STAGES IN THE LEGEND

The opening episode, in both style and theme, creates a model for the transition in consciusness depicted by the film. The sequence begins with the infant Jason, sitting in a patch of light inside the doorway of a small hut. The camera also is enclosed in the hovel, focused upon a centaur who lectures Jason about his origin and destiny. As the scene progresses, both camera and characters move gradually toward the light of the exterior world. At the episode's conclusion, e, Jason, and the centaur stand on the shores of an ocean, gazing raptly into infinite space, on the threshold of an unexplored world. There is, thus, both audience and characters a gradual expansion of vision from the hermetic world of the hut to the world at large.

To some degree, this shift is inherent in the change of consciousness marked by the centaur's talk. Initially, he describes for us a reverential but mythological sense of nature not unlike that which Pasolini speaks of in regard to The Gospel According to Matthew. When the centaur looks upon the world, he sees not a machine governed by physical laws, but a vital, living organism in which every visible form is sustained by a spiritual presence "All is sacred. All is sacred. There is nothing natural in nature . . . Does a piece of that sky seem unnatural and possessed by a God . . . Wherever your eye roams a God is hidden."

The anthropomorphic nature of that presence, however, is a measure of the limitations of the vision, of myth consciousness. To a certain degree sacredness is in the eye of the beholder, for as the episode proceeds and Jason grows to manhood, we discover that the centaur's vision of nature is significantly fictive, not the perception of an absolute external condition but a conscious, imaginative construction in which religious faith operates as a tool to induce spiritual vision. Hence, the episode concludes with the centaur's explanation that under the scrutiny of the "new" reason the old analogies between humanity and nature (seeds and human resurrection) "no longer have any meaning." "In fact," he concludes, "there is no God." The crisis confronting Jason, which he does not understand, is precisely how to reconcile the two forms of perception exposed by the centaur (the mystical and the rational), or, in terms more relevant to a modern audience, how are we to operate in the world with the freedom gained from the birth of reason without sacrificing the spiritual vision of reality inspired by the old religion?

Jason does not fare well at making the reconciliation; his reason becomes a tool for making business deals. But Pasolini does not present a one-sided picture of the conflict between the two modes of consciousness. The initial episode moves toward enlarged rational vision, but before we can witness the further development of the new perception, the film cuts directly to a more "primitive" society in which the contours of a literal, primitive myth-consciousness can be seen.

Mythological humanity, in true Pasolini fashion, achieves a sense of vivid spiritual immediacy through his anthropomorphic vision, but he does so by enclosing itself hermetically in a world of static symbols. He becomes prey to outside forces of change and to the latent individuative urges suppressed by his religion. Medea's world, for example, is a closed system, centered on and organized around a static symbol, the fleece of a goat. In essence, the spiritual presence in nature is holly externalized in an iconic object which freezes consciousness and becomes ready prey to forces which might impinge upon and destroy it. Moreover, as the symbol gains power over human consciousness, it engenders an essentially propitiatory need of dealing with the gods of nature, a need that results in human sacrifice. As the centaur notes, "The Gods that love, at the same time hate." Hence, our introduction to the mythological world of Medea comes by way of a sacrificial rite of spring in which the blood of a victim is used as a catalyst to impel the fertility of the land. Likewise, the vineyard trees are clustered with wine jugs symbolically hung to inspire a rich harvest. It is a land in which objects are invested by faith with magical powers.

Moreover, despite the rigid profiles of his group, Jason also introduces something else, a capacity for directional movement lacking in both Medea's world and his own pre-adolescent island. The sacred vision of the centaur (in line with what we see) is largely based on stillness, "the stillness of a summer sky" or "the clouds reflected in the calm, still water at three in the afternoon." Indeed, the most motion perceivable in the scenes of Jason's youth occurs when he plays with a sand crab. If Medea's world seems, by contrast, effervescent, its vitality is based on motion which is largely ritualized and constrained. This motion is cyclical, like that of the wheel Medea spins, and centered upon essentially static, or repeating forms. Moreover, as the heavy clothing suggests, it is a world in which the patina of ritual and control suppresses any natural instincts for personal definition. One thinks here not only of the obscured faces of the people (or the painting of the victim), but of the royal family itself, forced to conform to an inherited, definitive role, standing still and unmoving in their abode, framed individually in a series of arched windows. One functions not as a self-sufficient agent in this world, but in terms of an inherited structure which draws definite boundaries around his/her natural mobility. Everyone is, in a sense, the sacrificial victim in the rite of spring, for the prevailing constraint upon motion is indeed a constraint upon individuation and personal identity.

