Month: August 2023

‘Mama,’ a Psychological Horror Novel, Chapter Ten

Several weeks have gone by with me in this…mental hospital, and I have been cooperating with Dr. Sweeney, Aunt Jane, and…my…father, in the hopes that they’ll let me out of here soon enough. Even in my private thoughts, I’m trying to approximate the perception of reality they’re all imposing on me, all of them working for a certain…spirit, in the hopes that she, too, will be fooled. Then I can be freed of all of them.

My subterfuge seems to be working. Sweeney and the staff are pleased with my cooperation and lack of belligerence. I haven’t worn the straitjacket since it had been taken off me; I’m not even in the padded cell anymore. I’m in quite a pleasant-looking, well-furnished room.

They’re letting me take walks outside, where there are trees, there’s grass, and even a pond with ducks I can feed, as long as my…father…accompanies me and I chat with him. I’m going along with all of it; I’m being patient about it. I even smile and call him…Dad…without wincing. I actually entertain the thought of him being my dad in my thoughts, not only to fool that…spirit, but also to test the waters, as it were–to see if I like it.

Not really.

Dad is so lame.

I want a heroic father, not this loser.

Still, I must keep up appearances, even in my thoughts.

After all, it’s quite possible that I’m succeeding in keeping…her…at bay. I haven’t seen anything blatantly surreal over these past few weeks, and I see flames only in the distant horizon when I go outside with…Dad. The…ghost…isn’t fucking with my head as a reward, I surmise, for cooperating with the others.

Still, something’s going to happen, some fresh trap to be sprung on me while I’m here, so I have to be careful and hope I get discharged as soon as possible.

Then I can find my chance to break free and run from them all.

Oh, here he comes–Dr. Sweeney. Time to act like a good little patient. Cue my fake smile.

“Good morning, Roger,” he says with a fake smile of his own.

“Good morning,” I say.

“How are you feeling today?” he asks.

“Oh, fine,” I say. “I had a really good sleep last night.”

“Good. I trust you’re still enjoying your walks with your father, then? You’ve fully accepted that he is your father, haven’t you?”

“Fully.” My acting is so good, I’d fool myself.

“I’m happy to hear that, Roger. In fact, I have some good news for you.”

“Oh?” I’m trying hard to suppress my anticipation of what he’s about to say. If I overreact to what I think he’ll say, I might be exposed as faking my recovery.

“I think you’re well enough to be released from here.”

“Really? Are you sure I’m well enough? This could be premature. I might have a relapse.”

“Well, if so, you know where you’ll return,” he says while writing something down on his notepad. “In any case, I’m confident that you’ve made sufficient progress, to the point where you can be put under the care of your aunt and father. They’ll report back to me on your continuing progress, or any problems you have, and we’ll react accordingly here.”

“Oh, very well, then, Doctor,” I’m still restraining my enthusiasm. “When will I be released?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“Oh, OK.”

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

Now, it’s the early afternoon of the next day, just after lunch, and I’m getting ready to be taken out of here. I’m bracing myself, taking deep breaths, and trying to stay calm. I’m thinking over how I can find an opportunity to break free of my aunt and…father, how to know when it will be safe to do so.

I don’t want to wait until I get home, whether that home is mine, my aunt’s, or…his. Firstly, will either of them be watching me, or having someone watch me, 24/7, so I can’t get away any better than here in this nut house? Secondly, I’m so eager to get away from them that I simply can’t wait any longer. It’s a foolish risk I’ll be taking, but I’ve run out of patience.

Ah, there’s my door being opened!

There they are, the shrink, my aunt, and…him.

“OK, Roger,” Sweeney says. “You’re all set to go.”

“Come on home, Son,” says my…dad, smiling.

“All the paperwork’s been signed, so we can just go,” Aunt Jane says, also smiling.

“OK,” I say, getting up with a sincere smile of my own, and I leave the room with them.

As we’re walking through the front doors, and I can see the streets and buildings out there (as well as the blazing fires all along the city’s horizon), Dr. Sweeney stops me for a moment.

“Now, remember, Roger,” he says in a kind, avuncular attitude. “Your father may not be the great hero you’d always fantasized of him as being, but he’s a good man, and that’s enough. You, too, are good enough, and that’s all you and he need to be, OK?”

“OK,” I say. “And thank you, Doctor, for all your help.”

We all say goodbye to him and walk out of the hospital and on the sidewalk surrounding it, my aunt to my left, and my ‘dad’ to my right. There’s a nearby parking lot, on the other side of the street, that we’re approaching.

My mind is racing, and my eyes are darting all over the place, looking for an opportunity to escape.

I find just such an opportunity.

I see a man parking and getting off of his motorcycle. His keys are still in it, and he’s a short run from where I am. My aunt and…he…are looking away, distracted. Lucky for me.

I suddenly break into a sprint for that bike.

“Roger!” Aunt Jane shouts.

“What are you doing?” he shouts.

I reach the bike, shove the rider to the pavement, and get on it. The keys are still in the ignition switch. I kickstart the bike.

“Hey!” he shouts. “What the fuck you doin’?”

“What does it look like?” I say, then ride off.

“Asshole!” he shouts. “Stop! Thief!”

“Roger!” my aunt and ‘dad’ shout several times.

As I’m distancing myself from them, surprising myself at how well I’m riding the motorcycle without any crashes or much of any obstacles on the road slowing me down, I see the flames quickly return all around me, burning every building in sight. I’m also seeing those giant, brightly-coloured, polka-dotted mushrooms again.

Yes, Mama’s back to her old tricks. But that’s no matter: I’m now free to go back to trying to stop her from destroying the world. My chance to be a hero has returned.

Bridges

Since rivers of bitterness separate ourselves from others,
bridges
must be
built to
link us together. Our words, then, can walk back and forth

above all that water, and not let our words get cold feet.
Bridges,
made of
empathy,
can then replace bitter thoughts with compassion and love.

Remaining here, not looking over there, past troubled water,
.
.
.
makes lonely and desolate banks of grass on either side.

While trolls may be hiding beneath bridges, our big, gruff friends,
ramming
them out
of the way,
can make walks from one side to the other less painful for us.

Analysis of ‘Spellbound’

Spellbound is a 1945 psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, with Michael Chekhov, Leo G. Carroll, and John Emery. The screenplay was written by Ben Hecht, from a treatment by Angus MacPhail, after an earlier treatment by Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, which all was “suggested” by the 1927 novel, The House of Dr. Edwardes, by Hilary St. George Saunders and John Palmer (the two authors going under the pseudonym of Francis Beeding).

The film was a critical and commercial success; it was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and it won Best Original Score. The score, by Miklós Rózsa, inspired Jerry Goldsmith to become a film composer. (I must be honest, though, in saying that I find the love theme rather mawkish, and the spooky music, with the whistling theremin, melodramatic; but you can hear the music and decide its merits for yourself, Dear Reader.)

Here is a link to quotes from the film, here’s a link to the full movie, and here’s a link to the novel by ‘Beeding.’

When we see how often this story was revised, and was “suggested” by the 1927 novel, we see an example of how a Hitchcock film has changed so much of the original story as to retain very little, if anything, from the original (The Birds is another example of such radical changes.).

The few things that Spellbound retains from The House of Dr. Edwardes include the character names of Dr. Edwardes, Constance (Bergman)–though in the film, she’s Dr. Constance Petersen, and in the novel, she’s Dr. Constance Sedgwick (the change of surname owing presumably to a need to accommodate Bergman’s accent, which sounds anything but English), and Dr. Murchison (Carroll). Also retained is the idea of having a mentally ill man impersonate a psychiatrist, though in the film, Dr. Edwardes is impersonated by, as we eventually learn, John Ballantine (Peck), whereas in the novel, a madman named Geoffrey Godstone impersonates Dr. Murchison.

A huge transformation in plot from novel to film is how, in the latter, Constance and Ballantine are chased by the police while she, in love with him, tries to cure him of a guilt complex in which he believes he’s killed the real Dr. Edwardes, while in the former, Godstone not only relishes in his crime of imprisoning, incapacitating (with drugs), and impersonating Dr. Murchison, but also practices Satanism in Edwardes’s mental hospital, a secluded castle on a mountainside in France!

Despite these huge differences between novel and film, though, they do share a few common themes that deserve investigation. Namely, these are the blurred line between doctor and patient, or sane and insane, as well as the juxtaposition of the life and death drives, or Eros (which includes libido) and Thanatos.

The first of these two themes is especially significant in that it calls into question the authority of the psychiatrist. Though common sense reminds us that the doctor is as much a fallible human being as the patient is, we nonetheless have a habit of attributing great wisdom and expertise to the analyst, whom Lacan called “the subject supposed to know.” The novel and film punch holes in this supposed psychiatric authority, in both literal and symbolic ways.

Not only do madmen impersonate psychiatrists in these stories, they also manage to fool the rest of the staff in their respective mental hospitals, if only for a relatively short time. Only Dr. Murchison knows the truth right from the beginning: in the novel, because the real Dr. Murchison is being held against his will by the madman; in the film, because Dr. Murchison is Dr. Edwardes’s real murderer!

In the novel, an old castle in France, the Château Landry, has been made into a mental hospital. Its inaccessibility among the mountains, as well as the evil practices believed by the local villagers to be going on there, reminds me of the Château de Silling, a castle in the German Black Forest, in the Marquis de Sade‘s unfinished erotic novel, The 120 Days of Sodom, adapted as Salò by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which four wealthy libertines (who, being a duke, a bishop, a president, and a banker, are also of dubious authority) sexually abuse, torture, and kill a number of young, often naked, victims. This clash between a place supposedly meant to heal the sick, but really a place of Satanism and/or perversion, underlines the implied anti-psychiatry and antiauthoritarianism of the novel.

In the film, the blurring of the lines between sane and insane, and doctor and patient, can be seen not only symbolically in Ballantine’s brief impersonation of Dr. Edwardes, but also in the growing mental instability of Dr. Murchison, which leads to him murdering Dr. Edwardes, threatening to murder Constance, and finally committing suicide, all with the same pistol. Finally, Constance’s own professionalism as a doctor is taken into question when she lets her countertransference for her patient, Ballantine, run wild: she’s as much in love with him as he is with her.

