Rebel Moon and the Psychology of Perpetual Crisis

John P. Flynt, PhD
Apr 24, 2024
14 min read

Updated: Feb 13

Crisis, Trauma, and Dissociated Selfhood

The Production - Cult Art

A few thoughts occur after watching the first episode of Rebel Moon, a celebrated science fiction miniseries on Netflix. A video on the making of the series emphasized that production focused on visual effects characteristic of popular films such as Star Wars and Dune and video games such as World of Warcraft and Elder Scrolls. With director Zack Snyder and writers Kurt Johnstad and Shay Hatten, it is safe to say the video’s strengths are action-orientation, digital intensity in effects, and primitiveness of emotional and intellectual dimensions. The psychological and cultural depth of the characters is stereotypical. The acting is forced and often dramatically unconvincing. None of this is intended as negative criticism. In fact, such formulaic crudeness is essential to cult films. As the documentary on the production of the video indicates, the development of a cult context of art was fundamental: the effects achieved through digital art were central, while the characters and dramatic interactions were peripheral, even secondary. The video has the dimensions of an excellent B movie—the ideal venue for cult film phenomena.

The B-movie cult qualities of a video provide an excellent starting place for discussions of popular culture because they are so transparent in their expressions of contemporary social values and psychological issues. Due to this ranking as a techno-art production, Rebel Moon serves as an especially good medium for exploring a pervasive psychological orientation common today. This can be called the psychology of perpetual crisis.

The Psychology of Perpetual Crisis

The psychology of perpetual crisis sustains a world in which the development of selfhood as the outcome of integration and individuation is minimalized. With integration and individuation selfhood is developed inwardly over the course of a lifetime. It involves continually gathering intelligence and wisdom and developing the ability to remain regulated in contexts characterized by turmoil and confusion. In contrast, the psychology of perpetual crisis presents selfhood as a process that mirrors external events. Selfhood is sustained though momentary interactions that trigger continuing crisis, which is characterized by repeated triggering of reactionary states of emotion. The outcome of this is a chain of reactions leading to trauma, which is buried in unconscious psychic states characterized by various levels of amnesia. With the psychology of perpetual crisis, selfhood is narrowed to a shallow condition of semi-conscious reactivity from which a core set of assumptions and interactional frameworks emerge. Among these are the following:

Flawed by nature. Life begins as trauma. In this case, trauma is an event of being overwhelmed, of experiencing the self dissolved in an intense field of dysregulation. Everyone is flawed by trauma, and the psychological effects of trauma cannot be mediated or resolved. They are only lived out through perpetuation of trauma (crisis) and disappearance of memory though amnesia.
Betrayal and Narcissism. Trauma usually begins by unwilling betrayal of those who are loved or trusted. This type of betrayal can be understood in the context of the trauma of childhood, where the child assumes responsibility, usually without articulation, for the abuses, deaths, or tragedies the child witnesses or experiences. This is a form of narcissistic expansion. Expansion is the notion that “I” am responsible for everything that happens—especially those things that bring pain and suffering.
Trauma on trauma. Life proceeds as continued trauma (crisis), which translates to the notion that the only way that early trauma can be resolved is to induce further trauma. One trauma resolves another. Further trauma is induced by challenge and conflict. Conflict (battle) involves finding worthy adversaries. Some are good (from which arise strengths). Others are evil (from which arises desperation and survival). The most pervasive traumas involve people (or beings) who are treacherous, implacable enemies.
Dissociation. Although perpetual (one trauma resolves another), the trauma events remain dissociated. You live beyond (leave dissociated) what has happened. Beginning with the dissociated trauma of childhood, life unfolds with the assumption that anyone loved is destined to die in or disappear into conflict (trauma), so loving or being sincerely anchored in anyone or anything can be a sentence of death or vanquishment for the beloved. Although trust and altruism are good, anyone or anything that exists by trust and altruism will be destroyed. Life is tragic.
Celebration of struggle. Since life is tragic, the values of life can be validated only through struggle (crisis). Anyone who does not live in perpetual crisis is not experiencing life on an authentic basis. And since persistent peace and the resolution of conflict through dialog are delusional, the only path to survival is through crisis. This encompasses relationships, interactions, associations, intimacy, and companionship.

