‘Sirens,’ A Horror Novella, Chapter One

The three beauties just appeared out of nowhere. Ari couldn’t believe his luck. He was standing at the bar of the dance club, waiting for the bartender to give him his beer, when the three young women walked up to him, all three of them grinning. Then they asked his name.

And now he had all three of them on his motorcycle. He was taking them on a highway towards his apartment. His bike was big enough to fit all three of them on it.

Ari couldn’t believe his luck.

All three women had wavy, shoulder-length hair: a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead. All three wore tight, sleeveless dresses that showed plenty of cleavage and went only half-way down their upper legs. The blonde wore black, the brunette wore red, and the redhead wore gold. Their high heels matched the colour of their dresses. The brunette wore black fishnet stockings.

And now they were all on his bike. Unbelievable luck.

They hadn’t said much to each other in the dance club. Though he’d drunk only the one beer, he was feeling a kind of intoxication the whole time he was with the girls.

It was strange, but why would he have cared? He was about to get the most amazing lay of his life. As he looked up at the starry, moonlit night, he imagined how the reverse gang-bang was going to be: him fucking one pussy, licking the second pussy, and fingering the third? Or would he fuck one of them while watching the other two do each other, then they’d all switch positions?

He felt a strange, buzzing, tingling vibration with those girls all around him. It felt amazingly good, too good to be suspicious about. It was like swimming in a sea of pleasure, the wavy ‘water’ soothing his whole body.

And those girls, with their curves, round asses, and huge tits! Their faces brightly painted to perfection! And they wanted him! He didn’t even have to do much work to take them home with him. It was more like them pursuing him than the traditional vice versa.

As he’d danced with them on the crowded dance floor, their hips grinding together, he could hear them singing in his ears, a beautiful, perfect three-part vocal harmony with the techno music and its pounding rhythms surrounding him. The other people dancing around him were looking at him strangely, as if he were making a fool of himself.

What’s their problem? he wondered as he felt the blonde’s ass rubbing against his pointy crotch. Haven’t they ever seen a guy dirty dancing with three hot chicks before? I’ll bet they’re just envious.

Now, all three of them were with him on his bike, the blonde in front, her ass grinding on his hard lap again. The brunette was immediately behind him, her arms around his chest, her fingers tickling his nipples. The redhead was behind her, of course, and as he could see from his rear-view mirrors, she had her arms around the brunette, her hands cupping her tits.

As he raced down the highway, on a lonely, open road, he could hear them singing again. It was odd that they would sing like that, but it was such pretty, seductive music. Hearing it made him feel as if he were high on ecstasy.

I’m still driving OK, he reassured himself.

He felt those intoxicating, wave-like vibes going around and through his body, undulating to the cadence of the three women’s singing. Sometimes the bike veered a little to the left–to the lane for oncoming traffic–or to the right shoulder of the road, near a ditch, but he generally kept control.

“What’s with all the singing, girls?” he shouted out.

“Don’t you like it?” the brunette asked.

“Well, yeah, but…” he began.

“Go faster!” the blonde shouted. “It gets me hot! Faster!“

“OK.” He sped up.

“How much longer till we get to your place?” the redhead shouted.

“Oh, about another twenty minutes or so,” he said.

“Faster!” the blonde shouted again. He went faster.

“You sure live far away from the city,” the redhead said.

“Yeah, I do,” he said.

“Faster!” the blonde shouted. He sped up again, and the girls resumed their singing.

There’s that beautiful singing again, he thought, not noticing the huge truck that was approaching in the opposing lane. Oh, those good vibrations…

He veered into the truck’s lane, so charmed was he by the singing that he was oblivious to what he had done. Those undulating, blurry vibes moving before his eyes and massaging every muscle in his body made him forget everything that was actually happening around him.

The singing continued.

That truck was getting closer.

The driver gave several urgent honks of his horn, but Ari didn’t hear them at all. The girls’ singing was drowning out every other sound in the area.

He was grinning to the beautiful harmony of their singing, as were the girls. His eyes were closed…as were the girls’.

“What the fuck is wrong with that guy?” the truck driver said, still honking his horn. “He must be stoned!”

He tried to slow the truck down and swerve out of Ari’s way, but it was too late: the bike skidded and tipped to the right, for only at the last split-second did Ari finally see what danger he was in. The very last thing he felt was his pelvis being crushed under the wheels of the truck.

And the three beauties just disappeared into nowhere.

Analysis of ‘Withnail and I’

Withnail and I is a 1987 British buddy film written and directed by Bruce Robinson, based on an unpublished, semi-autobiographical novel, based in turn on his experiences as an actor during such incidents as the filming of Franco Zeffirelli‘s Romeo and Juliet. It stars Richard E. Grant, Paul McGann, and Richard Griffiths. It also features Ralph Brown and Michael Elphick.

The film had George Harrison as executive producer through his company, HandMade Films. It has become a cult classic. Withnail (Grant) “and I” (McGann–actually, the character’s name is Marwood as indicated in the script, as well as discovered, by a watchful eye, written on the cover of a telegram, though we’d never know, since he’s never referred to by name anywhere in the film) are two struggling young actors who, after an intense experience of being stoned and drunk over a period of several days and nights, decide to spend a weekend in the country to rejuvenate…only to stumble into other problems.

Here are some quotes:

Withnail: [reading from the paper] “In a world exclusive interview, 33-year-old shotputter Geoff Woade, who weighs 317 pounds, admitted taking massive doses of anabolic steroids, drugs banned in sport. ‘He used to get in bad tempers and act up,’ said his wife. ‘He used to pick on me. But now he’s stopped, he’s much better in our sex life and in our general life.'” Jesus Christ, this huge, thatched head with its earlobes and cannonball is now considered sane. “Geoff Woade is feeling better and is now prepared to step back into society and start tossing his orb about.” Look at him. Look at Geoff Woade. His head must weigh fifty pounds on its own. Imagine the size of his balls. Imagine getting into a fight with the fucker!
Marwood: Please, I don’t feel good.
Withnail: That’s what you’d say, but that wouldn’t wash with Geoff. No, he’d like a bit of pleading. Add spice to it. In fact, he’d probably tell you what he was going to do before he did it. “I’m going to pull your head off.” “Oh no, please, don’t pull my head off.” “I’m going to pull your head off, because I don’t like your head.”

“I demand to have some booze!” –Withnail

“Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, and for once I’m inclined to believe Withnail is right. We are indeed drifting into the arena of the unwell. Making enemies of our own futures.” –Marwood, voiceover

“Speed is like a dozen transatlantic flights without ever getting off the plane. Time change. You lose, you gain. Makes no difference so long as you keep taking the pills. But sooner or later you’ve got to get out because it’s crashing. Then all at once those frozen hours melt out through the nervous system and seep out the pores.” –Marwood, voiceover

“Danny’s here. Headhunter to his friends. Headhunter to everyone. He doesn’t have any friends. The only people he converses with are his clients, and occasionally the police. The purveyor of rare herbs and proscribed chemicals is back. Will we never be set free?” –Marwood, voiceover

“You’re looking very beautiful, man. Have you been away? Saint Peter preached the epistles to the apostles looking like that.” –Danny, to Marwood, who has come out of the bathroom wearing a towel

“I don’t advise a haircut, man. All hairdressers are in the employment of the government. Hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain. This is the reason bald-headed men are uptight.” –Danny

“Ponce!” –Irishman in pub, to Marwood (because he has perfume-smelling boots)

“I could hardly piss straight with fear. Here was a man with 3/4 of an inch of brain who’d taken a dislike to me. What had I done to offend him? I don’t consciously offend big men like this. And this one has a definite imbalance of hormone in him. Get any more masculine than him and you’d have to live up a tree.” –Marwood, voiceover

“‘I fuck arses’? Who fucks arses? Maybe he fucks arses! Maybe he’s written this in some moment of drunken sincerity! I’m in considerable danger here, I must get out of here at once.” –Marwood

“Oh! you little traitors. I think the carrot infinitely more fascinating than the geranium. The carrot has mystery. Flowers are essentially tarts. Prostitutes for the bees. There is a certain je ne sais quoi – oh, so very special – about a firm, young carrot…Excuse me…” –Uncle Monty

“It is the most shattering experience of a young man’s life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself, ‘I will never play the Dane.'” –Uncle Monty

[They drive past some schoolgirls] Withnail: [leaning out the car window] SCRUBBERS!
Schoolgirl: Up yours, grandad!
Withnail: SCRUBBERS! SCRUBBERS!
Marwood: Shut up.
Withnail: Little tarts, they love it.

“I been watching you, especially you, prancing like a tit. You want working on, boy!” –Jake the Poacher

[Withnail and Marwood are lying in bed together, listening to a man coming inside the cottage. Withnail is cowering under the covers] Withnail: [whispering] He’s going into your room. It’s you he wants. Offer him yourself. [the bedroom door slowly opens and the intruder enters with a torch…screwing his eyes shut in terror, moaning] We mean no harm!
Monty: Oh, my boys, my boys, forgive me.
Marwood: [relieved] Monty! Monty, Monty!
Withnail: MONTY, YOU TERRIBLE CUNT!
Monty: Forgive me, it was inconsiderate of me not to have telegrammed.
Withnail: WHAT ARE YOU DOING PROWLING AROUND IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING NIGHT?

“The older order changeth, yielding place to new. God fulfils himself in many ways. And soon, I suppose, I shall be swept away by some vulgar little tumour. Oh, my boys, my boys, we’re at the end of an age. We live in a land of weather forecasts and breakfasts that set in. Shat on by Tories, shovelled up by Labour. And here we are, we three, perhaps the last island of beauty in the world.” –Uncle Monty

Monty: Now, which of you is going to be a splendid fellow and go down to the Rolls for the rest of the wine?
Withnail: [getting up] I will.
Marwood: [getting up at the same time] No, I’d better go. I want to see about digging the car out anyway.
Monty: But we have my car, dear boy.
Marwood: Yes, but if it rains, we’re buggered. [realises he’s used the wrong word] I mean…
Monty: Stranded!

“I can never touch meat until it’s cooked. As a youth I used to weep in butcher’s shops.” –Uncle Monty

“If you think you’re going to have a weekend’s indulgence up here at his expense, which means him having a weekend’s indulgence up here at my expense, you got another thing coming.” –Marwood, to Withnail, about Uncle Monty

“I think you’ve been punished enough. I think we’d better release you from the légumes and transfer your talents to the meat.” –Uncle Monty, after having amorously put his hand on Marwood’s arm as he peels vegetables

Monty: Laisse-moi, respirer, longtemps, longtemps, l’odeur de tes cheveux. Oh, Baudelaire. Brings back such memories of Oxford. Oh, Oxford…
Marwood: [voiceover] Followed by yet another anecdote about his sensitive crimes in a punt with a chap called Norman who had red hair and a book of poetry stained with the butter drips from crumpets.

Monty: There can be no true beauty without decay.
Withnail: Legium pro Britannia.
Monty: How right you are, how right you are. We live in a kingdom of reigns where royalty comes in gangs.

Monty: You mustn’t blame him. You mustn’t blame yourself. I know how you feel and how difficult it is. And that’s why you mustn’t hold back, let it ruin your youth as I nearly did over Eric. It’s like a tide. Give in to it, boy. Go with it. It’s society’s crime, not ours.
Marwood: I’m not homosexual, Monty.
Monty: Yes, you are! Of course you are! You’re simply blackmailing your emotions to avoid the realities of your relationship with him.
Marwood: What are you talking about?
Monty: You love him. And it isn’t his fault he cannot love you any more than it’s mine that I adore you.

“I mean to have you, even if it must be burglary!” –Uncle Monty, to Marwood

Marwood: I have just narrowly avoided having a buggering. And I’ve come in here with the express intention of wishing one on you! Having said that, I now intend to leave for London.
Withnail: Hold on, don’t let your imagination run away with you…
Marwood: Imagination! I have just finished fighting a naked man! How dare you tell him I’m a toilet trader?!
Withnail: Tactical necessity. If I hadn’t told him you were active we’d never have got the cottage.

Danny: The joint I’m about to roll requires a craftsman. It can utilise up to 12 skins. It is called a Camberwell Carrot.
Marwood: It’s impossible to use 12 papers on one joint.
Danny: It’s impossible to make a Camberwell Carrot with anything less.
Withnail: Who says it’s a Camberwell Carrot?
Danny: I do. I invented it in Camberwell, and it looks like a carrot.

“London is a country coming down from its trip. We are 91 days from the end of this decade and there’s gonna be a lot of refugees.” –Danny

“I’m getting the FEAR!” –Marwood, while high

“You have done something to your brain. You have made it high. If I lay 10 mils of diazepam on you, it will do something else to your brain. You will make it low. Why trust one drug and not the other? That’s politics, innit?” –Danny, to Marwood

“If you’re hanging on to a rising balloon, you’re presented with a difficult decision — let go before it’s too late or hang on and keep getting higher, posing the question: how long can you keep a grip on the rope? They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworth’s, man. The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over. And as Presuming Ed here has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.” –Danny

“I have of late — but wherefore I know not — lost all my mirth… and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air — look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire — why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties! …How like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world. The paragon of animals. And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither… nor woman neither.” –Withnail, imperfectly quoting Hamlet

A recurring theme in this film is a sense of ‘the end of the world as we know it.’ This quasi-apocalyptic sense comes in many forms: it’s late 1969, so “The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over.” Associated with the end of the 1960s is the soon-to-come end of welfare-oriented capitalism, that is, the Keynesian post-war economic era that would end with the 1973 oil crisis and be replaced with the neoliberal era inaugurated by such politicians as Thatcher and Reagan. Finally, there’s the end of Withnail’s and Marwood’s partying, boozing, and getting stoned together. England is “coming down from its trip.”

Indeed, at the beginning of the film we see Marwood coming down from a lengthy period of getting wasted with Withnail, looking exhausted. He is also a hyper-agitated sort, given to intense fears of imminent catastrophe (“My thumbs have gone weird! I’m in the middle of a bloody overdose! My heart’s beating like a fucked clock! I feel dreadful, I feel really dreadful.”) His preoccupation with survival makes him representative of Eros, the life instinct.

Withnail, on the other hand, is self-destructive in the extreme, not only drinking like a fish and doing drugs to excess, but also drinking toxic substances like lighter fluid or possibly even antifreeze [!] when he’s desperate for more booze. He almost always seems to have a wine bottle in his hand. He’ll drive drunk, not at all caring if the cops nab him. He thus personifies Thanatos, the death instinct, and is Marwood’s opposite.