Her love for him, translating into a need to have him, is representative of a Lacanian application of Hegel‘s master/slave, or lord/bondsman, dialectic, a holdover from feudal times. She would be the one in authority over him, as analyst over analysand, but her countertransference weakens that authority.

As Ian Parker says in his book, Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity, “…Hegelian phenomenology…[was]…influential on Lacan’s early work…the psychiatrist becomes a master who discovers that he is dependent on the slave he commands to work, who discovers that he himself relies on the other he imagined he would dominate, for without that domination his activity would amount to nothing. This master-slave dialectic is actually rooted by Hegel…in the feudal relationship between what he preferred to term ‘lord’ and ‘bondsman’, and it only then starts to have retroactive hermeneutic effects on the way longer past historical relations between masters and slaves might be understood…we can already see the spectre of a totalising system of knowledge–very much of the kind [Hegel] is accused of unrolling and celebrating on the stage of history–haunting psychiatry.” (Parker, page 23)

In the novel, that the mental hospital is in a castle, an icon of feudal times, is significant in how early, authoritarian forms of psychiatry came out of the feudal world, thus reinforcing the mystique around the authority of psychiatrists over the mentally ill, an authority that is challenged–symbolically and literally–in both the novel and the film.

“The bourgeois-democratic revolutions that ushered in new forms of the state in Western Europe to guarantee capitalist interests never completely eradicated feudal power relations, and the remnants of feudalism were recruited into and re-energised in specific ideological projects that served class society well. Psychiatry was thus incorporated into the psy complex, the meshwork of practices that individualize subjectivity and regulate the activities of bourgeois subjects…This replication and recuperation of feudal social links under capitalism has consequences for political-economic analysis of the development of psychoanalysis.” (Parker, page 25)

The fact that, back in feudal times, mental illness was perceived as being caused by demonic possession (recall how Hamlet, in having seen his father’s ghost, is quite possibly really mad, and not merely pretending to be) is echoed in the novel in how not only the villagers neighbouring the Château Landry believe that the patients are possessed, but also rightly suspect that Satanism is being practiced there. This devil-worship, practiced by a madman who convinces the medical staff for quite a time that he’s Dr. Murchison, reinforces the blurring between doctor and patient.

As for the authority of those who have practiced psychoanalysis, a method endorsed in Hitchcock’s film, I am greatly influenced by it myself, as many of my articles have demonstrated, but I have no illusions about it. Psychoanalysis is no science. Freud got a lot more wrong than he got right. Wilfred R. Bion was much more insightful, but his own traumas from his war experiences further demonstrate the blurred line between doctor and patient. Lacan, with his frustratingly obscurantist way of communicating his ideas, comes off as a pretentious narcissist.

For all of these reasons, a novel and film about the mentally ill impersonating psychiatrists seems a fitting topic. In the larger sense, people in all positions of authority–be they psychiatrists, politicians, or bosses–are far too often impostors.

The mad can often do an expert job of faking sanity and self-control, as Ballantine does for much of the film, despite his frequent moments of agitation. Psychopaths and narcissists are also frequently skilled at pretending to be empathetic, caring, and socially conforming; we can see Dr. Murchison do this throughout the film, right up to his suicide; we can also see this self-control in Godstone as he impersonates Dr. Murchison through most of the novel.

These characters wear masks of sanity that slip only from time to time. We all wear masks.

The film begins with a nymphomaniac patient, Mary Carmichael (played by Rhonda Fleming), being taken to see Constance for a therapy session. Fleming’s portrayal of a madwoman in the one scene we have of her (most of the rest of her character was removed from the film for having stretched the limits of 1940s movie censorship…rather like repression of unacceptable unconscious urges, is it not?) is, I’m sorry to say, terribly overacted; still, maybe that’s the point. The mentally ill, in their inability to blend in with society, are simply ‘bad actors.’ the sane know how to maintain the dramatized illusion of sanity.

Constance’s ‘performance’ of a woman totally uninterested in sexual or romantic feelings is impeccable…until “Dr. Edwardes” arrives, that is. Dr. Fleurot (Emery), who up to the arrival of the surprisingly young and handsome “Dr. Edwardes” (In the novel, “Dr. Murchison” is also quite young, unlike Carroll’s Murchison.) and his effect on Constance, has remarked that embracing her is like “embracing a textbook.” So when Fleurot sees her schoolgirl-like crush on “Edwardes,” he can’t help poking fun at her for it.

One suspects that the origin of her countertransference is in her presumably Oedipal relationship with her father, since she complains of how the poets romanticize about love, raising our hopes with it, only for us to be disappointed and heartbroken; actually, our romantic feelings for someone are just a transference of our original Oedipal feelings for the (usually) opposite-sex parent. What’s more, she’s read all of Edwardes’s books, and obviously admires him for his psychiatric expertise, the way a child will regard his or her (then-younger!) parents’ knowledge as quite infallible.

Another patient in Green Manors, Mr. Garmes (played by Norman Lloyd), embodies the opposite, it seems, to Constance’s Oedipal feelings: he imagines he killed his father and has guilt feelings from this delusion, when it’s really just his unconscious wish to remove his father, rooted in childhood, so he could have his mother. Constance reassures him that analysis will help him see the truth buried in his unconscious, and seeing that truth will cure him of his guilt.

Now, Ballantine, in his impersonation of Edwardes, is listening to Garmes talk about his fantasy of having killed his father, and instead of understanding how unconscious Oedipal feelings, rooted in jealousy, can lead to delusions of guilt when the object of jealousy is killed, Ballantine can relate to that guilt and find it very real, since as we learn towards the end of the film, his own guilt complex is based on an accidental killing of his brother, presumably another object of jealousy, another rival for the attention of their mother.

So Ballantine’s most imperfect impersonation of a psychiatrist, especially apparent when he has a mental breakdown during surgery on Garmes, is symbolic of the human imperfections of psychoanalysts, reminding us of the limits of their authority.

To go back to the novel, it isn’t only the authority of the doctors that is questioned (only Constance seems to keep her head the whole time), but also the patients, who though being obviously ill are also often people associated with some form of authority. There’s an extremely forgetful colonel, an ineffectual, foolish druggist named Mr. Deeling, a reverend who finds himself easily brought under Godstone’s Satanic influence, and an elderly woman–normally someone who would be revered as a wise matriarch–who has delusions of being a little girl, and behaves accordingly. And the madman is often referred to as the Honorable Geoffrey Godstone.

The juxtaposition of Eros and Thanatos as mentioned above, of feelings of love and of death, are demonstrated when Constance, always trying to deny her love for “Edwardes,” nonetheless gives in and embraces him. Just at that point, though, he becomes agitated when he sees the pattern of dark lines on her white robe, triggering his memory of ski tracks in the snow where he saw the real Dr. Edwardes fall off the side of a mountain to his death.

Constance realizes that “Edwardes” is an impostor when she compares his signature on a recently-written letter with that of the real Dr. Edwardes in one of his books. A parallel scene can be found in the middle of the novel, when Constance goes through some of the books of “Dr. Murchison” and finds writings on Satanism and the witches’ Sabbath. Not only is psychiatric authority to be questioned, but given the feudal era’s association of mental illness with demonic possession, it can sometimes also be the opposite of therapeutic.

Still, Constance is smitten with John B., as she knows him to be named, and she wants to help him get well, refusing to believe even his own insistence that he killed the real Dr. Edwardes. Her countertransference has gone from an Oedipal one (a ‘daddy thing’) to more of a Iocaste-like transference, with Ballantine, in his vulnerability and fear, being like a son to her.

He leaves Green Manors, having been found out to be not only an impostor but also a suspect in the killing of Dr. Edwardes. He’s left Constance a letter, telling her he’s staying at the Empire State Hotel, so she goes there. She’s waiting in the busy hotel lobby, not far from the elevators, out of one of which we see Hitchcock doing his cameo, him walking out of one of them carrying a violin case and smoking a cigarette.

A drunken lout (played by Wallace Ford) sits next to her and annoys her until the hotel detective (played by Bill Goodwin) gets rid of him. This hotel detective, well-meaning and wanting to help her, catches hints from her body language and facial expressions to help him figure out what she needs. He fancies himself something of a psychologist, since one needs to be one in his line of work. His discussion of his skills in human psychology with Constance, who as an actual psychiatrist finds his skills most charming, is yet another example of the film blurring the distinction between doctor and non-doctor.

As Constance tries to analyze Ballantine, he–not wanting to confront his traumas–tries to resist her probing, even getting angry with her. Such hostility to the doctor is as frequent a manifestation of transference as are feelings of love. Again, in this love/hate relationship we have an example of the juxtaposition of Eros and Thanatos.

Eventually, Constance and John end up at the home of her old teacher and mentor in psychoanalysis, the elderly Dr. Alexander Brulov (Chekhov). Though this doctor is a good, capable man, he has his own clownish eccentricities and idiosyncrasies that remind us of how human therapists also are. For example, he makes a few on-the-spot diagnoses that come across as rather ludicrous: he claims Ballantine has “photophobia,” and is a “schizophrenic.”

And in spite of Brulov’s assertion that “Women make the best psychoanalysts until they fall in love. After that they make the best patients,” he also shares some of that old-fashioned Freudian sexism, wishing that Constance wouldn’t fill his ears with “the usual female contradictions. You grant me I know more than you, but on the other hand, you know more than me. Women’s talk. Bah!”

Recall how Freud, on the one hand, wanted to have more female psychoanalysts to shed light on the “dark continent” of female psychology (hence his famous question, “What do women want?” and his daughter, Anna, becoming an analyst), yet on the other hand, he believed women to have a less-developed superego, and therefore a less-developed sense of morality.

Brulov quickly figures out that something is wrong with “John Brown,” and when he finds the man descending the stairs with a razor in his hand, held like a murder weapon, and with a wild look in his eyes, Brulov resolves to drug John’s milk to knock him out for the rest of the night.

Ballantine seen drinking the drugged milk is one of two significant POV shots that Hitchcock put in the film, the other being the one when Dr. Murchison points his pistol at his face and shoots himself. Apart from the POV linking the two shots is also the fact that both characters have obvious mental health issues, Ballantine in the film impersonating a psychiatrist, and in the novel, a madman impersonating Dr. Murchison.

