In delving into interpretations of The Omega Man’s murky depths, an understanding of psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s concept of the shadow self is paramount. According to Jung, the shadow is the repressed element of the human psyche housing the amoral and negative urges of man that stem from primitive and primordial instincts. While similar to the concept of the doppelganger, it differs insofar that the shadow self is not necessarily ‘evil,’ but merely represents deviations from a collective consciousness. Moreover, the shadow self is an aspect Jung believed must be confronted, but can never be eradicated. The inner anxieties and fears constantly shift and alter within us, its amorphous nature allowing it to permeate our unconscious and therefore make itself known.
The shadow, then, can embody our own negative urges (e.g. deep-seated racism) as well as our silent uneases (e.g. guilt as a result of racist beliefs). It provides a landscape for inner conflict where the self can conflict with the greater self, the collective unconscious. Our own predilections and conceptions of right/wrong and good/bad clash with societal mores, and when found incongruous, are stored within and projected upon other individuals or groups. For example, a devout Christian may openly condemn sexual promiscuity, but their fervent damnation reflects their own suppressed desire to engage in such hedonism. The shadow becomes a reservoir of anger, fear, and desperation within and without, and is therefore capable – if not properly confronted – of destroying both in a battle for dominance.
This struggle is both constant and multiple, however. It is a conflict for the salvation of identity, and thus, existence. Neville finds a monstrous shadow in the Family, a twisted monolithic representation of his unspoken traits as well as his abandoned desires. Physically, the Family denotes hyperbolic whiteness, an exaggeration form of Anglo-Saxon possessed with a fiery devotion to eradicating both societal and philosophical deviants. The Family expels Lisa and Richie as awareness of their physical difference mounts; Lisa relates to Neville their initial joining and ultimate flight from Mathias’ sect:
When it happened, when even the army fell apart, and there was nobody left except those living alone like animals, Mathias walked the streets at night ringing a bell. Richie and I, we had us a place in the back of a furniture store. One day, we hear this bell. We go out to see, and there’s people there! We thought we were alone – just me and Richie with millions of corpses! But there was Mathias and other people. Well, anyway, he gave us the Family – for a while. We helped with the burials, we helped with the burnings, but when it was over, and the worst was past, they began to know how different we were – our skin, our eyes. One day while they were asleep, we just – took off.
The Family’s dependence upon visual homogeneity is two-fold: it reflects Neville’s (and therefore white American society’s) bigotry as well as subsequent guilt. The post-apocalyptic realm of The Omega Man relies on the breakdown of society and its norms, and in doing so, transcends racial barriers by victimizing the victimizer. Neville has become the minority, the outcast of the (hyper)white society of the Family. To put it succinctly, Neville – and much of white American society – is getting a taste of its own medicine; the Family brings a nightmarish element of the shadow to society’s racial dynamic.
Much of white America feared black America, knowing of the boiling anger and frustration they had endured for generations; their fight for identity and recognition in society was met with hard words and clenched fists. The country seemed obstinate in refusing black identity, hoping that the painful shards of discrimination and mistreat would simply fall away. They did not. Events like the Watts riot and the march to the Alabama State Capitol screamed of the horrific endemic nature of racism. Some of American society did not desire anything more than subservient “negroes” barred from adequate representation and influence.
Can, then, the racial interpretations of the Family exist on opposing, if not contradictory, levels? The Family seems to at once represent the nightmare of weakened white supremacy, the visage of black America’s longing to victimize white America and embody white society’s guilt over the generations of maltreatment and inequality. The answer, I believe, is yes; all three depicts are connected through the concept of the shadow. Neville, as the prototypical white American bourgeois, finds his Other in the compounded projection of unequivocal hatred and self-flagellation by his own victimization. Neville’s acrimonious rhetoric brands the Family as “vermin,” refuting Richie’s pleas to “either kill them or cure them, damn it;” Richie responds by telling Neville “You’re hostile – you just don’t belong … sometimes, you scare me more than Mathias does.” Neville’s rebuttal is to simply laugh, but his guffaws belie his own brand of violent racism. The Family and Neville are part of a shared hatred, a symbiosis of prejudice. In this similarity, they are distortions of one another.
Perhaps a more abundant source of comparison is in the singular dichotomy of Neville and Brother Zachary, Mathias’ right-hand man. Both figures bear vestigial mindsets, largely unaffected by the shift of environment around them. Neville, obviously, still grasps civilization, order, and technology; Zachary clings to what Mathias calls “the old ways … all your hatreds, all your pains.” It seems his contempt for Neville stems from a racial and economic source; he refers to Neville’s home as a “honky paradise.” During Neville’s judgment before the Family, Mathias asks if Neville bears the marks, if he is one of the the Family. The camera does not focus on the obedient masses, but on Zachary, seated to the left of Mathias; his response is framed in close-up and even gets precedence on the audio track. Zachary eagerly condemns the outsider, an obvious reversal from a character obviously black – the script describes him as having “features clearly African.” Zachary is the only member of the Family to have their own identity (read: deliver lines) as well as advocate the use of technology to kill Neville. He beseeches Mathias to allow him to “just a little nitro … I can get the cannons out of the old guard armory, we can have him out of there in no time!” Mathias denies him, refuting the use of technology – Zachary tells him while Neville remains, they must all “rot and hide like grubs.” Visually, Neville and Zachary are contrasted in an action sequence during the later half of the film. Neville and Lisa find themselves susceptible when the generator runs out of gas, blanketing the complex in darkness. Fearing infiltration, Neville descends to refill the generator, while Zachary ascends the building walls.