetition, involving the intersubjective unconscious in relation to Self-construction, ego defense, splinter selves, and alienation. Freudian unconscious states “derive originally from the interactions of basic value-dependent hedonic systems, perception, and language,” which are “subject to recategorization in memory” through concepts (209). The selective accessibility of unconscious memories to conscious recall depends upon “the gating of the various conceptual classifications of global mappings back through the cortical appendages” (210). This may be a neurobiological justification for Lacan’s theoretical axiom: the unconscious is structured like a language, as the discourse of the Other (though Edelman makes no reference to French Freud). Thus, conceptual categories and classifications are absorbed in each brain, as it is shaped by the external womb of human culture, from infancy onwards. Edelman speculates that the “adaptive advantage of repression” in the brain’s evolution might have been for the “efficacy and continuity” of higher-order consciousness, so that “concepts of the self [could] be developed without disruption” (211). Human evolution, from primary to higher-order consciousness, involved different technologies of mind-sharing, in the dynamic interplay of Self concepts and Other disruptions, through the communal shaping of individual brains. Edelman speculates how certain “diseases of consciousness” relate to neuronal group selection. He offers schematic drawings of major brain sites and “reentrant paths” that are disrupted in amnesia, shortterm memory loss, motor and sensory aphasia, schizophrenia, hysterical dissociation, and obsessive-compulsive disorder (Remembered 217).19 He calls hysteria and OCD “diseases of attention and succession in which the affective state alters the balance between

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automatization and novelty.” Like the problem of too much novelty in hysteria and too much automatization in obsessional neuroses, human cultures throughout history have faced the challenge of balancing the various degrees of innovation and conformity in many interconnected minds, allowing for “free will,” yet also constraining its expression. But how does free will exist in the human brain, if the mind is produced by neural circuitry? According to Edelman, higher-order consciousness, with “rehearsal and planning based on value-laden memory and goals,” extends the particular variability of neuronal groups in each brain, for a vast repertoire of thought and action choices, though still limited in its array of selections (Remembered 261). Likewise, in the group mind of each human culture, there are collective rehearsals, plans, and actions—from the inner theatre of each brain to external, fictional and real worlds—based on shared, value-laden traditions and ideological aims. Often the group mind, with its dynamic core states and unconscious loops, functions well. But sometimes there is an imbalance of oppressive conformity or chaotic innovation. The struggle between automatization and novelty, conformity and innovation, or patterned memory and symmetry breaking, has always been the evolutionary drive of life on this planet. “Symmetry principles govern the possibility that memory can arise, but only after symmetry breaking occurred, leading to chemistry and to living and evolving organisms, could memory develop” (Edelman, Bright 207). Yet, the specific development of human memory, with its conscious and unconscious ghosts (as I have called them), involves a new dimension of interconnected, cranial theatres—through the patterns and novelties of “social transmission and intersubjective communication” (Edelman, Remembered 263). Eventually, modern science evolved through particular forms of intersubjective communication and transmission, further liberating humans from the threats of the natural environment and the adaptive values of bestial oblivion: eating, sleeping, fleeing or fighting, and reproducing. Western technologies and democratic ideals have expanded the free will and “natural rights” of individuals. And yet, the stress on individualism in our culture may have deepened the pitfalls of alienation, through


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the illusory extremes of ego and community, of independent innovation and mass-media conformity. Today’s ghosts of Self and Other, of alienation and intersubjectivity, are expressed through the novelties, patterns, and diseases of human consciousness in its current evolution of higher orders. How are these ghosts redefined by the postmodern convergence of psychoanalysis and neuroscience? Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas describes the Self as being “filled with the ghosts of others who have affected me” (59). These “internal objects” are the traces left by encounters with specific things and personalities in the external world: “the effect of a musical structure, a novel, or a person.” Bollas advocates the psychoanalytic value of “being a character” in everyday life: enjoying the risk of other objects (or persons) and seeking encounters with them in order to be transformed—or continually “born again” in subjectivity. “To be a character is to gain a history of inner objects, inner presences that are the trace[s] of our encounters, but not intelligible, or even clearly knowable: just intense ghosts who . . . inhabit the human mind.” Despite the ego-defensive repressions of the human brain’s dynamic core, especially in Western culture, we are, says Bollas, “recurrently lost in thought (and the use of object) when we are involved in the process of living and informed by the ghosts of experience” (60). Bollas defines therapeutic transference as learning to be a character (or characters): “bringing along . . . inner presences—or spirits— that we all contain . . . and then transferring them to a receptive place in the other” (62). This happens also in the theatre of everyday life, but with less awareness: “as we pass back and forth the spirits of life, we hardly know quite whom we are holding for the other, however briefly, although we will know that we are being inhabited.” This is shown in the colloquial terms of someone emitting certain “vibes,” or being on the same “frequency,” or being “in tune” with us. Bollas also characterizes some individuals as “spiritual imperialists, greedily moving through others, militantly affecting people in destructive ways” (63). He recognizes the potential accusation that his spiritual terminology is guilty of “mystification”—in the view of deconstructionists (and scientists). But he still values “spirit,” with reference to Derrida and Heidegger, for the “Unthought” that it may

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revive in our postmodern culture, “as we carry the spirit of the other’s idiom within our unconscious” (64–65). Such spiritual terminology may seem antithetical to neuroscience. Indeed, Edelman explains that there is no continuation of the personality as a disembodied soul. “With the death of each individual, that particular memory and consciousness is lost—if personal identity depends on morphology undergoing a particular history, it cannot persist in a disembodied state. There is, as such, no individual immortality” (Remembered 270). And yet, Edelman recognizes that while science “is the greatest of communal cultural achievements,” involving particular contributions of many mortal individuals, it is not a complete view of the shared consciousness that goes beyond individual mortality. “Science is only a partial experience of the consciousness that, once born and developed in human culture, has a potentially endless sweep in subjective personal experience, in art, and in the creation of myths.” Another neurologist, Joseph LeDoux, asserts that “a spiritual view of the self isn’t (or doesn’t have to be) completely incompatible with a biological one” (Synaptic 15). Whether or not an individual soul survives after the body’s death— and may appear as a ghost—is a matter of faith. But the experience of one’s mind “being inhabited,” as Bollas says, by the “intense ghosts” of others can be theorized by neuroscience. As LeDoux puts it, “the normal functioning of the soul [prior to the body’s death] depends on the brain.” I would add that a more complete view of the “endless sweep” of the human soul may be gained by combining neuroscientific and psychoanalytic theories with theatre’s display of various phantom psyches in different historical cultures, onstage and onscreen. We saw in the last chapter how the Ghost made its appearance in distinctive ways in films of Hamlet from the 1940s, 1960s, 1990s, and 2000, reflecting the intersubjective, cultural mappings of Self and Other in those periods. Even in Shakespeare’s early modern script, from 400 years ago, there are various apparitions of the Ghost: to others without Hamlet, to others with Hamlet, to Hamlet alone, and to Hamlet when he is with his mother and she does not see the father’s phantom. (Almereyda’s film adds other apparitions on video and through Marcella’s sleep.) These show not only the intersubjectivity


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of Hamlet’s identity, dependent upon the desires and demands of others, living and dead, but also his alienation as a ghostly Self, despite the Other phantoms circulating through his brain matter. The different types of ghosts in the brain that I listed earlier in this chapter can all be seen in Hamlet, between the godlike discourse and bestial oblivion of human consciousness. 1. A shifting, dynamic core in Hamlet presents various self concepts, ego images, and concurrent Real emotions, while others watch him: from a melancholic traveler lured by the sleep of death to a playful trickster testing his villainous uncle, lustful mother, and possibly demonic father—to a raging, yet hesitant, and then intrepid avenger. 2. The repressed value-categories of his particular family traumas and the rotten state of Denmark erupt, as others see the Ghost in war armor and Hamlet hears its story, then embodies its vengeance in circuitous ways. 3. The neural networks of Hamlet’s brain, pruned by numerous experiences of mother, father, uncle, girlfriend, and others not shown in this drama, continue to shape his present twisted thoughts, elaborate philosophical speeches, and eventual bloody acts—as he chooses between the various phantom mappings, conscious and unconscious, in his brain. 4. The remnant animal instincts in Hamlet’s primary consciousness— the four Fs of fighting, fleeing, feeding, and fornicating—are marshaled toward setting right what is out of joint in the human environment around him. All these types of material ghosts in Hamlet’s mind also involve what I would call the three Cs of competition, cooperation, and control—the neuronal drives of his higher-order consciousness, tied to other human brains, creatively and destructively, through shared mappings of godlike discourse and bestial passion. Bollas’s notion of psychoanalytic transference as learning about one’s character being full of ghosts shows the potential cathartic kinship between a patient in Freudian therapy and Hamlet—or an actor and spectator of Hamlet, onstage or onscreen. Through Modell’s

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redefinition of Freudian transference using Edelman, one can also see a connection between the ghosts of Hamlet and the ghosts in each human’s neural circuitry. Such ghosts and their material basis in the brain might be cathartically purified and physically altered, in incremental ways, by watching theatre and film—as with the more personal drama of affect training and memory retranscription in psychoanalysis. As mentioned already in chapter 3, psychoanalyst and neurologist Mark Solms cites the evidence of functional-imaging studies of the brain that show physical changes in the prefrontal lobes through psychotherapy, thus extending the communication between the advanced neocortex and primal limbic system. Psychologist Louis Cozolino has also argued for connections between the process of psychotherapy and the evidence of neuroscience, involving those and other brain regions. Neither of them uses spiritual terminology as Bollas does, nor considers Lacan’s theories of the Other. But Cozolino does point to certain areas of the brain’s anatomy that show the ghosts of Self and Other, of alienation and intersubjectivity, in the flesh (so to speak). Or, as he puts it; “The self is primarily constructed and populated by those with whom we have had relationships” (167). This also indicates, in my view, the vast significance, impending danger, and potential virtue of theatre, film, and other mass media today: manifesting the ghosts of the cultural unconscious as they reshape the particular phantoms in each person’s brain, toward conforming with current ideologies, which repeat good and bad patterns—or toward the difficult, innovative catharsis of crossing fundamental fantasies and changing painful, repetitive symptoms. Cozolino describes the “interpersonal sculpting” of the triune human brain from birth onwards, as a recapitulation of evolution in each person’s mental development (11–12). “At birth, the reptilian brain is fully functional and the paleomammalian brain is ready to be organized by early experiences” (12). But the neomammalian cortex is much slower to develop “and is still forming in the third decade of life.” Thus, the baby’s brainstem has genetically prescribed reflexes, as well as internal regulatory systems, to help it survive initially and interact with the external world. “Brainstem reflexes, having been shaped by evolution, organize much of the infant’s early behaviors.


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The neonate will orient to the mother’s smell, seek the nipple, gaze into her eyes, and grasp her hair . . . A baby’s first smiles are also a reflex controlled by the brainstem to attract caretakers” (75). However, as the baby develops, some of its initial brainstem reflexes are “inhibited” as the limbic paleomammalian and cortical neomammalian systems grow further and become organized (through neuronal pruning) to live in a particular human environment, shaped by continual interactions with primary caretakers (77). For example, the primitive grasping reflex of an infant’s hands only allows the holding of a spoon in a tight fist. But this human tool becomes more useable with the cortical inhibition of this reflex and through memory skills that develop finer motor movements between the thumb and forefinger. Primal reflexes are still present in the brain, though, as shown by Alzheimer’s patients who lose cortical cells inhibiting such reflexes and thus revert to a newborn’s movements. Cortical inhibition with “descending control” also develops to regulate limbic affect (Cozolino 78). “As the middle portions of the frontal cortex expand and extend their fibers down into the limbic system and brainstem, children gradually gain increasing capacity to regulate their emotions and find ways to gain soothing, first through others, and eventually by themselves.” The frontal and occipital cortices also begin to mature at a “sensitive period” in development, corresponding, in my view, to the Lacanian mirror-stage recognitions of Self and Other: “a child at eight months is able to distinguish faces and compare them to his or her memory of other faces. It is around this period that stranger and separation anxiety develop” (Cozolino 79). Thus, the child gradually evolves a “social brain,” sculpted by interactions with parents and others.20 Using John Bowlby’s theory of “attachment schemas,” Cozolino points to the early “memory networks” of the social brain, within each individual, that “become evoked in subsequent interpersonal experiences throughout life” (183, 201–2). This may also relate to Lacan’s notion of the primal traumas of alienation and separation, as foundational structures in all human brains (although psychotics are trapped, to some degree, in the alienation step, and perverts in the separation dilemma).21 The mirror stage shows the infant recognizing a whole image of itself in the

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reflective glass, exemplifying its numerous interactions with human caretakers who carry, specify, and personify the social Other’s desires for that child to be a complete Self in image and name. Mirrored by parents and others around it, as well as by the human environment and various theatrical media, the child develops an illusory ego—a phantom image and concept of Self as individual—that masks its split- and intersubjectivity, with other characters (or characteristics of the Other’s desire) playing as directorial ghosts and audience zombies in its brain. The child thus evolves social parts of its brain that recognize it as a Self, yet also misrecognize it. Through the expanding posterior (association) and frontal (advanced cognitive) areas of its brain, the child grows and prunes neural networks, in the physical, but malleable wiring of reentrant maps, that connect it with other humans—via the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic orders of emotional attachment schemas, image schemata, and embodied metaphors (Lacan; Bowlby; Lakoff and Johnson). But the darker side to such mind-expanding developments in the human brain involves the Lacanian alienation of being, as the human child is gradually captured by language and culture, exemplified by the “stranger anxiety” of a precarious Self and threatening Other in the mirror stage. It also involves a further separation (anxiety) in the child’s Oedipal odyssey away from and yet return to the mother’s body. Then, as adolescent and adult, there is a further repressing of and building upon the affective memory networks of infantile alienation and separation, with the maturing of ego independence, apparent free will, and erotic reproductive fantasies. The foundational traumas of alienation and separation occur through particular experiences of perceptual events and conceptual discourses in each person’s life—producing the specific, unique wiring of each brain. However, as there are common anatomical networks in all human brains, there are also shared cultural ghosts that can be traced in the brain’s physical structures and its intersubjective theatre of alienation. HAUNTED BRAIN PARTS Citing various research studies, Cozolino details the initial, mimetic theatre that sculpts the baby’s brain, as it is captured by the external


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womb of its human environment. “Within the first hours after birth, newborns will open their mouths and stick out their tongues in imitation of adults” (174). In the first 36 hours of life, a baby can begin to distinguish between happy, sad, and surprised faces. “Looking at happy faces causes newborns to widen their lips, whereas sad faces elicit pouting. Surprised models elicit wide-open mouth movements.” Thus, the brain-sculpting interplay with other human characters starts immediately as the baby leaves the natural womb, spurred by its smile and other reflexes. Then it builds through numerous, multisensory, preverbal communications, toward the fullbody mimicry, primal joy, and stranger or separation anxiety of the mirror stage and beyond. Smell and touch play “primary roles” in the initial weeks of bonding between the infant and primary caretaker, along with “the tone and prosody of voice hold[ing] center stage” (173). But eye contact is central, too, for the primal bonding between mother and child—and for the initial steps of independence later on (176). A toddler looks back frequently to see the expression on the parent’s face, finding calm and confidence, or fright and anxiety, as it moves away and returns. This transfers the “parent’s internal world” to the child—in a process known as “social referencing.” Thus, the primal ghosts of parents’ faces and bodies, along with the unconscious phantoms and zombies of value-category maps and memory patterns in their internal worlds, become absorbed in the vastly expanding and selectively pruned neural circuitry of the infant’s intersubjective, mental theatre.22 There is a “multigenerational unconscious shaping of neural structure passed on,” from the external and internal ghosts of grandparents and other ancestors, through parents, to the child (58). Cozolino also points to the complex neurochemical “cascade” in the brains of both mother and child as they interact, especially the endogenous opioids that regulate the attachment process. These internally generated opiates reinforce the memory patterns of safety or anxiety, as “emotional aspects of the internalized mother,” invoked throughout life in times of stress (177). Cozolino locates the ghost of this internalized mother (without the spectral terminology),23 as repeated neural patterns and biochemistry, primarily in the right hemisphere of the neocortex, as it engages the limbic system. “The

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building of the social brain between 18 and 24 months is driven by the attunement between the right hemisphere of the parent and the right hemisphere of the child . . . It is through this process that the unconscious of the mother is transferred to the unconscious of the child” (192). Cozolino specifies certain areas of the frontal cortex and limbic system in this building of the social brain, through the “growth spurt of the right hemisphere” in the first year of the child’s life (178). The orbital area of the prefrontal cortex, as “apex of the limbic system” in its connections with the cortex, provides a “convergence zone for polysensory and emotional information” (180). It operates as an “association area that mediates information concerning our external and internal worlds,” with an “inhibitory role in autonomic [brainstem] functioning” that contributes to the “organization of higherorder behavior and affect regulation.” This is precisely the area, along with the ventromesial prefrontal cortex, that Solms and Turnbull pinpoint as being affected by psychotherapy, extending the communication between the conscious and unconscious, with the cortical ego mediating the panic, fear, rage, and seeking systems of the limbic brain, as “instinctual drives” (104, 136). According to Cozolino, the orbital cortex also participates in the recognition of facial expressions, linking “our motivational states to the expressed likes and dislikes of others, allowing us to attune with and respond to others’ feelings and needs” (180). Thus, the right-brain biased, emotional, preverbal communication between mother and baby—with the child internalizing her spirit and the ghosts of her unconscious, in the earliest mirror stages of human life—continues to haunt the social brain, particularly its orbital area (above the eye), throughout all the facial interactions of adult life and the many quotidian theatres of character interpretation.24 The limbic system’s amygdala, working with the orbital cortex, is a core component of the social brain, as it appraises safety and danger (using the templates of parental reactions) and “mediates many aspects of the fight-or-flight response,” through its direct ties to the brainstem’s autonomic nervous system (Cozolino 180–81). In primitive mammals, the amygdala is mostly involved with a sense of smell, as the means to organize “feeding and social communication”


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(181). However, through primate evolution toward the human brain, with upright posture and the shift from nocturnal to diurnal life, “the lateral areas of the amygdala expanded and connected with cross-modal sensory areas, especially vision.” The limbic’s anterior cingulate is another association area, “densely connected” with the orbital prefrontal cortex, involving “visceral, motor, tactile, autonomic, and emotional information” (137, 182). This brain area evolved as certain mammals specialized in the theatre of “maternal behavior, play, and nursing” to produce social bonds—at a stage when sound also became crucial in the “communication between predator and prey, potential mates, and mother and child” (182). According to Cozolino, the temporal lobes constitute part of the social brain as well. Here the “senses are integrated, organized, and combined with primitive drives and emotional significance in a topdown linkup of all three levels of the triune brain.” Cozolino defines three illusions of Self that are constructed by the brain, in its top-down (cortex, limbic system, brainstem) and left to right hemisphere integrations. The first is the “Cartesian theater” illusion of consciousness coming together at one location in our heads, where experience “is presented to us on a screen” (157). This has led, as discussed in chapter 1 here, to the philosophical problem of mind–body dualism, with consciousness experienced as a ghost in the machine of the brain: “a spirit inhabiting the body as opposed to being one with it” (158). However, as I argue throughout this book, such an illusion should not be simply dismissed through the discovery of neuroscientific truth. It remains vital to consider how this illusory ghost of Self persists in various ego images and concepts on the narrowly lit stage of consciousness (Baars), through the integrative complexity of the dynamic core’s functional cluster (Edelman), as exhibited by various phantom projections onstage and onscreen. The second illusion of the brain’s spectral theatre, delineated by Cozolino, “is that conscious awareness leads us through time,” with moment-to-moment thinking by the Self occurring prior to feelings and actions, instead of the other way around (158). This contributes to the third illusion of the Self ’s control over outcomes, underestimating the role of chance and other factors. “In truth, we have little or no conscious access to the information or the logic on which most

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of our decisions are based . . . Nonconscious decision-making penetrates and shapes the construction of the self.” Thus, our brains may select from a vast array of complex repertoires, through various mappings of desires, images, and concepts absorbed from the social Other, in the phantom influences of particular parental figures and other persons, plus their unconscious relations. But this selection process—choosing between specific neural networks of ghostly personas, value-categories, and attitudinal vectors in thought or action—occurs mostly in unconscious parts of the brain. It then becomes rationalized as a characteristic choice of the conscious Self—or, if strange enough, it changes the idea of one’s Self. Like Dennett, Cozolino emphasizes the “narrative” construction of the Self (157). But he also suggests the internal theatricality of the mind, playing out and rescripting the myth of Self and its memories, when he explains “executive brain” areas. The primary executive areas are the orbitofrontal and dorsolateral regions of the prefrontal cortex, with the former biased toward the right hemisphere (as discussed above) and the latter biased toward the left (136). The orbitofrontal regions become involved in emotional decision making; the dorsolateral in attentional decisions (137). But both are involved in the top-down inhibition and control of other areas in the triune brain. The dorsolateral regions develop more slowly, not fully maturing until the middle to late teens, thus maximizing the executive brain’s environmental learning and adaptability, especially toward the rational, audioverbal, left side of the cortex (140). The dorsolateral areas evolved with networks connected to the hippocampus, which records long-term, autobiographical memories. The orbitofrontal areas evolved in connection with the amygdala and its ties to emotional memories, as gateway to the limbic system. Cozolino thus emphasizes the top-down and left-right “integration” of brain regions—for the healthy mind’s executive and social control (inhibitory) system of an evolutionary and developmental hierarchy: top neocortical over limbic/brainstem and left, cognitive hemisphere over right, emotional. Yet, the dominant regions of the brain, toward the top and left, cannot simply repress the more unconscious and disruptive ghosts elsewhere, patterned by particular personal traumas. While the orbitofrontal areas grow rapidly during the sensitive


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period of infancy and the dorsolateral areas mature later on, “with the development of language and the exploration of the physical and conceptual worlds” (140), communication between them and lower brain areas is crucial to mental health—which can be increased by therapeutic catharsis as the re-cognition of painful, repetitive networks (28–31, 63). Cozolino includes the parietal lobes (above the ears, near the back of the cortex) as part of the executive brain, “organizing body image and inner subjective experiences” (145). They thus create the perception of “inner and outer spaces (both physical and imaginal),” although without conscious, self-reflective awareness (146). As mentioned in the introduction of this book, Dennett points to the growth of the parietal lobes in primates, especially humans, as showing a distinctive capacity for the “designed imagination” of an inner, preselective environment. According to Cozolino, “studies of skulls reflecting different stages of primate evolution suggest that expansion of the parietal and not the frontal lobes is most characteristic of the human brain” (145). Thus, the evolution of an imaginative and eventually symbolic theatre within the brain can be traced to various areas in the bicameral neocortex, beyond the brainstem and limbic system. In the course of human evolution, with the expansion of the neocortex, there were also changes in its bicameral functions. Most of the left parietal lobe, which had been devoted to spatial movement relations like the right (and still is in other primates), became devoted to the social development of language instead, further distinguishing the two halves of the neocortex (LeDoux, Synaptic 303, 318). According to LeDoux, “spatial perception was forced from the left during the language invasion of human synaptic territory” (303).25 Thus, Cozolino’s depiction of an executive brain and narrative illusion of Self inhibiting other areas, while interacting with the social brain in them, from left to right and from top down, might be viewed another way. The theatre of the Self in the human brain emerges, through its social ties in species evolution and in personal development, from bottom to top, from right to left, and from back to front: in brainstem reflexes and limbic emotions (including amygdaloid drives and hippocampal memories), in posterior perception,

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projection, and association areas (of the occipital, parietal, and temporal lobes) depicting imaginary scenes as well as external reality, and in frontal-lobe concepts as revised value-categories with plans for action.26 The ghosts flow both ways. Advanced top, left, and frontal fictions repress the primal instincts and personal traumas, while foundational structures and internalized parental spirits, in the bottom, right, and back areas of the brain, form unconscious paradigms that direct and reinterpret the percepts and concepts onstage, in the uncanny spotlight of higher-order consciousness. Cozolino agrees with the theory of psychologist Robin Dunbar that primate grooming, as a social and spatial movement activity using the parietal lobes, evolved into gestures, sign language, and then verbal language, with larger hominid groups.27 “Given that larger groups increase the probability of success in warfare and competition for resources, the brain, language, and group size had to evolve together. Hemispheric specialization and the expansion of the neocortex created neural space for the development of more complex forms of social communication” (Cozolino 155). Different types of physical and verbal communication evolved, from grooming and sign language to gossip (which still constitutes 60 percent of human speech) and eventually inner dialogue. “This inner track of language may have evolved into what we now call introspection, or the private self ” (156). But the dialogue and characters of an inner, ghostly theatre might have also developed through the hominid collective mind-tool of Self and Other deception (according to the theory of Machiavellian Intelligence). “Evolutionary psychologists suggest that denial and repression may have evolved to make us better at deceiving others by fooling ourselves.”28 Thus, the superego inhibitions by the left hemisphere (frontal and parietal lobes) against the right, and by the social brain’s neocortex against lower limbic-system emotions and brainstem reflexes, can become repressive, denying any contradictions to the phantom ego of Self. Although a certain degree of stress increases neural plasticity, higher levels of traumatic stress cause dissociation. Biochemical changes “unlink” the circuits of the reptilian and paleomammalian brains from the conscious neomammalian cortex—as shown in studies of child abuse and post-traumatic stress disorder (Cozolino


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24–25). This effect may have evolved so that language and cognitive functions will shutdown or decrease—with more emotional and instinctual reflexes taking over and acting—in times of danger (26). But the long-term effect of stressful situations for many individuals today (despite the human success in conquering the threats of a natural environment) has been an abject alienation of Self through the bombardment of stimuli in our mass-media consumerist society. As Almereyda’s Hamlet suggests, the social brain has become more and more virtual in the postmodern. Children grow up surrounded by video ghosts. Their own images and voices are replayed on the mirror stages of the TV screen. Cartoon characters supplement parental figures and fears with media heroes and villains. News reporters and Hollywood stars bring daily doses of violence into the home theatres of our living rooms and bedrooms. The dream-world avatars of multiplex cinemas, music videos, and computer games lure us into continual, ritual interactions—into the godlike fiction and bestial oblivion of feeding on virtual realities. During dreams, as in stressful real-life situations (or schizophrenic hallucinations), the frontal lobe’s cognitive controls are unlinked, allowing limbic emotions and brainstem instincts to create fantastic inner worlds in the association theatre of the parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes—although without external actions (Solms and Turnbull 201, 211–13). “In our dreams, the focus of motivated cognition is therefore removed from our goal-directed action systems and shifts toward the perceptual systems—especially the visuospatial [right-brain] component” (213). Cinema, television, and videogames create a collective dream space of intersubjective human brains, stimulating the “appetitive interest” circuits of spectator and players through their share in the particular phantoms of the current social unconscious. As Solms and Turnbull put it, regarding the dreaming process within the individual brain; “an arousal stimulus only triggers dreaming proper if it attracts appetitive interest” (211). But I would argue that the stress of a mass-mediated, consumer-oriented society increases the depression, boredom, and abject alienation of individual brains—as defenses against Real anxiety—thus fueling the appetite for fantasy worlds and fictional thrill-rides. Mass-entertainment fantasies, like personal dreams that go unremembered and unanalyzed,

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may remain unlinked to frontal lobe cognition. At best, this leaves us living mostly in a dream world. At worst, it may trigger schizoid hallucinations and paranoid actions in susceptible spectators. But a more complex, cathartic theatre in the mass media, beyond the easy violence of melodramatic entertainment and the fear-mongering of news shows, might integrate the social and personal ghosts in the audience’s frontal and posterior cortical lobes, limbic systems, and brainstems. Cozolino argues that controlled exposure to stress during psychotherapy can “work against dissociation” to reintegrate neural networks (24). His goal as a therapist is to help the patient use “anxiety as a compass” to understand the meaning and significance of unconscious fears (33). This involves “the integration of cortical linguistic processing with conditioned subcortical arousal in the service of inhibiting, regulating, and modifying maladaptive reactions.” For example, the amygdala’s right-brain biased, somatic and emotional (limbic) memory system, “organizing early memories of abandonment, makes the patient with borderline disorder react to the perception of abandonment where little or none exists in reality” (96–97). Psychotherapy with a borderline patient would use left- and topbrain biased, logical and social functioning, hippocampal-cortical memory systems “to test the reality of their amygdaloid cue for the experience of abandonment in order to organize and inhibit inappropriate reactions.” The primal terror of abandonment, which means death “for a young primate,” can be triggered in the borderline adult through something as innocent as another person being late for an appointment (97). But this “catastrophic reaction” and its fundamental fantasies might be reorganized through the therapeutic enhancement of communication between neural networks in the top and bottom, left and right areas of the brain—rewiring the ghosts of primal traumas. Spectators may seek to experience (and artists seek to create) stage and screen terrors for a similar reason. The “left-hemisphere interpreter”29 within the spectator’s brain can reassure the Self that the right-brain’s anxieties, experienced while watching the monsters of a violent drama or horror film, are merely reactions to fictional ghosts. But the right hemisphere of the brain is still drawn toward the


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terrifying scenes and their activation of its fear, rage, and panic systems, exercising the primal flight or fight instincts, as well as erotic drives—without motor actions, like in a dream. Particular personal anxieties can be exercised this way, in a melodramatic thrill-ride, with safety assured by the left brain and primal fears experienced by the right, through its connections to the limbic system. But more fundamental mappings of personal value-categories, from specific foundational traumas, might also be touched—and their ghosts exorcised—in a more therapeutic, cognitive catharsis, through the controlled exposure to greater stress in tragic terror onstage or onscreen. This depends on how the monsters are presented by the drama and how the spectator’s emotional associations and cognitive interpretations engage it—via the right-bottom and left-top networks of the haunted brain. As discussed in chapter 5, Ramachandran and Blakeslee define the left brain as a war-room general, in relation to the right brain’s function as a devil’s advocate scout (135–37).30 Cozolino calls the left hemisphere “an internal press secretary for the self, putting a positive spin on what is experienced and how it is presented to others” (115). The right hemisphere involves the bubbling up of feelings or images, “which are then quickly lost,” but can make the person “pessimistic and depressed” without the help of the left. Experiments with splitbrain patients suggest “another ‘will’ residing in the right hemisphere,” which may be experienced as “a force from outside the self ” (Cozolino 116–17). The left brain is thus more optimistic and prosocial, trying to maintain a consistent Self even through confabulation, as it “helps us to connect with others and decrease anxiety” (113, 118). But the right brain’s “bias toward anxiety, suspiciousness, and negativity keeps the body alert to danger.”31 Thus, Cozolino argues (like Ramachandran) that the “blending of the strengths of each hemisphere allows for the maximum integration of our cognitive and emotional experiences with our inner and outer worlds” (115). GOOD AND EVIL ALIENS Why does Cozolino locate the foundation of the “social brain” in the right hemisphere (192), yet call the left more optimistic and

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“prosocial” (118)? As discussed above, he credits the mother’s interaction with the child as forming the basis for security—or anxiety, suspicion, and negativity—in the right hemisphere and its limbic ties. Cozolino emphasizes Bowlby’s notion of “attachment schemas,” in the child internalization of its mother’s unconscious, plus Winnicott’s theory of the “good-enough mother,” who provides a proper “holding environment” with empathy yet respect for the child’s autonomy, thus “mirroring” an organized inner world for the infant’s social brain (195–96, 201). But Cozolino does not consider Julia Kristeva’s theory of the maternal, abject, semiotic chora, as a womb-like space of becoming within human language and culture, as well as the mind. Rather than putting the blame on some mothers as not good enough, Kristeva points to the inevitable patriarchal repression of the preverbal mother–child chora, in order to articulate a proper language and purified culture. She gives many examples from different works of literature and various social practices in Western and non-Western cultures, along with case studies from her own psychoanalytic practice.32 Although repressed and abjected by the patriarchal, symbolic order, the semiotic chora persists as a creative and destructive space in the poetic, tonal dimensions of language, the obscene realms of culture, and the disruptive passions of the mind’s unconscious. Like Cozolino’s mapping of the internalized mother as organizing principle of the social brain, I would locate the chora’s neural networks primarily in the right hemisphere and subcortical (limbic and brainstem) areas of each human mind—and yet also between minds in the external womb of culture. The Kristevan patriarchal order, like Lacan’s Symbolic order of the Father’s language and law, becomes absorbed in the later developing brain areas of the left neocortex—as the child separates from the mother and learns the proper words and rites of the social environment.33 Cozolino points to a “growth spurt” in the left hemisphere during the middle of the child’s second year, along with the development of the dorsolateral areas of the frontal lobes, linked to other cortical regions, “that sculpt the language network” (107). This time period corresponds to the climax of the infant’s Imaginary mirror-stage fascination with its Self and its primal alienation from natural being through the (m)Other’s desires,