Ballantine’s taking of the razor blade, as if to use it as a murder weapon, can be seen as a case of what Freud called “the compulsion to repeat,” in that Ballantine, imagining himself to be Dr. Edwardes’s murderer (rather than just the accidental killer of his brother), is repeating an expression of his toxic shame, in the futile hopes of processing that shame and thus eliminating it. Luckily, he never successfully reenacts that supposed inclination to murder on either sleeping Constance, with her white blanket and its dark, straight lines caused by shadow–which obviously has triggered Ballantine–or on Dr. Brulov.

After his long, drug-induced sleep, and an argument between Constance and Brulov over whether to treat him or hand him over to the police, Ballantine wakes up and describes the dream he’s just had to the two psychoanalysts. The designs for the dream, fittingly, were done by surrealist Salvador Dalí.

We see the inside of a gambling house with curtains with eyes all over them, suggesting that it represents Green Manors, and that the eyes on the curtains represent the guards of Green Manors, or just criticizing eyes in general. A scantily-clad woman, representing Constance in a wish-fulfillment for Ballantine, is going around from table to table kissing all the male guests in the gambling house.

Someone with huge scissors is cutting all the eye-covered drapes in half, suggesting a wish to eliminate all those critics watching guilt-ridden Ballantine, who has been playing cards with an elderly man in a beard…Edwardes. The card game could represent a therapy session between the two, since Edwardes’s unorthodox methods included allowing his patients to enjoy recreational activities…like in the skiing incident.

The proprietor of the gambling house, wearing a mask, suddenly appears, accusing the elderly card player of cheating. The former, representing Murchison, as we eventually learn, threatens to “fix” the latter; in other words, Murchison is threatening to kill Edwardes, and the masking of his face represents Ballantine’s repression of the memory of Edwardes’s real killer.

Next, we see the elderly man standing at the edge of a sloping roof on a building. The slope of the roof represents the snowy slope of the side of a mountain, where Edwardes and Ballantine were skiing. The elderly man falls off the roof; then we see the masked proprietor again, hiding behind the chimney of the roof. He’s holding a warped wheel, shaped a bit like a revolver. He drops it on the roof.

What the dream is trying to remind Ballantine, albeit in an extremely distorted form so as not to wake him in a state of great distress, is that Murchison, hiding behind a tree, shot Edwardes in the back, causing him to fall off the mountain to his death, so Murchison could stay on as the “proprietor” of Green Manors, instead of being replaced as such by Edwardes.

The dream ends with Ballantine being chased by a great, shadowy pair of wings down a hill. A speculation of angel wings leads to him recalling where the skiing with Edwardes occurred: a ski lodge named Gabriel Valley. Ballantine and Constance go there to ski, in the hopes that they can bring up more memories to fill in the puzzle of his troubled unconscious. As they’re going down the slope, though, the two skiers are also hoping he won’t, in a fit of repetition compulsion, kill her, too. In this scene, we again see the juxtaposition of Eros and Thanatos.

Just before they reach a precipice, he remembers the time he, as a child, accidentally killed his brother. Little John was sliding down a side ramp, where one puts one’s hand to go up or down stairs in front of a building, and his brother was sitting at the bottom of the ramp, with his back to John and ignoring his cries to get out of the way. John’s feet knocked him off and onto a spiked fence, stabbing the spikes into his guts.

This sliding down and killing someone became a repressed memory that returned to Ballantine’s conscious mind in the unrecognizable form of him sliding down a snowy hill on skis and seeing Edwardes in front of him, like his brother, then seeing him fall to his death. Such returns of the repressed in unrecognizable new forms is common enough.

His innocence of the death of Edwardes seems fully established, except for when the police find the body, right where Ballantine says it was…and with a bullet in the corpse’s back. Ballantine is arrested, tried, and convicted.

Refusing to give up on Ballantine, Constance keeps searching for ways to acquit him. She discusses her heartbreak over his conviction with Dr. Murchison, who lets it slip that he knew Edwardes “slightly” and didn’t like him. (He’d earlier said he never knew Edwardes…though Constance wasn’t in the room to hear him tell this lie!)

Suspecting him, she discusses Ballantine’s dream with Murchison, who freely interprets it in a way to help Constance incriminate him. Since under his calm shell, he is also mentally ill, Murchison in his cooperation with her is demonstrating the promptings of the death drive, especially when he pulls his gun on her. The imposter Murchison of the novel, though at first denying he’s really Godstone, also freely admits to it when the evidence against him is stronger.

In the POV shot of Constance leaving the room with Murchison’s pistol following her, we can expand on the parallels with the POV shot of Ballantine drinking the drugged milk. The perspective is of a madman who either has impersonated or is impersonating a psychoanalyst; the person being looked at is a real psychoanalyst. One receives a drug and sleeps; the other receives a bullet and dies–“to die, to sleep, no more…”

The person seen in both cases, an actual, sane doctor, as opposed to the madman seeing the doctor, is a metaphorical mirror, in the Lacanian sense, of the mentally-ill viewer of him or her. The doctor being watched is thus the ideal-I of the viewer, who in his frustration cannot measure up to that ideal, and therefore must be knocked out or killed.

In these observations we see how Spellbound can be understood to be a critique, allegorically speaking, of the psychiatric profession. One must be careful to ensure that the therapists are as psychologically healthy as humanly possible, for the line between doctor and patient is blurred. Hence, when Constance tells Ballantine that all psychoanalysts must first be analyzed themselves before they can begin practicing, he says, “Ah, that’s to make sure that they’re not too crazy.”

‘Mama,’ a Psychological Horror Novel, Chapter Nine

I feel myself coming out of a daze, a waking-up from what has felt like a dark sleep, the darkness slowly beginning a glow into brighter and brighter light. I’m looking around, my eyes focusing.

What is this place I’ve been taken to? I’m still surrounded in fire, but the fire has become so bright, it’s almost white. I’m still not burning, though it’s very warm all around me. I see walls of near-white fire surrounding me…imprisoning me.

Because I was resisting my persecutors–that man and my aunt, who’s still possessed by Mama’s ghost, no doubt–resisting them with all of my strength, they found me so violent that I can see they’ve put me in a straitjacket. What I don’t have on my person anymore are my amulet and sachet!

My resistance was at its most violent when they were taking those things from me. The last thing I remember was someone sticking a needle in my arm as I saw them take away my amulet and sachet, and I was screaming…then everything slowly faded to black as my struggles grew weaker and weaker.

No longer at home with my magic circle or witch bottle to protect me, I feel completely naked, as it were, totally exposed to Mama’s magic! What am I going to do without any protection?

What were those magical formulas that I used to chant, to ward off her evil spells and apparitions? I’ve gone and forgotten them; in my stress and disorientation from the drug they put in my arm, I find myself unable to utter even one syllable of the ancient, mystical languages. Mama can do anything she wants to me, and I can’t stop her! She schemed to put me in this position, and now she has me right where she wants me. I’m as good as dead.

After I die, after she kills me, I’ll be in hell with her (I already am in hell here, but I’ll be even closer to her when I’m dead in body), and then she can really torture me…forever!

Let’s face it: I’ve already passed the entrance where the sign says, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”

What’s this? Somebody’s coming into the room…if that’s what this fiery-walled, white room can be called, this prison cell of mine.

Oh, God! It’s that man, the one who calls himself my father, in the long white coat of a doctor. He thinks he’s going to treat me?

“Good afternoon, Roger,” he says to me with a phony smile. “How are you feeling now?”

“How do you think, Father?” I growl sarcastically at him.

“You think I’m your father?” he asks with an incredulous look.

“Isn’t that what you’ve been claiming you are?” I ask. “I assure you–you aren’t my father, and never will be.”

“I know that, Roger,” he says. “I’m your therapist. Your father and aunt are outside. They are hoping I can help you. You’ve been under sedation for several hours now. Now that the drugs are wearing off, they could be still affecting your hallucinations. I guess that’s why you’re seeing your father’s face instead of mine.”

I blink a few times and look at his face again. No, he isn’t that man. He looks quite similar, but he isn’t him.

“My name is Doctor Sweeney,” he says. “Feel free to talk to me about anything you like. Don’t censor yourself.”

“I’d rather not talk to you at all,” I say, still frowning at him.

“Why is that, Roger?”

I look around at the fiery, white walls, which look rather soft now–cushiony, even. This ‘doctor’ is no doubt part of Mama’s plan to get inside my head.

“Let’s just say that I don’t trust shrinks.”

“You’ve been mistreated by psychiatrists before?”

“I know who my aunt and that man are working for.”

He’s writing something down on a notepad. “And who is that, I’m curious to know?” he asks with a self-satisfied smirk.

“You know who,” I say with a scowl.

“Um, no, I’m afraid I don’t,” he says, still writing.

“Oh, yes, you do. You’re working for her, too, obviously.”

“For her?“

“Don’t play dumb with me, shrink.”

“I’m sorry, Roger, but I guess I am dumb. I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why don’t you just tell me, then we can bring it out into the open and fully explore what’s troubling you?”

“Oh, right. Then you can call me crazy, lock me up in this inferno of a prison, and then Mama will get what she wants!”

“Mama? Is she who we’re working for?” he asks, still writing.

“Of course it’s her! Don’t you condescend me!”

“Didn’t your mother die a little while back?” he asks, writing really fast now. “Your aunt and father said she died…”

“HE’S NOT MY FATHER!!!”

“If you insist, though I do see a facial resemblance between you two.”

“You’re working for my mother, that’s why you say I look like him.”

“She is dead, though, isn’t she?” He’s still writing away.

“Of course she’d dead…in body, anyway.”

“So is she still alive in spirit? Is she a ghost?”

“Obviously!”

“Has her ghost appeared to you, telling you her plots against you?”

“I’ve seen her ghost, though she tells me little.”

“And why do you think she’s trying to persecute you?”

“Revenge.”

“For what?”

“Because I k…!” Oops. I’m quite silent now.

“Do you believe you…killed her?”

I’m still silent, looking down at my shoes.

“Your aunt and…that man say she died of a heart attack. You aren’t guilty of her murder, Roger. This guilt complex must be the basis of your delusions.”

“If I’m so non-violent, then can you please remove this straitjacket?”

“I’m afraid you might hurt yourself, and me.”

“Then I am of a violent nature, aren’t I? Violent enough to have killed her.”

“You have the potential to be, but you never killed…”

“We all have the potential to be violent, Doctor.”

“Am I being violent to you?”

