Analysis of ‘Last Tango in Paris’

Last Tango in Paris is a 1972 erotic film co-written and directed by Bernardo Bertolucci (the other writers being Franco Arcalli and dialogue writers Agnès Varda and Jean-Louis Trintignant). It stars Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider as two lovers sharing an apartment and having an anonymous sexual relationship.

The film is controversial for its violent sexuality, in particular for a scene in which Paul (Brando) anally rapes Jeanne (Schneider). Upon release in the US, it got an X rating from the MPAA, even with the most graphic scene cut. It was, however, universally well-received in France, and was praised by Pauline Kael and Robert Altman. Brando received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role and Bertolucci was nominated for Best Director.

Here are some quotes:

“Fucking GOD!!!” –Paul, with his hands over his ears at the overwhelming sound of a passing train overhead (first line)

“That’s your happiness, and my hap-penis.” –Paul, when Jeanne puts her hands on his crotch

Jeanne: I fell in love with him when I heard him playing piano.
Paul: You mean when he first got into your knickers.
Jeanne: He was a child prodigy; he was playing with both hands.
Paul: I bet he was!

“Olympia is the personification of domestic virtue: faithful, economic and racist.” –Jeanne

Jeanne: Free? I’m not free. You want to know why you don’t want to know anything about me? Because you hate women.
Paul: Oh, really?
Jeanne: What have they ever done to you?
Paul: Well, either they always pretend to know who I am, or they pretend that I don’t know who they are, and that’s very boring.

“It’s beautiful without knowing anything.” –Jeanne

“Go get the butter.” –Paul

“Family secrets? I’ll tell you about family secrets.” –Paul, to Jeanne, preparing to sodomize her

“No, you’re alone. You’re all alone. And you won’t be able to be free of that feeling of being alone until you look death right in the face. I mean that sounds like bullshit. Some romantic crap. Until you go right up into the ass of death. Right up in his ass. ‘Til you find the womb of fear.” –Paul, to Jeanne

Paul: Put your fingers up my ass. Are you deaf? Go on. I’m gonna get a pig. And I’m gonna have the pig fuck you. And I want the pig to vomit in your face. Then I want you to swallow the vomit. Are you gonna do that for me?
Jeanne: Yes! Yeah!
Paul: I want the pig to die while you’re fucking him. Then you have to go behind it. I want you to smell the dying farts of the pig. Are you gonna do all of that for me?

“A little touch of Mommy in the night. Fake Ophelia drowned in a bathtub.” –Paul, to Rosa’s corpse

“Our marriage was nothing more than a foxhole for you. And all it took for you to get out was a 35-cent razor and a tub full of water. You cheap, goddamn, fucking, godforsaken whore, I hope you rot in hell. You’re worse than the dirtiest street pig that anybody could ever find anywhere, and you know why? You know why? Because you lied. You lied to me and I trusted you. You lied and you knew you were lying. Go on, tell me you didn’t lie. Haven’t you got anything to say about that? You can think up something, can’t you? Go on, tell me something! Go on, smile, you cunt!” [crying] “Go on, tell me… tell me something sweet. Smile at me and say I just misunderstood. Go on, tell me. You pig-fucker… you goddamn, fucking, pig-fucking liar.” [sobbing] “Rosa… I’m sorry, I… I just – I can’t stand it to see these goddamn things on your face!” [peels off her fake eyelashes] “You never wore make-up… this fucking shit. I’m gonna take this off your mouth, this – this lipstick… Rosa – oh GOD! I’m sorry! I – I don’t know why you did it! I’d do it too, if I knew how… I just don’t know how… I have to… have to find a way…” –Paul, to his dead wife at her wake

Paul: You ran through Africa and Asia and Indonesia, and now I’ve found you… and I love you. I want to know your name.
Jeanne: Jeanne. [she shoots him]

“I don’t know his name…” –Jeanne, in French (last line of the film)

As suggested by the two Francis Bacon portraits of a man and a woman seen during the opening credits, the theme of duality is ever-present in this film: male vs female, English vs French languages, an American (Paul) vs a Frenchwoman (Jeanne), old vs young, life vs death, knowing vs unknowing (or, as Wilfred Bion would have said, K vs -K), lies vs truth, illusion vs reality, Jeanne’s cheating on her fiancé, Thomas (played by Jean-Pierre Léaud), vs Paul’s wife, Rosa (Veronica Lazar), cheating on him, and Paul’s hotel vs the apartment he and Jeanne rent for their sexual relationship.

