The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter Eight

“I’m telling you,” Michelle typed in a message shared with three other neopagans in a private conversation on Facebook. “There are people who have come forward and said they saw faces in the sky, in the ocean, on the grass in the golf course, and in the underground mine.”

“I’ve heard a couple of claims like that, too,” said Gary to the others. “The claims could be true—we don’t know.”

“What’s interesting, regardless of whether these face stories are true or not, is that all the people killed were rich people publicly known for not caring about the environment at all,” Shelly said. “Not that these connections, of course, were ever acknowledged in the mainstream media, who are on the payroll of the rich. To know the connections, you have to do additional research, as I did.”

“That’s right,” said Nina. “I did a little of that independent research, too. The victims made no secret about their contempt for the poor and for our Mother Earth. Any staff in the areas where these natural disasters occurred survived. At worst, they got a little hurt and a big scare, like my miner husband. Then there are the shared dreams we have all had. All the evidence suggests intervention from the gods to save our planet.”

“So, what should we do?” Gary asked.

“Gary, you live close to that golf course your brother manages,” Michelle said. “How about you go there and wait for signs from Gaea? I’m near the California Yacht Club; I’ll go sit by the pier, watch the water, and wait for a sign from Poseidon. Nina, since you live near the mine in Texas, can you go over there, as close as they’ll allow you, and wait for signs from Hades?”

“My husband’s a miner, as I said before,” Nina said. “Steve was badly hurt and got one hell of a scare from the experience, but thank the gods he’s going to be all right. He refuses to believe the gods had anything to do with what happened, but he can get me inside the property with a key he once stole from Lipton’s office. Now that he is dead, Lipton won’t object to the petty larceny. I can get right up to the holes and listen for Hades’ words.”

“Good,” Shelly said. “I can drive up near the Wells mansion in Vermont. I’ll park there, look up at the sky, and wait for signs from Zeus.”

“We can also message each other by phone to keep the conversation a four-way one, with each god, too…we hope,” Michelle said.

“Great,” Gary said. “Let’s all do this, well, at 10:00 PM my time. You can all work out the time zones in your areas. You know mine: Gary, from Gary, Indiana—so easy to remember.”

The other three responded with “Yeah, lol.”

And before I go on the green in the golf course, I’ll make another attempt to get my brother to listen to me about the coming danger, Gary thought. The rest of our family are opening their minds to this. Please, gods, help me to get him and his wife to open their minds!

Similarly, Michelle prayed, Please, gods, help my mother to see my gods as real as she does her Jesus.

And Nina prayed, O gods, help Steve to understand that he didn’t hallucinate Hades’ voice!

Analysis of ‘Hour of the Wolf’

Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen–literally, “Wolf Hour”) is a 1968 psychological horror film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. It stars Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann, with Gertrud Fridh, Georg Rydeberg, Erland Josephson, Naima Wifstrand, Ulf Johanson, Gudrun Brost, and Ingrid Thulin.

At first, Bergman had come up with much of the story as part of a screenplay, The Cannibals, which wasn’t produced, but given up on so he could make Persona in 1966. His inspiration for Hour of the Wolf came from Mozart‘s opera, The Magic Flute (a segment of which is shown in a puppet play in one scene of Bergman’s film), The Golden Pot, a novella by ETA Hoffmann (which includes a love interest named Veronika, and the protagonist of Hoffman’s novella finds himself falling in love with her as well as with another woman–just as the protagonist of Bergman’s film is torn between his wife and an old paramour named Veronica), and some of Bergman’s own nightmares. There are also allusions to vampire and werewolf legend in Hour of the Wolf.

That Bergman incorporated some of his own nightmares into the film is significant, since it is disturbingly autobiographical, with von Sydow’s and Ullmann’s roles (a married couple in the film) corresponding to Bergman and Ullmann in real life; she not only frequently collaborated with him, but also had a relationship with him, resulting in a daughter, Linn Ullmann.

Hour of the Wolf was negatively received by the critics in Sweden upon release, but in time it was received far more positively. According to a 2012 directors’ poll by the British Film Institute, it was ranked one of the 50 greatest films of all time. David Lynch called Hour of the Wolf one of the five films that inspired him the most, and he called it a masterpiece. On Rotten Tomatoes, 92% of critics gave it a positive review. Ullmann was awarded Best Actress at the 1968 National Board of Review Awards, and the 1968 National Society of Film Critics Awards, for her role in the film, and Bergman won Best Director for the latter awards, too.

Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation, and here is a link to the complete movie, with English subtitles.

The film is called “Hour of the Wolf” because, as painter Johan Borg (von Sydow) tells his pregnant wife, Alma (Ullmann), that hour is when most births and deaths occur. This is an interesting idea, given how one thing incorporated into the film is legends about the werewolf, which is ‘born,’ if you will, through its transformation from a man, and then it causes death to its human prey. Also, just two months after the premiere of The Magic Flute, after its ‘birth,’ its creator, Mozart, died in 1791. Not too long after Johan disappears, after which I assume Alma’s narration couldn’t have come much later, she’ll give birth to their baby, which will be in a month. The hour of the wolf is when nightmares come, deep into the darkness of the night, when Johan’s inability to sleep is at its worst. He associates his fear with his guilt, the source of which I’ll go into later.

While not necessarily a literal hour, the Vargtimmen (for my purposes here) represents a short space in time between death and life, which can also be represented by the ouroboros, a cyclical symbol of eternity in which the bitten tail can be seen as death, and the biting head seen as birth.

As I indicated above, Johan has been suffering from increasing insomnia. He’s had frightening visions, which he’s sketched and shown to Alma. The people of these sketched visions he has named the Birdman (which was partly influenced by Papageno from The Magic Flute, and he is Lindhorst [Rydenberg] in the film), the Insects, the Meat-Eaters, the Schoolmaster, and the Lady With a Hat, among others.

Because people agitate and upset Johan so much, he and Alma have come to the island of Baltrum, one of the Frisian Islands, where he hopes to find peace and quiet. He likes how quiet Alma is, and so he enjoys his dyadic relationship with her (more on the significance of that later). The sight of footprints on the island upsets him, though, and indeed, he’ll have to deal with others on Baltrum.

The people on the island, corresponding to those of his sketches, he considers to be demons, or cannibals. Since he is slowly losing his mind, they more accurately represent projections of internal objects, people from his past, his own inner demons. Johan can escape from other people, but not from himself.

During the opening credits, we can hear the film crew as they’re talking and working to get ready to film a scene. This gives off a Brechtian alienation effect, reminding us that we’re watching a movie and removing the illusion of the story ‘really happening.’ Just as we’re kept consciously aware that we’re watching a movie, so are we kept conscious of the fact that Johan is an artist, and later, during the puppet show Lindhorst has the guests at the party watch (the Magic Flute scene), we are fully conscious of its spectacle as a puppet show, a scene that can be understood as a microcosm of the entire movie (more on that below).

Now, opposing the idea of Brecht’s distancing effect, of alienating us from identifying with the characters in the scene, is how Alma tells Johan that, having been married to him and living with him for so long, she feels that the two of them are beginning to resemble each other. She empathizes with him thoroughly, and if I am right to think that Johan’s ‘demons’ are projections of parts of himself, then such empathizing and identifying with him makes it possible for anti-Brecht Alma to see his projected demons as clearly as he does.

Her name is generally thought to mean ‘kind,’ ‘fostering,’ or ‘nourishing,’ which reflects her gentle, empathetic, and supportive attitude to Johan as he is going through his dark night of the soul. In some of the Romance languages, Alma can also mean ‘spirit’ or ‘soul,’ making her, in her closeness and resemblance to Johan, his Jungian anima. Alma can yet again be heard as a pun on alba, or ‘dawn,’ ‘white,’ to contrast with Johan’s dark night, or his ‘hour of the wolf,’ his blackest moments of madness and despair. After his disappearance and presumed death, she lives on to bear his child and tell his story; she who identifies with him is the dawn and white light after his blackest moment.

She hopes to grow old enough with him that they will think each other’s thoughts, so much does she love him and empathize with him. If I’m right that his ‘demons,’ such as the Lady With a Hat, are really his mental projections, then Alma is already sharing Johan’s thoughts when she sees the Lady With a Hat the very day after she’s talked with him about beginning to resemble him and think like him. In fact, the Lady With a Hat will urge Alma to know even more of his thoughts by telling her of the diary he has hidden under his bed.

When she reads the diary, she begins to learn more of his deepest, darkest secrets, including not only the strangers, real or imagined, but also real people like his old paramour, Veronica Vogler (Thulin), whom he’ll see again on the island, her tempting him to more adultery.

In his diary, Johan has written of meeting Baron von Merkens (Josephson), who lives in a nearby castle and invites the painter and his wife to a dinner party there. The baron also owns the island, so on one level, we can see here the relationship between the wealthy and the worker, for it is at this party that Johan will feel a sense of oppression from his host and the other guests, his ‘demons.’ The baron’s reason for inviting Johan and Alma is that he and his wife, Corinne (Fridh), are among Johan’s fondest admirers.

Alma continues reading the diary and comes upon an entry in which Johan says he’s encountered Veronica by the rocky beach. She exposes a breast to him and tells him about a letter she’s received, an ominous one that seems to have been sent to her from his ‘demons.’ He kisses her on the cheek. This juxtaposition of the lovers’ meeting with the threatening letter reinforces the sense that his illness, insomnia, and fears all stem from his guilty past. Eros, the life and sex instinct, is here juxtaposed with Thanatos, the death drive, that moment of birth and death that is the hour of the wolf.

Alma reads more, and comes to an entry about Johan being accosted and chased by Heerbrand (Johanson), who finds Johan to be strenuously shuffling away and avoiding him. Heerbrand calls himself a “psychiatric curator” (implying a combination of a therapist and one potentially interested in Johan’s paintings), one who would “finger people’s souls and turn their insides out.” Since Johan has some dark shadows inside himself that he’d rather not bring to light, Heerbrand is the last man he’d want to be talking to. Since Johan can feel Heerbrand trying to pry into his mind, he slaps the man hard, knocking him to the ground, and tells the loquacious man to shut up. This violent act is a clear case of resistance. Heerbrand, still on the ground and reeling from the swat, has a nosebleed and needs to hold a handkerchief to his face. That guilt that Johan feels is far too much for him to bear, let alone disclose to the “psychiatric curator.”

Alma’s fears for her husband are growing, and she puts the diary back under the bed just before he returns home. As he’s eating, she discusses her accounting of the family finances, and her need for more money, since there are so many expenses they have. The juxtaposition of this moment with the following scene, their visiting the baron’s castle for the dinner party, clearly puts in relief the class differences between Johan and Alma, on the one hand, and the baron, his wife, and his other wealthy guests, on the other.

The baron introduces Corinne, his mother (the countess), and the other guests (who include Heerbrand and Lindhorst) to Johan and Alma. Recall the baron having told Johan that he and Corinne are admirers of his work, as is Lindhorst. The wealthy are often patrons of the arts, and I suspect that the baron, Corinne, and Lindhorst, as examples of Johan’s projected internal objects, all either are or in part represent such patrons from his past, people he doesn’t like hobnobbing with, but has to, for he depends financially on their patronage. In this tension, we can see the class aspect of Johan’s suffering.

All of these ‘demons’ also personify what Wilfred R. Bion would have called beta elements that irritate Johan. According to Bion’s theory, one normally takes raw sensory data (beta elements)–which chafe, agitate, and annoy us–and processes them (a procedure Bion called alpha function), turning them into what he called alpha elements, or experiences that can be dealt with and tolerated.

Sometimes, though, one finds that one cannot, or refuses to, process the beta elements, and thus one splits off, expels, and projects them outwards, resulting in the formation of what Bion called a beta screen, composed of unprocessed beta elements and preventing alpha function, or the transformation of the raw, irritating sensory data into meaningful experiences that lead to rational thought. This prevention leads to psychosis, which brings us back to Johan’s problem.