“You’re depriving me of my freedom of movement, caging me in walls of white fire, binding my…”

“Walls of white fire?” Oh, he’s writing really fast now!

“Of course! Look around you! Are you blind?”

“No, but I must be having delusions myself, for all I see around us is a padded cell.”

“A padded cell? How cute.” Condescending bastard!

“Did your mother’s ghost surround us in white fire?”

“Of course she did! She’s a witch!”

That pen of his is moving like…crazy…now.

“Is that why you killed her? Did you use magic yourself to give her a heart attack?”

No courtroom would believe I killed her with magic, so I felt safe nodding at the shrink’s question.

“And now that she’s a spirit, I suppose she’s much freer to use her magic in a much more malignant way?”

“The fact that you can predict her freer use of magic on me proves that you are working for her,” I hiss at him. “But I can promise you this, shrink: I’ll find a way out of this prison. You’ll see!”

“M-hmm,” the shrink says in his usual smug manner. “What do you think your mother’s ghost is going to do to you, and to the world in general?”

“She’s destroying the global economy, she’s worsening global warming, as you can see all around us,…”

“Oh, yes, the burning padded cell.” He’s writing this all down, of course.

“…and the worsening of tensions between the West and China and Russia, leading to World War Three and nuclear annihilation.”

“Your mother’s ghost is causing all that? She must be one powerful witch.”

“Is condescension your preferred form of therapy, shrink?”

“No, getting all your thoughts out in the open, analyzing them, and learning where you got them from is my preferred method.”

“And where do you think I got my ideas from, Doctor? My tinfoil hat?”

“We’ll figure that out in time, Roger. For now, though, I’d like to observe you talking with your aunt and your f…, excuse me, that man.”

“Oh, God, no! Not him!”

“If he isn’t your father, why does he upset you so?”

“Because you all want me to believe he is!”

“How will believing he’s your father harm you?”

“It’s a lie of Mama’s, intended to lead me into a world of illusions!”

“Your hallucinations and delusions have already done that, Roger. I think you’re far more afraid of realizing that he really is your father. There’s something about him really being your father that you’d find devastating. We must explore this possibility, nonetheless, to get to the root of what is troubling you. I’ll be right back with him and your aunt.”

The shrink is getting up and walking towards the fiery white walls. I’m trembling in this straitjacket, rocking back and forth, trying desperately to hang on.

Oh, God, they’re coming in, emerging from the white fire!

Maybe I can incinerate myself by ramming into one of the fiery walls. Unh! I feel no burns from it, only a cushion pushing me back into the middle of the area. Mama won’t let me kill myself! She wants to torture me by forcing me to face this man!

He’s standing in front of me, looking at me with a fake look of concern for me. That shrink says he resembles me…wait! His face is being reshaped…to look exactly like mine! This is another of Mama’s tricks, for sure!

“Roger, please accept that I’m your father,” the impostor says. “Here’s a photo of your mom and me when we were dating. I had all my hair back then, but you should be able to see that it’s my face. Look!”

I’m looking at it, then looking back at him. His face is changing again: I’m seeing five eyes on it, three noses, and two mouths. Definitely not the face in the photo. Granted, the monstrous face I see on him is not his real face–something Mama is making me see–but it doesn’t prove he’s the man who dated Mama and got her pregnant.

All I can do is laugh at him. “It’s not you, old man.”

“Yes, it is,” he insists. “Deny it all you want, I am your old man. I’ll prove it further.”

He’s fumbling in his pockets for something. I’m sighing in exasperation. “My father died years ago!“

“No, he didn’t. He’s standing right here in front of you, Roger.” He takes out some paper and presents it to my reluctant eyes. “Here’s a document from a paternity test I did. Look at it! See my photo, and your name, and your mother’s name.” He’s pointing everything out for me.

“Forgeries!” I shout.

I get groans of frustration from him, my aunt, and the shrink.

“Roger, why is it so awful to you to believe that I’m your father?” that man asks. “Can’t you see how hurtful it is to me to be rejected by my own son? I know I left you before you were born, and I remained uninvolved in your life, and I’m sorry about that, truly sorry! But I want to make it up to you now. I wanna take care of you. I wanna help you get well. I can see now that the lack of a father in your life is, to a great extent at least, the cause of your sickness. I left your mother because I could see that there was something wrong with her, some kind of narcissism or psychopathy in her. It was a cowardly move on my part to have left you, and I’m sorry. Can’t your father get a second chance?”

“No,” I say with an icy look.

“Why not?” he screams.

“My father can’t get a second chance because my mother killed him. You’re right about her probably being narcissistic or psychopathic; but you left out one thing.”

“What’s that?” my aunt and the shrink ask together.

“My mother was a witch.”

More groans from all three of them. I’m unmoved.

“Look, Dr. Sweeney, could you at least remove the straitjacket?” the man asks. “Let’s give him some dignity. He isn’t normally violent. I’m sure we’ll be safe.”

With a sigh, the shrink says, “All right. I have orderlies just outside, who’ll come in at the drop of a hat the very second he begins acting up.”

“I’m sure he’ll be OK,” my aunt says. “He only got combative when we took those two silly things off of him, that necklace and sachet.”

“My only means of protection from Mama’s magic,” I growl as the shrink is taking off the straitjacket.

“Ridiculous,” my aunt says.

My arms are free at last. I’m still calm.

“See?” I tell the shrink. “I’m in control.”

“Please, Roger,” the man says with teary eyes. “Stop pushing me away. Let me be your father.”

“His ‘proof’ is faked,” I grunt through clenched teeth.

“Oh, you’re a fine one to judge the falsity of anything,” she says. “Will you ever acknowledge the falsity of your own delusions and hallucinations? You can’t see what’s wrong with what your eyes see and your ears hear, yet you’re so sure his photos and documentation are faked? He’s a nice man. OK, he left you and your mom, but he wants to make amends. Why can’t you just forgive him?”

My head is bent down, looking at my shoes again. I’m fighting back sobs. Tears are forming in my eyes.

“Your own mother told you he left you and her,” my aunt says. “Where’d you get this weird idea that she killed your father with witchcraft?”

“She lied to me,” I’m sobbing. “That witch was a liar!“

“Your very thoughts are lying to you,” my aunt says. “As soon as you come to accept that, you’ll begin to heal.”

“I abandoned you, Roger,” that man says. “I left you with a sick, disordered woman. I should never have done that. I was weak, irresponsible, and cowardly for doing that to you, and for that I am deeply sorry. I hope you’ll let me make it up to you.”

Now, I am bawling like a baby.

“Roger,…” he begins to say.

“No,” my aunt says, taking his arm. “Let’s leave him. Let him explore his thoughts a while, search his feelings. Maybe he’ll come to his senses.”

The two of them leave the room with the doctor. I’m no longer seeing white flames surrounding me. I really do see a padded cell, all white cushions for walls and the floor.

I’m still bawling my eyes out. Could it be true? Could that man really be my father? Did he abandon me, and leave me to the mercy of that horrible woman? Could he, my father, have been so unloving, so selfish, and so cruel? Could my father really have been so weak, so cowardly, so irresponsible, so contemptible?

My face is drowning in tears. My sobbing must be audible all over this…mental hospital. How embarrassing.

The idea I’ve had in my mind, that my father was a great man, murdered by my treacherous mother…is it just me kidding myself? Am I really so worthless as to be the offspring of such a feckless coward and a scheming bitch? Oh, that’s even worse, much worse!

No! This whole thing is a lie! That man is not my father! Surely, I come from better stock than that! Mama’s ghost tried to trick me there, to provoke my tears, but that was just a temporary weakness in me! This was all part of her plan to deceive me further!

I see that the white flames have returned. Mama is using them to trick me into thinking I’m deceiving myself again.

Still, I’ll go along with her plan. I’ll pretend I’ve accepted that man, even in my private thoughts. Then my conspirators will relax their hold on me, and I can figure out a way to escape this fiery prison.

And then, maybe, I’ll learn some more magic to stop Mama, and to save the world from the fiery hell of war she wants to impose on it.

Luciana

Now
as you
walk up
these steps
to your so new
resting place, do
remember us down
here on Earth who loved
you, learned from you, laughed
at your witty barbs on the sad state
of our world down here, and felt your caring
for the downtrodden. We will never forget you, for
your absence down here is a black void we’ll never fill
with another comrade so great as you were. I don’t believe
in heaven, nor do many of us, your friends, but your loss is enough
to make us all wish for a heaven, since your not being here anymore makes
our Earth more of a hell. May you find peace where, without contradiction, no matter
if the place is above or below, a state of mind, or a void of nirvana, that is still a heaven.

Analysis of ‘My Dinner with Andre’

My Dinner with Andre is a 1981 film directed by Louis Malle. It was written by André Gregory and Wallace (‘Wally’) Shawn, who also star in it, playing fictionalized versions of themselves having a discussion at dinner in Café des Artistes in Manhattan, the topics including experimental theatre, the nature of theatre and of life, and Andre’s spiritual experiences.

Just as Andre and Wally are based on the actors who play them, Andre’s experiences as described in the movie are based on the real-life experiences of Gregory from the mid- to late 1970s: his growing misgivings about the theatre, the fear of a trend towards fascism in the US (he and Shawn are Jews), his trip to Poland to work with Jerzy Grotowski on experimental theatre before private audiences, and his years spent with spiritual communities like Findhorn.

The film has received universal acclaim, with a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 25 reviews. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert praised it highly on Sneak Previews, which kept the film in theaters for a year.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the full movie.

A fascinating irony about this film, brilliantly made fun of at the end of Waiting for Guffman, with Corky’s “My Dinner with Andre action figures” [!], is that the bulk of the film is just these two men sitting at a table in a restaurant chatting…and yet Andre is discussing these out-of-this-world experiences in remote places like Poland, Tibet, India, the Sahara, and Scotland. Andre is advocating going out there and experiencing real life in all of its mystical ecstasy, hallucinatory madness, and tear-inducing trauma…yet he and Wally are just sitting in a restaurant in New York, chatting the whole time, never leaving the city.

Since both men are playwrights and actors, in real life as well as in the film, we see a blurred distinction between the acting world and the real world, reminding us of Jacques‘s famous speech in As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage…” Andre’s ‘sermon,’ if you will, spoken during this ‘last supper’ with Wally, is that we need to break free of the phoniness, the ‘theatre,’ of our boring routines and experience real life. Andre’s dropping out of the New York theatrical scene to travel the world is thus symbolic of such a break with the numbing routine of ordinary life.

