Harry Redmond was a special effects artist in Hollywood when cut and paste was not a metaphor for a keyboard click. He was famous for his work on the film King Kong. 1930s audiences were thrilled and moved to the edge of their seats by the effects of stop-motion photography and live action projected on to the cinema screen, as Harry and his team convinced them that a 25 foot-tall gorilla could climb the Empire State Building -- the world's tallest building -- single-handed while holding a wailing actress in the other hand.

A little lower down the totem pole Harry, who died recently aged 101, created the famous transition scene in the film The Woman in the Window. A film noir and famously perhaps the film that originated the genre, The Woman in the Window is a Faustian drama of an aging man's obsession with a femme fatal who effectively materializes out of a picture and seemingly lures the protagonist into the deepest debasement of human tendencies -- murder, crime, deception, treachery and animal passion.

Hollywood at this time was infatuated with psychoanalysis and flaunted psychological conditions like paranoia and repression with risqué abandon, fixating audiences who alternated contempt and fascination towards its own transferred desires. An audience could live out its deepest-held unconscious obsessions via identification with actors and celebrities who acted as scapegoats -- as they arguably still do -- for their shameful sins.

The prescribed ending was the suicide of the hero (or anti-hero depending on how we feel about our shadow side), but to avoid offending sexual mores, the church and the Hays Code, it was commuted to a classic dream ending. Edward G. Robinson falls asleep and wakes up in his club, only to discover that it was all a dream.

The transition scene that depicts the transformation between dreaming and waking life demanded that Harry and his team shift the background scenery of a New York apartment and exchange it for a gentleman's club. They did it in real time and the finished scene in the film has no cuts, splices or doctoring of any kind: everything changed and yet nothing changed.

In the personal exploration process known as psychotherapy something similar takes place. It is so similar that Harry Redmond's profession evoked it for me with lucidity.

The first "special effect" in life is early conditioning. From it we are condemned to wander in a wilderness of limitation and contraction. Everything is more or less as we expect it to be. The addendum to this is that we are unaware of it: it is as if the experience of real life were rubbed away by the hypnotic trance of conditioned thought and behavior.

Anaesthetized to life, we tend to act as if we are numb to experience, to others, to intimacy and touch, to beauty and aesthetics. We may only respond to the blow of a gigantic stick, which is a metaphorical way of saying that when occasionally life throws a shock at us in the form of a bereavement, a serious accident, an illness, bankruptcy, a romantic obsession or any other intimation of mortality, we tend to awaken, albeit momentarily or for a limited time, and smell the fresh air of real life and enter authentic existence.

The corollary of these shocks (which some think may be the outward manifestation of unconscious forms and fears, or dreaded events) is inflated scenarios. Common examples are the recovery of our childhood selves to our true home well away from the planet earth (see the film E.T. or the more recent movie, Paul), the solicitor's letter from our deceased long-lost uncle in the Congo who has left us a colossal monetary fortune or bequeathed us an aristocratic title (see any number of old or new fairy tales and their re-telling by Hollywood, including the classic Alfred Hitchcock's movie Rich and Strange, or the modern novel Inheritance by Nicholas Shakespeare) or the most common mainstay of all, falling in love with the man or woman of our dreams and living together happily ever after (see any story in living history).

King Kong is just such an inflated scenario or allegory. Compressing it or expanding it -- depending on your point of view -- into the inner realms, we see a man's (or woman's) animal, instinctive nature captured by the base motivations of greed and profit. But the animalistic, physical, sexual male deeply desires a tactile mate, which in the inner world stands for our irresistible attraction towards wholeness, which is achieved through our soul journey guided by the anima (or in the case of women the animus) or "other half". Fay Wray's character in the film symbolizes this and then endures a reversal of soul guidance when Kong struggles to protect her.

This is not a good state of affairs. The wise soul should guide the compulsive instinctual nature, not the other way round. Fear and desire must be tempered with a higher wisdom within the human psyche, or it will be consumed and overwhelmed by its baser nature. The only hope for a human being is to realize his or her true nature by opening to wholeness. King Kong is a pointed lesson in how not to do it. Kong is over-sized; instinct dominates, nature is exaggerated, the ego-self is inflated.

Self-inflation, like self-aggrandizement, is a mental object: it comes out of our imagination. Similarly Kong comes out of Skull Island (a mind sufficient unto itself - an island), where he lives amongst a plethora of over-sized prehistoric animals: plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, styracosauruses, triceratops and the inevitable dinosaurs, all living together in a brutal world of primitive battles for survival.

