THE UNTOUCHABLES (Intouchables), by Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, 2011 This moving film is based on a real story. A rich aristocrat, Philippe Pozzo di Borgo (François Clouzet) becomes tetraplegic after a paragliding accident and needs someone to take care of him full time. With that aim, he employs a young black ex-convict and gang leader (Driss / (Omar Sy). In real life, Philippe, the wealthy and aristocratic business man wrote a book about the experience of that relationship and about what it added to his life; a book that became a best seller. The film is based on the book. Taken separately, the main characters of The Untouchables could represent, from the point of view of analytical psychology, two key elements of the psychology of the personality: the Superior and the Inferior Functions. One of them, the character of Philippe Pozzo di Borgo, the wealthy aristocrat, would symbolize the Superior Function. We know that the Superior Function is that function of consciousness which we most identify with: we can be a thinking, feeling, sensation or intuition type, the development of that function helps us to adapt in a particular way to reality: it helps us to develop our consciousness. The Superior Function is the function that leads us through life until the moment when, sometimes our psychic growth, or the development of our individuation, the urge to reach wholeness, or an excess of one-sidedness may demand us to incorporate other undeveloped aspects of our personality. If we resist and block that transformation in our life, a moment can come when a collapse of our conscious life is produced, because we are in need of renewal. That is what happened to Philippe, who after being the owner of a fabulous fortune in his conscious life: money, culture, social position, status the 1
moment of collapse came to him, and since then he couldn t enjoy his fortune because, after remaining tetraplegic, he didn t have a body to do so. Psychologically we can say that, once and again in life, this usually happens when consciousness has developed to its highest level; then a collapse can occur in the guise of an annoying symptom, an illness, a depression, an accident, etc. and all that one-sided conscious development can come to nothing. Life cannot go on advancing in the same direction, and a lot of life possibilities, which are incompatible with that one-sidedness, are without development and claim their conscious realization. In the film, little by little, we learn what has taken Philippe to that situation. When he had everything in life, he lost his wife, which symbolically represents a loss of contact with the anima, and with it he also lost the meaning of life and his inner balance. But after his wife s death, and although Philippe couldn t fly inwardly, he went on flying with his paragliding until the accident that condemned him to the wheelchair and to an insensitive and useless body. Philippe s liking in reaching for the skies after his wife s death symbolically points to his escape from reality, his running away from pain, his rejection of bearing the feeling of loss, the difficulty of relating to his new reality all that precipitates the final breakdown, the crashing against the ground, symbolically, the collapse of his conscious world. The situation is so blocked that, from the beginning, we have the intuition that Philippe doesn t need a personal caregiver who understands him in a motherly way, who rocks him and treats him like a baby, but he desperately needs somebody to treat him in a radically different way. We know that sometimes being treated with compassion, with exaggerated empathy, is the last thing that can help us, because sometimes it only perpetuates the problem and keeps us in paralysis, going on living the same old story. On the contrary, Philippe has the intuition that he needs his opposite, and that shows us that the moment has arrived for the new process to start from the unconscious: the situation has arrived at an end where there are no more possibilities in that side of known life; now it has to shift over to the opposite direction. In this case, that means to discover a different way of living, of feeling things and relating to them. Following this, the most interesting part of the film starts when the character of his personal caregiver turns up, bringing an injection of life and reality, of energy and vitality. The Inferior Function, here symbolized by the character of Driss, appears on stage. 2
The Inferior Function is the part of the personality which has remained behind and therefore it still has the original wholeness of nature.. The Inferior Function brings a renewal of life. Through it the world is, as it were, rediscovered 1 The Inferior Function is the least developed: it is incompatible with the Superior Function, it is primitive and wild, autonomous and rebellious, but it is in contact with all the energy of the unconscious. That s why, in the initial interview to hire a new caregiver, Philippe understands that the only one that can help him is the person who apparently seems to have fewer skills for the job. But things are not what they seem to be and Driss, the young ex-convict from Senegal, who belongs to the lowest level of society, unemployed and without qualifications, will be the one, because he is the only person who can provide a new life potential for Philippe, the only one who can help him to rediscover the world. Following von Franz, The Inferior Function can be personified by the Shadow in many occasions: its personification by the Shadow occurs when the fourth function is contaminated by the lower levels of the social strata of the population or by the famous under-developed countries. ( ) The inferior function often appears as a wild Negro or Indian. It is also frequently represented by exotic people of some kind: Chinese, Russian, or whoever may possess something unknown to the conscious realm. ( ) This social representation of the inferior function is particularly fitting in that this function tends to have, in its negative aspect, a barbaric character. ( ) I mean barbaric in the sense of being unable to exert conscious control, being swept away, being unable to put a break on, unable to control 2. 1 M.L.von Franz. Jung s typology. The inferior Function. Chapter one. Pages 9 and 11. 2 Ibid. page.55 3
This personification of the Inferior Function by means of the shadow appears in the character of Driss, the black caregiver. He is the only one who can help Philippe, for he possesses countless unknown and renovating aspects for consciousness. Driss is someone who, in a radically opposed way to Philippe, is completely in contact with his own body, a young, strong and energetic body. Apart from this, Driss is unemployed, that is, he cannot develop his ability because his social integration is limited. He is part of a marginalized minority with little social and economic resources. So, just for all these reasons, Driss is the one who can best symbolize an Inferior Function that is far from being accepted by consciousness That way, throughout the film we witness that wonderful clash of opposites that complement each other: the slow integration of the Inferior Function and of the Shadow- in the totality of the conscious personality. That enables Philip achieve a more complete life Examples of this are the scenes such as the one where Driss dances and plays his music at Philippe s birthday. It is not just that Driss dances, but that he also gets the people at the birthday dancing. Through it, the joy in the body returns again, as well as spontaneous movement, emotion expressed through the dance. In other scenes we can see how Driss is the only one capable of bringing Philippe closer to nature, to the sea, to the beauty of night walks through the lonely city. He is the one who helps Philippe to restore his eros, to recognize his desire of having a relationship with a woman again. 4
Possibly, the reason why Philippe and Driss's story has moved so many millions of readers and spectators is because it has a collective, archetypical background. It could be said that, in a certain sense, in the same way as individuals, society has developed some superior functions, but has left others behind, for example, intellectual, scientific, technological development related to a collective superior function, have taken us to the heights, but now, as in Philippe s case, it is the turn of its collapse. It is easy to see it in questions as evident as ecological problems, or the economic crisis, problems that belong not just to one country but to a whole civilization. That is why it is very hopeful, in a collective situation of collapse as the one we are experiencing, to know that shadow and the Inferior Function are there waiting for us in the wings; in them we can still find renewal, as much in a personal as in a collective way, because many of the contents represented by the wonderful character of Driss can help us to rediscover the world: hence the joyfulness felt by spectators when they see the film. María Mora Viñas Valencia, May 2012 5