Month: September 2020

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Five

[WARNING: sexual and violent content]

The electronic beat was pounding in their ears, and pink, green, and white lights were flashing in their eyes. Eddie was making progress with a pretty, curvaceous blonde that he was dirty dancing with; then he noticed one of his friends, Virgil, was dancing off on his own. Virgil was acting as if he were dancing with several girls.

Eddie tapped on the shoulder of one of his friends dancing nearby. “Hey, what the fuck is Virgil doing over there?” he asked, gesturing over to Virgil’s loneliness at the side of the dance floor.

All of Eddie’s friends looked over at Virgil and laughed.

“Hey, Virgil!” Eddie shouted. “What the fuck, man?!”

Virgil seemed deaf to him. He also seemed to be talking to himself.

Eddie’s friend tapped him on the shoulder. “Did Virgil take a half-pill of powerful ecstasy, or something? He must be too high to know what he’s doing.”

“I’d say he took a whole pill,” Eddie said. “He must be hallucinating. He’s acting like he’s with a bunch of hot chicks.”

“It looks that way,” the friend said.

A few seconds later, it looked as though some invisible person were holding Virgil by the hands and leading him off the dance floor. The boys saw an ear-to-ear grin on his face, as well as sparkling, hypnotized eyes. As he walked towards the door out of the dance bar, he had both arms around invisible waists.

“Holy shit,” Eddie said, wide-eyed. “He must be really, really wasted.”

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

Virgil was driving his car, feeling the redhead blowing him. (His hard-on was poking out of his open fly, doing nothing but getting harder.)

“So, where…are we going, girls?” he panted. “Oh!“

“Just keep going straight,” the brunette said. “We’re almost there.”

He kept driving for several more minutes, hypnotized by the three girls’ singing and the lips and tongue he felt going up and down on his cock. Oddly, he heard three-part, not two-part, vocal harmony.

“Oh, you girls…are talented,” he moaned. “You suck…while singing, but don’t…suck at singing. Oh!“

He looked all around his surroundings, seeing flat fields of grass, airstrips, and parked airplanes.

“You wanna screw…in an airfield?” he grunted.

“Yes,” the brunette said, then resumed singing with the other two.

“Why here?” he panted.

“It’s sexy,” the blonde said. “In a public place, we might get caught.” She resumed singing.

“Don’t you think that’s exciting?” the brunette asked, then sang again.

“Yeah, I guess,” he sighed. “Unh!“

They approached a big plane, one with a huge propellor.

“Stop here,” the brunette said.

“OK,” he sighed, then parked his car by the plane.

He got out, hearing the girls’ singing as his full erection was still pointing out of his zipper. The redhead took him by the hands and led him just in front of the propellor, a few steps to the left of the centre. Then she knelt before him and resumed her sucking…or so he imagined.

At the same time, he imagined the brunette behind him, kissing him on the neck and fingering his nipples. The blonde was facing him, her legs spread out and on either side of the squatting redhead. He was French-kissing the blonde while her hands were on his buttocks, squeezing them and pressing them with her fingers.

The girls were singing the whole time, even while French-kissing and blowing him, and while the brunette nibbled on his neck. They didn’t need their mouths to be free, since they weren’t physical. Virgil heard what sounded like the words of a foreign language in their singing; he couldn’t recognize what language it was, let alone understand its meaning…not that he cared.

He was in sensual heaven.

Then, the engine of the airplane started, though no one was in the cockpit. The wind blowing on him, the rumbling of the engine–he barely noticed them. It was as if the mild breeze and hum of a large fan were cooling him. He was too busy screwing his illusions.

The wheels of the plane were moving it slowly forward.

He, still with his hard-on pointing towards the propellor, was still standing a few feet to the left of its centre. All he saw, though, were the mesmerizing eyes of the blonde he seemed to be kissing.

“Hey!” called out a female voice he didn’t notice at all. “What are you doing here? Who is in that plane…? Oh!” She was now close enough to him to notice his dick was out; she quickly looked away. “What are you, some kind of pervert? All alone with your…?”

Since her head was still turned away, it was his blood spraying all over her that made her realize the propellor had already begun slicing him up.

She looked back at him and screamed from all the red she saw splashing everywhere. She quickly backed away.

Oddly, he didn’t seem to notice what was happening to him. No pain at all.

Armless, with only half of his dick left at the moment, and thoroughly bloody, he just kept French-kissing that invisible blonde.

Analysis of ‘Pet Sematary’

Pet Sematary is a 1983 supernatural horror novel by Stephen King, the one he considered his scariest (King, page ix) because of a real-life situation in which his toddler son ran off to a road and almost got hit by a truck (page xi). It has been made into two film adaptations, the 1989 one starring Dale Midkiff, Denise Crosby, Blaze Berdahl, and Fred Gwynne; and the 2019 version starring Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, and John Lithgow.

Here are some quotes from the 1989 film, the screenplay written by Stephen King:

“But he’s not God’s cat, he’s my cat… let God get His own if He wants one… not mine.” –Ellie Creed, afraid of her cat, Church, dying on the road in front of the Creed’s home

“The barrier was not meant to be crossed. The ground is sour.” –the ghost of Victor Pascow

“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier, Louis. A man grows what he can, and he tends it. ‘Cause what you buy, is what you own. And what you own… always comes home to you.” –Jud Crandall

Louis: Has anyone ever buried a person up there?
Jud: Christ on His Throne, NO! Whoever would!?

“Today is thanksgiving day for cats, but only if they came back from the dead.” –Louis Creed

“I knew this would happen. I told her when you were first married you’d have all the grief you can stand and more, I said. Now look at this. I hope you rot in hell! Where were you when he was playing in the road? You stinkin’ shit! You killer of children!” –Irwin Goldman, at Gage’s funeral, to Louis…then punches Louis

Louis: I’ll bite, Jud. What’s the bottom of the truth?
Jud: That, sometimes, dead is better. The person that you put up there ain’t the person that comes back. It might look like that person, but it ain’t that person, because whatever lives on the ground beyond the Pet Sematary ain’t human at all.

Rachel: It’s okay, Ellie! You just had a bad dream.
Ellie: It wasn’t a dream, it was Paxcow! Paxcow says daddy is going to do something really bad!
Rachel: Who is this Paxcow?
Ellie: He’s a ghost, a good ghost! He was sent to warn us!

“Rachel, is that you? I’ve been waiting for you, Rachel. And now I’m going to twist your back like mine, so you’ll never get out of bed again… Never get out of bed again…NEVER GET OUT OF BED AGAIN!” –Zelda Goldman

“I’m coming for you, Rachel… And this time, I’ll get you… Gage and I will both get you, for letting us die…” –Zelda, who then cackles

“Darling.” –reanimated Rachel, to Louis

The deliberately misspelled title is derived from an actual pet cemetery whose sign had the same misspelling, made by a child (page x). In the story, as in the real pet cemetery (it’s safe to assume), a number of the grave markers of the children’s dead pets have other misspellings; these all give a sense of the innocence of children who must learn to come to grips with loss.

I see another possible interpretation of the “Sematary” spelling, that it is a pun on seminary, or a school of theology. To study God is to study life’s meaning, as well as the mystery of death, the afterlife, and how to cope with suffering and loss. In this connection, recall the surname of the protagonist, Creed (the Christian belief system), and the name of their cat, Winston Churchill, usually shortened to Church. Pets are churches that, through their deaths, teach children about loss.

There are two cemeteries in the story, the good one (the Pet Sematary) and the bad one (the Micmac burial ground). The good one helps children deal with their grief and to learn to accept loss; but the bad one, which resurrects the dead and transforms them into demonic versions of their former selves (because the ground is inhabited by a Wendigo, an evil spirit of the First Nations tribes of the area), is for those who cannot accept the loss of loved ones.

So, the Pet Sematary is a kind of seminary, if you will, teaching children how to process the grief they feel after losing their beloved pets. The children can imagine that their pets are going from there to ‘dog [cat, hamster, etc.] heaven.’ The misspellings on the sign and grave markers, as I said above, show us the sweet naïveté of these children in their contemplation of God-like things; for as Jesus says in Matthew 18:3, “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

The Pet Sematary is in a forest at the end of a long path from behind the house that the Creed family has just moved into. The religious often speak of following the right path to salvation, and the wrong path to damnation. There’s the path to the Pet Sematary (“It’s a safe path…You keep on the path and all’s well.” –page 39), and there’s also that road in front of the Creeds’ new house, where the Orinco trucks dangerously speed by, often killing people’s pets, thus filling up the Pet Sematary.

The inevitability of these trucks going by, something that happens regularly, is symbolic of the unescapable reality of death. Each truck is a juggernaut–not the actual Jagannath of the Hindus–but the apocryphal interpretation that Western observers made of it centuries ago: the idea that the chariot carrying the Hindu idol went non-stop down the road, and ecstatic worshippers threw themselves on the road to be crushed under the wheels of the chariot, in a rite of human sacrifice.

The name of the company printed on the trucks, Orinco (almost an anagram of the Cianbro truck King saw almost hit his little boy–page xi), sounds like a pun on Orinoco, the South American river whose name is derived from a term meaning “a place to paddle,” or a navigable place. Well, the road is good for Orinco trucks to drive on, since nothing can stop those juggernauts…nothing can stop death. The trucks are one with this road of death, a kind of via dolorosa.

So, the path to the Pet Sematary is a way to get to (pet) heaven, and the road the Orinco trucks drive on is a kind of highway to hell…or at least to Sheol. Then there’s the way beyond the Pet Sematary, the deadfall leading up to the Micmac burying ground, an evil sublation of the thesis–the Pet Sematary leading to eternal life for pets–and the negation of that thesis–the Orinco truck road to death. The Micmac burial ground is a place of living death.

That the Pet Sematary and the evil land of the Wendigo, leading to the Micmac burying ground, are closer together than the former is to the road suggests my ouroboros symbolism for the dialectical relationship between opposites (see these posts to understand my meaning)–the closeness between the Pet Sematary’s heavenly Godliness, if you will, and the devilish hell of the Micmac burial ground.

When Jud Crandall (played by Gwynne in the 1989 film, and by Lithgow in the 2019 one) takes Louis (Midkiff, 1989; Clarke, 2019) past the Pet Sematary and up the deadfall–“the barrier [that] was not made to be broken,” page 161–there’s a further trek of “Three miles or more” (page 164) to the burial ground, but before long one senses a hellish, demonic presence among the eerie animal sounds one hears (pages 166-169)…the Wendigo. They may be a while before getting to the burial ground, but they’re already in a kind of hell…Little God Swamp, or Dead Man’s Bog.

