Monster, Skin and Flea: Analysis of The Queen in The Tale of Tales (2015) from a Psychoanalytic View
In traditional psychotherapy, a typical method used to diagnose or treat patients’ mental diseases is to let them comment the classic fairy tales or write sequels of them. This method’s basic hypothesis is that people’s different projections towards the same fairy tale could be reflections of their own cognitive structure and psychological symptoms. From this perspective, fairy tales and the “dreams” in Freud's psychoanalysis theory share the same intrinsic natures: on the one hand, they both establish connections with humans’ subconscious through the “sets” consisting of prototypes, symbols and metaphors; on the other hand, patients could achieve the catharsis and balance of their mental states by empathizing with characters’ emotions in a dream or a fairytale.
As demonstrated by August Nitschke in Soziale Ordnungen im Spiegel der Märchen, “the nature of oral folk tales depends on the stage of development that a tribe, community, or society was going through”, and all versions of fairy tales reflect values of their time. In particular, the original version of fairy tales and folk tales not only serves as a sample to observe the value proposition in its age of birth, but also is an abstraction of human’s collective consciousness. The ethics of good and evil as well as discipline and punishment in those tales is a clear display of the desires and fears deep in the human nature. Therefore, using a psychoanalytic approach to decode fairy tales could help understand human’s most original dreams, needs, wishes, experience as well as how they (un-)change through time.
As a rich collection of some of the earliest oral folktales, which later inspired Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm’s famous adaptions, Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone preserves many “dark” or “adult” versions of today’s popular fairy tales. In 2015, Italian director Matteo Garrone chose three stories that weren’t known by many people out of this seventeenth-century classic, and adapted them into a feature-length film The Tale of Tales, which were later nominated for the Palme d'Or in Cannes Film Festival. This essay intends to use Freud’s psychoanalysis theory, in specific, Oedipus Complex theory and libido theory, to analyze the first story in the film, The Queen. Since it was an adaption of La Cerva Fatata (The Enchanted Doe) in Pentamerone, differences between the two versions would be briefly mentioned. The other two stories in the film would also be included in the analysis, but only with the purpose of understanding the theme and plot design of the first one.
1. Introduction and Comparison of Two Versions of the Story
In the film, the King and Queen of the Kingdom of Long-Trellis couldn’t have a baby and were desperate to conceive one. A necromancer advised that the Queen would be pregnant as long as she ate a sea dragon's heart cooked by a virgin, but a life would be costed. The King killed the monster but died from his wounds. The Queen went to the beach to fetch the heart and asked a virgin servant to cook it for her, not saying a word or even looking at her dead husband. After eating the heart, she gave birth to her son, Elias, the next day, and the servant also had a baby, Jonah, which looked identical to Elias. The two boys grew up together and became inseparable friends, which greatly vexed the Queen. She tried to murder Jonah, but he escaped, so the next day Jonah decided to leave the kingdom. He thrusted a knife into a tree root, telling Elias that the root spouting clear water is a signal that he was alive and well. When one day Elias found the water to be red with blood, he left to search for Jonah, and the Queen got furious. The necromancer told her that the two boys were inseparable, and that her violent desire could only be achieved through violence. The Queen said that she was willing to depart them and keep her son with her at whatever cost, so the necromancer complied with her request and led her out of the castle. Jonah were finally found by Elias, wounded in a cave, but a monster appeared in the cave at this moment, attempting to eat Jonah. When Elias protected Jonah with his body, the monster hesitated, and was killed by Elias. Jonah reunited with his mother, and the monster’s corpse in the cave dissolved into that of the Queen.
The original story in Pentamerone is basically an entirely different one. The King killed the sea monster but weren’t died, and the babies were both born by the Queen, one of them favored and another one hated by her. The Queen didn’t play an important role and mainly served as a background in the story, as more of the plot happened after the disfavored Prince left the Kingdom. To be brief, The Enchanted Doe is a traditional “heroic Princes killing monster” story, with the plot of two brothers helping each other. The “monster” is an ogre that could constantly change its appearance, and it turned into an enchanted doe to fool the Princes but was finally killed.
Although The Tale of Tales is a modern retelling, and as a fairy tale movie it unavoidably contains lots of elements in fantasy films, the director seems to pursue a realistic style that intends to make audience feel they’re staring at what really happens in the era when these folktales were being told. By removing the beautifying filters and skillfully drifting between illusion and reality, the director intends to arouse the subconscious and undetected parts in audiences’ minds. The adaption not only reflects the value in modern context, but also discusses the unchanged topics in human nature throughout history: desire, greed, love, obsession, fraud, violence, etc. The film seems to be inspired by Il Mistero di Oberwald (The Mystery of Oberwald, 1981) by Michelangelo Antonioni in terms of plot adaption, and the elegant yet decadent visual style could trace back to Contes Immoraux (Immoral Tales) in 1974. The use of elements from Excalibur (1984) and Alice in Wonderland (1951) could also suggest what has influenced the director.
