‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter Three

Al was relieved, for the vast majority of his date with Hannah the following night, that she’d never brought up the subject of meeting his family and having dinner with them. She’d never even mentioned it in her texts or phone calls that day, prior to their date.

The fact is, she was worried herself that he was going to try to get out of the family get-together again.

Still, as he was walking her home in her neighbourhood, and they were holding hands and looking up at the stars, admiring their shining beauty, she knew she had to bring up the dinner sooner or later. So she took a deep breath and looked at him, having noted his thinly-disguised nervousness right from the beginning of their date.

“So,” she asked, “have you talked to your family about me going over to your home and having dinner with you all?”

She felt his hand jerk in hers and saw his whole body shake in a set of spasms.

“What is it, Al? Surely it won’t be that bad for me to meet them. Have you talked to them about it at all, or not?”

“N-not yet,” he said. “But I w-will s-soon.”

“Al, you had all of last night after our date and all day today to talk to them about it. Why are you delaying it?”

“I-I told you before. They’ll bully me and make me look stupid in front of you. I don’t want you to see that. I’m really sensitive about it; it really upsets me when they do that.”

“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “I told you before. If they treat you badly, I won’t see it as a fault in you. I’ll see it as a fault in them. After the one dinner, I won’t have to see them again. I won’t want to.”

“Please, Hannah. This is so hard for me.”

“Surely it can’t be that bad, Al. It’s just a dinner.”

“Can we please just not have the dinner with them? Everything is so nice when it’s just you and me.”

“This isn’t about them having a low opinion of you, is it, Al?” She was getting angry now.

“It is, it is, Hannah. It’s just as I said.”

“I don’t think so. They don’t like you dating a non-Chinese, a non-Asian, and you don’t have the guts to stand up for your girlfriend!”

“No, no, it’s not that. It’s…”

“It’s…what?!“

“It’s…well,…”

“If you truly loved me, you’d stand up for me, and you’d get them to grow out of their xenophobia.”

“My family isn’t racist at all, Hannah!”

“Then what is it?”

He remained silent for several seconds.

“Well, whatever it is, Al, you’re hiding something from me, and no relationship can ever work if either of the people involved is hiding something from the other. There has to be openness and honesty for a relationship to work, and if you can’t be open and honest with me about your family, then I guess we should break up.”

“No, no, no! I love you, Hannah, more than anything!”

“Then you know what you have to do to prove your love to me!”

He took a deep breath. “OK, OK. H-how about…w-we have your whole f-family…come over?”

“My whole family?” She sneered at him in disbelief. “We just went from you not wanting me to meet your family to my mom, dad, brother, and me meeting them, all in one fell swoop?”

“Well, I f-figure i-if I have to go through you meeting my family, w-we’d might a-as well have our whole family meet them, all at once, and just get this all over with. They’ll all have to meet each other eventually anyway, right? And after that, you and I can just be together without w-worrying about whether or not my family likes you, whether or not they respect me, or if your family likes me or my family. You and I will still have each other, and that’s all that matters, right?”

“OK,” she said slowly, still looking askance at him. “Are you sure you want us all there?”

“Yes, I’m a-absolutely sure,” he said.

“Really? You still look a little nervous about it.”

“Well, I am, ’cause my family will make me look stupid in front of all of your family, but if you don’t care about that, who cares if your family cares about it, right?”

“Still, it might make you a little too uncomfortable. I don’t think they should come; only I should.”

“Well, think of your family coming as me making it up to you, f-for my reluctance to have you meet my family.”

“Oh, Al, that isn’t necessary.”

“I think it is. Our whole families should meet each other, as a test to see if they’re cool with us being together. If they don’t approve, fuck ’em. We love each other, that’s all that matters.”

They’d now reached the front porch of her house.

“Well, OK. We can have the dinner tomorrow night, at about…8:00?”

“That sounds good. Can your whole family make it?”

“They should all be free, and they’ll be happy not to have to cook their own dinner, and they all love Chinese food. I’ll tell them about it as soon as I go inside, so you tell your family we’re all having dinner together, OK?”

“OK, I’ll tell them for sure. I promise.”

“Great. We’ll see you at your home tomorrow night at 8:00. If there’s a problem, text me, as I will you if my family can’t make it.”

“Sure. Good night, Hannah.” They kissed.

“Good night,” she said with a smile, and she went inside her house.

Al just stood there for a few minutes, frozen on the spot.

I hope Hannah and her family can forgive me, he thought.

Analysis of ‘Kin-dza-dza!’

Kin-dza-dza! is a 1986 Soviet film directed by Georgiy Daneliya, and written by him and Revaz Gabriadze. A dystopian science fiction black comedy, it stars Stanislav Lyubshin, Levan Gabriadze, Yury Yakoviev, and Yevgeny Leonov.

In 2016, the British movie magazine, Little White Lies, described Kin-dza-dza! as a cross between Mad Max, Monty Python, and Tarkovsky, saying the film is still relevant. The same year, Russia Beyond said that Russians still love the film. Three years earlier, an animated remake of the film was done by Daneliya, called Ku! Kin-dza-dza! The cartoon won Best Animated Feature Film in the 2013 Asia Pacific Screen Awards.

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

I see this film as not only relevant for our times, but also prophetic in how the planet Pluke, in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy–to which the Russian and Georgian protagonists, respectively Vladimir Mashkov, or Uncle Vova (Lyubshin), and Gedevan Alexandrovitch Alexidze, or the Fiddler (Gabriadze), are teleported–is representative of the capitalist world, as contrasted with the Soviet world from which the two originate.

Now, as of the making and release of Kin-dza-dza!, which had been achieved by December of 1986, Mikhael Gorbachev had not yet implemented his policies of perestroika and glasnost as an attempt to put an end to the ongoing economic stagnation that had begun during the Brezhnev years; but he had spoken of the two reform concepts in his report to the 27th Congress of the Communist Party, which occurred from late February to early March that same year.

Gorbachev had given a speech the previous year about the slowing economy, and the perestroika reforms that would come by the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s included the return of “free market” economics and private property. When Yeltsin took over, not only were these reforms all the more aggressively and brutally implemented, plunging millions of Russians–hitherto used to a planned economy that had provided for their basic needs–into poverty, but attempts to resist the reforms were ruthlessly suppressed.

I bring up this history to show how the film can be seen to have predicted, in allegorical form, the economic and political disaster that the bringing back of capitalism would cause. Despite the economic problems that the Soviet Union was undoubtedly going through in the mid-1980s, most Russians wanted to keep the Soviet system intact; indeed, majorities of Russians since the dissolution of the USSR have consistently said that life was happier then than it’s been since the return of capitalism, and a referendum had been held in 1991, the results of which said that the majority of Russians had wanted to keep the Soviet system.

So, when Russians in the mid-1980s were hearing Gorbachev’s talk of economic, market reforms, the instincts of many of them must have been warning them of the danger of his reactionary talk. Recall Stalin’s words in this connection: “What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.” 

Such is the political background in which we should understand what Kin-dza-dza! is trying to say to us. Uncle Vova’s thoughtless tapping of a button on the teleportation device of the barefoot, alien stranger is like Gorbachev and his followers foolishly allowing themselves to be influenced by the Western capitalists and bringing about the “new world order” that has led to all of our economic and political problems today. For it is that very pressing of the random button on the teleportation device that sends Uncle Vova and the Fiddler from the city centre on Kalinin Prospect in Moscow to the dystopian, desert wasteland of planet Pluke, with its glaring class inequalities.

The story begins with Uncle Vova returning home from work as a construction foreman. He chats with his wife, Lucya (played by Galina Daneliya-Yurkova), about mundane troubles at work. She asks him to go out and buy some bread and noodles, which she earlier forgot to buy, so he goes out to do that.

He arrives at the city square to buy he food, and there he meets the Fiddler, who tells him about the unshod alien traveler with the teleportation device. What should be noted is that, up until our two protagonists’ unwitting teleportation to Pluke, that the world we see around them, Moscow, is a perfectly normal society, without Pluke’s deprivation. Furthermore, the alien traveler, barefoot, scruffy, and as lost as a fish out of water, makes one think of a homeless man, which is fitting given that, as an outsider to the Soviet Union, he is representative of the capitalist world.