The dangerous climb up the unstable branches of the deadfall represents that meeting place where the teeth of the ouroboros bites its tail (symbolizing the meeting of the opposites of life and death, of heaven and hell), that meeting of opposites where, paradoxically, too much careful and nervous climbing leads to falls and injury, whereas climbing that is “done quick and sure” (page 161), never looking down, results in a miraculously safe and successful ascent.

That barrier is not made to be broken because it is so easy to break. Victor Pascow himself–a jogger hit by a car and killed before Louis can save him (page 89)–breaks the barrier to warn Louis never to break it, in thanks to the doctor for at least trying to save his life.

Jud advises Louis to have Church fixed (pages 23-24) because fixed cats “don’t tend to wander as much,” and therefore the risk of him running across that treacherous road, and getting crushed under the wheels of one of those Orinco trucks, will be lessened. The castrating of the cat, though, does nothing to prevent him from suffering the very fate Louis has tried to prevent. His daughter, Ellie (Berdahl in the 1989 film; Jeté Laurence in the 2019 film), loves Church so much that she will be heartbroken to learn he’s dead.

All of this leads us to a discussion of desire and the inability to fulfill it. Lacan considered the phallus to be the most important of the signifiers, since its lack (through symbolic castration) leads to desire, which can never be fulfilled. For Church, desire means the wish to roam and run about freely, whether fixed or not, whether the fulfillment of that desire is or isn’t excessive, transgressive, or dangerous (i.e., the racing across the road as symbolic of jouissance).

For humans, desire is symbolically expressed in being the phallus for the Oedipally-desired mother, though we can apply Lacan’s idea more generally–that of desire as ‘the desire of the Other’ (i.e., wanting to fulfill the desires of other people, wanting others’ recognition)–to the desires of the Creed family and Jud. Louis fixes Church in the hopes of keeping him safe, for Ellie’s sake; but when Church is killed, Jud has Louis take the corpse to the burial ground for her sake, too.

Louis, whose father died when he was three and who never knew a grandfather (page 3), has had strained relationships with father figures, particularly with his father-in-law, Irwin Goldman (played by Michael Lombard in the 1989 film). Irwin actually took out his chequebook and offered Louis a sum of money so he wouldn’t marry Rachel (page 146)!

If we see Louis’s love for her as a transference of Oedipal love for his mother, then his hostility to Irwin can be seen as a transference of Oedipal hate toward the father who left this world before Louis could even get a chance to know him. And Irwin’s disapproval of Louis marrying Rachel can thus be seen as a symbolic Non! du père, in turn resulting in Lacan’s notion of the Oedipally-based manque.

Louis has an even better reason to hate Rachel’s parents when he learns that they made her, as a little girl, take care of her sick older sister, Zelda, whose spinal meningitis made her so deformed and ugly that the sight of her traumatized little Rachel…especially when she found Zelda dead in her bed!

But in Jud, “the man who should have been his father,” Louis has found a good father figure, someone onto whom he can transfer positive Oedipal feelings (page 10). So when Jud, influenced by the Wendigo of the Micmac burying ground, has Louis bury Church there, Louis goes along with it, against his better judgement. After all, Daddy knows best, doesn’t he?

Lack gives rise to desire: Church’s castration, meant to keep him safe from the trucks, drives him to run across the road, to the point of him getting killed by a truck after all; “Cats lived violent lives and often died bloody deaths…Cats were the gangsters of the animal world, living outside the law and often dying there.” (pages 52, 53) The Creeds’ lack of a cat drives Jud, feeling compassion for Ellie, to have Louis bury the cat in the burial ground, though Jud knows it’s a foolish and dangerous thing to do. And Louis, lacking Gage after he is killed by an Orinco truck, is driven to exhume his son’s corpse and–with all the pain and exhausting work it involves–to rebury him in the burial ground. Then he’ll do the same with Rachel after demon-Gage kills her.

All four of these lacks lead to desires, which are excessive wants. The barrier that isn’t made to be broken is, symbolically, the barrier to jouissance, the forbidden fulfillment of excessive desire. We all have basic, biological needs, and as we learn language, social customs, culture, etc., in entering the Symbolic Order, we use language to make demands; but demands, especially the demand for love, are never expressed completely through the limitations of language, so some of that need and demand is never fully satisfied.

The residual lack gives rise to desire, an excess that’s never fulfilled. This remainder, incapable of being symbolized in language, is in the realm of the Real Order, a traumatic world symbolized by the frightening, inarticulate animal cries in the land of the Wendigo and the Micmac burial ground…”the real cemetery.”

The Buddhists teach us that suffering is caused by desire, attachment to things in a universe where all things are impermanent. The reality of death is an impermanence too painful for Louis Creed to bear, so his lack of Gage and, at the end of the novel, Rachel, drives him to feel a desire so excessive as to want to use the burial ground to raise them from the dead.

One cannot have the originally desired object–the Oedipally-desired parent, a universal, narcissistic desire, since, as a child looking up into the eyes of that parent, he or she is looking in a metaphorical mirror of him- or herself, a manifestation of the Imaginary Order–so one spends the rest of one’s life searching for a replacement of that object, the objet petit a. This replacement can never be a perfect substitute for the original, so desire is never fulfilled.

The demonic replacements of Church, Gage, and Rachel can be seen to represent the objet petit a, for they, of course, can never replace the originals…though Louis does all he can to have them replace his lost loved ones. When Jud’s wife, Norma, dies, he wisely accepts her death and never even considers burying her in the Micmac burial ground; but its demonic influence drives him to desire to have Church buried there, for Ellie’s sake, since desire is of the other, to wish to fulfill what one believes others want. Similarly, Louis reburies Gage there in part out of a wish to fulfill what he at least imagines is what Rachel would want…to have her little boy back (“She cried his name and held her arms out.” –page 527).

So, the forbidden fulfillment of excessive desires, jouissance, symbolized by the demonic resurrecting of Church, Gage, and Rachel, is another example of the dialectical relationship between opposites–pleasure/pain, bliss/suffering, heaven/hell, life/death–as I would represent with the head of the ouroboros biting its tail. In passing into jouissance‘s indulging in transgressive pleasure, one goes past pleasure and suffers pain; whereas in the Pet Sematary, one learns to accept loss.

Young Jud originally buried his dog, Spot, in the Micmac burial ground (page 181); then, when he saw what trouble the resurrected dog was, he came to his senses, killed it, and buried it in the Pet Sematary (page 45). The problem is that the desires kindled by the Micmac burial ground are addictive, like a drug–hence, Jud’s ill-advised taking of Louis there with dead Church.

One always wants more, that ‘surplus value,’ or the plus-de-jouir that Lacan wrote about. When animals are brought back, their demonic nature is usually not so bad as it is with resurrected humans (“…because Hanratty had gone bad, did that mean that all animals went bad? No. Hanratty the bull did not prove the general case; Hanratty was in fact the exception to the general case.” –page 390); again, as with the animals buried in the Pet Sematary, they act as a kind of warning to us not to play around with life and death, especially not with human beings.

There is our attachment to what we can’t keep, what we love; and there’s what we wish we never had, what we hate, yet what we must have at least sometimes in our lives. The Buddhists speak of the Three Poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion. Greed represents all those things and people we want in excess, because we want to keep them, but must one day let go of them–still, we won’t want to let go of them: hence the resurrecting of Church, Gage, and Rachel.

Hatred represents what we wish would be gone, but must have, hence Rachel’s trauma in dealing with Zelda, and her shame at feeling glad her sick sister finally died…but the painful memories live on, haunting her, for she can’t get rid of Zelda until she’s properly processed her pain. Hatred is also in Irwin’s refusal to accept Louis as a son-in-law.

Delusion is the false belief that things can be permanent, hence Louis’s reburying of Church, Gage, and Rachel. Even though he sees how evil resurrected Gage is, Louis still fools himself with the belief that resurrected Rachel will be better, because apparently he waited too long with Gage. “Something got into him because I waited too long. But it will be different with Rachel…” (page 556)

So, the message of the novel is that we can’t force our desires onto the world…but we can’t help doing so, even though doing so will only make our suffering worse. We know this, but still do it. “Sometimes, dead is better”…but we refuse to accept it.

The sweetness and innocence of children and animals, as expressed in the Pet Sematary–that seminary, if you will, that teaches us to have the misspelling simplicity of a child entering the kingdom of heaven–turns rotten, into Oz the Gweat and Tewwible (pages 510-511, 513ff), if we try to bend the world to our will. The Wendigo makes all the difference.

As we already know, the Micmac burial ground is a demonic double of the Pet Sematary, with their spirals (pages 386-387, 498) and graves curling like the coiled, serpentine body of the ouroboros; the land of the murderous, greedy, cannibalistic Wendigo that so frightens Louis on his way to rebury Gage, is right where the serpent’s teeth bite into its tail, the abyss where heaven and hell meet.

It’s so easy for the sweet and innocent to phase into their opposite, the Gweat and Tewwible.

Stephen King, Pet Sematary, New York, Pocket Books, 1983

Analysis of ‘The Boys from Brazil’

The Boys from Brazil is a 1978 thriller film directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and written by Heywood Gould, based on Ira Levin‘s novel of the same name. It stars Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier, with James Mason, Lilli Palmer, Uta Hagen, Steve Guttenberg, John Rubinstein, Anne Meara, Denholm Elliott, Walter Gotell, Michael Gough, Rosemary Harris, John Dehner, and Jeremy Black.

Dr. Josef Mengele (Peck) is trying to revive Hitler by cloning him 94 times and paralleling Hitler’s life by, at this point in it, having all the clones’ adoptive fathers killed when the clones (played by Black) are around thirteen/fourteen years old. Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Olivier) has learned of the planned assassinations and is trying to piece together what Mengele is doing.

While the film had a generally positive reception, with praise for Peck’s and Olivier’s performances, some critics have considered the plot to be dubious, even ludicrous, and the acting to be inane and overwrought, with bad imitations of accents. I consider this film worth analyzing, though, because it can be seen as an allegory on the danger of a revival of the far right, which has been happening in recent years in many parts of the world. Hence, though this film’s praise has been far from universal, it is an extremely relevant one for our times.

Here are some quotes:

Barry Kohler: Okay, I’m running it down now. It will only take a second.
Ezra Lieberman: Take your time, old men don’t go back to sleep once they’ve been awakened.

“[Mengele was] the chief doctor of Auschwitz, who killed two and a half million people, experimented on children – Jewish and non-Jewish – using twins mostly, injecting blue dyes into their eyes to make them acceptable Aryans… amputating limbs and organs from thousands without anesthetics.” –Lieberman, speaking to Sidney Beynon about why he is searching for Josef Mengele

Sidney Beynon: Have you any idea how many men in their mid-60s die every day?
Ezra Lieberman: I try not to think about it.

