With the recent release of Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man, I find myself falling deeper and deeper into the history of the werewolf and Wolf Man mythos, attempting to understand the grander insinuations of the beast. To quote George Waggner’s 1941 film, The Wolf Man, “Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night, may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.” This is to say, should the conditions be right (wrong?), anyone might regress into their more animalistic form, acting purely on aggression and instinct—or emotion—rather than the logic we so proudly hail as representative of our deviation from the animal world.
The Manimal
Since the dawn of the Wolf Man mythos, critics have compared the monstrous entity to the human animal’s analogous properties, making many attempts at disproving the separation of man from animal. Thus, the Wolf Man becomes nothing more than the imaginal representation of man’s regression into Monster—or animal—as an impulse of pure instinct, emphasizing the inhumanity of mankind itself. Plato emphasizes this incongruity in his theory of forms, where all things are imperfect in their material existence, living as a Shadow of that which occurs perfectly on a higher register. Or, we, as material humans, lack the necessary form to exhibit the ideological form, as it exists primarily in the imaginal or sacred realm. In layman’s terms, the human is no less animal than the wolf itself, despite our drive to embody the ideal human as we understand or imagine it.
Two Become One
I want you to consider the distinct difference between the Wolf Man and his lycanthropic brother, the werewolf. Where the werewolf is a being that may shift from human to wolf form, the Wolf Man is neither man nor wolf but a grotesque conglomeration of the two. In this sense, its place in the realm of existence is ultimately compromised by the merging of the anthropomorphic and animalistic. Rather than representing a regression of the human into its baser animal form, which might more clearly be represented as Ape Man; it expresses a transformation into something entirely new: the Outsider or Shadow (more on that in a bit).
The Stranger Beside You
This transmogrification into a monstrous Outsider does nothing to illustrate the true horror of the Wolf Man. The true horror lies in a dualistic field experienced by the Outsider and its victims. For the Outsider, it is the total destruction of autonomy, and for the victims, the stark realization that the afflicted are not who they presumed them to be. Now, you might be reading this and asking yourself, “Can’t it just be a monster?” And the answer is: of course it can. And it is. But what is ultimately worse than being attacked by a feral wolf? Perhaps, being attacked by a loved one who you no longer recognize—staring into once familiar eyes only to find an abyss that most certainly stares back. In the latter scenario, we are faced with the realization that we never truly knew the thing attacking, despite the foundations of our preconceived ideals. We are forced to reconcile the reality posed by Plato’s theory of forms (again, more on that in a bit).
The Wolf Man
With all of this said, this metaphor can be reconfigured to symbolize separate societal fears, and it is not lost on me that Whannell’s Wolf Man centers on a patriarchal figure whose transformation threatens his wife and daughter. In this sense, the Wolf Man affliction represents the toxicity of patriarchal chauvinism. As such, the man who attempts to face the previously mentioned threat will ultimately succumb to it, both literally and figuratively threatening the lives of the women close to him. The women are thus reduced to automata, dictated by fear and without autonomy. In this way, the patriarchy takes on the role of the Wolf Man affliction, itself, threatening feminine autonomy.
The Final Form
Within the previously described fears, a deeper, more sublimated fear is also realized. The Wolf Man represents an invasion of post-modernism into the modern. Transformation, particularly of archetype or form, forces the viewer to accept that the ideal Man, as represented by Carl Jung’s Hero, can quickly become the Shadow; the protector becomes the threat; the ideal is no more than a concept. Though never expressly examined, the most positive takeaway from such realization is that those threatened do not revert to solipsism—or the belief that only the self can be known to exist. Despite the brutal assault of such philosophical terror, our victims retain hope. And, as mentioned in my article regarding the work of David Lynch, hope is humanity’s greatest expression of beauty. The Woman then becomes a symbol of radical optimism in the face of a reality-shattering threat to her freedom and perception of self.
