The word mythos describes a spoken narrative that is altered, inevitably each time it is retold. Myth functions as a pre-text; hence its similarity to the dream. Manifest versions are communicated as written (or filmed) texts, through which we ascertain the underlying latent unconscious structures. Myth, like the Janus-faced ego, turns outward to connect with society, as well as the interior.
A most generative archetype, the legend of Orpheus bears multiple meanings as particular strands are altered to fit individual expressive needs and shifting historical contexts—a story of undying love, a metaphor for the pain of relinquishing an absent object, a depiction of the permeable boundary between our world and death, a meditation on the creative process.
In Orphée, we find Cocteau's lifelong preoccupation with the myth as an expression of the artist's search for creative rejuvenation through the “beyond”; Orpheus, poet and priest who, Christ-like, returns from the dead. Conceived in the traumatic aftermath of occupation during WWII, the film locates its underworld in the bombed out ruins of St. Cyr, exploring the nature of Eros in a world permeated by death and destruction.
By transforming Death into a character rather than an abstract concept, Cocteau allows us to observe the usually silent permutations of Thanatos. By altering the affective heart of the myth so that the relationship between Orpheus and Death is central, Cocteau is able to study the transformation of loss into more integrated states of selfhood, the route from narcissism to generativity, the role of subliminatory outlets in binding the death instinct and the journey into the unconscious as a necessary prerequisite to creativity.
Cocteau's Orpheus, a staid bourgeois poet whose inspiration failed him, is scorned by the avant-garde, who prefer the inscrutable verses of the young Cegeste. Orpheus first glimpses the coldly elegant princess, “Death,” through a window in the Café des Poets. Inexplicably drawn to her, he obeys when she summons him to her Rolls Royce after Cegeste is killed by two leather-coated motorcyclists. The car rushes toward a twilight countryside, its radio offering enigmatic messages from the beyond.
The landscape, shot using negative film, proposes death as an inverse reality, a realm of dark reflections. Heurtebise, Death's chauffeur, is filmed from the back seat, as he looks into his rearview mirror. The theme of reflections and reversibility continues at Death's chateau; Death's henchman carry Cegeste upstairs, the scene first shot from below with Orpheus looking up and then with Orpheus looking down from the top of the stairs. The surfeit of doorways, portals, and stairs and the numerous camera angles from which they are filmed serve to present the descent into Hades as a journey into the labyrinth.
The dead Cegeste rises as if alive to be initiated into the “other world,” leaving Orpheus to wonder whether what he sees is dream or reality. Orpheus observes as Death, her henchman and Cegeste exit through the mirror, the door through which Death comes and goes. Orpheus faints, awakening next to a puddle that reflects his image and is driven home by Heurtebise.
Cocteau's Orpheus, close to Narcissus, shows little interest in devoted, bourgeois Eurydice, who tries unsuccessfully to tell him she is pregnant. Instead, Orpheus is enamored of the poems that stream from the radio in the princess's Rolls Royce, betraying both his wish to be near her and to own the phrases he believes will “astonish” the bohemians. The poems emerge from the other world in exact repetitions, their invariance representing the intrusion of death's stasis into language. Unbeknownst to Orpheus, Death comes to his bedroom nightly to watch him sleep.
The transcribed poems that Orpheus sends to his editor turn out to have been written by the dead Cegeste. The police call Orpheus into the city for questioning. The filmed city is reminiscent of a De Chirico painting, its ominous arches offering passage into the unknown. Spotting the elusive princess, Orpheus pursues her as she moves in and out of the dark solitude; she remains an obscure object of desire. The labyrinthine streets anticipate the descents to the underworld reminding us that death penetrates the “upper” world, always present even when hidden by noisy Eros.
Lissa Weinstein, Ph.D., is an associate professor in City College's doctoral clinical psychology program and a graduate of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Her film papers have appeared in Projections, Projected Shadows, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Psychoanalytic Psychology and Rivista di Psicoanalisi.
Bruce H. Sklarew, M.D., an associate editor and co-founder of the award-winning Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, organizes the film programs at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association and has co-edited two books on psychoanalysis and film.