His ‘demons,’ rejected beta elements that are split off from him, expelled, and projected, have become what Bion called bizarre objects, which are Johan’s hallucinated projections and the cause of his growing mental illness. Alma empathically shares in the experience of these bizarre objects because she, having lived with him long enough to share his thoughts and now resembling him, has now made his delusions into a kind of folie à deux, though she doesn’t experience his horrors on the same psychotic level as he. They merely sadden her, for his sake.

At the dinner table with the baron, Corinne, and all of their loquacious guests, he tries to bear all of their noisy, endless chatter as best he can…all of those irritating beta elements. Due to the class difference between Johan and Alma on the one side (i.e., all of their expenses), and the baron, his wife, and other moneyed guests on the other (e.g., their sumptuous feast), Johan must put up with it all. It is all very oppressive for him.

One woman at the table (the countess?) says, “The summer heat makes you so thirsty,” the thirst being an example of a beta element in need of processing, of quenching, and an example of something far more easily dealt with by the wealthy than by the poor. Already we can see Johan’s agitation: his head rapidly turning left and right as he tries to respond to each guest addressing him, his wiping of sweat off of his face, his loosening of his collar, and his frown of discomfort.

One guest, the baron’s brother, Ernst, complains about the housemaid, calling her “damned awful,” and “cheap,” meaning she’s paid a small enough salary to motivate her not to be any better. We again see how class conflict is a factor in how oppressed Johan and Alma feel among this company. Ernst continues to be irritating in his incessant complaining, blaming himself for the loss of the baron’s money (which, by the standards of the wealthy, still leaves the baron rich, hence his castle and dinner party); Ernst claims he embezzled the family fortune–he is clearly neurotic, perhaps a projection of Johan’s guilt, his inability to make more money for Alma.

Adding to Johan’s tension, Corinne, sitting next to him, brings up Veronica, that he knows her. Later, he and Alma will be in Corinne’s room, where she’ll show the husband and wife a picture of his old paramour. Corinne and the others at the dinner table all eagerly agree on how beautiful and charming Veronica is; all of this talk of her will make both Johan and Alma most uncomfortable, reinforcing his guilt and her jealousy (recall her reading about Veronica in his diary).

After the dinner, the guests all go to see a little puppet show by Lindhorst, the one based on an aria from The Magic Flute. Recall that Lindhorst, the Bird Man, is the Papageno equivalent in this film, to Johan’s Tamino. The aria from the opera that the guests hear is “O, ew’ge Nacht” (“O, eternal night.”) The protagonist of the opera, Tamino, sings in despair, wondering when the blackness of night will finally end and the light return.

The puppet show is thus again a provocation for Johan, whose sleepless nights, each an hour of the wolf, are exactly of this kind of eternal blackness, causing him a despair like that of Tamino. Lindhorst is rubbing it in for Johan, knowing of his and Alma’s suffering and taking delight in aggravating it.

We can see Johan closing his eyes during the puppet show, him unable to watch it. Lindhorst watches him intently, noting Johan’s discomfort. After the show and the applause, Lindhorst gives everyone a commentary on what happens during the aria, and on its emotional meaning. By graphically describing Tamino’s despairing dread of the darkness and wish for a return of the light, Lindhorst is again rubbing it in for Johan. Lindhorst also mentions the illness Mozart had at the time of the early performances of The Magic Flute, of how fatal the illness was. Johan’s growing mental illness will prove fatal for him, too, and Lindhorst et al are egging it on.

Tamino’s asking if his love, Pamina, is still alive reminds us of how Johan must wonder if Veronica is still alive, arousing his adulterous lust, Alma’s jealousy, and his guilt. Lindhorst praises Mozart’s aria as “the highest manifestation of art,” suggesting a link between the composer’s genius and the greatness, as felt by Johan’s admirers among the ‘demon’ guests, of his paintings. The artistic link, of course, suggests in turn a link between Tamino’s love of Pamina and Johan’s continuing desire for Veronica.

In expressing his modest opinion of his own art, Johan is deflecting any comparison with Mozart and his genius…and by implication, he is also deflecting any comparison between his passion for Veronica and Tamino’s love of Pamina.

After the party, and after seeing the picture of Veronica in Corinne’s room, Johan and Alma are back home at night. “VARGTIMMEN” is shown on a black background, indicating that that time has come again for him. We see him holding lighted matches before his eye in the darkness; he stares at the flame obsessively, craving the light. She is with him, of course, always worrying about his worsening condition.

They both note how quiet it is. He wistfully remembers back on those nights when he could sleep, “deep, dreamless sleep,” he says. Bion noted that psychotics can’t dream or sleep because they don’t process beta elements as described above. The work of dreaming creates the conscious and unconscious mind, not the other way around; so when one cannot dream, one cannot differentiate between conscious and unconscious experience. His psychic state, therefore, cannot differentiate sleeping from waking, dreaming from perceiving the real world.

Bion’s ideas thus can help us understand why so much of this film is surrealist, since surrealism expresses the unconscious. Johan in his psychotic state is increasingly seeing and experiencing dreamlike images and events in his waking life. The ‘demons’ he sees are all projections of internal objects from his unconscious.

Johan speaks of “deep, dreamless sleep,” which in the past must have been a prelude to his insomnia, a prefiguring of the psychosis that was to come. It is here, at the worst hour of his sleeplessness, that the “hour of the wolf” comes, as he tells Alma, when most die and most are born, and “the nightmares come to us,” which for him are in his waking hours at night.

He then tells her of a traumatic experience he once had as a child. He was punished by his parents, who threw him in a closet and shut the door. It was quiet and dark there, just as it is now in the house with her at night. He as a child was, of course, as terrified then as he is now, for his experience of the Vargtimmen is a PTSD-like reliving of that old closet trauma.

His parents told him there was a little person living in the closet, one “who gnawed the toes off naughty children!” Such a punishment sounds symbolic of castration, Johan’s punishment for having Oedipal feelings for his mother, presumably, and an explanation of how his current fears are caused by guilt. His desire for Veronica could be a mother transference, and the ‘demon’ guests, like the little person in the closet, are on this level all representations of his parents, who are punishing him for his naughty Oedipal desires.

Certainly the baron later on, towards the climax of the film, tells Johan of his own relationship with Veronica, that she has been his mistress for several years, and that he knows that Johan has returned to his castle to find her. The baron knows of Johan’s sexual relationship with her, and naturally, he is jealous.

So if Veronica is Johan’s mother transference, and all the ‘demons’ in general represent Johan’s parents in one sense or another (i.e., judging him and tormenting him as his parents did when he was trapped in the closet), then the baron here is a father transference for Johan. In this triangle of Johan, the baron, and Veronica, we can see a relived Oedipal triangle of Johan as a child with his parents, and in this triangle we can discover the unconscious root of his guilt.

Now, I’m sure there are many reading this who are scoffing at my reliance on Freud as a basis for interpreting the symbolism of Hour of the Wolf. To be sure, Freud got a lot more wrong than he got right, but as Don Carveth explains in his YouTube video on the Oedipus complex, Freud was on to something, even if he’d limited its application to a strictly literal, sexual one. It is a universal narcissistic trauma, Carveth explains, based on a child’s painful realization that he or she must give up hogging the Oedipally-desired parent all to him- or herself, and must share Mom or Dad with each other and with many others (e.g., brothers and sisters).

That universally-held child’s wish to hog Mom or Dad all to oneself doesn’t have to be incestuous, sexual desire; it just has to be a wish to have that parent always exist as an extension of one’s narcissistic self, to be a kind of 24/7 slave to the child’s ego, always doing everything for the child and for no one else. The Oedipus complex often enough can be sexual, though, and so when one realizes one cannot have the Oedipally-desired parent, one tries to find a more socially-acceptable substitute in someone else as a transference, as Johan has done with Veronica as his illicit lover.

When we hear of young men desiring older women, calling them MILFs (a “Mom I’d Like to Fuck”), it’s obviously an Oedipal transference. When women call the men they’re attracted to “Daddy,” it’s obviously the female version of the Oedipus complex (what Jung called the Electra complex) as a more socially-acceptable transference of the desire, going away from an object of incestuous desire.

Finally, while most people today reject Freud as a ‘heap of hooey,’ back when Hour of the Wolf was made, his ideas were still much more accepted. Think, for example, of how often 20th century productions of Hamlet showed the Danish prince having a thing for his mother, Queen Gertrude. So it should be quite reasonable to give a psychoanalytic interpretation of Hour of the Wolf as being a product of its time, even if one doesn’t agree with Freud’s theories.

Back to the story. When trapped in that closet, little Johan knew that his hour had come, the hour of the wolf, the same terror that the present Johan has as he’s talking with Alma. He as a child was being punished, ultimately, for his primary narcissism, since his parents wanted to push him away from ego-love (with his mother as a mirrored extension of himself) and towards object-love, or the love of other people. Lacan would have called this shift one from the other to the Other (i.e., from a dyadic relationship with one other, as an extension of the narcissistic self, a metaphorical mirror in the Imaginary, to the Other of society, of many people, as in the Symbolic).

Johan has recently, however, in his growing psychosis, needed to experience secondary narcissism (a return to ego-love, away from object-love) as a defence against psychological fragmentation, a falling apart of the mind and a psychotic break from reality. So when Johan tells the guests, after the puppet show, of his modest assessment of his own artistic creations, we can see this as an example of his false modesty, his conflicted attitude to his narcissism, an attempt to resist the defence of secondary narcissism, which in turn puts him in more danger of psychosis.

A little bit after Johan’s telling Alma of his childhood experience in the closet, he tells her about a time he was fishing on a rocky shore, and a boy in a bathing suit was sitting by him. Johan ended up struggling with and killing the boy, then throwing the body in the water, but it bobbed up to the surface for a moment.

Alma is horrified to hear this confession from her husband, but given how the fishing scene is filmed–it’s overexposed, with quick edits of more than thirty shots, and it’s mostly without sound (except for the boy’s cries of pain as Johan bashed his body against a rock behind them), replacing the sound with creepy music–we get the impression that Johan’s flashback is a fantasy rather than a real event.

If it’s a fantasy, as I’d say it likely is, then what we’re seeing is a distortion of Johan’s actual, unconscious mental processes. Professor Frank Gado, in The Passion of Ingmar Bergman (1986), speculated that Johan fears he is homosexual. Earlier, when Johan showed Alma the pictures he sketched of his ‘demons,’ he spoke of one of them, “the one who turns up most often,” as “almost harmless” and–Johan thinks–homosexual. Since these ‘demons’ are his projected internal objects, this one could easily be his projected fear of homosexuality. Also, towards the end of the film, when he has heavy makeup put on his face, this can be an association made in his mind with homosexuality based on the stereotype of effeminacy as often perceived by society, and thus also probably by Johan.

Anyways, the fighting with and killing of the boy, meant by Bergman to look “orgasmic” according to Barbara Young in The Persona of Ingmar Bergman: Conquering Demons through Film (2015) can–as a fantasy–be like a dream distortion of the homosexual rape of a boy, or at least the unconscious desire to commit such an act, or in turn the fear of such an unconscious desire. The boy being on Johan’s back, as he bashed the boy against a rock behind them, could be a projection of Johan’s (perceived and feared) forbidden wish to be on the boy’s back.

The fantasy of killing the boy can also be like a dream distortion of raping the boy in how historically rape, including the pederastic sodomizing of boys, has been compared to murder…sometimes seen as even worse than murder. So in Johan’s mind, distorting the scene from one of rape to one of murder can be a way for him to mitigate his guilt somewhat.

Dropping the boy’s body in the water symbolizes Johan’s attempt at repressing the feared forbidden desires in his unconscious. The body briefly rising to the surface, however, represents the return of the repressed, which always comes back in unrecognized forms…in the case of this dreamlike fantasy, like the form of a dream distortion.

After Johan has made this confession to Alma, a man arrives in their house to invite Johan once again to the castle for dinner, and to give him a pistol. Veronica Vogler will be at the party, so naturally, Johan is interested.

