Analysis of ‘Child’s Play’

Child’s Play is a 1988 horror film directed by Tom Holland, written by him, Don Mancini (whose story the film is based on), and John Lafia. It stars Catherine Hicks, Chris Sarandon, and Brad Dourif, with Alex Vincent, Dinah Manoff, and Jack Colvin.

Child’s Play gained a cult following, and its commercial success spawned a media franchise including seven sequels (with a TV series), comic books, and a 2019 reboot. It won a Saturn Award for Best Actress (Hicks), and was nominated for three–Best Horror Film, Best Performance by a Younger Actor (Vincent), and Best Writing (Holland, Lafia, and Mancini).

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

There is a subtle critique of capitalism in Child’s Play. We see a stark contrast between the haves and the have-nots, that is, people like Karen Barclay (Hicks) and her son, six-year-old Andy (Vincent), on the one hand, living in their nice apartment, and the homeless, one of whom (played by Juan Ramirez) has sold her a Good Guy doll.

The doll itself is a commodity sold to “bring…a lot of joy” to the child who plays with it. The Good Guy doll, especially when the soul of Charles Lee Ray, or “Chucky” (Dourif), is in the doll, is a literally fetishized commodity. One buys the commodity as a complete, finished product, without any sense of the workers who made it, just as one might worship an idol, believing in the god inhabiting the carved wood or sculpted statue, without any thought as to who made the idol. Chucky is thus like a pagan idol, with a spirit animating it, adored by Andy the idolater, because the lonely, alienated boy has no real, living friend to play with. In commodity fetishism, there’s a preoccupation between things (money and merchandise), not between people, hence its relationship with alienation.

As far as the opposition of those with shelter and the homeless is concerned, that opposition is in potential danger of being erased, in Karen’s case, as a consequence of her walking out on the job during her shift to buy the doll from the homeless peddler. Her manager, Walter Criswell (played by Alan Wilder), pesters her about walking off on the job, and implies a threat of firing her if she won’t agree to covering a sick worker’s shift…on Andy’s birthday. In this conflict, we see an example of worker alienation, which is adding to the Barclay family’s alienation as already discussed in lonely little Andy (whose father died).

Another thing should be mentioned about the homeless, as seen in the peddler in particular: they aren’t portrayed sympathetically. The peddler tries to suck as much money as he can out of Karen (but isn’t that what capitalists do?), on two occasions: his selling her the doll, and his exploiting her need to get information about where he found the doll, even to the point of wanting a sexual favour from the pretty woman in exchange for that information.

This associating of the homeless with criminals can be interpreted in two ways: either it’s a 1980s Reaganite lack of sympathy for the poor, or it links the peddler’s desperation with that of Charles Lee Ray. The frustrations of being poor often have a way of making people mean; they either try to get as much money out of better-off people, like Karen, as they can, or sexual frustration can make them act like creeps, as the peddler does to her; or the detrimental effect of capitalism on one’s mental health can drive one to commit violent crimes, as it drives Charles Lee Ray to become a sociopathic serial killer.

His passing of his soul into a doll represents a classic case of projective identification, a Kleinian concept that goes beyond the ordinary projection of imagining one’s own traits in others, but instead one succeeds in putting those traits into someone else (or in the case of the doll, something else). What’s more, the bad guy puts himself into a Good Guy, in the form of a voodoo incantation.

There is a lot of duality in this film. In particular, there are many pairings: Charles Lee Ray and Chucky, Andy and Chucky, Karen and her friend, Maggie Peterson (Manoff), Charles Lee Ray and his double-crossing partner-in-crime, Eddie Caputo (played by Neil Giuntoli), Detective Mick Norris (Sarandon) and his partner, Detective Jack Santos (played by Tommy Swerdlow), and Chucky with the voodoo doll of John “Dr. Death” Bishop (played by Raymond Oliver).

These pairings are generally parallels and/or opposites of each other, in some way: a bad guy in a Good Guy doll, a sweet little boy who physically resembles (sometimes even dresses like) his doll with the killer’s soul in it, his nice mother and his cranky baby-sitting substitute mom, two criminals, two cops, and a victimizer doll vs a victim’s doll. These parallels/opposites remind us of dialectical realities.

Because Karen has to cover the sick worker’s shift on her son’s birthday, her friend Maggie will babysit the boy that night. She’s rather cranky about Andy getting to bed without letting Chucky watch the news to know the latest about the police’s manhunt for Eddie Caputo, the partner of the presumed-dead Charles Lee Ray, and someone he wants to kill for having driven away and abandoned him when Norris was chasing them at the beginning of the film.