Since Marwood represents Robinson, who played Benvolio in Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, and since Robinson at the time of filming had to fight off gay Zeffirelli’s aggressive sexual advances (as represented by those of Montague Withnail against Marwood), the title Withnail and I can be seen as a parallel of Romeo and Juliet, the story of two star-cross’d lovers who tragically cannot be together.

Thus, Uncle Monty is the Romeo (or a Romeo…see below) Montague of this film, and Marwood is the would-be Juliet. In this connection, the made-up surname of Withnail (inspired by an admired childhood friend of Robinson’s, whose name was Withnall, which Robinson misspelt in–as I see it–a Freudian slip), or “with nail,” as some old friends of mine who introduced me to the film mispronounced it, can be seen as a phallic symbol.

That “nail” stabbing, or threatening to stab, into Marwood can be in the form of Monty’s attempted homosexual rape (“burglary”), or in the form of young Withnail’s exasperating personality and behaviour, ultimately making Marwood want to distance himself from the hopeless drunk. Thus young Withnail “and I” are opposites, just as there are many opposites in Romeo and Juliet, as I observed in my analysis of that play.

The two young men are fated never to be together, just as Romeo’s and Juliet’s love is tragically thwarted by fate, because of the conflict between irresponsible, Thanatos-driven Withnail and career-focused, Eros-driven Marwood. Similarly, Uncle Monty can never have Marwood because the latter isn’t gay (or at least isn’t consciously aware of having homosexual feelings…see below). The conflict between the Montagues and the Capulets ensures that Romeo’s and Juliet’s love won’t last in this world, either.

Though Marwood has been getting drunk and stoned with young Withnail, because he knows that the two of them are “drifting into the arena of the unwell,” he is losing his taste for the world of partying. He wants to ‘choose life’ and be straight in a capitalist world that is soon to phase out of its welfare life support system.

As struggling actors, they have a filthy apartment in Camden Town with little food and lots of rats and “matter” growing in the sink. They need to get away and restore their health, but the only means available to them is to take advantage of Withnail’s wealthy uncle, his overtly gay, corpulent, silver-tongued Uncle Monty…who will agree to Withnail’s mooching only if Monty can hope to take advantage of pretty-boy Marwood.

So Uncle Monty, with his cottage out in the country, his money, and all the food and wine he can provide for poor Withnail and Marwood, can be seen to personify the British welfare state, and therefore the liberal wing of the ruling class. Oh, sure, Monty will help out his two boys, but with strings attached. Similarly, the bourgeois state may be generous to the poor if it wants to, but one day it will fuck them.

Bourgeois liberal politicians may create ‘generous’ social programs for the poor (as symbolized in the film by Uncle Monty’s largesse to Withnail and Marwood that weekend), but the same class structure stays intact (wealthy Monty stays wealthy, and the two young men stay poor). That generosity doesn’t last long, either, as it hadn’t between 1945 and 1973, as symbolized by the brief, “delightful weekend in the country.”

Marwood’s only hope for survival, his major preoccupation, is to join the capitalist system, which he does at the end of the film by accepting an acting job to play the leading role in a play, cutting his hair short (i.e., betraying the hippie counterculture), and leaving London (and Withnail, of course) for Manchester. It’s fitting that Marwood is an actor, and a successful one, unlike Withnail; for in order to succeed in capitalism, one must learn how to pretend, to put on an act.

In order to escape from the miseries of the world, the two young men use drinking and drugs as a manic defence; hence their friendship with fellow stoner Danny (Brown), who comments on the “uptight” men of the capitalist system, those “bald” men. As for hair, he notes how capitalists are “selling hippie wigs in Woolworth’s.” Just like the selling of Che Guevara T-shirts, capitalism can accommodate and absorb anything, even the counterculture and socialism.

The drinking and drugs seem to be an escape from not only the “hideousness” of modern life, as Withnail calls it in the car on the way to the cottage. I suspect that Withnail and Marwood are repressed homosexuals. In fact, Danny, who sees Marwood in a towel after a shower and calls him “beautiful,” could be doping to escape facing up to repressed homosexuality, too.

To understand my meaning, we have to be sure of what is meant by the ‘repressed.’ It’s not just about suppressing unacceptable feelings while being aware of them; it’s about pushing them into the unconscious, making oneself totally unaware of them. The feelings do manage to be expressed, to come out to the surface, but in ways totally unrecognizable to the person feeling them.

There are many phallic symbols in the movie, apart from the ‘nail’ in Withnail already mentioned. There is the hot dog wiener that Marwood, nude in the bathtub, offers to Withnail. Uncle Monty’s reference to the ‘mystery’ of the obviously phallic carrot (in ironic contrast to the far more mysterious yoni, our uncanny place of birth, symbolized in the film by flowers, “tarts. Prostitutes for the bees.”) should be recalled when we see Danny’s Camberwell Carrot, a huge phallic joint put in one’s mouth to give pleasure.

All those bottles of wine that Withnail puts to his mouth are more phallic symbols; and excessive drinking and pot-smoking can be seen as a fixation of the oral stage. Sometimes a carrot is just a carrot…and sometimes it’s much more than that.

Still more phallic symbols are the sword and shotgun that Withnail recklessly points at Marwood, an expression of an unconscious wish to have sex with his friend. Indeed, Withnail’s telling his uncle to feel free to enjoy Marwood sexually can be seen as a displaced wish to have Marwood himself.

(To return briefly to the Marxist interpretation, Withnail’s betrayal of his friend to his uncle–the two young men representing the proletariat, and Monty representing the bourgeoisie–can be seen to represent class collaboration, a lack of solidarity being the last straw that makes Marwood want to give up on his friendship with Withnail.)

Marwood’s fear of the homophobic Irishman in the pub is also peppered with unconscious homoerotic elements. While pissing, Marwood reads graffiti on the bathroom wall above the urinal (“I fuck arses.”), and imagines it’s the Irishman who has written it, an absurd idea that is better explained as an unconscious wish fulfillment. The Irishman recognizes Marwood’s homosexuality, and supposedly he’d rather fuck his ass than “murder the pair of [Withnail and Marwood].”

It’s quite curious how a number of characters in the film ‘mistake’ Withnail–and especially Marwood–for homosexuals. Not only does that Irishman, but also Jake the poacher (Elphick), who speaks of Marwood as “prancing like a tit,” and, of course, Uncle Monty. And just as Monty consciously makes unwanted advances on Marwood, so are there unconsciously homoerotic elements in the exchange with Jake, who has phallic eels in his pants, takes “a wheeze on [Withnail’s phallic] fag [!],” and says Marwood “want[s] working on.”

When Monty says that Marwood is “a thespian, too,” he pronounces the s and p like a zed and a b, making a word that rhymes with lesbian, another homosexual association. Marwood later makes a Freudian slip in saying he and Withnail are “buggered” if they can’t get their car out of the mud.

Marwood knows from his first meeting of Uncle Monty that “he’s a raving homosexual,” yet he is always grinning at this man who so lusts after him. He continues grinning even when it’s obvious that Monty wants to seduce him. It strains credibility to dismiss Marwood’s grinning as mere politeness: part of him wants to have a gay sexual experience (though assuredly not with roly-poly Monty), while another part wants to repress that urge.

That, in so brief a time, so many characters ‘mistake’ Withnail and Marwood for gays suggests that the former know something about the latter that the latter don’t know about themselves. Why does Marwood use perfume, of all things, to clean his boots after Withnail has puked on them? Why not use something like soap? Why is there perfume, rather than cologne, in their Camden Town flat? There aren’t any girlfriends to give it to, which is in itself a significant observation. The two young men may be poor, struggling actors, but they’re good-looking; if they’re straight, why don’t we see them even try to pick up any women?

When Uncle Monty attempts his “burglary” (interesting choice of words) on Marwood, the latter’s having “barely escaped a buggering” is achieved by having told Monty he’s in a gay relationship with Withnail. Even a non-homophobic man, one not normally given to violence, might find himself having, as a last resort, to hit a gay aggressor to stop him from succeeding in that “burglary.”

In the stress of the moment, one tends to blurt out unprepared, unrehearsed words, the first thing that comes to one’s mind, and therefore something tending to reveal unconscious wishes, like having a closeted gay relationship with one’s friend. It’s less his fear of homosexual rape than it is fear of ‘cheating’ on Withnail that’s bothering Marwood. His ‘lie’ to get Monty to stop his aggressive sexual advances is an unconscious truth, another Freudian slip. Both Withnail and Marwood have told Monty that each other is a closeted homosexual; again, I’m saying that both ‘lies’ are truths.

Still, Withnail’s betrayal makes Marwood want ‘to dump’ him, as it were. Now, Marwood’s wishing of a buggering on Withnail reflects both his conscious anger at his would-be friend’s betrayal, and his unconscious wish for sex with him, displaced onto someone like Monty, just as Withnail, in offering Marwood to his uncle, has displaced his own wish for sex with his friend, as mentioned above.

On their ride out from London to Monty’s cottage (at the beginning of which we appropriately see a wrecking ball being used to raze a building), we hear Jimi Hendrix‘s version of Bob Dylan‘s “All Along the Watchtower,” a song variously interpreted to be about such things as the Vietnam War and the Apocalypse. I tend toward the latter interpretation (though I’m sure many during the late 60s considered that war to be apocalyptic); this film presents the end of the hippie era, the near-end of the Keynesian, welfare-oriented capitalism of 1945-1973, and, most importantly, the end of the friendship of these two young men.

The song seems written for Withnail (the thief) and Marwood (the joker), or rather, the film seems made for the song. Marwood wants to find “some way out of here,” and Withnail tries to tell his friend there’s “No reason to get excited,” since all that matters to him is mooching off of his uncle and conniving at Monty’s attempted “burglary” of Marwood. To Withnail, the bourgeois “feel that life is but a joke,” he and Marwood have “been through that/And this is not [their] fate.”

“Businessmen, they drink my wine”; capitalists enjoy the luxuries of life and don’t “Know what any of it is worth.” This is prophetic of the dawn of Thatcher/Reagan neoliberalism, the effects of which were already being felt in England at the time of the filming of Withnail and I in 1987. “All along the watchtower/Princes kept the view/While all the women came and went/Barefoot servants, too.” The contrasts between these people reflect class differences felt even more sharply now, since neoliberal capitalism has grown like a cancer over the past forty years.

Just as we hear a Jimi Hendrix recording on the way out of London, so do we hear another of his recordings, “Voodoo Child (Slight Return),” on the way back. Instead of hearing a song about the end of the world as we know it, we hear one about how great and powerful the singer is (a feeling that often comes as a result of being drunk and/or high on drugs): “Well, I stand up next to a mountain/And I chop it down with the edge of my hand.”

Since we hear this song while drunk Withnail is driving recklessly back to London, we can interpret it as expressive of his narcissistic personality, something that has been trying Marwood’s patience for the whole length of the movie. Recall Withnail’s scream out on the hills of the countryside earlier: “Bastards! You’ll all suffer! I’ll show the lot of you! I’m gonna be a sta-a-a-a-ar!”

The threat of capitalism against one’s ability to survive is evident again when, on returning to their flat, Withnail and Marwood receive an eviction notice from their landlord, making Marwood spiral into another of his hysterical fears of annihilation. Ultimately, it won’t matter to him, as he’s been given the lead role in a play in Manchester. Since his acting career is taking off, he can enter the competitive world of capitalism. Since all Withnail does is get drunk, he won’t ever even enter that world, much less hope to be a star.

Not even going all the way to the train station with Marwood, Withnail knows he’s lost his friend forever. He recites Hamlet’s words to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about the reason for his unhappiness, not only because he knows, as his uncle did years ago, that he’ll “never play the Dane,” but because he’s lost the man he’s unconsciously in love with.

Robinson originally intended to end the story with Withnail returning to the flat, picking up the shotgun he’d found in Monty’s cottage, pouring a bottle of wine into the barrel, then drinking it and blowing his brains out. Robinson chose to omit this scene because it’s too dark an ending for the film, but I take it as still having happened, even if unseen.

Why would Withnail want to kill himself just over a friend leaving him? Yes, he is self-destructive by nature, but only in the forms of drinking, doping, and reckless driving, not all the way to suicide. He still has Danny and Presuming Ed to hang out with. Yes, he envies Marwood’s greater success as an actor, but surely he knows that his own future as an actor, though dim, isn’t completely hopeless.

As I’ve said above, I believe he has unconscious homosexual feelings for Marwood, whose departure–not even wanting Withnail to follow him all the way to the station–is tantamount to a break-up. A clue is heard in Withnail’s quoting of Hamlet, which isn’t letter-perfect (in itself symbolic of his insufficient acting talent or determination) when he says, “Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither,” he says the part about women twice, whereas in Hamlet, it’s said only once. Women don’t delight Withnail because he’s gay.

This inability to gratify homosexual desire, the inability of any of these men–except Monty, of course–even to give expression to such desires, allied with the male hostility to them (the Irishman’s bigotry, Jake’s taunting of the “tit,” Withnail’s pointing of a phallic shotgun and sword at Marwood), all can be seen as symbolic of the alienation and lack of comradely solidarity between men (I’m using this word in the old-fashioned sense of people, the male sex here being symbolic of all people) as a consequence of capitalism, even in its postwar welfare-oriented form.

The party is over, that is, the 1945-1973 party of welfare capitalism was over, because it was never a suitable substitute for socialism anyway. Life in London as seen in the film can be seen to symbolize the First World, and life in the countryside, where the commons once was, can be seen to symbolize the Third World, a place full of peasant farmers (including Isaac Parkin), poverty, and want.

So Withnail’s and Marwood’s weekend indulgence in Uncle Monty’s cottage can be seen to represent a First World colonizing of the Third World, inhabiting its space and using its resources. Monty provides for his two “boys” the way the welfare state threw the poor a few bones to placate them and stave off socialist revolution, but the stark contrast between the First and Third Worlds has remained, a contrast we see clearly between London and Crow Crag.

We don’t resolve the world’s problems with brief moments of indulgence: getting drunk and stoned, enjoying “a delightful weekend in the country,” etc., then return to squalor and self-destruction. As Uncle Monty observed, “We live in a kingdom of reigns where royalty comes in gangs.” Even the best of them, the liberals and social democrats who pushed for the welfare state, didn’t make it last long, and then the neoliberals took over, the next gang.

There can be no true (welfare capitalist) beauty without (neoliberal) decay.

‘Experiment,’ a Poem by Jason Morton

Here is another poem by my friend, Jason Morton, whose work I’ve written about a number of times before. Again, as before, I’m putting his poem in italics to distinguish his writing from mine:

Shattered symmetry
Breaking every side I thought i held
No longer one
I can’t see through my broken eyes
Everything I once held true
Is no longer real or harmonised
Every lip every kiss
Every touch and every finger tip
Don’t!
Touch!
Me!
I can’t shatter anymore than this
It is so visual
And the high
Is residual
Where Lucifer claims me
I fall where my blood Cascades
And puddles beneath me
In a moment I am but a breath away
From transparency….