“Would you like me to tell you who really killed him? God. To set free a stupid little farm girl after twenty-two years of unhappiness. Do Nazis answer prayers, Herr Lieberman? No, that is God’s business and I have thanked Him every night since He pushed Emil under that car. He could have done it sooner, but I thank Him anyway.” –Mrs. Doring (Rosemary Harris), to Lieberman

Lofquist: Good God man, you are an officer of the SS! Have you forgotten? ‘My honour is loyalty.’ Those words were supposed to be engraved on your soul.
Mundt (Walter Gotell): It isn’t Lundberg…[throws Lofquist off the dam, watches him fall to his death]…and it doesn’t have to be Saturday.

“Are you, my SD Chief of Security, telling me that a project twenty years and millions of dollars in the making will be dropped because of this insignificant impotent old Jew?” –Mengele, to Seibert

“You’re not a guard now, madame! You are a prisoner! I may leave here today empty handed. But you… are not going anywhere.” –Lieberman, to Frieda Maloney

“He betrayed me, he betrayed you, he betrayed the Aryan race!” –Mengele, of Mundt

Gertrud: [Mengele has just knocked Mundt to the floor] Get a doctor!
Dr. Josef Mengele: I *am* a doctor, idiot.
Gertrud: Don’t you come near him!
Dr. Josef Mengele: Shut up, you ugly bitch.

Eduard Seibert: [after discovery of Mengele’s plan by Lieberman] The operation has been terminated.
Dr. Josef Mengele: Terminated… by whose authority?
Eduard Seibert: General Rausch… and the Colonels.
Dr. Josef Mengele: [enraged] I told you… I told you from the beginning! Kill him! Kill him! It would have been so easy!

Eduard Seibert: Your operation has been cancelled.
Dr. Josef Mengele: No, *your* operation has been cancelled! Mine continues. [raising his hand] Heil Hitler.

Professor Bruckner: Cloning. What if I were to tell you that I could take a scraping of skin from your finger and create another Ezra Lieberman?
Ezra Lieberman: I would tell you not to waste your time on my finger.

[Bruckner begins listing the boys’ common features on a chalkboard] Professor Bruckner: Now, Mengele would certainly know that every social and environmental detail would have to be reproduced. Thus, if the parents were divorced when the boy was ten, this would have to be arranged…
Ezra Lieberman: [in horrified realization] Dr. Bruckner… the one who is cloned, the donor, he has to be alive, doesn’t he?
Professor Bruckner: Not necessarily. Individual cells, taken from a donor, can be preserved indefinitely. With a sample of Mozart’s blood, and the women, someone with the skill and equipment could breed a few hundred baby Mozarts. My God… if it’s really been done, what I’d give to see one of those boys. [turns around and sees the room is empty] Herr Lieberman?

“Not Mozart. Not Picasso. Not a genius who will enrich the world. But a lonely little boy with a domineering father, a customs officer who was 52 when he was born. And an affectionate doting mother who was 29. The father died when he was 65 when the boy was nearly 14… Adolf Hitler.” –Lieberman, to Bruckner

Ezra Lieberman: Did you kill Wheelock?
Dr. Josef Mengele: [sarcastically] No, he’s in the kitchen mixing us some cocktails!

“Do you know what I saw on the television in my motel room at one o’clock this morning? Films of Hitler! They are showing films about the war! The movement! People are fascinated! The time is ripe! Adolf Hitler is alive!” [Takes photo album and places it on his lap] “This album is full of pictures of him. Bobby Wheelock and ninety-three other boys are exact genetic duplicates of him, bred entirely from his cells. He allowed me to take half a liter of his blood and a cutting of skin from his ribs.” [laughs] “We were in a Biblical frame of mind on the twenty-third of May 1943, at the Berghof. He had denied himself children because he knew that no son could flourish in the shadow of so godlike a father! But when he heard what was theoretically possible, that I could create one day not his son, not even a carbon-copy but another original, he was thrilled by the idea! The right Hitler for the right future! A Hitler tailor-made for the 1980s, the 1990s, 2000s!” –Mengele, to Lieberman

Dr. Josef Mengele: You are a clever boy. Are you not? You do not do well at school, but it’s because you are too clever. Too busy, thinking your own thoughts. But you are much smarter than your teachers, hah?
Bobby Wheelock: My teachers are nowhere.
Dr. Josef Mengele: You are going to be the world’s greatest photographer, are you not? Have you ever felt superior to those around you? Like a prince among peasants?
Bobby Wheelock: I feel different from everyone sometimes.
Dr. Josef Mengele: You are infinitely different. Infinitely superior. You are born of the noblest blood in the world. You have it within you to fulfill ambitions one thousand times greater than those at which you presently dream, and you shall fulfill them, Bobby. You shall. You are the living duplicate of the greatest man in history. [raising his hand in a heil motion] Adolf Hitler.
Bobby Wheelock: Oh man, you’re weird.

Dr. Josef Mengele: Bobby!
Bobby Wheelock: [screaming] You freaked out maniac! [to dogs] Bite!

David Bennett: We have the right and we have the duty.
Ezra Lieberman: To do what? To kill children?

The movie begins in Paraguay where Barry Kohler (Guttenberg)–a former member of the militant Young Jewish Defenders, but who now works alone, like Lieberman–has been tracking down members of the far-right Comrades organization. Through the help of a Paraguayan boy named Ismael (played by Raul Faustino Saldanha), Kohler is able to plant a bug to record a meeting of these ex-Nazis, chaired by Mengele in his mansion.

What is significant about having so much of this story associated with South America (Hitler clone babies born in Brazil, these Nazis in Paraguay) goes far beyond the obvious fact that many ex-Nazi war criminals went there to hide and avoid being brought to justice. Fascism is the logical extreme of capitalism and imperialism; and South America, as “the backyard of the US,” has been dominated by the US for decades and decades.

Any attempt by South, Central, and other Latin American countries to liberate themselves from the yoke of US imperialism, through democratically electing leftist governments, is thwarted either by CIA-influenced coups (Chile in 1973, Bolivia in 2019, Guatemala in 1954, to give a few examples) that install right-wing dictatorships, or it is sabotaged through starvation sanctions (Venezuela). So a movie with Nazis in the land of Operation Condor is chillingly fitting.

Kohler and Ismael are discovered for having bugged the room where the meeting is held. As Mengele is walking before a lineup of the Latino servants (including Ismael) while holding the removed bug, it is interesting to see the stark contrast between the Nazis, as domineering members of the white bourgeoisie, and the swarthy servants, as the intimidated proletariat.

Oh, the difference between the First and Third Worlds. Mengele is aptly wearing a white suit.

Kohler and Ismael are killed, but Mengele, before giving the order to kill the boy, gives him an avuncular smile–another chilling contrast.

Gregory Peck researched his role thoroughly, for he shows the same affected charm to children that Mengele was known to have shown. Back when Mengele was doing his sadistic medical experiments on Jewish and Romani children in the Nazi concentration camps, he was called the “Angel of Death.”

He charmed the little kids (typically twins), giving them candy, etc., before doing such sick things to them as injecting blue dye into their eyes (to make them “acceptable Aryans”), amputating limbs, removing organs, or sewing kids together–without anaesthetic–to make them into conjoined twins. One story of him doing this last, cruel operation on a pair of Roma children, who later died of gangrene after days of being in agony, is especially heart-breaking.

Lieberman has received the tip from Kohler about the planned murders of those 94 men (Europeans, Canadians, and Americans, mostly civil servants), and he begins his investigation. The problem is, Lieberman is no longer listened to or taken seriously. Such a change in fortune is symbolic of mainstream liberal society’s growing apathy to the dangers of fascism. Sidney Beynon (Elliott) finds Lieberman annoying, and tries to avoid him.

Similarly, over the past ten years, there has been minimal outrage over the US’s replacing Yanukovych‘s Ukrainian government with one tolerating neo-Nazis, or over far-right politician Marine LePen‘s near victory in France, or the fascist rumblings in Poland, Greece (though suffering a setback, Golden Dawn could rise again), Austria, or Spain…to say nothing of Bolsonaro in Brazil, Añez in Bolivia, or, of course, Trump, with his concentration camps for immigrant kids, his apologist attitude towards the right-wing militias attacking BLM protestors, and the federal officers shoving Portland, Oregon protestors into vans to be taken God knows where.

As Lieberman interviews the widows (Harris, Meara) of the men killed so far, certain patterns emerge: the murdered fathers are in their mid-sixties, while the mothers are much younger. Each family has a son about 13 or 14 years old…and the boys look exactly alike! Even their personalities are similar: gruff, rude, belligerent…the hallmarks of a spoiled child. The fathers are similarly gruff and harsh-tempered, and the mothers generally dote on their boys.

When Lieberman learns that the boys are adopted, that’s when he starts to put it all together. Furthermore, the adoption arrangements were done by Frieda Maloney (Hagen), an ex-Nazi who, as a guard in a camp, “strangled young girls with their own hair, bayonetted infants,” and who is now incarcerated. He goes to the prison holding her and interviews her there, tolerating her antisemitic taunts as best he can.

Through this interview, he learns where and when a victim will soon be hunted down: a man named Henry Wheelock (Dehner) in Pennsylvania, owner of a number of Doberman pinschers trained to attack and kill anyone who might threaten his life.

Meanwhile, General Rausch and the colonels leading the Comrades organization are getting nervous about what Lieberman is finding out, so they finally terminate Mengele’s operation, infuriating him and making him carry on alone. The lack of commitment of Colonel Eduard Seibert (Mason) and the others to the Nazi cause parallels, on the other side of the political spectrum, Lieberman’s lack of commitment to the antifascist cause at the end of the film, when he refuses to give David Bennett (Rubinstein) the list of names and addresses of all the Hitler clones so the Young Jewish Defenders can kill them.

Lieberman learns about cloning through an expert on the subject, Professor Bruckner (Bruno Ganz, who incidentally also played Hitler, decades later, in Downfall). Though many critics considered the film’s portrayal of the cloning of a man to be scientifically ludicrous, I think we should focus instead on what the cloning symbolizes.

While fascism today obviously isn’t and cannot be the same as it was back in the 1920s and 1930s, the same basic ingredients for its resurgence today are here as they were back then. Fascism is an ideology promoted and allowed to grow by the ruling class whenever their power and privileges are threatened by a working class uprising.

Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, et al all rose to power as a response to failed socialist revolutions in their respective countries. Similarly, in today’s world, left-wing anger towards the excesses of neoliberalism has resulted in right-wing reactions like Trump, Bolsonaro, Añez, etc. They’re not exactly the same as the old Nazi reactions of the 1930s, of course, but neither are the Hitler clones exactly the same (in personality) as Hitler.