Now, the sight of our two protagonists stuck in a strange desert, actually a desert planet, reminds me of R2-D2 and C-3PO on Tatooine. The arrival of Uef (Leonov) and Bi (Yakoviev) in their flying vehicle suggests the Jawas, though these latter two have little, if anything, in common with the short, hooded droid thieves.

I’m not saying that the filmmakers intended these similarities with the early scenes of the first Star Wars movie, but the coincidental parallels between Pluke and Tatooine are meaningful in how they illustrate that the two desolate, desert planets are reflective of how capitalism sucks the life out of a place’s ecology. On Tatooine, Luke helps his uncle and aunt use moisture vaporators to produce water; on Pluke, fuel is called “luts,” and it’s made from water, so drinking water is a rare and valuable commodity.

The two droids unwittingly land on Tatooine to escape from the Galactic Empire, and they’re chased by imperial stormtroopers. Uncle Vova and the Fiddler have been thrust upon Pluke, and they’ll have to deal with the planet’s “ecilopps” (police, spelled backwards), whose bullying nature reminds one of the skeletally-armoured stormtroopers (after all, ACAB). Not yet knowing where he and his Georgian friend are, Uncle Vova comments that they must be in “a capitalist country” when they meet Uef and Bi for the first time, seeing the two Pluke inhabitants do their customary squatting and opening-out of their arms in an act of obeisance to say “ku” (“good”).

This act of obeisance is the first of many signs of a society structured around class lines, hence Uncle Vova’s assumption that it’s “a capitalist country” is not far off the mark. Money, known on Pluke as “chatls,” is hard to come by (note how chatl sounds virtually identical to chattel).

There are two kinds of people who live on Pluke–Chatlainians, and Patsaks; Uef is one of the former, and Bi is one of the latter. A hand-held device called a “visator” determines which of the two kinds of people you are: an orange dot of light on the visator indicates a Chatlainian, or a person of higher social status; green indicates a lower-status Patsak, of whom Uncle Vova and the Fiddler are also determined to be by the visator. Our two Earth visitors consider this discrimination to be outrageously racist; but had they all been on a Patsak-dominated planet, the Chatlainian/Patsak discrimination would have been reversed.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler are hoping for a ride in Uef’s and Bi’s vehicle, and they offer some of their things (coats, a hat) in exchange for it, since they lack money, chatls in particular. But Uef and Bi begin to fly away in their vehicle without our two protagonists, until Uncle Vova uses a match to light a cigarette, making Uef and Bi want to return. We learn that matches, called “ketse” on Pluke, are among the most valued of commodities.

Since the society of Pluke is a dystopian one, it’s interesting to note that it, as being also a capitalist one, has a number of things in common with the society as depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The people of Pluke have a limited vocabulary, typically saying “ku” for whatever is good, or saying “kyu,” a mild swear-word for whatever is bad. These two words, as well as such words as have already been discussed above, make up the bulk of their vocabulary. Similarly, in Orwell’s dystopia, the development of Newspeak involved eliminating words in order to limit thought, including ideas potentially dangerous to the Party, such thoughts as being revolutionary. (On Pluke, though, this limited vocabulary seems unnecessary as such, for a plot device in the film gives the planet’s inhabitants telepathic abilities that, conveniently, allow them to converse in Russian and Georgian with our two protagonists!)

Furthermore, where the world of Orwell’s hell is led by Big Brother, a mysterious figure we never directly encounter in the story and who, for all we know, may not even exist, the leader of Pluke, named “Mr. P-Zh,” or “PG” (played by Nikolai Garo), is harmless and simple-minded, as it turns out. The film thus seems to be predicting such incompetent, ineffectual heads of state as Biden.

Now, such comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four are useful, since many in the capitalist West would dismiss Kin-dza-dza! as mere Soviet propaganda, while conveniently ignoring Orwell’s novel, as well as the deluge of such things as late twentieth-century Western movies, like Rocky IV, as blatant Cold War anti-communist propaganda. Western propaganda is “the truth,” apparently, not Eastern. How convenient.

That something as mundane and non-extraordinary as “ketse,” or match-like sticks, are among the most valuable commodities on Pluke is a satiric comment on the absurdity of our slavery to pieces of paper that, in essence, are IOUs. Furthermore, “luts,” fuel made from water, which makes drinking water so valuable, sounds like a comment on the petrodollar, as well as one on the ruthless destruction of the environment for the sake of profiting off of fossil fuels. In a fully communist society, there would be products as use values without exchange for money.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler, however, have no choice but to exchange commodities–their ketse–with Uef and Bi if the former pair are to get the help of the latter pair to get back to Earth. Our protagonists try to exchange ketse for drinking water from some people who run off with the ketse, cheating them.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler eventually get the idea to perform music in order to earn chatls. Though he’s referred to as “the Fiddler,” he doesn’t actually play the violin he carries around with hm. He was originally trying to find the violinist who’d forgotten to take his instrument when leaving. When the two perform their music, it’s actually Uncle Vova who ends up playing the violin…worse than a child violinist with no ear for music at all. In the Fiddler-as-non-fiddler, we see a satiric comment on Marx’s theory of the alienation of the worker from his labour.

The song that the two men sing, which sounds like some simple Russian folk song of some sort, includes such lines as, “Mama, Mama, what is to be done?” as well as “Winter is no fun,” “I don’t have a coat to keep warm,” and “How shall I live?” The song is all about a needy child asking his Mama for help, like a proletarian making a clamour about his needs.

The performing is typically done in small cages, or, on one occasion, on one’s knees, which should tell you something. The worker struggling to make enough to survive is, essentially, putting on an absurd performance, being an actor trying to please those who pay him, a wage slave caged in the world of capitalism, brought down to his knees. And the acting is all fake, and often it’s not performed very well, as we see of Uncle Vova and his scraping violin bow and his and the Fiddler’s bad singing. The alienation referred to above is enough to explain the poor, insincere ‘performances’ of the working class.

A physical indicator of lowly Patsak status is the wearing of a small nose-bell called a “tsak.” (Note in this connection that “Patsak” is backwards for “katsap,” a derogatory term for a Russian.) Bi would have Uncle Vova and the Fiddler each clip a tsak on his nose, which the two of course do with the utmost reluctance. The wearing of a tsak looks like the film’s commentary on the Nazis making the Jews wear the Yellow Badge, or German gay men wear the pink triangle.

Another indicator of class differences on Pluke is the wearing of differently colored pants: yellow, pink, etc. Uef covets them because, if he can wear those of the higher social classes, Patsaks and Chatlanians will have to do the “Ku!” squat of obeisance for him, the ecilopps can’t beat him up, etc. These colored pants are a social commentary on one’s preoccupation with social status as attained through high fashion.

At one point in the story, when Uef and Bi have enough ketse in their vehicle to buy what they need to get to Earth, they fly away and leave Uncle Vova and the Fiddler with nothing in return. Furious, our protagonists want to send the ecilopps after the two cheats; but they don’t have forty chatls to pay the ecilopps, so Uncle Vova lies that Uef and Bi failed to “ku” in obeisance to P-Zh’s image.

In these acts of dishonesty, we see how a world where money talks results in alienation. When Uef and Bi are apprehended, though, Uncle Vova quickly repents of his false accusation and hopes Uef and Bi won’t be imprisoned, which is particularly unpleasant, since instead of being put in a cell, they are locked up in a small metal box with barely enough room to hold the two of them inside. Given the dreadful state of prison life in the US, especially now, when corporations make practical slaves of the inmates, whose population outnumbers that of the Gulag (and even the CIA back then acknowledged that Gulag conditions weren’t anywhere near as bad as Western propaganda portrays them), we can see Pluke’s form of imprisonment as a comment on life in prison in a capitalist country.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler are reunited with the barefoot alien they first met on Earth, the one with the teleportation device; he gives our two heroes a chance to return home immediately. Uncle Vova, however, feels guilty about causing Uef and Bi to be incarcerated, and he wants to pass up his chance to go back to Earth in order to help those two unfortunate ones.

