hunger
when did one so young become / so fed up with hunger -- Saintseneca
I wrote this essay last summer after I considered the conversation around spiritual hunger present in two films. It was a practice of archetypal analysis that I was reminded of after writing about Sleepless in Seattle. — CJL
Last month I watched Spirited Away and Sinners, for the first time; an unintended double feature. I have recently stepped into a practice of sharpening my critical analysis of narrative. A symptom of the push to move past an exploration of meaning to an awareness of craft in a writing workshop. A set of ideas encountered by watching content from the Midnight Scholar Society on TikTok. A skill stoked by reading Women Who Run With Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, years after it was gifted to me by a friend.
Spirited Away was the first Miyazaki film that I had seen. My friends were shocked that I had not watched any of them, but I was a child who only wanted to watch “real people” movies over a plethora of cartoons. Since then I have appreciated the art of animation but still find myself drawn to narrative realism in much of the media that I consume. Art, for me, is in the fracture of structure rather than the creation of new worlds. And as I write this sentence, I wonder what wisdom I have found.
The creative nonfiction workshop looked at the function of character in memoir. I wrote an analysis on The Greeter, an essay from T. Kira Madden’s Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, and claimed that the supporting characters are explorations of different aspects of the author’s conception of self. Because even in the best attempts at objectivity, our experience of relationship to the other is projection. And the function of writing them into our work is, at its most self aware, a practice of reckoning with our own internal world. My instructor responded to this decision by saying that we should always consider the supporting characters in memoir as mirrors. They are reflections of resonance shared between two people, though oftentimes, in the process of writing, the subjectivity of experience becomes incredibly clear. And I wonder if difference in experience is something to be feared.
Estes, and Simone of the Midnight Scholar Society, take a psychoanalytic approach to fiction. They encourage readers to look at story as a picture of the different parts of the psyche. Simone often reminds her viewers that each character that an author, filmmaker, or musical artist writes into being is a part of themself. When you approach a narrative with multiple characters, you can consider each character as a representation of an archetype and analyze the relationship between parts. To use this as a tool for spiritual growth or a deeper understanding of self, you can consider how the different tropes manifest in your internal world or in a relational experience. In the latter, I find it important to remember the wisdom of reflection offered in my instructor’s feedback on memoir.
That day, as I watched Spirited Away, I was struck by how easily I recognized archetypal parts. A young child on a mission to save herself, hoping to save her parents. They are separated when a strange, seemingly abandoned, amusement park is transformed by nightfall. The parents’ greed turned them to pigs. The child, left alone to fend for herself, meets a boy who gives her instructions to find the work that she needs to stay safe; escape her parent’s fate. The bustling bathhouse for spirits looking to unwind is where she survives, where she works, where she follows love. All with the hope that they will be reunited on the other side, gifted with the freedom to return. That she will be given back her name.
Two monsters meet her as challenges on the quest. A giant, stinky, puddle of mud, and an unassuming shadow of a ghost caught out in the rain. The old woman who runs the bathhouse gives the girl the task of taking care of each of these guests at two pivotal moments in the story. Her first task is to give this impossibly dirty monster a bath, without knowledge of the process, and without resources. However, her mysterious friend gifts her with a stack of bath tokens that allow her to tend to the filth with care. We find that the first monster is a river spirit drowned in waste. He offers her medicine as a gift of appreciation. For a time her attention leaves the second monster, a shadow of a ghost, occupied by her mission and then the pain of her friend. When she meets him again he has transformed.
The ghost’s name is No Face. He offers gifts in abundance and then he consumes. Ravenously. All he wants in the end is to be tended to by the child. She sees him. She offers him kindness, then medicine that he needs. He finally follows her on a journey to meet the old woman’s twin. A place where he is welcome. A place where she finds what she needs to establish safety and a way home.
In the map of the psyche, I see the child as tender hope. The impulse to do what is right. The impulse to follow her desire. The impulse to do the work it takes to live. She will always find her way to the right source of help. She will always find herself, even when she loses her name.
There are many characters that she encounters in the story, including the boy who guides her in the direction of safety, but in this context I consider the two monsters that come to light. Two monsters that she tends with tender care.
The river spirit is boughed down by waste. He is regarded as other because of the effects of a human maltreatment of nature. If this character is to represent something inside, let it be the metaphorical rug we peel back to shove under excess. The place that we avoid for fear; what might overflow if exposed. On the other hand, No Face is an emptiness that we cannot escape. Let him be a desire for connection, a desire for consumption, that stems from loneliness; the shadow ignored and left behind.
For weeks I had dodged the TikTok hot takes on Sinners to avoid spoilers. Going into the theater, I understood that Ryan Coogler’s film sparked conversation about culture and spiritual hunger through the lens of vampirism. I am going to do my best to weave the connection between the two pieces without too many spoilers of my own, but be forewarned that some will follow if you have not yet seen the film.
That afternoon, I was struck by an uncanny connection between No Name and Remmick. The ringleader of a group of vampires that come to crash the opening of Smoke and Stack’s new juke joint. A group that wanted to consume the joy of their night of freedom. A group that wanted to consume the joy of their right to freedom.