The visitor leaves, and Alma in her growing jealousy wants Johan to tell her more about Veronica. He tries to trivialize the affair as something that came and went, but she knows from his diary that it’s still alive in his mind. As she’s reading of his obsessive passion for Veronica in the diary, he’s playing with the pistol. Since the gun is a phallic symbol, this fondling of it can represent masturbation as he hears his wife reading about Veronica.

He says it was a five-year affair, which could be an unconscious distortion of a five-year-old boy’s experience of the Oedipus complex. His guilt from the scandal of the affair with Veronica, his mistress, could be a distortion mitigating his guilt of actual Oedipal love.

Now, I’m not saying that I agree with the following idea (I most certainly don’t), but I bring it up merely to explore the Freudian themes as I see them unfolding in this film. An unresolved Oedipus complex, in its classical (and I believe far too limiting) formulation was thought to lead to homosexuality, which could explain Johan’s fears of possibly being gay, given his Oedipal transference in Veronica. The point is that she as a mistress, as is the case with him possibly having homosexual desires, is just repression, distortion, and mitigation of his forbidden Oedipal feelings. Better to love other men, or a mistress, than to want one’s own mother.

Johan, of course, won’t let Alma’s jealousy stop him from being with Veronica again, so he takes the pistol and shoots Alma. He doesn’t kill her: he only wounds her, which reflects his conflict over whether he wants her or Veronica, resolving itself in a parapraxis of three shots fired. Then he rushes off to the castle.

The first person he meets there, significantly, is Gamla Fru von Merkens (Brost), the countess mother of the baron. She could be seen as an unconscious displacement of Johan’s own mother, a projection onto the baron. During the dinner table scene, we heard her say, “nowadays I want to be loved.” And all Johan could do during all that irritating dinner chit-chat was to drink and drink, to take his mind off of all of it.

While with the countess now, she’d have him accompany her as she eats her dinner, she who wants to be loved, as if it were a romantic dinner date. She’s clearly trying to seduce him. She tells him she thinks of herself as one of the “old harlots,” to use Lindhorst’s words, who “have an unhealthy desire to fill their mouths and stomachs.” Such a choice of words sounds unmistakably sexual especially in the context of Johan’s wish to reunite with Veronica.

The countess offers him a bite of the chicken leg she has on her dinner tray, and she denies any knowledge of a dinner party. Looking at him lewdly, she asks him to help her remove her stockings. That she’s old enough to be his mother, never mind the baron’s, clearly implies an Oedipal relationship that makes Johan most uncomfortable, since the countess is far too close to the real thing, whereas Veronica, his age, is further removed as a transference, and so she makes for a far less uncomfortable mother-substitute for the guilt-laden man.

The countess senses he doesn’t want to touch her, yet she says she is the one who can tell him where to find Veronica, so connected the two women are to each other. The point is that both women are associated, in his unconscious, with his Oedipally-desired mother. The countess asks him to look closely at her feet, at her young, tight arches, her smooth and fine heel, and her “strong toes and beautiful nails.” She asks him to kiss her foot; he gives in and kisses it. She caresses his cheek like a lover, and she tells him to go to the west gallery to find Veronica. Off he goes.

So both the countess and Veronica, in the mishmash of Johan’s unconscious as it’s expressed in the surrealism of this film, are his mother transferences, split off from each other. On the way to the west gallery, first he sees a raven…an ill omen. Then he encounters the jealous baron as I described him above. He is the countess’s son and Veronica’s lover, a relationship paralleling that of Uranus and his mother/lover, Gaea. Recall that I described the baron, in this connection, as a father transference for Johan, fearing a supplanting (a Laius complex) comparable to how Uranus hated his Titan sons and daughters, including the son who would supplant him, Cronus.

It’s interesting how, at the end of this scene, the baron walks away from Johan, then in a surreal moment, he walks up a wall and onto the ceiling, looking down on Johan from above, like a sky-father god (Uranus, Cronus, or Zeus) looking down from the heavens onto Earth and speaking of his jealousy. The baron, thus, is like Uranus hating his children, or like Cronus fearing being dethroned by his, or even Zeus, fearing being dethroned by his unborn child (who would be Athena) in the womb of Metis, which brings me to my next point.

Johan’s shooting of pregnant Alma could be in part motivated by a Laius complex similar to that of Cronus or of Zeus…or the father of Oedipus, of course. Johan’s own paranoid anxieties could indeed be partly caused by that child growing in Alma’s womb: will it supplant him? His shooting of her would thus be like Zeus eating the fetus in Metis’ womb, only in his conflict over whether or not to kill Alma, Johan’s shot missed and only wounded her in the arm, leaving a little scar.

Johan leaves the baron and comes to a room in which we hear a man playing music on a harpsichord; the music is from the Sarabande of JS Bach’s Partita No. 3 in A minor (BWV 827). Corinne and the Lady With a Hat are in the room with the musician. Corinne tells Johan that Veronica has been waiting for him, and that “she has become even more beautiful.” Corinne knows of her suffering husband’s jealousy, which amuses her, given how she has every reason to be jealous of his passion for Veronica. This would of course motivate Corinne to encourage Johan in pursuing Veronica, and so Corinne lies that one of his gunshots killed Alma, thus freeing him of her so he can have Veronica.

So we have Alma’s jealousy, Corinne’s jealousy, the baron’s jealousy, and even Johan’s jealousy over his unborn child: jealousy is a major theme in Hour of the Wolf.

When the Lady With a Hat takes it off to hear the beautiful harpsichord music better, her hair also comes off. In another surreal moment, so do her face and even her eyes. We’re reminded of how Oedipus ‘lost face’ upon learning of his incest with Iocaste, and how he put out his eyes, and she hanged herself, having also ‘lost face.’ Thus the Lady With a Hat can be seen as another projection of Johan’s mother internal object, and her removal of her eyes and face can be seen as a projection of Johan’s own ‘loss of face’ and his wish to put out his own eyes in shame.

Johan leaves the two women and comes into a room with Lindhorst, where again he encounters the cawing raven, his ill omen of what’s soon to come. Lindhorst notes how pale Johan looks, no doubt from the horrors he’s experienced and the guilt and shame he feels from approaching his next sexual union with Veronica, his mother-transference. Lindhorst applies makeup to Johan’s face.

With the makeup on, Johan is also given perfume and “beautiful pajamas” to wear from Lindhorst. This feminizing of Johan is symbolically an emasculating of him, similar to the castration symbolism of the gnawing off of the toes of naughty children by the little person in the closet of his childhood trauma, as I mentioned above.

Indeed, the threat of castration by the father is how a boy is supposedly made to end his incestuous love of his mother, according to Freud. In Lacanian terms, le Non! du père forces the boy to realize he cannot be the phallus for his mother, a symbolic castration that takes him out of the dyadic mother/son relation of the Imaginary, from the other to the Other of society in general, to the Symbolic.

On the way to see Veronica, Johan sees a large group of fluttering birds: yet another ill omen of what’s to come.

So in the climactic scene of the movie, when ‘tarted up’ Johan is in a room with naked Veronica lying on what appears to be an autopsy table, with a blanket over all of her body, as if she were dead and left with the coroner, it’s as if he were at last reunited with his (dead?) mother, back when she was young and beautiful. Eros and Thanatos are one in this moment, the hour of the wolf, a moment of birth and death. He removes the blanket and runs his hand up and down her body, an action symbolic of sex with her. Then she arises suddenly and laughs, and he kisses her passionately.

Then he hears the judgmental laughter of all of the guests, his ‘demons.’ With his lipstick smudged, he looks in shame at them; he’s reliving the dissolution of his Oedipus complex, as he had as a child in that closet. He feels castrated once again, like the gnawing away of his toes by the little person in the closet, and he feels humiliated for it. He masochistically thanks the guests for judging him for his sin, they who represent his punishing father; and as he continues speaking, we hear no more of his words: he’s entered the wordless, inexpressible, traumatic realm of the Real. We then see a flashback of the dead boy floating to the surface of the water, Johan’s fear that he’s homosexual, his mental association (right or wrong) with psychological castration.

Alma says he’d been writing in his diary the whole time; in other words, his trip to the castle has all been a hallucination, the waking dream of a psychotic who cannot sleep or dream, as Bion described such people. She goes into the woods to find him. He’s lying on the ground, only half-conscious. She tries to comfort him; but because she, in her closeness to him over the years of their marriage, is at one with him, she shares the hallucination and sees him become the baron.

Johan is farther off in the woods. All the ‘demons,’ or ‘cannibals,’ as Johan has called them (also Bergman’s original name for the film, recall), are there with him. Heerbrand gets his revenge on Johan and slaps him several times. He’s bleeding at the neck, as if from a vampire bite. The other ‘cannibals’ close in on him. He sees the omen of the raven again. The attacking ‘cannibals’ are punishing him, as Father would, for his Oedipal desires, his transference of them onto Veronica. Alma can only watch helplessly. Then Johan disappears forever, absorbed in the void of the Real.

At the end of the film, Alma finishes her narrative, asking if she’s really become like Johan, out of her love for him. She thinks and sees like him, sharing his hallucinations and madness, though without its violence–she’s only deeply sad about it. She loved him, but in being like him from that love, of course she couldn’t have protected him better. He was beyond hope, as was their marriage.

Such incurable madness, based on a universal narcissistic trauma (wanting to hog a parent all to oneself) that so many of us deny even exists, is in my opinion what makes Hour of the Wolf so disturbing. We all have in us the potential to go as mad as Johan does, to disappear, to lose our very souls–all because of unconscious feelings that are all too relatable.

The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter Seven

“Don’t you dare form a union!” Jack Lipton shouted down the mining hole at Steve and Jim, the two miners who had been discussing the idea for weeks with their colleagues, one of whom, sucking up to Lipton, told him. “You’re lucky to have a job at all, in this economy. If you go on strike, I’ll replace you all!”

“We have a perfect legal right to get organized,” Steve shouted back up at Lipton. “You know that perfectly well. The working conditions down here are atrocious! I don’t think I even need to prove how much worse the working conditions are for your workers in your many fracking operations, Mr. Lipton.”

“And the pay nowhere near compensates for the bad conditions here,” Jim added. “Beyond whoever squealed on us, the vast majority of us miners agreed to unionize. We’ll work to rule.”

“And replacing us with scabs won’t stop us!” Steve said. “We’ll convince the scabs to join us. It won’t be hard, once they see how bad it is down here. You’ll see, Mr. Lipton.”

“You ungrateful bastards!” Lipton shouted. 

“Ungrateful,” Steve snorted. “We’re grateful to be still alive down here in this hell—“

Just then, everyone felt a brief tremor.

“We’re about to be reminded of how dangerous it is down here,” Jim told Steve. “We may not be grateful for much longer.”

Another, stronger and longer tremor shook everyone.

“Oh, God,” Steve said.

Lipton’s foot slipped a little too close to the hole. “Jesus!” he said after almost falling in. He backed up a bit.

Immediately after that, Steve, the further up of the two miners, flew out of the hole, screaming. He fell on the ground to the right of Lipton. No bones were broken, but the arm, hip, and leg that hit the ground were in great pain. He was groaning and rubbing his sore spots.

“What the hell happened?” Lipton asked.

“I…don’t know,” Steve said in a scratchy voice.

“Aaaaah!” Jim screamed as he flew out of the hole in the same way. He hit the ground, with a grunt of pain, to Lipton’s left.

Stepping back twice towards the hole and looking at the two hurt men, Lipton asked, “What could possibly have vomited you two out of the hole?”

The two men shook their heads.

“Me,” a deep, booming voice called out from the hole, causing all three men to shudder. Then powerful sucking came from it.

Steve and Jim slid closer to the hole, but Lipton got sucked in screaming. The sucking stopped, and the two men could hear Lipton screaming and knocking against the rocky walls of the mine, falling in deeper and deeper, until his screams ended.

Steve and Jim just sat by the mouth of the hole in complete silence, shaking. They looked at each other.

“What the hell just happened?” Jim asked.

