Arcane and Archetypes: Analyzing Netflix’s Arcane
The purpose of this essay is to emphasize the themes undergirding Arcane. In a sense, I am interested in the psychological scaffolding beneath the story, manifest in symbols and relationships. In this short essay, there is not enough space to elaborate on every character, their story lines, and the details of the world. To do so would relegate us to a mundane description of the details of the show. You are better off watching it. Instead, I will focus primarily on two characters – Jayce and Viktor – who represent a problem in modernity which threatens to annihilate us today.
There’s no question, Arcane is a modernist myth; the art deco and art nouveau designs, the idealistic technological progress – with dire unforeseen consequences – all point to an imaginative version of the early 20th century where magic fills in for the tedium of contemporary science. What we’re met with is a reculer pour mieux sauter to the alchemical age. In effect, the magic circles and mysteries of alchemy mythologize science, granting the creators enormous freedom to explore the history of the last century without the burden of historical fact. Instead, they are privileged to capture the (dare I say) spiritual themes of our age and what has led to it.
Characteristically, this reversion to magical thinking conjoins the objective and subjective worlds. When science was inchoate and alchemy reigned, flasks, fire, metal, and poison were artistic instruments – canvases upon which to project the content of one’s unconscious. Just like Michelangelo said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free,” or a sketch artist sees a face in their initial scribbles, the alchemist saw his mind in rising smoke. Carl Jung states:
In an age when there was as yet no empirical psychology… everything unconscious, once it was activated, was projected into matter – that is to say, it approached people from outside. It was a hybrid phenomenon, as it were, half spiritual, half physical… the act of imagining, was thus a physical activity that could be fitted into the cycle of material changes, that brough these about and was brought about by them in turn… there did exist an intermediate realm between mind and matter, i.e., a psychic realm of subtle bodies whose characteristic it is to manifest themselves in a mental as well as a material form (C.W. 12; p. 277-279).
Jung notes that the alchemist witnessed his mind on matter. Part material, part psychological he experienced them as elusive objects, flickering in and out of experience. Then, by manipulating these objects, he reorganized his mind. Alchemy was a spiritual practice. Only coincidentally, when true chemical reactions occurred, was chemistry was discovered. Therefore, insofar as Arcane employs alchemical symbols in good feeling, then we should expect them to play their archetypal role and appropriately be interpreted through a Jungian lens.
Sure enough, many of the symbols of Arcane coincide perfectly with alchemical archetypes and are utilized to announce the terrifying conundrums of modernity. These themes center around Hex Tech, devices which utilize magic as their power source. We will interpret Hex Tech as modern technology whose capabilities appear magical to us. Beneath Hex Tech, unconfined by the limits of mechanical instruments, is the arcane – a wild metaphysical power appropriately referred to as “chaos.” In a sense the arcane is whatever is outside of our understanding and control. It is reality itself, dynamic and ever changing, and our unconscious, which gives us power while simultaneously risking disaster. We can say the following about the arcane: “it has a life of its own,” “you don’t know what you’re messing with,” and, should you tap into its power – “be careful what you wish for.” The consequences of reality, which reacts to our machinations, are often unforeseen and generate tremendous horrors (e.g., in the 7th episode, Jayce sees a calamitous future: a mix of nuclear fallout and calcified Pompeii). This is the arcane: The writhing unknowable essence of nature – including our own nature.
There is no better psychological analogue for the arcane than the prima materia. Jeffrey Raff helpfully summarizes the “first matter:”
The state of chaos marks the initial state of the alchemical prima materia and symbolizes the chaos of the psyche before inner alchemy has begun. This is a dark, brooding state in which all [psychological] contents are out of order and none are in relationship. The whole of inner alchemy consists in the transmutation from chaos to order, which is created around the center that is the self” (2000, p. 14).
The prima materia, and the arcane, by extension, is one’s unordered, uncontacted, unconscious self. It is your disordered mind before it has been made conscious. Because it is the light of consciousness which identifies and categorizes reality, the hex core’s anomaly is a writhing darkness, periodically displaying spinning colors: it is all things in flux.
The alchemists’ work transmuted this material into a philosopher’s stone – a symbol of the self. The self is all that you are and could be. In effect, the self is a symbol of wholeness or totality, integrated as a coniunctio oppositorum (C.W. 9 part II, chapter 4). When the ego confronts the unconscious, identifies its contents, and integrates them into its understanding of itself, then the first material is ordered into a unity: opposites organized under a common purpose. The alchemical process takes the disordered unconscious (prima materia) and forges it into an integrated individual (the self).
Viktor, throughout his transformation in season 2, is a symbol of the self. He contacts the arcane, dies, and is reborn through it. He undergoes a “baptism by fire,” wherein one’s excessive habits of thought are burned off and only the self remains. Reborn, he heals others and the world. It is no coincidence that the Christ-image is also a symbol of the self and Viktor carries a shepherd’s rod; “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11).
Jayce’s contact with the anomaly is quite different from Viktor’s. Viktor came from the under-city. He was already injured and aware of the dark side of human life. However, Jayce was insulated from the nightmares Viktor was accustomed to. His first contact with the dark underbelly, when he fought shimmer-addled lunatics and killed a child in the crossfire, exhausted him. He immediately parlayed with his enemy, unable to stomach the reality of Piltover’s depths. His journey to one possible future is a revelation of the shadow, wherein the darkest possibilities of oneself become conscious. His naïveté is dispelled and Jayce, having been shown what he lacked, returns a more complete, heroic man.
