Drive Retells the Eleusinian Cycle

The movie Drive, directed by Nicolas Winding Refn appears as a lucid demonstration of the ancient Eleusinian mysteries. The film’s characters symbolize varying aspects of death as it applies to mortality and immortality. Its illustrative formula correlates with the specific phases of the Persephone myth and the masks of Hades, lord of the Underworld. The film maps a journey into the chaos of the soul, and the necessary trauma that forges a vehicle for consciousness to endure cosmic assault.

The movie’s title, Drive, is a direct reference to instinct. What is little known about urge is that it is only ever toward life and life eternal. Though it take the soul, no matter how vulgar or refined, through death and death again, it climbs, with glib disregard for the pains and pleasures of its process upon the instruments of its ascent, toward the perpetuity of consciousness of its host. This is the drive of self to Self. To identify with the drive is to harness the power of that one will that runs from one to many and many to one.

The complexities of this process are revealed in the book of nature. Its components of entropy and enthalpy, of gravity and levity, of death and rebirth, when perceived through the eyes of grace, belie a vision of unity, wholeness, and eternity. This vision exalts the spirit and grants the seer with confidence to move mountains. It is this confidence that strengthens limbs and steadies gaze. Our protagonist carries this sacred flame.

As the movie begins, the song Nightcall by Kavinsky informs us that this story is of a journey into the Underworld. It essentially romanticizes Hades pull of Persephone into the shadow of the valley of death. Death must necessarily swallow life so that life may strive to claw its way from that maw. This striving compounds until immortality is realized.

The song’s first line, “I'm giving you a night call to tell you how I feel”, indicates that this pull is, by nature, a watery and emotional experience. The desire of Hades to “drive you through the night, down the hills” is for the purpose of telling “you something you don't want to hear”. It is a dark experience that culminates in a courage-imbuing revelation, as promised, “I'm gonna show you where it's dark, but have no fear”.

The following stanza voices Persephone’s seduction. She sings back to Hades, “There something inside you, it's hard to explain”, celebrating her confused draw to death’s gate. Why indeed would life yield to death? She follows this by stating, “They're talking about you boy, but you're still the same”. Here she admits that the common misperceptions of death amount to nothing more than superficial gossip. She is unimpressed with rumor and warnings and must know this timeless “bad boy” first hand. She instinctively knows that she must go down to come up and is ready and willing.

The Driver dwells in a low-rent apartment building and works alternately as mechanic, stuntman, and getaway driver. These three professions predicate the three phases of the Elusinian mystery’s perennial cycle. The Driver’s job as mechanic is the “descent” or loss of Persephone. Irene’s first meaningful encounter with the Driver is in this context. His job as stuntman is a metaphor for the “search” phase, requiring trial and risk. His secretive role as getaway driver symbolizes the all-significant “ascent” from the Underworld into the world of the living.

In this regard the Driver demonstrates two specific aspects of ascent. Firstly, he works anonymously and never for the same people twice, indicative that urge or drive is impersonal and determinate. Its aim is furtive and final. Secondly, the Driver allows his riders only five minutes to do their business, indicative that this ascent is accomplished through humanity and the upright five-pointed star of controlled sensuality. The film’s theme song, “A Real Hero”, celebrates the virtues of the actualized human being. His countdown during each “job” is a pointed commentary on mortality, and the dire and ticking clock that accompanies our ascent.

The Driver rides with his neighbor Irene in their apartment building elevator, and later helps her and her young son Benicio when Irene has car trouble at a local supermarket. His role as mechanic here initiates her “under the hood” and into the gears and mills of Hades that wind and grind at the foundations of creation.

Irene is the Greek goddess of peace, and her son Ploutos’ name means “wealth”, as does her screen son’s name, Benicio (beneficent one). Ploutos is another name for Pluto, the Roman Hades. Peace yields wealth and abundance, but all things turn to dust. All individual things, in time, be they treasured or not, transform, and the Elusinian mysteries are the story and why of this transformation.

Irene is also known by her more popular name, Demeter, in Greek mythology. Demeter is the mother of Pesephone, who is seduced and abducted by Hades. So will Irene and Benicio be lured into a lushly violent criminal Underworld by the Driver.