Wally, his dialectical opposite, defends this routine, though. The film begins with him on his way to meet Andre at the restaurant, walking the streets of New York, getting on a graffiti-covered subway, and thinking about all of his day-to-day troubles as a struggling playwright, barely making ends meet. He only reluctantly is going to meet Andre, having not seen his old colleague in years, and having heard dauntingly bizarre stories of what the theatre drop-out has been doing.

Wally lived an easy life as a kid in a rich family, always thinking about art; but now, he’s 36, and only thinking about money. As the pragmatic realist of the two men, Wally is preoccupied with the material issues of life. Andre, having much more money and thus able to travel the world, is more preoccupied with abstract, idealistic things.

Wally would rather his girlfriend, Debbie, cook his dinner than eat with Andre. Instead, she has to be a breadwinner for them, as a waitress, rather than ‘play the role’ of housewife. In the dull routine of his life, the phony existence of his that’s symbolized by his work as a dramatist, he’s so conformist as to have his girlfriend cook for him instead of him cooking for himself.

In his private thoughts, a soliloquy given in voiceover as he’s on the subway, he remembers Andre’s “amazing work…with his company, the Manhattan Project (the actual name of the real André Gregory’s theatrical company). When we consider Andre’s misgivings about the role of theatre in modern life, how he, in his discussion at dinner with Wally, talks about how fake our interactions are with others, how like actors pretending and not living real life, we can see how fitting it is that Andre named his company after the research undertaking that resulted in the first of those very weapons that can wipe out all life on the Earth.

The notion of Andre suddenly dropping out of the theatre, traveling the world, and ‘talking with trees,’ when he never used to want to leave his home and family, suggests to Wally that “something terrible had happened to Andre,” as opposed to what Andre will insist were deep, mystical, enlightening experiences.

Just before entering the restaurant, Wally puts on a tie: all actors must put on their costumes before walking onstage. Given Andre’s problems, Wally wonders if he is supposed to play the role of doctor, of psychiatrist, for his apparently ill former colleague.

It’s interesting that the chosen restaurant is called the Café des Artistes, where two men of the theatre will engage in a theatrical dialogue of their own, with Wally doing an acting job of pretending to be interested in whatever Andre has to say. Wally waits for him to arrive at the bar.

Wally has heard a recent story of Andre being seen sobbing because he’d seen a scene from Autumn Sonata, in which Ingrid Bergman‘s character says, “I could always live in my art, but never in my life.” These words touched Andre so keenly because this has precisely been his problem as a dramatist: his whole life has been only fakery, acting, pretending; it has never been a real life. All the world’s a stage…

Andre arrives, sees Wally, and gives him a warm hug and a big smile. Wally, the actor, puts on his fake smile for Andre, says Andre looks “terrific,” though Andre insists that he feels terrible. (Falsely saying an ailing or profoundly unhappy person looks “terrific,” a phoniness that infuriates Andre, will be dealt with again later.) Fittingly, Wally notes that he’s “really in the theatre” at this moment.

Early on in their conversation, Andre mentions Grotowski, his old theatrical mentor who’d also dropped out of the theatre. Their table is ready, and they can go sit down: the rest of the film, minus Wally’s taxi ride home at the end, is just them sitting at their table chatting, for about an hour and forty minutes out of the total hour and fifty-one minutes.) Kids, get out Corky’s action figures and have some fun!

Since Wally is feeling very nervous about having to socialize with Andre for the whole duration of this dinner, he figures the best way he can get through it all is to ask him questions. He’s sometimes thought of himself as a private investigator, as a detective: once again, Wally is finding himself an actor playing roles instead of just being himself. He still has that fittingly fake smile on his face. They order their meals, Wally hardly understanding the French on the menu, while Andre orders expertly…even though Wally has always known Andre to be quite ascetic in his eating habits. Maybe Andre is being a bit of an actor here, too.

Though at first reluctant to talk about what he’s been doing for the past five years, Andre finally opens up about it. First, he discusses going to Poland to be with Grotowski and a group of Polish actors in a forest there. None of these actors could speak English.

As the leader of a group of people who couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and vice versa, Andre had no frame of reference by which he could communicate with them or organize the improvisational theatrical events. Out in a forest, they were far away from modern civilization and all of the things that Andre had been coming to dislike. The actors would act on impulse, doing anything that came to mind…but they, as improvisors, weren’t trying to embody any kind of character from a play. They were being themselves.

They weren’t speaking from a script. They weren’t pretending to be someone else. They weren’t being fake, or following a plan. They were being real, as natural as their green setting. Andre was seeing real life in action, a breaking-free from the routines of New York.

Andre speaks of Grotowski’s “beehives,” paratheatrical events that involved simple interactive exchanges and unstructured work that Andre was fascinated with. Grotowski made Andre lead a beehive, which made Andre very nervous, since he didn’t know what to do to organize an event with a huge number of Polish strangers. But that was the point: there was to be no organization at all. The group of people ended up singing a beautiful song of St. Francis, a song these people didn’t even know how to sing.

Now, Grotowski’s beehives–in real life, that is–generally weren’t successful as attempts to blur the line between performer and audience, to bring about genuine creative spontaneity; the participants mostly gave stock emotional reactions, causing stereotypical, clichéd performances. Andre’s beehive, however, seems to have been a glorious success with this St. Francis song, sung over and over again.

There were no costumes or makeup for the performance, but it was a performance all the same. The beehive was, as it were, a sublation of the opposites of performance and non-performed, spontaneous, natural action. People were singing the song and dancing an impromptu dance; it built into a group trance, something Andre compares to one of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies (this being one of a number of references in the film to Naziism), so we see how trance can be heavenly or hellish.

Nonetheless, all of this improvisational work in Poland has been like an enlightening, mystical experience for Andre, a discovery that theatrical performances can still be genuinely felt, as long as they maintain this level of spontaneity. Life, like drama, can be real if unscripted, free of routine.

An example of one of the wonderful experiences he had with the Polish improvisers was seeing two of them fall in love. This, during an improvisation about being on an airplane with a bad motor, and therefore fear among the passengers that they might die. Here, we see the heaven and the hell of the mystical state felt in trance-like improvisation, the fusion of acting with real life.

These two lovers, having left the group to be alone in the forest, understood the real meaning of these unstructured improvisations: it was all about really living.

On the last day of the improvisations in the forest in Poland, the group arranged a christening, a baptism for Andre. It was a simple ceremony, with flowers, candles and torches set up all over a castle in “a miracle of light.” Again, this was a spontaneous act, yet also a ceremony, a fusion of the planned with the impulsive act, a dialectic of theatre and life. A man and a woman played the roles of Andre’s godfather and godmother. He was named Yendrosh, and it really felt like a new name for him; it could be said that Andre felt reborn.

He says that this experience in the forest was the first time in his life that he’d ever felt truly alive. Again, such a mystical experience has both a heavenly and a hellish aspect to it; such spiritual feelings are not a mere sentimental removal of all of one’s pain. In Andre’s feeling of being truly alive, there’s also the frightening realization of the opposite of that state…death. He will later discuss an experience he had during Halloween of almost dying that is the dialectical opposite of this experience in the Polish forest. The mystical feeling of being connected to everything means also being connected to death.

Andre’s next major topic of discussion is The Little Prince, and certain feelings of synchronicity associated with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry‘s book. Andre discusses a trip to the Sahara with a Japanese monk (whom Andre imagines to embody the little prince) to work on a play based on the book. Analogous to Andre’s travels around the world, the little prince also leaves his tiny planet to visit a number of other planets, including Earth, where he meets a pilot who’s crash-landed in the Sahara, far from civilization…rather like the Polish forest. So if Kozan, the Japanese monk, is the little prince, in this context, does this make Andre the pilot?

A recurring criticism in The Little Prince is that of adults; the little prince considers them to be very strange. Andre’s experience in the Polish forest, with the unstructured improvisations, was that it made everyone like children at play again, something he found to be wonderful. The little prince’s nobility is in his childlike state: he’s a prince because he’s little. Andre and the improvisers were truly alive because they were children again.

Other parallels between My Dinner with Andre and The Little Prince can be found, thus further justifying Andre’s discussion of the book in the movie. Both stories involve two males, the one telling the other about his travels to many places, meeting interesting and even strange people. Wally thus is the pilot, and Andre in this context is the little prince. Wally at first dreads having to have dinner with Andre, worrying about his own personal, financial problems; the pilot is at first annoyed with the little prince wanting him to draw a sheep for him, when he urgently needs to repair his plane. Just as the little prince cares for the flower that he’s left behind on his little planet, and is fearful of her dying, so does Andre care about his wife, Chiquita, and his two kids, Nicolas and Marina, and he grieves bitterly over his mother’s death.

One major difference between the two stories, though, is that while in The Little Prince, the two friends meet in a desert, the pilot having a limited supply of drinking water, in My Dinner with Andre, the two friends are eating in a fine restaurant, with Andre ultimately treating Wally. This opposition of famine and feast, however, can be interpreted dialectically, as can the film’s other oppositions: theatre vs life, routine vs spontaneity, ecstasy vs agony, staying in the same place vs going out there into the world.

Andre’s noting of the oft-repeated word “tame” in The Little Prince is also worthy of commentary. The little prince tames his flower, the fox, and by implication, the pilot, making them all his friends. Andre tamed his Polish improvisers, making them all his friends, too. We all need taming, so we can be each other’s friends. In the act of spontaneously experiencing real life in those improvisations, the group of people collectively experiences a mystical, ecstatic oneness, inspiring mutual love.

In any case, nothing productive came from the trip to the Sahara with Kozan, so Andre, still acting on impulse (a habit he no doubt picked up from the Polish improvisations), brought the Japanese monk with him to New York to stay with him and his family. Kozan ended up staying with them for six months, taking over, since Andre, always wanting to travel to places like Tibet and India, wasn’t being much of a father.

It was as though Kozan and Andre were trading places. The monk taught the family about meditation, Asia, and his monastery, but he also began wearing Gucci shoes under his robes, as well as eating beef. Just as Andre had been neglecting his children, Kozan came off as not liking them, either. His taking over was like him being the new father…the implication being that Andre, wanting to go to Tibet, getting into meditation, and having these mystical experiences, was turning into a kind of Buddhist. In these two men we see another instance of the unity of all things, the blurred boundary between self and other.

