Symbol of eternity and connectedness, wholeness and unity, as embodied in the image of the snake with its tail in its mouth; aka mandala. In the similarly circular Chinese Yin-Yang emblem, it’s the harmonious collision of opposites – positive and negative, masculine and feminine, light and dark, consciousness and unconscious, reality and dream – together forming the basis of all that comes into being.

Jewish tradition alleges that Adam also was created man and woman both, with two faces pointed in opposite directions, as was the Roman Janus. In Plato’s retelling of the myth of the androgynes we find an entire race of such beings similarly split by a jealous Zeus, as was the Babylonian Goddess-Mother Tiamat by her son Marduk. According to Barbara Walker in the indispensable WOMAN’S ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MYTHS AND SECRETS (Harper Collins: San Francisco, 1983; p. 34), Hindu mystics told of a Yab-Yum – "'Father-Mother,' the sexual union of a sage and his Shakti [or cosmic-energy counterpart] at the crucial moment of death. Sexual sacraments," she goes on to note, "were in effect practicing for that moment, when the enlightened one would be restored to the condition of primordial bliss as an androgynous creature."

It’s a vital component of archaic Goddess religions that this figure, also, comprise both the elementary formative and apocalyptic

transformative qualities of the Great Mother. Like the vulture which was once thought to exist only in the female, She was often seen as just such a Phoenix-like, self-contained and self-regenerating spirit similarly taking nourishment from, and thus transforming, our earthly remains; think of the sequence in Hammer’s film of H. Rider Haggard’ novel, SHE, in which Ursula Andress is similarly festooned with feathers not long before inviting her lover into the revivifying fire conferring eternal youth and beauty upon him. In the preoedipal stage of individual human development, before the child is able to differentiate itself completely from the nourishing, caregiving, and also chiding and punishing mother, this iconic figure is seen as an all-powerful confounding of opposites, both "masculine" and "feminine" and Good and

Terrible Mother combined. When all these figures became split somewhere along the development of civilization, the world was sundered, also.

According to Jungian psychology, the human personality is likewise split into the Yin-Yang elements of animus and anima. Marie-Louise von Franz describes this anima as

the personification of all feminine psychological tendencies in a man’s psyche, such as vague feelings and moods, prophetic hunches, receptiveness to the irrational, capacity for personal love, feeling for nature, and – last but not least – his relation to the unconscious. (PROBLEMS OF THE FEMININE IN FAIRY TALES: Spring Publications, Zurich, 1976; p.186).

Many men, instead of owning and appreciating this anima (which James Hillman has since amended to suggest, rather than an explicitly feminine force, a more androgynous character still given to represent these qualities) instead project it onto women, expecting them to be more "feminine" than perhaps necessary in order to make up for their own self-created lack. In patriarchal society especially, which tends to equate such characteristics with feminine behavior, this force has been thrust to the perimeter, causing an imbalance in our psyches whose continued existence may in fact be the cause of much conflict in the world today. Jung’s own wife Emma has suggested that

[in] our time, when such threatening forces of cleavage are at work, splitting peoples, individuals and atoms, it is doubly necessary that those which unite and hold together should become effective; for life is founded upon the harmonious interplay of masculine and feminine forces, within the individual as well as without (ANIMUS AND ANIMA: Spring Publications, Zurich, 1981; p.87).

This was quite a departure for director Hooper up until then, as his previous encounters between men and women had typically left the men

His work in toto seems the product of a ruined transcendentalist, sometimes seeing the rejuvenative powers in his own material yet often finding that power deflated and negated by reality. In the Oedipal scenarios he maps out, the "boy" doesn’t want to be like the father and the "girl" doesn’t want to separate herself from him but is forced to do so by virtue of the mistreatment he deals her. Lifeforce, made just after the director’s commercial breakthrough with producer/co-screenwriter Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, stands as the single moment when he was able to defeat this mechanism – part of the reason it’s such an exhilarating view, although a wrenching experience for its astronaut hero and Hooper-surrogate, Carlsen. The beautiful, desirable Space

Woman (owing a debt to Curtis Harrington’s 1966 Queen of Blood as well as earlier conceptions such as the Devil Girl from Mars, Astounding She Monster, and Terror from the Year 5000) is a symbol for him not only of the artistic and philosophical glory to which he aspires, but a further commercial one as well.

In one way or another, all interplanetary sci-fi and some horror stories are about death, man’s experience of sex, and rebirth – "a journey across a threshold into an alien world," as Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi put it in her 1988 book MOTHERSELF (Indiana University Press; p.75). So in Lifeforce the entranceway to the alien craft resembles both a giant iris with pupil (indicating the drama – hence, threshold – as one of perception) and a vulva, the further chamber containing thousands of egglike outgrowths. (The set calls to mind the similarly biological interiors of co-screenwriter Dan O’Bannon’s earlier sci-fi cocktail, Alien, as well as 1966’s Fantastic Voyage.) Among these is a cluster of crystalline sarcophagi enclosing three fully-

that he’d become "a new life form" on meeting her. He is in fact reborn following, as we see when he’s recovered in his tiny escape module back on Earth, curled up fetal-position – bearded, as is the director – in Hooper’s home state of Texas.