The animals are over-sized because they represent the repressed emotions and brutal competition of thought and idea in the human mind. While the world of food, hunting and primordial survival has been rendered irrelevant in the post-industrial, postmodern Information Age, it survives intact in our restless dream world, in violence, rape and brutality on the movie screen and, most of all, in the personal and collective unconscious.

Fay Wray plays Ann Darrow, a disillusioned vaudeville actress turned aspiring movie star. Ann comes from the entertainment world and reflects its impending shift from stage to screen, or symbolically from outer to inner worlds, as Kong's soul guide. Her name means "God has favored me". But Kong's story is not a Dantian journey through heaven and hell, more a journey through two hells that never gets out of the second one.

Rampaging monster or tragic antihero? Our ambivalence about Kong climaxes when he climbs the Empire State Building, which represents man's highest achievement (at the time of course; only recently completed the Empire State Building remained the world's highest building until 1972 when the ill-fated World Trade Center's North Tower was completed). Will animal instincts, animal passions and raw emotion destroy the superior, sophisticated man of intellect and morals or does it have to be not suppressed but resuscitated, incorporated and integrated into the healthy psyche, so that it doesn't turn against him. Biplanes, which like Kong would become obsolete within a few years, attack him at the uppermost reaches of the body of man. For the Empire State Building, drawn, engineered and constructed from the creative thought and imagination of a man (William F Lamb) represents the higher reaches of man's ambition: the top the head. Man is destroyed by reason and intellect when thought dominates feeling, emotion and instinct. The primitive battle for survival is no less brutal in a man's internal mental life than it is was in the primeval jungle.

This is spectacular stuff and it catches the collective imagination. The giant King Kong is also a perennial entertainment monster, with countless TV, movie films and spin-offs, novels, comic books, animation series, electronic games, theme park rides, DVDs, laser discs, official website and merchandising panoply.

In contrast, the transition scene at the climax of The Woman in the Window is understated, drama-free, yet the meticulous attention to detail and technical expertise that must have gone into it is a match for the spectacular pyrotechnics of King Kong.

The second "special effect" in life is the transformation of a human being. After a long period of application to integrity, honesty and cultivating transparency a person seeking truth may, through awareness and non-clinging arrive at that point of freedom when they experience a rebirth. The precursor for this is the death of the conditioned self, the hypnotized, apparent being, the one invested in self-aggrandizement, self-inflation, and fear and desire.

Dramatic, spectacular, ecstatic and despondent as the journey is, on arrival the transition and the transformation are comparably mundane and profoundly natural: a homecoming, a return to sincerity and spontaneity, somehow where you have always been. It really is as if Harry Redmond and his team shifted the stage, the theatre and the background and we have returned home at last.

In the movie Edward G Robinson's character lurched from one realization to another, puzzling over his reorientation. His relief escalates into innocent joy as he realizes that all he dreamt is not really true. Everything has changed and in a Scrooge-like way you know that he will appreciate the ordinariness of his life since, apparently taken away, it is now miraculously restored.

The transition scene and subsequent events recall the poet Rilke's words: "Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart." And this is the point: it was and has been all scenery and when it falls apart you realize what is true. The world lacks scenery and is devoid of backdrop, as well as assurance and certainty. When the scenery shifts and falls apart all that remains is dangerous uncertainty. Sureness is a chimera as we wander in life's adventure to awakening, afraid of death and desiring what we do not have.

But when we have stopped doing all that we are doing to prevent reality, the truth from setting in, from informing us in everything we do; when we start to see what the heart sees, as opposed to what the eye sees, we prepare the way for wisdom to arise and present itself to us. This is the ageless paradigm. The muddy puddle clears from being left alone, undisturbed, and in the same way our inner restlessness, when it finally ceases from our disinclination to fuel it, allows the reflection of truth to become central and stable; it enables and empowers us to finally see. And when we do, we may recall the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eye."

What is unconscious or invisible to the eye is the fact that most of us are spending all of our time holding up the structure of the ego, without realizing that the heart can see exactly what is happening.

In yet another accomplished piece of special effects work Harry Redmond has shown us this. The Marx Brothers' film, A Night in Casablanca begins with Harpo leaning against a wall. An officious policeman, making his rounds, takes offence at his casual stance and asks, "What do you think you're doing, holding up the building?" Harpo nods vigorously and contentedly and then, as the policeman pulls him away, the entire building collapses.

BLOG entry #119