Saturn-Pluto archetypal combination with it's associated attributes: work ethic, maturity, high seriousness, and the highest and lowest of human potentials.
With the saccharine sentimentality of Always and the overindulgence of Hook recently behind him, Spielberg needed to find projects that would allow him to return to form. Schindler's List was the vehicle that not merely restored his reputation but would be the struggle of his personal and professional life. Prior to the production of Jaws, Spielberg acknowledged his reluctance to take on the project because it threatened to turn him into a commercial director and not the auteur he longed to become; he would be a director, in his words, of "movies" and not "films." At long last, Schindler's List represented the opportunity to become the artist that was Spielberg's original intention. The effort to transcend his commercial success was compounded by the equally demanding need to return to his Jewish heritage and to immerse himself in the difficult recreation of the mass annihilation of his people.
In essence, Schindler's List was the complete transformation of Spielberg as director and individual and the archetypal configuration of Pluto, Saturn, and Sun parallels this theme of annihilative metamorphosis. As Author Joseph Mcbride writes, "Schindler's List became the transforming experience of Spielberg's lifetime. Making the film after a decade of hesitation and avoidance was the catharsis that finally liberated him to be himself, both as man and as artist, fully integrating those two, sometimes distinct-seeming halves of his personality."15 As Spielberg himself commented on the process of change during this production, "It was so bloody painful."16
Not only could the archetypal manifestation of Saturn-Pluto be seen through Spielberg's rapidly changing character but also through the films themselves. Saturn and Pluto symbolizes the polarization of good vs. evil, of the peaks and valleys available to the human condition, as Saturn concretizes and manifests Pluto's tendency toward extremities. In Schindler's List we see Oskar Schindler an enterprising capitalist caught between the saintly morality of his accountant and the immoral monster S.S. Untersturmfuhrer, Amon Goeth. It this excessive schism between forces-angel versus devil, madness vs. holiness-under the harshest and most extreme of circumstances-war, poverty, famine, plague-that typifies Saturn and Pluto in combination.
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