Steve shrugged, still shaking. Then he remembered his wife’s warning to be ‘especially careful’ over the next few weeks. Then he remembered her ‘pagan nonsense,’ and thought, No…I ain’t gonna go there. I certainly don’t wanna talk about it with Jim. He’ll think I’m nuts…which I’m starting to think I am, too.

“I guess we gotta search for Lipton,” Jim said. “If anyone dares go down there, that is.”

Steve shook his head. “Not me.”

A search was conducted soon enough.

“C’mon,” the foreman said to those further down the hole. “Keep looking.”

Lipton’s body was never found…not even at the deepest point of digging.

Near that area, though, a miner’s light shone on the stony, muddy wall.

A man’s face, carved in the mud and rock as if by a sculptor, was smiling.

Analysis of ‘Birds of Fire’

I: Introduction

Birds of Fire is a 1973 studio album by the jazz rock fusion band, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, their second, and the last that the original line-up would release, before British guitarist/leader John McLaughlin dissolved the band and got all new members. Birds of Fire is considered, along with the band’s 1971 debut, The Inner Mounting Flame, to be one of their greatest albums.

The original line-up of the Mahavishnu Orchestra was a truly international band, with–as I said above, McLaughlin from England, American electric violinist Jerry Goodman (formerly of The Flock), Czech keyboardist Jan Hammer, Irish bassist Rick Laird, and Panamanian-American drummer Billy Cobham. Bassist Tony Levin would have been McLaughlin’s first choice to be in the band, but he didn’t get it because of a missed telephone call, which his mother-in-law received, mishearing the message and telling him, “Some guy, Murray Vishnu, asked about joining his orchestra.”

The music of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, apart from being a fusion of rock instrumentation and rhythms with the harmonic sophistication and improvisation of jazz, is characterized as also incorporating elements from Indian and Western classical music (e.g., Goodman’s classical violin technique, as well as how the ornamentation in McLaughlin’s guitar solos imitates such ornamentation in Indian music). Furthermore, the music is known for its flashy, virtuosic playing, complicated riffs, and odd and irregular time signatures–all hallmarks of 1970s jazz fusion.

II: Why ‘Mahavishnu’?

The name of the band was derived from the name that McLaughlin’s then-guru, the Indian spiritual leader Sri Chinmoy, gave him. “Maha” in Sanskrit means “great,” and “Vishnu” is from the Hindu god of preservation. So “Mahavishnu Orchestra” is a fancy, ostentatious way of saying “the John McLaughlin Band.”

On the one hand, the name of the band sounds like something from Eastern philosophy–typically about a renunciation of the ego while on a quest to attain peace of mind and enlightenment. On the other hand, though, the name of the band sounds rather pretentious, especially since the band shows off its technical skill in a manner that, to put it mildly, raises suspicions of inflated egos. With these observations, we come to the central contradiction of the band.

There’s a tension between the philosophical renunciation of the ego and its glorification. This tension can be seen and heard as a recurring motif, if you will, throughout Birds of Fire, just as it could also be heard throughout The Inner Mounting Flame, their live album, Between Nothingness and Eternity, and The Lost Trident Sessions, released in 1999 and including three tracks heard on the live album.

A number of tensions led to the break-up of the original band, including the pressures of sudden fame, exhaustion, and a lack of communication. Another source of irritation to McLaughlin’s bandmates was how sole songwriting credit was always given to him, an ironic thing given how he was supposed to be on a spiritual path with Chinmoy that promoted “love, devotion, and surrender” (a kind of Bhakti Yoga) as well as “self-transcendence.” A follower of Chinmoy is supposed to renounce those negative qualities that prevent union with the Divine.

Chinmoy’s teachings were influenced, of course, by Hinduism, hence McLaughlin’s name of “Mahavishnu.” Union with the Divine is, essentially, union of Atman with Brahman as a result of renouncing the ego. The guitar player had to abstain from recreational drugs and alcohol, live a celibate lifestyle, and adopt a vegetarian diet. McLaughlin also had to keep his hair short because it was Chinmoy’s wish for him to do so. His teachings did, however, show tolerance for and inclusiveness of other religious and spiritual traditions.

Speaking of other spiritual traditions, the tension between indulging and denying the ego in the Mahavishnu Orchestra philosophy can be associated with Mahayana Buddhism’s dialectical unifying of nirvana and samsara. Also, incidentally, Chinmoy himself was often accused of leading a cult, and of sexual misconduct, even sexual abuse. McLaughlin would stop following Chinmoy by the mid-1970s.

Here is a link to the entire album.

III: Birds of Fire

The title of the album and the first track is inspired by the fourth line of “Revelation,” a poem by Chinmoy seen on the back cover of the album. It is about the soul’s joyful realization of the Divine, Atman coming to be at one with Brahman.

Brahman is referred to in the poem as “God” (which should not be confused with the God of monotheism, for Brahman is of pantheism; “God” here isn’t separate from creation, but is at one with it); Brahman is also called “the Infinite,” “the One,” “Him,” “the Supreme,” and “Immortality.” (And for McLaughlin, “music is the face of God,” which should help us understand how the music we hear on the album is intimately linked with his spirituality.)

“His secret Play” would refer to lila, where creation is an outcome of the playful nature of the Divine. “Ignorance Dream” would be the result of the illusion of maya, and the poet has passed beyond it, therefore, he will “sob” and “grieve” no more.

His soul is “above the toil of life…a Bird of Fire winging the Infinite.” If the poet’s soul has achieved enlightenment and moksha, though, why would it be “a Bird of Fire“? Shouldn’t fire be associated with egoistic desire, that which is blown out in nirvana, and so the very antithesis of the bliss of enlightenment?

This contradiction parallels what I said above about the tension between the renunciation of the ego and its overindulgence (the five musicians showing off their virtuosity, McLaughlin getting sole credit for writing all of the music, the premature break-up of the original line-up when they should have been at the very height of their powers, and even Chinmoy’s sexual misconduct). It’s the dialectical unity of nirvana and samsara.

That the Atman is a bird of fire, a being burning with desire, reflects the spiritual conflict and difficulty of attaining enlightenment. One often has a habit of thinking of religion, spirituality, and philosophy as being things of mere sentimentality, a quick and easy way of ending one’s pain with simple, black-and-white solutions. Placing oneself seriously on that path, though, would make it clear very quickly that nothing could be farther from the truth. It is a path constantly beset with temptation to go astray.

Understanding such difficulties is how we can find the dialectical Aufhebung between the need to renounce the desires of the ego and to overindulge them. This is the bird of fire of Atman, “winging the Infinite” of Brahman.

So, “Birds of Fire” can refer to all five members of the Mahavishnu Orchestra, showing off their virtuosity and playing with all of their fiery passion. For Goodman, Hammer, Laird, and Cobham were struggling through life no less than McLaughlin was, and we can hear that struggle in the music.

In a review of Birds of Fire for All About Jazz in 2002, Walter Kolosky wrote that the title track “is a fusion classic. John McLaughlin scares the hell out of his guitar…” The opening track will “frighten a musical neophyte…it’s guaranteed to send him or her fleeing.” One would think those seeking enlightenment would prefer listening to peaceful, New Age music. Birds of Fire, and the title track in particular, are the diametrical opposite of such easy listening.

The opening title track begins with Cobham banging a gong a number of times. McLaughlin comes in playing arpeggios, each ascending in fast groups of five, five, five, and three. These dense arpeggiated chords are in A♭ and B♭, played first with distortion, then clean, on a twelve-string electric guitar. Note that McLaughlin was known for playing double-neck guitars onstage with the band, a twelve-string and a six-string, the latter for playing leads.

The bass and violin come in next, doubling each other octaves apart with this line: A♭, A♭, G♭-E♭-A♭, A♭, G♭-E♭-G♭-A♭-B♭, B♭, A♭-F-B♭, B♭, A♭-F-A♭-B♭. Cobham has still been hitting the gong, but he soon also comes in on the drums.

This riff they’ve been playing, still with the twelve-string guitar arpeggios in the background, is in 9/8 time, which could be subdivided 4+5 or 3+3+3, depending on the players (i.e., Cobham is playing it 3+3+3). McLaughlin and Goodman are doubling each other with a fiery, high-pitched lead, McLaughlin now playing his six-string in unison with Goodman.

After that, McLaughlin goes into a blistering solo, with his six-string using distortion. This playing he’s doing is what Kolosky above must have meant by saying that “McLaughlin scares the hell out of his guitar with his melodic convulsions.” “Birds of Fire” is clearly not the music of the quietened mind of the enlightened. This, if anything, is the music of the spiritually troubled, perhaps beginning a quest for peace of mind out of sheer desperation from having experienced in full the horrors of the world.

After McLaughlin’s solo, he and Goodman return to that lead they’d played together. They end the lead with fast ascending and descending triplets, then go into a bridge in 3/4 with a shuffle rhythm at a slightly slower tempo. Again, McLaughlin and Goodman are doubling each other, playing a lead in unisons. It’s in B at first, then it modulates elsewhere; it also switches to a bar in 4/4 before returning to the main riff in 9/8.

Now, Jan Hammer does a solo on the synth. Part of his solo imitates, to an extent, those arpeggios McLaughlin played on the twelve-string. Then they return to the high-pitched lead played on the violin and six-string, and back to the bridge, then back to the main riff in 9/8.

As the main riff is fading out with McLaughlin doubling the bass and violin line I described towards the beginning of the track, Goodman adds a few high-pitched violin licks.

IV: Miles Beyond (Miles Davis)

As I said above, every track on this album is credited solely to McLaughlin, including this one, though the title sometimes includes “Miles Davis” in parentheses as I gave it above, and this may give off the mistaken impression that the Mahavishnu Orchestra here is doing a cover of an old Miles Davis piece of music. No: the hyphenated “Miles Davis” is just meant as a dedication to McLaughlin’s former bandleader (the closest you’ll come to a Miles Davis track of this title is “Miles Ahead,” from the 1957 album of the same name, and it sounds completely different from the second track on Birds of Fire).

McLaughlin played with Davis on the albums In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Live-Evil, On the Corner, Big Fun, and A Tribute to Jack Johnson. On Bitches Brew, there’s even a four-minute track named “John McLaughlin,” on which he plays guitar licks over Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul playing electric piano variations on a riff, in C, essentially of B♭-A-G-F-G…F-G♭-G♭/G♮.

Of course, Bitches Brew, released in 1970, is considered one of the seminal albums ushering in the jazz fusion genre, and apart from including McLaughlin, Corea, and Zawinul among its musicians, the album’s musical innovations spawned several jazz fusion bands in the 1970s alongside the Mahavishnu Orchestra, including Corea’s Return to Forever and Zawinul’s Weather Report. What’s more, Lenny White of Return to Forever played drums on Bitches Brew, as did Cobham on “Feio”; and Wayne Shorter of Weather Report played soprano sax on the album, as did Weather Report percussionists Don Alias and Airto Moreira.

Anyway, “Miles Beyond” opens in G major with Jan Hammer improvising the track’s main riff on the Fender Rhodes electric piano. It’s chords of G major, F major, then going up to the subdominant with chords of B♭major, B♮major, and C major, then back to the B♭ major and to the tonic with F major, G♭major, and resolving back to G♮ major. The music is in 6/4 time, subdivided 4+2.

If one were to regard the tracks of the album as chapters to a narrative about McLaughlin’s “pilgrim’s progress,” so to speak, of a spiritual journey from sin and ignorance to the peace and enlightenment of Chinmoy’s teachings, then this track would find McLaughlin ‘miles beyond’ the spiritually troubled beginnings of that quest as understood on “Birds of Fire.” Still, the tension and passion felt here on “Miles Beyond” means he still has “miles to go before [he] sleep[s].”

After that electric piano opening, with Goodman softly playing the tonic on the violin in the background, Laird and Cobham come in, Laird playing the same basic riff of F-G♭, G♮, F…B♭-B♮, C, B♭, etc., with Hammer still improvising on the Fender Rhodes. Then McLaughlin and Goodman come in, playing F, C, E♭, B♭, A♭, the former playing these as power chords.

