Katábasis in Cinema

The katábasis has endured through antiquity to modern cinema, for its broad applicability, which perhaps speaks to how the katábatic mythology resonates with something fundamental in the human psyche. The katábasis can be seen in Ford’s The Searchers (1956), Cameron’s Inception (2009), and Lucas’ Empire Strikes Back (1980), which in some way address identity, and how these films correspond to the tradition will be evaluated according to Campbell’s schema. Despite any historical-political contingency, the katábatic narrative-structure transcends such, making it ‘a possession for all time’.

Ford’s The Searchers

The Searchers inherits much of the katábasis, although it interrogates the nature of the protagonist himself. Ethan’s journey is prompted by the Comanche chief Scar’s taking of Debbie, Aaron and Martha’s daughter, akin to Hades’ abduction of Demeter’s daughter, Perspehone, by which Ethan must return Debbie, as white-Americans, the ‘underworld’ of Indian territory. The place of abduction is a gravestone, marking Debbie’s symbolic death, by which the katábasis begins from the funerary: ‘Put an Amen to it’. This rebirth motif is expressed through the repetition of song- ‘Shall We Gather at the River’, an allusion to the River Styx, a threshold, sung at the funeral, and at the wedding ceremony- and the physical crossing of the river. Akin to the river, the cave acts as a threshold, in which they discover life-restoring water, as does the cliff, which reflects the barrier between death and life. Entering into the underworld, Ethan and Martin employ the advice of guides, including Mose, Greenhill, Look, Emilio, who provide spiritual guidance, military aid, directionality, information, but also the dangerous guide, Futterman, who seeks to trick them, for Futterman is not the friendly Hermes-figure like Mose, but the Nessus-figure who must be defeated, presenting himself as a ferrier, but poisons Heracles. Encountering Scar, they must find a superior position for survival, using the river at the guidance of Mose, whose name is an allusion to Moses- ‘I’ve been baptised, Reverend, I’ve been baptised’. The men return to the white settlement, ‘which in terms of the mythic paradigm signifies the land of the living’, reflecting the passage from death to life of the baptism, which must be inverted in order to retrieve Debbie. Martin accidentally takes an Indian wife, Look, by which, through Martin’s letter to Laurie, ‘Laurie in essence creates in her mind an icon of herself in the underworld’. The underworld is an inversion: whereas Laurie is ‘white, slender, and pretty’, Look is not; symbols of life are replaced by animal skulls. Accordingly, before conflict, Ethan regards the Indians’ chant as a ‘death song’, whereas Mose offers a prayer as if before a meal- ‘That which we are about to receive, we thank Thee, oh Lord’- a life-restoring action. There is a circularity which emphasises this motif, and corresponds with Demeter, who, upon the abduction, ‘refused to allow the earth to bring forth crops’, by which they strike a deal where Persephone remains with Hades, and the crops do not grow, but when she returns, the crops reemerge, as seen in the seasonal change from hot to cold, and back. In the crossing, there is ‘rebirth’ where a new protagonist emerges, Martin, symbolised in his first kill, and ultimately rescuing Debbie and killing Scar. Ethan and Martin inhabit an archetypal symbiotic relationship between older-stronger, and younger-weak, such as Gilgamesh-Enkidu, Achilles-Patroclus. However, in Martin’s absence, MacCorry lures Laurie into marriage, akin to the men who try to marry Penelope in Odysseus’ absence. Their love reaches its climax in the fight between Martin and MacCorry, in which Martin is victorious, and Martin’s final descent in which he returns Debbie, and reunites with Laurie. Here also is Ethan’s redemption is in his rejuvenated hope for Debbie’s reconciliation, whereby he scalps Scar, and takes Debbie home, by which ‘he rid himself of the emotional scar caused by his painful loss and bitter anger, perhaps even his unspoken desire for his brother’s wife; he now resembles the avuncular figure who greeted his young niece so lovingly upon his arrival’. Debbie, despite returning to the cave, is prepared to give up the underworld, and the katábasis is successful. Prior to this, Ethan shoots the eyes out of the body of a Comanche man lying in a shallow grave- ‘he will wander forever between the winds’- an allusion to the notion of ‘the inability of a person’s spirit to find rest because of some burial procedure done or left undone’, notable throughout antiquity, and ironically, Ethan finds himself ‘wandering between the winds after the search is completed’. Moreover, Ethan continued shooting upon the retreat of the Indians, and the buffalos, and wanted to kill Debbie. These violent acts, and his attitudes of racial superiority- ‘a human rides a horse until it dies, then he goes on afoot. A Comanche comes along, gets that horse up, rides him 20 more miles, and eats him’, and misogyny- ‘Don’t forget you’re a lady’- makes Ethan a morally questionable protagonist- ‘Like Achilles mutilating Hector in Homer’s Iliad, Ethan hates his enemies beyond death’. Clauss thus recognises that rebirth corresponds not only with Ethan’s journey, but with a ‘search that makes a man leave home and wander never end … for mankind in general’, thus elevating the katábasis from its historical-political contingencies, concerned with American-Indian identity, up to humanity.