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at 6–18 months of age, according to Lacan34—although this relationship also continues throughout life, with the internalized maternal chora of the right hemisphere, orbitofrontal regions, and limbic system. Next, there is a further separation of the child from its mother through the Symbolic, Oedipal role of the Father’s law and language—internalized in the left hemisphere and its dorsolateral ties. “An explosion in language comprehension and expression, and increased locomotion, propel the child into an extended exploration of the physical and social worlds” (Cozolino 107). The slow maturation of the corpus callosum, connecting the two hemispheres, begins in the first year, yet continues past the age of ten. This means that the child’s right and left brains “at first function more autonomously, gradually gaining coordination through childhood.” Thus, the specific ghosts of mother (or primary caretaker) and father (or third party representing the external society) are incorporated in the child’s neural growth and pruning, through the theatre of the developing brain. Despite the rule of patriarchy and the dominant role of the left neocortex, the maternal chora continues to be a revolutionary, creative and destructive space of right-cortico-limbic security and anxiety in the brain’s theatre, as it is externally between brains, displaying intersubjective ghosts. Cozolino describes the internalized mother and her unconscious as being incorporated in the neural networks of the child’s right hemisphere and subcortical regions. But the father’s face, voice, and personality are also incorporated in the child’s developing brain, especially as the superego-growth of language and law, of prosocial awareness in the left hemisphere, builds upon the social brain’s right and limbic chora, producing the fiction of a distinct Self, as Imaginary ego between Symbolic and Real. We each bear intersubjective brains, with the maternal, “holistic,” right hemisphere, emotional limbic system, and patriarchal, “linear, sequential, language-based” left hemisphere (Cozolino 110) all tied to the social Other of present interactions and past ghosts. Yet, we are ultimately alone in the brain’s theatre, especially through the human experience of mortality and the misrecognition of the subject by the Other, in the mirrors of desire and language. Aloneness in facing one’s own

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death, evoked by the loss of someone close, especially a parental figure like Hamlet’s father or Orestes’s father and mother, may also summon the phantoms of the social brain, in the neural circuitry of the left and right hemispheres, through uncanny, intersubjective communications of Self and Other alienation. The infant gains a theatrical sense of its holistic Self during the right-brain growth spurt of the mirror stage in its first year. With subsequent left-brain growth, it adds a narrative sense of sequential identity, using both neural systems to build short- and long-term, episodic and autobiographical memories. It also continually revises them, through images and concepts of the Self with others, changing in various scenes and roles.35 The emotional, holistic foundation of the Self ’s image is thus grounded in specific neural mappings, especially through primal interactions with the mother’s body, voice, and gaze. But the further structuring of ego images is also a rescripting of this illusory persona in malleable neural networks. Likewise, narrative structures of the Self, building a sequential, language-based concept, are continually revised through memory traces and fictional creativity. Yet they are also based on many miscommunications with the Other. “Given the rapidity with which we process speech, Wernicke’s area [in the left temporal lobe] may process what is heard based as much on what it expects to hear as what is actually said” (Cozolino 110). In some of us, such (mis)perceptions of external communication might involve internal expectations through conflicts between left and right hemispheres—forming a particular phantom, heard as a self-alien Other within the brain’s theatre and projected as a vision, as something uncannily expected out there. Psychotics, like split-brain patients, sometimes experience another “will” in their right hemisphere, as an ego-alien force, confronting the Self in the left brain. This psychotic “intrusion of righthemisphere processing, which is usually inhibited or filtered out of consciousness by the left,” shows that such a force also exists as a spectral influence even in normal, integrated brains (Cozolino 119–20). Usually the primary, unconscious processes of the right brain and limbic system are experienced by most of us as merely a bubbling up of intuition, feeling, and fantasy in waking life, or as dream scenes while asleep—filtered by secondary, cognitive


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consciousness in the left brain’s sense of Self and social reality. But research on schizophrenics (and their close relatives) shows “reduced left-hemisphere volumes in a number of brain areas, including the hippocampus and the amygdala,” correlating to “increases in thought disorders” (120). Thus, Cozolino explains auditory hallucinations, a core symptom in schizophrenia, “as right-hemisphere language (related to primary process thinking and/or implicit memories) breaking into left-hemisphere awareness. These voices are experienced as ego-alien by the left hemisphere and, in the past, were thought to be signs of demonic possession.” They often occur as single words, with strong emotional value, and as criticisms or commands “to hurt oneself or others.” Psychotics also report an experience of “dreaming while they are awake,” as they struggle with “negative and shameful aspects of their inner world, against which the rest of us are better defended.”36 Orestes’s experience of his mother’s monstrous, hound-like Furies, summoned in their dreams by the ghost of Clytemnestra and shared with the theatre audience in a collective mythic dream, might correspond to such right-hemisphere, ego-alien voices and fantasies invading the left, in a psychotic’s brain, or bubbling up through the filters of a “normal” brain, especially when stressed by mourning (or murder). Such incursion from right to left, in a character’s internal cranial theatre of ego-alien Furies, with audience minds participating in collective sympathy and fear, shows a return of the repressed, in both personal psychology and human cultural evolution. This invasion by Imaginary monsters and Real passions from the maternal chora of the right hemisphere and limbic system—against the patriarchal, Symbolic left, taken over by language functions in the prior evolution of the human brain—reveals a continuing territorial battle in the brain, as in gender politics, from ancient to modern cultures. Before he commits the murder of his mother, Orestes also fears the Furies of his dead father, which might arise through the “negative and shameful aspects” of his inner world, if he does not get revenge for his father’s death at her (and her lover’s) hands. Likewise, Clytemnestra, before she dies, fears an avenging monster from within her right-cortico-limbic chora. She had a dream, the chorus says, of giving birth to a snake that bites her breast—a semiotic

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attack against the Self in her inner theatre, which Orestes then acts out through the drama onstage. But Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon (and of his war prize Cassandra), with the help of her lover, Aegisthus, also involves the ghosts of Iphegenia (the daughter sacrificed to get good winds for war) and of Aegisthus’s brothers, killed and fed to their father, Thyestes, by Agamemnon’s father, Atreus. These furious ghosts, although not shown in the play, populate the brains of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, especially their raging, vengeful, limbic systems and right hemispheres, making right in their minds the murder of the king, upon his victorious return from the Trojan War. Thus, Orestes bears all of these ego-alien forces in his own right brain: an accumulation of Furies and ghosts through the sculpting of his brain by psycho-genetic ancestry, going back to his grandfather, Atreus, repeating the perversity of his grandfather, Tantalus, as Seneca’s drama shows. The demons in Orestes are not merely from his mother’s deed and his own direct vengeance against her. They are the perverse family spirits and schizoid brain battles that Orestes absorbed from both of his parents: the Furies in his social brain’s specific evolution of an intersubjective Self. Orestes seeks an exorcism of such phantoms through the god Apollo, eventually taming the parental Furies on both sides by fighting his father’s enemies and fleeing to Athens for Athena’s judgment—as Apollo had commanded. Apollo thus represents the left-hemisphere activation of fight and flight systems in Orestes’s limbic (Dionysian) brain. Hamlet is likewise commanded by a patriarchal spirit to avenge his father’s death at the hands of his mother’s lover, though he first flees into melancholic indecision and near madness. Neither the god Apollo nor Hamlet’s Ghost is a purely positive left-brain commander. They also represent the perverse, obscene, “anal” Father (Zizek, Enjoy 124–27)—as potential demonic influences in the tragic brains of Orestes and Hamlet. Within the cultural ideal of a good (enough) mother, whose “purposeful regression . . . translate[s] bodily states into words and actions that are soothing to the infant,” there lurks the potential, right-brain demons of maternal anxiety or postpartum depression (Cozolino 192–93)—or of Clytemnestra’s violence and Gertrude’s infidelity, further structuring the child’s intersubjective brain. Even the prosocial, patriarchal, left-hemisphere


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superego, embodied as Apollo/Agamemnon, Titus in allegiance with Saturninus, or Hamlet’s father and uncle, may bear perverse cognitive controls—in the tragic hero’s brain and in the specific culture’s language and law. Thus, the left brain’s neural mappings of value-category judgments, inhibitions, and repressions may return as rightbrain, ego-alien forces: gods or ghosts demanding repeated sacrifices, like the negative and shameful aspects of the psychotic’s inner world, in critical words and violent commands, with auditory hallucinations projected outwards. The shared, dream-like hallucinations of theatre and cinema, at their best, can help to exorcise the unconscious ghosts of internalized mothers and fathers in audience brains, through a cognitive catharsis of sympathetic fears and other emotions, between left and right hemispheres, involving the faulty evolutionary heritage of limbic and brainstem drives. As neurologist LeDoux puts it, “there is an imperfect set of connections between cognitive and emotional systems in the current stage of evolution of the human brain” (Synaptic 322). LeDoux recounts how the development of language in the brain “required additional cognitive capacities and made new ones possible, and these changes took space and connections to achieve” (323). The spatial problem was solved by “moving things around in existing cortical space,” as with the changes in left-hemisphere functions, and by adding more space in a gradually bigger brain. But part of the problem has not been solved by evolution: “connectivity between cognitive systems and other parts of the mental trilogy—emotional and motivational systems.” I would argue that theatre and cinema, along with other mass-media technologies, as extensions of the brain’s internal performance and narrative spaces, are continuing experiments of cultural evolution. They express specific ghosts embodied in our brain parts, as we work together or in conflict to resolve the competition for space and Self/Other control, in neuronal and communal group selection, inside and between our skulls. Although we suffer throughout our lives from misinterpretations between Self and Other, and from selective ghosts inherited in our brains and families, we can still share the terrors of our mortal alienation and communal demons through the extended cranial spaces of stage and screen—as shown by the examples in the next chapter.


8. Noh Desires and The Others x

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ll characters onstage and onscreen are, in a sense, ghosts. They are phantom limb figures and spectral personalities projected from numerous neuronal mappings of Self and Other in the intersubjective, yet alienated, human brains of writers, directors, actors, technicians, and spectators—through the creative sharing of specific plots and embodiments on the stage or screen. In ordinary life, science has freed modern culture from many prior superstitions. But our brains continue to be haunted by the primal experience of key figures, especially in childhood, and by innate animal drives. These internalized spirits and unconscious zombies involve particular, repeated patterns of concepts, emotions, and motives that have been sculpted and encoded in our material brain structures. Stage and screen dramas are extensions of the theatre within the brain, as considered in prior chapters here. Yet theatre and cinema are also mechanisms of evolution, from nature to culture, as humans not only adapt to a natural environment but also radically transform it—replaying the past changes and future possibilities, onstage or onscreen. How do communal brain-sculpting and personal neural patterning, through the cultural extensions of human higher-order consciousness, appear not only in the classical and Shakespearean dramas considered thus far in this book, but also in non-Western theatre? I briefly referred to the Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of The Oresteia in chapter 2, applying Nietzsche’s nineteenth-century theory about ancient Greek theatre to the prefrontal-lobe superego and limbic id. The Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic also arises through the distinct lateralization of the human neocortex: with the

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left hemisphere’s orientation toward linear, executive, Apollonian logic, involving the superego control of communal norms, in contrast to the right’s holistic, Dionysian anxieties, tied to limbic system emotions and the brainstem’s internal body regulations.1 Of course, there were many more gods in ancient Greece than just Apollo and Dionysus. There are also many complex subsystems in the human brain. Yet, the Apollonian/Dionysian shorthand (or top and bottom, left- and right-brain dichotomy) provides a way to understand, at least from a Western, neurotheatrical viewpoint, the Noh drama of Japan, arising in a very different culture on the other side of the globe in the fourteenth century—influenced by two thousand years of Buddhist theories of consciousness from India and China. Since Japanese writers, actors, and spectators (or Buddhist philosophers), then and now, have the same basic brain anatomy as Westerners after millions of years of human evolution, the distinctive ideological context and performance tradition of Noh illuminates further aspects of the diverse, yet related, cultural evolution of the human brain’s ghost theatres.2 RIGHT AS PINE WIND, LEFT AS AUTUMN RAIN Unlike the Christian doctrine of the soul traveling and suffering through one lifetime toward eternal punishment or reward, Buddhism explains human suffering in this life as the reincarnation of desires from prior lives, as the karmic repetition compulsion in successive lifetimes until enlightenment is reached.3 The afterlife is this life, repeated through multiple reincarnations until the transcendent consciousness of nirvana is attained. (While the Freudian version of the repetition compulsion involves a Judeo-Christian sense of a single lifetime, it also involves the reincarnation of symptomatic traumas and their effects in succeeding generations.)4 In the Noh play, Matsukaze, written by Zeami in the fourteenth century,5 a traveling Buddhist priest (in the waki role) meets two poor women, sisters from a fishing village, who turn out to be ghosts (as shite and tsure). First, the Priest introduces himself to the audience and mentions the setting on the empty Noh stage as being “the Bay of Suma in Settsu Province” (Tyler, Twenty 21). Then the Priest sees a lone pine tree on

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the beach with a wooden tablet and poem hanging from it. He asks a villager (the kyogen) about it and learns that the tree “is linked with the memory of two fisher girls, Matsukaze and Murasame.” At the Villager’s request, the Priest prays for the girls and then realizes that “the sun, as always on autumn days, has set quickly” (22). He must find shelter, due to the primal needs of his animal brain and body. But he will also encounter two phantom personas that represent higher cortical desires of right-brain passion and left-brain rationality, struggling with social and religious demands. On the traditional Noh stage, a long bridge (hashigakari) connects the offstage “mirror room,” where the actors dress, to the main stage area. Along the bridge are always three pine trees, symbolizing heaven, earth, and man. There is also a painting of a pine tree as the permanent backdrop to any play. But at the start of this play, a stagehand places another pine, a sapling, at the front edge of the stage. It is this lone set piece that the Priest focuses on—in curiosity and prayer. Then, realizing that time has passed and the sun has already set, he decides that the village is too far and he will try to spend the night “in this fisherman’s salt shed” (Tyler, Twenty 22). There is no shed onstage. Instead of moving toward one, or going offstage, the Priest kneels at the traditional waki-position, by a pillar at the front edge and to one side of the stage. The fisher girls enter along the bridge-way, but the Priest does not see them, or interact with them yet. Thus, Matsukaze presents a specific geographical setting, a bay in western Japan with a fishing village nearby, while centering on an actual pine tree onstage. Yet, Noh drama is also very stylized in presenting its human and supernatural characters. Females in Noh are played by men wearing masks—in a tradition going back to 1629, when women were banned from the stage. Actors also contemplate the mask in the mirror room before entering, to reincarnate the spirits of their characters. As the Priest (without a mask) kneels and waits for Matsukaze and Murasame to play their scene, a stagehand places a cart onstage by another pillar and each of the girls brings a pail with her. They speak (or slowly chant) about the brine cart and their “meager livelihood” of collecting salt water from the sea, in a painful life of transience, yet repetition, like ocean waves (Tyler, Twenty 22). “The sad world

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rolls / Life by quickly and in misery!” Matsukaze tells of the court poet Yukihira, who was exiled there and wrote poems about Suma. She quotes his lines, inspired by the sea. Thus, the Noh audience hears words by the historical Ariwara no Yukihira (who lived in the years 818–93), while imagining the seawater, waves, and moonlight of a geographical place, Suma Bay—and the endless labor of two girls collecting brine. Yet, the poetry of Yukihira gives beauty to their abject lives and work, as do their own lines chanted in the play. “Our toil, like all of life, is dreary, / But none could be more bleak than ours. / A skiff cannot cross the sea, / Nor we this dream world. / Do we exist, even?” (23). These ghosts are trapped in a dream world that is both Apollonian and Dionysian, both poetically beautiful in the moonlit sea waves and repetitively abject: “Poor fisher girls whose sleeves are wet / With endless spray, and tears / From our hearts’ unanswered longing” (Tyler, Twenty 23). They long for Yukihira, with an endless love that traps them in a dream beyond existence and yet still in the habitual neural patterns of their bodies at work.6 Next, the Chorus (visible at the side of the stage) speaks for them, showing the communal orders of a group selection process. Other personas and power relations have sculpted the sisters’ behavior and brain matter (like the masks the actors wear), shaping their fate and Self-awareness into right-brain ego envy and left-brain superego shame: “we envy the pure moon / Now rising with the tide. / . . . / Our reflections seem to shame us.” The masks on the actors’ heads move slightly, changing the shadows on them and clouding the expression on the character’s faces, thus making the fixed wooden forms seem lifelike onstage. Through further shifts in the perceptions and associations inside spectators’ heads, these characters come to exist onstage as reincarnated ghosts, abject and beautiful, dead and alive. The fisher girls return to Suma as ghosts, laboring as in life, yet struggling against their communal bonds, because they bear a forbidden longing for the court poet Yukihira. The sisters are individual spirits rebelling against the neural networks of the group mind and breaking the social order of their lowly station in life—through erotic, romantic, and artistic passions for him, like their envy of and friendship with the pure moon.7 The Chorus intones for them: “The


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late moon is so brilliant— / What we dip is its reflection! / Smoke from the salt fires / May cloud the moon—take care” (Tyler, Twenty 24). With his fan, the actor playing Matsukaze mimes dipping the brine, from sea to pail. In this labor, a transcendent beauty appears for these ghosts. At the same time, they lose it, as they try to grasp it, for it is only a reflection in their pails, not the pure moon itself—and the smoke from the community’s salt fires threatens to mask that moon (a symbol for enlightenment). Yet, the fisher girls find joy as they “load the moon” on their carts. “No, life is not all misery / Here by the sea lanes” (25). Through their own poetry, the sisters have nearly attained enlightenment. But they still long for Yukihira, against the communal order, thus reattaching themselves to desire and misery in the living world. This second section of Matsukaze, after the Priest’s initial inquiry about the pine tree, seems like a flashback showing the daily life of the sisters before they died. But it demonstrates how these reincarnated ghosts are caught in the endless labor of their desires, even after death, like “sea tangle,” as the Chorus says (Tyler, Twenty 23). In the next section, they return to their hut, imagined onstage with one girl sitting on a low stool and the other kneeling beside her. The Priest asks them for lodging there. They at first refuse him, because of shame for their “wretched” home (26). Then they allow him inside, as someone who has “renounced the world.” The Priest quotes a poem by Yukihira, about the solitude at Suma, and asks about the solitary pine tree, growing “in memory of two fisher girls” (27). His quoting from the poem reignites the passionate memories of the fisher girls, who found a transcendent significance, while alive, in Yukihira’s words, written during his three-year exile at Suma. Thus, they cling to the Other’s language, through their passion for him, rather than finding their own transient, enlightened significance in dipping reflections of the moon and catching it briefly in their pails. “His poem . . . / . . . / Filled us with memories which are far too fond. Tears of attachment to the world / Wet our sleeves again.” They explain that Yukihira whiled away his time at Suma on a “pleasure boat”; yet his heart was refreshed by the moon, like theirs. He named the girls: “Pine Wind” and “Autumn Rain” (Matsukaze and Murasame), fixing their identities as phantoms in the illusions of art

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and nature.8 Then he left Suma, returned to the capital, and died far away from them. Finding transcendent significance through attachment to a celebrity is also prevalent today, as ordinary spectators in the massmedia audience identify with particular stars. But the sisters were given new identities and poetic fates by the famous author who lived near them for a time. Matsukaze, as Pine Wind, pines for news of the poet, even after her death and his. (Matsu means pine or pining; kaze means wind or news.) Murasame, Autumn Rain or Passing Shower,9 is also tied to Suma, especially in the fall when the Priest visits, as her tears and her sister’s fall like rain. Yukihira’s poetry, like the art of theatre, may make ordinary things meaningful. Yet it may also bind the ghostly Self to live in the past, to repeat memories in endless flashbacks. Through primal attachments and internalized parental personas in childhood, ideals of Self are constructed in the human brain—and reconstructed later in life through similar ideal egos in the wider cultural environment beyond the family. Matsukaze presents the social ideologies of medieval Japan—involving Buddhism, class, and gender—through the Priest and the absent court poet, shaping the ideals of the poor fisher girls (played by men in later centuries). This Noh drama shows the human brain evolving its survival needs and animal passions, in the brainstem and limbic system, toward specific neocortical desires of the Other in a certain culture. Thus, the ideal personas and beautiful expressions of art (or popular entertainment)10 trap the insecure, mortal Self, in its greed for transcendent belonging, or free it for further evolution through enlightening insights. Matsukaze and Murasame reveal themselves to the Priest as ghosts, saying that they continue to love Yukihira—even after their death and his—for changing their “salt makers’ clothing / To damask robes” (Tyler, Twenty 28). The Chorus then speaks about their passion and class rebellion (“hopeless love beyond their station”), shifting from third person to first person plural to appeal for help and yet also to bring the audience inside the ghosts’ limbic, memorial pain: “Our sin is deep, o priest. Pray for us, we beg of you!” Thus, Matsukaze shows, through the choral voices and performers’ gestures, a group mind shaping the girls’ identities: the left-brain


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superego demanding that they conform to their humble station in life, despite the promise of another ideal through Yukihira’s renaming of them, against the right-brain, libidinal desires of their sinful love for him. The Chorus describes the insanity of the girls’ rebellion, in their double bind between the hemispheres of the communal mind, grasping wildly in Dionysian (right brain) passion at the poet’s words, while also mirroring his transcendent Apollonian (left brain) view of Pine Wind and Autumn Rain as ideal personas. “Our love grew rank as wild grasses; / Tears and love ran wild. / It was madness that touched us.” The girls say they tried a spring purification rite and prayers, to exorcise their mad love, but the “gods refused” to help.11 So they turn now, after death, to the Buddhist priest and theatre spectators. The actor playing Matsukaze then demonstrates a further degree of rebellious insanity. Matsukaze looks down again, clouding the mask (Tyler, Twenty 29). She takes a man’s cloak and hat from the stagehand and dances with these props, grasping and gesturing with the material mementos of her beloved poet. According to the play’s stage directions, she looks at the cloak, places it in her lap, lifts it, stares at it, and then walks in a trance, dropping it, “only to cradle it in her arms and press it to her.” The Chorus explains that Yukihira left “these keepsakes of his stay: / A court hat and a hunting cloak.” Then the Chorus moves inside the theatre of Matsukaze’s mind, shifting from first person plural to singular (and quoting an anonymous poem): “ ‘This keepsake / Is my enemy now; / For without it / I might forget.’ ” When Matsukaze drops the cloak, picks it up, and cradles it again in her arms, the Chorus chants: “I drop it, but I cannot let it lie; / So I take it up again / To see his face before me yet once more” (30). Matsukaze not only cradles the cloak like a child in her arms, seeing the poet’s face in it; she also puts on the cloak and ties the court hat on her head, with the help of the stagehand (Tyler, Twenty 118). The Pine Wind ghost, in her madness, sees a ghost in the pine tree onstage. “Look! Over there! / Yukihira has returned! / He calls me by my name, Pine Wind! / I am coming!” (119). But the left-brain spirit, Murasame, catches her sister’s sleeve and holds her back, telling her: “For shame! . . . / You are lost in the sin of passion. / That

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is a pine tree. / And Yukihira is not here.” Yet Matsukaze insists, through her right-brain holistic view and limbic passion: “This pine is Yukihira.” Matsukaze quotes from a poem by the historical poet, Yukihira, repeating a promise from him to them: “ ‘Though we may part for a time, / If I hear you are pining for me, / I’ll hurry back’ ” (Tyler, Twenty 30–31). Murasame repeats the poetic promise, confirming it as the reason for her sister’s mad attachment to the tree, to the wind, and to the rain. Then Matsukaze explains that she is waiting by the tree for the “pine wind / To whisper word of his coming” (31). As a ghost still attached to life, she wears the keepsakes of her transcendent poet, waiting for her namesake (pine wind) to whisper news of his return—and hallucinating this as already happening. Murasame, on the contrary, tries to stay in the future subjunctive, while waiting for the return of the poet’s ghost and seeing that the tree is still just a tree. Yet her name, given by him, also draws her left-brain logic toward that right-brain vision of his presence and her own salty tears. “If that world should ever come, / My sleeves for a while / Would be wet with autumn rain.” Nature, transformed through poetic naming, binds both of these ghosts—in the mad love, yet rationality, of right and left brains—to their phantom beloved and the transient, mortal world. Murasame declares her “trust” in Yukihira’s poem and Matsukaze performs a final dance between the permanent pines of the Noh bridge-way and the temporary pine tree setting of this play, declaring, “I love him still” (Tyler, Twenty 31). But then the Chorus announces that the play has been a dream of the Priest and theatre audience: “We have come to you / In a dream of deluded passion. / . . . Pray for our rest” (32). The play’s left-brain social controls and transcendent Apollonian poetry, along with its right-brain Dionysian love, madness, and visions, are actually in the minds of the Priest and spectators. “Your dream is over. Day has come. / Last night you heard the autumn rain; / This morning all that is left / Is the wind in the pines / The wind in the pines.” Thus, the Chorus and Priest are also ghosts in the drama’s dream, competing with the Apollonian and Dionysian sisters, Murasame and Matsukaze, for brain space in the spectators’ skulls. Unlike the ghosts of Orestes’s mother, Titus’s sons, and


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Hamlet’s father, they do not haunt the living with the demand for revenge. More like Tantalus as a ghost, they are caught in a dream of the tantalizing past, drawn by the wonder of ordinary life and its cruel passion for transcendence. Humans suffer a profound alienation from nature, plus particular family traumas, through the evolution of higher-order consciousness. But nature also produced us as a bigger-brained species. The nature imagery in Matsukaze and the actual pines on the Noh stage evoke a collective dream of ghosts competing for brain (and stage) space in the minds of the living. Each sister becomes her natural name, while the Chorus shows the cultural shaping of their shame, in a ritual repetition of their trauma, triggered by the Priest’s prayers and curiosity. Matsukaze finds her lost poetic love in Yukihira’s memorial clothes and the solitary pine onstage, while Murasame continues to wait for news in the wind, with her tears becoming the autumn rain or passing shower that the Priest and audience experience as they dream the play. This Noh drama displays the alienation of humans from each other and from nature—yet also the transformation of nature, of others in memory, and of the Self as a ghost, in the evolution of human desire beyond social masks and past keepsakes, toward the mind’s acceptance of transience and loss, as the full realization of poetic transcendence within and between mortal brains. Thus, Matsukaze reveals the ghosts of ordinary village folk, clinging to painful desires, but also evolving through their mortal and erotic drives toward the full integration of natural, animal, and supernatural areas of the human brain. Matsukaze presents the material traces of ghosts continuing to exist, after death, through the prayers and dreams of a Buddhist priest and theatre audience. As popular entertainment, religious instruction, and elite art of the warrior class, Noh theatre expresses a battle for the Self ’s immortal meaning in the neural circuitry of power relations—through rebellious spirits, masked dances, transcendent poetry, gender impersonations, and choral chants, from medieval to modern Japan.12 Matsukaze’s abject madness might be seen as a religious punishment for her “sin” of loving beyond her station, or as a natural consequence of her attachment to the illusory ideal of romantic desire, or as an idiosyncratic rebellion of

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right-brain passions against left-brain communal controls (and of a feminine, semiotic chora within the patriarchal symbolic order, especially in the cross-gendered performance of the play).13 Each of these potential views creates a specific neuronal reality for the play’s ghosts, especially if the play is seen sympathetically and cathartically by spectators’ brains, through limbic passion, right-brain sensitivity, and left-brain logic. PHANTOM PERSONAS, FIGHTING FOR SPACE AND TIME There is not enough space in this book to consider the ghost dramas of various other non-Western traditions from elsewhere in Asia, Africa,14 aboriginal Australia, indigenous lands in North and South America, or the mixed cultures of Europeans and native peoples in all these continents. Nor is there time to look closely at the modernist ghost plays of Europe and America (from the late 1800s to mid-1900s), such as the Noh dramas of Yeats, the possessed psyches in Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata, the Oresteian phantoms in O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra or Eliot’s The Family Reunion, and the communal pruning of rebellious spirits in Wilder’s Our Town.15 Nor is there room for recent postmodern dramas with explicit ghosts, gods, or angels. These tend to focus on identity politics (August Wilson’s Piano Lesson, Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit, José Rivera’s Marisol, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Caryl Churchill’s Fen and Cloud Nine)16 or on social issues of mental illness (Doug Wright’s Quills and David Auburn’s Proof ), unlike the earlier modernist tragedies, which presumed a universal metaphysics. Nor does the scope here allow for an exploration of the many ghost dramas in cinema’s history.17 However, it should be noted that the technology of cinema offers distinctive ways for humans to express, experience, and reinternalize their ghost theatres—as shown in earlier chapters of this book through the films of Titus and Hamlet. Spectators today often move through a film in a spectral way without even realizing it, going beyond the fourth-wall invisibility of modern box-set realism in live theatre. They float ghostlike in the camera’s movements, go inside characters’ subjective viewpoints, or


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leap through time and space with quick editing cuts. These phantom perspectives have been expressed through theatrical poetry, if not scenery, for many centuries—as evidenced by Shakespeare’s plays and their recent translations to the screen. But cinema technologies and computer graphics continue to extend the virtual views of the spectator as ghost, from the brain’s inner theatre to various massmedia screens. Sometimes ghost characters are also shown onscreen for audience identifications, with the after-death experience of a life in review or the struggle to realize where they are in a postmortem world overlapping that of the living. The final work of art examined in this book shows both of these cinematic schemas for the afterlife—in a postmodern mix of cultural contexts, involving history and fable, class conflicts and supernatural revelations, as well as the ghostly perspective of the cinema’s own virtual realities. Like other ghost dramas considered here, The Others shows a tantalizing dream of the Self ’s continuation after the death of the body, through the haunting of other brains. Yet it also offers cathartic enlightenment beyond this lure and horror, revealing primal attachments to parental personalities and Darwinian battles for neural spaces—in the theatres of cranium and culture. As a recent, haunted-house mystery, The Others (2001) depicts a postmodern critique of modernist metanarratives, with parental and social controls going awry, with children and servants rebelling against religious ideals and property rights—as the worlds of the living and the dead intermingle in a limbo of simulacra.18 It thus illustrates the continued evolution of the brain’s ghost theatre in our new millennium. Its phantoms cooperate and compete, as gene-like memes, for control of neural and domestic territory, both onscreen and in the mass audience watching them. Written and directed by the Spaniard Alejandro Amenábar,19 with Australian actress Nicole Kidman in the lead role, The Others (2001) used studios in Spain and a mansion in Long Island, New York (Oheka Castle), as shooting locations. But Amenábar set his film on a British island in 1945: Jersey in the English Channel, after its fiveyear occupation by the Germans and the end of World War II. This popular hit demonstrates the international reach of Hollywood ghost dramas, mixing the historical, cultural, and supernatural for

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today’s global marketplace—while battling other movies and their star personas for brain space in millions of watching spectators, like its dead and living ghosts fighting for possession of a doubly haunted house onscreen. If a house or fortress represents the body and ego in dreams, as Freud and Lacan theorized, then a haunted house in a movie may show a particular crisis of identity between the projection of Self, as public persona, and the Other, as spectral presence.20 In The Others this is shown through a mysterious sharing of subjective, domestic, communal spaces, by ghosts and living residents of the same house. Likewise, the inner spaces and neural networks of the brain’s performance, with phantom personas cooperating or competing behind the controlling mask of a public Self, become exposed allegorically in The Others, as its mass-media memes battle for selective survival (and reincarnation) in spectators’ minds. The Others was Amenábar’s first English-language film, made when he was still in his twenties. His two prior features, Tesis (1996) and Abre Los Ojos (1997), also mixed the worlds of the living and the dead. In the thriller Tesis, two students discover that there are killers among the faculty and other students at their film school, through evidence left by the dead onscreen, who were tortured in the snuff films that the killers made, and by the dead body of a movie spectator. In Abre Los Ojos, a wealthy young man loses his good looks in a car accident, after falling in love with a beautiful woman, who then rejects him because of his disfigured face and artificial mask. He gets his handsome face and beautiful girlfriend back, apparently through plastic surgery, but eventually learns that his brain is actually in a coma and dreaming the return of his ideal Self and significant other. He chooses to wake in the real world of the living, with a disfigured face, rather than dwell in the half-dead dream. So, he jumps off a building, dying in his dream world in order to reawaken in the year 2145 with the promise of better technology to fix his face (after he committed suicide and was cryogenically frozen for 150 years, then revived and allowed to dream). This romantic sci-fi thriller was remade as the English-language film, Vanilla Sky, directed by Cameron Crowe and starring Tom Cruise (with Penélope Cruz reprising her role). It was released in 2001, the same year as