And now, for my analysis.

The title ‘Experiment’ may seem at odds with the content of the poem, but when you consider the etymological origin of the word–it comes from the Latin experimentum (‘a test, a trial,’), which in turn comes from experiri, ‘to try, test,’ from ex, ‘out of’ and peritus (‘experienced, tested’), from the root per-, ‘to try, risk’–we can see a plausible relationship between title and poem. The poet has tried things, tested them, had experiences, and has had disastrous results.

The trauma and pain of life’s experiences, tests, and trials has resulted in psychological fragmentation for the poet. Everything has broken apart for him: he is “No longer one.” Normally, the danger of fragmentation is averted by caregivers, lovers, and friends, who empathically mirror and validate one’s feelings and experiences; but in the case of the poet, these would-be empathic mirrors, or what Heinz Kohut called self-objects, have failed him.

So he “can’t see through [his] broken eyes,” which are broken mirrors reflecting those shattered ones that failed to empathize and validate his feelings. Fragmentation can lead to a lost sense of reality. Nothing is “harmonised”; all is discord for him. In the second line, we see a deliberate use of a lower-case i, which symbolically expresses this sense of a broken self.

Those body parts and actions that normally express love and empathy, “Every lip every kiss/Every touch and every finger tip,” he is deprived of them, so he rejects any subsequent attempt to show affection for fear that such attempts are fake. They seem deceptions meant to betray his trust once again. Hence, “Don’t!/Touch!/Me!” Even these three words are broken apart, each given its own, separate line, divided with the exclamation marks of violent shouting.

After being rejected from the outside world, after experiencing frustrations from out there, one tends to respond with the defence mechanism of splitting, of breaking up objects (both internal and external) into black-and-white opposites of absolute good and bad, then expelling the bad halves to protect oneself from the pain. When taken to extremes, this splitting, this rejecting of so many parts of oneself, can result in one feeling as if he has little of himself left, hence the danger of fragmentation. Hence, the poet “can’t shatter anymore than this”.

There is a fleeting pleasure in rejecting, the relief of not having anyone around to hurt oneself, if only for the moment. Thus, “the high/Is residual”. The kind of pain typically felt is the trauma personified by “Lucifer,” the devilish inner critic, Freud‘s overbearing superego. Lucifer (‘light-bringer’), was a beautiful angel before he was cast out of heaven and thenceforth known as Satan. His goodness turned into overweening pride; thus Lucifer is a perfect metaphor for the self-righteous, cruel inner critic.

This inner critic “claims” the poet, making him “fall where [his] blood Cascades/And puddles beneath [him]”. Capitalized ‘Cascades’ suggests (if only unconsciously, like a parapraxis in typing) the many waterfalls in the world, in turn suggesting a huge outpouring of blood, so great is the poet’s pain and loss from so much splitting and projecting of unwanted objects.

“In a moment [he is] but a breath away/From transparency….” Since he “can’t shatter anymore than this,” his fragmentation is approaching disintegration. He is almost transparent because he is about to vanish. Pain and trauma can lead to the extremes of psychotic panic. These problems indicate how imperative it is not to trivialize psychological trauma. Mental illness is on the rise, and for many reasons, including some that I’ve complained about in many blog posts.

Let’s hope the poet can bring the pieces back together, and soon.

Tears

Pain wells up
inside us. It is so
poisonous that

w
e

m
u
s
t

c
r
y

i
t

o
u
t
.

Some people
turn their teardrops
into bullets,

t
h
e
n

f
i
r
e

t
h
e
m

a
t

u
s
.

The holes put
in our hearts pour
tears of blood,

t
h
e

r
e
d

r
a
i
n

o
f

s
o
b
s
.

How do we
make the weeping
stop? Not by

m
a
k
i
n
g

g
u
n
s

o
f

o
u
r

e
y
e
s
,

but by making
mirrors of them, by
looking at each

other, listening.
We can dry our faces,
and see clearly.

‘Want,’ a Horror Short Story

“I can’t believe you just did that, you humongous animal!” Dr. Will Cameron shouted in sobs as he looked up and watched his gigantic colleague, Dr. John Gula, licking human blood off his fingertips. “How could you just…pick up…Dr. Sanders and…eat her?”

“I was hungry,” thirty-foot-high Dr. Gula said, then belched.

“You were hungry?” Cameron said. “That’s all you can say, you cannibalistic monster!”

“It must be one of the bizarre side effects of Aggrandizin, the drug we were going to test on the diseased fish around this island…”

“And you’re still hungry, after all those apes you ate,” Cameron said, looking up at Gula in horror. “Making you grow to that monstrous size.”

“Another…surprising…side effect of the drug,” Gula said, pulling up the tarpaulin he had wrapped around his waist to cover his nakedness. “And you know I had to eat the drugged apes, to stop them from eating us. One of them almost got you.”

“I’d rather we were eaten by the apes then to see this nightmare as it’s unfolding! I keep hoping I’ll wake up from a nightmare, but this…insane…moment seems all too real!”

“I find it as hard to believe as you do, Cameron.”

“We were only supposed to dose marine animals with the Aggrandizin, to speed up their ability to heal wounds and recover from disease, after the exposure to the pollution and toxic chemicals surrounding the island. How did this simple experiment turn into such a nightmare?”

“That baby shark grew in size, and hunger. It bit Sanders, she bumped into me, and I accidentally injected myself with the drug. I already explained that to both of you.”

“How much of the drug did you dose yourself with? Ten times the amount we gave that shark?”

“It must have been at least about ten times the amount we were going to dose the fish with,” Gula said, without a trace of emotion.

“And you ate all those apes!”

“It was either that, or they were going to eat us. We saw how ravenous they got after they, it’s more than safe to assume, broke into the phials of Aggrandizin in the boat, and how they grew like me, each time after they ate something. We saw how insatiable their hunger got, like mine, even to the point of eating what no animal of their species would normally ever eat, including flesh. We saw how they ate most of the plant and animal life here…”

“And you ate the rest, and Dr. Sanders, just now!”

“I couldn’t help myself, Cameron! Try to understand! I’m not any happier about it than you are.”

“You don’t seem to give a shit, John!”

“You don’t know the hunger that Aggrandizin causes!”

“I don’t wanna know!” Cameron bawled. “How could this have happened? How could we have gotten this drug so horribly wrong? This is like something out of a B science fiction movie. How could a mere drug cause someone to grow into a giant, of all things, and to hunger so much, that he’d eat apes, and another human being?”

Speaking of hunger, Gula was looking down at Cameron and licking his lips.

“John, don’t look at me like that,” Cameron said, backing up a few steps, with trembling legs.

“I can’t help it.” Gula was drooling as his eyes explored Cameron’s meaty body.

“John, only I can fit into the boat to go back out and get help for you. There’s no more food for you to eat here.”

“I’ll go fishing by hand in the ocean after I eat you.”

“The massive pollution in the water surrounding this island means that you won’t be able to eat any edible marine life here,” Cameron insisted. “That’s why we chose this island to do our experiments: to dose the sick fish, and hopefully save them from the poisons in the water. You can’t eat the marine life here. You’ll get sick.”

“The drug dose I took should be strong enough to repel any toxins from the dead fish near here.” He licked his lips again at Cameron, who shuddered at the sight.

“The toxic chemicals dumped in the water are so poisonous that even your Aggrandizin dosage, as excessive as it was, surely won’t be strong enough to counteract the toxicity of any dead fish floating around here.”

“You don’t know that for sure. You’re only saying that because you want to believe it. But even if what you say is right, I’ll go further out into the water. I’m getting larger and larger. I could conceivably wade far enough, with my gigantic size, to get past the polluted part.”

“You can’t swim, by your own admission, and the toxic chemicals are already spread out so far into the ocean around here that, even at your size, you won’t be able to wade out far enough to get past the pollution surrounding the island. The ring of pollution is like a thick donut, and this island is like the small hole in the centre, there’s so much donut out there.”

Gula licked his lips and said, “Donut.”

“OK, bad comparison,” Cameron said, shaking spastically at how Gula’s eyes were staring at him, appraising his tastiness. “Look, you need me alive to sail the boat back to the African mainland and get help. Just hang on, be patient, control your hunger, for God’s sake.”

Gula’s hand reached down to pick up Cameron, who dodged the huge fingers and started running away. “You can’t catch me; how can you expect to catch any fish by hand in the ocean?”

“I’ll practice and get better.” He reached for running Cameron and missed again.

“If you eat me,…you’ll have…no food left.” Cameron raced for the leafless trees that Gula and the apes had already fed on. “What will you do…after eating me…eat yourself? You eat, you grow…and only get hungrier. Aaaah!”

Gula grabbed him and picked him up.

“The tarp is slipping off your waist!” Cameron said, hoping to distract Gula and make him let go.

“So what?” Gula said as he brought Cameron up to his face. “Nobody else is here to see me with my cock and balls hanging out.”

“After you eat me, the tarp won’t…be big enough…to cover you! You’ll rip out of it…the way you…ripped out…of your clothes…after eating…those apes!”

“Nobody will be here to see me.”

“Exactly!” Cameron shouted. “Without me, you’ll have…no one to help you! You’ll be trapped…alone…on this island! With no more food!”

Gula opened his mouth wide enough to bite off Cameron’s head. Cameron put his hands on Gula’s upper lip, pushing away to keep from going in his mouth.

“Only I…can help you…find food!” Cameron shouted while kicking at Gula’s chin and swinging away from his mouth. “The water’s…toxicity…will damage…your skin…if you wade out…to find fish. The Aggrandizin…won’t be strong enough…to heal you. If you eat me, you’ll die!”

“Yeah, I probably will.”

“Then, why won’t…you resist…the temptation…to eat me? Unh!”

“I can’t help it,” Gula said, grabbing Cameron’s legs and aiming the feet at his mouth. “It’s in my nature to keep eating. I’m the scorpion, and you’re the frog, like in that old fable.”

He put Cameron’s legs in his mouth, up to his thighs. Cameron was screaming and kicking at Gula’s uvula, and at the roof of his mouth.

“No! John, don’t!”

He felt Gula’s sharp incisors bite through his waist, cutting through his skin and muscles, and cracking the bones. He screamed as he saw the blood spraying everywhere. His now-separated upper half hung loose and shook; his eyes and mouth were wide open in horrific disbelief. He passed out.

Gula was chewing, cracking the bones and sighing with relief that his hunger was being satisfied…for the moment. He felt his body vibrating, as it always did whenever he ate something since his Aggrandizin dosage. He grew by about a foot.

He looked down. Cameron was right. The tarpaulin had fallen from his waist and onto the sand on the beach. A breeze was caressing his balls.

He gulped down Cameron’s masticated bottom half, licked the blood from his lips, and belched out loud.

“Goodbye, Cameron. Sorry about this.”

His mouth was now big enough to stuff in, with the greatest of ease, all of the upper half of Cameron’s body, so he did.

Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!

Blood splattered all over his face. The bald head of the chubby man looked like that of a giant baby’s having eaten tomato sauce and soaked red all over his cheeks. The white tarpaulin would be his diaper. How appropriate.

Gulp. Burp!

He wiped the blood off his face and licked his hand. To see the day when he would actually find cannibalism to be appetizing…what a shock. His body vibrated again, and he grew another foot or so.

He picked up the tarp and wrapped it around his waist. “You were wrong about one thing, Cameron. It’s still large enough to cover my dick and ass.”

Then, he felt another pang of hunger.

“Oh, shit. What do I do now?”

He walked over to the edge of the shore, where the filthy water washed up pieces of plastic and dead fish. The water was a mix of blue and yellow from all the toxic waste in it.

“Eww,” he groaned at the sight of the dead fish’s unnatural colours. As hungry as I am, he thought, there’s no way in hell that I’m eating any of those.

He looked far out to sea. Cameron was right again: the pollution went so far out that Gula couldn’t see any pure blue water anywhere beyond the filth. Even at his enlarged size, he still couldn’t see far enough.

I wonder if I can see the shark out there, he thought, straining his eyes. I’ll bet it’s gotten really huge by now. If I were to see it, I might consider going out there, trying to swim and risking drowning, then eating it if I caught it…or letting it eat me, even. I can’t imagine wanting to continue living like this. A part of me actually wouldn’t mind drowning or being eaten by the shark.

His stomach was growling.

To think, that shark was a baby, swimming just outside the periphery of the ring of pollution. We caught it in a net, Sarah Sanders held its wiggling body, and I stuck the needle of Aggrandizin in its side. I dosed it with a generous amount. Then it bit her on the arm.

The hunger in his gut was getting painful.

She screamed and jerked her arm. Her elbow nudged my arm, and I stabbed the needle into my left wrist. I accidentally pushed the plunger all the way in and injected a huge dose of the drug into my arm. Neither she nor Cameron noticed what I’d done, they were so busy fussing with the shaking, growing shark and throwing it back into the water, then worrying about treating her bite wound. Cameron said the baby shark had already grown to almost twice its size, just from the one bite.

Another stomach growl.

Back in the water, it caught a fish in its teeth and ate it. It grew some more. We saw it eat a few more fish; now it had grown to about the size of a great white shark…and like at the end of that old Spielberg movie, it attacked our boat.

Another hunger pang.

Cameron got out his binoculars, and after about half a minute of frantically searching for somewhere we could go to save ourselves from the shark, he spotted this island. Getting here would have been the fastest way to get to safety from the shark, which we saw eating more and more fish, and growing and growing, and trying to ram a hole in the side of our boat. We turned on the motor and raced over here. We’d already eaten all of the food on the boat, so I was holding back as best I could…as I am now—oh, this is getting difficult! Anyway, when we got here, I ran over to the trees and wolfed down as many of the leaves as I could stuff into my mouth. Cameron and Sanders were shocked at my behaviour. They left the boat and ran into the woods with me. Some apes must have gotten into our boat, found the phials of Aggrandizin, broke the glass, and drank from it; because soon after, they were growing and eating like the baby shark and me.

His hunger was getting unbearable.

As I, grabbing at leaves and grass to eat, was being chased by Cameron and Sanders, the apes that must have had the drug ran back into the woods with us. They ran around eating leaves and other animals, too. We ended up eating all the leaves off the trees on this tiny island. I was ripping out of my clothes. One of the enlarged, ravenous apes jumped on Cameron; in its new taste for flesh-eating, it would have eaten him, but I grabbed it and ate it. Again, Cameron and Sanders were shocked at my behaviour. I fought off the other attacking apes, and ate them.

