I’m
sinking in this
mess
and
I have no means of escape.
If
ever I try to move,
I’ll
just sink deeper and deeper.
My
luck is running
out. I have so little time left.
I’m
desperate to keep my head above the surface.
Live burial will be my fate if I’m not saved.
The Sacrifice (Offret) is a 1986 Swedish film written and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It stars Erland Josephson, with Susan Fleetwood, Allan Edwall, Sven Wollter, and Valérie Mairesse. Many of the crew had worked in Ingmar Bergman films.
The Sacrifice was Tarkovsky’s last film, and his third film as an expatriate from the Soviet Union, after Nostalghia and the documentary, Voyage in Time. He died of cancer shortly after filming it; in fact, he was too ill to attend its presentation at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986. It won the Grand Prix there, as 1972’s Solaris had.
The film also won Tarkovsky his third FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes, and his third Palme D’Or nomination. It won the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988. It was considered as a nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 59th Academy Awards, but it didn’t get the nomination.
As was a problem with Stalker, the shooting of The Sacrifice included a failed attempt to capture something important on film: this time, the climactic burning down of the house of Alexander (Josephson), because the only camera used to film the burning jammed, thus ruining the footage. The house had to be reconstructed at great expense in two weeks, and the burning was more prudently re-filmed with two cameras.
Here is a link to quotes, in English translation, from the film; and here is a link to the complete film, with English subtitles.
The film begins with a shot of a detail from Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished painting, Adoration of the Magi. The detail from the painting shows the baby Jesus receiving a gift from one of the Magi. As we look at this detail, we see the credits and hear the aria “Erbarme mich, mein Gott” (“Have mercy, my God”), from JS Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.
When the credits have all been shown, the camera shot slowly moves upwards, so we see the palm tree in the top centre of the painting. From this, we go to a distant shot of a tree that Alexander is planting near the shore at Närsholmen, on the island of Gotland. The tree is Alexander’s gift to the land there, just as Jesus received gifts with a tree in the background, one associated with the Virgin Mary (partly from the verse, “You are stately as a palm tree,” from the Song of Songs—7:7). A movie called The Sacrifice fittingly has gift-giving as a major theme.
Just as we see a celebration of Christ’s birth in the painting, with a tree in the background, so is it Alexander’s birthday, with him planting a tree, and he’s soon to receive gifts. Also, just as Christianity is a fusion of Biblical and pagan elements (as I argued here), so is The Sacrifice a combination of Christian and pagan elements, as we’ll soon see.
Trees have been sacred in both paganism and Christianity, and Leonardo’s painting, with its ruin of a pagan building in the background (not that we’ll see this part during the credits), shows the supplanting of paganism by Christianity.
Alexander asks “Little Man” (a boy played by Tommy Kjellqvist), his son, to help with the tree. Alexander speaks of an orthodox monk planting a barren tree on a mountainside. The tree was to be watered every day until it came to life; after three years of this constant work, the tree was finally covered with blossoms! In this story, we learn the value of systemic work.
This notion of constantly doing something would be contrasted with constantly talking, something Alexander has a problem with, and even admits to himself. A former actor turned journalist, critic, and lecturer of aesthetics, he will later quote Hamlet: “Words, words, words,” sharing the Dane’s opinion that words are useless, and action is needed (while also doing plenty of the former and not enough of the latter).
In this connection, we should remember that, for the great majority of the film, Little Man doesn’t say a word, because of a throat operation he’s recently undergone. Only at the very end of the film does he say anything, which is, “In the beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?” As a mute for almost all of the film, this innocent child is almost as Christ-like as the baby in Leonardo’s painting, who also would have been without a word to say.
Action without speech would thus seem to be the moral ideal of the film…and yet Jesus–committing the ultimate salvific act, his self-sacrifice on the Cross–is called “the Word” at the beginning of the Gospel of John. This Jesus had many important words to say in all four Gospels, too, of course, including his parables. Tarkovsky in fact called this last film of his a “parable,” according to his book, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (1985).
On the other side of the coin, one may question the moral validity of Alexander’s actions to save the world from a nuclear holocaust. Salvation by adultery? Salvation by arson? Do such actions really appease an angry god, be he Christian or pagan?
As a result of such considerations of works vs. words, one can see a dialectical relationship between these in terms of their worth. Both words and actions have their share of validity vs. worthlessness.
A similar dialectical relationship can be seen in theism vs. atheism in the film, as I also noted in my analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Otto (Edwall) arrives on his bike as a postman to give Alexander a telegram wishing him a happy birthday, with jocular allusions to Richard III and The Idiot (Alexander has played both King Richard III and Prince Myshkin on the stage, back in his acting days.)
Otto asks Alexander about his relationship with God, to which the latter answers, “nonexistent.” This attitude is soon to change, though, when he learns from the news of the threat of WWIII. There are no atheists in fallout shelters, apparently.
Otto discusses his interest in Nietzsche‘s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which it is famously declared, “God is dead!” Yet later, Otto will discuss his belief in witches, angels, and the bizarre idea that Alexander can prevent nuclear war through having a sexual union with Maria (played by Guðrún Gísladóttir), one of his house servants, who is also, according to Otto, a witch “in the best possible sense.”
We can see a dialectical relationship even between that English king and Russian prince whom Alexander once played on the stage: the former is clever, but as ugly morally as he is physically deformed; the latter is simple and naïve, yet has a good heart. Such ambiguities and equivocations can be found throughout The Sacrifice, for spirituality here is at one moment portrayed as the highest good, and the next moment, the highest foolishness.
Speaking of foolishness, while he has Little Man sitting on his lap among trees further away from the shore and closer to his house, Alexander tells the little boy about what a difficult thing the fear of death is. It sometimes makes us do things we ought not to do…and yet it is this very fear of death, in a nuclear holocaust, that drives Alexander not only to sleep with Maria, but also to burn his house down, in some superstitious hope that these acts will save humanity from destruction.
At home, Alexander has received a gift from Victor (Wollter), the family doctor who did Little Man’s throat operation, as well as a close friend of Alexander’s family. The gift is a book of pre-Renaissance art depicting Christian saints; Alexander is most pleased with it, since though his relationship with God is “non-existent,” he has aspirations to bring it into existence. There’s a sense he’s been waiting for a catalyst to make this happen–it’s coming soon.
His English wife, Adelaide (Fleetwood), also an actress and fluent in Swedish, appears in the house with her daughter, Marta (played by Filippa Franzén). House servants Maria and Julia (Mairesse) are preparing the birthday dinner, and Otto will soon arrive with his own gift for Alexander, a huge, framed, old map of Europe.
“Every gift involves a sacrifice,” Otto says.
Is adultery with one’s maid a gift to God? Otto seems to think so, in spite of Exodus 20:14.
Is burning down one’s house a gift to God? Alexander seems to think so, as we’ll see.
There’s a sense of coolness not only between Otto, the postman, and bourgeois Victor, but also between Maria and bourgeois Adelaide, who finds the odd Icelandic servant frightening; bourgeois Alexander also finds her a bit “odd.” Otto, Maria’s neighbour, is more acquainted with her, and thus thinks better of her. It shouldn’t be surprising to find fellow proletarians warmer with each other, but alienated among the bourgeoisie.
Studying the map, Alexander imagines it to depict a much happier Europe than that of the modern world, just as he was idealizing in his mind the book’s pictures of ancient saints. He prefers the world of the past to that of the disillusioning present.
He discusses his having given up on acting due to a feeling that his identity dissolves in his roles. He came to be ashamed of impersonating other people. Adelaide preferred him as an actor, fell in love with him then; but she has grown disenchanted with him as a mere bookish, loquacious intellectual now.
Her disenchantment with him seems to have led to alienation in the family, an aloofness between him on the one side, and her and Marta on the other, while he is trying hard to be close with his son, to compensate for that alienation.
These issues lead to a suspicion that Adelaide has been having an affair with Victor. In fact, given that pretty Marta is barely of the age of consent, and that we see Victor touching her in a creepy way later on, I suspect that our good doctor has been in bed with both mother and daughter! Could this be why he wants to take a job in Australia, to escape the guilt of his tangled sexual indiscretions? I’ll discuss these issues in more detail later on.
After discussing his hobby of collecting evidence of the paranormal, Otto suddenly collapses on the living room floor. When the other guests check on him, he insists that he is alright; apparently, an evil angel has passed by and touched him.
Almost immediately after that, the guests hear jet fighters flying low, just above the house, and causing such a shaking that a large jar of milk falls off a shelf and breaks on the floor. All of the guests are disturbed by the jets except Otto, who remains still on the chair he’s gone to after his fall. It’s as if he knew the jets were coming, and he is equating them with the angel that touched him.
Alexander has been outside, looking at a miniature model of his house, something Little Man and Otto have made for him as a birthday gift. Upon beholding the model, Alexander quotes Macbeth in the original English: “Which of you have done this?”, which originally was the Scottish King’s frightened response to seeing the ghost of Banquo, whom he’s just had murdered. It’s as though Alexander, seeing himself in the future and seeing the ‘ghost’ of the house he is to burn, is feeling a similar guilt and looking for someone else to blame it on, to project it onto.
He goes back into the house to find all the guests listening to a news report about what seems to be the beginning of WWIII and a possible nuclear holocaust. Everyone is in a state of shock, but Adelaide reacts in the most extreme way, having a complete mental breakdown and needing a sedative from Victor.
A few interesting things should be noted about Adelaide in connection with what used to be called ‘female hysteria.’ Her hairstyle and dress remind one of the fashions of the 19th century, the last in which diagnoses of ‘hysteria’ in women were common. She calls out to the men to “do something,” to come to the rescue of the Victorian-minded woman. A prominent symptom of ‘hysteria’ was hypersexuality; now, while Adelaide is flipping out, and Victor is embracing her from behind in an effort to restrain her (holding her almost like a lover), her legs are spread out on the floor, revealing sensuous hosiery and high heels.
I’m not at all trying to revive bizarre, antiquated, and indeed sexist theories of mental illness in women (Freud himself, not exactly one to be called a feminist, was one of the first people to acknowledge symptoms associated with ‘hysteria’ in men, thus contributing to the decline in the diagnosis of this spurious medical condition.). I’m merely making links here between Adelaide’s mental state, her sexuality, and foolish old world thinking. After all, Alexander is about to engage in some hysteria of his own.
The needle that Victor sticks into Adelaide’s arm, to sedate her, can be seen as a phallic symbol. Some in the 19th century believed that genital stimulation could treat women’s ‘hysteria,’ including the use of the first electric vibrators [!]. My point in bringing all of this up is to show how it’s hinted, in symbolic and literal form, that Victor and Adelaide are lovers.
As Victor is embracing her, Alexander is further off, looking out a window: shouldn’t her husband be holding her? In this we can see the family dysfunction hiding behind a birthday party.
Victor asks Julia if she wants a phallic shot of sedation, she who’s shown no signs of mental breakdown, but who is as pretty as Adelaide. The maid walks away without a word, as if disgusted by the doctor’s apparent lechery. Then he goes over to pretty Marta to give her a shot. She says she doesn’t need the shot, but he insists, with a lecherous smirk and that creepy touching of her face that I mentioned above, that “it’s absolutely necessary.” That shot is symbolic Rohypnol…isn’t it?
Alexander would rather have drinks than the doctor’s offered shot. Otto doesn’t want a shot, either. (Perhaps by sedating the two men, Victor would have a chance to get at Mother and daughter, with Julia being discreet enough not to say anything.) Marta offers to go upstairs with Victor, while Julia watches over Mama [!]. A little later, we’ll see Marta get naked in her bedroom, knowing that Victor is still around, and Otto has left.
The phones are dead, and the electricity is out. Julia refuses to wake Little Man and have him traumatized with knowledge of humanity’s impending doom.
Alone in a room near sleeping Little Man, the Leonardo painting hanging on the wall, Alexander takes a look at it, then says the Lord’s Prayer. Teary-eyed, he is now entering his own version of ‘hysteria,’ behaving foolishly in a state of fear. Terrified of nuclear war, he has come to what he has been waiting for all of his life: to bring back into existence his relationship with God.
Note how contradictory his prayer is. After finishing his recital of the Lord’s Prayer, he on the one hand offers all he has to God, including his son (as mad as Abraham must have been), then he begs God to restore everything to what it was before the news report. In this prolix prayer, he offers to be mute for the rest of his life. His ‘brevity’ is like that of Polonius–the soul of folly.
His prayer thus demonstrates a paradoxical attitude towards faith and spirituality in this film: it’s illuminating and comforting, yet foolish. The terror of nuclear war urgently needs an escape, yet the opium of the people is no more than that–an escape. Fittingly, after his prayer, Alexander gets on a couch and sleeps to escape his fears.