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Amenábar’s The Others, which was produced by Tom Cruise and starred his wife, Nicole Kidman (during the break up of their marriage). Amenábar continued to explore the threshold between the living and the dead, with more intermingling of phantom personas from both worlds, through The Others at the turn of the millennium— opening just a month before the American horror of 9/11, with its haunted sites and thousands of ghosts. The Others presents characters who think they have survived another disaster from a half century before: the horrors of World War II, including the occupation of their island by the Nazis for five years. Grace is master of the house after the war, since her husband, Charles, has not yet returned from the fighting. She meets three potential servants at the door and quickly trains them in her strict rules for keeping all sunlight out of any rooms that are near her children. Heavy curtains cover the windows and each door must be closed and locked again whenever a room is entered. The children are extremely allergic to sunlight, she says, and they will choke and die if light comes through the windows or doorways. (This notion is based on an actual disease, xeroderma pigmentosum.) The film starts with Grace’s voice in darkness, saying to the audience: “Now, children, are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.” (This line comes from the opening phrase of a British radio program, “Listen with Mother,” broadcast from 1950 to 1982.) Along with the opening credits, the audience hears Grace’s voice give a brief summary of the biblical creation story, about God existing prior to everything that “we can see now . . . the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, the animals and plants.” And so, she says, “Only He could have created them.” During the telling of this familiar Christian myth about God as prime mover existing prior to all creation, the film audience sees line drawings on yellow paper onscreen, with a flickering light behind them like magic-lantern figures or storybook illustrations viewed by candlelight. The drawings show the sun at the horizon of a lake with a deer, birds, and elephants, and two children viewing them, as Grace’s storytelling ends with the onscreen title “The OTHERS.” Next, with the film’s opening credits, the drawings preview certain parts of the film’s plot: the inside of a house with children on the stairs, an old woman in a chair with a book on her

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lap, a hand locking or unlocking a door with a large set of keys, a girl pointing, and an angel puppet on strings. Grace’s voice and the flickering drawings demonstrate something that feminist theorists have argued since the 1980s (Doane 342–43; Silverman 72–81). Despite the dominance of male voiceovers in cinema and television, especially in documentaries, the mother’s voice is actually the prime mover in each person’s identity, heard first inside the womb and then as the primal storyteller of childhood. The Others will give further details of the mother’s dominant presence in controlling domestic spaces and sculpting the phantom personas in her children’s neuronal group mappings. However, as prime mover and master of the house, she is not the only ghostly, storytelling influence. The last flickering drawing, an external view of a mansion reflected in water, cross-fades to the same shot of the film’s haunted house. Then the film cuts to Grace screaming in bed, checking her watch, and sitting up, as if waking from a nightmare, while laughter is heard from the servants outside, walking toward the house. They talk about others being “dead” and express nostalgia for the past: “Ah, those were the days.” By the end of this movie, Grace will learn that the three servants are ghosts, and that she and her children are also dead. They all cling to the past, like the dream ghosts in Matsukaze. Yet, these specters help each other to understand their “limbo” and its intersections with the ghosts of the living, even if they seem to threaten each other, competing for control, as well as cooperating, in the neural networks of their haunted house and its various, nightmarish reflections, both horrifying and darkly humorous. After Grace meets the new servants at her door, she tells them that her old help suddenly “vanished” almost a week ago. Mrs. Mills introduces herself to Grace, along with Mr. Tuttle and the mute Lydia, who is “older than she looks.” Eventually, near the end of the film, Mrs. Mills will admit that all three of them died from tuberculosis a half century before, then returned to the house where they had been happy as servants, though Lydia no longer speaks. Mrs. Mills gives clues to this phantom existence during the film, when she says that her past years in the house were “the best years of my life” and that she still knows it “like the back of my hand.” She also tells Grace


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at another point, “Sometimes when you leave a place, it’s like it’s still there with you all the time. I always felt like I never left this house.” Like Matsukaze and Murasame at Suma, Mrs. Mills knows she is a ghost tied to a certain place and to her labor there. Her persona is fixed by that site, grounded in the habitual memory traces of its floor plan, walls, and doors—even if that space is haunted by others, too, from another time. At the start of the film, the audience assumes with Grace that Mrs. Mills, Mr. Tuttle, and Lydia are living servants, looking for work. Grace explains that her household does not use electricity now, because it was often cut off by the Germans during the war and they have “learned to live without it.” When Grace shows the servants the music room, she warns them sternly not to let her children play the piano. “It sets off my migraine. Silence is something that we prize very highly in this house. That is why you will not find a telephone, a radio, or anything else that makes a racket.” Grace tells Mrs. Mills that she does not like the “fantasies and strange ideas” her children sometimes have and warns their new nanny not to listen to such things. Grace is thus presented sympathetically, as a victim of migraine headaches, struggling heroically to run a family and household without her husband there, under very difficult conditions in the past during the war, and now with children who are ill. But her actions and words also suggest certain perverse, almost villainous extremes, as a smothering mother who locks her children in rooms, not just closing the curtains, to seal off the outside light “as if it were water”—controlling the house like the captain of “a ship.” Likewise, she tries to keep mechanical and musical sounds from invading her anxious right brain, while using her rational left to limit the thoughts and fantasies expressed by her children’s minds—shaping all the personas in the household, if she can. The traumatic source of Grace’s overpowering love for her children and of her demand for total control over the household will eventually be revealed—through the sights and sounds endangering their lives and her brain, as phantom “intruders.” During their lessons, with a heavy curtain shutting out the sunlight and a flickering oil lamp on the table, the pious Grace questions her children, Ann and Nicholas, about whether they would choose

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to be like Roman martyrs dying for Christ, or to deny Him and live, but then suffer in the next life—in “limbo” at the center of the earth “where it’s very, very hot” and they would be “damned forever.” Later, when Nicholas is scared to be left alone in a dark room, his mother tells him that she cannot be with him all the time. If he sees a ghost, he should just say, “Hello.” But if afraid, he should squeeze his rosary and “the Lord” will be with him. While she is in another room, Grace hears a child crying. She checks the rooms where she has locked each of her children, but they are not producing the crying sound. Ann explains it must be “Victor,” a child ghost she has seen. Her mother reprimands such a fantasy. But the audience then sees Ann, the older child, scaring Nicholas during the night, by claiming that Victor has opened the curtain of their bedroom. She speaks to, or mimics, a boy’s voice. Then a hand (Ann’s or Victor’s) touches Nicholas’s face, causing him to scream. Grace punishes Ann by making her read a religious book on the stairs. But Ann rebels against her mother’s explanation of limbo, saying she has read that it is a place for unbaptized children, not for liars, as her mother claimed. Mrs. Mills tries to mediate, but Grace insists that the persona of a religious superego must be performed by her daughter, showing that the patriarchal orthodoxy in Ann’s left brain can control the impertinent fantasies of her daughter’s right (like curtains blocking the dangerous sunlight): “She’s got to learn to swallow her pride and ask for forgiveness.” At this point in the film, it seems that Ann may be causing the ghosts to appear, as a trickster and supernatural medium herself. Grace also hears strange sounds in the house, but blames the mute servant Lydia for making too much noise while cleaning. Then the mother experiences doors mysteriously opening and closing, one of which knocks her down. Her daughter points in various directions where she saw the ghosts pass by and Grace starts to believe her. Ann draws four phantoms and writes the number of times she has seen each of them: a mother (twice), a father (twice), the child Victor (four times), and an old woman or “witch” (fourteen times). According to Ann, the witch-like woman “is always around, saying: ‘Come with me.’ ” While searching the house for these intruders, Grace finds a book of old photographs. Mrs. Mills explains that it is


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a “book of the dead,” photos of nicely dressed dead people made in the previous century in the hope that “their souls would go on living through the portraits.” Grace tells her to get rid of it. But Mrs. Mills believes that “sometimes the world of the dead gets mixed up with the world of the living.” Grace replies, “The Lord would never allow such an aberration. The living and the dead, they will only meet in eternity. It says so in the Bible.” Yet, she now believes that her house may be haunted, so she leaves to get help from the village priest. Before she goes she asks Mr. Tuttle to look for the graves of the intruders somewhere near the house, but he covers up a gravestone after she goes. She walks into a thick fog outside the gate and gets lost in it. Then she sees a strange figure in the fog, walking toward her like a zombie. She recognizes it as her husband, Charles, coming home from the war. She is overjoyed to meet him there in the fog, after others had told her to give him up “for dead.” But he says, “Sometimes I bleed,” and she admits that he seems “so different” to her. As explored in previous chapters, the human brain inherits remnant animal instincts and emotions in the brainstem and limbic system, through selective survival mechanisms of prior species and generations. Neural networks of panic, seeking, fear, and rage systems (in limbic interconnections) may take over—as the unconscious stagehands, directors, and audience members of deep goals, conceptual contexts, and interpretive memory traces invade the stage space of rational, left-brain consciousness (Panksepp; Baars; and Cozolino). The Others evokes primal fears in its audience through emotional cues in the soundtrack (composed by Amenábar) and by plot twists that shift the spectator’s sympathetic recognition of certain characters as good or evil, friend or foe. Grace seems to be a good mother, fighting for the survival of her children. Yet, her highstrung anxiety about light and noise, with her obsessive control of doors, windows, and spaces, while rationally explained, also seems perversely excessive—with a love and religious piety that is overpowering for her children. As evidence of the “intruders” increases, she arms herself with a shotgun and screams at the servants: “For five full years during the occupation I managed to avoid a single Nazi stepping foot in this house. And now there is someone here, under my nose, opening and closing the doors.” The Others involves its

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audience in a complex sympathy for, yet fear of Grace, through fear of her fears. This evokes the memory traces and association areas of spectators’ brains, triggering further primal emotions of panic, rage, and seeking—along with Grace onscreen, who tries to maintain control, to fight the intruders, and to find help with the mystery of survival. Ann is also presented sympathetically, but shows a wicked side in teasing out her younger brother’s fear of ghosts and rebelling against her mother’s Catholic teachings. Perhaps spectators will begin to think she is possessed by “something diabolical,” as her mother calls the phantoms in their house, since Ann sees more of them, while playing with the ghost (or her imaginary friend) Victor, drawing sketches of the others in his family, and communing with the witchlike old woman—who eventually turns out to be a spirit medium in the living realm, “possessed” by Ann. When her father comes home from the war, he turns from sympathetic hero to abject victim and irresponsible villain: from a war survivor in a happy family reunion, to taking sick in bed and not joining his wife and children for meals because he has seen “lots of dead men,” to leaving his wife and children in a return “to the front,” clinging to the war and avoiding the domestic battleground. Nature, too, becomes the enemy of Grace and her children, with the sunlight threatening their health inside the house and the fog confusing her outside. But as the audience sympathizes with the family’s fight for survival, The Others reveals that the rules of fitness in their environment are defined as much by the mother’s habitual ideals and paranoid sensitivities (especially in the father’s absence) as by the natural habitat or the body’s limitations. Language evolved in the human brain, beyond the limits of the natural environment, through an “invasion” of the left parietal lobe inside the cranium, which had previously been devoted to spatial perception and movement like the right (LeDoux, Synaptic 303). In the development of each human brain, the patriarchal Symbolic again invades the dyadic intimacy of the child in its primal spatial relations with the mother, installing the social orders of language and law as a further separation from the (m)Other’s body, after the initial alienation of an Imaginary Self formed from her mirroring desires (Lacan).


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In The Others, Grace fights to reinstall the patriarchal order against the natural. Yet, other forces threaten to invade the spatial relations in her house and threaten her children’s bodies and minds, through the impotence of prior social controls. The curtains fail to keep out the light, as the fog traps Grace’s family in isolation from the surrounding community. The village priest fails to visit them. The Lord God fails to keep the living and the dead separate, despite Grace’s religious lessons and prayers with her children. Her husband, the children’s father, returns from the dead to be with them, but then leaves again for the war as a repetition-compulsive ghost (like Matsukaze and Murasame). Even Grace’s shotgun fails to protect her and the children from the intruders, the servants, the phantom witch, and others invading her house and left brain, with deadly light and afterlife insights, with rebellious noises and migraine memories. For she is also fighting the limbic emotions and memory traces within her own brain that threaten to erupt—through the abject, semiotic, maternal chora beneath the stage and behind the screen of consciousness—as the right hemisphere’s hallucinatory, spatial anxieties reinvade the left’s rational, discursive controls. Eventually, the film reveals why this madness is so powerful within her and in the house—involving the audience in the melodramatic triumph of Grace’s heroic struggle against the evil intruders, yet also the tragic horror of the evil within her, in her love for her children. The leaking of light and spirits into Grace’s home, which threatens her sanity and the children’s survival, seems to begin with the arrival of the new servants at her door. But the Christian creation myth and the strange house drawings by flickering candlelight during the film’s opening credits, along with Grace’s awakening scream, hint at other sources of danger in her storytelling control and developing nightmare. The servants appear sympathetic at first, as they cooperate with Grace’s commands and mediate her harshness with the children. The movie audience sees their helpful influence in the household, especially through Mrs. Mills’s Irish-accented calm, as an older, more sensible woman with folk wisdom and migraine medicine, applied against Grace’s British propriety and paranoid irritability. Ann confides in Mrs. Mills, telling the new nanny that the prior servants left because her mother “went mad.” But the film also shows

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brief moments of the three servants huddling together to discuss their plan—whether the father will give them trouble and when to uncover the graves. Thus, the battle lines are eventually drawn through specific clues to the mystery of the phantom invaders and the servants’ greater knowledge about them, or conspiracy with them, plus Ann’s communion with Victor and the witch, as threats to Grace’s sanity and control. But this battle is not just about the house. It also shows the unconscious forces in Grace’s mind: the director and stagehands of deep goal and conceptual contexts (Mrs. Mills and the other servants), along with an interpretive audience of memory traces (the phantom intruders), fighting for the spotlight of conscious awareness onstage/onscreen. Amenábar’s film works on various levels to engage its audience, shifting sympathies and blurring boundaries, through the apparent battle between a pious heroine and her evil enemies. The Others moves through various subgenres: from historical survivor film to domestic drama of parent–child and master–servant conflicts, to spirit-possession and alien-invader flick, to romantic war movie about reunion and loss, to zombie film and complex supernatural horror. Thus, the left-brain rationality, right-brain intuition, and limbic emotions of spectators’ brains are entertained and challenged by mysterious plot twists and tragic character revelations. The theatrical and cinematic spaces of the film’s haunted house and its characters’ minds mix with such spaces in the watching audience— like the mixing of the dead and living within the drama, despite the patriarchal mother’s controls. Grace starts to see her daughter as the enemy: in the girl’s mischievous tricks of teasing her brother about ghosts, in her outright rebellion against her mother’s teachings, and in the devilish spirit that seems to possess her. This conflict reaches a climax when Grace dresses Ann in a First Communion outfit she has sewn for her. Grace tells her to keep it “spotless,” while the girl insists on wearing it longer in front of the mirror. Grace leaves, then returns to the room, and sees the back of Ann in her white dress sitting on the floor, exactly as the mother had forbidden, and playing with her angel puppet there. The mother begins to rage against the daughter’s further mischief, but then she sees an old woman’s hand, instead of the girl’s,


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holding the cross of wood that controls the puppet’s strings. Grace approaches the figure and sees an old woman’s face as well, behind the veil of Ann’s dress. A deeper, limbic fear and panic fuels the mother’s rage. She screams at the old woman for taking her daughter away and tries to strangle her. Ann reappears then in the white communion dress and flees to Mrs. Mills, telling her nanny that her mother “won’t stop until she kills us.” Grace explains to Mrs. Mills that she saw the old woman instead of Ann. The servant responds, “Leave it to us. We know what has to be done.” The father also learns about this event before he leaves. Yet, he remains tied to the war, vacating the Symbolic role of helping his children to separate from their mother’s possessive passions, haunted anxieties, and destructive love. Only the servants can help Ann and Nicholas. But here again the movie’s mystery evokes primal, animal instincts of fighting or fleeing in the spectators’ limbic brains—while testing their left and right brain recognition systems—through empathy with the children. Are the servants allies or enemies, to be trusted or outwitted, like the phantom intruders? Is the mother with the children or against them, as heroic survivor or dangerous madwoman? Grace sees the three servants as her enemies, blaming them when the curtains are suddenly missing (just after Charles leaves) and bright light pours through the windows into all the rooms, threatening the children’s survival. Grace demands the keys from Mrs. Mills and forces all three servants out of her house at gunpoint. That night, the children sneak out of the house to look for their father (after Ann tells Nicholas that their mother has gone mad). They discover the graves of Mrs. Mills, Mr. Tuttle, and Lydia—while Grace, still inside the house, finds a photo of those three as nicely dressed corpses. The three zombies approach the children in the graveyard. Ann and Nicholas flee back into the house, and Grace shoots her gun at the zombies, without effect, and then locks them out. But they linger at the front door, speaking to her through the panes of glass in it. “We must all learn to live together,” Mrs. Mills says, “the living and the dead.” Then Amenábar puts a further twist on this mystery of competition or cooperation between different ghosts in the house and in the brain. The children hide behind a mirror, in a closet upstairs, but that space is soon invaded by the old, witch-like woman. Grace hears

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Figure 8.1 Ann whispers into the blind psychic’s ear, while a male assistant translates her written swirls, during the séance between ghostly realms in Amenábar’s The Others

their screams and goes to the room, as advised by her zombie servants outside. There Grace sees a séance, involving an old woman with blind, all white eyes, drawing swirls on paper, as Ann whispers behind her and a man next to her interprets the swirls: “something about a pillow.” The old woman asks, “Is that how she killed you, with a pillow?” But Ann and Nicholas scream that they are “not dead.” Grace screams, too, shaking the table and tearing the papers on it. The people at the séance, including Victor’s mother and father, experience this without seeing her. Victor’s parents decide to leave the house the next morning, because the old woman’s communion with the dead children has shown that they were killed in the house, smothered by their mother. The living people then fade away, along with their séance table and chairs. Thus, the movie reveals that the ghosts of the living were haunting the dead, while residing in the same house. The servants conspired to help Grace and her children realize this situation—and remember their own deaths. The old woman as witch-like medium also helped the children return to their mother, despite the trauma of Grace’s violence against them in the past. Unconscious, deep goal contexts and memory traces, as servant directors and séance audience, broke


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Figure 8.2 Grace holds her children, Nicholas and Ann, as she remembers smothering them with pillows and shooting herself, in a prior life

through the repressive screens of mortal habit and changed the stage—in Grace’s and her children’s minds. At the end of the film, Grace sits on the floor against a wall, holding her children close to her body. She recalls how she suffocated them and then shot herself in the forehead, but says she heard them laughing after that and saw them playing with the pillows “as if nothing had happened.” She thought that “the Lord” in his great mercy was giving her another chance to “be a good mother.” Then she adds: “But now . . . where are we?” Nicholas realizes that his father died in the war and asks if they will ever see him again. The mother admits she does not know the answer to that, or whether they are now in the eternal “limbo” that she had made them fear before. “I’m no wiser than you are, but I do know that I love you. I’ve always loved you and this house is ours.” The children chant with her: “This house is ours.” They discover that the sunlight does not hurt them anymore and Victor is shown moving out of the house with his parents. Thus, the main characters triumph over their uncanny foes for control of their home and they survive, at least as ghosts, beyond physical illness and mental instability. But the film’s audience is left with a postmodern, open ending—and further

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mysteries. Why did Grace kill her children and herself? Will they ever evolve beyond that horror and its repetitions? Will the father return for a full family reunion? Will the dead, as servants and masters, learn to “live together” with the ghosts of other living intruders who will come in the future, according to Mrs. Mills? Like the lingering phantoms of Matsukaze, the specters in The Others must mix with the ghosts in the brains of living, theatre or cinema spectators— for a full catharsis of their tragedy. Rippling through the audience’s personal associations and interpretations, such dramas may contribute to a further evolution of human higher-order consciousness, in the spectral media of cinema, television, and other virtual realities today. But this depends on whether the phantom personas in our living brains cling to the past and its spaces, with ideal egos and repressive screen memories, or open the curtains of our haunted minds for further enlightenment. Apparently, the ghosts of Self in Ann’s and Nicholas’s developing brains were arrested at a certain age by their mother’s perversely powerful “love,” in the struggle to survive their sunlight allergies and her Nazi-migraine-intruder anxieties, without a father present. The Others demonstrates the vital influence of an internalized mother figure in the brain, for good or ill, but also the significance of the father’s role, and of other caretakers and intruders in the home, sculpting neural networks and intersubjective theatres. Today, with the invasion of mass-media phantoms, leaking through TV and computer windows into our homes and brains many hours each day, we may be haunted by other social ideals, beyond our family ghosts, even more than the characters on the British island of Amenábar’s film, in their dark mansion without electricity. But there is no way to seal off our homes from others in the communal mind, or to repress ancestral specters, even if parents do not let children watch TV or use the Internet. They will still meet the others outside. Grace’s attempt to seal off her house, by imposing strict patriarchal and divine ideals upon her servants and children, backfires. Her pious persona bears repressed memories of her own violence against her children—a smothering love that continues after death, through her primal fear of and rage against those who threaten to intrude upon the territory of her home and mind (as enemy Nazis, defiant


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servants, domestic ghosts, or childish noise-makers). Grace perceives these threats to her personal and religious ideals of Self and Other as “something diabolical,” so she becomes diabolical herself in fighting them. The other Symbolic orders of enemy soldiers in the past, of subversive lower-class workers renarrating the present, of an alternative father, family, and séance-medium possessing Grace’s home and invading her children—through Imaginary horrors and Real traumas— are inside her troubled brain and outside, in her connections with others, living or dead. The Others shows that the ghost of Self, with its perverse extremities, resides in others’ perceptions and fantasies of oneself, as well as one’s own brain theatre and its control of living spaces. Even those in the postmodern who do not believe that they will reach an afterlife beyond death must struggle in this life, like the ghosts of Matsukaze and like Grace in The Others, with internal and external phantoms of the brain. Like these characters, we are tempted to project an ideal Self and metaphysical Other (as Lord) to control the perverse personas that threaten to invade us. And yet, these others already live inside us. Perhaps they will help us to realize who and where we are—as we choose to fight against, work with, or yearn endlessly for them. The Others illustrates the haunted theatre of the brain, with the film’s wisely defiant servants, clairvoyant poltergeists, and rebellious children, like the alter-ego stagehands and directors in deep goal and conceptual contexts, along with repressed memory traces, that may disrupt the left-brain’s executive controls, especially through competitive intuitions from the right. But why did humans evolve such a haunted house, with stages and screens, artists and audiences, ghosts and demons, inside the skull? Will humans continue to act diabolically, as big-brained creatures competing for control, yet cooperating to survive—while projecting their own culture’s ghosts and gods, ideologies and technologies, as more righteous and powerful than those of others? Or will humankind eventually integrate its unconscious poltergeists, so that the dead and the living, the animal and the human in the brain, may live together—as Mrs. Mills hopes? The next chapter can only begin to consider the possible answers.


9. Brain Stages x

E

volutionary psychologist Merlin Donald has theorized certain stages in the human development of Self and Other awareness, which I would relate to the theatre of ghosts and gods, emerging within and between our ancestors’ brains.1 Donald uses archeological research to argue that around two million years ago— when the species Homo erectus evolved with bigger brains, improved tool use, and more meat eating than the prior Australopithecines— hominids became “highly social and evidently used a cultural strategy for remembering and problem solving” (Mind 261).2 Donald calls the prior stage of primate brain evolution “episodic,” involving a basic self-awareness and event sensitivity (260). All mammals bind their perceptions and short-term memories into sequences of “discrete episodes” (201). They integrate experiences and internal body feelings, organizing them into “large-scale scenes” of memory—as in Dennett’s theory of an internal environment (discussed in chapter 1 here). Some nonhuman primates can also recognize themselves in a mirror or photograph (Donald, Mind 120–22).3 But they lack a selfreferential awareness of inner states, even when taught by humans to use language. According to Donald, they are “immersed in a stream of raw episodic experience, from which they cannot gain any distance” (120)—as with Edelman’s notion of a “remembered present” in animal consciousness (considered in chapter 7).4 Yet, Homo erectus developed a new cognitive capacity, “mimetic skill, which was an extension of conscious control into the domain of action. It enabled playacting, body language, precise imitation, and gesture” (Donald, Mind 261).5 Thus, the internal theatre of the hominid brain, with its growing control of conscious perceptions and memories, was extended into cultural performance and communication.

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This “solidified a group mentality, creating a cultural style that we can still recognize as typically human.” Mimesis in early hominids involved not only gestures but also “intentional vocal sounds.” Though not yet a verbal language, early mimesis included prosody: “deliberately raising and lowering the voice, and producing imitations of emotional sounds.”6 Donald relates such primal mimesis in early hominids to the playacting of children today, to the “many institutionalized versions of pretend play in theater and film, and [to] imaginative role playing [that] is integral to adult social life” (Mind 263). Two-year-old children exist in “an almost purely mimetic culture” (266). The family environment, as cultural womb (in my terms), is “the first stage on which our actor minds become locally famous, interlocking with other minds. . . . Mimesis is the level of cultural interaction on which we first assume a basic tribal identity and become conscious of ourselves with reference to our primal social group.” Donald calls the family “a small theater-in-the-round” and points to emotional regulation as a crucial achievement of mimetic culture, from two millions years ago to today (266, 269). It provided the germ of Selfconsciousness for early hominids, through an evolving “mimetic controller” in the brain, “a whole-body mapping capacity . . . under unified command” (269). Unlike prior primate consciousness, which was largely perceptual and directed outwards, archaic hominid consciousness was redirected inwards, toward executive control of one’s own actions, while imitating others in the culture (270). This corresponds to the neurological evolution of a bigger prefrontal cortex, which “invaded many brain regions that formerly dominated the control of action in primates” (271)—and set the stage for a later invasion of the left parietal lobe by Symbolic language in Homo sapiens. Donald also describes the “kinematic imagination” (of envisioning the body in motion) in early hominid and current human mimesis as “our true Cartesian theater” with its physical “image of self ” as the anchor of our experience (273). Its original development moved both inwards and outwards to make “better self-representations . . . [of ] the self-in-its-environment,” as an eventual “public theater of convention” (273–74). The primal significance of kinematic

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imagination in the evolution of hominid mimesis is evidenced by rhythmic body movement: “a perceptual template that expresses temporal relations” (272).7 However, this ghost theatre of Self and Other consciousness reached a new stage with the evolution of archaic Homo sapiens a half million years ago (Donald, Mind 261). Its “mythic” stage includes oral traditions of language, mimetic ritual, and narrative thought, beyond the mere gesture, mime, and imitation of prior mimetic hominids, or the basic awareness and event sensitivity of episodic primates (260). About forty thousand years ago, humans reached a further “theoretic” stage with the “externalization of memory . . . [using] symbolic devices to store and retrieve cultural knowledge” (262). But modern human culture still bears the traces of its prior stages of cognitive evolution: “the same old primate brain” for episodic knowledge and three additional, uniquely human layers—the mimetic, oral-linguistic (mythic), and external-symbolic (theoretic). According to Donald, the transitions between these stages provided survival values that we still benefit from today: self-conscious control of action in mimesis, faster accumulation of cultural knowledge in speech, and more powerful, abstract, reflective culture through symbolic technology, from writing to computers and mass media. Each child born today moves through similar stages: from primal episodic awareness of the remembered present to mirror-stage Selfconsciousness (Lacan) in the mimetic “interlinking of the infant’s attentional system with those of other people” (Donald, Mind 255)8 to narrative speech and eventually to communal knowledge of the external world through our mass media. The numerous interactions in the mimetic stage—through “mutual imitations with the mother,” playacting, and various social games—build a complex repertoire: “a scaffolded system, with each new level adding to a vast cultural edifice of control . . . interlock[ing] the infant’s growing mind with those of its caretakers and ultimately the broader society.” Thus, the transcendent ghosts of mass-media stars today are built upon the phantom characters of past myths, plus the mimetic specters of particular parental influences in current brains and the episodic zombies of preconscious experiences. As Donald points out, theatre and film are “cognitive hybrids,” both mimetic and linguistic (Origins 170).

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Cinema may indeed be more “mimetic in style” than dialogue-driven stage drama, as Donald states.9 Yet both theatre and film are theoretic media, expressing the left-hemisphere, Symbolic, Apollonian, mythic, individualistic and right-hemisphere, Imaginary/Real, Dionysian, mimetic, communal dimensions of the brain’s current ghost theatre and its prior evolutionary stages. MIMETIC MEMES The theatre of the brain is not just a metaphor or model of cognitive theory. The mimetic drive is a crucial evolutionary force in our species and in each person’s intersubjective brain, producing the ghostly Self as memetic extension of the selfish gene, through the human technology of finding one’s being in the Other of society and divinity. The term “meme,” as coined by biologist Richard Dawkins and elaborated by psychologist Susan Blackmore (4–6, 98), comes from the same Greek word, mimesis, which Aristotle used in his Poetics to theorize the source of theatre in child’s play and in the lifelong enjoyment of watching and learning from imitation. Human language and consciousness begin with imitative gesture as social communication (Donald, Mind 292, 320–21). We each inherit a haunted theatre of particular brain phantoms and neural zombies— as we develop a mimetic sense of Self, fated to die, yet yearning for spectral survival through the replicating memes of a transcendent Other. This might be called “hyper-survival,” with the ghosts of others continuing, as neural traces and influential fictions in living brains, through mythic and theoretic monuments left by the dead. Blackmore distinguishes her notion of memetic drive from Donald’s mimetic stage of hominid culture, as a more fundamental replicating impulse beyond genetic reproduction (Blackmore 98). According to her theory, the evolution of human language gave selective advantage to the horizontally spreading cultural memes, as faster and more pervasive than vertically developing generational genes (99, 137). This changed the genetic environment so much that memes “forced” genes to build a “better and better meme-spreading apparatus” in the human brain, “at a much greater cost than would be predicted on the grounds of biological advantage alone”

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(99, 119). She argues that we should take a “meme’s eye view” to see the truth of biological and cultural evolution, from selfish genes to selfish memes (8–9). “Instead of thinking of our ideas as our own creations, and as working for us, we have to think of them as autonomous selfish memes, working only to get themselves copied. We humans, because of our powers of imitation, have become just the physical ‘hosts’ needed for the memes to get around.” Memes make us “live our lives as a lie, and sometimes a desperately unhappy and confused lie . . . because a ‘self ’ aids their replication” (234). Thus, one might add (as this meme arises in my brain and replicates in yours) a fourth C to the trio I suggested before as primal factors of neural and cultural evolution: “continuity,” along with competition, cooperation, and control—producing ghosts of Self in and between human brains. Without reference to Blackmore, Donald begins his recent book by ridiculing such a neo-Darwinist “Hardliner” position in the works of Dawkins and Dennett (Mind 1–4). He attacks their theory of memes for describing cultural memories as “parasitic on individual minds . . . [like in] a bad horror movie” and negating the significance of the conscious mind (4). Memes, according to Donald, are “the end result . . . [of ] genetically installed demons in the minds of most other species, some of which we have inherited” (8). Yet, the conscious mind is not simply a vehicle for genetic demons and cultural memes; it “supervises their assembly and ultimately controls the hierarchies of demons that make culture possible.” The debate between Donald and neo-Darwinists like Blackmore exemplifies the lure, on both sides, of a phantom Self (and family name) identified with the transcendent meme of a certain academic theory, in cooperation and competition with others for control of the truth. But there may be a more complex truth that can be glimpsed by combining these adversarial theories. Blackmore offers us a meme’s eye view that challenges our godlike apprehension as paragon of animals and the divine illusions often given to spectators of theatre and film, who watch over and move through characters’ lives like trickster ghosts. Instead of competing selves as transcendent souls, or God as providential Other in control, Blackmore points to powerful memes shaping hominid genes toward a Thespian species of “best

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imitators” and infecting our brains as zombie vehicles (129–31). Yet, she insists that we have some choice (even if not a fully free will) in how memes use our brains to replicate ideas and ideologies (241–44). Donald stresses more conscious control with his “culturefirst approach” (Mind 280). But he also acknowledges that “symbols of all kinds are the playthings of a fantastically clever, irrational, manipulative, largely inarticulate beast that lives deep inside each of us, far below the polished cultural surface we have constructed” (285). Blackmore’s memetic drive and Donald’s mimetic cultural consciousness may be the inner zombie and outer phantom trickster represented in many myths and their extended theoretic technologies, from ancient ritual and theatre to modern cinema, television, and cyberspace.10 Donald adds, “The difference between us and other primates is only that our conscious-beast-within is much better equipped than theirs to understand and navigate the complex environment needed for public idea laundering” (Mind 288). He argues that it is time to launder the “deep psychic drives that we have tried hard to lock in the attics and cellars of cognitive science . . . to drag them out into the light of public debate because they are the principal forces that energize our entire cultural universe.” Donald challenges his colleagues in cognitive science to reconsider the Freudian cultural unconscious and its “intuitions, drives, and emotional complexes . . . represented in art, writing, and theater”—in relation to the cognitive unconscious as “the golem, the automaton world of instincts and zombies” (286–87). Such a charge resonates with the efforts of this book to show connections between theatre, film, psychoanalysis, cognitive science, neurology, and evolutionary psychology. Donald makes a distinction between conscious, cultural symbols, such as “Earth Mother myths and ankhs” (Mind 287), and the beast within us that “drives all our collective enterprises, lobbing its semiotic hand grenades at various imaginary targets” (285). I would relate this to Lacan’s psychoanalytic dimensions of the Symbolic, Real (beast within), and Imaginary—and to Kristeva’s theory of a maternal chora in each of us, as the cultural womb for patriarchal, symbolic norms, yet also the rebellious force of semiotic disruptions and thetic changes in the symbolic order. Blackmore’s notion of the