Even though Uef and Bi double-crossed Uncle Vova and the Fiddler and made them wear those ridiculous bells on their noses, our two heroes want to help them, even to the point of giving up their chance to go home. While the capitalist world of Pluke teaches selfishness and alienation, leading to Uef’s and Bi’s double-crossing, the socialist world of the Soviet Union taught selflessness and solidarity. Though Kin-dza-dza! might be considered Soviet propaganda, it doesn’t teach its viewers to loathe and despise the citizens of capitalist societies (it may portray them as buffoonish and silly, but Uncle Vova and the Fiddler have their own foibles, too). In contrast, consider the malevolent scowls you see, for example, on the faces of Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), his wife (Brigitte Nielsen), and his trainer and promoter (Michael Pataki) in Rocky IV.

Indeed, Uncle Vova and the Fiddler postponing their return to Earth–even returning to Pluke after a brief trip to other planets on the way home, and going back in time–to rescue Uef and Bi both from their incarceration, and later their fate on planet Alpha to be turned into plants is a kind of selflessness that would remind one of that of the bodhisattva, who postpones entering nirvana upon attaining Buddhahood and returns to samsara to help all other living beings, however unenlightened they may be, to attain nirvana together, a liberation for the entire Earth. Such is the selflessness of the true socialist, who would ultimately share liberation from capitalism with the whole world, not just hog it in his own country.

The planet Alpha is an interesting topic in itself. The people of Alpha have a method of dealing with Uef and Bi–whom they consider miscreants–that may seem cruel (turning them into cacti). Still, since Uef and Bi are governed by “vile desires,” rather like those of us caught up in samsara, then perhaps being transformed into plants, without human sense perceptions and the pain associated with them, is a kind of nirvana for them.

That buffoonish pair might be best left not to decide their own fate (as Uncle Vova would have it), since if left to do so, they’d choose foolishly; still, bodhisattva Vova would leave the nirvana of Alpha and postpone his return to the Pure Land, so to speak, of the USSR and help those two Pluke bumpkins.

After going back in time and back to Pluke, and helping those two, Uncle Vova and the Fiddler reunite with the barefoot man and his teleportation device, and our two heroes finally get sent back to Moscow. We see a repeat of the beginning of the movie, as if their time on Pluke never happened: Uncle Vova comes home from work again, and his wife sends him out to buy groceries.

Back in that city square, he meets with the Fiddler again, but the latter doesn’t tell the former about the barefoot alien this time, because he isn’t there. Our two protagonists don’t even recognize each other: it’s as if they’d never met, let alone got stranded in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy. As we soon learn, though, what happened is really just a repressed memory.

They see a tractor with a flashing orange light pass by. This triggers their by-now-instinctive attitude of submission to the Chatlainian colour, and the two men do their “ku” squat of obeisance.

Their return to the socialist world of the Soviet Union does not render them immune to the classism of the capitalist world as represented by Pluke. This is why reactionary instincts must be guarded against; old attitudes have a way of coming back if we aren’t careful. Just recall how those former Soviets became Russian oligarchs.

Still, one good thing has come from Uncle Vova’s and the Fiddler’s relapse: they now recognize each other, and exchange smiles like good old friends. Uncle Vova then looks up at the sky and hears the voices of Uef and Bi saying “ku” and singing the “Mama” song. They feel united, if only in spirit, with their Chatlainian and Patsak friends once again. Whatever good or ill may happen to us, being reunited with friends is above all else in importance.

‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter Two

“Oh, there goes Al again!” his older brother, Freddie, called from the top of the basement stairs. “In the basement, talking to himself.”

“Shut up, Freddie!” Al shouted. “Go away and mind your own business! I’m busy!”

“Yeah, busy talking to yourself,” Freddie said. “Freak!”

“I’m not talking to myself. I’m praying to the ancestors. You know that, you faithless scum!”

“I know you still believe in that stupid old religion, which never did the family any good, and which we all left behind in Asia, ’cause we aren’t backward-thinking, the way you are!”

“My praying to the ancestors is the only thing keeping the family’s bad luck from getting any worse.”

“You’re the only one giving the family any bad luck,” Freddie said. “You’re a stupid, spastic loser!”

“Go to hell!” Al shouted. “Leave me alone!”

“Leave me alone!” Freddie said in a mocking, whiny voice.

“Will both of you be quiet?” their father shouted from the living room. “Freddie, get out of the basement and help me move this desk. Leave Al to his silly praying, if he must do it. Cut out the noise, and give the rest of us some peace!”

“Freak!” Freddie shouted at Al, then slammed the basement door.

“Asshole,” Al whispered, then he sighed and looked back at the altar. He closed his eyes and started to concentrate on the spirits.

He breathed in and out, slowly and deeply.

He listened in the silence of the dark room, waiting for a sign of the spirits’ presence.

Finally, after about half a minute, he heard a hoarse, feminine voice, speaking in Chinese.

What do you want, boy?

“Po?” Al said, his voice wavering.

Well, what is it?

“I have a girlfriend,” he stammered in Chinese.

How sweet, the old woman’s voice rasped with sarcasm.

“She w-wants to m-meet the family,” he went on. “Please d-don’t cause any trouble w-while we have dinner together here. I love her v-very much.”

How touching. Why should we care about your personal problems, boy? Your family abandoned us years ago. We became demons because of your neglect. Your weak attempts to placate us are far from enough to compensate. Why should we do anything kind for a worm like you?

“What can I do t-to ease your wrath? What do you want me to do t-to ensure that she and my family can have a pleasant dinner here together, with no bad luck, no disasters of any kind?”

There was a long silence.

“Please, Po. What do you want from me?”

Po paused thoughtfully in silence a little longer.

He opened his eyes, then said, “Po?”

A glow of light appeared weakly at first, then it grew larger and brighter. Finally, he saw an apparition of an old woman in traditional Chinese clothing, a red Qing Dynasty dress with an ornate, light-blue headdress. She looked like a bride at an old wedding.

As pretty as her clothes were, though, the look on her face was anything but pleasant. It wore a scowl and piercing, malignant black eyes that looked at him as though she wanted to kill him, slowly and painfully.

He was afraid to ask again, but he knew he had to.

“What do you want me to do for you, Po?”

Have the girl’s whole family come here for dinner.

“Her whole family?”

Yes. Her mother, father, brothers, and sisters, if any.

“Why h-have all of them come, Po?”

Why not? If you want to marry this girl one day, don’t you think it’s right if all of both families meet and get to know each other?

“W-well, yes, but…”

But what? What could be the problem? Now, Po was grinning. What could possibly be wrong with that? Families should be close, shouldn’t they? Her words implied his family’s neglect.

“O-of course, but…what do you want to do with her family?”

What we spirits will do with her family is none of your concern, boy. Just make sure they’re all here, and don’t interfere with us while they’re here. If you want to live a long and happy life with this girl, with us never troubling you again, then you’ll do exactly as we wish without question. Give us her family, and you’ll be free of us forever. I give you my word.

“But, Po,” he said as he saw her image slowly fading away, “at least give me some idea of what you plan…”

Give us her family… Her voice dissolved in a reverberating echo, as did her apparition.

He just stood there alone in the darkness, shuddering.

Synchronicity and September 11th

I: Introduction–What is Synchronicity?

Synchronicity is a concept that CG Jung wrote about in 1960. Literally, “unified time,” synchronicity refers to meaningful coincidences that have no causal connection. Because of this acausality, there’s no scientific way of testing the idea by way of falsifiability; one either believes in synchronicity, through personal, subjective experience, or one doesn’t believe in it.

Jung’s belief in this idea was part of his interest in spirituality, myth, and religion in themselves, not just for their psychological meaning, as atheistic Freud would have used them. This difference of opinion is essentially why Freud and Jung had a falling-out.