What Jason brings into this world is a vitality of liner motion, a sense of personal power, and a new historical sense which perceives time not in terms of recurring cycles but as a linear process and progression, open-ended and capable of being initiated by an individual. Although his journey begins under the aegis of inherited destiny (to capture a symbol), Jason transforms it into a quest for "experience" valuable in its own right. He ultimately throws the sought-after fleece at his uncle's feet, proclaiming it to be meaningless outside its own country and disavowing any claim to his uncle's empire because "I discovered the world is far wider than your kingdom."

For Jason, motion, rather than symbol, is the dominant force in his life-style, and in the process of being liberated from stillness and static form, he comes to see the world not as a system of absolute roles but as a range upon which he himself is the centering force. Thus, Medea will criticize his camp site: "You are not seeking the center, not marking the center." Liberated from static form and symbol, Jason's men easily carry out their mission, fleeing to their boat while the king's army is immobilized in the ritual of collecting the prince's body. Jason's mobility further liberates him from the quest for inheritance enjoined upon him by the centaur. He moves beyond primitive perception and a sense of identity conditioned by the past (only to arrive in Corinth to join the new establishment rapidly congealing into a bourgeois stasis of its own). Jason's real crime, for Pasolini, is that he stops growing; he severs his ties to the primitive God who once inhabited his consciousness and to the "religious" sentiments - imaginings - which, when released from their anthropomorphic prison, might impel his consciousness to synthesize rational and mystical perception.

Whatever his shortcomings, Jason exudes a sense of vitality to Medea capable of inspiring her to break free of her own hermetic world, at least temporarily. He releases her suppressed impulses for individual destiny. But for Medea, the reconciliation of Jason's rational world with her own proves impossible. The linear forms which endow Jason's life with a degree of liberty become for her a trap and a death sentence. As she wanders along the beach the first night of her departure, the land around her appears as a parched grid, a dry checkerboard of linear form in which the old "God" has been replaced by the form's reason: "Earth, where is your meaning . . . where is your link to the sun?" She perceives that Jason has broken with nature - for him it is no longer an analogue to human life - but cannot herself accept such a split.

The bifurcation in Jason's relationship to nature is a division of consciousness as well, a condition dramatized in the dualistic visitation of the centaur upon his return to Corinth. The centaur appears in two forms, only one of which is that of a centaur, the other being that of a man. It is significant that Jason is informed by this vision that each form has been produced by himself: "It is you who produced it. We are inside you: a sacred one when you were a boy; a desecrated one when you became a man. What was sacred is preserved beside the new desecrated form." Jason divides one historical form of consciousness - irrational, symbolic, and propitiatory - from another - rational, mechanistic, and "human-centered." Both possibilities exist side by side, yet Jason largely denies the urges of the old form, saying, "What use is it to me to know all this?"

Jason has become man in the historical "humanistic" vision, a rational animal placed at the center of his universe - or making himself that center. But in Pasolini's vision this is not enough, for this replacement of symbol with individual soon leads to replacing the individual with reason itself, reducing humanity to an object in a devitalized expanse. By its very rationality, humanity removes itself from its spiritually energetic and creative origins in nature. Humanity stands outside nature, fostering a dualistic, subject-object relationship to life which, by its violation of the irrational foundations of life, breeds catastrophe. The solution is not to go back, but to go forward, beyond rationalism, to creative consciousness, a deed not wholly achieved in Pasolini's works until The Arabian Nights. Jason's consciousness, blind to a large portion of reality, converts itself into bourgeois materialism, and he ultimately chooses to remarry with the king's daughter, Glauce, in order to improve his station (and that of his children) in bourgeois Corinthian society. This stodgy ideal is to be achieved by leaving Medea behind. Hence, love and passion disappear from the world, having been converted into merchandise.

Narratively, by this point the film we have passed through two stages of human history, a collision of forms of consciousness, and a bifurcation of perception engendered in the emergence of rational humankind. In the episodes of Glauce's death, the consequences of rational consciousness are made manifest: specifically, as "conscience" and moral guilt. Such guilt is based not upon the recognition of a violation of divine law but upon those human rites dependent largely upon the humanistic sense of humanity as a rational center of the world. Glauce cmmits suicide because she feels guilty for stealing Medea's husband. In Medea's world, however, this sense of guilt does not exist. Men can be sacrificed and brothers slaughtered without remorse, for such actions are those of the Gods and can be atoned for through the agencies of ritual or the intervention of divine providence. Humanity is not the center; it must conform to one.

For Glauce, however, no such external form of expiation exists. She dwells solely with her guilt, and her suicide, from a modern perspective, is psychologically and humanistically apt. She leaps from the ramparts of the castle, a small figure against a vast, rather blank background, and dies. From Medea's primitive vision, however, the death is charged with magic and supernatural power. The psychological discomfort of Glauce becomes literal flame for Medea, when in another vision of Glauce's death the garments Medea sends Glauce as a wedding present burst into fire when donned, and Glace and father perish in the flames of divine retribution.

