The shapeshifter is one of the patron archetypes of contemporary culture—a purely self-defining, ever-morphing being.
I want to look at a few examples of how this archetype manifests in popular culture, specifically cinema (and I will be summarizing the movies I discuss, so beware of spoilers ahead).
First, let us turn to the shapeshifter in mythology and in particular to the Greek god Nereus or Proteus to get our bearings.
In Homer’s Odyssey (IV:355) and in some versions of the myth of Heracles, this shapeshifting lord of the waters provides the hero with knowledge if he can hold on to the god despite its many transformations: keep your grip over the watery deity throughout its changes in shape and its insights will be revealed to you.
From this we can already extract a basic symbol: the waters of the sea, or the ever-changing thoughts of the psyche, can be held onto and observed throughout their changes without losing our own stability. We can tame the mind and learn to use it correctly for the sake of true knowledge. Heracles gripping Nereus is a symbol for meditation, for contemplative spiritual exercise, for calming the mind.
Now, as well as a specter to be overcome by men, mythology also presents us with the shape-shifting god as ruler over men. Zeus himself was said to take on all sorts of (mostly animal) forms to seduce human women (and the young man Ganymede). On one level, the symbolism of the king of the gods taking on different forms relates to the idea that the Divine manifests in different forms and dwells in all things. However, because these stories about Zeus have to do with disordered desire—god with human, animal with human, lust and violence—we should submit to Plato’s assessment that these stories are not spiritually edifying accounts revealing deeper meaning. Rather, they are a sign of the degeneracy of Greek culture.
We may add that this degeneracy consists of elevating the shapeshifter—the mental power and its ever-changing thoughts and appetites—to the level of the king of the gods. They mark an apostasy from true insight, from true metaphysics and a sense of the transcendent, coming to worship the human psyche instead: “Falsehoods, wicked stories about gods who go around taking on the appearance of all sorts of outlandish foreigners” (The Republic, II:381e).
In many respects, The Talented Mr. Ripley presents the best cinematic portrait of the shapeshifter archetype. Ripley has been sent by his employer, the father of a character called Dickie, to get his son to come home to the United States, back from Italy, where he’s been gallivanting around.
In the first scene where Ripley displays his chameleon-like ability to imitate others, he specifically imitates Dickie’s father. This is the false father; Proteus in his negative guise, pretending to be Zeus; the shapeshifter usurping the throne of the king of Olympus.
Ripley was initially an agent of the pathological masculine, the father, tasked with bringing Dickie back to the United States. He was supposed to participate in this return, but soon gives up on that, preferring to inhabit Dickie’s world instead.
The initial attempt to return to the vitality of a culture that’s already in decline by overcompensating through authority (politics, conquest, Caesarism) is now followed by what we’re calling the archetype of the shapeshifter.
The shapeshifter archetype follows from pathological, excessively rigid, authority. It is the opposite of that authority, but also its natural conclusion: the postmodernity that comes after a materialistic modernity, confusion and decline after conquest and destruction, the anarchic after authoritarian cultural moment, effeminacy after pathological masculinity.
After Julius Caesar and the political mask of the “golden age” myth promoted by Caesar Augustus, we end up with emperors like Caligula and Egolabolus. It won’t be the conqueror, but the consolidator, like Diocletian, and eventually, the convert, Constantine, who will allow our culture to live on in a renewed form.
On this point Oswald Spengler was right: imperial expansionism is usually a sign of cultural decline (as an aside, I find the way Spengler characterizes different civilizations largely spurious).
Evidence that Dickie’s father represents a pathological type of authority may be sought in the fact that, although he is successful and very much the emperor figure, he believes Ripley’s lies about his son.
The irony is that Dickie’s father is in the business of building boats, and that this is the source of the wealth that allows Dickie to live a dissolute life abroad, where he ends up being murdered at sea, on a boat. There is a continuity here between the one and the other: false “Zeus” as tyrant and false “Zeus” as shapeshifter.