Another stomach growl. “Unh!” he grunted.

After having feasted on the rest of the island’s apes, plants and insects, Gula continued in his thoughts, I’d grown so big, I ripped out of my clothes. Sanders gave me the tarpaulin to cover myself with, then…I…ate her. How could I have done that? But…how could I not have…

Oh, the hunger…

He was shaking…gasping and wheezing…

“Aaaaaah!” he screamed, running into the water. It was slimy and disgusting. He grabbed a large shark’s corpse and tried eating it out of desperation. It tasted so awful, he spat it out within a second. He waded out as far as he could go. The…liquid…more like piss than water, had reached his chin. Waves splashed on his face. Then he remembered: “I…can’t…swim.”

He turned around and rushed back, plodding in the water and almost falling into it, till he finally got back onto the land, soaking in caustic filth and sobbing in despair. The Aggrandizin managed to heal his skin reasonably well, but his stomach was growling so much, it was like having a huge second mouth…or many little mouths…in his belly.

“For God’s sake,” he said in gasps and sobs. “We made Aggrandizin…to make animals stronger, more immune…to disease and injury, not to make them…become giant gluttons!” We didn’t see any of these side effects during the lab experiments on the rats, he thought. Granted, we gave them very small doses, unlike with the baby shark (or me, for that matter). We weren’t in charge of feeding them afterwards, and we came out here quickly after what seemed successful experiments. I guess I was too proud to wait and see if there would be any undesirable after-effects. I just saw quick healing, and we all jumped to conclusions. There was an email or two from the people in the lab; we never got around to reading them—maybe the messages were a warning about such after-effects. I don’t know—it’s too late for me now.

He looked down at his arms.

They looked tasty.

He was salivating.

“Come on, John,” he said. “You can’t be serious.”

The growing happens only after eating, he thought as he looked at that meaty flesh. My powers of healing, particularly strong after my large dose, could compensate for the bite wounds, at least to enough of an extent that, if a boat comes by, I can be taken away and saved.

His stomach growled again. He was shaking.

“I can’t take this anymore. It’s crazy, but I have to do it.”

He bit off a huge chunk off of his left forearm. Blood sprayed everywhere.

“Aaaaah!” he screamed in clenched teeth as he began chewing.

The pain was excruciating, but the delicious flesh was satisfying in a way that made him forget the throbbing.

He swallowed. He felt the flesh enter his stomach, filling in the void.

“Aaaaah!” he sighed. Thanks to the Aggrandizin, the pain was subsiding, the blood clotted faster, and he felt every encouragement that the wound would soon just be a crater in his arm. He felt those familiar vibrations, and grew a tiny bit.

He enjoyed a few fleeting minutes of relief from his hunger. The pain in his arm disappeared.

“Wow,” he said. “That was a fast recovery.”

Then he felt another hunger pang.

“And that was fast, too,” he said. “Fuck!” I can’t just keep taking bites out of myself…but what else am I going to eat? My shit when I crap? (Funny thing: I’ve eaten so much, yet I never piss or shit…why is that? Is it another side effect of the Aggrandizin? What kind of bizarre voodoo drug did we synthesize in that lab?) “Am I drugged, or possessed of a devil?”

He looked at his left arm, where the freshly healed crater was. Then he looked at the flesh right next to it, just before his elbow.

Maybe a huge ship will sail by and find me here, he thought. Hope, hope.

Another pang…a sharp, stinging one.

He opened his mouth wide, and his head dove onto that arm.

“Unh!” he grunted as he sank his teeth into that coveted arm-flesh. His teeth dug deep enough to reach the bone, several square inches of which were exposed after his ripping the flesh off, spraying blood all over the place and making him groan muffled whimpers of pain as he chewed.

Again, when the flesh hit his stomach, the more important pain was gone…for the moment.

He trembled, then grew another tiny bit.

With my growing size, I should be more visible to ships, he thought, massaging his throbbing arm as it healed. Then again, I’m not growing as much as I was before. It must be because I’m eating myself instead of eating other living things.

Speaking of eating, he wanted more flesh. He felt like a pregnant woman whose belly was a womb with half a dozen hungry fetuses aching for food.

“I’m getting used to the pain,” he said as he looked at his upper left arm. “If only I could get used to the hunger.”

He bit off the bicep; again, the bite went all the way to the bone. His face was red with blood. He grunted in pain, but indeed, he found it more and more bearable.

His want of flesh continued to grow.

He looked over at his right arm now…and he coveted the flesh he saw.

All I do is want, want, want! he thought. I always want more! I only want more! I can never stop wanting! I’m wanting of flesh on my arms, and I only want to eat more. I have a surplus of want, and a lack of anything to eat other than myself! This is madness!

He bit off a chunk from his right forearm. He was so used to the pain now that he easily ignored it. His body wasn’t growing anymore, though.

The only thing growing now was his hunger. He now felt as though his, so to speak, belly-womb was housing a dozen so-to-speak hungry fetuses instead of half a dozen.

The moments of relief were getting shorter and shorter. Within an hour, he’d ripped off and eaten all of the flesh on his arms. He’d chewed off the flesh on his hands and fingers. All that was left of them were bone and ligaments.

The sharp ends of his finger-bones were useful; he could use them to rip off flesh on parts of his body that he couldn’t reach with his head.

Now that his arm flesh was all gone, he looked down at his legs.

He licked his lips.

Oh, so much meat, he thought.

Without even hesitating anymore, he dug his bony fingers deep into his upper right leg flesh, tore off a huge chunk, right down to the bone, and didn’t seem aware of any pain in his leg as he brought the meat up to his grinning face. He munched on it with manic glee.

No sooner did he gulp it down and feel it hit his thankful stomach, but he felt more hunger pangs.

I’m slowly killing myself, he thought, but I can’t help it. It’s my nature. I’m the scorpion on the scorpion. I’m sitting on my own back, crossing the river and stinging myself.

He tore off a chunk of flesh from his upper left leg and stuffed the bloody mass into his greedy mouth. He chomped on it with a gory grin.

“Mmm!” He swallowed and belched.

Next, he ripped off his left calf and stuffed it in.

I am so high in protein! he thought, then let out a macabre laugh.

He shrank a little.

He ripped off his right calf and ate it. His hunger went on in an unbroken line—no more brief moments of relief, not even for a few seconds. He dug his fingers into the remaining flesh on his legs, tore it all off, and ate it. He shrank some more.

Within another hour, all four of his limbs were just bone and ligaments. His hunger, the only thing growing, was growing far faster than he was shrinking.

He dug his fingers into his cheeks, ripped them off, and ate them. The sight of all of his teeth, in what would have looked like a perpetual grin (were he to have looked at his reflection in the water), made no difference in terms of his facial expression; for if that cheek and lip flesh were to have remained on his face, he’d still have been grinning from ear to ear, his teeth just as fully exposed, he was enjoying his ghoulish meal so much.

The healing effects of the Aggrandizin were still working just enough to keep him alive, but they were abating, fading away little by little. Though his healing was slower, his growing urge to eat overshadowed the pain from the wounds so much that he seemed numb everywhere except in his stomach.

He ripped all the skin off of his face. After eating that, he felt himself shrinking again. He was now just slightly larger than his original size.

He looked out to sea; he saw no ships anywhere.

His stomach was growling, louder and louder, like a thousand voices inside, whining for food.

He felt his energy beginning to wane, too.

With effort, he ripped off the flesh on his chest and ate it. In his skeletal hands, he cupped the blood, as best he could, to stop it from dripping on the sand, then he drank it.

Still, he just got hungrier and hungrier.

He tore the flesh off his neck, all the way around from the front to the back. His neck bone, larynx, and esophagus were showing. He ate the flesh, chewing with lethargic slowness.

He looked down at his chest, where his upper ribcage was showing. Though he’d shrunk all the way back to his original size, his stomach was bloated with all the rest of his eaten body. Instead of being rotund, though, it oddly had a number of bumps on it.

Yet still, his stomach felt as if empty.

He ripped the flesh off of his buttocks and ate it. Then, amazingly, his cock and balls became appetizing, so he tore them off and ate them, his hunger so severe that he gave no thought to how disturbing it would be to lose them. There is no castration anxiety when one is as famished as he was, apparently.

He was sitting in a lake of reddened sand. All that was left of his body were his skull-like face, with his eyeballs showing because he’d ripped off and eaten his eyelids, his exposed skeleton—his ribcage being the only cover of his heart and lungs—and the skin on his back.

He couldn’t bear the sight of his lower body. He’d have shuddered to think what his face must have looked like in the reflection in the water. What have I reduced myself to? he wondered. And the Aggrandizin is still keeping me alive…how?…even though I can feel my life slowly fading away. My energy is draining from me, little by little. The only energy I seem to have in large amounts is in my guts.

He looked out to the polluted sea…still, no ships to be seen anywhere out there.

He looked back down at his bloody, mutilated body, at the protrusions in his belly.

“There is nothing good to see, anywhere,” he said. “And still, I’m hungry.” His bony index fingers stabbed into his eyes. “Unghh!” He pulled them out of their sockets, each pull making a popping sound, then he popped them into his mouth.

He wanted to sob, but he had only blood for tears pouring out of the sockets.

His stomach felt about to burst, it was so stuffed.

Still, he hungered.

He began scratching his back for more flesh to eat, his diminishing strength making those scratches slower and shallower. As he stuffed his bony face with the bloody flesh, he felt the strain on his stomach.

And he was still hungry.

After ripping off all the flesh he could reach on his back and eating it, he tore into his guts, ripped out his pancreas, bits of intestine, and his kidneys. He stuffed the meat in his mouth. It tasted awful, but it gave some relief—not much—to his hunger.

How am I still alive? he wondered. I can feel myself slowly weakening, slowly dying, but I should have already been dead long ago. Was the dose I gave myself really so strong as to sustain me in this extremity?

His hunger pangs continued to grow, even as his energy was fading away.

I don’t wanna live anymore, he thought. That’s for sure. Maybe I can speed up my death. Destroying my vitals should do it. The apes that had the Aggrandizin died soon enough when I ate them; surely I can die soon enough if I keep eating myself, right to the bone. Surely the Aggrandizin won’t keep me going forever.

He dug his hand under and behind his ribcage and tore out a lung. He ate it. Fantastically, he was still conscious and breathing. He tore out and ate the other lung: he still lived. He couldn’t believe it—the drug apparently made breathing unnecessary to live. He ripped out his heart and ate it. The Aggrandizin was, to some extent, counteracting all of these mutilations, though his life was ever so slowly fading away.

Has the drug made me immortal? Am I hallucinating in my fading consciousness? Is that how these impossibilities are possible?

He felt a jiggling of those protrusions in his stomach—not the rumblings of hunger so much as the sensation of what seemed to be small living beings in there.

Am I immortal, or are there immortal beings inside me? Has the drug resurrected and regenerated all the bits of flesh that I’ve digested? Is Aggrandizin making us all immortal, me and those inside me? Or, in my delirium, am I hallucinating their existence?

With his energy level so low now, he couldn’t lift his arms to rip off any more body parts to stuff into his mouth. Yet his hunger kept growing…especially the hunger of whatever had awoken and was growing and fidgeting around inside his belly.

Those things were poking bubbly bumps against his belly, making wavelike movements along the surface of his skin there. After a while of this continued pressure, one of the things poked a hole in his belly, spitting blood out of the opening.

It kept pushing, ripping a larger hole and spraying out more blood. The rest of his body lay still and, finally, he was dead. The thing pushed its way out of the hole, followed by all of the others, one by one, until the bloody belly lay empty on the soaking red sand.

Those things, kept alive by the Aggrandizin that they all shared, were blood-covered blobs, lumpy but basically spherical, with mouths that had serrated, teeth-like protrusions all along the edges. They looked like gruesome, deformed 3-D Pac-men, each about the size of a tennis ball. They rolled out over the sand in a blind search for food, their mouths flapping open and shut without ever tiring, while making grotesque grunting sounds: “Ngah-ngah-ngah-ngah!…” They quickly turned beige as more and more sand grains stuck to the blood on them.

Some rolled out to sea, eating the plastic and dead fish. They would die of food poisoning minutes after their exposure to the impurities in the water. Others rolled into the woods, eating the few remaining blades of grass and leaves on the trees. As they ate, they grew somewhat.

By the time they’d eaten everything alive on the island, they too found their energy waning as their insatiability only strengthened. Instinctively, as they had sensed while hibernating inside Gula’s guts, they knew that eating each other was futile. Each of them about the size of a medicine ball now, they just lay on the ground, rocking from side to side as their mouths faced the sky, as if babies wishing to cry out to their mother for something to eat.

All of them were in the middle of the leafless forest, hidden by the trunks of the trees. Night was falling. They were saving what little energy they had left for any possible food that chance might provide. They didn’t make the slightest sound.

Within an hour, the stars and moon offered the only light. A large, lost boat came ashore, filled with about twenty people—adults, elderly, and children.

“Where are we?” a ten-year-old boy among them said as they began disembarking.

“I don’t know,” his mother said. “It stinks here. Pollution in the water…Do I smell blood?”

Everyone got off the boat after a few minutes. Some of them, those who hadn’t smelled the blood, wandered into the woods.

The eating blobs felt the vibrations from all the footsteps. Their mouths curled up into smiles.

Some Pop Songs I Wrote

Back about eight to twelve years ago, after having composed a number of classical compositions, I wrote and recorded three albums’ worth of pop songs. They were originally published on the Jamendo website, which is based in Luxembourg. I’ve had difficulty gaining access to those songs due to problems with the website (and my computer, as I suspect). Fortunately, I’ve published some of the songs on other places, like SoundCloud, ReverbNation, Jango, and Fandalism. If only I could get access to the rest of the songs published on Jamendo.

I wrote, recorded, sang all of the vocals, and played all of the instruments (electric, acoustic, and classical guitars; two electronic keyboards [a Korg and a Yamaha] with not only organ, electric and acoustic piano, clavinet, and synth sound patches, but also sound patches for bass guitar, drums, orchestral instruments, etc.; percussion, including bongos, tambourine, maracas, triangle, claves, Chinese temple blocks, cowbells, etc.; and wind instruments like recorders and harmonica). I was only learning how to record music, though, so such errors (especially with the first recordings) as bad mixing, EQ, and compression are evident.

“Let Me Come In” is a dance-oriented song that I wrote at the synthesizer, the main riff being an A minor ninth and E minor 7th-added major 2nd (no fifth), then a D minor 7th and D minor 6th. Unfortunately, you don’t really hear the synth part in my recording, since I didn’t mix and EQ the keyboards well; instead, you hear the rhythm guitar playing the main riff.

