"Within every woman there lives a powerful force, filled with good instincts, passionate creativity, and ageless knowing. She is the Wild Woman, who represents the instinctual nature of women. But she is an endangered species." - Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PHD -Women who Run with the Wolves
There's not a lot of wise women archetypes in the movies - maybe that's because they were all burnt at the stake in the gynocide of the Middle Ages. We've largely forgotten how cool they can be. When they've appeared they've either come on as wizened old crones (hence not a sexual threat), pedantic humanitarians, and/or fantasmagorical spirits. There are real-life icons like Jane Goodall (left), healers (Mother Theresa), TV earth mothers (Oprah), first ladies, scientists, surgeons, pilots, astronauts, and they abound in fairy tales and myth. But in cinema, few and far between be they. 
Is it because wise women aren't cinematic, or do they just 'spook' us into feeling guilty, like we should finally call grandma? I've enjoyed assembling this entire series, but I must say I've been dreading this one. Luckily there's the amazing Clarissa Pinkola Estes, author of Women who Run with the Wolves, a book I once bought for an old girlfriend, who couldn't understand it, gave up after ten pages, and thought I was holding my knowledge of Jungian archetypal symbolism over her head, and I was. The very existence of that book brought on a lot of fights, and maybe even broke us up and for that I am grateful. As was she. As Estes notes:
“Sometimes the one who is running from the Life/Death/Life nature insists on thinking of love as a boon only. Yet love in its fullest form is a series of deaths and rebirths. We let go of one phase, one aspect of love, and enter another. Passion dies and is brought back. Pain is chased away and surfaces another time. To love means to embrace and at the same time to withstand many endings, and many many beginnings- all in the same relationship.”The wild wise woman has, as Estes notes, the ability to love even death, and failure, and rejection, as well as their opposites. She knows how to let go of her children without a thought, never resisting heartbreak any more than the sky resists a passing cloud, to take all that comes as rungs on a single winding ladder, to nurture without conditions... Jung wrote of the 'whole self' and discovery of one's true nature as essential to one's ability to be a good parent: "Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent." Guiding the wise wild woman towards the universal life are the archetypes. Mothers, queens, doctors, spirits, and warriors, have lived that life, to the benefit of all us children.
I found the first Elizabeth to be over-plotted and over-acted, but The Golden Age is just good old-fashioned, even subversive, camp. Blanchett--having dispensed with the origin story and all the 'must rise against patriarchal oppression' historical accuracy motif-mongering--is free to play Elizabeth how she should be played, with drollery and sly spirit. A great moment comes early on when, in the midst of an ornate procession aglow in Bollywood pomp, she breaks her regal deadpan and winks at one of her friends in the crowd, but majestically and very British. Both figurehead and woman, neither repressed nor repressive, she is earth mother and sky father both, able to wear the crown without it hanging too heavy. Two steps ahead of her enemies, free of all fear, she is an iron lady and effervescent as a daisy. She's both nurturer and destroyer and, as the indirect result of having transcended sex, she is possessed with the ability to wipe out the entire Spanish armada with her virgin power and golden stormy garb, the stormy magic of the channel! She becomes what royalty was always supposed to be: a living archetype that points endlessly inwards, outwards, and upwards... and redefines fabulousness with an insect reptilian glam.
What a pair of career bookends! Surely Laughton had Gish's role in the silent multi-narrative film Intolerance--with its connecting images of Gish rocking a cradle as the archetypal mother--in mind when casting her as Rachel Cooper in Hunter. While Intolerance didn't do well at the box office, Griffith's unabashed symbolism has aged very well if Night of the Hunter (which also flopped) is any indication. Both offer a clear line between evil 'false prophets' (the child-stealing moral crusaders of Intolerance and Mitchum's scary preacher in Hunter) and the true protectors of innocence.
Gish is perfect in both roles. Vulnerable, a bit frail maybe but iron tough, whether enduring betrayal by a no-good man (Way Down East), the dust bowl (The Wind), the French revolution (Orphans of the Storm), or beatings at the hands of her cruel drunk father (Broken Blossoms), she wins us over to her cause through those hardscrabble Yankee eyes.