There are dozens of YouTube videos out there on synchronicity, describing it all too often in a sentimentalized way, linking it with ideas like the “law of attraction.” To be honest, I’d rather stay away from this kind of rose-tinted glasses interpretation.

To be even more frank, I haven’t yet made up my mind about whether or not I believe in synchronicity. As of this writing, I’ve recognized one distinct synchronicity that’s occurred over the past fifty-one years: three incidents occurring on September 11th–one in 1973, one in 1990, and one in, of course, 2001.

Notice how none of these three dates, assuming you know the history of all three incidents, are in any way ‘positive’ or sentimentalized. These three are the Chilean coup d’état of 1973, George HW Bush’s 1990 speech about us moving into a new world order (I’ll go into what is so unsettling about the speech below), and of course the terror attacks of 2001.

What these three incidents have in common beyond all sharing the same date–and this is the deeply meaningful part–is how all three tie in with US imperialism.

II: The Three September 11th Years

The Chilean coup d’état, backed by the CIA, ousted the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende, a socialist who wanted to nationalize Chilean industries and thus thin the wallets of the American capitalists who wanted to be able to continue exploiting the country. Allende was replaced by Augusto Pinochet, a right-wing dictator and puppet of the Western imperialists. Allende’s socialist economic policies would be replaced by the “free market” ones of the Chicago Boys. Any leftist resistance resulted in imprisonment, violent punishments, killings, and being ‘disappeared,’ which included being thrown out of helicopters.

While Bush’s 1990 speech tried to present the coming new world order as a positive change in the political climate of the time, properly understood, the president was heralding a post-Soviet world, in which the “free market” had triumphed over ‘Big Brother’ government and socialism. The USSR hadn’t yet been dissolved as of the speech, but its demise was coming soon, and no one knew better that this dissolution was coming than the very people who’d been scheming about it. The fall of communism allowed the capitalists to do anything they wanted…to everyone.

As for the terror attacks in 2001, it really doesn’t matter if we go with the official narrative that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda masterminded the attacks, and that George W Bush’s administration was too careless and incompetent to have prevented the attacks; or if you believe it was an inside job with controlled demolitions, and that it was all blamed on Al Qaeda and, by extension, the whole Muslim world. What matters is how the attacks were used by the American ruling class to manufacture consent for war after war in the Middle East, not only to steal the oil and enrich themselves with it, but also to exercise their dominance over the whole region, being the capitalist imperialists that they are.

Indeed, as far as all three of these incidents are concerned, it isn’t so much what happened on September 11th as it is the aftermath. What happened on that day, these three times, was more about the warning of what was to come than the inciting event itself. For another part of this synchronicity is, how 911 can signify an emergency telephone number you ring when an urgent situation comes up.

III: The Chilean Coup D’état

All three of these incidents could be, and should have been, seen as dire warnings that matters were about to get much worse. The replacement of a socialist government with a right-wing dictatorship using “free market” economic policies was a kind of ‘laboratory experiment,’ if you will, to see how well it would go…from the point of view of the global capitalist class, of course. They never cared that the Chicago Boys’ economic policies were a disaster for poor Chileans; what mattered was the huge amassing of wealth for the rich, known as the “miracle of Chile.” As of the 1980s, this “free market” experiment would be tried in the US under Reagan and in the UK under Thatcher.

So the immiseration of the poor Chileans would be extended to Americans and the British. The lie would be propagated that the “free market” would involve minimal state intervention in the economy, when a) there’s always at least some state intervention in it, and b) state protection of private property, especially when the capitalist class accumulates a huge amount of private property, necessitates a particularly intrusive form of government…capitalist government–hence, Pinochet’s brand of fascism, hand in hand with the “free market.”

And still, right-wing libertarians and ‘anarcho’-capitalists continue to be duped by the idea that “true” capitalism is antithetical to an intrusive state. One shouldn’t be surprised in the least that Reagan‘s ‘small government’ (translation: war on the poor) would be accompanied by a great increase in military spending as part of a scheme to bring the USSR to an end. Since imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, requiring the expansion of markets and capital into other countries, an expanded military will be needed to protect the interests of capitalist globalization.

Now, where plunging people into poverty hits you immediately, and scathingly, when you live in Third World Latin America, as was the case with Chileans in the 1970s, hitting us in the First World with poverty is more insidious and gradual in its effects. Problems like homelessness certainly increased under Reagan in the 1980s, but it’s grown worse since then, and now in the 2020s, there’s an epidemic of homelessness in many cities in the US and elsewhere.

This is all why I see a synchronistic meaning in these three September 11th dates and the emergency number 911. The Chilean coup d’état was an urgent warning not to let the “free market” counter-revolution spread to other countries. It was a warning left unheeded.

IV: Bush’s ‘New World Order’ Speech

As I said above, Bush’s new world order speech was presented in rosy, optimistic language about a new era of triumphant liberal democracy, since it was understood that the Cold War was over. There would be a greater commitment to US strength as the leader of that promotion of liberal democracy. Translation: US imperialism would reign supreme, and every other government in the world was expected to do whatever the US government told them to do.

There would be a Soviet-American partnership in promoting world democracy, as Bush expected. Again, translation: Russia was expected to do American bidding as everyone else was. Gorbachev‘s compliance with all of this was further proof of his weak, treasonous leadership.

Of course, nothing like Bush’s rosy vision came to be since September 11th, 1990. The advancement of American imperialist ambitions certainly did, though. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe in 1989, it was already known that communism was out, and that Russia’s days, in their Soviet form, were numbered.

But while the mainstream Western media of the time were hailing the end of the Cold War as a triumph for democracy and the “end of history,” it would be foolish to assume that most Russians, and indeed many in the former Soviet Bloc, were holding their arms up, ready to embrace ‘capitalist freedom.’ Most people in the USSR wanted to keep the Soviet system; Boris Yeltsin and his ilk forcibly took it away.

In fact, since then, poll after poll has been done in Russia, indicating that majorities of Russians have consistently said life in Soviet-era Russia was happier than it has been since the era’s end. Since they were provided with free healthcare, education, housing, full employment, and other government benefits, it isn’t hard to see why the Soviet system was preferred.

While the Soviet system surely had its faults, it was also an effective counterweight to Western imperialism. The USSR aided anti-imperialist liberation movements in the Third World, and its example pushed the postwar capitalist West to adopt welfare systems and public healthcare. With the USSR’s demise, though, the West has had less and less incentive to keep these social services going. Accordingly, we’ve been losing them, bit by bit, over the years.

The signing of NAFTA not only took jobs away from American workers, but also gave those jobs, at lower pay, to Mexicans. The corporate tax rate, cut way down by the Reagan administration, stayed low (and was cut even lower by the Trump administration…it’s unlikely that Biden or anyone will raise it significantly any time soon).

Clinton killed welfare in the mid-1990s. His signing of the Telecommunications Act in 1996 led to the mergers and acquisitions in the media that, in turn, has led to 90% of American media being owned by only six corporations, meaning that the vast majority of our access to information is controlled by the rich. (This American near-oligopoly on information, incidentally, is also internationalized.) The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act led, as many believe, to the 2008 financial crisis. And the government bailed the big banks out.

All of these forms of government intervention were clearly in the interest of capital…and yet there are still political idiots out there who think that the government and capitalism are musically exclusive opposites. Long live the “free market”!

The above are but a few examples of what Bush’s new world order resulted in for the US. Now we must take a brief look at what the ideas of his September 11th speech led to for Russia.

Part of the reason we should regard with skepticism Bush’s claim to greater Soviet-American cooperation (at the time, in the context of a united response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and therefore Gorbachev’s compliance with Western imperialist interests) is that, when the Berlin Wall fell, and East and West Germany were to be reunited and thus a part of NATO, it was promised to Gorbachev, most mendaciously, that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.”

Note how much farther eastward NATO has advanced to the East since then. A number of former SSRs and Warsaw pact members–the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania–joined NATO. Russia has NATO armies right on her borders now! Attempts have been made to have Ukraine join, too.

Anybody who knows anything about NATO realizes that the organization is an extension of US imperialism. These members of NATO do the bidding of the American empire, even when it’s against their own national interests to do so.

