Here's My Psycho Analysis

Okay everyone, I gave you at least a week to be the first to post, so no whining about how I said what you wanted to. Also, I hope that your respective Thanksgivings were very nice. I spent mine throwing up, which was just about as bad as it sounds.

Psychoanalysis is really interesting to me because I find myself simultaneously accepting and rejecting it. Lacanian psychoanalysis is of particular interest because it seems to me that without saying the words, he seems to support the idea of a "collective unconscious" in that the unconscious is tied to language, which is a shared and complete system shared by all people (or at least those who speak the language in question). So, there are systems at work that govern our own actions more than our conscious selves do, and that's crazy. I find it interesting that we can regard characters "as assemblages of signifiers clustering round a proper name" (108), which seems to relate directly to the ideas of metonymy and metaphor. So, while Lacanian psychoanalysis seems to disrupt or deconstruct many of our traditional notions of self-hood and consciousness, it still asserts that there is some meaning to be had in the world, and that reading texts correctly can uncover this meaning.

All this said, I thought for some reason that psychoanalytic criticism would somewhat easy. I started making a list of the things that the characters could possibly stand for:

The Hire: Western Culture
His Noble Steed: Products of capitalism
Mason Lee: Eastern Culture
Ignoble Steeds and associated drivers: Colonizers, perhaps? Oppressors? Power grabbers?
Wicked Monk of the East/West: Those who would exploit/expose their own culture for status among the Other.
The Box: The unconscious.

However, as I finished this list, I realized that it was just starting to sound like the already hashed out Postcolonial or Liberal Humanist reading I've already done, with the exception of the last element. I also remembered that psychoanalysis (this time of the Freudian type, but what's a good analysis without some hybridization?) privileges "the individual 'psycho drama' above the 'social drama' of class conflict" (101). So, with that in mind, here's take two of my attempt at psychoanalysis, treating the whole thing as an attempt to understand and uncover one's essential selfhood:

The Hire: The individual, lacking in understanding of self
The Chosen: The Other, at peace with the interaction between his conscious and unconscious
The not-as-good-as-Clive Owen-drivers: Distractions that function as screen memories for the hire.
Evil Monk: Another individual, living in denial.
The box: The unconscious itself

So, at the beginning of the film, the boy gives the hire a box and tells him not to open it--it's for later. The desire to understand what is inside the box--and hence, the boy's motivation in giving it to Clive Own--is the mystery that subtly drives the entire narrative. As viewers, we forget that we care about the box, but once it's opened we realize that perhaps a desire to understand what was in the box is what drove the hire to act as he did in preserving the boy. All the distractions along the way function as screen memories, making us forget the box. Perhaps Clive Owen's adept driving is simply his way of transferring his tension with the mystery of the box into physical action.

The end of the film, the opening of the box, could represent pushing away all distraction and allowing the individual to uncover the unconscious thought that has shaped the whole narrative. A hulk bandaid. The use of the Hulk itself suggests the fragmentation of self, the duality of our identities. It is only in accepting and acknowledging his unconscious that Clive Owen becomes whole (after all, psychoanalysis of the Freudian nature was supposedly therapeutic...).

I feel at once insightful and stupid. Is this normal?