I sang much of the lead vocals in falsetto, since I hadn’t yet learned how to sing in head and mixed voice. The lyrics to the song can be found here. The song actually opens in 5/4, and the main riff is in 4/4, though there are a few changes to 3/4, including, just before the chorus, three bars of 3/4, one of 2/4, (“No way!”), then back to 4/4 time.

“I’m Breathless” is a song about loving someone and being unable to tell the person, for fear of rejection. The lyrics are included with the SoundCloud link; you’ll need to read them, for this is another early recording in which I didn’t mix the vocals well. Sorry.

Elsewhere, the electric piano part, at which I wrote the song, has melodic influences including Jethro Tull’s “Alive and Well and Living In,” UK‘s “Thirty Years,” a melody from Yes’s “Remembering (High the Memory)” combined with Schoenberg‘s notion of Klangfarbenmelodie, Genesis’s “Can-Utility and the Coastliners,” Ricky Lee Jones’s “Company,” ABC’s “When Smokey Sings,” the six opening notes (I played them simultaneously here) of the slow third movement of Bartók‘s 4th string quartet (Non troppo lento) on top of which I sang a melody derived from Diane Tell‘s “Marie-Jeanne, Claire, et Sophie,” and the last verse is melodically inspired by a section from Van der Graaf Generator‘s “Plague of Lighthouse Keepers” (v. The Presence of the Night/Kosmos Tours)

“Without You With Me” is a Latin-jazz-oriented pop song whose lyrics are about a vacation I had over twenty years ago in Thailand with a certain special somebody (nudge-nudge, wink-wink). You should be able to hear the lyrics OK, which I sang mostly in a low baritone; they are here.

I wrote the song at the acoustic guitar, whose rhythmic strumming carries the song all the way through. The chords of the main riff are A major 7th, C major 7th, D minor 7th, and F major 7th; then there’s a repeat of the first three chords, but now a F minor 7th instead.

“I Lie Alone” is a slow song I wrote at the piano. It’s a song about loneliness caused mainly by having excessively high beauty standards for potential partners; here are the lyrics.

“She Was a Funky Girl” is, predictably, a funk song I wrote at the electric guitar. Here are the lyrics: I’ll let you figure out for yourself what I’m singing about.

“Blow” is an electronic dance tune with guitar and synthesizer solos. It’s about people trying to pick each other up in dance clubs. Here are the lyrics.

I’m afraid I was in a rather naughty mood when I wrote “Lucille,” about a young French lady I was briefly fascinated with years ago (here are the lyrics: try not to judge me too harshly). Still, I’m quite proud of what I created musically with this song: that is, the beat, the dark clavinet riff in the octatonic scale, and the guitar, keyboard, and percussion solos. Maybe that’s what should be focused on, rather than what I was singing about.

“Angelic Devils” also has a dance-oriented beat, though the subject matter of the lyrics (here) is much more serious than in the previous song. It’s about how people in positions of authority (parents, religious leaders, and politicians) abuse their power while seeming good on the outside. I wasn’t quite awake politically at the time, but I was getting there with this song.

Anyway, that’s it for now. If anyone out there, who likes what I did and wants to hear more, could help me get access to the rest of the songs on Jamendo, I’d appreciate it; then I can post a sequel to this one.

Analysis of ‘Salò’

Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma) is a 1975 art horror film directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini. The screenplay, written by Sergio Citti and Pasolini, was based on the Marquis de Sade‘s unfinished pornographic novel of the same name (sans Salò, or). Pasolini updated the story, moving it from the Château de Silling in 18th century France to the final years of WWII, in fascist Italy, during the time of the fascist Republic of Salò.

The film stars Paolo Bonacelli (who also played Cassius Chaerea in the Penthouse Caligula film), Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto Paolo Quintavalle, and Aldo Valletti as four wealthy libertines who abduct, sexually abuse, torture, and ultimately murder a group of teenage boys and girls. The cast also includes Caterina Boratto, Elsa De Giorgi, and Hélène Surgère as three middle-aged prostitutes who tell erotic stories to inflame the lust of the libertines and inspire them to acts of depravity.

Salò was and still is controversial for its shocking depiction of sexual violence against the teenaged boys and girls, at least some of whom are believed to have been underage at the time of filming, though they all look as though they could be 18 or 19 years of age. For these reasons, Salò is considered one of the most disturbing films ever made. It has been banned in many countries.

As a gay communist, Pasolini was trying to make some harsh social critiques in the making of this movie, especially as a critique of capitalism and the atrocities of fascism. He was murdered by bitter anti-communists, who allegedly had in their possession stolen rolls of film from the movie, just after its completion. Still, despite the unsettling subject matter of the film (or rather, because of it), Salò has been highly praised by many critics.

Here are some quotes, in English translation:

[first lines: four men, sitting at a table, each sign a booklet] The Duke: Your Excellency.
The Magistrate: Mr. President.
The President: My lord.
The Bishop: All’s good if it’s excessive.

“Dear friends, marrying each other’s daughters will unite our destinies for ever.” –the Duke

“Within a budding grove, the girls think but of love. Hear the radio, drinking tea and to hell with being free. They’ve no idea the bourgeoisie has never hesitated to kill its children.” –the Duke

“Signora Vaccari is sure to soon turn them into first class whores. Nothing is more contagious than evil.” –the Magistrate

“I was nine when my sister took me to Milan to meet Signora Calzetti. She examined me and asked if I wanted to work for her. I said I would, if the pay was good. My first client, a stout man named Vaccari, looked me over carefully. At once, I showed him my pussy, which I thought was very special. He covered his eyes: “Out of the question. I’m not interested in your vagina, cover it up.” He covered me, making me lie down, and said “All these little whores know is to flaunt their vaginas. Now I shall have to recover from that disgusting sight.” –Signora Vaccari

“Homage to the rear temple is often more fervent than the other.” –the President

“On the bridge of Perati, there flies a black flag, the mourning of the Julian regiment that goes to war. On the bridge of Perati, there flies a black flag. The best young men lie under the earth.” –the Duke, singing

“We Fascists are the only true anarchists, naturally, once we’re masters of the state. In fact, the one true anarchy is that of power.” –the Duke

“It is when I see others degraded that I rejoice knowing it is better to be me than the scum of “the people”. Whenever men are equal, without that difference, happiness cannot exist. So you wouldn’t aid the humble, the unhappy. In all the world no voluptuousness flatters the senses more than social privilege.” –the Duke

“I remember I once had a mother too, who aroused similar feelings in me. As soon as I could, I sent her to the next world. I have never known such subtle pleasure as when she closed her eyes for the last time.” –the Duke

The Duke: [Renata is crying] Are you crying for your mama? Come, I’ll console you! Come here to me!
The President: [singing] Come, little darling to your good daddy / He’ll sing you a lullaby
The Duke: Heavens, what an opportunity you offer me. Sra. Maggi’s tale must be acted upon at once.
Female Victim: Sir, Sir. Pity. Respect my grief. I’m suffering so, at my mother’s fate. She died for me and I’ll never see her again.
The Duke: Undress her.
Female Victim: Kill me! At least God, whom I implore, will pity me. Kill me, but don’t dishonour me.
The Duke: This whining’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever heard.

The President: [while eating a meal of faeces] Carlo, do this with your fingers. [the President sticks two fingers in his mouth] And say, “I can’t eat rice with my fingers like this.”
Male Victim: [with fingers in his mouth] I can’t eat rice.
The President: Then eat shit.

“It is not enough to kill the same person over and over again. It is far more recommendable to kill as many beings as possible.” –Signora Castelli

“Idiot, did you really think we would kill you? Don’t you see we want to kill you a thousand times, to the limits of eternity, if eternity could have limits?” –the Bishop

“The principle of all greatness on earth has long been totally bathed in blood. And, my friends, if my memory does not betray me – yes, that’s it: without bloodshed, there is no forgiveness. Without bloodshed. Baudelaire.” –the Magistrate

[last lines: two young male guards are dancing with each other] Guard: What’s your girlfriend’s name?
Guard: Marguerita.

Four wealthy and politically powerful libertines–a duke (Bonacelli), a president (Valletti), a bishop (Cataldi), and a magistrate (Quintavalle)–discuss plans to marry each other’s daughters (without their consent, of course), as well as to abduct youths and maidens to abuse sexually and torture physically and mentally (and even kill some of them) over a period of four months.

These four libertines obviously represent the ruling class, though in the context of late fascist Italy (i.e., Mussolini and Hitler are about to lose the war), we can see their sadism as representing capitalism in crisis (fascism, properly understood, is a kind of hyper-capitalism). When such a crisis occurs, the gentle, smiling face of the liberal is revealed to be a mask covering the scowling face of fascism. Hence, the four men’s cruelty.

The victims, frequently if not always naked, represent the proletariat: exploited, brutalized, vulnerable, humiliated, and lacking the means to live freely. Recall Hamlet’s use of the word naked (‘stripped of all belongings, without means’ [Crystal and Crystal, page 292], as used in Hamlet, Act IV, Scene vii, lines 43-51), to understand the symbolic meaning of the victims’ nakedness.

The studs, or fouteurs (“fuckers”) in Sade’s story (Sade, page 80), as well as the young male collaborators, or guards (dressed in the uniforms of the Decima Flottiglia MAS) represent the police and standing army of the bourgeois state. They are comparable to the militarized police of today. Without them, the four libertines would have no power, and the same, of course, goes for the state.

These young men are all rounded up to work for the four libertines, and only one of them, Ezio, is reluctant to do so. Indeed, when the guards apprehend the libertines’ daughters, all as members of the bourgeoisie who normally would be used to much better treatment (apart from their fathers’ previous rapes of them, as understood in Sade’s novel), Ezio apologizes to the women, saying he must obey orders. If only all of these thugs could understand that some orders shouldn’t be obeyed, such horrors as those seen in this movie wouldn’t happen.

But how does one get through to class collaborators?

Since capitalism is sheer hell for the poor–as I observed in my analysis of American Psycho, another story involving brutal violence inflicted by the rich–it is appropriate that Salò be divided into sections reminding us of Dante‘s Inferno: Anteinferno, Circle of Manias, Circle of Shit, and Circle of Blood. Abandon all hope, ye proletarians who enter here.

None of the four libertines are named, and the studs and collaborators aren’t often called by name. The three middle-aged prostitute storytellers are named, but the piano player isn’t; and of the victims who are named, most have names equal or approximate to those of the actors portraying them, as if naming them was an afterthought by Pasolini. Thus, we aren’t very conscious of the names of many of the characters. This near-anonymity reinforces the sense of emotional distance, the alienation, felt not just between all the characters, but between them and us, the audience.

Indeed, one of the many reasons that this film is so disturbing to viewers, as has been noted by critics, is how we cannot get close to any of the characters, there being too many of them to focus on any; so it is difficult to empathize with, to care for, any of them individually (except for shit-eating, motherless Renata and the daughter who is tripped and raped at dinner, and these are only a few incidents, not plot points drawn out for the full length of the film), and the ability to empathize with individual characters is crucial for grounding in the story, for being able to enjoy it.

We pity the victims in a general sense, we pity them en masse, but we can’t follow any individual character arcs. There is no sense of anyone growing, developing, or changing; it’s just victims entering a sea of trauma and swimming through undifferentiated torment from beginning to end.

We know the victims are doomed, and that their depraved masters are irredeemable. There’s nothing anybody can do to help the victims, so all that there is here is a sadistic stasis throughout. Lasciate ogne speranza,…

In Sade’s novel, the characters are grouped and categorized in a manner almost like taxonomy: the four libertines, the prostitute storytellers, the libertines’ daughters, the huit fouteurs, the four elderly, ugly women, etc. The numbers of characters are often reduced (e.g., four studs instead of eight) in the film, and Sade generally names the characters, but this sense of ‘taxonomy’ is retained in Salò.

This categorizing of characters is significant in terms of the Italian fascist context of the film, since Mussolini wanted his fascist society to be broken up into corporate groups of people according to the functions they were meant to perform in society (syndicates). When Mussolini spoke of “corporatism,” this is what he meant, not the corporatocracy that we see today, the unholy alliance of business corporations with the state, which is really just the logical extreme that capitalism comes to.

The fact that the libertines allow their daughters to be abused and killed doesn’t in any way detract from them also being symbolic of the bourgeoisie. The daughters are every bit as representative of capitalists–that is, the less fortunate ones–as their fathers are. Recall Marx’s words: “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929)

Apart from the fact that their fathers’ cruelty to them is a reflection of the patriarchal family, especially cruel in a fascist context, the daughters as victims can be seen as representative of, for example, the Jewish petite bourgeoisie up until the Nazis stripped them of their rights with the Nuremberg Laws. Hence, the daughters being stripped naked and forced to stay naked throughout the four months, humiliated, made to serve everyone’s meals and to endure being spat on by the guards and raped by the studs.

Indeed, the first scene in which the daughters appear as naked waitresses is one that I find to be among the most painful to watch. What we see here is the essence of fascism: the guards and studs, as class collaborators instead of joining in solidarity to overthrow the ruling class, would rather target and bully a select portion of the petite bourgeoisie, symbolized by the daughters.

That poor daughter who is tripped and raped by one of the studs, while the others watch and laugh at her–the bourgeois fathers would rather sing a song together than help the girl. This is the essence of the bourgeois family: being more concerned with maintaining power and prestige than even with helping their own children.

Marx, in The Communist Manifesto, wrote of how there is no meaningful sense of family among the proletariat: “On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution…Do you charge us [communists] with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.” (II: Proletarians and Communists)

Indeed, with all the teen victims snatched away from their parents (and Renata actually having witnessed the murder of her own mother, who tried to save her), we can see the truth of Marx’s observation. To make matters worse, though, we see this injustice to the family extended to that of the bourgeoisie itself, in the form of the libertines’ abuse of their daughters. The psychopathic and narcissistic libertines have no qualms at all about abusing their own flesh and blood.

The prostitutes, catering on the one hand to libertine lust with their erotic storytelling, and on the other hand being far less vicious to the victims, can be seen to represent the liberal wing of the bourgeoisie. The ruling class maintains its power over us with a kind of one-two punch: the liberal jab, and the conservative right-cross.

When liberals are elected, they give the people the false hope that all will be well with their modest reforms, which don’t really help the people in any meaningful way, but rather exist as concessions that keep us at bay and stave off revolution. Then, when we’re comfortable and complacent, conservatives get elected and create harsher legislation, which we hate but ultimately get used to, so no attempt is ever made, when liberals get reelected, to reverse the hated new laws. One-two punch.