Paul is an American widower living in Paris and mourning his wife, Rosa, who has recently committed suicide after having been discovered in an affair with a man staying in Paul’s hotel, named Marcel (played by Massimo Girotti). By chance, Paul and Jeanne find themselves renting the same apartment. As the two of them converse, they both switch back and forth between French and English. The scene climaxes (pardon the expression) with them having sex.

After that, Jeanne rushes off to find her fiancé, Thomas, a young film director with exuberant feelings about his moments of artistic inspiration, to the point of looking, to put it bluntly, foolish. As such, he makes the perfect cuckold, a sharp contrast to jaded, macho, pouting Paul.

The engaged couple kiss ecstatically, and Thomas tells her about a TV project, ‘Portrait of a Girl,’ he’s filming with her. He hasn’t told her about it yet, because he wants it to be a surprise. The cameras are rolling as they speak. She is annoyed that he’d do this without asking her consent first.

This TV film they’re making is supposed to be about her life, but how much of it really is autobiographical, and how much of it is made up, is anyone’s guess. One finds it safe to assume that Jeanne doesn’t want to reveal all that much of her personal life to the general public.

Now, whatever extent this TV film is a break from reality is nothing compared to the break from the real world that Paul wants to establish with Jeanne in the private, cut-off world of their affair in the apartment. He doesn’t want them to know each other’s names, nor are they to discuss anything true about their pasts.

Their room, as he sees it, is a sanctuary from the pain and suffering of the world outside. He’d rather the two of them have animal grunts instead of names, so in one scene he grunts like a gorilla, and she makes a high-pitched, bird-like, extended rhotic trill. Theirs is an Edenic rejection of civilization. How appropriate that they’re both nude when they make these animal sounds: they’re like Adam and Eve before eating the forbidden fruit…or at least they’re trying to be like them.

Recall that Adam and Eve didn’t have their names yet. He named her Eve only after the Fall (Genesis 3:20), and he was ‘named’ Adam only insofar as, in the original Hebrew, he was ‘adam (“man”) from the ‘adamah (the dirt, or dust, of the ground–Genesis 2:7). Theirs was a world of unknowing prior to the Fall, since the forbidden fruit was from the Tree of Knowledge. Ignorance is bliss: Paul is trying to create a paradise out of unknowing. The two naked lovers are in a Garden of Eden of their own (given his dominance over Jeanne, note the irony in my allusive choice of words). This ‘paradise’ is something Paul imagines will help him get over his grief over Rosa’s suicide.

Put another way, Paul is using Jeanne to play a role in his Edenic fantasy, just as Thomas is using her for his film fantasy. Both men get irritated if she does anything to defy their wishes to carry on acting out these fantasies: at a train station, Thomas actually throws punches at her for refusing to carry on with the film. She would be free to live her own life…but they don’t want to let her do so.

In one of her attempts at defiance of Paul’s rule that he and she never learn anything about each other, she goes through his jacket pockets to find some identification on him. Nude except for a scarf wrapped around her neck, Jeanne looks like Eve picking one of the forbidden fruits off the Tree of Knowledge (i.e., his jacket, hung up by the entrance to the bathroom, as if it were a cluster of leaves).

Since Paul is making the rules, forbidding any gaining of knowledge, he represents not only Adam, but also Yahweh. On his way to the bathroom, Paul approaches her after she’s looked through his jacket pockets, and in a way he seems like Yahweh “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Genesis 3:8). Paul enjoys her, as Adam enjoyed Eve, and he rules over her, as Yahweh did…and Adam did (Genesis 3:16).

Naturally, Jeanne resents Paul’s dominance and accuses him of hating women. She complains that she is merely his whore, though she–being a non-native English speaker–mispronounces the word as “wore.” This mispronunciation can be seen as a Freudian slip, for he and she, during their sexual unions prior to this scene, “wore” each other, as it were, each other’s bodies as clothes on their own nakedness; but this ‘wearing’ of flesh as metaphorical clothing especially applies to Paul in his ‘wearing’ of her body, his using it as a kind of commodity.

Indeed, the movie itself uses Maria Schneider as a commodity: if she isn’t nude, she is in tight blue jeans spreading her legs, or topless and arching her back in them to accentuate her ass as she does a scene masturbating. She’s the one showing off her body, not Brando (except when he moons the female emcee of a tango contest towards the end of the film). Schneider complained much of how poorly she was treated during filming, especially the “butter” scene.