Now, McLaughlin and Goodman are playing the main riff with the rest of the band, with McLaughlin’s power chords, and it’s two bars, one in 4/4, and the other in 5/4. Then the guitar plays a lead, doubled on the violin, and it’s in 9/4 time (3+3+3); this is heard three times, then the passage is finished off with two bars in 4/4.

Next, Goodman does a violin solo, but in pizzicato. As I’ve seen him do in a video of a performance of another piece of Mahavishnu music, he is presumably doing this pizzicato solo not by holding the violin under his chin, but rather as if it were a small guitar or a ukulele. He does some impressively fast licks–using pull-offs–in the middle of the solo. The rest of the band is silent, except for Hammer, who is giving Goodman a very soft Fender Rhodes accompaniment.

After Goodman’s solo, the rest of the band comes back in full force, with McLaughlin playing those power chords again. As this is going on, Cobham throws in some fast, powerful drumming. Then at the climax of the track, McLaughlin does a fiery solo, his plucking of the notes like bullets fired out of a machine gun. He may be “Miles Beyond” the spiritual turbulence he experienced in “Birds of Fire,” but the passion of his playing here shows that he, as I said above, still has a long way to go before attaining the peace of enlightenment.

The track ends with McLaughlin and Goodman playing that doubled lead in 9/4, then the two bars in 4/4.

V: Celestial Terrestrial Commuters

This is one of the very best tracks, if not the very best one, on the entire album. It is pure fire. I still remember the first time I heard it as a teen on the vinyl I’d bought and played on the family’s stereo in our living room. I was thrilled and energized.

If by “celestial,” we mean the heavens of nirvana, and by “terrestrial,” we mean the earth in all of its sin, desire, and attachment, then the “commuters” are either going back and forth between sin and enlightenment, or they’re leaving enlightenment altogether and commuting back to the samsara of attachment. Given the wildly passionate wailing of the musicians here, we’re clearly far away from the peace of nirvana.

Cobham begins the track by hitting the crash cymbals and drums to punctuate the irregular rhythm we’ll hear for most of the song. This rhythm is a 19-beat cycle of sixteenth notes, which I’d notate as alternating bars of 3/4 (or 6/8) and 7/16. It could otherwise be thought of as bars of 4/4, but with an additional three sixteenth notes at the end of each bar.

The track is in G, a kind of expanded tonality of G major and G minor, with a Mixolydian/Dorian feel (i.e., with the flat 7th). The guitar and violin start with ascending lines, eighth notes of G (open G on the guitar), D, B, G, E, C♯, a sixteenth rest, then G-F-D-G-E-C♯ in sixteenth notes. This riff is heard twice, then the guitar and violin double each other with a high-pitched lead, while that ascending lead I just described is now played by Hammer on the Fender Rhodes.

In terms of its harmonic progression, it starts at the tonic, in G, then moves up to the supertonic, in A, then back down to the G tonic. While back in the tonic, instead of twice hearing the 19-beat cycle I described above as alternating 3/4 (6/8) and 7/16, we hear–after one time of that cycle–an 18-beat cycle I’d notate as a bar of 4/4, then of 5/4 (this is just one time, then we’re back to the 19-beat cycle). This in turn leads to a move up a tritone to C♯, then down a minor third to B♭, and back to the tonic in G, with the guitar and violin playing the ascending lines from the beginning.

Next, Hammer plays a mind-blowing solo on the synth, backed up by Laird and Cobham. McLaughlin and Goodman come back with the ascending riff, and Hammer finishes off with a few more tasty synth licks.

Now it’s time for McLaughlin and Goodman to trade licks back and forth…and boy, do those two ever wail! At one point, while in G, McLaughlin plays a standard blues-rock lick of bending notes from C to D, a G, and a bend from F to G, these are done twice; I call it a standard lick, but McLaughlin’s execution of it, in the context of the music, is face-melting!

After a violin lick, McLaughlin comes back with a quick quintet of descending sixteenth notes–the first, a C bent up from B♭, then B♭-G-F-D; these are played three times, then four more descending sixteenth notes lead back to more violin licks. While in C♯, Goodman plays and arpeggiated C♯ major chord. Then after a final, high-pitched lead from McLaughlin in B♭, we cone back to G major, with both McLaughlin and Goodman playing licks at the same time.

Now, still in G major, the guitar and violin are playing a lead mostly of Ds, Bs, and F, first in the 19-beat cycle, then in the two bars of 4/4 and 5/4 with some descending notes. Then Hammer does a synth lick in A. Back to the Ds, Bs, and F lead, then another synth lick in C♯ and B♭.

The lead of Ds, Bs, and F is done again, but this time, all in the 19-beat cycle, and then McLaughlin and Goodman return to the doubled, high-pitched lead heard before the first synth solo. Hammer helps out playing some of the lead on the synth.

The song ends with a variation on the ascending lead, done to a different chord progression, and with an added three sixteenth notes, ending on a high C.

VI: Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love

This track, not even thirty seconds long, was just a spontaneous soundcheck improvisation that was included on the album as a kind of interlude, almost psychedelic-sounding, between “Celestial Terrestrial Commuters” and “Thousand Island Park.” The band was just testing out their equipment.

So, unlike McLaughlin’s other compositions for the band, this short oddity carries no grand philosophical or spiritual meaning. The title, nonetheless, is intriguing in how it can be related to the broader theme on the album as I’ve described it. Bullets cause harm, and are lethal, but these ones are of pure love. They’re also made of sapphire, a precious gemstone.

“Sapphire” can also be heard to pun on fire. So in the title we can hear the dialectical tension, once again, between the fire of passion and the pure love of the devotion in Chinmoy’s Bhakti-yoga-style of spirituality. The spiritual struggle is a valuable one, like a sapphire, for it is only through such a struggle that one can eventually become enlightened, always dodging those bullets, so like the love arrows of Eros, provoking fiery sensual desire.

VII: Thousand Island Park

This track, like “A Lotus on Irish Streams” on The Inner Mounting Flame, is the acoustic piece on Birds of Fire. But whereas the former piece was played by a trio of McLaughlin, Goodman, and Hammer (on piano), the latter is played by a trio of McLaughlin, Hammer, and Laird (on double bass).

The piece is mostly a showcase of McLaughlin’s acoustic guitar playing skills, with Hammer’s piano right hand largely doubling the written acoustic guitar melodies (though not in exact time with McLaughlin, as the piece is, to a great extent, of a free rhythm), and with Laird mostly playing root notes.

As a more sedate, peaceful piece of music, “Thousand Island Park” can be heard as a moment of considerable spiritual progress from the passion heard on the previous tracks…miles beyond “Miles Beyond.” While Thousand Island Park is, of course, a real place in New York State, there are interesting connotations to be heard in the title of McLaughlin’s piece, understood from the point of view of the grand philosophical and spiritual meaning of his music in the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Nirvana was compared by the Buddhists to an island (dipa) in the Sutta Nipata, a place of refuge from decay and death. How much more peaceful would a thousand of such islands be!

Furthermore, according to the Lalitavistara Sūtra, Queen Maya gave birth to the Buddha in a tranquil grove or garden in Lumbini, his birthplace often described as a beautiful park. So symbolically speaking, one could speak of such a place as the birth, or beginning, of a spiritual quest for enlightenment. Chinmoy did not, of course, teach Buddhism, but his spiritual teachings were similar enough to justify a comparison with Buddhist symbolism; and besides, he also taught respect and tolerance of other religions, wanting to promote interfaith harmony and seeing all religions as one; so there shouldn’t be anything discordant about discussing Buddhist ideas in an analysis of the Chinmoy influence on McLaughlin and his music.

The piece begins with McLaughlin playing a high B♭, doubled by Hammer and with Laird playing a G♭ above middle C. McLaughlin and Hammer are mostly descending melodically as Laird plays an E♭, a D♭, an A♭, and a G♭, then resolving to F.

Hammer improvises on the piano in F Mixolydian as McLaughlin plays fast ascending arpeggios in F major and E♭major. Then the two return to a written melody, doubling each other as Laird’s double bass descends by step from E♭ to D♭and C (below middle C); the acoustic guitar and piano melody here is mostly a repeat of G♮, D♭, B♭G-F (3x), then it goes down to F, D♭, and C.

Then the bass goes to D♭, with the guitar and piano rising to a high C. As the guitar and piano continue their doubled melody, the double bass goes up to an E♭, a G♭, and A♭, and a B♭. Then the guitar and piano improvise over a D super Locrian scale.

Then the guitar and piano play another written, doubled melody in C. As they’re playing this, the double bass is going up from the C to a D♭, an E♭, and up to the G♭ above middle C, where the guitar and piano are at the B♭; this is where the melody now matches that of the very beginning of the track as I described above, resolving to F as before.

Now, McLaughlin is soloing in F Phrygian, as Hammer backs him with piano chords, and Laird is playing mostly low Fs as a kind of drone, with the occasional G♭or D♭. This is another showcase of McLaughlin’s shredding skills on the acoustic guitar, demonstrating the truth of what it says in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll, in its entry for the Mahavishnu Orchestra: that when it comes to McLaughlin’s playing, “even those players who could match McLaughlin’s speed couldn’t approach his lyricism.” (Warren, Romanowski, page 598)

After this improvisation, there’s a return to the G♮, D♭, B♭, G♮-F (3x) theme, followed by some fast ascending and descending runs on the guitar and piano. Then there’s a repeat of the melody with the rising bass line, going from D♭to E♭, G♭, A♭, and B♭, and from there, we hear more improvising on the guitar and piano, much of which involves McLaughlin playing a fast descending and ascending line of D down to B♭(the tonic), and back to the D, then an E♭and an F (perfect fifth in relation to the tonic), but often we hear him play this line with a G♭(augmented fifth) instead of that final F. Hammer plays variations on these descensions and ascensions alongside McLaughlin.

The track ends with the guitar/piano theme starting in C, with the bass ascending to D♭, E♭, and G♭ above middle C as described above, and finally resolving in F major.

VIII: Hope

This two-minute track ends Side One of the LP. It’s in seven, mostly subdivided 4+3, but just after the first hearing of the 4+3 subdivision, it changes to 3+4 just the one time (that is, for the whole theme, all of which is repeated over and over throughout the two minutes). Because of this switch, the listener may be deceived into thinking he or she is hearing a bar of 6/4 instead.

It’s odd that a track with such dark, ominous music should be called “Hope.” It must be remembered, though, that hope is experienced in a dialectical way, with the lingering fear that that hope will be frustrated or crushed.

Such hope mixed with fear ties in well with the tension between renouncing ego and overindulging in it, with the hope of attaining nirvana as against the frustration of staying trapped in samsara. It’s fitting, thus, that this track would be in the middle of the album, representing the halfway point of McLaughlin’s spiritual journey; he’s made progress in “Thousand Island Park,” and so he has “Hope” for moksha, but he still has a long way to go, where he’ll still be beset with many temptations and setbacks.

The bass line starts on F and goes up to G, A♭, and down to E, then up to A, and then there’s a chromatic ascension of A-B♭-B♮-C, C♯, D♯, and E. Over this ascension is a theme, heard primarily on the violin, of an arpeggiated D♭major chord (with an added sixth on the violin that is sustained ’til the end of the chord progression) in second inversion, heard over the F in the bass. Then there’s B♭ and E♭ over the bass G, and G and D over the bass A♭: these notes are all heard during the “6/4” moment; then there are A♭, D, and G over the low E. After this comes a D♯ major chord, arpeggiated in second inversion, with the A in the bass.

Then, the bass chromatic ascension of A, B♭, B♮, and C is heard, with the arpeggiated D♭ major chord in second inversion. Then there’s C♯ in the bass, over which is heard an arpeggiated E♭ major chord (second inversion). Next, there’s the D♯ in the bass, with an E♮ major chord in second inversion; and finally, the E in the bass, with a G♭ major chord in second inversion.

This whole progression repeats as such throughout the track, though later, when the chromatic ascension is heard in the bass with the D♭ major chord and added sixth, the violin plays a high A♭and an F, slid up to and sustained ’til the end of the progression. You can also hear Hammer’s acoustic and electric piano in the background.