Bobby Wheelock, the closest approximation the movie offers to Hitler, is a photographer, not a painter. Though his father, Henry, has a gruff personality comparable to that of Alois Hitler, and Henry has racist attitudes of his own (he claims that it’s “the niggers” that Americans need to worry about, not the Nazis [!]), Bobby clearly loves his adoptive father, and avenges his murder by sicking his Dobermans on Mengele (ironically making ‘Hitler’ the hero of the film). When Alois died, however, little Adolf wasn’t exactly heartbroken, for now he could freely pursue his dream of becoming an artist and be spoiled by his mother, Klara.

A number of details about Hitler’s life don’t seem to have been paralleled in the clones. Little Adolf had a younger brother, Edmund, whose death had a profound effect on the future Führer. While Edmund was alive, little Adolf was a happy, confident boy who did well at school; after Edmund died, little Adolf grew bitter and morose, and his academic performance declined, leading ultimately to his quitting high school at about 16, his underachievement as a young man, and the frustration he must have felt from his failures.

Furthermore, Alois Hitler was a patriotic Austrian, loyal to the Habsburg Monarchy; whereas Adolf cultivated German nationalism, which I suspect was, at least unconsciously, meant as a big “screw you” to the father who had beat him and tried to dominate his life. I suspect that the Anschluß gave Hitler glee from the thought of dominating the country Alois had so loved.

None of these historical issues are dealt with in the film. (If they are dealt with in Levin’s novel, which I haven’t read, anyone who has read it can enlighten me in the comments below–I’d appreciate that.) It seems odd that families capable of having their own kids (i.e., ‘Edmund’ equivalents) would be eager to adopt, even to the point of being rejected by adoption agencies until the Comrades organization offered them babies. And how would every adoptive father’s nationalism be guaranteed?

Still, with all these differences from the life of the actual Hitler, the clones still seem dangerously close to their original, especially Bobby Wheelock, who in an added final scene (with a similar ending in Levin’s novel), admires his photos of the bloody Nazi and Jewish visitors to his house, and gazes with awe at Mengele’s jaguar-claw bracelet.

The scene before that one, with Lieberman in hospital and Bennett visiting him, disappointed a number of critics. Bennett and the Young Jewish Defenders want to find and kill the boys, while Lieberman takes on the wishy-washy liberal attitude that killing innocent children makes the killers no better than Nazis.

The point is that the Hitler clones are too dangerous to be left alive, free to develop, grow to adulthood, and be whatever kind of men they will be. The cruelty of killing teenage boys must be weighed against the cruelty of allowing 94 potential fascists to rise up and, quite possibly, take over the world, then kill millions of Jewish, Roma, and other children.

The logic of killing the Hitler clones is understood in a symbolic, not a literal, sense. The clones symbolize the resurgence of fascism, something we’re seeing today, as I pointed out above, and something Levin was prophesying. That the boys are clones is symbolic of how like-minded far right-wing thinkers are: embracing capitalism, hating foreigners, pushing for state authoritarianism and ultra-traditionalism, promoting patriotic historical narratives, using violence to achieve their ends, and not thinking independently.

In contrast, the ideological differences between different leftist groups (anarchists, Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyists, etc.) are huge…hence, our difficulties in uniting against the right. Moderate conservatives, and even some liberals, find reason to unite with (or at least wink at) fascism if their class privileges are threatened; hence, the current revival of fascism that Levin’s novel and this film are warning us about.

What many fail to appreciate is that fascism never really died…it just went underground, as the Comrades organization represents in the movie. The Nuremberg trials were more of a show than anything else. Many ex-Nazis not only went unpunished, but were given jobs in the American and West German governments, the rationalization being that they were needed to help fight the communists during the Cold War. Small wonder East Germans built the Berlin Wall, calling it the Anti-fascist Protection Rampart.

So, when Mengele says that his clones are “A Hitler tailor-made for the 1980s, the 1990s, 2000s,” we should understand what he means in an allegorical sense. The novel and film should be seen as a prophecy for our times. When Mengele tells Lieberman he was in his motel watching TV programs about Hitler, and that “People are fascinated!” and “The time is ripe,” this should be understood as a foretelling of the contemporary resurgence of fascism.

If Peck’s Mengele and the other Nazis in the film seem absurd to you, consider how absurd fascist ideology is in general. ‘If your life is hard, don’t blame the rich–blame foreigners for taking away your jobs! Blame the Jews: after all, capitalism is bad only when they practice it! Fight imperialist wars to strengthen the Motherland–get your aggression and hatred out of your system in that way!’ Far too many people take these idiotic ideas seriously, so the film’s over-the-top acting is fitting.

On the other hand, there’s the liberal who either trivializes the fascist threat, or ignorantly equates fascism with communism: this is the thanks the Red Army gets for having done most of the work defeating the Nazis, losing about 27 million Soviet lives.

This is why studying history is so important.

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Four

“Holy shit!” Eddie Sayers said as he read his sister’s story on the death of Tor. “I gotta go talk to Nancy about this.”

He tried calling her on her phone, but it was busy, so he sent her this text message: “We need 2 talk about this news story U wrote about Tors death When RU free”

About ten minutes later, she texted this reply: “In 2 days I’m too busy right now”

Eddie: “Ok Ur home Thurs”

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

“Hi, Eddie,” Nancy said that Thursday evening, opening the door to her apartment and letting him in. “So, what do you want to know about Tor’s death?”

“Well, it’s just that he was my friend,” Eddie said.

“He was?” she asked with her eyes and mouth wide open.

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “In fact, he’s the second friend of mine to have been killed in freak accidents recently.”

“Oh? Who was the first?”

“My buddy, Ari Schneider.”

“Oh, my fucking God.” Her eyes were opened even wider now.

“He died in a motorcycle collision with a truck.”

“I know,” she said, eyes still agape. “I wrote an article about his death, too.”

“Wow, what a coincidence. Small world.”

“Much too much of a coincidence, Eddie. Much too small a world.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because there’s something strange about their deaths. Those accidents should never have happened. They should have easily been able to avoid their accidents. Ari and Tor were neither drunk nor stoned. They weren’t suicidal, according to their families; nor were they self-destructive in any way.”

“Oh, yeah,” Eddie said. “They were the happiest dudes I’ve ever known. We partied hard all the time together, with my other friends I’m getting together with tonight. Talking about Tor and Ari dying is gonna darken our party tonight.”

“What do you guys usually do together?”

“You know, the usual. Go to dance clubs, get drunk, chase pussy. Man, this one time, about a month ago, we took this one girl to…Virgil’s apartment, I think. It’s hard to remember in detail. We were all really drunk, and we…oops! Never mind. You don’t need to know about that.”

“I don’t, don’t I?” Nancy asked, looking askance at Eddie.

“She consented.” He avoided her eyes.

“Really?” Nancy glared at him. She saw a confession of guilt in his eyes.

“What am I, on trial here?”

“Look, forget it. Just be careful tonight with your friends. Don’t do anything stupid. I have a bad feeling about what happened to Ari and Tor. And your naughty partying is giving me even worse vibes. That woman’s OK, right?”

“Of course. What do think we did…kill her?” He was doing a bad job of hiding that guilt on his face.

“No, but whatever you all did with her, or to her, after that she may have wanted to kill herself.”

“Oh, come on! What’s this bullshit? She was fine when we left her. Really.”

“Really?” she asked, looking hard in his eyes.

“Yes, really,” he said, looking back in her eyes with a more assured attitude.

“Look, something weird is happening to your friends, it seems. It almost seems supernatural. As crazy as it sounds, I don’t know any other way to explain it.”

“Do you think her ghost is coming after us, or something?” he asked with a dopey look on his face, mocking the absurd attitude she seemed to have.

“No, of course not. Just be careful tonight, OK?”

“OK, Ms. Paranoia.” He left her apartment, sneering.

Analysis of ‘The Last of Sheila’

The Last of Sheila is a 1973 murder mystery film written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, and produced and directed by Herbert Ross. It stars James Mason, Richard Benjamin, Joan Hackett, James Coburn, Dyan Cannon, Ian McShane, and Raquel Welch.

Sondheim and Perkins were inspired by the scavenger hunt games they used to play with their friends back in the late 60s and early 70s, the kinds of games we see Clinton Greene (Coburn) play with his guests in the film–Philip Dexter (Mason), Alice Wood (Welch), Lee Parkman (Hackett), Anthony Wood (McShane), Christine (Cannon), and Tom Parkman (Benjamin)–aboard his yacht on the French Riviera. These games involve searching around such places as hotels, etc., to find clues to solve tricky mysteries.

But the game Clinton wants to play–“The Sheila Greene Memorial Gossip Game” (named after his late wife [played by Yvonne Romain], a Hollywood gossip columnist who was mysteriously killed, a year before the film’s main action starts, by a hit-and-run killer…one of the guests on Clinton’s yacht)–involves real pieces of gossip about his guests, embarrassing secrets that, in some cases, provoke a guest or two to try to murder him.

Here are some quotes (WARNING–SPOILERS AHEAD!):

“Sheila. Sheila, come on back!” –Clinton

“What do you mean, what do I mean? This is the same b-group that was at your house the night Sheila got bounced to the hedges.” –Christine, on the phone with Clinton

“Darling, I must hang up now. One of my cast is peeing on my leg. Something Garbo never did, even at her moodiest. Bye now.” –Philip, with a little girl sitting on his lap

“Who did this room? Parker Brothers?” –Lee, on entering Clinton’s yacht

“What a game! And now, Tom gets to write it; Philip gets to direct it; and what’s-her-face, I mean, ah, my new client, Miss Alice Wood, gets to thrill you as Sheila Greene. Who rose from call girl to columnist… Ha-ha-ha.” –Christine, to Tom and Lee

“Well, I’m thinking of calling it…don’t be shocked, now: The Last of Sheila. Fox is interested, Paramount‘s interested. The perfect woman’s picture. Every bit as big as Love Story.” –Clinton

“Do you think we’ll ever hear the last of Sheila?” –Lee

“There’s nothing worse than a hustler with bad timing.” –Christine, on Anthony’s failed attempt to be made an associate producer for Clinton’s ‘Last of Sheila’ film project

Christine: [while suntanning] I have to do 25 minutes on my stomach.
Alice: To make up for the 25 minutes you spent on your back, last night?

Christine: I’m here because I’ve got a client to keep, and one to get. What’s your excuse?
Lee: I’m trying to hold on to a husband… who’s trying to hold on.
Christine: With your money?