2. Maternal Evils, Absence of Husband, and the Oedipus Complex
The relationship between mother and son is the major topic in The Queen. Usually it is a social taboo to publicly speak of mother’s evil to their own children, which explains the reason why it was Snow White’s biological mother who wanted to kill her in the original version of Fairy Tales of Brothers Grimm but was later changed to Snow White's stepmother. While mother could sometimes be the person that traumatizes their children the most, authors still chose to use the image of a fictional “stepmother” to symbolize the evil side of the mother and make her receive the punishment during the retelling process. In contrast, the evils of parents were depicted in a quite explicit manner in ancient fairy tales and Greek myths, and the director intends to imitate that tradition in the film.
The Queen’s evil is first manifested in the indifference to her husband’s death. When the King sacrificed his life to get the heart for her, there’s nothing but that heart representing the desire for a child in her eyes. Though this plot may seem strange, it actually fits the realities in many families. As males are commonly out for work to earn living resources for the entire family, the mother would spend most of her time in house with her children after giving birth. Besides, having a child usually means that the woman’s status in the family would be relatively stable, and as woman ages, the child’s future instead of the changeable love from her husband would be her most valuable asset. These two reasons could explain why mothers become child-centered and no longer concerns about their husbands after having kids.
From the widowed mother’s perspective, she needs to pay attention to and gain a sense of possession of her son to compensate for the psychological discrepancy caused by her husband’s death. Since she no longer has a sex partner, her libido, which is the psychological energy that motivates human activities, keeps accumulating but has no approach to give vent to, thus bringing psychological distress to her. To get back to the balanced state, the easiest and most moral way is to put all her attention to the only male that she’s allowed to deeply get in touch with, which is her son (supposing she is not allowed or approved to have affairs and get married to another male).
In the film, the Queen’s deep yet possessive love towards her son is directly shown in her words with Elias: “Even though you were inside me only one night, you still managed to take on my form. You have no idea how much I wanted you, how much I sacrificed for you… No one will ever love you like I do.” Ironically, Elias didn’t look like her at all. He had the white hair in the same color with the sea dragon, and his appearance is exactly the same to Jonah, while the Queen has nothing in common with them. What’s more, it is actually Elias’ father instead of her who sacrificed the most for him, as he has given up his own life for his son’s birth. The Queen’s words are apparently against the reality, but she couldn’t accept the truth and even fooled herself due to her blind love. Elias’ respond to his mother has further confirmed this inference: “You told me many times before.” Though Jonah’s humble origin would be a reason for the Queen’s dislike, the more fundamental conflicts between the Queen and Jonah is the rivalry over the love of Elias, and the Queen could not accept that her love towards her son would be shared by anybody else.
From the son’s perspective, the absence of father’s participation in Elias’ childhood leads to an undifferentiated and uncontrolled intimate relationship with his mother, arousing the Oedipus conflict inside of him. During the “phallia stage” out of the five personality development stages according to Freud, a boy would have the desire to completely possess his mother on a fantasy level in his subconscious, and the existence of father acts as a threat to that motivation, making the boy fear of being punished or castrated by a stronger male. Therefore, it is necessary to have the father accompanying the children, acting as a factor that could slightly separate the son with his mother and keep an appropriate distance between them. In Elias’ case, he has received too much libido from his mother’s excessive attention, so it is reasonable to conjecture that he had to symbolically “castrate” himself to make sure that he kept a “normal” relationship with his mother and would not be punished. It would make sense when we consider that the director used various camera languages to leave ambiguity in the relationship between Elias and Jonah, suggesting the audience that they may be more intimate than just friends. Besides, mother’s attention to her son is a coin with two sides. Apart from libido, it would also bring aggression and even hostility. While in the reality, a mother would project both emotions to her children, the Queen’s aggression in the film was entirely towards Jonah. As the two boys looked identical, they could be regarded as the embodiments of these two opposite types of relationship that would coexist in a single mother-and-son relationship in reality.