Before we see his dream, though, we see an example of one of the family problems that he must at least be suspicious of: that scene I mentioned above, of Marta getting naked in her bedroom, happens now. She calls for Victor, saying she needs him [!]. Alexander hopes to save the world, and he can’t even set his own family issues right!
Alexander’s dream, in black and white, begins with melancholy Japanese flute music and dripping water for a soundtrack. It depicts him looking out of a window from a dark room to see snow on the grass. Since he has fears of WWIII, this snow could be seen as symbolic of a nuclear winter. Outside now, he’s stepping in the mud and puddles of melted snow, symbolic of a return to formless, primordial Chaos after the destruction of the world.
He bends down and moves some leaves and trash aside to reveal a number of coins. So much of the motive behind Cold War hostilities, leading to the danger of nuclear war, is money: either the greedy love of it, or the urge to transform society so that it can be shared by all or be eliminated altogether.
He walks in the snow, looking around. More of those coins are seen in the snow, among the puddles, mud, and trash. He sees the bare feet of Little Man in the snow, so vulnerable in the danger of WWIII, and he speaks fearfully for the boy, who then runs away. We hear the sound of approaching fighter jets, which blow aside everything on the ground as they fly by.
He wakes from his dream with a jolt.
Otto returns, to tell Alexander what, apparently, he needs to do to save the world from nuclear war. He must make love with Maria, one of his house servants! Since Otto, as we know, has an interest in the paranormal, and Maria is “the best” kind of witch, such rationalizing is all we need, it seems, to be convinced of this “last hope” as a viable solution.
Alexander sneaks out of his house while Adelaide and Victor are sitting together at a table outside [!], and he uses Otto’s bicycle to ride over to Maria’s home. All of this subterfuge just reinforces the sense of alienation in Alexander’s marriage.
When he arrives at Maria’s home, then begins what must be the most bizarre seduction in human history. Seriously: how does a man convince a woman (his employee) to have sex with him, saying that their tumble in bed is the only way nuclear armageddon can be prevented?
He starts by discussing a time when he was a boy and his mother was ill, and he wanted to tidy up an unweeded garden, so it would be more pleasing to her eyes. After doing so with the utmost diligence, he regrets his gardening efforts, preferring the unruly beauty of the original garden. The story seems to be teaching us not to tamper with nature, not to change anything from its original state, for it may have beauty despite its messy imperfections.
Il ne faut pas cultiver notre jardin.
When he’s come to the point of asking to lie with Maria, he points to his temple a pistol he’s taken from home, implying he’ll kill himself if she doesn’t consent to the sex. One is reminded of when Richard Gloucester, a role Alexander has played, remember, threatens to stab himself if Lady Anne won’t accept the evil hunchback’s hand in marriage. So Maria gives herself to Alexander. Indeed,…
Was ever woman in this humour woo’d?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
The fact that, when the lovemaking happens, we don’t see it done the usual way, but rather Tarkovsky has us see the two lovers floating, turning together in a circle over her bed, emphasizes that it isn’t the sex act per se that matters, but what their physical union symbolizes.
And when we see the sex in a symbolic sense, we can see how it finally makes sense. Consider who Alexander and Maria are in relation to each other. He is her employer. He is an affluent bourgeois, she is a worker. Their sexual union symbolizes the removal of class differences. Their lovemaking represents the sublation of the material contradiction between the upper and lower classes, which is vital in ending nuclear brinksmanship between the US and the USSR, as I’ll explain in more detail later.
Now, many will object to my interpretation on the grounds that the oh, so spiritual Tarkovsky wasn’t exactly a card-carrying Marxist-Leninist. There was friction between him and his mystic visions, on the one hand, and the atheistic Soviet authorities, on the other hand. After all, he left the Soviet Union to make his last movies, like The Sacrifice, for the sake of pursuing artistic freedom, did he not?
That friction between him and the Soviet government was there, but it’s been exaggerated by bourgeois, imperialist propagandists (as one can see in liberal Wikipedia). The fact is that Soviet censorship had been softening little by little over the years, ever since the death of Stalin in 1953, three years before Tarkovsky’s first student film and nine years before Ivan’s Childhood, his first feature film. Though the Soviet censors would have been sensitive to anything even remotely, subtly critical of communism, they would have also recognized Tarkovsky’s obvious genius, and would have known that promoting that genius would have been good for the USSR’s global reputation; so a balance between censorship and indulgence was sought.
Recall, also, that Tarkovsky’s son insisted that his father was no political dissident. While Tarkovsky was surely no doctrinaire supporter of the Soviet system, being someone born, raised, and educated in the USSR, he would have at least unconsciously absorbed some basic socialist values, like closing up the gap between the rich and the poor, something this sex scene can be seen to symbolize.
There is a dream sequence seen while Alexander and Maria are making love, in which we see her in the hairstyle and clothing of Adelaide; this shot suggests a wish-fulfillment of Maria being his true soulmate. This vision, along with one–immediately after another brief shot of Leonardo’s painting–of naked Marta chasing after chickens (representing cowardly Victor, who’s running off to Australia after his sexual misconduct?), reinforces our understanding of the failure of Alexander’s married life, his own unconscious acknowledging of that failure.
As they make love, we can hear Maria’s voice, comforting Alexander, trying to soothe his pain and ease his fears. It’s easy to see how he’d prefer her to his emotionally volatile wife, whom, indeed, we see lurking in the darkness immediately after we see naked Marta.
He wakes up on his sofa, back at home. The power and telephones are back. His beloved Japanese flute music is playing on his stereo. He later puts on a Japanese robe, as if about to perform some kind of Shinto ritual.
The electricity having come back, right after the supposedly salvific lovemaking, implies that all is back to normal, that God, satisfied with Alexander’s ‘gift,’ has prevented nuclear war. Still, Alexander is not assured of the world’s safety, of this Nietzschean eternal recurrence (i.e., from the end of the world to its new beginning) that Otto had promised, so Alexander–in his ongoing religious hysteria–feels he must make the ultimate sacrifice: burn his house to the ground.
Further evidence of his family’s dysfunction is seen when, as he’s sneaking around behind them in his frenzy, Adelaide and Marta are upset to have heard of Victor’s plan to leave them and go to Australia. The women complain of Alexander losing his ‘friend,’ but they’re really just jealously upset about losing a lover. Victor, of course, just wants to run away from facing the responsibilities of his own sexual misconduct.
Alexander must be aware that he’s been made a cuckold: he’d be overhearing their conversation as he’s sneaking around, and he must have seen and heard previous hints of their fooling around behind his back. Part of his reason for burning down the house, rendering Adelaide and Marta homeless, must be out of spite; yet with no consideration for Little Man, whom he deeply loves, Alexander is still being irrational.
And again, I must ask, especially if the lovemaking with Maria (also Alexander’s unconscious revenge against his adulteress wife) is enough to save the world: why would burning down his house appease God? Didn’t He prefer His Son’s crucifixion?
My answer to this, as with the lovemaking with Maria, is that its meaning is symbolic. Alexander’s house, where his maids work, is his property. Private property, which we socialists wish to abolish, is places: farmland, factories, office buildings, apartment buildings–the means of production.
The acquisition and accumulation of capital (which must ever expand), along with the ruthless and jealous wish to protect ownership of it, have led to the export of capital into other countries, as well as competition over who will exploit the most of those countries. This has resulted in two imperialist world wars, and with the American invention of the atomic bomb, fears of nuclear war.
So, to avert nuclear war, Alexander’s burning down of his house can be seen to symbolize a bourgeois sacrifice of private property. (This message is especially relevant to us today, in our current Cold War with Russia and China–hence my urgent recommendation of this film.) Class war is the inevitable result of rich landowners leaving very little for the poor to live with. Bourgeois exploitation of the proletariat, being so intolerable for the poor, necessitates class antagonisms and socialist revolution.
In the modern world, imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism makes war inevitable, as a competition for land and resources. The Manhattan Project brought in the nuclear age, resulting in the necessity of the USSR, China, and the DPRK to develop their own nuclear weapons programs, to prevent the US from bombing them as Japan had been bombed. To prevent nuclear war, then, the class antagonisms of capitalism and imperialism must be ended–hence, the abolition of private property, as Alexander’s arson symbolizes.
It’s fitting in this connection that, as the house is burning down to the ground and his family, Julia, and Victor return from their walk to watch the fire in horror, Maria arrives on her bicycle and Alexander runs up to her, falls to his knees, and kisses her hands. This is symbolic of the bourgeois ceding power to the worker, as linked with the burning down of the house as representing the abolishing of private property.
Bourgeois Adelaide and Victor take him away from Maria, he runs back to her, and they take him away again, Adelaide growling at Maria, “Don’t touch him!” This symbolizes capitalist attempts at counterrevolution. As a bourgeois himself, Alexander can thus be seen as like Engels.
Now, the above is my allegoric interpretation of Tarkovsky’s “parable.” On the literal level, however, it’s obvious that Alexander, driven to hysteria by the fear of nuclear annihilation, has simply gone mad in his religious ecstasy. Just as Tarkovsky was, as I speculate, ambivalent about socialism, so was he ambivalent about spirituality and religion, seeing both the good and bad sides in it. Spirituality can give comfort, and it can cause one to go mad. Tarkovsky’s genius allowed him to have just as nuanced an attitude towards religion as he had towards socialism.
It’s safe to assume that the paramedics, presumably answering a call from a neighbour about the arson, will drive Alexander to a mental hospital. His family has fallen apart just as he has mentally. There is no spiritual edification to be found in this scene, except for the allegory I provided.
With the end of this family’s world achieved in his arson, the eternal recurrence brings us back to the beginning with Little Man tending the tree. Finally, he can speak, and he quotes the opening of the Gospel of John as mentioned above. His question, “Why is that, Papa?”, seems to be another example of Tarkovsky’s ambivalence towards religion. The quote from John affirms it, while the boy’s question challenges its validity.
The lesson that the parable of The Sacrifice seems to be teaching us is that spirituality has its good and bad sides, and that we must be forever mindful of both. It’s a wavelike dialectic, going up and down and up and down.
A week has passed since I had that nightmare, or vision, or whatever it was. Nothing crazy has happened since then; Mama’s ghost hasn’t done anything to upset me. She’s probably just taking her time with me–starting slowly and gradually building up, knowing that that dream, or vision, would be enough to disturb me for at least a week.
As I’ve walked to work and back home, I haven’t even seen that man trying to get my attention. Didn’t Mom want me to talk to him, according her her taunts, speaking through other people’s mouths?
Anyway, I’m in the Pet Valu store now, at the cash register, waiting for customers to come in. My aunt is using the washroom at the moment.
This is so stupid–me continuing to work here, when Mama left me so much money that I could just stay at home and never need to work again! If Aunt Jane wants to take over Mom’s business, for a way to pass the time, that’s her business; but she could easily hire someone to replace me…why won’t she?
I just heard the toilet flush in the back. She can come back here and be bored at the cash register while I face cans, or something. Here she comes.
“I can take over here, Roger,” she says.
“Good,” I snort, then step aside for her.
“Why the grumpy attitude?” she asks me with a scowl.
“I’m sick of it here,” I say. “Why don’t you find someone else to do this job? I don’t need the money. You know Mama left me enough to live on.”
“I already told you why, Roger. Your mother told me months ago, when she felt her health declining, that she wanted you to continue working, in spite of the objections she predicted you would make, so you would stay in contact with other people. That’s why I agreed to take over the pet food store when she died. We worry about you, Roger, that is, the whole family does. If you quit your job here, you’ll just sit around at home all day and all night, doing nothing but watching TV or wasting time online–probably looking at porn or something–avoiding people, and just rotting away in isolation. Having this job keeps you around people. It keeps you functioning on at least some level of normality. It’s good for you.”
I groan in annoyance at all of these words. The last thing that interacting with people has ever been is good for me; but try to convince my aunt to see the truth in that!
“I guess I’ll go face the cans,” I say with a sigh.
“Actually, there are some bags of Iams at the back,” she says. “They’re too big and heavy for me to lift. I need you to pick them up and put them under the older ones.”
“OK.” I walk over to the back.
At least I’d managed to talk her out of moving in with me, back when she suggested the idea…to watch over me, and make sure I “wasn’t doing anything foolish.” Her living in the apartment with me would be beyond awkward.
Just as I’ve been thinking about her interfering in my life, think of the Devil, and she appears.
I’m putting the older bags of Iams dog food on the two new bags I got from the back, and she has just arrived. I can feel her standing behind me.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you, Roger, if you’ve talked to your father yet,” she says, causing me to groan in annoyance. “A few days ago, he told me he tried to get your attention when you were coming here or going home, and you just kept ignoring him, so he gave up trying. Have you spoken to him since then?”
“Of course not,” I say, then hiss between clenched teeth, “And he’s not my father. My father is dead. And even if he were alive, my real father couldn’t be such a foolish looking fellow as he.”