“Honey, would you drop me down a Tab? My mouth is so dry, I feel like they could shoot ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ in it.” –Christine

Clinton Greene: [Gesturing to a small island not too far from his yacht] You like it? [They all look, while Clinton beams proudly] I love it. Tiny, tiny islands fascinate my ass. I’ve got this crazy broker in London that sends me these brochures on all the islands for sale all over the world. Little impoverished islands. A few thousand dollars cash, and you’re practically king to six shepherds and their families. Or whatever. I read every word on every island. Then you know what I do? I tear them neatly in half and drop them in the wastebasket. Then I say to myself…
Christine: [interrupting] I’m still weak, Clinton, but I’m eating solid food.
Clinton Greene: I say to myself, “If there’s one thing I hate, it’s to have my island speech interrupted.” [continues] I say to myself: “No, you poor people… you don’t deserve a good king like me.” That’s what I say!

Lee: Have I ever told you how sweet you were to me, when I was a child?…at Daddy’s legendary Sunday lunches.
Philip: I can still see you on Olivia de Havilland‘s lap.
Lee: It’s funny, you know, she was one of the few people that Sheila ever had anything good to say about.

“Just enough time for me to get dressed as a catamite, if I knew what it was.” –Christine, waiting to get ready to play the game and search for who has the ‘HOMOSEXUAL’ card

“Do you think there’s a homosexual aboard the yacht?” –Lee, asking Tom

“It was more than a game. It was a private joke.” –Tom

“It was an accident! It was an accident, I swear, Clinton! I was DRINKING!” –Lee

“The last of Sheila should be an A. Hit and run doesn’t begin with an A, does it, Tom?” –Philip

“I don’t have any gloves.” –Tom, with puppets on his hands, ready to strangle Philip

“Dictate it tomorrow when you can get a secretary. You know, he killed her, she killed him.” –Christine, just after Tom’s attempted murder of Philip

“Well, I think I’ll turn in. I’m almost dead on my feet. So much to do tomorrow and still a few pages to type tonight.” –Philip, implying a warning to Tom not to make a second attempt to kill him

“In these perilous times, one can’t be too careful.” –Philip

“Honey, let me hit you with a couple of names. Yul Brynner is Clinton. Paul and Joanne as Tom and Lee! I know, I hope it has enough content for ’em. Who have I got for Alice? Oh, I know, Carly Simon. I mean the soundtrack album alone will pay for her clothes. Now, now don’t scream. Virna Lisi. No, darling, as me!” –Christine

Beyond being a witty murder mystery (which generally got positive reviews, such as this one by Roger Ebert), The Last of Sheila is also a satire of the sins of bourgeois liberal Hollywood. We’re dealing here with people who are proud and narcissistic, who enjoy spreading rumours about the faults of others. They pretend to be progressive, but really it’s all about raising their social status, trying to get back on top, not wanting to be has-beens anymore.

Sheila, who has bashed people time and time again in her gossip column over the years, doesn’t take it as well as she dishes it out; so after hearing an unwelcome remark from Clinton during a conversation at a party in the Greenes’ home in Bel Air, she storms outside and walks it off in her neighbourhood that night. A driver who is obviously extremely inebriated slams into her, kills her, then drives away. The driver’s identity isn’t known…until a year later, when Clinton invites his guests to his yacht on the Mediterranean to play his new game.

He also wishes to begin a new film project, The Last of Sheila, and is offering his guests jobs in it. Alice is an actress; Tom is a screenwriter frustrated with only doing rewrites of others’ work; Anthony is Alice’s husband and manager, and hopes to be an associate producer for the new film; Christine is a talent agent; Philip is a “has-been” director; and Lee, Tom’s wife, is…well, rich.

All of these guests have truly gossip-worthy faults, each of which is suggested as they are introduced at the beginning of the movie. Alice is seen in a gift shop, looking at things she seems tempted to sneak into her purse and walk out with. Tom is seen in a photo with Clinton, the two men seeming a bit too close and familiar with each other to be just friends. Anthony, taking Alice away from annoying reporters, knocks one of them down. Christine is seen in her office, her gossipy mouth rattling off like a machine gun. Philip, directing a commercial with a group of cute little girls, has one of them sitting on his lap. Lee is seen with a drink in her hand; surprisingly, it’s just ginger ale.

One recurring theme in this film, apart from the obvious one about gossip, is that of the stark difference between appearance and reality. Those who seem good are actually bad, and vice versa. Be leery of those who would seem sleuths, when in fact they’re, in varying degrees, the guilty.

Similarly, though Clinton is offering his guests jobs for his new Sheila movie project, he’s actually exploiting their desperate need and hope to get back in the good graces of the Hollywood power establishment. He is thus the quintessential capitalist, knowing he can taunt them again and again, and get away with it. He is thus also the typical unlikeable murder victim.

Clinton’s very game for them to play involves “six pretend pieces of gossip” that are all very real, but not given to those who are guilty of those embarrassing secrets. (More spoilers ahead!) It’s his fun way of making his guests squirm.

The embarrassing secrets are printed on small, white rectangular cards saying, “You are a…SHOPLIFTER, HOMOSEXUAL, EX-CONVICT, INFORMER, LITTLE CHILD MOLESTER, and ALCOHOLIC.” These secrets thus are presented as labels, suggesting that each person guilty of such a secret is perceived as having his or her whole identity bound up in that label, when actually, these are just things that each of them at one point in his or her past was guilty of.

Alice was caught shoplifting back when she was a teen, and Philip bailed the pretty girl out…then he did other things with her. Tom, actually married to Lee and having an affair with Alice, had a brief gay fling with Clinton after Sheila was killed. Anthony has twice done time for assault. Christine gave some names to the HUAC. Lee “was AA for a while.”

So Clinton’s game, on the surface, is just a fun scavenger hunt to amuse his guests during their vacation in the south of France. But just as the job offer in the movie project–with better billing for those who score better in the game–is just what the guests need to repair their damaged careers and reputations, while it’s really just Clinton exploiting their desperation, so is the game a sadistic exploitation of their insecurities. What seems good is really bad.

Now, are any of those secrets damaging enough to their reputations to be a motive to murder Clinton? During the day, in between the nights of the hunts for the owners of the SHOPLIFTER and HOMOSEXUAL cards, Clinton and his guests are all either on the yacht or swimming by it (in the latter case, Clinton and Christine). Clinton is especially loud out there, taunting Tom and Philip about their flagging careers, while Christine alternates between singing and calling out to Vittorio (played by Pierre Rosso), the captain of the yacht’s crew, each member of which wears a white T-shirt with SHEILA printed on it.

Someone turns on the yacht’s propellors, almost killing Christine, who’s unlucky enough to have been floating too close to them. There’s no reason for anyone to want to kill her: as she herself later observes, they aren’t in Hollywood, where her informing ruined the careers of many. Clinton must have been the intended target, given what a few guests have already surmised about the cards’ secrets.

But which of the guests has a secret embarrassing enough for him or her to want to kill Clinton before it is outed? Philip’s having helped out teen Alice…in more ways than one…is a strong motive, but then there was that hit-and-run killing of Sheila.

Someone will demonstrate that strong enough motive to murder Clinton during the scavenger hunt on a small island with a castle in which a group of monks once lived, centuries ago. Indeed, Clinton et al will be wearing monks’ robes as they search for clues to determine who has the HOMOSEXUAL card.

What’s interesting about the monastery scene is how it symbolizes what I said earlier about seeming good while secretly being sinful. According to a brochure read by Anthony, the monastery was inhabited by “perverts, onanists, catamites, and other riff-raff of the day.” Seeming devotees to God were really engaging in sexually transgressive behaviour, hence Clinton’s choice of the island for the hunt for the owner of the HOMOSEXUAL card.

Clinton and the others will wear monks’ robes, symbolically hiding their sins in holiness. Clinton’s “island speech,” given earlier on his yacht, demonstrates the narcissism of the capitalist who would imperialistically buy and own an island, but then decline to, feeling he’s too good to be the king of the lowly, poor inhabitants of that island.

In this castle of supposed holiness, the murder is committed, the ultimate contrast between seeming saintliness and actual wickedness. Furthermore, there’s the contrast between the apparent murder of Clinton (his face bashed in with a large candlestick while he sits in the priest’s box), and his actual murder (having been stabbed from behind with an ice pick).

Back in the yacht the next day, after discovering Clinton’s body, him apparently killed from a loose rock having fallen and hit him on the head, there is the first of two solutions as to how he was really killed, and by whom. This solution, provided by Tom, is the seeming explanation, as opposed to the actual solution given by Philip at the end of the movie.

The contrast between what seems to be and what is is made especially clear by what a nice man Tom seems to be, the clever sleuth, and the man he really is, as discovered at the end of the movie: not so nice, and not all that clever, either.

An example of how Tom can make himself into the ‘nice guy’ is by claiming that Alice’s HOMOSEXUAL card applies to him. Of all the six cards, this one is the least damaging to one’s reputation (the fact that the screenwriters were both LGBT men helps in this regard). What’s more, Clinton, surely aware of how the gossip would fly out everywhere, seemingly isn’t worried about people finding out about his gay affair with Tom; we even see him caress Tom’s cheek publicly, on the yacht, when telling him that his card would be played out last, on Saturday.

As of the beginning of the 1970s, progressives in significant numbers were no longer joining conservatives in regarding homosexuality as a vice. We can see the Hollywood liberal hypocrisy here as evident in Anthony’s reaction to Tom’s claim to that card. By claiming the HOMOSEXUAL card, Tom is “in the clear”: he needn’t fear the nastier labels of the remaining cards.

Why does Tom have “the exclusive right to that card?” Anthony angrily asks. When Tom, in his answer, implies the possibility that it could also apply to Anthony, the latter senses a slur on his manhood–hence the hypocritical Hollywood liberal attitude to homosexuality: ‘it’s OK to be gay, but don’t call me one.’

As we go through who lays claim to the other cards–Alice, after being pressured by Tom, irritably admits to being the SHOPLIFTER, and Christine to being the INFORMER–the tension builds. The tension is especially high, since Tom has revealed that his card says, “You are a HIT-AND-RUN KILLER.”

It’s implied that Tom has been hoping to label Anthony with this card, and thus to make him seem Clinton’s murderer; certainly this is what Anthony thinks Tom is doing. But Anthony triumphantly claims the EX-CONVICT card, leaving the LITTLE CHILD MOLESTER card for Philip, and HIT-AND-RUN for…

Lee tearfully breaks the tension by admitting that when her car hit Sheila, she was “too drunk to drive.” She also believes that, after confronting Clinton in the priest’s box and begging him to stop the game (with a confused look on her face from hearing Clinton’s voice cruelly refusing to stop, but also from seeing his motionless body in the darkness, his lips not seeming to be moving, either), she accidentally killed him by smashing open the door to the confessional and hitting him in the face with that big candlestick.

So, the guilty party seems to have been sought in Anthony, but has been found in Lee, who, sobbing, leaves the others, taking with her a bottle of Jim Beam, and goes off to her cabin to drink her guilt and shame away. Later, she is discovered in the bathtub with slashed wrists.