It is important to note that Jayce is the embodiment of modernism’s optimism. The 20th century marked a succession of revolutions, and the spirit of the age believed itself unbound by superstitions – free to remake the world for the better. Darwin, Freud, and Einstein – each one represented an upheaval of the medieval world. Unfortunately, modernism also produced Fascism and Communism, and the advances that produced the polio vaccine also produced the atomic bomb. For that reason, Jayce’s journey parallel’s the protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (albeit, more psychedelic and lacking in political persecution). Jayce sees the consequences of untrammeled progress and the part he played in it. Informed by this, he turns away from “progress” to the simple connection between two friends. [1]
In contrast, Viktor transforms a second time. After Jayce, determined to prevent Viktor’s calamitous ascent, “kills” him, Viktor changes into a deity. Symbolically, he becomes all spirit or form. He is an ideal perfection. The modernists’ symbol of the self, man purified of his corrupting nature, all machine, all mind, an ideological totalitarian. His acolytes lose their individuality, those subtle imperfections that amount to authenticity, and become faceless mouthpieces of Viktor’s perfectionist mindset. Viktor embodies the Transhumanist belief that technology will be our redeemer. Christ is replaced by our demiurgic tools, which, if we could only augment ourselves enough, will result in our purification.
To emphasize this point further, I want to linger on Viktor’s followers. They are white, a color associated with purity, and gold, a color associated with the highest value and the sun. Mircea Eliade states, “The ore of gold, as might be expected, grows under the influence of the sun” (p. 49). I do not have the space here to elaborate, but in ancient thinking objects participated in a common meaning. Gold participated in the meaning of the sun. Thus, gold is a “high” metal. Light, as I have noted elsewhere, symbolizes consciousness. It is what we are aware of. In Viktor’s ideology of perfection, there is no room for the dark or obscured. Knowledge must be total. Light must shine on everything. His followers’ aesthetic reflects this. Furthermore, they are faceless – without an identity of their own. Viktor speaks through them. They are ideologues who mindlessly repeat the words of one long dead (e.g., Marxists regurgitating Marx’s thoughts). They have been subsumed by ideas, lacking a heart or intuition. As they are transformed in the final act of season 2, their eyes go pale. They are blind to the present, lacking in consciousness, seeing only what they already know to be true. Their ascent and spread, mirrors the vapid ideologues of our time who blurt rote slogans. Should they overtake our institutions, uniformity will be enforced, and ambiguity will be violently repressed.
Emphasizing the spectacular intuition of the show’s creators, Jayce begins high and is redeemed after hitting rock bottom. Viktor begins low and aims impossibly high and is brought down to earth, saved by Jayce’s love (philia). In the end, the Transhumanist strain of modernism, incarnated in Viktor, is brought to an end. Viktor concludes, “there is no prize to perfection, only the end of pursuit.” Pursuit is a verb – a process. Perfection is a noun – a frozen object that, once achieved, is over. In a phrase, perfection is stagnation, stagnation is death.
There are technical reasons for this that go well beyond the explicit or even symbolic representations within Arcane. I doubt the show creators thought so deeply about the metaphysics to arrive at an explicit philosophy.[2] However, embedded in the themes, waiting to be unpacked, profound conclusions. As Dr. Iain McGilchrist (2021) has discussed, reality is fundamentally a process. The only constant is change. Just as a tree begins as a seed is planted, born from his father tree, watered and grows, is torn down and formed into lumber, carved into a chair, used and worn, thrown away and decomposed into the soil – all things are part of a macrocosmic process: the coincidentia oppositorum. Any attempt to perfect is an attempt to stagnate something. It takes a process and brings it to a frozen finale. Once this occurs, the object, be it a tree or an entire society, is unable to adapt to the changing environment. Inevitably, it reaches a “blind alley” and the dialogue from Ghost in the Shell (1994) becomes salient: “Overspecialize and you breed in weakness.”
The downfall of Viktor and modernism is that no amount of tinkering, no amount of manipulating and perfecting, will redeem us. Our faith must be put in something else. Something else must redeem us. Arcane’s subtle moments (e.g., Jayce’s final dialogue with Viktor, Echo’s vision of the Piltover that could have been) hint at the answer: Love, non-instrumental person-ifying attention. If we are wise, we’ll learn this lesson and reorient ourselves towards love before we tyrannize civilization into compliance with a stultifying ideology, enforced by lead and fire.
Footnotes
[1] - This same sentiment, the disillusionment with technological progress, can be found in contemporary feminism; namely, Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress.
[2] - Why I doubt the creators’ explicit philosophy: Much of Viktor’s dialogue in the late episodes is contradictory or nonsensical. On one hand, he says he’ll achieve a perfect balance of chaos and order. On the other, he is caught off guard by chaos. By definition, chaos is indeterminate and unpredictable. This contradiction leads me to judge Viktor by his actions and aesthetics – which are always deeper than words.
References
Eliade, M. (1979). The forge and the crucible: The origins and structures of alchemy. University
of Chicago Press.
Jung, C. G.
-C.W. volume 9
-C.W. volume 12
Koestler, A. (1968). The ghost in the machine. Macmillan.
McGilchrist, I. (2021). The matter with things: Our brains, our delusions, and the unmaking of
the world. Perspectiva Press.
Oshi, M. (Director). (1995) Ghost in the shell. Bandai visual.