“How can you be so sure he isn’t your father if you never even find out? Why would he pretend?”
“Because he’s delusional, of course!”
“Roger, you’re hardly the one to be judging the mental stability of others, with your tendency to see and hear things. Don’t project your faults onto others…and don’t talk to me in that tone!”
“If you don’t like the way I talk to you, then just fire me!”
“You’re not getting out of this job, and out of the social world, this easily. You are going to meet him sooner or later, even if I have to bring him over to your apartment.”
“Oh, God, just leave me alone, would you?”
“Just get back to those bags, and watch your mouth,” she says, then walks away in a huff. “Impossible kid,” I hear her say under her breath.
Yeah, impossible “kid.” Mama always used to call me a kid, even well into my adulthood. I heard her call me that a few times even days before she died. I was never an adult to her, because she didn’t want me to be one. I had to remain a child in a man’s body for her, so she could control me better. She ruined my life with her witchcraft, and she seems to have come back to life in the form of my Aunt Jane. Or perhaps her spirit is possessing my aunt…that could be it!
Either way, I’m no freer than when Mama was alive.
Maybe this is it: maybe she’s using her magic in a subtle way. Could Mama’s spirit be worried that I, having learned a little magic of my own, might learn more, develop my skills at it, grow in power, and thus be a threat to her? It’s possible…unlikely, but possible.
Perhaps I can make it less unlikely if I really do make more of a study of the magic arts. In any case, she’ll keep persecuting me, and causing more and more mischief for the rest of the world, regardless of whether I try to stop her or not…so I’d better try learning more.
After work, I’m going back to the library.
*************
Here I am, at a table with a dozen or so books about how to communicate with, influence, and protect oneself from the spirit world. I’ve already spent several hours jotting down notes in the hope that they’ll help me against Mama.
I have no way of knowing if any of the books I’ve chosen are authoritative or if they’ve all been written by quacks and charlatans. If they’re any good at all, have I written down the better information from them, or have I just written down a bunch of useless nonsense?
In any case, what I have learned has at least given me some hope that I can stop Mama. It will improve my chances of sleeping tonight, if it doesn’t do anything else for me.
It’s getting late. I see nothing but black out that window over there to my right. I’d better put these books away and go home. I can read more from them tomorrow, and I can find more information online on my laptop, if I feel like it.
**********
I’m walking on a sidewalk with the library behind me, lampposts giving me some light in an otherwise starless, black night. It will be at least another ten blocks or so before I reach my apartment. The darkness is ominous.
A few of the spells I read about looked as if they could be effective. In my living room, I can use a piece of chalk or something to draw a magic circle on the floor, draw a pentacle in it, and chant the verse I wrote down to sanctify it.
If the spell works, that is, if it keeps Mama out, I can get my sleeping bag and sleep there, with the TV and my laptop handy to keep me entertained.
As for when I need to leave that zone of protection, another thing I learned from those books is that I can get an amulet or a witch bottle, something I can take with me anywhere for protection against Mama’s ghost. I hope buying such things won’t gouge out too much of my money.
I could fill the witch bottle with my urine, hair or nail clippings, or maybe with rosemary or red wine, if I find pissing into it to be too disgusting. I could bury the bottle in the dirt on the front lawn of my apartment building; I’ll do it at night, so no one sees me and tries to stop me.
The amulet could be a necklace of some kind that I can wear everywhere, never taking it off, for extra protection. I could buy a sachet, or Chinese xiangbao, to ward off Mama’s evil. All of these extra precautions should keep me safe; if none of them work, I really have no idea of what I’m going to do.
Hey…are those footsteps I’m hearing behind me? At this time of night, there are few pedestrians walking about, and there were none on the sidewalk as I left the almost-empty library, and I haven’t seen one person walking here since. Am I imagining the footsteps? Dare I look behind me?
Those aren’t my own footsteps, are they? Is my mind exaggerating the sound, making an imaginary echo? I’ll keep walking and listening: a pair of footfalls, or two pairs of them?
I’m hearing two pairs–no echo.
There’s no way I’m going to stop walking. In fact, I’m going to start walking faster, with long strides.
The person behind me is doing the same thing.
He…or she…sounds really close behind, too.
“Roger, please,” the male voice behind me says. “Can I have a minute to talk to you?”
Oh, God. It’s that guy again! Fine, I’ll talk to him. I’ll tell him to go away, as rude as I can be.
“Listen, buddy, can you fu…?” I begin as I’m turning my head back to see him. But what I end up seeing–illuminated by a nearby lamppost–is a man’s body with the head of a blue elephant!
“Roger, I can prove to you that I am your fa…” he begins.
But I’m already running, screaming, before that thing can finish its sentence.
There
are those
who think our world today is normal in this state,
when
actually,
our world today should be seen from this perspective.
Many
on the
right think all our problems should be seen this way,
but
such a
vantage point just pushes things the other way.
The left is pushed so far aside, it isn’t even seen,
and
so, the
middle’s pushed rightwards, yet still seen as the centre.
False families are primarily concerned with their public image, as ‘virtuous,’ ‘upstanding,’ ‘admirable,’ ‘moral,’ and ‘loving.’ Maintaining this image is far more important to them than actually striving to live up to such ideals, since doing the latter is, of course, far more difficult.
One doesn’t just put on an act of virtue and goodness, while secretly knowing that one isn’t the good family member one pretends to be. These people lie to themselves as successfully as they lie to the public. Contemplating the truth is much too intolerable, an unbearable blow to their inflated egos; so they must convince themselves that the theatre of virtue put on is real.
Conflicts and feelings of resentment are inevitable, even in the best of families, but the better ones will at least try to resolve these problems as fairly as they can. Toxic families, on the other hand, will find ways of ‘resolving’ these conflicts so that they can maintain an illusion of blamelessness for most of the family, while projecting the unavoidable blame on one, or a few, scapegoat(s).
A healthy family will, paradoxically, acknowledge fault, blame, and ill emotional health in all the family members who are at fault in the conflict, and they will reserve judgement fairly and in proportion to how much fault each member involved has. A false family, or toxic one, or emotionally abusive one (whichever name you wish to use to describe them), will dump all or most of the blame on the scapegoat(s), while absolving of blame other family members who may bear much, if not most or all, of the blame, thus maintaining the illusion of family health for the majority of the members.
A false family has a black-and-white view of the family members. Generally speaking, and with at least relatively few exceptions, certain members are seen as largely good: the narcissistic parent (the ringleader of the toxic family structure) and his or her golden children, his or her flying monkeys. On the other side are those deemed largely ‘bad’: the codependent parent and the scapegoat(s) or identified patient(s). Any reasonable person would know that everyone is a lighter or darker grey between the good and bad extremes, but the group narcissism of the toxic family will admit to little beyond the black and white.
This is the kind of family that I had to endure growing up with. To be sure, I have plenty of glaring faults, but I hardly deserved to be scapegoated because of them. In fact, a reasonable argument can be made that the exacerbating, if not largely the origin, of most of my faults was because of the emotional abuse that I suffered under my parents’ mismanagement of the family.
I have already described in detail, in the links given above as well as such links as these, the whole story of how I was bullied, belittled, lied to, and subjected to gaslighting by my late parents and older siblings (my brothers, R. and F., and my sister, J.). If you have either already read some or all of those posts, or if you don’t care to do so much reading, Dear Reader, then please just go along with what I’m saying to you now: that my having gone NO CONTACT with the family for the past seven years (as of this post’s publication) has been perfectly justified, for the sake of protecting myself against being subjected to any further emotional abuse in the future, something guaranteed from those three surviving siblings. When trying to heal from C-PTSD, one cannot do so while in contact with any of the abusers.
One of the family’s chief rationalizations for bullying me and treating me with contempt is one of those glaring faults I referred to above: namely, my self-centredness (something supposedly based on ‘my autism,’ or really their distorted, outdated definition of autism, which is a mental condition I learned from psychiatrists that I don’t really have, but was rather one of my late mother’s many fabrications). As far as I’m concerned, only my wife has the right to complain of my selfishness (which was really the result of my alienation from an emotionally neglectful family), for unlike the family, my wife is truly selfless.
As I said above, the selflessness of a false family is just that…false. It is an outward show, meant not only to impress and fool the public, but also for the false family to fool themselves into thinking they’re genuinely good people. One only has to use one’s instincts, though, to realize that there’s nothing good about bullies and narcissists. Accordingly, highly sensitive people like me can see through the family bullshit, and they as a result get scapegoated…to protect the lie.
When my mother was dying of breast cancer, she was nonetheless healthy enough to tell me a slew of lies online (see the links above for details), after I’d already known of other lies of hers (e.g., the autism lie mentioned above). When you know someone has lied to you, you cannot trust the liar ever again–this is ancient wisdom. I, living on the other side of the world and already refusing to communicate with her for fear of more manipulating, had no way of knowing if the messages by phone or email about her dying were real, or just another fabrication to make me feel guilty and manipulate me into making a visit to Canada that I vowed never again to make.
My brother R. wanted me to phone Mom, who was in hospital and on her deathbed, to make regular phone calls and chat with her, something I absolutely didn’t want to do, especially given her ever-impenitent attitude. R. wanted me to put on a show of love, which I refused to do.
He later stumbled upon a YouTube video I’d made about seven years before her death, in which I bitterly recited “This Be the Verse,” by Philip Larkin. The combination of my refusal to call her with my recitation of a poem with a four-letter word made him (freshly grieving over her death) so angry that, instead of letting himself calm down and then later asking me, in the comments section, what Mom had done to make me so mad at her, he made a snarky comment to the effect that I’m apparently mentally “disturbed,” and that I should be ashamed of myself for not loving a mother who, apparently, “loved [me] more than anyone else on the planet.”
No attempt was made at an investigation to find out what happened between Mom and me: there was just an assumption that she was ‘all-good,’ and that I am ‘all-bad.” This is the typical attitude of the false family, which idealizes the narcissistic parent and his or her golden children/flying monkeys, and a further vilifying of the family scapegoat.
The way I acted at her death, combined with my continued enforcement of the NO CONTACT rule, is essentially the family’s motive for never trying to contact me since, save for two or three puny attempts by my sister J.–the number one golden child of the family, who is obligated ‘to love’ her younger brother (for the sake of a show of family virtue, remember)–to contact me by email, Facebook, and Twitter. I never responded to this hoovering, of course.
The thing is, for the great majority of the family, save J. and Mom when she was alive, there was never an interest in contacting me, with ever so few exceptions, for the whole time I’ve lived in Taiwan. R., my other brother F., and all the others have never needed my reaction to Mom’s death as a reason never to contact me.
In our family, the word love is meaningless; the words like and dislike, however, do have meaning. Love for them just means family obligation. While love is supposed to be unconditional (i.e., we can be mad at or resentful of family members because of certain faults of theirs, but we won’t stop loving them for that), this family is selective about whom they care about. R., F., and J., and their spouses and kids (minus any new scapegoats intended to replace me and my cousins) are loved and cared for because they are liked.
As for us scapegoats, though J. pays lip service to caring about me (and is convinced that her fake love is genuine, as was Mom), we could all rot in a leper colony for all R. and F. care. I grudgingly respect my brothers’ attitude to me, since at least there’s a dram of honesty in it.
I’ve known the truth of the above for years, but recently I’ve discovered further proof to consolidate the accuracy of my judgement of them. This new proof lies in their total non-reaction to the growing crisis between China and the US regarding my home here in Taiwan.
It doesn’t matter if the family believes the lies and propaganda being spewed from the mainstream Western media about China wanting ‘to invade’ the ‘nation’ of Taiwan, or if they know the truth that I’ve known, which is that the American government has been trying to provoke China into invading, the way the US and NATO provoked Russia for years into invading Ukraine. My home is in danger of becoming a war zone, in which my wife, her family, and I could suffer and die.
…and my ‘morally superior’ family hasn’t lifted a finger to contact me and offer to get us to safety.
[It is totally unfeasible for me to return to Canada, since apart from my estrangement from the family, my limited skill set–teaching English as a second language–will not find me much of anything in terms of employment there; the vast majority of such jobs, teaching immigrants, are presumably already snatched up. My wife and I moving to Canada would almost guarantee us a future of homelessness. In any case, I have high hopes that the American empire will crumble before it even has a chance of bringing about a war with China.]
Now, a number of objections to what I’ve said need to be addressed and put into proper context. I haven’t exactly made it easy for the family to communicate with me–such is the nature of going NO CONTACT. I blocked them, for example, from sending emails to me; and as I mentioned above, I refused to answer J. in her attempts to contact me through Facebook and Twitter.
That said, though, attempts to contact me are far from impossible. Since they know my internet/pen name, they could contact me here in the comments section. They could contact the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, who in turn could contact me by email or phone. The family could phone me themselves! A simple Google search of Mawr Gorshin could bring up a slew of websites where I can be found, and if I never answer their messages, they can pester me over and over again until I finally relent.