Cameron’s Inception

Inception is a psychological katábasis into the subconscious for the ‘true self’. Cobb is tasked by Saito to layer multiple dreams, a state of ‘inception’, within the subconscious of Robert Fischer, son of business competitor Maurice Fischer, who is on his deathbed, by which Robert will be manipulated into dissolving his father’s company, promising the clearing of Cobb’s records, and return home to his children, his perceived boon. Cobb enlists the help of a team of companions- Arthur, Eames, Yusuf, Ariadne, yet whilst Arthur regards the task to be impossible, Cobb is optimistic. This difficulty, and the moral ambiguity of Saito, means that Cobb must perform a ‘leap of faith’. The thresholds to be surpassed are those between dreams, transgressable through the kick, where one remains behind in the previous level to perform the kick to awaken the dreamers. The threefold katábasis of The Searchers is here extended: from river, cave, cliff, to the four dream-levels. In this underworld, like Virgil’s, there is no proper substance to things, they’re shades, whereby Virgil describes Aeneas (Cobb), and Sybil (Ariadne) crossing the River Styx, and moving into Limbo. As the Sibyl says to Aeneas, ‘the way down to Hell is easy . . . but retracing your steps and getting back up to the upper air: there is the task’. Prior to the descent, the companions consume Yusuf’s sedative elixir, which stabilises the dream. The first dream-level is similar to reality, yet physical laws may be violated; a city, in which Robert is abducted, and they are attacked by Robert’s subconscious projections; Eames metempsychoses into Browning, Robert’s godfather, to suggest that Robert reconsider the will. The dream-level is a hotel; Cobb convinces Robert that he has been kidnapped by Browning, which leads them deeper in order to enter into his subconscious. The third dream-level is an alpine fortress, which holds a projection of Maurice behind a vault, where the inception may be performed. However, Yusuf performs the kick too early, forcing Arthur and Eames to improvise a new series of kicks, thus rigging the elevator in the second level, and exploding the fortress in the third level. And it is revealed, through the subconscious projection of Mal, that Cobb is haunted by the loss of his lover, who he tries to retrieve, as Orpheus did Eurydice, but realises its impossibility. Mal appears and kills Robert before the inception is performed, and he and Saito are lost in Limbo, forcing Cobb and Ariadne to rescue them. The final dream-level is barren and sterile, like Tartarus, a fiction of Cobb’s subconscious- it is Limbo, Purgatory. Here, Cobb makes peace with Mal’s death, whilst Ariadne kills the projection of Mal, and Robert is awoken. This is the apotheotic moment which frees Cobb, a moment of symbolic death, through which he is reborn. Returning to the third level, Robert recognises the idea, and whilst Cobb searches for Saito, the others return to reality. In Limbo, Cobb finds an old Saito, whom he reminds of their agreement. Thereafter, Cobb returns home to his children, spinning Mal’s top which spins indefinitely in a dream, but falls in reality, to test whether he is in reality, but he chooses not to observe what happens, and instead joins his children. Ariadne acts as an internal author, constructing the architecture of the underworld, akin to Dante, or Virgil, and Ariadne herself is an allusion to the Greek Labyrinth story, whereby she guides Theseus through the labyrinth to kill the Minotaur, akin to her guiding Cobb through the dream-labyrinth to kill Mal. But Saito acts as a psychopomp, tasked with escorting the newly deceased from earth to the afterlife, who is not to judge, only guide, which expresses a motif of ‘a deal with death’ in order to return to the living world, as Saito is concerned with ‘honouring our agreement’. However, the film inverts, and Saito becomes the old man filled with regret, whilst Cobb returns happily to his children. Although Inception appears to be largely bereft of any historical-political content, the film is a Dantean ‘descent-to-self’, in which Cobb finds in himself the ‘thing of darkness’, and through the revelation and anabasis, the ‘true’ self, the self severed from Mal, making the katábasis successful.