Maggie’s perceived crankiness as Karen’s substitute puts her in the role of what Melanie Klein called the bad mother, as opposed to Karen as the good mother. Maggie not letting the ‘boys’ stay up is frustrating to them, whereas Karen going all out to buy the doll for Andy makes her the good mother, who strives never to fail in pleasing her son. These women are thus like the “bad breast” that won’t give the baby milk, versus the “good breast” that will feed the baby.

This splitting of the women into two moms is a defence mechanism that Andy also does, in a symbolic way, on himself, with his understanding that Chucky is alive. Just as there is a good mom and a bad one, so is there a good boy and a bad ‘boy.’ Splitting as a defence mechanism is thus aided by another defence mechanism, projection. Andy is projecting his bad, hateful side into Chucky (in a symbolic sense), just as Charles Lee Ray has literally done.

It’s interesting that much of the doll’s violence and terrorizing happen in the apartment, with Maggie or Karen as the victims. We’re reminded of the last, and best, episode of Trilogy of Terror, “Amelia,” in which the Zuni doll terrorizes Amelia (played by Karen Black) in her apartment. In my analysis of Trilogy of Terror, I explored the projection and splitting-away of the bad character traits of the characters Black plays in all three episodes, leaving the remaining ‘good’ characters as timid and sexually repressed. Andy’s sweetness, as opposed to Chucky’s viciousness, can also be seen in this light. Maggie‘s falling out of the window and crashing through a car roof, incidentally, reminds me of the fate of Katherine Thorn (played by Lee Remick) in The Omen, another film about an evil boy.

When the police investigate Maggie’s death, Norris notices that the soles of Andy’s Good Guy shoes match the footprints leading up to the attack on her, so he deems Andy to be a suspect. Of course, Karen is too upset even to consider such suspicions.

Later that night, she’s talking to her son, who says that Chucky told him that he was sent to Andy by his dead father in heaven. I’m curious to know how Chucky learned of Andy’s father’s death in so short a time to be able to make up such a story. One wonders how much of the boy’s conversation with Chucky is real, and how much of it is just the boy’s imagination.

Andy also tells his mother that “Aunt Maggie was a real bitch and got what she deserved.” He insists that Chucky is the one who said it, which is of course perfectly plausible, given the killer’s personality…but technically, we never hear those words come out of the doll’s mouth. For all we know, Andy said and thought it himself, however unlikely that may be, given the context.

Even if all of this did come out of Chucky’s mouth, though, which is of course more than probably true, it’s true only on the literal level. On a symbolic level, we can still see the living doll as a case of projection and splitting-away of Andy’s bad side onto the doll.

His father’s death would have caused emotional trauma for the boy, who would have imagined the death as a kind of abandonment of him, thus making Andy’s father the bad father, in the Kleinian sense. The good father in heaven may have given him the doll as a gift; but the bad father gave Andy a Bad Guy in a Good Guy doll.

The police see Andy as a suspect, even though it’s hardly much more plausible that a little six-year-old boy could have had the strength to make a woman fly out of a window than a ‘living doll’ could have. Andy’s insistence that the doll is alive sounds like a manifestation of mental illness in him, even though Chucky really has the killer’s soul animating it, so it’s not surprising that he’s taken to a psychiatric hospital to be treated by Dr. Ardmore (Colvin).

As I said above, on both literal and symbolic levels, little Andy really does have issues. His father died, the death of Maggie is a shock to him even if he isn’t the perpetrator of the killing, and he’s so lonely, he needs a talking doll for a friend. His physical similarity to the doll, including their clothes, sometimes suggests a potential merging of identities, in spite of the splitting and projection.

Andy’s experience of what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position–a schizoid splitting of his mom into absolute good (Karen) and bad (Maggie, the mom substitute), as well as a paranoid fear that the bad projection will come back to get him (i.e., Chucky coming to the mental hospital to get him–actually, not to kill him, but to put the killer’s soul into the boy’s body…still, Andy doesn’t know that)–is a projection of the splitting of the good and bad sides of Andy himself. His splitting of his dead father into good and bad versions is also such a projection, as is his projection of his bad side into Chucky.

This splitting of people into good and bad, as well as the projection of this splitting onto people in the outside world, is symptomatic of the alienation we all feel in a society ruled by the profit motive, which splits people into rich and poor, then idolizes the rich while looking down on the poor. The capitalist class exploits this splitting and projection by selling us the commodities representing idealized people (Good Guy dolls, films and TV shows glorifying our objects of hero worship), and the war on the poor that results from chasing profits in turn results in desperate people we denigrate, the lumpenproletariat (criminals and the homeless).