One of my getaway fantasies is to escape out to the wilds of Kiloran and shack up with Catriona in her supremely cozy inn. Can't you see me, bonding with her troop of wolfhounds and borrowing from her loaded gun rack? Getting my hair wet from the wind and warm foggy damp of the isles and warming it up by the cheer of a good fire as I pour out whiskey for steady streams of cool visitors like Roger Livesy. There we are, the lot of us, staring out at the windy, stormy sea while nodding in and out of woozy romantic black-outs.
"Blown by the wind with an umbrella, she comes down from the clouds in response to the Banks' advertisement for a nanny. Her personality can be abrasive at times. She is not very sympathetic to the children other than in the Disney movie adaptation. There have been many questions as to whether Mary Poppins is human or not (perhaps an extraterrestrial disguised as a human)--that is for the reader to decide. P.L Travers said that Mary Poppins is 'a pretty young woman, a nurturing mother and a wise old woman, all in one.' Thus, Mary Poppins may be a reference to the "Triple Goddess," a frequently occurring archetype in many world cultures." -- Woo Factor
She's already shown up in this series as devouring mother (Suddenly Last Summer) and anima (Bringing up Baby), but I don't dare leave her out of this. In films like her Spence collaborations or On Golden Pond she proved she could match the big old patriarchal blowhards stare for stare. The real sizzle in her chemistry with Spencer Tracy (who, gifted though he may be as an actor, radiates a joy-killing sanctimoniousness) is her refusal to buckle to his bullying, nor hold a grudge about it, nor lose her feminine cheer in the process, all of which makes her a modern heroine and a wise woman of the first class... She always played herself, but it was a self that could encompass any character or role the way the sea encompasses the sailor.
Perhaps this unique character slipped by the censors because having an adult male doctor playing dolly games with a child would be creepy, but it's great and rare to see an unencumbered professional female character like this in a film, even today (compare her with, say, the doormat sex-starved shrinks in THE DEPARTED or BASIC INSTINCT) and Nancy Davis pulls it off very well: she's got low key sexual appeal because she's strong rather than in spite of it. She's allowed to take over important medical duties from men without them squawking or belittling her, and she even educates older men lawyer friends of the family on the latest breaks in the developing field of child psychology. No man comes along feeling he has to 'put her in her place' with a smug passive aggressive put-down. While it's great this film exists, it makes Hollywood's long history of sexist inequality that much more glaring by contrast, since it never had its own series, or spawned imitators.
As a god that's both an avenging apocalypse-toting Kali 2000 and a goofy Harpo Marxist sprite, Alanis's God is one of the few redeeming features of Kevin Smith's overwritten, under-directed, tediously foul-mouthed ode to the pantheon of Catholic angels. Electrifying and 'in the moment' Morisette proves you can be wise and wild without sacrificing ditziness. As Television without Pity notes, Morissette-God:
"Makes angels cry and stoned slackers stop swearing with the sheer force of her presence; issues screams that are literally earthshaking and explosive; resurrects the dead and makes ‘em pregnant; can do a pretty good handstand."
She's a good witch, despite her crooked nose (putting to rest the libelous claim of Glenda in OZ that "only bad witches are ugly"), and I love the casual way she asks the stranger at her door "Are you from this era or from a time yet to be?" as if hypnotists from the future like himself were not uncommon in her bizarre Middle Ages dimension. Neumann was a great find for Corman; she's to the putty nose and chin born, but with a genuine ease, wisdom and spry sweetness that makes her Meg equally reassuring and spooky.
