A Film Analysis of Beyond The Dream (2019) in a Jungian aspect

**SPOILERS**

Rarely has a movie made me feel the urge to analyse and review on. Surely there are great films that I've watched recently such as 1917 (2019) (which was an overstatement, as it wasn't that great of a film and felt gimmicky), but Beyond The Dream (2019) felt like the culmination of what I've been interested recently. As a presupposition, I have been recently immersing myself in the lectures of Jordan B. Peterson (Personalities and its Transformations), and concurrently studying a bit on cinematography (through random tidbits on the internet and throughout my hobbyist learnings in analog photography). Hence, I feel very strongly towards this movie, which in its gist is about different neuroses and that of Erotomania (a form of schizophrenia which the inflicted falls in love with the hallucination). In the movie, multiple references towards Jungian psychology and there exist multiple symbolistic and archetypical shots that reference Jungian philosophy. In this review or analysis, I will attempt to analyse Beyond The Dream (2019) in the lens of Jungian psychology, then try to pinpoint a few shots that I think was amazing cinematography wise. I will also cite different YouTube videos as a reference whenever I think it is suitable to do so to sediment different pieces of knowledge that I have read or studied throughout recent times. Since the ending to the film is sort of ambiguous, I will give you my interpretation of what I think in terms of character development and

Synopsis of the movie (IMDb) : Lok (Chun-Him Lau) is a recovering schizophrenic who yearns for love. One day, he encounters the young and beautiful Yan (Cecilia Choi) and quickly falls in love with her. Just when he struggles whether to tell her about his illness, he has a relapse and becomes delusional. Little does he know that she's a psychological counselor who has a hidden agenda. Turns out that Yan was just a figment of his hallucination from the encounter, and was actually Yip Nam, the psychology student who was struggling to find a erotomanic schizophrenic patient for her graduate thesis. As Yip Nam counsels Lok, she discovers that she was the one in Lok's hallucinations. She soon falls in love with Lok, which concurrently exposes her own psychological trauma of being sexually exploited when she was young. They soon continue the counselling yet her affair with Lok gets discovered by the institution rehabilitating Lok, and Yip Nam gets disciplinary action from her university, in which she refuses to accept the terms to terminate interaction with Lok. In the final scenes, the pair is shown to be in their rooms alone, with an abrupt cut to the ending scene that portrays them running towards each other and embracing.

In this two-part analysis, I will first start in the context of Jungian psychology. In Jungian psychology, the human psyche is generally divided into two major parts - the conscious self (or the Ego), and the unconscious self, which can be further divided into the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious is the absorption of the reality which is not detected or sensed by the conscious Ego, but manifests itself in the actions of the psyche. The collective unconscious, is the culmination of the evolutionary process in the form of different symbols and archetypes. The "collective" part refers to something that is akin to a universal language, in which supersedes human language and superficial methods of communication. For example, albeit from different cultures, many can feel familiar with concepts such as death, birth, mother, love, child, the hero. These archetypes have been deeply intertwined with the Darwinian evolutionary process, and these archetypes can stem quite deep in the human neuropsychology. As a result, the proclivity of humans to different actions (the consciousness or Ego) are influenced by the different interactions between the conscious and the two unconscious. One product of the subconsciousness are complexes, in which these sub-personalities manifests itself in the behaviours and emotions.

[References: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wywUQc-4Opk (Archetypes), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emZ10npcvDo (Archetypes), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0KzUS0b_uc&t=246s (The collective unconscious)]