The film’s uroboric vision, abetted by production designer John Graysmark, is evident also in the oblong shells the aliens inhabit – the egg as coffin, and vice versa – as well as in the figure of the woman herself, who is given as not only traditional lifegiver but "energy vampire" as well. (She’s seen in many scenes literally "sucking the life out of" her mostly male victims.) The dead souls she collects on earth serve, as noted, as a revitalizing force for the remaining dormant creatures back on ship, these souls seen as lights coursing through like new sperm cells along its phallic shaft. The theme continues in the image of Halley’s comet, in whose slipstream the craft is discovered, and its 76-year return cycle with Earth (approximating the average life span), and in the figure of Dr. Hans Fallada, after the German novelist – a secondary character in a scenario

comprised mainly of secondary characters: the narrative skips from protagonist to protagonist as do the parasitic aliens themselves; not only is he a biologist, he’s an avocational thanatologist, besides.

This roundelay of life and death gets carried even further, into issues of sex and gender. The uterine chamber of the mothership is contained within its phallic whole, compared to the complementary figure of the woman at the conclusion erect upon a sarcophagus within the womblike tomb; when she and Carlsen make love for the final time there it’s in just such an upright position, rendering neither of them sexually "superior." In another climactic scene (one of several, the film a string of orgasmic set-

pieces), Carlsen has a Dr. Armstrong, the warden of a mental institution, pinned to a table, under interrogation. As he proceeds, the doctor’s appearance changes, from Carlsen’s perspective, from his own slightly feminine looks to those of the femalien inhabiting his body, his voice synthesizing into an odd combination of the two. The electricity between them is incredible. Another shot in the dormitory posits Carlsen on one side, a female nurse he’s interviewing on the other, between them a poster of formerly androgynous rock star David Bowie, another Man Who Fell to Earth; seconds later, the shot is reiterated, this time replacing Bowie with Carlsen's own mirror image, each framed like an intermediary personality.

Hooper’s movies are full of such similar characters as Carlsen, in transition after being drawn into some sort of ambiguous realm. In his earlier works this

Strangely for the sci-fi/horror genre, however, it’s the ostensible, male heroes in Lifeforce who act the most viciously; the "monster" is, in fact, serene and warmly desirable. It’s the histrionics of those around her which seem to generate the most

jarring cuts to scenes of cannibalistic mayhem in the streets outside the several military and scientific installations and mental and governmental institutions it takes place in (all suggestive of the previously independent filmmaker’s relationship to Hollywood) seem crazy and discontinuous, as though dropped in from another movie. In fact, the characters are by now so far removed from reality that they have as little awareness of what’s going on outside their world as we do.

Soon after Carlsen’s asylum-confrontation with the Armstrong-monster, he and Caine part company so that he may finally and again commune with his uroboric counterpart, all three later converging upon the cathedral where the lovers are united in their womb-tomb below. The scene plays out like a take on Haggard, where Victorian Leo Vincey, whose anima has been so far removed it’s taken on a life of its own, joins with her in the eternal flame while her city burns. It’s at this point that her counterpart in the

Hooper reveals the astronaut’s true nature by intoning, "You have always been one of us" (meaning alien and female, as each of us was, originally, feminine in form in our earliest womb-development), and Carlsen’s reintegration and ascension can take place.

He’s particularly equipped for such an epiphany because of his own non-domineering, non-voyeuristic attitude toward the woman throughout: where others eye her lasciviously, through visors and capsules and windows and monitors, he shares an immediate intuitive connection with her. Not only is he not inhibited by all these separating devices (which she blows away so

effortlessly, as in the scene of her escape from the scientific compound where she shatters all the windows and doors in her way), he can literally see through her eyes at times and inhabit her mind. By placing all these surrogate screens or lenses between his characters and their object of desire, the director toys with our relation to the film itself; and just as the men all condescend to the alien in her apparent vulnerability only to be surprised by the sheer force of her power, the viewer should also be alerted to the hidden potency behind what we may be tempted to regard only for its superficial allure. When one relates to this Other openly rather than critically or exploitatively, he or she, like Carlsen, may be amazed to learn how similar they may really be, the payoff arriving in the form of a mutually rewarding symbiosis and – ultimately – ascension and regeneration, difficult or dangerous only so long as one resists it.