We can see such a situation as symbolized by how, for example, Signora Vaccari holds naked Renata in her arms as a mother would her child. Yet it isn’t long after that that the trembling, traumatized girl is forced into a mock marriage with Sergio during the ceremony of which the Duke fondles a number of the male and female victims; then the boy and girl are pressured to fondle each other, then they are raped by the libertines to stop them from consummating their own ‘marriage.’

Later, at the beginning of the Circle of Blood, the duke, president, and magistrate, all in women’s clothes, growl at the weeping victims, demanding that they smile and laugh during this ‘joyous’ occasion of a mock wedding between the libertine ‘brides’ and the stud grooms. Vaccari and the piano player (played by Sonia Saviange) improvise jokes to make the victims laugh. We all know, however, that this is only a brief respite from the teens’ endless frowning.

Another way that the prostitute storytellers can be seen as symbolic of liberals is in how their lewd stories parody, and thus can represent, our permissive pop culture, with its gratuitous swearing in Hollywood movies and sexually suggestive pop and rock songs. We seem to be liberated with such indulgences, but in our growing poverty, we aren’t.

The scene in which the libertines have the victims, including their daughters, crawl naked on all fours and bark like dogs to be fed is significant. I suspect they have been starved, and the only way they can hope to be fed is to degrade themselves in this way. It makes me think of how capitalists use charity to create the illusion that their philanthropy is generosity rather than just good public relations. Poverty is solved by a socialist reorganizing of society, providing guaranteed housing, healthcare, employment, education, etc., not giving occasional ‘charitable’ dollars to the poor.

When the poor are given alms out of pity, that pity is really condescension coming from the ruling class. And in Salò, when one of the male victims (Lamberto) refuses to be so degraded, the magistrate whips him until he passes out. Later, the magistrate hides nails in some food and feeds it to one of the daughters, who screams in pain on having the nails stab into her mouth. Some charity.

From the Circle of Manias we go to an even more torturous one, the Circle of Shit. It is appropriate that this one be in the middle of the movie, for as film scholar Stephen Barber has observed, Salò is centred around the anus. This is true not only because of the revolting coprophagia that we see, but also in all the sodomy, that is, all the gay sex.

On one level, the coprophagia–at the dinner table in particular–represents our society’s overindulgence in junk food. When you see a fork or a spoon raising a turd from a plate up to one’s ever-so-reluctant mouth, think of a McDonald’s hamburger.

On a deeper level, though–and this is especially evident in the notorious scene in which the Duke defecates on the floor and forces Renata to eat it–the coprophagia can be seen to represent the splitting-off and projection of hated aspects of oneself (understood as internal objects of the negative aspects of one’s parents), to be introjected by others. Melanie Klein observed that a baby, experiencing what she called the paranoid-schizoid position, would engage in projective identification, ejecting unwanted parts of itself and making its mother receive those projections, which in unconscious phantasy often come in the forms of faeces or urine.

Wilfred Bion took Klein’s notion of projective identification further, stating that babies and psychotics use it as a primitive, pre-verbal form of communication. Bion‘s theory of containment is normally applied to a mother’s soothing of her distressed, agitated baby, or to a therapist dealing with a deeply disturbed patient. Negative containment (see Bion, pages 97-99), however, results when a narcissistic or psychopathic parent, or therapist–or in the case of Salò, the four libertines–do the opposite of soothing, worsening the agitation of the baby, patient, or Salò victims, so that the distress changes into a nameless dread.

The container, or receiver of the stressful emotions (the parent or therapist), is given a feminine symbol, implying a yoni; the contained, or projection of those emotions (those of the baby or patient), is given a masculine symbol, implying a phallus. So the process of containment can, in turn, be symbolized by the notion of making love. In Salò, however, the container isn’t symbolized by the yoni, but by the anus.

The soothing of containment as symbolized by lovemaking, therefore, has relevance in Salò only in the context of homosexual sex, hence the homoeroticism in the film shouldn’t be surprising. The only mutually pleasurable sex in this film is between libertines and their willing gay partners (symbolic class collaborators), i.e., the bishop and his stud, and the duke and his catamite (Rino), one of the few boys among the victims who, because of his willing submission, isn’t brutalized. Apart from these oases from abuse (including some lesbian sex among the female victims), there is only rape.

This rape, be it penile/vaginal or anal rape, is all a symbol of the negative containment described above. The libertines, studs, and guards project their viciousness onto their victims, either in the form of rapes, or, using their shit as the contained, they project their cruelty into their victims’ mouths, another container.

The resulting trauma is the victims’ nameless dread. The introjectively identified cruelty is then manifested in the victims when they later betray other victims, or when Umberto, a victim promoted to guard/collaborator to replace Ezio, calls the boy victims “culattoni!” (faggots!)

One doesn’t have to accept Freud‘s theory of anal expulsiveness (i.e., drive theory) to see its symbolic resonance as applied to Salò. Two noteworthy traits associated with anal expulsiveness are cruelty and emotional outbursts, as are seen plentifully among the libertines in this film. Psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, and narcissism are understood to be caused to a great extent by childhood trauma, which is then projected onto others in the negative container/contained way described above. It’s easy to believe that the four libertines were abused as children, then grew up to be abusers themselves; the same goes for the studs and guards.

At the beginning of the Circle of Blood, we shouldn’t mistake the libertines’ cross-dressing for transgenderism. If anything, their transvestitism and gay marriage to the studs is a fascist mockery of the LGBT community. These are the kind of men who would put muscular transwomen into sporting competitions with cis-women to ensure that the latter lose every time. It’s a typical divide-and-conquer tactic that the ruling class uses to keep the people distracted from revolution.

Fascists and Nazis, of course, have never tolerated the LGBT community. Even Ernst Röhm, the gay leader of the SA, was an exception proving the rule. He was only grudgingly tolerated by Hitler until the Night of the Long Knives, when the Nazis eliminated all of their potential political enemies, using the very politically powerful Röhm’s homosexuality as a rationale to have him killed (apart from an unsubstantiated claim that he was trying to wrest Hitler from power, the so-called “Röhm Putsch”). So when we see any gay sex or cross-dressing among the libertines, none of it should be understood as an affirmation of LGBT rights: it’s just that those four men can do anything they like, because they can, because they have the power.

The mounting suffering of the victims, and their powerlessness, causes their alienation to grow, meaning–apart from the occasional lesbian sex we see–they never feel any sense of solidarity, togetherness, or mutual aid. So when the bishop comes into their sleeping areas and threatens them with punishment for breaking any of their little rules, the victims promptly betray their fellow sufferers so they can save their own skins. This culminates in the betrayal of Ezio, the only guard who obeys the libertines with reluctance.

He is found making love with a black servant girl, offending not only the libertines’ disgust at the sight of penile-vaginal sex (and the implication that the boy and girl are fucking because they love each other, like the husbands and wives they lampoon with their mock marriages), but also arousing their abhorrence of interracial sex. And Ezio’s final offence is his raised fist: the two naked lovers are then shot.

The lovers’ nakedness shows their proletarian identification with the victims. His bold standing there, frontally nude (before four men with lecherous desires for young male bodies) and raising his fist, emphasizes his defiance of their hegemony.

They hesitate before killing him. Is it their lustful reluctance to waste a beautiful body they haven’t taken the opportunity to enjoy? Is it awe at his boldness, when he has absolutely no means to defend himself or fight back (refer above to Hamlet’s use of the word naked)? Is it shock at his unexpected socialist salute, indicating their unwitting employment of one they’d deem a traitor?

The only other reluctant collaborator among them is the piano player, who upon realizing the full extent of her employers’ murderous designs, jumps out of a window and kills herself. Such is the despair that so aggravated a form of right-wing hegemony can arouse in those who love freedom.

Finally, the libertines choose those victims they’ll have murdered, including all their daughters. Wearing blue ribbons around their arms, they await their doom, the daughters sitting in a large bin filled with shit. The daughter who was tripped and raped by the stud at dinner, imitating Christ on the Cross, shouts, “God, God, why have you abandoned us?” When a parent frustrates his or her children (or in this case, abuses them), their oft-used defence mechanism is splitting the parent into absolute good and bad, with a wish to expel the bad parent and keep the good one near; in this case, God as the good father is gone, while the libertines as all-too-bad fathers are all-too-present.

Not only are these victims murdered, they are killed in the most agonizing, sadistic, and drawn-out of ways. The boy Sergio is branded on the nipple. The daughters are raped one last time, one of them killed by hanging. The boy Franco has his tongue cut out. Renata’s breasts are burned, as is a boy’s penis, and a girl is scalped.

The libertines, studs, and guards are the gleefully willing perpetrators, of course, but each libertine goes inside the house to take a turn to watch the murders, which occur outside, from a window, viewing the cruelty through small binoculars. This voyeurism is comparable to our watching of violence in movies and on TV: we’ve seen so much of it that we’re desensitized to it; the voyeurs’ watching of the violence from farther away symbolizes our emotional distance from such violence when we see it on TV and in film.

The two guards we see at the end of the film, two boys dancing to music–can be seen as another fascist mockery of the LGBT community. One of them has a girlfriend named Marguerita–I don’t think he is bisexual.

The horrors seen in this film should be understood as prophetic, a dire warning of a reality that is more and more apparent each coming year. The film’s sadism only symbolizes that reality, but it’s no less of a reality just because of symbolism. Neoliberal capitalism hadn’t yet come into its own as of the mid-Seventies, but Pasolini knew that all of the imperialist ingredients were already on the table. The fascist shit dishes were going to be made and eaten, and quite soon: he could smell them.

Analysis of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’

Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 erotic thriller produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, his last film before he died. It was also written by him and Frederic Raphael, based on the novella Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler. It stars Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman (actually married at the time), who play Bill and Alice Harford, a doctor and his wife who, just before Christmas, struggle with jealousy and temptations to adultery.

The film follows Schnitzler’s novella closely, changing only the setting (from early 20th century Vienna, during the Carnival, to late 20th century New York City, pre-Christmas) and characters’ names (Fridolin to Bill Harford, Albertina/Albertine to Alice, Nachtigall to Nick Nightingale [played by Todd Field], Mizzi to Domino, etc.), and adding more erotic or quasi-erotic content (i.e., more nude scenes). A 1969 German TV movie, with English subtitles, of Traumnovelle can be found here.

Here are some quotes:

“Don’t you think one of the charms of marriage is that it makes deception a necessity for both parties?” –Sandor, the Hungarian dancing with Alice

“Sex is the last thing on my mind when I’m with a patient.” –Bill, to Alice

Bill: Uh… look… women don’t… They basically, just don’t think like that.
Alice: Millions of years of evolution, right? Right!? Men have to stick it in every place they can, but for women it’s just about security, and commitment, and- and whatever the fuck else!
Bill: A little oversimplified, Alice, but yes, something like that.
Alice: If you men only knew.

“I first saw him that morning in the lobby. He was- he was checking into the hotel and he was following the bellboy with his luggage… to the elevator. He… he glanced at me as he walked past; just a glance. Nothing more. And I… could hardly… move. That afternoon, Helena went to the movie with her friend and… you and I made love. And we made plans about our future. And we talked about Helena. And yet, at no time, was he ever out of my mind. And I thought that if he wanted me, even if it was only… for one night… I was ready to give up everything. You. Helena. My whole fucking future. Everything. And yet it was weird because at the same time, you were dearer to me than ever. And… and at that moment, my love for you was both… tender… and sad. I… I barely slept that night. And I woke up the next morning in a panic. I don’t know if I was afraid that he had left or that he might still be there. But by dinner… I realized he was gone. And I was relieved.” –Alice, telling Bill about the naval officer she was tempted to have an affair with during the family vacation at Cape Cod

Mysterious Woman: [at the masked orgy] I don’t know who you are or what you think you’re doing, but you obviously don’t belong here.
Dr. Bill Harford: I’m sorry. I think you must have me mistaken for someone else.
Mysterious Woman: [whispering] Don’t be crazy. You are in great danger.

Red Cloak: [pleasantly] Please, come forward. May I have the password?
Bill: Fidelio.
Red Cloak: That’s correct, sir! That is the password… for admittance. But may I ask, what is the password for the house?
Bill: The password for the house…
Red Cloak: Yes?
Bill: I’m sorry. I… seem to have… forgotten it.
Red Cloak: That’s unfortunate! Because here, it makes no difference whether you have forgotten it, or whether you never knew it. You will kindly remove your mask. [Bill removes mask] Now, get undressed.
Bill: [nervously] Get… undressed?
Red Cloak: [sternly] Remove your clothes.
Bill: Uh… gentlemen…
Red Cloak: Remove your clothes. Or would you like us to do it for you?

“If the good doctor himself should ever want anything again… anything at all… it needn’t be a costume.” –Mr. Milich

“Listen, Bill, I don’t think you realize what kind of trouble you were in last night. Who do you think those people were? Those were not just ordinary people there. If I told you their names… I’m not gonna tell you their names, but if I did, I don’t think you’ll sleep so well.” –Ziegler

Bill: There was a… there was a… there was, uh, a woman there. Who, uh… tried to warn me.
Ziegler: I know.
Bill: Do you know who she was?
Ziegler: Yes. She was… she was a hooker. Sorry, but… that’s what she was.
Bill: A hooker?
Ziegler: Bill, suppose I told you that… that everything that happened to you there… the threats, the- the girl’s warnings, her last minute intervention, suppose I said that all of that… was staged. That it was a kind of charade. That it was fake.
Bill: Fake?
Ziegler: Yes, fake.
Bill: Why would they do that?
Ziegler: Why? In plain words… to scare the living shit out of you. To keep you quiet about where you’d been and what you’d seen.

Bill: The woman lying dead in the morgue was the woman at the party.
Ziegler: Yes.
Bill: Well, Victor, maybe I’m missing something here. You call it fake, a charade… Do you mind telling me what kind of fucking charade ends up with somebody turning up dead!?
Ziegler: Okay, Bill, let’s cut the bullshit, alright? You’ve been way out of your depth for the last twenty-four hours. You want to know what kind of charade? I’ll tell you exactly what kind. That whole play-acted “take me” sacrifice that you’ve been jerking off with had nothing to do with her real death. Nothing happened after you left that hadn’t happened to her before. She got her brains fucked out. Period.

“And no dream is ever just a dream.” –Bill

Themes pervading both Eyes Wide Shut and Traumnovelle include jealousy, temptation, and the blurry distinction between dream/fantasy and reality. Also, there’s a close relationship between sex and death, between Eros and Thanatos.

One night, Dr. Bill Harford and his wife, Alice, go to a Christmas party hosted by his wealthy friend and patient, Victor Ziegler (played by Sydney Pollack). Both husband and wife are assailed with temptations almost from their arrival: a handsome Hungarian named Sandor makes moves on her, while Bill has two beautiful young models charming him. Already tipsy Alice, while dancing with Sandor, sees Bill with the two women and feels a pang of jealousy.