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memetic drive corresponds, too, to the repetition compulsions of the Real chora in human brains and cultures. But Donald’s theory of mimetic consciousness through kinematic imagination may relate more to Lacanian desire, as the movement toward various illusory ideals of Self-transcendence in the Other (shown in the trickster ghost), rather than the consistent aim of the drive at a profoundly troubling jouissance.11 Both dimensions of theatricality within the brain involve, however, its “ongoing boxing match with culture” (Donald, Mind 285). If humans are mimetic creatures, used as vehicles by memetic drives or by a beast-within, why are there so many different cultures and individual minds? Why do we not just imitate each other’s thinking and act the same? Occasional mutants in genetic replication create biological diversity over millions of years, making new norms through the gradual weeding process of natural selection. However, in the horizontal spread of cultural memes, our esoteric talents, perverse ideas, and rebellious actions change the norms much more quickly, through selections made by individual brains and the fickle fashion trends of the group mind. Rebellions by criminals, terrorists, and freedom fighters (or insurgents) continue to cause great destruction in our world. Yet, political and religious controls enforced by competing, large-scale “memeplexes” also produce violence and suffering—while limiting the freedom of individual minds. Mutating memes are needed for creativity and change, even if they result in painful conflicts between social norms and rebellious innovations, through the left-brain, executive superego and the right-brain, Dionysian id of various actors, plus their limbic emotions and remnant animal instincts, in a particular culture’s group mind. Donald’s evolutionary model, combined with Blackmore’s meme theory, helps us to parse the theatrical drives and desires in Dennett’s preselective inner environment, in Ramachandran’s neurology of an extended self, unconscious zombies, and phantom projections, in Damasio’s emotional developments of proto- to human selves, in Baars’s cognitive staging of consciousness, and in Edelman’s dynamic core of neuronal group selection and reentrant mappings—through ties with the neuroscience of psychoanalysis in Solms and Cozolino. But Donald also describes the enduring ghost of Self in the shifting

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sands of brain matter, reminding us that our bodies are continually changing. “Only the blueprint of the brain outlives the elementary particles of which it is composed and endures throughout an entire lifetime. By the time we are adults, we do not have a single atom of our childhood left . . . The cognitive entity growing at the center of all this activity . . . [of molecular and cellular change] is a ghost, in the truest sense of that High German word Geist, which means ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ ” (Mind 207). Donald argues that the hominid evolution of episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic cultures involves all those levels of consciousness and communication still developing in our minds (321). This suggests a continuous refinement of the ghosts and gods shared by living human brains in the external womb of culture. As Donald reminds us, images displayed in the various fields of cultural memory are “vivid and enduring, unlike the fleeting ghosts of [personal] imagination” (309). Through evolving mimetic and mythic media, from ancient to postmodern, humans aspire toward the apprehension of divinity: “a powerful theory can take the conscious mind on a voyage to Mount Olympus . . . [with] a glimpse of what it might have been like to be a god” (326). THE SOCIAL ANIMAL WITH DIVINE ASPIRATIONS Spectators contemplating ghosts and gods through the external memories and imaginations of their culture’s stages and screens commune with spirits at all levels of their evolutionary ancestry: theoretic, mythic, mimetic, and episodic specters or zombies—in their neocortex, limbic system, and brainstem. Spectators thus identify the fleeting ghosts of Self inside their skulls with more “vivid and enduring” specters onstage or onscreen. But there, as Hamlet says, is the rub. Is such mystical ecstasy—moving beyond an isolated Self toward communion with the divine Other—merely a regression to the memory traces of a lost womb, with the “oceanic feeling” of infantile attachment to the mother’s body returning as fantasy? Or might the best works of theatre and cinema show a continued evolution of consciousness, connecting the episodic beasts, mimetic phantoms, mythic heroes, and theoretic god-actors in each

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person’s brain to the Other in all of nature, as well as in other humans? Psychiatrist Leslie Brothers uses neurology and evolution to argue that humans are fundamentally social animals—especially through the development of the amygdala and orbital frontal cortex in primates (47). Specific neurons in the human brain “respond preferentially and selectively to social aspects of our world” (37). Researchers have found neurons in primate brains that respond to certain physical characteristics and feelings of familiarity in viewing others as individual faces—or to specific angles in the other’s gaze (40) and threatening facial expressions (36). Brothers argues that the “increasing load of complex and shifting signals” in hominid brains and their evolving social interactions (as in Donald’s stages) “might have led to paralysis . . . unless a way could be found to organize them all” (29). She says the “advantage of the concept of person” in humans is that it “automatically organizes the sights and sounds of other individuals” and thus makes “tie[s] to the social order,” especially through the “pretend play” of childhood and later life. In fact, human brains show a better recall of others’ faces when the person concept is related to the social order, when judgments are made about “personality characteristics,” not just physical features. Theatre encourages this (I would add) when spectators interpret characters through plot conflicts, identifying with them beyond the star’s physical features onstage or onscreen. However, as discussed throughout this book, we humans bear a distinctive agony in our primate brains, as highly social (and antisocial) animals trapped in Self-alienation. We each move from primal attunement with the mother’s desiring body, through the mirrorstage reflections of an independent Self in her gaze, toward further alienations from and yet particular connections with others in various cultural contexts. Eventually, we reach the alienation of pain (Scarry) and of the dying process, which may or may not unite us with other ghosts or with a divine Other. As Brothers puts it, “our brain’s specialization for producing social responses seems to have a bias toward negative situations, as though evolution placed a premium on our ability to shrink in submission, bristle in retaliation, or retreat from others’ indifference” (64). Yet, humans can develop an

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“intersubjective faith” in others, especially through the “imitation games” between parents and their infants in the first year and a half of life (77), during the mirror stage as Lacan calls it. Thus, “a belief in shared understanding,” through pretend play and its “scripts,” allows the human infant to actively co-construct a “detailed intersubjective world” with the parental Other outside (Brothers 78)— and with corresponding ghosts of the Other in the brain, internalized by the anxious right and prosocial left hemispheres. Social neurons and their scripting in infancy, through intersubjective beliefs and the negative bias of Self-defensiveness, can produce shared experiences that take “destructive forms in some human groups, as in mob phenomena and hysterical contagion.” Brothers says that such “contagious social phenomena underline the fragility and contingency of the so-called individual self.” They may indicate “a primordial condition of pure belonging that, evolutionarily speaking, predated the concepts of ‘self ’ and ‘other’ ”—as evidenced by “mirror neurons” in monkeys’ brains, which respond to a specific hand motion in the same way, whether it is performed by the self or the other.12 This suggests “that an archaic sociality, one which does not distinguish self from other, is woven deeply into the primate brain.”13 With our higher-order consciousness of mortality and alienation, we humans have evolved tremendously destructive memes: a greedy Self of hyper-survival demanding immortal remembrance, plus malicious gods requiring further sacrifices for cosmic aid. These memes can be seen in various periods and cultures, from the vengeful ghosts and family furies of Orestes, Thyestes, and Hamlet, to the bloodthirsty and unresponsive gods of Titus and Grace. Theatre in our current theoretic culture of mimetic and mythic technologies may help us to exorcise such demonic or failed memes. The various ritual media of stage and screen, playing with perverse what-ifs, in the continual reinvention of communal norms, may help to evolve the Social Darwinism of group power and selfish genes toward individual rights of social justice, while altering tragic greed and sacrificial demands through new survival rules.14 Theatre and cinema might thus become the vehicles for our cultural evolution toward a better sense of divine providence. But this also involves the competing

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memes of credible teleologies: 1. an active, personal God or gods pulling the strings, even in a sparrow’s fall, benevolently or maliciously; 2. a distant, deist God who started the process, then stepped out of it, yet waits for each of us at the end; 3. an evolving God in nature, higher-order consciousness, and cultural progress;15 or 4. no gods, just the natural and cultural escalation of human consciousness, as the paragon of all creation on earth and the quintessence of dust, moving from primal social being to Self (or multiple selves), and then beyond self and god(s) to something else.16 Whether we regress through the ecstasies of theatre to a remembered present in the episodic stream of primal consciousness or progress toward the pure presence of Self merging with the Other, histrionic ghosts in our brains do matter, as do the dramas in our conflicting souls. Each of us may find a distinct purpose in life through our personal beliefs and esoteric talents. But we do that as part of a cultural evolution of consciousness much greater than our individual lives: the immortality of selfish genes and memes yearning for something Other, through the theatres of our brains and our performed personas—as they continue on the stages and screens of future minds. My identity, even while alive, exists not just in my own mind, but also in others’ views of me—broadcast, recast, and rescripted through phantom characters in their brain theatres. Hopefully, my spirit will continue in living brains after mine is gone, like the words of this book, playing out in your mind, after my writing ends. Within each of our brains, and between them, nature’s creative experiment of mortality and immortality, of Self and Other, persists, while we choose and are chosen in the ghostly roles we play every day. Thus, we may be evolving toward an ultimate union with God and with lost loved ones, or at least toward memes of more cooperation and respect in this life, beyond our current theatres of competition and control. Perhaps we may even move, through continuity, to

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a fifth C, “compassion,” as a higher order of consciousness. If so, then the traumas, dreams, and dramas of our little lives play a part in the divine tragicomedy of life on this planet, as a wondrous natural and cultural experiment—although we only glimpse that show, while we perform it, through the ghost theatres of our brains.

Epilogue x . . . The rarer action is In virtue than in vengeance. The Tempest 5.1.27–28

In Amenábar’s The Others, the little girl Ann asks her mother, “Mummy, when people die in a war, where do they go?” Grace answers, “It depends . . . on whether they fought on the side of the goodies or the baddies.” She explains that Ann’s father, who is home from the war but staying in bed rather than joining them at their meal, “fought for England on the side of the goodies.” Ann then asks, “How do you know who the goodies and the baddies are?” Her mother’s only answer is, “That’s enough questions. Eat your food.” By the end of the film, Grace realizes that they are ghosts now, after she smothered her children and shot herself. But she does not know where they are—in limbo, hell, or elsewhere. There is no father with them and no God as “Lord” to keep the living and the dead separate, as Grace had believed before. This book has considered various ghosts and gods in dramas from different cultures, regarding theatrical elements of the brain’s anatomy. The right-brain and limbic Furies, along with the left-brain Apollo and Athena, appear in Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Seneca’s Thyestes gives an ancient Roman view of the mythic Atreus building a godlike ego, through limbic rivalry with his grandfather’s god-tricking evil. Shakespeare offers a retrospective look at the Roman general, Titus, shooting futile arrows at absent gods in the stars, while sacrificing his enemies and loved ones to the twisted, left-hemisphere, Symbolic order and right-hemisphere, Imaginary and Real furies of vengeance. Yet, the bard’s medieval Hamlet finds a providential destiny through the vengeful demand of his phantom father. When he returns to

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Denmark, after pirates help him to escape from execution, Hamlet says, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” (5.2.10–11). A bit later he adds, with a biblical reference: “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow” (5.2.220–21; Matthew 10:29). But the rough-hewing of human ends, by the brain’s executive left and devilish right hemispheres, beyond providential wisdom, becomes more and more apparent from Shakespeare’s Renaissance humanism to the apocalyptic destructiveness of world wars in Grace’s modern era, to the selfreflexive recklessness of postmodern mass-media mirrors. Like the lost souls of Matsukaze and Murasame, addicted to their earthly desires, we in the postmodern are caught between the libidinal and transcendent illusions of many virtual realities, while our phantom selves reside within, yet struggle against our material brains. THE GOODIES AND THE BADDIES IN A SPARROW’S FALL Animals in nature need to react quickly to predators, competitors, or other dangers. After millions of years of evolution, humans have inherited a reptilian brainstem for automatic motor reflexes, reacting to external threats, and for internal homeostatis. Humans have also inherited a paleomammalian limbic system with remnant instincts and epigenetically developing emotions for survival in the wild—plus a neomammalian cortex with distinctive left and right hemispheres for higher cognitive functions. The panic or separationdistress system in the limbic brain, especially in the anterior cingulate gyrus, enables human infants to first seek their absent mothers with preprogrammed distress calls, and then to hide in hormone-driven, depressive withdrawal (as considered in chapters 1 and 3). The infant’s distress calls activate the “care subsystem” in the mother’s brain, evoking further nurturing and attachment behaviors when she returns. This causes biochemical changes in the infant—enabling it to withstand stress later in life. However, if the mother’s return as nurturing presence is delayed or reduced, the infant’s brain changes biochemically in the opposite way (increasing its glucocorticoid levels) with more fearfulness and anxiety in response to stress, repeating

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the primal depressive reaction—not only then, but throughout life. This survival instinct in the limbic brain’s primal emotion of seeking the mother, and then depressively withdrawing when she is not found, also produces memory loss (with hormonal changes causing the atrophy of hippocampal neurons). In psychoanalytic terms, screen memories mask the loss; yet traces of prior traumatic experiences return—through uncanny symptoms, dreams, and art works. The human species now dominates its environment, reducing natural threats to a minimum. But each human culture creates new avenues of the “wild” through its intersubjective theatres of competitive significance and monetary power. As the saying goes; “Be careful. It’s a jungle out there.” We each develop survival strategies and symptomatic habits, using the instinctual zombies of our brain anatomy and the phantom personas absorbed from our family, community, and mass-media to persist with an ideal of Self that can negotiate the mutating terrain of current customs, news terrors, and virtual realities. We thus continue to seek, or depressively withdraw from, transcendent ideals of the imaginary (m)Other and symbolic Father, as nurturing or threatening ghosts and gods—with material sources and effects in the brain. The survival and reproduction drives in nature’s evolution have reached a zenith with human Self-awareness, sublimating the body’s genetic prerogatives toward the group mind’s Other ideals, which determine the Self ’s place and purpose, yet with some degree of independence, uncertainty, and contrariness. The process of competitive selection has evolved from nature to culture—from DNA codes in organisms and their neuronal groups to symbolic meanings and imaginary worlds in the conflicts of many religions and nations with their collective ideological projections. But the survival and reproduction of cultural characteristics are often expressed in destructive ways: through the greed for power, the perpetuation of revenge, or altruistic sacrifice. These human drives fuel various illusions of an independent Self, as well as shared ideals of the Other—transforming the animal heritage of panic, fear, rage, and seeking systems in the limbic brain. Good and evil are extrapolated from natural forces of competitive survival into cultural ideals of angels and demons that magnify the brain’s limbic emotions, through its neocortical theatre

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and godlike technologies. The human remaking of the world—from nature to culture to virtual realities—shows this transformation of the brain’s inherited mechanisms toward transcendent creativity and destructiveness, producing various heroes and villains to make sense of the sparrow’s fall, while driven by ancestral zombies of panic, fear, and rage, yet seeking the trick of immortal survival. This book’s introduction considered two main types of ghosts in film and cyberspace fiction: the possessive, sadistic zombie (or the fading, masochistic phantom as its mirror image) and the transformative, fetishistic trickster. Chapters 2, 4, and 6 found these Dionysian and Apollonian specters, to varying degrees, in ancient drama, in two of Shakespeare’s plays, and in distinctive screen apparitions of Hamlet’s Ghost from the 1940s, 1960s, 1990s, and 2000. Chapter 8 disclosed similar types of specters with the desperate longing of zombie-like phantoms in Matsukaze and with the possessive mother battling her trickster servants, rebellious children, and meddling “intruders” in The Others. Both types of ghosts involve various drives and desires. But the possessive zombie or fading phantom expresses more of the Lacanian death drive and abject lack of being in the brain’s limbic fear, rage, and panic systems, with primary connections to the Dionysian right hemisphere. The transformative trickster, on the other hand, shows the transcendent desires of the Apollonian left hemisphere, through the brain’s seeking system in the mesocortical-mesolimbic dopamine area. Good and evil, nurturing and threatening specters circulate through all of these brain areas, in the haunted theatre of the human mind and its intersubjective relations to the surrounding cultural environment—as shown by the unconscious cogito, zombie selves, phantom limbs, performance elements of cognition, neuronal group mappings, internalized parental figures, and stages of brain evolution considered in chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9. The fundamental paranoia and perversity (of zombies and tricksters) in the architecture of all human brains1 may intensify in our postmodern era, not only with the advent of nuclear weaponry, international terrorism, and other millennial anxieties and rebellions, but also with the schizoid diversity of current cultural crossings and high-tech virtual realities. The stage and screen ghosts examined in this book reveal that the growing pains

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of human evolution continue today, especially in the theatre of the brain. Like our ancient and early modern counterparts, we idealize the brain’s primal pleasures of nurturing goodness, and demonize its animal anxieties about mortal threats, through personal experiences of parental ghosts—projecting stereotypical heroes and villains as communal personas of transcendent good and evil. The Self ’s place in the group mind today, through mass-mediated identities of race, class, gender, nationality, and religion, becomes stronger with the distinction of an enemy Other as the incarnation of evil, focusing our limbic system’s panic, fear, and rage against certain “terrorists”— while seeking our favorite “stars” as godlike ideals. It may take many more millennia for humans to evolve the primal zombies and tricksters in their brains beyond the repeated projections of violent demons and hollow gods. For millions of years, the brainstems and limbic systems in our animal ancestors, using their bodies’ sensory and motor organs, were trained to discern—and react quickly to—threats of evil and lures of goodness in their immediate environments. The interpretation of a passing shadow, a certain shape or reflective color, a look in the eyes, a growl or a grin, as well as numerous other sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches might make the difference between mortal survival, reproducing a whole set of genetic and epigenetic patterns (involving collective brain-sculpting), or the end of that particular experiment in recognizing the Other. The hominid development of an advanced neocortex vastly expanded this drama of natural survival, through the cultural tools of art and language communicating Imaginary and Symbolic ideals between the right and left hemispheres of many brains—trying to recognize a friend or foe and projecting supernatural faces onto the mysterious, natural forces that sustained or threatened (Guthrie). It is no wonder that we continue to be haunted by the ghosts in our brains, as expressed by stage and screen fictions, despite the modern rationalism and postmodern skepticism of our current left and right hemispheres. A full reintegration of those hemispheres’ Imaginary and Symbolic cosmologies with the Real of the limbic system and brainstem requires a further cathartic evolution: accepting more and more of the Other’s tragicomic complexity, beyond melodramatic goodies and baddies.

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MEMETIC MONSTERS OR MORE? Dawkins, Blackmore, and Dennett present a dangerous idea about the ghost theatres in our brains.2 If we are merely vehicles for the competitive survival of selfish genes and memes, with no Self in conscious control and no free will, then our brains might be possessed by vastly destructive ideologies.3 Ancestral spirits of sacrifice (like the furies and phantom limb family members of the dramas considered in this book) may take power in entire populations through modern genocide, terrorism, and counterterrorism. The remnant instincts and drives of the human brainstem and limbic system (as an abject, yet disruptive Real order) might be twisted by right-brain, intuitive, Imaginary anxieties and left-brain, rational, Symbolic commands, through the tantalizing virus of Social Darwinism: justifying extreme violence in the survival and reproduction of certain ideals. Primal drives might be refocused by the current cultural womb toward a righteous triumph of one’s own heroic group against the other’s villainy (especially through the stereotypes of melodrama). The desire to remember persons from the past, while valuing their sacrifices and traditions, may evoke perpetual sacrifices in the present—through reciprocal vengeance, rites of warfare, communal habits, and specific family legacies, as in The Oresteia, Thyestes, Titus Andronicus, Hamlet, Matsukaze, and The Others. Thus, from inherited value-categories to learned reentrant mappings, human brains are shaped by family and culture in beneficial or disastrous ways. Competition, cooperation, and control continue to be forces of good and evil today—as the personality traits and collective memeplexes of those who have passed away inhabit our living brains. But there are choices that each of us makes every day in how to fight against, cooperate with, submit to, control, or eventually reintegrate the zombie selves and phantom forms in our brains. At any given moment, we bear a limited space of consciousness in our brain theatres—with deep goal stagehands, conceptual context directors, and interpretive memory spectators shaping the ideas and identities onstage, as well as our external performances. Through these neural zombies and inherited ghosts of emotion and thought, we choose which ideals to keep in the spotlight—if not with a totally “free” will,

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then with an unconscious cogito of a dynamic core cluster, in the brain’s shifting centers of narrative and theatrical gravity. This shifting core of Self combines many internal stages and projection areas into the augmenting or interfering environments of fantasy, memory, and reality-perception. Each of us thus participates in the vast experiment of nature’s evolution into the higher-order, self-reflective, yet compassionate consciousness of our species and its various cultures—through numerous choices of what to feel, think, imagine, believe, speak, write, and perform in everyday life. On the other hand, we might despair at times that our little lives seem meaningless, especially if Justice and other gods are absent from the sky, as in Titus’s ancient world or Grace’s existential limbo. Some of us are born into desperate circumstances of injustice— haunted by physical disabilities, psychological symptoms, dysfunctional families, and the communal interpretations of gender and ethnicity. Certain evolutionary drives, over millions of years, may reinforce such inequities—with reproductive strategies and survival alignments contradicting the “natural rights” of individuals in modern democracies. But the better we understand the ghosts in our brain matter, through complex tragedies and comedies, onstage and onscreen (or by questioning the binary propaganda of melodrama’s clear-cut good and evil ideals), the better we can choose which gods to materialize in our real-life actions, for future generations. Whether God and our lost loved ones continue to develop through us or truly exist beyond us, we each play a role in the cultural evolution of higher-order consciousness toward the divine, reinterpreting the episodic, mimetic, mythic, and theoretic stages of our mind’s theatre and its external media—or perpetuating its cruelties through current terrors and technologies. Many more plays and films beyond those considered in this book, plus numerous TV shows and videogames, might be explored through the neuroscience of the brain’s ghost theatre. A listing of all such works with ghostly characters would be almost endless. Yet, the neurotheatrical theories in this book could be applied to other dramas as well—since all characters onstage and onscreen are in a sense ghosts, reflecting the phantom selves within writers, actors, designers, technicians, directors, and spectators, shared in the performance

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spaces between them. The dramas and theories of this book also reveal the overlapping theatres of perception, memory, fantasy, dream, and performance in our daily lives—as we continue to figure out the riddle of our survival, our reproduction, and our destiny. Further neuroscientific research might be applied to the theatrical predicament of the human brain in its transcendent lack of being: reaching toward divine apprehension, as the paragon of animals, yet haunted by individual mortality and persistent communal spirits, as the quintessence of dust. For example, Jaak Panksepp has studied rough-and-tumble (RAT) play in laboratory rats and concluded that “play may serve to exercise and extend the range of behavioral options under the executive control of inborn emotional systems. In fact, play may be the waking functional counterpart of dreaming” (295).4 Another researcher, Antii Revonsuo, theorizes that dreaming is “a mechanism for simulating threat-perception and rehearsing threat-avoidance responses and behaviors” (90). If RAT play and dreams evolved in our mammalian and hominid ancestors over millions of years, as emotional exercises and threat rehearsals, then the current competitive play and shared dream mechanisms of theatre, film, TV, computers, and videogames extend the cultural womb of such intersubjectivity, evoking collective ghosts and ideological gods (in players and spectators) to prune our brains and behaviors today. It is imperative that we understand these media and their dramas in relation to the ghost theatres of the brain, since the very structures of emotion, thought, ethics, and cultural reality are at stake, as they continue to evolve through us.5 No one finds it easy to imagine not existing anymore. Nor is it easy to accept the loss of someone meaningful to us, who shaped the way we think, feel, and live in this world. It is also difficult to accept how each of us is a ghost right now, with fictions of the Self in the brain and further avatars of our identities in others’ brains—as phantom characterizations living beyond us through them. Whether or not we believe in supernatural ghosts, science and art can help us to come to terms with our mortality, our inevitable aging, our dispersal into others’ minds, and our altered connections to those who have died. The material and psychological dimensions of theatre and cinema within the human skull make the ghosts of our selves and loved

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ones appear inside us and continue outside, through our current interactions with others in this life. Even if each mind’s unique personality disintegrates with brain death and bodily decay, there are ways that the characters it created live on—as shown by the plays, films, and scientific ideas explored in this book, continuing now to evolve in your brain and in the theatres that we share.


Notes x INTRODUCTION NOTES TO PAGES 2–3 1. I use the term “theatre” rather than the more general concept of “performance” because the ancient Greek term and its subsequent tradition of an art form (from theatron, a seeing place, related also to “theory”) indicates certain aspects of theatricality, not just performativity, in the functioning of human brains. Yet this extends the idea of theatre far beyond the narrow sense of a certain Euro-American art to involve ritual, festival, ceremony, sports, cinema, television, and cyberspace—as in the field of Performance Studies. See also Pizzato, Theatres of Human Sacrifice. 2. Throughout this book I use the capitalized term “Self ” to indicate the illusory specter of a whole ego, masking the diverse selves or zombie-like agents within the brain. The Self is also structured by ghostly influences from the group mind around it, through particular family experiences and social networks, though it often masks those desires of the Other (in a Lacanian sense), while asserting its own independent identity, especially in Western culture with its stress on the individual. I use the capitalized term “Other” in this psychoanalytic sense of a social, ideological system, and yet also in relation to the notion of ghosts and gods (or God) as the personification of intuited metaphysical forces. 3. Cf. Penrose on computer or embodied brain models. 4. See, for example, Grodal 48–57 on the “narrative” and “lyrical” functions of the left and right hemispheres of the neocortex, which he associates with film emotions and genres. Grodal dismisses Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage as “rudimentary” and his three orders of Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real as “bizarre”—though he does find some “similarities” to the “mental models” of cognitive neuroscience (111–13). 5. For a related approach, exploring connections between religion and cognitive science (with less use of neurology and none of psychoanalysis), see the collection edited by Andresen, especially the essays by Guthrie and McNamara.

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Notes to Pages 3–4

6. See Solms and Turnbull; Panksepp 142, 168, 226; Ramachandran and Blakeslee 152–53; Damasio, Looking 37–50; Edelman, Bright 145 and Remembered 209–11; Edelman and Tononi 178, 190; Schore 536; Berridge and Winkielman; Baars, Consciousness 113–114, 158, 240, 295, 302, 320–21, 350, 363–64, 386 and Theater 16–17, 84–85; Bucci 262–63; Cozolino 6–9, 84–85, 159–66; and McNamara, Mind 67. See also the various essays in Corrigall and Wilkinson, especially those by neurologists Douglas Watt and Oliver Turnbull. Cf. Levin, including his brief reference to Lacan’s work as relevant to the symbolic dimension of nonverbal communication (161–64). 7. See Zizek, “Lacan,” on the value of Lacanian psychoanalysis in mediating between cognitive science and cultural studies. Cf. Hart for a critique of Zizek’s use of the term “cognitivism” and a preference for cognitive and cognitive-evolutionary literary theories, with their “internal realism” and “constrained constructivism,” as mediating the opposition between scientific, objective realism and cultural, subjective relativism. See also Varela 64, who uses neuroscience, Buddhism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis to develop a theory of ethics. 8. See Bordwell and Carroll, especially their essays and Prince’s in that volume. Bordwell criticizes the “Grand Theory” of Lacanian film studies for making “interpretation a substitute for the empirical dimension” (26). Carroll attacks the “juggernaut of [such] Theory” for being “essentialist” (40–41) and sees a current “dialectical competition” between cognitivism and psychoanalysis in which the latter “is being retired” because cognitive film theory is more rational and “plausible” (64–65). 9. Joseph Anderson disparages the “nihilism” and “cynicism” of Lacanian/Marxist postmodern theory, comparing it with “the mannerism that followed the Italian Renaissance” in the sixteenth century (7). Yet he summons nostalgic hope now, through cognitive film theory, for “a new surge of the human spirit,” as in the work of Bernini, Rembrandt, Galileo, and Newton. 10. Lacanian theory defines three dimensions of the human mind and its reality (akin to Freud’s superego, ego, and id): the Symbolic order of language and law, plus the Imaginary order of perception and fantasy, along with the Real order of lack and loss—repressed or replaced by, yet disrupting the other two. See the translator’s notes by Sheridan in Lacan, Four. See also Fink, Lacanian 24–27, 84–92. 11. See Miller 154–61 for a summary of various psychoanalytic and theological theories of ghosts (by Freud, Jung, Lacan, Hillman, and Tillich)


12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

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as the projections of unconscious, ambivalent emotions in relation to the dead that must be “hosted” for spiritual health: “discovering the proper location of the ghost to be within the self, where the Fourth Gospel said one would discover the Holy Ghost” (160). See also Finucane 37 and W. M. S. Russell 206–7 on St. Augustine’s (ancient Roman) view that ghosts in personal dreams or visions are true products of the living mind as images, but not the dead actually returning to life. Cf. C. Russell on the “social context” and “social environment” of ghost apparitions and haunted places, involving a “return of the repressed” in a particular community, “like creative and veridical dreams, [but] . . . without necessarily providing an immediate solution” (113, 126). See also Finucane for specific ghost contexts throughout Western history. Cf. LeDoux, Synaptic 22, on the phrase “ghost in the machine” adopted a half century ago by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, for his behaviorist view of mental states. Ryle’s phrase refers to the “deus ex machina,” an ancient Roman term for flying a god over the stage (using a Greek mechane) to resolve the drama’s action, which became a critique of using any character to end the plot artificially. See Kosslyn, Ghosts 12, for a cognitive rebuttal of Ryle’s view that there is no consciousness, that the mind is nothing more than brain and body mechanisms (with mental states as illusory ghosts). See also Baars et al. on the “observing self ” in the brain, contra Ryle. Cf. Auslander 10–23, 158–62. He argues that television is the “dominant” performance medium today and has “usurped” theatre’s position even more than cinema (162). Ironically, the survival drive also involves a death drive for the species to progress. Unlike Blau, Carlson does not emphasize mortality in his exploration of theatrical haunting. He refers just briefly to the mortality of the body onstage and behind the art, giving the example of Polish director Tadeusz Kantor, whose company used an empty chair onstage to represent him after his death (Carlson 104–5). Blau gives further examples of the mortal body’s “ghosting” of performance in his work as a director. See Take Up, chapter 5, and To All 195. See the essays in King and Krzywinska on various “interfaces” between cinema and videogames. See also Ryan, especially chapters 9 and 10, on the relation between theatrical theories of participation and cyberspace interactivity.

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18. Cf. Turkle on the paradigm of an executive, controlling Self in computer models of artificial intelligence (AI) and in American ego psychology (opposed by postmodern, Lacanian theories of split and fragmented subjectivity): “there are versions of both AI and psychoanalysis that defuse the subversive decentering principle by restricting its role to explaining parts of the mind and thus avoiding the risk of dissolving the whole” (262). Rather than referring to Lacan, however, Turkle uses the English school of Kleinian object relations to consider an alternative view of the Self, in psychoanalysis and AI, as the “drama of inner objects” (263–65). 19. See also Pizzato, Edges of Loss, on various postmodern theories of splitsubjectivity and polymorphous perversity since the 1960s, in relation to modern drama and modernist ideals in the first half of the twentieth century. 20. Cf. the videogame Black and White, in which the player takes the role of a good or evil god, cultivating worshippers through an animal totem. Numerous other “god games” have been invented, where players evolve fictional, mythical, or historical communities—scripting and watching their avatars’ domestic, social, military, and imperial dramas from a godlike, yet not omnipotent viewpoint. Examples would include (according to my Internet research, not personal playing experience): Heaven and Hell, Sim-City, Civilization, Zeus, Emperor, Children of the Nile, Pharaoh/Cleopatra, Rome, Caesar, Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, Medieval, Warcraft, and Starcraft. There are also roleplaying games (RPGs) and their online versions, such as EverQuest, in which a mass audience of computer users compete and cooperate for control of virtual environments—more like Murray’s first version of a violence-hub narrative. In these videogames, players explore and fight through a linear maze adventure—like ghosts possessing virtual bodies (and starting again or changing bodies if “killed”) but not taking a divine perspective as in the god games’ hypertexts. See also Rehak’s application of Lacanian theory to videogame avatars. 21. See Lacan, Four 207–8, 217–21, on the fading of the subject and the lack (or alienation) of being, as effects of human language. See also Lukacher 74–75. 22. See J. R. Porter 232 on ancient Egyptian ghosts that “suck blood from their victims like a vampire.” See also W. M. S. Russell 210–11 on the ancient Roman ghost as a “poltergeist” trickster, or more often as counselor to the living. And see Finucane 75 on the medieval belief that the dead (like zombies) “still exist in their tombs . . . literally climbing out


23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28.

