The Curse of the Wer.. - Site de Thomas - Free

THE CALL OF THE WILD
solely by savage, carnal desires. Rather, his communion with nature is
seen as a source of wisdom, morality and spirituality.
In keeping with such imagery, Will’s infection with lycanthropy
augments the qualities of morality, loyalty, sincerity, authenticity and
spirituality in his personality, rather than submerging these characteristics
beneath the impulses of hunger, carnality and lust. The crisis
Will experiences as a result of his affliction therefore allows him to
develop his own potential in a Jungian sense; to become acquainted
with his interior urges (associated with the archetype of the Shadow in
Jung’s schema) and thus forge a more integrated, harmonious version
of himself. In the course of the narrative, Will bites his rival, who is
consequently also presented with the same opportunity for self-development
through crisis. This character, however, proves to be driven by
lust, hatred, revenge and violence, and is thus more closely related to
the Freudian representation of a man at the mercy of the repressed
impulses of the ‘beast within’.
By suggesting that there is an element of choice about how psychic
connections with the wolf are manifested, Wolf underlines the extent to
which the performance of masculinity is, among other things, about the
careful negotiation of the border between nature and culture, or civilization
and the wilderness. As Mark Dery argues, the representation in
the American media of the Unabomber is a case study in the vilification
of a man who was perceived to have got the balance wrong.
The five head-shots of Kaczynski in the Time cover story read … as a
transformation scene straight out of An American Werewolf in London
or The Howling, protracted over a lifetime. As in such films, Kaczynski
metamorphoses from the high school and Harvard math nerd of the
’50s and early ’60s, neatly attired in the regulation suit and tie, into
the shaggy-haired, sallow-faced hermit of his 1996 mug shot. The story
told, as in all werewolf tales, is Wild Nature revenged upon culture — the
nightmare, equal parts Darwin and Freud, of the return of what a Cheers
episode hilariously called the ‘inner hairy man’: the bestial self brought
to heel by evolution and civilization …
If the Unabomber–Wolfman analogy seems strained, consider the
print media’s tendency to collapse misanthrope and lycanthrope in their
characterizations of Kaczynski: Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World
Report have had a field day with creepshow descriptions of the feral
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