Vampires are voracious creatures, hungry for blood. Edward fights it. Stefan is afraid to return to the monstrous man that tore up Chicago in the roaring twenties, along with Rebecca and Kalus. Damon embraces his hunger.
Vampire lore tells of coerced lineage. Live forever, connected to the one who gave you eternal life, at the cost of blood. Elijah’s fear of death stretches out to the thousands of vampires sired in his name. Vicki is turned against her will and goes rogue. Elena searches far and wide for the antidote to break the cycle of doppelganger prophecy.
A trail of examples sourced from a summer immersion into the worlds of the Vampire Diaries and Twilight.
I once read a novel written by an evangelical man who took inspiration from the old hymn There is a Fountain.
there is a fountain filled with blood / drawn from emmanuel’s veins / and sinners plunged beneath the flood / lose all their guilty stains.
The irony of vampirism being connected to the practice of the eucharist, in a positive light, is not lost on me; in the context of a faith structure that so mars the image of the god they claim. A practice that devours. This claim could be complicated by the shift from the monstrous to the erotic, but that is another essay.
Coogler’s Remmick craves the soul he lost, the unsearchable grief of his hunger. He claims a connection and safety that comes from surrendering to consumption. And he wants Sammie for the power that he has to connect to his ancestors through story and song. Immani Barbarin, crutches and spice on TikTok, suggests that Coogler’s villains are those that choose to exert power over others as a form of protection. She argues that because others in the film were turned without their consent, Remmick could easily be assumed to have had his soul taken from him in the same manner.
The first time that I sat down to write this piece, I had a strange diversion. I started with authoritarian discipline of children through the lens of a book called Wild Faith by Talia Lavin. Wound my way to a phrase of scripture that met me on the steps of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in China. While unready to write the essay on the former, I think the latter contextualizes my position in this conversation.
The summer after my freshman year of college, I went to China for the first time. We took language classes, we made friends, and we had spiritual conversations. This is a moment where earnestness and structural intention collide. The contradiction between two competing intents are irreconcilable, and the material impact is something I do not have access to due to years of distance. That summer we took a vacation to another city that functioned as a vision trip. In the context of evangelical ministry, vision trips are taken to gather insight into the spiritual need of a city. The city that we visited had a diversity of communities that are considered unreached people groups, groups of people that do not have a significant number of christian converts.
On the steps of that temple, a message rang through my body, with a holy calling birthed from fear.The kind of fear that tugs on earnest adherence to belief and a lifetime of conditioning to see difference as wrong.
The decontextualized declaration that I remember now in fragments: the nations will come from the ends of the earth and say our fathers have inherited nothing but falsehood, futility, and things of no profit.
Words that made more sense to me than the practices I observed; ritual movement, the meditative pounding of drums. It was a call to action, an imperative to reach the nations. And I followed that call for much of my life.
When I am feeling glib, I like to scoff at the audacity that sends twenty year olds across the world with the key to the mysteries of the universe. But there is a stark reckoning that I have had to have with my complicity in a colonial project. The vampirism that comes from being sold the lie that your god requires complete and utter surrender, control. Falsehood. Futility. Things of no profit.
Remmick is Irish. He comes from a land colonized by the British. The lineage that he gave up (the lineage that he had to give up) to be seen by whiteness, is rich in story and song. He faces Sammie in a body of water, in an embrace, akin to baptism, and they recite scripture together. Psalm 23: a comfort and a curse.
I cried in the theater, the words that were meant to subsume and eventually control were a comfort to his soul. At least for a time.
I look at my hunger.
It’s been a sin to squash. A container for belief. A pleasure that leaves behind the material world in another’s embrace. A thirst for knowledge that cannot be quenched no matter how many books, films, songs, pieces of art, languages.
As Saintseneca says: when did one so young become / so fed up with hunger.
But the hunger is old. And it does well to remember where it came from, to remember what was lost. To remember the cost. To remember that the antidote to consumption is relationality. Practices of firm, rooted, reciprocal care. Respect and gratitude for difference.
There is a fierce need to recognize that the material reality of oppression inflicted by whiteness is accelerated by a festering wound. And like the mud monster, it requires care. Requires the best resources that we have to heal loss left unattended for generations. Remmick is given a generosity that is intentionally withheld in fictional depictions of “monstrosity” that threaten to inflict the sameness of the colonial project.
He is still culpable, he still inflicts harm, but it is contextualized in his own loss of lineage; the loss of his soul.
Stories tell us how we live and how we can live. Simone encourages her viewers to see narrative as lesson, not only as moments of fantasy and escape. My teacher creates space for people to write for the sake of wellness, collaborating with one of my good friends. When we approach our lived experience on the page, there is an opportunity to see how the stories we have inherited shape our worldview. There is an opportunity to see the roles that we play. This act can take back power from the circumstances that confine and constrain, that repeat patterns. Perhaps the pattern of victimhood that masks power exerted over the other, a mask of protection.
When we move between stories, there are contradictions. Multiple characters at play. The impulse of control at this juncture is to flatten the less salient, or the ones that we do not want to own. To relegate them to the shadow, no face, no name. Where they will hunger to be seen.