Although undeniably ridiculous, Lifeforce is directed with such a deliberately comic-bookish sense of relentless pulp energy that it emerges as a fascinating, riveting vision of a kind of vampiric apocalypse. Its analysis of the vampire myth (something reportedly more sustained and developed in Colin Wilson’s original novel) blends horror and science fiction motifs for a clever variation on the traditional concept of a vampire. Indeed, the film suggests that the vampire is a kind of psychic “other”, a predatory species that can absorb the desires and needs of its victims and correspondingly take shape from their psychic projections. These vampires may have physical form but, confirmed in the case of May, seem to also exist as a disembodied entity that can be transferred from mind to mind and body to body, suggesting even that it is a form of psychological malaise that precedes the descent into physiological despair and transformation. Such a process is also addictive, and hence Railsback admits that he feels invigorated, as if finally close to a truer form of love. The plague thus becomes a metaphor for the notion of a contagious psychosis which in turn is strangely enough rooted in Jungian notions. This provocative idea is one of many such out of the ordinary concepts that are dangled in a film wherein what is most striking concerns the bizarre sexual allegory that develops out of the link between Railsback and May.
The film considers “woman” as a sexual force that cannot be contained nor controlled by patriarchal authority. Although riddled with sexual paranoia (as opposed to misogyny), the film nonetheless stresses the psychic bond between Railsback and May. Indeed May has taken her appearance from Railsback’s own mental image of the ideal woman. This raises the possibility for a Jungian reading of the film in which May is the projected personification of Railsback’s anima. The conflict for dominance between May and Railsback thus becomes an allegorical clash of the anima and animus and the film in turn becomes a weirdly Jungian sexual psychodrama in a field where Freudian analysis still prevails – it is no longer a loosed male id which is monstrous, but a wild anima. This is a rare conceit and done with ferocious aplomb by Hooper. Males react at the prospect of this out-of-control anima with total fear for it represents the potential collapse of their patriarchal order and thus their sexual dominance, hence Railsback’s violent treatment of a woman in the film as a kind of compensation. The film holds that the inability to reconcile the anima and animus will result in the collapse of any social order into violent anarchy and the loss of one’s life essence in a regression to another state of existence that is perhaps even stored in some part of the collective unconscious. The absurdly inventive pseudo-religiosity of this astonishing film is staggering. read more