Andre speaks of a hallucination he had in a Catholic Church on Christmas Eve: he saw a six-foot-eight apparition, half-man, half-bull, with blue skin and violets coming out of its eyelids! It remained for the whole Mass. Andre couldn’t erase the monster’s presence from his mind. With enlightenment also comes madness, paradoxically–that mixture of heaven and hell. And indeed, he did feel some enlightenment with this madness that wouldn’t go away, for Andre felt that the creature was there to comfort him, that even though he wasn’t being productive as a dramatist, all was okay, just a part of the journey. Hang in there, Andre, for the bad luck would soon change to good.

Around when Kozan left, Andre got this odd idea of getting a flag, and he ended up getting one with a Tibetan swastika on it. Though, of course, it was nothing at all like the Nazi swastika, one cannot help making the association, and so when he took the flag home, his wife and daughter found it intolerable to look at. Again, we see in this flag associations of extreme opposites: the ancient, Tibetan meaning of the swastika, a symbol of divinity and spirituality; and the Nazi meaning, linked with virulent racial hatred.

After this, he went to India in the hopes of finding great spiritual enlightenment, but he left the place disappointed, feeling his experiences were no better than those of a tourist. After that, he went to Findhorn in Scotland, and found far better spiritual inspiration among the people there and their plants. He tells Wally of having run in the forest there, in a state “where laughter and tears seem to merge.” He was also having lots of wild hallucinations at the time: once again, enlightenment meets madness, heaven meets hell in the realm of mysticism. Indeed, Andre alludes to William Blake, who wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

In the fall, after these experiences, he had his last wild one, on Long Island. This was the hellish one to contrast with the heavenly one he had in the Polish forest. It was during Halloween. He and the other participants were made to write out their last will and testament. After this, he had to wear a blindfold and run through a field. Then he was taken to a basement and made to get naked. He was so scared, he was thinking about Nazi death camps and secret police.

The participants of this Halloween event took photos of him, naked and blindfolded; he was made to run naked in a forest, still blindfolded, and taken on a stretcher through forests and lowered into the ground. It was one of six graves, each eight feet deep! Wood and dirt were put on him, and a sheet was put over his head, all to make him feel buried alive. He was left in there for about a half-hour, though he didn’t know how long he’d been left there…then he was “resurrected,” as it were.

The blindfold was taken off, and they had him run through fields until he came to “a great circle of fire” with music and wine, “and everyone danced until dawn.” So his first experience in the Polish forest was the ecstatic, nirvana-like one that he wanted in some way to relive as best he could in places like the Sahara, India, Findhorn, and this Halloween event…but this last one was so traumatizing that Andre didn’t want to do these things anymore. Still, in all of it, he was really living.

The extremes of these experiences, going to heaven and back, and later to hell and back, are rather like going all the way along the coiled body of the ouroboros, as I’ve described it and used as a symbol of the dialectical relationship of opposites, something I’ve written about in so many other blog posts. The biting head represents one extreme, and the bitten tail represents the opposite extreme, them both meeting at the bite, of course, while the rest of the serpent’s coiled body symbolizes all the intermediate points on a circular continuum.

When Andre, so disillusioned as he was with the state of the theatre in New York in the mid-1970s, left it to experience the blissful spontaneity of the beehives in the Polish forest, he moved up the serpent’s coiled body from the back half, near the tail, to the biting head. He loved it, like a cocaine high, and he tried to sustain that high, tried to stay as close to the serpent’s biting head (if you’ll indulge me in my mixed metaphor, Dear Reader!) as he could.

It is a reality in life, though, that the initial ecstasy of the ‘religious experience’ will wear off over time, and one will come back down to a middling experience, one around the halfway point between the head and the tail. Still, Andre felt the urge to return to that point of extremity, but he went the other way during the Halloween event…he went to the bitten tail, where a kind of harrowing of hell led back to the biting head, the circle of fire, the wine and the dancing–heaven.

This going all the way around the circular continuum that I’d have the ouroboros symbolize is the essence of what Andre would deem living real life. It isn’t a sentimental place where one never feels pain again…on the contrary, one can feel torturous pain as well as profound joy. All of it, all the same, is experiencing life to the fullest.

Wally, on the other hand, prefers life in the comfortable, safe area in the middle of the coiled body of the ouroboros–not too happy, but not too scary, either. Hence, towards the end of the movie, he vehemently defends his enjoyment of simple pleasures: coffee, an electric blanket to keep himself warm in winter, writing his plays, and being satisfied with just staying in New York.

The extremes that Andre has gone through have made him feel as though he’s guilty of some kind of delusion of grandeur, and thus he’s a terrible person, as bad as someone like Albert Speer, the Nazi architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production. Andre compares himself to the man because he imagines himself, like Speer, to be guilty of narcissistically thinking himself above the normal rules of human conduct, that they don’t apply to him.

Since Andre has seen a lot of death around him over the past several years, he knows that when you die, you do it alone. None of your life’s achievements matter anymore. Dying alone feels like facing judgement before God, as it were; so Andre is feeling guilt over the excesses he’s been experiencing. Were they any less theatre than the plays he’s done? Were those events he participated in any less phony than his plays? The trauma of the live burial, combined with the deaths and hospitalizations in his family (a family he left behind, he abandoned, to travel the world) must have gotten to him.

His mother died, other family members have had medical problems…and he had left these important people in his life in a Buddha-like quest for enlightenment in India, Tibet, etc. Far from attaining his desired spiritual growth, Andre was indulging in some kind of self-absorbed solipsism–if anything, a spiritual degeneration…or so he feels, at least.

In his feeling that he was fooling himself in this spiritual quest, we see another example of the dialectical relationship between good and evil, heaven and hell, saint and (Nazi-like) sinner. He starts complaining about some talkative Norwegian director, telling story after story, and sounding pompous. Yet what has Andre been doing this whole time, if not talking and talking endlessly, telling story after story, while Wally patiently listens? Just as with Kozan, this Norwegian is another double for Andre, another case of the blurred boundary between self and other, further proof of the oneness of everything.

The Norwegian gabbed about his mother constantly, and Andre found him so intolerable that he politely asked his garrulous guest to leave. Recall that, around this time, Andre’s mother died. He wept, since this guest had been a good friend of his for some time. Then after the man left, Andre saw a man on the TV win at some sporting event, “smiling malevolently at his friends,” and Andre judged the guy harshly…then he realized he was projecting his own bad qualities onto him.

Just as he’d projected his own chattiness onto the Norwegian.

At a show on Billie Holliday, Andre was similarly judgmental of some businessmen-types, then again realized he was no better–just projecting his own vices onto them. When Andre’s speaking at this point in his discussion with Wally, his words are all shot out rapid-fire, like bullets from a machine gun. He is in quite an extreme, turbulent emotional state. He hates the theatrical phoniness of the world, yet he feels himself to be no less theatrical or phony!

And Wally, the whole time, is just listening to Andre pouring out his thoughts in an endless torrent, listening as if he was Andre’s psychoanalyst, making the occasional comment or interpretation, trying to figure out just what is troubling him.

Andre, in his highly emotional state, feels the world is getting worse and worse. Few people seem aware of how bad things are. He recently met a number of people who said he looked ‘wonderful’ (i.e., his physical appearance), when he really felt awful; recall that Wally, when he first saw Andre in the restaurant, said he looked “terrific,” yet he’s really been feeling awful.

Only when Andre met a woman, whose aging, beloved aunt was in hospital for a cataract and was crippled from a fall from her poorly-prepared bed (therefore the woman was very upset for her aunt), did he find in her someone who, in her own pain, could clearly see how awful he felt! Only those of us in deep pain, roused from the torpor of our comfort zones, can see “with complete clarity.” The rest of the complacent world cannot, because they’re living in a kind of insane dream world.

Andre’s observations here tie in with what he was talking about before, with the Halloween event, and how I interpreted it above, in terms of my ouroboros symbolism. His having gone to hell and back, from the trauma of the serpent’s bitten tail to the enlightenment of its biting head, is like this woman’s pain for her aunt’s sake giving her the empathic insight to see Andre’s pain for what it really is.

Wally can empathize with Andre, too, for he can understand that those who thought Andre looked “wonderful” couldn’t see the real him–they only saw what they wanted to see, being in their insane dream world. Andre discusses his dying mother in the hospital, and how infuriated he felt with a doctor who saw her and said it was so “wonderful how she’s coming along.” Andre felt she looked as awful as any survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau. Again, this doctor was in a complacent dream world.

This idea of Andre’s, that most people are in some kind of fog, in a trance, a dream world, also ties in with the idea explored above about how life is like theatre, a display of false emotions and scripted words, planned routine, lacking spontaneity and genuine creativity. As Wally is growing more sympathetic with what Andre is saying, we can see Wally going from just politely agreeing with him, acting out a role of his own, waking from his own dream world, to offering some experiences of his own of this kind of inappropriate communication, from friends whose words are ultimately hostile to him.

Social convention, Wally observes, requires one to express oneself indirectly, resulting in awkward, inappropriate word choices. This is the phony theatre of life that Andre has been trying to escape from. In fact, the hostile words of Wally’s friends were in the context of a theatrical performance in which there were serious problems with Wally’s costuming, a cat suit he’d be uncomfortable wearing onstage, making him hear everything wrong. His friends, colleagues in the performance, were pointing these problems out in a taunting way, as if to laugh at him and make him feel humiliated onstage in front of a presumably large audience. Here is an example of how My Dinner with Andre uses theatre as a metaphor for life.

Wally, in his having not yet woken from his own torpor from the societal dream world, hadn’t known what to think about his colleagues’ taunting words. Over the course of his listening to Andre’s recounting of his extreme experiences, though, Wally is beginning to wake up to the kind of world we’re all living in.

Andre and Wally continue to discuss how bizarre people’s topics of conversation can be, such as the death of Mary Jo Kopechne–and laughing about it. This joking about macabre things is a reflection of social alienation and a lack of consciousness…it’s also another example of people performing, in the theatre of life, rather than being themselves. Hence, Grotowski left the theatre, as Andre attempted to.