IX: One Word

This ten-minute track, beginning Side Two of the LP, derived its title–as well as one brief guitar line with ascending triplets, a pair of quarter notes and two pairs of eighth notes–from a song written by McLaughlin when he was playing in Tony Williams Lifetime, with Williams (drums), Larry Young (organ), and Jack Bruce (bass and vocals). The song was recorded in 1970, with a lyric.

“One Word” refers to a sense of oneness with everything in the world: “One with the sun, one with the moon, one with the star…”, etc. So this oneness ties in with the general theme of Birds of Fire–the spiritual aspiration to transcend the limitations of the ego to be as one with Brahman.

The Tony Williams Lifetime version of the song, under four minutes long and appearing as a bonus track on the 1970 album Turn It Over, is actually much closer to the final track on Side Two of Birds of Fire, the two-minute “Resolution.” The melody that Bruce sings, along with the chordal backing, is more or less identical with that track, making me wonder why McLaughlin didn’t name it “One Word” instead of “Resolution.”

Are we meant to believe that the ten-minute instrumental represents an aspiration to that oneness, while “Resolution” represents its attainment? That the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “One Word” is merely the aspiration, rather than the attainment, of oneness with Brahman is evident when we consider the frantic passion of the quintet’s playing, especially during the fast intro.

Indeed, while the aspiration may involve a renunciation of the ego, we don’t hear a more obvious expression of overindulgence in the ego than on this ten-minute track. All five members do solos on this one; as McLaughlin, Hammer, and Goodman take turns doing licks in the middle section of the track, they clearly seem to be in competition with each other…which of them is the most virtuosic, inventive, and awe-inspiring in his playing?

Cobham, starting off the track with a long drum roll crescendo on the snare, plays at a particularly frenetic pace when the rest of the band comes in. They start by playing a G♯ and a C♯–that is, the guitar, violin, and bass–setting off Cobham to be wildly drumming at lightning speed. This continues, with more single tones on the guitar (doubled by the violin and bass), which punctuate specific points in that sea of Cobham’s frantic drumming. Then the music softens, and they’re playing in G.

Both McLaughlin and Hammer are matching Cobham’s speed, the former demonstrating his lyricism as well, and the latter playing arpeggios and other ornaments on the Fender Rhodes. After McLaughlin plays a series of fast Gs hammered on from F, with Hammer improvising chords, McLaughlin plays those triplets I mentioned above, those from the Tony Williams Lifetime version: these are an arpeggio of G major (quarter notes), one of D major and one of F major (eighth notes), one of C major (quarter notes), one of D major, of B major, and of A major (eighth notes), then a low open E. All of the arpeggiated chords are in root position. Note how, with the additional eight-note A major arpeggio, this is a new variation on the old Tony Williams Lifetime version, making the whole thing a bar of 4/4, then one in 5/4.

McLaughlin ends that section with an A major chord; then Cobham slows down the tempo to a funky groove, and still in A, Laird begins a long bass solo. He is the only member of the band not doing anything flashy or virtuosic; he’s just keeping the groove going, serving the music and helping the rest of the band build up to the climactic trading of licks to be heard–in this order–by McLaughlin, Hammer (on synth), and Goodman, whose violin adds a wah-wah pedal.

These three musicians’ playing epitomize a notion that can be summed up in two simple, but in-your-face words: fucking WAILING!!! Each player’s turn to play is, at first, four bars of 4/4 (2x), then two bars (2x), then one bar (3x), then half a bar (3x), then all three are wailing at the same time for several bars.

Next comes Cobham’s solo. At first, he just keeps the funky groove going, then he does some fast rolls back and forth on the snare and tom-toms. An interesting lick comes soon after: kicking the bass drum, followed by triplets on the snare, over and over; first, it’s a syncopated 4/4, then it’s a 6/8 and 5/4, a 6/8 and 4/4, another 6/8 and 5/4, then he varies the lick to other irregular rhythms. He climaxes the solo with, largely, drum rolls on the snare and a kicking of two bass drums. He ends the solo with the frantic drumming of the beginning of the track, and the band comes back in, all in A.

The ultimate climax of the track comes with a fiery riff of groups of high notes, in twice-descending A minor pentatonic notes in 7/4, and jumping groups of pentatonic notes in 11/8; the bars of 7/4 and 11/8 alternate. Laird is backing the riff with notes of A, G, G♭, and G♮. McLaughlin ends the track with those guitar triplets I’ve already described, then ends with an A major chord.

X: Sanctuary

Once again, we have a title for the track that seems to be in contradiction with the tone and mood of the music. While a sanctuary is a place of safety, peace, and refuge, the music we hear on this track is dark, gloomy, mournful, and even despairing. Such a contradiction, however, fits in with the recurring theme of Birds of Fire.

There is, on the one hand, the aspiration to attain the peace and spiritual sanctuary of nirvana, of moksha; and yet, with the constant temptation to overindulge the ego, a temptation that’s all too often given in to, there is also the profound sadness, the despair, of a constant frustration of such spiritual aspirations. So “Sanctuary” once again demonstrates the album’s theme of a tension between the wish to renounce the ego and the desire to overindulge it.

The track opens with a soft, low bass note of E. It’s in 9/8 time, sometimes subdivided 5+4, sometimes 3+3+3. The former subdivision is heard with the low E in the bass, and a soft guitar line of G and an F that’s a minor 7th above the G, then a G♯ and the F, then an A♯ with the F, then the G♯ and F, and a G♮and F. In the first five beats of the 5+4, the E is on the first beat, and G, G♯, A♯, and G♮ on the third beat, and F on the fourth beat. In the next four beats of the 5+4, the G, G♯, A♯, G♯, and G♮ happen on the second beat, while the E and F occur on the same beats as before. All of these notes suggest an octatonic scale rising by alternating half-steps (e.g., E to F) and whole steps (e.g., F to G).

As for the 3+3+3 subdivision, it is heard in the lead played on the guitar and doubled on the violin, while the other guitar part described above is now played on the Fender Rhodes. The lead is in F Aeolian (or F natural minor scale), mostly made up of dotted quarter notes, though with some ornaments, ascending and descending in steps.

Then the music gets louder, moving up to C, the lead guitar and violin doing the same 3+3+3 subdivision, but in the Phrygian mode, with mostly dotted quarter notes and some ornaments as before, ascending and descending mostly by steps. The Fender Rhodes is doing a variation on the 5+4 subdivision theme, but with notes of a low C in the bass and with upper notes of C and B♭; then a low A in the bass, and with upper notes of C♯ and B♭, then a low F♯ in the bass, and with upper notes of D♯ and B♭; then back down with the A, C♯ and B♭, then C, C and B♭; then this whole progression is repeated, but with a playing of the last F♯, D♯, and B♭heard twice.

After this, we return to the beginning progression with the E in the bass, but Hammer plays a synth solo, which continues through the change to the progression with the bass notes in C, A, F♯, and A. The track returns twice to the progression and theme with E in the bass (with the C, A, F♯, and A part one more time in between, too), and it ends with the last chord in F major.

XI: Open Country Joy

This track has a ternary form, opening with the feeling of an idyllic setting of being out in the country and enjoying the peacefulness of nature. Then the middle section contrasts that joy with a sense of the stress of living in the hectic, bustling city. Then there’s a return to the idyllic setting of the beginning.

Such a contrast between rural and urban atmospheres ties in again, in a symbolic sense, with the tension recurring throughout the album of nirvana and samsara, of the peace that comes from renouncing the ego (the country joy), and the pain that results from an overindulgence in the ego (the stress of the city). Fittingly, it is during the ‘city’ middle section that the flashier soloing is heard (overindulgence of the ego), while during the country sections, we hear simpler, more modest playing, including triadic chord progressions rather than the more usual harmonic sophistication associated with jazz.

Indeed, the beginning chord progression is in D major, with variations on chords in D major, C major, and G major, McLaughlin embellishing the chords with such ornaments, here and there on his 12-string, as suspension 9ths and 4ths, etc. You can also hear Hammer doing some licks on the Fender Rhodes.

Goodman comes in with a violin melody, ascending by step from the tonic D up to A, then up again by step from there to E above the D an octave higher; then he goes essentially down by step back to the A. The chord progression at this point is D major, C major, B minor, and to A major, then G major, F♯ minor and to E minor, then back to the dominant A major. There is a repeat of this progression, but it resolves in the end on a B major chord.

There’s a brief silence, then we’re brought abruptly into the ‘city’ section, also in B. There’s a flashy, fast flurry of notes, a largely descending pentatonic run played on the guitar (six-string) and violin, with Cobham’s fast drumming in the background. Then McLaughlin, Goodman, and Hammer (on the synth) take turns soloing, each solo interrupted by either the fast pentatonic run just described, or another, similar one. During his second violin solo, Goodman adds the wah-wah pedal. This taking of turns soloing happens twice, then we return to the ‘country.’

Goodman incorporates a bit of country-music-style fiddling during his solo in this final section. The track ends as the first ‘country’ section did, with a B major chord.

XII: Resolution

This two-minute track that ends the album is, as I said above, a brief instrumental version of the beginning and ending parts of that song, “One Word,” by Tony Williams Lifetime. Instead of the melody being sung, as it was by Jack Bruce, it is played by the violin and guitar, doubling each other again, in B♭Dorian/Aeolian/Phrygian with a guitar chordal backing. It’s all in 4/4 time.

The melodic contour is made up of three-note descents by step down to major or minor thirds, then ascending leaps by perfect or augmented fourths, or by perfect fifths, as it is at the end. The contour rises by pitch and dynamics to reach a climax at the end of the track.

The chords McLaughlin plays are an A major triad over a B♭ bass note, then a B major 7th/B♭, then a B♭minor, and E♭major over a B♭bass, and similar such variations. These dissonant chords build tension in the music, making “Resolution” a rather odd choice for a title.

Indeed, we’re not hearing a resolution in harmony, nor does it seem like a resolution of spiritual aspirations. Perhaps this is why the lyric of the original song, with its ideal of oneness with everything, is excluded (McLaughlin could have simply found a singer to do a guest vocal on the album).

Or maybe the whole point of “Resolution” isn’t that it’s a resolution of the spiritual problem of ego, but that it’s about having the sense of resolve to keep on trying to overcome the desires and lusts of the ego.

XIII: Conclusion

Such an interpretation of the final track, of course, ties in with the general theme I’ve emphasized about Birds of Fire. To attain oneness with Brahman, moksha, nirvana, isn’t a state of sentimentality, in which all of one’s pain is magically removed, once and for all time. It’s an ongoing process, a never-ending struggle.

This interpretation can explain how music with such mystical subject matter can also have so much tension and passion in it, as opposed to relaxing New Age music. The Mahavishnu Orchestra’s album truly exemplifies the meaning of what it is to be “a Bird of Fire winging the Infinite.”

The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter Six

The gods met in the dark place again.

“Now that I, our brother in the sea, and our grandmother and sister of the Earth, have sent out our warnings,” Zeus said. [We’ll use the Greek names, too, for convenience.] “It is time for you to send yours, Brother.”

“Yes,” Hades said. “I know a particularly despicable man in the oil mining and…as the people of Earth call it…’fracking’ businesses. He deserves to meet an unhappy end.”

“Good,” Zeus said. “With your attack, our wave of warnings will be complete.”

“But most won’t listen,” Gaea said with more tears running down her cheeks. “You saw how that young man’s brother wouldn’t even consider that the deaths of his clients were caused by me.”

“No, of course not,” Zeus said. “People like him never listen. We do not do these things, however, to make the deaf hear us. We do them to make those who do listen, listen harder. As for those who never listen, we can know that we gave them all fair warning, so we needn’t pity them or feel any remorse when we ultimately destroy them.”

“Yes, Brother, this is true,” she said after a few more sobs. “I just wish this all didn’t have to be so painful for everyone.”

“They already make everything painful for everyone,” Hades said. “What we are doing will ultimately end the pain, and bring in a newer, better world for all.”

“Yes, and the making of all things to be new is coming very soon,” Poseidon said.