It’s not that they can’t contact me. They just don’t want to.
Please don’t misinterpret my meaning, Dear Reader. I’m not saying that I want them to contact me…No! I’d find such attempts at communicating with me to be nothing less than triggering. But this isn’t about what I want: it’s about what they want.
If my mother were still alive, to her credit, she would have stopped at nothing to break through my defences and get to me. My siblings’ attempts have been less than feeble…and they imagine themselves better than I, a mere scapegoat.
The point I’m trying to make here is that this lack of a response proves that they don’t really love me. There is a continuity between this callous disregard for my safety here in East Asia, and back in the day when I was a kid, when F. used to spit on me and hit me, J. played disgusting games with me when I was about eight or nine, and these two and R. shouting one four-letter word after another at me, usually over minor things I’d done to annoy them.
It simply doesn’t occur to them that I am a human being, with a heart and feelings, who has the same basic rights as everyone else. I’ll bet that R. and F. would smile at the thought of me trapped in a war zone…those two fucking bastards! J. calls them ‘brothers,’ by the way. Anyway, all of this only further justifies my continued estrangement from them.
Another objection to the conclusions I’ve drawn is that the family may mistakenly believe that I’m dead (from Covid, presumably–a virus the vast majority of those having died from being either people in their 70s or 80s, or people who had other health problems, neither of which apply to me). After all, J. sent me her direct Twitter message around that time, and as I said above, I never responded to it.
Aside from the overblown media hysteria around Covid, though, why would my not responding necessarily mean I died? Does J. think someone hacked my Twitter account? All she has to do is follow me there, find my many blog articles posted there, and read some of them to know, by my idiosyncratic writing style (and photo at the top!) that it’s really me. My politics have changed radically since the days when we were still talking to each other, but changing one’s political opinions (in my case, from centre-right to hard-left) is surprising, but far from impossible.
But again, this issue leads back to my argument before: if they really need to know if I’m alive or dead, they can just keep pushing and nagging online until I finally respond, or get the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office to contact me. If I’m dead, have they received proof of it? Did they get a death certificate? Has a corpse been produced?
Merely assuming I’m dead is just an excuse not to try to find out for sure. Again, it’s not that they can’t find out for sure. They just don’t think I’m worth the effort…these people who routinely bullied and belittled me when I was a kid, who deliberately undermined my ability to develop self-confidence, and whom Mom never reprimanded for it.
…and it justifies my estrangement from them all the more.
Their reason for not loving me is not because of my faults: everyone has faults, but some people’s faults are put under a magnifying glass (mine and my cousins), while others’ faults are swept under the rug (R.’s, F.’s, J.’s, and our parents’). It’s a vicious double standard, and it’s proof that my family is a false one.
Now, what I want to say to you, Dear Reader, is that if you find yourself the scapegoat of a false family, know that it’s not your fault that they don’t love you (though they may pretend to); it is their fault. They are supposed to love you, and it is their failure, not yours, that they don’t truly love you.
So give yourself heaps of love, to compensate for what they so cruelly denied you, because you’re worth it.
[Postscript: If by chance any of my elder siblings, or anyone else in the family back in Canada, should contact me here in the comments section, my response would be a quote I heard from my condescending sister decades ago: “You’ve left it a little late, haven’t you?” The US has been banging the war drums against China for years now. It’s been a hot item in the news for at least about a year, since Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan last summer…and only now do they contact me, if they ever plan to?]
It’s celebration time here at home! Four hours into it, and I’ve already had a glass of red wine to start off, then two glasses of Kahlúa and milk, three glasses of Bailey’s Irish Cream, and four glasses of Jim Beam and Coke.
I. Am. So. Wasted.
I’ve been listening to music from YouTube videos, often annoyed by the ad interruptions. For the past hour, I’ve been playing a compilation video of songs from the 1980s. At the moment, I’m hearing one I haven’t heard in years. I don’t remember who did the song; I’m too wasted even to remember the song’s name, as ridiculous as that sounds.
The rhythm section sounds like a combination of heavy pounding on the drums with a drum machine. The keyboards are dark and eerie, while the singer–whose voice sounds really familiar, but I’m too drunk to place it–keeps doing a perverse, evil laugh.
What I do remember, and vividly at that, about the song is a line I’m singing along to: “Don’t leave me, Mama!” I sing it out loud, powerfully…then I remember my neighbours, above, below, and on either side of my apartment. I listen carefully for any reactions to the noise I’m making.
All I hear, apart from the song, is a feminine voice whispering, “I won’t leave you, Roger…ever.”
I stagger, almost falling on the floor.
*************
Several days have passed by since my little solo party on the night of the funeral day. I was too oppressed by my killer hangover the next day even to give a second’s thought about the voice I’d heard. So far, since hearing that whisper, I haven’t noticed anything disturbing or unusual.
My aunt is running the pet food store with the expected efficiency. I begged her to let me call her just by her name, without “Aunt”: she’s grudgingly allowing me to, thank God.
Sometimes, as I’m walking from my apartment to the pet food store, or the other way around, or if I’m out for any reason, such as to buy something from the grocery store, I’ll see that man again. He’ll gesture to me, wanting to get me to talk to him. I’ll turn my head away and pretend he’s not there. I really hope he’ll get the hint and stop bothering me.
Anyway, here I am on the sidewalk, on my way to the pet food store. As I’m walking past a park, I can see that man sitting on a bench under a tree. Oh, God, he’s waving at me! I’m turning my head away to ignore him–that should work.
Wait…what’s that over there? The face on the street sign on the other side of the street. It’s showing a man selling beer, but the mouth is moving. I hear, “Go on. Talk to him,” in a feminine voice.
It’s the voice of my mother.
I trip over a break in the sidewalk and fall on my face. As I get up, I can hear people laughing at me.
****************
Having arrived at work, I’m visibly shaken, for my aunt has noticed the fear on my face. “Roger, what’s wrong?” she asks.
“Oh, uh…I fell down,” I say. “It was embarrassing. People were laughing at me. You know how sensitive I am about that kind of thing.”
“Well, be more careful,” she says. “When you change into your Pet Valu shirt, the first thing I want you to do is face the cans.”
“OK,” I say; I change into the shirt, and go into an aisle to face the cat food cans. I see a middle-aged couple entering the store–a man and his wife, I assume. They’re coming into my aisle to look at the cat food.
After looking at the cans for a while, the woman says, “Hmm. No Whiskas to be seen anywhere here.”
“We should be getting a shipment later today,” I tell her. “Any time, really. I’m surprised it isn’t already here.”
“Could you ask your boss, please?” she asks.
“Sure,” I say. “Ma–er, Aunt–er, J-Jane?”
“Yes, Roger?” I hear her say with a sigh of annoyance, obviously from my not calling her Aunt Jane. “What is it?”
“Have the Whiskas arrived yet?” I ask her.
“The truck is on its way as we speak,” she says.
“When do you think it will get here?” I ask. “There’s a lady here who wants to buy some.”
“It should be here in about ten minutes,” she says.
“Can you wait ten minutes?” I ask the customer.
“Well, I’ll come back in about a half hour,” she says. Then, just as she’s walking away, I hear her say, “Go talk to that man in the park.”
Her voice changed distinctly into that of my mother.
The cans I had in my hands have fallen to the floor, just barely missing my feet.
**************
I haven’t heard Mama’s voice at all for the rest of the day, but I’ve been shaking the whole time. Is that voice real, or have I been imagining it? It sounds too exact, too vivid, to be an auditory hallucination.
After a week, I’m lying in bed at night, drifting off…
At night, I see the graveyard where Mama was buried. My eyes are like a movie camera, slowly coming closer to her grave. I see a yellow mist rising from the ground before the headstone. The mist stays there for a moment, hovering there. Then it floats away.
I see it moving down the street, in the direction of my apartment. My camera-like eyes follow the mist like a tracking shot. A white fog, like the kind you’d see in England, is all around, surrounding the original mist, which is still floating along, a hazy spot of yellow moving in the white haze. The yellow reaches my home.
It slips through my bedroom window like a ghost. Indeed, it is a ghost, for it wakes me from my sleep. I hear Mama’s voice: “Roger! Roger, wake up! It’s Mama.”
I wake up and look at the yellow mist, in the centre of which I see her face forming. She is grinning malevolently at me. “What do you want?” I ask in a tremulous voice. “You haven’t come here to kill me, have you? Have you come here for revenge?”
“Oh, no!” she says in a hissing voice. “On the contrary, I want to thank you for helping me to liberate myself from the limitations of my physical life.”
“Limitations?” I ask, my eyes and mouth wide open.
“Yes. Being in a body puts great constraints on the magical powers that a witch like me can use. Now that I am all spirit, I am free to roam anywhere and do anything I like. Killing myself wouldn’t have worked, because the spirit world frowns on suicide as a sin, just like the Church does. So I needed to prod you into making that voodoo doll and killing me with it. And you, my dutiful son, did exactly that! You freed me from the prison of my body, and now I want to thank you for your gift of love! My good boy!”
“And what are you planning to do with all your newfound freedom?”
“Oh, I’m planning all kinds of mischief! Nothing I can tell you about in detail, though, since you, now acquainted with the magical arts, might try to stop me. If you want to stop me, you’ll have to hone your skills to a level matching a witch who’s been a master for decades, so you’ll have a lot of catching up to do. And with that bad habit of yours, always seeing and hearing things, you already have quite a bad handicap, so I’d advise not even trying to interfere with my plans, OK? Gotta go now, son. I have some wickedness to indulge in, now that my corporeal chains have been broken, thanks to you. Oh, how delightful it is to have power over so many people! What fun this will be! Don’t worry about it. You’ll see what I’m up to soon enough. ‘Bye!”
The glowing, golden mist evaporates, leaving me in total darkness.
I rise from my bed with wide open eyes, a pounding heartbeat, and sweat all over me. I’m shaking. My bedroom is as black as it was before, minus the mist. Was that a dream, or a vision? It’s hard to tell the difference between the two. Has this all been real, or have I been imagining it? Is Mama really a ghost, reappearing in my life to torment me, or is all of this just a reflection of my fears and guilt?
Come to think of it, it makes perfect sense that she would have planned my killing of her with the voodoo doll. That was far too easy; surely, she would have known, or at least suspected, what I was doing, with her far greater mastery of magic. So as strange as it may seem to believe she’s returned as a spirit, believing I, a novice in magic, could outwit her, is even less plausible.
This must be real.
As a witch, she’d know all about the spirit world and how to use it to aid her in her manipulative purposes. To become such a spirit herself would simply be the next step for her, no longer needing the aid of other spirits.
I’m in trouble.
The whole world is in trouble.
I’m not going back to sleep, that’s for sure.
Today’s
world’s
a game
which is
played
by fools,
teetering,
a tower
liable to
fall at any
time now.
The left
is
marginalized
as
usual.
Few, if any,
are
listening
to any of
their
dire
warnings.
The right
is
dominating
discourse
while
pretending
that
affairs
aren’t
enough
to
the
right.
The centre
pretends
to be
left,
while
inching
further
and
further
to
the
right.
Pieces
keep
being
pulled
out
without
any
regard
for
balance.
The edifice
will one day fall to the floor,
a heap of ruins we’ll have to clean up,
yet may not live to do so. There are far too
many holes in the stack as it is: let’s be careful.
I: Dedication
This short story is dedicated to my Facebook friend, she who goes by the intriguing pseudonym of Dorian Grey (I must do an analysis of that novel one of these days; in the meantime, there’s this one, which has lots of allusions to the novel.), and she whose AI art is full of black cats, witches, mushrooms, cat-women, nuns, etc., which have inspired this story as well as my other one, “Sister Sorceress.” This story is also dedicated to her “old familiar,” Peta, and a friend of hers, Cain Helsson. I hope they like what I wrote.
II: Loss
Clara Jefferson bawled as she held the dead body of Ptah, her beloved black cat named after an Egyptian god, in her arms. The loss of this pet, her only friend in this whole rotten, cruel, uncaring, stinking world, was unbearable to her.
The one thing that gave her the hope to carry on was that she had been practicing sorcery for so long. The shelves on her walls were filled with books on such topics as ceremonial magic, how to contact the spirit world, various spells, world mythologies and religions, and the like. At the age of forty-five, Clara had been studying these books for almost thirty years. She was a master, and now she was about to work out a master plan to resurrect her cat.
It was either resurrect Ptah, or kill herself, for she knew she could never live without him. She hadn’t become a master of the spiritual and magical arts just to commit suicide, though.
She already knew, from memory, a number of rituals and spells she could use in aid of bringing Ptah back to life; but this would be such a difficult and complex act of sorcery that she would have to study hard, in the minutest detail, to get this done right. She put the cat’s body on the floor and immediately reached for a few books on her shelves.
