To celebrate its exhibition of The Red Book, C.G. Jung's vividly-illustrated text chronicling his journeys into the unconscious, the Rubin Museum of Art has been hosting a wonderfully eclectic discussion series in which a noted guest and a psychoanalyst talk about a section of the book. Just about all the speakers are fabulous, but Saturday's felt particularly equipped to discuss Jung's tripped-out images: Charlie Kaufman.
NewScientist's Culture Blog recounts the evening, in which the Oscar-winning screenwriter joined Jungian psychoanalyst John Beebe in analyzing a single image from The Red Book: a man with a snake wriggling around his feet and a mysterious beam of light shooting into (or is it out of?) his chest. A highlight came when Kaufman was asked, on the spot, to spin a story around the image. He paused briefly, before launching into a heartbreaking, head-spinning yarn about a man singing to a malignant unseen force in the hopes of escaping its energy-sucking reach. It ends on a Kaufman-esque note of existential ambivalence:
"[The man] begins to lose his boundaries, his identity. The energy that is his distinctiveness is pouring out of him and that's the snake, and it is all that will be left of him until the snake too is absorbed. But for a moment, he exists in the world, before everything is blue."
Sigh. When is his next movie coming out again?
Be sure and check out the rest of the series, which will feature such guests include Adam Gopnik, Kathleen Chalfant, Jonathan Demme and a ton of other cool people.
