In the TV series Wilfred, Elijah Wood plays Ryan, a depressed man who is the only one who can see his neighbor’s dog Wilfred, played by Jason Gann, as a man dressed in a dog costume. Wilfred the dog talks with Ryan constantly, persuading and manipulating him to take certain courses of action.
It may be tempting to categorize Wilfred as a straightforward animal spirit guide, like those found in Native American mythology where a young initiate, usually an adolescent male, embarks on a lone vision quest and discovers his totem animal after fasting and praying through many days and nights. This concept of the spirit animal is popularized and romanticized today as 100% benevolent, a figure who uses its powers for the good of the human it’s guiding.
Wilfred, though, is anything but straightforward, and his “guidance” is not only misleading but often appears to harm rather than benefit Ryan. Wilfred is not an animal spirit guide, as he often argues, but rather a trickster figure. And he is not either Krungel the good trickster or Matama the evil trickster, figures invented by the show’s writers that have no precedents in world mythology, but a combination of both.
Wilfred is not either/or, but both/and. The psychologist Carl Jung explained that figures such as tricksters or gods contain both light and shadow sides, and Wilfred is in line with this theory that archetypal figures are non-dualistic. Furthermore, he fits the Trickster’s profile: vulgar in ways that mock the seamy underbelly of life, like the Native American Coyote’s sexual and scatological humor.
A Crow Indian story goes like this: Coyote was out walking by a strawberry patch when he saw some good-looking girls picking berries. He tricked them by poking the end of his penis out of the bushes to make it look like a strawberry that they then fondled, to his delight. Then they threatened to cut if off so they could pick it, but he snuck away in time. The girls realized it was Coyote playing a trick on them, so they played a trick back on him by pretending to be dead on the ground the next day. He sniffed around the girls, wondering if they were dead, and each time he sniffed near their anuses, they farted in his face. Then they all jumped up and said the joke was on him this time!
That myth certainly sounds like something Wilfred would do. The talking teddy bear in the movie Ted fits this same horny, smutty profile.
Mainly, though, Wilfred, like all tricksters, is a boundary crosser, similar to the Greek god Hermes who guides humans from one world to the next. In season 2, episode 11, Wilfred leads Ryan out of the dank basement into a wonderland of natural smells and sights where they meet a Native American spirit guide and Wilfred immediately gets jealous, acting out and playing tricks to throw Ryan off that particular track.
Why can Ryan see Wilfred? Is he not only depressed, but also schizophrenic? Is he just like his mother, who also sees visions and for a while has a human-dressed-as-cat trickster familiar? In studying the history of shamanism in cultures around the world, one learns that the shaman in a tribe or village was frequently an outcast with a deformity or mental illness, all the better to allow him or her to enter ASC, the Altered State of Consciousness that is necessary to travel to and communicate with the spirit world. And so the dream sequences in Wilfred are appropriate, because the shaman, in this case Ryan, enters the realm of the soul, with its wild dream images and distorted time. Of course Ryan’s daily weed smoking doesn’t hurt his ability to bend perception.
The audience is allowed multiple perspectives of reality. The audience sees what Ryan sees, but also sometimes what everyone else sees--Wilfred as a dog. Toward the end of the series, the viewer is offered glimpses of Wilfred’s perspective of his lover Bear as a human in a bear suit. Most tricksters are shape shifters. Does Wilfred shift back and forth between actual dog and dog-costumed human? Without giving spoilers, check out the last few episodes of the series to see if he accomplishes this shape shifting. The viewer oscillates and mediates between multiple worlds, just as Ryan and Wilfred do. Most shocking is when Ryan is dosed with a hallucinogen, and he sees Wilfred taking off his dog costume and revealing himself as a man who has been consciously tricking Ryan all along, perhaps Ryan’s worst fear realized, similar to Jim Carrey's character's revelation in The Truman Show.
In some West African cultures, the costumed divinities that have acted out annual rituals are at one point revealed to the adolescent village children as men wearing costumes, shocking them into adulthood in a rite of passage akin to the revelation that Santa Claus is not real. Ryan is undergoing a rite of passage beyond his suicidal tendencies, his need for his father’s approval, and his need for the love of Jenna, his neighbor. He is coming into his own identity. And so like most tricksters’ behaviors, Wilfred’s many malicious acts are revealed as ultimately beneficial to Ryan, at least in the big picture.
One of the messages in Wilfred is that the trickster energy is sometimes needed to shock a person out of his or her self-obsession. Animals have the advantage there--they are not self-referential (although Wilfred certainly has his needs). Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy emphasizes the power of the animal world and mocks humans when he states that humans are only the third smartest creatures in the universe. Mice come first, as they manipulate humans by controlling the outcomes of their experiments. Dolphins are second smartest. Humans come in third. Is Wilfred smarter than Ryan? Maybe--he sure is able to trick Ryan every time. But does Ryan need to be tricked in order to be healed? Apparently, yes.
What would happen if we could all talk to our dogs and cats? A Swedish invent team is working on a headset that reads your pet dog's brain waves and translates common EEG patterns into English phrases. The No More Woof headset is still in the works, but it's a lot of people's dream come true. At the same time, it lets the "dog out of the bag" (sorry) in that perhaps some things, such as our dog's opinion of us, are better left unsaid. Ultimately, though, I want to be like Dr. Doolittle or Ryan and talk to the animals. If a human could merge his or her consciousness with other species of the natural world, can you imagine the effects and reverberations?