She spent hours perusing these and many other books, jotting down notes, ignoring her hunger and fatigue. After reading enough, for the moment, she decided it was time to summon the spirits to give her aid and counsel.
…and which spirits were those that she confided in?
Trusting few, if any, people in this world of liars, cheaters, abusers, rapists, and corrupt politicians and clergy, Clara had sought the rarest, most obscure religious traditions she could find, searching for one untainted by the lure of money and power. She learned of the ancient pagan traditions of the Liput, an old tribe living on a small island off the west coast of what is now Finland. Over two thousand years ago, the Liput practiced animism and a kind of polytheism that phased into pantheism, or a spiritual oneness of all things. Such ideas appealed to Clara.
III: Summoning Divine Aid
Deep in a state of meditation, she was beginning to hear the soft, inarticulate moans of Talas, the Liput goddess of the sea. Soon, those moans became intelligible speech, the ancient language of the tribe, in which Clara had become fluent after years of rigorous study.
I know what you want, the goddess said in Clara’s mind. Are you aware of the great price you will have to pay to get Ptah back?
Yes, I’m aware, Clara said in her thoughts to Talas. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. I still want my cat back.
It is not natural to move the energy, which has left your cat, back to its body, the goddess warned. All life comes and goes, Clara. You must accept that. You should allow the energy of Ptah to flow where it will in the universe, wherever that may be, as far away from you as it may be. Give up your attachment to your dead cat, and your suffering will end.
I want my cat back! Clara insisted in her thoughts. She was moaning and sobbing. I’ll do anything to get him back!
Very well, Talas answered. There is a way to bring Ptah back, but you will need the aid of Lechi, the Liput god of mischief. In your studies of us gods, you’ll know his ways. He can be outright evil if he wants to be. However you negotiate your way into getting his aid, you will have to be extremely watchful of his tricks. Ensuring that you have come the closest you can to having your genuine cat back, in body and spirit, while also ensuring that he can do as little wickedness to you, in body and spirit, as possible, will demand the subtlest and cleverest use of spells and ritual magic that you can possibly muster.
I’m aware of the complications and dangers, Clara told Talas. To work with Lechi, while making my ritual flawless, will be like navigating a mine field. Still, I want to do this.
I will summon Lechi for you tomorrow morning. For now, study your books thoroughly. Take no detail for granted. Think of every possible obstacle, for he will find ways to get through your protective walls. Good luck, Clara.
Thank you, Talas.
Remember that the cat you resurrect, even through the best and most careful of rituals, won’t be absolutely the same as Ptah was. It may be the most ingenious of facsimiles, but it can never be exactly the same cat, however close it may come to such sameness.
I’m prepared to accept that.
Also know that as tight as your security is against Lechi, he will find some way to get at you, however slight that way may be for him. What he does to you will be, at the very least, something unsettling, something disturbing. Your safety against him may be impressively close to perfect, but never absolutely perfect. He is a god, after all, and you are just a mortal. You will have to accept whatever he demands from you in return for his aid, however you may circumscribe it.
I understand, Clara told Talas before the goddess vanished.
IV: Fear of Violation
After reading through all of the relevant passages in her books, anticipating what to expect from Lechi, Clara got out all of her tools and magical weapons, laying them out all over the floor of the red room where the ritual was to be done. These weapons were all daggers and swords, and the tools included several wands. A large magic circle was drawn on the floor, with a pentacle inside.
So many daggers and swords were needed to repel Lechi’s advances, since Clara knew, from her extensive reading, of how lewd and lascivious the god was. His sexual proclivities, being often quite perverse, triggered the most sensitive of feelings in her, for Clara was first raped by her father when she was a teen. In fact, she got into magic in order to learn how to protect herself from his lust.
Her mother had ignored her cries for help when he was preying on her, conniving at it, even, so Clara would satisfy his desire so her mother wouldn’t have to. It was for reasons such as these that Clara eventually used her magic to kill both of them in a car accident, then collect their vast amount of money and property so she could live self-sufficiently without need of a job.
She’d feed herself through gardening and a vegetarian diet; her garden was also where she collected various magical properties and drugs from her herbs and many mushrooms. Having no job was a blessing: no need to deal with so may people in whom she had no trust.
She did her rituals in the nude, and sometimes peeping Toms would watch her through her windows at night. Though forty-five now, she used her magic to ensure she’d always have the shapely, buxom figure of a twenty-year-old. Nine lecherous men in her neighbourhood liked her for her beauty, though through her magic, she made sure they’d never get their filthy hands on her!
She shuddered every time she realized any of those nine men were looking in her window during her rituals, often feeling PTSD flashbacks of what her father had done to her. This was why she needed so many consecrated daggers and swords, all fanned out in a circle surrounding her: they were a crucial part of her magical, protective wall, ensuring that no one could ever get inside her house, already protected with an electronic security system to be extra sure, or get at her body.
In fact, she was so sure of the efficacy of her daggers and swords that she found it amusing to think that those voyeurs/potential rapists all wanted the lovely naked body they saw, but could never have it. Her tantalizing of those men was her torturous punishment for all rapists.
Still, dealing with Lechi would be far more difficult. She’d need more than her daggers and swords to keep him away from her. They would be necessary, but not sufficient; and sure enough, having her delicious body would be one of his demands in exchange for his help in resurrecting Ptah. Clara would have to be extra subtle in tricking him into thinking he’d get what he wanted, while ensuring he’d never actually get it.
V: Lechi
The next morning, nude and meditating in the red room, sitting in the middle of her magic circle and pentacle, she summoned Lechi.
You are lovely, he told her mentally, in what felt to her like a grunt of lust, as he studied every inch of her body. I already know what I will want in return for helping you get your cat back.
Talas told you? Clara asked him in her thoughts.
No, I read your mind just now, my pretty.
She shuddered, knowing how difficult it would be to stop a mind-reader from knowing of her plan to cheat him out of having her. She would have to bury her thoughts and feelings deep down in her unconscious if she was to have any hope of him not detecting them.
I know what you want from me, she told him. I know your reputation as an incubus. Please spare me the filthy details. Just tell me what I have to do to get Ptah back, and I’ll do whatever you want.
One detail I must share, he insisted. I want to have you in a physical form, not just as a spirit. I want to enjoy you sensually.
Very well, she told him while a tear ran down her cheek. What must I do in the ritual to bring my cat back from the dead?
One thing crucial to the success of your ritual will be the collection of nine human skulls, he said.
May I dig them up from a graveyard? she asked.
No! You must have nine people decapitated. Have someone else do it for you, to deflect the bad karma away from you. Your killing of your mother and father is already a bad enough karmic burden for you. Find a young, strong, but naïve man who is in love with you; such a man would be willing to do anything for your love, and your magic and mushroom drugs should make him all the more obedient to your will. Gordon Marsh, from your neighbourhood, would be a good choice.
She trembled again at the realization of how thorough Lechi’s knowledge was of her private thoughts–to know of her killing of her parents–and of her neighbours. He’d only just come here, and already he knew of Gordon, one of the peeping Toms! Outwitting this god would be a formidable task. Still, she wanted Ptah back, and would do anything to have him again.
Why must it be nine skulls, specifically? she asked Lechi.
Come, come, Clara! A sorceress who has practiced for as many years as you have should already know of the symbolism of nine. Three symbolizes completion, so three times three reinforces that completion. Also, cats have nine lives, don’t they? Not literally, of course, but my point is that not only can I help you get Ptah back, but I can also allow you two potentially to live forever together…would you not like that? That is what the ‘nine lives’ will symbolize. Finally, I am aware that there are nine people in this neighbourhood whom you would like to see dead, are there not?
Yes, there are, she answered, remembering not only the eight peeping Toms other than Gordon, but also the woman she suspected of poisoning her cat for always trespassing in her garden, Ms. Bellows…that bitch! Still, such killings would be dangerous to her in terms of karma, as desirable as they were to her, so her next question to Lechi (though she already knew the answer to it) was this: and why must I have nine people die so Ptah can live?
Oh, Clara, I am disappointed in you! You surely know the religion of the Liput better than that! You’ve read of the unity of opposites as a central feature of the tribe’s belief system. There is also the unity of life and death. To have the one, you must allow its opposite. To bring about Ptah’s life, you will have to bring about someone’s death.
Yes, I suppose so, she acknowledged.
And with my willingness not only to help you bring your cat back, but also to let you and him live potentially forever in love and happiness, surely you will be willing to let me enjoy you while I am in physical form? he asked. She could feel his lewd smirk. Not only do I assure you that I will not hurt you at all, but I will also make it most pleasurable for you, even more than for myself.
His promises reminded her of her father’s words before raping her: “Don’t worry, honey,” Dad would say while unzipping his fly. “I’ll be gentle. In fact, I’ll make it better for you than it is for me.”
She cringed at the recollection, but she couldn’t let on to Lechi that she was unwilling to indulge the god in his disgusting desires. Very well, she told him. As you wish.
Good, he replied. Go find that young man, Gordon Marsh. Get him to hack off the nine heads. He, as one of your peeping Toms, could be incited to do the violence with a combination of you promising him he can enjoy your charms with a spell you can put on him to make him more obedient.
Yes, Lechi, I’ll do all of these things. Just help me get my cat back, she begged.
I will keep my promises if you keep yours, Clara.
He vanished.
VI: Preparations
Resurrecting Ptah would test her skills at magic to the maximum. Could she outwit a god? Could she ensure that Lechi kept his promise to her while she failed to keep her promise to satisfy his lust? She would have to set up powerful spells to keep him bound to his promises, while also sufficiently augmenting her sword-and-dagger protection against his every attempt to ravish her.
Also, she’d have to ensure, through her own spells and the structure of her ritual, that the resurrected cat really was Ptah, in body and spirit. Though Talas was right to remind her that the resurrected cat could never be 100% Ptah, Clara had to try to bring him as close to that 100% as possible–97%, 98%, at least.
She certainly didn’t want the new cat to be anything like “Church,” from that old Stephen King novel. She wanted a cat to cuddle, not one to recoil from.
She immediately went to work at preparing her spells and ritual for defence, for restoring Ptah as faithfully as she could, for deflecting away from herself the bad karma for the killings, and for charming Gordon into committing them.
Her extensive study of the ancient Liput language, a ritually powerful one, allowed her to remember certain ambiguities of meaning that she could use to her advantage. She could remember them without need of consciously thinking about them, which mind-reading Lechi might pick up on and thus thwart her plans.
One such ambiguity was in the meaning of the Liput word zvarge, which could mean “container” or “cage.” She could use this word in her ritual when putting Lechi’s spirit in the body of her cat. Ptah’s body would contain his spirit, yet also cage it, that is, trap it. The nuances of zvarge could be used to trick him into thinking he’d be put into a body–pita in Liput–when really he’d be trapped in her cat…forever able only to see and hear her, and to receive Clara’s touch, but never able to control Ptah’s body.
Lechi would thus be like John Cusack’s character at the end of Being John Malkovich: trapped in a girl’s body, forced to see, hear, and sense only what the girl wants to, and never able to control her body. Clara planned to do the exact same thing to the souls of the nine decapitated people, as well as with Gordon when she was finished with him. She’d sense the longing of all of them in Ptah’s eyes, while only receiving the affection of her cat. She considered such a punishment–such an imprisonment–fitting for all those potential rapists, as she saw them.
She would be sure to say the words zvarge and pita (this second word with the accent on the second syllable, making its pronunciation identical with that of Ptah) nine times, to reinforce the completeness of the imprisonment of all those lechers, to ensure her safety…and revenge.
The nine skulls would be used to augment the protective power of her swords and daggers, making it sufficient to keep Lechi away. She’d have the spirits of the nine decapitated to act as eunuch guards, so to speak, of her body, to ensure no violation of her.
Another convenient ambiguity in meaning was that of the Liput word slivu, which literally meant “decapitated,” but which metaphorically meant “castrated,” “emasculated,” or “impotent.” Her saying of this word nine times in her ritual would also ensure no danger of rape.
Clara would say these words with no especial emphasis on them, to suggest no alternative meanings to the basic ones, while allowing the ambiguities to slip by, undetected by Lechi. She felt she was safe.
VII: Gordon
Now that everything was planned, she had to find Gordon. He seemed a rather simple soul, easily manipulated. He was easy to find, too, for all she had to do was look out her front window and there he was, standing before her house on the sidewalk, looking in, obsessively hoping to see her.
Trembling and reluctant, she nonetheless put on her best smile, went over to her front door, and opened it.
“Hi, Gordon,” she said. “Come here. I wanna talk to you.”
“Oh, hi, Clara,” he said, amazed that she finally noticed him. Smiling back, he hurried over to her. Now standing on her porch two feet in front of her, he was trembling and excited. “What can I do for you?”