Shannon owns the garage the Driver works at and arranges his other jobs on the side. Shannon represents the common cringing fear of death. He is crippled and, as Bernie states, has “never really had a lot luck” indicating that the gripping fear of change that haunts most of humanity is that which separates them from death’s abundance symbolized by Benicio (Ploutos). Fortune favors the bold, and the bold are distinguished by an unflappable courage in the face of big change. The current global economic crisis is a refining fire, which will, in time, separate the parasitic dross that infests the financial sector from those noble spirits that will give society new rise in magnanimous fields to follow. We are not all aboard a sinking ship, but rather a courtroom, in which the secret laws of justice are trying and judging the metal of our systems and institutions and their human fallout. As always, balance will prevail.

Shannon persuades the mobster Bernie Rose to purchase a stock car for the Driver to race after seeing the Driver's skill. The mobster Bernie Rose may be viewed as lustful desire (a burning rose). The red rose means desire, and while all desire is sacred, not all desire is refined. As such it presents the second obstacle, behind the fear of death, to be overcome before Persephone may escape from the Underworld.

Bernie's business partner is Nino, a Jewish mobster. Nino, spelled backwards is Onin, and Onin is a symbol of waste in the Old Testament. According to Genesis 38:3-10, Onin was killed by God for spilling his seed upon the ground instead of impregnating his new wife. Onanism, over time, came to refer to masterbation, but in reality, it is a reference to any waste, though especially of sperm. Nino once had Shannon's pelvis broken when Shannon failed to pay a debt, leaving him with a limp. Here we learn that the third obstacle, namely waste, is responsible, in part, for the crippling fear of death. Waste diminishes the body and the spirit, and opens the door to fear.

Irene has her car towed to Shannon's garage and the Driver gives her and Benicio a ride home. They begin spending time together. Irene (Demeter/Persephone) here begins her seduction by the Driver (Hades), but she is not initiated until her husband, Standard Gabriel, is released from prison and returns home. This tells us that it is not her first journey into the Underworld, as Gabriel is qabalistically associated with the planet Pluto and sounds the trumpet transition from world to world. He is also the father of Benicio indicating that wealth is both the product and the substance of transformation. Implicit here is also the Egyptian Horus/Isis/Osiris triangle, wherein son and father are actually one.

Standard Gabriel owes protection money to a gangster, Cook, dating back to his time in prison. Cook symbolizes the sentimental personal love that leads to universal love – if it is carried to its conclusion. While the movie portrays Cook in a negative light, it is through the catalyst of Cook (personal love) that Irene is initiated into the shadows where the drive toward immortality is conceived. This occurs when Cook beats up Standard Gabriel, and threatens to go after Irene and Benicio, if Standard does not agree to rob a pawnshop. It is personal affection that may interrupt natural realization and transition, as demonstrated by Trinity’s and Neo’s kiss at the end of The Matrix. As such it serves as a powerful catalyst for inspiring the necessary twists and torques toward dynamic change.

The Driver agrees to help Standard pay off the debt by driving him to and from the pawnshop. Blanche, Cook's moll, also participates in the heist. Blanche means white, and she represents purified desire, as opposed to the crude red desire of Bernie Rose. The pawnshop heist is a critical juncture, at which the descent into the Underworld completes itself with the shooting and killing of Standard Gabriel outside. While waiting in the parking lot for Standard and Blanche to complete the heist, the Driver sees another car pull into the lot and park. This other car, with its tinted windows depicts the dweller on the threshold, a profound and terrifying sense of other, cuing the beginning of the second phase of the Hades experience, the search. Blanche returns to the car with a large bag filled with money, lending us to the idea that purified desire yields Ploutos’ wealth; however, when Standard exits the pawnshop, he is shot in the neck and dies. The Driver flees with Blanche and the money, but the car that pulled into the parking lot minutes earlier gives chase, trying to run them off the road. The search has begun.

The Driver eludes the other vehicle, and he and Blanche hide out in a motel room. The Driver discovers that the amount of money is much more than was expected. After the Driver threatens Blanche, she tells him that the chasing car belongs to Cook and that she and Cook planned to double-cross the Driver and Standard, taking the money for themselves. Keep in mind that while affectionate love and purified desire are in cahoots, they jeopardize our goal of revelatory knowledge gleaned through experience of the dark side. Two of Cook's men attack them in the motel room, killing Blanche and injuring the Driver before he kills them both. Ultimately personal love arrests righteous desire. It simultaneously gives rise to and inhibits high ambition.