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of, and back into, their coffins . . . [or with hands] thrust up from their mouldy graves to receive holy water . . . .” See Nietzsche on the intoxicated Dionysian passions and dreamlike Apollonian ideals of ancient Greek culture (or of modern theatre, potentially)—with the maternal body of the chorus giving “birth” to the transcendent mask of the actor onstage. See Feher Gurewich and Tort 5, 23, and 90. Cf. Fink, Lacanian 74, 77, on Lacan’s view of signifiers as allowing “drives to be represented: presented to us as beings of language” and of “neuronal links [as associated with] the links between signifiers.” See also Fink, Clinical 97–98, 208–12. See Panksepp 21: “When our basic emotions are fully expressed, we have no doubt that powerful animal forces survive beneath our cultural veneer. It is this ancient animal heritage that makes us the intense, feeling creatures that we are.” Panksepp also describes a sense of “primordial ‘self ’ ” in the brainstem, as the “lowest level of integration” for emotions, providing “a sense of presence for the animal within its world” (77). See Solms and Turnbull 113–17, who link Panksepp’s model of primal emotions, and our “shared evolutionary heritage” as mammals, to Freud’s theory of the drives. The theory of a “triune” human brain, with reptilian brainstem and basal ganglia, paleomammalian limbic system, and neomammalian cortex, was first articulated by Paul MacLean a half century ago and has since become a common parlance in neuroscience. For a critique of this theory, particularly of the limbic system as seat of the emotions, see LeDoux, Emotional and Synaptic 35, 210–12. LeDoux still agrees, however, with MacLean’s general theory “that emotions involve relatively primitive circuits that are conserved throughout mammalian evolution” and that cognitive circuits function somewhat independently from emotional ones (Synaptic 212). Cf. Panksepp 70–72, 341, for an update of MacLean’s theory, countering LeDoux’s critique. Humans could not evolve a larger birth canal after they became bipedal creatures. See Schroeder 111: “Because the mother’s pelvis must support the entire weight of her upper body, it requires considerable bone mass. This limits the size of the opening through which the fetus must pass at birth.” Four-legged animals have relatively larger birth canals because their pelvis only supports half the body weight, but the human brain’s “higher intelligence requires hands freed from the supporting body.” Cf. Blackmore 71. See also Panksepp 248 on the “relatively immature” newborns and longer bonding process of predatory animals

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29.

30.

31.

32.

Notes to Pages 11–17 in comparison with prey species, which are “typically born rather mobile” to escape from predators. See Albright and Ashbrook 115–16 on the newborn human brain having “fewer cells with built-in instinctual patterns” in comparison with other animals. See also Feher Gurewich 23 on the Lacanian contrast between human drives and animal instincts, which involves the infant’s mirror-stage “ability to recognize and identify with the imago of the human form . . . compensating for the underdevelopment of instincts due to prematuration at birth.” Cf. Panksepp 122 on the “instinctual,” and yet “open” human brain, “permeable to many environmental influences.” Cf. the Lacanian view of philosophical anthropologist Van Haute: “the relations of the [human] subject to itself and to its environment are basically marked by the impossibility of [biological] adaptation—that is precisely what constitutes our humanity” (288). The human lack of being, with instinctual patterns mostly replaced by cultural ones, still involves the structural legacies of an evolutionary nature (including erotic and death drives), as “human nature” and cultural nurturing continue to evolve beyond, yet build upon, the natural body, brain, and environment. See Ridley on current clues to a “neuroscience of culture,” involving sociobiological selectionism and Chomskian nativism, in both nurture and nature, through the human environment and genetics—with each gene functioning as “a device for extracting information from the environment” (214, 245–47). See also Pinker’s critique of the “blank slate,” the “noble savage,” and the “ghost in the machine,” as traditional ideals that deny the role of nature in the human brain and culture. Cf. Epstein 177, on the “Hungry Ghosts” of Western individuality, encountered through psychotherapy and Buddhism, in contrast to the more communal sense of identity in traditional Asian cultures. See also LeVine 114, on ethnographic contrasts between the Western sense of an independent self and the non-Western interdependent self.

1

WILL THE REAL COGITO PLEASE STAND UP?

1. See also Ragland-Sullivan 183–95; Fink, Lacanian 24–31. 2. Cf. Kubiak 36–39, for his critique of Dennett’s anti-theatrical view. 3. See Dawkins, Extended 109–12, 297, and Selfish, for his theory of “memes” in human cultural evolution (from the Greek term mimesis).


4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

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See also Blackmore 4–6, 98. Dawkins and Blackmore make the determinist argument that humans, like all animals, are merely machines for the selfish reproduction of genes (“vehicles” for such “replicators”)— extending into memes in human culture. But the notion of memes does not require such a mechanistic theory of evolution, especially with the vast changes that humans have made in their environments, survival rules, and evolutionary processes. See Giovannoli on his related idea of “psychogenes,” which require “a mental act, perception, condition, habit of acceptance or conviction that something is true, actual, or valid” (155). See also David Wilson on religion as a group-level adaptation in humans, rather than a parasitic meme in Dawkin’s sense. Cf. Plotkin’s critique (253–58). And see Horgan 114–19 and Shermer 70–71. See Zizek, “Lacan” 26, on subjectivity as “the ‘I of the storm’, the void in the center of the incessant vortex/whirlpool of elusive mental events.” See also Freud 572 and Lacan, Four 56, on primary processes and dreams as the other “scene” of the unconscious subject, “between perception and consciousness.” Cf. Carter 83–86 on the unconscious “Readiness Potential” in subcortical centers, which initiate muscle movements a half second prior to the conscious “willed” decision to act. See also Maasen et al. 112–13, 129–30, on this finding in Benjamin Libet’s research in 1983 and again by Haggard and Eimer in 1999. Dennett ultimately argues that consciousness itself is illusory. See (his debate with) Searle. See Elliott 46–77 on the significance of Freud, Lacan, and Zizek to current sociological theories of the self and other. Cf. Ramachandran and Hirstein, “Science” 20–21n3, on the brain’s internal rehearsing of complex postures or actions while perceiving them externally when performed by others. This is part of the “peak shift” principle (capturing the essence and amplifying it) that they define as one of eight neurological “laws” of visual art, along with isolation, perceptual grouping, contrast, problem solving, abhorrence of unique vanishing points, metaphors, and symmetry (49–50). They relate the peak shift to the Hindu notion of rasa, the artistic essence that evokes a specific mood (17–18), which is also an important term in the ancient theatrical text, the Natyasastra. Cf. Kay on the difference between the Freudian notion of superego as conscience and the Lacanian/Zizekian sense of it as that which “condemns us to perverse enjoyment” (53).

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9. Cf. Butterworth 121–22 on specific stages of neonatal mimesis through experiments with mirrors (beyond Lacan’s references): interest in mirror reflection at 3–8 months, awareness of stable categories of self at 8–12 months, use of the mirror to locate others in space at 12–15 months, and recognition of self-specific features (and rouge on the face) beginning at 15 months. See also Meltzoff on the infant’s use of adults as “social mirrors,” forming a Self by imitating and interacting with the Other. See especially Meltzoff ’s brief reference to Lacan (158). Cf. Neisser, “Self-narratives” 12. 10. Cf. Donald, Mind 25–28, 286–87, on his distinction between the “unconscious” in cognitive neuroscience (the part of the brain permanently inaccessible to consciousness) and in Freudian psychoanalysis (parts of the mind and culture of which we are only temporarily unaware). However, this oversimplifies the Freudian position and does not take into account Lacan’s revision of Freud—nor the empirical arguments of Ramachandran. 11. See Solms and Turnbull: “the way our neurons connect up with each other depends on what happens to us . . . [T]he fine organization of the brain is literally sculpted by the environment in which it finds itself . . .” (11). 12. The brain’s hippocampus, which encodes experiences in retrievable form, is not fully functional in the first two years of life. Its neurons can also be damaged by glucocortico-steroids produced during the extreme stress of traumatic experiences. See Solms and Turnbull 164–68. 13. See also Kaplan-Solms and Solms 260: “habitual perceptual associations are internalized and automatized in heteromodal cortico-thalamic ‘directories’ . . . [and this] is how perceptual experience transforms a portion of undifferentiated id into the associative mnemic structure of the ego.” 14. Cf. Panksepp 261–79 on the panic (separation-distress) system of the brain in relation to animal and human “distress vocalizations” and the art of music in bringing chills or thrills to the body. 15. See also LeDoux, Synaptic 5: “genes only shape the broad outline of mental and behavioral functions, accounting for at most 50 percent of a given trait, and in many instances for far less.” And 67: “In humans, the vast majority of neurons are made in the months just prior to birth. At the peak production point, about 250,000 neurons are being generated per minute.” 16. Cf. anthropologist Victor Turner’s theory of human play and ritual in relation to brain anatomy and evolution. He speculates that play has a “similar role in the social construction of reality as mutation and variation in organic evolution” (236).


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ANCIENT SPECTERS (PREHISTORIC, EGYPTIAN, GREEK, AND ROMAN)

1. See Hovers et al. on the mining of red ocher at Qafzeh 92,000 years ago, suggesting “the existence of symbolic culture” (491). See also Chase and Dibble 275. 2. Some studies date the Neanderthal burials at 120,000 years ago. For a summary, see Joseph 11–18. 3. See Constable 101; Howell 128–30; Leaky and Lewin, Origins 125; Shackley 84–113; and Solecki. But cf. Benditt 32; Chase and Dibble 274–76; Johanson and Edgar 100; Mithen 136, 180; Sommer; and Rudavsky 44—who dispute the interpretation of Neanderthal burial rites and grave offerings, following Gargett’s challenge in the 1980s (“Grave”). Yet, in 1992 Leaky and Lewin insisted that “evidence is still convincing,” at the Neanderthal site of Shanidar (Iraq), for “deliberate burial” (Origins Reconsidered 269–70, 303). Even Gargett admitted in 1999 that “most palaeoanthropologists consider these inferences of purposeful burial [in Middle Paleolithic hominid remains] to be based on irrefutable evidence”—while continuing to offer a different interpretation himself (“Middle” 27). See Harder for a summary of various positions in this debate. Shackley also considers the evidence of cannibalism (ritual brain-eating) at Neanderthal and Homo erectus sites (106–9). 4. See also Shreeve 53–54, 340–41. He finds an “absence of ritual” at Neanderthal sites, but says that “does not mean the absence of religion” (341). 5. Cf. Shackley 87. 6. See also Constable. 7. See Mithen 12; Lieberman 146; and Ramachandran and Blakeslee 191. 8. Cf. Howell 130 and Armstrong 287–88. 9. The manuscript for the coronation drama dates from 1970 BC. But the event has been dated much farther back to the First Dynasty of ancient Egypt in the fourth millennium BC. See Kernodle 27–28 and Rothenberg 456. 10. For a translation of further scenes, beyond those given by Rothenberg, see Gaster 384–403. See also Kernodle 27–29. Symbolic colors were used: red for Set, green for Horus’s retained eye, and black for the eye stolen yet restored to him (Gaster 389, 397). 11. Set was also beheaded in the drama, symbolized by the beheading of a goat (Gaster 390). Set’s testicles, taken from him by Horus in battle,

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12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

Notes to Pages 29–32 were symbolized by two maces presented to the new pharaoh, which he then “engrafts upon himself ” (395). Set’s thighbone, as the thighbone of a sacrificed animal, was presented to the pharaoh (401). Horus’s blood was apparently symbolized by an offering of wine as well (394). See Kristeva, Revolution 25–28, 46–59, for her reinterpretation of the chora from Plato’s cosmological “space of becoming” in The Timaeus, as an abject, semiotic, disruptive, womb-like space in the mind, in language, and in culture (akin to the Lacanian Real). See Rozik 315–23, 333–34, 343–37. He views the Egyptian coronation drama as ritual, not theatre, and yet as “sharing the roots of theatre” in child’s play (322), dreams (333), and “the spontaneous creation of immaterial images in the psyche” (344). His psychoanalytic references are to Freud, Jung, and Piaget, but not to Lacan. Therefore, he does not consider the mirror-stage tension between wholeness and fragmentation, from the mind’s internal theatre of “immaterial images” to external child’s play and large-scale politics, as shown in the Egyptian drama. See also Porter 224–26 on ghosts of the ancient Middle East with certain types of demands: for offerings of food and drink, for a better burial, and to finish certain duties on earth. Cf. Miller 111–13 on etymological ties between the word “ghost” and fury, anger, ugly, to rage, to terrify, to wound, to tear, to pull to pieces, ghastly, host, stranger, enemy, guest, parasite, and Holy Ghost. Cf. the translation by Grene and O’Flaherty: “ ‘Kill them,’ he said, ‘to match their killings’ ” (105). Agamemnon’s captive Trojan mistress, Cassandra, was also killed when he was. See A.L. Brown 28: “the Greeks commonly spoke of the Erinyes of a particular individual, so that those of Clytemnestra will be different from those of Agamemnon.” See also Onians 44–48, 74n6, 93–96, on the relation between psyche, as the soul (located in the head) that leaves the body at death, going to Hades like a “phantom” in a dream, and thymos as the breath/blood soul (in the chest) that is destroyed at death. Cf. Sophocles’s Electra, who calls upon the Furies and other underworld gods to take revenge against her mother for her father’s murder (55). She also prays for the help of her father’s ghost (Electra 68). Cf. Euripides, Orestes, where he tells his uncle Menelaos to “imagine” that the dead Agamemnon hears them and that his ghost speaks through Orestes’s voice (46). Apollo also says, during Orestes’s trial, that Agamemnon could not be brought back to life after Clytemnestra killed him because “once a man


21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

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is dead, / and the ground has sucked dry all his blood, / nothing can ever raise him up again” (Shapiro and Burian 173). This parallels the Furies’ vampirism as earth goddesses, who sprang from the Earth (Gaia) and from the blood of Heaven (Ouranos) that fell on her, when Cronos castrated his father. See Lefkowitz 16, 126–28, 139–40. Cf. Sophocles’s Orestes, who pretends, with the help of Electra, that Clytemnestra’s dead body is his own, in order to trap Aegisthus (Electra 109). See Girard 286–90, on the katharma as a cathartic scapegoat that defuses the reciprocal violence of perpetual vengeance. Cf. Euripides’s Orestes, who hallucinates the Furies while his sister, Electra, tries to restrain him, although he says she is one of them (30–31). Cf. Whallon, who argues that the theatre audience does see the Furies onstage at the end of The Libation Bearers (Choephori), even though the Chorus does not. But A. L. Brown summarizes this debate: “Almost all scholars [aside from Whallon] rightly assume” that the audience does not see the Furies until the third play of the trilogy (19). Cf. Bowie’s explication of the “political codes of the Oresteia” through its references to various myths and rituals of ancient Greece. Clytemnestra was the daughter of Leda, who was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan. According to one tradition, Leda’s husband, Tyndareus, also slept with her the same night. Leda gave birth to an egg, out of which came Pollux and Helen, children of Zeus, and Castor and Clytemnestra, children of Tyndareus. By other accounts, however, Zeus was her father. In Euripides’s play, Orestes kills Helen as well as his mother (Orestes). Helen joins the gods on Olympus, while Clytemnestra is left with the mortal dead. Cf. Zizek, Metastases 194, on the “obscene superego underside” that functions as “the annoying ‘ghost,’ the shadowy double that always accompanies the public Law.” I thank my colleague at UNC-Charlotte, Dale Grote, for this insight. Cf. A. L. Brown 31 on this double dream of the Furies, with Clytemnestra as a dream figure inside their dream of chasing Orestes, as she wakes them and returns them to the actual pursuit. Cf. Jaynes’s very different analysis of the “bicameral mind” in ancient Greece and elsewhere, with religion and gods produced by the right hemisphere of the brain (413)—prior to modern, scientific consciousness. Jaynes also interprets the “superstition” of childhood sexuality in psychoanalysis as a lingering example of the bicameral mind (439).

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30. Cf. Geschwind and Iacoboni. They cite various studies confirming the functional localization of language in the left (or “dominant”) hemisphere for 99 percent of right-handed humans, but with less certainty for left-handers, who mostly demonstrate left-hemisphere or bilateral language, yet sometimes right-hemisphere. (The left brain also controls the right side of the body and vice-versa.) While the function of language is located in the left brain, particularly in Broca’s area as a distinct anatomical structure, “the right-hemisphere homologue of Broca’s region . . . [also plays a] critical role . . . in the melodic and musical aspects of speech and language” (52). 31. The dichotomy between left- and right-hemisphere functions is not a simple binary. There are aspects of the Lacanian Imaginary and Symbolic orders on both sides of the brain. See Ramachandran, Brief 140–41: “the generation and control of internally generated imagery is mainly a left-frontal [lobe] function and . . . ‘checking’ it against reality is done in the right.” The left brain has distinctive language functions (in Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas), but the right brain also processes language prosody and holistic narrative contexts (Deacon 312–13). Yet, I would argue that the Symbolic order of language and law, rationality and control, operates primarily in the left hemisphere, while the Imaginary order of perception, fantasy, and holistic intuition relates to the right, which has a greater bias toward the emotional Real of the limbic system. 32. The Solmses also use the term “symbolic” for the left hemisphere, but without reference to Lacan’s Symbolic order (Kaplan-Solms and Solms 262). Cf. Lieberman 20 on the primitive, subcortical, “reptilian” areas of the brain, “such as the cerebellum and basal ganglia, [which] play a part in regulating human language and thought.” See also Kosslyn, “Einstein’s” 278 on the left hemisphere’s encoding of “categorical” spatial relations (i.e., Symbolic ordering in Lacan’s sense) and the right’s of “coordinate” spatial relations, while both are used by the brain “to form images.” 33. See also Carter 270 on the crying and freeze responses, instead of fight or flight, in young animals threatened by danger. 34. Katharsis has been variously translated as purging, purifying, or clarifying. For an application of each of these terms to Lacan’s theory of the psychoanalytic cure, see my Theatres of Human Sacrifice. See also Lutz 90–91, 117–32 on the phenomenon of crying in relation to the limbic brain and Aristotelian or Freudian catharsis, with the persistent notion in our culture that tears at a play or movie are “cleaning up our psychic house” (118).


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35. See Solms and Turnbull 97–99, 137, 271–72 285–87 on the Freudian id and ego in relation to current neurological mechanisms and brain anatomy. See also Panksepp 167, on the animal “needs” of sex and hunger, utilizing a shared seeking system between the frontal cortex and “drive-specific systems” of the brainstem. However, Panksepp prefers the more specific concept of “a bodily need state as opposed to drive” (168). 36. Many scholars consider Seneca’s plays as closet dramas produced in his time only as readings. But Davis, “Chorus,” and Hill refute that argument, using the choral odes of Seneca’s Thyestes. See also Davis, Shifting 3–10. 37. My interpretation of Thyestes was aided by Caryl Churchill’s translation, since she is also a leading postmodern playwright. But I have also consulted other translations by Miller, Hadas, Parker, and Slavitt. 38. Yet, the Fury still uses the legacy of Tantalus, as the ghost fears, to infect his offspring: “like / a poisonous gas seeping / out of the earth or / a virus scattering / plague on my people to / lead my grandchildren to horrors” (Seneca 4). As the Fury puts it, with the ghost thirsting: “This this madness rip / through your whole house, like / this like this whirled away / thirsty for blood” (5). Later in the play, Atreus says: “something is swelling / and urging on my unwilling hands” (11)— perhaps indicating that the blood-thirsty spirit of his grandfather’s ghost has infected him. 39. See Finucane 111 on the typical Senecan ghost as “revenge-seeking” and inspiring similar vengeful ghosts in Renaissance dramas a millennium later. 40. See Davis, “Chorus” 425, on the “bestial impulses” (“feros . . . impetus,” translated by Churchill as “wickedness”) that the Chorus hopes Tantalus’s descendants will avoid, although the Fury had just commanded Tantalus to excite his grandsons’ “bestial hearts” (“ferum pectus” or “wild hearts” in Churchill’s translation [4]). Davis also points to the “bestiality” of Atreus in the similes Seneca uses for him: an Umbrian hound, an Indian tigress, and an Armenian lion. 41. Seneca, while critical of arena violence as sadistic amusement, praised the example set by gladiators and criminals who demonstrated the tragic freedom of dying bravely. Bravery, even from the vilest criminal, engaged audience sympathy in a virtuous way, clarifying the fear of death through suicidal valor. See Wistrand 13–20 for three examples of Seneca praising suicidal gladiators, including a convict who killed himself by sticking his head into the spokes of a cart en route to his arena

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execution (19). See also Barton 21 on Seneca’s praise for gladiators fighting without regard to their own wounds, and 31–32 on his philosophical emulation of gladiatorial fierceness, shown by the warrior’s glory in his wounds. However, Seneca also criticized the bloodlust of the Colosseum audience: “In the morning men are thrown before lions and bears, at noon they are thrown before the spectators” (Epistles 7.4; trans. in Wistrand 17). 42. Cf. Damasio, Looking 49–50, for his distinction between “appetites” (or “drives”), such as sex, hunger, and thirst, having internal triggers, and “emotions-proper,” including fear and anger, having mostly external triggers. Damasio also examines the lower levels of homeostatic regulation, as the foundations to human drives, motivations, emotions, and feelings: from immune responses, basic reflexes, and metabolic functions to fundamental pain and pleasure (28–37). 43. Earlier in the play, Thyestes also seems stoic in his reluctance to return to power in Argos with his brother: “You have vast power if you / can manage without power” (19). 44. See Schiesaro 147–52 on the moral “uncertainties and ambiguities” (or, I would say, tragic complexities) of Thyestes as a “Stoic sage.” See also Meltzer 320, 327–29, on Thyestes’s expression and contradiction of “Stoic sentiments” as he moves toward a more complex, “tragic recognition” of his own character, as well as his brother’s, and becomes the “archetypal tragic man in Seneca”—even though “Atreus encourages the audience to view Thyestes as ridiculous and his tragic predicament as grotesque.”

3

PHANTOM LIMBS, UNCONSCIOUS ZOMBIES, AND MULTIPLE SELVES

1. See also Ramachandran and Hirstein, “Perception” 1622–25. “We are now exploring the possibility that a long-lost phantom that has faded many years ago in an arm amputee, or even one that never existed (e.g. in some patients with a congenitally missing arm) may be lying dormant somewhere in the brain” (1625). 2. See the first chapter of Ramachandran, Brief, which summarizes his phantom limb research and mentions Lord Nelson’s argument that his own phantom arm demonstrated the possible existence of a non-corporeal soul. Cf. Ramachandran and Hirstein, “Perception” 1607–8, on the “Emergence of ‘repressed memories’ in phantoms.” See also Nasio 21–27 for a Lacanian view of the phantom limb or “phantom loved one.”


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3. See also Albright 33 on the intimacy between the reader and character of a novel: “Just as an amputee may feel phantom sensations in an absent arm or leg, so we are capable of evolving phantom sensibilities that grope outward toward experiences that never happened to our usual selves.” 4. Cf. Gazzaniga, Mind’s Past 21: “Ninety-eight percent of what the brain does is outside of conscious awareness.” He also describes how thoughts, perceptions, and choices to act are computed by the unconscious brain just prior to conscious awareness (73), which might be used to support Zizek’s notion of an unconscious cogito (considered in chapter 1 here). 5. Cf. Ridley 272–75 on the genetics of free will, “despite nature and despite nurture.” 6. See Fink, Lacanian 24–29, and Ragland-Sullivan 188–95. 7. See also Persinger 11–12, on the evolutionary “migration” of the amygdala and hippocampus in the human brain, forming parts of the temporal lobes, as the neocortex grew in size. Thus, the amygdala moved “away from its origin in the smell brain” to become the “control center for the display and experience of emotions and moods,” involving fight or flight, anger or fear, “the heights of euphoria and the depths of depression.” And the hippocampus became the “gateway to the experiences of images,” including memories and fantasies, “over which the experiencer had little control.” These specific areas and functions of the temporal lobe produce what Persinger calls the “God Experience.” 8. Cf. Persinger 1–21 on electrical activity in the temporal lobes of the normal brain (temporal lobe transients) in relation to epileptic seizures there. 9. Ramachandran argues that temporal lobe epilepsy patients “enjoy the unique privilege of gazing directly into God’s eyes every time they have a seizure” (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 179). He asks, “Could it be that human beings have actually evolved specialized neural circuitry for the sole purpose of mediating religious experience?” (183). Cf. d’Aquili and Newberg, and Newberg et al., on the mystical experience of “Absolute Universal Being”—studied neurologically. 10. Cf. Solms and Turnbull 282. 11. See Ramachandran and Blakeslee 134, 151, 155–56. 12. See Winnicott 9–12, for his object relations theory of the “good enough” mother, and Klein 215–18, on the infant’s fantasies of the mother’s good/bad breast and womb, as nurturing or devouring.

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13. Cf. La Cerra and Bingham 132 on the possible evolution of human depression: “if you were an ancestral human who was being exploited by another individual or group of individuals, a complete behavioral shutdown could abruptly force a renegotiation.” See also Panksepp 276. 14. Cf. Panksepp 145–46. The seeking system “mediates ‘wanting’ as opposed to ‘liking,’ ” with appetitive behavior stimulated by the need to “eat, drink, copulate . . .” (somewhat like Lacan’s distinction between drive, desire, and need). 15. For Lacan there are three basic structures to the human psyche: neurotic (most of us), perverse, or psychotic—involving alienation from being for perverts and neurotics (through the Father’s “No”), plus a further separation for neurotics (through the Father’s Name). See Fink, Clinical 175–79. 16. Cf. Persinger 10–11. 17. See also LeDoux, Synaptic 217, 306, and Damasio, Descartes’. 18. See also Fink, Clinical 47–49. 19. Cf. Deacon 340, 396–97. He argues that symbol using came first in human evolution, before brain expansion, in order to communicate monogamous sexual relationships and the sharing of meat with females by hunting pack males. This initial use of language, improving adaptation and survival, then promoted the genetic development of bigger brains and frontal lobe expansion in early humans. 20. Cf. Metz 4–5 on film as the lure of ego (or Self ), as a “prosthesis for primally dislocated limbs,” and on the mental machinery of cinema, outside and inside us. 21. See Kaplan-Solms and Solms 278–79, on the “structuralization of the ego,” with associative patterns acting as stimulus barriers, through specific levels of “mnemic transcription”: from whole-object, visuospatial representations in the right hemisphere to “abstract” audioverbal ones in the left. “The symbolic transcriptions,” from things to words, “provide an especially powerful shield against stimuli, because they organize the infinite diversity of real external things into a fixed lexicon of categories.” In a Lacanian view, however, such symbolization (with the word as the death of the thing) is an incomplete shielding, as it produces a powerful, disruptive remainder in the Real. Chains of primal signifiers and their Imaginary associations of desired objects also become entangled in the unconscious, creating symptomatic repetition compulsions. 22. Cf. Panksepp: “cultural forces in human societies have the ability to change emotional forces into new entities, both beautiful and horrific” (286).


4

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SHAKESPEARE’S ROMAN SHADES (TITUS ANDRONICUS AND TITUS)

1. See Rudd 204 on the theatrical use of “severed heads” in both plays. 2. Titus Andronicus was initially performed in 1590 or 1593 (McDonald). Or possibly in 1594 (Tobin). It was Shakespeare’s first tragedy (though possibly coauthored with George Peele), produced at the very beginning of his career, or just a few years later after several comedies and history plays, including Richard III. Frank Kermode notes that this play, though popular during Shakespeare’s lifetime, was already criticized by Ben Jonson in 1614 (1019). It fell into further disfavor in the rest of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Kermode himself calls it “certainly the least of the tragedies” by Shakespeare (1022). 3. According to Richard Burt (84), several low-budget versions of Titus Andronicus were made recently as cult films by Lorn Richey (1996), Christopher Dunne (1999), and Richard Griffin (2000). Burt also calls Taymor’s version a “schlock” film (82), but admits that hers “stops short of the gruesome explicitness of Dunn’s and Richey’s productions” and that she “does not represent the violence as camp” (86–87). Yet he strongly criticizes Taymor’s fascism and holocaust references, her “undeconstructed opposition” between violent parents and sanctified children (94), and her “Right-Wing feminism” (97). 4. See also Blumenthal and Taymor 184. Taymor has directed several Shakespeare plays onstage—The Tempest and Taming of the Shrew—as well as Titus Andronicus. 5. Cf. Pikli 58 on the play as a “tragic farce.” She describes Titus as an “unreflective hero” and a “tragic clown” (61). 6. Cf. Lindroth 111: “The camera registers responses to violence rather than the violent acts themselves, thus reminding audiences of their own position as responders as well as suggesting plausible responses.” As Lindroth mentions (113), Taymor herself calls this effect “Brechtian,” as she combines violence and humor to evoke self-conscious, nervous laughter in her audience. Hopkins (“ ‘A tiger’s’ ” 68) and Walker (“ ‘Now’ ” 200) likewise describe Titus as Brechtian. But Walker also finds an Artaudian theatre of cruelty in Taymor’s film. (Cf. Starks, “Cinema” 122, and Lehmann et al. 220). Walker describes the film’s Derridean relationship to most Hollywood movies: “Taymor deconstructs the notion of cinema as an inherently ‘realist,’ ‘illusionist’ medium as distinct from the more obvious artifice of the stage” (“ ‘Now’ ” 198). McCandless, however, argues that Taymor’s prior production onstage

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7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

Notes to Pages 68–73 succeeds to a far greater degree in staging trauma and deconstructing violence” than the film—while admitting he never saw that live production, only a video of it (489). “Andronicus” means “Conqueror of Man” in Latin. See Rudd 200. See also Moschovakis on the association of the name “Titus” with the Roman general, Titus Flavius Vespasianus, who besieged and recaptured Jerusalem for his father, the emperor Vespasian—demonstrating to early Christians that God had sided with them and against the Jews, through the horrible suffering of the city’s inhabitants. Cf. Tobin 223 for his argument that Shakespeare took the names “Titus” and “Saturninus” from Thomas Nashe’s play, Christ’s Tears Over Jerusalem. Cf. Blumenthal and Taymor 117–22 showing and describing her mask for Caliban in The Tempest, a primitive mud shell with simple holes for eyes and mouth, like the boy’s sack. Caliban’s mud-caked body also resembles the makeup of Roman soldiers near the start of her film, Titus. Taymor also used that technique in her staging of Stravinsky’s opera, Oedipus Rex (Blumenthal and Taymor 41). That kitchen table was a persistent set piece in Taymor’s 1994 stage version of Titus Andronicus, serving also as “a sacrificial altar and the final banquet table . . . to ground the events of the story, to bring them home” (Blumenthal and Taymor 192). In the film it is used only at the beginning, yet fulfills a similar function. In her director’s notes on the film, Taymor calls the boy’s journey “an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ time warp,” and mentions that the “coliseum” scenes were shot in Pula, Croatia, just two months before the Kosovo war (Taymor 178, 182). Taymor says she covered the soldiers and war machines in clay as a “common denominator” for the different time periods blended together and because she wanted “the image of the Chinese terracotta soldiers” that were found buried together (qtd. in Johnson-Haddad 35). As Taymor points out elsewhere, Shakespeare’s drama, like Elizabethan staging practices, also “blended times” (qtd. in Johnson-Haddad 35). Taymor borrowed the actor, but not the idea, from Noble’s film. She had already created the expanded role of Young Lucius as a witness throughout the play when she directed it onstage in 1994, at Theatre for a New Audience in New York City, two years before Noble’s film. Cf. Starks, “Cinema,” for her application of Kristeva’s theory of abjection to this film.


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15. See Rudd 200 for classical parallels to this line in Shakespeare’s text, with ancient Greek and Roman notions of appeasing the spirit of the dead with bloody sacrifice. 16. See also Blumenthal and Taymor 20 on her stage version of Titus Andronicus as (according to Blumenthal) “closer in a way to Balinese trance ritual than to traditional Western classical productions.” 17. Titus remonstrates himself, while in Taymor’s coliseum scene, for letting his unburied sons “hover on the dreadful shore of Styx” (1.1.91; Taymor 24). 18. See Blumenthal and Taymor 186 and Taymor 25. 19. Cf. 1.1.139–44, which Taymor’s film script condenses. 20. See Boyd for evidence that this scene was written by George Peele, not Shakespeare. Cf. Keller. 21. See Giddens 342–43 for a comparison of Shakespeare’s villains, Tamora and Aaron, with the Biblical characters, Tamar and Aaron. 22. See Vaughan 75 for her view that Taymor and actor Harry Lennix make Aaron empathetic to the film audience, with “the text’s oppositions between white and black, good and evil, civil and uncivil, moral and barbaric . . . imploded in the film.” 23. Cf. Welsh 156. 24. Cf. Heath 92 on Oudart’s theory of the cinematic suture as theological, involving the spectator as the Absent One, having a godlike role. 25. See Odom and Reynolds 11–13 who argue that Aaron does not follow a prior tradition of black characters as villains, although the devil in medieval drama was often depicted as black. 26. See Giddens for a similar parallel between Titus’s sacrifice of Alarbus in Shakespeare’s play and Abraham’s plan to use both knife and fire in sacrificing his son Isaac (343). 27. In both her stage and screen versions, Taymor used twigs for Lavinia’s missing hands, along with a column or tree stump as her pedestal, although in the film this becomes “heightened reality” (Taymor, qtd. in Johnson-Haddad 35). 28. Taymor cuts the lines of Titus becoming “perfect” as he studies Lavinia’s gestures, like “begging hermits in their holy prayers” (3.2.40–41). But her imagery still suggests this sacred allusion. Cf. Blumenthal and Taymor 39–40 on her use of extended, oversized hands, held by the performers in her staging of the opera, Oedipus Rex. 29. Cf. Willis on these and other ghosts in the play as avenging trauma through reenactment—in relation to today’s diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

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30. See T. Anderson on the “problematic nature of oaths and vows” in this play (301). 31. Cf. Kahn who compares Titus’s delay in vengeance to Hamlet’s, knowing that his enemies are in power, yet with Titus caught between two women—a daughter and a mother (67). 32. Cf. Schechner’s interview with Taymor, where she relates this scene to Bosnia. “You can’t live anymore. You’ve been raped by the enemy. Your life is over, you are disgraced, you are condemned—so why live?” (47). 33. Taymor’s screenplay cuts this line and has Titus distribute the arrows before his speech about soliciting heaven (133). 34. See Noble on the practice of European medicinal cannibalism during Shakespeare’s time—in relation to this play. 35. Cf. Pizzato, Theatres of Human Sacrifice on ancient Roman and Aztec god-actors. 36. See Hopkins, “ ‘A tiger’ ” 68, on the “cathartic” resolution of Taymor’s film.