Though the infamous scene of Paul sodomizing Jeanne was, of course, just simulated sex, Schneider was actually traumatized during the filming; she “was crying real tears” and complained of feeling “humiliated and…a little raped.” The scene was not originally in the script, and she would have refused to do it had she known she could.

If she’d felt “a little raped” during a scene of simulated sex, that sounds suspiciously like a PTSD flashback reaction to a memory of a real rape. For Schneider’s sake, I hope I’m wrong in speculating that about her real life history.

As unpleasant as the experience of filming that scene was for her, though, in terms of adding to the plot and symbolism of the story, I see the “butter” scene as full of meaning. As I said above, Paul is using Jeanne to help him, in the form of his anonymous Edenic fantasy, to process his grieving over Rosa’s suicide. Paul has absolutely no right at all to use Jeanne in this way, but he does anyway.

He weeps like a baby over Rosa’s death. This infant-like weeping is significant, for in Rosa, her mother, and Jeanne, I suspect Paul is doing a transference onto them of his Oedipal feelings for his own mother. His macho, sexist exterior is a reaction formation, a false self hiding the dependent baby within. Normally, we think of a transference happening between a patient and his or her therapist (i.e., feelings of childhood relationships transferred onto the analyst), and Paul is, in a way, using Jeanne to be his therapist; but transference can be achieved between any two people.

He lives with Rosa’s mother (played by Maria Michi) in his “flophouse” hotel, and just as he isn’t particularly nice to Jeanne, so is he abrasive with Rosa’s mother and was, I suspect, to Rosa herself (Could his nastiness have driven her into Marcel’s arms, then to her death? It seems that way.).

His bad attitude toward women is probably rooted in his relationship with his mother; object relations theory explains how our early childhood relationships with our parents and primary caregivers are like blueprints for how our relationships with people will be later in life. When Paul speaks to Jeanne of his mother, he says that she was, on the one hand, a drunk, and he implies that she was promiscuous (implying, in turn, his own Oedipal jealousy–he remembers her having been “arrested nude”); and on the other hand, he says she was “poetic,” and she inspired a love of nature in him. Such a dual attitude suggests a psychological splitting of her into the ‘good mother’ and the ‘bad mother.’

So Paul’s frustrations with the ‘bad mother’ end up being transferred onto Jeanne, Rosa’s mother, and probably Rosa herself when she was alive. He certainly treats Rosa’s corpse like a bad mother when he tearfully rants at her, calling her every four-letter name imaginable, then sobs like a baby.

To deal with all of his frustration, Paul must project it, as a baby would onto his mother when, for example, she doesn’t provide the breast for him. A baby pushes his negative feelings onto his mother, making her contain them, then return them to him in a detoxified form. Bion‘s theory of containment uses a masculine symbol (implying a phallus) for the baby’s contained feelings of agitation, and a feminine symbol (implying a yoni) for his mother as a container. Hence, the sex act is a perfect symbol for this notion of containing and detoxifying agitating emotional experiences. (See here for a more thorough explanation of Bion’s and other psychoanalytic concepts.)

Unfortunately for Jeanne, though, her anus is the symbolic container, not her vagina; so the sodomy represents negative containment. This kind of containment does not lead to the soothing, detoxifying kind that is supposed to happen for a baby whose mother has a capacity for reverie, or for a psychotic patient whose psychotherapist is playing the soothing, maternal role. Rather, it leads to a nameless dread, the trauma Jeanne is experiencing. As I said above, Paul is using Jeanne as a kind of therapist on whom he can thrust all of his pain, but she cannot be expected to play such a role.

As he is sodomizing her, he has her repeat his reflections on “family secrets,” which sound suspiciously like traumatizing experiences he had as a child because of his family, and maybe his church, too. He reflects on the social lie that the family is “a holy institution meant to breed virtue in savages,” that the “holy family” is a “church of good citizens,” but really, “the children are tortured until they tell their first lie,” ” the world is broken by repression,” and “freedom is assassinated by egotism.” So this so-called “holy family” is really just “you…fucking…family.” When he comes, he grunts, “Oh, God…Jesus,” implying the hypocrisies not only of the bourgeois, church-going family, but also the myth of the Church’s Holy Family. Outside, the phallic overhead train is seen flying by.

This linking of the hypocrisies of the family of “virtue” with those of the “church of good citizens” seems to shed light on the meaning of his condemnation of “fucking God,” both at the beginning of the film, with the thundering noise of the phallic overhead train, and in his refusal to allow Rosa’s mother to have any priests at Rosa’s funeral.

