The Mythic Birth of Lover's on the Run in Cinema: Pluto in Cancer
table of contents
Part I: The Mythology Behind The Trope
Part II: The Mythic Birth into Cinema
Pluto in Cancer — 1913–1939
Under a moonlit sky of celluloid dreams, runaway lovers have sped through film history in a whirl of gunsmoke and heartbeats.
From early noirs to modern road romances, these fugitives are “lawless and loved-up,” embodying a forbidden intimacy apart from the world. As one essayist puts it, such outlaw couples “tell us that it’s better to go out with a gun in hand – doomed and in love”.
The lovers on the run trope was first unleashed into cinema during the final degrees of Pluto in Cancer (1913–1939). More precisely, these last degrees fall into the lunar mansion of Ashlesha (Vedic Astrology, Jyotish), symbolized by the embrace or the coiled serpent.
According to astrologist Claire Nakti, "Ashlesha relates— for both its male and female natives— to the raw feminine principle in its most dangerous, desirous and untainted manifestation, coiled at the base and closest to the earth."
We can understand "the power and danger of Ashlesha" when we consider "the use of restriction, indirectness or confusing methods in order to get what we want and need in the world, utilizing shrewd methods in order to obtain power, safety, and security," instead of the direct power and strength of a balanced masculine polarity.
Eternal Love (1929)
The Partial Birth
By the time the first surviving film that partially embodies our mythic “lovers on the run” trope emerges in 1929, a cultural shadow has settled over the postwar psyche. The men shaping cinema at the dawn of this trope had just survived World War I. In its wake, they found themselves less aligned with the balanced, life-giving masculine principle of Father Joseph—and more attuned to the darker aspects of the trope’s origin figures.
Rather than expressing generative force or solar vitality, this generation—scarred by trench warfare and the spiritual desolation of economic collapse—identified with the death principle of Hades, the god who binds Persephone with a pomegranate, and with the volatile spirit of Dionysus. What remained was intensity: deep emotional enmeshment, transformation through loss, and a devotion so destructive it blurs into fate.
This energy—part binding, part abandonment—foreshadows the incomplete, haunted masculine archetypes that would surface in early cinema.
The Death-Bound Lover
The first known film echoing parts of this myth to still survive today is Eternal Love (1929), a title that feels almost fated. In this silent film directed by Ernst Lubitsch, much of the action is focused on love and betrayal within a village, but it culminates in a desperate outlaw flight that makes it a partial match with outside societal forces rising up against a forbidden coupling, forcing them to flee for their lives into the snowy Alps.
After carrying his desired lover bridal-style in an iconic pursuit scene, the man sets her down on a boulder to rest. She slips to her knees and folds her hands in desperate prayer.
"Thou knowest that love is our only sin..."
While she prays, he stands still, staring into the distance where their pursuers creep ever closer down the mountain.
"Do not part us again... Take us, take us together, unto Thyself."
Slowly, as if surrendering his fate to something greater than himself, he kneels beside her after hearing her last words and bows his head against her shoulder.
An avalanche starts.
God answers his lover's prayer.
He lifts his eyes to her; she turns to him, wide-eyed, the realization dawning between them.
They rise as he speaks,
“Never to be parted again... together through all eternity."
He draws her into the pose of The Kiss, eerily prefiguring the image that will symbolize the end of the next World War.
After they kiss, the lover’s walk hand in hand into the avalanche.
As they disappear from the scene into the snow white, he wraps her in a coiled Ashlesha embrace, and together, they are swallowed whole.
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Though Eternal Love (1929) culminates in the mythic imagery of lovers swallowed by the serpent of white oblivion, its earlier acts reveal the shadow side of this devotion. The reason that the couple is condemned by society is because the male lead marries another woman—not out of passion, but out of duty, social pressure, or misplaced loyalty.
His heart, however, remains elsewhere. This division—between social performance and soul allegiance—evokes the binding quality of Ashlesha in its most negative polarity: entrapment masquerading as commitment. In a warped version of Hades' trickery, he binds one woman legally while keeping his soul entangled with another—ultimately returning to her only in death.
The film’s climax, where he joins his true beloved in an act of shared surrender, becomes not only a tragic consummation but a release from the false contract of his earlier choice. In the Ashlesha paradigm, this is the final twist: when emotional enmeshment, unresolved longing, and fatal devotion fuse into one moment of mythic annihilation.
Eternal Love (1929)
When the Sun of God Becomes the Son of a Gun
Exactly a decade after his iconic and towering Metropolis (1927), German Expressionist and film noir Hollywood director, Fritz Lang, gave a mythic birth to the first full lovers on the run trope with You Only Live Once (1937). In YOLO, the final scenes are both eerily similar and more sinister than Eternal Love (1929).
You Only Live Once (1937)
As the lover's are chased off the road, the divine feminine is shot.
After the crash, the outlaw carries his lover bridal-style up the mountainside and into the wilderness in order to evade their pursuers.
As she weakens in his arms, the criminal outlaw can be seen through the spotter of a riffle—out of alignment with its three-sided cross.
the femme in fatale wounding says,
“I'd do it again, darling. All over again, gladly…"
before dying in his arms.