The psychology of perpetual crisis forms the underlying dramatic premise of Rebel Moon. All that is or can be begins with trauma and is sustained by crisis. For those with a political orientation, this might be interpreted as a psychology of revolt or even fascism. But the goal here is not to develop a political critique. Rather, the goal here is to explore what is currently a widely popular approach to interpreting and negotiating the human condition. The theme is exemplified by the life of Kora.

Kora

The character Kora (played by Sofia Boutella) is shaped by trauma and crisis. This is a notion that she herself introduces as she shares events of her life with her lover, Gunnar (played by Michiel Huisman). Gunnar learns from her that she was taken from her parents and raised by the militaristic ruling class to become a highly skilled and ruthless soldier. All that she has loved has been destroyed. We learn that her first love died in battle. After losing him, she became the ideological and emotional functionary of Regent Balisarius, a ruthless, ambitious aristocrat who plots to assassinate the royal family. His plot requires Kora to kill the daughter of the king, Princess Issa, for whom Kora is a personal guard. Princess Issa possesses extraordinary, magical powers of love and healing. During a flashback, we watch through Kora’s eyes as Princess Issa restores life to a fallen sparrow (a creature who flies, representing freedom).

The visualization the film provides of Kora’s murder of Princess Issa reveals much relating to the progression of life through crisis and trauma. Regent Balisarius orders Kora to assassinate Princess Issa. Another way to state this is that he forces (orders) her to commit (submit to) an act that destroys her capacity to develop through positive, loving relationships. A downward spiral is confirmed. This is so because Kora is brought to accept that any relationship is a bond, good or bad, that cannot be escaped, and when two relationships conflict with each other, she must submit to the bond with the greater power, even if it destroys her basis of positive self-esteem.

At the moment of trauma—sustained by crisis—we see Kora holding her weapon (a gun) and being ordered to pull the trigger. The camera image is clear and sharp. But then the impact of the shot on the princess is shown in a softened, blurred focus. The response of the princess is shrouded in a mystifying haze. The princess fades into what is ostensibly death (but not really, as we learn later). The princess speaks a benediction to Kora, thanking her for her (Kora’s) act of (self) destruction or murder. This approach to the actual psychological event of trauma is psychologically accurate, portraying how the moment of trauma brings dissociation. At the heart of trauma is the brain’s resistance to conscious processing of the full emotional impact of the traumatizing event. The emotional impact of the event is not consciously processed. Instead, it is consigned to an amnesiac subsystem of the brain. Only the general context of the event remains, blurred into a cloud of anxiety.

A further dimension of this event can be explored using terms introduced by Carl Jung. At issue here is Kora's capacity to sustain her gender identity. In Jung's view, gender identity is not a binary, cisgender phenomenon. Instead, gender identity emerges along a continuum of possibilities that represent a combination of the masculine (animus - Ares) and feminine (anima - Eros). Princess Issa can be viewed as Kora’s anima—the Eros of her psychology, which encompasses love, caring, and the capacity to engage in dialog. All of this is destroyed by Kora when she is overwhelmed by the psychological dimensions of the tyrant Balisarius. Kora’s animus—the figure of Ares—is the rational, unemotional, self-denying aspect of her psyche, which prevails in the identity she accepts as a highly trained soldier and functionary, one who is capable of killing without feeling.

In Kora’s moment of crisis, we see that Kora is possessed by her animus while being alienated from her anima). When she is possessed, her dissociated unconscious mind (the mind of trauma) dominates her conscious mind, and a spiral toward the extreme begins. In the language of neuroscience, we can say that dysregulation arising from dissociated states prevails. In the psychology of Jung, a person with a feminine identity can be possessed by the animus—the unconscious (or dissociated mind). Kora’s reveals that she is a traumatized cisgender female living in crisis, so the dissociated mind of the animus will be obeyed as insuperable, unconscious power.

Expressed differently, because Kora experienced trauma early in her life with the loss of her family and induction into a social class characterized by militarism and crises, she is led to try to kill the princess (anima) within. By killing this inner dimension, she becomes her contrary self (animus), which is not amenable to conscious control (since it is dissociated). Living in a world dominated by crisis and trauma, she abandons the dimensions of selfhood that sustain trust, love, and community and that allow her to grow psychologically through open and honest relations with others as she develops meaningful interactions. Jung refers to such growth as individuation of the psyche, which he considers the primary path of human fulfilment. But with the dysfunctional stagnation of trauma and conflict, Kora's individuation stops, and her actions are characterized by shallow, violent reactivity in the present, where motives arise from enforced, externally imposed obligations and inevitabilities rather than inner growth.