The debacle that has been the Russia-Ukraine war is squarely the fault of the US/NATO empire…but you wouldn’t know that to read the lies and propaganda of the Western media, who routinely call it “Russia’s war” and “Putin’s war.” Indeed, so much effort has been made to call Russia’s intervention “unprovoked” that in fact such a lie has been told precisely to cover up the fact that it was most definitely provoked.

Collaboration of the capitalist West with ex-Nazis, from the end of WWII to the present, has included the recruitment of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers the whole time. Knowledge of this exposes the lie in the current capitalist mainstream media that there is no major Nazi menace in Ukraine.

Ever since a CIA-assisted coup d’état in 2014 in Ukraine, removing democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych and replacing him with US puppets (recall Chile in 1973 and see these coups as part of a pattern), Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers have been part of their government and military, including far-right organizations like the Azov Battalion, Right Sector, and other admirers of Stepan Bandera.

These Russophobic extremists were, for the eight years between the coup and the beginning of the Russian intervention, discriminating against the use of the Russian language and terrorizing ethnic Russians in the Donbass. Putin, branded an “imperialist” and a “fascist” in a shameless act of projection by the Western establishment media, tried everything he could to find a peaceful resolution over those eight years, including the Minsk accords.

All the US and NATO have wanted to do is to keep sending weapons to the Ukrainian Nazis, including weapons that can be fired into Russia, which could provoke a wider war–WWIII, which in turn could go nuclear and bring about the end of the world. Since all of these events stem ultimately from the hypocritical words and secret schemes of Bush et al when he spoke on September 11th, 1990, we can see the 911 emergency that also went largely unheeded.

V: The Terrorist Attacks

That the terrorist attacks of 2001 were ringing the 911 emergency number is so obvious that I hardly need to explain how, but going through its consequences can remind us of the gravity of this emergency. Right from George W Bush’s statement that the attacks were “acts of war,” the red flags were waving.

Not only did the attacks give his administration a pretext for perpetual war (a “war on terror” isn’t directed at any country in particular, so there’s no clear way of ending the war), but they were also used to justify a number of restrictions on American civil liberties (the Patriot Act, which was extended during the Obama administration; racial profiling; NSA surveillance).

This authoritarian stripping-away of civil liberties is all too often assumed by propagandized right-wing idiots to be a form of socialism, since these politically illiterate morons assume that socialism is just “anything a government does.” These people are so ignorant of the political history of their own country that they’ve paid no attention to the removal of workers’ rights over the years (some of which I describe above), the cutting of taxes for the rich, and union-busting, none of which would happen under a socialist government.

These right-libertarians refuse to acknowledge the existence of authoritarian right-wing governments (recall again Pinochet). The Democratic Party–and the Labour Party in the UK–moved to the right because, as I said above, the demise of world communism meant that the West was no longer pressured into accommodating the working class.

US/NATO imperialism thus has been able to do anything it wants to any country, and to anyone within its own countries, with complete impunity. Endless war is in the interest of capital because war is a business–all those weapons manufacturers: Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, etc., have been laughing all the way to the bank profiting off of human death and suffering in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and now Ukraine, the Palestinian Territories, and potentially Russia, China, and Iran. The American military is all over Africa, the rationale being that they’re fighting terrorists.

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) means that these weapons manufacturers, in order to remain competitive and survive as businesses, must keep their profits up. The only way they can do that is by either having actual wars all the time or at least sustaining a constant threat of war. No war, no sale of weapons–it’s as simple as that. The “war on terror” has given these companies a most convenient excuse to keep banging the war drums.

The scapegoating of the many heads of state around the world who refuse to kow-tow to US imperialism–starting with Milošević and Saddam, then continuing with Gaddafi, Assad, Maduro, Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, and whoever comes up in the future–has led to a desensitizing to the idea of war and its horrors. There was a time when people in the West were instinctively anti-war, regardless of whether they were leftists or mere liberals/hippies; not so much now…though a ray of hope has been seen in some who oppose US support of war in Ukraine and American support of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The point is that we’re seeing not just a resurgence of cold-blooded capitalism, but also a resurgence of its extreme…fascism. We’ve seen it in the anti-immigrant policies of Obama the deporter-in-chief, continued by the “anti-establishment” Trump/à la ICE and the caging of Latin Americans, and again continued with no-less-right-wing Biden. We’ve seen fascism in the excessive surveillance online. We see it in militarized cops. We’ve seen fascism in the support of Ukraine, as I discussed above. Indeed, all of the totalitarian things we were told would happen to us under communism have actually happened to us under neoliberal capitalism.

People complain about the supposed lack of human rights in Cuba. To those people, I’ll say two words: Guantanamo Bay. This is a form of contemporary fascism and authoritarian government.

People on the right complained about intrusive government during the Covid pandemic. I’m a skeptic about its dangers, too, but I never saw a “communist plot” to establish a “one-world government.” I saw a group of pharmaceutical companies make huge profits while millions of poor people got poorer–many became homeless. I saw the fascist, authoritarian government that grew out of this problem as a threat of capitalism, not communism.

VI: The Collective Shadow

I hope, Dear Reader, that you can now see the deep meaning behind this triple 9/11 synchronicity. It’s not just three identical dates when something…political…happened. They all share common themes: the intrusion of imperialism, a shift to the political right, violent consequences, the taking away of basic civil rights, and the promotion of fascist, authoritarian government.

Now, part of synchronicity is how the inner psychic life is connected with these meaningful coincidences in the external world. For me, it’s how I saw the deeper meaning in these three September 11th dates and their aftermaths. As for those behind the three events, I’d say that the connection between the inner and outer worlds is based on the Collective Shadow.

Just as there’s a collective unconscious, a large reservoir of all of the unconscious feelings of all of humanity, going back to the earliest of us in prehistory, so is there also an accumulation of all of our worst, most hateful, most bigoted, and most destructive thoughts. This accumulation is the Collective Shadow, an amalgam of the personal Shadow of each and every one of us.

Erich Fromm, in his book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, would have called this dark part of all of us “the necrophilous character.” He wasn’t referring to the paraphilia; he described “necrophilia” as “the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures. (Fromm, his emphasis, page 369)

Consider in this connection all that resulted from all three September 11th events: the death resulting from Pinochet’s repressions, the terrorist attacks and the imperialist wars that ensued, but also the violence done to Russia as a result of the dissolution of the USSR: Yeltsin bringing out the tanks on the Russian protestors in 1993; his re-election, as a result of American interference in the vote in 1996; the impoverishment of the Russian masses (as a result of privatization) as the elites snapped up most of the amassed Soviet wealth to make themselves the Russian oligarchs; and as I mentioned above, the Western enabling of Ukrainian Nazis to attack ethnic Russians in the Donbass.

Now, please be careful with my use of the the expression “new world order”: I’m not using it in the sense of many right-wing conspiracy theorists who fantasize about a “one-world government” run by Freemasons, “the Jews,” and other members of an imagined elite of people in some kind of secret society of Devil-worshippers (“the Illuminati”). Those who run the world are capitalists and imperialists; they aren’t of any particular ethnic or religious group. They don’t need to have formal meetings, they don’t twirl their mustaches or laugh “Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!”, as in some badly-written B-movie. They simply share similar interests, and have social get-togethers where they discuss how to further their interests as the ruling class–how to get more for themselves and less for the rest of us.

I don’t believe in the Devil because I don’t need to. Human greed, aggression, and selfishness–spawned by, and a distortion of, the evolutionary drive to survive–sufficiently explain the problem. The Devil as a metaphorical concept, though, the Collective Shadow, might be believed in.

VII: Conclusion (Including 119 and November 9th)

I don’t necessarily believe in any of these ‘supernatural’ ideas; I just want to explore some possibilities, and show how, regardless of whatever the real explanation is for these coincidences, there have been some most disturbing patterns.

I see patterns. I can’t help it.