A shot is fired into him. Then a voice calls him by name to reveal,
"You are free, the gates are open…"
The Cosmic Womb, the Gates of Heaven, and the Portal of Rebirth
You Only Live Once (1937)
We can't forget that the nakshatra of Ashlesha also falls within the sign of Cancer, a sign long associated with the cosmic womb. It is an archetype of the immaculate conception, connecting with the Virgin Mary and the seashell as a sacred container. This is the shell that both protects and conceals—the matrix of soul-making.
Ashlesha's serpentine nature entwines itself around this origin point. It represents the dual possibility: either emotional entrapment or profound transformation. When expressed unconsciously, it can manifest as toxic attachment, manipulation, or a possessive grip disguised as love. But when integrated, Ashlesha becomes a vehicle for spiritual alchemy—where binding gives way to transcendence, the serpent stands tall and stiff as a counterpart lingam instead of slithering on the ground, and union is not forced but chosen with full awareness.
Pluto moving through Ashlesha activates this polarity. It invites confrontation with the deepest emotional patterns—whether they rot or regenerate depends on how they are held. In Eternal Love, we glimpse this fork in the path. The male lead’s entanglement with the wrong partner, followed by his final union in death, illustrates an unresolved Ashlesha pattern—where karmic ties are severed only at the edge of annihilation, not within life itself.
Had he chosen the transformative route earlier—had he resisted the performative marriage and claimed his deeper truth—the myth might have played differently. But in 1929, the archetype is still gestating in the cinematic unconscious. The lovers are swallowed by the avalanche not as punishment, but as a mythic purification: a return to the womb, white and all-consuming, where something new might be born.
The female lover on the run in You Only Live Once (1937) is an impeccable example of the pure and sacrificial Mother Mary archetype, even more so than the lead in Eternal Love (1929) because she truly goes on the run with her infantile male counterpart, staying devoted to him the entire time.
The act of carrying the woman bridal-style at the end of both these films is highly symbolic—not merely a gesture of protection, but an embryonic reversal, unsettling in its implications. It evokes not the mature Christ figure who ascends the cross in full conscious sacrifice, but an earlier, incomplete form: the infantile Jesus who never grew into that destiny. Instead of embodying the solar masculine willing to die for the world, he remains coiled on the ground, tangled in the Hades principle—death-bound, regressive, and fused with the maternal.
In this posture, the woman becomes a stand-in for the Virgin Mother, but inverted—no longer the giver of life, but the one being carried toward death. The image recalls a Pietà in reverse: the son cradling the mother he could not save, a savior who has failed in his redemptive arc. It is not resurrection but recursion—materia being carried back to the altar, not transfigured, but consumed. This is not the hero carrying his beloved toward life, but the incomplete man dragging his anima toward annihilation, under the guise of love.
The cross of Mater being carried to the altar of sacrifice
This imagery echoes Claire Nakti’s insight on Ashlesha as a cosmic threshold point where masculine consciousness must either evolve to sustain life or regress into demanding sacrifice from it.
These films capture a masculine archetype that cannot fully mature — stunted by world conflict and destroying the beloved in order to preserve the bond.
Thus, rather than portraying a Joseph figure protecting Mary, these early films seem to depict a fusion of the infantile Jesus unwilling to bear the cross and his Virgin Mother, where purity is left without protection, love becomes both womb and grave, and individuation is denied.
Conclusion
To view either Eternal Love (1929) or You Only Live Once (1937) as merely romantic tragedies is to miss their deeper function: cultural echoes of the wounded masculine psyche, unable to evolve past the trauma of war and the seduction of death-bound devotion.
If World War I gave us men who identified not with the self-sacrificing Christ but with the shadow aspects of the chthonic Hades and Dionysus, what mythic forms would rise from the ashes of a third World War? Another iteration of the infantile savior, unable to ascend? Another coiling embrace that confuses possession for love, annihilation for union?
If Eternal Love (1929) offers us a mythic prelude—a half-formed archetype where the lovers vanish into an ethereal surrender of snow—then You Only Live Once (1937) completes the full memeplex with brutal finality: the woman already lies dead in his arms, yet still he moves forward—toward nothing, toward everything—until he is shot dead in the back and the illusion can shatter.
You Only Live Once (1937) — but do you?
The writer of You Only Live Once (1937) often shows sympathy to the shadow of infantile masculinity unable to break free from its cycles. Yet, the script’s final words, “You are free, the gates are open..” ring not as liberation—to me—but as a tragic misfiring.
Beyond the obvious heaven, they suggest that the gates of the yoni—the Virgin Mary who died before him—are open, signaling not salvation but reincarnation.
His journey is not so much closure but repetition, doomed to return with the same wounds because he never found the right path in the current lifetime. In this way, the film mourns not only lost love, but the failure of masculine transformation itself.
If these early films tell us anything, it’s that when wounded love myths go unexamined, they don’t just haunt cinema—they shape history.
You Only Live Once (1937) was released just two years before the outbreak of World War II—not as prophecy, but as prelude: rehearsing, in mythic language, the very patterns of destruction the world was preparing to enact. It was a quiet confession of what Hollywood culture already seemed to know—that love, death, and guilt would soon become indistinguishable, collapsing into one; that the same tragic masculine arc that filled the silver screen would soon unfold on the world stage—again—but this time with real blood.
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You Only Live Once (1937)