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Overnight in the Underworld:The Archetype of the Shadow in Michael Mann’s Film Collateral
- John Bonaduce
- Aug 3
- 7 min read
By shadow I mean the “negative” side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious
Carl Jung, Footnote #5, Two Essays on Analytic Psychology
Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow Knows.
Radio serial, 1931
Is it just me, or does any movie set in Los Angeles at dusk necessarily trigger profound mythological associations?
We are in fertile and vibrant transpersonal psychic territory from the first FADE IN of Michael Mann’s Collateral with actors Jamie Foxx, Tom Cruise, and Jada Pinkett Smith as Cab driver Max, his homicidal hit man passenger, Vincent, and a high-end public defender, Annie Farrell.
Full disclosure. This is not a movie review. I don’t care if you liked it or if you hated it. Our task this month is to identify the presence of an archetype, The Shadow, as it manifests in cinema. I’ve chosen this 2004 crime drama in which a cab driver and a hit man are brought together for one night in which five homicides will take place on the mean streets of the city of angels. Five murders break down into five acts, a strange format but very Shakespearean, if you think about it.
Why do you think they call it “noir,” anyway?
Max is a modern Osiris, a dead man in his barque, the corpse forever in motion in the streets of Los Angeles, his dead dreams of a limousine service briefly fanned into flames by the attractive district attorney in his back seat, her Isis to his Osiris.
People are always leaving little bits and pieces of their fractured lives in his hack for hire. Some passengers talk, whining about those fatal lapses from which they have never recovered, that stock deal gone south, that mistress who decided to spill the beans, thus destroying a whole family. Others weep. Max hears it all as he conveys his lost souls from places they shouldn’t have been to places they don’t need to be.
And then there’s Annie. Max can read her like a book. Gotta be a lawyer by the looks of the suit and the briefcase. She likes Max but has more important things to do than explore human relationships. Her job is simply to take the worst of society and remove them from civic life, to throw them into that vast network of hidden humanity, our prison system, where the shadow of our culture sleeps in the cages required to restrain them.
Tonight, Max will encounter his own shadow, menacing and confident in a relationship of parts to the whole which Campbell describes in Pathways to Bliss:
The shadow is, so to say, the blind spot in your nature. It’s that which you won’t look at about yourself. This is the counterpart exactly of the Freudian unconscious, the repressed recollections as well as the repressed potentialities in you … It is made up of the desires and ideas within you that you are repressing—all of the introjected id … In the myths, the shadow is represented as the monster that has to be overcome, the dragon. It is the dark thing that comes up from the abyss and confronts you the minute you begin moving down into the unconscious. It is the thing that scares you so that you don’t want to go down there. It knocks from below. (73)
The ultimate back seat driver
Tom Cruise as Vincent is the only character in the picture to be denied a last name. He is a hollowed-out man, man minus morals, light on his toes because he carries no ethical qualms like the rest of us. And he is everything that his driver, Max, must become if he is ever to move his dream of a company called “Island Limos” to more than a little photo of a tropical paradise behind his cab’s sun visor.
The relationship between driver and passenger is always transactional. Charon accepted a single obol back in the archaic era, though by Aristophanes’ time it had risen to two obols due to Athenian wartime inflation. Knowledge, too, is exchanged, as many of us have experienced from life in the ride-share era where we are tempted to divulge everything to some dude we will never see again, precisely because we will never see him again. Since I tend to be older than most of my Uber drivers, I am often asked my opinion on a variety of subjects about which I know nothing but try my best. It was, after all, knowledge of the universe that Arjuna’s charioteer imparted to his mortal employer. The driver, of course, turned out to be one of the chief deities of the cosmos, Krishna.
Vincent, like Krishna, accepts the inevitability of violence and mocks his driver for his refusal to engage the world at the level of warfare. He asks Max how long he has been planning to launch his own company. Max says, “Twelve years.” Vincent scoffs. He lectures the driver on the need to be reactive and proactive in life: “Adapt. Darwin. I Ching.”