People, in these public performances, know exactly how they ought to act and present themselves, yet privately, they don’t know who they are or what they should be doing, what Marx called alienation from one’s species essence. We focus on goals and plans, the structure of the performance of the theatre of life, but none of those goals and plans have anything to do with reality. Life becomes habitual, dream-like, and meaningless.

Very rarely do things happen in a spontaneous way anymore, since if they did, people would be too disoriented by the shock to deal with it, as happened when Brando rejected his Godfather Oscar, having Sacheen Littlefeather decline it on his behalf as a protest against Hollywood’s negative portrayal of Native Americans. Andre insists that if we’re always living by habit, those planned performances in the theatre of life, then we’re not really living.

In Sanskrit, he says, the root of their verb for “to be” is the same as “to grow,” or “to make grow.” To exist in a meaningful sense, we must grow and help other people and things grow.

Andre then discusses a mathematician associated with Findhorn who refused to have any kind of imaginary or dream life, yet who saw, in the gardens of Edinburgh, a faun! A man who insisted on having only a direct perception of reality, apparently saw a mythological creature! Again, the boundary between fantasy and reality has been blurred. All is one. The extreme insistence on experiencing only direct reality, the serpent’s biting head, can lead to the experience of fantasy, the bitten tail.

We’re so stuck in our states of habit that we lose consciousness of what we’re doing or saying, ignoring such things as the taste of our food or the macabre things we laugh about, and thus we enter that dream world that Andre dreads so much. Wally, enjoying the comfort of his electric blanket or the taste of the food he’s eating in the restaurant, has far less of such a dread.

Andre, not liking such technological advances as electric blankets, feels that the comforts provided by these things lull us into a dangerous comfort that blinds us to direct perception of reality. When, lacking the electric blanket, you feel the discomfort of the cold of winter, not only are you aware of your own discomfort, you’re also aware of the discomfort of your cold partner lying beside you, and you feel compassion for him or her. Schopenhauer noted how the hell of suffering leads to the heaven of compassionate love, as I observed here.

Andre complains about how we treat one another in our semi-conscious state, and Wally agrees that this is a problem. Some of this alienation is due to class differences, and some of it, as Wally observes, is based on being focused only on our experiences in our own part of the world, ignoring what’s outside of it.

Though Wally admits that he ignores large parts of the world, like Africa, which are not relevant to his immediate place in it, he enjoys writing plays that he feels connect him with some sense of reality. He agrees with Andre that the theatre (a metaphor for real life, remember) is in terrible shape, yet at least a few years ago, people acknowledged what bad shape it was in. Now, it’s so bad that people can’t even see what’s wrong with it.

Andre, too, understands that the theatre, if done well, can bring the audience face to face with reality. He tells Wally about a production he did of The Bacchae when, at the point of the dismemberment of Pentheus, he’d wanted to have a head…a real one…passed around the audience. The actress playing Agave, for obvious reasons, refused to do this. Andre wants a kind of theatre that shocks people out of their dream-state, but contemporary theatre lulls people further to sleep by just presenting things all too close to everyday life, so close to it that people don’t notice what’s wrong.

Still, Wally, who is becoming more and more engaged in the conversation, insists that one shouldn’t need to escape all the way to Mount Everest to experience the fullness of life. Surely, one can experience that fullness just from a trip to the local cigar store, provided one’s consciousness is sufficiently sharpened. Surely one can still write meaningful, realistic plays today, too! All of reality, human experience, is uniform on a deeper, mystical level…all is one, so where one experiences it is irrelevant.

Andre agrees with Wally’s argument in principle, but most people are blind to this uniformity of truth. Most cannot see that nirvana and samsara are the same, as the Mahayana Buddhists see these opposite states of being. This blindness of most people has become more and more serious in recent years, as Andre has come to understand.

Now, Andre comes to an extremely important point, perhaps the most important one of the entire film. This inability of most people to see the nirvana in samsara, the hidden Mount Everest, so to speak, inside the ordinary cigar store, comes from a boredom, an apathy to life that in turn comes from a self-perpetuating kind of brainwashing.

…and with this brainwashing, things start to get scary.

This self-induced brainwashing, this conditioning not to care about what’s going on around us, was started “by a world totalitarian government based on money.” Now, I suspect that most people who hear Andre’s words at this point focus on “world totalitarian government” (which it surely is), but pay far less attention to “based on money” (a.k.a. capitalism).

So many people in recent years have been lulled into believing in the popular NWO conspiracy theory, which tends to be a far-right-wing conspiracy theory (though admittedly, some leftists believe in a version of it). They imagine that its centre of evil is in the government-as-such, rather than in the love of money, and the power that comes from owning billions of US dollars.

The far-right ideologues that believe in the coming totalitarian ‘One-World-Government’ also think it is a kind of socialism, since, apparently socialism is ‘anything a government does,’ rather than how I explained it here and here. But Andre isn’t talking about a left-wing world government; he’s talking about fascism (recall all of his references to Naziism in the movie). Our current world government is in Washington, DC, NATO is an extension of it, and American military bases can be found all over the world.

The totalitarianism we need to fear isn’t communism; it’s capitalist imperialism, which has plundered the Third World for resources in a big way since at least the years of the Scramble for Africa. Meanwhile, those of us living in the imperial core, like Wally, have wandered about apathetic to the problem, because if we did wake up to it, and began to care, the powers-that-be would feel threatened. Those powers have an investment in keeping us all asleep.

Andre tells Wally of a man who no longer reads newspapers or watches TV, to escape the brainwashing. He speaks of another, a man from Findhorn in his eighties who’s trying to save the trees, who goes everywhere with a backpack because he could end up anywhere tomorrow. This old man told Andre that New Yorkers never leave the city, even if they say they really want to. He told Andre that the reason for this staying in New York is because they’re psychologically imprisoned there; the Big Apple has become a kind of concentration camp that the inmates have built for themselves. Their pride in what they’ve built (symbolic of nationalism?) keeps them imprisoned in the city.

Andre says that he and Chiquita have had the same, growing fear that they need to get out of this Auschwitz that they’re living in…except that every city, in every country around the world, is growing into its own Auschwitz. There’s nowhere to escape to anymore. In this predicament, we see the sublation of the dialectic of Andre’s wanderlust and globetrotting on the one hand, and Wally’s preference to stay in New York on the other, all encapsulated in a film the bulk of which is just two men chatting at a dinner table, going nowhere else.

Andre then states his belief that the 1960s were the last decade “of the human being, before he was extinguished.” For him, this moment being 1981, when the movie was made, is the beginning of “the rest of the future, that from now on, they [the people, that is] will simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing, and there’ll be nothing left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts…”

It’s significant that this beginning of “the rest of the future,” especially now, understood by us in hindsight, should be the early 1980s, with the beginning of the ‘Reagan Revolution.’ Recall that this “world totalitarian government” is “based on money,” that is, it’s a capitalist government…and Reagan and Thatcher were the ones who inaugurated the neoliberal, “free market” version of capitalism in the 1980s.

As I’ve argued many times, right-wing libertarian ‘small government’ is a con game, which, by cutting taxes for the rich and deregulating businesses so capitalists can maximize profits, allows the wealthy to become super-wealthy and thus buy all the political parties in order to control them better. When the common people try to resist, this capitalist government becomes more authoritarian…fascist, even.

Back in the 1960s, political leftism was still a formidable force, pushing liberals to the left, if only relatively so. Now, after all the ill effects of Reaganite neoliberalism have set in, liberals are so far to the right, without even realizing it, that they’re banging the war drums against Russia and supporting Ukrainian Nazis!

Technology has numbed us with smartphones, tablets, and social media to the point where we scroll and scroll while ignoring those sitting next to us. Andre is being prophetic about these social ills we now have, and his fears of a resurgence of fascism, way back in the 1980s, when the ideology was still latent, were also foretold by Frank Zappa, who was scoffed at for it…and yet what Reagan began has become much more apparent in the 2020s, with such things as the overturning of Roe vs Wade and the authoritarian measures used to deal with the pandemic.

Now, Andre has some hope that we can “preserve the light” through these new dark ages. Pockets of resistance are popping up here and there with organizations like Findhorn, the kind of thing Andre was trying to do with his spontaneous beehives. He wants a new language, one of the heart, as there was in the Polish forest, where language wasn’t needed. He wants us all to have a “sense of being united to all things,” because all is one.

After hearing all these wacky things that Andre has been going on and on about, Wally offers his thoughts about it all. As Andre’s dialectical opposite, Wally isn’t concerned with deep, spiritual issues or political conspiracies; he’s just trying to survive. He is living on the plain, ordinary, surface level of material existence.

Accordingly, Wally derives happiness from simple things: being with his girlfriend, Debbie, drinking coffee, and reading Charleton Heston’s autobiography. He gains intellectual satisfaction from writing plays and reading those of other playwrights, as well as reading reviews of those plays. Simple stuff.

He has a notebook with lists of errands and everyday responsibilities–his routine to which he adheres, all antithetical stuff to Andre’s hyper-spontaneous philosophy of life. Wally can’t imagine there being anything more than his simple, hum-drum life. Why can’t we just be happy with what we have? he wonders.

The dialectical opposition between Andre and Wally is that the former is hovering–to use my ouroboros symbolism again–around where the serpent is biting its tail, at the extremes, while the latter is in the moderate middle of the serpent’s coiled body. Ironically, both Andre and Wally are, each in his own way, experiencing a verson of both opposites together: Andre has had heaven and hell thrust in his face in a vivid, shocking way, while Wally has had both in the sense of being in the middle of them, a dull experience of half of the one and half of the other. This is the unity of their opposition to each other, further proof that all is one.

Wally also rejects Andre’s synchronicity, affirming modern science over a belief in heavenly-ordained coincidences. Wally can understand the temptation to believe in synchronicity, but his rational mind cannot accept a belief in omens or portents of the future.

Now, Andre and Wally don’t completely disagree: Andre acknowledges that total belief in omens can be abused in order to avoid responsibility for one’s own actions. The occasional agreement of dialectical opposites is their sublation, a manifestation of their unity in opposition. Such unity is a further example of how My Dinner with Andre uses dialectical opposites to show how all is one.

Andre acknowledges that the kind of spirituality he’s been exploring can grow authoritarian, even fascistic; but science, too, if held in too high an esteem, can also be perceived as a kind of “magical force” capable of solving anything. He sees a destructiveness in science that people are reacting against.