Tak Fujimoto's cinematography captures the purple brilliance of black skin at twilight with precise poetry, but director Jonathan Demme couldn't really find the right ground to make Beloved breathe. Still, Beloved offers a textbook wealth of mythopoetic realism: old plantation myths, ghosts, folktales, superstition, and religion all bleed into the mundane muddy life of a woman haunted by some bad deeds and bad history. But then there's Bea Richards' awesome Suggs, the backwoods earth mother / preacher. Bea Richards alone seems to grasp the folksy deconstruction at work and morphs herself into the humble epitome of a wise woman in a way that's genuinely compelling. The end has her conducting a big gathering in the woods where she tells the congregation to love their hands. I think of her a lot when I'm stressed out in the grocery store... just keep thinking of Baby Suggs telling me to look at my hands.
Unfortunately gypsies have had a hard time throughout history--first Middle Age witch hunters and then the Nazis tried to wipe them out. But as archetypes they survive and are without parallel, especially as fortune telling, whip-cracking, Esmeralda-pimping relics of a deeper connection to arcane things, a connection Christianity has tried for thousands of years to eradicate. Ouspenskaya gave the role of Wolfman's advisor a lot of sympathy, as Theron Neel notes:
Ouspenskaya’s main purpose is to act mysterious and deliver ominous expository dialogue to let the audience—and Lon Chaney Jr.’s Lawrence Talbot—know what’s going to happen. This she does wonderfully, but she does oh so much more. As the mother of the doomed Bela (played by Bela Lugosi), she’s oddly touching as a loving parent who has somehow accepted the fact that her son is damned. Ouspenskaya treated the character of Maleva as seriously as any other she’d played. (Portraits in Horror)Dietrich's gypsy woman is no slouch either, but a whole different sort, more adult and ennui-ridden, more stand-offish yet just as 'oddly touching' and compassionate in her cold way; Ouspenskaya doesn't have to recall years of sleeping with Larry Talbot while he hangs out at her place guzzling a case of whiskey. Still, Dietrich comes running out of her salon after Hank Quinlan bites it in a last minute gesture of compassion for her fallen ex-John, noting "he was some kind of a man." Up until then she seldom speaks without a cigarillo in her mouth, is usually counting money or reading tarot cards, and telling Hank his future is "all used up." Like Ouspenskaya's gypsy she is the earth mother to a falling shadow self (both Hank and Maleva's son Bela are in the Shadow section of this series), the wellspring of nonjudgmental forgiveness that western civilization has tried so hard to cement over (with by-the-book blind men like Vargas). In the twilit world of the gypsy, even monsters can find motherly love. Too bad it's the gypsies that are always first on any culture's kill list.
"(Taylor's) character in Giant clashes with her newfound homeland Texas' narrow-minded patriarchal ways, and everyone of the old guard just has to put up with it. None of their patronizing crap works, even when she's way out of line they can't rope her in. So they surrender, like aggressive dogs surrendering to Cesar Milan in the Dog Whisperer. Like said dogs, these Texans realize they love her for beating them, and she becomes the social mother conscience for all of Rich Oil Texas. She creates a new respect and admiration for the voice of dissent. It's okay to walk away having lost a fight with Liz Taylor. She'll always let you try again. And after she bloodies your nose she'll gently wipe it for you with her own perfume-scented cloth" (From Great Acid Movies: Suddenly Last Summer)
When you're captured by oppressive apes or aliens you always hope some nurturing earth mother scientist will come along and declare you an endangered species in need of protection. Zira's compassion for humankind provides the sense that perhaps, somehow, things may turn out all right for human-ape relations. In the sequels she ends up giving birth to her own species thanks to traveling back into the past, the ultimate in matriarchal self-creation.
Few people have seen this disaster from beginning to end, I'm told. But I caught a whole middle stretch on IFC awhile ago, so got to see Dolores Del Ruby conducting peyote rituals and Bracco is awesome, dropping truth bombs like "playfulness ceases to have a serious purpose when it takes itself too seriously."
I still wish there could be an alternate cut of Blake Edward's Switch where Bracco hooks up all the way with Ellen Barkin (who's a straight male reincarnated). Irregardless, matriarchs of the psychedelic bent are so far between I have to at least mention her as extra credit. Okay, mother?
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