Incidentally, just as there is the 911 emergency phone number and the three September 11ths, so is there a 119 emergency phone number in parts of Asia (including where I live) and in Jamaica. Furthermore, just for fun, we can, in this connection, look at three dates for November 9th: 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was published in The Times newspaper; 1938, when Kristallnacht happened; and 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.

Anyone who cares about the Palestinians will see the publication of the Balfour Declaration as, in a way, a kind of declaration of emergency of the oppression to come. Anyone who cares about Jews and worries about the spread of fascism will see the obvious state of emergency in Kristallnacht. And anyone who knows that the real purpose of the Berlin Wall (the Anti-fascist Protection Wall, as it was called in East Germany) was to keep bad people out, not to keep good people trapped in (the real resistance against defectors was to prevent brain drain; most of the East German workers and others in the former Soviet states were happy to stay and enjoy the government benefits that were soon to be gone by the 1990s), will see its fall as the beginning of NATO enlargement to the East, which has ultimately culminated in the Ukraine Nazi problem.

Now, you can criticize me, Dear Reader, for being selective about bad events on September 11th and on November 9th, while ignoring many good things that surely also happened on those dates, in different years. The point about synchronicity, though, is not to say that those two dates are “evil” ones; they simply represent, on these six occasions, coincidences that I find highly meaningful. I might consider these synchronicities a manifestation of two of what I call The Three Unities–that is, The Unity of Action and The Unity of Time.

Forget about the coincidental dates, though. The point is that fascism (Nazi or Zionist), and authoritarian, imperialist capitalism, along with its government and endless wars, are on the rise. None of the events of the earlier of those six dates directly caused those that succeeded them; but all of the events I discussed of those dates are disturbingly meaningful.

‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter One

Al Dan, 25, and Hannah Sandy, 24, were taking a walk in the park at around 9 pm. They’d been seeing each other for almost a year. Smiling, she had her head on his shoulder. With an ear-to-ear grin, he was enjoying resting the side of his head against the top of hers, feeling the soft cushioning of her long, blonde hair.

He looked up at the night sky. “The stars are really beautiful, aren’t they, Hannah?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said after taking a quick look. “I love coming out here in this park with you.”

“It’s such a nice place for us to take a walk after having dinner,” he said. “The trees, the grass, the smell of the flowers, the soft breeze on our faces, and best of all, you.”

“Aww, you’re so sweet,” she said, then they gave each other a peck on the lips. “You know, Al, we’ve been going out for about a year now, and I’m so happy with you, I don’t see myself being with anyone else.”

“I feel the same way. You’re pretty, you’re nice,…”

“You’re cute, you’re sweet, you’re funny, you’re considerate to me in ways that no other guy I’ve dated ever has been,…”

“You drive me wild in bed,…”

She giggled and hugged him tight. “You’re great in bed,…”

They both hugged each other even tighter and kissed again.

“There’s just one thing, though, Al.” They stopped walking and looked at each other.

“What’s that?” His smile faded.

“I introduced you to my mom, dad, and brother months ago, but I still haven’t met your family. Not even once.”

He was frowning and visibly shaking.

“What is it, Al? I’ve asked to meet your family for the third time now. The first two times, you made excuses to get out of it, and now, you’re still uncomfortable about me meeting them. What’s wrong?”

He was stammering, groping for the right words.

“Your family doesn’t like the idea of you dating a white woman, is that it?” she said with growing anger. “They’d never accept you with anyone other than an Asian, someone of Chinese descent only, is that it?”

“No, no,” he said, holding her hands and looking into her eyes so she’d see his sincerity. “It isn’t like that at all. My family’s not racist at all. They’re completely tolerant. It’s…just…that…”

“What?!”

“Well, it’s hard to put into words. If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d think I’m crazy.”

“Well, what is it?” She was calming down, and sensing genuine anxiety about his family mixed in with that love for her that she’d always known was sincere. She looked in his eyes with empathy. “Come on, Al. What’s bothering you about your family?”

“Well,…my mom and dad…and my brother and sister…are always putting me down, insulting me, bullying me, and blaming me for everything that goes wrong in the family. They’ll make me look stupid, and I’m afraid that after a night of listening to them belittle me, you’ll think I’m a loser and want to dump me.”

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, then hugged him. “If I see your family treating you badly, I’ll see that as a blot on them, not on you. I know the real you, and if they can’t see your goodness, then that’s their problem, not yours. I’ll always love you, no matter what. But let me meet them so I can at least see for myself what kind of people they are, OK?”

He put on his most convincing fake smile, hiding all of his undying worries. “OK.” They kissed.

*************

After walking her home and kissing her good night, Al walked back to his house as slowly as possible, for he needed as much time as he could give himself to think of a way out of this predicament.

What the hell am I going to do? he wondered. I can’t tell Hannah about my family’s secret curse! She’d never believe me; she’d think I’m crazy, and I probably am. I’ve certainly been driven crazy by this problem my family started ever since we moved here in Toronto from China, and they gave up on the old family traditions.

I’m the only one who still believes in them, and the family laughs at me for doing so. The ghosts of the ancestors, mad at the family for neglecting them, directly trouble only me. Only I ever pray to them, keeping them from doing their worst. The only problems we have are constant cases of bad luck, which the family blames on me, instead of realizing it’s the ghosts that are doing it. If I were to stop praying to them, they’d be far more malevolent, even violent. Not only could a lot of bad luck happen during our big dinner together; the ghosts may do something awful to Hannah, to hurt her. I can’t let that happen!

Oh, what am I going to do? I can’t keep making excuses to stop Hannah from seeing my family. She isn’t going to accept verbal abuse from them as a sufficient reason to avoid meeting them. She wants to take our relationship to the next level, and I do, too. I want to marry this girl! No one’s ever loved me or valued me the way she does, and marrying her will require my family’s involvement, one way or the other. I’ll have to take this risk if I’m to keep her.

Al was now within a block of his house. He thought, Maybe I can pray extra hard to the ancestors. The family’s neglect of praying to them is what has made them so angry with us, so if I pray all the more earnestly to them, maybe I can appease their wrath, at least to an extent. Maybe I can ask them to tell me what they want me to do in exchange for not troubling us anymore. Trying to get the family to pray to them again is useless: they don’t believe in the spirits, and as I’ve always known, the moments of bad luck that the ghosts cause are always made to look like they’re my fault, rather than being supernatural. I’m the pious one who prays to the ghosts, but I suffer the worst: no good deed goes unpunished!

He went in the front door of his house, then into the basement where the altar was. He sighed, then lit a stick of incense and put it between his hands. He bowed before the altar. Oh, well, he thought. It’s worth a try.

Raised Fist

O, keep your fingers
on the pulse of what
the people need in this
alienating, unfair world!
A good rule of thumb is
remembering we can’t
do all of this alone.
We all must raise
our arms together
in loving solidarity.
Alone, we’re weak;
together, we’re not.
When our muscles
are stacked, one on
top of the other, we
can be unstoppable,
a giant which could
pound the crap out
of the ruling class. There are so many more of us than there are of them.
They want us just to be fingers and thumbs, all insignificant sinews. We
must link up–as ligaments–muscles and bones. A fist that’s connected
can punch out the rich, so let’s raise it together. Our rulers would have
us all fighting, so we won’t be fighting them, defeating them for good.

Analysis of ‘Frantic’

Frantic is a 1988 film directed by Roman Polanski and written by him, Gérard Brach, and Robert Towne. It stars Harrison Ford and Emmanuelle Seigner, with Betty Buckley, John Mahoney, and Yorgo Voyagis. Ennio Morricone wrote the film score.

The film was a box office disappointment, except for in countries like France, but it was a critical success. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 77% positive reaction, based on 43 reviews. Siskel and Ebert, though critical of aspects of it, gave it “two thumbs up.”

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a transcript of the dialogue.

The film begins with Dr. Richard Walker (Ford) and his wife, Sondra (Buckley), in a cab going from the airport to their hotel in Paris. From San Francisco, they’re here because he has to do a medical conference (they also had their honeymoon here twenty years before). One normally associates a trip to France with the height of romance, but a business trip like this tends to deflate those feelings of excitement for a return to the place of one’s honeymoon.