Meanwhile, Marge, the faithful woman who loved Dickie and who sees that Ripley is the murderer, is ignored. The true feminine is cast aside. She finally confronts Ripley and is silenced by Dickie’s father, who drags her away on a boat and sails off.
The spoiled child (Dickie is an overgrown child), resented by its parent, creates a generational breach that can be filled by the shapeshifter. This is a pattern in cultural decline which, to a degree, is manifest in the Boomer generation and its having allowed the rise of the inversion of gender and sexual norms.
Becoming erotically or romantically fixated with the character of Dickie, Ripley is in truth only falling for his own watery reflection, like narcissus, the failed initiate, champion of Proteus, as opposed to Heracles, champion of Zeus, overcomer of Proteus.
The symbol of water comes up over and over again, and it is at sea that Ripley will murder Dickie and into which he will throw the corpse.
Ripley’s imitation of Dickie comes into clearest relief when he is discovered wearing Dickie’s clothes. Ashamed, he hides behind a mirror on which the annoyed Dickie is reflected. The shapeshifter’s body disappears and presents as a void of dread reflection containing the facsimile of the subject he is to absorb.
Ripley was dancing before being discovered—a dance that manifests the parodic femininity of the shapeshifter. Effeminacy not as female receptivity to the masculine, but as parasitism and absorption of the desired male subject.
It is interesting that already in 2003, the Vanity Fair article about Epstein was titled “The Talented Mr. Epstein.” He is, indeed, a shapeshifter type, albeit not one characterized by lusting after the object of admiration. His predations had more to do with demeaning others and feeling powerful. And yet, we find that the Epstein milieu did express this sense of superiority by transgressing established forms (I am thinking of the notorious portrait of Bill Clinton wearing a woman’s dress which was owned by Epstein).
The recent film, Saltburn, presents us with a villainous shapeshifter called Oliver, insinuating himself into the life of Felix, a wealthy young man. He eventually murders or drives to suicide the whole family, becoming sole heir to their estate.
Here again, a special insight manifests in the female character of Felix’s sister, who eventually sees through Oliver, and a special resentment is reserved for femininity, with Oliver’s poisoning and murder of Felix’s mother, in which context he displays the fullness of his moral corruption.
We also have an explicit symbol of what I’ve called parodic femininity and the theme of absorbing the object of desire in order to replace it.
In all the above cases, we see how the traditional understanding of Eros as a fitting between corresponding forms is abandoned. The shapeshifter does not believe in his own essential form, and so does not feel himself to correspond with the particular form of another. Instead, the desire to be with someone and the desire to become that someone are conflated.
A final example of the shapeshifter archetype, one that triumphs and becomes ‘culture hero,’ occurs in the 1983 Woody Allen film Zelig. Here, Allen’s character morphs into a semblance of whoever he has around him. The movie hides the perversity of the shapeshifter, but makes the interesting point that such a creature, lacking a center, will eventually transition from agent of power and of its own desires, to a perfect, malleable, subject of power.
The alliance of the shapeshifter with power, or with the desire for power, which ultimately leads him to a hubristic downfall comes through in Shakespeare’s reference to Proteus in the mouth of the villain of Henry VI:
I can add colours to the chameleon,
Change shapes with Proteus for advantages,
And set the murderous Machiavel to school.
Can I do this, and cannot get a crown?
Tut, were it farther off, I’ll pluck it down.
— William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Three, Act III, Scene 2
And again in Milton’s use of Proteus in the context of the vain pursuit of power over nature as a dark art:
In vain, though by their powerful Art they bind
Volatile Hermes, and call up unbound
In various shapes old Proteus from the Sea,
Drain’d through a Limbec to his native form.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost, III.603–06
A person with no essence, no inner center, able to adopt the culture of whoever gets moved in next door, and to move wherever required. The perfect subject for late capitalism: malleable, interchangeable, the unconditioned individual.
When Leftists critique capitalist exploitation while defending mass migration and pathologizing Europeans championing cultural rootedness, they succeed only in being useful pawns for the system.