“Go, Brother,” Zeus said to Hades. “Go find that employer of miners and…’frackers.’ Send him the message he and his workers all need to see and hear.”

“Immediately, Brother,” Hades said to Zeus, then he disappeared from the place.

Nina woke up from the dream. Hades is going to hit the owner of a mining company, someone who is also into fracking? she thought. And the gods have sent the dream to me! Then she whispered, “Mr. Lipton, my husband’s boss?” I’d have no sympathy for him if he dies, since he’s such a greedy asshole, but Steve works in one of his mines. What if he gets killed?

She went online and started an instant message with Michelle. “Did you just dream about the gods discussing the attacks on Earth?” she typed.

“And that Hades was going to hit the owner of a mining company?” Michelle typed.

“I’ll bet Shelly and Gary have had our dream, too,” Nina typed. “My husband works for a mining company.”

“Oh, no!” Michelle typed. “You’ve got to warn him.”

“I will as soon as I can. But what about Shelly and Gary?”

“Yeah, let’s get them in the discussion as soon as they’re available,” Michelle typed.

Nina looked back in the direction of her bedroom. She saw Steve getting out of bed to go to the bathroom.

“Honey,” she said. 

“Yeah,” he said as he turned on the bathroom light and went in.

“When you go to work over the next few days…the next few weeks,” she said, “be especially careful, OK?”

She didn’t hear an answer because the bathroom door was closed. All she could hear was the tinkling of his piss in the toilet water.

“Honey, did you hear me?”

She heard a flushing of the toilet, then he came out of the bathroom.

“What was that, honey?” he asked with a yawn.

“When you’re at work for the next few days and weeks, be especially careful, OK?”

“Why do I have to be especially careful? What big bad thing is going to happen? Is Mr. Lipton planning to have us all killed for wanting to form a union?”

“No, I don’t think it’s going to be anything like that, unless you’ve been really vocal about it,” she said.

“Then what are you worried about?”

She thought for a second. He’s not going to believe any of my pagan stuff. “Oh…just be careful, OK?”

“Anything you say, babe,” he said, then went back to bed. I’ll bet it’s more of her ‘pagan’ nonsense, he thought as he lay there, beginning to drift back off to sleep. Whatever. I’ll be careful.

She was too worried to go back to bed just yet.

Analysis of ‘Tootsie’

Tootsie is a 1982 satirical comedy directed by Sydney Pollack and written by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal, from a story by Gelbart and Don McGuire. It stars Dustin Hoffman, Jessica Lange, and Teri Garr, with Dabney Coleman, Charles Durning, Bill Murray, Pollack, Geena Davis, George Gaynes, and Doris Belack.

Partly inspired by a play McGuire wrote in the early 1970s, Tootsie was first made into a screenplay in 1979 by Dick Richards, Bob Kaufman, and Robert Evans; Richards would be made director, and he showed Hoffman the project. Hoffman gained complete creative control after signing on. Production was delayed because of screenplay revisions and the replacement of Richards with another director, Hal Ashby, then with Pollack.

The film was a critical and commercial success, grossing $177.2 million worldwide, and being nominated for ten Oscars, including Best Picture; it won Best Supporting Actress for Lange. Tootsie has been selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the complete movie.

Since Tootsie is largely about people struggling in the acting profession, it can be seen to embody the idea behind Jacques‘s famous quote from As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage,/And all the men and women merely players;/They have their exits and their entrances,/And one man in his time plays many parts…” (III, vii, lines 139-142).

Not only is Michael Dorsey (Hoffman) pretending to be a woman, “Dorothy Michaels,” to get a major money-making role out of desperation to find acting work–to raise $8,000 to produce a play by his roommate, Jeff Slater (Murray)–but so is everyone else, in a larger sense, pretending and playing roles, not just as actors and actresses, but also in ordinary life, too. Two major roles in this real-life sort are the expected masculine and feminine roles of society–something “Dorothy” is going to clash with.

Indeed, though Dorsey is a capable and respected actor in New York City, “no one will hire [him],” as his agent, George Fields (Pollack), bluntly tells him to his face, because he is too perfectionistic and difficult to work with. Dorsey is an example of the kind of person I wrote about in my blog post, How Does the Non-dupe Err? To succeed in this society, you have to learn how to be fake with people, to say what they want to hear, to be gracious and polite. If you refuse to be duped by society’s polite hypocrisies, you will err and fail to succeed. This is the problem of otherwise talented Dorsey.

So in all irony, he does the greatest act of fakery of them all: he pretends to have a completely different identity, one not even of his own sex. This leads to the central theme of Tootsie: the dialectical tension between being fake and keeping it real, something embodied not only in “Dorothy,” but also in many of the other characters in the movie.

The very name of the movie, “Tootsie,” is just a brief detail in the story, a reference to something “she” is called once by Ron Carlisle (Coleman), the womanizing, male-chauvinist-pig director of the soap opera (Southwest General) for which “she” lands the role of hospital administrator Emily Kimberly. “She” protests his referring to her by that demeaning name, for indeed, “Tootsie” is just a fake social role. No real woman in the whole wide world is a “Tootsie,” and ironically, it’s a man who tells a man this truth.

The movie begins with a shot of Dorsey’s makeup in a dressing room; he isn’t dressing up like “Dorothy” yet, of course–he’s gluing on a fake mustache. In other words, he ironically is making himself to be even ‘more’ of a man than he is.

Dorsey makes ends meet by working as a waiter in a restaurant and teaching acting classes. One of his students is Sandy Lester (Garr), who also wants a chance to play the Emily Kimberly role. Her unsuccessful audition nonetheless makes Dorsey aware of the acting opportunity, because he has tried to help her improve her acting for the audition.

Sandy is rather timid, and she isn’t good at projecting the kind of rage the Kimberly role is supposed to have. So while she is practicing a scene from the soap opera with an attempt at that rage in front of Dorsey, he deliberately provokes her, hurling harsh criticisms of her acting to get her mad enough. This here is an example of that dialectical tension between showing real feelings and pretending to have them.

(As we know, during the filming of The Shining, Stanley Kubrick used the same kind of tactics, though far nastier and more abusive, on poor Shelley Duvall, rationalizing that it was the only way he could get a convincing performance out of her, as a terrified, stressed woman. It worked, but Kubrick was still an asshole to have done it.)

Now, when Dorsey is all dressed up as “Dorothy” to try out for the Kimberly role, Carlisle deems “her” physically unfit for the part. He doesn’t even give “her” a chance to act and see if “she” can embody the assertive nature of Kimberly. Dorsey initially presents “Dorothy” as a rather genteel, lady-like persona; but when Carlisle rejects “her” out of hand, without even giving “her” a chance to play the role, the inner Dorsey comes out swinging, demonstrating just how tough and assertive “Dorothy” can be. Ironically it’s his difficult personality that gets him the part, finally.

So again, we see the dialectical tension between being who you really are, vs the persona you present to society. It’s natural for Dorsey to be belligerent and argumentative, not for “Dorothy” to do so. On the other hand, being genteel and lady-like are personae that women use in order to fit into society, because it is expected of them to behave in a properly “feminine” way; yet “Dorothy,” enraged at being rejected so unfairly, lets out real emotions that any woman should have the right to express in such a situation.

When “she” get the chance to audition after all, “she” at one point nervously drops the papers with “her” lines, and as “she” stoops down to pick them up, Julie Nichols (Lange), an actress who plays a nurse on the soap opera, helps “Dorothy” pick up the papers. She smiles at “her,” and Dorsey is instantly smitten with her. Being a woman will soon be most inconvenient for him.

Another thing that “Dorothy” does that is, on the one hand, disconcerting to the crew and production of the soap opera, yet on the other hand, a demonstration of “her” natural talent and way of keeping it real, is “her” tendency to disregard the script and to ad lib “her” own dialogue. Again, Dorsey is playing a role, as “Dorothy” and as Kimberly, but his true, rebellious nature is also coming out.

He gets the role, and since “she” has told the producer, Rita Marshall (Belack), and Carlisle that Fields is “her” agent–though he hasn’t yet told Fields that he is “Dorothy”–Marshall tells “her” that they’ll send the contracts over to Fields that very day…so “Dorothy” has to meet up with Fields as soon as possible to let him know that Dorsey and “Dorothy” are one and the same person.

“Dorothy” finds Fields in a restaurant and accosts him there. Again, “she” is presenting the usual genteel, lady-like demeanour, yet “she” also mixes into it the usual Dorsey aggressiveness when “she” insists on sitting with Fields at his table in the restaurant. “She” even has the audacity, as a presumed stranger, to impose on him to buy “her” lunch. Once again, we have that tension between playing a role and being one’s true self. Fields will be far more shocked, of course, to learn that “she” is actually Dorsey in drag.

Now, mention of a man in drag in a comedy leads me inevitably to address an issue that’s sensitive to many today, one to which people were not all that sensitive back in the 1980s. While we shouldn’t be laughing at a man in drag here, for the sake of the transgender community, we can still appreciate Tootsie for the other social issues it addresses, namely, its social critique of sex roles and the experience of women being treated disrespectfully by men. For it is Dorsey’s very dressing in drag that he comes to an understanding of what women go through; he’s like John Howard Griffin in Black Like Me. Perhaps Tootsie could have been named Female Like Me.

The very name, Tootsie, as I mentioned above, is an ironic one for the movie, since “Dorothy” is anything but a tootsie. While Dorsey has found himself falling for Julie, he’s also saddened to see her in an unhappy relationship with Carlisle, who being the philanderer that he is, is also fooling around with another pretty cast member, April Page (Davis).

“Dorothy” hits it off with Julie, who asks if “she” could help her go over a lot of lines for the show in her apartment. There, “she” gets more of an idea of how Carlisle treats her; “she” also comes to notice how much Julie drinks. Julie tells “her” that she’d like a man to be honest with her about how much he likes her, and instead of playing roles and giving her a line, he could just, in all bluntness, tell her he finds her very interesting, and that he’d like to make love with her.

Dorsey, of course, makes a mental note of what Julie has said; and later, at a party that Fields has invited him to, where Julie also is, Dorsey can approach her as himself. Remembering word for word what she said she wanted a man to say to her, he says those exact words to her, assuming he’ll succeed.

She throws her drink in his face.

In this scene, we once again see the tension between being oneself and playing a role. He has said the ‘up front, honest words’ she’s said she wants to hear from a man…yet he has also simply used a line on her. She can sense this, of course, in spite of his acting talent in delivering the line, and it’s even more obvious that she won’t accept hearing a man she’s never met before say he wants to get in bed with her.

To get back to April Page…and speaking of male lechery…”Dorothy” first meets her in the dressing room, and she’s in her bra and panties. April is totally being her unadorned self in front of Dorsey, who must find it very hard (pardon the pun) to carry on pretending to be female. Talk about the…tension…between faking it and keeping it real.

As I mentioned above, on the set, “Dorothy” tends to disregard the script when “she” feels that “her” lines don’t make Kimberly’s points strongly enough, so “she” ad libs instead. As a result of this improvising, Dorsey makes “Dorothy” into something of a feminist icon for American women, refusing to take any man’s shit and standing up for “her” rights.

An example of such ad libbing as an assertion of women’s rights is when Dr. Brewster, played by John Van Horn (Gaynes) is supposed to kiss Kimberly, supposedly out of admiration for her sense of power and authority as a woman. Dorsey won’t tolerate a man kissing him on the lips, of course, so he has “Dorothy” hit Brewster on the head with some files in “her” hands. “She” then reprimands him for treating “her” as a sex object and not respecting “her” for “her” mind.

John Van Horn, incidentally, is the polar opposite of “Dorothy.” He not only sticks to the lines religiously; he’s dependent on them, never able to memorize them and needing cue cards to read from. He’s terrified of having to do live acting on TV, for fear of screwing up–he’s that incompetent. He’s like Marlon Brando, but without the acting talent to compensate. Van Horn is an all-around fake.