"So what does it have to do with the movie?" You may ask. I will try to focus on the protagonist of the film Lok first. The movie is quite deeply rooted in the Jungian aspects of psychology as it even references it several times during the scene where Yip Nam is giving a presentation of her graduate thesis project proposal which references a Chinese psychological text on the dream analysis of Jungian psychology. But even before the actual presentation scene, we are given the fact that Lok's mother has recently passed away, and that she loved him like no one ever would. This is deeply archetypical in the sense that it signifies the death of the anima figure, the ideal woman who unconditionally loves him and gives him love. One could say that the death of his mother has created a tear in his personal unconscious and his lack of love creates the illusory neurosis of Yan, another anima figure which is the manifestation of the perfect woman, or the Mother Mary archetype in Western Christianity. Furthermore, during the film, Lok explains a recurring dream about himself being chased as a black goat, in which he is pet and smiled upon by many people, but ultimately he is buried alive in his grave. He sees himself, in the latter part of the movie, in the grave whilst a female child looks over him in matrimony with a male child in black. There are some explicit analytical commentary by Yip Nam to Lok, in which she explains that the archetypes refer to himself unwilling to let go of his hallucinative girlfriend, and forces him to essentially tear her old hallucinative girlfriend apart in order for him to vie for her. I personally disagree with her analysis (as did Yip Nam's mentor), in which I believe you cannot simply repress one's proclivity towards the figure of the anima, in which it has to be developed and integrated from the shadow of oneself. Also, Yip Nam's mentor mentions the possibility of transference and counter-transference, in which Lok's hallucinatory girlfriend Yan might be exacerbated in aspects of experiences due to counselling by Yip Nam. And this is exactly what happens.

Personally, the goat has always been an archetypical figure of negative light (in an Judeo-Christian aspect) and his visualisation of himself as a goat could signify that he sees himself as imperfect and damaged. His visualisations of other people petting him and smiling could be seen as something that is purely social, but nonetheless nothing to do with true intimacy (as is Lok's relationship with other people - children play with him yet does not fully socialise with him, the staff at the center views him as a patient) and that he finally is put into a grave and buried alive. He is first seen buried alive with the female child (the anima figure) peering over the grave, then later he reveals that he sees another male child dressed in black with the anima, seemingly in matrimony. I think this is the idealisation of the female anima, in which Lok views an impossible distance between himself in reality with Yan.

I believe the repression of Yan (the figure of the undeveloped anima) and the exposure to the fact that Yip Nam was sexually exploited causes Lok to increasingly compare Yan and Yip Nam (even though he says he accepts Yip Nam as who she is) finally trigger his schizophrenia by having Yan to resurface and saying that she doesn't fully love him, and that the divide between love towards the anima (Yan) and the actual romance between Lok and Yip Nam triggers an actual act of aggression and self-harm to himself. The divide in his subconscious has finally full manifested in the conscious mind as psychosis and neurosis and that he feels extremely torn. The development of the male psyche towards individuation requires Lok to realise that Yan can never be true, and to integrate this fact into his psyche, but due to the hallucinatory images, we can see that Lok cannot overcome this fact and falls depressed in his late mother's room.

[References: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exqL4C2u7HA (anima)]

The whole counselling arc falls apart when Yip Nam phones the mental asylum to rehabilitate Lok once again in which after rehabilitation, Lok rejects Yip Nam completely for her sake (more described later in the analysis of Yip Nam), and that his isolation fully manifests himself as something that cannot be fully realised, and we see him trapped inside his room at the end, bouncing his ping pong ball at the wall. Personally, I reject the idea that the final scene of them embracing being canonical, as it would contradict with the idea that in the final few scenes, Lok rejects Yip Nam, telling her "to wake up from this dream". I first thought this as the complete failure of Lok to integrate his trauma with Yip Nam, seeing that he decides to give up the relationship. But after seeing one particular shot that shows Lok in a spherical reflection (similar to the pattern of a mandela) bouncing his ping pong ball, it seems that Lok has accepted that the figure of the anima can never be who he thinks it will be, and that he has to give up the duality of Yip Nam/Yan to move on with his life. The pattern of mandela has a symbolic and archetypical meaning of individuation, in which a part of repression is integrated into his psyche, and he is now rehabilitated again from his trauma. This is part of the rebirth archetype, quite similar to how he pulls himself up from the grave after he "integrates" the two parts of self together. This is fully up to personal interpretation.