“Actually, it’s what I can do for you,” she purred, “if you do something for me, that’s what matters.”
“Oh?” he asked stupidly, his erection pushing painfully against his pants.
“Yes,” she said, still smiling. “Did you know I’m a witch?”
“A witch?“
“Yes.” she dropped her black dress, revealing her frontal nakedness to his amazed eyes.
He was overcome with the sight of all of that lovely, creamy flesh. Unable to resist, he reached over with one had to grab one of her large breasts, and with the other to stroke her shaved vulva.
“Uksha leida binko!” she shouted at him, the Liput words shooting at him like bullets from a machine gun, and the magic causing an electric force field to form, protecting her body from his intrusive fingers, giving them a shock.
“Oww!” he shouted, sheepishly pulling his hands back.
“You may look, but not touch!” she said angrily. “Only when you have done what I want you to do will I let you touch me. For now, enjoy only looking, to motivate you to do my will.” She turned around to give him a view of her curves and her callipygian behind. He gazed at her milky skin, stunned at its flawlessness.
“W-what would you have me do, goddess?”
“Robaya kinestro koubra,” she said, making her dress rise up and go back on her body. “You’ve seen enough, and as you can see, I really am a witch. How old do you think I am?”
“I dunno. Early twenties?”
“I’m forty-five. I look so young because of my magic. That should be enough to convince you that my magic is real. Do you believe I’m a witch now?”
“Not the ugly kind, that’s for sure,” he said. “I’d say you’re a goddess, with your beauty.”
“Aww, you’re so sweet,” she said, smiling and caressing his cheek, which made him sigh and moan. “Are you ready to do what I need you to do, Gordon?”
“Yes, Goddess! I’ll do anything for your love!”
“Anything? Even decapitate nine people with one of my consecrated swords, remove all the flesh, hair, and innards, and give me the skulls for a ritual I need to do?”
He stood speechless and motionless for about ten seconds.
Finally, he asked, “H-how w-will I avoid jail?”
“My magic will protect you from the police,” she assured him.
“What if these people a-are too strong for m-me to overpower them?”
“My magic will give you the strength you need.”
“What if I can’t…I m-mean, what if I don’t have the…stomach to do a-all this bloody business? Cleaning o-off skulls, a-and everything?”
“My magic will give you the ability, physical and emotional, to do all of that.”
“L-look, I’m really crazy about you, Clara, but I-I don’t know if I’m u-up to killing a…”
“Shadzock abba ultika!” she said while looking dead straight into his eyes. He felt a line of energy go straight from her eyes into his.
He was shaking, his eyes and mouth wide open.
“You will do what I need you to do, Gordon. You will not flinch. You will not question it. You will obey me from the beginning to the end.” She kept her steely eyes fixed on his the whole time. “Do you understand, Gordon?”
“Yes, I understand, Clara. I will obey you.” He stood there in a trance.
“Good. I’ll go and get the sword you will use to kill the nine people.” She went back into the red room, got the sword, and returned to him. “Here it is. You will kill these nine people from our neighbourhood: Kurt Davies, Ron Sweeney, Bill Wynn, Shaun Holmes, Jim Fredricks, Phil Sulikowsky, Chris Culig, Jon Schmidt, and Ms. Adrianna Bellows. You know all of them, right?”
“Yes, I know them all. Those eight guys are all big and strong. Your magic will help me win in fights with them all? I hate them all for always watching you, knowing they’d probably have a better chance with you than I could ever have; so I’ll be glad to get rid of them…with your help, of course. But why Ms. Bellows? What did she do to you?”
“She killed my cat, which I want to bring back to life.”
“Oh, you have enough power to do that, eh?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then, you’ll have enough power to help me kill those guys?”
“Of course I will,” she said with perfect confidence.
He smiled.
“Those guys bully you a lot, don’t they?”
He sighed and frowned, then said, “Yes.”
“Then you have all the more motive to kill them. Go.“
VIII: The Killings
That night, Jon Schmidt was parking his car in his garage. After he got out and closed the door, he heard a shuffling noise in the shadowy corner behind a stack of boxes near the door into the house. He stepped forward.
“Is that you, Ginger?” he asked, thinking it was his cat.
As he got closer, he saw a human figure in the shadows.
“Hey, who are you?” he said defensively.
Gordon emerged from the boxes with the sword.
Jon laughed. “What? That’s you, Scrotum Breath? WIth a sword? You’re gonna kill me with that? You’re so weak, I bet you can’t even lift it.” He continued laughing.
Gordon felt a surge of magical energy buzzing in his arms. That warm tingling was his cue to action. He raised the sword effortlessly to the level of Jon’s neck.
Jon was impressed. “Wow, you can lift it.”
Gordon swung the blade in a graceful arc, cutting off Jon’s head in a smooth stroke.
**************
About a half hour later, Jim Fredericks was sitting on a chair in his backyard patio enjoying a beer and listening to music on his iPod. He’d had his eyes closed for much of the time, so Gordon was able to sneak in with his sword and a large bag holding Jon’s head.
When Jim opened his eyes to reach for his beer, though, he saw a black silhouette moving in the bushes by his fence. “Who is that?” he whispered, then removed his earplugs and got up.
He stepped off the patio and walked across the grass with caution, as tipsy as he was. That human silhouette in the bushes remained unmoving.
“What are you doing on my property, whoever you are?” he said, squinting and failing to make out any details that might have identified the intruder.
Gordon remained silent and still as Jim came closer.
“This isn’t funny. Get off my property, or I’ll pick you up and throw you out.”
Jim was now right in front of the bushes.
“Come out of there!” He brushed a few leaves aside and saw a familiar face. “Scrotum Breath?”
The sword went through his gut before he could laugh his first “Ha.”
************
Twenty minutes after that, Gordon slipped through the unlocked back door of Jim’s next door neighbour, Ron Sweeney, whom Gordon saw lying fast asleep on the living room sofa. The TV was left on, at a low volume, but enough to mask any sounds of Gordon entering and approaching.
By the time Gordon was standing right in front of the sofa, though, with the sword raised up high and ready to come down, slicing into Ron’s neck, his eyes were half open, just making out the black outline of Gordon’s figure.
Ron whined and trembled at first, then switched on the nearby lamp. “Scrotum…?”
The sword had already sliced through before he could say “Breath.” His head fell on the floor and rolled a few times in the direction of the TV.
***********
Carrying a bag with three heads, our swordsman got to the house of Chris Culig about a half hour later. He was taking out the garbage, at the side of his house.
Chris reached for the lid of one of the garbage cans. Gordon was in it, his sword coming up and stabbing Chris in the chest before he could say that hateful nickname.
************
Shaun Holmes lived two doors down from Chris, so Gordon could get there and ready to kill in about ten minutes. Clara’s magic was working like a dream, for though he could hear the screams of neighbours and police car sirens, he felt a kind of force field surrounding him, assuring him that, no matter how sloppy and careless he was being with these killings, he was easily eluding the cops.
Again, the door was left unlocked, thanks to Clara’s magical influence, so Gordon was able to slip inside. Sensing, again, through her magical guidance, that Shaun was coming down from the bedroom to get a bite from the fridge, Gordon waited by the kitchen.
Shaun went in the kitchen with the light left off. He opened the fridge door and focused on all the food he saw there: chicken, a half-finished cherry pie, three quarters of a chocolate cake, etc. He licked his lips as he thought about which food to choose. Finally, after ten seconds of consideration, he chose the pie.
He took the plate of pie out, then looked up from the fridge. The light from the opened door alerted him to the presence of his killer, who hacked his head off after he gave a gasp.
The clanging of the sword against the freezer door, and the smashing of the plate on the floor, were noisy enough to rouse his wife from their bed; but Clara’s magic muted the sounds.
***********
Kurt Davies lived several blocks down the road from Shaun, but Gordon was able to get to him within about ten minutes, because he saw a drunken Kurt staggering on the sidewalk just a few houses from Shaun’s. Gordon tiptoed a few feet behind his next victim.
He particularly hated Kurt for, among many other reasons, inventing the “Scrotum Breath” nickname. Now that he had confidence in his skill at wielding the sword (with Clara’s magical guidance, of course, since normally Gordon was rather spastic), he wanted Kurt to see who his killer was.
“Hey, Kurt,” he whispered from just by Kurt’s right ear.
“Huh?” the drunk said while turning his head.
“This is for you, courtesy of Scrotum Breath,” Gordon said while swinging the sword. Kurt was only able to say the “Sc” before the blade slashed through his neck.
*************
Killing a woman would be hard for Gordon to do, even with Clara’s magic pushing him to do it.
Ms. Bellows’s house was just a few houses down the street from where Gordon had put Kurt’s head in the bag. Though slowed down with reluctance, he knew he had to get it over with, and her house’s proximity made now the sensible time to do it.
He went up to her porch and put his hand on the doorknob. When he turned it, he was relieved to find it locked at first…then he heard a click, unlocking it. Clara’s magic, for sure.
He gulped and stepped inside. She had to be in bed asleep by now. He found the stairs and went up them, as slowly and quietly as he could.
Ms. Bellows was an unpleasant woman, to be sure: cranky, often crabbing at people for some petty reason or another. She once growled at Gordon for walking on her front lawn. But did she deserve to die, and in such a bloody way?
At the top of the stairs, he was now walking down the hall to where he could hear her snoring in her bedroom. At the door and about to turn the knob, he was hesitating: killing those guys for Clara was fine, even enjoyable, but decapitating Ms. Bellows was too much.
Just then, he heard Clara’s voice whispering in his ear: She killed my cat, whom I loved dearly and who deserves to be avenged. Kill Ms. Bellows, and you can have me forever, Gordon.
He turned the doorknob as carefully as he could, not that she’d hear it over her snoring. He walked over to the bed. He raised the sword over his head.
He heard police sirens outside. His hands were shaking. He felt that force field around himself, giving assurance that the cops wouldn’t get him, but he still felt pangs of guilt over killing a defenceless, middle-aged widow in her sleep, all just over a cat.
He looked back from the window and down at her.
Her eyes opened.
She saw his dark silhouette standing over her.
She gasped, shook, and clutched her weak heart.
He brought the sword down, silencing her forever.
***********************
As he lugged the heavy bag of heads out of Ms. Bellows’s house and back to the sidewalk, amazed that the cops taking Kurt’s headless body away on a stretcher found him invisible, Gordon was shaking and nauseous over this last killing. At least there were only two left to kill now, and they were guys he didn’t like at all.
Phil Sulikowsky’s house was on the other side of the block from Ms. Bellows’s, so Gordon had to lug that big, heavy bag all the way around. When he got there, he saw Phil walking his dog, returning from the park.
They were facing each other. “What’re you doing out with that bag, Scrotum Breath?” Phil asked, then chuckled. “Hey, I got some chocolate for you.” He gestured with the plastic bag of his dog’s shit.
Gordon was so angry that he raised the sword and rushed at Phil, even screaming, knowing Clara’s magic would make everyone else deaf to it.
“Hey, what are you…?” Phil said, eyes agape. “No!”
His head spun a few times in the air, blood spraying everywhere.
***********
One more man to kill: Bill Wynn, Phil’s neighbour from across the road.
Baggy-eyed, exhausted, and emotionally drained, Gordon plodded over to the house like one of the undead.
He stood by the porch, with the sword hidden behind him, looking through the front window and seeing Bill in his living room. Bill looked back, saw Gordon, and went over to his front door.
He opened the door and said, “What the fuck are you doing on my lawn, Scrotum Breath? Get out of here.”
“Come out here and make me,” Gordon hissed.
“You telling me what to do? Oh, you’re gonna get it now.”
Bill went out on the porch with a balled fist. He went down the steps and on the grass where Gordon was. Before he could swing, though, the sword suddenly appeared and went through Bill’s gut and out the other side. Gordon’s bloody work was finished.
IX: The Ritual
Everything was now ready. Gordon had brought the bag of heads to Clara’s house. She had him run bath water over all of them, and as the water poured from the shower nozzle onto each head, she said a magical formula in Liput and waved a magic wand in the shape of a pentacle, making all the skin, hair, eyes, ears, and everything inside each head dissolve and disintegrate, and leaving only nine skulls.
Since Gordon had blood all over him, she even used her magic to clean him and his clothes. She needed all traces of the violence removed from her ritual, to ensure that no bad karma would contaminate it.
Everything was laid out as planned in the red room, around the magic circle and pentacle. The swords and daggers were fanned out in all directions, with the nine skulls at the tips of the swords (including the one Gordon had used), all along the periphery of the circle and facing outwards, to keep out any unwelcome spirits, including Lechi’s, most especially, for the moment at least.
Clara, nude, was sitting in the middle of the circle with Ptah’s body in her lap; she’d used magic to keep the corpse from decomposing and putrefying. Gordon was standing in the circle, facing her, but also in a magically-induced trance, to ensure that he couldn’t interfere with the ritual in any way.
