THE WIZARD OF OZ (FIRST PART)

Much has been said about the meaning of The Wizard of Oz; Dorothy’s fascinating voyage to the Land of Oz, her outlandish friends and the eccentric characters she meets on her way, have haunted many generations of children and adults, Americans and non Americans. The countless adaptations for the stage, the movies, the sequels and television shows, compete with the multiple interpretations about the book and the film.
Since the publication in 1900, the fairy tale of L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, enforced the theory of a political allegory and a parable of populism in the last years of the XIX century in the USA. From this point of view almost every aspect of the story can be translated term to term; the Wizard would be President Grover Cleveland; the Cowardly Lion, the Democratic-Populist Presidential candidate; the Scarecrow, the farmers; the Tin Man, the alienated factory workers; Dorothy herself, the good American People; Emerald City, Washington D.C., and it goes on and on. The one l like the most in this interpretation, fashionable these days, is the Wicked Witch as the bankers who terrorized the people (the Munchkins?), and l am certain you had already guessed this last one.
Notwithstanding the authenticity of this theory, for the modern audience and fans of the Wizard of Oz, the explanation sounds flat and dull for such a rich account of adventures and extravagant and lovable characters. Frank Baum’s allegory surpassed the political intention of its time becoming a saga of self knowledge, a universal fable of coming of age.
Very few modern tales have acquired the status of universal myths, and here the merit cannot be ascribed totally to the author of the ‘Wizard’; the musical version of 1939, made and engrossed by the ideas of a big team of producers, writes, musicians and artists, set the ‘canon’ of the Wizard of Oz. The less acquainted modern audiences become of the historical context that produced the allegory of the book, the more the play becomes an open metaphor, a byproduct of the collective unconscious accountable of multiple interpretations.
One of the many is the gay approach. Reid Davis, a scholar from the University of California, published in Film Quaterly magazine a long and serious essay, a psychoanalytic (based mainly on Lacan) exegesis entitled: ‘Lost Objects, Repeat Viewings, and the Sissy Warrior’, where he studied the multiple screening in TV, cinema and theatre, the reaction and identification of several generations of gay people with the personality of the Cowardly Lion, first posing as a macho or a butch and then singing: ‘Oh it’s sad, believe me, missy, When you are born to be a sissy’; funny dialogues as this of the Good Witch: ‘Only the ugly witches are bad’; or Judy Garland and ‘Somewhere beyond the rainbow’, for some, definite icons of the gay culture.
My personal interpretation, deeply rooted in the enthusiasm for the movie and the play since my early childhood, is strongly influenced by Carl G. Jung. The Wizard of Oz is more an authentic myth than a fable of coming of age; it depicts a process of individuation, the perilous journey into owns psyche in order to become an integrated individual. The fact that a whirlwind transports Dorothy to the Word of Oz, interpreted in the 1939 version as a dream, a jump from the ‘real world’ into a fairyland inhabited by equivalents of Dorothy’s everyday life, authorizes this approach.
That Dorothy is not confident and grounded at her uncles’ home is a fact made clear since the beginning; she falls while playing on the fence and the adult that helps her seems weak and emotional (later, he will turn into the Cowardly Lion); we see her threatened viciously by the neighbour, Elmira Gulch, who wants to kill Toto, Dorothy’s most vital and cherish object; the aunt and uncle cannot help and she actually intends to run away. Then, the whole house is carried away by the tornado; are we talking here about a dysfunctional family?
Another important element related to roots and foundations in the tale are the Red Shoes; the same that the Wicked Witch of the West covets to the point of wanting to kill her. The shoes become the key element since her arrival in the World of Oz; her violent landing actually kills the other Wicked Witch, a sort of ‘acting out’ against this terrible mother image full of envy and repression; those same Red Shoes will eventually transport her to her native Kansas once she realizes that ‘There is no better place like home’. Dorothy can now stand on her own ground.
We know that Dorothy is an orphan. But how did her parents die? How did she lose her mother? If we assume that the witch can be a personification of the dark aspect of the child’s mother image, then the ‘accident’ that kills the witch is a sort of murder. Is Dorothy resentful at her mother for abandoning her? We also know that the surrogate mother, Autie Em, is a hard working stern woman with no time to express her love and that she hardly takes care about the child’s main concerns.
The Wicked Witch of the West personifies an aspect of what Jung calls the Shadow; a projection of Dorothy’s own psyche where she includes both her own destructive drives as well as the aggressive tendencies of those adults who are suppose to love and protect her. The witch coveting Dorothy’s Red Shoes can be associated with the ‘bad mother’ preventing her from being well rooted in life and therefore becoming an adult.
The World of Oz makes apparent every dimension of our heroine's inner world, the mother destructiveness, the inner personalities of her friends, their unconscious desires, and the aspect each of them represents in her own process of individuation, her own psychological function, her astrological elements and complexes. Thus, Toto stands for the part of herself (instinct to be protected) that feels threatened all the time, the endangered child persecuted by the ‘bad woman’; as instinct of survival, Toto is also the most sensible and clever part of herself.