I believe we should take literally Paul’s references to “fucking God” and “you fucking family”: this isn’t just gratuitous swearing. There’s the phoney virtue of the Father-God of the sanctimonious Church, some of whose priests (“Fathers”) rape children and go unpunished (Did this happen to Paul as a boy, hence his anal rape of Jeanne to have her contain his trauma…or did one of his parents sexually abuse him?).

Then there’s the “fucking god” of Greek myth, Zeus, or Jupiter (“Dieus-pater“), the sky-father god who hurled thunderbolts as noisy as that overhead train that seems to fly by–in the sky, as it were. Zeus, who also ravished nymphs and pretty maidens, seems to resemble Paul’s “whore-fucker” father…and he seems to resemble Paul himself. The sky-father isn’t the God of the Church, but the rapist Zeus.

Belief in God is often seen as a transference of feelings for one’s father onto the heavenly deity. Along with the love one feels for, and the need one has for security from, the father-God, also comes the sense of the god’s authoritarian dominance, rooted in the authority of one’s father.

Recall how Paul describes his father as “tough,” a “whore-fucker,” and “super-masculine,” all of which sound like projections of his macho self, but which could also be him identifying with his father. He claims that he may not have been telling Jeanne the truth about his past, but even his lying can have included unconscious, Freudian-slip confessions of truth…if he even is lying.

Added to all of this is the surprising civility he shows to Marcel: shouldn’t he be throwing punches at the man who seduced his wife? Marcel is older than Paul, though actor Girotti was older than Brando by only six years. Brando was about 48 when making this film, but Paul–in his truthful revealing of himself to Jeanne at the end of the story–says he’s 45, allowing for a greater age difference between him and Marcel, who could be even older than Girotti, and therefore older than Paul by several more years.

My point in mentioning these age differences is that, if Paul has transferred his Oedipal feelings for his mother onto Rosa, then he easily could have also done such a transference from his father onto Marcel. The fear of his “tough,” “super-masculine,” and (symbolically) castrating father (who bullied him into milking a cow and getting cow-shit on his nice shoes before taking a girl to a basketball game) has been transferred, however unconsciously, onto Marcel, thus preventing Paul from fighting the older man…and as we know, Paul is easily provoked to violence.

Paul punches a door, in what looks like a childish temper tantrum, in response to Rosa’s mother asking why Rosa killed herself (her mother didn’t know she’d had an affair with Marcel, hence Paul’s anger). He grabs, throws around, and slaps a man for not wanting to sleep with an old prostitute, one who knew Rosa and is desperate for the money; Paul shouts at the would-be john, calling him a “faggot.” But he won’t fight Marcel.

Paul is far more upset about Rosa’s suicide than her adultery. My interpretation, that he has transferred his Oedipal feelings from his parents onto Rosa and Marcel, can explain this: unconscious fear of his father, transferred onto Marcel, inhibits and restrains his anger at the adultery; unconscious fear of abandonment by his mother, transferred onto Rosa, explains how Paul not only mourns, but has fallen to pieces, over her suicide.

He enters the room where her body is being kept, and he makes two Shakespearian allusions: “a little touch of Mommy in the night,” and Rosa is a “fake Ophelia drowned in a bathtub,” surrounded in flowers. Rosa’s mother has arranged this gaudy presentation of her body, heavily made up, and Paul is disgusted at the over-the-top display. Henry V, in the Bard’s play, is a paternal figure going about the camp, concerned with the morale of his army, who are about to fight the French the next morning; Paul’s allusion, of course, is sheer sarcasm. Ophelia’s suicide, provoked by her mad boyfriend, Hamlet, is like Rosa’s suicide, provoked by her mad husband.

Paul lets out a long, four-letter rant at his wife’s corpse. He sobs like a baby frustrated with its mother for denying it what it needs (and recall that he’s transferred his feelings for his mother onto Rosa). His hostile attitude toward Rosa is like a baby going through what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position, in which Mother is seen as all bad. Then, weeping even more profusely, Paul apologizes to Rosa and lets his body fall onto hers; he’s like a baby going through the depressive position and wanting reparation with the mother it has hated. This scene seems to show Paul finally processing his grief with a degree of success, unlike his attempts to have Jeanne contain his pain.

Because he feels he has largely processed his grief and exorcized his demons, Paul no longer needs his anonymous sexual Garden of Eden with Jeanne, and so he not only stops using the apartment, but he also removes all the furniture there, all without telling her. She finds the abandoned room and sobs in frustration and desolation.