5

THEATRICAL ELEMENTS IN THE MIND’S EYE

1. Cf. Ramachandran, Brief 99, 109, who argues for a specific sense of the brain’s homunculus, the “little man in the brain watching a movie screen filled with qualia,” relating it to the left supramarginal gyrus, which is “required for conjuring up an internal image.” 2. Cf. Carter 115 on the orbitalfrontal cortex as the area of the brain where emotions become conscious feelings. 3. Cf. Edelman and Tononi 245–46n20. See also Carter 128, 133 on the “ceaseless, internal chatter” of unconscious brain areas, singing together as a “chorus” to produce conscious, subjective awareness. 4. Cf. Tomasello’s argument that human cognition involves biological, cultural, and personal evolution—in phylogenetic, historical, and ontogenetic timeframes (202–3, 216–17). 5. Cf. Vogeley et al. who map various essential features of the “human self ” (ownership, body-centered spatial perspectivity, and long-term unity of beliefs) in the prefrontal cortex. They also refer to Baars’s theatrical model of consciousness and state that the “PFC plays a cardinal role in that ‘theater’ ” (343, 357). 6. Cf. British director Peter Brook who describes cinema’s “flash[ing] on to a screen images from the past” as being like “what the mind does to itself,” in contrast to theatre’s “assert[ing] itself in the present,” which makes it “more real than the normal stream of consciousness” (99). See also Ebrahimian.


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7. See also Kosslyn, Ghosts 67, on the paradox of the eyes’ movement (or mind’s eye’s) as stabilizing the object viewed. 8. The rectangular instead of oval screen in cinema probably developed from the prior proscenium tradition of theatre (and the picture frame in Euro-American art). See Brewster and Jacobs 147, 168. 9. Cf. Galaburda et al. 263 where Kosslyn points out that the creation of mental imagery is a slower and more “constructive process” than perceptual representation in the brain, because “the backward connections are not as precise as the forward.” 10. Cf. Carter 39, 43 on the brain’s “need for a conceptual template within which to place a new sensation in order for it to be conscious.” 11. Cf. Coleridge’s famous description (in his 1817 Biographia Literaria, chapter 14) of creating “supernatural, or at least romantic” characters in his poetry, “so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith” (397). 12. See also Hochberg and Brooks on the cognitive perception of movement onscreen. 13. Ramachandran argues that the brain’s conceptual or perceptual filling in, as metaphorical and revocable or physical and irrevocable, “can be logically regarded as two ends of a continuum, [but] evolution has seen fit to separate them” (Ramachandran and Blakeslee 242–43). This might be related to Lacan’s argument that the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real orders are distinct, yet interdependent, like interlocking Borromean rings. 14. See Ramachandran and Blakeslee 104–6 on ghost and angel sightings “by otherwise sane intelligent people” that may be due to the “fairly common” Charles Bonnet syndrome that afflicted James Thurber. “Is it any surprise that roughly one third of Americans claim to have seen angels?” 15. See also Baars, Cognitive 340–44. 16. Cf. Kauffman’s theory of order and entropy, complex “self-organization” and natural selection, as necessary forces in evolution (vii, 8). See also La Cerra and Bingham on the “Life History Regulatory System” in all evolutionary organisms and the particular “Adaptive Regulatory Network” of each human brain. 17. Cf. Geschwind and Iacoboni 53: “the left frontal lobe is more specialized for positive emotions related to approach and exploratory mechanisms, and the right for negative, avoidance-related reactions.” They also indicate that the left frontal lobe may be specialized for routine

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18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

Notes to Pages 109–116 since there is evidence that the right is specialized for novelty with its attentional mechanisms (62). Edwards-Lee and Saul argue that the “attentional abilities of the right frontal lobe contribute to its function in visuospatial cognition”—through “global attention to the environment”— while the left hemisphere “is analytical and attends to details” (306). They cite evidence “that verbal analytical processes of the left hemisphere are subserved by an organization that emphasizes processing or transfer within a region, whereas the spatial-gestalt functions of the right hemisphere are subserved by an organization that optimizes transfer across regions” (314). Ramachandran also calls the right hemisphere an “anomaly detector” (Emerging 41). Cf. Levin 17–42 on Freudian aspects of the left and right hemispheres. Cf. Volkan on the human need for enemies and allies. Cf. Ramachandran and Blakeslee 239: even one look at a “jumble of splotches,” when it reveals a hidden picture, permanently alters “neurons in the temporal lobe . . . after the initial brief exposure.” See also Baars, Cognitive 359–60. Cf. Carter, Exploring Consciousness 124, on the fractal pattern, “like a set of Russian dolls,” of neurons as mini-brains within the minimodules that form the processing modules of the brain—and of many brains then forming “group minds” through external behavior.

6

GHOSTS OF HAMLET ONSCREEN

1. For the possible influence of Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Euripides’s Orestes (in Latin translations or English adaptations) on Shakespeare’s writing of Hamlet, especially with Pylades/Horatio, matricide, and graveyard parallels, see Kott and Schleiner. The latter claims that “Shakespeare’s Hamlet is much more a version—even a purposive revision—of Orestes than of Oedipus,” but with the furies “loosed upon Hamlet in advance” (37, 43). 2. I have chosen not to consider Rodney Bennett’s 1980 BBC production of Hamlet, starring Derek Jacobi, where the ghost is portrayed as a stiff figure in armor on a bare stage. 3. Cf. Crane 149. She applies a cognitive linguistic analysis to Hamlet (without reference to the recent films) and finds that he “invents not only the bourgeois subject but also its postmodern disintegration,”


4.

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6.

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showing the tragic “hollowness of this version of the new self even as he embraces it.” See also Demastes 1–3. He finds a connection between Hamlet’s discovery of “providence” and current scientific theories of material consciousness and complexity: “we, too, may soon be able to follow Hamlet and retune ourselves to a long-forgotten integral natural harmony and to become participants in rather than mere auditors/ observers/manipulators of this world” (3). For another sense of the ordinary world’s penetration by demonic spirits, through the meeting of psychic disturbance and objective truth in this play, see Reynolds on the relationship between Roman Polanski’s film of Macbeth and the massacre of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and others in their home by members of the Manson family in 1969, a year before the film was made. See Finucane on the Protestant belief, during the Reformation, that ghosts were “illusory, demonic or angelic,” while many Catholics believed they were “returned souls of the dead” (93). This is precisely Hamlet’s dilemma when he encounters his medieval Ghost in Shakespeare’s partly Catholic and partly Protestant play, as Finucane discusses (112–13). Cf. Smidt 437 who claims that “Shakespeare probably did not care too much for ghosts,” including his own apparent role as the Ghost in Hamlet. Greenblatt does explore the contradiction between the Ghost’s claim that he resides in Purgatory and his call for revenge, more like a Senecan ghost residing in Hell (237). Greenblatt summarizes the play’s personal and political issues, involving the playwright’s family history and the religious conflicts of Elizabethan England: “a young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperament, is haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost” (240). See also Simmons and Weller. Cf. Freud 309–11. Cf. Hirsh on the theatrical and cinematic history of removing the famous “To be” speech from its original context as a “feigned soliloquy” spoken to mislead Ophelia, Polonius, and Claudius (193). Richardson filmed the play in the daytime while presenting a stage performance of it at night with the same cast, costumes, and set—along with some added locations using the theatre building’s cellars and tunnels, especially for Hamlet’s initial encounter with the Ghost. Yet he made his film much more cinematic that the Colleran/Gielgud version. See Meier 178–79.

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12. The Ghost’s offscreen voice was also performed by Williamson, increasing the sense of the apparition as a personal projection (Meier 185). 13. See Charnes 8 on the “cinematic intertextuality” of Zeffirelli’s casting choices, given the other films where Gibson and Close had already appeared. 14. Cf. Sloboda 144 who sees Zeffirelli’s initial funeral scene as resolving a creative debt to Olivier’s prior movie by “symbolically interring him.” 15. See Lacan, “Desire” 12: “the play is dominated by the Mother as Other.” See also McCombe’s critique: “Lacan’s and Zeffirelli’s Hamlets are far less complex than Shakespeare’s play would suggest” (125). McCombe relates the film to Zizek’s view of Hamlet. Cf. Starks, “Displaced” 170; Lupton and Reinhard 82–86; and Garber 130–65. 16. Cf. Quinn 2, who calls Zeffirelli’s film “Gertrude-centered” and sees it as answering T. S. Eliot’s charge that the play lacks an “objective correlative.” While not casting an actress younger than Hamlet to play his mother, like Olivier, Zeffirelli did cast a 43-year-old Close and 34-year-old Gibson, enhancing the erotic, Oedipal connection. 17. Lacan’s essay on Hamlet points to the lack of proper mourning rites, in the “play of the symbolic register,” along with the mother’s desire, as sources of Hamlet’s tragic indecision (“Desire” 38–39). Cf. J. R. Porter; W. M. S. Russell; Boyer; Blacker; and Finucane on the lack of proper burial as a common reason for angry or pleading ghosts (and for the “grateful dead” if the rite is then corrected) in the ancient Middle East, Greece, Rome, medieval and modern Europe, and Japan. 18. Cf. Adelman on the “contaminated maternal body” in Shakespeare’s play as a “specter” that paralyzes Hamlet’s will, more than his father’s ghost (17, 30). 19. Cf. Starks, “Displaced” 171–72. She views Zeffirelli’s Hamlet as growing out of “the 1980s–1990s backlash against feminism common in many popular Hollywood films” and sees Branagh’s version as continuing “in this conservative vein.” 20. Zeffirelli cuts the list of gods, but includes the following lines: “a form indeed / Where every god did seem to set his seal” (3.4.61–62). 21. Cf. Simmons, who calls Gertrude a “sexual predator” and says, “As viewers, we feel that if the Ghost did not appear at this point, fullfledged intercourse would follow” (115). 22. Zeffirelli cuts Gertrude’s lines in defense of Claudius, when Laertes blames the king for responsibility in Polonius’s death (4.5). This allows the film viewer to consider her as more aligned with Hamlet. Zeffirelli


23.

24.

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26. 27.

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29. 30. 31. 32.

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also cuts Claudius’s reading of a letter from Hamlet about his return to England (4.7). Thus, Hamlet appears at Ophelia’s gravesite like a ghost to Claudius, who had sent him to England to be executed. Branagh himself refers to the film as “the full-text version” in his interview with Gary Crowdus. But scholars dispute the validity of the second folio as a full text, pointing to other versions from Shakespeare’s time: the first and second quartos. For example, Bourus and Campbell both argue that Zeffirelli’s Hamlet (and Richardson’s, according to Bourus), based on the first quarto, may correspond to the original staging of Shakespeare’s play, as a simple revenge drama, with “an explicit alliance” between Hamlet and Gertrude (Bourus 188). Although the film’s exterior scenes were shot at Blenheim Palace, an eighteenth-century mansion (and eventual boyhood home of Winston Churchill), the interior scenes and costumes were designed to create a nineteenth-century setting. See Turim on the history of flashbacks in cinema, especially the contrast between American silent film and European avant-garde experiments in subjective imagery. Cf. Bordwell and Thompson 94–97 on Citizen Kane. This also assumes that young Hamlet, not just the movie audience, sees the flashbacks as the Ghost speaks—and sees them as the father’s attempt to share his memories, not as the son’s own imaginings. Cf. Burnett, who mentions the eerie soundtrack at the Ghost’s appearance, plus the camera’s movements while in the Ghost’s POV, as indicating its demonic possibility. Cf. Robson who sees in Branagh’s numerous “flashbacks,” and his avoidance of the Oedipal reading, an Oedipal attempt to outdo the prior filmmakers of Hamlet, Olivier and Zeffirelli, as cinematic fathers (254–55). Robson thus views Branagh’s Hamlet as a “prosthetic body inhabited by the ghost of its own spectralizing performance” (256). See also Lehmann 180–85, who finds an Oedipal struggle in the film between Branagh and Derek Jacobi (as elder Shakespearean actor and mentor in the role of Claudius). Cf. Smith 143–44 and Lanier. Cf. Crowl 188–89 who finds the influence of Orson Welles in Almereyda’s “anti-Branagh” Hamlet. Cf. Walker, “ ‘Harsh’ ” 319–27. Almereyda shot the bomber images “off the TV during the bombing in Bosnia” (135). The initial sequence of Hamlet editing his video ghosts was added after test screenings of the film by Miramax “yielded the

276

33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

Notes to Pages 146–163 second worst scores in the company’s history” and Almereyda decided a more intimate opening was needed. Thus, the ghosts of that first audience also shaped the final film and its director’s choices. Cf. Lehmann’s Zizekian view of Almereyda’s Hamlet. “For the question is no longer ‘to be or not to be’ but, more simply, how to be in a world in which everyone is a ghost” (98). She finds various cinematic effects in Shakespeare’s original script, arguing that Hamlet “cannot represent that which he has within except through cinematic analogy,” as exemplified by Almereyda’s filmmaker within the film (96). See Almereyda’s comments on Olivier’s Hamlet and other film versions, as “An Inventory of Ghosts” to his (131–33). Cf. Crowl 191–92. The end of the film was initially shot with Fortinbras arriving by (offscreen) helicopter to take over Denmark Corp. at the death of Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet in a rooftop fencing match. The fight location was kept, but Fortinbras’s arrival edited out, because the dissatisfied director could not reshoot that part. The ultimate ending with MacNeil’s news reading was added instead. See Almereyda 127–29, 142–43. Almereyda credits Ethan Hawke for offering him the Vietnamese Buddhist monk’s prerecorded videotape (ix). Cf. Ethan Hawke’s observation that perhaps “the Ghost breathed nothing but evil into his son’s ear, . . . burdening the mind of his child with the baggage of his own vengeful anger and lust for power” (qtd. in Almereyda, xiv). Hawke relates this to himself and others in his current audience, especially his Gen-X peers: “How many people feel lost and drowning under the weight of their parents’ judging eye?”

7

SELECTIVE SPIRITS IN NEURAL EVOLUTION

1. Cf. Damasio, Looking 117–18: “the body-sensing areas constitute a sort of theatre where not only the ‘actual’ body states can be ‘performed,’ but varied assortments of ‘false’ body states can be enacted as well, for example as-if-body states, filtered body states, and so on.” 2. In using Edelman’s ideas, I move back and forth between three books, two by Edelman alone and one coauthored with Giulio Tononi. I will refer to the theories of all three as Edelman’s (pace Tononi), since the latter book rehearses and builds upon ideas in the former two. 3. According to Gazzaniga, The Mind’s Past 55, “Although billions of cells remain in place after neurogenesis, as many as 50 percent die off during development.”


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4. Cf. LeDoux, Synaptic 4–5, 67–68, 73–79, 87–90, on current debates between “selectionist nativism” (promoted by Edelman) and “instructional constructivism.” LeDoux takes a position between these camps, which is also convincing to me. “It is probably best to think of instruction and selection as two complementary means by which circuits can be constructed rather than as mutually exclusive theories of brain development” (79). 5. See also McNamara, Mind 58. “A memory is stabilized if it resonates (roughly: matches) with an item from either the environment or from another part of the cognitive system.” 6. Cf. LeDoux, Synaptic 50–52. 7. Cf. Varela et al. 192–200, on “multiple levels or units of selection working in parallel” in the natural drift of coevolution—of organisms and environments evolving in relation to each other (even prior to the vast changes in environments brought about by the human species). They find Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection compatible with their theory of natural drift. They also relate various ideas of Buddhism to evolutionary theory and cognitive science. 8. Cf. Cantor et al. for a cognitive study of various possible selves— positive and negative, desired and feared, past, present, and future— involving particular motivations and concepts in individual college students. See also Ross and Wilson 240. 9. Cf. Siegel 169–70, 321, where he relates the psychotherapeutic notion of “resonance” to Edelman’s theory of reentrant mapping, involving “clusters of neurons, circuits, systems, hemispheres, or entire brains (as in interpersonal communication).” See also Blackmore 197–200, on group selection in meme replication (through religious practices, for example) as a force beyond genetic evolution. Cf. Rose 200–202, for a summary (and critique) of V. C. Wynne-Edwards’s theory of “group selection” in animals, William Hamilton and E. O. Wilson’s notion of “kin selection” in sociobiology, and Robert Trivers’s idea of “reciprocal altruism.” 10. See LeDoux, Synaptic 92. “by the thirtieth week of pregnancy, the heart rate of the fetus changes when sounds occur in the environment. The fetal brain can even discriminate environmental events and can learn and retain information about environmental stimuli.” 11. For more on group selection and “evolutionary altruism,” see Sober and Wilson, especially 330–32. See also Rolston 249–80 and Wright. 12. See Damasio, Looking 162–64, on the “genomic basis for brains capable of producing cooperative behavior” (especially in the ventromedial

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13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

Notes to Pages 169–178 frontal lobes), surviving more often in human evolution, toward more civilized and moral cultures, “beyond the restrictions of the inner groups” and battles between them. Damasio also describes the “trait of dominance” in social emotions, as both positive and negative. Cf. Feher Gurewich 5 on the Other as the “intersubjective structure of the human psyche” (in the unconscious) according to Lacanian theory, as distinct from other schools of psychoanalysis. Cf. LeDoux, Synaptic 246, on various current interpretations of the “exact role of dopamine in motivation, reward, and habit learning.” Cf. Baars, Cognitive 349–50, on the evolution of two operating modes in the human nervous system: “a parallel (unconscious) mode and a serial (conscious and limited-capacity) mode”—to allow both global broadcasting and whole system processing. Cf. Bucci 22–23, 32–34, 51, and 67–74. She develops a further critique of Freud’s metapsychology of “energic” drives, using cognitive science and neurological evidence—yet without any consideration of Lacan. Cf. Crane 18–22. She finds that the Lacanian theory of the unconscious includes “both cognitive and Freudian versions,” while sharing with cognitive theory a sense of the human subject as fragmented, lacking unitary agency, and being formed by culture acting through language (18–20). But Crane also points to cognitive theories of human babies having “innate linguistic capacities,” and to Edelman’s idea of innate values, plus Damasio’s somatic markers, as disputing Lacan’s notion of human language as “profoundly alienating” (21–22). In making this distinction, she relies on Fredric Jameson’s summary of Lacan, considering only the Symbolic order of language as entering the subject “from outside,” not the primal role of Imaginary desires or innate structures of the Real (21). For Lacan also defines the unconscious as “structured like a language” and as “the discourse of the Other.” See Aitken and Trevarthen, plus Siegel 101–2, on the infant’s “primary intersubjectivity” in its first few months of communication with others, then its “secondary intersubjectivity” by nine months of age, developing internal parental images of “virtual others”— invoked as attachment patterns throughout life. See also Neisser, “Five Kinds” 42–43, who uses Trevarthen’s research to support his notion of an “interpersonal self,” as one of five types of self-knowledge, along with ecological, extended, private, and conceptual. Cf. Neisser, “Self-narratives” 16.

Notes to Pages 179–194 19. 20. 21. 22.

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Cf. Cozolino 309 on OCD. See also Gazzaniga, Social Brain. See Fink, Clinical 172–79. See Cozolino 230. “the child’s first reality is the parents’ unconscious, transferred . . . well before the articulation of self-identity. Because it is implanted in early implicit memory, it is never experienced as anything other than the self.” He also describes (with reference to the work of Alice Miller) the “tragedy” of parents aware of the painful alienation of having had narcissistic parents themselves, of being caretakers to them as children and vowing never to make their own children feel that way, yet repeating it with them. See also Eagle 53–54 on the “internalized object” in Fairbairn’s sense of a personal experience that has not been completely “digested” and may then recur as the obsessive thoughts of a ghostly “saboteur”— like the “soul of a deceased person” in folk literature—or of “alien ‘presences.’ ” Cf. Edwards-Lee and Saul 310–11 on the right hemisphere as “responsible for the aural and visual comprehension of emotion, . . . the retrieval of emotional memory, . . . [and] the expression of emotion through speech, intonation, . . . and body gesturing.” See also Cozolino 80: “Instead of having two equivalent and redundant hemispheres, humans have evolved in such a way as to slow the growth of the left hemisphere so that neural space can be preserved for the development of language and other functions.” See Solms and Turnbull 23–31, 90–92 on posterior and anterior projection and association areas, involved, along with limbic and brainstem visceral emotions, in “bottom-up” processing. See also Siegel 197, who compares the left brain’s top-down view to the right’s “bottom-up perspective” (197). See also Banyas 97 on the evolution of language functions in the left brain due to “the earlier advent of sign language—communication in which the right hand took the lead and the left hemisphere, which controlled this hand, took on the role of organizing its sequential gestures.” See Nesse and Lloyd, who compare the views of evolutionary psychology and psychoanalysis on repression as self-deception, while finding benefits to the integration of these disciplines, like Cozolino. Cozolino uses this term in reference to Gazzaniga’s (and LeDoux’s) research on split-brain patients, who exhibit bizarre confabulation symptoms after the corpus callosum connecting their left and right

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31. 32. 33.

34.

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Notes to Pages 194–199 brains has been damaged or surgically cut. Their left hemisphere fills in the gaps in experience and memory not coming from the right, thus showing that in all human brains the left side may create “defense mechanisms that distort reality in order to reduce anxiety,” since it is “the core mechanism of reflexive social language . . . [and] the spokesperson for our conscious reflexive self ” (Cozolino 113–14). See also Ramachandran and Blakeslee 136, 147–55, 280n5; Solms and Turnbull 82, 245–47; and Gazzaniga, “FortyFive.” See also Siegel 197–98 on the vertical, intraregional linkages of the left brain, “designed for a categorical [linear and linguistic] response to routine stimuli,” in contrast to the horizontal, interregional linkages of the right, “designed for newly assembled [holistic and spatial] responses to novel stimuli.” Cf. Goleman 12. See Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language, Tales of Love, Powers of Horror, and Black Sun. Cf. Schore 238–39: “In the middle of the second year . . . the father first begins to become an emotional object on a par with the mother, thereby shifting the infant from primarily dyadic to triadic object relations. His increasing role . . . influences . . . the experience-dependent maturation of the dorsolateral system” and its ties to the left hemisphere. But see also 482, on the infant’s “single word speech” (saying “no” or “good”) at that point in development, which is based in the right hemisphere and in “early affectively-focused language interactions” with the primary caretaker, through “right hemisphere-to-right hemisphere dialogue.” Cf. Schore 492–93 on the “nascent self ” emerging at 18 months of age, through imitation of the mother and “mirror self-recognition reactions,” along with the “emergent function of a structurally mature and integrated right hemisphere.” He refers to various psychoanalytic theorists, as well as neurological research, but not to Lacan. See also Gazzaniga, “Forty-Five” 657–58 on the facial recognition of self and other in the adult brain. Cf. Cozolino 157 where he uses Dennett’s concept of the Self as a “center of narrative gravity,” involving a “matrix of memories” that come from the Other: “we don’t spin these tales, but rather the tales spin us.” Cf. Solms and Turnbull 213 on the anatomy of dreaming, in the normal brain, shown by functional-imaging studies as being “almost identical to” schizophrenic hallucination, except that the latter is primarily audioverbal.


8

281

NOH DESIRES AND THE OTHERS

1. Cf. biologist Edward Wilson’s theory of the Apollonian and Dionysian, neoclassical and romantic aspects of “consilience” between the sciences and arts, through the “coevolution” of genes and culture, as shown in the debates between modernist New Critics and postmodern deconstructionists (214–18). He also refers to Edmund Wilson’s similar theory in 1926 of neoclassical and romantic oscillations in literature. 2. Each human brain is unique, with distinctive neural networks; but all humans share a common brain anatomy. Cf. Houshmand et al. 118–19 and Levin 117–18. 3. For similarities between Christianity and Buddhism, see Hanh. See also Blackmore; Goleman; Houshmand et al. Revel and Ricard; Varela; Varela and Shear; and Varela et al. on connections between Buddhism and neuroscience. 4. Cf. Epstein 28–31 on the “Realm of the Hungry Ghosts” in Buddhism and Freudian psychotherapy. 5. The original authorship of Matsukaze has long been credited to Kan’ami, Zeami’s father. But recent scholarship shows that only one sequence of the play was connected to Kan’ami and it was probably an independent dance piece with text by an unknown author and the music composed by Kan’ami (Tyler, Japanese 183). The rest of the play, except for another short section, was written by Zeami (194). See also Goff who regards Matsukaze as “first performed by a dengaku [Noh] actor and later revised by Kan’ami and then Zeami” (65). She explores intertextual references between that play, Yukihira’s poetry, and The Tale of Genji. 6. Cf. Houshmand et al. 165–67 on the mental body, akin to the nonphysical self in dreams, that a person’s consciousness becomes in death, according to Buddhist philosophy (in relation to modern neuroscience). After a series of dreamlike experiences, that mental body also perishes and the person’s next life begins, as a fetus in a new womb—carrying its prior karmic traces. See also Rinpoche 180–81. 7. Cf. Terasaki 236–45 on the conflict of individual desires against Buddhist doctrine and social class in Matsukaze, with reference to Lacanian theory and Derridean deconstruction. 8. According to Tyler, Zeami used both names for the play’s title, Matsukaze Murasame, and “Autumn Rain probably took more lines of the text than she does now” ( Japanese 187). Her name means “the kind of rain that falls hard, then gently, in fits and starts . . . particularly the cold rains of late autumn.” The two terms were often “paired poetic images” in medieval Japanese verse.

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9. See Terasaki 252–53. 10. Early Noh theatre, from the twelfth century until the time of Zeami, was performed at festivals and religious ceremonies to bring Buddhism “to the common people by means of popular entertainment” (Terasaki 4). The players were scorned by warrior-aristocrats as being in the lowest social level until the company headed by Zeami and his father Kan’ami obtained patronage at the court of the shogun, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, and then evolved as an elite form of theatre for the samurai class (5). 11. Cf. Steven Brown 80–85 on the exorcism onstage in another Noh play, Aoi no Ue. 12. Cf. Steven Brown 25–30 on the Noh actor “becoming the body of the other as if possessed” in meditating on the character’s mask in the offstage mirror room and while performing onstage, as “imago made flesh”— according to Zeami’s theories and exemplified by Matsukaze’s dance with the pine tree. Brown also explores Zeami’s theory of yugen or “sublime elegance,” as “symbolic capital” in the feudal politics of his time (30–33). 13. Cf. Terasaki 261: “Matsukaze’s hallucination is like Julia Kristeva’s theory of the semiotic, filled with pre-Oedipal maternal space and energy . . . repressed by the restraint of the symbolic, and . . . now unharnessed, irrupting into a frenzy of poetic outpouring.” 14. Cf. Pizzato, “Soyinka’s Bacchae.” 15. See Pizzato, “Nietzschean,” on the ghosts in Our Town. 16. See Pizzato, Theatres, on the Aztec god, Tezcatlipoca, in Valdez’s Zoot Suit. See also Ann Wilson on the limits of realism in Churchill’s ghost plays. Cf. Weinstock 4–6. 17. See Kovacs. 18. See Lyotard and Baudrillard on little stories and simulacra (instead of modernist metanarratives of authentic truth) as defining the postmodern era since the 1960s. 19. Alejandro Amenábar was born in Chile in 1972, but his family moved to Spain in 1973 after Pinochet’s coup. 20. See Freud 258–59 and Lacan, Écrits 7. See also Lacan, Four 56. Nicole Kidman reportedly hated her own portrayal of Grace in The Others and became physically ill when she saw herself in the finished film onscreen (“Kidman”). She also tried to get out of her contract during the shooting (“Kidman Wanted”).

9

BRAIN STAGES

1. Cf. Mithen, who “follow[s] in Donald’s footsteps,” but as an archeologist drawing on ideas from psychology, rather than the other way around


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5. 6.

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9.

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(10–11). Mithen “highly recommend[s]” Donald’s work, yet faults it for oversimplifying the archeological data and for underestimating the cognitive ability of living apes, in distinguishing the evolution of Homo erectus with a mimetic culture distinct from apes’ episodic awareness (227n4). See Donald, Origins 124–29, 134–35, 147–61, 168–74, 182–86, 382. Cf. Damasio, Looking 37–45, for his tree model of social feelings, as the leaves extending from the prior evolutionary branches of emotions, drives and motivations, pain and pleasure behaviors, and immune responses, basic reflexes, and metabolic regulation—all of which are present in the human brain and nervous system. Cf. Gallup on the basic awareness of self in humans, chimpanzees, and orangutans (but not gorillas) as shown with mirror experiments—in relation to “the widely held view in social psychology [from G. H. Mead] that the self is a byproduct of social experience” (123). Gallup points out that “chimpanzees reared in social isolation are incapable of recognizing themselves in mirrors.” See also Byrne 100–18. Cf. Ramachandran, Brief 121, who questions whether “the Gallup mirror test [is] really a valid test for awareness of self.” See also Donald, Origins 149–151, on episodic memory in mammals and birds, as they live their lives “entirely in the present, as a series of concrete episodes,” yet also use the more archaic and structurally distinct “procedural memory . . . of learned action patterns.” Humans have both, plus “semantic memory” (152). Cf. Byrne 54–79 on various aspects of imitation as “social learning” among apes. See also Donald, Origins 190–91. See also Banyas 90. Cf. Geschwind and Iacoboni 52–53, plus EdwardsLee and Saul 306–7 on the right hemisphere’s comprehension and output of language prosody, expressing the emotional content of speech. Cf. Shlain on the specific contribution of females to the evolution of hominid mimetic consciousness through the temporal relations of menses and moon stages. See also McNamara 67 on the evolution of “concealed ovulation” in female humans as a “gradual transfer of control of sexual responding from limbic to cortical sites.” Cf. Nelson who argues for “an ontogenetic equivalent of the mimetic phylogenetic stage projected by Donald’s thesis”—with evidence of 14-month-old infants using adults for “social mirroring” and thus finding a primary sense of “self ” in the “other,” through body movement and postures (101, 104). Certain postmodern forms of avant-garde theatre have stressed mimetic media more than linguistic text. See Marranca on “image theatre” and Ebrahimian on “cinematic theatre.”

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10. Cf. Donald, Origins, on ancient Greece as the “birthplace of theoretic civilization”—involving “great advances in theater” and many other areas of human culture (340–41). 11. See Fink, Clinical 241–42. 12. Various types of mirror neurons have been discovered by Rizzolatti and his colleagues: grasping-with-the-hand (selective for particular grips), grasping-with-the-mouth, holding, and tearing (Churchland 108). Thus, unconscious motor commands are made, in the spectator’s brain, to mime such movements. They may be inhibited, yet are “used to interpret what is seen,” especially by mirror-stage infants rehearsing self and other movements (110). 13. Cf. Ramachandran, Brief 80–81 and “Mirror Neurons.” He argues that this discovery in primates helps to explain the “great leap forward” in hominid evolution forty-thousand years ago, as a few of our ancestors invented new tools, which were then imitated by others using their mirror neurons, rapidly spreading the cultural transformations. See also Lacan’s notion of an “intra-organic mirror” in the cerebral cortex, although he was theorizing this a half-century before the discovery of primate mirror neurons (Écrits 6). 14. See David Wilson on the “innate psychology of moral systems that evolved by group selection to suppress self-serving behaviors in our own species”—even with our human history of religious “evils perpetrated in God’s name” (32). See also Sober and Wilson. 15. Cf. Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of “Christian pantheism” with God as both prime mover and teleological “Omega” point of nature’s evolution (171, 240). See also Paul Fiddes’s theory of an alienated Christian God, suffering through the free will of all creation (225–26), and physicist Freeman Dyson’s idea of God learning and growing as the universe unfolds (119). 16. Cf. Banyas 104 and Torey 236–39.

EPILOGUE 1. Cf. Fink, Clinical 178–79, on the stages of psychotic paranoia (prior to primal alienation) and perversity (prior to Oedipal separation) that are normal developments of neurotic brains—and traps for psychotic and perverse minds—according to Lacanian theory. 2. Cf. Rose for a biologist’s critique of Dawkins and Dennett (including the latter’s book, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) as being guilty of ultraDarwinian reductionism.