Eurydice's death will similarly involve passages through doors and portals. Heurtebise, seeing Eurydice run down by Death's cyclists, carries her to her bedroom. The princess enters through the mirror followed by Cegeste, who keeps Orpheus from interfering by transmitting repetitive nonsensical “poetry.” Heurtebise, aware of Death's fascination with Orpheus, accuses the princess of having killed Eurydice in order to have him for herself. In an all-too-human rage at Heurtebise's accusation, Death loses her ability to pass smoothly through the mirror, leaving it shattered on her return to the underworld. Heurtebise offers to accompany Orpheus into the underworld to retrieve Eurydice, aware that Orpheus is more enamored of Death than his wife.
Passing through the mirror, the two men careen past shattered doorways, burnt out walls, and half-window jambs to find Death before a harsh tribunal, on trial for her transgression of arranging Eurydice's death without “orders.” The judgment: Orpheus can leave with Eurydice provided he does not look back or tell what he has seen. Orpheus wants only to be with Death, who has confessed her love for him to the judges.
After Orpheus and Eurydice return to the upper world, the scene is comical, more like the French slang for a bored lover (he can't stand to look at her anymore) than eternal love. Tormented Eurydice arranges her own death; Orpheus's famous look back takes place in the car's rear view mirror. When the bohemians who blame him for Cegeste's disappearance attack, Orpheus submits, welcoming his fate. He descends again to the underworld, where the Princess awaits. Transformed by desire, she is now subject to the painful affect of longing. Yet Death conspires to undo what has taken place. With Heurtebise's help, she “labors” to strangle Orpheus; her pained ecstatic expression suggests birth. Now, their love will exist only in the poetry he will create—their child. Orpheus's death in the underworld signals his return to life. Orpheus and Eurydice awaken as from a midsummer night's dream, in what appears to be a parody of heavenly ecstasy while Heurtebise and Death will face an even deeper circle of hell where unimaginable torments await.
Death undergoes the more profound transformation from narcissism to generativity. Her chilling demeanor vanished, she sacrifices herself for Orpheus's immortality. Like timeless Eros, she believes their love has always existed; Orpheus's description of her as “burning like ice” is a well-known representation of desire from Sophocles. Thus Cocteau reaffirms the inextricable tie of Thanatos and Eros in creativity.
Film offered Cocteau the ideal medium to examine death, creativity, and the unknown. In film, people are both present and absent, a parallel to the underworld where the dead exist in itinerant forms while their immobile remains are buried. Film's technological tricks allowed him to represent the reversibility of time; vanishings by fade-out and materialization by fade-in became visual metaphors for reversing death. Montage worked to depict the non-sequential, dreamlike narrative. Opposites form the core of the film: presence and absence, contrasts of light and dark, and the doorways that mark the boundaries between zones of life and death. These images form the visual poetry of the film, superior to dialogue in decoding its multiple levels of meaning and reference. The interpenetration of opposites drives the narrative structure—itself constructed out of fragments that do not always cohere.
Although Orphée is autobiographical, it captures much of the beauty of the original myth. Like Orphée, Cocteau struggled with his place in French literature. His mixing of modern context with mythical allusions created a film both real and supernatural, mimicking the confrontation of ordinary life with the invisible mysteries that feed creativity. While its overt form is a thriller, a French gangster movie melded with a war/resistance drama, it is an immortal thriller with every image a condensation. Death's Rolls Royce is simultaneously a conveyance across the River Styx; her headquarters in the ruins of St. Cyr condense Hades and the hell of German occupation. Death's “orders” from unknown superiors mimic the pyramidal structure of the resistance, while expressing the inherent unknowability of the drive. The tribunals copy the Communist purges after France's liberation while still representing the judgmental punishing superego.
Both the underworld and the creative, generative aspects unconscious share an absence of time and distance, lack “whys and reasons,” and equate opposites. Both are storehouses of memory and repetition. It is Cocteau's genius to have shown us the interpenetration of the underworld, with its lost inhabitants mired in delusion and invariant repetitions, and the “heavenly” ending scene, to suggest that the mirror that births the self also opens the portal of death. His magnificent images of paradox remain long after the dialogue fades from memory.