Before we move onto Yip Nam, I think the cinematography is excellent and the symbolism is rife in this film. Throughout the first part of the film, where Lok gets to know Yan, we never explicitly see Yan being in a shot - all we see are reflections and through mirrors; her continuity throughout the shots are also very erratic - you see her appear and disappear suddenly; the aperture used throughout the entire period is large to give a dream-like appearance. The symbolism is also plenty in this movie - most notably the diary, which represents the past trauma and the insufficiencies of Lok, which we can see is referenced multiple times in the film that Lok wishes to give Yan the diary, and that Yan wishes to see the diary in the latter part of the movie when Lok trashes his home to find it as he wishes someone to understand his insufficiencies. Furthermore, I speculate that the ping pong ball he bounces on the paddle symbolises his sanity and the stability of his psyche. In the beginning, he bounces the ball steadily until he overhears Yan's abusive father hitting her and the ball falls off the paddle. A similar thing happens when Lok has his schizophrenia triggered again, as we see the ball shown rolling along the ground - as well as the final scene, where we see he bounces the ball regularly. This is why I think he has recovered from Yan - he gets his sanity back in check finally. There are also some symbolism that might be a bit more far-fetched - such as Lok crouching in the fetal position in his mother's room (symbolism for the regression into the fetal state - regression of the development of psyche)

For Yip Nam, she reveals in the latter part of the story that she has been with multiple men and as a result feels extremely insecure about her body - which is the manifestation of her relationship with her mother. In the movie she reveals that she has been abused and unwanted by her mother, in which the subconscious vies for her mother's approval, and resulting in herself following her mother's footsteps of having multiple sexual relationships with different men for her own gain. In Jungian psychology, this is a phenomenon rooting in the personal subconscious - the complex that a girl hopes to win over her mother in a psychosexual sense for her father. In the case that the girl lacks maternal love and paternal love altogether, this manifests into the Electra complex, in which she sleeps with other man as compensation for her lack of given love. Throughout the film she realises that her sexual interactions with other males has made her pale in comparison to Lok's imaginary manifestation of Yan, which she has to tear down her persona and expose her subconscious and conscious flaws. One could say that this expression of the repressed love is a step in integrating her complexes back to a fully individuated person, yet she does this to a similarly damaged Lok. Finally, after being exposed, she sacrifices her career to be together with Lok, yet she is rejected in the library albeit the sacrifices she made. One interesting symbolism that is made quite apparent is the red bracelet on Yip Nam's arm throughout the movie. She wears this initially and tells Lok that she overcame and integrated her mother's abuse into something motivational - the aim of being a clinical psychologist, yet she still manifests her trauma into her act of sleeping with other men, which is a poor integration. She then finally cuts her ribbon after exposing her past with Lok, in which her lack of love is satisfied by Lok, and this symbolises the integration of her mother's impact on her, and resolving and integrating her Electra complex. Yet we see her being rejected by Lok and her past motivation sacrificed - we see nothing that of the Yip Nam we initially saw - she became a women with even more trauma and hurt, all of her love and motivation gone - one of the more parts of the story that in my opinion a real tragedy. We see her opening up her door to a seemingly empty hallway and calling out Lok's name, seemingly suggesting that she has fallen to the same low as Lok - even hallucinatory.

[References: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VAo-FQTB8E (Freudian Electra Complex)]

But the tragedy is given a seemingly saccharine ending - we see both of the damaged reuniting under a footbridge. This reminds me of the ending of La La Land, in which the director shows a what-if version of the entire movie. Yet this ending would be conflicting with the previous scenes of rejection by Lok, and that I see this as a figment of imagination of what-if in both of Lok's and Yip Nam's minds.

Before I wrap up, there are some reviews online saying that this movie "slut-shames" Yip Nam. The movie certainly depicts Yip Nam and Lok degrading herself verbally, claiming that she's "dirty" and "used". But one thing about analytically dissecting the personalities of both is that it shows that the movie isn't criticising the act of having multiple sexual partners - it is the exact opposite of that. It shows that how the cause of the manifestation of such acts - such as child abuse and maternal influence could ruin a female adult's psyche. And the movie does nothing at all to slut-shame - we must delve deep into the human psyche to see the point of the matter - and this movie does exactly that. It delves deep into one's rationalisation and reasoning of the psychological mind to fish us valuable insights in how to orient ourselves in the increasingly nihilistic and psychologically damaged population in society. This is one reason I find this film so interesting - it's similar with the books from Dostoyevsky (such as the Notes from Underground), with deep psychological influences inside stories, with archetypical influences underneath.

This is why such movies work amazingly no matter what language it was in. The cinematography, the archetypes and the symbolism all tell us what higher abstraction of what the screenwriter wants to tell - and what it wants to say in a universal language. The Jungian analysis proves that the character construction is solid and archetypical enough to be realistic, and that I believe this has to be an 8.5/10.