Over The Rainbow: Jung and Pink Floyd Style

This post was submitted by Sergio, an enviro, vegan new gay (and sometime crazy cat lady) living in Adams Morgan.

Over the Rainbow. Jung and Pink Floyd-style.

A few friends and I went to a small gathering last Saturday to watch The Dark Side of the Rainbow. Have any of you heard of it? If you watch the 1939 film "The Wizard of Oz" set to the 1973 Pink Floyd album "The Dark Side of the Moon" (hence the name Dark Side of the Rainbow) you will find a series of eerie and allegedly unintended—coincidences between the film and the album. The beginning and ending of the album’s songs seem to match the beginning and ending of the film’s sequences. Lyrics and song titles of the album uncannily appear to refer to the film’s characters, action, and themes on screen, and the mood that the album’s songs evoke eerily corresponds to the moods in the film. Very odd.


Many use the phenomenon as an example of synchronicity, the principle espoused by Carl Jung to explain "meaningful coincidences." Have you even found yourself thinking of a friend with whom you haven’t spoken in months moments before the phone rings and you pick up only to hear his/her voice greet you? Coincidence or synchronicity? Jung would argue it’s the latter. Others would call it apophenia--the mind’s ability to find meaning where there is none. Jung believed moments such as those (and phenomena like Dark Side of the Rainbow) are indications of how we are connected with our fellow humans and, really, to our entire world. Synchronicity is, after all, evidence of something called “the collective unconscious,” a sort of repository of the experiences of our species – our instincts, fears, dreams, and archetypes.

Thinking about the collective subconscious has made me reflect in the past couple of days on my own desire to feel connected to something greater than myself, to belong. I was excited to see The Dark Side of the Rainbow. I had read about it years ago and at the conclusion of a drunken conversation about it with a new friend, he and I agreed to follow up with a viewing. We were both excited to have found something in common. I was pleased that he’d followed up and thrilled that he’d invited me to watch Judy Garland battle Pink Floyd at his partner’s house in the company of relatively new friends, a bunch that, in a former life, I would have dismissed in a horribly haughty and erroneous manner as "old gay" (you know, the Judy-Garland-loving type). Would the merger of the two pieces be messy? A mud wrestling match between Garland’s Get Happy and Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall?
“Take that, you drink-swigging performer.”
“How about that for a punch in the gut, you moody stoners?”
But I knew that in reality that the merger would be smooth and organic.

I saw Wizard of Oz when I was a kid but since coming out, the contrarian in me has purposely avoided it. Why watch a film whose iconography is so relentlessly referenced in mainstream gay culture and hammered in as part of our cultural identity as gay men? I wanted no part in that. But the idea of watching it to the tune of Pink Floyd’s magnus opus piqued my interest. Perhaps I craved feeling part of something (if only ephemerally)–-of tribes of stoners hovering around the telly watching Floyd and Garland cavort together, of groups of gay men watching their beloved Dorothy under a new light, of clusters of hipsters confirming the rumors about the eerie synchronization.

I sat and watched the film with my friends and for that night and a couple of days after that, I felt new. I felt connected. I had experienced the proverbial “bonding experience,” not a transformative event but rather something a lot more subtle and haunting. That night I felt incredibly comfortable in the company of my queer brethren watching a work of art that is used as a cultural reference for Post-Stonewall gay men in the West… Watching something in which my hipster brethren would also revel … Watching it under a new light. Through the eyes of different tribes (stoners and hipsters and old gay alike). That night gave me newly-found reverence for the film, for the identities that we forge in ourselves(however ephemeral they might be), and for the power of art to bring people together and make us feel connected.