Carlsen’s return to his point of origin bears similarities to the Hardestys’ return to their grandfather’s house in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and to that of David Soul’s writer-character in the Salem’s Lot miniseries – both primo Hooper. Always, the encounter seems to lead to the obliteration of both masculine and feminine qualities, as when Carlsen and the woman are impaled on an Excalibur-type sword as they make love. (The weapon itself resembles the opening video-image of the mothership, further

clenching the snake’s jaws round its tail.) This is, again, the only time such communion leads to the creation of anything even marginally new and promising in Hooper; for, after such total and cosmic resolution, where could any commercial filmmaker go but backward?

"Saturn is in retrograde," one character notes in ’Saw, signaling the director’s own downward spiral from the (at least, budgetary) zenith of this picture and its two companions for backer and distributor Cannon films, Invaders from Mars and Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2. His

to-video-and-cable Spontaneous Combustion and further television assignments for the likes of "The Equalizer" and "Freddy’s Nightmares" and the aforementioned USA movie. In the latter, the orphaned student played by Madchen Amick finds her own erotic power in an alchemist’s cloak, and the Hooper surrogate essayed this time by Anthony Perkins winds up in a womb-like grave clutching at the remains of her garment in a last-ditch attempt at rejuvenation. It doesn’t work, and the Amick-goddess quietly moves on while HooPerkins (a peripheral character at best, as all director-surrogates should be in their stories) is thrown out of the uroboric circle of time and regeneration, seemingly for good. (The Goddess giveth, and the Goddess taketh away.) It took him a long time afterward to realize a theatrical film again – 1994’s The Mangler – and it has been a long time since, with no others on the horizon.

But with the goddess of home video granting him periodic rebirth in the form of the occasional reissue of his strongest features on whatever new format springs to the marketplace, maybe Hooper’s former estimation can afford him the means to recreate himself once again. It’s always counter-productive wishing a filmmaker back to his or her beginnings – visionary directors are like jazz musicians or abstract artists, who often catch a groove that takes them straight out of the solar system as their patience with ordinary materials grows thin – but sometimes that’s where the Colin Caine in us can come in handy. A part of Hooper went rocketing off with his Goddess in Lifeforce. It would be nice to see both of them return someday (he doesn’t have 76 years to do it in), bringing back a little of the exhilarating, elementary magic his lower-budgeted features brought us. It isn’t

any sort of cosmic-androgynous windstorm-and-lightning special-effects orgasm in outer space, but it’s a living, and can be a brilliant one at that.

WE’VE ALL HAD to readjust our expectations, these days. All the modern reiterations of those fifties’ downed pilots and planes in such films as The Monster That Challenged the World, The Cosmic Man, The Cyclops and so on and their recent reincarnations in Fearless, Alive, Forever Young, Air America, and Hero suggest a similar Icarus story, the atom-bomb sun that melted our wings back then now perhaps more nebulous and diffuse. One reflects on the actual astronaut’s account of life on mundane earth after having walked on the moon, and the realization hits that his fulfillment of our Camelot-Kennedy dream of flying hasn’t been improved on since; we as a nation are left with only the recollection of what we were once capable, and its reflection, in turn, on what we’ve achieved since then is humiliating. We are all of us, somehow, stalled on reentry.

Whatever Goddess/es we may have pursued or imagined in the spendthrift eighties seem to be showing their shadow sides now (that materialism our compensation, perhaps, for our ultimate failure to accomplish anything elsewhere), as more and more screens fill up with the doppelgangers we’d kept buried in the preceding decade, be it in suburban thrillers such as The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Unlawful Entry or such harmless comedies as Twins and their edgier dramatic cousins Dead Ringers, Equinox, and The Krays. Such doubles have also turned up with striking frequency in recent years in the pages of women’s fashion magazines and elsewhere, suggesting that these women, once trained to look for their mirrors of potency in their male companions, are now finding it in themselves, having apparently reached the end in that particular path.

While some men may see Her for only the terrifying, unknown, carnivorous mother-past from which they must escape if to succeed in creating an identity of their own separate from their mother-dominated childgrowth years, the Goddess may also comprise the lover-to-be for others and the mother-future for women, the adventurous Door through which we may all travel to tomorrow – equally frightening, but also full of promise. "She’s destroyed worlds," a hyperventilating Carlsen fumes at one point, but what he doesn’t tell you is that She’s also created universes.

In the guise of both Good and Terrible Mother, She’s where we all originate and what we all can look forward to: the Goddess, mandala, vessel, planet, Great Round and primal unity; the eternally collapsing and regenerating fundamental force of life and death rolled into one, the mother and lover and mother again; the anima in animus and the reality of the dream, the circle made by the phallic snake, and the original, "bisexual" Adam; the formative and apocalyptic earth which eats its dead in order to force up new life and nourishment; the egg and the moon and the halo and labyrinth and ocean and psyche and womb and tomb and cave and widening gyre, the eternally returning cycle of life and time itself…

The uroborus.