Remember, though, that nothing is as it seems in this movie. Anthony may have a criminal record, but he is guilty of no wrong-doing in this story. The murder mystery only seems to have been solved. Tom has come across as a nice guy, and as gay; but he’s actually having an affair with Alice, and with Lee dead, Tom is free to have Alice and to inherit Lee’s estate of $5,000,000. Finally, we are only assuming that Lee has slashed her own wrists.

It’s far less unpleasant to think that the deaths of Sheila and Clinton Greene are the result of accidental killings, and that Lee’s death is a tragic suicide brought on by overwhelming guilt, than it is to contemplate that these deaths (at least two of them) were deliberate murders. The real killer of Clinton, imitating his voice in the confessional when provoking Lee, is projecting his murderous intent onto her by pretending she cared only about the damage to her car when it hit Sheila.

Given the nasty gossip that Sheila was spouting over the years in her column, much (if not almost all) of which must have inspired Clinton’s gossip cards, Lee’s not having seen Sheila when she hit her could have been unconsciously motivated, a Freudian skid, if you will.

Removing the exploitative Greene dynasty, so to speak, from the lives of the guests on the yacht (not the mention Clinton’s crew) might have been more liberating had the ‘removers’ shown more solidarity and comradeship. Instead, their motives are of pure selfishness: they’ll all make the Sheila film without Clinton, Tom will get Alice as well as Lee’s money, and none of them will have to put up with Clinton’s verbal bullying anymore.

In the end, the character with by far the most shameful secret–LITTLE CHILD MOLESTER–is the one to get to the truth of what has happened to Clinton and to Lee. Philip learns that the killer dropped a cigarette in the priest’s box, making Clinton bend down to get it while the killer pulled out an ice pick and stabbed Clinton in the back. The killer then imitated Clinton’s voice, fooling Christine and Lee.

Next, Philip discovers a photo, put in plain view on a wall by the yacht bar, of all six guests meticulously posed by Clinton under the letters of SHEILA as painted on the side of his yacht. Philip is under the S, Alice under H, Lee under E, Anthony under I, Christine under L, and Tom under A. Philip also remembers that on the first day, Clinton said they don’t have to move (e.g., search around the city or the monks’ castle to find the clues to everyone’s cards) to play the game…if they’re smart enough.

Philip also remembers that Tom crumpled his card on the first day, while his HIT-AND-RUN KILLER card is not crumpled. The first hunt was for Philip’s SHOPLIFTER card, and the second hunt was for Alice’s HOMOSEXUAL card. These two initial letters spell out SH, leading Philip to speculate that Lee’s EX-CONVICT card, Anthony’s INFORMER card, Christine’s LITTLE CHILD MOLESTER card (the redundant word LITTLE was needed to provide the L)…would spell out SHEIL…

But then there’s Tom’s…HIT-AND-RUN KILLER? The last of Sheila should be an A, not an H. Then we recall Tom’s crumpled card, which actually was ALCOHOLIC, a most fitting secret for Lee. Tom thus is the murderer of both her and Clinton.

Now, even though Philip has proven to be the truth-telling sleuth of the movie, this doesn’t mean that he’s completely innocent, either. Never is what seems to be true actually the truth. He is the one, by his own admission, who turned on the propellor while Clinton was splashing about in the water beside the yacht. Tom, meanwhile, had Guido (played by Serge Citon) to vouch for his alibi, and thus Tom could be encouraged to carry on with his own murderous plans after Philip’s failure.

Just before Tom attempts to kill Philip, he says that Clinton’s crew are all ashore celebrating the death of their boss (i.e., no one is onboard to stop Tom from killing Philip…or so Tom thinks). But of course the killing of Clinton can in no way even symbolize a socialist revolution (Clinton’s crew are really no better off now than they were before); a bourgeois has killed a bourgeois, and Philip, Christine et al are going to get rich making Clinton’s film without him.

Instead of seeking justice for Clinton and Lee, Philip and Christine (the latter having come up from her cabin on the yacht and, just in time, interrupted Tom’s attempt on Philip’s life) decide to blackmail Tom into using all of Lee’s money to finance the Sheila film. Tom won’t even get to write the screenplay: Philip wants the first draft to be written by an outsider. Tom will have to do rewrites again. What’s more, Philip that very night will type up a sealed letter to his lawyer–to be opened in the event of his death–exposing everything Tom has done, if he ever tries to kill Philip again.

The violence we see in this movie, that of bourgeois against bourgeois, shows not only the hypocrisy of the narcissistic Hollywood liberal–who would seem to be doing right, but who in reality is as exploitive as any other capitalist–but also the poisonous lack of solidarity between people. There isn’t even a sense of loyalty in the guests’ marriages, with these adulterers and adulteresses.

All these narcissists care about is rising up, so they have no qualms about stepping on others, in the forms of murder or gossip, to achieve their ascent. Small wonder we hear Bette Midler‘s song “Friends” as an ironic ending to a film with so much alienation in it.

You gotta have friends, Tom.

Tom had some friends, but they’re gone…

A New Poem by Jason Morton

Here’s a short poem by my friend, Jason Morton, whose work I’ve looked at before. As always, his writing is given in italics to distinguish it from mine.

I dream in grays
Slip away into yesterday’s
That have no meaning
Straining my heart to find a day that will cleanse me of my sickness and help me feel whole
All I’ve ever wanted was to feel as if I had a soul
Things darken and fall apart
Every dream a broken heart
Singing songs or requims
Requires dreams to live off of
And I hold onto a small hope that meaning will be found one day
And the sky will be blue not gray.

And now, for my analysis.

One tends to think of dreams as wish-fulfillments, but the poet only dreams of sad things, “in grays.” This is so because the poet finds little, if anything, to hope for. In those dreams, he will “Slip away into yesterday’s/That have no meaning.” The apostrophe is deliberate, indicating a pun on the plural for yesterdays and its possessive. Of course, we see no noun to go with yesterday’s, and so I speculate that the intended word was nothings, or many instances of emptiness. We don’t see the word, the absence of which ironically emphasizes its meaning.

And this leads us to how those nothings “have no meaning.” The poet’s world is one of nihilistic emptiness. He wishes that “a day [would come] that will cleanse [him] of [his] sickness.” He wishes he could “feel as if [he] had a soul,” and this leads to some indirect religious allusions.

“Things darken and fall apart” is an obvious reference to the third line of WB Yeats‘s poem, “The Second Coming,” which is full of religious imagery referring to the end of the world. It would be useful to take a brief look at the context of that poem in order to see how it links to Morton’s.

Yeats’s poem was written just after the end of WWI. The destructiveness of the First World War led to much of the modern despair and apocalyptic fears that were expressed in the arts of the time. Added to this trouble was the 1918-1919 flu pandemic, to which Yeats’s poem is also connected (his wife caught the virus). It is interesting to point this out in connection with what Morton says in his poem about wanting “a day that will cleanse [him] of [his] sickness”; in turn, we can associate that flu pandemic (albeit with due caution) with the current fears of the coronavirus, which in turn can be a metaphor for the despair and apocalyptic fear the poet may be feeling, feelings many of us share.

My point is that his poem encapsulates the fear and despair many feel these days by using echoes from such work as Yeats’s. In today’s world, we often feel a comparable apocalyptic fear in the form of the environmental destruction caused by climate change; added to this is the fact that war is the number one polluter of the world, as seen in all these imperialist wars going on now. They had their huge war just over a century ago, and we have our many wars now.

The conveniences of upper middle class living give little comfort. “Every dream a broken heart” reminds me of the Roxy Music song, “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” in which a man’s love for an “inflatable doll” is a manic defence against the emptiness and loneliness he feels.

“Singing songs or requims [sic]/Requires dreams to live off of” continues this quest for a manic defence against sadness, a defence in the form of sex (hence the pun on requiem, requires, and ‘re-quim,’ if you will, an addictive, compulsive repeat of the search for quims, or addictions to porn and prostitutes in a wish to avoid dealing with sadness).

Requiems that require “dreams to live off of” reminds me of Requiem for a Dream, a novel about the destructiveness of drug addiction, yet another manic defence against sadness. All of these allusions–the end of the world, the destructiveness of war, pandemics, sex addictions as an attempt to alleviate loneliness, and drug addiction to cope with sadness–these are powerful images that Morton uses to depict the dark modern reality of despair, a true pandemic in our world.

I, too, hope that “meaning will be found one day,” and that the poet’s “sky will be blue” again, as it may one day be for all of us sufferers.

‘Pointy Sticks,’ a Short Prose Poem by Cass Wilson

A poet friend of mine, Cass Wilson, whose work I’ve looked at before, has recently published this new prose poem on her Spillwords page. Let’s take a look at it. Again, I’m putting her words in italics to distinguish them from mine.

Pointy Sticks

Incessant pointy sticks, endlessly poked at her through the bars of her self imposed prison.
She grabbed at the earth, pushing it inside the wounds, foolishly thinking if she could fill the holes left by the sticks, then she’d be complete once more.
But one stick was replaced by two. Then four. Then multiplied until she was just a hole herself. Nothing left of her but a vast, empty black hole where her heart once was.
The other parts of her, incarcerated in the illusionary safety of her solitude, the place she longed to be and to flee, both simultaneously; just floated away over time, grains of someone who had once been, but was no more.

And now, for my analysis.

The “incessant pointy sticks” can be seen to represent a number of things. Since they’ve “poked at her,” they can easily be seen to be phallic, the poking thus symbolic of the sexual abuse (I certainly hope, for the writer’s sake, that this isn’t meant to be literally autobiographical!) of a woman. Her pushing of the earth “inside the wounds,” suggestive of an introjection of the mother goddess in the hopes of healing, is an attempt to heal the injured female of the wounds of male dominance.

Another way to think about the pointy sticks is to think of them in terms of projective identification, a Kleinian concept that Wilfred Bion expanded on through his theory of containment. Normally, in a healthy mother/infant relationship, the mother is a container of her baby’s anxieties, frustrations, etc., taking in those harsh emotions (the contained), detoxifying them, then returning them to the baby in a form it can tolerate, thus soothing it. (Click here for more on Bion and other psychoanalytic concepts.)

The container is given a feminine symbol, suggesting a yoni, and the contained is given a masculine, and thus phallic, symbol. So containment, or projective identification as a primitive, preverbal form of communication between parent and infant, can be seen as symbolized by the sex act, with energy passing from one person to the other, then back again.

The problem arises when this containment is negative. Instead of leading to a soothing of one’s anxieties, a processing of trauma, in negative containment, seen in abusive parent/child relationships, the pain is intensified; this is what we see described in this prose poem. The pointing sticks are phallic daggers causing yonic wounds in the poet’s body, a symbolic rape.

