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“The Elder’s Shadow”
There are many facets to any archetype, and rather than further speak about the healthy and good, I want to address the damaged and potentially destructive. Whether we want to admit it or not, I think it’s the negative face of the Elder Within that is the one we first meet. Let me tell you how I first encountered mine.
One Saturday afternoon, about thirty years ago, my mother surprised me by pulling up a chair in front of the television set and asking me to sit down. Usually during this time of day she was commanding me to go outside and be “like the other boys,” rather than hiding out in my room with a book. While my father was long resigned over my lack of athletic prowess, my mother remained disgusted by it. Still, here she was, inviting me to watch a movie in broad daylight.
The movie was The Razor’s Edge, the 1946 adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham’s best-selling novel starring Tyrone Power as the soul-searching protagonist, Gene Tierney as his shunned fiancee, and Clifton Webb as her effete uncle Elliott. Obviously, the picture had made a big impact on my mother when she was young, and now she wanted to share it with me. I dutifully did as my mother asked, and with a slight, almost conspiratorial smile, she left the room.
The Razor’s Edge was long and turgid in spots, and I remember little of it from that viewing other than it touched some secret inner place in an inexplicable way. Certainly, I recognized myself in the asexual hero; a young idealistic seeker, a loner if there ever was one. It was obvious to me that day that the handsome Larry was a gay man much like myself; in pursuit of an ineffable one thing as surely as he was being pursued by something else. Maybe they were the same. But there was Uncle Elliott to consider; waspish and uptight, more concerned with the outward appearances of things than what was going on inside. Here, in one old movie suspiciously watched, were the polarities of my own character revealed. Could my mother have possibly known what she was doing?
As the movie progressed throughout the afternoon, I could feel a mounting horror as Elliott’s character took shape and unfolded. True to Maugham’s text, Webb played the part of a supercilious old queen with elan. “It may have escaped your notice,” he haughtily informs a friend at one point in the drama, “but I am not an ordinary man.” Yet despite his bravado and polished charm, Elliott contained a fulsomeness that made me cringe. It was the dark side of being gay: emotionally crippled, socially lethal, and undeniably sad.
When the movie’s end credits finally rolled, I knew my mother had done me a great service, although not the one she had probably intended.
In her mind, I was Larry: a sexual enigma; a self-sacrificing caretaker of woeful others; a soft man easily manipulated. But as night fell, I realized that it was Elliott who lived most heatedly inside; sexually frustrated; defended and selfish of his own neurotic concerns; brittle, even false, if always resilient and nobody’s fool.
Like many gay boys, I had been made old before my time. I was like Elliott by the time I was fifteen, constantly protecting myself and others from the truth of who I really was. Seeing
The Razor’s Edge that day helped me to begin sorting through the good and bad qualities of both characters and integrate what was worth saving back into my being. You see, Larry and Elliott were but opposite faces of the same inner figure: the archetype of my gay manhood, with all of its complexity, pain, and bright promise. It would no longer suffice to stay lumpish and unaware of my own inner quest. It was time to come down from the edge of the blade and proceed in the invention of my own life.
Most of us were precocious young things, eager learners and good with old people, kind of like the Patrick Dennis character in
Auntie Mame who knows how to stir the perfect martini by age 12. It sounds fun, but much of that glibness was meant to disguise the sadness and feelings of displacement inside. Few of us were properly mirrored growing up, a pernicious form of abuse if there ever was one. As a result, most of us, in effect, are orphans. And that wounded little boy, whose childhood was stolen, lives within each one of us still.
This is how I believe the Elder within was first summoned: as a compensatory act, a means to isolate and protect what precious little of our true selves was left. And having been so powerfully awakened he continues to live aggressively within, cloaking himself behind many masks. We all possess “old souls.” There is a facet of my inner Elder that will always look and act like Clifton Webb playing Uncle Elliott. But thankfully, over the years, other dimensions of this archetype have developed as well. One of them is speaking to you now.
--Mark Thompson, addressing the 1995 Gay Spirit Visions Conference
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