In the backstory we learn that Kora is regarded as the most dangerous criminal in the universe. She feels she deserves this status because she is and views herself as the assassin of Princess Issa. But this attitude is more something Kora feels about herself than it is something those around her might accept. Her self-imposed ostracism reveals the degree to which a life of trauma and crisis has led to narcissism. Because trusting others has always led to pain, she has turned inward. But inwardly, Kara harbors agonizing shame that leads to self-judgement and condemnation. In the setting the village on Veldt, where Kora encounters people who offer kindness and caring, the shame intensifies. Since she is convinced that if others learn about her real feelings she will become vulnerable, her interactions must always arise from protective performances in which the outward self gives no clue about the inward, vulnerable self.

A symbol of this one-directional performative personality of the narcissist is the gun. We learn also that Kora has a special gun, one that is made for her alone, one that represents unimaginable powers when she uses it to repel threats. The gun in an ideal symbol for narcissism since it is power is directed outward and aimed by a precise, unfeeling, dissociated mind that can be, literally, triggered by threatening circumstances. It is the perfect expression of the possessing animus or the dissociated mind.

At the start of the video, Kora has been temporarily separated from her gun. Disoriented, she is forced into silence and self-searching. The opening scene of the video shows Kora struggling to plow a field on Veldt. She labors in the glow of dusk behind a pre-industrial plow drawn by a horse-like creature known as a Uraki. Laboring to guide a plow behind a beast of burden can be interpreted as a symbol for exploring the unconscious. Kora encounters a large egg-shaped rock that she must struggle to unearth before she can continue on. This might be interpreted as a narrowed anticipation of renewed life and healing. But it is also a symbol of the difficulty she has in revealing her real identity to anyone. As she unearths the rock, her future lover Gunnar calls on her to come to the meeting hall of the village. She says she must finish with her labor before she can accompany him to join with the villagers.

But in the context of the agony that defines her life, she must wait for a crisis before she can share in any social context. This is what in fact occurs, unfolding in two phases. First, she learns that the evil admiral Atticus Noble (Ed Skrien) is on his way to Veldt in a battleship to demand that the village turn its harvest over to him. The universe is thrown into crisis. Second, her gun is restored to her by an avuncular farmer, Hagan (an authority or wise old man figure played by Ingvar Sigurdsson), who endeavors but fails to persuade Kora to trust and stay with the villagers to fight for their integrity. But driven by the need to deny feelings, Kora takes the gun but resists commitment. Commitment, she knows, will always bring vulnerability and tragedy.

While restoration of her weapon allows Kora to turn inward and flee in the night, the second phase is not complete until the crisis turns to trauma. This occurs when the community is taken over by soldiers under the command of admiral Atticus Nobel, a psychopathic minion of Regent Balisarius. After Nobel brutally murders the gentle elder who heads the village, Kora’s future lover Gunnar assumes the role of village leader and promises the village’s crop in return for "protection" by Nobel. Nobel departs, leaving a contingent of brutal soldiers to terrorize the village to keep it subservient and productive.

The trigger is thus set. Kora’s rage (dysfunctional reaction) erupts when the soldiers abduct Sam (played by Charlotte Maggi), a maiden (or anima figure) who fetches water from a well (symbol of emergence from the unconscious). Knowing that they are about to gang rape Sam (converting crisis to trauma), Kora valorizes her selfhood through rage. The narcissist’s venue of validation is defined by situations in with trauma induces the narcissist to exert the greatest effort (to become the hero). In this instance, Kora kills Nobel’s soldiers and rescues Sam, opening the history of the village to a forced, imposed, externalized crisis that Kora can feel emotionally safe to participate in.

At this point, also, Kora's sense of self is balanced to the point that she can form a relationship with Gunnar, a cisgender male with a pronounced orientation toward his anima. Balanced by Gunnar's extreme orientation toward the anima, Kora is attracted to him and becomes is intimate companion. Koral then sets with him to find others with psychological dimensions similar to her own with--whom she can recruit to protect the village from Nobel.

Nobel is the ideal catalyst for ongoing crises. He is a narcissist, and his narcissism is characterized by vicious sociopathy. While Kora controls and is controlled (as hero) by the society that recognizes her during times of crisis, Nobel destroys such societies. He murders without feeling, but he also murders out of a desire to raise himself to the status of someone who will be recognized for his actions by the highest authority. This authority is Regent Balisarius, who dominates the Motherworld and its ruling Senate and the prevailing developmental source in Kora’s life.