What’s more, so much of Paris has changed since the last time the Walkers were here that it’s hard for him to rekindle those romantic feelings through nostalgia. The sky is grey and overcast. Their cab even gets a flat tire.

A shower and a sleep are all the jet-lagged husband and wife want when they get to their hotel room. He speaks as if he’s going to ride her like a stud when they’re in bed, to which she coolly replies, “Promises, promises.” Indeed, after years of marriage and a few kids, it’s hard [!] to imagine a rekindling of the embers of the old fires of passion.

Even worse, she picked up the wrong suitcase, something that will have huge significance later. Though she thinks he should have lunch with Dr. Maurice Alembert, a colleague, since she thinks the latter knows that she and Richard have arrived early enough for them to have lunch together, he doesn’t want to go, so averse is he to extending the business aspect of his trip to Paris. She wants Walker to give her a note she can use to contact Alembert about the lunch, but he’s so opposed to it that he eats the paper.

Walker calls their kids at home and finds out that there are worries over there, too. Somebody has called for Sondra…from Paris (more significance about this will come later), and their teen daughter, Casey, is on a date that night all of a sudden. All of these concerns just add to the atmosphere of a very non-gay Paree.

Walker takes a shower and shaves, and during this time, Sondra has put on a tight red dress and left their room without his knowing. When he realizes she’s gone, he assumes that she’s just stepped out for the moment. Room service has given both of them a meal. He lies on the bed and takes a nap.

When he wakes up, this is when his worries really begin to grow. Things aren’t dull any more.

It’s interesting that he slept before the excitement has begun. I’m not saying that the rest of the movie is a dream. I’m not about to describe what literally happens in Frantic, but rather what I feel is the symbolic meaning of what happens, from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Walker sleeps…perchance, to dream. And as Freud pointed out, “the interpretation of dreams is  the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” This association, of Walker having a brief sleep, dreaming, and therefore his unconscious expressing itself, is sufficient in itself for my purposes here.

His trip to France, so far, has been one disappointment after another, one annoyance after another. He wants some excitement in his life, and he’s about to get it…whether he likes the form that excitement is about to come in, or not.

One of the chief things we need to understand about the unconscious is that it’s all about conflict. One part of the mind wants to do one thing, while another part of the mind wants to do something else. Part of Walker wants his wife back, of course…but another part of him wants to get rid of her.

Sure he loves her–there’s no doubt about that; but she’s getting older, and it’s common for married men his age–especially in romantic Paris–to have the seven-year itch and want to chase young women, as morally objectionable as that may be. He’s a strait-laced, conservative family man, but he’s also a handsome, successful doctor, the kind of man many young women would find attractive and see as a good catch.

Surely Walker is aware of how potentially appealing he must be, including to sexually appealing young women like Michelle (Seigner), so he must be feeling the temptation to cheat on Sondra while she’s gone. It doesn’t matter that he never ends up cheating on her–the point is that he feels the temptation, and part of what’s making him so…frantic…about finding Sondra as soon as he can is his wish to make impossible any more opportunities to cheat.

What we see in Walker is the classic manifestation of the id, the ego, and the superego. His id, to put it perfectly bluntly, wants to fuck Michelle’s brains out. His ego knows that jeopardizing his marriage, a divorce from which would probably mean losing custody of his kids, makes an affair out of the question. Yet even if he can get away with sleeping with Michelle while Sondra’s missing, and she never learns about his adultery, Walker–being the strait-laced, conservative man that he is–has a superego that would plague him with guilt over doing such a naughty thing…especially while his wife is being held for ransom!

So the events as they unfold in the film give him his adventure, while resolving the conflict between to do or not to do (Michelle). The girl helps him find his wife, there are a few sexy, suggestive moments between them, and he gets Sondra back physically unharmed, though having had a big scare. In short, Frantic is wish-fulfillment for Walker…though because of his conflicted feelings, it’s also a nightmare.

As he’s trying to get help from such people as the hotel management and the American embassy, it is suggested one or two times that Sondra may have sneaked away to have an affair of her own. After all, she changed into that red dress just before leaving the hotel. Walker, of course, is offended at the idea of his wife betraying him; yet in his unconscious, this betrayal could also be a wish-fulfillment for him, since it now allows him to fool around with a clear conscience. In Eyes Wide Shut, Dr. Bill Harford (played by Tom Cruise) has similar thoughts, and therefore similar temptations.

Now, it can be argued that, with his wife out of the picture for the moment, Walker in his unconscious thoughts can explore homosexual possibilities as well as heterosexual ones, as is suggested when he asks about “the good-looking guy” working at the hotel desk to see if he knows where Sondra went. This man is later found in a gym, exercising and lifting weights, so his muscle tone is clear to see through the T-shirt he works out in.

Of course, Walker doesn’t make advances on this “good-looking guy” any more than he does on Michelle, but that isn’t the point. In his unconscious thoughts–allowed to come out with fewer inhibitions while he’s in a drowsy state of jet lag–his id explores the possibilities while his ego rejects them as unrealistic and his superego morally condemns their very contemplation.

The adventure and excitement aren’t limited to sexual possibilities. There’s also the contemplation of doing drugs. In a bar called The Blue Parrot, Walker is looking for a man named Dédé Martin (played by Boll Boyer). He meets a Rastafarian there who intuits that he’s desperately looking for “the white lady.” While Walker assumes the Rastafarian is talking about Sondra, he really means cocaine, a sample of which he gives Walker to snort in a toilet stall in the bar’s washroom.

Now, of course Walker doesn’t want–in his conscious mind–to be high on cocaine while he’s searching for his wife, so he washes it out of his nose as soon as the Rastafarian leaves. His acceptance of “the white lady” up his nose for the moment, however, is only out of politeness on the conscious level; unconsciously, he’d love at least to give coke a try, so he resolves his conflict about it by having it up his nose briefly, then washing it away.

Mistakenly equating “the white lady” with Sondra also rationalizes his indulgence with the drug, however brief it may be. [Later, when Michelle is helping him and they’re in her car, she snorts a line of “the white lady”…until he angrily stops her from doing it. Again, there’s a brief indulgence in it (his id projected onto her), then his ego and superego stop it.]

Walker asks the Rastafarian to give him Dédé’s address, which he gets from Michelle at a table farther off in the bar; so Walker and Michelle, maybe, see each other ever so briefly, without thinking much of it. Her distinctive leather jacket and hat make her more recognizable to him than vice versa, but her recognizing him seems to have more significance when we consider her liking of a particular song by Grace Jones: “I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango).”

Walker finds Dédé in his apartment with his throat cut. Michelle goes there at a later point, when Walker’s also there, and they meet right when she’s trying to process the shock of seeing Dédé’s body. She initially assumes Walker’s the killer, and she must be thinking that she’s seen his face before, him having asked the Rastafarian about Dédé’s whereabouts.

Now we can begin to understand the significance of the Grace Jones song as it relates to Michelle’s experiences of the plot of the movie. Walker isn’t “hanging ’round [her] door,” but rather Dédé’s; still, since Walker has accosted Michelle, frightening her in her already traumatized state upon having seen the corpse, he’s “like a hawk stealing for the prey,” as she imagines him.

Walker “shadows [Michelle] back home,” that is, he goes back to her apartment [his spastic crawling on the roof of which–with the suitcase–reflects his conflict over being with her vs resisting the temptation], because she mistakenly took Sondra’s luggage, and he needs to find out what’s in Michelle’s (which has been in his hotel room), to get what’s in it to exchange it with the kidnappers and get Sondra back.

What Grace Jones says in French sounds like something Michelle wants to say to Walker: “What are you looking for, meeting with death [i.e., Dédé’s corpse]? Who do you think you are [i.e., sticking your nose in my business]? Ah, you also hate life [i.e., your disappointing trip to France and your dull married life and work routine].”

Towards the end of the film, Walker and Michelle will “dance in bars and restaurants” (one in particular, called A Touch of Class, and they’ll dance to this song in particular). Before that, she’ll be “home with anyone who wants” to be there with her: namely, two Israeli agents who are also looking for what was smuggled in her luggage (a krytron), and later on, Walker will be there.