Healing from such trauma isn’t a simple matter of appealing to the mythological feminine. One tries to rid oneself of the pain by pretending it isn’t there, and so one never frees oneself from one’s “self imposed prison.” It’s self-imposed because one isn’t doing what one must do to free oneself, even though one knows one must heal the pain by confronting it, by feeling it.

The pointy sticks are like the heads of the Hydra, for when one cuts a head off, it is “replaced by two.” When one cuts the two off, then there are four. Since the sticks are phallic, cutting them off–castration as symbolic of hating men–isn’t the solution, for however justified women’s anger is at the all-too-typical male attitude, hating men leads to an even more intensely misogynistic reaction from them. Whatever we send out there, karma brings back to us.

Please don’t confuse what I’ve said above with victim-blaming; I’m not trying to judge women for being angry with men, something they very, very often have a perfect right to do. This isn’t about passing judgement; it’s about finding real healing.

Ending male dominance must be dealt with more subtly, in a manner that makes an ally out of a former enemy; otherwise, the female sufferer will be nothing but a giant yonic dungeon of her own pain, of her own making, “a vast, empty black hole where her heart once was.”

Part of how negative containment intensifies pain, turning anxiety into what Bion called a nameless dread, is the use of projective identification to eject parts of the self out into the external world in an attempt not to have to deal with the parts of oneself that one doesn’t want to accept. These ejected parts are the “other parts of her, incarcerated in the illusionary safety of her solitude, the place she longed to be and to flee.”

If one ejects too many of the undesirable parts of oneself, one feels oneself to be disintegrating, suffering psychological fragmentation, leading to a psychotic break with reality. Narcissism can be a dysfunctional attempt to protect oneself from this kind of fragmentation, the danger of an underlying borderline structure, as Otto Kernberg has observed.

Those ejected parts of herself “just floated away over time, grains of someone who had once been, but was no more.” Those ejections, accumulating over time, result in the fading away of the self, a gradual disintegration. The projected parts that float away become what Bion called bizarre objects, or hallucinated objects felt to be in the external world but which are imbued with characteristics of one’s own personality.

One cannot rid oneself of pain by projecting it outwards. The broken pieces must all be put back together. Instead of division and fragmentation, there must be oneness. Splitting must be replaced with integration of one’s good and bad internal objects (e.g., the internalized ‘good mother’ and the ‘bad father’ of the psyche), or reparation–a shift from what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position to the depressive position.

The broken-off parts must be freed of their incarceration, from one’s “self imposed prison.” One’s solitude, or hiding from the world, gives an “illusionary safety,” but it will never give one lasting healing. True healing comes from connection with others, from a communal love.

‘Sirens,’ a Horror Novella, Chapter Three

Two nights later, reporter Nancy Sayers got a tip about another accident, this time just outside a warehouse near downtown Sulla. She raced over there in her car. She arrived about twenty minutes later.

A crowd surrounded the police, the paramedics, and the accident victim. Some crates were piled near the crowd; she climbed up a few of them so she could see. The victim, a young white male, was impaled through the belly on the left of the raised blades of a forklift. The paramedics were trying to remove the body from the blade; blood was splattered everywhere.

“Oh, God!” she gasped, wincing at the sight.

A bicycle lay on its left side just by the forklift and immediately after a huge pothole. Nancy assumed that it was the victim’s, him having fallen after hitting the pothole.

He must have been drunk or stoned not to have seen such a big pothole, she thought.

“Come on, all of you!” a police officer shouted. “Make room, clear the way! We’ve gotta get the body to the coroner, and we can’t do that with all you people in the way!”

The young man’s body was on a stretcher now and being carried into the ambulance. The crowd was dispersing, except for a few reporters.

“No reporters!” the cop said angrily. “Get outta here. I’ll answer your questions at the station. I won’t have much to say beyond what we see here, because I have to wait for the coroner’s report. C’mon, people. Go!”

Nancy noticed that the forklift blade the boy’s body had been impaled on was chipped and jagged at the edge. Small wonder it cut clean through the body. But why would such a defective forklift be kept for use at a warehouse?

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

Two days after writing up and publishing her brief, initial story on the death–which didn’t have much to say beyond the fact that the young man’s name was Tor, he was 23, and it was his bike–she heard the coroner’s report. As with Ari, Tor was neither drunk nor stoned at the time of the accident.

How could a sober guy have missed that pothole? she wondered. I interviewed his parents just before publishing my story, and they said he had no suicidal or self-destructive tendencies at all. He was always a happy boy. Just like Ari, this was an accident that should never have happened. It makes no sense at all!

The time of death was estimated at about 6:30 in the evening, a pretty accurate estimate given how quickly his body was discovered and sent to the coroner, about 10:00 that night. There were clear signs of lividity in Tor’s body, but rigour mortis hadn’t set in yet, so he couldn’t have been dead for more than three to four hours upon discovery of his body.

The bicycle was definitely his, for Nancy learned from her interview of his parents that they’d bought it for him as a birthday gift a year ago. Since he’d been riding his bike at around 6:30 in the evening, the sun hadn’t set yet, so Tor had plenty of light to see that large pothole in the road by the forklift. He was perfectly sober, and known to be an excellent bicyclist–he had won several trophies in bike races in his teens, and habitually rode every day.

It doesn’t make any sense at all that he hadn’t noticed the pothole, she thought. Yet it seems he rode right into it, causing him to fly off his bike and onto the forklift blade.

As odd as it was that the blade he hit had a jagged edge, it was even odder to see the blades raised up to about five feet in the air.

It was as though someone had premeditated, planned out his death, she thought. What living person could have done such a fantastic thing? It was like something right out of The Omen, a conspiracy of demons.

Then, Nancy remembered Ari’s accident, and how odd that death was.

Nah, they couldn’t be connected, she thought. I’m thinking crazy now.

Analysis of ‘A Shock to the System’

A Shock to the System is a 1990 American black comedy crime thriller written for the screen by Andrew Klavan and directed by Jan Egleson, based on the 1984 novel by British author Simon Brett. The film stars Michael Caine and Elizabeth McGovern, with Peter Riegert, Will Patton, John McMartin, and Swoosie Kurtz.

The film’s delightfully quirky soundtrack was composed by Gary Chang, with its string quartet pizzicatos, marimba, etc. The tagline, “Climbing the corporate ladder can be murder,” is apt, for it encapsulates perfectly the predatory capitalism that is satirized in the film.

Here are some quotes:

It all began one night when the lights went out. –Graham Marshall, voiceover, opening line

Beggar #1: Hey buddy, gimme a buck, willya? What do you make, a million a year?
George Brewster: [handing beggar a pittance] City’s getting to be like Calcutta.

“The whole point of these takeovers is to sell off the assets, and put old farts like me out to pasture. I can hear the fat lady singing, Graham. I can hear her singing.” –Brewster

“Space invaders, Graham. The new people – all gadgets and the bottom line. Stop them early, or they’ll run right over you! ‘We can be more efficient than such-and-such a program…’ Blah blah blah, it’s all bullshit, Graham, soup to nuts. It’s code for mass firings and low quality. Just melt the market dry, and get out. I mean, if our system wasn’t any good, why did they take us over in the first place? Christ!” –Brewster

Robert Benham: Gentlemen, gentlemen… you don’t understand! We are the young, the proud! We shouldn’t be ashamed of success! We should say, “Yes, I *have* a boat. I *have* a country home. I *have* a girlfriend named ‘Tara’!” Say it with me, brothers.
Executive #3: I do have a Mercedes.
Executive #2: I have a condo with a pool.
Executive #1: I have a personal sports trainer.
Graham Marshall: I have a wife, a mortgage, and two dogs.

“What the hell is going on out there, George? Did somebody die or lose money or something?” –Graham

Graham Marshall: I didn’t get the job, Leslie. The promotion… I didn’t get it.
Leslie Marshall: No, of course you got it, Graham. You always get it.
Graham Marshall: I’m sorry. I know what it meant to you.
Leslie Marshall: No, you don’t, Graham. I really don’t think you do know how much it meant to me!
Graham Marshall: [voice-over] That’s when he realized she… was a witch.

“I think it’s rotten, Mr. Marshall. The only reason you didn’t get that job is ’cause they didn’t give it to you!” –Melanie O’Conner (played by Jenny Wright)

He was perfect. She was perfect. The house was perfect. The boat was perfect. The American dream. –Graham, voiceover, speaking of Benham, his country home, his boat, and his beautiful girlfriend, Tara

“My father had it all figured out. He was a London bus driver. And when I was a boy, he used to take me over the river to Mayfair, where the rich people lived. And he used to say to me, ‘Son – there is no heaven. Here is the closest you will ever get. Life, here, is sweet. Life, back over there, is hard. So live over here, son!'” –Graham, to Stella

The world, as they say, had become his oyster. Now he was going to pry it open. –Graham, voiceover

Graham Marshall: I will try and put this as politely as possible, Henry… what the fuck are you doing in my office?
Henry Park: Bob says I’m supposed to help out with the reorganization report.
Graham Marshall: Uh huh. Let me rephrase the question. — [shouts] –What the fuck are you doing in my office?
Henry Park: Bob just thought it was crazy not to have a computer in here.
Graham Marshall: It’s not the *computer*, it’s you and your goddamn desk!

Graham Marshall: [shouting] Why don’t you bring Henry Park in here, huh? Why don’t you bring Melanie in to make sure the phone gets answered? Hell, we could bring in the whole goddamn New York Knicks, just to make sure your trash hits the basket! How’s that?
Robert Benham: If I thought I needed an assistant to do my job…
Graham Marshall: Meaning what? That I don’t do *my* job? Then why don’t you have me removed, Bobby Boy?
Robert Benham: Because you’re too senior in the company to be fired for anything less than gross insubordination.
Graham Marshall: So you’ve decided to have me removed piece by piece. A privilege here, a responsibility there – never enough to fight over, just a subtle drain of power, right? [Menacing] Well, let me tell you something, Bobster. You don’t know the first fucking thing about power. I have more power in this hand than *all* you fucking know!

“Abra kadabra. Shalakazam. Bye-bye, baby. Boom.” –Graham, repeated line

He felt like one of those gods who appeared to maidens in human form. He knew he’d been great. Ah, Stella… such a sweet girl, really. He’d have to be sure to reward her for being in the right place at the right time. –Graham, voiceover

Lieutenant Laker: He was your superior, wasn’t he?
Graham Marshall: No, he was my boss.