Indeed, she was worried that the magic she had used on him wasn’t as effective as she’d hoped it would be. During the killings, he’d showed signs of reluctance and hesitation that shouldn’t have been there at all. She would have to use stronger formulas and incantations to keep him fully under her control.
After all, she had no intention whatsoever of keeping her promise to satisfy his desires in bed, any more than she did with Lechi. Their souls were to be trapped forever in Ptah’s body, able only to see, hear, and feel her passively; the cat alone would retain control of his body.
When Gordon and Lechi were to realize that they were being double-crossed, they were naturally going to try to get out of their prison in Ptah’s brain. Clara was going to have to ensure the prevention of such a danger. She knew some incantations that surely would work to stop these two would-be lovers.
Just before the ritual began, she gave Gordon a cup of hot tea she’d prepared. “Here, Gordon. Drink this.”
“Thank you,” he said, taking the cup and saucer from her. “What is it?”
“Just tea,” she said with a smile. “It’ll help you to relax during the ritual. Drink up.”
As he sipped it, she watched him, noting how he was–in spite of the trance she’d put him in–still shaken up after having killed those people. She needed him to be totally calm, relaxed, in a meditative, suggestible state of mind.
…and magic mushroom tea would do the trick.
He gulped it all down, suspecting nothing, even as he saw her lips moving, whispering a secret incantation to make the drugged tea take effect faster.
Within ten minutes of his having drunk all of it, she was ready to begin, for she could see that his trance-like state was now complete with the aid of the tea. She began the ritual by summoning Lechi, and having the god’s spirit enter Gordon’s body, feeling all of his physicality.
What is this? Lechi thought. Gordon is…under the influence…of mushroom tea. I can feel his…euphoria, and his dazedness. I told Clara…to have him…ingest her mushroom drugs…so she could better…control him…while he was killing…the nine people…not during…this ritual.
She then used this incantation–“Ud Lechi eek zvarge im atta dis Gordon”–to ensure Lechi’s caging, or containment, in Gordon’s soul, or self. There was yet another useful ambiguity in the Liput language: atta could mean self, or soul.
Lechi, already addled by the high from the mushroom tea, wouldn’t notice the ambiguous meaning of atta. The god would think that his spirit was being contained in Gordon’s self, his person, his body, rather than caged in Gordon’s soul. Lechi would think he was merely being put in Gordon’s body so he could enjoy sex with her, rather than being eternally imprisoned in Gordon’s soul. This spiritual incarceration would ensure her safety against ever being sexually assaulted.
To be sure of this safety, Clara of course said this incantation nine times, each time pointing herself in the direction of one of the nine protective swords. Her next incantation would be this: “Ud Lechi ed Gordon ed nuna hashan dis atta zvarge im pita sola chi!” That is, “May Lechi and Gordon and the nine victims’ souls be safely contained in the body [of Ptah]!” Again, she chanted this nine times in the direction of each sword.
Finally, she intoned the following: “Ud Lechi ed Gordon ed nuna hashan slivu its im pita atta zvarge solachi!” Or, “May Lechi and Gordon and the nine victims beheaded/castrated be, safely in the body/soul/self of Ptah!” Again, there was ambiguity in the meaning of these words, beyond the ambiguities already explained. Did her words mean, “the decapitated nine victims,” or did they mean, “May Lechi, Gordon, and the nine victims be emasculated, made impotent, in Ptah’s body”? Clara was hoping to slip this meaning by drugged Lechi without his suspecting; and she chanted this last incantation nine times, in the direction of each sword.
At the end of this chanting, she noticed, as expected, that Gordon was getting sluggish, enervated. He was having difficulty staying on his feet. Now Clara chanted, “Ptah, vivoka! Schlink bur ta tenki!” Or, “Ptah, come to life! Embrace the souls entering you!” And this was said nine times in the same way as before.
She looked down and saw Ptah’s body beginning to stir, ever so slightly. A tear of joy ran down her cheek. She was shaking with expectation.
Gordon fell to the floor, motionless, but with his eyes looking straight at hers, accusing her. She shuddered, knowing that not only was Gordon looking at his betrayer, but also Lechi was. Still, that same look of anger and heartbreak seemed to reassure her that those souls would truly be trapped in Ptah’s body forever.
Outside, there was the sound of the sirens of approaching police cars. Then, Gordon did something unexpected.
He got up.
With hate in his eyes, he plodded like a zombie towards her.
She gasped.
Lechi won’t be contained? she wondered.
Then, Gordon tripped, she used her magic to raise up a sword under him (the same one he’d used to kill the nine victims with, fortuitously), and he fell on it.
Now he would stay motionless.
She could hear the cops barging into her house, so she quickly wrapped a nearby black blanket around her nakedness.
“Oh, God, please help me!” she screamed as the cops came into the red room and saw Gordon lying on the floor in a widening pool of blood. “He just barged in here and tried to rape me and kill me with my sword!”
“Then why has he been stabbed with it?” a cop asked.
“He got clumsy, tripped, and fell on it,” Clara said in sobs. “Earlier today, he barged in here, stole my sword, and ran off with it. I normally use it with all these others for my rituals, but he had this crazy look in his eyes, always yelling, ‘Revenge!’.”
“That’s plausible,” a second cop said. “That’s Gordon Marsh lying there dead. I knew him. You should’ve seen how clumsy he was. All those guys whose heads were cut off, they used to pick on him. I don’t know why he killed Ms. Bellows, but the rest of the girl’s story makes sense to me.”
“Nine decapitated victims,” a policewoman said, “with one of her swords, and nine skulls lying here. The swords are for your rituals, are they? Satanic rituals, by chance?”
“Of course not,” Clara said, then lied, “they aren’t real skulls. They’re all made of plastic.”
“They sure look real to me,” the policewoman said, reaching down and about to pick up a skull.
“Ni tchah!” Clara shouted, suddenly making all the police oblivious to the skulls.
“Well, we’re going to need to borrow your sword for evidence,” the first cop said. “You’ll get it back when we’ve finished the investigation. Apart from that, I’d say the girl’s story fits in with everything else we’ve seen. We’ll need a full testimony from you as we put together the rest of our investigation here.”
“OK,” Clara said, thinking, I’ve finished the ritual. The cops’ taking away my sword shouldn’t negatively affect my magic. The souls are all safely trapped in Ptah’s body. Speaking of which…
She looked over at her cat. The body was stirring a little more. Her heart was beating faster with hopefulness.
X: The Cat Came Back
Clara had to get dressed and go to the police station to give her full testimony and help the cops finish their investigation. It took hours! Thankfully, they didn’t think any more about her magical practices than those of the harmlessly eccentric behaviour of a kook loner.
By the time she finally got back home, though, the sun was already up. She was exhausted, and just wanted to strip and fall down naked on her bed.
As she climbed the stairs to her bedroom, though, she heard something that gave her a sudden burst of adrenaline, making her run the rest of the way.
She heard a meow.
She ran into her bedroom and saw Ptah lying on the bed, licking himself and purring.
“Ptah!” she screamed with tears of joy running down her cheeks. “You’re back! I’ve got you back!” She got on the bed, picked him up, put him on her lap, and stroked him. She couldn’t stop weeping. She was shaking with happiness.
Then, just to make sure, she picked him up and looked all over his body to see if anything at all was different about him. She knew, as Talas had told her, that the cat wouldn’t be 100% the same as before, but he seemed amazingly close to that 100%, for she saw absolutely nothing different.
All of his fur was black, he had his claws, though he knew to keep them in whenever she held him, for she’d used her magic to teach him never to scratch her, even by accident. She abhorred declawing.
The only thing that seemed different, and even this, ever so slightly so, was the even greater love she saw in his eyes, obviously the result of the trapped souls of all of those in Ptah’s consciousness, those of the men–and Lechi–who lusted after her.
XI: Nodding Off
Looking into Ptah’s loving, longing eyes with soaking wet, teary eyes of her own, she whispered, “I love you so much.” Then she kissed him on the top of his head, put him at the foot of her bed, and began undressing.
She giggled as she saw the cat staring at her as she got naked, thinking, This is all you boys in there will ever have of me. When fully nude, she turned around for the cat and giggled some more. See me fulfilling my promise to you, Lechi and Gordon? The cat just sat there looking, with that caged desire in his eyes.
She lay on her back on the bed with her legs apart at about a forty-five-degree angle, with her right foot touching Ptah. She closed her eyes for a few seconds, taking a deep breath and relaxing.
When she opened them, she looked down and saw, of all the bizarre things, Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman licking her between her legs! It felt so good: Clara was getting wet, her labia were beginning to swell, and her clitoris was hardening. Oddly, Pfeiffer’s tongue felt much smaller than a human tongue, but it was still effective. Clara closed her eyes, sighed, and moaned softly.
She opened her eyes again and looked down, but now she saw Julie Newmar’s Catwoman licking her! The tongue’s size felt the same, but so was its deliciously tickling skill as good as ever. Clara was getting wetter, sighing more and more, and moaning louder.
Newmar put two fingers inside Clara, gently and slowly moving them back and forth while tickling her vaginal walls. A third finger was rubbing against her hardening clitoris. While she felt all of these thrills, Clara found that those fingers inside her felt more like one thick finger–in fact, it felt hairy, even fuzzy.
She closed her eyes again and decided not to wonder about the oddity of the sensations; she’d rather just have enjoyed them. She was fidgeting on the bed and letting out little yelps of pleasure.
She opened her eyes and looked down again. Instead of seeing another actress as Catwoman again, though, this time she saw Sister Rosalie Mason, her old grade ten teacher of religion class. This nun, with her pretty face and kindness to Clara (as she’d been enduring her father’s abuse), caused her to have a lesbian crush on her back then in her teen years; so seeing her in her habit, licking her, was just all the more enjoyable. She was soaking wet between her legs, her clitoris fully engorged, and her labia swelling.
She closed her eyes for a few seconds, anticipating an even better lover on opening them. When she did open them, though, she looked to her left and saw Ms. Bellows, standing by the foot of her bed and grinning maliciously.
Then she looked straight up and saw Gordon. He was also looking at her with a malevolent smile. Instead of tongues and fingers, she now felt a phallus moving in and out of her…a furry one, but nonetheless a phallus.
Gordon said, in the panting voice of Lechi, “You actually thought…that your feeble skills…at magic…would be a match…for my power? You did need…that ninth sword…to lie in position…with all the others…to ensure…the efficacy…of your spell. Now all of us..will enjoy you…every time you sleep!”
Clara now felt phalli entering her anus and her mouth. She sensed in them the presence of Bill Wynn and Ron Sweeney. Soon after, she felt a phallus between her breasts, with invisible hands pushing them together and wrapping them around the invisible phallus. This, she sensed, was Jon Schmidt.
The fact that these were all incubi is what kept if from being physically impossible. Next, she sensed the phalli of Kurt Davies and Shaun Holmes respectively in her left and right hands. After beginning to masturbate these invisible masses of meat, she felt two more, those of Phil Sulikowsky and Jim Fredericks, pushing against her left and right armpits respectively. Finally, the invisible hands of Chris Culig took her feet, put them on either side of his invisible phallus, and had them rub it.
None of this probing hurt; in fact, her arousal was soaring. She was sweating and moaning a high-pitched “Mmm!” with every thrust she received, them all being perfectly synchronized. Finally, after another minute, she climaxed with a scream, then they all sprayed bukkake, soaking her with come from head to toe.
The incubi all disappeared. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth wide open, the sides of her lips curled up in a smirk. She let out a long sigh. Then she opened her eyes.
Instead of seeing Gordon on top of her, she saw her father.
“I told you I’d make it good for you,” he said in Lechi’s voice.
Clara woke up screaming. Shaking all over, she needed a few minutes to calm down and feel her heart rate slow down to normal. She whispered over and over, “It was just a dream. It wasn’t real. They never had me.”
Finally calm, she looked down to the foot of the bed. A puddle of come had soaked the sheets between her legs. Ptah was sitting just behind it, with his tongue sticking out.
“A wet dream?” she whispered. “I haven’t had…one of those…since I was…in high school.”
Then she looked at Ptah again. His right front leg was soaked in her gushing. He was looking at her with those loving, longing eyes. He was purring.
“Oh, my God!” she yelled, then, “No, no. That could not have happened. Not my Ptah, no. H-he just…he dipped his leg in the puddle, that’s all! Yeah, I gushed quite a lot, and that’s how he g-got so much of his leg wet with it. That explains it! I just had a dream about those men. They’re all trapped in Ptah’s consciousness; my ritual was c-complete, perfect! There’s no way they could have got out of the mental prison I put ’em in.”
She picked up her cat and hugged him.