Of course, the Shadow is a know-it-all. “The ego is being reminded that it knows nothing about the psyche in its totality. The part cannot express the whole” (Ego and Archetype: Individuation and the Religious Function of the Psyche, Edinger, 90).
The Shadow always has knowledge superior to the ego. This is beautifully evoked by the dialogue between driver and his fare conducted through the narrow aspect ratio of the rear-view mirror. It is literally a moment of reflection for the driver, a driver ironically stalled in his life’s pursuits. And the man in the back seat, in terms both pitiless and practical, lays out Max’s alternate future, consistent with Campbell’s assessment that the “shadow is you as you might have been; it is that aspect of you which might have been if you had allowed yourself to fulfill your unacceptable potential” (Pathways, 73).
The Shadow always has knowledge superior to the ego.
The bewildering interplay between good and evil
Max’s descent into the Los Angeles’ cartel-influenced underworld precipitates the disintegration of his persona as he merges with the Shadow. At the point of a gun, Max is told that he must literally assume the role of “Vincent” serving as a decoy for the actual assassin. It is a stunning character reversal, the humble cabbie telling hardened killers to back off before they get hurt. You can tell Max has waited a lifetime to say that.
The sequence recalls what Jung called “the bewildering interplay of good and evil” (from “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairy Tales,” The Essential Jung, 127).
[Faust] awakened in me the problem of opposites, of good and evil, of mind and matter, of light and darkness. Faust, the inept, purblind philosopher, encounters the dark side of his being, his sinister shadow, Mephistopheles, who in spite of his negating disposition represents the true spirit of life as against the arid scholar who hovers on the brink of suicide. (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 235)
Ultimately, the Shadow must emerge. Despite our tendency to deflect its influence and to project its face onto others, to dodge the worst of its behavioral excesses, to match the expectations of society, to keep one’s head down, the Shadow will find us, will erupt when we think it is under our control, will get in the back seat of our car and tell us there’s a turn up ahead.
MythBlast authored by:
John Bonaduce, PhD, a seasoned writer for Norman Lear and for most of the major Hollywood studios (Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros, et al.) developed a profound interest in story structure beyond the commercial objectives of the industry. His exploration led him to conclude that much of what we call myth derives from a biological origin. This insight inspired his pursuit of deeper relationships between biology and narrative through his theory of Mythobiogenesis, which he explored in his dissertation at Pacifica Graduate Institute and was recognized as a “discovery” in the field of prenatal psychology by Dr. Thomas Verny.
John was recently appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health (JOPPPAH) where he advocates for an unrecognized level of human consciousness which exists at the border of biology and mythology.
As a featured writer for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythBlast, he passionately showcases Joseph Campbell’s enduring relevance to a modern audience.
This MythBlast was inspired by The Hero With a Thousand Faces and the archetype of The Shadow.
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In this episode of The Podcast With a Thousand Faces, we’re joined by Maureen Murdock - author, psychotherapist, educator, and a groundbreaking voice in the world of myth and memoir. Maureen is best known for her influential book The Heroine’s Journey: Woman’s Quest for Wholeness, written in response to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Maureen had a personal and professional relationship with Campbell and it was through their dialogue that her vision of the feminine mythic path began to take shape. Her newest work, Mythmaking: Self-Discovery and the Timeless Art of Memoir, invites us to explore how our personal stories echo ancient archetypes and how writing can become a transformative act of reclaiming the self. In this conversation with host John Bucher, we explore the evolution of the heroine’s journey, Maureen’s reflections on Campbell’s legacy, and how myth and memoir together can help us find meaning in the chaos of change.
This Week's Highlights
"The shadow . . . is that aspect of yourself that your ego doesn't know about, which you bury because it doesn't fit how you perceive yourself to be."
-- Joseph Campbell