Note how the story takes place in winter, with the homeless huddling together around outdoor fires to keep warm. One homeless man, the peddler of the doll, turns nasty and tries to get as much out of Karen as he can, even her body, in exchange for information about where he got the doll (never mind all the greedy capitalists who try to squeeze out as much profit as they can through the extraction of surplus value, some of whom exploit the bodies of females far younger than Karen!); but when Norris rescues her from the peddler and his meat-hook hands, he also points his gun at all the other homeless in the area, as if they were just as bad as the peddler, making them run away from their one source of heat, their outdoor fire, on that cold, bitter night.

Norris may be a good guy in his helping of Karen, but as a cop pointing his gun at freezing cold homeless people who never laid a hand on her, he is working to protect the class interests of the wealthy. By speaking of an area where the homeless hang out as a rough part of town that she shouldn’t be in alone at night, Norris is lumping the homeless together with criminals. This lack of sympathy for the poor and desperate makes Chucky’s revenge attack on him in his car not exactly surprising.

Now, Chucky learns from John “Dr. Death” Bishop, his former voodoo instructor, that in order for his soul to escape the doll (which is becoming increasingly human), he must put it in Andy’s body (he being the first person to know that Chucky’s alive). This putting of Charles Lee Ray’s soul into the boy’s body, a merging of bad Chucky with good Andy, should be understood, symbolically speaking, in terms of the paranoid-schizoid position, which is a splitting into absolute good vs bad, and the depressive position, an integrating of the split-off good and bad.

Though a child perceives the split-off good vs bad as being in his good vs bad parents, we must remember that the splitting is happening in the child’s mind, and it is thus a projection of a splitting that isn’t really in his parents, but rather in himself. Chucky, back in Karen’s apartment with Andy and having knocked the boy out, begins the incantation to put his soul in Andy’s body, a merging that represents the integration of the good and bad sides. He doesn’t complete the ritual, though, because Karen and Norris arrive just in time to stop him.

Just as the merging of Andy and Chucky isn’t complete, so is the integration of the good and bad mother, or the good and bad father, a child’s reparation with them, never complete. Throughout one’s life, one tends to shift back and forth between the paranoid-schizoid position (PS) and the depressive position (D), an oscillation Wilfred Bion expressed in this shorthand form: PS <-> D (e.g., in Bion, page 67).

Accordingly, Chucky as the bad Andy fights with Karen and Norris (who could be seen as a substitute father). When Karen, having put Chucky in the fireplace, screams to Andy to get the matches so she can burn the doll, the boy sits in hesitation at first–partly out of fear, no doubt, but also partly out of an unconscious wish to remove Karen the bad mother by letting Chucky kill her. Nonetheless, the good Andy wins out in his conflict, and gets the matches.

Chucky attacking Karen with, for example, him stabbing the knife through the door with her holding it closed on the other side, can be seen to symbolize how Andy, in unconscious phantasy, is attacking his mother through a projection of his bad self. He unconsciously wants to attack her because he feels she’s frustrated him in certain ways (not buying the doll at the beginning of the movie, not being with him at night for his birthday, but having cranky “Aunt Maggie,” Karen’s substitute and therefore split-off bad mother, instead to babysit him, etc.).

Later, when he sees Karen and Norris trying to protect him from Chucky, he can see the good mother in her, and he can understand that both the good and the bad mother are the same person. Now, instead of wanting to attack her in unconscious phantasy, Andy wants to keep her. In fact, even Chucky, wanting to merge with Andy, says he’ll let Karen live if she gives him the boy (a pretty weak promise coming from a serial killer, but still symbolic of an unconscious train of thought). So the bad side in Andy, Chucky, is still vicious, but thanks to his help in getting the matches, as well as his recognition that his bad side is really bad (“This is the end, friend.”), Andy can weaken his bad side and integrate it with his good side, a switch from PS to D.

With the final destruction of Chucky, through not only gunshots breaking off his limbs and head, but also that bullet in his now fully-formed heart, Andy no longer needs to project his bad side. He can now switch from paranoid anxiety to depressive anxiety, from the fear of being persecuted by the projected bad mother to the urge to hang on to his mom with all of her faults, her mixture of good and bad.

The film ends with a frozen shot of Andy leaving the room and looking at burned, mutilated, and dead Chucky. The boy’s frown isn’t only from his trauma: it’s also from his enduring sense of connection to his other, bad, projected self. The movement between splitting and integration doesn’t end in infancy or childhood: PS <-> D is a lifelong oscillation.