Meanwhile, the ad libbed antics of “Dorothy” have made “her” a sensation among women viewers of the soap opera, for they find “her” assertiveness to be an inspiration, a form of women’s liberation. As “she” becomes a big TV star, photographers are taking promotional pictures of “her” in various outfits for magazines like Cosmopolitan, Ms., Woman’s Day, TV Guide, People, and New York. She’s gone from ad libbing from her heart to posing for cameras.

On this last example of magazines “she” poses for, “she” is seen in a bright red dress, saluting with the American flag in the background. In all of this, we can see examples of the tension between someone keeping it real as against faking it. “Her” ad libs are all Dorsey keeping it real, while “Dorothy” is of course fake. The implication of “her” as an embodiment of the experience of ‘freedom’ in the US (i.e., free to be one’s real self) is particularly ironic–and nauseating, if you have left-wing views like me–when contrasted against the ‘totalitarianism’ of life in such socialist states as the USSR, a major source of propaganda in the West in the 1980s. Again, freedom to be real is often fake, and appearances are often deceiving.

Dorsey talks to Fields about getting other acting jobs as “Dorothy.” He’s aware of what a feminist message “she” has for women, and he’d like to expand on that. He, as an actor, has experienced frustrations similar to those of career women: unemployment, waiting forever for phone calls, and working in places where he has no power or control.

While Fields is dismissing as ludicrous the idea that Dorsey can both play other female roles as “Dorothy,” and that as “her” he has important things to say to women, he lists off a number of classic female roles he could play–namely, Medea, Ophelia, and Lady Macbeth…even Eleanor Roosevelt. These choices of female roles for “Dorothy” are significant in terms of Dorsey’s wish to say something important to women, for all of them, in one sense or another, represent a kind of women’s defiance of male power.

Medea takes revenge on her husband, Jason, for abandoning her for another woman (Creusa, or Glauce), which will force Medea, a foreigner in Corinth, to go into exile. She kills Creusa as well as her father, Creon, the king of Corinth, and even the two sons of Medea and Jason! Ophelia, in her madness over Hamlet‘s perceived (or actual?) madness and his killing of her father, Polonius, sings bawdy songs in front of the Danish king and queen, shocking and outraging them. Lady Macbeth conspires with and goads her husband into killing King Duncan of Scotland so Macbeth can be the next king…and she, the next queen of Scotland. Eleanor Roosevelt was a kind of feminist icon in how she completely transformed the traditionally silent role of the First Lady into a platform for political and social activism, proving that a woman could hold immense public influence on the world stage.

Indeed, these references to Shakespeare and other classical theatre bring me back to my “All the world’s a stage” quote from As You Like It. We are all acting, in a larger sense, in real life. Yet within that fakery of acting in society, we’re also paradoxically putting in a lot of our real selves, too, that tension between faking it and keeping it real.

Dorsey tells Fields that he is “Dorothy,” and “she” is him–the role of “Dorothy” is coming out of him. He insists to skeptical Fields that he isn’t just acting, but that there’s a woman inside him, that he’s experiencing the feelings that “Dorothy” has. There’s no script he’s memorizing–not just a lack of one in his ad libs, but also in all of his interactions with others as “her.” This is true Method Acting for Dorsey: the actor tries to achieve sincere and expressive performances by identifying with, understanding, and experiencing a character’s inner motivations and emotions.

Some of the assertiveness of “Dorothy” is rubbing off onto Julie when we see the crew film a scene on the soap opera, in which she aggressively tells off Dr. Brewster. Immediately after the filming of that scene, we have Carlisle’s calling of “Dorothy” by the name of “Tootsie,” and so it is fitting at this time to see “her” telling him off, too.

Dorsey’s charade as “Dorothy” is getting more and more intense, for himself and for others. While in Sandy’s apartment, and she’s taking a shower, he’s in her bedroom and wondering how “Dorothy” will look in one of Sandy’s dresses; so he gets undressed, about to try it on. But she finishes her shower faster than expected and suddenly returns to her bedroom, finding Dorsey in his underwear.

He’s forced to think fast and improvise, so he claims that he wants to sleep with her. She’s receptive to it, and they do; this, of course, will complicate what was just supposed to be a friendship and professional relationship: Sandy is going to act in Jeff’s play.

In this moment of foolishness, we again see the dialectical tension between being oneself and pretending to be someone else. Dorsey is stripped down to his underwear (more his ‘true’ self), yet he’s pretending to want Sandy. He wants to try on her dress, to pretend to be “Dorothy” in it, but he sincerely wants to wear it, too, even when he doesn’t have to be “her,” for as he’s told Fields, “she” really is in Dorsey.

“Dorothy” is getting intense for other people, too, requiring Dorsey to get more intensely involved in the character. Julie’s widowed father, Les (Durning), has met “Dorothy,” and he falls for “her.” Now Dorsey has to keep Les from getting too close without upsetting him and, by extension, Julie.

Meanwhile, John Van Horn arrives at Dorsey’s home, and he makes sexual advances on “Dorothy.” Luckily for Dorsey, Jeff arrives and walks in on them. Soon after, Sandy arrives at the apartment, upset that Dorsey hasn’t answered any of her calls or shown any interest in carrying on his romantic relationship with her. He tries to placate her by giving her a gift of chocolates he got from Les, but she reads the card attached to the package, which has Les’s name on it, and she asks Dorsey if he’s gay. When he finally tells her the truth, that he’s in love with another woman, Sandy is infuriated and leaves the apartment. Dorsey’s excessive pretending eventually forces him to be himself with her.

While we’re developing this supposed LGBT theme, at another point in the story, when “Dorothy” is alone with Julie–after she’s ended her relationship with Carlisle–Dorsey forgets himself in his passion for her and almost kisses her on the lips. Straight, of course, but not homophobic, Julie gently rejects the advance of “Dorothy,” naturally assuming that “she” is a lesbian.

To make things even more difficult for Dorsey, the popularity of “Dorothy” on the soap opera means that the producer, Rita Marshall, wants to extend “her” contract for a year, forcing Dorsey to keep up a charade that, in its growing intensity, is getting to be too much for him. He has to figure out a way to get out of playing the role.

A technical problem forces the cast of the soap opera to perform live on camera, and Dorsey finds his opportunity to get out of playing “Dorothy.” He goes off-script yet again, to the dismay of production, and improvises some nonsense about Emily Kimberly actually being her twin brother, Edward, who took her place to avenge her. He pulls off the wig with an absurdly dead-pan face, and he shocks everyone on set and those watching the show.

Here again, we have the tension between keeping it real and pretending. Dorsey is keeping it real by revealing that he’s a man, but his improvised story about Edward is more pretending. Once the cameras stop rolling, Julie, furious with him for his deception, punches him in the gut and storms off the set.

Les, naturally, is upset about it all, too. Dorsey has returned an engagement ring Les gave him, but when the two meet in a bar, they reconcile, share a few beers, and play some pool.

With the needed money now, Dorsey and Sandy can do Jeff’s play. Dorsey meets with Julie outside the TV studio. She at first doesn’t want to talk to him, but he manages to warm her to him after he tells her he’s reconciled with her father. She admits she misses “Dorothy,” and he says “she” misses Julie, too, and that “she” is right there, inside Dorsey, for whenever Julie needs “her.” He just has to learn how to be “her” without the dress.

His whole character arc has been about learning what it’s like to be a woman, and how to sympathize with women. Such sensitivity should be ideal for Julie, so she can accept him now.

After all, he’s finally keeping it real.

The Gods Must Be Furious–Chapter Five

A few days later, some rich old men were playing golf on their exclusive country club’s course in Indiana…the one Gary had been talking about. One of them, Gene, snorted at his caddy, who was daydreaming at the moment.

“Jeff!” Gene growled at the young man. “Get out of dreamland and get me my putter!”

As Jeff looked through Gene’s golf bag, he said (not softly enough), “Little kids should be playing here, not grumpy old men with too much money.”

“What?” Gene snapped.

“I think you heard me fine,” Jeff said, looking Gene straight in the eye.

“It’s your job to be my caddy, to give me advice on how to play and give me my clubs immediately, not to give me lip! Do you understand?!”

“Yes, but you can try being a little nicer, too, old man. We workers have feelings too, you know.”

“Do I have to report you to the country club, you insolent little bastard?”

“I’ll speed things up for you, you stuck-up rich cunt! I quit.” Jeff gave him the finger along with the putter, then started walking off.

“I’ll make sure you never work as a caddy again, you little shit!”

“Good,” Jeff said as he kept going.

“Smart-ass kids these days have no respect for the elderly,” said the man Gene was playing against. “He’ll need all the help he can get finding a job in this economy.”

“You’re goddamn right, Roger,” Gene said, then got into position to putt his ball into the hole. “Those working-class lowlifes are way beneath us.”

But just as he was about to tap the ball, the ground began shaking.

“What the hell?” Roger said. “Since when do we ever get earthquakes in this area?”

The shaking didn’t stop. In fact, it got worse. Instead of being afraid, though, Gene just got angry with the inconvenience of it all.

“Goddammit, when’s the shaking gonna stop?” Gene grumbled. “I’m surprised my ball hasn’t fallen off its tee.”

“Yet,” Roger added.

“Oh, shit!” Gene shouted as he saw it finally fall off. “It’s rolling away!”

“Oh, my God!” Roger yelled as the shaking was getting really bad, causing them both to stagger.

The two men were no longer able to keep their balance. They fell on their asses. Their golf cart went on its side. Other golfers were yelling in shock at the worsening quake, staggering and falling, too.

Then Gene and Roger, still lying on the ground, looked down at the grass just by them. The ground was cracking open. The two men gasped.

Gene’s ball fell in the widening opening.

A few seconds later, so did Gene and Roger, screaming the whole time as they went down. 

Their bodies smashed against the rocky walls inside, then their screaming stopped forever.

Several other rich golfers fell in screaming, too, their screams also being silenced soon after.

Shocked Jeff was frozen in fear, after having also fallen to the ground and lying there, as he saw his two bosses fall to their deaths, swallowed up in the earth. 

I may not have liked the two of them, he thought, but I wouldn’t have wished that on them. I wouldn’t have wished that on my worst enemy.

Then he looked down at the grass, now that the earthquake had ended and the cracks had closed up.

He saw a woman’s beautiful, smiling face in the shadows between the grass blades.

“What in the flying fuck?” he whispered to himself. I’m not high. Why am I seeing that? he wondered.

Gary wasn’t anywhere on the grass to see her face, but he was in the staff building, in his brother’s office. They all felt the quake, Gary having just finished chatting with his brother about the thunderstorm and the sea storm, as well as the dreams, and putting up with his brother’s sneers and derision about Gary’s pagan interpretations of what had happened. 

The beginning of the quake stopped his brother’s laughing. 

The continuing—and worsening—of the quake replaced his laughing with bodily trembling.

They both needed several minutes to calm down once the shaking ended.

“Do you believe me now, Cam?” Gary asked.

“You think a goddess caused this quake?” Cam, who’d had both shared dreams but forgot all about them, said. “Look, I’ll agree that this was scary, what just happened, but I’m not about to lose my ability to reason, Gary.”

“Suit it yourself, Cam,” Gary said. “But I can guarantee you that more mayhem is going to come, and to more rich people like those old farts out there. You’ll see.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Cam said. “Sure. Pray for me, won’t you?”

“I will, Cam. But it will be up to you to change your attitude if you expect to survive what’s coming.”

“Oooh!” Cam walked out of the room laughing, if nervously.

“If you’re not going to worry about yourself, you can worry about your clients, Cam!”

Though his brother was certainly worried about his clients, especially the families of those who had been swallowed up in the earth, he didn’t show such concern to Gary by closing the hallway door behind him. 

Gary just sat on a sofa in the room and let out a big sigh.

“What the hell am I going to do?” he whispered to himself. Cam is never going to listen to me. He’s such an arrogant asshole, but he’s my brother, and I love him. His sympathies lie completely with the rich bastards to patronize this country club. All he cares about is the money this place makes, the profits he shares with the boss. He’s gonna die with all of them when the gods finally do their thing. How am I going to save Cam?