Portals We Walk Through

Conan O'Brien's comic dislike of portals in movies, understood as cheap exits from difficult plot problems, turned inward: people may also use portals in the movies of their own lives. Foods such as In-N-Out cheeseburgers, delivery pizza, and other stereotypically bad-for-you meals can be more than nutritional events. They may reopen an earlier emotional world or summon a recognizable version of the self. These rituals may feed something archetypal: a stereotyped but partly autonomous figure that may belong to Jung's collective unconscious—or may simply behave as if it does when carefully described by a phenomenologist.

Jung, archetypes, complexes, phenomenology, ritual, memory, identity, nostalgia, liminality, ordinary life