Michelle finds Walker “standing there alone” with “staring eyes” that “chill [her] to the bone,” because in spite of his conservative restraint, she–as an extremely desirable young woman–can sense that he wants to have her. His desire both scares and excites her. Indeed, she offers him plenty of opportunities to have her: in her apartment the first time, she changes shirts, being briefly topless and allowing him an opportunity to check her out; later, she gives him a peck on the cheek in his hotel room; and when she dances with him, she undulates seductively in a provocative red dress [!] that accentuates her curves.

Grace Jones’s next words in French seem, for the purposes of this movie, to be equating “Joël” with Walker; for he is in his hotel room with his suitcase (or Sondra’s, or Michelle’s, whichever). His hotel room has been ransacked by those trying to find the krytron, so he’s looking at his clothes, among other things lying all over the place. There are photos of Sondra that he’s used to help him find her; Michelle notices how happy his wife looks in one of them. The idea that he left without regret or melodrama sounds like irony or denial, since he slammed the door and stormed off.

Leaving Paris without regret or melodrama, while having also slammed the door of his hotel room and stormed off, sounds like his attempt at reconciling his unconscious wish to have an adventure without Sondra while consciously fearing for her life the whole time.

To continue discussing the events of Frantic as a symbolic expression of Walker’s thought processes, as I said above, Michelle changing her shirt in the bedroom of her apartment is such an example. While she’s briefly topless, he’s in her bathroom; he sees her and promptly closes the bathroom door. In his actions we can see him resolving his conflict of ‘to see, or not to see’ in this brief look and closing the door.

Not convinced that he secretly wants her? Later, he returns to her apartment with her suitcase (i.e., that clumsy entrance I mentioned above). Having sneaked through the bathroom window, and hearing her being questioned aggressively by the two Israeli agents, Walker gets naked and lies in her bed. He interrupts the interrogation, pretending to be her boyfriend; she goes along with it and sits on the bed with her arms around him.

He gets out of bed with only a stuffed animal to cover his groin. She’s standing behind him as he threatens one of the Israelis, giving her a clear view of his bare ass. Why the need to be nude, except as part of a wish to have a sexual relationship with her? His id wants him to be nude, while earlier, his superego closed the bathroom door.

In another scene earlier in the movie, Walker and Michelle are at the airport getting the suitcase, and they run into some old American colleagues of his, one of them–“Peter”–played by David Huddleston. Though nothing sexual is going on between Walker and Michelle, it must look that way to Peter and the other colleagues. The worried look on Walker’s face can be easily misconstrued as guilt, since the colleagues know Sondra…but in Walker’s unconscious, he really does feel guilty, not just worry that they’ll be gossiping about him and Michelle later.

In his hotel room with Michelle–and the French authorities and hotel staff are with him investigating his wife’s disappearance, since he knows the kidnappers will kill Sondra if he involves the cops–he gets rid of them by claiming he wants to be alone with Michelle, implying he’s having an affair with her, and also claiming they were right to think Sondra was also having an affair with someone. Again, on the surface, this is just an excuse to get rid of all of them; but unconsciously, he’d really like to be with her. He must have enjoyed her peck on his cheek.

To get back to the krytron, it’s hidden in, of all things, a statuette of the Statue of Liberty, which was in Michelle’s suitcase. How ironic it is that something used as a switch for a detonator for nuclear weapons has been put inside a symbol of ‘freedom.’

There’s a terrible fear of Arabs getting their hands on nukes (and Sondra’s kidnappers are Arabs, still routinely portrayed in movies of the time as villains); but the US created the first atomic bomb, and is the only country to have used nukes to kill people, yet we in the West don’t worry about American possession of nukes. France also has nuclear weapons, and while the Israeli government likes to keep to a policy of ‘deliberate ambiguity’ about having them, they most certainly have many.

The men at the American embassy (one of them played by Mahoney) are eager to get their hands on the krytron, as are the two Israeli agents, as if it would somehow be ‘safer’ in their hands. All Walker knows it that it’s the key to Sondra’s survival. To Michelle, as the smuggler of the krytron into France, it’s something she should have asked a lot more money for.

After a failed attempt to give the krytron to the kidnapper (Voyagis) in a parking lot to get Sondra back, Walker and the kidnapper agree to meet in A Touch of Class to arrange another exchange, this time, on the Île aux Cygnes. During Walker’s sexy dance with Michelle in that tight red dress, and Grace Jones is singing “I’ve seen that face before,” there are Arab men in the bar looking at him.

On the surface, Walker’s fearful face on the dance floor would seem to be because he thinks the watching Arabs are working with the kidnapper (lots of Arabs frequent A Touch of Class, as Michelle has remarked earlier), and that Sondra’s life is in their hands. On an unconscious level, though, Walker’s nervousness is really his guilt over dancing with Michelle while his wife’s in danger. He’s uncomfortable because he’s enjoying himself. When they walk into the bar, he politely says she looks nice; he’s really thinking that she looks hot.

The exchange on the Île aux Cygnes is next to the Paris replica of the Statue of Liberty. Recall the juxtaposition of an electronic detonator of nuclear weapons encased in a statuette of “Lady Liberty.” Now, the dangerous exchange of Sondra for that detonator is near another replica of “Lady Liberty.”

Just as there’s the paradox of fantasizing about an extramarital affair mixed with guilt over such thoughts, so is there the paradox of the ideal of democratic freedom mixed with coercion (the kidnapping) and the threat of using a weapon of mass destruction. A surface of goodness (marital fidelity, bourgeois democracy) hides the darkness inside us all (affair fantasies, ambitions of global imperialist dominance through nuclear deterrence).

Though Walker finally gets Sondra back, and it’s interesting to see both her and Michelle in those tight red dresses as they pass each other in the exchange, Michelle complicates the exchange by demanding payment from the kidnapper for having smuggled the krytron into France. A gunfight ensues, because the two Israeli agents arrive, demanding they hand over the krytron. In the struggle, Michelle is mortally wounded from a gunshot in the back from the pistol of the kidnapper, who’s been shot by one of the Israelis.

She puts the krytron in Walker’s pocket as she’s dying in his arms. The parallels between her and Sondra continue: where Sondra was in danger of being killed by the kidnapper, Michelle actually is killed by him. As she’s dying, Walker calls her “baby,” just as he was calling Sondra “babe” a number of times at the beginning of the film.

The point is that the second woman in a red dress has been a double for the first, having replaced her for a time. Now that Sondra is back, though, her appealing double is no longer needed in Walker’s unconscious fantasy world. His calling Michelle “baby” implies his wish, however unconscious, for her to be his new lover.

Siince all the Arabs are killed, the two Israelis approach Walker and Sondra for the krytron. He shows his contempt for them and their coveting of such a dangerous device, which has caused so much trauma and death, by throwing it into the Seine. The preoccupation with the krytron over human lives, a preoccupation on all political sides–American, Israeli, and Arab–as opposed to our sympathetic protagonist’s disregard for it, is meant to represent that old liberal “there’s bad on all sides” position on contentious political issues, a stance that ignores how there’s typically much more bad on one side (the US and Israel) than there is on the others (the Arabs and Soviets).

The movie ends with Walker and Sondra in a cab on their way out of Paris, paralleling their entrance into the city at the beginning. Where in the beginning, the couple were jet-lagged and bored, in the end, they’re emotionally scarred.

On the surface, those scars are from the scary kidnapping and killings they’ve witnessed; unconsciously, though, there’s guilt over fantasies about affairs–did Sondra have such unconscious thoughts, too? Is the fear of violence and death a cover for such guilt? Is that what everyone’s so…frantic…about?

In his review, Ebert criticized Frantic for having a number of ‘unnecessary’ scenes, such as the dance scene. As I’ve tried to show in my psychoanalytic interpretation, though, those scenes are very necessary. For the kidnapping is really a camouflage for unconscious fantasies of tossing aside one’s spouse to have an affair. The fear is really guilt.