There has never really been a connection between the two, outside of the sex. In an earlier scene, Paul leaves the apartment, shutting the door in her face, and not even saying goodbye to her. He hasn’t wanted to know her name, nor have her know his, because he hasn’t wanted them to know each other at all, beyond physically. This unknowing has been his definition of Eden: not eating of the Tree of Knowledge, so to speak, what Bion called -K. Ignorance is bliss, as I said above.

The K-link is a link between subject and object, or between the self and other; it has its origin in the mother/infant relationship, developed through the container/contained exchange of emotional experiences as described above. But Paul doesn’t want to grow in K with Jeanne; accordingly, when she describes her sexual experiences, she notices that he never listens to her. He orders her around, with never a ‘please’ or a ‘thank you’ when he wants her to get the butter or the manicure scissors.

There’s no mutuality in their relationship, so there’s no growth in K as shared, exchanged knowledge of emotional experiences between two people. Even though he has her stick her fingers up his ass, this is no equalizing reversal of his having sodomized her, for it is he who’s wanted it, not her. He isn’t containing her pain, as he’s had her contain his during the anal rape.

Just before she puts her fingers up his ass, we hear him rationalizing his alienating of her by saying that we’re “all alone.” Only going “right up into the ass of death,” looking death straight in the face, to “find the womb of fear” (his words sound like an expression of his facing his infantile Oedipal trauma), will we “be free of that feeling of being alone.”

Jeanne tells Thomas about the apartment and tells him on the phone there that they should consider it as their new home when they’re married. He arrives and looks around; she mentions a room too small for a bed, but one in which a baby could sleep. This leads to a discussion of baby names.

Both of them would name their future son or daughter after communist revolutionaries: Fidel or Rosa [!], the latter being not as well-known, but also “not bad,” in Thomas’s opinion. Here we see the hypocrisy of the bourgeois liberal, posing as progressives, masquerading in the trappings of radical chic. One might think, for example, of a critic of Cuba who still wears a Che Guevara T-shirt: the unsuccessful revolutionary is “not bad,” whereas the successful one is considered bad.

We can see this hypocrisy earlier in the film, in Jeanne’s judgement of her nurse Olympia as “racist,” on the one hand, but also in her love and admiration for her late father, the colonel in Algeria who died in 1958 (of whom she forbids Paul to speak disrespectfully), presumably killed in battle during the Algerian fight for independence from France (which included such Marxist revolutionaries as Frantz Fanon), ending in an Algerian victory in 1962, ten years before this story.

A true progressive leftist would condemn her father’s defence of imperialism and colonialism, but Jeanne has loved her father “like a god” (she even wears his uniform and points his phallic pistol in a scene in her home, an act of identification with him), an interesting point to be made in connection with the ‘fucking gods’ in Paul’s life, as discussed above. Her love of “the colonel,” thinking he looked handsome in his uniform, is no less an Oedipal fixation than is Paul’s towards his parents and their transferences, Rosa and Marcel, as well as Rosa’s mother and even Jeanne herself.

Jeanne’s mother is no less racist than that “personification of domestic virtue,” Olympia (who notes that their old dog, Mustapha, could recognize an Arab by his smell, as well as tell the difference between the rich and the poor): her mother calls the Berbers “a strong race, but as servants–disastrous,” a typical bourgeois imperialist attitude. Jeanne has no more words of criticism for her mother than for her father, yet she would name her son after Castro.

Ever wanting to capture Jeanne in his world of filmic fantasy, Thomas imagines getting shots of her dancing about the apartment, her arms spread out like an airplane’s wings…but the vivacity he sees in her eyes perhaps raises his suspicions that she’s been seeing another man–in this very apartment? (Recall all those times previously, when she’s had to rush off after filming.) As a result, he wants to find another apartment for them. He says goodbye and shakes her hand, as if they were mere business partners, or friends, rather than lovers.

I suspect she has seen suspicion in his eyes, raising her fears. These fears, combined with how badly Paul has treated her, strengthen her resolution: she must break it off with Paul. He, of course, won’t have that: she is a mere possession in his eyes, and she isn’t allowed to live her own life without him.

Not only does he want to start the relationship all over again, he also wants them to know each other. They’ve left the Garden of Eden that was their rented apartment, and now he’d have them eat of the Tree of Knowledge, so to speak. Jeanne is not impressed with what he tells her of his dull life. Paradise is lost. Paul’s quest for knowledge (K), like that of Adam and Eve, as well as of Oedipus, will destroy him.