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3. Even biologist Dawkins, famous for his theory that genes and memes use human bodies and brains as mere “vehicles,” claims that we can still “rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (qtd. in Blackmore 241). Blackmore, on the other hand, argues that humans have no “free will” since the Self is an illusion, “just a story that forms part of a vast memeplex, and a false story at that,” like the deceptive meme complexes of religion (202–3, 237). Cf. Microsoft Word inventor Richard Brodie’s explanation of the meme as a “virus of the mind” and Aaron Lynch’s theory of popular memetic beliefs as “thought contagions.” See also biologist Edward Wilson, who finds a specific sense of “free will” in the brain’s neural complexity—despite the “self ” being an illusion, as an “actor” in a “perpetually changing drama,” lacking full control, while decisions are actually made by the unconscious brain: “strings dancing the puppet ego” (119–20). 4. In comparing humans with chimpanzees and rats, Panksepp discerns the mother’s primal role in guiding “play and initial social interactions.” Yet he finds a change in human rough-and-tumble play with “ritualized dominance sports” that create an “arena for demonstrating one’s acquired and aggressive skills” (286). One might also relate this human extension of “ingrained ludic impulses” to the aggressive skills of stage dramas and action movies. 5. Cf. Changeux 383, on the “mental Darwinism” of competing “prerepresentations” in the brains of artists and scientists: “fragmentary images of sketches of mental representations . . . [that] pop up spontaneously and transiently in the brain” and then combine with memories and current perceptions until “one ‘recombination’ wins out.”


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Index x abandonment 44, 194 abjection 10, 35, 41, 50–53, 64, 73–76, 79–80, 89, 96, 98–99, 113, 118, 121, 123–24, 132, 138, 154, 156, 162, 193, 196, 206, 211, 220–21, 244, 260 n.12, 268 n.14 abuse 108, 120, 123, 132–33, 156, 192 actor character as 94 family 19, 230 film 71, 126, 128, 136, 142, 149, 154–55, 268 n.13, 269 n.22 internal (brain) 18, 32, 99–103, 107, 112, 164, 235, 285 n.3 theatrical 2, 5–7, 9, 12–13, 15, 34, 65, 183, 203–7, 209, 236, 247, 255 n.23, 270 n.35, 275 n.28, 282 n.12 see also interactor (Zizek) adaptation cinematic 64, 67–69, 157 evolutionary 7, 11–12, 22, 29, 42–43, 59, 143, 169–70, 179–80, 204, 256 n.30, 257 n.3, 266 n.19 neural 108, 190, 194, 271 n.16 Adelman, Janet 274 Aeschylus 31–38, 43, 44, 46, 98, 241, 272 n.1 afterlife 27–28, 46, 113, 155, 173, 204, 213, 221, 227 Aitken, Kenneth 278 n.18 Albright, Carol Rausch 256 n.29

Albright, Daniel 265 n.3 alienation 2, 20–25, 33–35, 39, 45, 60–62, 108, 111, 177–81, 183–86, 193, 195–203, 211, 220–22, 237–38, 254 n.21, 266 n.15, 266 n.17, 278 n.17, 279 nn.22–23, 284 n.15, 284 n.1 see also separation (Lacanian) alien presence 279 n.23 see also ego-alien force Almereyda, Michael 68, 145–60, 182, 193, 275 n.30, 275–76 nn.32–37 alter-ego 86, 227 Amenábar, Alejandro 213–27 amygdala 57–58, 60, 188–91, 194, 199, 237, 265 n.7 ancient Egypt 28–30, 74, 96, 130, 254 n.22, 259 n.9, 260 n.13 ancient Greece 2, 30–44, 64, 67, 96, 98, 105, 109, 112, 115, 203–4, 251 n.1, 255 n.23, 260 n.17, 261 n.25, 261 n.29, 269 n.15, 284 n.10 ancient Rome 30, 43, 45–53, 64, 67–96, 98–99, 105, 115, 241, 253 n.11, 253 n.13, 254 n.22, 269 n.15, 270 n.35 Anderson, Joseph 4, 252 n.9 Anderson, Thomas 270 n.30 Andresen, Jensine 251 n.5 animal actor in ritual/theatre 29 ancestors 245

306

Index

animal —continued behavior 164 brain (within human) 41–44, 51, 57, 60–62, 64, 66, 72, 79, 84, 96–98, 107, 111, 121, 123, 144, 146, 203, 205, 208, 211, 227, 243, 245 consciousness 165–72, 177, 229 emotions 18, 25, 32, 97–98, 152, 255 n.26 instincts 10, 52, 62, 183, 219, 223, 235, 263 n.35 memory 167 nature 20–22, 43–45, 49, 123, 242 offering 27–28, 85, 94, 260 n.11 perception 164, 166 social 237 species (nonhuman) 10–11, 13, 38, 42, 60–61, 73, 100, 161, 233, 248, 255 n.28, 256 n.29, 258 n.14, 262 n.33, 277 n.9 spirits/totems 170–71, 254 n.20 see also bird; mammal; primate; and reptile angel 86, 146, 156, 212, 216, 222, 243, 271 n.14, 273 n.5 anterior cingulate gyrus 57, 60, 189, 242 anxiety 3, 17, 22–23, 30, 48, 60–63, 177, 185–87, 193–97, 200, 204, 217, 219, 221, 223, 226, 238, 242–46, 280 n.29 appetite 45, 87, 193 appetitive-interest circuits 36–37, 60, 193 archeology 25, 229, 282 n.1 Aristotle 43, 176–77, 232 Armstrong, Gordon 259 n.8 Ashbrook, James 256 n.29 association 1–2, 6, 16, 21, 24, 39–40, 60, 70, 103, 106, 120, 126, 145, 148, 152, 186, 188–89, 192–93, 195, 206, 220, 226, 258 n.13, 266 n.21, 279 n.26

association area (in the brain) 188–92, 220, 279 n.26 attachment 12, 207–13, 236 attachment behavior 23–25, 242 attachment schemas (Bowlby) 186–87, 196, 278 n.18 attention 18, 99–100, 102, 115, 153, 179, 190, 231, 272 n.17 attunement 188, 237 Auburn, David 212 audience communal 133 divine 98–99, 105–6 Elizabethan 69, 74 film 71–72, 75, 80, 83–84, 86–87, 89–91, 94–96, 118–22, 127, 130, 132, 135, 137–40, 148–49, 155–57, 159, 215, 217, 219–21, 225, 267 n.6, 269 n.22, 275 n.27, 276 n.32, 276 n.37 ghostly 75 internal (brain) 17–18, 25, 99–100, 102–4, 111, 126, 131, 156, 160, 186, 201 interpretive 222 mass-media 6, 34, 47–49, 141–42, 145–46, 208, 213, 254 n.20 memorial 142 postfeminist 137 postmodern 69, 71, 74–75, 84, 93, 95, 145, 156 Roman 48 spectral 117, 132, 160 theatrical 5, 32–34, 43–44, 47–48, 64, 69, 73–74, 99, 112, 117, 127, 199, 204, 206, 210–11, 261 n.31, 263 n.41 unconscious 18, 99–100, 106, 115 zombie 106–10, 118, 120, 186 augmentation 101–3, 247 Auslander, Philip 253 n.14 Australopithecines 229

Index author (or Author) 6, 17, 34, 98, 146, 208, 267 n.2, 281 n.5 see also playwright awareness 11, 12, 17, 18, 20, 25, 42–45, 49, 53, 56, 61, 65, 97–98, 106, 144, 161, 167–69, 173, 175, 178, 181, 189, 191, 197–99, 206, 222, 229–31, 243, 258 n.9, 265 n.4, 270 n.3, 279 n.22, 283 n.1, 283 n.3 Baars, Bernard 2, 11, 18, 25, 99–103, 107–9, 111–12, 118, 164, 167, 169, 178, 189, 219, 235, 252 n.6, 253 n.13, 270 n.5, 271 n.15, 272 n.21, 278 n.15 Badley, Linda 9 Banyas, Carol 279 n.27, 283 n.6, 284 n.16 Barton, Carlin 264 n.41 basal ganglia 11, 174–75, 255 n.27, 262 n.32 Baudrillard, Jean 282 n.18 beauty 29–30, 146, 155, 174, 206–8, 214, 266 n.22 Benditt, John 259 n.3 Berridge, Kent 252 n.6 Bingham, Roger 266 n.13, 271 n.16 bird 95–96, 166, 215, 283 n.4 Blacker, Carmen 274 Blackmore, Susan 232–35, 246, 255 n.28, 257 n.3, 277 n.9, 281 n.3, 285 n.3 Blakeslee, Sandra 21, 43, 55–58, 72, 104–10, 195, 252 n.6, 259 n.7, 265 n.9, 265 n.11, 271 nn.13–14, 272 n.20, 280 n.29 Blau, Herbert 6 blindsight 57, 104 Blumenthal, Eileen 267 n.4, 268 nn.8–9, 269 n.16, 269 n.18, 269 n.28 body image 53, 55–59, 63, 65, 70, 82, 191 see also self, image

307

Bollas, Christopher 2, 181–84 borderline disorder 194 Bordwell, David 4, 252 n.8, 275 n.26 Bourus, Terri 275 n.23 Bowie, A. M. 261 n.25 Bowlby, John 185–86, 196 Boyd, Brian 269 n.20 Boyer, Richard 274 n.17 brainstem 11, 39, 41, 45, 58, 60, 79, 84, 167–68, 184–85, 188–94, 201, 204, 208, 219, 236, 242, 245–46, 255 nn.26–27, 263 n.35, 279 n.26 Branagh, Kenneth 68, 138–47, 151, 160, 274 n.19, 275 n.23, 275 n.28 Brewster, Ben 271 n.8 Broca’s area (in the brain) 262 n.30 Brodie, Richard 285 n.3 Brook, Peter 128, 270 n.6 Brooks, Virginia 271 n.12 Brothers, Leslie 237–38 Brown, A. L. 260 n.17, 261 n.24, 261 n.28 Brown, Steven 282 nn.11–12 Bucci, Wilma 252 n.6, 278 n.16 Buddhism 153–54, 167, 204, 208–11, 252 n.7, 256 n.32, 276 n.36, 277 n.7, 281 nn.3–4, 281 nn.6–7, 282 n.10 Buñuel, Luis 159 Burian, Peter 261 n.20 Burnett, Mark 275 n.27 Burt, Richard 267 n.3 Burton, Richard 127 Butterworth, George 258 n.9 Byrne, Richard 283 n.3 Campbell, Kathleen 275 n.23 cannibalism 45–52, 65, 72, 85, 88, 91, 94–95, 174, 259 n.3, 270 n.34 Cantor, Nancy 277 n.8 capitalism 67, 146, 152, 157, 171, 174, 282 n.12

308

Index

care subsystem 60, 242 Carlson, Marvin 6, 253 n.16 Carroll, Noël 4, 252 n.8 Carter, Rita 2, 18, 101, 257 n.4, 262 n.33, 270 nn.2–3, 271 n.10, 272 n.22 Cartesian (Theatre) 3, 15, 17–19, 22, 25, 34–35, 97, 189, 230 see also Descartes, René catharsis 8, 33, 37, 43–45, 51–53, 61–65, 79, 93, 96, 100, 107, 117, 125, 133, 154, 156, 162, 173–77, 183–84, 191, 194–95, 201, 212–13, 226, 245, 261 n.22, 262 n.34, 270 n.36 Catholicism 74, 117, 155, 158, 220, 273 n.5, 273 n.8 celebrity 65, 68, 173, 208 see also mass-media star cerebellum 175, 262 n.32 Changeux, Jean-Pierre 285 n.5 Charnes, Linda 274 n.13 Chase, Philip 259 n.1, 259 n.3 chora 29, 35, 41, 50, 122–23, 144, 196–97, 199, 212, 221, 234–35, 260 n.12 chorus 31–37, 44, 48, 72, 208, 211, 263 n.36 Christianity 67, 85, 105, 204, 215, 218, 221, 281 n.3, 284 n.15 Churchill, Caryl 212, 263 n.37, 282 n.16 Churchland, Patricia 284 n.12 cinema in the brain, see internal theatre class (or station) 206–9, 211, 213, 227, 245, 281 n.7, 282 n.10 see also servant Close, Glenn 129–30, 274 n.13, 274 n.16 close-up 69, 106, 123, 129, 132, 135, 143, 146, 149, 151 coevolution 277 n.7, 281 n.1

cogito (Cartesian) 15, 17–20, 22, 24–26, 35, 58, 97, 102, 107, 244, 247, 265 n.4 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 271 n.11 Colleran, Bill 127–29, 152, 159, 273 n.11 communal belonging/identity 2, 5, 28, 30, 33–39, 50, 56, 64, 98, 104, 115, 118, 123, 127, 160–61, 179, 203, 256 n.32 forces (or demons/ghosts/spirits) 12, 161, 164, 168–69, 171, 201, 248 group selection 164–65, 201 norms (or orders) 204, 206–7, 238 wound 118, 123 see also audience communal communion 59, 65, 222–24, 236 community 8, 34, 93, 110, 131, 156, 181, 207, 221, 243, 253 n.12 compassion 76–77, 86, 240, 247 competition 13, 48, 52, 112, 160–64, 168, 171, 175, 177, 183, 192, 201, 223, 227, 233, 239, 243, 246, 248, 252 n.8 complexity neural 162, 168, 172, 177, 189, 273 n.3, 285 n.3 tragic 245, 264 n.44 concepts 1, 102–7, 110–12, 120, 160, 166–69, 172, 178–79, 183, 186, 189–92, 198, 237–38, 271 n.10, 271 n.13 conceptual context (Baars) 107, 111, 160, 169, 178, 219, 222, 227, 246 consciousness 4, 18, 21–22, 40, 42–43, 51, 98–104, 108, 110–12, 116, 120, 140, 144, 155, 161–83, 189, 192, 198–99, 203–4, 211, 219, 221, 226, 229–40, 246–27, 253 n.13, 257 nn.4–5, 258 n.10,

Index 261 n.29, 270 nn.5–6, 273 n.3, 281 n.6, 283 n.7 consciousness, higher-order (Edelman) 61, 98, 161, 166, 168, 170–73, 175, 177–80, 183, 192, 203, 211, 226, 238–39, 247 consciousness, narrative 18 consciousness, primary (Edelman) 165–71, 178, 183 Constable, George 259 n.3, 259 n.6 consumerism 67, 150, 193 continuity 71, 102, 179, 233, 239 control 6, 12, 21, 29, 42, 46, 56, 61, 65, 77, 97, 107–10, 116, 121, 130, 138, 143, 145, 147, 152–54, 160, 167, 172–73, 176, 183, 185, 189–90, 193–95, 201, 204, 210, 212–14, 216–23, 225, 227, 229–31, 233–35, 239, 246, 248, 254 n.18, 254 n.20, 262 nn.30–31, 265 n.7, 279 n.27, 283 n.7, 285 n.3 convergence 164, 181, 188 cooperation 16, 112, 168–69, 171, 183, 213–14, 216, 221, 223, 227, 233, 239, 246, 254 n.20, 277 n.12 corpse 27–30, 51, 73–74, 78, 85, 118, 129, 131, 143, 223 see also mummy corpus callosum 197, 279 n.29 Corrigall, Jenny 252 n.6 Cozolino, Louis 184–200, 219, 235, 252 n.6, 279 n.19, 279 n.22, 279 n.25, 279 nn.28–29, 280 n.35 Crane, Mary Thomas 272 n.3, 278 n.17 Crowdus, Gary 275 n.23 Crowe, Cameron 214 Crowl, Samuel 275 n.30, 276 n.35 Cruise, Tom 214–15 Cruz, Penélope 214 cultural evolution 2, 11–12, 25, 52, 61, 64, 98, 100, 113, 115–16,

309

199–201, 204, 233, 238–39, 247, 256 n.3 cultural womb, see external cultural womb cyberspace 5–10, 118, 157, 234, 244, 251 n.1, 253 n.17 see also virtual reality (VR) Damasio, Antonio 2, 18, 25, 49–50, 97–98, 112, 165, 235, 252 n.6, 264 n.42, 266 n.17, 276 n.1, 277 n.12, 278 n.17, 283 n.2 d’Aquili, Eugene 265 n.9 Darwin, Charles (or Darwinian) 162–63, 213, 233, 284 n.2, 285 n.5 see also Neural Darwinism (Edelman) and Social Darwinism Davis, Peter 263 n.36, 263 n.40 Dawkins, Richard 232–33, 246, 256 n.3, 284 n.2, 285 n.3 Deacon, Terence 61, 262 n.31, 266 n.19 Dean, James 155 deception 110, 141, 192, 279 n.28 deep goal context (Baars) 107, 111, 118, 131, 160, 169, 178, 219, 222, 224, 227, 246 Demastes, William 273 n.3 demon 2, 30, 34, 116, 137, 171, 183, 199–201, 227, 233, 238, 243, 245, 273 nn.4–5, 275 n.27 see also devil Dennett, Daniel 3, 11–12, 15–19, 24–25, 56, 97, 108, 165, 190, 191, 229, 233, 235, 246, 256 n.2, 257 n.5, 280 n.35, 284 n.2 depression 59–63, 193, 195, 200, 242–43, 265 n.7, 266 n.13 Descartes, René 17–18, 25–26, 50, 58 see also Cartesian (Theatre) desire 3, 6, 9–10, 12, 16, 19–22, 25, 29, 31–36, 40–41, 43–44, 48,

310

Index

desire—continued 50–51, 60–62, 66, 68, 69, 72, 75, 77–80, 93, 106–7, 110–13, 117, 120–21, 125–26, 128, 130–34, 137, 150, 154, 159–60, 162, 165, 172, 177, 183, 186, 190, 196–97, 204–11, 220, 235, 242, 244, 246, 251 n.2, 266 n.21, 274 n.17, 278 n.17, 281 n.7 desire of the Other (Lacanian) 10, 12, 19, 21–22, 25, 29, 31, 34–35, 40, 48, 60, 79, 106, 110–11, 154, 159, 172, 186, 190, 196–97, 208, 235, 251 n.2 despair 22, 85, 89, 98, 156, 157, 247 destiny 7, 241, 248 see also fate and providence deus ex machina 5, 253 n.13 devil (or devil’s advocate) 42, 109–11, 156, 195, 222, 242, 269 n.25 see also demon Dibble, Harold 259 n.1, 259 n.3 diegesis 7, 71, 105, 129 director divine 71, 98 film 68, 119, 126–27, 136, 141–42, 147, 159, 203, 268 n.10, 276 n.32, 276 n.35 theatre 6, 68, 128, 203, 253 n.16, 270 n.6 unconscious (internal) 12, 15, 18, 25, 100, 107–12, 118, 120, 131, 136, 142, 156, 160, 164, 169, 178, 186, 219, 222, 224, 227, 246, 247 dissociation 178–79, 192, 194 divinity 2, 8, 13, 20, 30, 34, 44, 48, 50, 58–59, 84–85, 96, 98, 106, 129, 140, 146, 156, 158–60, 174, 226, 232, 233, 236–40, 242, 247–48, 254 n.20 Doane, Mary Ann 216

Donald, Merlin 61, 229–36, 258 n.10, 283 n.1, 283 nn.4–5, 284 n.10 Donaldson, Peter 119–21 dopamine area (of the brain) 60, 174, 244, 278 n.14 dorsolateral area 190–91, 196–97, 280 n.33 double bind 123–24, 130–31, 135, 151, 209 dream 3, 5, 17–19, 22, 24, 32, 35–37, 41, 56, 62, 66, 71, 93–94, 101, 103, 112–13, 116, 125, 154–55, 159, 172, 193–95, 198–99, 201, 206, 210–11, 213–14, 216, 240, 243, 248, 253 nn.11–12, 255 n.23, 257 n.4, 260 n.13, 260 n.17, 261 n.28, 280 n.36, 281 n.6 drives (Freudian/Lacanian) 10, 37, 41, 43–46, 49–52, 58, 61–64, 66, 111, 145, 160, 177, 195, 211, 244, 253 n.15, 255 nn.25–26, 256 n.29, 256 n.31, 263 n.35, 266 n.14, 278 n.16 see also “F” drives Dunbar, Robin 192 dynamic core (Edelman) 18, 168–72, 175, 178, 180–81, 183, 189, 235, 247 Dyson, Freeman 284 n.15 Eagle, Morris 279 n.23 Ebrahimian, Babak 270 n.6, 283 n.9 Edelman, Gerald 18, 25, 61, 162–80, 182, 184, 189, 229, 235, 252 n.6, 270 n.3, 276 n.2, 277 n.4, 277 n.7, 277 n.9, 278 n.17 Edgar, Blake 259 n.3 Edwards-Lee, Terri 272 n.17, 279 n.24, 283 n.6 ego 3, 13, 17, 19–20, 29–30, 34, 37–40, 42, 44, 48, 51, 58, 62–64,

Index 67, 73, 77, 105, 108–16, 131, 133, 155, 162, 174, 176, 179, 181, 183, 186, 188–89, 192, 197–201, 206, 214, 227, 241, 251 n.2, 258 n.13, 263 n.35, 266 nn.20–21, 285 n.3 ego-alien force 198–201 Egyptians, see ancient Egypt Eliot, T. S. 212 Elliott, Anthony 257 n.6 embodiment 3, 5–6, 9, 57, 85, 116, 167, 182–83, 186, 201, 203, 239, 251 n.3 emergence 2, 15, 21, 25, 97–98, 108, 153, 160, 175, 191, 229, 264 n.2, 280 n.34 emotion 10, 49–53, 56, 59–64, 99, 110–13, 121, 144, 160, 177, 243, 246, 248, 279 n.24 episodic awareness 61, 229–31, 236, 239, 283 n.1 episodic memory 22, 198, 283 n.4 episodic stage (Donald) 61, 229–31, 247, 283 n.1, 283 n.4 Epstein, Mark 256 n.32, 281 n.4 ethics 44, 169, 177, 248, 252 n.7 Euripides 31, 44, 260 n.19, 261 n.23, 261 n.26, 272 n.1 evil 5, 26, 28–30, 42–45, 49–53, 63–64, 74, 79, 81–82, 87, 93, 95–96, 98, 130, 133, 136, 152, 177, 219, 221–22, 241, 243–47, 254 n.20, 269 n.22, 276 n.33, 284 n.13 see also devil evolution biological 23, 45, 98, 100, 109, 243, 247, 271 n.16, 284 n.15 brain 53, 64, 73, 99, 115, 143, 161–73, 177, 179–81, 184, 191, 199–201, 211, 213, 229–30, 244, 258 n.16, 271 n.13 cathartic 245 cognitive 15–17, 231, 278 n.15

311

human 29, 38, 41–42, 59, 76, 97–98, 191, 204, 211, 231–37, 242, 245, 266 n.19, 278 n.12, 283 n.1, 283 n.7, 284 n.13 language 279 n.27 mammalian 255 n.27 personal 270 n.4 primate 189, 191 see also coevolution and cultural evolution expectation 40, 64, 107–8, 198 external cultural womb 12, 20–21, 23, 25, 29, 30–32, 34, 40, 59, 61, 76, 100, 104, 113, 122, 157, 160, 164, 177, 179, 186–87, 196, 230, 234, 236, 246, 248 facial expression 188, 237 family 12, 20, 23–25, 30, 34, 43, 45, 49–50, 53, 56, 59, 64, 74, 75, 78, 79, 96, 99, 107, 111, 115, 117, 137, 139, 156, 160, 165, 171, 173, 183, 200, 208, 211, 217, 220–21, 226–27, 230, 233, 238, 243, 246, 251 n.2, 273 n.8 fantasy 1, 18, 22, 32, 37, 71, 87, 93–94, 106, 112–13, 118, 134, 140, 193, 198, 218, 236, 247–48, 252 n.10, 262 n.31 fate 2, 5, 8, 30, 42–44, 47, 50, 95, 98, 105, 115–16, 133, 136, 206, 208, 232 see also destiny and providence fear system (Panksepp) 60–65, 145, 188, 195, 219, 226, 243–45 feeling, see emotion Feher Gurewich, Judith 255 n.24, 256 n.29, 278 n.13 feminism 36, 131, 138, 216, 267 n.3, 274 n.19 fetishism 9–10, 171, 174, 244 “F” drives 10, 42–46, 50–53, 60, 62–66, 72, 79, 96, 105, 125, 145, 180, 183

312

Index

Fiddes, Paul 284 n.15 filling in (Ramachandran) 104–6, 140, 271 n.13 Fink, Bruce 58, 62, 252 n.10, 255 n.25, 256 n.1, 265 n.6, 266 n.15, 266 n.18, 266 n.21, 284 n.11, 284 n.1 Finucane, R. C. 253 nn.11–12, 254 n.22, 263 n.39, 273 n.5, 274 n.17 flashback 2, 7, 90, 138–43, 145–46, 149–50, 159, 207, 208, 275 n.25, 275 nn.27–28 Fowkes, Katherine 9 free will 57, 62, 70, 180, 186, 234, 246, 265 n.5, 284 n.15, 285 n.3 Freud, Sigmund (or Freudian) 1, 3, 10, 17–18, 21–23, 36–38, 41, 44, 56, 62, 108, 120, 126, 130, 172–77, 179, 183–84, 204, 214, 234, 252 nn.10–11, 255 n.26, 257 n.4, 257 n.6, 257 n.8, 258 n.10, 260 n.13, 262 nn.34–35, 272 n.18, 273 n.9, 278 nn.16–17, 281 n.4, 282 n.20 frontal lobe (or prefrontal lobe) 11, 24, 37–38, 57, 61–62, 64–65, 98, 167, 184–86, 188–94, 196, 203, 230, 237, 262 n.31, 263 n.35, 266 n.19, 270 n.5, 271 n.17, 278 n.12 functional cluster (Edelman) 18, 25, 168, 172, 178, 189 Gallup, Gordon 283 n.3 Garber, Marjorie 274 n.15 Gargett, Robert 259 n.3 Gaster, Theodor 29, 259 nn.10–11 Gazzaniga, Michael 265 n.4, 276 n.3, 279 n.20, 279 n.29, 280 n.34 gaze 4, 80, 104, 185, 198, 237 Geist (as spirit of history) 6, 41, 117–18, 122, 171 Geschwind, Daniel 262 n.30, 271 n.17, 283 n.6

gesture 75, 79–80, 86, 89, 129, 135, 178, 192, 208–9, 229–32, 269 n.28, 279 n.27 “ghost in the machine” 4–5, 15, 58, 189, 253 n.13, 256 n.31 Gibson, Mel 129, 136, 274 n.13, 274 n.16 Giddens, E. Eugene 269 n.21, 269 n.26 Gielgud, John 127–29, 152, 155, 273 n.11 Giovannoli, Joseph 257 n.3 Girard, René 261 n.22 God 7, 13, 26, 58–59, 67, 98, 105, 116, 121–22, 215, 221, 233, 239, 241, 247, 268 n.7, 284 nn.14–15 “God Experience” (Persinger) 265 n.7 god from the machine, see deus ex machina godlike drives 44, 93 ego 34, 241 forces 44, 83 ideal 25, 134, 245 power or position 7, 9–10, 45, 48–51, 66, 71, 83–84, 92, 105–6, 115, 146, 233 reason (or discourse) 161, 183 spectatorship 96, 105–7 superego 7, 123 technology 42, 157, 193, 244, 254 n.20, 261 n.26 transcendence 45, 47 trickster 10, 71, 118, 121 vengeance 52, 77 gods 1–2, 5, 7, 9–10, 13, 15, 19–21, 25–26, 28–39, 41–51, 58–59, 62–68, 74, 77, 80, 84, 86, 88–93, 96–100, 105–7, 110–16, 122, 130, 134, 144, 162, 171, 200–1, 204, 209, 212, 215, 221, 227, 233, 236–48, 251 n.2, 253 n.13, 260 n.18, 261 n.26, 261 n.29, 265 n.9, 268 n.7, 269 n.24, 274 n.20, 282 n.16, 284 nn.14–15

Index Goff, Janet 281 n.5 Goffman, Erving 111 Goleman, Daniel 280 n.31, 281 n.3 gossip 192 gravesite 27–28, 129, 136, 144, 159, 219, 222–23, 255 n.22, 259 n.3, 272 n.1, 275 n.22 Greeks, see ancient Greece Greenblatt, Stephen 116–18, 273 n.7 Grene, David 260 n.16 Grodal, Torben 251 n.4 grooming 23, 192 Guthrie, Stewart 245, 251 n.5 habit 225, 257 n.3, 278 n.14 habitat 7, 11, 29, 42–43, 73, 105, 115, 119, 122, 143, 220 hallucination 37, 56, 86, 94, 106, 110, 112, 142, 193–94, 199, 201, 210, 221, 261 n.23, 280 n.36, 282 n.13 Hanh, Thich Nat 153, 281 n.3 Harder, Ben 259 n.3 Hart, F. Elizabeth 3, 252 n.7 haunted house 213–16, 219, 222, 227 Hawke, Ethan 146–47, 149, 276 nn.36–37 Heath, Stephen 269 n.24 hemispheres of the brain 10, 40–42, 58, 62–64, 84, 108–11, 131, 157, 160, 187–201, 204, 209, 221, 232, 238, 242–45, 251 n.4, 261–62 nn.29–32, 266 n.21, 272 nn.17–18, 277 n.9, 279 nn.24–25, 279 n.27, 280 n.29, 280 nn.33–34, 283 n.6 Hill, D. E. 263 n.36 hippocampus 23, 57–58, 190–91, 194, 199, 243, 258 n.12, 265 n.7 Hirsh, James 273 n.10 Hirstein, William 257 n.7, 264 nn.1–2 Hochberg, Julian 271 n.12 Hodges, Larry 103

313

hominid 12, 61, 169, 192, 229–33, 236–7, 245, 248, 259 n.3, 283 n.7, 284 n.13 Homo erectus 229, 259 n.3, 283 n.1 Homo sapiens 27, 42, 64, 230–31 homosexuality 120 homunculus 97, 270 n.1 Hopkins, Anthony 76, 95 Hopkins, Lisa 139–41, 267 n.6, 270 n.36 Horgan, John 257 n.3 horror 9, 43, 52, 94–98, 133, 143, 194, 213, 215, 221–22, 226, 233 Houshmand, Zara 281 nn.2–3, 281 n.6 Hovers, E. 259 n.1 Howell, F. Clark 259 n.3, 259 n.8 humanism 106, 116, 119, 146, 171, 242 hysteria 179–80, 238 Iacoboni, Marco 262 n.30, 271 n.17, 283 n.6 id 3, 35, 37–38, 40, 59, 109, 111, 203, 235, 252 n.10, 258 n.13, 263 n.35 idealization 131, 134, 139, 172, 245 ideology 27, 115, 165, 169, 171, 174, 180, 184, 204, 208, 227, 234, 243, 246, 248, 251 n.2, 288 identification 9, 29–30, 32, 35, 42, 57, 69, 74, 79, 83, 94, 103–4, 121, 132, 152, 208, 213, 233, 236–37, 256 n.29 identity 19–20, 30, 34–35, 39–40, 58, 63, 66, 90, 112, 115, 130–131, 169–70, 174, 178, 182–83, 198, 207–8, 214, 216, 230, 239, 245–48, 251 n.2, 256 n.32, 279 n.22 see also communal belonging/identity Imaginary order (Lacanian) 4, 10, 16–18, 20, 22, 24, 32, 37, 39–41, 44, 46, 52, 56, 58, 61–64, 84–85, 111, 131, 160, 178, 196–97, 199,