“You know, sudden death hasn’t been all bad to you.” –Laker

“Whoa, let’s not all panic – you, you, and you panic; the rest stay calm.” –Graham

There was only one tiresome detail. Jones. He just wouldn’t let go of that corner office. [sputtering Cessna flies by] Abracadabra, Shalakazam. Bye bye, baby. –Graham, voiceover, last lines

Graham Marshall (Caine) is an executive in an advertising company in New York City, and he’s expecting a promotion. This promotion will be a great relief to him financially, since his expenses (his mortgage, and his wife’s extravagant spending–that is, her exercise machine, their dogs, etc.) are like a ball and chain around his leg.

Little does he know that the top dogs of his company have no intention of giving him that promotion (he’s seen as too soft, like George Brewster [McMartin]); still, they take him out to lunch and regale him as if they don’t know anything about who will really get the promotion–a cocky yuppie by the name of Robert “Bobby” Benham (Riegert).

Upon hearing the disappointing news, Graham goes about for the rest of the day with a black cloud over his head. Normally, he’d give generously to the many homeless men who appear numerous times throughout the movie; fatefully, he doesn’t feel generous on this particular night.

The homeless, for obvious reasons, have much better reasons to be discontented than Graham has, but this means nothing to him at the moment. On this particular occasion, the homeless man, facing Graham at a train station, has chosen the wrong man to be irritable with, and Graham pushes him, causing him to fall on the train tracks, just as a train is coming by, killing him.

Graham is like the liberal who, as long as all is going reasonably well for him, will show generosity to the poor; but when things go wrong for him, he becomes mean-spirited, and even violent. Don’t mess with his class privileges (i.e., that promotion he has earned and should have gotten), and he’ll be good to you. When, however, the liberal doesn’t get what he wants…for example, his preferred presidential candidate elected, he’ll bang the war drums as loudly as a conservative will.

It’s fitting that, though Brett wrote the novel in 1984, the film should have been made in 1990, when the Soviet Union was soon to be dissolved and Bill Clinton would be president in a couple of years. Granted, Reagan and Bush Sr. did plenty of damage to the working and middle classes in the 80s; but it was the Democrat shift to the right in the 90s, spearheaded by the Clintons and causing such damage as NAFTA, the gutting of welfare, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the manipulation of the 1996 Russian election to keep Boris Yeltsin in power, and the “humanitarian war” in the former Yugoslavia in 1999, that the shit really hit the fan.

Now, Graham’s killing of the homeless man (symbolic of bourgeois liberals’ wars on the poor and imperialism in general, as noted in the above two paragraphs) is, of course, accidental and shocking for him. He goes home shaking and terrified, even thinking he has torn a hole in his shirt–the unconscious wish-fulfillment of a mild punishment to assuage his guilt. But…he has gotten away with the killing. He can do it again.

As Virgil (played by James Gandolfini) observed in True Romance, “Now the first time you kill somebody, that’s the hardest.” It only gets easier after that, and Graham finds himself especially easing into the “murders and executions” that Patrick Bateman of American Psycho indulged in. Such is the nature of capitalism, especially in its late stage, imperialistic, monopoly form.

On his way home transferring from train to train that night, Graham sees a man emerging from the steam from a train. For a split second, he imagines it’s the homeless man he’s pushed onto the tracks, but he’s really a worker in the train system. For our purposes, it actually makes little difference whether the man is a member of the lumpenproletariat or the proletariat: poor is poor in the eyes of capitalists like Graham; he steps on both types, though in different ways.

To add to Graham’s frustrations, he is henpecked by his conservative wife, Leslie (Kurtz), who makes demands on him to be an ever bigger wallet. This doesn’t give him any special right to plot to kill her, of course, but the pressure she puts on him to earn more is the last thing he needs after having been passed over for a promotion. Because of her attitude, he imagines her to be “a witch,” draining him of his power.

In his narcissistic imagination, Graham fancies himself a sorcerer, able to bend any circumstance to his will, including the seduction of women. His killing of Leslie–tricking her into electrocuting herself in the basement by yanking on the string of a lightbulb with one hand while holding onto a slimy, wet pipe for balance with her other–will free his magical powers of the control of the “witch.”

Light is a recurring motif in this film, coming in the forms of the basement light bulb, electrocution (Graham’s near death from it at the film’s beginning, as well as Leslie’s actual death from it), lit matches, and cigarette lighters. These lights are representative of social and economic power, Graham’s wish to have it, and his envy of other people’s use of it, especially at his expense.

Beyond his fancying of himself as a sorcerer, he also imagines himself to be like Zeus in his seduction of maidens (i.e., Stella Henderson, played by McGovern, as well as his potential seduction of Melanie O’Conner [played by Jenny Wright, who also, incidentally, played a groupie in Pink Floyd–The Wall]). The electrocutions thus can be likened to Zeus’ lightning. In zapping Leslie, ‘Zeus’ was getting rid of his nagging ‘Hera.’

Benham requiring Graham to light his cigars, just as mild-mannered George Brewster has done (even to the point of buying Graham the lighter with which he’d light Brewster’s cigars), is like Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus to give to man. A great sorcerer/god like Graham should not have his fire taken from him for the use of mere mortals like Benham!

So, to reach the only truly existing heaven in Graham’s world, the corporate Mount Olympus, he must crawl from the darkness of his humbler beginnings (“a wife, a mortgage, and two dogs”) and up into the light. I once again must quote Satan’s words from Milton‘s Paradise Lost: “long is the way/And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.” (Book II, lines 432-433) Graham, Satan of capitalism, must use the fire of lit matches to blow up Benham’s boat to reach the top of Olympus.

To repeat another relevant quote: “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929, as Graham does to Benham and, at the end of the film, to Jones [played by Sam Schacht]). This wiping out of executives is also comparable to the usurpations of Greek myth. Benham’s replacement of Brewster is like Cronus‘ taking of the heavenly throne from Uranus. Graham’s violent killing of Benham and Henry Park (played by Philip Moon) parallels Zeus’ defeat of Cronus after the ten-year Titanomachy. And Graham’s killing of Jones in his Cessna is like Zeus defeating such adversaries as the Giants and Typhon, further consolidating his Olympian power.

It’s especially fitting that Brewster should be compared to Uranus, who was castrated by Cronus. The whole reason that Brewster is replaced is because he is weak. As a ‘kinder, gentler capitalist’ who wants to save his employees’ jobs and not ‘trim the fat’ from the company, he is seen as ineffectual, not conducive to the growth of the business empire. Brewster, in this sense, is the Jimmy Carter of capitalist leaders, not fighting any wars during his…brief…term.

Graham, however, is potent both sexually and as an executive, rather like that Democrat of the 1990s. He may have seemed like a softie, like Brewster, but when Graham has his chance, he shows his true colours. His imitating of Brewster’s voice on the phone, as part of his scheme to kill Benham, is symbolic of how bourgeois liberals like the Clintons, Obama, and Biden pretend to be gentle and progressive, when really they’re as right-wing as Reagan, Trump, and the Bushes.

People like Lt. Laker (Patton) of the Connecticut police, as representatives of the government, sometimes try to soften the effects of capitalism by bringing to justice those who abuse the system, men like Graham; but they fail far more often than they succeed. Laker is in this sense like Brewster, representative of those who would smooth over the sharp edges of capitalism, but who fail because its cruelties are inherent in the system. Only a revolutionary death blow to capitalism will end its cruelties…and who has the willpower to do that?

We hear Caine’s voice as the narrator of the story, meaning Graham is telling it; but all the way through the narration, except at the end, we hear Caine refer to Graham in the third person. Only when he has succeeded in thwarting Laker’s attempts to build a case against him, does Graham’s voiceover finally speak in the first person.

This switch from third to first person represents the switch from his initial alienation from himself, from his species-essence, to his feeling of comfort with his identity, his oneness with it, at the end of the film. For though Graham is a capitalist, he also has bosses over him, and the only way to end worker alienation is to remove one’s bosses.

Too bad that he, as a boss himself, is now causing the same estrangement for those under him, for people like Stella, who is shocked in the end to learn he’s a murderer. And though he promotes her, his sending of her to the company’s Los Angeles office, causing their geographical separation, is symbolic of that alienation.

The film’s ending differs greatly from that of Brett’s novel, but the changes the film makes are good ones. Brett had Graham’s mother-in-law, Lillian (played by Barbara Baxley), scheme to have him charged with murder for a crime he hasn’t committed, in revenge for the killing of her daughter, Leslie. In the novel, Graham originally makes an attempt to poison Leslie’s whiskey bottle, but the drink turns blue, so he abandons the attempt. However, Lillian discovers the poisoned whiskey, and in a fit of mental instability publicly kills herself by drinking it, having those who see her drink it know that he poisoned it.

There are two problems with Brett’s ending: first, the notion that Lillian goes crazy and publicly poisons herself just to get revenge on Graham, ironically causing him to be convicted of a crime he hasn’t committed (as opposed to his previous getting away with crimes he is guilty of), strains credibility and comes off as “awfully contrived,” as one critic noted (Graham’s getting away with killing Leslie, Benham, Park, and Jones is already stretching things as it is).

Second, the film’s ending, with the bad guy prevailing, works better as black comedy. Besides, Graham’s success also works better as an allegory of capitalism, for indeed, the capitalists and imperialists have been getting away with crime after crime against the poor, and with war crime after war crime against all the countries that the US and NATO have bombed.

Bill Clinton not only got away with the bombing of the former Yugoslavia and the demonizing of Slobodan Milošević, but he also has a statue of himself in Kosovo, where there’s a huge NATO/US military base! Not only did George W. Bush get away with the illegal invasion of Iraq, killing about one million Iraqis, but he has also recently been rehabilitated by such liberals as Ellen DeGeneres, merely because he isn’t Trump! Though Obama continued, extended, and expanded Bush’s wars, use of drones, surveillance (i.e., the Patriot Act), etc., he is lionized by liberals as being an exemplary president, undeservedly awarded a Nobel Peace Prize…and every day of his administration was at war somewhere, including the bombing of seven countries in 2016.

I wonder how Trump will be rehabilitated in the 2030s.

These men, like Graham, all got away with their crimes. That’s the magic of capitalist imperialism, the supremacy of Zeus.

Abra-cadabra, shalakazam, bye-bye, baby…boom!

Shootings

Cops
have
been
getting…away…with…the…
shooting
of
black
people
for
far
too
long.

Black
skin
should
…not…be…a…sin…in…the…eyes…of…police.
Crime
comes
in
blue
and
in
white
far
more
often.

Riots
arise
from
this
senselessness…It…is…a…fact…
that
brutality
bears
such
strange
fruit.

Ending
unrest
…can…not…come…in…the…guns…of…militias’
mad,
wild,
eager
fingers.

One
day,
all…the…shots…will…fly…out…of…the…
rifles
fired
from
revolution.

Then,
pigs
will
…get…it…in…the…gut…as…they’ve
given
it
so
far
more
often.