The Cold War Prophet: Jack Ryan and the Senex-Puer Alchemy in The Hunt for Red October

Scott Neumeister, PhD
19 minutes ago
6 min read

The Hunt for Red October (1990) © Paramount Pictures — *The Hunt for Red October* (1990) © Paramount Pictures

“Jack! Boy! Get yourself in here!” Admiral Greer (James Earl Jones) heartily greets Jack Ryan (Alec Baldwin) as they meet in the admiral’s office. After some banter, Greer continues, “What’s important enough to get you on a plane in the middle of the night?” These lines occur minutes into the beginning of John McTiernan’s The Hunt for Red October (1990), a taut thriller about a renegade Russian nuclear submarine, set in the Cold War era. Together, they set the tone not only for establishing Ryan’s character in the film but also for how I would like to analyze him as a form of the prophet archetype.

Sometimes a prophet appears in a form we’re not expecting. So often we associate prophetic powers with old age, in what Jung identifies as the senex archetype—embodying wisdom gained through life experience. The word senex means “old man” (although it applies equally across all genders), and its opposing archetype is the young puer. As James Hillman notes, these two “personify the poles of tradition, stasis, structure, and authority on one side, and immediacy, wandering, invention and idealism on the other. The senex consolidates, grounds, and disciplines; the puer flashes with insight and thrives on fantasy and creativity” (Senex and Puer, x). Holding these two poles in equilibrium is no easy task, but doing so enables Jack Ryan, particularly in his expression of the prophet, to become the hero in this film.

The reluctant seer: intuition in a world of data

Ryan is a CIA analyst specializing in Soviet naval affairs. His innate acumen, analytical skills, and deductive abilities allow him to infer the capabilities of the Soviets’ latest creation: a submarine (the Red October) that can run virtually silent, evading the United States’ sonar capabilities. Ryan’s intuition from his synthesis of the intelligence reports lead to his middle-of-the-night plane flight from the UK to Washington to present Greer with an ominous evaluation—this sub could rain nuclear destruction onto the US before its military could respond.

A key revelation of Ryan’s prophetic powers occurs when Greer asks him to give a precis to a meeting of top US naval and intelligence officials. New information has revealed that the Soviets believe Captain Ramius (Sean Connery), the commander of Red October, has gone rogue. While the top officials in the room interpret Ramius’s unsanctioned course toward American waters as a hostile maneuver, Ryan alone rejects the consensus, seeing this as a calculated bid for freedom and insisting that Ramius intends to defect. Ryan’s conviction stems not from tangible evidence, but from an almost instinctive understanding of Ramius’s character, gleaned from studying the captain’s personal history and psychological profile. This moment underscores Ryan’s prophetic ability to read between the lines of cold data, discerning the human story beneath the strategic noise.

Ryan reluctantly agrees to get near the action of the hunt and flies to the aircraft carrier Enterprise. He once again embodies the prophet by deducing that the US submarine Dallas is the closest to Red October, and he asks to be placed aboard her. Moreover, Ryan divines how Ramius intends to get the crew to exit the submarine while he and the other officers (complicit in the defection) can escape. All of this intuiting, strategizing, and action leads to the finale of the film (no spoilers) where the true test of Jack Ryan’s prophet occurs: the confrontation of the US with the Soviets.

Joseph Campbell, in his conversation with Bill Moyers, relates one of the powerful themes of Star Wars—Vader’s loss of humanity in his cyborg form—with the problem he saw as ever-increasingly in modern society: the overreliance on technology (and its accompanying materialism and rationalism). The prophetic power of intuition, he claims, is even more at risk than ever before: “Technology is not going to save us. Our computers, our tools, our machines are not enough. We have to rely on our intuition, our true being” (The Power of Myth, xiii). Later in their discussions, Campbell relates the myth of the Greek prophet Tiresias, who had experienced life as both male and female, to the correlation of intuition with the inner balance: “There’s a good point there—when your eyes are closed to distracting phenomena, you’re in your intuition … [Tiresias] represented symbolically the fact of the unity of the two” (252). In other words, Campbell saw the need for the prophet in all of us to gain ascendency as part of our human birthright and ongoing evolution. I would argue that another unity that fosters intuition is the senex-puer.

Balancing the scales: the senex-puer synthesis in action

Ryan’s puer is constantly being reinscribed by others in the film—from Greer’s opening (though affectionate) “Boy!” greeting, to his youth contrasted with the much older military and intelligence brass during his precis on Red October, to another aging admiral (played by Fred Dalton Thompson) referring to Ryan as “that kid.” However, Ryan’s unity of the puer and the senex is the key to his version of the prophet archetype. The prophet receives their unique insight or "message" through moments of sudden inspiration, intuition, and visionary capacity—the classic traits related to Hermes or Dionysus. This connection provides the imagination, creativity, and radical idealism needed to envision a different future or a higher truth, often challenging the status quo. The puer provides the spark and the "sense of destiny and mission" that drives the prophet.

To be effective, the prophet must articulate their vision in a way that can be understood and implemented in the real world. This requires the structure, discipline, responsibility, and groundedness of the senex, associated with Saturn and the reality principle. The senex provides the authority and the capacity for ordered thinking necessary to consolidate the initial "flash" of insight into a coherent message and to endure the resistance that often accompanies radical change. A prophet who is all puer might have many visions but be unable to communicate them effectively or bring them into concrete reality, remaining an eternal dreamer. A prophet who is all senex might be a rigid, authoritarian figure obsessed with maintaining traditional structures, lacking the creative spark to offer new, transformative insights. The balanced prophet integrates the puer's imaginative flight with the senex's grounding, creating a figure who is both a visionary and a credible authority.

the most effective prophets are those who can dance on the edge of order and chaos

From insight to impact: the prophet’s dance between vision and actualization

Ryan’s journey from reluctant analyst to accidental hero illustrates the essential alchemy of the prophet: the ability to harness the visionary energy of youthful inspiration while tempering it with the discipline of mature judgment. In this balance, Ryan not only prevents an international incident but also models the psychological integration that depth psychologists like Jung and Hillman argue is vital for true leadership and transformation. His story reminds us that prophecy is not merely about foreseeing the future, but about bridging the gap between revelation and reality—a task that requires both the structured wisdom of the old and the daring imagination of the young. Ultimately, Ryan’s character reveals that the most effective prophets are those who can dance on the edge of order and chaos, using the senex’s clarity to give form to the puer’s flashes of genius to reshape the world.

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MythBlast authored by:

Scott Neumeister, PhD is a literary scholar, author, TEDx speaker, mythic pathfinder and Editor of the MythBlast series from Tampa, Florida, where he earned his PhD in English from the University of South Florida in 2018. His specialization in multiethnic American literature and mythology comes after careers as an information technology systems engineer and a teacher of English and mythology at the middle school and college levels. Scott coauthored Let Love Lead: On a Course to Freedom with Gary L. Lemons and Susie Hoeller, and he has served as a facilitator for the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Myth and Meaning book club at Literati.

This MythBlast was inspired by Myth & Meaning and the archetype of The Prophet.

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