Paul and Jeanne go into a place where a tango competition is almost finished. He says that the tango is a rite. The stylized movements of the dancers certainly give off that ceremonial effect: they are precise and graceful, but their Apollonian discipline and precision look artificial.

Paul and Jeanne, however, are Dionysian drunks at their table, drinking champagne and whiskey and making a toast to a “life in the country,” which Jeanne finds distasteful. Earlier, Thomas filmed her at her country home with Olympia, and so the idea of a life in the country with Paul suggests an intrusion by him into her world.

Paul decides they should join the dancers, and their drunken clumsiness among the tangoing couples is a scandal to see. Since the tango symbolizes the sexual union of a man and a woman (hence, the film’s title), Paul’s and Jeanne’s Dionysian tumbling exposes the artificiality of the sexual relationship as symbolized by the precise, Apollonian tango dancing. She wants to break it off with him, yet she grins as she goes piggyback on his shoulders onto the dance floor.

They sit again at a dark area on the other side of the dance floor. Paul makes another Shakespearian allusion: “If music be the food of love, play on,” originally said by Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night, in his sadness over his unrequited love for the lady Olivia. In fact, the play’s central theme is unrequited love, which is exactly Paul’s predicament at the moment.

Lacan once provocatively said that there’s no relation between the sexes: love is an illusion; it doesn’t last (Will Jeanne’s and Thomas’s love last?). Indeed, for all the hype surrounding this film as an X-rated, erotic film, there isn’t all that much sex in it–how symbolic of the lack of a relationship between the sexes. There’s Paul’s and Jeanne’s first fuck when they meet in the apartment, there’s Schneider showing off her nakedness several times, there’s the profanity, the butter scene, Jeanne’s fingers up Paul’s ass after he bathes her, and there’s the hand job she gives him during the tango competition. In a film over two hours long, that’s about it: little more than morsels of porn.

She runs out onto the streets, and he chases her. At one point, just before she reaches her apartment building, he’s ahead of her, but he steps out of her way, reminding us of when Brando stepped out of Vivien Leigh‘s way towards the end of A Streetcar Named Desire (then Kowalski, it’s strongly implied in the 1951 film version, rapes Blanche). Paul races after Jeanne into her apartment, fighting his way inside as she tries to close the door on him, his forcing his way in being symbolic of raping her.

Inside her apartment, he puts on the cap that’s part of her father’s old uniform. She, standing in front of a drawer that holds her father’s old pistol, frowns at the sight of Paul in the hat. He may have transferred his Oedipal feelings onto Rosa and Jeanne, but Jeanne would never transfer her love of her father onto Paul. His mock saluting feels like more disrespect to her father.

He wants to know her name. As with Adam, the day of gaining knowledge is also the day Paul will die (Genesis 2:17). No sooner does she say, “Jeanne,” than she also pulls the trigger and puts a bullet into his gut.

This wound is his experience of negative containment. His gut is the yonic container, the bullet her ejaculated pain, now contained in him, and he’ll feel that nameless dread for these last few seconds of his life as he staggers out onto the balcony. She’s returned to him what he gave her in the anal rape.

She holds the phallic pistol dangling at waist level, just by her crotch. She is thus the phallic woman, gaining the strength and power she needs to liberate herself from this dominant man. The gun also symbolically makes her what Klein called the terrifying combined parent figure, the mother with a phallus (recall Paul’s words, “the womb of fear”).

Camille Paglia sees the mother “as an overwhelming force who condemns men to lifelong sexual anxiety, from which they escape through rationalism and physical achievement” (Paglia, Preface, page xiii). Paul has tried, but ultimately failed, to escape the ghost of his mother through his “super-masculine” bravado. How fitting that Paul would be killed by Jeanne, on whom he’s transferred his feelings for his mother.

On the balcony, he sticks the gum he’s been chewing on the balustrade; one last projection of his. Next, we see him lying dead out there…in a fetal position. I told you that, behind his macho façade, he was a baby.

She must get her story straight for the police. Conveniently for her, he never got around to telling her his name, so that won’t slip out when she’s telling them she doesn’t know him at all.

But in a larger sense, is she really free of male dominance? Will the mostly (if not all) male police accept her story? And what of her marriage to Thomas, who never wants to stop filming her? Recall how he hit her when she refused to carry on with his filmic fantasies, a direct parallel with Paul’s Edenic use of the rented apartment to disavow all knowledge of the outside world.

“When something’s finished, it begins again”…doesn’t it?