“I got you back, Ptah! That’s what matters. I’ve had bad dreams before. They just reflect my unconscious traumas, that’s all. I have you back, and that’s what’s important, even if you did put your foot in my–no, that couldn’t have happened! My life is complete again with you. I’m so happy to have you back, Ptah! I love you so much.”
She would spend her whole day petting, feeding, playing with, and cuddling her cat. That look of longing and love in his eyes never stopped, not even for a second. She was in an ecstasy with him right until sundown, when she would go to bed with him at the foot of it. She would fall asleep smiling from ear to ear.
To sleep, perchance to dream.
Ay, there’s the rub.
Blow Out is a 1981 thriller film written and directed by Brian De Palma. It stars John Travolta and Nancy Allen, with John Lithgow and Dennis Franz.
Though the film pays homage to Hitchcock and a number of slasher films, it is directly based on Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blowup, replacing the medium of photography with that of audio recording. In this way, Blow Out is also influenced by The Conversation, by Francis Ford Coppola.
Though Blow Out was largely praised on release–in particular, Travolta’s and Allen’s performances, De Palma’s direction, and the film’s visual style–it didn’t do well at the box office. Over the years, however, it has developed into a cult film. Quentin Tarantino has called Blow Out one of his favourite films.
Here is a link to quotes from the film.
Since Blow Out is based on Blowup, it’s useful to compare and contrast the themes in both films. I discuss the themes of Blowup in my analysis of that film, so you can look there, Dear Reader, for a more thorough discussion of that; whereas here I’ll only briefly refer to them as I compare and contrast them with those of Blow Out.
In Blowup, there is an exploration of how one’s perception of reality is deceptive: something caught and frozen in mid-action in a photograph may not be what it seems, since reality is fluid, in endless motion, and so what is caught in the photo may be wildly out of context. Similarly, sounds can go by in time so fast that our ears can miss them…unless one happens to have the sensitive, attentive ears of a sound effects technician like Jack Terry (Travolta).
There are crucial contrasts between these films, though, in their exploration of perception and reality. Thomas, the photographer in Blowup, overanalyzes photos he’s taken, and he ends up imagining a murder having taken place that, in my interpretation at least, probably never happened. His analysis has led to an illusion, projected from himself onto the scene based on his own guilt feelings. Jack’s analysis of sounds he’s recorded, on the other hand, lead to the truth, as well as proof of that truth…though his attempts to publicize that truth are thwarted.
Thomas’s conflict between his faulty perceptions and reality are of a more philosophical nature. Jack’s difficulties proving the truth of what he’s perceived–the sound of a gunshot blowing out the tire of a politician’s car, causing it to fall into a lake, killing him–are the stuff of a political conspiracy, which in the end Jack cannot prove, because the evidence is destroyed.
So both films explore how reality is manipulated in some sense: in Blowup, it’s manipulated in Thomas’s mind in an effort to deflect personal guilt; in Blow Out, a Chappaquiddick-style killing is manipulated to look like an accident, with all the evidence of the blown-out tire removed.
Another point of comparison between the two films is how they deal with sexism. Thomas is routinely disrespectful to his models, generally female, until an assertive woman in the park where he took the photos, which included her and her lover, confronts him about them, demanding him to give her the negatives. In Blow Out, pretty much every woman (apart from extras and a TV anchorwoman) is young, beautiful, sexualized, and–I hate to say it–ditzy. Rather than being a promotion of sexism, though, I’d say that De Palma’s film, like Antonioni’s in its own way, is a comment on sexism.
By presenting almost all the women in Blow Out as hot-looking bimbos, we’re seeing a commentary not on how women actually are, but rather how they’re perceived in society, especially in the media. Remember that a theme common to both films is the contrast between perception and reality, and how perception is manipulated through such instruments of the media as photography and sound effects.
Feminists have written book after book about the evil of presenting women as sex objects, and of how such presentations of women give men power over them. The film’s portrayal of women as stupid and talentless reinforces that sense of female powerlessness under men. It’s easy to see the link, therefore, between on the one hand, female beauty (so attractive to sexual predators) and a woman’s perceived lack of intelligence or talent (i.e., those awful, fake screams for the slasher film that Jack is doing the sound for), and on the other hand, women’s vulnerability to male serial killers. One is reminded of that old Chinese misogynist saying, “女子無才便是德” (“If a woman has no talents, that is virtue for her.”)
Blow Out is known as a film concerned with the mechanics of movie-making, how visuals and sound are put together to make an effective illusion (e.g., Jack’s synching up of the recorded sounds of the blow out and car crash with a set of photos of the incident, run together to make a crude, short film), a story for an audience to get lost in watching. The element of political conspiracy in the film, and the cover-up of the assassination of the politician in the car, presenting it in the media as a mere accident, shows how this film’s preoccupations with the mechanics of visuals and sound can be expanded on into a general critique of the media as a tool used by the powerful to thwart the powerless.
The film begins as what looks like a third-rate slasher film. We see things from the POV of the killer, who is approaching a sorority house at night; we’re reminded of the opening of Black Christmas. That many of the sorority girls are engaging in various forms of naughtiness (dancing in see-through nighties by a window, where a security man is enjoying the show; a woman having sex with a man by her window, where the killer watches them; a woman masturbating in her room) before the killing spree starts suggests a parody of Friday the 13th, released the year before Blow Out.
That POV camera also suggests Hitchcock’s voyeuristic camera, and the killer’s first victim being a girl in a shower is an obvious allusion to Psycho. The actress’s terribly unrealistic scream at seeing the killer’s knife destroys the illusion, and we soon realize that we’ve been watching Coed Frenzy, a slasher film that Jack and producer Sam (played by Peter Boyden) are doing post-production on.
This shift from thinking the slasher film is the real story to knowing it’s a film within a film is comparable to many moments in Blowup when we’re led to believe, for example, that at the beginning Thomas is one of the destitute men until he gets in his nice car and drives away. As in Blowup, a major theme in Blow Out is the tension between appearance and reality.
And just after we’ve been briefly tricked into thinking that Coed Frenzy is the real story, we soon come to realize that much of what’s going on in Coed Frenzy is paralleled in what’s going on in Jack’s story. The theme of maniacal men terrorizing the powerless is seen not only in the killer in the slasher film; he has his double in Burke (Lithgow), a psychopath working for the rival candidate of McRyan, the presidential hopeful killed in the car crash.
Sam likes neither the showering girl’s fake-sounding scream nor the wind that Jack has chosen for the beginning of Coed Frenzy (i.e., with the killer outside the house at night), so Sam wants Jack to help him find a better female screamer as well as to record new wind effects. This altering of sounds to get a more ‘realistic’ effect ironically makes the film all the more fake (i.e., getting the sounds from sources far removed from the originals), and it reinforces the theme of how the media, a tool of the powerful, is used to deceive the powerless.
Jack goes to a park by a lake to record wind that night. As he’s recording the blowing of the wind, we see an example of De Palma’s use of the split screen (i.e., Jack recording in one half, and a closeup of an owl in the other…to get that ominous effect). This splitting-up of the screen causes a kind of Brechtian alienation effect, destroying the movie goers’ illusion that what they see is an actual world, and reminding them that they’re seeing a show. Again, the use of split screen is part of the theme of media as an illusion used to manipulate the emotions of the common people.
Wind, air, breath–these make up a recurring motif in the film, symbolic of life and of communication. If Jack hadn’t been out there this night recording wind, Sally (Allen) would be dead in McRyan’s car at the bottom of the lake–drowned, her air supply cut off. Burke typically kills his victims by strangling them with piano wire, by cutting off their air supply.
The Hebrew word for soul is nephesh, which literally means ‘breath.’ Recall Genesis 2:7. There’s also the Spirit of God, the ruach, which literally means ‘wind,’ or ‘breath.‘ So wind and breath are symbols of life in the film.
Another point is that sound travels through air. Jack’s preoccupation with sounds, the sound of the blow-out of the tire (from Burke’s shooting of it) in particular, letting air out of the tire, further reinforces the motif of air throughout the film.
Only Jack, with his sensitive, attentive ear for sounds, is up to rescuing Sally…and at the end of the film, not even he can save her. He represents that male ideal so many modern women have wanted: a man who listens.
He is the kind of man Sally so desperately needs, because all of the other men in her life exploit her. Manny Karp (Franz) is more or less her pimp, giving her jobs to get in bed with powerful, wealthy men so he can take photos of them together, blackmail the men, and pay her far less that she’s worth. McRyan was supposed to have been thus blackmailed, him being the one challenging the president in the upcoming election, but Burke wanted to blow out the tire of his car as well.
Powerful men like McRyan exploit Sally for sex; sleazebags like Karp exploit her for money and sex (indeed, he even tries to rape her at one point), and psychopaths like Burke want to kill her to clear up loose ends, for political purposes. That Sally is pretty and speaks in a high-pitched, ‘ditzy’ voice, reinforces her sense of naïve vulnerability, her everywoman powerlessness in a male-dominated society.
She is exploited and abused in all of these ways, and she is also made invisible, in how the politicians allied with McRyan don’t want the public to know that she was in the car with him. Keeping her involvement out of the media’s awareness, to prevent a scandal that would taint his memory and hurt his family even worse, is nonetheless another example of disguising the truth with the media, by way of omission. Hence, Jack is made to sneak Sally out of the hospital so the media won’t know about her.
The theme of disguising the truth comes in other forms, including Sally’s own choices. In the hospital, she’s embarrassed to be seen by Jack without her makeup on, though he insists, being the nice, sensitive guy he is, that she looks fine without it. Later, she talks to him about her skill as a makeup artist to make women’s faces look better…that is, to disguise reality in a mask of cosmetics.
Other disguises of reality include Burke’s replacing of the shot-out tire with a new one, so the news will report McRyan’s death as a mere accident, and when Jack insists it was a deliberate murder and a cover-up, everyone will think he’s a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Certainly, Detective Mackey (played by John Aquino), who has done the investigation on McRyan’s death and doesn’t even like Jack (for having used his sound-man skills to put away a number of corrupt cops), thinks the death was an accident and treats Jack’s suspicions with contempt.
It’s significant that Burke, hired by and therefore associated with American politicians, is a murdering psychopath. Hollywood movies typically portray psychopaths as violent killers, as in the slasher films that Coed Frenzy parodies. In fact, this Hollywood portrayal is a wildly exaggerated stereotypification, for usually these people, though lacking in empathy, enjoying exploiting and hurting others remorselessly, and needing excitement, often enough get their kicks within the limits of the law. Burke thus is another distortion of reality in Blow Out.
Still, as an employee of the American government, Burke is aptly presented as a serial killer, as a symbolic critique of the imperialist US government. Consider all of the violent deaths caused by American interference in the politics of other countries. In this connection, it is grimly fitting that this serial killer is referred to as the “Liberty Bell Strangler,” given that the killings occur around “Liberty Day,” the time of celebrations and a parade commemorating the Liberty Bell.
Indeed, the murder of Sally happens right on the night of the commemoration; we see her screaming for Jack to save her while she’s standing against a huge backdrop of the American flag. This land of ‘liberty’ has a killer hired by American politicians going after some of the most vulnerable people of the world–women in particular.
The false presentation of reality–the celebration–is what is seen on the TV. The identity of the serial killer, he being an employee of the US government, is conveniently kept secret, since the news reporters claim that who he is remains unknown…which seems odd when the police, after finding his body, would presumably find some kind of ID on him. The government plot is covered up, and the people continue to believe in the ‘freedom and democracy‘ of the US.
Now, the liberal producers of Blow Out would have us believe that Burke represents an aberration of the system, since the politician in on the plot to blackmail McRyan–during a telephone conversation with Burke, and disgusted with his excesses–tries to distance himself from the psychopath. This is a common liberal tactic: the system, apparently, is OK; we just have to get rid of the ‘bad apples’ in it. Again, this is how it appears to us in the media–not so in reality.
All of Jack’s attempts to present proof of the plot to kill McRyan are erased or destroyed by Burke. Stills from video filmed by Karl are sold to a tabloid, presenting the false story of a car accident instead of a killing. But at least Jack has been able to provide better wind and “a good scream” (Sally’s) from his recordings. It’s painfully ironic that the only way the producers of Coed Frenzy can get a convincing scream is from one of a girl really being murdered.
The weakest and most vulnerable in society are looked down on, demeaned, over-sexualized, and ultimately killed. Only sensitive Jack has seen the human being behind Sally’s pretty face; as a result, he’s fallen in love with her, and he mourns her death, obsessively listening to recordings of her last words before Burke gets to her. He cares for her through listening to her, not leering at her.
Just as his attempts to root out police corruption, through wiretapping someone to record evidence, result in an undercover cop’s getting killed, so do his attempts to expose a government conspiracy, again through wiretapping Sally, get her killed. Jack’s attempts at achieving justice fail; his sensitive listening just falls on deaf…and dead…ears.
Infinite Ocean 