DEPARTURES (OKURIBITO )

WHY OKURIBITO?

First time l heard about ‘Departures’ (Okuribito) l was in Japan and my poor knowledge of Japanese made me wait until the movie could be shown in Hong Kong or Mexico City. I was excited to see it because some friends, whose opinion l respect very much, had been enthralled by it; when they mentioned the theme and some aspects of the plot l imagined ‘Okuribito’ as the Japanese version of ‘Six Feet Under’, the HBO series about a family who runs a funeral home in LA.

Then came the Oscars Ceremony Awards, ‘Departures’ was awarded the Best Foreign Film and l was glad, both for the film industry in Japan and for me, knowing this would make easy now to find my way to see it; so l hurried up to the Broadway Cinemateque as soon as l arrived in Hong Kong where ‘Departures’ was being shown.

The first sequence showing Daigo (Masahiro Motoki) performing the ritual of a nokanshi (since then l acquired some more words in Japanese) lets clear that ‘Okuribito’ has little to do with the American series or with any kind of Western approach to death. Daigo performing those hypnotic elegant movements, the sudden contrast of humour and sexual life reference of the deceased in front of the family create an amalgam of beauty and sadness, so particular to the Japanese culture.

THE GENRE

No doubt ‘Okuribito’ is a ‘tearjerker’ as some film critics have described it, it is clear that the director and the producers appeal to a sentimental involvement on the part of their audience, but the emotional frame of loss and regret they impose on the spectator is counterbalanced by the black humour of the situations, the beauty of the proceedings and the change of perspective within the family of the deceased during the ceremony. Thus, Daigo’s gradual understanding of the real job he has undertaken, his predicaments to keep the nature of this new job secret to his wife, are misunderstandings typical of a sitcom. The ceremonial aspect of the procedure, both mesmerizing and instructing the audience in an art not commonly appreciated in Japan, tradition basically unknown abroad, makes Okuribito a sort of pedagogical document in itself.

THEATRE AND MEANING

Most valuable of these three counterbalancing aspects is, from my point of view, the change of attitude in the families watching their loved ones prepared for the coffin. Every ritual performed on any of the dead is a short drama in itself, a drama composed more in a Western than in a Japanese way; the Aristotelian three acts can be easily distinguished. Take, for example, the case of the stern man complaining harshly to the nokanshi for arriving late, this could be our first act; this man is obviously angry for the loss of his wife, and as we witness the transformation of a dead body into an actual portrait of love and inner wisdom, the second act takes place; the third would be the ‘catharsis’ of the whole family, especially of the father and husband letting go his anger and openly expressing his pain and therefore being able to show his gratitude to the Daigo and his boss.

The director clearly assumes the theatrical aspect of these rituals putting the camera in the position of the spectator, sometimes abstracting in black the surroundings of the nokanshi to make both the audience and the family concentrate on the ritual as well as experiencing the sensation of a theatre.

Certainly, the ceremony as a whole, the precision of the movements, the expectancy of whereto these will lead, imposes theatre as technique as wel as metaphor, but here the metaphor is a serious one: in order to let go the beloved person, we have to see he or she come back to life and then depart us with the smile of someone who has found the key of an enigma; and this is such a play were the dead body becomes the main character, the nokanshi the director, a sort of bunraku master animating the puppet (ningyo), or as in the case of Daigo, the instrument the artist is playing.

DAIGO AND THE QUEST OF THE FATHER

Well, here we spoil the contents of the film letting the reader know the end, but since our purpose is not recommending it but digging into its meaning we have to go further.

Daigo will eventually perform the whole drama for himself, his wife will be present but the ritual will not be performed for her, she will only be the witness of her husband’s own catharsis. Seen from this perspective, this scene, criticized for its melodramatic contents and for relying too much on easy coincidences makes ‘Departures’ a most serious film.

It all happens as if every accident of Daigo’s life, the dismissal from the orchestra, the return to the native land, the discovering of his real vocation as a nokanshi, had led to reencountering his father. There was only one way he could meet again the father who had forsaken him, and this is as a cadaver; the psychoanalytic reason would obviously be because the father had already been dead in his unconscious since the moment the man had abandoned the six year old boy, this is why Daigo could not remember his face. The picture of the father only becomes distinct when the son performs the whole ritual as a nokanshi, he brings his father back to life for an instant, then he sees him clearly and thus expresses his pain, for the abandonment and for the death of the father, a separation repeated twice at the same moment, and then the son lets the father go, he can mourn him now.