Soon after, Bill is to be subjected potentially to more temptation when Ziegler needs him upstairs to take care of a beautiful and naked prostitute who has overdosed on speedball. Now, Bill can easily resist thoughts of lust for her, since his love and commitment to Alice are…so far…unshaken by any fears of unfaithfulness from her.

Indeed, the whole time Bill is examining the nude prostitute, he looks only at her face, asking her to open her eyes and look at him. He never gives in to the temptation of looking down at her body. He asks what her name is (Mandy, played by Julienne Davis), showing further that he, as a responsible doctor and family man, has no interest at all in treating her like a sex object.

He tells her that she’s lucky she hasn’t died…this time, but she mustn’t do these kinds of dangerous drugs ever again. To Bill, she’s a human being, though to Ziegler, her rich client, she’s a human commodity to be enjoyed. In this scene, we see the first example of sex juxtaposed with death, or at least the danger of death.

Bill, as a middle class bourgeois, is content with what he has, since he feels no threat of losing it. But when Alice, stoned with him on marijuana the night after the party, tells him of the temptation she had of having an affair with a naval officer while she and Bill were on vacation in Cape Cod the year before, he wonders if she’s told him the whole truth, or if she’s concealing an actual affair she’s had with the man.

Bill’s fear of having been cuckolded is a symbolic castration of him, an unmanning. The resulting lack gives rise to a desire for other women he hitherto hasn’t had. A further unmanning occurs when Bill is walking the streets of New York that night, after making a sudden house call (during which a woman, the daughter of a man who has just died, declares her love to Bill…more temptation for him). A group of college-age men, one of whom bumps into Bill, taunts him with homophobic slurs. Like Fridolin in Traumnovelle, Bill feels like a coward for not challenging them to a fight.

Soon after, as he continues walking the streets, moping, and ruminating about Alice’s suspected adultery, a pretty young prostitute named Domino (played by Vinessa Shaw) comes up to him and invites him up to her apartment. Here we see how his symbolic castration, his wounded sense of manhood, his lack, gives rise to his desire.

Though he doesn’t go through with having sex with Domino (a phone call from Alice ruins the mood), the point is that he has seriously considered the sex. He even pays her the full amount.

Bourgeois, middle class Bill is liberal in his thinking: smoking pot with Alice, respectful to women when they are undressed, and therefore repressing his darker desires. But when the security of his world is threatened, those darker impulses of his start to come to the surface.

In The Liberal Mindset, I described the psychological conflict the liberal has between his id impulses towards pleasure (sex, drugs, etc.) and his superego-influenced sense of morality about responsibility to social justice issues. Since Schnitzler and Freud thought very similarly about sex and psychology (they even exchanged correspondence), it seems appropriate to apply Freudian psychoanalysis to my interpretation of this movie.

Bill, as a doctor and devoted husband (and as a bourgeois liberal), has a strong superego that normally prevents him from indulging in any temptations to adultery or to objectifying women. As long as all that is his is secure, he will be a good boy; but if the security of what is his is threatened, his superego will no longer restrain his id.

Similarly with the liberal, as long as his or her class privileges are safe, he or she will be generous and have a kind attitude towards the disadvantaged. He or she will make endless pleas for peace, and will speak out against such problems as income inequality; but elect the wrong presidential candidate, and the liberal will bang the war drums against any country accused–without a shred of evidence–of having aided said candidate to win, and he or she will have no qualms about voting in a candidate equally right-wing as this wrongfully elected incumbent, no matter how unsympathetic this new, desired candidate is to millennials or to the plight of the poor…as long as he is a Democrat.

The mask of the superego slips off, and we see the face of the id. Speaking of masks…

After the failed encounter with Domino (already proof of Bill’s willingness to exploit the poverty of prostitutes to satisfy his desires), Bill finds a night club where he knows his old friend, Nick Nightingale, is playing jazz piano. The two men chat after the end of the gig, and Bill learns of Nick’s next, far more exciting one: in the mansion of a secret society whose members are masked and cloaked, and where there will also be a bevy of beautiful, nude women!

By the end of the movie, we learn that Ziegler is one of the masked men in the mansion, as is Mandy, according to him, anyway (though she, also masked, and the one who warns Bill to leave immediately, is played by a different actress–Abigail Good). These nude, masked women are obviously prostitutes meant to satisfy the lust of the men of the secret society, men of wealth, power, and influence. By an interesting irony, the men’s masks give them their power, the power of anonymity; the prostitutes’ masks strip them of their power, by making them faceless, robbing them of their individuality, making them mere commodities instead of letting them be human beings.

Bill–the man whose superego kept him from objectifying women before, kept him from ever dreaming [!] of exploiting prostitutes, now, with his suspicions of Alice’s infidelity (and the password to the house is Fidelio!)–is letting his id run wild. He eagerly insists that Nightingale give him the password and address to the mansion.

Given the outrageous nature of the goings-on in the mansion, the pagan, seemingly near-Satanic rituals, and the orgies, as well as how unlikely the members of the secret society would just let Bill in, him having arrived in a taxi cab instead of in a limo, it seems less likely that Bill has really experienced the orgy scene than that he has just dreamed it, or at least fantasized about it.

Traumnovelle means “Dream Story”; Eyes Wide Shut seems to mean “eyes wide open while seeing a dream” (i.e., with one’s eyes shut), or it could mean refusing to see reality, preferring to see one’s fantasies. In other words, one is so preoccupied with seeing the fantasies used to gratify the pleasure principle (id), and is so preoccupied with the accompanying guilt (superego), that one’s eyes are shut to the reality principle (ego).

Along with the controversy of the sexual material in much of Schnitzler’s writing, he was also known to have been a highly sexed man, given to many a dalliance with women. Added to this was his chauvinistic attitude, most prevalent at the time, of course, that his female lovers ought to have been virgins. Only he was permitted to have a multitude of lovers.

There is much of Schnitzler in Fridolin (and therefore also in Bill, though in a more muted form, thanks to Kubrick’s and Raphael’s rewrites), and so his sexual double standards are reflected in the protagonist’s attitude; though, to be fair, Fridolin and Bill have their share of guilt over their sexual venturings. Indeed, on some level, Traumnovelle seems to have been Schnitzler’s purging of his own voracious sexual appetite.

So, has the whole, wild night really happened, is it just Bill’s imagination, or is it somewhere in between? A dream is the fulfillment of a wish, as Freud originally observed; or, as he observed two decades later in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, with his theories of the death drive and repetition compulsion, sometimes one engages in patterns of self-injury, or acts out unpleasant experiences over and over again. In other words, sometimes one has self-destructive urges, as Bill’s refusal to heed the Mysterious Woman’s warnings of the danger that the secret society poses to him–were it all a dream dramatized in his mind–would seem to indicate.

Recall that Bill has just smoked weed with Alice before going out for the house call. I don’t think his being stoned has detracted from the fantastic aspects of his experiences that night. He could easily have nodded off in his cab a couple of times–the ride to the house call and back–and he could thus have dreamt all, or at least part, of the more extreme experiences.

Certainly his encounter at the costume rental, with Mr. Milich (played by Rade Serbedžija) and his sex-kitten teen daughter (played by Leelee Sobieski), her being caught undressed with two Asian men in that awkward incident, seems wild enough to have been part of a dream. Then again, maybe much of it really did happen, for such is the blurred line between fantasy and reality in this film.

So, when Bill arrives at the mansion, we can interpret the meaning of the ritualistic, orgiastic goings-on inside in two ways: as having really happened, or as a dream/fantasy of his. Let’s consider the former interpretation first.

Like the authoritarian power of priests in ancient religion, we can see the ritualistic elements in the mansion as symbolic of the religious awe one might feel in the presence of such powerful people. In Traumnovelle, the masked men wear monks’ hoods and cloaks, and the masked prostitutes wear nuns’ habits.

As for the orgiastic aspect, the prostitutes’ nudity represents their powerlessness as have-nots (consider Shakespeare’s use of naked, as meaning ‘stripped of all belongings, without means’ [Crystal and Crystal, page 292], as used in Hamlet, Act IV, Scene vii, lines 43-51), as contrasted with the clothed men, the haves, the rich and powerful. Their threat to strip Bill of his clothes is thus to deprive him of his power, too. The women’s powerlessness is a lack of their own, giving rise to the desire for such things as drugs (i.e., Mandy’s speedball), a manic defence against the depression they must feel from always being sexually exploited.

The secret society’s exploitation of the prostitutes reminds us of Jeffrey Epstein‘s and Ghislaine Maxwell‘s prostituting of underage girls to satisfy the hebephilia and ephebophilia of all those implicated in the scandal. Their gargantuan amounts of wealth buy them the power needed to silence or kill anyone who may squeal, just as Bill is threatened by the Red Cloak (played by Leon Vitali).

So much for the interpretation that the mansion scene really happened. Now let’s interpret the scene from the point of view that Bill has imagined, or dreamed, the whole thing. Now, the goings-on in the house are a dramatization of the thought processes of Bill’s unconscious.

What we have here is a dream that is a wish-fulfillment of Bill’s desires (an orgy of anonymous sex), as well as a fulfillment, on some level at least, of his self-destructive urges (the threats). Sex meets death.

Many of the goings-on represent unconscious ego defence mechanisms: denial (Bill’s mask; his pretence that he’s a member of the secret society), projection (the members of the secret society indulging in the naughtiness instead of him), reaction formation (in Traumnovelle, the monks’ and nuns’ clothes, symbolizing the secret society’s wish to seem virtuous rather than sinful; in the original script, they were supposed to be monks’ cloaks, and actually, the cloaks and hoods we see are still rather similar to those of monks), and turning against oneself (Bill is threatened, though he hasn’t indulged in any of the sex: he’s only been watching).

Since much of the ego and superego are unconscious, the defence mechanisms tend to be activated unconsciously, too: “…the ego also contains complex unconscious defensive arrangements that have evolved to satisfy the demands of neurotic compromise, ways of thinking that keep repressed impulses out of conscious awareness in an ongoing way. Unlike unconscious id impulses that respond with enthusiasm to the prospect of liberation in making their presence felt in the analytic hour, unconscious ego defenses gain nothing from being exposed…The ego, charged with the daunting task of keeping the peace between warring internal parties and ensuring socially acceptable functioning, works more effectively if it works undercover.” (Mitchell and Black, page 26)

The password, Fidelio, represents Bill’s wish that his wife be faithful to him, even though he, like Schnitzler, wishes he could get away with being unfaithful to her. The fact that he is tricked into thinking there’s a second password means that his id is fulfilled by being allowed in the house, while his superego‘s unconscious wish to be punished for his thoughts of infidelity is also satisfied.

If the mansion scene is all a dream, the Mysterious Woman can easily be Mandy, who can also know that he is Bill, the doctor who helped her get through her OD ordeal, which she can see as him having saved her life. (In his narcissistic imagination, Bill can then think that this nude beauty likes him.)

Her offer “to redeem him,” a perversely Christ-like moment amidst orgiastic activity that some may deem Satanic, can be seen thus as Mandy wishing to repay Bill for having helped her at Ziegler’s Christmas party. If the mansion scene has really happened, though, her willingness to take the punishment (presumably death) for a man she apparently doesn’t know could come from her hatred of her life as an exploited prostitute, a kind of suicide.

As the focal point of Bill’s dream, the secret society is, on the one hand, an intimidatingly powerful, wealthy, influential group, and on the other hand, an envied group whose indulgence in forbidden pleasures is something Bill would love to join. They could, in this sense, be seen to represent the NWO of the conspiracy theorists (many have tried unconvincingly to associate the secret society with such things as the Illuminati), that is, in his imagination, in his dreams, as opposed to reality.

The secret society could also represent–again, in Bill’s imagination only–the “corporatists” that the right-wing libertarians accuse of perverting the “free market.” The corporatist NWO is both feared and unconsciously admired and envied, since they have a power and influence that their detractors would gladly wield, were the detractors as rich and successful.

Bill is conflicted between his id wanting to join the big club we aren’t in and participating in their lewd indulgence, and his superego‘s moral condemnation of their wickedness, hence his leaving the house unscathed and sexually unfulfilled, with a prostitute dying for him. The right-wing libertarian similarly condemns the corruption of the bourgeois state and its super-rich beneficiaries, imagining that this corruption has nothing to do with “real capitalism,” when it is easy to believe that, were he to rise up to the level of the elite, he too would be defending his and their opulence, claiming they’d got there through ‘hard work, gumption, and talent,’ rather than through the merciless exploitation of the working class. Just look at the libertarian Koch brothers to see what I mean.

The liberal has similar repressed desires, including his wish to preserve his class privileges, though his loftier ego ideal would have him pretend to care for the exploited, as Bill consciously does Mandy.

So, a combination of Bill’s jealousy over Alice’s suspected infidelity, his smoking of weed intensifying that jealousy and fogging his mind, his fatigue throughout the night, his presumed napping in the cabs, and his own guilt over his near-succumbing to temptation has all blurred the boundary between fantasy and reality for him.

The stress he has felt–Was the Mysterious Woman murdered by the secret society? Was she Mandy? Did she just OD one too many times? Will the secret society have him and his family killed? Did he just dream/imagine it all?–is at least to a large extent just a dramatization of his own conflict.

Projecting onto a murderous, rich elite helps Bill to forget that he, too, has at least wanted, and has the money, to exploit prostitutes, just as Milich, the owner of the small costuming business, prostitutes his own daughter. Whether petite or grande, bourgeois are still bourgeois.

Bill has the same desires as Alice, who definitely dreams of being in an orgy with men and laughs while dreaming, then weeps about it after waking up. Here we see the difference between the indulgent unconscious and the censorious conscious mind. Bill also has the same desires as Ziegler, whose Christmas party, with the constant flirtation among the guests, is a double of the mansion orgy, as well as its inspiration for Bill’s dream. Alice’s orgy dream is also a double of the mansion orgy dream.

If the mansion orgy is a dream, so is every following scene associated with it. These scenes include Bill’s return to the house gates to receive the warning letter, his fortuitous discovery of a newspaper article about Mandy’s death by drug overdose, his seeing her body at the morgue (his id ogling her nude body like a necrophile, though his superego mourns her death and his ego fears for his and his family’s lives), and Ziegler’s explanation that her “sacrifice” was staged. All of these scenes thus are unconscious wish-fulfillments, expressions of Eros, as well as expressions of the death drive.