The two versions of the death, being directly juxtaposed, may confuse viewers, but, in actuality, the double view juxtaposes the two forms of consciousness and carries forward the consequences of their bifurcation. Each vision is true from one point of view because reality in the film is, itself, fictive, dependent upon the manner in which the imagination chooses to create it rather than being a totally absolute "given." They are accordingly different; art is not entirely metahistorical, for the human story changes radically in cultures of different consciousnesses.

NARRATION

To suggest that the film promotes a fictive or non-absolute sense of reality is not to condemn it, but rather locate it more firmly in a contemporary worldview in which no absolute reality has been discovered behind the phenomenal world and truth, at least since Nietzche, has been seen to be a function of our life goals. But these are latent, rather than explicit, conditions in the universe of Medea. What is obvious, however, is the film's recurring concerns with fiction, narrative, and lies.

One of the centaur's first revelations to Jason is the disclosure of his previous misrepresentation of the child's parentage: "You are not my son nor did I find you in the sea." But the lies do not stop here. After the centaur's long prelude in regard to the presence of gods in nature, he closes the first episode with a denial of gods. While he accurately foresees the labors enjoined upon Jason by his uncle, the goat skin itself proves useless and the real value of Jason's adventure proves not to inhere in the centaur's early goals but in the experience of growth itself.

Besides the centaur's deception, there is Medea's duplicity at film's end, the double vision, and the centaur's complicated narrative spun in the opening scene. The film is obsessed with storytelling and thus calls attention to its own narrative structure as being in some way part of the "message" or thematic interest. What becomes important in all of these fictions is not their absolute truth but their operative value, the ability to generate holistic perception or individual growth. Underlying the film is the implied sensibility that the universe is itself neither an absolute pantheon of gods nor a rational system but a creator or storymaker. Truths become useful fictions by which we live, different forms of fictions.

It is the compelling narrative of the centaur that explodes Jason from his hermetic life, causes him to rupture another closed culture, and, in short, sets modern history in motion. It is creative fantasy that fuels evolution and change, rather than, as one might expect in Pasolini, Marxist dialectic. (But Pasolini ad clearly qualified his Marxist affinities by the late 1960s.) Within the context of an essentially fictive universe (and there is no guarantee that Jason's rational perceptions are less fictive than Medea's mythological consciousness), both Jason and Medea become the narrators of their own lives and thus, in an important sense, become what they choose to make themselves. For Medea, unable to accept either Jason's betrayal or exile into a world she cannot comprehend, the choice is regression, and she weaves a narrative of self-destruction - one, however, in which she reclaims her lost sense of kinship with nature. Her betrayal by Jason embodies his severance from his own irrational dimension, a tributary source of his initial adventurousness and "narrative power." As a narrator, he opts for a marriage to a system in which his fictive powers would be shut down, in its own way an act of self-destruction and a refusal t carry forward the narrative impulse as its own end and purpose. He chooses to wed himself to the historical by-product of rational consciousness, the stable, bourgeois, mercantile society. Hence, by the end of the film, the two narrative impulses, mythological and rational (and their counterparts in forms of consciousness), have been irrevocably split and self-defeating. Medea and her children burn while Jason watches helplessly. But, significantly, the rational society of Corinth never wholly denies the power and potential of Medea's form of consciousness; because they no longer understand it, they choose to repress and exile it. In fact, they are afraid of it, as bourgeois society fears any real spiritual perception. Its forms of perception are never wholly discredited within the film itself. It is "profaned" perhaps, but not eradicated.

The film ends with Jason and Medea shouting at each other across the unbridgeable gap of their different worlds as the house and children go up in flames. Medea's final words, "Nothing is possible anymore," testify to the failure of her imagination, her inability to carry forward the narration of her own life. Trapped in the mythological cycle of jealousy and retribution, her life ends in passion and fire, but also in the negation of life. She as failed to grow and thus thwarts growth in others, killing her own children to inflict suffering on Jason. Her failure to grow is consistent with the veneration of stasis which permeates mythological consciousness in the film. And this sense of arrest is implicit in the freeze frame of the sun rising with which the film begins and ends.

In conclusion, the film brings us to the disjunction of two forms of consciousness by way of the severance of Jason and Medea. Jason, though he may not be particularly "savory," still bears the possibility of reconciliation within him in the form of the old and new centaur. His identification with the latter has resulted in a profanation of the former, but if we believe the centaur, the old form remains, though dormant, as a source of holistic vision and creative inspiration.

From Pier Paolo Pasolini by Stephen Snyder (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980).