Lucas’ Empire Strikes Back

In Empire Strikes Back, there is a physical katábasis into the galactic underworld, but also a spiritual katábasis. Upon the killing of his family, Luke is prompted into the unknown galaxy, with Kenobi, to save Leia, his unbeknownst sister. Luke’s motivation is thus moral, but also a pursuit of purpose, trapped in the alienation of his farm labour. Luke is thus Orphic in that he does not have that which fills his heart’s desire, searching for a ‘new sense of self’. The threefold move is repeated, but there is also the spiritual katábasis in Luke’s training with Yoda, a Tiresias-figure, and by sum of which Luke receives his revelation. Accordingly, the rebirth motif repeats in the movement from the snowy Hoth, to the warm swampy Dagobah, to the urbanity of Bespin. The initial katábasis of the film is viewed relative to A New Hope, where we learn that Luke has been raised in the deserts of Tatooine, but he is now seen on Hoth. Here, Luke, and the Rebels, who act as companions, come into confrontation with Vader, the Hades-figure. Luke’s second katábasis is his call to Dagobah, further geographical alienation, and sterility, where he is spiritually, and physically guided by Yoda, which culminates in his stepping into the cave, where he confronts a projection of Vader, which he tries to defeat, and fails, but Luke receives a revelation which helps him defeat the Empire, and overcome his paternal estrangement. The final katábasis is thus Luke’s descent into Bespin, where Luke receives his ultimate revelation: ‘No, I am your father’. Here, Lando is an inverted Nessus-figure, who Han thinks he can trust, but Lando has to ‘sell him out’ to Vader, so the audience cannot trust him, but he ultimately redeems himself, showing himself to be a trusted guide. Literally descending, tumbling through the bowels of the city, hanging at the bottom of which, Luke is saved through the Force sensitivity he had garnered through his katábasis, carried away by his companions. Only here does everything become clear to him, akin to Aeneas’ ‘learning of Rome’s future’, learning of his family, his destiny, the Force, by which Luke experiences an anabasis, culminating in his transformation in Return of the Jedi. The boon for Luke is thus the revelation of his family, and the true nature of the Empire, for the film acts as an analogy for colonial resistance in the Global South against Empire, and Fascism, explicit in how the Empire parades fascist clothing, iconography, architecture, arms, in the same way that The Searchers addresses American subjectivity, and Indian resistance. In this subjective transformation, similarly, Orpheus’ story is one of transformation, each precipitated by loss: ‘first the dying bees in the frame-narrative, which drive Aristaeus to seek out Proteus … then the chase through the forest which kills Eurydice, which propels Orpheus into Hell where he charms the dead, then Orpheus’s backward look which changes Eurydice from flesh back into spirit, then the grief which turns Orpheus into a famous singer, then the fame which brings him enemies, and finally the dismemberment of the singer which results in the unearthly survival of his song, and the rebirth of the hive,’ whilst Luke transforms from farmer into rebel, into Jedi Knight. In this katábatic framework, we live ‘precariously poised over calamity’, i.e. the Real, and when this underground surfaces, subjectivity fractures and dissolves, ‘dragged down by existential Scyllae and Charbydes’, an inescapable process. Thus, the ‘human condition is to be disoriented’, yet paradoxically oriented towards death- Luke is disoriented, yet oriented toward Vader. Thus, the ultimate question is how to respond to loss, which for Luke is loss of family: ‘does one submit to metamorphosis or resist’, like Orpheus? The katábasis is thus successful in that it equips Luke with the knowledge for the completion of his quest, and Luke submits to his metamorphosis, embracing transformation.

Ford, Cameron, and Lucas demonstrate the persistence of the katábasis in myth in culture from antiquity to modernity. Their films address identity, whether remaining at the level of their historical-political contingencies, or addressing subjectivity and identity altogether, within the traditional structure, whereby the protagonist is successful, despite the interrogation of the nature of the protagonist, and the transition from the literal descent into the psychological, or spiritual, katábasis.

References

• Campbell, J, 1949, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, pp. 49–94.
• Clauss, J.J., 1999, ‘Descent into Hell: Mythic Paradigms in The Searchers’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 2–17, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01956059909602804.
• Falconer, R, 2004, ‘Shape-changing in Hell: Metamorphosis and katábasis in Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet’, Poetics of the Subject, vol. 2, no. 2, DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.449.
• Holtsmark, E.B., 1991, ‘The katábasis theme in modern cinema’, Classics and Cinema, Bucknell University Press, London, pp. 60–80.
• Salmond, P, 2017, ‘Greek myth, film and American anxiety’, La Trobe University, <https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2017/opinion/greek-myth,-film-and-american-anxiety>.
• Skerry, P.J., 1991, ‘What Makes a Man to Wander? Ethan Edwards of John Ford’s The Searchers’, New Orleans Review vol. 18, pp. 86–91.
• Solomon, J, 2000, The Ancient World in Cinema, Yale University Press, Connecticut, pp. 113–8.
• Winkler, M.M., 2001, Classical Myth & Culture in the Cinema, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 272–90.
• Thucydides, 404 BC, 1950, History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Crawley, R, E.P. Button and Company, Inc., New York.

Relevant Works:

• Homer, Homeric Hymn to Demeter.
• Homer, The Iliad.
• Homer, The Odyssey.
• Ovid, Metamorphoses.
• Virgil, The Aeneid.
• Virgil, The Georgics.