Finally, Bill breaks down and cries in his bedroom, waking Alice up, because he sees his mask on the pillow beside her. Is this because the secret society’s muscle have been following him everywhere, or has he, because of all the stress he’s been enduring, hallucinated it? (Alice doesn’t seem to notice it.)

After all, he returned to Domino’s apartment with a gift, hoping to finish what he started the last time; and since she wasn’t home, but her pretty roommate was there instead, he was tempted to cheat with her. The news of Domino being HIV-positive reinforces the sex/death link. Domino’s bedroom walls are also covered in masks, inspiring the mansion dream as well as linking his guilt feelings with seeing (or hallucinating) his mask lying on his pillow.

He tearfully confesses everything to Alice, and the last scene shows them Christmas shopping with their daughter in the toy section of a department store. Their discussion of the matter doesn’t seem to be so much about the threats of a secret society as about his guilt feelings. This would explain why, as a solution, their focus is on loving each other, and why Alice says that, as soon as possible, they should “Fuck.” It’s all about dealing with their temptations to adultery, not a fear of being murdered.

Meanwhile, Christmas lights and decorations have been seen throughout the movie, except for the ‘Satanic’ mansion scene, of course. Christmas in this context should not in any way be confused with the Christmas spirit. In line with the commodification of women (symbolic of the exploitation of the working class in general) seen from beginning to end, Christmas here should be understood only in terms of consumerism, the fetishization of commodities, hence the final scene of the Harfords doing their Christmas shopping.

The point is that ending the elite’s exploitation of prostitutes, and of all of the working class, must include those lower-level bourgeois, like Bill, also no longer exploiting other people. One cannot stop at overthrowing those at the very top; one must overturn the entire capitalist system, and those among the petite bourgeoisie can be a great help, provided they join the workers’ cause. As Mao once said, “Our closest friends are the entire semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie.” (Mao, page 7)

Consider the opening of Traumnovelle, when the daughter of Fridolin and Albertine is reading the story in which “brown slaves” row a prince’s galley to a caliph’s palace. The narration’s concern is with the prince meeting the princess once he reaches the shore; the slaves, however, are as faceless, as anonymously disposable, as the nude masked women in the mansion.

Bill has shown all that concern for Mandy, but he has done so from the hypocritical point of view of a liberal. As with his condolences for Domino over her having tested HIV-positive, his empathy for Mandy is a thin disguise–a mask–covering his desire to have both women in bed.

The proletariat is always “ready to redeem” the bourgeoisie, suffering and dying so the rich can continue to live well. “Someone died,” Ziegler says to Bill, referring to Mandy. “It happens all the time. Life goes on. It always does, until it doesn’t.” The eyes of the bourgeoisie are wide open to the pleasures they can see, but shut to the suffering of those they pay to give them that pleasure. Life is a dream story for the wealthy, but a nightmare, a trauma novella, for the poor.

Political Distractions

Of all the methods that the ruling class uses to keep the people in their control, the use of political distractions is among their most cunning. The vast majority of the population is, of course, angry about the corruption in the political systems of the world…but how should we understand the true nature, the origin, of this corruption? The ruling class’s deft use of distractions is what causes far too many people to misinterpret the nature and source of these problems.

Typically, these misinterpretations involve a mixture of some truth with many falsehoods. For example, we all know that there’s a kind of unholy alliance between corporations and the state: it’s a natural, logical state of affairs that in capitalism, the more successful businesses will centralize and concentrate their capital; then in the bloodthirsty world of competition, they’ll step on and crush the smaller businesses to ensure their ascendancy. Using the state to enact laws favouring the big businesses at the expense of the smaller ones is par for the course.

A misinterpretation of this process occurs, however, among the right-wing libertarians, who–unable to admit that their precious capitalism is the problem–imagine that this merging of government and corporations isn’t “real capitalism” (i.e., the no true Scotsman fallacy), but rather “crony capitalism,” or “corporatism” (that infelicitous word whose incorrect usage is a misinterpretation of Mussolini‘s meaning, and which should, if anything, be replaced by “corporatocracy”…which, incidentally, is capitalism brought to its logical conclusion!).

If there’s private property (factories, office buildings, apartment buildings, farmland, etc., owned by bosses, as opposed to being collectively run by workers…No, communists don’t want everyone to share his toothbrush or smartphone with everyone else!), that’s capitalism. If commodities are produced for profit, rather than to provide for everyone, that’s capitalism. If capital is accumulated (hence, the word capitalism), that’s capitalism. How extensive, minimal, or non-existent (this third being an impossibility) government regulation happens to be in an economy is completely irrelevant.

Right-wing libertarians believe the current system isn’t “true capitalism” because they can’t bring themselves to face the reality that capitalism has been an epic, spectacular failure…and it’s obvious even to them that the current state of political and economic affairs has been only a failure. But rather than face the facts, they’d rather be distracted by a belief in other, spurious causes.

Another group, one that to a great extent overlaps with the right-wing libertarians, is the conspiracy theorists who believe in such nonsense as the NWO: apparently, the ‘old world order’ wasn’t all that bad. They imagine a one-world government will be the ultimate dystopia, as if one cannot be as brutally oppressed by many governments. They imagine the Illuminati still exists, it supposedly having descended from the Bavarian one that helped end feudalism: this, incidentally, was a good thing. Then, there’s the whole chemtrails thing. And finally, we have to throw some bigotry into the pot, so there are the Masonic and Jewish conspiracies, too.

Though secret societies certainly have existed, one doesn’t need to believe in them, let alone those that apparently worship the devil, to understand that there’s a lot of wrongdoing in the world. One doesn’t need to believe the Devil exists to believe evil exists; nor does one have to limit one’s understanding of aggression and destructiveness to the instincts or to the ideas of the behaviourists–as Erich Fromm argued in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Our malignant aggression comes from our failure to transcend our nature through creativity, from our failure to feel a oneness with others, and a failure to feel a sense of accomplishment.

Fromm states that “the character-rooted passions are a sociobiological, historical category. Although not directly serving physical survival they are as strong–and often even stronger–than instincts. They form the basis for man’s interest in life, his enthusiasm, his excitement; they are the stuff from which not only his dreams are made but art, religion, myth, drama–all that makes life worth living. Man cannot live as nothing but an object, as dice thrown out of a cup; he suffers severely when he is reduced to the level of a feeding or propagating machine, even if he has all the security he wants. Man seeks for drama and excitement; when he cannot get satisfaction on a higher level, he creates for himself the drama of destruction.” (Fromm, page 29)

The conspiracy theorists seem to think it’s bad only when Jews, Freemasons, government workers, or businesses favoured by the state get rich, but if any other capitalist does well, then it’s OK. Their scapegoating of anyone outside of their circumscribed fantasy world of the “free market” is yet another political distraction from the real source of the world’s problems: capitalism.

Of course, the political right are far from the only people distracted by nonsense. Next, we must discuss the liberals, who often pose as left-leaning, but are really centrist or even right-leaning when the pressure is on to protect their privileged place in society. These are the people who think that, as long as Trump (or whoever the leader of the GOP happens to be at a given time) is booted out of the White House, and as long as a Democrat is elected, all will be well. (The same applies to the Tory vs. Liberal/NDP parties in Canada, Tory vs. Labour in the UK, etc.)

Things have gotten so bad in the US that liberals there think that voting in Biden is acceptable, even desirable. Who is more right-wing, I wonder: him, or Trump? Granted, I agree that, after his caging of “illegals,” the fascist antics he’s brought about in Portland, Oregon, and his wish to suspend the 2020 election that he’s increasingly unlikely to win, Trump has become intolerable by even neoliberal capitalist standards; but placing hope in Biden is yet another distraction from the real problem. Why can’t we try revolution instead?

Similarly among liberals, the whole Russiagate farce was yet another distraction from facing up to the Clintons’ corruption. I discussed here why there was, and is, little substantive difference between Trump and Hillary Clinton. That’s what I meant above by why ‘left-leaning’ liberals are centrists or right-leaning in disguise. The same can be understood with regard to Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, etc. They aren’t socialists: they just lure progressives over to vote for the Democratic Party.

And now, we have the greatest political distraction of all, one that has addled the right, centre, and many on the left: the coronavirus. Most of the world’s population has been distracted from dangers far greater than a virus that, when you catch it, you usually show few, if any, symptoms, and those who die of it are less than 1% (We need to be careful only with the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions, not the general population.). Lockdowns are causing millions to be thrown out of work, and out of their homes, in all likelihood.

Millions of people worldwide are either being thrown into poverty or from there to extreme poverty because of the coronavirus scare. Tens of thousands of people die of seasonal flu every year, but only this virus has gripped the world’s attention–and by an interesting coincidence, this is when the global economy has crashed, millions of dollars have transferred upwards to the already obscenely rich, and the administration of “anti-establishment president” Trump has, like those of Bush and Obama, bailed out the big financial institutions.

Millions of people in Third World countries die of malnutrition every year, especially children under five. We have, for a long time, had a perfect “vaccine” for hunger…food! The wealth of billionaires like Gates, Bezos, and Musk could easily feed these people, but they are never adequately fed. Gates‘s ever-so-dubious vaccine research–a real money-maker for him, but for Covid sufferers, virtually needless, and for other patients, possibly dangerous–is the priority. And no, I’m not an ‘anti-vaxxer,’ I just don’t trust him. That computer, not medical, man is practically running the WHO, so we shouldn’t be too sure about that organization’s objectivity.

The virus has, for the most part, declined, but the capitalist class is going to milk COVID-19 for all it’s worth. Small wonder we keep hearing warnings of the “next wave” of the coronavirus. Constantly wearing masks does virtually nothing to protect oneself or others from the virus, but wearing them for excessively lengthy periods of time can cause some other very serious health problems. (Granted, not bad enough to develop hypoxia or hypercapnia, but still, bad enough problems. In any case, if you’ve read enough of my posts, you should know by now, Dear Reader, how much I distrust the MSM, so their attempts at ‘debunking’ criticisms of the ‘rona narrative don’t impress me.).

The global capitalist class has every motive in the world to keep this coronavirus hysteria going. They’ll have ever more and more money to make, not just from Gates’s putative vaccine project, but also from the killing that e-commerce is making at the expense of physical stores (think of Bezos‘s soaring fortunes: as Marx once said, “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” [Marx, page 929]), and from the benefits the ruling class hopes to get from a cashless society (the result of customers being too scared to touch ‘tainted’ money).

You don’t have to be a flaming right-winger or conspiracy nut to doubt the coronavirus narrative. Nowhere in this post have I said we’re inching closer to a ‘one-world-government NWO.’ Nowhere have I said the Freemasons or the Rothchilds are behind this. Nowhere have I said the government has made “real capitalism” impure. Nowhere have I said the coronavirus isn’t real. Nowhere have I said that the lizard-people are behind this. And I’m not opposed to vaccines in general.

I don’t base my coronavirus research on YouTube videos made by cranks; I base it on the research of doctors, virologists, and epidemiologists who don’t conform to the MSM narrative (when CNN and the like sell the coronavirus scare without rest, that’s when I get skeptical). The right-wing conspiracy theories, as I said at the beginning of this post, are as much a political distraction as the b.s. mainstream liberal narrative is.

The capitalist class wants to keep the social distancing and lockdowns going on in order to increase our sense of alienation, and to keep the working class distracted from organizing and planning revolutions. They know that we are getting increasingly fed up with neoliberal capitalism…and any and all forms of capitalism. The capitalists are destroying the planet. They’re stealing from us and making us more and more desperate. They’re secretly scared that we’ll rise up one day. Hence, the virus is, for them, a Godsend. Keep us too scared of getting sick, and keep us from revolting.

Just because the Trumpist right talks about ‘prematurely’ ending the lockdowns and getting people back to work, doesn’t mean people like me are supportive of him and his ilk. Their wish to end the lockdowns, etc. only means that they’re right in a ‘broken clocks’ sense. Where the Trumpists are dead wrong is in their refusal to put any money into a decent healthcare system, what would truly stop the spread of COVID-19, as well as properly deal with all the other health problems Americans have.

People forget that the ruling class has several competing factions, not just one agenda. We must do a lot more than just get rid of Trump, or just get rid of the Democratic Party. It isn’t a matter of choosing conservative vs. liberal. That divisive thinking is just controlled opposition. We need to get rid of both sides. We need a revolution. Then we need to build socialism, which means providing guaranteed employment, housing, and healthcare, all the required solutions to our current problems. We don’t need masks; we need Marxism. We need socialism, not social distancing.

Nothing will do a better job of ending pandemics than universal healthcare. Nothing will do a better job of overthrowing the elite than a socialist revolution.

‘Time,’ a Poem by Jason Morton

Here’s another poem by Jason Morton, whose work I’ve analyzed before. I’ve put the text in italics to distinguish it from my own writing.

Time

Everything
Is nothing
It’s the truth of time
Where songs are sung by the dead
And then are transformed into lullabies
Nothing
Is everything
It’s sad to say this is true
Where hearts were giving in surrender
And I once cared for you
Now I let go
Never will i trust again
And i reach the end
Soul divine
In a matter of perspective
I perceive the threat of time.

And now, for my analysis.

“Everything/Is nothing” can be interpreted to mean that everything in life is inherently worthless; but I tend to see it dialectically, as Hegel did in his Science of Logic. He used ‘being,’ ‘nothing,’ and ‘becoming’ to represent an example of what is popularly labelled ‘thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.’

The point is that time, like everything, is in constant movement, and so things constantly arise and pass away. Everything becomes nothing, then nothing becomes new things, or a new set of everything, so “Nothing/Is everything.” So we move from everything to nothing, then back again, in cycles. What is so painful about time is seeing the people and things we love die off. Also, new pains emerge from nothingness.

Chronos, the personification of time, which consumes everything, changing it into nothing, has sometimes been equated with Cronus, or Saturn, who in Greek myth devoured his children. This eating of children can be associated with the ravages of destructive time.

Life is painful because those things we want to have last forever, cannot. “Songs are sung by the dead/And then are transformed into lullabies”: these are the dreams we have of what we’ve lost coming back to us in a wish-fulfillment. But when we wake up, we see our dreams were illusions, “Where hearts were giving in surrender.”

Note how when the writer “let[s] go,” the first-person I changes to lower-case i. This is deliberate: “Never will i trust again/And i reach the end.” Lower-case i here can be see to represent a standing human figure, but with the head separate from the body, indicating a fragmented soul. He’ll never again trust the love of one who has betrayed him, be that a former lover, or the God he’s lost faith in.

“Soul divine” thus could be an ironic reference to a Christian belief now abandoned, or to the divine beauty of a lost love, or it could be a reference to mythical Saturn, in whom one “perceive[s] the threat of time.” After all, nothing kills more slowly, more softly, more painfully, than time.

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