The two men agree that both religious feeling and a credulous acceptance of science, taken to excesses, can be equally bad for humanity. So again, we see the dialectical opposites in Andre and Wally being sublated.

Wally observes that the whole purpose of Andre’s workshops was to strip away all purposefulness in order to experience “pure being,” which seems Zen-like. Not doing any particular thing, a state of ‘no-thing-ness.’ Wally objects to such a project, feeling instead that one shouldn’t have moments of not trying to do anything. It’s in our basic human nature to have purpose, he argues.

Andre notes that the idea of doing nothing, of just being, seems to frighten Wally, to make him nervous, which Wally deems a perfectly understandable emotion to have in such a situation. Andre considers it equally absurd, and deadening, to find oneself always needing to have something to do, a neurotic need that, incidentally, has only grown exponentially worse in our neoliberal era.

One should only do things if one really feels the passion to do them; but if one does things mechanically, as Andre says, one isn’t really living. One is just acting out roles in the phony theatre of life. In relationships, in marriage, this can be a problem, too; we often only play the roles of partner, husband, wife…the love is gone.

An irony about Andre’s own relationship with his wife and kids, after a day of being annoyed with them, was that a contemplation of what it would be like to leave them all, to abandon them, led to the realization that he all the more wanted to stay with them. However one chooses to do it, by going to the Sahara or just staying at home, Andre insists that we must, at some point in our lives, “cut out the noise,” stop performing, and listen to what’s inside ourselves, the silence.

Wally admits to disliking “those quiet moments”: they scare him. Perhaps they’re like doing Shadow Work, “the fear of unconscious impulses.” He’d feel exposed and vulnerable to failure. Andre can understand Wally’s fears: feeling emotions as intensely as Andre’s been feeling them can be overwhelming…but one can also be filled with overjoyed enthusiasm, a true lust for life.

All the patrons except Andre and Wally have left. The restaurant is about to close. Andre pays for the whole meal, so Wally can treat himself to a cab ride home.

The first of Satie‘s Trois Gymnopédies is heard on the piano. It’s a fitting piece of music to end the movie with, firstly because the title means “three nude dances,” symbolic of how Andre threw himself into the world ‘naked,’ as it were, vulnerable and unprotected from the abrasiveness of his surroundings; secondly, because the opening back-and-forth of the G-major 7th and D-major 7th chords suggests a symbolism of that unity-in-opposition as personified in Andre and Wally.

As Wally’s going home in the cab, he looks out the window and remembers all the places he’s been to at some point in his life. He’s feeling a mystical union with New York. Andre’s words have touched him. He knows that all is one.

…and he didn’t even need to leave the city to realize that unity.

‘Mama,’ a Psychological Horror Novel, Chapter Eight

I haven’t slept a wink all night. Though Mama’s ghost hasn’t penetrated my magic circle of protection, not even once, I’m still disturbed by what I saw in the mirror. I’ve just been lying here on the living room floor with my blanket and pillow, looking out the window, and seeing that glowing fire augmenting the light of the rising morning sun, the glow getting brighter and brighter, however slowly. The fire is coming closer to my apartment–I’m sure of it.

Somehow, Mama tricked me into doing a spell that has put me in Hell instead of her. She’s telling me that I’m my own worst enemy, rather than her. Such an idea is, of course, nonsense: she has always been, and always will be, my worst enemy. All my life, she tried to make me think that my problems have all been of my own creation, rather than a product of her scheming; this current problem was her tricking me into bringing the Hell of her presence ever closer to me.

I’ve gotta get something to eat. I’ll fix myself some cereal in the kitchen. As I pass the mirror, I just see myself, not her. Still, that fire outside is getting closer. In the kitchen now, I can see the glow of it in the window. I’ll go closer and get a better look at it.

Yes, I can see genuine fire burning some of the buildings in the distance! Mama isn’t here, in my zone of protection, but she’s coming to get me, for sure!

I’m pouring the cereal in my bowl, and it all looks okay. The milk I’m pouring into it also looks okay. Her ghost isn’t here with me, but she’s coming.

I’m eating it–it doesn’t taste strange or awful. At least I can satisfy my hunger with no problems…for now, that is.

Now that I’ve finished my cereal with no problems, I’ll go back into the living room and take a look out the large window leading out to the balcony to see how the fire looks out there…Oh, my God!

I see a fire all the way across the horizon, from the far left to the far right. I see it burning buildings in the distance, just as I saw through the kitchen window. It’s coming here slowly, but it’s surely coming–no doubt of it.

There’s no way I’m going to work today.

There’s no way I’m setting foot outside at all.

I’m sure that fire is surrounding my apartment and the city in general. I won’t be able to escape the city, so I’m staying here. I’ll burn to death here, but I’ll burn to death even sooner out there. I choose to stay alive as long as I can, in the hopes of thinking of something I can do to stop Mama’s ghost.

Maybe there’s a magical ritual I can find online that can reverse the spread of that fire. I’ll turn on my laptop and take a look. My WiFi is okay; the approaching Hell hasn’t de-activated it. I’ll have to rely on this instead of the library from now on.

I’ll just type something in the search engine…’how to get out of an inferno’…wait! What’s this here?

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

Why am I seeing a Dante quote instead of practical advice for how to stop this fire? This must be Mama’s doing!

I see the fire through the window again. My eyes are wandering back to the mirror.

Mama’s in the reflection again, sitting where I should be seeing myself.

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

I’ve stayed here at home for the past three days now. I can’t find any useful spells online; Mama’s ghost is preventing me from finding anything useful. Aunt Jane keeps trying to call me on my cellphone, which I’ve switched off. I’ve unplugged my landline, too. I won’t answer her emails to me on my laptop.

Why should she care if I’m not at work? It’s not like she needs me there to deal with an excess of customers. The economy is so bad that virtually nobody is going to Pet Valu to buy anything. My last day working there, before I got those verses from the library: how many people did I see come into the store to look around, let alone buy anything? You could count the total number of people on the fingers of one hand and still have a couple fingers to spare.

People especially won’t go there today, with the huge fire raging outside. I’m amazed it hasn’t reached my apartment yet: I just see a wall of orange flames blazing outside through the window.

The online newspapers I’ve been reading are still reporting on the downward spiral of the economy, with so many people losing their jobs. I’ve essentially lost mine, though I’m not regretting it.

The news is also discussing the escalating tensions between the US and NATO on one side and Russia, China, Iran, and now a number of African countries on the other. World War Three is coming for sure, if it hasn’t already. Maybe that’s what’s caused the fire outside–a conventional bombing, if not an outright nuclear attack, that the news doesn’t want to report, for fear of causing a panic.

Whatever is going on, I know that Mama’s ghost is behind it all! She’s sinking the economy, destroying the environment with global warming and wildfires, bringing a nuclear armageddon on us all, bringing Hell to Earth…all to spite me for using my protective magic against her. She’s relentless in her wish to torment me!

Hey, what’s this? Another email from Aunt Jane.

Oh, shit! It says, “We’re coming over,” in the email’s title.

We? Who’s coming with her? I’ll have to read it after all…No! Not that man!

Oh, please, no! I don’t wanna have to see or talk to him! Again, this is Mama’s ghost’s doing! She’s using Aunt Jane, possessing her body, to help torment me!

KNOCK! KNOCK! KNOCK! on the door. Oh, that made me jump!

DING, DONG! rings the doorbell.

“Go away!” I shout at whoever’s out there.

“Let us in, Roger!” the unmistakable voice of my aunt bellows from the other side of the door.

“I’ll never unlock the door for you and that man!”

“We figured you wouldn’t,” she says. “That’s why we got the landlord to bring his key!”

“Oh, no!” I say as I hear the key go in the lock. Mama’s ghost is bringing Hell into my home!

The door swings open, banging against the wall.

I scream at the top of my lungs, making my aunt and…that man…plug their ears with their hands as they enter. I see another hand, from an arm in a white T-shirt, pull the key out of the lock and disappear; I hear his footsteps walking away.

“What is the matter with you, Roger, screaming like that?” she says as the two of them approach me. “What a mess he looks like, with his hair sticking up like that, and the wildness in his eyes! We’ve got to get him to a psychiatrist,” she says to…that man.

It’s only the two of them–no landlord, whom I’ve never met, since Mama always dealt with him alone…unless, of course, that man is the landlord!

Yes, that’s it! This man, who’s always claiming to be my father, is the landlord! He’s come to evict me for not working and making money to pay this month’s rent. He and my aunt are grabbing me, taking me…to jail?

“Come on, Roger,” she’s saying as she and that landlord are pulling me up on my feet. “We’re taking you to a hospital. I should have done this with you right after your mother’s funeral.”

“Hospital, nonsense!” I shout as I’m struggling to break free of them, dragging my feet on the floor to stop them from dragging me outside. “You’re helping…the landlord here…throw me out…on the street!”

“Landlord?” he says, holding my left arm tightly. “Roger, I’m your father! I just want to be reunited with you, but you’re obviously unwell, and we need to get you to a doctor.”

“Liar!” I spit back at him as they’re getting me through the doorway and out into to the hall. “You’re both…working for…Mama’s ghost! She possessing…both of you!”

“The only one who’s…possessed…is you, Roger,” my aunt says in grunts as she’s struggling to get me to the elevator. “Mr. Morse, can you help us, please?”

“Of course,” a man in a white T-shirt and white pants says, obviously a man from the asylum they want to lock me up in. “Here I come. C’mon, Roger. We’re gonna take you somewhere nice and quiet, nice and peaceful.”

“Quiet?! Peaceful?!” I shout, hooking my feet outside the elevator entrance to stop them from getting me in. “You’re taking me…out into…the fires of Hell! Aaah!”

“What a nutcase,” some woman behind me says. I’ve been shoved into the elevator. We’re going down.

The landlord must be evicting me because the fire outside has burned down the bank where Mama’s money was held. The money’s destroyed, so I can’t pay the rent anymore. Mama destroyed the money to ruin me! This is how she’s getting revenge on me for having killed her!

I’m outside now, where the fire is surrounding the apartment building. Oh, no!…They’re throwing me into the fire!

Oddly, I’m not burning, though. I’m floating down the street, moving as if in a van. Where am I going?