In a healthy mother-child relationship, it is necessary for the mother to let go of her child at some point of their life, and the director used quite a poetic scene to illustrate mother’s powerlessness towards the child’s drifting away: the chase in a maze. The track-up shot from follows the Queen’s back while they played a chase-and-escape game, and from her point of view, the audience could see Elias slowly running away until totally out of her sight. However, the Queen would never accept this natural rule. Her love towards Elias consists not only maternal love to a child, but also more importantly, her uncontrolled narcissism and self-pity, as Elias could be treated as the continuation of herself. Driven by her frenzied desire that keeps swelling, she would rather become a murderer and besmirch her soul. The terrifying monster in the cave is the manifestation of her evil desires, and her ferocious appearance could not be recognized even by her own son. From Elias’s perspective, he has finally learnt how to courageously face his mother’s evils or imperfections and completely became himself by killing that manifestation, and he embraced the pure and innocent love by clearing the dark side that came along with it, thus achieving a critical self-development.
3. Ultimate Theme of the Story (and Film): Human Desire and its Balance
As indicated by Zipes, “tales are human marks invested with desire”. While The Queen discusses the development and balance of human desire shown in a mother-son relationship, the following two stories further examine this topic in other scenarios.
In the second story, a lustful King was one day occasionally obsessed with a woman’s singing voice. He had never seen this woman’s appearance, so he came to the door of her house, asking to meet her. The woman is actually an old ugly lady called Dora, living together with her sister, Imma. Dora asked the King to come back a week later, and then she’d show him a part of her “beautiful” body. During that time, she sucked and moisturized her finger every day, so when the King came, she showed him a finger that is as tender as a young girl. The King asked her to spend the night with him in his palace, and Dora said that she’d agree as long as it was in complete darkness. When she fell asleep, the King used a candle to see her out of curiosity, and was horrified when he saw her appearance. He asked guards to throw her out of the window, but she survived, entangled in the branches of a tree. When she woke up the next morning, she found herself rescued by a witch and became a young and gorgeous maiden. The King came upon her while hunting, and decided to marry her as the Queen. Imma was invited to the wedding, and was surprised for what happened. Imma wanted to stay in the castle and be as young and beautiful as her sister, but Dora feared that people would doubt their relationships, asking her to leave. Imma refused to go and kept asking her the secret of changing her appearance, and in annoyance, Dora said she got herself flayed. Imma got back and found somebody who was willing to flay her, leaving herself bloody and disfigured.
In the third story, a ridiculous King one day noticed a handsome flea and kept it as his pet. He fed him every day secretly until it has grown to a giant beast as large as a sheep. When the flea died, the King got so grieved that he asked people to had him flayed and his skin shown publicly, claiming that whoever could tell what this skin was could marry his daughter, Princess Violet. Countless people from around the world tried but none succeeded. Finally, an ogre who was the ugliest being in the world came to this trial. Though the ogre wasn’t smart, he was very good at recognizing animals by their smell, so he instantly told the right answer. The Princess begged her father to change his mind, but the King got furious and said that a girl should never teach her father. Therefore, the poor Violet had to follow her husband to get back to his shabby and dreadful cave that locates on a cliff, isolating the two from the civilized world so that the Princess could never escape. Every day she waited in the cave, doing housework, and getting raped by this monster at night. The Princess one day found a woman passing by and asked for help, and the lady had three sons that were in the circus. The next day they came to save her when the ogre got out for hunting, and the ogre soon smelled that there were strangers around, so he chased after them. All of them except the Princess got killed. When Violet was trapped in a corner, she began crying and fell into the ogre’s arms, softening the ogre’s heart. He let her on his shoulder, but the princess used a knife to kill her husband. She took the ogre’s head back to the Palace, and the King got very sick and guilty for what he did. In the end, Violet became the Queen.
According to an interview with the director, though the three stories have distinct themes, “they are all connected to the idea of desire that can lead to obsession.” The focus of fairy tales is often the interpersonal relationship in the family. This is not only because fairy tales are the earliest courses for children to understand the world, but also because family relationships are the starting point of social relations. The film discussed the desire of humans in mother-son, father-daughter, sisterhood, male-female relationships, and altogether told a story of “a woman in three different stages of her life”: youth, motherhood and advancing age.
From my perspective, the flea in the third story is a clear metaphor for the morbid desire that keeps swelling and growing in people’s heart, and driven by that desire, the King failed to do his duty but become a flea himself, depending on his people’s labor and blood to survive and thrive. Similarly, the “flea” inside of the Queen’s heart is the cause of her tragedy. In the end of the film, a majority of the characters that were alive in the three stories gathered together in Queen Violet’s castle and watched the performance of wire-walking, suggesting the delicate balance of fulfilling and controlling one’s desire.
References
Basile, Giambattista. Pentamerone. Project Gutenberg's Stories: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2198/2198-h/2198-h.htm
Zipes, Jack. Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: The Classical Genre for Children and the Process of Civilization. New York: Methuen, 1983.
Zipes, Jack. The Changing Function of the Fairy Tale. The Lion and the Unicorn, Volume 12, Number 2. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988, pp. 7-31.