314

Index

Imaginary order (Lacanian)—continued 220, 227, 232, 234, 241, 245–46, 251 n.4, 252 n.10, 262 n.31, 266 n.21, 271 n.13, 278 n.17 imitation (or mimicry) 7, 16, 24, 28, 90, 120, 187, 220, 229–35, 238, 258 n.9, 280 n.34, 283 n.5, 284 n.13 see also mimetic stage (Donald) immortality 6–7, 12, 65–66, 98, 105, 107, 182, 211, 238–39, 244 see also mortality independence 7, 41, 44, 67, 144, 168, 171, 175, 181, 186–87, 237, 243, 251 n.2, 255 n.27, 256 n.32 individualism 2, 4, 7–8, 13, 23, 28, 30, 41, 97–98, 115–16, 165, 168–73, 180–82, 182, 232, 235, 238, 247–48, 251 n.2, 256 n.32, 281 n.7 inner preselective environment (Dennett) 15–16, 19, 24, 28, 64, 93, 101–3, 165, 191, 235 see also internal theatre instincts 10–11, 16, 22–24, 38, 43–45, 49–52, 64, 66, 100–111, 115, 123, 144, 165, 169, 171, 176–77, 183, 188, 192–95, 219, 223, 234–35, 242–43, 246, 256 n.29, 256 n.31 see also drives interactor (Zizek) 7–8 interference 101–2, 247 internalized mother 187, 196–97, 201, 226 internal theatre 1, 15, 19, 21, 26, 33, 39–40, 45, 48, 63–65, 72, 75, 84, 97, 105, 107–11, 115, 118, 121–26, 135, 140, 146, 149, 154, 157, 164–66, 177, 180, 190, 200, 213, 229, 260 n.13 intersubjectivity 65, 169–75, 178–87, 193, 197–98, 200, 203, 226, 232, 238, 243–44, 248, 278 n.13, 278 n.18

intuition 158, 198, 222, 227, 234, 246, 251 n.2, 262 n.31 Jacobs, Lea 271 n.8 Jameson, Fredric 278 n.17 Japan 12, 119, 204–5, 208, 211, 274 n.17, 281 n.8 Jaynes, Julian 261 n.29 Johanson, Donald 259 n.3 Johnson, Mark 167, 186 Johnson-Haddad, Miranda 88, 91, 268 nn.11–12, 269 n.27 Jones, Ernest 120 Jones, Osheen 71 Jonson, Ben 267 n.2 Joseph, Rhawn 259 n.2 jouissance (Lacanian) 30, 32, 59, 89, 235 justice 18, 64, 68, 88, 92–94, 99, 107, 133, 158, 238, 247 Kahn, Coppélia 270 n.31 Kandel, Eric 22–23, 60 Kantor, Tadeusz 253 n.16 Kaplan-Solms, Karen 37–41, 56, 258 n.13, 262 n.32, 266 n.21 karma 204, 281 n.6 Kauffman, Stuart 271 n.16 Kay, Sarah 257 n.8 Keller, Stefan 269 n.20 Kermode, Frank 267 n.2 Kernodle, George 259 nn.9–10 Kidman, Nicole 213, 215, 282 n.20 kinematic imagination (Donald) 230–35 King, Geoff 253 n.17 Klein, Melanie (or Kleinian) 3, 59, 254 n.18, 265 n.12 Kosslyn, Stephen 2, 101, 253 n.13, 262 n.32, 271 n.7, 271 n.9 Kott, Jan 272 n.1 Kovacs, Lee 282 n.17 Kristeva, Julia 3, 196, 234, 260 n.12, 268 n.14, 280 n.32, 282 n.13

Index Krzywinska, Tanya 253 n.17 Kubiak, Anthony 256 n.2 Kushner, Tony 212 Lacan, Jacques (or Lacanian) 10–11, 16, 18–25, 38–40, 44, 52, 56, 58–62, 100, 105, 110–11, 130, 172, 177–79, 184–86, 196–97, 214, 220, 231, 234–35, 238, 244, 251 n.4, 252 nn.6–11, 254 n.18, 254 nn.20–21, 255 n.25, 256 nn.29–30, 257 n.4, 257 n.6, 257 n.8, 258 nn.9–10, 260 nn.12–13, 262 nn.31–32, 262 n.34, 264 n.2, 266 nn.14–15, 266 n.21, 271 n.13, 274 n.15, 274 n.17, 278 n.13, 278 n.17, 281 n.7, 282 n.20, 284 n.13, 284 n.1 La Cerra, Peggy 266 n.13, 271 n.16 lack of being (Lacanian) 10–12, 16, 20, 22–25, 29, 34, 41–45, 51–53, 60–65, 112–15, 142, 244, 248, 252 n.10, 254 n.21, 256 n.31 Lakoff, George 167, 186 language 16, 20, 23–24, 27, 42, 50, 52, 100, 102, 110–11, 160–61, 167–70, 177–79, 186, 191–93, 196–201, 207, 220, 229–32, 245, 254 n.21, 255 n.25, 262 nn.30–32, 266 n.19, 278 n.17, 279 n.25, 279 n.27, 280 n.29, 280 n.33, 283 n.6 see also Symbolic order (Lacanian) Lanier, Douglas 275 n.29 Leaky, Richard 27, 259 n.3 LeDoux, Joseph 182, 191, 201, 220, 253 n.13, 255 n.27, 258 n.15, 266 n.17, 277 n.4, 277 n.6, 277 n.10, 278 n.14, 279 n.29 Lee, Brandon 154 Lefkowitz, Mary 261 n.20 Lehmann, Courtney 154, 267 n.6, 275 n.28, 276 n.33 LeVine, Robert 256 n.32

315

Levin, Fred 252 n.6, 272 n.18, 281 n.2 Lewin, Roger 27, 259 n.3 Lieberman, Philip 27, 259 n.7, 262 n.32 limbic system 10–11, 32, 37–38, 41–45, 50–52, 56–65, 72, 93, 110–11, 121, 131, 137, 144–45, 148, 160, 167–68, 173, 184–204, 208, 210, 212, 219–23, 235–36, 241–46, 255 n.27 Lindroth, Mary 267 n.6 Lloyd, Alan 279 n.28 Luhrmann, Baz 154 Lupton, Julia Reinhard 274 n.15 Lutz, Tom 262 n.34 Lynch, Aaron 285 n.3 Lyotard, Jean-François 282 n.18 Maasen, Sabine 257 n.4 Macdonald, Andrew 131–32 Macdonald, Gina 131–32 Machiavellian intelligence 192 MacLachlan, Kyle 147 MacLean, Paul 255 n.27 MacNeil, Robert 152 mammal 11, 22, 32, 44, 60, 62, 79, 166, 184–85, 188–89, 192, 229, 242, 248, 255 nn.26–27, 283 n.4 maps, neuronal 16, 18, 24–25, 28, 49, 164–75, 179–83, 187, 190, 195–96, 198, 201–3, 216, 230, 235, 244–46, 277 n.9 Marranca 283 n.9 mask 63, 69–70, 74, 98, 110–12, 115–16, 137, 144, 164, 186, 205–7, 209, 211, 214, 251 n.2, 255 n.23, 268 n.8, 282 n.12 masochism 9, 244 mass-media star 6, 20, 68, 146, 214–15, 231, 237, 245 McCandless, David 267 n.6 McCombe, John 274 n.15 McDonald, Russ 267 n.2

316

Index

McNamara, Patrick 251–52 nn.5–6, 277 n.5, 283 n.7 Meier, Paul 273–74 nn.11–12 melancholy 118, 125, 156, 177, 183, 200 melodrama 30, 43–45, 48, 50, 52–53, 63–64, 79, 88, 93–94, 96, 133, 136–37, 152, 177, 194–95, 221, 245–47 Meltzer, Gary 264 n.44 Meltzoff, Andrew 258 n.9, 264 n.44 meme (Dawkins) 17, 34, 65, 143, 209, 213–14, 232–35, 238–39, 246, 256 n.3, 277 n.9, 285 n.3 memeplex (Blackmore) 235, 246, 285 n.3 memetic drive 232–35 memory 1, 4, 8, 17–24, 39, 116, 118–20, 122–23, 126, 131, 139–44, 148–51, 160, 163, 166–76, 179–87, 190–91, 194, 198–99, 205, 207–8, 211, 217–33, 236, 243, 246–48, 264 n.2, 275 n.27, 277 n.5, 279 n.22, 280 n.30, 280 n.35 affective 186, 194, 279 n.24 categorical 166 collective 142 conceptual 168 cultural 236 episodic 22, 283 n.4 interpretive/legislative 126, 219, 246 loss 179, 243 networks 185–86 procedural 167, 283 n.4 reconstructive or retranscripted 176, 184 semantic 283 n.4 skills 185 specialists (in brain) 108–11 traces 24, 57, 131, 160, 169, 172, 198, 217, 219–22, 224, 227, 236 traumatic 88, 119

unconscious 99 value-dominated 169, 172, 180 mesocortical-mesolimbic area (of the brain) 60, 244 metanarrative 126, 213, 282 n.18 see also narrative metaphysics 2, 5, 20, 33–34, 39, 41–42, 55, 71, 75, 86, 88, 116, 118, 151, 160, 171, 212, 227, 252 n.2 Middle Ages (or medieval) 12, 25, 67, 105, 117, 119, 130, 138, 147, 208, 211, 241, 254 n.22, 269 n.25, 273 n.5, 281 n.8 millennium 113, 145, 148, 152, 213, 215, 244–45 Miller, David 252 n.11, 260 n.15, 263 n.37 mimesis 19, 43, 53, 61, 88, 155, 186, 207, 229–38, 247, 256 n.3, 258 n.9, 283 n.1, 283 nn.7–9, 284 n.12 see also imitation mimetic drive 232 mimetic stage (Donald) 61, 229–32, 236, 247, 283 n.1, 283 nn.7–9 mimicry, see imitation mind’s theatre (or cinema), see internal theatre mirror neuron 238, 284 nn.12–13 mirror stage (Lacanian) 20–21, 29, 39, 41, 59, 62–63, 146–47, 153, 160, 178, 185–88, 193, 196, 198, 231, 238, 251 n.4, 256 n.29, 260 n.13, 284 n.12 Mithen, Steven 27, 259 n.3, 259 n.7, 282 n.1 Modell, Arnold 176–77, 183 modernism 7, 126, 142, 147, 212–13, 254 n.19, 281 n.1, 282 n.18 montage 6, 144, 149 morality 68, 80, 169, 173, 264 n.44, 278 n.12, 284 n.14 see also ethics

Index mortality 2, 6, 12, 20, 42–45, 51, 65, 75, 96–97, 105–6, 113, 144, 146, 149, 153, 157, 170–73, 182, 197, 201, 208–11, 225, 238–39, 245, 248, 253 n.16 see also immortality Moschovakis, Nicholas 268 n.7 mourning 50, 71–73, 75, 78, 88, 112, 118, 121, 129–30, 138, 142, 144, 148, 161, 199, 274 n.17 multiple narrative drafts (Dennett) 17, 108, 140, 142 multiple selves 56, 63–65, 70, 72, 80, 89–90, 97, 108, 110, 112, 178, 239 see also zombies mummy 28–30, 74–75, 129 see also corpse Murray, Janet 7–9, 254 n.20 muse 3, 174 mythic stage (Donald) 61, 231–32, 236, 238, 247 narrative 3, 7–8, 17–19, 25, 34, 69, 108, 140, 142, 178, 190–91, 198, 231, 247, 251 n.4, 254 n.20, 258 n.9, 262 n.31, 278 n.18, 280 n.35 see also metanarrative and multiple narrative drafts (Dennett) Nashe, Thomas 268 n.7 Nasio, Juan-David 264 n.2 natural selection 162–65, 235, 271 n.16 nature 4–5, 12, 16, 20–23, 41, 42, 45, 52–53, 60, 64, 77, 89, 97–99, 106, 111–16, 119, 123, 143–47, 152, 157, 160, 165, 171–72, 203, 208, 210–11, 220, 239, 242–44, 247, 256 n.31, 265 n.5, 270 n.30, 271 n.11, 284 n.15 Neanderthals 27–28, 129, 259 nn.2–4 Neisser, Ulric 258 n.9, 278 n.18 Nelson, Katherine 283 n.8

317

neocortex 10–11, 32, 40–45, 49–52, 57–59, 64, 160, 184, 187, 190–92, 196–97, 203, 208, 236, 243, 245, 251 n.4, 265 n.7 Nesse, Randolph 279 n.28 Neural Darwinism (Edelman) 163, 174, 179 neuronal group selection (Edelman) 162–63, 172, 176, 179, 235, 277 n.7 Newberg, Andrew 265 n.9 Nietzsche, Friedrich (Apollonian and Dionysian) 10, 33, 37, 109, 200, 203–6, 209–10, 232, 235, 244, 255 n.23, 281 n.1 9/11 82, 126, 145, 215 Noh drama 12, 203–12, 281 n.5, 282 nn.10–12 nurture 36, 60, 63, 113, 242–45, 256 n.31, 265 n.5, 265 n.12 object relations 3, 254 n.18, 265 n.12, 280 n.33 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) 61, 176, 179 occipital lobe 24, 185, 192–93 Odom, Glenn 269 n.25 Oedipal complex 3–4, 20–21, 32, 38, 78–80, 120, 125–27, 130, 135, 186, 197, 274 n.16, 275 n.28 O’Flaherty, Wendy Doniger 260 n.16 Olivier, Laurence 118–27, 129–30, 139, 142, 146–48, 152, 159, 274 n.14, 275 n.28, 276 n.34 O’Neill, Eugene 212 Onians, Richard 260 n.17 orbital (or orbitofrontal) area 61–62, 188–90, 197, 237, 270 n.2 panic system (Panksepp) 60–65, 145, 188, 195, 219–20, 242–45, 258 n.14

318

Index

Panksepp, Jaak 18, 60, 219, 248, 252 n.6, 255–56 nn.26–29, 258 n.14, 263 n.35, 266 nn.13–14, 266 n.22, 285 n.4 parietal lobe 11, 24, 57, 167, 191–93, 220, 230 patriarchy 10, 29, 31–38, 46, 59, 69, 72, 76–80, 86, 117, 121, 127–31, 136, 138, 144–46, 152–54, 156–57, 196–200, 212, 218–22, 226, 234 Peele, George 267 n.2, 269 n.20 Penny Arcade Nightmare or PAN (Taymor) 75, 83–86, 88–93 Penrose, Roger 251 n.3 perception (or percepts) 4, 11, 21, 24, 39–41, 57–59, 100–107, 110–13, 140, 164–70, 176, 178–79, 186, 191–94, 198, 206, 220, 227, 229–31, 247–48, 252 n.10, 258 n.13, 271 nn.12–13 Persinger, Michael 265 nn.7–8, 266 n.16 persona 153, 164, 172, 198, 214, 217–18, 226 personality 1, 4, 7, 17, 57, 65, 79, 108, 154, 164, 178, 182, 197, 237, 246, 249 person concept 237 perspective 4, 12, 34, 104–5, 213, 254 n.20, 270 n.5, 279 n.26 perversion 8, 20, 46, 78–81, 112, 143, 163, 185, 200–1, 219, 226–27, 235, 238, 244, 254 n.19, 257 n.8, 266 n.15, 284 n.1 phallus 72, 129–30, 134 phantom limb 55–56, 59, 63–65, 67, 73–80, 82, 86–87, 94, 118, 122–23, 129, 134–35, 142, 145, 149, 154, 159, 161, 203, 246, 264 n.2 Pikli, Natália 267 n.5 Pinker, Steven 256 n.31

Pizzato, Mark 251 n.1, 254 n.19, 270 n.35, 282 nn.14–16 play pretend 230, 237–38 rough and tumble (RAT) 248, 285 n.4 playwright 15, 17, 67, 117, 136, 263 n.37 see also author Plotkin, Henry 257 n.3 Polanski, Roman 273 n.4 poltergeist 227, 254 n.22 Porter, J. R. 254 n.22, 260 n.14, 274 n.17 possession 5, 6, 9, 33, 157, 171, 199, 212, 214, 220, 222–23, 227, 244, 246, 254 n.20, 282 n.12 postmodern 1, 6–7, 17, 20, 33–36, 39–42, 44, 55, 58, 67–75, 80, 82–84, 87, 93, 98–99, 106–7, 113, 116, 126–28, 131, 141–42, 144–47, 150, 156, 160, 162, 171, 181–82, 193, 212–13, 225–27, 236, 242–45, 252 n.9, 254 n.19, 263 n.37, 272 n.3, 281 n.1, 282 n.18, 283 n.9 post-traumatic stress disorder, see stress and trauma POV (point of view) shot 139, 148, 275 n.27 prefrontal lobe, see frontal lobe prematurity of birth in the human species 11, 21–23, 29–30, 42, 62, 256 n.29 presence 1–2, 4, 6, 9, 50, 58, 129, 132, 136, 146, 181, 210, 214, 216, 239, 242, 255 n.26, 279 n.23 Pribram, Karl 18 primate 11, 23, 61, 189, 191–92, 194, 229–31, 234, 237–38, 284 n.13 Prince, Stephen 4 projection 1, 3, 5–6, 9, 11–12, 16, 19, 21, 24, 26, 33, 39–40, 45,

Index 50–51, 57, 62, 64–65, 93, 98, 104, 106, 110, 116, 118, 122–23, 127, 149, 157, 161, 163, 166, 176–77, 189, 192, 198, 201, 203, 214, 227, 235, 243–47, 253 n.11, 274 n.12, 279 n.26 projection area (in the brain) 101–2, 247 props 28, 41, 49, 74, 209 prosody 187, 230, 262 n.31, 283 n.6 Protestantism 117, 155, 158, 273 n.5, 273 n.8 providence 2, 159–60, 233, 238, 241–42, 273 n.3 see also destiny and fate pruning (neuronal) 22, 24–25, 163, 172, 178, 183, 185–87, 197, 212, 248 see also sculpting psychosis 185, 198–99, 201, 226 n.15, 284 n.1 puppetry 17, 68, 70, 72, 74–75, 81, 83, 86, 101, 216, 222–23, 285 n.3 Purgatory 117–18, 123, 125, 132–33, 137, 155, 273 n.7 qualia 3, 171, 270 n.1 Quinn, Edward 274 n.16 racism 80–82, 245 rage system (Panksepp) 60–65, 93, 188, 195, 219–20, 243–44 Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie 256 n.1, 265 n.6 Ramachandran, V. S. 2, 21, 42, 55–59, 63, 65, 67, 70, 72, 97, 104–6, 108–12, 118, 195, 235, 252 n.6, 257 n.7, 259 n.7, 262 n.31, 264 nn.1–2, 265 n.9, 265 n.11, 270 n.1, 271 nn.13–14, 272 n.18, 272 n.20, 280 n.29, 283 n.3, 284 n.13 Ramanan, Kharlena 27–28

319

rationality 7, 59, 190, 217, 219, 221, 246, 252 n.8 see also reason Readiness Potential 257 n.4 Real order (Lacanian) 4, 8, 10–11, 16–20, 22, 24–25, 29, 32, 37, 39–41, 43–44, 48, 51–52, 56, 58, 61–64, 84, 91, 93, 111, 131, 142–43, 160, 171, 177–78, 193, 197, 199, 227, 232, 234–35, 241, 245–46, 251 n.4, 252 n.10, 262 n.31 reason 17, 26, 34–35, 56, 79, 99, 113, 119–23, 135, 146, 148, 157–58, 161, 194, 210 see also rationality rebellion 2, 29, 31, 43–44, 69, 78–79, 85, 112, 134, 138, 144, 162, 171, 206, 208–13, 218–22, 227, 234–35, 244, 285 reentrant mapping (Edelman) 161–71, 179, 186, 235, 246, 277 n.9 see also maps, neuronal reflex 165, 184–87, 191–93, 242, 280 n.29 regression 47, 20, 236, 239 Rehak, Bob 254 n.20 rehearsal 19, 102, 105, 167, 180, 248, 257 n.7, 284 n.12 Reinhard, Kenneth 274 n.15 religion 13, 20, 27, 41, 43, 58, 117, 171, 205, 211–13, 218–21, 227, 235, 243, 245, 251 n.5, 257 n.3, 259 n.4, 261 n.29, 265 n.9, 273 n.8, 277 n.9, 282 n.10, 284 n.14, 285 n.3 remembered present (Edelman) 61, 166–67, 170, 177, 229, 231, 239 Renaissance 44, 64, 67–69, 99, 105–7, 116, 144, 147, 160, 162, 242, 263 n.39

320

Index

repetition 3, 17–18, 45, 47, 53, 72, 100, 107, 111, 120–21, 163, 173–79, 204–5, 211, 226 repetition compulsion 58, 62–64, 174–77, 204, 221, 235, 266 n.21 replication 155, 233, 235, 277 n.9 representation 18, 29, 40, 55, 58, 100–102, 149, 162, 165, 230, 266 n.21, 271 n.9, 285 n.5 repression 3, 21, 61–62, 76, 108–9, 112, 129, 172, 174, 177, 179, 181, 192, 196, 201, 279 n.28 reproduction 5, 52, 155, 165, 171, 232, 243–48, 257 n.3 reptile 11, 79, 166, 184, 192, 242, 255 n.27, 262 n.32 resonance 126, 234, 277 n.5, 277 n.9 Revel, Jean-François 281 n.3 revenge, see vengeance Revonsuo, Antii 248 Reynolds, Bryan 269 n.25 Ricard, Matthieu 281 n.3 Richardson, Tony 129, 152, 159, 273 n.11, 275 n.23 Ridley, Matt 256 n.31, 165 n.5 Rinpoche, Tenzin 281 n.6 ritual 5–7, 17, 28, 49, 59, 76–77, 79, 82–83, 96, 98, 100, 129–30, 144, 161, 174, 193, 211, 234, 238, 253, 258 n.16, 269 n.16 Rivera, José 212 Robson, Mark 275 n.28 Roche, Paul 31–38 Rolston, Holmes 277 n.11 Romans, see ancient Rome Rose, Steven 277 n.9, 284 n.2 Ross, Michael 277 n.8 Rothbaum, Barbara 103 Rothenberg, Jerome 28–29, 259 nn.9–10 Rozik, Eli 260 n.13 Rudavsky, Shari 259 n.3

Rudd, Niall 267 n.1, 268 n.7, 269 n.15 Russell, Clair 253 n.12 Russell, W. M. S. 253 n.11, 254 n.22, 274 n.17 Ryan, Marie-Laure 253 n.17 Ryle, Gilbert 253 n.13 sacrifice 30, 32, 35–36, 46–49, 64, 66, 71–87, 94–95, 100, 107, 144, 165, 175, 177, 200–1, 238, 243, 346, 269 n.15, 269 n.26 sadism 9, 244, 263 n.41 St. Augustine 253 Salecl, Renata 58 Saul, Ronald 272 n.17, 279 n.24, 283 n.6 Scarry, Elaine 237 Schechner, Richard 270 n.32 Schiesaro, Alessandro 264 n.44 schizophrenia (or schizoid) 147, 179, 193–94, 199–200, 244, 280 n.36 Schleiner, Louise 272 n.1 Schore, Allan 252 n.6, 280 nn.33–34 Scofield, Paul 129 sculpting (neuronal) 19, 24, 84–85, 173, 184–87, 200, 203, 206, 216, 226, 245, 258 n.11 see also pruning séance 224 Searle, John 257 n.5 seeking system (Panksepp) 60–65, 188, 219–20, 243–44, 263 n.35, 266 n.13 selection, see communal group selection natural selection neuronal group selection and somatic selection self awareness 11–12, 18, 49, 97, 144, 168, 178, 206, 229, 243 concept 102–3, 172, 179, 183 consciousness 40, 97, 155, 161, 231

Index deception 110, 192, 279 n.28 defensiveness 110–11, 115, 238 destruction 32, 34, 145 image 56; see also body image knowledge 278 n.18 recognition 280 n.34 reflection 7, 17, 41, 43, 111, 116, 191, 247, 280 Seneca 45–53, 65, 67, 98, 200, 241, 263 n.36, 263 n.38–41, 264 n.41, 264 n.44, 273 n.7 separation (Lacanian) 20–25, 38, 60–62, 197, 220, 266 n.15 see also alienation separation anxiety 185–87 servant 80, 218, 222–24 Shackley, Myra 259 n.3, 259 n.5 shadow 74–75, 84, 86, 127–30 Shakespeare, William 64–96, 99, 106, 115–60, 162, 182, 241, 244, 267 n.2, 267 n.4, 268 n.7, 272 n.1, 273 nn.5–6, 274 n.15, 274 n.18, 275 n.23, 276 n.33 Shapiro, Alan 261 n.20 Shear, Jonathan 281 n.3 Shepard, Sam 146 Shermer, Michael 257 n.3 Shlain, Leonard 23, 283 n.7 Shreeve, James 259 n.4 Siegel, Daniel 277 n.9, 278 n.18, 279 n.26, 280 n.30 Silverman, Kaja 216 Simmons, James 273 n.9, 274 n.21 Sloboda, Noel 274 n.14 Smidt, Kristian 273 n.6 Smith, Emma 275 n.29 Sober, Elliott 277 n.11, 284 n.14 social animal 236–37 social brain (Cozolino) 185–98, 200 Social Darwinism 152, 238, 246 Solecki, Ralph 27, 259 n.3 soliloquy 122, 125, 134, 148, 273 n.10

321

Solms, Mark 22, 24, 36–41, 56, 60–62, 184, 193, 235, 252 n.6, 255 n.26, 258 nn.11–13, 262 n.32, 263 n.35, 265 n.10, 266 n.21, 279 n.26, 280 n.29, 280 n.36 somatic selection 162, 165 Sommer, Jeffrey 259 n.3 Sophocles 43–44, 260 n.18, 261 n.21 spectator, see audience split brain, see hemispheres of the brain split-subjectivity 7, 33–34, 40, 58, 116, 128 stagehand 107, 110–12, 118, 120, 164, 169, 178, 205, 209, 219, 222, 227, 246 see also technician stage space 12, 66, 99–101, 107–8, 111–12, 115, 125, 127–30, 137, 219 star, see mass-media star Starks, Lisa 267 n.6, 268 n.14, 274 n.15, 274 n.19 Stoicism 48, 50–51, 264 nn.43–44 stress 23, 60, 103, 108, 115, 180, 187, 192–95, 242, 258 n.12, 269 n.29 Strindberg, August 212 superego 19, 20, 30, 35, 37–38, 40, 59, 77, 111–12, 115, 123, 126, 128, 133, 145, 155, 192, 203–4, 206, 209, 218, 235, 257 n.8, 261 n.27 survival 5, 22, 52, 97–98, 105, 111, 143–44, 147, 152, 157, 161–62, 165, 171, 173, 178, 208, 214, 219, 231–32, 238, 242–47, 253 n.15, 257 n.3 Symbolic order (Lacanian) 4, 10, 16–19, 22, 24–25, 30, 32, 37, 39–41, 44, 46, 52, 56, 58, 61–64, 84–85, 111, 131, 160, 178, 186, 196–97, 199, 220, 223, 227, 241–46, 252, 252 n.10, 259 n.10, 262 nn.31–32, 274 n.17, 278 n.17

322

Index

sympathy 34, 36, 43, 79, 86, 94, 138, 158–59, 176–77, 199, 201, 212, 217–22, 263 n.41 Taymor, Julie 64–96, 106, 267 n.4, 267 n.6, 268 nn.8–13, 269 nn.16–18, 269 n.22, 269 nn.27–28 technician 156, 160, 203, 247 Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre 284 n.15 television 6–7, 19, 48, 52, 69–70, 72, 80, 83, 102, 104–6, 146, 148–53, 155, 174, 193, 226, 247, 253 n.1, 275 n.32 temporal lobe 24, 58, 167, 189, 192–93, 198, 265 nn.7–9, 272 n.20 Terasaki, Etsuko 281 n.7, 282 nn.9–10, 282 n.13 terror 30, 33, 56, 103, 126, 145, 170, 177, 194–95, 201, 243, 247 terrorism 30, 42, 45, 47–48, 72, 81, 126, 145, 148, 165, 235, 244–46 theatre (and cinema) in the brain, see internal theatre theoretic stage (Donald) 61, 231–38, 247, 284 n.10 Thompson, Kristin 275 n.26 threat 29–30, 38–42, 52, 56, 74, 82, 96, 108–9, 119, 128–29, 137–38, 147, 151, 170, 172, 180, 186, 193, 216, 220–23, 226–27, 237, 242–45, 248, 262 n.33 Tobin, J. M. M. 267 n.2, 268 n.7 Tomasello, Michael 270 n.4 Tononi, Giulio 162–63, 165–68, 174–76, 178–79, 252 n.6, 270 n.3, 276 n.2 Torey, Zoltan 284 n.16 Tort, Michel 255 n.24 tragedy 2, 30, 42–45, 49–53, 63–65, 69, 74, 78–79, 82, 88–89, 91, 94–96, 98–100, 105–7, 111–13, 119–21, 126, 131, 133, 136–37, 145, 147, 157, 170, 173, 177, 226, 240, 245, 267 n.2, 279 n.22

tragic flaw 16, 61, 93, 119, 131 transcendence 6, 10, 13, 20, 42–45, 47–48, 52–53, 64, 66, 73, 77, 83, 97–98, 107, 157, 170–73, 176, 204, 207–11, 231–35, 242–45, 248, 255 n.23 transference 176, 181–84, 187–88, 279 n.22 transience 205, 207, 210–11, 285 n.5 trauma 8, 21–22, 47, 59, 61, 88, 90–91, 94, 96, 99, 103, 107–8, 111, 119, 126, 144, 157, 160, 172–73, 183, 185–86, 190–95, 204, 211, 217, 224, 227, 240, 243, 258 n.12, 268 n.6, 269 n.29 Trevarthen, Colwyn 278 n.18 trickster 9–10, 68, 71, 90, 93, 118, 121, 129, 132, 137, 152, 156, 159, 162, 171, 178, 183, 218, 233–35, 244–45, 254 n.22 Turim, Maureen 275 n.25 Turkle, Sherry 254 n.18 Turnbull, Oliver 22, 24, 60–62, 188, 193, 252 n.6, 255 n.26, 258 nn.11–12, 263 n.35, 265 n.10, 279 n.26, 280 n.29, 280 n.36 Turner, Victor 258 n.16 Tyler, Royall 281 n.8 unconscious 17–22, 24–25, 36, 41, 56, 58, 62–65, 99–100, 102, 104, 106–7, 110–12, 115, 120, 131, 142, 156, 160, 164, 167–84, 187–203, 222, 224, 227, 234–35, 244, 247, 257 n.4, 258 n.10, 265 n.4, 270 n.3, 278 n.17, 279 n.22, 284 n.12 Valdez, Luis 212 values value-categories 167, 172, 183, 187, 190, 192, 201, 246 value patterns 164–65, 173 value systems 163, 168–69, 174

Index vampire 10, 32, 173–74, 254 n.22, 261 n.20 Van Haute, Philippe 256 n.30 Varela, Francisco 252 n.7, 277 n.7, 281 n.3 Vaughan, Virginia 269 n.22 vengeance 45–53, 63–64, 71–85, 88–89, 91–96, 98, 110, 113, 115, 117–19, 126, 131, 133, 136–38, 151, 154–55, 158, 160, 171–74, 177, 183, 199–200, 211, 238, 241–43, 246, 260 n.18, 261 n.22, 263 n.39, 270 n.31, 273 n.7, 275 n.23, 276 n.37 Venora, Diane 147 ventromedial frontal lobe 57, 277 n.12 ventromesial area (of the prefrontal lobe) 37, 61–62, 188 videogames 6–8, 15, 47, 53, 81, 105, 193, 247–48, 253 n.17, 254 n.20 violence 7–9, 30, 35, 38, 42–53, 63–64, 67–68, 71–76, 82–91, 95–96, 120, 136–37, 170–71, 177, 193–94, 200, 224–26, 235, 246, 254 n.20, 261 n.22, 263 n.41, 267 n.3, 267 n.6, 268 n.6 virtual reality (VR) 5–10, 19, 47, 101–5, 113, 146–47, 152, 157, 193, 213, 226, 242–44 Vogeley, Kai 270 n.5 voice-over 118–19, 122, 144, 148, 150–51, 155, 158 Volkan, Vamik 272 n.19 voyeurism 92, 121, 126, 128 Walker, Elsie 149, 267 n.6, 275 n.31 war 31, 42, 66, 69–75, 78, 82–83, 85, 109–11, 113, 115, 118–19, 121–22, 126, 130, 141–46, 151, 174, 183, 200, 213–17, 220–22, 225, 241, 268 nn.10–11 Watt, Douglas 252 n.6

323

Weinstock, Jeffrey 282 n.16 Weller, Philip 273 n.9 Welsh, Jim 269 n.23 Wernicke’s area (in the brain) 198, 262 n.31 Whallon, William 261 n.24 Wilder, Thornton 212 Wilkinson, Heward 252 n.6 Williamson, Nicol 129, 274 n.12 Willis, Deborah 269 n.29 Wilson, Ann 282 n.16 Wilson, Anne 277 n.8 Wilson, August 212 Wilson, David 257 n.3, 277 n.11, 284 n.14 Wilson, Edmund 281 n.1 Wilson, Edward 277 n.9, 281 n.1, 285 n.3 Winkielman, Piotr 252 n.6 Winnicott, D. W. 196, 265 n.12 wiring, neural 16, 22, 23, 40, 56, 59, 111, 161–63, 186, 194 Wistrand, Magnus 263 n.41 Wrathall, John 68, 71 Wright, Doug 212 Wright, Robert 277 n.11 Yeats, W. B.

212

Zeffirelli, Franco 68, 129–38, 146, 148, 151, 152, 160, 274 nn.13–16, 274 nn.19–20, 274–75 nn.22–23, 275 n.28 Zizek 1, 3, 6–9, 12, 18, 22, 25, 58, 200, 252 n.7, 257 n.4, 257 n.6, 257 n.8, 261 n.27 zombie 2, 9–10, 27, 56–57, 59, 61, 63–65, 68, 85, 87, 104–8, 110–13, 118, 120–22, 127, 129, 132, 138, 145, 158, 160, 162, 178, 186–87, 203, 219, 222–24, 231–36, 243–46, 251 n.2 zoom 100, 125

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