The use of the term “Motherworld” has much to say about the psychology of crisis and trauma. The mother archetype in Jung’s psychology is what neuroscientists refer to as the underlying network of neurons that is expressed from its genetic source by physical and emotional contact with the infant’s mother and primary caregiver(s). Unless the nervous system is expressed through secure bonding with caregivers, the child develops neurosis (anxiety, depression, or borderline personality disorder, for example). In this case, Nobel and Kora are “mothered” by a being who provides them with no basis of integrated psychological development—bonding. This leads to a situation in which crisis and trauma dominate the most fundamental dimensions of their lives.

In the journey outward to find allies, Kora is emotionally seduced by the smuggler and bounty- hunter Kai (played by Charlie Human). Kai's expertise as a trader (Trickster) and pilot (false self) attract Kora. Because Kai is so accomplished at concealing his feelings, Kora does not feel threatened by him. Since Kai's actions ostensibly assume the form of narcissism, in the context of general social interactions, Kora feels confident that all will go well with him, even in the most perilous situations. Narcissistic relationships can be based wholly on performed identities that mitigate the threat of emotional intrusions. In reality, however, Kai draws on Kora's narcissistic fears to trick her.

Outtake of Kai fools Kora. — Kai fools Kora.

Kai's role of Trickster (one who produces the opposite of what is expected) brings Gunnar into a renewed role. Gunnar is a cisgender male who has strong feminine (anima) qualities. He is calculating, but he also readily expresses his feelings and is comfortable in the face of strongly expressed feelings. His ability to be authentic is so pronounced that both Kora and Nobel feel degrees of comfort with him. One approach to explaining this comfort is that narcissism involves fear of feelings, especially concealed feelings. If someone is both regulated in their emptions and authentic in their expressions of emotions, then the narcissist–Kora or Noble–is not likely to be intimidated by them.

Gunnar fools Kai because he is able to sustain an extraordinary level of emotional regulation in the face of crisis. He is also able to be authentic–to know and accept his feeling. His regulation and authenticity enable Gunnar to save Kora from the captivity her fear of emotions has led her to when Kai finally reveals his betrayal and takes her and her fellow warriors prisoner. Much of how this happens is revealed when he later tells Kora, in response to her question about what he feared most, that his greatest fear is not for himself but for loss of her. Gunnar's authenticity allows for self-sacrifice out of compassion for others. His compassion relates to Kora's lack of the ability to be at peace with her inner world. As is often the case with the caretakes those who possess high levels of narcissism, Gunnar's capacity to give endlessly of his own regulated emotions makes it possible for his narcissistic companion to experience comfort and dependency in his company. This is the basis of the high level dependency Kora displays toward Gunnar.

With the defeat of Kai, Nobel's life nearly ends. Nobel, like Kora, choses to trust Kai on the basis of his ostensible narcissism. But the blade is double-edged, for although narcissistic, Kai is also a trickster. He feels that survival depends on submission, and he is willing to betray anyone for the sake of financial gain. Kai gains the trust of both Kora and Nobel, but there is a degree of emotion in Kais personality that Nobel and Kora cannot comprehend.

Nobel's confidence in Kai's abilities leads him to assume that Kai can force Gunnar to pull the trigger on a gun that will thrust a Matrix-like needle into the back of Kora’s cranium, reducing her to abject helplessness for delivery to Balisarius. The problem with this is that he opens the context of activity to human emotion, something a narcissist cannot easily share or comprehend. Even Kai is led to think that Gunnar's calm reflects complete submission. But regulated feelings enable Gunnar put aside his fears of his own survival, allowing him to turn abruptly and use on Kai the instrument that Kai has mistakenly assumed he can intimidate him into using on Kora. Self-regulation and compassion prevail with Gunnar, enabling him to accept self-sacrifice (altruism), and within seconds, he disables Kai and liberates Kora.

As a closing note, in the battle erupts after Gunnar liberates Kora, Darrian Bloodaxe (played by Ray Fisher) dies. In the logic of perpetual crisis, his death motivates his sister, Devra Bloodaxe (Cleopatra Coleman) to come to the rescue of the Veldt farmers at the end of the second episode.

Rebel Moon and the Psychology of Perpetual Crisis

Crisis, Trauma, and Dissociated Selfhood

The Production - Cult Art

The Psychology of Perpetual Crisis

Kora

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