Much can be said about this unique moment where Daigo possesses his father one hundred per cent, we will not go that far; he had repressed the pain of his progenitor’s absence, the desire he had repressed of meeting him. The message might be that we can only let things go when we apprehend them, ephemeral as they can be, like the tradition of sakura no hanami in Japan.

THE SYMBOLICAL APPROACH

From a short astrological and symbolical approach of ‘Departures’ l would like to use the charts of Motoki Masahiro san and of Takita Yojiro san, respectively the main actor and the director of the movie. I found the data on the internet, the time of birth is missing but many things can be said using the positions of the planets at noon.

What impresses me first is that Takita Yojiro, director of the movie, Motoki Masahiro, leading actor, and Yamazaki Tsutomu, the boss and father image of Daigo, are all Sagittarius. I do not know about the rest of the cast or the producers, a more extensive research would surely bring about amazing discoveries. Knowing the coincidence of sign of three of the most important people in he feature provides us with a lot of material. This, of course, assuming, from the Jungian perspective and from any sort of traditional sciences such as Astrology, that there are not accidents and that any creation of man organizes the world more unconsciously than consciously.

From the perspective of my work, the way l explain it to myself, there are two main opposite tendencies in the world, one leads to disorganization, the other, towards organization. Archetypes and symbols rule this movement.

THE THREE CHARTS

These are the three charts, l hope the data are correct. In any case this would be a good exercise on astrological interpretation.

Takita Yōjirō, born December 4, 1955 in Takaoka, Toyama, Japan), is an Academy Award-winning Japanese filmmaker.

Tsutomu Yamazaki (山崎 努 Yamazaki Tsutomu) (born December 2, 1936 in Matsudo, Chiba Prefecture, Japan) is a Japanese actor.

Motoki Masahiro 21 Dec 1965

Okegawa, Japan

What made these three Sagittarius come together? It is not so easy to find a team composed by this sign, Sagittarius are strong willed people who do not like so easily to be said what they have to do. But here it must have been relatively easy to attune with each other having the three of them their Mercury (the planet of communication) also in Sagittarius; surely, intuition, non verbal communication, functioned better while they were working and jokes and good humour during the production helped a lot.

SATURN, PISCES AND THE SCHOOL OF COMPASSION

We can lay out three of the main themes in ‘Okuribito’ to study the symbol of Saturn in the movie and in these charts: Death, The Father and Purpose in Life.

The three charts have Saturn in water, an element related to emotions and those of the actors, Yamazaki san and Motoki san have this planet in Pisces, the sign of compassion; as Saturn in water tends to block emotions (Daigo represses the pain of his father’s desertion, the incapacity to remember his face being the effect) the aim is not only to release them but to learn from them. Pisces and Sagittarius belong to the mutable cross, related to teaching and learning.

I have always said that one of the many ways to describe Saturn in Scorpio, where the director of ‘Departures’ has his own Saturn, is a frozen corpse. This would be related to a bereavement that never took place, a radical pain that was never expressed, both Saturn and Scorpio tend to control and obstruct, it takes time and hard work to liberate pain and express forgiveness with this position; a process of transformation is being prevented.

Takita san's Saturn in Scorpio squaring Pluto emphasizes this extreme contraction; ‘Okuribito’ illustrates a wonderful way of developing Pluto in Leo (the Moon in Leo helps) through creative means. Leo is related to theatre and dramatic rendition; Pluto, to death and transformation; therefore, the theatrical aspect in the movie we mentioned above would be deploying this theme graphically; but a Saturn in Pisces was needed to melt the ice, massage the rigidity, convey the message that that corpse deserves respect, love and admiration in order to gain compassion and fulfillment in life.

Saturn in Pisces in the charts of both actors is in conjunction, Motoki san and Yamazaki san are separated in age by a whole cycle of this planet; the relation father and son, boss and employee, is obvious in the film, the Sagittarius ingredient adds the teacher and disciple dyad. In a very deep level they represent an archetypal dynamics of the director’s unconscious; we can only speculate that some kind of issue happened with his father relationship while Saturn was transiting Pisces and squaring his sun (Father image) when Takita san was around 9 or 10 years old; the Saturn in Pisces of both actors square the sun of the director of Okuribito they made him work hard and he made them work hard.

‘Departures’ shows the of process opening and healing deep wounds from the past through art and compassion.

We will develop more about this and the other themes in the film in further comments, l do not want to extent this first post too long, for the moment.