The Driver confronts Cook in his strip club and learns that Nino was behind the heist after posing to hammer the bullet Cook gave to Benicio into his forehead. Cook’s gift to Benicio is the threat that personal love poses to wealth. The naked women (symbolic of nature) in the strip club sit idly by and watch the Driver threaten and torture Cook, who reveals Nino’s role. It is ultimately waste that terminates rapture, destroys high desire, and compromises affection. Waste (Nino) is the agent of all this chaos and pain.

Nino sends a hitman to the Driver's apartment building, with whom the Driver and Irene unknowingly ride the elevator down, revealing that a deeper layer of darkness must fall before they begin their ascent. The Driver kisses Irene before stomping in the hitman’s head. This transition from dreamy romance to unbridled rage is illustrative, as is boot to brains, of the quick movement from Pisces winter to Aries spring, and the beginning of the ascent from shadow to sunlight. The Driver’s drive toward life is now intact. Persephone will be free, and Hades, at the bidding of Zeus, the eagle, elevated expression of Scorpio, will make it so.

Meanwhile, Nino explains to Bernie that the money from the pawnshop belonged to the East Coast mafia. Fearing retaliation, Bernie and Nino agree to kill those with knowledge, starting with Cook. Finally, lust and waste destroy affection. However, a subtle turn of the tides occurs when Bernie confronts Shannon in his garage and reluctantly kills him with a straight razor by cutting his radial artery and leaving him to bleed out. Here lust serves the purpose of annihilating fear, which clings to the back of the Driver like a parasite both enabling him and shackling him. Like a swarm of nesting dolls, death begins to fold in upon itself as we climb the ladder from the realm of Hades.

            Here now, enunciated by the song, “Oh My Love” by Riz Ortolani, is our glorious rise to new life. She sings, “Oh my love, look and see the Sun rising from the river. Nature's miracle once more will light the world. But this light is not for those men still lost in an old black shadow. Won't you help me to believe that they will see a day, a brighter day, when all the shadows will fade away. That day I'll cry that I believe. Oh my love, high above us the Sun now embraces Nature, and from Nature we should learn that all can start again, as the stars must fade away to give a bright new day.”

The Driver, wearing a silicone mask, follows Nino to the Pacific Coast Highway in his car and rams Nino's car onto a beach. With Nino wounded and weakened, the Driver drowns him in the Pacific Ocean. The ascent requires firm resolve, demonstrated by the head stomping in the elevator. It requires the arrest of waste, demonstrated by Nino’s murder on the beach. Lastly, it requires a conversation and an agreement with lust. The Driver speaks to Bernie on Nino's phone, and they arrange to meet at a Chinese restaurant. This implies that the Chinese mechanisms for dealing with lust, namely the Taoist sexual practices, may be a key in transcending unrefined desire.

Before meeting Bernie, the Driver makes a final phone call to Irene to tell her he is leaving, and says that meeting her and Benicio was the best thing that has ever happened to him. Irene, Demeter, Persephone, and Ploutos are nearly free. Spring has arrived and new life will bloom, new wealth will circulate, and peace, however temporal, will prevail… pending on what must happen between the Driver and Bernie at the restaurant.

At the restaurant, Bernie promises only Irene and Benicio's safety, in exchange for the money, and the Driver acquiesces. In the parking lot, Bernie stabs the Driver in the abdomen as he pulls the money from the trunk of his car. The Driver pulls the weapon from his own gut and fatally stabs Bernie, leaving his corpse and the satchel of money behind.

That evening, Irene knocks on the Driver's apartment door, with no response. She is done, however reluctantly, with Hades. Her Underworld experience is over. She is reborn in the longing lonesome beauty that aches when the witchcraft has subsided, when the madness of love abates, when the dead have gone and left the living to do the living.

The Driver drives into the night. He is immortal, and descends again to his realm to await his next seduction of life and life’s wealth. In the end there is only urge. Urge constructs and deconstructs all. Urge is eternal and infinite. Urge leads through sunset and sunrise. Urge leads through death and rebirth. Urge paves the road and goads us upon it. Follow urge, that dark shepherd, into the black unknown until forever is a byword.